Literature and Music talks - session 5 - Late Romanticism and Early Modern

Flaubert and Baudelaire: 

Flaubert (1821-1880), Madame Bovary (1857) – from Part Two, Chapter 8: text...

 

What Emma hears in Pt. Two, Ch. 15: Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermore” Act 1 Finale “Ah! Verrano a te sull'aure”:

LUCIA On the breeze
will come to you my ardent sighs…
When you think of me
living on tears and grief,
then shed a bitter tear
on this ring, ah, on this ring, etc.
ah, on this ring, etc.
EDGARDO and LUCIA On the breeze will come to you, etc. EDGARDO Remember, Heaven has joined us!
EDGARDO and LUCIA Farewell!      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xToxhv_Y9nc  Sutherland, Pavarotti.

Verlaine, Mallarmé (by Manet), Debussy and Stravinsky: 

    

Text for Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (0-3:00) – and recreation of Diagalev/Nijinsky ballet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzzF21CFJFE

Debussy – from his libretto based on Maeterlinck’s play Pélleas et Mélisande:

Mélisande: [I love you.] Forever. Ever since I first saw you.

Pelléas: It is as if your voice had come over the sea in the spring! I have never heard it until today. It’s as though it had rained on my heart. You say those words so openly, like an angel answering questions. I can scarcely believe it, Mélisande. Why should you love me? Why do you love me? Is it true what you say? Were you making it up? Were you lying to me just to make me feel happy?

Mélisande: No, I never tell lies. I only lie to your brother.

Pelléas: Oh, the way you say that! Your voice, your voice! It is as fresh and as clear as water! It is like pure spring water on my lips. It is like pure spring water on my hands. Give me your hands, let me take your hands. Oh, your hands are so tiny! I never knew you were so beautiful. I had never set eyes on anything as beautiful before. I could not rest, I kept searching everywhere in the house, I kept searching everywhere in the country, but never found the beauty I sought. And now at last I have found you. I have found you. I don’t believe there is anywhere on earth a woman more beautiful. Where are you? I don’t hear your breathing any more.

Debussy, Pelleas and Mellisande – 1902 (7:30 to 9)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxBzEUjwwfw

Mallarmé – from “Literature and Music” – Oxford speech, 1894: > text...

Pater (1839-1894) – from “Giorgione” (1877) in Studies in the Renaissance,  Conclusion to Studies in the Renaissance (cancelled in 2^nd ed., then restored in 3^rd): texts...

Ravel, La Valse (Argerich and Freire) 9:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwBuhTZtDT0&list=RDmwBuhTZtDT0&start_radio=1

Debussy, La Mer – 1905 (Boston, Munch) 16:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOCucJw7iT8

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring – 1913 – Beginning (Orch. de Paris, Boulez) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOUYtDpKCc

Ending (L.A.Phil, Salonen) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSyOfJRmbLY  -From“Poetics of Music” ’38: text...

Image of Debussy and Stravinsky.

Notes on the modern period - 25 - Modern Music iii

Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the two most compelling masters of modern music, have fascinated me from the beginning of my listening life, to the extent even that I imagined them as characters in my novel Hungry Generations about the tense friendship in Los Angeles between a young studio composer and the family of a virtuoso classical pianist, a European émigré and friend of both composers. Also, especially Schoenberg haunts one of the stories, “Contrapuntal Piece,” in my new novella and story collection Acts of Terror and Contrition. As well, his conception of atonal music is one subject in my critical study Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music. Modern music, then, has been central to my imaginative and intellectual life for many decades, let alone a source of great pleasure.

Before I turn to Stravinsky and Schoenberg, I’d like to offer a bit more commentary on the connection between Debussy and Mallarmé, a connection which my last post mentioned in too hurried and compressed a way (I'll try to work on that tendency!). Particularly for the poet’s work, consciousness can seem wavering and tenuous and to verge toward a state of non-being. That ‘state’ can be both a symptom of and a response to a culture dominated by technology, materialism, and war, when the human can seem reduced to the condition of an automaton or an animal. The experience of modern life as a sort of spiritual death-in-life prompts and frames the struggle to express, to preserve, to “deliver up the volatile scattering which we call the human spirit, who cares for nothing save universal musicality” – in Mallarmé’s words. Each of the poet’s characteristic elegies (for Poe, for Gautier, for Wagner, etc.) confronts the pervasive sense of death in his era and renders it paradoxically as both a sign of modern paralysis and an opening toward transcendence, whose adepts have incurred the ultimate and universal payment. (This idea is evident also in Proust’s meditation about Swann, music, and “not-being” as “perhaps our true state:” if so, as we perish, “we have for our hostages these divine captives” of music. And the idea is present too in Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus I, 3: different from the voice of passion, “true singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.”)

