Abstract
Chapter 5 explores the ways absolute music gave rise to the concept of modern listening. Rather than providing access to transcendental truth, music becomes the vehicle of skepticism about the way we assign meaning to experience. By engaging with Beethoven’s late string quartets, Proust inherits and transforms the heritage of absolute music. By forcing listeners to give up epistemic clarity, the music reconstitutes subjectivity by the act of listening itself, in a process analogous to the experience of reading the Recherche. Music and literature are united in that they pose questions of how best to make meaning from works whose goal is not primarily communicative. This approach encourages resistance to the assertion of fixed meaning in the Recherche.
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Notes
- 1.
See Duncan Large, who argues, contra Anne Henry and others, “that Proust, like Nietzsche, reacted against Schopenhauer, having first gained an intimate acquaintance with his philosophy” (13). Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey also observes that Proust’s actual references to Schopenhauer occur “often in an ironic context” (19).
- 2.
For more on Proust’s pessimism, see my article “Epistémologie.”
- 3.
For a critique of Kristeva’s reading of Proust and Schopenhauer that claims that it reproduces the binary logic of Anne Henry’s analysis that it wants to get beyond, see Large 31–2.
- 4.
About the latter, Bersani comments that “The two points of view become intelligible if we realize that it is only by inventing his past that he can write about himself” (248).
- 5.
See also Hamilton on Wagner and the notion of “resonance” in the Recherche.
- 6.
See also Dahlhaus 17.
- 7.
See Mark Evan Bonds’ Absolute Music for a thorough history of the concept and its applications. The parallel between absolute music and poésie pure is reinforced by the fact that, twelve years prior to Edouard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen’s translation into French (1877), Charles Beauquier presented Hanslick’s ideas without mentioning him by name in Philosophie de la musique (1865), where the notion is indeed referred to as la musique pure. See Bonds Absolute 229–30.
- 8.
Bonds emphasizes the slippage in Carl Dahlhaus’ use of the term in his landmark study: “Dahlhaus begins his brief monograph by rightly distinguishing between absolute music as an intellectual construct—an idea, as his title makes clear—and as a type of music. […] Two sentences later, however, this idea, this conviction, becomes a repertory with its own agency and immanent qualities” (Bonds Absolute 13). The blurry distinction dates back at least as far as Wagner, who, as Bonds summarizes, had used the term in “at least three different ways: as any music that served no purpose beyond itself, as purely instrumental music, as a kind of music that could not be imagined, much less realized in practice” (Absolute 138).
- 9.
Quoted in Bonds Absolute 141. “Hanslick resisted the term absolute Musik on the grounds that it was redundant. To his mind, music was by its very nature absolute” (Bonds Absolute 144).
- 10.
For an argument that nuances this view and suggests that attentive listening began to emerge in the eighteenth century, see Weber.
- 11.
Even this claim about Beethoven’s relationship to absolute music was not without dispute, however: “In his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), Edouard Hanslick argued against the use of parallels to language in music. He cited examples where the attempt to incorporate aspects of speech and linguistic narrative in instrumental works led to musical ugliness (Unschönheit). Hanslick, who later in the same work denigrated the Ninth Symphony, criticized ‘smaller’ instrumental works that use contrasts, cadenzas, recitatives, mysterious moments, and interruptions of the melodic and rhythmic flow, techniques that ‘disorient’ the listener. Hanslick’s attack, by its description of the culprit and the frequent discussion of Beethoven in the same portion of the text, seems directed at the late quartets” (Botstein 100 n44).
- 12.
See Bonds Absolute 248 for the text of Hugo Riemann’s 1909 revision of his Musik-Lexikon article about absolute music which, rather than claiming a strict distinction between program music and absolute music, see them as two paths to the same kind of goal for all instrumental music, that of “moving the soul.”
- 13.
See Dahlhaus 124.
- 14.
In that sense, absolute music needs to be instrumental music, which undoes the unity that was historically associated with vocal music: “What happens to music when the world is unsung? It becomes instrumental. A disenchanted world vocalizes its hope by projecting its loss as instrumental music; its unsung tones only make sense as a negation of the past […]. In opposition to the pastoral, instrumental music is an empty sign, lacking the magical presence that only the voice can represent” (Absolute 32).
- 15.
See Bonds Absolute 113 for a discussion of how “changing conceptions of verbal language itself” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries “precipitated a fundamental thinking of this analogy” of music as a kind of language.
- 16.
See Prisonnière 246–7.
- 17.
Dahlhaus emphasizes the same point: “Insofar as one takes the romantic music esthetic to mean the music esthetic of the romantics, that esthetic—as metaphysics of instrumental music—is at least as far removed from the esthetics of feeling as it is from Hanslickian formalism […] The romantic theory of instrumental music is a metaphysics that was developed in opposition to the esthetics of feeling, or at least to its more popular variants. Schlegel compares musical form to a philosophical meditation in order to make clear that form is spirit and not the mere shell of a representation of affections or an expression of feelings. Romanticism—the authentic kind, not trivial romanticism—contrasted simplicity with the ‘beautiful confusion’ of the artistic, the natural with the wondrous, and the sociable cult of feelings with the metaphysical intimation that a solitary person gains in musical contemplation that forgets the self and the world” (70–2).
- 18.
Here too Kramer echoes an earlier argument by Adorno: “Music suffers from its similarity to language and cannot escape from it. Hence, it cannot stop with the abstract negation of its similarity to language. […] No art can be pinned down as to what it says, and yet it speaks” (Essays 122).
- 19.
“The supposed happiness that is provoked by tonally moving forms is much too thin and abstract a principle to serve as the foundation of a highly organized art form. If this were all there were to it, there would be no difference between a kaleidoscope and a Beethoven quartet except the difference in material” (Essays 139).
