Framing Till Eulenspiegel

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 4-43

  Hepokoski, James ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Antimetaphysical aesthetics; German early modernism; Nietzsche; Sonata deformation; Till Eulenspiegel

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949253697     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2006.30.1.004     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2005)
2. "The Private Intellectual Context of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra," this journal 22 (1998), 101-26
3. "Ten Letters from Alexander Ritter to Richard Strauss, 1887-1894," Richard-Strauss Blätter 35 (June 1996), 3-22
4. Compare the summary in Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 50-66
5. Youmans, "The Private Intellectual Context," p. 110
6. See also the information about Seidl in Youmans, "The Private Intellectual Context" and Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, pp. 21-23
7. in Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss, pp. 19, 36, 61, and 64
8. and in Morten Kristiansen, Richard Strauss's Feuersnot in Its Aesthetic and Cultural Context: A Modernist Critique of Musical Idealism (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2000), pp. 80-94
9. (also cited in Youmans, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, pp. 259-60, n. 28)
10. Arthur Seidl, "Richard Strauß - eine Charakter-Skizze (1896)," in Seidl, Straußiana: Aufsätze zur Richard Strauß-Frage aus drei Jahrzehnten (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, [1913]), p. 46
11. Compare, e.g., Richard Wattenbarger, "A 'Very German Process': The Contexts of Adorno's Strauss Critique," this journal 25 (2001-02), 313-36
12. and, more extensively, Wattenbarger, Richard Strauss, Modernism, and the University: A Study of German-Language and American Academic Reception of Richard Strauss from 1900 to 1990 (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2000)
13. Theodor W. Adorno, "Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864," trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, Perspectives of New Music 4 (1965), 22-24
14. See, e.g., Hepokoski, "Beethoven Reception," in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 424-59 (esp. pp. 454-58 on the two generational waves of composers after 1870)
15. Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996), pp. 125-32
16. Much of the remainder of this and the following paragraph is drawn from Werbeck. Hepokoski, review of Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen, in Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998), 603-25, summarizes the contents of Werbeck's book more generally
17. Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen, p. 83, n. 18, noted that this statement, while perhaps correct, could not currently be checked
18. Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen, p. 128, n. 111: "Mystifikation der Philister"; "er tanzt den Philistern auf den Köpfen herum"; "Lektion")
19. Translations of the labels are provided by Mary Whittall in Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years, p. 397 (which transmits Schuh's indavertent omission of No. 13 below, which I have supplied). Whittall's translations are: (1) "Once upon a time there was a knavish fool"; (2) "named Till Eulenspiegel"; (3) "He was a wicked goblin"; (4) "Up to new tricks"; (5) "Just wait, you faint-hearts!"; (6) "Hop! On horseback through the market-women"; (7) "He runs away in seven-league boots"; (8) "Hidden in a mouse's hole"; (9) "Disguised as a parson, he oozes unction and morality"; (10) "but the knave peeps out at his big toe"; (11) "But, because of his mockery of religion, he feels a sudden horror of his end"; (12) "Till as gallant, exchanging dainty courtesies with pretty girls"; ([13] "They've been really smitten"); (14) "He woos them"; (15) "However fine, a basket still signifies refusal" (alternatively, "However fine it may be, a basket is still nothing more than a basket"); (17) "Vows revenge on the whole human race"; (18) "Philistines' motive"; (19) "After imposing a few whopping theses on the Philistines, he abandons them, baffled, to their fate"; (20) "Grimace from a distance"; (21) "Till's street ditty"; (24) "The trial"; (25) "He whistles nonchalantly"; (26) "Up the ladder! There he swings, the air is squeezed out of him, a last jerk. Till's mortal part has come to an end."
20. Seidl, "Richard Strauß," pp. 11-66
21. The term "Ausnahmemenschen" appears in Seidl's recycling of much of the above passage - with slight variants - in an essay, "Also sang Zarathustra" published in his Moderner Geist in der deutschen Tonkunst (Berlin: "Harmonie" Verlagsgesellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, [1901]), p. 88
22. Youmans, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, p. 183. Compare p. 186: "One of the ways in which Till is defined for us, then, is through a kind of demystification that treats parody as more faithful to reality, not less."
23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Section 108 ("New Struggles"), Beginning of Book 3, p. 167: "God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. - And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too" (Kaufmann noted, p. 167, n. 1, that "this is the first occurrence of this famous formulation in Nietzsche's books")
24. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1961, rpt. 1969), p. 68 (from the section of Zarathustra's initial discourses, "Of Reading and Writing")
25. Compare Youmans, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, pp. 183-200 ("Eulenspiegel and Zarathustra as Alter Egos")
26. For a recent, influential discussion of traditional sentence structure ca. 1800, see William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 35-48
27. A few modifications to the theory have been proposed in Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 84, n. 14 and 106, n. 8
28. See also the discussion of the expansion of the classical sentence into significantly modified nineteenth-century formats in Matthew BaileyShea, The Wagnerian Satz: The Rhetoric of the Sentence in Wagner's Post-Lohengrin Operas (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2003), esp. pp. 47-90
29. Caplin's descriptions are overly restrictive in their implications, however, and the outlines for the sentence provided in the text above are more flexible, even as they also slightly modify some of Caplin's terminology. For subverted or evaded cadences within nineteenth-century sentences, see BaileyShea, The Wagnerian Satz, e.g., pp. 52, 98, 166-88, 236-44
30. and - perhaps derivatively from Austin - by Milton Babbitt, Words about Music (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 149
31. As also noted in Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen, p. 353
32. Reinhold C. Muschler, Richard Strauss (Hildesheim: Franz Borgmayer, [1924]), p. 319 (the Pastor episode as "das erste Seitenthema")
33. Alfred Lorenz, "Der formale Schwung in Richard Strauss' 'Till Eulenspiegel'," Die Musik 17 (1924-25), 658-69 (see esp. the structural table on p. 668)
34. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, pp. 101, 52
35. Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory, pp. 333-36, 388-89, and 413-27, which also provide bibliographical references on this topic
36. Compare Michael Talbot, The Finale in Western Instrumental Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 2
37. See also, e.g., only one of many such overviews, Malcolm S. Cole, "Rondo," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 21, pp. 649-56, esp. pp. 650-51 on the well-known traditional character of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century rondo-oriented composition and rondo theme proper
38. "Structure and Program in Macbeth: A Proposed Reading of Strauss's First Symphonic Poem," in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 78-80
39. Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, pp. 6-7
40. review of Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen (see n. 13 above), pp. 618-23
41. "Beethoven Reception," p. 451
42. Mauke, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, rpt. Richard Strauss: Symphonien und Tondichtungen, ed. Walden, p. 93
43. Otto Klauwell, Geschichte der Programmusik von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1910), p. 241
44. Max Steinitzer, Richard Strauss (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1911), pp. 232-34
45. Richard Specht, Richard Strauss und sein Werk, vol. I (Leipzig: E. P. Tal, 1921), pp. 217-28 (though ultimately bizarre, the most unique and curious of all of the formal analyses at hand)
46. Lorenz, "Der formale Schwung in Richard Strauss' 'Till Eulenspiegel'," pp. 658-69
47. Reinhard Gerlach, Don Juan und Rosenkavalier, Publikationen der Schweizerischen Musikforschenden Gesellschaft II, 13 (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1966), p. 67 (cited in Werbeck, p. 406, n. 72)
48. Mauke, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, p. 93
49. See, e.g., the discussion of formal problems associated generally with sonata-form-based program music in Hepokoski, review of Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen, pp. 612-25
50. For discussions of these recapitulations from this point of view, see Hepokoski, "Structure and Program in Macbeth," pp. 80-82
51. "Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero?", pp. 147-52, 160-62
52. This important feature remained unobserved by Youmans, who erroneously insisted that "the recapitulation focuses exclusively on one theme, the second Till theme" (Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, p. 188)
53. Specht, Richard Strauss und sein Werk, p. 225, facsimile between pp. 226-27: "Und jetzt wird alles in den tollsten Wirbel gerissen; im doppelten und dreifachen Kontrapunkt springen und durchkreuzen sich die Themen in grenzenloser Ausgelassenheit - zunächst unwiderstehlich possierlich im Gegeneinandertanz der sich wie 'beschwipst' geberdenden Hauptthemen 2 und 3."
54. On the history and potentially narrative implications of the introduction-coda frame, see Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, p. 6
55. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: Norton, 1968), e.g., pp. 14-18
56. Several of these issues have been recently explored and related to music in Matthew McDonald, "Silent Narration? Elements of Narrative in Ives's The Unanswered Question," this journal 27 (2004), 263-86, which also furnishes through its footnotes a starting-point for further reflection on this topic. See especially pp. 276-77, a discussion of theories of an implicit filmic narrator or grand imagier - or his or her absence - in the late-twentieth- century critical work of Christan Metz, Sarah Kozloff, André Gaudreault, Albert Laffay, David Bordwell, Seymour Chatman, and Jakob Lothe