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Izdaja • Published by
Oddelek za muzikologijo Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani
Urednik zvezka • Edited by
Kevin Korsyn (Michigan)
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Vsebina • Contents
Kevin Korsyn Foreword
Predgovor 5
Slavoj Žižek Mercy and its Transformations
Usmiljenje in njegove transformacije 7
Slavoj Žižek
C Major or E Flat Minor? No, Thanks! Busoni's Faust-Allegorie
C-dur ali Es-mol?Ne hvala! Faustova alegorija F. Busonija
17
Lawrence Kramer
One Coughs, the Other Dances: Freud, Strauss, and the Perversity of Modern
Life
Ena kašlja, druga pleše: Freud, Strauss in sprevrženost sodobnega življenja
33
Christian Bielefeldt
'Brillantes Labyrinth': Die Psychoanalyse, die deutsche Musikwissenschaft und Lacans Schlüssel zur Musik
»Briljantni labirint«: psihoanaliza, nemška muzikologija in Lacanov ključ h glasbi
45
Leon Stefanija
Convolutions of musical meaning - a sociopsychological note on listening
to music
Zapletenost glasbenega pomena - sociopsihološki zapis k poslušanju glasbe
55
Beat A. Föllmi Unheimlich bewegt Ein 'unheimlicher' Diskurs in Gustav Mahlers Humoresken aus 'Des Knaben
Wunderhorn'
»Grozljiv« diskurz v humoreskah Gustava Mahlerja iz »Dečkovega čudežnega roga«
77
Bemd Oberhoff Die unbewusste Sinnebene in Mozarts Oper Idomeneo
Podzavestna raven smisla v Mozartovi operi Idomeneo
89
David Schwarz
A (Dis)Pleasure of Influence: George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (1973)
(Ne)ugodje vplivanja: Georg Rochbergove Kapriciozne variacije za violino brez
spremljave (1973) 107
Kevin Korsyn
Reception History and the Trauma of Real History: Decoding the Pantomime in Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony
Zgodovina recepcije in travma resnične zgodovine: dekodiranjepantomime v Haydnovi»Simfoniji slovesa« 143
Imensko kazalo • Index
159
Avtorji • Contributors
170
Foreword
When I proposed devoting a special issue of this journal to rethinking the connections between music and psychoanalysis, I was inspired by the political and philosophical interpretation of Lacan associated with Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, Renata Salecl, and others; the leading Slovenian musicological journal seemed to be the ideal forum for engaging the work of the Ljubljana Lacanian school. Despite my personal affinity with post-Lacanian thought, however, I also wanted the issue to include other approaches to psychoanalysis, whether classically Freudian, Kleinian, or whatever.
My plans for this project remained tentative, however, until a conversation with Žižek in November 2006, in which he expressed his passionate interest in music; the prospect of his participation encouraged me to invite others to contribute. Eventually he surprised me by giving me a choice between two articles, one on Busoni and the other on Mozart. My reaction to his offer could be summarized by paraphrasing a well-known joke by Groucho Marx that Žižek has quoted several times: "Mozart or Busoni? Yes, Please!" Žižek generously allowed us to publish both articles, so that the Ljubljana Lacanian school is very well represented here. Of all the individuals who made this project possible, therefore, Slavoj deserves special gratitude.
In the meantime I invited two leading American scholars, Lawrence Kramer and David Schwarz, to contribute to the issue, while Leon Stefanija recruited Christian Bielefeldt, Beat Follmi, and Bernd Oberhoff, whose articles appear here in German. Contributions by Stefanija and me round out the collection.
Kevin Korsyn, University of Michigan
Predgovor
Ko sem predlagal, da bi bil poseben zvezek tega zbornika posvečen premisleku o povezavah med glasbo in psihoanalizo, me je pri tem spodbudno vodila politična in filozofska interpretacija Lacana, ki in kakor se kaže pri Slavoju Žižku, Mladenu Dolarju, Alenki Zupančič, Renati Salecl in drugih; vodilna slovenska muzikološka periodična publikacija se mi je zdela kot idealen forum za delovno pritegnitev ljubljanske laca-novske šole. Navkljub moji osebni afiniteti do postlacanovske misli, sem želel vključiti tudi druge pristope k psihoanalizi, pa najsi gre za freudovske, kleinovske ali kakšne druge.
Moji načrti v zvezi s tem projektom so ostali v zraku, dokler ni prišlo do razgovora z Žižkom novembra 2006, v katerem je izrazil svoje vneto zanimanje za glasbo; pričakovanje njegovega sodelovanja me je vzpodbudilo, da sem postavil pred izbiro med dvema sestavkoma, enim o Busoniju in drugim o Mozartu. Mojo reakcijo na njegovo ponudbo bi lahko povzel s parafraziranjem dobro znane šale Groucha Marxa, ki jo je Žižek večkrat citiral: »Mozart ali Busoni? Da, prosim!« Žižek nam je velikodušno dovolil da objavimo oba članka, tako da je ljubljanska lacanovska šola zelo dobro predstavljena. Od vseh, ki so omogočili uresničitev tega projekta Slavoj torej zasluži posebno hvaležnost.
Med tem sem povabil vodilna ameriška znanstvenika, Lawrenca Kramerja in Davida Schwarza, medtem ko je Leon Stefanija število sodelujočih okrepil s Christianom Bie-lefieldtom, Beatom Föllmijem in Berndom Oberhoffom, katerih članki so natisnjeni v nemščini. Prispevka Leona Stefanije in mene zaokrožujeta zbir sestavkov.
Kevin Korsyn, Univeza v Michiganu
UDK 78:159.964.2 Slavoj Žižek
Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani Philosophical Faculty, University of Ljubljana
Mercy and its Transformations
Usmiljenje in njegove transformacije
Prejeto: 30. marec 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: odgovor resničnega, smrtonosna gonja, polomija sublimacije, ironija, Jacques Lacan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, La clemenza di Tito, perverzno dejanje
Izvleček
Daleč od tega, da bi izžarevala dostojanstvo strogih, a usmiljenih vladarjev v zgodnjih Mozartovih operah, Titova dejanja kažejo poteze histeričnega samoinsceniranja. Lažnivost njegovega položaja odseva v sami glasbi, ki - kot vrhunski vzorec mozartovske ironije - spodkopava eksplicitno ideološki projekt opere.
Received: 30th March 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: answer of the Real, death drive, failure of sublimation, irony, Jacques Lacan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, La clemenza di Tito, perverse act
Abstract
Far from radiating the dignity of the severe but merciful rulers of Mozart's early operas, Tito's acts display features of hysterical self-staging. The falsity of his position is rendered by the music itself, which, in a supreme display of Mozartean irony, undermines the opera's explicit ideological project.
It is a very rare case that a (relatively) unpopular work like Mozart's La clemenza di Tito plays such a crucial structural role in the history of music. As we shall see, what makes it unpopular is not its archaic character, but, on the contrary, its uncanny contemporaneity: it directly addresses some of the key issues of our time.
Clemenza has to be put in the series which characterizes opera from the very beginning: Why was the story of Orpheus the opera topic in the first century of its history, when there are almost one hundred recorded versions of it? The figure of Orpheus asking the gods to bring him back his Euridice stands for an intersubjective constellation which provides as it were the elementary matrix of opera, more precisely, of the operatic aria: the relationship of the subject (in both senses of the term: autonomous agent as well as the subject of legal power) to his Master (Divinity, King, or the Lady of courtly love/ die Minne/) is revealed through the hero's song (the counterpoint to the collectivity embodied in the chorus), which is basically a supplication addressed to the Master, a call
to him to show mercy, to make an exception, or otherwise forgive the hero his trespass. The first, rudimentary, form of subjectivity is this voice of the subject beseeching the Master to suspend, for a brief moment, his own Law. A dramatic tension in subjectivity arises from the ambiguity between power and impotence that pertains to the gesture of grace by means of which the Master answers the subject's entreaty.
As to the official ideology, grace expresses the Master's supreme power, the power to rise above one's own law: only a really powerful Master can afford to distribute mercy. What we have here is a kind of symbolic exchange between the human subject and his divine Master: when the subject, the human mortal, by way of his offer of self-sacrifice, surmounts his finitude and attains the divine heights, the Master responds with the sublime gesture of Grace, the ultimate proof of his humanity. Yet this act of grace is at the same time branded by the irreducible mark of a forced empty gesture: the Master ultimately makes a virtue out of necessity, in that he promotes as a free act what he is in any case compelled to do - if he refuses clemency, he takes the risk that the subject's respectful entreaty will turn into open rebellion.
Crucial here is the move from Monteverdi's Orfeo to Gluck's Orpheus undEuridice: what Gluck contributed was a new form of subjectivization. In Monteverdi we have sublimation in its purest: after Orpheus turns around to cast a glance at Euridice and thus loses her, the Divinity consoles him - true, he has lost her as a flesh-and-blood person, but from now on, he will be able to discern her beautiful features everywhere, in the stars in the sky, in the glistening of the morning dew... Orpheus is quick to accept the narcissistic profit of this reversal: he becomes enraptured with the poetic glorification of Euridice that lies ahead of him-to put it succinctly, he no longer loves her, what he loves is the vision of himself displaying his love for her.
This, of course, throws another light on the eternal question of why Orpheus looked back and thus screwed things up. What we encounter here is simply the link between the death-drive and creative sublimation: Orpheus' backward gaze is a perverse act stricto sensu; he loses Euridice intentionally in order to regain her as the object of sublime poetic inspiration (this idea was developed by Klaus Theweleit1). But should one not go here even a step further? What if Euridice herself, aware of the impasse of her beloved Orpheus, intentionally provoked his turning around? What if her reasoning was something like: 'I know he loves me, but he is potentially a great poet, this is his fate, and he cannot fulfill that promise by being happily married to me - so the only ethical thing for me to do is to sacrifice myself, to provoke him into turning around and losing me, so that he will be able to become the great poet he deserves to be' - and then she starts gently coughing or something similar to attract his attention.
Examples here are innumerable: like Euridice who, by sacrificing herself, i.e. by intentionally provoking Orpheus into turning his gaze towards her and thus sending her back to Hades, delivers his creativity and sets him free to pursue his poetic mission, Elsa in Wagner's Lohengrin also intentionally asks the fateful question and thereby delivers Lohengrin whose true desire, of course, is to remain the lone artist sublimating his suffering into his creativity. Wagner's Brunnhilde, this 'suffering, self-sacrificing
See Klaus Theweleit, Buch der Könige, Band I: Orpheus und Euridice, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld und Roter Stern 1992.
woman,' is the ultimate example here: she wills her annihilation, but not as a desperate means to compensate for her guilt - she wills it as an act of love destined to redeem the beloved man, or, as Wagner himself put it in a famous letter to Franz Liszt: 'The love of a tender woman has made me happy; she dared to throw herself into a sea of suffering and agony so that she should be able to say to me 'I love you!' No one who does not know all her tenderness can judge how much she had to suffer. We were spared nothing - but as a consequence I am redeemed and she is blessedly happy because she is aware of it.' Once again, we should descend here from the mythic heights into everyday bourgeois reality: woman is aware of the fact that, by means of her suffering which remains invisible to the public eye, of her renunciation for the beloved man and/ or her renunciation to him (the two are always dialectically interconnected, since, in the fantasmatic logic of the Western ideology of love, it is for the sake of her man that the woman must renounce him), she rendered possible man's redemption, his public social triumph - like Traviata who abandons her lover and thus enables his reintegration into the social order.
With Gluck, however, the denouement is completely different: after looking back and thus losing Euridice, Orpheus sings his famous aria 'Che faro senza Euridice,' announcing his intention to kill himself. At this precise point of total self-abandonment, the goddess of Love intervenes and gives him back his Euridice. This specific form of subjectiviza-tion - the intervention of Grace not as a simple answer to the subject's entreaty, but as an answer which occurs in the very moment when the subject decides to put his life at stake, to risk everything - is the twist added by Gluck. What is crucial here is the link between the assertion of subjective autonomy and the 'answer of the Real,' the mercy shown by the big Other: far from being opposed, they rely on each other. The modern subject can assert its radical autonomy only insofar as it can count on the support of the 'big Other,' only insofar as his autonomy is sustained by the social substance. No wonder this gesture of 'autonomy and mercy,'2 of mercy intervening at the very point of the subject's assertion of full autonomy, is discernible throughout the history of the opera, from Mozart to Wagner: in Idomeneo and Seraglio, the Other (Neptun, Bassa Selim) displays mercy at the very moment when the hero is ready to sacrifice his/her life, and the same even happens twice in Zauberflote (the magic intervention of the Other prevents both Pamina's and Papageno's suicide); in Fidelio, the trumpet anounces the Minister's arrival at the very point when Leonora puts her life at stake to save Florestan; up to Wagner's Parsifal in which Parsifal himself intervenes and redeems Amfortas precisely when Amfortas asks to be stabbed to death by his knights.
What occurs between Monteverdi and Gluck is thus the failure of sublimation: the subject is no longer ready to accept the metaphoric substitution, to exchange 'being for meaning,' i.e., the flesh-and-blood presence of the beloved for the fact that he will be able to see her everywhere, in the stars and the moon, etc. - rather than do this, he prefers to take his life, to lose it all, and it is at this point, to fill in the refusal of sublimation, of its metaphoric exchange, that mercy has to intervene to prevent a total catastrophe. And we live in the shadow of this failed sublimation till today.
See Ivan Nagel's outstanding Autonomy and Mercy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991.
In Mozart's work, the key moment in this process of the failure of sublimation is Cost fan tutte. What makes Costthe most perplexing, traumatic even, among Mozart's operas is the very absurdity of its content: for our psychological sensitivity, it is almost impossible to 'suspend our disbelief' and accept the premise that the two women do not recognize their own lovers in the two Albanian officers. No wonder, then, that, throughout the nineteenth century, the opera was performed in a changed version in order to render the story credible. There were three main versions of these changes which fit perfectly the main modes of the Freudian negation of a certain traumatic content: (1) the staging implied that the two women knew the true identity of the 'Albanian officers' all the time - they just pretended not to know it in order to teach their lovers a lesson; (2) the couples reunited at the end are not the same as at the beginning, they change their places diagonally, so that, through the confusion of identities, the true, natural love links established; (3) most radically, only the music was used, with a wholly new libretto telling a totally different story.
Edward Said drew attention to Mozart's letter to his wife Constanze from 30 September 1790, i.e. from the time when he was composing Cost; after expressing his pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again soon, he goes on: 'If the people were to be able to see into my heart, I would have to be almost ashamed of myself...' At this point, as Said perspicuously perceives, one would expect the confession of some dirty private secret (sexual fantasies of what he will do to his wife when they will finally meet, etc.); however, the letter goes on: 'everything is cold to me - cold like ice.'3 It is here that Mozart enters the uncanny domain of 'Kant avec Sade,' the domain in which sexuality loses its passionate, intense character and turns into its opposite, a 'mechanical' exercise in pleasure executed by cold distance, like the Kantian ethical subject doing his duty without any pathological commitment. Isn't this the underlying vision of Cost: a universe in which subjects are determined not by their passionate engagements, but by a blind mechanism that regulates their passions? What compels us to bring Costclose to the domain of 'Kant avec Sade' is its very insistence on the universal dimension already indicated by its title: 'they are ALL doing like this,' determined by the same blind mechanism. In short, Alfonso the philosopher who organizes and manipulates the game of changed identities in Cost, is a version of the figure of the Sadean pedagogue educating his young disciples in the art of debauchery. It is thus oversimplified and inadequate to conceive this coldness as that of 'instrumental reason.'
The traumatic core of Costresides in its radical 'mechanical materialism' in the sense of Pascalean advice to non-believers: 'Act as if you believe, kneel down, follow the rite, and belief will come by itself!' Costapplies the same logic to love: far from being an external expression of the inner feeling of love, love rituals and gestures generate love - so act as if you are in love, follow the procedures, and love will emerge by itself. Apropos of Moliere's Tartuffe, Henri Bergson emphasized how Tartuffe is funny not on account of his hypocrisy, but because he gets caught in his own mask of hypocrisy:
He immersed himself so well into the role of a hypocrite that he played it, as it were,
sincerely. This way and only this way he becomes funny. Without this purely material
3 See Edward W. Said, 'Cost fan tutte,' in Lettre international 39 (Winter 1997), p. 69-70.
sincerity, without the attitude and speech which, through the long practice of hypocrisy, became for him a natural way to act, Tartuffe would be simply repulsive.4
Bergson's precise expression 'purely material sincerity' fits perfectly with the Althus-serian notion of Ideological State Apparatuses, i.e. of the external ritual which materializes ideology: the subject who maintains his distance towards the ritual is unaware of the fact that the ritual already dominates him from within. This 'purely material sincerity' of the external ideological ritual, not the depth of the subject's inner convictions and desires, is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice. Moralists who condemn Cosifor its alleged frivolity thus totally miss the point: Cosiis an ethical opera in the strict Kierkegaardian sense of the 'ethical stage.' The ethical stage is defined by the sacrifice of the immediate consumption of life, of our yielding to the fleeting moment, in the name of some higher universal norm. If Mozart's Don Giovanni embodies the Aesthetic (as was developed by Kierkegaard himself in his detailed analysis of the opera in Either/Or), the lesson of Cosiis ethical - why? The point of Cosiis that the love that unites the two couples at the beginning of the opera is no less 'artificial,' mechanically brought about, than the second falling in love of the sisters with the exchanged partners dressed up as Albanian officers that results from the manipulations of the philosopher Alfonso - in both cases, we are dealing with a mechanism that the subjects follow in a blind, puppet-like way. Therein consists the Hegelian 'negation of negation': first, we perceive the 'artificial' love, the product of Alfonso's manipulations, as opposed to the initial 'authentic' love; then, all of a sudden, we become aware that there is actually no difference between the two - the original love is no less 'artificial' than the second. So, since one love counts as much as the other, the couples can return to their initial marital arrangement. This is what Hegel has in mind when he claims that, in the course of a dialectical process, the immediate starting point proves itself to be something already-mediated, i.e. its own self-negation: in the end, we ascertain that we always-already were what we wanted to become, the only difference being that this 'always-already' changes its modality from In-itself into For-itself. Ethical is in this sense the domain of repetition qua symbolic: if, in the Aesthetic, one endeavors to capture the moment in its uniqueness, in the Ethical a thing only becomes what it is through its repetition.
This perspicuous example compels us to complicate a little bit Pascal's 'Kneel down and you will believe!', adding an additional twist to it. In the 'normal' cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto another, onto a 'subject supposed to believe,' so that the true logic is: 'Kneel down and you will thereby make someone else believe!' One has to take this literally and even risk a kind of inversion of Pascal's formula: 'You believe too much, too directly? You find your belief too oppressing in its raw immediacy? Then kneel down, act as if you believe, and you will get rid of your belief - you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-sist objectified in your act of praying!' That is to say, what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one's own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one's belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? To believe - to believe 'directly,' without the externalizing mediation of a ritual - is a heavy, oppressing, trau-
Henri Bergson, An Essay on Laughter, London: Smith 1937, p. 83.
matic burden, which, through exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring it onto an Other... If there is a Freudian ethical injunction, it is that one should have the courage of one's own convictions: one should dare to fully assume one's identifications. And exactly the same goes for marriage: the implicit presupposition (or, rather, injunction) of the standard ideology of marriage is that, precisely, there should be no love in it. The Pascalean formula of marriage is therefore not 'You don't love your partner? Then marry him or her, go through the ritual of shared life, and love will emerge by itself!', but, on the contrary: 'Are you too much in love with somebody? Then get married, ritualize your love relationship, in order to cure yourself of the excessive passionate attachment, to replace it with the boring daily custom - and if you cannot resist the passion's temptation, there are extra-marital affairs.'
