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 - 4 - the example of Keats; Verlaine

In previous iterations of my “Birth of the Modern” course, I would early on offer Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” as an example and guide to some seminal ideas about the imagination, ideas whose influence lasted beyond Romanticism to shape modern thought.


Part of what Keats does in the poem is to anatomize forms of death and partly prefigure some of the concerns I’ve tried to describe in my previous posting. Initially the poem speaks of a suicidal state – “as though of hemlock I had drunk” and “Lethe-wards had sunk” – spurred by the nightingale’s “happy” and “melodious” music, for art can make ordinary life seem a sort of dying, “a drowsy numbness.” The poem then portrays a drunken state and the yearning for “a draught of vintage” and “purple-stained mouth” – “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim” – in order to escape “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” here, where death reigns over the old, the young, and also beauty and love. But beyond the implacability of those forms of death, Keats seeks a sanctuary in the “viewless” realm of art – of the nightingale’s music he hears and of poetry – where there is no light and “tender is the night.” This dark sanctuary is simultaneously at a remove, a sort of dying away from ordinary life and a revelation of potentially transformed life, for here in the “embalmed darkness, he “senses” the both sacramental and sensuous images of fertile nature, where even “the murmurous haunt of flies” is hallowed and redeemed. At this peak of “ecstasy,” presenting and absorbing the transcendent richness art can achieve, the poem contemplates death by suicide, for now “more than ever seems it rich to die,” yet that willed death is rejected: “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – / To thy high requiem become a sod.” In the face of each of those earthen forms of death – suicide, the blotted mind of drunkenness, the weary grinding down of lives that cannot “keep” – “No hungry generations tread thee down,” for art embodies the possibility of an autonomous state of being, one that transcends the cycling of time and space, of “ancient days,” entering into and transforming “the sad heart of Ruth” and, as we saw, even “the haunt of flies.” The end of the poem acknowledges how difficult it is to sustain that autonomous transformation achieved by art and the music of the nightingale, how words can “toll me back from thee to my sole self,” to his ambiguous and leftover existence. The “Romantic agony” is just this struggle to sustain let alone achieve vision. The existence one finds oneself in is constantly on the border between blindness and vision, between death and life: “Do I wake or sleep?” The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Keats

The difficult autonomy of art is on the mind not only of Keats and the Romantic poets, but also of writers and thinkers later in the nineteenth century and in the modern period. Verlaine, for example in “Art Poétique,” imagines an art departing from and “vaguer” than French classical art. In such an art, “Nuance alone links / The dream to the dream,” and there is “Music again and always! And let your verse be the thing in flight,” for ambiguity must always be sustained through suggestion, connotation, and implication. “Take eloquence and wring its neck.” It is not only in the foreboding romantic agony that aesthetic autonomy dwells but also in the ironic lightness of Verlaine’s symbolist manifesto, in his momentary and sensuous ambiguities: “all the rest is literature.” Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems

In my next post, I’ll try to suggest the modern shifts or breakthroughs in thinking about art, about society, and about the psyche, achieved by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.