Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past

Front matter

COMING

TO TERMS WITH OUR MUSICAL PAST

An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics

Preface

Introduction: Setting the Stage, and Then Exiting It

1 On Critique; or, Two Paths through the Art-Critical World

2 On Transcendence; or, Mozart among the Neoplatonists, Present and Past

Conclusion: An Other Modernism?

Notes

Index

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Illustrations

Examples

Example 4.1. Beethoven, String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131 (1826), mvt. 1, mm. 4-8.

Example 4.2. Beethoven, String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131, myt. 7, mm. 21-23 (first violin only).

Example 4.3. Beethoven, String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131, mvt. 1, sketch of fugal answer.

Example 5.1. Mozart, Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 332 (1781-83), mvt. 1, mm. 12-16.

Example 5.2. Mozart, String Quintet in C Major, K. 515 (1787), myt. 1, mm. 37-41 (first violin only).

Example 5.3. Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, K. 588 (1790), no. 5: “Vorrei dir,” mm. 1-5.

Example 5.4. Martin y Soler, Una cosa rara (1786), no. 5: “Ah pietade, mercede,” mm. 1-4.

Example 5.5. Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, “Vorrei dir,” mm. 9-14.

Example 5.6. Mozart, Cos? fan tutte, “Vorrei dir,” mm. 20-23.

Example 6.1. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde (1865): Prelude, act 1, mm. 1-3.

Example 6.2. Debussy, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), mm. 107-10.

Example 6.3. Hypothetical resolution of example 6.2.

Example 6.4. Mozart, Don Giovanni, K. 527 (1787), no. 4: “Catalog Aria,” mm. 130-35.

Example 6.5. Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), mm. 982-87.

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86 87 87

96 96

X @ ILLUSTRATIONS Example 6.6. Bach, Fugue in C-sharp Minor, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk. II, BWV 873 (1742), mm. 16-20.

Example 7.1. Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492 (1786), no. 13: “Venite inginocchiatevi,” mm. 106-10.

Example 9.1. Schumann, Piano Quintet, op. 44 (1842), mvt. 1, mm. 1-5. Piano part only.

Example 9.2. Schumann, Piano Quintet, op. 44, mvt. 4, mm. 319-25.

Example 10.1. Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro: act-2 finale, mm. 907-11. Played and sung in unison and octaves by everyone onstage, in unison with the orchestra.

Example 10.2. Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro: act-4 finale, mm. 445-48. Example 10.3. Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro: act-4 finale, mm. 420-24.

Figures Figure I.1. Mozart, Cos? fan tutte, production by Claus Guth.

Figure I.2. Mozart, The Magic Flute, production by John Cox, design by David Hockney.

Figure 4.1. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500.

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CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: National Endowment for the Humanities

Preface

Writing is a solitary activity. One person, alone with pen, paper, and thoughts, and relying, finally, on one’s variable but persisting self as the arbiter of what ideas will stay, what will be discarded. But it would be misguided and ungracious to overlook how writing is, at the same time, a gregarious activity. There is always a reader, and not just imagined or implied, but real. The two I owe the greatest debt to are Nina Penner and Stefano Mengozzi. They not only read several drafts of the manuscript but spent pleasant hours discussing, agreeing with, and arguing against its ideas. When I first tried out a version of this essay at a Mozart colloquium, it was much briefer, and I was not sure what to do with it. Simon Keefe suggested that I expand it, and for that encouragement, as well as much else, Iam grateful. It was gratifying to work with Ralph Locke, Julia Cook, and Sonia Kane at the University of Rochester Press. They lined up two very helpful referees, the more skeptical one no less than the one who summarized what I was trying to do better than I could, and the press’s own suggestions helped to improve this book at every level, from overall organization to minutiae of individual arguments. Of course the press had to think about marketing, but I always felt that belief in the project drove the marketing, and not the other way around. Chris Kayler set the musical examples, Craig Darling assisted with copyediting, and Marilyn Bliss created the index. I knew that my friend Julia Marvin had many gifts, but I was not aware of how keen her eye was for the design of a book jacket. The cover you have before you owes much to her skill. I also want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for material assistance and David Myska for that precious resource of research time.

