Abstract
With his famous statement: „Alles muss gehörig singen” [“Everything must sing properly”] in Der volkommene Capellmeister [The Perfect Chapelmaster] of 1739, Johann Mattheson summed up the rules of all musical composition, be it instrumental or vocal. The implication that some “vocal” element is (or should be) omnipresent in all instrumental music makes it difficult to distinguish musical topics or characters of typically vocal provenance in an instrumental piece. This issue has also been discussed by modern semioticians – Raymond Monelle says: “Music is already song before any text is added”. Sarah Day-O’Connell adds: „The singing style [in the instrumental music] means so many things that it risks meaning nothing”. If – following these statements – “all music is a song”, is the notion of a ‘Wordless Song’ in the instrumental music still relevant, unless such idea was clearly indicated in the title, as in the works of Felix Mendelssohn (Lieder ohne Worte), Peter Tchaikovsky (Chants sans paroles), Gabriel Fauré (Romances sans paroles), to give but a few examples? In order to take a closer look onto what could be defined as an instrumental ‘song without words’, it is worth looking at musical pieces that became wordless simply by the act of removing the verbal layer and became instrumental transcriptions, or the instrumental ones, in case of which more or less successful attempts were made to add poetic text. In both cases following features can be distinguished: melody range similar to that of a human voice, a texture that implies the presence of a vocal line (resembling a vocal transcription), a regular metric structure imitating that of a poem set to music.

Keywords: topic theory, musical arrangement, 19th-century piano music, art song, Ludwig van Beethoven.

About the author
Małgorzata Grajter is a music theorist and pianist, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. graduate of The Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz University of Music in Łódź, Poland. Recently, she has worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of the Music Theory at her Alma Mater and Guest Researcher at the University of Łódź, Faculty of Philology. She took part in international congresses and conferences such as International Congress on Musical Signification (Kraków, Cluj, Barcelona), International Beethoven Symposium (Warsaw), International Beethoven Conference (Manchester), Academy of Cultural Heritages (Ermoupolis, Syros), Beethoven-Perspektiven (Bonn), Transfers and Traversals (Bloemfontein), Multimodal  Translation (Cardiff),and World Congress of Semiotics (Thessaloniki, Warsaw).
She is the author of Applying Translation Theory to Musicological Research (Springer, 2024) and Das Wort- Ton-Verhältnis im Werk von Ludwig van Beethoven (Peter Lang, 2019), as well as of many articles in Polish, English, German, and Portuguese. Her main research interests include the relationships between language and music, translation theory, popular music studies, intermedial studies, and musical signification.

DOI: 10.47809/MP.2024.39.01.01

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