Musik & Ästhetik, 2017, Jg. 21, Ausgabe 83

Carl Loewe, Or, The Great Misunderstanding: Attempt at an Explanation – While Carl Loewe’s works tend to be viewed as stuffy and old-fashioned nowadays, the author uses interpretation-historical analyses to show that the contemporary view of Loewe is still tied to an interpretative approach closely connected to the nationalistic propaganda of the German Reich in the Bismarck era, and later the Third Reich. This approach, however, directly contradicts the way in which the composer himself performed his works.

Machaut’s Dissonances – The present text conceptualizes the use of dissonances in Guillaume de Machaut’s music from a historical perspective. As the 14th-century theory of contrapunctus excludes dissonances from compositional technique, the examination of dissonance in the context of contrapunctus diminutus must be understood as a justification of its very presence, not a set of rules for its use. Instead of rules, we find a doctrine of figuration that works with fixed melodic building-blocks, presented in the Berkeley manuscript with verbula (little words). Through the use of these melodic building-blocks, the dissonances are integrated very naturally into the textures. Examining Machaut’s two-part ballads in particular, the present text lays out a figurational vocabulary of melodic and rhythmic phrases as well as a further diminution technique, namely syncopation. Both techniques are applied without restrictions to the music’s vertical dimension. Hence the use of dissonances is only indirectly regulated via the stylistic boundaries of figuration.

Irony of Audibility. Ole-Henrik Moe’s »Three Persefone-Perceptions« for Violin Solo – Ole-Henrik Moe’s Three Persefone-Perceptions hide a rich repertoire of nuances behind a surface of repetitive gestures such as tremolos and crescendo-decrescendo sequences. Even though the details of an extremely differentiated overtone technique are clearly audible, the listener is almost forced to understand these as mere side effects of the primary gestures of the piece, much too differentiated to be actually composed. The fact that nothing is hidden in this piece, everything is on the surface, and still the listener is almost bound to misinterpret the piece in a fundamental way because of preconceptions about what can be done and what can not be done in music, could be seen as an irony of audibility: the piece is a proposal, but it does not try to convince the listener, because that very effort would compromise the inherent quality of its artistic point of view.

In Search of a Lost Place: The Schubert Explorations of the Singer Julian Prégardien – Although one often hears laments about a supposed crisis of the traditional Lieder recital, the Lied genre is actually receiving a particular amount of tension at present. A young generation of singers are making the songs their own, below the threshold of an institutionalized performance pose that is considered exclusive. This results in astutely programmed festivals and concert series; standardized recitals are receding behind individual concept albums. The singer Julian Prégardien, who thinks in terms of historically informed performance practice, stands out with two special Schubert projects: he has released a CD entitled Schubertiade, which imagines Schubert’s songs in their context prior to the invention of the Lieder recital. The focus is not a historicizing reconstruction, but rather an imaginary place in which the songs are brought to life under both their past and present conditions. A second project creates a dialogue between different versions of Schubert’s Winterreise. As a medium for this dialogue, Prégardien has installed a web platform where he also plans to create a »digital salon«.

»I am a happily gifted person«: Artur Schnabel’s Correspondence with Therese Behr-Schnabel – This correspondence offers extensive insight into the living and working conditions of musicians in the first half of the 20th century. The fact that this is a dialogue between a married couple who are artistic equals but of different social backgrounds (Austrian provincial bourgeoisie with Jewish roots on the one hand, the metropolitan German educated class on the other) touches time and again on events and topics in their historical context, which ranged from the eventful to the catastrophic. In the case of Artur Schnabel, it is particularly instructive to observe how dramatically the distribution of recordings fundamentally transformed the interpretation, indeed the entire perception of music. His determination to cling to traditional views and intentions of musical presentation produced results that are still impressive today, but it also has aspects that can be considered tragic.