This insight brings us back to the power of Sellars's staging, enabling us to formulate the difference between the two couples of young lovers and the additional couple Alfonzo-Despina. The first two simply exemplify the Bergsonian 'purely material sincerity': in the great love duets of the Act II of Cost, the men, of course, hypocritically fake love to test the women; however, in exactly the same way as Tartuffe, they get caught in their own game and 'lie sincerely.' This is what music renders - this sincere lie. However, with Alfonzo and Despina, the situation is more complicated: they enact - through others - the rituals of love for the sake of their own love, but in order to get rid of its direct traumatic burden. Their formula is: 'We love each other too much - so let us stage a superficial love imbroglio of the two couples in order to acquire a distance towards this unbearable burden of our passion.'
What all this implies is that Mozart occupies a very special place between pre-Romantic and Romantic music. In Romanticism, music itself - in its very substantial 'passionate' rendering of emotions, celebrated by Schopenhauer - can not only also lie, but lies in a fundamental way, as to its formal status itself. Let us take the supreme example of music as the direct rendering of the subject's immersion into the excessive enjoyment of the 'Night of the World,' Wagner's Tristan, in which the music itself seems to perform what words helplessly indicate, the way the amorous couple is inexorably drawn towards the fulfillment of their passion, the 'highest joy (höchste Lust)' of their ecstatic self-annihilation - is this, however, the metaphysical 'truth' of the opera, its true ineffable message? Why, then, is this inexorable sliding towards the abyss of annihilation interrupted again and again through the (often ridiculous) intrusion of the fragments of common daily life? Let us take the highest case, that of finale itself: just prior to Brangäne's arrival, the music could have moved straight into the final Transfiguration, two lovers dying embraced - why, then, the rather ridiculous arrival of the second ship which accelerates the slow pace of the action in an almost comic way - in a mere couple of minutes, more events happen than in the entire previous opera (the fight in which Melot and Kurwenal die, etc.) - similar to Verdi's Il Trovatore, in which in the last two minutes a whole package of things happen. Is this simply Wagner's dramatic weakness? What one should bear in mind here is that this sudden hectic action does NOT just serve as a temporary postponement to the slow, but unstoppable drift towards the orgasmic self-extinction; this hectic action follows an immanent necessity, it has to occur as a brief 'intrusion of reality,' permitting Tristan to stage the final self-obliterating act of Isolde.
Without this unexpected intrusion of reality, Tristan's agony of the impossibility to die would drag on indefinitely. The 'truth' does not reside in the passionate drift towards self-annihilation, the opera's fundamental affect, but in the ridiculous narrative accidents/ intrusions which interrupt it - again, the big metaphysical affect lies.
Catherine Clément was therefore right: one should turn the standard notion of the primacy of music in opera around, the idea that words (libretto) and stage action are just a pretext for the true focus, the music itself, so that the truth is on the side of music, and it is the music which delivers the true emotional stance (say, even if a lover complains and threatens, the music delivers the depth of his/her love which belies the aggressivity or, rather, shows it in its true light). What if the opposite is true - what if the music is here the emotional fantasmatic envelope whose function is to render palpable the bitter pill delivered by the words and action (women getting killed or abandoned, etc.)? One should thus read operas as Freud proposes to read a dream: to treat the basic emotional tone as a lie, a screen obfuscating the true message which is in what happens on the stage. Wagner was wrong when he advised a friend in Bayreuth in the midst of the performance of The Flying Dutchman: 'Just close your eyes and enjoy the music.' It is absolutely crucial to bear in mind what goes on on stage, to listen to the words also.
This brings us back to Tristan: crucial for Tristan is the gap between this opera's 'official ideology' and its subversion through the work's texture itself. This subversion in a way turns around the famous Mozartean irony, where, while the person's words display the stance of cynical frivolity or manipulation, the music renders their authentic feelings: in Tristan, the ultimate truth does not reside in the musical message of passionate self-obliterating love-fulfillment, but in the dramatic stage action itself which subverts the passionate immersion into the musical texture. The final shared death of the two lovers abounds in Romantic operas - suffice it to recall the triumphant 'Moriam' insieme' from Bellini's Norma; against this background, one should emphasize how in Wagner's Tristan, the very opera which elevates this shared death into its explicit ideological goal, this, precisely, is NOT what effectively happens - in music, it is as if the two lovers die together, while in reality, they die one AFTER the other, each immersed in his/her own solipsistic dream.
Along these lines, one should read Isolde's ecstatic death at the end of Tristan as the ultimate operatic prosopopeia: Tristan can only die if his death is transposed onto Isolde. When Tristan repeats his claim that death could not destroy their love, Isolde provides the concise formula of their death: 'But this little word 'and'—if it were to be destroyed, how but through the loss of Isolde's own life could Tristan be taken by death?' - in short, it is only in and through her death that he will be able to die. Does then Wagner's Tristan not offer a case of the interpassivity of death itself, of the 'subject supposed to die'? Tristan can only die insofar as Isolde experiences the full bliss of the lethal self-obliteration for him, at his place. In other words, what 'really happens' in Act III of Tristan is ONLY Tristan's long 'voyage to the bottom of the night' with regard to which Isolde's death is Tristan's own fantasmatic supplement, the delirious construction that enables him to die in peace.
Now we can formulate the uniqueness of Mozartean irony: although, in it, music is already fully autonomized with regard to words, it does not yet lie. Mozartean irony is
the unique moment when the truth really 'speaks in music,' when music occupies the position of the Unconscious rendered by Lacan with his famous motto 'Moi la vérité, je parle.' And it is only today, in our postmodern time, allegedly full of irony and lacking belief, that Mozartean irony reaches its full actuality, confronting us with the embarrassing fact that - not in our interior, but in our acts themselves, in our social practice - we believe much more than we are aware of.
In a first approach, of course, things cannot but appear exactly inverted: does Romanticism not stand for the music which renders in a direct, non-lying, way the emotional core of the human being, i.e., which tells the truth much more directly than words, while the uncanny and disturbing lesson of Mozart's Cosiis precisely that music can lie (for example, although the seduction arias of the two 'Albanians' and the ensuing duets are a fake - they pretend to be madly in love in order to seduce the other's fiancée - the music is absolutely 'convincing' in rendering the emotion of love)? The answer to this counter-argument is that it misses the point of Mozartean irony: of course the individuals think that they just fake to be in love, but their music bears witness to the fact that they 'fake to fake,' that they are not aware how there is more truth in their declarations of love than they are aware of. In Romanticism, on the contrary, the very pretense to render directly the emotional truth is a fake - not because it does not render accurately the individual's emotion, but because this very emotion is in itself already a lie...
Clemenza strengthens even further this Mozartean irony. Giacomo Rossini's great male portraits, the three from Barbiere (Figaro's 'Largo il factotum,' Basilio's 'Calumnia,' and Bartolo's 'Un dottor della mia sorte'), plus the father's wishful self-portrait of corruption in Cenerentola, enact a mocked self-complaint, where one imagines oneself in a desired position, being bombarded by demands for a favor or service. The subject twice shifts his position: first, he assumes the roles of those who address him, enacting the overwhelming multitude of demands which bombard him; then, he feigns a reaction to it, the state of deep satisfaction in being overwhelmed by demands one cannot fulfill. Let us take the father in Cenerentola: he imagines how, when one of his daughters will be married to the Prince, people will turn to him, offering him bribes for a service at the court, and he will react to it first with cunning deliberation, then with fake despair at being bombarded with too many requests. The culminating moment of the archetypal Rossini aria is this unique moment of happiness, of the full assertion of the excess of Life which occurs when the subject is overwhelmed by demands, no longer being able to deal with them. At the highpoint of his 'factotum' aria, Figaro exclaims: 'What a crowd/of the people bombarding me with their demands/ - have mercy, one after the other/uno per volta, per carita/!', referring therewith to the Kantian experience of the Sublime, in which the subject is bombarded with an excess of data that he is unable to comprehend. And do we not encounter a similar excess in Mozart's Clemenza - a similar sublime/ ridiculous explosion of mercies? Just before the final pardon, Tito himself is exasperated by the proliferation of treasons which oblige him to proliferate acts of clemency:
The very moment that I absolve one criminal, I discover another. /. . . /I believe the
stars conspire to oblige me, in spite of myself, to become cruel. No: they shall not
have this satisfaction. My virtue has already pledged itself to continue the contest.
Let us see, which is more constant, the treachery of others or my mercy. / . . . / Let it be known to Rome that I am the same and that I know all, absolve everyone, and forget everything.
One can almost hear Tito complaining: 'Uno per volta, per caritä!' - 'Please, not so fast, one after the other, in the line for mercy!' Living up to his task, Tito forgets everyone, but those whom he pardons are condemned to remember it forever:
SEXTUS: It is true, you pardon me, Emperor; but my heart will not absolve me; it will lament the error until it no longer has memory.
TITUS: The true repentance of which you are capable, is worth more than constant fidelity.
This couplet from the finale blurts out the obscene secret of Clemenza: the pardon does not really abolish the debt, it rather makes it infinite - we are forever indebted to the person who pardoned us. No wonder Tito prefers repentance to fidelity: in fidelity to the Master, I follow him out of respect, while in repentance, what attached me to the Master is the infinite indelible guilt. In this, Tito is a thoroughly Christian master.
One usually opposes the Jewish rigorous Justice and the Christian Mercy, the inexplicable gesture of undeserved pardon: we humans were born in sin, we cannot ever repay our debts and redeem ourselves through our own acts - our only salvation lies in God's Mercy, in His supreme sacrifice. In this very gesture of breaking the chain of Justice through the inexplicable act of Mercy, of paying our debts, Christianity imposes on us an even stronger debt: we are forever indebted to Christ, we cannot ever repay him for what he did for us. The Freudian name for such an excessive pressure which we cannot ever remunerate is, of course, superego. (One should not forget that the notion of Mercy is strictly correlative to that of Sovereignty: only the bearer of sovereign power can dispense mercy.)
How, then, does Tito fit into the series of Mozart's operas? The entire canon of Mozart's great operas can be read as the deployment of the motif of pardon, of dispensing mercy, in all its variations: the higher power intervenes with mercy in Idomeneo and Seraglio; in Le nozze di Figaro, the subjects themselves pardon the Count who refuses mercy; etc. In order to grasp properly the place of Clemenza in this series, one should read it together with Zauberflöte, as its mocking shadowy double: if Zauberflöte is mercy at its most sublime, Clemenza turns this sublimity into a ridiculous excess. The ridiculous proliferation of mercy in Clemenza means that power no longer functions in a normal way, so that it has to be sustained by mercy all the time: if a Master has to show mercy, it means that the law failed, that the legal state machinery is not able to run on its own and needs an incessant intervention from the outside. (One witnessed the same situation in state-socialist regimes: when, in a mythical scene from Soviet hagiog-raphy, Stalin takes a walk in the fields, meets a driver there whose tractor broke down, and helps him to repair it with wise advice, what this effectively means is that not even a tractor can function normally in a state-socialist economic chaos.)
The obverse, the truth, of the continuous celebration of the wisdom and mercy displayed by Tito is therefore the fact that Tito as a ruler is a fiasco. Instead of relying on
the support of faithful subjects, he ends up surrounded by sick and tormented people condemned to eternal guilt. This sickness is reflected back into Tito himself: far from radiating the dignity of the severe but merciful rulers from the early Mozart's operas, Tito's acts display features of hysterical self-staging: Tito is playing himself all the time, narcissistically fascinated by the faked generosity of his own acts. In short, the passage from Bassa Selim in Seraglio to Tito in Clemenza is the passage from the naive to the sentimental. And, as is usual with Mozart, this falsity of Tito's position is rendered by the music itself which, in a supreme display of the much-praised Mozartean irony, effectively undermines the opera's explicit ideological project.
Perhaps, then, the fact that Clemenza was composed in the midst of the work on Zauberflöte is more than a meaningless coincidence. Clemenza, composed to honor the investiture of the conservative Leopold II after the death of the progressive Joseph II, stages the obscene reactionary political reality that underlies the reinvented fake 'magic' of the Zauberflöte universe. Back in the 1930s, Max Horkheimer wrote that those who do not want to speak (critically) about liberalism should also keep silent about fascism. Mutatis mutandis, one should say to those who detract Clemenza as a failure in comparison with the eternal magic of Zauberflöte: those who do not want to engage critically with Zauberflöte, should also keep silent about La clemenza di Tito.
Povzetek
Mozartovo La clemenza di Tito je treba postaviti na tisto mesto, ki označuje opero od samega začetka in ki nudi njeno osnovno matrico: odnos podanika do njegovega vladarja se odkriva v junakovi pesmi, ki predstavlja prošnjo, naslovljeno na vladarja, oziroma rotitev za milost. Čeprav je milost izraz vrhovne vladarske moči, ki se more dvigniti nad lastne zakone, pa vendar na koncu iz nujnosti naredi vrlino, s tem da kot svobodno promovira tisto, kar je sicer prisiljen storiti. V popačenju, ki ga je dodal Gluck, pride do pojava milosti v trenutku,
ko se podanik odloči dati na kocko svoje življenje. Kar se dogaja med Monteverdijem in Gluckom je polomija sublimacije, pri kateri podanik zavrne sprejeti metafizičen nadomestek za prisotnost svoje drage in raje izgubi vse, tako da mora - v izogib popolne katastrofe - intervenirati usmiljenje. Daleč od dostojanstva, ki ga izžarevajo strogi, a usmiljeni vladarji Mozartovih zgodnjih oper, Titova dejanja kažejo poteze histeričnega samoinsceniranja; Tita fascinira lažna velikodušnost lastnih dejanj. Lažnivost njegovega položaja odseva v sami glasbi, ki - kot vrhunski vzorec mozartovske ironije - spodkopava eksplicitno ideološki projekt opere.
UDK 78.01 Busoni Slavoj Žižek
Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani Philosophical Faculty, University of Ljubljana
C Major or E Flat Minor? No, Thanks! Busoni's Faust-Allegorie
C-dur ali Es-mol? Ne hvala! Faustova alegorija
F. Busonija
Prejeto: 30. marec 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: alegorija, Ferruccio Busoni, smrtonosna gonja, Doktor Faust, objet petit a, melanholija, simbol
Izvleček
Busonijev Doktor Faust je melanholična žaloigra, ki sega nazaj v tradicijo lutkovnih iger. Busoni-jeva nedokončana partitura je rezultat lastnega ustvarjalnega zastoja ne pa zunanjega naključja. Dvoumnost v zvezi z mladim fantom, ki se ob koncu pojavi kot reinkarnacija Faustove volje pri Busoniju še ni bila raziskana.
Received: 30th March 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: allegory, Ferruccio Busoni, death drive, Doktor Faust, objet petit a, melancholy; symbol
Abstract
Busoni's Doktor Faust is a melancholic Trauerspiel that returns to the tradition of Puppenspiele. Busoni's unfinished score is the result of an inherent creative deadlock rather than an external accident. The ambiguity of the young boy who appears at the end as a reincarnation of Faust's Wille remains unexplored in Busoni.
Adorno begins his Drei Studien zu Hegel with a rebuttal of the traditional question about Hegel: what is dead and what is still alive in Hegel's thought? Such a question presupposes an arrogant position of ourselves as judges of the past; when we are dealing with a truly great philosopher, the question to be raised is not what can this philosopher still tell us, what does he mean to us, but the opposite one, what are WE, our contemporary situation, in his eyes, how would our epoch appear to his thought. And the same should be done with Faust: our question should not be what does the Faust myth still tell us, but how does our own predicament appear when it is seen through the lenses of the Faust myth. This is what Busoni does: his Faust provides a diagnosis of a certain historical moment, his as well as ours.
Busoni takes as his premise the irreducible gap between singing and action that characterizes conventional opera: the absurdity of people singing on stage while pretending to be engaged in ordinary human actions. But the conclusion he draws from it is the opposite of the expected one—not that music should adapt to the reality of action, but that the action on stage should adapt to music by way of being pointedly artificial, improbable, magical, untrue:
The sung word on the stage will always remain a convention and an obstacle to the genuine affect of opera. In order to emerge with honor from this conflict, a plot in which characters sing while acting will, from the beginning, have to be gauged to the incredible, the untrue, and the improbable. In thus mutually supporting each other, the two impossibilities become possible and acceptable.
The fact that we experience the stage singing as a convention which prevents genuine affect is in itself a sign of the change in historical sensibility: the 'objective spirit' of Busoni's time made another romantic-realist Faust in the line of Gounod impossible. This is why Busoni returned to the Renaissance, a return already discernible in the dramatic construction of his Faust: he wrote a 'foreshortened' libretto which lacks continuity, i.e., which does not aim at telling the whole story, but offers only a succession of selected cross-sections—his unit is a Bild, the image of a decisive segment, not an Akt, the organic unity of action. As if to make this point clear, he left out the best known and dramatically most effective episode (Gretchen's seduction), referring to it only in absentia, in a brief Intermezzo where Gretchen's brother searches for Faust to kill him in revenge for his ruining her. No wonder such a procedure evokes Brechtian echoes—like Brecht, Busoni also emphasized the need for Entfremdung: 'Just as the artist, if he wants to move others, must not let himself be moved (if he is not to lose control over his means at the crucial moment), the audience, if it wants to savor the theatrical effect, must not confuse it with reality. Otherwise, the aesthetic pleasure deteriorates into human compassion.' In exactly the same way as in the case of the tension between music and action, the two impossibilities—the artist's impossibility of being directly identified with, moved by, his work, and the audience's impossibility of confusing stage with reality—mutually cancel themselves.
Busoni's return to the Renaissance is more complex than it may appear: he doesn't simply ignore Goethe—quite the contrary, what he ignores are all previous operatic versions of Faust (Berlioz, Gounod, Boito—the last undoubtedly the best) which intervene between Goethe and him. Busoni enters directly in a dialogue with the great Genius himself: in the Prologue Vor dem Vorhang, to be spoken by the poet to the spectators, he evokes Goethe as the supreme version of Faust, and, admitting his limitations, modestly withdraws to Puppenspiele:
Doch was vermächt', gen Zauberer, ein Meister! Des Menschen Lied am Göttlichen verschallt: Also belehrt erkannt' ich meine Ziele Und wandte mich zurück - zum Puppenspiele.
There is, of course, an element of fakery in this modesty—his step back is, to put it with Lenin, a step backwards aimed at enabling two steps forward. In Benjaminian terms,
what Busoni does is go back from symbol to allegory: from organic dramatic unity to parataxis, to the succession of tableaux vivants. This formal change brings about the change in the basic attitude of the work from tragic mourning to melancholy. In a famous passage from his letter to Schiller from August 16/17, 1797, Goethe reports on an experience of his which made him perceive a piece of ruined reality as a symbol:
My grandfather's house, its courtyard and its gardens had been transformed from the parochial-patrician home of an old Frankfurt elder into the most useful trading and market place by wisely enterprising people. Curious coincidence during the bombardment conspired to see the structure perish, but even today, reduced, for the most part, to a pile of rubble, it is still worth twice as much as the current owners paid my family for it 11 years ago. Conceivably, the whole thing may, in the future, be bought and restored by yet another entrepreneur, and you can easily see thast it would, in more than one sense, stand as a symbol of thousands of other instances, in this industrious city and in particular in my own eyes.1
The contrast between allegory and symbol is crucial here. Allegory is melancholic: as Freud pointed out, a melancholic treats an object which is still here as already lost, i.e., melancholy is a pre-emptive mourning. So, in an allegorical approach, one looks at a busy market-place house and already sees in it the future ruins it will turn into—ruins are the 'truth' of the proud house we see. Recall the old Catholic strategy of guarding men against the temptations of the flesh: when you see a voluptuous feminine body in front of you, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades—the dried skin, sagging
breasts____(Or, even better, imagine what already lurks now beneath the skin: raw flesh
and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrement . . . . ) This is melancholy at its purest—no wonder that one of the fashions among the rich in the Romantic era was to build new houses directly as ruins, with parts of the walls missing, etc.
