ABSTRACT
Todesfuge', written in May of 1945, confronts the problem of poetic musicality with a force that is simply devastating. In view of its poetic power, its widespread canonization and its intimate rapports with music, it is hardly surprising that 'Todesfuge' has appealed to so many composers of the late twentieth century. In fact, the author contrasts the musicality of 'Todesfuge' with one that would endow the poem with both sensuousness and sense. The rhetorical pattern connecting transcendentality with musicality surfaces in numerous comments on 'Todesfuge', and the controversy around the poem continued into the 1960s, long after Celan had adopted very different poetics. In the scholarly literature on the poem, however, the notion that 'Todesfuge' is composed like a fugue is usually followed by some attempts in this direction, focusing on the notions of 'polyphony' and 'counterpoint', musical phenomena paradigmatically though not exclusively associated with the fugue.
