“Stories from a Composer's Life” is the subtitle of Samuel Adler's autobiography. And a storyteller he is. The project of “rescuing” the stories from oral transmission and jotting them down for eventual publication in a book originated in the mid-1980s with Sam sitting at the family table and relating his stories as a tape recorder captured them. (The transcribed tapes served, thirty years later, to trigger his memories and bring the project to a conclusion.) The stories are full of humor and contain touches of irony; they show an awareness of human foibles, including his own, and are told with understanding and tolerance. And occasionally, the stories capture poignant, even traumatic, moments in history from a personal perspective—e.g., Dallas, Texas in November 1963 and New York City in September 2001 (and Adler is nearby in both instances). As a ten-year-old boy he witnessed the atrocities committed during Reichskristallnacht in November 1938 in his native Mannheim. Two months later, the same boy, with a fearful look in his eyes, arrived in New York City on the S.S. Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty in the background heralding the prospects of a new and promising life. And what a life it has become!: a life lived in ever-widening concentric circles; a life focused on building music's empire through teaching, composing, lecturing, and writing; a life devoted to nurturing friendships with musicians and other artists all over the world; and indeed the stories here are intertwined with the protagonist's travels across the United States, Europe, and, in later years, South America and Asia. Adler's life story is an example of how much a society is enriched by welcoming foreigners and giving them a chance at a new beginning.

The stories related in Building Bridges with Music are only a selection from a rich repertory of tales and anecdotes that could have been told as well. Chances are that a meeting with Sam Adler, when he is in the storytelling mood, will result in a whole set of additional tales, to be inserted in the narrative that here is making it into print. The autobiographical stories are followed by several appendixes: two essays central to Adler's activities as a composer and an interview about the teaching of composition as well as a list of his students at North Texas, Eastman, Juilliard, Bowdoin, and, most recently, the Berlin Academy.

Felix Mendelssohn grew up in an era and in a region of Europe—namely the German-speaking lands—that liked statues and monuments, not so much for their own sake as because they reflected a deep awareness of history. In fact, he contributed to such monuments—aural, semistaged, and in stone—throughout his life, calling attention to, indeed constructing, historical legacies through his activities. He even confessed his fondness for such monuments in England, when he proposed, perhaps in jest, that Dr. Henry John Gauntlett, an influential figure in British organ reform in the nineteenth century, “ought to have a statue.”

Profuse numbers of statues and monuments were installed in the German states of Europe following the Wars of Liberation 1813–15, and, more prominently, after the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Celebrating victories in wars and casting them as triumphs in stone had, of course, been a practice since ancient times. (One only needs to walk among Rome's archaeological sites to encounter triumphal arches and columns that reformulated military successes as icons of heroism and greatness for current and future generations.) Just a few years after Mendelssohn was born, the German-speaking people shook off the yoke of Napoleonic empire building and expressed their military victories—albeit accomplished with considerable foreign help, especially from the British and from tsarist Russia—in monuments throughout much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. Beethoven had participated in such celebrations early on with ephemeral works such as Wellingtons Sieg, oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria, op. 91 (Wellington's victory, or The Battle of Vitoria) and the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick, op. 136 (The glorious moment), both performed at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. Perhaps to atone for his reluctant participation in Napoleon's wars against Prussia and Russia when he was a crown prince, Ludwig I of Bavaria, once he ascended to the throne, would not be outdone in manifesting his Teutonic credentials in marble and granite. The Befreiungshalle (Hall of Liberation) in Kelheim near Regensburg celebrated the military success of the German people in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. Conceived in the 1830s, it was inaugurated on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig in 1863.

In contrast to most folk songs and popular songs, such as those discussed by Mark Booth in his monograph The Experience of Songs, art songs set preexisting poems. It is therefore understandable that when we examine text-music relationships in the German Lied, we often analyze the settings as responses to, or even imitations of, the poems that are their subjects and programs. Although we do not necessarily declare a setting aesthetically inferior if it does not follow the poem closely, establishing the extent of parallelism is a standard part of stylistic analysis.

But what exactly are the elements of a text to which a composer may choose to respond? Customarily, analysts look at how a song interprets, expresses, or enacts a sense of its text—how, for example, it renders an expressed emotion or whether it responds to an ironic current of meaning. Much less systematic are investigations of the other levels of a poem to which a composer's attention may turn, in particular its metric, rhythmic, and formal dimensions. Indeed, one might question whether a composer can respond to such dimensions or whether musical rhythm and structure do not simply overpower their more delicate textual counterparts.

In addition, one might ask how one can isolate the formal features of a text decisively enough to assert that a setting corresponds to them rather than to the ideas or syntax of text or to some “purely musical” consideration.

Our goal here is to find a means of approaching such questions. To focus attention on poetic form in Lied settings, we have chosen examples of an unusual and highly patterned structure: the Persian ghazal in its German realizations. By examining a variety of ghazals and comparing their settings, we hope to demonstrate that a poetic form can indeed reach through a poet's text, exerting influence on the musical setting and presenting the composer with at least partially specifiable compositional choices. In so doing, we hope to contribute to a general expansion of the analysis of text-music relationships.

The ghazal is not characterized by its length, which varies from about four to perhaps fifteen couplets, or by its meter, which is chosen freely by the poet and remains constant through the poem, but instead by the single rhyme that binds each poem.

Schumann's Liederkreis, op. 39, is generally considered one of the great song cycles in the history of the German Lied. But what makes it a cycle is less than clear. In fact, some of the principal defining characteristics of song cycles such as Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, and even Schumann's Dichterliebe do not apply here. The poems of op. 39 do not form a lyric cycle, they do not outline a story in the conventional sense, and even if we assume some kind of teleological narrative in the sequence of emotional states displayed in the songs, Schumann complicated or thwarted that pat assumption by replacing, in the second edition of the Liederkreis, the opening song of the cycle with a different one—which, in turn, projects a vastly different emotional trajectory. The ambivalence about how to begin the cycle opens up questions about motivic-thematic recall and key sequence, two aspects various authors— including myself in an earlier study—have identified as contributing to the cyclic coherence on the musical side. Questions upon questions, and no easy answers.

Stage 1: Selecting the Poems

A review of the compositional genesis of the songs later gathered to become the Liederkreis may be of some help in our quest for answers. In the case of text settings, such a review begins appropriately with the selection of the poetry to be set. In 1839 Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck started collecting poems by mostly contemporary poets and entering them into a book titled (in Robert Schumann's handwriting) “Abschriften von Gedichten zur Composition.” Many of these poems, including more than a dozen Eichendorff poems (fig. 14.1), would at some later stage serve as texts to be set to music. Even though both Schumanns added poems to the book well into the early 1850s, the collection was begun as a joint project of two artists who, during their courtship, wanted to be linked by artistic and spiritual bonds when they were physically separated. Schumann set to music the lion's share of the poems gathered in the collection, but Clara contributed a number of Rückert songs, which, together with others by Robert, were published as Liebesfrühling, op. 37, a few years after the couple married.