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- 1.
Euripides (c. 484–407 BC) is possibly the greatest of the Greek playwright who helped bringing Athenian culture to its unsurpassed heights.
- 2.
Johan August Strindberg (1849–1912), the Swedish playwright, pioneered European theatrical realism.
- 3.
Virgil (70–19 BC), well-known Roman poet.
- 4.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), German thinker, critic, and dramatist. In 1766, he wrote his famous art critical—aesthetical essay about “Lakoon oder die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie.”
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Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) the first composer of the Italian Renaissance.
- 6.
“Ruepelspiel”, literally “play of the louts.” is a short and coarse comedy. It was brought to its most popular form by Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the Nuremberg shoemaker and poet. Shakespeare integrated an English version of the Ruepelspiel into his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in form of the play within the play, which Bottom the Weaver and his friends perform for the Duke and his guests.
- 7.
Jean Lully (1632–87) another of the early Italian composers.
- 8.
Jean Rameau (1683–1764), French composer.
- 9.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the Swiss-French exponent of the philosophy of enlightenment.
- 10.
Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–87), Bavarian composer.
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The Piccinnists were followers of the Italian composer Niccola Piccinni (1728–1800) who was called, in 1776, to the French court. In Paris, he was made the center of a raging controversy with the followers of Gluck.
- 12.
Metastasio was the assumed name of Pietro Trapassi (1698–1782), Italian poet and writer of plays which were partially set to music.
- 13.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) lived in Paris during the years of 1778–9.
- 14.
Heinrich Schutz (1585–1672) was the first of the German composers of lasting significance.
- 15.
Richard Wagner (1813–83) wrote the study on “Opel” und “Drama” during his exile in Switzerland (1849–59).
- 16.
By material Schutz means here the dramatic plot, the story to be dramatized; usually pre-existing as legend, as story, as historical report, or at least provisionally outlined by the author before writing the drama.
- 17.
In his Poetics, Aristotle (348–322 B C.) postulated the “unity of the plot” as the crucial criterion of a good tragedy. His main requirement is that the tragedy “must represent an action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of anyone of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole” (De Poetica 8: 1451a). W.D. Ross (ed.), The Student’s Oxford Aristotle, vol. VI. London: Oxford University Press. The Poetics contains no explicit “law” of the “unity of space and time.” As one old but most reliable source informs us, it is “very doubtful” that Aristotle ever spoke of such a combined law; but if so, “rather as an observance than a strict law.” Johann Eduard Erdmann. A History of Philosophy (London: Swan, 1893), vol. 1: 176. The law, then, seems to be the product of later Aristotelians.
- 18.
Nicolas Boileau- Despreaux (1636–1711), an outstanding French writer of his period, published his L’Art poetique in 1674. In its third book, he dealt with tragic and epic poetry.
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Strindberg wrote “Froeken Julie” in 1888. This drama is considered the prototype of the realistic tragedy.
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Jean Baptiste Poquelin (1622–73) became famous under the assumed name, Moliere. An actor of wide experience, he became one of the greatest playwrights of Europe.
- 21.
Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829), one of the main exponents of German literary Romantic, published a two-volume History of Ancient and Modern Literature in 1815.
- 22.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the first German thinker in existential revolt against philosophical rationalism. His first book, written in 1872, was entitled The Birth of the Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. It gave rise to violent controversies.
- 23.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Next to Goethe, he was the main figure of the classical period of German literature. Like Goethe, he was involved with the theater in Weimar. In 1803, he wrote an essay about “The Use of the Chorus in Tragedy.”
- 24.
Johann Wolfgimg von Goethe (1749–1832) wrote various notes on the drama; notably “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry” (1797) and “Supplements to Aristotle’s Poetics” (1827).
- 25.
The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) opened up the era of “modern” music with the introduction of the twelve-stone scale. Among his earlier works is the musical drama, “The Lucky Hand” (1913). The Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), is best known for his ballet scores. He produced a “lyrical tale in three acts” (“The Nightingale”) in 1914, a “Cantata Ballet”’ (“The Marriage”) in 1917, and a comical opera (“Mavra”) in 1922. Alban Berg (1885–1935), another Austrian composer, wrote the opera “Wozzeck” in 1921.
- 26.
Arthur’Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the German philosopher generally labeled as philosopher of pessimism, broke with the prevailing Kantian and Hegelian traditions. Centering his philosophy on The Will, he called his major work The World as Will and Idea (1819). In its third volume, he developed his theory of music, which greatly influenced Richard Wagner.
