1994 Articles

Performance and Social Meaning in the Lied: Schubert's Erster Verlust

Kramer, Lawrence

The Lied is customarily thought to express the affective meaning of a
text by compositional means. Different performances of a Lied, however,
may decisively affect its expressivity, provoking specific interpretations of
the text music relation and disclosing social meanings that may not be
explicitly acknowledged by the text. It is possible to construct an interpretive
dramaturgy running from the relation of text and composition through
the relation of composition and performance. In Franz Schubert's Erster
Verlust, D. 226, the trajectory of one such dramaturgy uncovers the song's
implicit involvement with the perplexities haunting nineteenth-century
bourgeois marriage.