There is also another kind of person to acknowledge, those whom I know solely through their writings. Karl Böttiger reports in his “Literarische Zustände” how, “when Herder was leaving Königsberg, Kant spoke with the then nineteen-year-old youth and admonished him not to brood over so many books but instead to follow his own example. He [Kant] was very sociable, and it was only in the world that one could educate oneself” (127). We all know what Kant means about the perils of book learning. Still, some books were like cicerones, guiding me into the modernist world and its alienated souls and then out again into a world—this world—of greater possibilities. The regard

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I felt from reading them for the first time did not flag with later readings. A case in point comes with Marilynne Robinson. I first discovered her through the essay “A Great Amnesia” (Harper’s, May 2008), one of the finest defenses of a liberal education I have come across. Some of her other work helped clarify the core values of and stakes in a modernist Mozart aesthetic. When I began to write this essay, a very hazy intimation guided it: that admiration for Mozart from the late eighteenth into our day could be seen as part of a continuity and, what is more, one where it was possible—indeed, necessary—to be absorbed, intellectually rigorous, and worldly all at once. Confrontations with Mozart’s music spurred on the mind in its quest for understanding instead of arrested it with self-satisfaction. That seemed an unpromising or at least idiosyncratic line of argument, but then I came upon this passage, from Robinson, in an essay entitled “Cosmology”: “Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology. The primordial human tropism toward mystery may well have provided the impetus for all that we have learned” (197). Oh. To forsake mystery is to surrender a central way of knowing the world. That thought helped illumine a path through a thicket of prohibitions that have hedged in Mozart criticism. Against recent bans on the use of transcendence and a host of related everyday words that have been used to describe Mozart’s music and art more widely, I hope to show that such an older language of enchantment can still, after all this time, help us see more things, and truer things, in one corner of human achievement.

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Introduction

Setting the Stage, and Then Exiting It

More than two hundred years ago, a theater journal from Hamburg reviewed a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Its author was probably Bernhard Anselm Weber, a composer and music director. The evening’s entertainment left a deep impression on Mozart’s fellow musician:

It is just as one would expect from Mozart: great and beautiful, full of new ideas and surprising turns, full of art and fire and genius. Now beautiful, charming song bewitches us, now a fine comic wit and tone make us smile; now we marvel at the naturally executed, masterful plot; now the splendor and magnitude of art overwhelm us.”!

To Weber, Figaro looked like an animated thing. It awakened human passion; it extended and enriched life.

More than a decade ago, Figaro elicited a different kind of response from a journal, including to its famed penultimate scene, where the Count and Countess reconcile and in that ritual restore and renew a wider community:

When the Countess pardons the Count in act 4 of The Marriage of Figaro, it is not that Mozart’s music simultaneously gives voice to some more profound statement of or about forgiveness. Rather, it is the fact that there is a Countess, a Count, a specific dramatic situation, and ordinary words like “Contessa, perdono” sung out loud that has in quite precise ways predetermined the meaning to attach to Mozart’s musical moment. These mundane, visible things feed a conviction that transfigured forgiveness—that specifically—is being conveyed by some very beautiful noise.?

Now, Figaro looks like an inert thing. The concluding “very beautiful noise” concedes a surface appeal, but in the manner of monumental alabaster— immobile and impenetrable to human interest. Where there is art, there is no life.

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2 23 INTRODUCTION

Of the many questions crowding in for attention, the main one this essay pursues is: What are the terms of this more modern argument about Mozart’s music? Presupposed in that question is the availability of other vocabularies for describing art, in which case another question immediately intrudes: For whom are these values true? That question, of the durability and reach of what I call a modernist Mozart poetics, is much more difficult to answer. Although this essay attends to modernism’s imprint on art criticism in the academy, its quest to resolve creative acts into simpler states extends well beyond that discipline and even that venue. One of the more public and visible places where that reverse alchemy can be observed is on today’s operatic stage.