- 27.
Nietzsche’s critical response to Schopenhauer’s theory of music is contained in a fragment, “About Music and Word,” which he wrote in 1871.
- 28.
This paragraph was written by hand on the left margin of the MS.
- 29.
This poem is Schiller’s “An die Freude,” a rhapsodic praise of joy.
- 30.
The strata of consciousness, to which Schutz alludes here, are identical with the life forms which he treated at length in the main part of his projected study. (See “Part I” and the early sections of the first two pieces of “Part II.”)
- 31.
Franz Schubert (1797–1828), the Austrian composer, set various poems of Goethe to music.
- 32.
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903), also Austrian, wrote the music for more than fifty poems of Goethe.
- 33.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), the greatest German composer of the Baroque period, brought polyphonic techniques to perfection.
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Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) wrote a two-volume study, Johann Sebastian Bach, which, in 1938, appeared in English translation (New York: Macmillan).
- 35.
Cantatas are vocal compositions including arias, duets, recitatives, and choir presentations.
- 36.
Franz Liszt (1811–86), Hungarian composer and pianist, wrote various compositions which are classified as “symphonic poems” or “tone poems.” Richard Strauss (1864–1949), the German composer, created his own operatic form. Among his earlier works are a “Don Juan” (1888) and a “Till Eulenspiegel” (1894), prime examples of the symphonic poem.
- 37.
In Schutz’s MS, the title of this score was given as “Fireworks.” There are indications that, at the time, he disliked Stravinsky’s program music more than that of any other composer.
- 38.
One of the most characteristic operatic innovations of Wagner, a Leitmotiv is a short musical theme standing for a character or object fraught with symbolic significance. It is introduced in the overture and appears throughout the opera whenever the action brings the character on the stage or refers to the symbolic object.
- 39.
The secco recitative is recited in irregular rhythmic patterns and delivered in deliberately inexpressive manner (secco = dry).
- 40.
Arioso is a recitative of pronounced lyrical expressiveness.
- 41.
This statement occurs in the original MS in the midst of a very long paragraph (which I have divided into several sections). Yet, it does not precede a discussion of a Passion by Bach; it is merely a hint at the possibility of such an illustration. When Schutz, later in the essay, returned to the topic announced here, he chose Handel, not Bach, as model.
- 42.
Here, Schutz aimed at the fact that, in a monologue, a person (actor) addresses himself as if he were two persons. This “doubling of the I,” of course, is nothing but an incipient form of the juxtaposition of the “I” and the “Me” in the sense in which Schutz should later encounter it in the writings of William James and George Herbert Mead.
- 43.
In 1923, Guido Adler published his lectures about Richard Wagner, which he offered the University of Vienna. He wrote various historical essays about composers and musical styles, among them “heterophony.” His main work was the Handbook of Music, the first edition of which appeared in 1924.
- 44.
Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759), another outstanding German composer of the German Baroque period, wrote mostly church music. His oratorio “The Messiah” (1741) is his most famous work.
- 45.
The testa is presented by a testo, that is, a singer who narrates the story of the oratorio.
- 46.
In the original MS, the reference to the audience (das Publikum), here, is erroneously given with the masculine pronoun for the third person singular (er); in the next sentence, the correct German neuter pronoun (es) is used. I have replaced ‘Publikum’ by ‘listeners,’ setting the whole statement in the plural.
- 47.
Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), the leading figure of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, published a book entiled The Dramatical Idea in the Texts of Mozart’s Operas (1916). Schutz discussed it, in some detail, in his American essay “Mozart and the Philosophers” (1956a). This essay in reprinted in Collected Papers 2.
- 48.
“Nummernoper” is a generic designation of the early operatic style which consisted largely of a succession of disconnected pieces (arias, duets, songs for chorus, recitatives) written for and presented by different singers. As Schutz pointed out with regard to the early Italian operas, this style amounted to what I am tempted to call a kind of musical variety show in which individual singers offered their “numbers” for the benefit of the display of their vocal virtuosity. Mozart’s’ operas, of course, are not of this extreme type. But they preserved something of the number style in the alternation of what Schutz called operatic high points and musically unemphasized passages (recitatives or spoken dialogues) but also in his treatment of individual scenes as musical unities in themselves.
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Schutz, A. (2013). Meaning Structures of Drama and Opera. In: Barber, M. (eds) Collected Papers VI. Literary Reality and Relationships. Phaenomenologica, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1518-9_10
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