Lecture: Stephen Rodgers

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Robert Schumann’s Late Songs and the Aesthetics of Romantic Closure

One of the main differences between Classical and Romantic music is the way Romantic composers end things—the way they modify and distort the cadential norms of their eighteenth-century predecessors. The past decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on Romantic closure, but most of it has focused on instrumental music. Less has been written about closure in Romantic song, where the interaction of musical closure and text creates an especially rich expressive environment. My presentation explores this interaction, using Robert Schumann’s late songs as a case study. Schumann’s post-1849 songs are not only more dramatic and declamatory than his Liederjahr songs. They are also more open-ended: nearly twenty of his late songs close without cadences. Schumann uses two main strategies to do this: (1) replacing a root-position dominant or tonic with another chord at a moment of structural closure, so that an authentic cadence is undermined; and (2) inserting a tonic pedal before a moment of structural closure, so that the chords that would otherwise articulate a cadential progression are functionally obscured. Just as important as the strategies that he uses to create these non-cadential endings are the text-expressive effects that result. In many of these songs a lack of cadential closure becomes a powerful metaphor for a lack of poetic closure. The protagonists of the poems are either reluctant to let go of something or unable to attain it, and the musical open-endedness underlines their feelings of hesitancy and failure. Studying these open-ended songs not only reveals a strikingly original and understudied aspect of Schumann’s late style; it also suggests that in our ongoing exploration of Romantic closure we ought to attend not just to how composers end things but also to how they read things, because the two are inseparable.

Biography

Stephen Rodgers is Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. He writes about the relationship between music and poetry, focusing especially on German Lieder. His edited collection, The Songs of Fanny Hensel, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, and he is currently working on a book about Clara Schumann’s songs. He is also the author of a book about Berlioz’s approach to musical form, Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz (Cambridge UP, 2009). Rodgers’s work extends beyond academia as well. He regularly gives pre-concert lectures for the Oregon Bach Festival, and he wrote a one-hour episode for Thomas Hampson’s radio series “Song: Mirror of the World.” He is also active as a tenor, having performed several lecture-recitals throughout the United States. An Iowa native, he received his B.A. in Music and English from Lawrence University and his Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University.

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