Consider the following recent productions of Mozart’s operas:

— A Cosi fan tutte coproduced by the San Francisco Opera and Opéra Monte-Carlo in 2004 relocates the opera’s setting of a café in eighteenth-century Naples to a Mediterranean luxury hotel on the eve of World War I. For much of the staging, the change to a later time and a slightly more decadent place yields only minor alterations in behavior and character. Matters are different with the opera’s much-discussed ending. True to form, Don Alfonso unveils the play-within-the-play and invites the original couples to celebrate the happy ending of a double wedding. Then, unruly history stumbles upon the opera’s hermetic world and, in so doing, destroys it. The soldiers are once again called to war, only this time for real. As the two couples and their two instructors send them off with a Stoic hymn—“Fortunato l’uom che prende / Ogni cosa pel buon verso” (Fortunate is the man who looks at everything from the good side)—smoke from the battlefield fills the set. “Exeunt. Pursued by World War I.”

— Another Cos? fan tutte, this time under the direction of Claus Guth at the 2009 Salzburg Festival (and revived at the Teatro alla Scala in 2014), discerns a less geopolitical, more private trauma in Mozart’s resolution. The two couples’ bearing is rigid and mechanical, and Don Alfonso, concealing himself behind a primitive mask, strikes a Picasso-esque pose, as if his natural state were Cubist, to which form he reverts at the end (see fig. I.1). The only character showing signs of sentient, or even animate, life is Despina. In a metaphysical sleight of hand, she exits the stage in a fit, in effect declaring, “I don’t like the opera that I’m in, and I am leaving it to find a better one.”

— A Magic Flute staged by Chicago’s Lyric Opera in its 2005-6 season (and revived as recently as 2011-12) also concludes with characters who reject their own worlds. Described in elemental terms, Sarastro’s victory is conventionally cast as a triumph of light over darkness. For example, David Hockney’s set designs for the production at Glyndebourne in

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Figure I.1. Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, production by Claus Guth. Berlin: EuroArts, 2010 (DVD).

Figure I.2. Mozart, The Magic Flute, production by John Cox, design by David Hockney. San Francisco Opera, 1987. © Ron Scherl / Stagelmage / The Image Works.

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4 2 INTRODUCTION

1978 have a primeval splendor radiating out of the center of the stage (see fig. I.2). But in Chicago, darkness lies upon Sarastro and his entourage. Although Tamino and Pamina are supposed to take his place at the head of his enlightened order, they scorn the offer of a peaceful, nonhereditary transfer of power. A solitary spotlight illumines a narrow, oblique path by which they, too, exit the stage.

— A Don Giovanni put on by the Canadian Opera Company in 2015 subordinates a mimetic sensibility even more completely to a hypercritical one. The producer, Dmitri Tcherniakov, tries to sweep up from the opera every mote of improbability. Almost all the disguises are dropped, thereby cleansing the opera of most of its humor, and Don Giovanni is deflated from a dangerous, Bacchic character into an everyday alcoholic. Unlike the other productions mentioned above, Tcherniakov’s does not devise an escape for any of its characters, but, like them, it does revise the ending in order to evade it. There is no “ultimo momento” (act 2, scene 19), because neither the Commendatore nor Don Giovanni dies. Instead, Tcherniakov makes Don Giovanni safe from myth. The grand drama where Heaven grapples with Hell is miniaturized into a domestic power struggle where everyone ends up suspended in modern-day Limbo.

