Austrian Studies

AUSTRIAN STUDIES, 13, 2OO5 271 scholarly work that has already been carried out in this area. Kralik's lifelong fascination with Calder?n, and with ithis role in promoting a revival of Catholic drama, isdismissed in two sentences (p. 34), his dramatized history of the French Revolution and itsaftermath gets even shorter shrift (p. 39) and his seminal role in promoting the Catholic Laienspiel movement (a key reason for his following amongst Catholic youth groups in the 1920s and 30s) is nowhere mentioned. These are significant omissions, since much of Kralik's dramatic work was performed, and contributed weightily to the esteem inwhich he was held. The attempt to provide an overview of Kralik's career is laudable, and especially the later chapters of Geehr's study,which draws extensively on the Nachlass, held inVienna City Library, will be a useful resource. The Aesthetics of Horror is, indeed, a handsome and an accessible (if cosdy) volume, its sixteen pages of illustrations including a photograph of one of the frescos with which Kralik adorned the walls of his villa. Now covered over, it supposedly gave his descendants 'the Viennese equivalent of the willies' (p. 155). Unfortunately, however, Richard Geehr's account leaves the reputation of this important, if eccentric, figure as something of a conundrum. University College London Judith Beniston Textur inWort und Klang. Die Lyrik Georg Trakts und die Trakl-Lieder Anton Webems im Spannungsfeld von Sprache und Musik. By Laura Gerber-Wieland. Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach. 2003. 287 pp. 29,90. isbn 3-7930-9304-2. During the past decade, within many interpretative disciplines, there has been a movement away from analytical paradigms reliant upon the strictures of structural formalism and towards those that acknowledge themore problematic but potentially more fertile approaches engendered by interdisciplinarity, in which ambiguity and dualism may be recognized and, even, celebrated. This has certainly been the case with the study of Anton Webern 's uvre, and has allowed at least some of his works to emerge from the systematized agendas of post-war serialism and the grand project of Darmstadt, thereby revealing how more intuitive compositional approaches may be uncovered in his music. It isperhaps not surprising that some of this important work has been done in relation to Webern's settings of the lyricpoetry ofGeorg Trakl. Trakl's poetry, itself exemplary of pluralism and ambiguity in the rich and complex network of associations that its language generates, forms a promising ground for interdisciplinary approaches. These have the potential to place the atonal Trakl Lieder within the canonical works ofWebern, rather than encouraging them to be read as marginalia in light of themerits of the later, serial compositions. In this respect, one might have feared thatLaura Gerber-Wieland's studywould go over much of the same ground covered by Anne C. Shreffler's Webern and the Lyric Impube (1994), which also centres on a re-evaluation of the Trakl settings. But Gerber-Wieland's study ismarkedly different from Shreffler's in that she develops a hermeneutic framework using a double perspective. Her focus is, on the one hand, upon the complexities of Trakl's poetry as viewed through 272 Reviews the discipline of literary theory, and, on the other, upon a study ofWebern's approaches to the text-generated problems that occur within the compositional field. The book is, in effect, two parallel studies that intersect in precisely the area that Gerber-Wieland regards as most important and problematic: the ambiguous, pluralistic and mutable zone inwhich mediation happens between word and text, and the revelations that can emerge as the resulting stresses disclose aspects of their immanent principles. This field of possibilities can be full of hermeneutic pitfalls; it can be all too easy to generate facile readings from the apparently close analogies between music and text. For this reason, Gerber-Wieland offers an early health warning (pp. 13-16), inwhich she cites authorities from Carl Dahlhaus and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht to Theodor W. Adorno, in order to underline that linguistic discourse does not map onto musical discourse in a straightforward way. To emphasize the critical problem that she isgrappling with, she laysout her analytical map carefully, beginning with an overview of some of...