Goethe, however, does the exact opposite: he sees (the potential for) the future prosperity in the present pile of rubble. (In a somewhat pathetic way, one could say the same about the ruins of 9/11: a melancholic would see in them the 'truth' of the arrogant dreams of US grandeur, i.e., he would already see in the Twin Towers themselves the ruins that lie ahead, while a Goethean optimist would see in the ruins of 9/11 a symbol of the enterprising spirit of that other 'industrious city' who will soon replace the ruins with new buildings.) Crucial here is the rise of the symbol from ruin and repetition: Goethe's grandfather's house was not a symbol for its first generation dwellers—as Heidegger would have put it, for them, it was just a zuhandenes object, part of their environs with which they were engaged. It was only its destruction, the reduction to a pile of rubble, that made it appear as a symbol. (There is a temporal ambiguity in Goethe's last sentence: will the house become a symbol when it will be renovated, or is it a symbol already now, for the one who is able to see in it the future of its renewal?) Meaning—allegorical or symbolic—arises only through destruction, through an out-of-joint experience, through a cut which interrupts the object's direct functioning in our environs.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 'Brief an Friedrich Schiller, 16./17. August 1797,' in .Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, sec. 2, vol. 4 Goethe mit Schiller. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche vom 24. Juni 1794 bis zum 9. Mai 1805, ed. Volker C. Dörr and Norbert Oellers, Part 1: Vom 24. Juni 1794 bis zum 31. Dezember 1799, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1998, p. 390.
So if Goethe's Faust is one big Symbol, if Faust's failures themselves are so to speak premature successes, complications of the ongoing process of Bildung which point towards their future redemption, Busoni's Faust is an allegory in which the ongoing triumphs are already accompanied by the shadow of the final defeat. If Goethe's Faust is an optimistic tragedy, Busoni's is a melancholic Trauerspiel in which the highest act, the only successful one, is to fully accept one's failure. A puppet is a figure of such melancholy. That is to say, what does a puppet (more precisely: a marionette) stand for as a subjective stance? One should turn here to Heinrich von Kleist's essay Über das Marionettentheater from 18102, which is crucial with regard to his relationship to Kant's philosophy (we know that the reading of Kant threw Kleist into a shattering spiritual crisis - this reading was THE traumatic encounter of his life). Where, in Kant, do we find the term 'Marionette'? In a mysterious subchapter of his Critique of Practical Reason entitled 'Of the Wise Adaptation of Man's Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Vocation,' in which he endeavours to answer the question of what would happen to us if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the Ding an sich:
/ . . . /instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes./. . . /Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.3
So, for Kant, the direct access to the noumenal domain would deprive us of the very 'spontaneity' which forms the kernel of transcendental freedom: it would turn us into lifeless automata, or, to put it in today's terms, into 'thinking machines . . .'—What Kleist does is to present the obverse of this horror: the bliss and grace of marionettes, the creatures who have direct access to the noumenal divine dimension, who are directly guided by it. For Kleist, marionettes display the perfection of spontaneous, unconscious movements: they have only one center of gravity, their movements are controlled from only one point. The puppeteer has control only of this point, and as he moves it in a simple straight line, the limbs of the marionettes follow inevitably and naturally because the figure of the marionette is completely coordinated. Was it not already Heiner Müller who, in his Bayreuth staging of Tristan, read it as a Puppenspiel, emphasizing the mechanical movement of characters in a geometric space? Puppenspiel and passion are far from opposed: when I am wholly in the thrall of a passion, I am no longer the agent of my activity, it is the impersonal passion which acts through me.
Marionettes thus symbolize beings of innocent, pristine nature: they respond naturally and gracefully to divine guidance, in contrast to ordinary humans who have to struggle constantly with their ineradicable propensity to Evil, which is the price
2	Reprinted in vol. 5 of Heinrich von Kleist. Gesamtausgabe, München: dtv 1969.
3	Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, New York: Macmillan 1956, p. 152-153.
they have to pay for their freedom. This grace of the marionettes is underscored by their apparent weightlessness: they hardly touch the floor—they are not bound to the earth, for they are drawn up from above. They represent a state of grace, a paradise lost to man, whose willful 'free' self-assertions make him self-conscious. The dancer exemplifies this fallen state of man: he is not upheld from above, but, rather, feels himself bound to the earth, and yet must appear weightless in order to perform his feats with apparent ease. He must try consciously to attain grace, which is why the effect of his dance is affectation rather than grace. Therein resides the paradox of man: he is neither an animal wholly immersed in the earthly surroundings, nor the angelic marionette gracefully floating in the air, but a free being who, due to his very freedom, feels the unbearable pressure that attracts and ties him to the earth where he ultimately does not belong.
It is from this tragic split that one should read figures like Kätchen von Heilbronn from Kleist's play of the same name, this fairy-tale figure of a woman who wanders through life with angelic equanimity: like a marionette, she is guided from above and fulfills her glorious destiny by merely following the spontaneous assertions of her heart. What Kleist is not able to confront is not only the fact that such an angelic position is impossible due to human finitude, but also the more disturbing fact that, if this position were to be realized, it would amount to its opposite, to a horrible, lifeless machine. The very metaphor Kleist uses (marionette) is tell-tale: in order for it to function, Kleist has to exclude the machine-like aspect of it so strongly present in E.T.A. von Hoffman's Sandmann.
How does Busoni's Faust fit these coordinates? As with every great mythic figure, each epoch invents its own Faust. Today, Faust is predominantly read in a Heideggerian way, as the symbol of the hubris of subjectivity, of a nihilistic pact with the devil the subject concludes in order to gain unlimited power. The lesson of this Faust is best rendered by the vulgar proverb 'you cannot urinate against the wind': a plea for moderation, for the proper measure. This Faust perfectly fits the postmodern celebration of human finitude: his failure can stand for the 'Dialektik der Aufklärung,' for the failure of all big modern projects, from the political totalitarianism into which the Communist dream of a fully self-transparent society degenerated to ecological catastrophies as the consequence of the dream of the human domination over nature. Although, in Goethe, things appear much more ambiguous—at the end, Faust not only finds peace, but finds it without renouncing his activity—he dies happy, in the middle of colonizing/reforming activity—, the basic coordinates remain the same.
With Busoni, however, we enter a totally different field: his Faust is not a 'Faus-tian' larger-than-life heroic figure who pays the price for his hubris; he is, to put it in Nietzsche's terms, a slave pretending to be a master but not ready to pay the price for it. When Mephistopheles's voice tempts him to conclude the pact, Faust is aware that he is exposing himself to danger: 'Welchem Wahn gab ich mich hin!/Arbeit,/heilende Weile,/in dir bade ich mich rein.' However, he quickly succumbs to the temptations and abandons the heilende Weile of true knowledge. Faust does not stand for the hard work of science—science avec patience, as Arthur Rimbaud put it—but for the cheap trickery of magic; he is not ready to heroically assume his Will, but wants others to do
it for him. He is not a figure of unconditional Will, but a figure of the betrayal of the truly autonomous Will.
This is Busoni's implicit diagnosis of our predicament. On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . . And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight . . . )? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real—in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one.
Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. Today's hedonism combines pleasure with constraint—it is no longer the old notion of the 'right measure' between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction 'Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!', i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner's famous 'Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it' from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking . . . ) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's 'biopolitics.' Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is 'safe sex'—a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying 'Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?' The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent 'opium without opium': no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it—it already IS a kind of 'opium without opium'.
And the same holds for belief: we want others (our children, more primitive people) to believe for us, instead of us. Therein resides the stake of today's reference to 'culture,' of 'culture' emerging as the central life-world category: we today no longer 'really believe,' we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the 'life-style' of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules 'out of respect for tradition,' etc.). 'I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture' effectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/ displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural life-style, if not the fact that, although we do not believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house and even in public places every December? Perhaps, then, the 'non-fundamentalist' notion
of 'culture' as distinguished from 'real' religion, art, etc., IS in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs—culture' is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without 'taking them seriously.' Is this not also the reason why science is not part of this notion of culture—it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as 'barbarians,' as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture—they dare to take seriously their beliefs? Today, we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who immediately live their culture, those who lack a distance towards it. Recall the outrage when, two years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us enlightened Westerners believed in the divinity of Buddha, we were so outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the 'cultural heritage' of their own country and of all humanity. Instead of believing through the other like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions—for them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not 'cultural treasures.'
A reference to Goethe's Faust can be of some help here: after they consummate their love in the intimacy of sexual act, Gretchen asks Faust the other intimate question, the famous 'Nun sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?'—and Faust's long-winded answer is a case of what Harry Frankfurt called bullshitting if there ever was one. He goes through all possible excuses and phrases to avoid a direct answer: (1) let's forget about religion, we are now in the thrall of love; (2) I respect those who believe; (3) who can really say 'I believe'?; (4) it is not that I don't believe, but religion should be a matter of an ineffable deep feeling, not of confession, of words—'Gefuhl ist alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch'. . . . But it is not that Faust simply doesn't believe: in a way he is sincere in his hypocrisy. This hypocrisy is rendered much more directly in Busoni, where Faust twice takes off his girdle, makes a circle on the ground with it, and then himself enters it.
In his wonderful essay on fetishist Verleugnung 'Je sais bien, mais quand meme...'4, Octave Mannoni refers to an anecdote from Casanova's memoirs in order to explain the difference between the standard symbolic transferred belief and cynical (dis)belief. This anecdote also concerns the topic of entering a magic circle: Casanova reports how, in order to seduce a young uneducated peasant girl, he pretended to be a magician, marked on the ground a magic circle and claimed that this circle offers protection from all danger (his intention was, of course, to seduce the poor girl within this circle where she should have felt safe from danger). But then an unexpected thing happened: by pure accident, a wild storm suddenly broke out, and, struck by fear, Casanova quickly steps into his own magic circle to escape the danger. He knew very well that there is no magic here, that the magic power of the circle is his nonsense talk to cheat the girl—but nonetheless, once the real danger struck, he as it were got caught into his own illusion, he fell into his own trap—exactly like Busoni's Faust who, at the opera's end, when he accepts his fate, again makes the magic circle and steps into it—finally, he also gets caught into his own trap.
The distance of the cynical manipulator towards belief is not the same one as the 'normal' distance towards what one says: when we greet an acquaintance with 'How are
In Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l'imaginaire, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1968, p. 5-33.
you? Nice to see you!,' both of us also know very well that we did not mean it literally, that we just said it out of politeness. When we give Christmas presents to our children, neither we nor (probably) our children really believe that Santa Claus brought them, we just play the sincere game of pretending . . . . This is not what Faust is doing: he plays the same game with his Will as with his belief. He wants to believe without being engaged in it, he wants glauben, doch jede Verantwortung dafür refüsieren—er will seine Hände rein wahren, er sucht ein Andres to believe for him. The price he pays for his inauthenticity, for his cynical manipulation of belief is that he ends up stepping into his own circle.
Let us take a closer look at what kind of entity Faust is after he forfeits his autonomous Will in the contract with Mephistopheles. When the magic book is promised to Faust, he explodes in joy:
/ . . . /o, ihr Menschen, die ihr mich gepeinigt, hütet euch vor Faust! In seine Hand die Macht gegeben, heimliche Gewalt ihm zu Gebot/. . . /
One should bear in mind here the literal meaning of 'Faust'—there is a long tradition in popular culture of an 'undead' spectral organ starting to function on its own, independently of the body to which it belongs, like the hand from early surrealist films up to David Fincher's superb Fight Club. The truth, however, doesn't fit this joyful image—in the nice scene in the first Bild which takes place in the Herzog's park, Faust conjures three couples in order to amuse the noble public: Solomon and Sheba; Samson and Delilah; John the Baptist and Salome with the Baptist's executioner. These scenes are, of course, fully contextual (or, rather, indexical): they are intended as allegories of the ongoing love affair between Faust himself and die Herzogin. This scene renders clear the core of Faust's 'magic': he conjures mythical scenarios which stage (provide the coordinates of) the desires of the affected subjects—it is through this scene that the love-triangle is constituted and the Herzogin formulates her love for Faust. One should be very precise here: the conjured vision doesn't only represent the growing desire of Faust and the Herzogin, it literally gives rise to it.
In the deal with Faust, Mephistopheles promises to serve him till his death, while Faust should serve him after his death, for all eternity. The paradox here is that Faust is horrified by this prospect, although he perceives his deal with Mephistopheles as the renunciation of all (Christian) Beyond:
Es gibt kein Erbarmen. Es gibt keine Seligkeit, keine Vergeltung, den Miel nicht und nicht die Höllenschrecken: dem Jenseits trotz' ich!
There is no contradiction here: Faust doesn't deny that there is a Beyond, he wants to live in defiance (or ignorance) of it, of the Afterlife—and he will have to pay the price for it in the afterlife. (Mephistopheles of course cheats here: as Faust realizes towards the end, he already paid the price fully in this life.) This Beyond is not so much the literal beyond of afterlife, but more what Jacques Lacan called the 'big Other': the ideal
agency which decides on the ultimate meaning of our acts, the agency to which we are responsible, which passes Judgment on our life, which settles the accounts of our life. (In this sense, even—and especially—the Stalinist Communists believed in a Beyond: the Beyond of History which decides about the true meaning of our acts.) For Faust, the bargain with Mephistopheles is precisely that there is keine Rechnung: he wants to 'have his cake and eat it too,' to have one's wish without paying the price for it, as Mephistopheles's first service to Faust makes it clear. Faust wants the soldier, Gretchen's brother, liquidated:
' F: Räum ihn aus dem Wege. M: Auf deine Rechnung. F: Nein, ich will meine Hände rein wahren. Such ein Andres.'
And Mephistopheles does it: he finds a patrol of soldiers to do it. Faust is here the opposite of the Herzog's Zeremonienmeister, who states his position when ordered by the Herzog to introduce Faust:
Wenn ihr befehlt, so will ich ihn präsentieren, introduzieren, doch jede Verantwortung refüsieren.
Faust, on the contrary, will befehlen, doch jede Verantwortung refüsieren. He wants to be master-servant: il n'y est pour rien. The price he pays is that he does not lead a full life, but is a lifeless shadow. The standard idealist question 'Is there (eternal) life after death?' should be countered by the materialist question: 'Is there life before death?' This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: Am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? This is also the Faust question, as Goethe knew—when, after the spectre of Helen whom he tries to embrace vanishes, Faust states in a resigned way:
Ich weiser Narr,
ich Säumer, ich Verschwender!
Nichts ist getan,
alles zu beginnen;
the point is precisely that he did not really live his life, but missed it. Faust confronts his defeat in the Zweites Bild, when Helen appears to him: 'Was ich sehnte,/was ich waeh-nte:/höchsten Wunsches/Rätselformen.' When he tries to embrace her, enthusiastically exclaiming 'Nur Faust berührte je das Ideal!,' the vision disintegrates into nothing, and he accepts the bitter lesson: 'Der Mensch ist der Volkommenen nicht gewachsen.' (His conclusion is wrong: the lesson is rather that Helen is like rainbow, a pure appearance, something that is only visible from a proper distance.) At this moment, he knows that the game is over, that nothing was really done.
One should read these lines in their contrast to Goethe: what Faust here brutally experiences is that LA Femme n'existe pas—THE Woman, the substantial protecting Ground of the hero's existence, not a particular woman but das Ewig-Weibliche welches zieht uns hinan, mentioned in the Chorus Mysticus which concludes Faust II (and was set to music in the second part of Mahler's 8th Symphony, the exemplary late-Romantic
kitsch). These lines suggest the ineffable spiritual dimension of femininity which inspires men to realize their highest potential—an anti-feminist piece of wisdom, if there ever was one. That is to say, it is worth remembering here how Goethe's Faust concludes: the aged Faust has satisfied a dream of activity and economic progress, he has reclaimed the land from the sea, peopled it, and given it prosperity. But his pleasure and pride are not complete: a freehold enclave held by an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, disturbs the unity of his estate. He asks Mephisto to remove them, and the consequence is the burning-down of their house and their murder. Delighted with the growth of his project, Faust, now one hundred years old, speaks a phrase of satisfaction,
Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück
Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick,
and falls back dead. Thereupon Mephisto steps in, claiming his own. Heavenly spirits, however, intervene, drive off Mephisto, and reclaim Faust. In the final mystical scene, Faust's soul is conveyed in a progress towards Heaven, amidst the intercessions of Gretchen and other women . . . . What one should not miss is the colonialist-imperialist aspect of Faust's last years—Faust ends his life as a defiant capitalist, brutally disposing of the last obstacle, the owners of a free enclave . . . . This is how das Ewig-Weibliche zieht ihn hinan!
'Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück/Genieß' ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick'— does this not also hold for Busoni's Faust's last moment? The Glück here is in his awareness of how, through the highest act of transposing his Will onto the child, he 'stell ich mich/über die Regel/umfass in Einem/die Epochen/und vermenge mich/den letzten Geschlechtern:/ich, Faust/ein ewiger Wille.' This is an existential lie, a false exit, which is why it is a sign of Busoni's artistic authenticity that he wasn't able to compose these lines. Which, then, is the precise character of this Wille?
When Busoni stages a series of transformations—of a child into Christ, of Christ into Helen of Troy, etc.—, what we should focus on is the mysterious stuff which lends itself to such transformations, the proverbial 'stuff the dreams are made of.' Lacan's name for this stuff is objetpetit a, the object-cause of desire. One should imagine this object as a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present; it is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a 'something' that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. It is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal—more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the 'living dead' who, after every annihilation, re-compose themselves and clumsily go on. It does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void—its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called 'death drive,' and one should bear in mind that 'death drive' is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its
very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an 'undead' urge which persist beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with Wiederholungszwang, the uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death—again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject 'undead,' depriving him of the capacity to die (like the wound on the ill boy's belly from Kafka's 'A Country Doctor'): when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. For any avid cinema-goer, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that he has already seen all this in Ridley Scott's Alien: the monster appears indestructible; if one cuts it into pieces, it merely multiplies; it is something extra-flat that all of a sudden flies off and envelops your face; with infinite plasticity, it can morph itself into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The 'alien' is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal—this is what Busoni refers to as eternal Will. Where, then, does the plasticity of this object come? Lacan's solution is that all the figures of objet a are figures of the void, of nothingness. Human desire does not have a determinate object: every object is already metonymic, a place-holder of Nothing, when we get hold of it, our experience is the one of ce n'estpas ga, 'this is not that (what I really wanted),' no given object can satisfy my desire, its true object is the lost maternal Thing which is always missing, and objet a gives body to this void.
Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman drive is with reference to Kant's philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive statement 'the soul is mortal' can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate ('the soul is not mortal'), or affirm a non-predicate ('the soul is non-mortal'). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between 'he is not dead' and 'he is undead.' The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the 'undead' are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous 'living dead.' And the same goes for 'inhuman': 'he is not human' is not the same as 'he is inhuman.' 'He is not human' means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while 'he is inhuman' means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being-human. And, perhaps, one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the 'Night of the World', in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)
A look at the Wagnerian heroes can be of some help here: from their first paradigmatic case, the Flying Dutchman, they are possessed by the unconditional passion for dying, for finding ultimate peace and redemption in death. Their predicament is that,
some time in the past, they have committed some unspeakable evil deed, so that they are condemned to pay the price for it not by death, but by being condemned to a life of eternal suffering, of helplessly wandering around, unable to fulfill their symbolic function. This gives us a clue to the exemplary Wagnerian song, which, precisely, is the Klage of the hero, displaying his horror at being condemned to a life of eternal suffering, to err around or dwell as the 'undead' monster, longing for peace in death (from its first example, Dutchman's great introductory monologue, to the lament of the dying Tristan and the two great complaints of the suffering Amfortas). Brünnhilde's final farewell to him—'Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!'—points in the same direction: when the gold is returned to the Rhine, Wotan is finally allowed to die peacefully.
Wagner's solution to Freud's antagonism of Eros and Thanatos is thus the identity of the two poles: love itself culminates in death, its true object is death, the longing for the beloved is the longing for death. Is, then, this urge which haunts the Wagnerian hero what Freud called the 'death drive/Todestrieb/'? It is precisely the reference to Wagner which enables us to see how the Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any lifetension. Death drive does not reside in Wagner's heroes' longing to die, to find peace in death: it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying—a name for the 'undead' eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. The final passing-away of the Wagnerian hero (the death of the Dutchman, Wotan, Tristan, Amfortas) is therefore the moment of their liberation from the clutches of the death drive. Tristan in Act III is not desperate because of his fear of dying: what makes him desperate is that, without Isolde, he cannot die and is condemned to eternal longing—he anxiously awaits her arrival so as to be able to die. The prospect he dreads is not that of dying without Isolde (the standard complaint of a lover), but rather that of an endless life without her.
This weird 'undead' drive is not the same as the Schopenhauerian Wille—it is the gap that separates them which thwarts the planned triumphant conclusion of Busoni's Faust. When, at the very end, Gnade and Versöhnung are denied to him, Faust fully accepts his destiny and does das höchste Tun of assuming death and transfiguration: he reappears (is reborn) as a naked half-grown youth with a flowering branch, into which his death child changes. How are we to read this ending? Mephistopheles's line which closes the opera—'Sollte dieser Mann etwa verunglückt sein?'—is not rhetorical, but literally a question, a dilemma. It is not principally the question of illusion or reality (is the young naked boy only the dying Faust's hallucination, a mere illusion, or is he real?), i.e., it is too easy to say that for cynical realists there is no boy, just the miserable dead body of Faust, while those who believe in it see it. The question is a more radical one: real or not, is the appearance of the young boy an authentic vision or a fake way out?
And is this dilemma not reflected in the opera's two endings? Busoni left the ending uncomposed, and the opera was first performed in 1925 with Phillip Jarnach's ending, which makes no use of detailed musical instructions left by the dying Busoni (it is worth remembering that Busoni also left Helen's appearance uncomposed). Anthony Beaumont's later spacious final scene (first performed in 1984), realizing manuscript sketches as well as other original material from 1923 and 1924, is much more Busoni
making the opera's final image Nietzschean: a naked youth rises from the ruined body of Faust, shucking off old and constraining superstitions. That white innocence, symbolic of Busoni's yearning for a newborn classicism in the aftermath of World War I, is best expressed in the radiant key of C major, whereas Jarnach perversely forces it down to E flat minor, the blackest of all keys. This is the dilemma: C major or E flat minor?
But this dilemma was already that of Busoni himself—it is clear that the unfinished score of Faust is not just an external accident due to the composer's illness and premature death, but the result of an inherent creative deadlock. Faust belongs to the great unfinished operas from the same epoch, from Puccini's Turandot to Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron and Berg's Lulu—as Sergio Sablich put it: 'The fact remains that Busoni didn't compose this Finale because he didn't succeed in finding the adequate musical solution.' Something in him—his authentic artistic sense—resisted a triumphant finale in the style of the Wagnerian Verklärung which concludes Tristan. Musically, the declared triumph of the eternal Will remains a dead letter:
/. . . /so stell' ich mich/über die Regel/umfass in Einem/die Epochen/und vermenge
mich/den letzten Geschlechtern:/ich, Faust/ein ewiger Wille.
Busoni wrote: 'I hope that Faust's fear can be discerned, the fear that makes him collapse unconscious at the end.' But did he not himself shirk back from this fear in this concluding triumphant assertion of the Will?
So which version is better, Jarnach's or Beaumont's? One cannot but recall here Stalin's famous quip from 1928, when he was asked which deviation is worst, the Rightist or the Leftist: 'They are both worse!' The same holds here: Jarnach's 'Rightist' version (which emphasizes the catastrophy of the ending) and Beaumont's 'Leftist' version (which emphasizes the optimism of the Will) are both worse: they both miss the truth contained in the very fact that Faust remained incomplete. Our answer should thus be the obverse of the legendary Englishman's reply to the offer 'Coffee or tea?': 'Yes, please!' This is why the decision to stage Faust the way it was left by Busoni, with the last sung words 'Ich will wie ehemals aufschauen zu dir' (addressed to Christ, just before his figure changes into that of Helen), is a profoundly correct one. In Jarnach's standard version, Mephistopheles's last line in spoken, like King Herod's last line from Strauss' Salome 'Man töte dieses Weib.' If one performs as a spoken word everything that comes after 'Ich will wie ehemals aufschauen zu dir,' one does not just show respect to the Master— one does something much more radical: one turns around the Schopenhauerian eternal Will, Busoni's point of reference.
It was Schopenhauer who claimed that music brings us in contact with the Ding an sich: it renders directly the drive of the life-substance that words can only signify. For that reason, music 'seizes' the subject in the real of his/her being, bypassing the detour of meaning: in music, we hear what we cannot see, the vibrating life-force beneath the flow of Vorstellungen. Recall the remarkable scene at the beginning of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, in which we see a phone ringing loudly, and, when a hand picks up the receiver, the ringing goes on—as if the musical life-force of the sound is too strong to be contained by reality and persists beyond its limitations. (Or recall a similar scene from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, in which a singer on stage sings
Roy Orbison's »Crying«, and when she collapses unconscious, the song goes on.) What happens, however, when this flux of life-substance itself is suspended, discontinued? Georges Balanchine staged a short orchestral piece by Webern (they are all short) so that, after the music is over, the dancers continue to dance for some time in complete silence, as if they had not noticed that the music that provides the substance for their dance is already over—like the cat in a cartoon who simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring that she has no longer ground under her feet . . . . The dancers who continue to dance after the music is over are like the living dead who dwell in an interstice of empty time: their movements, which lack vocal support, allow us to see not only the voice but silence itself.
And something of the same kind happens when singers stop singing and start to perform like actors: we are confronted with mere words, deprived of their libidinal substance provided by music. What we hear are effectively dead words—words which we fully understand, but which nonetheless lack the proper subjective resonance. This reference to Balanchine also enables us to locate Busoni's philosophical mistake: what he refers to as the eternal Wille, the immortal drive which persists through all its transformations, is not really Schopenhauerian Wille; it is rather a persistence which goes on even when Wille disappears.
This, however, does not mean that such a staging only confronts us with Busoni's failure: the musical deadlock should also be understood as a direct call to us, spectators, to provide the missing music—the choice is ours. In such a reading, the Christian dimension is still present: it is implicit in the fact that the God who rejects Faust's redemption is explicitly designated by the Chorus as Gott 'der Rache, der Vergeltung und der Strafe,' nicht Gott 'der Milde und der Gnade'—Faust turns towards ewiger Wille after the crucified morphs into Helen—it is to her apparition that he exclaims: 'Verdammnis! Gibt es keine Gnade? Bust du unversöhnbar?' Faust is thus abandoned by the God of Rache und Vergeltung—one can well imagine a devil passing by the dead Christ on the cross and making the same cynical remark: 'Sollte dieser Mann etwa verunglückt sein?' Is this misfortune all that there is to it, or is there a resurrection—the choice is ours, because Christ is not resurrected as a particular individual, but as the Holy Spirit, the collective of those who believe. The resurrected Christ is not an X which exists independently of our belief, he is nothing but our belief in him: the resurrected Christ is the bond of love which unites his followers.
Is then the reborn child nonetheless a figure of the resurrected Christ? One should ask here a naïve but pertinent question: if Busoni wanted to return to the tradition of Puppenspiele, is there, in the narrative itself, a figure which stands for a puppet? This figure is, of course, the young boy who appears at the very end as the re-incarnation of Faust's Wille. The motif of the innocent/asexual boy confronted by an 'overripe' sexualized mature woman has a long prehistory which reaches back to the fin-de-siècle emergence of the (self)destructive femme fatale. Of special interest here is 'Language in the Poem,' Heidegger's seminal essay on Georg Trakl's poetry, the only place where he approaches the topic of sexual difference:
A human cast, cast in one mold and cast away into this cast, is called a Geschlecht.
The word refers to mankind as a whole as well as to kinship in the sense of race,
tribe, family—all of these in turn cast in the duality of the sexes. The cast of man's 'decomposed form' is what the poet calls the 'decomposing' kind. It is the generation that has been removed from its kind of essential being, and this is why it is the 'displaced' kind.
What curse has struck this humankind? The curse of the decomposing kind is that the old human kinship has been struck apart by discord of Geschlechter. Each of the Geschlechter strives to escape from that discord into the unleashed turmoil of the always isolated and sheer wildness of the wild game. Not duality as such, the discord is the curse. Out of the turmoil of blind wildness it carries each kind into an irreconcilable plot, and so casts it into unbridled isolation. The 'fallen Geschlecht,' so cleft in two, can on its own no longer find its proper cast. Its proper cast is only with that kind whose duality leaves discord behind and leads the way, as 'something strange,' into the gentleness of simple twofoldness following in the stranger's footsteps.5
The undead pale-faced ethereal boy Elis ('Elis in wonderland,' one is tempted to add) stands for the gentle Sex, for the harmonious duality of the sexes, not their discord. The first thing to do here (and which is not done by Heidegger) is to situate this figure of a presexual boy into its context, whose first references are Edvard Munch's paintings: is this 'unborn' fragile boy not the very terrified asexual figure of The Scream, or the figure squeezed between the two frames in his Madonna, the same foetus-like asexual figure floating among the droplets of sperm? The horror of this figure is not the Heideggerian Angst, but the suffocating Schrecken pure and simple. Perhaps the outstanding example of this confrontation of the asexual boy with the Woman are the famous shots, from the beginning of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, of a preadolescent boy with large glasses, examining with a perplexed gaze the giant unfocused screen-image of a feminine face; this image gradually shifts to the close-up of what seems to be another woman who closely resembles the first one—yet another exemplary case of the subject confronted with the fantasmatic interface-screen.
In short, what Heidegger's reading does not take into account is how the very opposition between the asexual boy and the discordant Geschlecht is sexualized: the discordant Geschlecht is not neutral, but feminine, and the very apparent gender-neutrality of Elis makes him a boy. So when Heidegger claims that 'the boyishness in the figure of the boy Elis does not consist in the opposite of girlishness. His boyishness is the appearance of his stiller childhood. That childhood shelters and stores within it the gentle two-fold of sex, the youth and the 'golden figure of the maiden','6 he misses the key fact that sexual difference does not designate the two sexes of the human stock/ species, but, in this case, the very difference between the asexual and the sexual: the external difference (between the sexual and the asexual) is mapped onto the internal difference between the two sexes. Furthermore, what Heidegger (and Trakl) already hint at is that, precisely as pre-sexual, this innocent 'undead' child confronted with the overripe and overblown feminine body is properly monstrous, one of the figures of the Evil itself:
5	Martin Heidegger, "Language in the Poem," On the Way to Language, New York: Harper & Row 1982, p. 170-171.
6	Op.cit., p. 174.
Spirit or ghost understood in this way has its being in the possibility of both gentleness and destructiveness. Gentleness in no way dampens the ecstasy of the inflammatory, but holds it gathered in the peace of friendship. Destructiveness comes from unbridled license, which consumes itself in its own revolt and thus is active evil. Evil is always the evil of a ghostly spirit.7
Perhaps, one should insert the figure of the resurrected boy from Busoni's Faust into the series of similar figures from the horror stories a la Stephen King to Trakl's Elis: the 'undead,' white, pale, ethereal monstrous asexual child returning to haunt the adults. This ambiguity of the asexual boy, oscillating between angelic and demonic—the ambiguity which reproduces the ambiguity of a puppet between Kleist and Hoffmann, between angelic and mechanically-possessed, is what remains open and unexplored in Busoni.
And, perhaps, we can surmise that, if, at Fausts end, the young boy were to utter a sound, it would have been something like the sound of the scream of the homunculus depicted in Munch's most famous painting.
Povzetek
Busoni ignorira vse prejšnje operne verzije Fausta in vstopa v dialog s samim Goethejem, ki ga ima za najvišjo različico Fausta. S tem ko se vrača k tradiciji lutkovnih iger, gre Busoni nazaj od simbola k alagoriji, od organske dramatske enovitosti k sosledju tableaux vivants. Busonijev Faust
je mlanholična žaloigra, pri kateri posamične zmage že spremlja senca končnega poraza. Buso-nijeva nedokončana partitura je rezultat lastnega ustvarjalnega zastoja ne pa zunanje naključje zavoljo skladateljeve zgodnje smrti. Dvoumnost v zvezi z mladim fantom, ki se ob koncu pojavi kot reinkarnacija Faustove volje pri Busoniju še ni bila reziskana.
Op.cit., p. 179.
UDK 78:159.964.6 Lawrence Kramer
Fordham University Univerza Fordham
One Coughs, the Other Dances: Freud, Strauss, and the Perversity of
Modern Life
Ena kašlja, druga pleše: Freud, Strauss in sprevrženost sodobnega življenja
Prejeto: 13. februar 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Dora, Saloma, podzavest, Richard Wagner, Tristan in Izolda, Schreber, Ples sedmih tančic
Izvleček
Navkljub znani ravnodušnosti do glasbe jo Freud včasih prav poznavalsko omenja. Ta sestavek napeljuje na misel, da se je freudovska podzavest deloma oblikovala po glasbi pozne romantike v povezavi z opisi ženskega poželenja. Freudov primer Dore in Richarda Straussa opera Saloma se stekata v findesieclovskem konceptu glasbene podzavesti.
Received: 13th February 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Dora, Salome, nezavedno, Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Schreber, Dance of the Seven Veils
Abstract
Despite his reputed indifference to music, Freud sometimes refers knowledgeably to it. This paper suggests that the Freudian unconscious is partly modeled on the music of late Romanticism in association with representations of feminine desire. Freud's Dora case and Richard Strauss's opera Salome converge on a fin-de-siecle concept of a musical unconscious.
What is the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and music? To ask this question is tantamount to asking about the historical relationship between Freud and music, and so asked it may seem to be a question without a topic. On the musical side, it is quite remarkable how few canonical works of late Romantic or modernist art music seem to have been influenced by Freudian ideas, quite in contrast to the fiction, poetry, and film of the first half of the twentieth century. It is doubtful that the fabled afternoon that Mahler and Freud spent together in a 'wild' psychoanalysis (they traced Mahler's
affinity for Trivialmusik to a traumatic childhood memory) had any impact on Mahler's symphonies (and certainly not on the Trivialmusik!); the Oedipus of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is anything but Freud's; Britten's The Turn of the Screw eroticizes its ghosts but leaves little room for the popular-psychoanalytic interpretation (set in motion by Edmund Wilson) that sees the ghosts as symptoms of the governess's repressed sexuality.1 The only famous work of musical modernism with a familiar Freudian subtext is Schoen-berg's monodrama Erwartung, hardly a popular staple, and the subtext is supposed to be there only because Freud was 'in the air' in Vienna when the piece was composed in 1909. If you look for references to Freud in Schoenberg's compendium Style and Idea, the only one you will find occurs in passing on a list of 'great Jewish thinkers'; in Theory of Harmony the only reference is by the English translator, who glosses Schoenberg's identification of 'the unconscious' with 'instinct'—a long-familiar idea with little specific relevance to the Freudian unconscious—by inserting a footnote, to wit: 'The impact of Sigmund Freud's work (and that of Jung and Adler) on his Viennese contemporary, Schoenberg, . . . invites investigation and speculation.'2
On the Freudian side, Freud paid little heed to music and notoriously declared himself averse to it on the grounds that he did not like to be moved without knowing why. Pondering the situation in which a tune gets stuck in one's head, he roundly states that what matters is not the tune at all but the words associated with it. Interestingly, he does not pause to ask what we might conclude from the capacity of music to act as a displaced form of language. It would thus seem that Freud was bedeviled not only by the question Was will das Weib?, but also by the equally vexing, Sonate, que me veux-tu? -which, within a certain longstanding tradition, is exactly the same question.
Nonetheless, scattered throughout Freud's work there are knowledgeable references to Wagner (both Tristan undIsolde and Tannhauser), Beethoven (the Ninth Symphony), Hugo Wolf, and Mozart (both The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro). In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud even recalls an incident in which he sung, sotto voce, Figaro's impudent aria 'Si vuol' ballare, Signor Contino' as a gesture of political defiance when he came across a reactionary government minister in a Viennese train station. For someone so unmusical, Freud certainly knew his music, especially opera. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay reports that Freud's daughters recalled their father being especially fond of five operas: Mozart's Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Bizet's Carmen, and Wagner's Die Meistersinger.3 The list is intriguing, not least because all of these operas deal with misplaced and displaced desires that threaten to run wild but at the same time feature music of great sensuous beauty, music that often tends to invoke the very desires it is supposed to sublimate. So it may be only a little bit of a stretch to say that psychoanalysis does have some historical relationship to music, and in particular to the music that would have been classic fare in Freud's world, but that this relationship is one that psychoanalysis, at least in the person of its founder, disavowed, or, if you will, repressed.
1	Edmund Wilson, "The Ambiguity of Henry James" (1934), in Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press,
1948), 88-132.
2	Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 504;
Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy Carter, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 416n.
3	Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York, 1988), 168.
This paper is a speculation on that possibility. Its thesis, bluntly put, is that the Freudian unconscious is modeled—not exclusively, to be sure, or as a hidden secret, but almost inadvertently, almost inevitably, among other influences-on the music of late Romanticism, or on music as conceived by late Romanticism. To set this thesis in motion we will need to refer to the medium in which it might have been posed at the time, again linking those two nagging questions: we will need to refer to the bodies of women. Eventually this will bring us to Wagner's Isolde, whom Freud does mention, a figure situated in more than one sense at the end of the world. But before we can do that we need to consider the woman who was the best and the worst of Freud's patients, the one he called Dora, together with her musical sister, involved, as Dora was, in a sleazy and perverted erotic triangle, the Salome of Oscar Wilde as rendered by Richard Strauss. It is only a coincidence, but an appealing one, that both women made their debut in 1905, when Freud's case study (his first) was published and Strauss's opera premiered.
As I have suggested elsewhere, the story of Salome (which I assume is too well known to require summary) was the object of a virtual mania before and just during the fin-de-siècle,4 so it is perhaps no surprise that the Dora case should have something in common with it. In both, a girl who has barely reached sexual maturity becomes the focal point of a hotbed of prohibited and perverse desires, and in both the girl ends up performing what amounts to an act of symbolic castration: in Salome's case the separation of John the Baptist (Strauss's Jochanaan) from his head, and in Dora's the premature termination of an analysis that the analyst, Freud, has planned as exemplary. Just as Salome takes revenge on Jochanaan for the religious zealotry that renders her a harlot in his eyes, Dora takes revenge on Freud for the theoretical zealotry that renders her, in his eyes, a perverted seductress, a harlot manqué. Freud even permits himself to lament her cruel stroke: 'Her breaking off so unexpectedly, just when my hopes of a successful termination of the treatment were at their height, and thus her bringing those hopes to nothing—this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part.'5 Thanks to Freud, it is difficult to ignore the phallic subtext of Freud's own statement.