What unites these productions is much greater than what divides them, and all align with the modernist values that orient important academic criticism. Modernism, like all public, nonscientific language, resists a univocal definition. The term has been used to divide the Christian from the pagan worlds and Renaissance humanism and Newtonian science from everything that preceded them. It has accorded a special place to the French Revolution, to French visual arts from the 1860s, and to literature from the 1920s. I use it here to bring out a continuity between what in common parlance are called modernism and its successor, postmodernism. For all of their antagonism, these two constellations of thought have intersecting values, many of them instantiated in the opera productions described above. As a psychology, there is the distillation of human inwardness to trauma, and, as a poetics, the pulling away of the curtain of art to expose its mechanisms. Morally, there is the sententiousness, and, as an ontology of stage works, there is the projection of the director’s objectivity onto characters, neither of whom is immersed in the drama but instead stands outside of it. In a word, the chief value promoted is that of self-consciousness. Whether self-consciousness should be the guiding principle of an art criticism is a topic for many independent studies. For example, a theme of Jacques Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art is that with an increasing self-consciousness

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INTRODUCTION ® 5 about art comes, for better or worse, a depreciation of art as an expression and amplifier of life.4 Wye Allanbrook takes up that thread with respect to the music of Mozart’s day. Against the “brooding self-consciousness” of both Baroque tragedy and its later incarnations in Romanticism and Modernism, the music of Mozart’s era both taps into and extends a vital force, an “energy.” Julian Johnson, in contrast, is more receptive to the self-critical tendencies of a modernist habit of mind.® Of the many virtues of taking modernism as an attitude more than as a distinctive historical era, a leading one is that it allows us to think of music from around 1600 into the present as a continuity.

In the following essay, the concern goes less to the validity of self-consciousness than to its quality in Mozart criticism. It is not clear that so deanimated and dematerialized a view manifests greater self-awareness of his music, and of art more generally, than one that presupposes a necessary enchantment with it, enchantment referring to the mind’s comprehension of some artifacts of human culture by means of a vocabulary designed for that purpose: concepts like intention, mimesis, author, genius, beauty, transcendence. But a modernist Mozart poetics has placed these and related terms on its Index of Prohibited Concepts. This essay ponders some historical, conceptual, and interpretive problems that arise from that embargo.

Throughout, I will turn to Mozart in general and Figaro in particular as touchstones of a richer appreciation of art and its possibilities. But inasmuch as this older vocabulary is banned chiefly for failing the test of a fully self-conscious art criticism, it is useful to begin with the term in the modernist lexicon that speaks most directly to that cool, objective orientation—that is critique itself.

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Chapter One On Critique; or, Two Paths through the

Art-Critical World

The term “critique” has two main uses in current academic writing. Following from Kant and the liberal arts comes the understanding of critique as reflection on the structure of a claim outside of its content, the search for limits to the claims of reason being a search for a moment of concord among dissonant positions. If, for example, someone were to aver, “There is no metaphysics,” that would be to make a metaphysical claim, in which case it would be useful to revisit this particular characterization of the world, thereby to discover what can be stated coherently. The second usage, more a product of the social sciences, resembles Kant in that it, too, takes the architecture of thought as its point of entry. Unlike Kant, however, it seeks resolution outside of the mind and self. The conclusion reached resolves a particular manifestation of culture and consciousness into a prior, more generalized, simplified state. (In this it aspires to the status of science—or a certain understanding of science.) Coming upon a fork in the road, with one path narrowing downward to necessary and sufficient cause, the other opening upward to ever-expanding reason, this type of post-Kantian thinker chooses the subterranean path, working down to the power relations governing an inherently antagonistic social world, to the primitive impulses that tyrannize the psyche, to the economic or material machinery that turns below without concern for private and social aspirations above. Art, when viewed in this manner, does not mean so much as manipulate, and the only way to lift its spell is to reduce its utterances to mechanisms, codes, or discourses.

The main task of this chapter is to show how art-historical critiques in this second, post-Kantian sense fail as critiques in the first one.

