CRISTINA G. ROJO

THE “RETROSPECT” IN JOHANNES BRAHMS’S WORK – OR HOW A PIANO SPEAKS WITHOUT WORDS

CRISTINA G. ROJO

Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya cris.gonzalez.rojo@gmail.com

The “Retrospect” (der Rückblick) is a narrative archetype that represents a changing of temporality. In the Retrospect, the musical discourse makes an expressive use of the double temporality implicit in the switching from predefined material – associated with a remembered past, unrecoverable, which is being evoked – to spontaneous material and back. The latter is associated with a dysphoric present that remembers and reacts spontaneously, as if improvised. The term is taken from Brahms’s Sonata No. 3 Op. 5, the 4th movement of which, Intermezzo, has the rubric Rückblick and presents a “retrospective” version of the material that had been previously heard in the second movement.

This paper aims to define and classify those concepts, categories, and styles implied in the signification process of the Retrospect (der Rückblick). Special attention will be paid to the markers of the temporal dimension: all those signs through which a change of temporality is represented in music. This change consists of a transition between the present and the past, and vice versa. All those markers need to be classified in order to propose a definition for the Retrospect. The agent behind those changes of temporality is the musical persona, through which music, as in literature, is able to represent a virtual character who is in the present and suddenly looks back to the past.

Furthermore, the aforementioned Retrospect can appear at the movement level and at the whole-work level. In this paper, I propose a systematization of this archetype on these two levels of action, taking Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 3 Op. 5 as an example. Regarding the whole-work level, Brahms added an extra movement to the four standard movements of the Sonata cycle. That is the aforementioned Intermezzo in the fourth position, with the rubric Rückblick (literally, “a look back”).

Keywords: musical signification, Johannes Brahms, narrative archetype, retrospect, musical persona.

Cristina G. Rojo is currently finishing her bachelor degree in piano at Esmuc (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya). She participates regularly in the Kawai Heinrich-Neuhaus Meisterkurs für Klavier, where she has performed several piano recitals in Holland and Germany. She is especially interested in musical narrativity and currently researching about how musical signification affects performance. In addition to piano performance, she has started teaching music appreciation and has given lectures on opera in Aula Oberta in Barcelona as well as on musical signification at the Jornades ab Sentits at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya.