« A Typical Romantic Narrative Strategy: the Case of Chopin’s Fantasy op. 49 »
Communication dispensée par Julie WALKER (membre du GREAM) dans le cadre du « 13th Congress on Musical Signification - Sound and Subject through Ages: Musical Meanings in Narratives, Topics and Technologiess », à Canterbury Christ Church University de Canterbury (Royaume-Uni), le 4 avril 2016 de 17h30 à 18h00.
Today I finished the Fantasy – and the sky is beautiful, there’s a sadness in my heart – but that’s alright. If it were otherwise, perhaps my existence would be worth nothing to anyone.
(Letter to J. Fontana, 20th October 1841)
Musical narratology is an important item to highlight and understand the narrative strategies of musical works by the study of the concatenation of the expressive unities it contains. In the 19th century, the narrative strategy is often built as a “path which leads the listener from dysphoric elements till the transcendental level (euphoric) through several steps […]. This itinerary often corresponds to the coming-of-age novel or imaginary or initiatory journey […]” (Grabocz, 2009, p. 33). This is also possible in music by the choice of the protagonists, their relationships and their evolution into the musical piece.
In our thesis, which focuses on Chopin’s last style, we study 21 works of the 1840’s to reach a definition of this late stylistic period. Among our corpus, the Fantasy op. 49 in F minor is particularly interesting. In fact, this piece was rather badly received by the contemporary critics, considering “a lack of unity and cohesion” according to Lenz while Schumann found it “full of genius traits, although the whole hasn’t felt to have being bound by a formal harmonious framework”.
However, we consider that this work is a very good illustration of a real mastery of the formal construction and the narrative strategy proposed by Chopin and revealed by the narrative analysis. Composed in the beginnings of the 40’s, two themes serve as a basis of all the progression: the first is dramatic and more and more powerful all along its repetitions which put us deeper into the dramaturgy. The second is more transitional, in an improvised style and presents two kinds of appearance, totally opposite, which carries the auditor into two different atmospheres. The interactions between these two protagonists will build the “plot” of the piece, anchored in this romantic aesthetic, as we will try to show it in our presentation.
This kind of narrative strategy will also be compared with other works of our corpus which present the same kind of strategy but also totally contrary, like the Ballade op. 52 in f minor whose analysis in our forthcoming paper "La Ballade op. 52: une « épopée dramatique ». Entre analyse formelle, narrative et thymique" noticed a totally inverse narrative strategy.
