2012年6月17日 星期日
2012年6月12日 星期二
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Imaginary Concerts
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Imaginary Concerts
In Search of Lost Time traverses much of the same territory with far greater authority. Proust understood acutely both the realities of musical culture and the internal life of listening. His salons are thronged with wellheeled music lovers, although their appreciation sometimes goes no deeper than that of the philistines in Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana. At one of Madame Verdurin’s salons, the adored young violinist Morel attempts to play Debussy’s "Fêtes" and, after forgetting how it goes, switches to Meyerbeer. The connoisseurs, who ordinarily would have dismissed Meyerbeer as a relic, don’t notice, and exclaim, “Sublime!” For Proust, Debussy was the supreme living composer. At one point, Proust subscribed to a rudimentary broadcast service that allowed him to monitor performances from Paris opera houses and concert halls over a telephone line. In his cork-lined room, he listened to Pelléas et Mélisande night after night, placing it beside Wagner’s Parsifal in his gallery of transcendent works.
The composer Vinteuil, an unheralded genius who finds posthumous renown, is threaded through In Search of Lost Time, although we never find out much about him. When the narrator first encounters him, in the mythic landscapes of Combray, he cuts a pathetic figure, “timid and sad.” He spends his time mourning the loss of his wife and ignoring the behavior of his daughter, who has formed a lesbian attachment to her music teacher. He seems a nullity of a person. Yet, when the music teacher undertakes the task of bringing Vinteuil’s oeuvre to light, deciphering and making fair copies of his sketches—“the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves”—a major body of work emerges. A cultish admiration for Vinteuil’s Sonata in F-Sharp, the piece that mesmerizes Swann, gives way to general adulation for the Septet, which transfixes and transforms the narrator when he first hears it, at the Verdurins’. By telling us so little about Vinteuil—we don’t even know his first name—Proust shows his disdain for biographical approaches to art (and for heroic sagas such as Jean- Christophe). The Septet is a masterpiece that comes from nowhere. In The Captive, Marcel marvels that “the boldest approximation to the bliss of the Beyond should have materialized precisely in the melancholy, respectable little bourgeois whom we used to meet in the Month of Mary at Combray!”
What does Vinteuil’s Septet sound like? Scholars have suggested various sources: one passage or another might echo the music of late Beethoven, César Franck, Debussy, or Proust’s onetime lover Reynaldo Hahn. The chamber works of Gabriel Fauré may resemble most closely the cultivated, compressed music that Proust describes—in particular, the “violet mist” that Vinteuil summons with certain of his textures, “so that, even when he introduced a dance measure, it remained captive in the heart of an opal.” (When I read of the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s Sonata, I think of the wistful motif—a filigree around an octave descent—that appears several times in the slow movement of Fauré’s Piano Quintet in D Minor. Proust himself named Saint-Saëns's First Violin Sonata as the principal source.) Wagner also lurks behind the scenes. Jean- Jacques Nattiez, in his book Proust as Musician, notes that the narrator was originally supposed to undergo a series of epiphanies while listening to Wagner operas, but Proust then decided that Marcel should “experience his revelation through an imaginary work of art, for according to the logic of the novel a real work always disappoints: attainment of the absolute could only be suggested by a work that was unrealized, unreal, and ideal.” Thus, a passage that in an early draft was intended to describe the Good Friday Spell in Parsifal—“like an iridescent bubble that had not yet burst, like a rainbow that had faded for a moment only to begin shining again with a livelier brilliance”—was reassigned to Vinteuil. This blend of French refinement and German grandeur is, as Nattiez says, a blueprint for In Search of Lost Time. Like Rolland, but far more evocatively, Proust is fantasizing a fusion of his favorites.
For the narrator, the Septet becomes an allegory of his life; phrases recurring from the Sonata remind him of past loves as well as of the sorrows of the now deceased Swann. Still, Vinteuil’s works escape Marcel’s interpretation of them, just as they would defeat the mundane biographer. They attain a higher reality precisely because the novel addresses them from so many angles, filtering them through the distracted ears of various listeners—not unlike Forster’s treatment of Beethoven in Howards End. As Vinteuil’s music is played at intervals through the cycle of novels, the Verdurins spew sophisticated platitudes, Swann keeps trying to pin down the significance of five fugitive notes, and the narrator savors the gradual evolution of phrases over time. Uncertainty about what the music means convinces us that it really exists. The ending of the Septet proclaims Vinteuil’s independence even from his creator. The fragrant little phrases drop away, and all that remains is a roughly joyful theme, like a “lurching and riotous clangour of bells.” This is the anthem of Vinteuil’s “lost fatherland”— the native country that takes shape only in sound.
At one point, the narrator asks, “Was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?” The sentence paints a picture of European civilization in majestic repose, with music shining at its center. Yet Proust lets a question mark hang in the air, as if he did not quite believe the image. He adds another tinge of doubt in Time Regained, the coda of the cycle. Earlier, the narrator praised Wagner’s ability to generate an “outward and absolutely precise reality”—a terrain over which listeners are borne aloft, as in an airplane. But that metaphor of the ecstatic wedding of art and power darkens when the First World War shatters the aristocratic idyll. Paris comes under attack from a zeppelin, and when the narrator’s friend Robert de Saint-Loup hears the air-raid sirens wailing he compares them to Wagner, saying, “What could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? . . . The Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.” Debussy, as it happens, died during one of the most brutal bombardments of Paris, his gossamer dreams buried in twentieth-century noise.
