Abstract: The article is devoted to Alban Berg’s «Lyric Suite», which has been the object of hermeneutical analysis for half a century as a classic example of instrumental music with a hidden program. «The narrative turn» in musicology in recent years has brought to life another interpretation of this work, aimed at revealing the principles of narrative in it. This becomes the task of this article.
The arsenal of sources accumulated to date allows us to interpret the Suite as a system of subtexts, not only musical, but also verbal. The narrative structure includes: the author (he is also the hero), characters, plot, several explicit and hidden addressees, events happening in a certain place and at a certain time, a clearly expressed author’s point of view, which is revealed by quoting from three works about love: «Lyric Symphony» by A. Zemlinsky, «Tristan and Isolde» by R. Wagner and «De profundis clamavi» by Ch. Baudelaire. A love story that does not have a happy ending unfolds in several planes: real, mystical and mythological.
Expanding the concept of narrativity, it is possible to point out other narrative properties of aesthetic and compositional-technical kind in the Suite: a romantic narrative associated with the relationship of words and music; the narrative of cinema, referring to the present; the narrative of dodecaphony as an individual interpretation of A. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition.
Keywords: narrative, hidden program, Alban Berg, quoting, word and music, cinema, dodecaphony
For citation: Veksler Yu. S. Narrative and narrativity in Alban Berg’s «Lyriс suite». Scholarly papers of Gnesin Russian Academy of Music. 2023;(4):39-55. (In Russ.) DOI: 10.56620/2227-9997-2023-4-39-55 |
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