But Dora has good reason to want revenge, especially on paternal figures, as a whole generation of feminist critics took pleasure in pointing out during the later years of the twentieth century.6 Dora's father, normally impotent, has been carrying on an affair with a friend's wife, Frau K., who apparently is happy enough to perform fellatio on him for an unspecified return (though the surmise is obvious). To buy off the friend, Herr K., the father tacitly agrees to let him seduce Dora, which K. duly tries to do starting when Dora is only fourteen. Not being slow on the uptake, Dora understands the whole debased situation all too well, but her father insistently denies its existence and, telling her in effect that she is delusional, he brings her to Freud in the hope that the famous nerve-doctor will cause her to see reason—in other words, teach her to shut up. Freud, of course, does exactly the opposite. He regards Dora as truthful 'in every particular' and notes mordantly that 'The two men had of course never made a formal agreement
4	Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 128-140.
5	Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, trans. James Strachey, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 131.
6	See the essays collected in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora's Case:Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
in which [Dora] was treated as an object for barter; her father in particular would have been horrified at such a suggestion. But he was one of those men who know how to evade a dilemma by falsifying their judgment. . . . [Both he and Herr. K] avoided drawing any conclusions from the other's behavior that would have been awkward for his own plans' (50). Dora, however, found Freud's attitude about sexuality as invasive as she found her father's hypocritical. Her colloquy with the therapist, like Salome's with the prophet, was bound to end badly.
This is not to say that Freud was entirely wrong, although in some of the 'particulars' (most notably Herr K.'s first attempt at 'seduction') he went wrong quite spectacularly. But in this case even Freud, still in the early days of psychoanalysis and thus apparently unable to see the point clearly even though in fundamental ways it is his point to see, understood sex too narrowly. Confronted by Salome, Strauss's Jochanaan does exactly the same thing. Salome and Dora obviously have their sexual problems, but they also share a problem that includes and exceeds the sexual.
What they have is a problem with speech and the power of speech, which fails both of these very young women despite the fact that they speak very well indeed. So both, as Freud is a bit too eager to tell us about his patient, decide to communicate in another way: with their bodies. And at that form of communication they do quite well—but it does not, as we will see, solve their problem. (And who would have thought otherwise?) Strauss's music, for which Freud has no equivalent, is particularly important in this connection. Salome's subjectivity, like Dora's, exceeds the power of her interlocutor (or in Salome's case of her creators—but then, Dora is in some sense also a creation of Freud's) to fix or even discern it. Salome's subjectivity arises explicitly as an effect of discourse in which the composer, the performer, and the character are all implicated; Dora's is a product of the conflicting erotic narratives spun about her by her father, her analyst, her would-be seducers, and herself.
The relationship of each woman to language suggestively resembles that of the other, even in its participation of the basic structure of the analytic session. Salome speaks, which is to say, sings, volubly and almost without pause to the severed head of Jochanaan, freely associating for some eighteen minutes and treating him very much like her analyst, the 'subject supposed to know' described much later by Lacan. Dora sees Freud with the greatest reluctance but nonetheless tells him everything, exposing her sexuality to him even as she fights against what she correctly perceives as his attempt to gain sovereignty over her. Both women, moreover, cut off the flow of speech at a moment of crisis. Salome does so by kissing the severed head and allowing the richly elaborated music to envelop and displace her speech; her action prefigures her death a few moments later. Dora abruptly tells Freud one day that she is in his office for the last time. On being asked, she says she had come to this decision two weeks earlier, as if, Freud observes, she were a governess giving him notice, as indeed a governess had done to Herr K. when he tried to seduce her. Dora's action prefigures her return to the iron cage of corruption from which neither Freud (who nonetheless tries to write a fairy-tale ending) nor anyone else could release her.
Salome's predicament is a study in another Freudian theme, the omnipotence of thoughts, which she seeks to identify with the sovereign power of language. Salome
desires as a women, and hence she desires defectively by fin-de-si cle standards. But she speaks as a princess. And as a princess, she believes herself to be in control of what Judith Butler calls the sovereign performative, or the fantasy thereof, the quasi-magical, perfectly authoritative utterance whereby the speech act always achieves its desired effect. In J. L. Austin's terms, the sovereign performative is a speech act in which illocution always-and at once-becomes the desired perlocution.7 In other words the sovereign performative is the absolute ruler of its own impact. The condition that Salome seeks is the inversion of the traditional formula of devoted service: my wish is your command. But in each of her three encounters with a major interlocutor (Jochanaan, Herod, and Jochanaan's head) Salome finds that the perlocution does not follow. She enacts and embodies the collapse of the fantasy and with it the psychological trauma, not only of the collapse of her particular all-too-magical performatives, but also of performative utterance in general.
In this way Salome falls into the condition by which Dora is trapped. Dora's language has been stripped of all performative power. She wants to expose the perverse economy of her situation and thus to end it or at least to burden it with a bad conscience. But although everyone involved knows that her statements are true, and that her father's accusations of dishonesty are not, Dora's narrative has no effect at all. Or rather it has the negative effect of her being turned over to Freud, who, it is true, will verify Dora's account and even condemn her father, but whose primary interest is in curing her of a hysterical cough by understanding it, too, as a form of failed language.
Dora's is a world in which the only speech acts that do not misfire are those that enforce the traffic in women, the unspoken barter arranged between men like the Father and Herr K. Dora's therapy is an ironic case in point: she can fire Freud (which preserves the status quo) but she cannot persuade him (which might have changed it). Her desires must be recognized as Freudian or not be recognized at all. In terms of the transference, Freud 'is' both the father and the seducer, but the more she seeks to break free of him, the more she falls prey to the men for whom he stands. (And to Freud too, whose text appropriates the real girl, Ida Bauer, and turns her into the legendary Dora.)
In this respect Dora is just like Salome, who can silence Jochanaan but not seduce him. Salome's is a world in which the only speech acts that do not misfire are those that negate and ultimately those that kill. (In the end they kill Salome too, via the force of Herod's last word, the sovereign('s) performative 'Man töte dieses Weib!'). Salome's one effective utterance in positive form is the exception that proves the rule. 'Ich will den Kopf des Jochanaan' simply gives the negative a fetishistic form. The process by which this happens manifests itself clearly in the music. The melodic motive for Salome's statement sounds several times in the orchestra, 'unheard' by her, before she utters the statement, and her utterance itself traces a slow musical evolution until her sentence finally achieves its efficacious form.
This association of the perverse power of Salome's speech with melodic repetition is profoundly ironic; Salome is its beneficiary only because she is its victim. The mantra-like repetition of musical motives gives the force of her words a sensuous form
7 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 71-102.
and a dynamic, drive-like consistency, by both of which she is shackled more than she is satisfied. Salome's power does not (pace Linda and Michael Hutcheon8) derive from her control over the field of vision; she is not in control of that at all, as she confesses when she complains to Jochanaan's head that if he had seen her he would have loved her. Instead her power derives from the word, but only insofar as it is the Word of the Other, the word of the sovereign, in musicalized form. Her motivically consistent repetitions of 'Ich will den Kopf des Jochanaan,' 'Ich bin nicht . . . . Tetrarch' (the ellipsis filled by a term for a positive quality), and above all 'Du hast ein Eid geschworen, Tetrarch' are grounded in a sovereign performative of which no one can claim ownership, not even the nominal sovereign, Herod. For Herod is as bound by his word as his subjects are.
Indeed, not even the word can claim the sovereignty of the word. The oath that Salome invokes against Herod refers not to the word but to the flesh, namely the flesh of Salome's dancing body. It is the body that ultimately secures the sovereignty of the word over the sovereign. Butler proposes that all illocutionary force is inflected, even grounded, in bodily force; here that thesis reaches its logical and self-destructive limit. When Salome dances, she becomes the sovereign performative. I would say she becomes the sovereign performative incarnate, except that the statement would be redundant in this context. The implication is that the sovereign performative can be at all only if it is incarnated, only if it is being incarnated, and by a woman, and by a woman moving through the matrix of eroticism. But not for very long: for the result of this sovereignty will be in the end to render the woman's actual speech mere words, disjoined from her body like Jochanaan's head and therefore deprived of any and every performative effect.
Salome's dance is a debasing spectacle but it is also a hieroglyph, easily legible if read through the perspective of the desire it arouses by expressing. Another way to say this is that the dance is a symptom along the lines that Freud was developing at the same time through the spectacle of that other perverse girl, Dora. I have in mind particularly the Dora (not as she was, however that might have been, but as Freud constructed her) whose persistent cough is supposedly the hieroglyph/symptom of her desire to perform fellatio on her impotent father and thus to restore the phallus which, one might think, is the very instrument of her subjugation and the false imputation of dishonesty. (More likely the cough represents her desire to cast out the erotic miseries that has been stuffed down her throat; Freud got things exactly half right.) Like Salome, Dora seeks to change her situation by turning the defect of her speech into a virtue by transposing the locus of expression from the voice to the body.
What is striking in reading Freud with Strauss is the chain of assumptions the two men share. They assume that the spectacles of perversity they envision will be both readable and credible; they assume that the truth of desire is concealed/revealed on the map of a girl/woman's body; and they assume that this body may desire anything and will do anything to get what it desires. Freud articulates all these assumptions in a remarkably if unpleasantly corporeal passage: 'He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters
8 Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, "Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss's Salome," in Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren
Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 204-21.
with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore' (96). Given Freud's analytic attention to Dora's bodily fluids, especially to her vaginal lubrication, the imagery of truth oozing from the pores is more than casual. The body, as female body, speaks, and it speaks provocatively, but what it speaks (whatever it speaks) is the truth. Thus both Dora and Salome: the latter seduces her stepfather by dancing the truth, the former seeks to seduce (or again, more likely to repudiate) her father by coughing the truth up.
What does this analogy signify?
The answer lies in the logic that subtends it, which consists of the production of a complex chain of substitutions and supplements, displacements and condensations, all in the service of a then-new principle of understanding emerging to replace an old one. The old principle states that desire distorts cognition; the new one states that desire rewrites cognition. Or, to put it another way, the old principle states that desire falsifies by distorting cognition; the new one says that desire distorts cognition into the truth.
And where does this logic come from?
I would like to suggest that the answer is music. Specifically it is the Wagnerian 'musical prose' or 'endless melody' grounded in the techniques of motivic elaboration and thematic transformation, a style that had become universally known by the fin-de-siecle and that was widely regarded as having profound historical significance. Strauss and Freud intervene on this mode of expression by narrowing its focus to its sources in desire, and in particular to a desire that emerges in a material zone of transition, the liminal body of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Both the opera and the case history catch desire in the act of its formation, which is also the act of its perversion.
In this context it is of fundamental importance that Salome's dance involves the recycling of three of her leading motives, each of which assumes multiple associations throughout the opera as a whole. Each motive is a locus for significations that constantly change, and in so doing uncover the truth of desire that the opera seeks to put on stage. The motives make these truths audible so that the operatic action can make them visible. The logic of Freudian analysis is precisely the logic of this motivic transformation. And we know that Freud was familiar with Wagner, if not with Strauss. So despite Freud's famous, though probably exaggerated, insensitivity to music, psychoanalysis in its classical form may well be the discursive form of post-Wagnerian compositional logic. This possibility is consistent both with Wagner's own exposition of the relationship of his musical style to psychological depths and Thomas Mann's account, in the essay 'Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,' of the link between Wagnerian and Freudian logic: 'When we think of the youthful Siegfried and observe the way Wagner . . . [represents] that young life and love [in a] a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear. . . [we realize that this is a] complex that displays Wagner the psychologist in remarkable intuitive agreement with another typical son of the nineteenth century, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.'9
I would not insist on a causal relationship, however, between the logics of late Romantic music and of psychoanalysis, at least not a simple one. To clarify the con-
9 Thomas Mann. "Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner," in Mann, Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Random
House, 1957), 203.
nection between musical prose and psychoanalytic technique it would suffice to say that each renders the other credible—but in a certain order. Psychoanalytic logic could draw credibility from its era's art music because the music deployed that logic in a form that rendered it immediate and expressive; the music connected the logic to a widely known and highly valued form of experience. And then, once psychoanalysis itself had acquired a certain prestige or notoriety, musical and in particular operatic invocations of it could gain credibility (much as Hollywood movies did in the 1940s and 50s) by demonstrating their timely awareness of the latest in depth-psychological insight. The core of that insight, and the reason for its paradigmatic reference to the figure of the perverse girl, is the sheer mobility of desire and its expressive surrogates, the figure of polymorphous perversity that stands as both an origin and as a guarantee of continuity in the voluble stream of signs the unconscious cannot restrain—that, indeed, in some sense it exists not to restrain.
The idea that the support of psychoanalysis is an unconscious that moves much the way music does is not so far-fetched that Freud himself didn't think of it, although the music in this case was by Mozart, not by Wagner. In 1912, Freud interpreted the form of his deteriorating relationship with Carl Jung as a transference from his earlier relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, which also began with intellectual intimacy bordering on erotic alliance and also ended with recrimination and estrangement. His point of reference is the second act of Don Giovanni, in which Mozart quotes an aria from his own The Marriage of Figaro and has Leporello comment disparagingly on the tune's familiarity. Writing to Sandor Ferenci, Freud says he has just come from the opera and found there 'a good application to the current situation. Yes, this music, too, seems very familiar to me. I had experienced this all already before 1906: the same objections, the same prophecies, the same proclamations that I have now been got rid of.' What returns like a too-familiar melody is not only the substance of the experience but the intense resentment that goes with it that the unconscious has faithfully preserved and that finds expression not in the content of Freud's statement but in its tone. Ironically, as recently as 1910, Freud had told Jung himself that another erstwhile colleague, Alfred Adler, 'awakens in me the memory of Fliess an octave lower.'10
With these ideas in mind, we can understand the dance on which Salome (and Salome) pivots, not by giving it a psychoanalytic reading, but by seeing it as a displaced form of psychoanalysis itself in which the silent interlocutor is addressed by a musical-ized body rather than by a speaking voice.
The Dance of the Seven Veils marks the one moment in her opera when Salome, with uncontested success, translates the unspeakableness of her desires at full tilt into a body language. Strauss seems to have thought of this 'language' in terms close to literal, as a gestural iconography. During the 1920s he even drew up a choreographic scenario for the dance that minutely prescribes both its gestures and their meanings. Perhaps the scenario's most interesting feature is the recurrent instruction for Salome to imitate illustrations from a pictorial anthology, La Danse, dating from 1898. The poses requested form a compendium of fin-de-siecle orientalism, including figures evoking
10 Freud's letters quoted in Gay, Freud, 276-77, 274, respectively.
ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, Japan, India, Arabia, and the Judea of Gustave Moreau's Salome paintings.11
Of course this scenario is never followed (for a long time it was lost), partly because it is not sexually explicit enough for most productions. One of the choicer ironies about Salome is that Strauss himself was oddly squeamish about the dance; he wanted its erotic charge to be embodied by the orchestra but only symbolized by Salome. Given this preference, the music he wrote might be (and often has been) regarded as a serious miscalculation. It is so flagrant in its bump-and-grind exoticism that the dancer really has only two choices: to go for broke as a seductress or to show calculated restraint against the grain. More often than not seductiveness has won out. But in the long run the choice may not matter, precisely because the music has already made it.
In other words, the specific effect of the dance is so dependent on the dancer's performance that making interpretive claims about it is pointless. Unless, that is, the claims are issued by the music, the famous 'badness' of which seems meant to guarantee both a certain power and a certain sleaziness. Salome's dance is musically a showgirl's triumph, regardless of who dances it or how, but for that very reason, of course, it designates her as a mere showgirl. The dance is meant to sink below the level of respectability but for reasons purely of musical style it can never rise above the level of equivocality, no matter how skilled the dancer is or how seductive she chooses to be-or not. As Robin Holloway observes: 'All of [the tunes] are "vulgar' (Proust) or "mediocre' (Faure), if not frankly bad. But we know how strangely potent cheap music can be. The bargain-basement orientalism at [rehearsal] letter F is both blenchmaking and stirring; at letter V we continue to be stirred even when we realize we are being taken advantage of-the oriental knickknack is a palpable fake. Are we stirred against our better nature, or do we gratefully acquiesce in our true baseness?'12 Salome is as caught up by this insidious quandary as 'we' are. Her dance is a palpable fake driven by real desire. Its strangely potent music permits her to seize as much visual power as she likes, but only because it also commands her to.
As the dance scene ends, the music and the stage directions combine to reconnect the equivocation thus produced to the larger action. In this context the equivocation becomes irrevocable; it assumes both a dynamic form and an analytic clarity that nothing can gainsay. At this point Salome is instructed to stand in a visionary attitude by the cistern imprisoning Jochanaan before throwing herself at Herod's feet. The music consists of an all-trill texture into which are inserted two elongated statements of the motive associated with her desire. The texture recalls an all-tremolo counterpart that occurs in the orchestral interlude just after Salome is spurned by Jochanaan, and into which the winds and brass inject quasi-orgasmic spasms to express or replace what has wot happened. The later passage is the sublimation of the earlier, the translation of a desire by which Salome is wracked into a desire that she stylizes and inflicts on Herod. And yet the desire is one that she still feels: for the Desire motive is a double-edged blade, especially when surrounded by the tremulation—the trilling and fluttering-that figuratively displaces Salome's bodily sensations into acoustic substance. The motive is
11	"Strauss's Scenario for the Dance of the Seven Veils," in Derek Puffett, Salome (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165-67.
12	Robin Holloway, "Salome: Art or Kitsch?" in Puffett, Salome, 149.
simultaneously the evidence that Salome's desire is irrepressible and a device that pins her down with a cursory phrase, half tic, half symptom. The same motive, backed by the same sort of texture, also frames the climactic kiss during Salome's final monologue. The pattern is broken only by the shattering chord that completes the aftermath of the kiss, an exorbitant dissonance that briefly propels the opera out of the sphere of what is conceivable or even, in a sense, audible as music in its era--leaving us to deal, better than Herod if we can, with the sight that motivates this sound.
That sight may be regarded as a literalized, corporealized version of the sight of Wagner's Isolde uniting, in her Transfiguration scene (often revealingly miscalled the Liebestod) with the dead Tristan. In Wagner's case, the sight is complicated by the fact that it is itself the residue of a sight visible to Isolde but one that neither the other characters on stage nor we in the audience can see, though we are in a certain sense supposed to hear it. This is Isolde's vision of the resurrected or, better, the post-mortal Tristan rising to meet her, his action somehow coextensive with the sound of the continuously flowing and surging music that envelops Isolde like a wave (the metaphor is hers) and nearly (sometimes actually) submerges her voice. Strauss indeed said that his Salome had to have the voice of an Isolde in the body of an adolescent. Although he was mainly thinking of the part's vocal challenges, his allusion also encompasses the condition of a woman or girl, in a state of rapture, positioned at the extreme limit of knowable and communicable experience. And like Wagner, Strauss as composer marks, so to speak, the limit of that limit, with the difference between the woman's song and the orchestral sound that exceeds it.
