Die Kantate als musikoliterarische Gattung.

Abstract

Abstract The cantata genre is one of the most important intermedial art forms in European cultural history. Originating in Italy, it has also been used productively in music and literature in Germany since the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Since Erdmann Neumeister, who was the first to formulate a poetics of the (madrigal) cantata, numerous cantata poems have been written, which – even before they are potentially set to music – are literary artifacts in their own right. It is therefore surprising that the genre of the cantata has been researched almost exclusively by musicologists, and that there has been a lack of literary studies, and consequently, interdisciplinary approaches, which would be necessary for a systematic understanding of the cantata as a musical-literary hybrid genre. This article is intended as a contribution to an interdisciplinary study of the cantata. It examines the cantata text “Ich will den Kreuzweg gerne gehen”, written by Erdmann Neumeister and set to music by Georg Philipp Telemann, according to literary-textual and musical criteria, paying particular attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of the interaction between text and music.