Abstract
This paper (read at the 2003 SMA Music Analysis Conference in Hull) combines a Schenkerian perspective with some key ideas from A. J. Greimas, expanding on an aspect of Eero Tarasti’s Theory of Musical Semiotics. The focus is on how music can be narrative in the broadest sense, first in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony and then in Nielsen’s portrayal of the choleric temperament in his Second Symphony. While the first half of the paper draws on Greimas’s relatively familiar narrative semiotics of action, the second half considers the implications of some Greimas’s later work with J. Fontanille on the semiotics of passion
(Bibliography)

Part I

Part II

Part III