Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century 'Lied'

Abstract

In spite of its ubiquity, and its singular claim to represent a natural mode of musical expression, song has had a less than decisive influence on the development of music theory and analysis in the twentieth century. Our canonical techniques of analysis have emerged primarily from considerations of instrumental music, not vocal music. And although nothing in principle precludes the application of such techniques to non-instrumental works, song analysis accepts the transfer only with some difficulty.' The marginalization of song as song in the literature speaks to a very real problem, namely, how to account for the syntax of a genre that includes two nominal semiotic systems, music and language. A pursuit of the dynamics of that inclusion relationship cannot be simply reduced to a routine search for patterns of coincidence or non-coincidence between words and music. To embrace the theoretical challenge fully, we need to define song as a single genre and test its semiotic status. And it is because of this need for basic research that the problems of song analysis cannot be left to music historians, who are usually more content to borrow, apply and criticise analytical methods than to develop them in the first place.2 The aim of this essay is to discuss, by means of example, some of the analytical and interpretative issues raised by the German art song of the nineteenth century. Theory-based analysis of song is notoriously lacking in models. The literature is dominated by individual 'readings'. But the failure to construct explicit models does not necessarily reflect the genre's resistance to theoretical definition. This is not to deny that the balance in disposition between words and music in song shifts at different moments in the history of European music the songs of Zelter and Schubert, Schumann and Loewe, and Brahms and Wolf present marked contrasts in the relative weighting of words and music. Such differences, however, are more stylistic than structural, more concerned with individual composerly preference than with song itself. Just as it was necessary for Schenker and