In Search of Lost Time traverses much of the same territory with far greater authority. Proust understood acutely both the realities of musical culture and the internal life of listening. His salons are thronged with wellheeled music lovers, although their appreciation sometimes goes no deeper than that of the philistines in Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana. At one of Madame Verdurin’s salons, the adored young violinist Morel attempts to play Debussy’s "Fêtes" and, after forgetting how it goes, switches to Meyerbeer. The connoisseurs, who ordinarily would have dismissed Meyerbeer as a relic, don’t notice, and exclaim, “Sublime!” For Proust, Debussy was the supreme living composer. At one point, Proust subscribed to a rudimentary broadcast service that allowed him to monitor performances from Paris opera houses and concert halls over a telephone line. In his cork-lined room, he listened to Pelléas et Mélisande night after night, placing it beside Wagner’s Parsifal in his gallery of transcendent works.
The composer Vinteuil, an unheralded genius who finds posthumous renown, is threaded through In Search of Lost Time, although we never find out much about him. When the narrator first encounters him, in the mythic landscapes of Combray, he cuts a pathetic figure, “timid and sad.” He spends his time mourning the loss of his wife and ignoring the behavior of his daughter, who has formed a lesbian attachment to her music teacher. He seems a nullity of a person. Yet, when the music teacher undertakes the task of bringing Vinteuil’s oeuvre to light, deciphering and making fair copies of his sketches—“the modest pieces, we imagined, of an old piano teacher, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little value in themselves”—a major body of work emerges. A cultish admiration for Vinteuil’s Sonata in F-Sharp, the piece that mesmerizes Swann, gives way to general adulation for the Septet, which transfixes and transforms the narrator when he first hears it, at the Verdurins’. By telling us so little about Vinteuil—we don’t even know his first name—Proust shows his disdain for biographical approaches to art (and for heroic sagas such as Jean- Christophe). The Septet is a masterpiece that comes from nowhere. In The Captive, Marcel marvels that “the boldest approximation to the bliss of the Beyond should have materialized precisely in the melancholy, respectable little bourgeois whom we used to meet in the Month of Mary at Combray!”
What does Vinteuil’s Septet sound like? Scholars have suggested various sources: one passage or another might echo the music of late Beethoven, César Franck, Debussy, or Proust’s onetime lover Reynaldo Hahn. The chamber works of Gabriel Fauré may resemble most closely the cultivated, compressed music that Proust describes—in particular, the “violet mist” that Vinteuil summons with certain of his textures, “so that, even when he introduced a dance measure, it remained captive in the heart of an opal.” (When I read of the “little phrase” in Vinteuil’s Sonata, I think of the wistful motif—a filigree around an octave descent—that appears several times in the slow movement of Fauré’s Piano Quintet in D Minor. Proust himself named Saint-Saëns's First Violin Sonata as the principal source.) Wagner also lurks behind the scenes. Jean- Jacques Nattiez, in his book Proust as Musician, notes that the narrator was originally supposed to undergo a series of epiphanies while listening to Wagner operas, but Proust then decided that Marcel should “experience his revelation through an imaginary work of art, for according to the logic of the novel a real work always disappoints: attainment of the absolute could only be suggested by a work that was unrealized, unreal, and ideal.” Thus, a passage that in an early draft was intended to describe the Good Friday Spell in Parsifal—“like an iridescent bubble that had not yet burst, like a rainbow that had faded for a moment only to begin shining again with a livelier brilliance”—was reassigned to Vinteuil. This blend of French refinement and German grandeur is, as Nattiez says, a blueprint for In Search of Lost Time. Like Rolland, but far more evocatively, Proust is fantasizing a fusion of his favorites.
For the narrator, the Septet becomes an allegory of his life; phrases recurring from the Sonata remind him of past loves as well as of the sorrows of the now deceased Swann. Still, Vinteuil’s works escape Marcel’s interpretation of them, just as they would defeat the mundane biographer. They attain a higher reality precisely because the novel addresses them from so many angles, filtering them through the distracted ears of various listeners—not unlike Forster’s treatment of Beethoven in Howards End. As Vinteuil’s music is played at intervals through the cycle of novels, the Verdurins spew sophisticated platitudes, Swann keeps trying to pin down the significance of five fugitive notes, and the narrator savors the gradual evolution of phrases over time. Uncertainty about what the music means convinces us that it really exists. The ending of the Septet proclaims Vinteuil’s independence even from his creator. The fragrant little phrases drop away, and all that remains is a roughly joyful theme, like a “lurching and riotous clangour of bells.” This is the anthem of Vinteuil’s “lost fatherland”— the native country that takes shape only in sound.
At one point, the narrator asks, “Was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?” The sentence paints a picture of European civilization in majestic repose, with music shining at its center. Yet Proust lets a question mark hang in the air, as if he did not quite believe the image. He adds another tinge of doubt in Time Regained, the coda of the cycle. Earlier, the narrator praised Wagner’s ability to generate an “outward and absolutely precise reality”—a terrain over which listeners are borne aloft, as in an airplane. But that metaphor of the ecstatic wedding of art and power darkens when the First World War shatters the aristocratic idyll. Paris comes under attack from a zeppelin, and when the narrator’s friend Robert de Saint-Loup hears the air-raid sirens wailing he compares them to Wagner, saying, “What could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? . . . The Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.” Debussy, as it happens, died during one of the most brutal bombardments of Paris, his gossamer dreams buried in twentieth-century noise.
訂閱：
文章 (Atom)