Some Consequences of “Figaro”
Kristina Muxfeldt
Indiana University
To the surprise of literary Europe Caron de Beaumarchais’ brilliant comedy The Marriage of Figaro broke through the last barriers of Parisian censorship in April 1784, despite its completely undisguised political critique— of, among other things, censored speech. Beaumarchais’ depiction of outdated aristocratic manners at a Spanish court interwoven with episodes drawn from his own life made this play into an instantly recognizable picture of the contemporary world. Spectators flocked to see the play as often as possible and learned its witty lines and long first-person speeches by heart. Ten months later an English production of this European sensation was created entirely from memory.
This mode of transmission had consequences for Da Ponte and Mozart’s 1786 opera of the same name, an adaptation of the most talked about play in Europe that was still banned from Vienna’s stages even after it had appeared in print and been translated. To gain permission for the opera Da Ponte and Mozart gave the emperor their assurance that the most politically charged moments were gone, but they would have lost face with their fellow artists and anyone delighted by the groundbreaking openness of the play had this been entirely truthful. In 1785, the frustrated first Viennese translator of Beaumarchais’ Figaro even encouraged his readers to compare his translation word for word with the original to confirm that all the good bits were still there. I shall explore how Mozart’s opera could call to mind what was absent to an audience already predisposed to take notice.
The phenomenon of Figaro found echoes as late as 1848, when Johann Nestroy wrote a quasi-autobiographical play about a playwright struggling to exercise his craft in the even more repressive climate of Metternich’s Vienna. His homage to Figaro is unmistakable in a famous soliloquy about rights and freedom. And a song of Franz Schubert, one that strikes a similarly personal tone (a song about a poet plagued by writer’s block), uses the musical structure to bring out a meaning latent in the poem, making sense of a punch line that would be otherwise incoherent: Schubert’s song is a poignant declaration of music’s fragile freedom from censorship.
Transformation within the Frame: Beethoven’s Revision of the First Movement of the Cello Sonata in A Major, Op. 69
Lewis Lockwood
Harvard University
Composed in the early months of 1808, apparently during an interruption in Beethoven’s ongoing work on the Fifth Symphony, the Cello Sonata in A Major Op. 69 is by common consent one of his most beautiful and significant keyboard chamber works. In a brilliant analytical study of its first movement, Eytan Agmon compared it in importance to the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” sonatas and to the Opus 59 quartets. The only surviving autograph of this sonata – that of the first movement – is unusual even for Beethoven for the scope of its revisions. Though the manuscript has been widely available in two separate facsimile editions published in1970 and in 1992, it harbors complexities that call for renewed study. Begun as a fair copy, the manuscript soon became a densely revised composing score as Beethoven recast many of its details and passages. This paper will focus on the Development section, in which, throughout the entire section he carries out a massive revision essentially by reversing the order of the dialogue entries of the cello and piano from start to finish. My discussion aims to show how Beethoven transformed the Development section and to explore issues of register and sonority that enable us to understand the aesthetic and structural consequences of this drastic revision.
Thresholds Between, Worlds Apart: On the Adagio of Schubert’s String Quintet
Scott Burnham
Princeton University
In the Adagio from Schubert’s String Quintet, music of otherworldly bearing frames and encloses an utterly contrasting music of churning turmoil. The analysis offered in this paper will focus on those passages that connect and mediate this contrast: the sighing codetta to the first section that makes an impossibly poignant fuss before coming to a close in E major; the trill that whisks the action from there into F minor; the stunning broken-off harmonies that form the retransition back to the opening; the brief flare of F minor right before the movement’s final cadence. How do these threshold moments leverage and profile the profound contrast of the movement’s two fundamental tableaux? What do they say about the worlds they both hold apart and join together?
Schubert at the “Final Barrier”
Blake Howe
Louisiana State University
Schubert’s “Nachthelle,” composed in September of 1826 for tenor soloist, male chorus, and piano, features many characteristics commonly associated with “late style.” The poem, by Johann Gabriel Seidl, describes the poet’s body as a full and overflowing container of light. With two curt phrases—“es will hinaus, es muss hinaus”—that container ruptures, the “last barrier breaks” (“die letzte Schranke bricht”). The subject–object divide bridged, internal light and the external moonlight are allowed to freely fuse. Schubert makes explicit Seidl’s narrative of emergence by constructing a musical space that serves as an analogue to physical space: woven throughout the song is a recurring musical gesture that gradually expands outward past pre-defined pitch boundaries, accumulating great tension in the process. At the gesture’s pressured peak, the music seems to “burst open” or “rupture,” explosively releasing the newly rejuvenated tonic. The principal characteristic of these “wedge gestures” is chromatic contrary motion, often generated with the aid of an augmented sixth that pries itself open into an octave, or with chromatic-mediant transformations, in which the outward-expanding voices are placed in the outer registers. In one of the most remarkable of these sequences—the first statement of Seidl’s final line (“die letzte Schranke bricht”)—Schubert seems to have struggled over how to sufficiently prolong the gesture: he revised this passage extensively, recomposing its beginning by introducing musical Schranken (in the form of pitch barriers) that are subsequently surpassed at the rapturous climax. Artistic lateness is, in part, a meditation on death, terminus, and finitude—themes that recur in Schubert’s other late choral settings of Seidl (notably “Widerspruch” and “Grab und Mond”). Each responds differently to the imagery of finitude, alternatively expressing trepidation, comfort, and—in the case of “Nachthelle”—an almost reckless fearlessness in the confrontation with finality.
