Theorising music history: intertextuality as a tool for reclaiming the past in fanny mendelssohn's cantata “lobgesang”

Abstract

A musical score is an authoritative text for music of the past. Accepted as any other written text, it is a source for inquiring about the composer's intentions, history, and psychology. But the text occupies more than just the composer's work; its space contains different subjectivities such as the various instruments, the voice of the performers, and language. Alongside there is another layer that does not appear in the score but is defined by other texts; an intertextual world consisting of multicultural codes that become a tool for decoding the tension created by the gaps between different subjectivities, history, and the musical narrative. Fanny Mendelssohn's cantata “Lobgesang” (written and performed for the first time in 1831) serves here as a model for such intertextual reading. Its real historical, and cultural, benefits lie in the dramatic structure of the cantata, with its variety of musical topics, gendered musical gestures, and other symbols; all of which carry references to earlier periods in music history on the one hand, and to certain events in Fanny's life, including her Jewish-Christian origins, on the other