Freud's Dora does not occupy this position in any dramatic sense, but it might well be said that by the end of Freud's text she has become an Isolde or a Salome of perversity, or to change the image a little, a new Queen of the fin-de-si cle Night. For what Freud does to Dora, in the course of validating her account of the game of musical beds in which she is caught and that her father and the K.'s keep insisting is a figment of her imagination, is to implicate her in an ever-expanding network of stigmatized desires. Dora is the Alice in a Wonderland of incest, fellatio, adultery, masturbation, and various forms of unspecified lesbianism: not the stuff a well-brought up girl from a respectable family ought to know about, let alone engage in, let alone embody. Like Strauss (who may, like Dora, have read it in a book, a book by one Freud), Freud identifies both the truth about desire and the legibility of that truth with the figure of a perverse young woman. And like both Strauss and Wagner (the latter minus the perversity—this time), Freud extracted that legibility from a fluid, constantly metamorphic texture of substitutions, displacements, transformations, recurrent motifs, and re-significations: the texture of post-Wagnerian orchestral music. In one of Freud's favorite operas, Die Meistersinger, there is even precedent for situating the drama of erotic misadventure in a domestic urban space and of making mental disorder—Wagner's Wahnsinn, which as the opera develops it is closer to neurotic acting-out than to madness—one of the stakes in its game.
Wagner, in the person of the opera's presiding genius, Hans Sachs, explicitly pulls back from the brink that Strauss and Freud tumble across. He does so by having Sachs, in a moment of self-reflection and renunciation, invoke the story of Tristan and Isolde while he, Wagner, quotes the opening of his own opera Tristan und Isolde. There is a
similar gesture in Freud, albeit not in the Dora case. It comes in the nearly contemporary case of Daniel Paul Schreber, the jurist whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness provoked Freud to a book-length commentary and has since, in combination with Freud's text, produced a mini-industry of commentary.
One of Schreber's chief delusions was that he was gradually being transformed into a woman by becoming, in effect the Bride of God. God was penetrating Schreber's body with divine 'rays' that accomplished their slow work of metamorphosis by irradiating Schreber with female sexual pleasure. This transformation, in a complex sense too perplexing to unravel here (if unraveling it were even possible), both precedes and follows, prevents and compensates for, a catastrophe in which the world has been destroyed and replaced by 'miracled up' surrogates for human beings. Freud's interpretation of this 'end of the world' fantasy leads him to make a Sachs-like allusion to Tristan from which, Sachs-like, he withdraws. The allusion is the more significant for not being argumenta-tively necessary—a perfect instance of a symptom in Freud's own sense.
Schreber, Freud suggests,
has withdrawn from the persons in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis [the charge or investment or occupation of libido] which he has hitherto directed at them. Thus all things have become indifferent and irrelevant to him. . . . The end of the world is his projection of this internal catastrophe; for his subjective world has come to an end because he has withdrawn his love from it.13
At this point Freud adds a footnote, a device by which he often sends shock waves rippling through his own texts. The note seems triggered by the glossing of libidinal cathexis as love, which for Freud always entails the seeking of an object: 'An 'end of the world' based upon other motives is to be found at the climax of a lovers' ecstasy (cf. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde); in this case it is not the ego but the single love-object which absorbs all the cathexes directed at the external world.' Between them, text and note create a libidinal force-field of world-creation and world-destruction in which desire and the world together may continually expand and contract, in which the macrocosm can, virtually at a touch, become the microcosm of solitary ego or single love-object. In this context, the allusion to Tristan and Isolde is as much musical as it is textual. Or rather more so: for it is not the action but the music of Wagner's opera that actually expresses 'the climax of a lovers' ecstasy.' The libido, it turns out, is a devoted Wagnerian.
Isolde in this account figures almost as the missing woman/wife whom Schreber seeks to become and whom both Salome and Dora become involuntarily. Read in reverse, Freud's invocation of Isolde to complement his explanation of Schreber's fantasy amounts to a proclamation that to experience the world as libidinally invested is to experience it as Isolde does when Tristan is alive, which is why she, and the music of her Transfiguration, cannot permit him to stay dead. In other words, to experience the world as world, and not as a miracled-up substitute, is precisely to experience it as
13 Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1968), 173. Translation by James Strachey. The word that Stachey translates with the invented "cathexis" is Beseztung, which means charge (as in electric charge), investment, and occupation (as in the occupation of a town).
libidinally invested, and to experience that is that to experience the world as a certain woman would. Not just any woman—and the point can't be stressed too much—but as one who has become, in this case by 'rays' of music, something like a Schreberian Bride of God.
Schreber's paranoia has lately been read as a symptom, not only of his personal disorder, but also of the constitutive disorder of modernity. Even more recently the same reading has been extended to what Freud called 'obsessional neurosis,' which now goes by the name of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).14 One way to develop these readings is to say that modernity was experienced historically as a condition constantly threatening to fray or sever the libidinal threads (Schreber's rays, as Freud pointed out) that tie us to the world and thus recreate the world, as world, every day. Salome and Dora, in this context, may both be seen as figures, that is metaphors, for an anxiety about the end of the world, Salome because Jochanaan would deprive the world of the very desire he arouses in her, Dora because the world into which she is born, or thrown, has no place for her desire even as she becomes a transfer point for the desires of others.
The lesson to be drawn from this, which is the lesson by which both psychoanalysis and the elaborate acoustic tapestry of late Romantic music define themselves, is simple, imperative, and unsustainable. At all costs, libidinal investment must be kept up. More: it must be allowed to proliferate. Psychoanalysis, in the end, is neither a therapy nor a body of themes, topics, and tropes. It is whatever conceptual activity seeks, like that music, to occupy itself, to charge itself, with upholding the investment. Psychoanalysis is (the music of) cathexis.
Povzetek
Kakšen je zgodovinski odnos med Freudovo psihoanalizo in glasbo? Čeprav naj bi veljalo, da je bil Freud ravnodušen do glasbe, pa njegovo pisanje občasno poznavalsko omenja glasbo, ki jo je visoka dunajska kultura njegovega časa cenila. Sestavek domneva oziroma razglablja o možnosti, da je freudovska podzavest oblikovala - seveda ne izključno ali kot kakšna zakrita skrivnost, ampak skoraj nehote, skoraj neizogibno, med drugimi vplivi - po glasbi pozne romantike oziroma po glasbi, ki in kakor jo je le-ta razumela. Medij tega oblikovanja je žensko telo, ki ga je razumeti kot ključno točko v zavozlanosti pritajenih poželenj. Paradigmatičen primer za Freuda je bila pacientka po imenu Dora; skoraj istočasno s primerom Dore
je za R. Straussa to bila Saloma Oscarja Wilda. Resonance med omenjenim primerom in opero so presenetljivo obsežne. Vodijo namreč k tehtni domnevi o pojavu findesieclovskega koncepta glasbene podzavesti.
Dora in Saloma, vsaka posebej, izoblikujeta določeno podzavest, ki se upira podati razlago njunega poželenja. Obe ženi sta prikrajšani učinkovitega govora, čeprav sta obe zgovorni. Obe izoblikujeta »premaknjeno« poved v telesni obliki, ki je tudi zvočna: Dorin kašelj in Salomin ples sedmih tančic. Logika substitucije in »premaknitve«, s katero Freud zakrije Dorino zgodbo, je zrcalna podoba wagnerjanske logike motivične ponovitve in preoblikovanja, s katerim Strauss razkrije Salomino zgodbo.
14 For the first reading, see Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul .Schreber's .Secret History of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); for the second, see Jennifer Fleissner, "Obsessional Modernity: The 'Institutionalization of
Doubt,'" Critical Inquiry 34 (2007): 106-134.
UDK 78:159.964.2 Christian Bielefeldt
Universität Zürich Univerza v Zürichu
'Brillantes Labyrinth': Die Psychoanalyse, die deutsche Musikwissenschaft und Lacans Schlüssel zur Musik
»Briljantni labirint«: psihoanaliza, nemška muzikologija in Lacanov ključ h glasbi
Prejeto: 2. marec 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: glasba in psihoanaliza, Glasba in estetika, Johannes Picht, Sonata za klavir s kladivci, glasbeni signifikant, odnos subjektobjekt
IzvleCek
Članek se ukvarja s spisi psihoanalitika Sebastiana Leikerta. Navezujoč se na Lacana Leikert opisuje glasbo kot sredstvo, ki naj ne bi izražala identitete, ampak ustvarjala predstave o identiteti. Glasba pri tem ne ustvarja fikcije neke statistične identitete ampak fuzionirano zlivanje meja med subjektom in objektom.
Received: 2nd March 2009 Accepted: Ist May 2009
Keywords: Musik und Psychoanalyse, Musik& Ästhetik, Johannes Picht, Hammerklaviersonate, Sebastian Leikert, Musikalischer Signifikant, Subjekt-Objekt-Verhältnis
Abstract
Der Artikel beschäftigt sich mit den Arbeiten des Psychoanalytikers Sebastian Leikert. Im Anschluss an Lacan beschreibt Leikert die Musik als Mittel, Identität nicht auszudrücken, sondern Identitätsvorstellungen überhaupt erst hervorzubringen. Musik gestaltet dabei nicht die Fiktion einer statischen Identität, sondern viel eher ein fusionelles Verschwimmen der Grenzen zwischen Subjekt und Objekt.
Die Verführung der Psychoanalyse und ihrer Expeditionen ins Unbewusste könnte es sein, über Dinge zu sprechen, zu denen der Ethos wissenschaftlicher Methodologie Aussagen normalerweise unterbindet - sofern die klinische Disziplin es denn fertig
brächte, mit Einsichten zu locken, die zugleich den Ansprüchen universitärer Forschung genügten. Die Grundfrage im Verhältnis von Musik, Psychoanalyse und Musikwissenschaft lautet daher, ob es solche akademisch anschlussfähigen Resultate psychoanalytischer Erkundungen gibt, und somit Gründe, uns verführen zu lassen. Oder dürfen wir getrost unsere Askese pflegen und auf die Beiträge der Musik liebenden Seelenkunde verzichten? Ich meine, es gibt viel versprechende Anläufe zu solchen Resultaten, wenn auch vielleicht nicht in großer Zahl. Einen dieser Ansätze will ich, nach einleitenden Anmerkungen zur derzeitigen Diskussion zwischen Psychoanalyse, Musik und der deutschen Musikwissenschaft, in diesem Artikel vorstellen.
Ausgeklammert seien dabei allerdings von vorneherein solche psychoanalytischen Texte zur Musik, die es auf einfache Kausalitäten zwischen latenten psychischen Prozessen und der künstlerischen Produktion abgesehen haben. Konstrukte dieser Art, die das musikalische Schaffen mehr oder weniger umstandslos mit den psychischen Dispositionen eines Komponisten, seinen biographischen Traumata, frühkindlichen Prägungen und derlei mehr erklären wollen, eröffnen ein Feld, auf dem sich die Psychoanalyse vielleicht zu ausgiebig, der Musikwissenschaftler aber seit jeher nur mit äußerster Vorsicht am Seil abgesicherten Wissens bewegt. Dass Entstehung und Gestalt einer musikalischen Komposition - irreduzibel komplex - biographisch bedingt sind, sollte eine ebensolche Binsenweisheit sein wie die, dass sich die - ihrerseits komplex bedingte - biographische Situation des komponierenden Subjekts in der Faktur eines konkreten Musikstücks keineswegs, und schon gar nicht irgendwie vorhersehbar abbilden muss, weil nicht auszuschließen ist, dass sie nicht nur ausgedrückt oder bekämpft bzw. kompensatorisch negiert oder überhöht, sondern möglicherweise ignoriert, beiseite geschoben, ja für entscheidende Momente in der Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen des Materials und des kompositorischen Vorgehens einfach abgestreift werden kann. Die Konstruktion kausaler Beziehungen zwischen (Konflikt-)Biographie und kreativem Prozess und die daraus abgeleitete Auffassung eines Kunstwerks als 'Symptom der Neurose des Künstlers' (Picht 2008b, 73) hat der Karlsruher Analytiker Johannes Picht darum unlängst mit allem Recht auf seiner Seite als veraltetes Paradigma psychoanalytischer Forschung kritisiert und dessen naiven und zugleich maßlosen Anspruch relativiert (Picht 2008b). Picht schlägt stattdessen das Umgekehrte vor, die fachwissenschaftlich fundierte psychoanalytische Deutung von Musik als Spiegel auch - aber nicht etwa ausschließlich - des komponierenden Subjekts, und zwar besonders in solchen Fällen, wo es um Fragen wie den musikalischen Umgang mit Gewalt und Gewalterfahrung geht, also Themenbereiche, bei deren Aufarbeitung die Psychoanalyse auf eine lange Tradition und ein entsprechendes Arsenal an klinischen Konzepten verweisen kann. 'Die Frage nach der Gewalt in der Musik führt an den Rand eines Abgrunds, der mit herkömmlichen musikwissenschaftlichen Analysekategorien nicht auszuloten ist. Hier können klinische Erkenntnisse und Konzepte der Psychoanalyse dem Verständnis weiterhelfen' (Picht 2007, 6). Eine offensive These, die Picht in einem Folgetext dahingehend präzisiert, die Psychoanalyse erschließe dabei 'nicht primär die Musik; sie ist (...) kein Werkzeug der musikalischen Analyse, das die Musikwissenschaft ihrem methodischen Arsenal hinzuzufügen hätte. Vielmehr kann die Psychoanalyse eine Einsicht in etwas beisteuern, das in der Musik zum Ausdruck kommt' (Picht 2008b, 72).
Die Aufgabe einer Psychoanalyse der Musik bestünde demnach nicht darin, eine Erklärung oder überhaupt ein besseres Verstehen musikalischer Sachverhalte zu liefern, sondern vielmehr eine erweiterte Interpretation von Musik als Medium wie auch immer strukturierter psychischer Vorgänge. Auch das allerdings ist eine bemerkenswertere These, als man vielleicht meinen könnte, und zwar insofern, als die Psychoanalyse selbst ein eher sprödes Verhältnis zur Musik unterhält. Zwar hat die psychoanalytische Beschäftigung mit Musik in den vergangenen Jahren auch in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz erkennbar an Fahrt gewonnen, vergleichbar mit ähnlichen Entwicklungen im angloamerikanischen Sprachraum. Zu sagen, die bei Freud wie Lacan mit wenigen respektvollen Bemerkungen abgespeiste Musik, jener 'dark continent' (Hoffmann 1988, 961) psychoanalytischer Forschung, sei inzwischen erschlossen, wäre aber entschieden übertrieben. In der Nachfolge des Gründervaters und seines französischen Nachkömmlings, die beide so fleißig über literarische, plastische oder bildnerische Kunst reflektierten, wie sie über musikalische schwiegen, fehlt weiterhin eine konsensfähige Übertragung zentraler psychoanalytischer Begrifflichkeiten auf die Musik und vor allem die Musikanalyse (v. Massow 2008). Das liegt nicht zuletzt daran, dass die wenigen deutschsprachigen Arbeiten zur Psychoanalyse der Musik überwiegend textliche oder szenische Aspekte in Chorwerken, Liedern und der Oper behandeln und Auseinandersetzungen mit musikstrukturellen Fragen extrem rar sind (Mätzler 2002). Auch der von Oberhoff 2002 unternommene Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme versammelt eher versprengte und methodisch heterogene Einzelfälle als eine kontinuierliche Tradition (Oberhoff 2002).
Pichts These kann sich darum auch auf psychoanalytischer Seite nur auf eine schmale Basis stützen. Hinsichtlich seiner umfänglichen Beethoven-Analysen, mit denen er 2008 den angestrebten Paradigmenwechsel demonstrierte, mag man ihr dennoch zustimmen (Picht 2007, 2008a). Picht offeriert eine an den Analytikern Winnicott, Mitchell, Glasser und Sabbadini sowie dem Philosophen Georg Picht orientierte1 Annäherung an Beethoven, in deren Mittelpunkt er die psychischen Kraft- und Gewaltakte des Komponisten stellt: Die Auseinandersetzungen eines komponierenden Subjekts mit sich selbst, das bei Beethoven charakteristischerweise in dem Maße als gefährdete und problematische, ja letztlich fiktive Instanz erscheint, in dem die Musik selbst um Stabilität und - tonale, formale - Identität ringt. Allerhand Analogien bietet Beethovens Leben diesbezüglich an (Vaterkonflikt, früher Tod der Mutter, problematische Beziehung zum Neffen bzw. zur Schwägerin, zunehmende Taubheit etc.), wie Picht offen legt. An der grundsätzlichen Differenz von musikalischem und individuell-biographischem Subjekt lässt er gleichwohl keinen Zweifel,2 und beharrt darauf, die entscheidenden Befunde aus dem Notentext abzuleiten und nicht aus dem überlieferten Wissen über die Person Beetho-
1	Donald W. Winnicott. 1960. „The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship". International Journal of Psycho Analysis, Vol. 41, pp. 585-595. Stephen A. Mitchell. 1993. „Aggression and the Endangered Self". Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol 62, pp. 351-382. Mervin Glasser. 1985. „Aspects of Violence", Paper given to the Applied Section of the British Psychoanalytical Society, see Rosine Jozef Perelberg. Ed. 1999. Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide. London: Routledge. Andrea Sabbadini. 1988. „The Replacement Child", Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 24, pp. 528-547. Georg Picht. 1985. Kants Religionsphilosophie, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
2	„Das musikalische Subjekt Beethoven darf nicht einfach mit dem biographischen Subjekt gleichgesetzt werden. Erlaubt sei aber, sein Gesamtwerk gewissermaßen als einen musikalischen Prozess, nämlich als Entfaltungsprozess des musikalischen Subjekts Beethoven zu betrachten" (Picht 2007, 11).
ven. Was es dazu braucht, ist eine ausführliche musikanalytische Detailarbeit, etwa in der subtilen Beschreibung harmonischer Beziehungen in der Hammerklaviersonate op. 6. Doch am Ende sind es die subjekttheoretischen Rückschlüsse, aus denen Picht seine Generalthese gewinnt, in Werken Beethovens wie der Hammerklaviersonate spiegele sich 'die Arbeit des Erwerbens subjektiver Identität und ihre Bedrohtheit wider' (Picht 2007, 11); eine Arbeit mit anderen Worten, in der es nicht (nur) um mögliche erlittene oder auch begangene Gewalt, sondern zentral um die Gewalthaftigkeit als Kehrseite eines Scheiterns geht, das jeglicher Stabilisierung von Identität, biographischer wie musikalisch-thematischer, unvermeidlich eingeschrieben ist.
Man mag nun dieser These zustimmen, oder sie im Blick auf ungeklärte historische und soziale Aspekte hinterfragen.3 Offenkundig bleibt, dass die psychoanalytisch fundierte Subjekttheorie hier Deutungspotentiale bereitstellt, die entscheidend zur Bearbeitung eines Problem wie das der Gewalt beitragen können, will man dieses in einer hinreichenden Komplexität eben auch bezüglich der Gewalthaftigkeit thematisieren, welche die Geschichte des Künstlersubjekts selbst und seines für die Moderne charakteristischen Einheits- und Autonomieanspruchs kennzeichnet.4 Dennoch, auch wenn Picht statt der üblichen spekulativen Rückschlüsse auf motivierende Hintergründe 'hinter' Beethovens Werken deren subjekttheoretische Interpretation offeriert, bleibt der Sprung von der musikstrukturellen Faktizität zum komponierenden Subjekt Beethoven gewagt. Die Beobachtung, die Hammerklaviersonate folge einer Ästhetik, in der thematische und harmonische Identitäten häufig mehrdeutig blieben, mag in der Sache richtig sein - in der Lage zu klären, inwieweit sich darin eine Instabilität des musikalischen Subjekts ausdrückt, oder aber, nicht weniger plausibel, ein Interesse Beethovens am reflektierenden Umgang mit dem Einheitsdesiderat der klassischen Ästhetik, ist sie nicht.
