Małgorzata PawłowskaAcademy of Music in KrakowMusic Theory

The Myth of Romeo and Juliet in music from the perspective of narratology

PhD thesis

Harald Weinrich, Narrative Structures of Myths

• A myth is conditioned by content (very significant meaning, great dimension), and form (narrative style).

• The language of a myth, just as every linguistic utterance, can be translated into another code. Narrative myth, for example, can be presented in a dramatic form.

• Various kinds of art can be regarded as various codes of a myth, while a narrative code serves as a basis and reference system.

The story of Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare

Xenophon from Ephesus, Ephesiaca 3rd.cent.A.D. - epic

Masuccio di Salerno, Novellino 1476 - epic

Luigi da Porto, Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti

1535 - epic

Matteo Bandello, Romeo and Juliet 1554 - epic

Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet 1562 - epic

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 1596 - drama

Archetypal narrative of a myth

its particularization in different media

literature theatre music visual arts film

in different genres

The myth of Romeo and Juliet in music – chosen works

• George Benda – Romeo und Julie 1776 - singspiel

• Vincenzo Bellini – I Capuleti e i Montechi 1830 - opera

• Hector Berlioz - Roméo et Juliette 1839- dramatic symphony

• Charles Gounod – Roméo et Juliette 1867 - opera

• Pyotr Tchaikovsky – Romeo and Juliet 1880- symphonic poem

• Sergei Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet 1957 - ballet

• Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story 1957 - musical

• Nino Rota – music to Franco Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet 1968 - film music

The myth of Romeo and Juliet in music

• 1776 G. BENDA, Romeo und Julie• 1776 J. G. SCHWANENBERGER, Romeo e Giulia• 1784 S. von RUMLING, Roméo et Juliette• 1792 N.-M. DALAYRAC, Tout pour l’amour, óu Roméo et

Juliette• 1793 D. STEIBELT, Roméo et Juliette• 1796 N. A. ZINGARELLI, Giulietta e Romeo• 1810 P. C. GUGLIELMI, Romeo e Giulietta• 1825 N. VACCAI, Giulietta e Romeo• 1828 E. TORRIANI, Giulietta e Romeo• 1830 V. BELLINI, I Capuleti e i Montecchi• 1839 H. BERLIOZ, Roméo et Juliette• 1862 L. DAMROSCH, Romeo und Julie• 1863 M. MORALES, Romeo e Giulietta• 1865 F. MARCHETTI, Romeo e Giulietta• 1867 Ch. GOUNOD, Roméo et Juliette• 1869 P. TCHAIKOVSKY, Romeo and Juliet

• 1878 P. X. D. d’IVRY, Les amants de Vérone• 1873 A. MERCADAL Y PONS, Romeo e Giulietta• 1901 H. R. SHELLEY, Romeo and Juliet• 1916 C. del CAMPO, Los amantes de Verona• 1916 J. BARKWORTH, Romeo and Juliet• 1922 R. ZANDONAI, Giulietta e Romeo• 1938 S. PROKOFIEV, Romeo and Juliet• 1940 H. SUTERMEISTER, Romeo und Julia• 1950 B. BLACHER, Romeo und Julia• 1955 K. FRIBEC, Romeo i Julija• 1957 L. BERNSTEIN, West Side Story• 1961 R. GERBER, Roméo et Juliette• 1970 W. HARPER, Sensations• 1970 B. MATUSZCZAK, Julia i Romeo• 1984 W. E. BLACK, Romeo & Juliet

The myth of Romeo and Juliet in music

Myth studies• Ernst Cassirer

• Mircea Eliade

• Claude Lévi-Strauss• Victoria Adamenko• Leszek Kolakowski• Eero Tarasti• Henryk Markiewicz• Eleazar Mieletinski• Denis de Rougemont

Narratology

Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Hjemslev, Chomsky

The birth of narratology in the 60’- French school Roland Barthes Tzvetan Todorov Algirdas J. Greimas Claude Brémond

1966: special issue of the journal Communications no. 8

• Expansion of the notion of narrative“Omnipresence of narrative has become a fact”.

Anna Lebkowska, Narrative, 2006

• “It is a change that has been taking place over the last years in various disciplines and often in a completely independent way - a change in the understanding of a category that belongs to the basic set of notions common for philosophy, the humanities and social studies. The category (…) is called a subject, human individual, self or individual identity. Common direction of those changes (…) is characterized by the abandonment of the understanding of man in the categories of ontological structure of the subject”.

