Theoretical Issues

A central issue in ‘Words and Music’ studies is the complex of ideas related to analysis of lieder that have been categorized by Kofi Agawu and amplified by Suzanne M. Lodato. These have mostly been discussed in relation to the nineteenth-century repertory, though clearly they have the capacity for extension, since Lodato's attempts to explain and refine Agawu's taxonomy makes comparatively little reference to specific lieder (unless in the context of methodologies) and deals largely with general issues. This chapter will consider a ‘vocal’ work that has a notional resemblance to a lied in proportion, that is situated within a ‘cycle’, but which contains no singing voice (apart from one word) – ‘Nacht’ from Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire – with a view to considering what the Agawu-Lodato scheme might indicate about it as melodrama. Although Pierrot Lunaire as a whole is a dramatic work, the level of surface and structural integration exhibited is not strikingly greater than in certain nineteenth-century song cycles, and certainly less than in a post-Wagnerian opera; it tends to rest (according to current analysis) on associations rather than deeper patterns and correspondences. ‘Nacht’ on the other hand takes structural integration to an extreme point for Schoenberg in his atonal period. As a special case, it remains particularly open to investigation in its own right, in much the same way as a song from Winterreise.

Theory is of particular importance to the historical repertory of which ‘Nacht’ is a part. It has the capacity to act as a kind of substitute for ‘meaning’ where the ‘sense’ of the verbal text is at least as much musical as literary, depending as it does to some degree on sound to transcend the semantic banalities and obscurities of the words; in thirteen lines the poem says the equivalent of ‘Night falls – man sleeps fitfully’, but dresses it in a variety of deliberately strained symbols; it is as much stage direction as lyric. Pierrot as a whole has been taken as a case study of ‘resistance to theory’, not so much in the area of pitch organization but in a broader sense that would make some sort of theory of melodrama useful in much the same way as Agawu's theory of song. ‘Nacht’ in this context is an extreme case: copious theory about pitch, comparative reticence about the whole.