Eine Anschlussfrage, die sich an diesem Punkt aus psychoanalytischer Perspektive stellen, betrifft die Funktion der Musik für das Zustandekommen subjektiver Identität. Picht untersucht Beethovens Musik als Niederschlag, 'Ausdruck' (Picht 2008b, 72) oder 'Spiegel' (Picht 2007, 11) psychischer Prozesse, während er die Frage einer Rückwirkung auf das Subjekt gar nicht erst stellt. Für seine Arbeit und ihren Anspruch ist das soweit auch legitim. In Jacques Lacans Theorie-Universum steht diesbezüglich allerdings eine differenziert ausgearbeitete Subjekttheorie zur Verfügung, die es bei einer breiteren Diskussion des Verhältnisses von Musikforschung und Psychoanalyse unbedingt einzu-beziehen gilt, so selten dass auch bisher in angemessener Weise geschehen ist. Lacans linguistisch gewendete Psychoanalyse erlaubt nicht nur Aussagen über die mediale Verfasstheit subjektiver Identität, sondern präzise auch über die Besonderheiten, die dabei bezüglich der Musik auftreten. Das jedenfalls kann man den Publikationen des ebenfalls in Karlsruhe praktizierenden Analytikers Sebastian Leikert entnehmen, der seine in französischer Sprache publizierte Dissertation über die Psychoanalyse der Musik Ende der 1990er Jahre erweitert und in mehreren Etappen ins Deutsche übertragen hat.
Interessant wäre es etwa zu sehen, welche gesellschaftlichen und geschichtlichen Gründe für die Situation des Künstlersubjekts um 1800 vorliegen, für das Beethovens Musik, wenn überhaupt, als beispielhaft gelten darf.
Gleichzeitig beweist die Psychoanalyse hier ihre hohe Anschlussfähigkeit etwa an die musikphilosophischen Positionen T.W. Adornos, wie die Querverweise zeigen, die Picht zu Adorno einflicht.
Sein Buch über 'Die vergessene Kunst' (Leikert 2005), eine noch einmal überarbeitete Zusammenstellung dieser Artikel, entfaltet den Orpheus-Mythos als Sinnbild für eine psychoanalytische Theorie der Musik und enthält neben einer über sechzig Seiten gehenden Grundlagenreflexion drei Kapitel mit ausführlichen Untersuchungen zu Bachs Wohltemperiertem Klavier, der 9. Symphonie Beethovens und Verdis La Traviata, sowie einen abschließenden Teil mit Kommentaren zu Freud, Lacan und James Joyce.
Auch Leikert hält die psychoanalytische Forschung zur Musik für vergleichsweise wenig fortgeschritten.5 Die ersten drei, den theoretischen Grundlagen gewidmeten Kapitel demonstrieren, dass die Potentiale der psychoanalytischen Theorie für eine MusikAnalyse dort zu suchen sind, wo diese bereits über differenzierte Konzepte verfügt (z.B. Ödipuskomplex, Sublimierung, Regression oder die von Lacan eingeführten Begriffe Signifikant, Phonem, Objekt Stimme ua.). Das anschaulichste Beispiel, das Leikerts Buch hierfür präsentiert, ist seine psychoanalytische Aufarbeitung des musikalischen Genießens. Sein Schlüssel für diesen Zusammenhang ist Lacans Konzept des Signifikanten.
Was meint es, Musik im Sinne Lacans als Signifikanten zu nehmen? So kurz wie nur irgend möglich sich das an dieser Stelle zusammenfassen lässt, heißt es, sie als Medium zu beschreiben, das die Konstitution des Subjekts in Gang setzt, dies jedoch auf andere Art als Sprach- oder Bild-Medien bewerkstelligt und dadurch zumindest der Tendenz nach andere Effekte im hörenden Subjekt auslöst als Bilder oder Texte. Musik zu hören bedeutet etwas anderes, als Bücher zu lesen oder Bilder zu sehen, und zwar, weil die Musikwahrnehmung das Verhältnis des Subjekts zu sich selbst in ganz anderer Art und Weise strukturiert als eine Rezeption von Bild- und Sprachmedien. Als theoretischer Hintergrund ist hier Lacans radikal anti-metaphysische Auffassung des Subjekts als einer Instanz mitzudenken, die jeweils durch einen psychischen Abgrenzungsvorgang, ein In-Relation-Treten von Subjekt und Objekt erzeugt wird. Die Ich-Funktion, Agens der Selbstvergewisserung, entsteht überhaupt erst in der Konfrontation mit dem Signifikanten, bzw. erzeugt sich selbst nur als Differenz, nämlich wenn das Subjekt in Relation zu einer Objekt-Welt tritt, zu der es nicht gehört, wenn es also hört, liest, sieht und mit den Wahrnehmungen und Bildern von dem, was es nicht ist, zugleich eine hinreichend trennscharfe Repräsentation seiner selbst hervorbringt. Ich-Reflexion im Lacanschen Sinne ist mediale Kommunikation. Die Medien aber, die innerhalb dieser Kommunikation auftauchen, sind nicht gleichgültig, sondern werden von Lacan verschiedenen psychischen 'Ordnungen' zugeschrieben und unterstützen darin jeweils verschiedene Prozesse. Lacan verdeutlicht das mit seinen berühmten Kategorien des Imaginären, Symbolischen und Realen.
Die Funktion des Imaginären ist die Hervorbringung einer stabilen Ich-Repräsentanz, als einer scharfen Spaltung zwischen dem Ich und einer Welt, die sich dem Ich als objekthaftes Nicht-Ich präsentiert. Solche Subjektrepräsentation sind notwendig, zeigt Lacans berühmte Narziss-Geschichte 'Das Spiegelstadium als Bildner der Ich-Funktion' (Lacan 1973), aber zugleich in dem Sinne imaginär, als sie fixierte Vorstellungen produzieren, feste Bilder und Behauptungen von Einheit und Kohärenz, die als solche immer
„Das brillante Labyrinth der Musik ist eine der letzten Festungen des Psychischen, die sich dem verstehenden Zugriff der Psychoanalyse entziehen. Trotz einer kontinuierlichen Tradition psychoanalytischer Texte zur Musik scheint es bisher nicht gelungen zu sein, ihren verborgenen Sinn zu entziffern" (Leikert 2005, 15).
auch Momente der Verfremdung beinhalten. Wo immer sich das Subjekt Medien sucht, um eine Ich-Repräsentation ausgestalten zu können, erzeugt es etwas narzisstisch Verkehrtes oder doch Zurechtgelegtes, weil es Widersprüchlichkeiten, Risse und amorphe Spannungen negieren muss, will es sich überhaupt als Einheitliches konstituieren. Das Ich als mit sich Identisches ist darum nichts anderes als eine 'Illusion der Autonomie' (Lacan 1973, 69).
Und eine Illusion, die, ins Pathologische gesteigert, bis hin zur Psychose führen kann, dem undurchdringlichen Schild, der das Ich vor jeder Störung seiner vorgestellten Welt bewahrt. Es ist die Funktion des Symbolischen, die das im Normalfall verhindert. Das Symbolische ist der Bereich der Sprache, der Differenz und der Prozessualität. Lacan beschäftigt sich in diesem Zusammenhang vor allem mit der Ebene des Signifikanten, den er als ein Noch-Nicht-Bedeutendes definiert, eine komplexe Lautstruktur, die erst sekundär - über ihre Eintragung in das 'System differenzieller Kopplungen' (Lacan 1975, 26) der Buchstaben - gedeutet (bzw. einem Signifikat zugeordnet) werden kann. Das ist der imaginäre Moment der Sprache, das Einfrieren des Signifikanten zum Objekt des Wissens, und zwar durch das Setzen einer Unterscheidung, mit der eine neuerdings binäre Relation entsteht. Das Ich hat verstanden und dem Signifikanten seinen Platz in der Welt zugewiesen. Hier aber tritt das Symbolische auf den Plan. Jede binäre Zeichenrelation ist kontingent und vom Kontext her bestimmt; prinzipiell ermöglicht eine strukturierte Lautfolge unzählige weitere Zuordnungen. Jeder Deutung haftet somit der grundsätzliche Mangel an, dass sie Komplexität und Sinnfülle reduziert - das (unter anderem) sagt Lacans Begriff der unendlichen Signifikantenkette. Im Gegensatz zur imaginären ist die symbolisch generierte Subjekt-Welt-Relation dadurch von der Dynamik des Begehrens bestimmt, einer Dynamik permanenter Umformung, in der die Begegnung mit dem Noch-Nicht-Bedeutenden selbst allerdings wiederum nur repräsentiert, durch die immer nächste metaphorische Kontextdeutung erinnert - und verkannt werden kann.
Genau darin, folgert Leikert, liegt der entscheidende Unterschied zur Musik. Während die Sprache immer wieder durch jene Momente imaginärer Stabilisierung führt, die es dem Subjekt ermöglichen, zwischen Selbst- und Objektrepräsentanzen zu unterscheiden, sind in der Musik binäre Referenzstrukturen eher die Ausnahme. Wo sich beispielsweise markante Entitäten aus dem musikalischen Strom abheben und eine deutlich abgegrenzte Gestalt annehmen, entspricht Musik zwar noch der wichtigsten Definition des imaginären Bilds. Vergleichbar dem Spiegelbild, wird Musik an solchen Gestalten wiedererkannt; Leikert nennt hier besonders die Melodie als Außenlinie oder 'Oberfläche' der Musik (Leikert 2005, 29). Als Orientierungsmarke innerhalb des verströmenden Klangs wird diese zur Repräsentanz des Subjekts: 'In ihr sieht sich das Subjekt wie beim Bild einem überschaubaren Ganzen gegenüber, das seine Spannung aufnimmt und ordnet' (Leikert 2005, 46). Trotzdem aber verbleibt noch dieses Ganze in der 'großartigen Unbestimmtheit des An-Sich-Seins' (Leikert 2005, 42) musikalischer Phänomene. Die Selbstreferentialität des musikalischen Signifikanten bietet dem Subjekt keinen Anhaltspunkt für eine stabile Repräsentation. Musik gestaltet darum nicht die Fiktion einer statischen Identität, sondern eher ein vibrierend anwesendes, körperlich erfahrbares Strömen der Töne und Formbewegungen, einen 'Klangleib'
(Leikert 2005, 28), der auch und gerade Widersprüchen, Friktionen, Spannungen und Verwerfungen aufnimmt und musikalisch symbolisiert. Und sie vermag dies, weil sie das Signifikat verweigert, und damit den Durchgang durch den Moment imaginärer Gewissheit, den auch semantisch hochkomplexe literarische Textsorten, sofern sie Worte verwenden, immer erst durchlaufen müssen, um ihn im Wirbel der Metaphern ins Taumeln bringen zu können - als Beispiel für letzteres diskutiert Leikert im letzten Kapitel seines Buchs die Schreibstrategien von James Joyce, dem 'Musiker des Buchstabens' (Leikert 2005, 149). 'Im Diskurs der Musik haben wir es mit einer Struktur zu tun, welche die Subjekt-Objekt-Ordnung außer Kraft setzt. Die Musik beruht auf der Begegnung des Subjekts mit dem Einen, von dem sich das Subjekt nicht zu unterscheiden weiß.' (Leikert 2005, 33).
Genau diese fusionelle Verbindung von Subjekt und Objekt in der Musik macht aber das Musikhören in der Perspektive Lacans zu einer 'signifikanten Praxis des Genießens' (Leikert 2005, 71). Denn das Genießen ('jouissance'), die Begegnung mit dem Realen, erscheint bei Lacan selbst als Prozess psychischer Diffusion, in dem sich das Subjekt sozusagen mit allem Risiko einer vollständigen Selbstaufgabe an eine selbstreferenzielle Verweisstruktur ohne Signifikat bindet. Genießen bedeutet, die Abgrenzung zwischen Subjektrepräsentation und Nicht-Ich aufzuheben und die Ich-Instanz zu destabilisieren, ja im Extremfall zu zerstören und auszulöschen. Daraus entsteht die paradoxe Situation, dass sich das Subjekt zugleich vor einem allzu zerstörerischen Genuss hüten und diesen durch einen ungefährlicheren, wenngleich auch 'schalen Ersatz' (Leikert 2005, 17), eine Symbolisierung seines ursprünglichen Objekts, austauschen muss. Bei Lacan gilt dieses ursprüngliche Objekt des Genießens als immer schon verloren, weshalb es symbolisch ersetzt werden muss, um überhaupt genießen zu können. Die Musik allerdings bietet, so Leikerts Schlusspointe, etwas an, was anderen Medien verwehrt ist. Leikert nennt es die 'Präsenzsuggestion' (Leikert 2005, 59), mit der die Musik das unmögliche, verlorene Objekt, das Sprache und Erinnerung nur als abwesend benennen können, zwar nicht vollständig wiedererweckt, 'durch ihre sirenenhafte Verlockung' aber, wenn auch als Verlorenes, erfahrbar macht. 'In dieser Suggestion liegt das magische Element der Musik begründet' (Leikert 2005, 59). Die Wirkung dieser Suggestion auf das Subjekt ist dabei nicht zuletzt eine körperliche: Die Musik unterstellt, 'wieder den Zugang zum verlorenen Objekt zu eröffnen und ergreift uns in unserer Körperlichkeit, wie weder Sprache und Bild es vermögen' (Leikert 2005, 61). Das zumindest ist die eine Seite der Musik, mit der sie sowohl auf den Verlust der pränatalen, fusionellen Verbindung des Fötus mit dem Mutterleib zurückverweist und ihm ermöglicht, 'den Verlust des primären Objekts zu erleben und zu ertragen' (Leikert 2005, 61), als auch sexuelle und andere, rauschhafte Entdifferenzierungserfahrungen aufgreift und in ihren Klangleib überführt. Leikert assoziiert sie mit dem Orpheus-Mythos, der Geschichte des Sängers, dem es mit seinem Gesang gelingt, zu seiner an die Unterwelt verlorenen Geliebten zurück zu finden. Zugleich ist Musik aber auch ein ästhetisches Material, das Geschichte aufnimmt, reflektiert und auf sie zurückwirkt. Und es zeichnet Leikerts Ansatz gegenüber anderen aus, dass er es nicht bei einer psychoanalytischen Theorie der Musikrezeption belässt, sondern dem gewissermaßen fachinternen Befund eine vermittelnde Auseinandersetzung mit der Materialebene musikalischer Werke an die Seite stellt.
Denn so überzeugend und gedanklich originell sein Vorstoß auf nahezu unbetretenes Terrain auch gerät - das Problem verallgemeinernder Überlegungen zu 'der Musik' lässt sich nicht völlig überdecken. Was sich für die west- oder mitteleuropäisch-angloamerikanische Kunstmusiktradition behaupten lässt, gilt noch lange nicht für alle europäischen Musikformen, geschweige denn interkulturell. Melodien etwa haben in repetitiven und Riff-orientierten, primär rhythmisch organisierten Musikformen mit starkem Improvisationsanteil wie Funk oder Soul, um hier relativ wahllos Beispiele zu nennen, einen gänzlich anderen Stellenwert als in der Wiener Klassik oder bei Bach. Und auf die Idee, in James Browns Hot Pants herrsche Langeweile und Sinnverlust, weil pausenlos ein und derselbe Akkord wiederholt werde, verfiele im Ernst wohl niemand (während bereits viermalige, fast unveränderte Wiederholungen in der klassischen Ästhetik Fragen aufwerfen, vgl. Leikert 2005, 104). Insofern klären die Werkanalysen im zweiten Teil des Buchs nicht zuletzt den Bezugsrahmen für die theoretischen Vorarbeiten. Interessanterweise bewegen sich diese Analysen selbst weite Strecken innerhalb des von Picht kritisierten Kausalitäts-Paradigmas, obwohl Leikert allzu direkte Parallel-Lektüren von Biographie und kompositorischem Schaffen vermeidet und sein Vorgehen vor allem im Beethoven-Kapitel sehr weitgehend von theoretischen und musikanalytischen Interessen geleitet ist. Wie selbstverständlich geht dagegen das Bach-Kapitel von einer primär biographischen Motivation für die Entstehung des Wohltemperierten Klaviers aus. Leikerts Verständnis insbesondere der Schluss-Fuge als 'kompositorische Umsetzung der Trauerarbeit', mit der Bach auf den Tod seiner Frau reagiert habe und die zugleich aber eine 'entschlossene Auflehnung' (Leikert 2005, 79) darstelle, liest sich entsprechend biographistisch. Im Laufe des Kapitels relativiert sich das aber, und die Dimension der ästhetischen Problemstellung, die sich in Bachs systematischer Auseinandersetzung mit der wohltemperierten Stimmung und dem dadurch möglichen Durchgang durch alle Tonarten abbildet, wird zumindest deutlicher. Leikerts findiger Leit-These, Bachs kompositorisches Spiel mit dem b-a-c-h-Motiv bzw. dessen Transpositionen ersetze gewissermaßen die fehlende 'Vaterfunktion' der in nicht-temperierten Stimmungen klanglich zentralen, weil intonatorisch reinsten Grundtonart, lässt sich allerdings entgegenhalten, dass die tonale Ordnung als solche bei Bach zwar ausdifferenziert und bis an ihre Grenzen erkundet, aber doch in keiner Weise real suspendiert wird. Der Platz und die 'gesetzgebende' Macht der jeweiligen Grundtonart bleibt unangetastet. Gemildert - nicht aber aufgehoben - wird nur die für nicht-temperierte Stimmungen maßgebliche Tatsache, dass im Regelfall C-Dur, die Tonart der weißen Tasten, die am reinsten intonierte Tonart ist, von der sich etwa schon die ebenso gebräuchlichen, zwei Quinten bzw. Vorzeichen entfernten D-Dur und B-Dur durch eine charakteristische 'Trübung' abheben.
Insgesamt gerät Leikerts teilweise kabbalistisch anmutende Feinarbeit mit der Namen- und Zahlensymbolik im Wohltemperierten Klavier dennoch so anregend, dass man geneigt ist, darüber die wackeligen Formulierungen musiktheoretischer und musikgeschichtlicher Sachverhalte zu vernachlässigen, die das Kapitel durchziehen (Bach als 'Vollender der Polyphonie' zu bezeichnen, ist so griffig wie vage, die wohltemperierte Stimmung ist, zumindest bei Werckmeister, eben noch lange keine gleichschwebende und die Frage der Tonartencharakteristik im Wohltemperierten Klavier zumindest um-
stritten, etc.). Und das, obwohl die den eigentlichen Analysen vorgeschaltete Systematik von Buchstabe und Note eher unterkomplex bleibt und mehr Verwirrung stiftet als hilfreiche Vergleiche. Leikert postuliert hier und an anderen Stellen des Buchs wiederholt, die Notenschrift enthalte im Gegensatz zum Alphabet nur den Singular, da sie nur 'einen einzigen 'Buchstaben', die Note' (Leikert 2005, 67), kenne. 'Die Intervalle der Musik sind insofern nicht mit dem Buchstaben zu vergleichen, als es sich jeweils um eine Koppelung zweier, an sich identischer, Noten handelt, die sich nur durch die Differenzierung ihrer Position (Tonhöhe) bzw. ihrer zeitlichen Dauer voneinander unterscheiden' (Leikert 2005, 67). Sofern nicht klar wird, was es in diesem Zusammenhang mit den weiteren Differenzierungsebenen der Fünflinien-Notation (Dynamik, Artikulation sowie Vortragsangaben) sowie nicht notierten, für jede musikalische Aufführung aber essentiellen Gestaltungsebenen wie Phrasierung und Klangfarbe auf sich hat, und schließlich auch der historische Entstehungsgrund der europäischen Tondauern-Notation unerwähnt bleibt, die Möglichkeit, in der organisierten Mehrstimmigkeit mehrere Notationssysteme gleichzeitig zu realisieren und damit die Komplexität der musikalischen Struktur dramatisch zu erhöhen, wird eines der zentralen Anliegen des Buchs, die systematische Unterscheidung von Sprache und Musik, an dieser Stelle mit untauglichen Mitteln betrieben. Leikert sitzt hier einer schon im Theorieteil getroffenen, problematischen Vorentscheidung auf, der Gleichsetzung des Signifikanten der Musik mit der Notenschrift. Viel nahe liegender erscheint es, den musikalischen Signifikanten im Blick auf sein zuvor so überzeugend entfaltetes Potential, sich als Noch-Nicht-Bedeutendes für das Subjekt körperlich erfahrbar zu machen, als komplexe Klangstruktur zu definieren, und also als genaues Gegenstück zu der - dem Subjekt eben in der Sprache aber unzugänglichen - Lautstruktur des Sprach-Signifikanten.
