Lord Berners’ Lieder

The composer and universal artist Lord Berners (1883-1950) is certainly one of the most eccentric figures in the artistic circle of the twentieth century. In addition to cheerful funeral marches and grotesque waltzes, his oeuvre includes songs in which animal sounds are transposed to the piano, nursery rhymes are crossed with sea shanties, and green-eyed dodos or red noses are sung about. To this end, he combines different styles, surprises with musical quotations, relates the old to the new, and the serious to the comical.
This analysis approaches Berners' compositional style, guided by the question of the intertextual structure of the work. Intertextuality refers to the totality of all references made by texts to other texts—from very universal aspects such as stylistic conventions to explicit reminiscences of an individual pretext. To demonstrate and reflect on this, an analytical tool based on literary theories is created to classify and weight different types of musical texts.

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