In “Literature and Music,” Mallarmé writes that there is no adequate language to render the paradoxical experience of modern consciousness except through a joining of poetry with music. For example in “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Mallarmé and Debussy, in his setting of the eclogue, evoke nymph and satyr, the sensual inhabitants of the imagination, by employing an evanescing stream of both sensuous sounds and silences: “these nymphs, I would make them endure…hovering yet upon the air / heavy with the foliage of sleep,” projecting paradoxically a “sonorous voice” on the edge of “silence.” The sinuous, intentionally disintegrating ‘voice’ of both the poetry and the music “hovers” on the edge of disappearing; it enacts yet transfigures the potential erasure which is everywhere possible in the modern period. Even as modern consciousness and the spirit may seem on the verge of disappearance, music – the weightless, airborne, least “materialist” art – becomes the sign and sanctuary of the human, “now vanishing into obscurity, [yet] now radiating unconquerably.” (Here’s a YouTube link to the opening of the Debussy – Gergiev/LSO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xK0F5KkfT4&feature=related - here, also, is a great recording with Boulez conducting: Debussy: Images / Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune / Printemps - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)

Stravinsky and Schoenberg offer two differing ways to confront the disintegration of traditional language and inherited convention in modern music. Stravinsky saw himself as shepherding classical music into an era of new opportunities to refresh inherited forms. In view of the riot the initial performance of The Rite of Spring provoked, he notes (in Poetics of Music) that “the tone of a work like The Rite may have appeared arrogant, the language that it spoke may have seemed harsh in its newness, but that in no way implies that it is revolutionary….If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established convention would be known as revolutionary….To speak of revolution is to speak of a temporary chaos. Now art is the contrary of chaos.” This paradoxical argument is illustrated by the extraordinary precision Stravinsky’s scores require of musicians as they execute new ideas of rhythm (abrupt shifts, surprising syncopations, and unprecedented time signatures) and render unstably shifting, newly dissonant harmonies. [A powerful example of “harshly” innovative intensity joined with control is evident in the following YouTube excerpt from Salonen conducting the ending of The Rite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi16suM21jQ&feature=related.] No matter how radical his new means sounded to listeners, Stravinsky saw himself imperturbably as “daring” but never “disorderly,” a model of autonomous art never given over to “gratuitous excess.”

Like Picasso, he continually sought inspiration in past or primitive art (in an earlier note - 14 - on the modern period, I suggest how a laying bare of essential form is at work in both modern art's primitivism and its experimental abstraction). An appropriated and concerted primitivism is evident in the erotic sensuality of his adaptation of Russian folk melodies in The Rite and other scores; the result is a sensuous array of sounds and sensations which repeatedly well up unexpectedly with intentional violence. [In the following YouTube excerpt from Boulez conducting the ballet, listen particularly to the powerful transition at 3:38: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOUYtDpKCc]; his wonderful Cleveland Orchestra performance is available here: Stravinsky: Petrouchka / Le Sacre de printemps (The Rite of Spring) ~ Boulez.] In the 1920s Stravinsky turned to earlier music (Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Pergolesi, Vivaldi and Bach) in order to create a sometimes grotesque hallowing; for example, he both masters and parodies 18th century Baroque style in the Violin Concerto, through allusion, inter-textual quotation, distorted imitation, and joining Baroque conventions with modernist dissonance and explicitly machine-like rhythm. In such acts of travesty, the pastiche of the past supplies an otherwise unavailable sense of unity and centeredness. [Here are YouTube excerpts from Gil Shaham’s performance of the first and third movements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErxgHH2eeFQ&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS0rMOXD5mg&feature=related. Here’s a link to a Stern recording: Stravinsky: Violin Concerto / Rochberg: Violin Concerto / Stern / Previn. There’s also Peter Serkin’s brilliant recording of the piano sonata: Stravinsky: Serenade In A, Sonata / Lieberson: Bagatelles / Wolpe: Pastorale, Form IV ("Broken Sequences"), Four Studies on Basic Rows, IV: Passacaglia.]