Ich hätte dem Buch für solche und ähnliche Stellen ein musikwissenschaftlich informiertes Lektorat gewünscht. Dennoch verblassen die diskutablen Momente gegenüber der ansteckenden Meinungsfreudigkeit, gedanklichen Schärfe und der Souveränitat, mit der Leikert seine musikalischen Gegenstände insgesamt in den Blick nimmt und mit dem schwer zu durchschauenden Netzwerk aus Schlagworten, Konzepten und Erzählungen verknüpft, das Lacans Schriften und publizierte Vorlesungen noch für den kundigen Leser bereitstellen. Eine Verführung stellt die Lektüre seines Buchs allemal dar, und das keineswegs nur für den deutschsprachigen Musikwissenschaftler.6
Bibliography
Bielefeldt, Christian. 2007. „'Nenavadni, nezni cutni dražljaji': psihoanalitske poti v zgodnji estetiki glasbe Hansa Wernerja Henzeja. ,Unusual, Gentle Sensory Stimuli': A Psychoanalytical Path to the Early Aesthesis of Hans Werner Henze". Muzikološki zbornik 2007, Vol. 2, pp. 252-264.
Hoffmann, Jürgen. 1988. „Popmusik, Pubertät, Narzissmus", Psyche, Vol. 42, pp. 961-981.
Vgl. meinen Anschluss an Leikert bezüglich der Musikästhetik Hans Werner Henzes (Bielefeldt 2007).
Lacan, Jacques. 1973. „Das Spiegelstadium als Bildner der Ichfunktion", Schriften 1, Olten: Walter, pp. 61-70.
Lacan, Jacques. 1975. Schriften 2. Olten: Walter.
Leikert, Sebastian. 2005. Die vergessene Kunst. Der Orpheusmythos und die Psychoanalyse der Musik. Gießen, Psychosozial-Verlag 2005.
Mätzler, Ruth. 2002. „Perspektiven einer Psychoanalyse der Musikrezeption", Musik & Ästhetik Vol. 22, pp. 5-22.
Oberhoff, Bernd. Ed. 2002. Psychoanalyse. Eine Bestandsaufnahme. Gießen: Psy-chosozial.
Picht, Johannes. 2007. „Beethoven und die Krise des Subjekts, Teil I-IV", Musik & Ästhetik, Vol. 44, pp. 5-26.
Picht, Johannes. 2008a. „Beethoven und die Krise des Subjekts, Teil V-VII", Musik & Ästhetik, Vol. 45, pp. 5-21.
Picht, Johannes. 2008b. „Musikwissenschaft - Musik - Psychoanalyse. Erwiderung auf Albrecht v. Massow",Musik & Ästhetik, Vol. 48, pp. 72-76.
Von Massow, Albrecht. 2008. „Psychoanalyse als Teil musikwissenschaftlicher Grundlagenreflexion. Eine Bilanz",Musik & Ästhetik, Vol. 46, pp. 94-102.
Povzetek
Zapeljivost psihoanalize bi lahko bila v tem, da govori o stvareh, o katerih etos znanstvene metodologije praviloma onemogoča kakršnekoli povedi. In vendar se je treba vprašati, katero akademsko merljive zaklade psihoanalitičnih raziskav bi bilo treba odkriti, in sicer onstran močno trivialnih pogledov na umetniško delo kot simptomu umetnikove nevroze in njene vzorčno pogojene paradigme, ki na nemškem govornem področju obvladuje psihoanalitična dela. Izhajajoč iz enega od komentarjev k razpravi na temo glasba in psihoanaliza, ki sta jo vodila Johannes Picht in Albrecht v. Massow v Glasbi in estetiki, se članek ukvarja z glasbenoteoretskimi deli psihoanalitika Sebastiana Leikerta. V nasprotju s Pichtom in drugimi psihoanalitičnimi avtorji, Lacan presega klasični teorem,
ki razume glasbo kot izraz subjekta in njegovih ogroženih konstrukcij identitete. Ko se navezuje na Lacana, Leikert opisuje glasbo kot sredstvo, ki naj bi sploh šele ustvarjala predstave o identiteti, in to na poseben način, ki ni na voljo vizualnim in verbalnim medijem. V njegovi knjigi Pozabljena umetnost (2005), ki poleg obsežnih teoretskih poglavij vsebuje tudi vrsto »case studies«, prepriča predvsem razdelava glasbenega užitka na podlagi lacanovskega koncepta signifikanta. Poslušanje glasbe, piše Leikert, pomeni nekaj popolnoma drugega kot branje knjig ali opazovanje slik, ker dojemanje glasbe strukturira odnos subjekta do samega sebe na popolnoma drugačen način kot recepcija vizualnih in verbalnih medijev. Glasba pri tem ne ustvarja fikcije neke statične identitete ampak fuzionirano zlivanje meja med subjektom in objektom.
UDK 78.159.9 Leon Stefanija
Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani Philosophical Faculty, University of Ljubljana
Convolutions of musical meaning - a sociopsychological note on listening to music
Zapletenost glasbenega pomena -sociopsihološki zapis k poslušanju glasbe
Prejeto: 15. februar 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: socialna psihologija glasbe, spoznavoslovje glasbe, funkcije glasbe
Izvleček
Namen prispevka je začrtati povezave med skladateljevim in poslušalčevim razumevanjem pomenskega potenciala glasbe. Natančneje: ali obe gledišči povezuje enak mehanizem? Odgovor na to vprašanje je podano po prerezu 1) raziskovalnih perspektiv, ki se ukvarjajo z ravnmi, ki razkrivajo pomenskost glasbe, 2) muzikoloških opredelitev glasbenega pomena in 3) analize treh primerov slovenske sodobne glasbe. Prispevek je predvsem poziv k upoštevanju naravoslovnih in družboslovnih gledišč kot dveh plateh raziskovalnega procesa istega pojava.
Received: 15th February 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: social psychology of music, epistemol-ogy of music research, functions of music
Abstract
The main aim of this paper is to indicate the relations between the composer's and the listener's level of understanding music. More specifically: do both levels have a common mechanism? An answer to this question is offered after surveying 1) scholarly perspectives dealing with the levels through which music affords meanings, 2) musicological elaborations of musical meaning, and 3) the analysis of three cases from contemporary Slovenian music. The text is directed toward a plea for considering a mutually »compatible« vocabulary of music research.
The Aim
Ludwig Haesler, in a brief text on music and psychoanalysis, pointed out that psychoanalysis seems fruitful in regard to music on four levels (Haesler 2002: 395-7): 1)
the composer and his personality, 2) 'the musical text' as a context of 'latent or explicit account' [Strukturbedeutung] in which a listener gains meaning out of music, 3) specific 'psychic conditions of the performer' and 3a) performer's 'deep understanding of the elemental structure' [Tiefenstruktur] and the 'psychic dynamics' of a musical piece as well as 4) the 'musical experience' [Musikerleben] of the listener. Haesler's 'Schichtenlehre' presupposes interrelated issues within which music 'affords' meaning to different subjects - of course, with specific differences and extent, since each of the four indicated levels deserves to be seen as a relatively autonomous focus of research.
The main aim of this paper is to indicate the relations between the composer's and the listener's level of understanding music. More specifically: do both levels have a common mechanism? An answer to this question is offered after surveying 1) scholarly perspectives dealing with the levels through which music affords meanings, 2) musicological elaborations of musical meaning, and 3) the analysis of three cases from contemporary Slovenian music. The levers of defining musical meaning point to certain psychoanalytical issues that seem worthy of interest in this volume on music and psychoanalysis.
Perspectives on musical meaning: functions of music
Music research has gained a stimulating study of the ways in which music's meaning is constructed with Eric F. Clark's book Ways of Listening - An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. The author begins his survey of the ties between different modes of understanding musical meaning with a rather realistic imagined example of a person tidying up his desk and trying to 'decipher' an unlabeled CD he finds among the papers. And his whole concept of an ecological approach to the levelling of musical semanticity 'should be no more than a part of a larger project on the enactment of musical meaning' (Clarke 2005: 205). Recognizing that there are no doubts about 'a truism that different people perceive notionally the same event in different ways,' but there are difficulties in grounding more specifically the fact that 'these individual differences are the specific manifestations of the same general principles of perception' (Clarke 2005: 194), I tried to collate the epistemological differences in the recent research of music's functions, much as, for instance, Radocy and Boyle have done (2003:10-19, 32-3):
The variety of categories with which music's functions have been studied clearly could be enriched even further according to specific genres of music (as, for instance, film music), to certain habitual variables (as in North, Hargreaves, Hargreaves 2004), to some conceptual issues (for instance DeNora 2000), to geographical or societal contexts (as it is usually the case in ethno/musicology) etc. Nevertheless, further differentiation would not change the strategies of generating a rather basic set of concepts that point to further domains of contextual variables (as indicated, for instance, in Bersch-Burauel 2004: 36 ff, esp. 197-221, or Behne 1986). However, a short comparison of Merriam's and Hargreaves and North's functions could serve as an illustration of these strategies. Merriam's functions of music indicate a holistic view lacking epistemological unity:
0										contributes to the integration of society
			consoling / compensating stimulus							contributes to the continuity and stability of culture
oo			background stimulus		link among past, present, and scenarios of the future			distanced listening	potency of music (in a group)	validation of social institutions and religious rituals
			arousing senses		symbolic indicator of change			associatve listening	a source of gratification	enforcement of conformity to social norms
			emotion / mood stimulation		incidental commodity		6* reinforcement function	sentimental listening	music's relationship to the tender emotions	physical response
			sentimentality arousing stimulus	Political values	moral and symbolic force		5* narcotizing dysfunction	emotional listening	music as structured reality	symbolic representation
	Association with dance		identity determining stimulus	Erotic values	therapy	provides a sense of musical ownership	4* status conferral function	diffusive listening	music as communication	communication
	marking importance of events	mood	escapistic stimulus	Technical values	personal experience	helps to shape memory, organize one's sense of time, and intensify experiences	compensate	vegetative listening	integrational relationship between music and religion	entertainment
	»transforming experience« (David McAllester): changes »individual's consciousness« or »ambience of a gathering«	interpersonal relations	associate / dream	Ritual values	collective posession	provides a way of managing the relationships between one's private and public emotional lives	emancipate	compensational listening	determinants of the cultural matrix on the mode of expression	aesthetic enjoiment
	use in rituals and addressing supernatural	management of self-identity	ease / relax	Communicative values	a form of knowledge	helps to create a type of self-definition, a particular place in society	regenerate	motorical listening	a need for aesthetic expression and experience	emotional expression
	Nettl 2001: 468	Hargreaves & North 1999	Lehman 1996	Middleton 1990: 253	Kaplan 1990: 18 ff	Frith 1987: 140-44	Karbusicky 1986 (borrowing from Paul F. Lazarsfeld's and Robert K. Merton's Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action [1948/60]* Alfons Auer's Ethos der Freizeit [1972])	Behne 1986	Gaston 1968: 21ff	Merriam 1964: 222-7
functions number 1, 2 and 6 are psycho- and physiological in nature, pertaining to different personal human faculties; functions 4, 5 and 7-10 address societal issues, whereas function 3, as Merriam also notes, can be understood either as 'pure' entertainment or as entertainment 'combined with other functions' (Merriam 1980: 223.). Functions indicated by Hargreaves and North offer a much subtler view if compared to Mer-riam's: they indicate quite clearly a division of music's effect as 'either psychological, physiological, or behavioral' arousal (McMullen 1996, quoted from Radocy and Boyle 2003: 41). They offer a frame for numerous intra- as well as interpersonal (communicative, social, cultural) functions emerging out of the two most commonly accepted psychological effects music can achieve: it can have either 'stimulating, invigouring' or 'soothing, sedating' effect (Radocy and Boyle 2003: 41). And considering Merriam's division of functions through Hargreaves and North's psychosociological eyes, the universalistic slant of his set of functions becomes the more elusive the harder one tries to exemplify them: are Merriam's functions 7-10 (enforcing, validating, stabilizing, integrating) not simply different points of view of elementary social relations emerging from 'interpersonal relations' (Hargreaves & North's function No. 2)? If so, then all functions of music, as indicated by Merriam in his last itemized function ('the function of the contribution to the continuity and stability of culture'), are anchored in a rather basic process offorming, creating, establishing, etc., hierarchies of socialization through music. And they do include personal (psychological, biological, physiological) as well as interpersonal (social, political, but also economical as well as a plethora of pragmatical) determinants. However, if one tries to find cohesive bonds between them and the other more explicitely personal functions of music (as Merriam's functions 1 and 2, or 1, 5 and 6 in Gaston's set, the first three functions of Karbusicky, etc.), the process of forming hierarchies of socialization through music becomes primarily an epistemological issue, not so much a phenomenological one as the piled up sets of functions above might suggest.
And as a concept of knowledge, not only as a field of scientification of one's own personal set of preferences for - and biases towards - certain musical styles and genres (or any other forms of musical activity), functions of music are a trajectory, or a cross-section, of phenomena consisting of two mutually connected sets of complexities: of 'musical complexity' (Parry 2004) as a bio-physiological stimulus and hermeneutically understood 'complexity in music' (R. Toop) that stimulates different epistemological framings. Both views can be traced not only in the current debates involving postmo-dernity or popular culture, they also have a long history of epistemological oppositions, mediating between facts of nature and variables of nurture that have been granting musicology a rather complex tradition of connections, leveling different functions of music with regard to a series of basic oppositions, such as 'outer' and 'inner' levels of musical structure (18th century treatises, as summed up in H. Ch. Koch Anleitung zur Komposition, 1787-1793); form and expression (as in the 19th-century aesthetics); absolute (formalist) and referential (expressionist) approaches to explaining music (Meyer 1956); aesthetic and epistemological understanding of music [ästhetisches / erkennendes Verstehen] (Eggebrecht 1995); musical and musicological listening (Cook 1992: 152ff); musical and everyday listening (Gaver 1993); cognitive and connotative
understanding (Hübner 1994: 26-38); listening as a fantasy thing and listening as fantasy space (Schwarz 1997: 3 ff); body-mind opposition (as, for instance, in Lidov 2005: 145164); even between ethic and emic issues, where 'the ethic point of view is that of the researcher who is outside of the culture; [while] the emic point of view corresponds to the cognitive categories [...] of the local inhabitants' (Nattiez 2004: 13 [after Kenneth Pike]). All the mentioned oppositions, however, are but the opposite poles of 'our continuing wavering between two modes of listening' (Bujic 1997: 22) to music - to 'two levels of musical understanding': of listening to music as to a physical structure on the one hand and, on the other, of listening to 'telling details' and 'assigning value' to them (Bujic 1997: 19).
The research into music's functions, as may be seen from the above list indicating the single disciplinary perspectives, seems to be a kind of 'march of names' - a process of transgressing cognitive, social and axiological levels through different identification categories. They seem to indicate relations between 'negotiation of meaning' about music and the 'levels of signification', between 'primary' and 'secondary signification' (Shepherd and Wicke 1997: 14, 203, 103 ff), between syntactic and semantic pregnancy of the musical flow (Middleton 1990: 176 ff), stirring up different functions that music may have as a stimulus for either 'visceral responses' (Cook 2000: 79) or/and 'cultural deeds'. Namely, refined questions regarding music's functions, such as, for instance, posed by Simon Frith - "how folk [music] 'consolation' differs from pop 'escapism' (Frith 2006: 161) - are interesting at the same time as issues that provoke reflections about 'a more mutable, pliable construction of [music's] autonomy, adapted to our relativized, post-modern frame, oblivious neither to other determinants of musical experience [...] nor to the social medium in which it operates' (Clarke 2003: 170) as well as for neuroscience and psychology (not only) of music (cf., for instance, Levitin 2006 and Huron 2006). On the face of it, the question of music's function seems to address a set of empirical particularities as a counterpart of certain universals impinged on music by the human faculties - contingencies of 'flesh' attached to a much more evasive, yet crucial 'skeleton' within which the very notion of music's myriad functions makes certain sense as 'cultural material' (DeNora 2000: 151) as well as an issue regarding its biological function that unfolds beneath the rituals of life (Levitin 2006: 241-61). In short: musical practices have more pragmatic cultural as well as elemental biological relevance for human beings as a 'tool for arousing feelings and emotions' (Levitin 2006: 261).
Specific or universal meaning: on musical universals
In spite of worthy holistic scientific ideals, mediating between the particularities and addressing music's functions as 'hard' as well as 'soft' science phenomena seems to be too extensive a task for the time being. Although there is a large amount of evidence for certain aspects of music's function, only several outlines of integrative thinking (Engel 2006: 226) in music research have been winning wider acknowledgement in claiming consistency for connecting the nature/nurture opposition: David Huron's The 1999
Ernest Bloch Lectures Music and Mind: Foundations of Cognitive Musicology, Daniel J. Levitin's This is your brain in music (2006), or Ian Cross's views (Cross 1998 et passim) should be set among them in first place.
If empirically gathered data, particularities, pointing to differences in music's functions, are to be integrated into inclusive theory, one should consider universals to be the one of the key categories that need be defined (the authors in Marieanu 1999 offered a valuable basis for this). Although music universals have long since belonged to musicological topoi centered in the common saying that 'music is universal language' (Brandl and Rösing 2002: 58) and have been repeatedly attracting scholarly interest (Bruhn 2002: 447-8), the debate over music universals seems to be 'abgelöst durch Erforschung von kulturspezifischen autonomen Musikgeschichten' (Brandl and Rösing 2002: 58). Nevertheless, interest in music as universal human competence (Cross 2001) seems to be, again, a rather alluring issue in current music research, offering itself not only as a counterpart to studying music's cultural and phenomenal diversities, but as inevitable scholarly positions that in the first place enable comparative views of the fragmented, particularized, specialized views to be compared at all.
To address the thorny question of universals, the following, deliberately hasty claim could be offered: to define the scope of the topic theory, one should define the points of traversing — the common features as well as differences — between the formalistic and hermeneutic categories — between the concepts, for instance, of 'auditory stream' (Albert Bregman) or 'auditory object' (James Wright), 'segment' (mainly in set theory analysis), 'formal' or 'structural' unit (classical theory of musical forms), 'topic,' 'gesture,' 'salient,' or 'marked structure/entity/feature,' 'trope' (semiotics of music), 'term' (D. Cook), 'figure' (universal notion used in different contexts from baroque theory of affection onward) etc.
The wonderful work done by semioticians (as Robert S. Hatten, Reymond Monelle, Eero Tarasti, among others), psychologists (such as by David Huron, