5 - Schubert’s Mignon and Reimann’s Mignon

Summary

Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) long maintained a dual career as a composer and as a collaborative pianist, with Lieder at the heart of both. In the early 1990s, Reimann stepped away from professional performance in order to focus fully on composition, and around this time he embarked upon a project of Lieder arrangement that has included, to date, eight adaptations of sets of nineteenth-century songs scored for voice and string quartet. This chapter illustrates the spectrum of ways in which Reimann’s arrangements and reimaginings of Lieder advance both musicological and performance-related concerns. My main case study is the complex Schubert-based Mignon (1995), which pulls together four voice-piano songs, two incomplete fragments, and a male voice part-song from Schubert’s many engagements with Goethe’s character. The presentation of Schubert’s songs in Mignon demonstrates Reimann’s close analytic engagement with the source songs—his compilation makes clear use of Schubertian harmonic traits—and his awareness of the history of these early settings in performance and scholarship, specifically within traditions that have primarily valued Schubert’s later engagements with particular texts. Ultimately, I argue that Mignon constitutes both a powerful defense of lesser-known and long-overlooked Lieder, and a historiographical critique that comes to life in performance.