Song and the Music of Poetry

As much as the Lied has been a mainstay in studies of the relationship between text and music, one important aspect of that relationship has been largely ignored: the ways in which composers respond to the sounds, or phonemes, of words themselves. Analysts of German Lieder (and art song in general) have emphasised the diverse ways in which music expresses the meaning of poetry, but they have remained largely indifferent to how music captures, and often enhances, poetry's materiality – its patterns of consonants and vowels, its intonational shapes, its ‘music’. Drawing in part upon literary scholarship on the sonic aspects of poetry (by Robert Pinsky, M. H. Abrams and others), this article explores how the sound worlds of poetry and music interact. I begin by evaluating three common approaches to the analysis of art song, each of which neglects poetic sound to some degree. I then propose an alternative approach, one designed to ensure that the music of poetry is given its due. Finally, I apply this method to a detailed analysis of ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’’, from Dichterliebe , and to another setting by Schumann, ‘Melancholie’, from the Spanisches Liederspiel .