De la transcriere la toposul muzical: „cântecul fără cuvinte” în lucrările pentru pian ale lui Ludwig van Beethoven și ale romanticilor timpurii
From transcription to musical topos: 'song without words' in the piano works of Ludwig van Beethoven and the early Romantics

Summary/Abstract: In his famous statement – 'Alles muss gehörig singen' ['Everything must be sung correctly'] from Der volkommene Capellmeister (1739), Johann Mattheson summarized the rules of any musical composition, whether instrumental or vocal. The idea that follows from this, that a 'vocal' element is (or should be) omnipresent in all instrumental music, makes it difficult to distinguish musical topoi or characters of typically vocal origin in an instrumental piece. This issue has also been debated by modern semioticians. Raymond Monelle wrote: 'Music is already song before any text is added,' to which Sarah Day-O’Connell adds: 'The style of singing [instrumental music] denotes so many things that it risks meaning nothing.' If – following these statements – 'all music is a song,' is the notion of 'song without words' still relevant in instrumental music, except when such an idea is clearly indicated in the title, as in the works of Felix Mendelssohn (Lieder ohne Worte), Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Chants sans paroles), Gabriel Fauré (Romances sans paroles), to name just a few examples? To look more closely at what might be defined as an instrumental 'song without words,' we will focus on musical pieces that have become wordless simply by having their verbal layer removed, thus becoming instrumental transcriptions or, in the case of instrumental ones, if more or less successful attempts have been made to add poetic text. In both cases, the following features can be distinguished: the range of the melody is similar to that of the human voice, a texture that implies the presence of a vocal line (similar to a vocal transcription), a metric structure that imitates that of a poem set to music.

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