Text and music - music theater stories


Music is unflinchingly loaded with meanings, a wonderful world of projections - taking on a life of its own without regard for possible objections. Why is the purely associative coupling of language and music, of narrative and sound structure, these analogies that cannot really be verified, not possibly questionable? Why is it that in this meadow of the vague with its mental constructs, with its verbal aha-experiences - why is the „per se", the not yet transferred into the pictorial, the origin of the sound structure of music on the one hand and of the sound of language with its associations of meaning on the other hand considered so unimportant?

Music and language (only) as mutual metaphor? Why can music "say" something?

Immediate reception is thwarted by demanded verbal detours of thought, distorting the perception of the processes.

Statements by dramaturges of large opera houses often give the impression that the usual text-music relationship, which has become self-evident, is rarely problematized.


In established music theater, pure stage realities are created far from material-immanent origins. Findings of a music-theatrical narrative often repeat what is already known anyway.

A direct experience of music theater, on the other hand, appears in contexts that emerge as a by-product of narrative reality, weary of its constructed contents of meaning.

The narrative's own time is then lost, sacrificing disposed contexts in the experience of music and de-temporalized text, losing its flow - gestures, detaching themselves from the word... (?)

Abstract of the subject and its processing :

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