For an example of what this failure might look like and how to take stock of it, I turn to one of the seminal representatives of this second mode, Michel

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Foucault, and his essay “What Is an Author?” It starts with an assertion all the more breathtaking for its surface objectivity: “The coming into being of the notion of ‘author,’” he states matter-of-factly, “constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas.”! I had planned to dwell on the phrase “coming into being” to show how Foucault viewed (rightly, I think) authorship not as an indelible and unchanging feature of the world but as contingent on culture and history. Yet even here, from the onset, Foucault has structured his statement in a way that creates a strain between an interest in describing the complexity of culture and an interest in forecasting its course or, more ambitiously, in domesticating it. Why does he say that it is the notion of author (or of “author”) that comes into being and not authors who come into being? It is probably too obvious to say that he wants to emphasize the term’s conceptual status, where identifying authorship as a concept is to render it thin as the air. (Foucault’s objective comes across still more laconically in his title, which, as Katharina Clausius pointed out to me, asks what rather than who an author is). But that concept, “author,” is empty without actual people who wrote actual things, who authored them. The historiographical credibility of Foucault’s essay is not completely vitiated by so great a skepticism about concepts, and he has rich things to say about how we have used authorship at different times and in different contexts. For example, about scientific writing from around the seventeenth century onward, he notes that the author function starts to fade away, or at least disperse itself among communities rather than staying concentrated in individuals. The truths of science, we have now come to understand, speak for themselves, and citing a name—“as Hippocrates says’—no longer carries much weight in the face of science’s “established or always redemonstrable truth” (109).

One may question this and other observations. Maybe it is not only atavism that accounts for a still-common usage like “Einstein’s theory of relativity.”? In light of recent scientific inquiry, can we credibly say that the truths of science speak for themselves? Or, more to the point here, is the concept of author really an Enlightenment invention? It is hard to make full sense of earlier works like the Divine Comedy or Don Quixote without reference not just to the author function—“Dante” and “Cervantes’—but to the historical persons— Dante and Cervantes. Such hesitancies are part of the point, however, and a virtue of Foucault’s essay: it is possible to argue with him, because his claims have a falsifiable, empirical, and historical side. The mind can get some traction over them.

But that is not Foucault’s main, or at least only, way of talking about history. His descriptive approach yields to one that corrals these insights into a a view of history where the conveniences we use to describe different eras— “Renaissance,” “Classical,” “Modern,” and so on—acquire an “absolute and reciprocal impenetrability,” in Séan Burke’s characterization.’ Foucault’s

This book is available under the Open Access licence CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: National Endowment for the Humanities premise about the conceptual status of authorship fences in his conclusion. He all but foreordains that someone will come along to discover the evanescence, the “constructedness” of the concept “author.” The truth has always been a matter of “what” and not “who.”

That priority emerges most clearly as his essay arrives at this point: “The author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (119). There it is: the descent into the underworld of causes. For all of the postmodern insistence that there is no depth, there is only surface,* Foucault is offering a metaphysics. The concept “author” projects our self-interest, the advancement of which is our deepest motivation, in a world presided over by fear, to whose behests we are (all but a few of us are?) enslaved.

Foucault knows he has changed the pitch of his argument. He immediately follows up by saying, “I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author” (119). It is no longer a description, it is a “call for a form of culture.” What troubles Foucault, however, is not the abandonment of description for manifesto but where that particular declaration is pulling him: toward “a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure” (119). And what is wrong with that? “It would be pure romanticism” (119). (To me it sounds like pure neostructuralism, a world comprised of drifting codes with no interfering human consciousness to organize them.)? Paradoxically, Foucault has wound up asserting authorial privilege; namely, his own. He rejects this “romanticism” because that is not how he wants the world to be. We are far from neutral observation, and necessarily so (because neutral observation is impossible). But if we cannot argue with Foucault’s diagnosis, we can still examine its structure and seek clarification of his intentions.

