9th EUROPEAN MUSIC ANALYSIS CONFERENC E — E U R O M A C 9 Frankie Perry *1 * Royal Holloway, University of London, England 1
[email protected] Seeking Schubert in Aribert Reimann’s Mignon ‘Mignon I’ D. 726 (‘Heiss mich nicht reden’), ‘Sehnsucht’ ABSTRACT D. 310a (‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’), and ‘Mignon II’, D. 727 (‘So lasst mich scheinen’). The songs unfold consecu- Background tively, each in its original key; Reimann links them with short Adaptations, orchestrations, and reworkings of nine- interludes and bookends the work with a quartet-only intro- teenth-century music by late twentieth and twenty-first cen- duction and postlude in E major, thus placing the pre-existing tury composers pose exciting challenges for musicologists: songs within a new structural and harmonic narrative. The the complex interactions between musical materials, contexts, introductory, closing, and interlude material is largely drawn and authors old and new often evade existing interpretative from another Mignon setting: the harmonically- and textur- frameworks. Since the 1970s, a significant body of such ally-adventurous ‘Sehnsucht’ D. 656 for male voice quintet. re-imaginings of nineteenth-century Lieder has emerged and Two surviving fragments of an abandoned ‘So lasst mich continues to expand, while there was a proliferation of Schu- scheinen’, D. 469 — again characterised by unexpected har- bert-based compositions in the decade of his bicentenary, the monic turns — are also incorporated; unlike the rest of Schu- 1990s, by figures such as Luciano Berio, Hans Zender, Hans bert’s material used, these fragments are transposed up a tone Werner Henze, and Aribert Reimann.