Approaches to the German Reception of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem through Metadata Analysis and Horizontal Reading

Abstract

This paper develops an aspect of my doctoral thesis which focuses on the German reception of Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem. It analyzes the critique and commentary in German newspapers and music journals from the period of the fi rst performances in Austria, Germany and Switz erland (1874–78) and outlines two ways of working with a corpus of heterogeneous texts by mostly unknown authors: Metadata analysis helps to distinguish the diff erent scopes of music journals and newspapers, and a »horizontal reading« approach based on viewing the context of individual semantic entities in parallel gives insight into the spectrum of the reception in all sources together.