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Webern's Wrong Key-Signature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
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The attribution of influence in music – usually, the influence of one composer on another – is a notoriously slippery business, one whose results are apt to seem arbitrary and impressionistic. Recently musicologists, inspired by the example of Harold Bloom in literature (The Anxiety of Influence, 1973, and several subsequent works) have tried to make the study of influence more rigorous. This has sometimes meant the setting up of a formidable theoretical apparatus, the complexity of which can make one lose sight of the simplicity of the musical relationships involved. The pursuit of theory easily becomes an end in itself: as one commentator has observed, references to Bloom, in such discussions, have now become more or less de rigueur, with authors rushing to demonstrate their familiarity with misprision, revisionary ratios and other Bloomian categories. As will be apparent, I am not primarily interested in influence as a matter of anxiety: influence when it shows itself is usually obvious enough (by which I mean obvious to the ear), and the obviousness of the connexion tends to make it uninteresting and further discussion redundant.
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References
1 A model example of a traditional kind is Holloway's, Robin book Debussy and Wagner (London: Eulenburg, 1979)Google Scholar.Holloway works by a method of collocation, showing similarities between passages often related by common dramatic or literary ideas. More recently Timothy Martin has employed a similar method to show the influence of Wagner, on Joyce, James: Joyce and Wagner (Cambridge: CUP, 1991)Google Scholar.The list of Joyce's allusions to Wagner at the end of Martin's book makes his case far more persuasively, in my view, than the arguments that lead up to it. See also the important article by Rosen, Charles, ‘Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration’, 19th-century Music, Vol.4, No.2 (Fall 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: OUP, 1973)Google Scholar; see also A Map of Misreading (Oxford: OUP, 1975)Google Scholar and Poetics of Influence (New Haven: Schwab, 1988)Google ScholarPubMed.
3 A case in point is an article by Kevin Korsyn, already much cited in the literature: ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis, Vol.10, Nos 1–2 (03–07 1991)Google Scholar.
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8 No.3 of the Three Poems for Voice and Piano (New York: Fischer, n.d. [copyright 1961])Google Scholar.
9 Moldenhauer, p.42. In a letter Webern describes this song as ‘especially beautiful’: see ibid., p.44.
10 I refer to the version for high voice, which retains most of Wolf's original keys: ‘Gesang Weylas’ is an exception.
11 There is also an echo of Wagner's Rheingold here.
12 The last of the Eight Early Songs.
13 The term is Christopher Wintle's: see esp.‘Kontra Schenker: Largo e mesto from Beethoven's op. 10, No.3’ Music Analysis, Vol.4, Nos.1–2 (03–07 1985)Google Scholar and‘Analysis and Psychoanalysis: Wagner's Musical Metaphors’, in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, ed. Paynter, John and others (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar.
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16 No.7 of the Eight Early Songs.
17 No.5 of the same collection.
18 Quoted in Moldenhauer, p.668 (n.l).
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20 Cf. the letter of Mozart quoted by Rosen: ‘For practice I have also set to music the aria “Non so d'onde viene” which has been so beautifully composed by [J.C.] Bach. Just because I know Bach's setting so well and like it so much, and because it is always ringing in my ears, I wished to try and see whether in spite of all this I could not write an aria totally unlike his’. Quoted in ‘Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration’, p.87.
21 ‘Gleich und gleich’, No.4 of the Vier lieder, op.12 (1917).
22 The third was ‘Denk es, o Seele’, with its proto-Webernian shifts of register and texture.
23 Such knowledge did not deter Webern's contemporary Othmar Schoeck, another Wolf admirer, from making 40 Mörike settings late in life: see Das holde Bescheiden, op.62 (1947–9).
24 Published by Moldenhauer, as Four Stefan George Songs (New York: Fischer, n.d. [copyright 1966])Google Scholar.