Set Down by the Voice of Orpheus: Transtextual Frames and Theorised Romanticism

The perception of the eighteenth-century sonata as a fully realised formal structure has, until recently, been treated as axiomatic; as a result, theoretical approaches to nineteenth-century form, syntax, and harmony, are problematically read as inferior reactions to earlier practice. This paper challenges the authority of Viennese classicism’s monopolism of the sonata style by, paradoxically, invoking its fundamental principles as central to large-scale formal analysis. Drawing on the work of William Caplin (1998) and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006), specifically formulated upon eighteenth- century repertoire, I contribute a re-reading of Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem Orpheus (1854) under the procedures of the so-called ‘new Formenlehre’. This analysis thus invokes the presumption that post-Classical composers were concerned with the expansion of both harmonic and architectural strategies, while remaining true to the fundamental principles of sonata composition.
In Liszt’s case, these strategies are further problematised by an explicit reliance on transtextual frames, of which this paper explores three types: the architext, the paratext, and the metatext. By observing Carl Dahlhaus’s advice that the Romantic sonata is concerned less with formal construction than motivic and harmonic development, these frames help to reorient the analysis of nineteenth- century symphonic form as a processual practice which references a Classical framework. Having situated Orpheus within its transtextual remit, the paper concludes with a detailed analysis of the piece’s structural features—arguing ultimately for a holistic hermeneutic that bridges the divide between ‘absolute’ and ‘programmatic’ readings of a work, under the rubric of ‘narrative analysis’.