Death & the Maiden String
Comparative Literature 133
Week 3b Lecture: Death in the 19th Century Imagination
Questions:
How does Gothic fascination with death animate music?
How do artists respond to the fate of death we share?
Theme: Death as Teacher
Death as Teacher:
Una ultima & in vita motu
Memento mori
Danse macabre
Danse Macabre [1538]
Hans Holbein the Younger
Theme:
Death as Teacher
“Dying means: you are dead already…by a death that was not your own, which you have thus neither known nor lived…you await it henceforth, constructing a future to make it possible…as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.” [Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster]
Is death an “experience”?
Is death ever ours?
Representing Death: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Albrecht Durer [1498]:
Left to right: Death, Pestilence, War, Conquest [Revelations 6]
Edgar Allan Poe’s Grim Reaper
Masque of the Red Death [1842]
Setting: court masque
Intertextuality: Prince Prospero & Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Color story: black room, blood-red window panes
Foreshadowing: ebony clock
Right: illustration of Fourth Horseman [Gustave Doré, 1865]
Edgar Allan Poe’s Grim Reaper
Masque of the Red Death [1842] continued:
“the figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave.” [8]
“a throng of revelers…gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.” [10]
Why the emphasis on clothes and staging?
Why does the Grim Reaper have no gender?
Representing Death: Still Life
Memento mori and still life
Studies in form
Skull and rotting fruit
Still Life with Skull [1900]
Paul Cézanne
Representing Death:
Post-Mortem Photography
Examples of memento mori:
post-mortem photography
Death & the Maiden
[1817]
“Death and the Maiden” [1817]
Lyrics by Matthias Claudius
[1817] German Lied [song: originally for voice + piano]
The Maiden:
Stay away! Oh, stay away!
Go, fierce death!
I am still young, please go!
And do not touch me.
Death:
Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender vision!
I am a friend, and come not to hurt you.
Be of good cheer! I am not cruel.
You will sleep softly in my arms.
Death & the Maiden String Quartet [1824]
Part I: Allegro
Motifs: small repeated units of melody
triplet notes
Dynamics: volume
Fortissimo [v loud]
pianissimo [v soft]
Evocation of terror
Death & the Maiden String Quartet [1824]
Part II: Andante con moto
One musical theme + five variations
Voice of death
Death & the Maiden String Quartet [1824]
Part III: Scherzo
Joke
Minuet [3/4 time]
Intended as interlude [“dance of the demon fiddler”]
Death & the Maiden String Quartet [1824]
Part IV: Presto
Tarantella [very fast peasant dance, 6/8 time signature]
Folkloric treatment
Final dance of death