Katarzyna Rosner, Narration, identity, time, 2006

• Narrative identity (inter alia: Anthony Giddens)

• Formalistic tendencies

music as tönend bewegte Formen

(sonorous forms in motion)

- Eduard Hanslik

From the 1970s, the notions of expression and meaning in music began to reappear

Narratology in music theory

• EDWARD CONE• ANTHONY NEWCOMB • JACQUES NATTIEZ• CAROLYN ABBATE• KOFI AGAWU• EERO TARASTI• FRED EVERETT MAUS• JOSEPH KERMAN• KAROL BERGER• GREGORY KARL• BYRON ALMÉN

EDWARD CONE

• The Composer’s Voice, Berkeley, 1974

• Three Ways of Reading a Detective Story – or Brahms Intermezzo, in: “Georgia Review” no 31, 1977

• Schubert’s Promissory Note: an Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics, in: “19-th Century Music” no 5, 1982

EDWARD CONE 1974: The Composer’s Voice

• Music as a language of gestures• Question: who speaks to us through musical

work?

• Terms virtual persona, virtual agent, virtual idea – we can identify them, but cannot strictly define them

• Repetitions in music (for example da capo) – as a past tense - persona „remembers”

ANTHONY NEWCOMB• Once More “Between Absolute and Program Music”:

Schumann’s Second Symphony, in: “19-th Century Music” no 7, 1984

• Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies, in: “19-th Century Music” no 11, 1987

• Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, in: ed. S. Scher, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, Cambridge, 1992

• The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative, in: ed. J. Rink i J. Sampson, Chopin Studies II, Cambridge 1994

• Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement, in: ed. J. Robinson, Music and Meaning, NY 1997

ANTHONY NEWCOMB• When listening to music we can recognize action, tension and dynamics similar to those which we experience while reading a literary text

• The analysis going beyond the formal level to the level of functional elements in the temporal span of the work

• The series of functional events construct musical narrative

• Plot archetypes, paradigms in musical works referring to functions of Propp and Todorov’s paradigms; but in a much more general sense (e.g. scheme: suffering leading to redemption – Symphony no 5 and no 9 of Beethoven, Symphony no 2 of Schumann)

JACQUES NATTIEZ

• Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?, w: “Journal of the Royal Musicological Association” 115/2, p. 240-57, 1990

JACQUES NATTIEZ,1990: Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music? He criticizes attitudes suggesting that narration is possible in music :

we need a literary reference , without which we can only speak about the metaphor of narrativity in music

the inability of music to narrate in the past tense, the lack of: the subject, the subject – predicate relation, causality

music can only suggest a narrative, be similar to a narrative. Formal syntactic relations developing in time create an illusion of narration, which exists only in the mind of a listener

Music itself “narrates without being narrative” (quote of Adorno speaking about the music of Mahler)

JACQUES NATTIEZ,1990: Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?

Music does not narrate, but rather, narrativize Narrative is not in music, but in the story imagined and constructed by listeners from the functional-formal objects

Narratology makes such a big career in our times because there is a huge need of story-listening. It is a source of pleasure

CAROLYN ABBATE

• Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press 1991

CAROLYN ABBATE 1991: Unsung Voices…

• Critical attitude:

Through music we can hear the voice of narration, but we don’t know what it is talking about

Music therefore imitates a narrative mode

Narrative interpretations trivialize music

However, she treats repetitions in music as epic syntheses

KOFI AGAWU

• Playing with Signs: a Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Princeton University Press, 1991

KOFI AGAWU 1991: Playing with Signs… :

• He recalls Ratner’s term topics – musical signs reffering to external world, like march, fanfars, pastorale

• Referring simultaneously to Mattheson’s rhetoric and to Schenker’s dynamic model, he postulates an attempt of deciphering the meaning of a musical work on the basis of the synthesis of topical signs and structural signs

EERO TARASTI• Myth and Music. A Semiotic Approach to the

Aesthetics of Myth in Music, especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky, Mouton, Haga 1979

• A Theory of Musical Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994

• Pre-and post-signs in musical narrativity – illustrated by Richard Wagner and Marcel Proust (paper, Vilnius, ICMS, October 2008)

• Three kinds of narrativity in music and other arts: conventional, organic and existential (paper, symposium Musica inter artes, Katovitz, March 2009)

• Beethoven: between ‘Moi’ i ‘Soi’ – approach to conventional, organic and existential narrativity in music (paper, symposium „Beethoven. Nature and Culture”, Warsaw, April 2009)

Eero Tarasti• Narrative units can be observed in music. We can perceive

narrative programmes in the structure of music itself, without referring to literature

• Greimasian model: the idea of semiotic square, isotopes,

modal categories, actants

• Narrativity can manifest itself in surface communicative structures - topics (so baroque rhetoric figures would be

narrative techniques) and deep structure signification

• The performance of a musical work is crucial for bringing out narrative elements

• A theory of three kinds of narrativity: conventional, organic and existential

FRED EVERETT MAUS• Music as Drama, in: “Music Theory Spectrum”

no 10, p. 56-73, 1988• Music as Narrative, in: “Indiana Theory Review”

no 12, p. 1-34, 1991• Narrative, Drama and Emotion in Instrumental

Music, in: “Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” no 55/3, p. 293-303, 1997

• Narratology, narrativity, in: ed. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians…

FRED EVERETT MAUS

Music is more similar to drama than to a narrative (the argument was later deconstructed by Karol Berger and Byron Almen)

Literary language is fully justified in the interpretation of music, but on a high level of abstraction – which means for example that actants should not be identified

„The exploration of instrumental music as narrative remains a tantalizing, confusing, problematic area of inquiry” (2005)

JOSEPH KERMAN

• Representing a Relationship: Notes on Beethoven Concerto, in: “Representations” nr 39, 1992

• Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, MA 1999)

JOSEPH KERMAN Representing a Relationship…,1997

While plenty of exceptions exist (…) in general one knows exactly who is who in a concerto and who is doing what. There is a soloist and an orchestra, and there is usually quite a sharp sense of character, of “the powerful and multicolored orchestra and its weak but high-spirited adversary”, as Tchaikovsky once put it. The agents exist in some kind of relationship, and what is traced in a concerto is the course of a relationship…

• Study of musical narration should begin with the concerto genre

• an attempt to decipher extra-musical meanings, because on some level they are evident, intersubjectively verifiable

• The perception of a work as it develops in time is significant in the context of musical narrative – in the linear course of time the listener uses the function of memory, he compares earlier passages with future ones, he anticipates, he is taken by surprise, he is being led by musical narration

• The problem of linearity in music requires further investigation

JOSEPH KERMAN Representing a Relationship…,1997

KAROL BERGER

• Narrative and Lyric, in: ed. Jan Stęszewski, Maciej Jabłoński, Interdisciplinary studies in musicology, ars nova, Poznań 1993

KAROL BERGER,Narrative and Lyric

• Introduction of a diad – narrative and lyric – instead of a triad. The narrative category, in such understanding, contains both epic and drama, and it is characterized by what it presents – that is - by plot

• Narration is a type of form (…) in which time plays an essential role, it is a sequence of parts which succeed one another in a determined order

GREGORY KARL

• Music as Plot: a Study in Cyclic Forms, dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1993

• Structuralism and Musical Plot, in: “Music Theory Spectrum” no 19, 1997

GREGORY KARL

• There is a persona – a subject in a work of music whose internal life, mental processes are presented in music (certain extremity can be illustrated by the following expression „but perhaps the persona has learned from mistakes”)

• The importance of binary opposition in the construction of musical structure-narrative. He takes over the system of functions from Propp (however on a higher level of generalization) and actants from Greimas

GREGORY GREGORY KARLKARL

BYRON ALMÉN

• Narrative Archetypes in Music: A semiotic Approach, dissertation, Indiana University 1998

• Narrative Archetypes: a Critique, Theory, and Method of Narrative Analysis, in: “Journal of Music Theory” no 47/1, 2003

• A Theory of Musical Narrative (Musical Meaning & Interpretation), Indiana University Press 2009

BYRON ALMÉN• He debunks one by one the critical arguments concerning the

existence of narration in music (arguments of Nattiez, Maus)

• Narration in music is possible, that it is not a secondary phenomenon taken from literature and that it can manifest itself through the interaction of musical elements

• Narrative categories are present in music (Frye) - comedy, romance, irony/satire, tragedy – they are the outcome of particular sequences of narrative formulas

• Definition: Musical narrative is the process though which the listener perceives and tracks culturally significant transvalutaion of hierarchical relationships within a temporal span

Christie Brookes-Rose:

The story of narratology becomes as much an auto-reflexive as a postmodern tale.