Stravinsky’s sense of sometimes grotesquely-achieved centeredness, unity, and objective mastery distinguishes his music from Schoenberg’s intentionally difficult and harmonically uncentered music. The latter presents almost no stabilizing repetitions of consonant harmonies and little sensuous celebration of dance rhythm and melody. Even the decadent dancing around the Golden Calf in Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron is leaden and spikily dissonant. To confront the 'world' of pure dissonance and to avoid any back-sliding into worn-out 'invalid' harmonies, he developed a “serial” scheme of rendering the twelve half-tones of the scale as a means of ordering his atonal music, but it does not diminish the sense of struggling integrity his music conveys as it faces the dissolution of traditional harmony, explores the “chasms in its clichés,” and fiercely opposes music for easy mass consumption. Descended from Sinai and witnessing the Golden Calf, Moses’ final ‘spoken song’ – “O word, thou word, that I lack!” – embodies a “surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked” (in a phrase from Adorno, who elevates Schoenberg music above Stravinsky’s, which he argues tends to promote “the illusion of authenticity and unity”). Much of Schoenberg’s work mourns the modern loss of sacramental human speech and meaning. [Moses’ last utterance is at about the 5 minute point in this YouTube excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kLFz5b13RU&feature=related. And here is a fine recording: Schoenberg - Moses und Aron / Pittman-Jennings · Merritt · Boulez.]

Another example of Schoenberg’s struggling ‘integrity’ is the String Quartet No. 2 (from 1911). The fourth movement (1911) opens with a reduction to the barest elements of the scale, then yields the accompanied song, which constitutes the first completely atonal classical music. This music embodies the difficult autonomy and abstraction which are central characteristics of modernism, as the singer here recounts a traversal of the painful breech between woeful modern reality and the possibility of an alien transcendent joy like that which Rilke and Mallarme evoke: “I feel an air from other planets blowing,” the soprano sings (in Stefan George’s words – sung after the 3 minute point in this excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90cgDmMhh0E.) [There is a great recording by the LaSalle String Quartet available: Schoenberg; Berg; Webern - String Quartets – and also at Amazon is a wonderful Glenn Gould recording of Schoenberg’s piano works, including the opus 25 Suite, Schoenberg’s successful foray into Neo-classicism (and, as explained above, travesty); particularly Gould's performance brilliantly projects a wide expressive range, from the tragic even to the joyous: Schoenberg: Piano Works.]

Notes on the Modern period - 3 - Precursors: Hegel's influence; Whitman, Dickinson, Chopin, Tennyson, Mallarme

In a recent session of the “Birth of the Modern” course I teach, we examined a few texts by precursors – a brief story by Kate Chopin, two excerpts from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain,” a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and Baudelaire’s “To the Reader.” [On the photocopied pages were also a few mournful lines from Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears” and some lines from Mallarmé’s “At Gautier’s Grave.”] The point of these excerpts was to forecast the qualities of the modern shift in the rendering of consciousness (a far-reaching breakthrough particularly in the arts and the social sciences, akin to Kuhn’s idea of the “paradigm shift”).

We began with Americans, for this course takes place in Cleveland, Ohio. In Chopin’s 1894 story, “The Story of an Hour,” a married young woman hears of the accidental death of her husband and finds that after she weeps “with sudden, wild abandonment,” she must withdraw to her room. There, her mind fills with a burgeoning consciousness of what is occurring outside her window, “the tops of trees…all aquiver with the new spring life…[the] delicious breath of rain,…a distant song,…countless sparrows twittering in the eaves,…patches of blue sky.” Finally the sense of being “free” becomes clear to her, free to “live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending her….And yet she had loved him – sometimes….[Yet:] What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion, which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being.” She discovers an independent will and consciousness as a woman previously subject to the “will” which her loving husband “imposed” upon her with “blind persistence.”

Part of what is adumbrated here is the centuries-old history of progress for women’s rights; finally in 1920, of course, women in the United States gained the right to vote. As interesting as this prefiguring of the steps ahead is the accuracy of Chopin’s rendering of the woman’s consciousness, the sense in her of upwelling liberation and freedom. Certainly the abruptly bitter ending of the story suggests that her liberation cannot quite survive in the society of 1894 America, for the rumor of the husband’s death was false, and when he returns to their door, she dies at the threshold – of “heart disease.” But earlier, we had witnessed the emergence of her new-born consciousness and then her laying claim to an independent will and self-awareness transcending any negotiations with her husband and transfiguring the image of his “loving” will into her own “possession of self-assertion.”

