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Carl Dahlhaus, the nineteenth century and opera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Abstract

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Type
Review article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Dahlhaus, Carl, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Robinson, J. Bradford (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).Google Scholar From Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1980).Google Scholar

2 See Hinton, Stephen, ‘The Conscience of Musicology: Carl Dahlhaus (1928–89)’, Musical Times, 130 (1989), 737–9.Google Scholar

3 Siegfried I: ‘Mich dünkt, des gedachtest du schon!’ The translation is Andrew Porter's.

4 Hinton, (see n. 2), 737Google Scholar, referring to Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Puffett, Derrick and Clayton, Alfred (Cambridge, 1987), 89Google Scholar: hereafter SNM.

5 SNM, 13.Google Scholar

6 SNM, 247.Google Scholar

7 SNM, 36.Google Scholar

8 See Deathridge, John and Dahlhaus, Carl, The New Grove Wagner (London, 1984), 108Google Scholar: hereafter TNGW. Dahlhaus returned to the subject of the nature of Wagner's dramatic music in a late article, What is a Musical Drama?’, this journal, 1 (1989), 95111.Google Scholar

9 TNGW, 99100.Google Scholar

10 The New Grove, VIII, 181Google Scholar: ‘Harmony’.

11 TNGW, 115.Google Scholar

12 Kurth, Ernst, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Bern, 1920Google Scholar; rpt. Hildesheim, 1975). See also Rothfarb, Lee A., Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst (Philadelphia, 1988), esp. 158–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Dahlhaus, Carl, Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Whittall, Mary (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 66Google Scholar: hereafter BRAM.

14 BRAM, 69.Google Scholar

15 BRAM, 66.Google Scholar Dahlhaus refers to Schoenberg's, Harmonielehre (Vienna, 1911)Google Scholar and Lorenz's, Der musikalische Aufbau des Bühnenfestspieles ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (Berlin, 1924).Google Scholar

16 BRAM, 66.Google Scholar A particularly striking demonstration of Dahlhaus's preferred method of Wagner analysis can be found in his ‘Tonalität und Form in Wagners, Ring des Nibelungen’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 40 (1983), 165–73.Google Scholar

17 For example, in Parsifal, Act III at bar 705, during Gurnemanz's ‘Good Friday’ narration at the words ‘Ihn selbst am Kreuze kann sie nicht erschauen’, the stepwise progression onto a ‘half-diminished’ seventh on E# heralds a change of mood and of motivic orientation in which the sense of disjunction (before the gradual return of the principal ‘Good Friday’ material) strongly counters the sense of continuation.

18 BRAM, 60.Google Scholar For a penetrating study of period structure in Wagner which takes account of Dahlhaus's work, see Rothstein, William, Phrase Structure in Tonal Music (New York and London, 1989), 249305.Google Scholar

19 Dahlhaus, Carl, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Whittall, Mary (Cambridge, 1979), 113.Google Scholar

20 Wagner's words –‘Scheidungen’ and ‘Verbindungen’ – are from ‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’ (1879): see Wagner, , Gesammelte Schriften, X (Leipzig, 1888), 185.Google Scholar This aspect of my article clearly relates to points made in Abbate, Carolyn and Parker, Roger, ‘Dismembering Mozart’, this journal, 2 (1990), 187–95.Google Scholar In his relatively early Esthetics of Music (Cologne, 1967Google Scholar; trans. Cambridge, 1982) Dahlhaus observed that ‘categories like ambivalence, paradox, ambiguity, and irony, which have long been at home in literary criticism, ought to be so in music esthetics too’ (p. 94).

21 TheNew Grove, XIX, 55Google Scholar: “Tonality”. See also TNGW, 120.Google Scholar

22 Dahlhaus first raised some of the issues relating to this passage in his Wagners Konzeption des musikalischen Dramas (Regensburg, 1971), 62–3Google Scholar, 69, 84–6. Lorenz-bashers will be pleased to note that he also limits the motif's associations by deeming it ‘Alberichs Herrscherruf’, thereby recalling the music of the dwarf's proclamation of power in Das Rheingold, scene 3, rather than tracing it back to the Rhinemaidens' song in scene 1. Nevertheless, Lorenz's discussion of the wider formal context in which this statement occurs (his Period 16 of Götterdämmerung, Act I) is far from inflexible or implausible in its balance of contrasts and similarities (see Lorenz, [n. 15], 261–3Google Scholar ).

23 SNM, 77.Google Scholar

24 See for example Forte, AllenNew Approaches to the Linear Analysis of Music’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 41 (1988), 315–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matthew Brown, ‘Isolde's Narrative: From Hauptmotiv to Tonal Model’, and McCreless, Patrick, ‘Schenker and the Norns’, both in Abbate, Carolyn and Parker, Roger, eds., Analyzing Opera. Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).Google Scholar

25 Dahlhaus, Carl, Analysis and Value Judgment, trans. Levarie, Siegmund (New York, 1983), 7Google Scholar: hereafter AVJ.

26 AVJ, 42. See also Dahlhaus's remarks on ‘the polemics against cohesion in music’ ( AVJ, 3841Google Scholar ), and his characterisation of the ‘patchwork technique’ of Part 3 of Schoenberg's String Trio as ‘a relapse into formal simplicity or even primitivity ( SNM, 104).Google Scholar

27 AVJ, 42.Google Scholar

28 Newcomb, Anthony, ‘Those Images that yet Fresh Images Beget’, Journal of Musicology, (1983), 233–4.Google Scholar Dahlhaus's 1983 article (see n. 16) does refer to Newcomb's The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama’, 19th Century Music, 5 (1981), 3866.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Wagner, “On Modulation” and Tristan’, this journal, 1 (1989), 36, 57.Google Scholar

30 Falconer, Keith, ‘Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 112 (1987), 155.Google Scholar

31 See in particular Christensen, Thomas, ‘Carl Dahlhaus, Die Musiktheorie im 18. and 19. Jahrhundert: Grundzüge einer Systematik’, Music Theory Spectrum, 10 (1988), 127–37Google Scholar; Gossett, Philip, ‘Carl Dahlhaus and the “Ideal Type”’, 19th Century Music, 13 (1989), 4956.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gossett reviewed Nineteenth-Century Music in the New York Review of Books, 10 1989, 21–6Google Scholar, making much of the celebrated case of the wrong Petrarch sonnet. Dahlhaus also gets into a muddle over the precise location of period divisions in Strauss's; Elektra (see p. 349).Google Scholar

32 Fittingly, the last substantial reference to an opera in Nineteenth-Century Music concerns the nature of ‘stylistic ambiguity’ in Janáček's Jenůfa (pp. 358–9).Google Scholar Not surprisingly, however, Dahlhaus avoids developing his discussion to the point where the relation between the brief examples of stylistic diversity he provides and the opera's large-scale structural characteristics might be addressed. Does Jenůfa, in his view, succeed where Louise fails? It is difficult to be sure.