For his first work composed without Schoenberg's supervision, Berg chose to set five short poems by his friend and intellectual idol, the controversial poet Peter Altenberg. Carrying the title Filnf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (1912), the cycle is at once aphoristic (with respect to the songs' duration) and titanic (with respect to their orchestration and motivic density). But the title invites the question: what imagery might the composer have hoped to illustrate with these musical postcards? This thesis investigates text-music relations in Berg's opus 4 with the objective of showing that the music's structure, far from being semantically neutral, participates actively in the création of rich poetic imagery anchored in the socio-cultural context of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Previous studies focus on the work's cyclic motives its interval-cycle substructure. The present study focuses on text-music relations and voice leading - the contrapuntal and harmonie procedures which govern the music's surface and determine its deep structure. It is shown that the voice-leading structures of the individual lieder - in both local detail and at a more broadly conceptual level - give form, meaning, and nuance to the poetic image that emerges in each song, and help define the different facets—physical, emotional, and spiritual — of the protagonist that inhabits them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.19771 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Pedneault, D. Julie |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Faculty of Music) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002024859, Theses scanned by McGill Library. |
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