- 20.
Cf. Mallarmé’s remark that if languages were perfect, poetry would cease to exist: “Seulement, sachons n’existerait pas le vers: lui, philosophiquement rémunère le défaut des langues, complement supérieur” [“Only, let us realize that verse would not exist, verse which philosophically makes up for the lack of languages an d is a superior complement”] (OC2: 208). I discuss this passage at greater length in French Symbolist Poetry 89–97.
- 21.
For specifics, see Spitzer 35–6.
- 22.
See Nattiez 67 and Hara 154.
- 23.
Quoted in Nattiez 67.
- 24.
For a survey of French habits of listening in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see James Johnson. For a wide-ranging history of Beethoven reception throughout Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Comini.
- 25.
Quoted in Carter 618.
- 26.
For Daniel Chua, the challenge that the late quartets pose to analysts attempting to see unity in disunity is one of their most crucial features: “Esoteric structures are pitted against an anthropomorphic desire to sing, setting social discourse against soliloquy; but surely one of the most disconcerting of these conflicts is that tension between unity and disunity which challenges the perception of art itself” (Galitzin 55).
- 27.
Julian Johnson reminds us that Proust “had access to the leading musical salons of his time and knew not only Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Franck, but also Debussy, Ravel and Reynaldo Hahn” (“Music” 91), and the sources for the descriptions of Vinteuil’s sonata include Wagner, Fauré, Franck, and Saint-Saens (see Carter 898).
- 28.
Here we can compare the narrator’s assertion that we grow to like a work only after time has passed because at first we have no interpretive framework by which to understand the new work. He writes in Le Côté de Guermantes that “ce sont les œuvres vraiment belles, si elles sont sincèrement écoutées, qui doivent le plus nous décevoir, parce que, dans la collection de nos idées, il n’y en a aucune qui réponde à une impression individuelle” [“it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression”] (II: 349/Guermantes 57).
- 29.
Piroué quotes a 1915 letter from Proust to Louis de Robert: “For a year now, I have much desired only two things: to see the Manzi exhibit and to hear the late quartets of Beethoven” (in Piroué 30, my translation).
- 30.
For an intriguing reading of Schopenhauer on music and meaning in the context of silence, see Goehr.
- 31.
See Leo Schrade’s summary of Bouyer’s argument: “In creating his work Beethoven forgot the exterior, earthly world and meditated in self-communion. This search into his own interior, into the depth of his own heart […] of the inexhaustibleness of the individual being, became his ‘instinctive method.’ Through contemplation of the interior world he brought his work to birth” (Schrade 181).
- 32.
See, for instance, Daniel Chua’s comments on the second movement of the Quartet in A minor: “At the start [of the musette section, bars 119–41], time stands still. There is tonal stasis—what Jonathan Kramer would call ‘non-linear time,’ that is, time structured by a non-processive segment of music in which the constancy of texture and rhythm moves in an indeterminate continuum of sound. There is simply a drone, a texture, a melodic fragment, unfashioned by tonal forces, so that it does not progress but ‘floats,’ disconnecting itself from everything around it” (Chua 132).
- 33.
Hara’s remarks on Proust’s omission of the sixteenth quartet are more convincing than those of Nattiez, who “proposes the hypothesis” that it is because Proust “had the idea of using the Sixteenth Quartet in connection with the Vinteuil [Septet] that he deliberately omitted to mention it” (Nattiez 68) in an attempt to cover his sources.
- 34.
See also Maynard Solomon: “German idealist aesthetics was well aware of the hazards of the unbridled romantic imagination, which, as August Wilhelm Schlegel acknowledged, had a ‘secret attraction to a chaos which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe […]’ Schiller, too, had earlier warned: ‘The danger for the sentimental (i.e., romantic) genius is,…by trying to remove all limits, of nullifying human nature absolutely…[and] passing even beyond possibility.’ Thus, [E.T.A.] Hoffmann’s defense of Beethoven was a bold one in that it did not minimize Beethoven’s attraction to chaos. Rather, he declared that Beethoven’s music enters ‘the realms of the colossal and the immeasurable,’ opening upon a labyrinthian cosmos, highly individual, utterly fantastic, and giving free play to extreme emotions such as terror, longing, and ecstasy. Uncompromising, Hoffmann saw Beethoven’s revolutionary imagination as wholly consistent with his genius for classical form” (72–3).
- 35.
Botstein notes that the late quartets were most likely the veiled target of attack by Edouard Hanslick in Vom Musikalisch-Schonen: “Hanslick, who later in the same work denigrated the Ninth Symphony, criticized ‘smaller’ instrumental works that use contrasts, cadenzas, recitatives, mysterious moments, and interruptions of the melodic and the rhythmic flow, techniques that ‘disorient’ the listener. Hanslick’s attack, by its description of the culprit and the frequent discussion of Beethoven in the same portion of the text, seems directed at the late quartets” (100 n44).
- 36.
Both the completed essays and the fragments are collected in Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music.
- 37.
As Peter Gordon indicates, “Although ‘late-style’ was originally a category confined in its application to Beethoven’s late compositions, the term as Adorno used it in his own later years had swelled in significance: it now described the formal law of antagonism governing all genuine art” (Gordon 91).
Works Cited
Cooper, Martin. Beethoven: The Last Decade. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
d’Indy, Vincent. Les Musiciens Célèbres: Beethoven. Paris: Henri Laurens, 1911.
Kerman, Joseph. The Beethoven Quartets. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.
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Acquisto, J. (2017). Saying, Doing, Listening. In: Proust, Music, and Meaning. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47641-4_5
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