Is Romance Dead? Erich Korngold and the Romantic German Lied

<p>Far from being the operatic aria's less glamorous sister, the Romantic German Lied offers much dramatic scope for the classical performer. It has been described as the “quintessential Romantic genre”: the balanced and harmonious union of the music and text, in which the pianist and singer are equals. As accessible at private music gatherings as in concert halls, the Lied enjoyed popularity in German-speaking countries for over a hundred years, before facing its greatest adversary: Modernism. Romanticism, as an artistic movement, fought to survive in the uncertain musical and political landscape of the twentieth century. In Erich Korngold, Romantic music found a staunch advocate, and Lieder gained one of its most gifted contributors. Following in the daunting footsteps of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, Korngold's unashamedly luscious, rich orchestrations and soaring melodies earned him the nickname “the Viennese Puccini.” A child prodigy, Erich Korngold's rise was swift and glorious; his fall coincided with that of the German Lied and Romanticism itself. Romance may not have “died”, but it became outdated in the twentieth-century push for modernity and innovation across all art forms. In encyclopedias little is written of Korngold and his compositional output beyond his most famous and enduring opera Die tote Stadt, and his pioneering film scoring in pre- and post-war Hollywood. In my research I will show that Korngold is deserving of a place in the music canon as not only one of the last great composers of Lieder, but one of the last great Romantics, whose life and works sit on the cusp between the old world and the new. Furthermore, I will address the question of whether Romanticism died with the arrival of Modernism and revolutionary experimentation in music, or whether it lives on today, albeit in different forms.</p>

Is Romance Dead? Erich Korngold and the Romantic German Lied

<p>Far from being the operatic aria's less glamorous sister, the Romantic German Lied offers much dramatic scope for the classical performer. It has been described as the “quintessential Romantic genre”: the balanced and harmonious union of the music and text, in which the pianist and singer are equals. As accessible at private music gatherings as in concert halls, the Lied enjoyed popularity in German-speaking countries for over a hundred years, before facing its greatest adversary: Modernism. Romanticism, as an artistic movement, fought to survive in the uncertain musical and political landscape of the twentieth century. In Erich Korngold, Romantic music found a staunch advocate, and Lieder gained one of its most gifted contributors. Following in the daunting footsteps of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, Korngold's unashamedly luscious, rich orchestrations and soaring melodies earned him the nickname “the Viennese Puccini.” A child prodigy, Erich Korngold's rise was swift and glorious; his fall coincided with that of the German Lied and Romanticism itself. Romance may not have “died”, but it became outdated in the twentieth-century push for modernity and innovation across all art forms. In encyclopedias little is written of Korngold and his compositional output beyond his most famous and enduring opera Die tote Stadt, and his pioneering film scoring in pre- and post-war Hollywood. In my research I will show that Korngold is deserving of a place in the music canon as not only one of the last great composers of Lieder, but one of the last great Romantics, whose life and works sit on the cusp between the old world and the new. Furthermore, I will address the question of whether Romanticism died with the arrival of Modernism and revolutionary experimentation in music, or whether it lives on today, albeit in different forms.</p>

Zwischen Atmosphäre und Narration

Musik kann zweifellos als Medium, aber auch als intermediales Phänomen aufgefasst werden. In dieser Perspektive bewegt sie sich zwischen den Polen Sprechen und Schweigen, Hören und Lesen, Subjektivität und Intertextualität und ist dem Medium der Literatur somit alternierend nah und fern. Am Beispiel der Autoren Imre Kertész und Christoph Ransmayr sowie Komponist*innen aus dem 20. und 21. Jahrhundert wie Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, John Cage, Annea Lockwood, Jennifer Walshe u.a. verortet Karl Katschthaler Musik und Klangkunst im unauflöslichen Spannungsverhältnis von Narration und Atmosphäre.

Alfredo Casella und Gustav Mahler

Der Wunsch sich größeren musikalischen Formen zuzuwenden, führte Casella dazu, sich mit der sinfonischen Musik Mahlers zu befassen. Casellas intensives Studium macht sich als erstes in seiner zweiten Sinfonie, c-moll 1908/09, bemerkbar. In den späteren Jahren unternimmt Casella den Versuch, Mahlers sinfonisches Werk auch in Frankreich publik zu machen. Die Wechselbeziehung beider Musiker sind gleichermaßen bedeutsam für die Mahler-Rezeption wie auch für die Entwicklung des zwei Jahrzehnte jüngeren italienischen Komponisten. (Autor)

Geliehenes Pathos

Seit Mitte der 1970er Jahre hat sich für die Musik von Manfred Trojahn, Wolfgang Rihm, Reinhard Febel, Hans-Jürgen von Bose, Wolfgang von Schweinitz und Detlev Müller-Siemens die Bezeichnung "Neue Einfachheit" als typologischer und historiographischer Terminus durchgesetzt. Durch die gemeinsamen Lehrer György Ligeti und Klaus Huber entwickelten die untereinander vielfach befreundeten Komponisten eine Art Gegenschule zur Darmstädter Schule. Im engeren Sinne schulbildend wirkten sie jedoch erst seit den 1980er Jahren als Lehrer der heute dreißig- bis vierzigjährigen Komponisten. Anhand der Musik von Matthias Pintscher wird die Frage diskutiert, inwiefern es sich bei der Musik dieser jüngeren Generation um eine Reformulierung von Ansätzen ihrer Lehrer aus den 1970er Jahren handelt. Ihr Verhältnis zur Musik der Tradition, insbesondere zu Gustav Mahler, zu tonalen Formen und musiksprachlichen Gesten, zu Hans Werner Henze und Helmut Lachenmann, sowie ihre Ablehnung der seriellen und postseriellen Avantgarde legt dies nahe. Angesprochen ist auch die Musik von Rebecca Saunders, Jörg Widmann, Johannes Maria Staud und anderen. Die exemplarische Erörterung des Begriffs einer "Zweiten Neuen Einfachheit" anhand von Pintschers "Fünf Orchesterstücken" (1997) versteht sich als ein erstes Diskussionsangebot über und mit dieser jüngeren Komponistengeneration.

Phenomenology and the ‘Levitation-Floating’ Feeling in Music’s Nostalgia. An Endless {‘Into’}-falling

"The essay focuses on completing one of Husserl’s signitive theory with a new perspective. The discussion of the signitive theory is based more on the apperception’s function than to the perceptive one. We have observed that music produces for the ʻSelfʼ different feelings. But one of the most seductive feelings we want to discuss related to music is the perpetual floating-feeling, which is quite similar to the levitation process and it has connections with the idea of the lightness of the Being in some circumstances. Despite these, stays nostalgia. We are introducing a model based on two terms, as permanent {ʻintoʼ}-falling Self’s condition into the sounds and the signitive-apperceptive-intuition. The basic assumption is that music is a continuously phenomenological-fall which extenses the Husserlian theory more, completing it day by day. We hope that our concepts proposed here, signitive-apperceptive-intuition and the {ʻintoʼ}-falling will bring a new light in modelling the sound in a phenomenological manner. Keywords: music, consciousness, floating, levitation, falling, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler, Max Richter, Jonathan Dawe, phenomenology, absorption, sounds, nostalgia, sadness, existentialism, existence. "