Reflections on Our Mimetic Heritage from Plato to Louis Vuitton
Leo Treitler
CUNY Graduate Center
The paper begins with a sympathetic citation of Stephen Halliwell’s lament about the “still regrettably standard translation of mimesis as imitation (The Aesthetic of Mimesis: Ancient texts and Modern Problems) and follows with alternatives that have been preferred: representation, portrayal, expression, evocation, and participation (introduced later by Aristotle in his reference to Plato’s concept of methexis.
Two studies by classicists are introduced, of the place of the mimesis concept in Antiquity, which sufficiently demonstrate the epistemological confusion that is generated by this compulsion: “Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity” by Richard Mckeon, a survey of the concept that the author calls imitation in the philosophies, principally, of Plato and Aristotle; and “Mimesis in Greek Historical Theory,” by Vivienne Gray, a study of “the use of mimesis to describe what the historian does in creating his history. Gray’s witnesses are late-Classical writers, principally Dionysseus of Halicarnasus, mainly in his critical essay “On Thucydites,” where he takes the author of the “History of the Peloponnesian War” to task for his citation of the speeches of principals, not on the question of their accuracy, but of the appropriateness with which just those persons would have uttered just those remarks in just those circumstances--the criterion of decorum, in short, as another sense of mimesis.
Indeed Gray writes in her opening sentence that “mimesis...has a wide range of technical meanings in the world of ancient literary criticism,” but not before asserting that it “can be literally translated as imitation,” but that doing so “is often unhelpful.” As if to unpack this caveat, McKeon, having fixed the link of imitation to mimesis, writes of its “diversity of meanings,” of the way it is left as a term “universal in scope and indeterminate in application,” not established in Plato’s use “in a literal meaning” or given a “fixed meaning.”
The contradictions found here are not unique to this particular issue of translation. They are fundamental questions about words, meanings, language, translation, and the over-used and under-explained concept of “literal”, questions which have been among the provocations of my paper.
Making Music History: Portraits, Anecdotes and C. P. E. Bach
Annette Richards
Cornell University
Musicology’s foundational texts, Burney’s and Hawkins’ General Histories (both published 1776) seem to many modern readers baggy and digressive. Sober chronological narration and insightful accounts of musical style jostle with character analysis, descriptions of countenance in prose, gossip, and the seemingly irrelevant biographical aside. For later readers, dipping into these texts for information on the past has meant putting up with a superfluity of portraiture and anecdote that bears dubious relevance to the scholarly present.
For his 18th-century readers, Burney intended visual and verbal vignettes to provide antidotes to boredom, but they do far more work in these texts than simply entertain. As Paul Fleming has recently written, the anecdote (a new literary genre in the 18th century) ‘opens up history’ like the portrait, disrupting the chronological fabric through personal achievement and the vortex of character. Given the explosion of interest in Germany and England in the later 18th century in the new literary genre of anecdote, and in portraiture and portrait collecting, this paper argues for a reconsideration of the period’s music-historiographical projects as compilations of annotations attached to the faces of the past. These first histories are unapologetically concerned with the individual actor, the subtleties of character and the concomitant demands of emotional sympathy; they embrace contingency over causality, and linger over the look and feel of the musician in his most telling moments.
Taking as its point of departure C. P. E. Bach’s famous, and newly reconstructed, portrait collection, I argue that for the hobbyist historians of the 18th century music history was conceived at the meeting point between the portrait collector, the physiognomist, and the anecdotist. Exploring the network of late 18th-century ideas and cultural practices focused on the individual countenance and its visual and literary representations, this paper argues that far from being extraneous by-products of the music-historiographical project, anecdote, annotation, physiognomical analysis and the visual discipline of portraiture were fundamental to the idea of music history.
Killing – and Burying – Sebastian
Robert L. Marshall
Brandeis University
In his provocative essay, “Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the Aesthetics of Patricide,” Richard Kramer remarks that “Everywhere, Emanuel felt the need to speak of his father. In his music, he fails to do so. The patrimony is not acknowledged there.” Kramer demonstrates this in a typically perceptive analysis of one of Emanuel’s challenging keyboard compositions, the Sonata in C, H. 248 (1775).
The towering shadow cast by J. S. Bach on the lives, careers, and ambitions of all his musically gifted sons was undoubtedly overwhelming. Building on Kramer’s insight, I propose to examine – in stenographic form - the various tactics these uniquely privileged and unfortunate offspring developed to cope with that unimaginably intimidating legacy.
The Performer Asks, “Who Am I?”
Janet Schmalfeldt
Tufts University
Some of the most breathtaking moments in Richard Kramer’s Unfinished Music arise when he searches for the persona of the performer in music from Emanuel Bach through Mozart and Beethoven to Schubert. In Kramer’s book performers are always lurking in the wings, ready to be called onstage at every turn of the page. Nothing could be more exciting for readers who perform than to know that their role has been exalted by the author, that, as a pianist, he shares their aspirations, and that, over the course of his study, their personae become ever more all-embracing.
Waiting backstage, with cold hands or a dry throat, performers who have read Kramer may well feel overwhelmed with the roles they have been assigned. Just as performers might ask Kramer, “Who am I?,” Kramer asks us to consider the status of a composer’s sketch in opposition to the finished work. In the end there is no opposition at all, but “rather a fluid process of mind, hopelessly dialectical, obscure to the point of blankness” (377). And yet, “the phenomenon of performance excites us … because we reenact, each time uniquely, this intuitive process that the text suggests of its origins” (375). I invite Richard and the panel to join me in weighing these imponderables in face of the realities of performance, and with the understanding that performers return us to the process, if not the moment, of creation.
The Search for the Ineffable
James Webster
Cornell University
Cornell University
Richard Kramer's writings thrive on difficulty; music interests him primarily when it poses a problem — the knottier the better. I will interpret these traits as signs of a search for the ineffable in music.