Freedom and Repetition in German Strophic Song

This dissertation confronts the commonplace dismissal of German songs in strophic form, which is defined by a single repeated melody that supports all stanzas of a text. In German song history, this song form was incredibly popular between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, scholars of German music have refused to engage with songs in strophic form, resulting in a warped understanding of Central European song history that omits the eighteenth century almost entirely from scholarly consciousness. Chapter One identifies this lacuna and lays out the foundations of this critical and reparative study, introducing key concepts used throughout the dissertation.Chapter Two identifies and critiques the “strophic problem,” a pervasive anti-strophic attitude present in the scholarly literature of German song. I dissect the rhetoric of this literature, ultimately locating the source of the strophic problem in Wagnerian aesthetics. Richard Wagner’s musical philosophy, later adapted and extended by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor Adorno, holds that structural repetition and classical forms limit aesthetic freedom. In deconstructing these attitudes, I argue that these received notions constrain scholars from approaching strophic songs productively, and that new techniques are necessary to redress their neglect. Chapter Three begins this ideological work by developing a new approach to repetition, combining historical evidence with philosophical theory to produce a liberatory aesthetics of strophic song. In this chapter, which attempts the composition of a strophic song in prose form, I center performance as the actualization of the virtual potential encoded in a strophic song’s repeat sign. Chapter Four offers a practical approach to the analysis of strophic song via the “mutability principle,” which posits that strophic form demands polysemic, multivalent music. I illustrate the principle by analyzing songs by C. P. E. Bach, C. F. Zelter, and Franz Schubert. Chapter Five concludes the dissertation with a reflection on further research that these innovations may support, exploring possibilities for the application of this dissertation’s concepts in areas such as eighteenth-century song, songs by canonic composers, popular music studies, music and politics, and video game music.