A critique of the first type would have another question to put to this version of the second kind: what must be the case in order for Foucault’s conclusion to be valid? For Foucault’s proposition is not self-predicating. To start with, it needs a fuller account of self-interest. Related to that is the priority he gives to fear. How do we know that, when we have come upon fear, we have hit bedrock? Of all our possible responses to the world, why would fear be idolized as dismal Prime Mover and not, say, wonder or awe (which could encompass fear, but not the other way around)? After all, among the many ways that books, that authors, lure in readers is not through compulsion but through attraction and curiosity. Reading promises contact with an Other, with a mind that is not identical to the reader’s. (And this is to assume that seeking a motivation is the way to go in the first place.) Foucault’s position overlooks other ways in which cultures have responded to authors. Writers from Plato to Salman Rushdie have been viewed less as comforting than threatening figures not always because

This book is available under the Open Access licence CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: National Endowment for the Humanities they have allowed meanings to proliferate, but because they have meant certain things all too well.

The ostensibly liberal (or libertarian) sentiments intimated in the equation of the death of authors with the expansion of freedom also needs further examination, on evidential no less than logical grounds. From time to time, calls for the proliferation or negation of meaning have been sounded in order to entrench instead of dislodge the status quo ante. A classic case involves the Ninth Amendment of the United States Constitution. It runs, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” A constitutional “originalist” like Robert Bork thought its meaning impenetrable. There was a blot over it that made it permanently indecipherable.® It hits nearer the mark, however, to say that he is evading the text, whose meaning is inconvenient for a legal theory adhering to strict constructivism. An outlook holding that only the rights explicitly enumerated in the Constitution may enjoy the protection of the Constitution will necessarily stumble on a passage, in the Constitution, that says that its text must not be taken to exhaust the rights that may be guaranteed by it. As Laurence Tribe writes, the Ninth Amendment “reminds us of the essential truth that our Constitution must continue to protect human rights that lie beyond the boundaries of its expressly spelled-out provisions.””

This is one instance where Foucault’s view of authors and texts can lead in the opposite direction from what he proposed. In the case of the Ninth Amendment, Bork is not saying that he dislikes or disagrees with the text but that it should be ignored because it is unintelligible. Blotting the text forestalls debate and conversation. Of those unspecified rights, what should be added, and under what authority? Or, for dissenters: If the amendment is a mistake, on what grounds, and should it therefore be repealed or modified? Such conversations on either side could not even arise absent the idea that the text means something, that its authors meant something by it. Contrariwise, accepting the validity of authorial intention can expand our horizons. Authors, including composers, can be, have been, figures by which we recognize and are shaped by remarkable attainments among the flux of human culture, achievements that could not have been foreseen before they appeared.

And therefore whose future cannot be foretold. The philosopher Raymond Geuss finds it “inherently odd” for critics to announce where art “must, could, might, or ought to go.” Specifically, he was speaking of this prophetic tendency against how Adorno’s music sociology applied Hegelian dialectic. Hegel’s method, as Geuss explains, is “essentially retrospective and contemplative in character.” The necessity it uncovers is knowable only post facto. Although Foucault does not explicitly take Hegel as his authority, he makes an analogous move from what is to what ought to be in contemplating the future of the concept of authorship: “I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment

This book is available under the Open Access licence CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: National Endowment for the Humanities when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint—one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced” (119). Foucault does not seem to be moving within the genre of utopian critique like Rousseau’s Second Discourse, which imagines a world that never was in order to magnify the deficiencies in what is. Foucault’s world to come does not function as thought-experiment but as prediction. If that is so, then questions of the claim’s testability resurface. How can he be sure that the world will unfold this way? And if it did, how would that world concern us or be intelligible to us? Or, in what ways would a future generation care about things that were important to us, other than to behold our errors with bewilderment or bemusement? True, Foucault pointed to a time before the author-function emerged. Why not return to that world, or, what would differentiate this new, nonauthorial form of constraint?