A transfiguring self-awareness is given full voice in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In the fourth poem, for example, he speaks of the streaming images of existence which “come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are not the Me myself.” A sort of flanneur, “watching and wondering” on a city street, he stands “both in and out of the game.” “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.” The stream of listed images encompass his life and all he touches, including “some man or woman I love,” or the hallowed “leaf of grass no less than the journey-work of the stars,” or “the plutonic rocks,” or the “esculent roots” of some barbaric and prehistoric swamp. Yet for all the sensuous and gigantic capaciousness of his “incorporating” imagination, he maintains a distance, a core of self-awareness which is the site of freedom and liberated consciousness for him.

Both Whitman’s self-celebrating self-awareness and Chopin’s story of the wife’s discovery of her self-possessed prefigure modernity's exploration of the 'self,' of subjectivity, evident in the “stream of consciousness” novels of the period, in its self-conscious poetry, and in its developing philosophy of phenomenology. These developments are illuminated by at least a brief engagement of Hegel’s thought about the dialectical relations between master and servant in the “Phenomenology of the Spirit” (published in 1807), and of course Marx’s thinking is similarly illuminated. It is not that I see Chopin or Whitman or, more generally, modernity as Hegelian. [I remember once my questioning John Cage’s aleatory music of ‘chance’ sounds, to which my critical older brother replied in exasperation, “You’re so Hegelian.”] It’s rather that Hegel can help us understand some of the logic at work in modern explorations of consciousness.

Hegel’s paragraph 194 in the “On Masters and Servants” section of “Phenomenology” analyzes the way in which the subject who serves the master must introject a consciousness of the master’s ‘mentality’ and needs, in order to serve them successfully. And the servant also maintains his awareness as a subject “worker” (the term is used by Hegel and emphasized in Kojève’s commentary). In this way, the worker develops a critical self-consciousness about each role, becoming doubly aware as he comprehends or ‘psyches out’ both modes. But this double consciousness distances him from life; the resulting critical distance from immediate existence mirrors yet transcends the master’s ‘withering scrutiny’ and, more deeply, his centeredness on himself, his “being-for-itself.” The critical distance of double- or self-consciousness functions finally like the ‘ultimate master’ death in negating all that is not itself, subjecting all – including itself – to a deadly exposure. This simultaneously negating and empowering self-consciousness casts all into a state of doubt where “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness.” Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” will echo just this passage when he evokes the Bourgeoisie, which as it upturns the aristocratic order creates a world of constant expansion and continuous change; the working class is left broadly aware of the resulting exploitation, the dizzying chaos, and the death of order: “All that is solid melts into air, all this is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” The Phenomenology of Spirit (The Phenomenology of Mind)

Hegel’s own insistence on the idea of destabilization, on the negation at work in “self-consciousness,” that “absolute melting-away of everything stable,” is striking. Paradoxically joined together here are of the awareness of death (death of the “ordinary” self and of “ordinary” society) with the opening-up of creative potential achieved by self-consciousness with its capacity to see multiple perspectives and to use its critical distance in order to liberate a rich sense of possibility. It is as if the death of former selves leads to liberated new selves, new potentiality.

The confrontation with death in modern thought is evident in works that prefigure the modern. In Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century poem “To the Reader,” spiritual death yields an ennui, an apathy or boredom, that would “willingly annihilate the earth” as it “chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine.” Yet this form of death spurs a sort of self-lacerating “shriek,” the poem’s punishing intensity of address: “you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!” Even Tennyson (and maybe especially he) is fixated on the destruction of a world, of ‘everything stable,’ and on the necessity to mourn for “the days that are no more” in language what is achingly vulnerable and continually polite. Two decades later, Mallarmé (“At Gautier’s Grave”) raises his “empty cup” in an “insane toast to nothingness, because the non-existent corridor gives hope,” for within that grave “nothingness questions the abolished man” and “shrieks” that the dead man’s evanescent poetry (“this toy”) “say what the earth was.” The point here is not merely that life is short, and art lasts; it is rather that death is a portal: a sort of gaping maw through which knowledge of what life might be yet speaks. This paradoxical melding of death and life is envisioned too by Emily Dickinson in her Civil War poems. For example, in 341, “After great pain,” she brings just such stark knowledge out of the experience of nothingness, of death and of mourning. Here she bares her knowledge in images of a snow-bound death (“First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go”) as well as of the chemical elements (“A Quartz contentment, like a stone – / This is the Hour of Lead”). [At some point, perhaps we’ll take a look at how Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” discerns various modes of death and models the insight that ‘death is a portal’ through which transfiguring knowledge might enter.] In any case, as World War I approached, needless to say, conceptions of how to confront and understand death were rather desperately needed.