Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011
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Bernhart, Walter and Werner Wolf (eds). Self-reference in literature and music. (Word and music studies ; 11). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. x, 192 pp. ISBN 978-90-420-3158-6 (softcover).
Reviewed by
Valparaiso University
There is a little bit of inconsistency in the title of this book: the front cover, one of the half-title pages, and one of the title pages says “Self-reference in literature and music,” while another half-title page and a second title page says “Self-reference in literature and other media.” Not quite sure which is the correct title, so will let catalogers and their concern with documenting every variation of bibliographic information decide. In any event, this group of essays were originally presented at the Sixth Annual Conference on Word and Music Studies held at the University of Edinburgh in June 2007. Self-reference exists as a system that looks at intertextual, intermusical, and intermedial references; indeed, if one looks at instrumental music overall, the verbatim repetition of whole passages through the use of the repeat sign or the indication “da capo al fine” allows the performer to repeat sections of music as part of the overall performance of the piece of music, something which is unthinkable in the recital of poetry or a story. The concept of metareference between literature and music, and many of these essays discuss these interactions.
The first essay in this book defines the terms metreference and metamusic in relation to instrumental music, and then discusses these concepts in relation to Mozart's Ein musikalischer Spass. Gustav Mahler's works are excellent examples of self-quotation within musical works. Mahler quotes extensively from his own works and that of other composers throughout his lifetime. The next chapter examines this compositional style in Mahler's First, Fifth, and Ninth Symphony, documenting where Mahler quotes from his other works as well as those of other composers. Erik Satie (1866-1925) was another composer who had an interesting style of composition: piano pieces with words on the score meant not for singing or reading out or to be placed on concert programs, but known to the pianists themselves. The third chapter examines this interesting self-reference in Satie's piano works. Moving on to opera, the next chapter focuses on metaopera as a distinctive dramatic genre in both a historical and systematic perspective. An examination of Strauss' and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos as a meta-metaopera is examined extensively. Franz Schreker's (1878-1934) late opera Christophorus, oder “Die Vision einer Oper” is an interesting composition written at a pivotal moment in the composer's life, during the 1920s when decisive changes in music and the arts were taking place in Europe. The next chapter examines Schreker's opera as a “drama on drama” or “theatre on theatre” at a time when Schreker's work was being attacked by advocates of absolute music. Metareferential elements in two contemporary operatic adaptations of twentieth-century drama comprise the next chapter, where William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge and Mark Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie are examined and discussed. The space between reality and the imagination is the topic of the following chapter, which documents the 2001 production of Robert Carsen's production of Les Contes d'Hoffmann at the Bastille Opera in Paris, set in the very opera house in which the production is being performed, with Mozart's Don Giovanni being used as a foil to the action. E.T.A. Hoffmann would have been proud of the meta-metareferences swirling around the performance of these two works. The next chapter examines Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci (1892) with its metareferences to text, score, and media. Metareference in musical novels is the topic of the final chapter of the book, where Hans Christian Anderson's novels Only a Fiddler (1845) and Lucky Peer (1871) are discussed and the complex interactions between literature and music are part of the drama and the action.
Many of the chapters in this book provide extensive musical quotations to illustrate their points, and there are good bibliographies provided at the end of every chapter. This is a well-constructed and fascinating book on a multidisciplinary area that embraces many of the performing arts and literature.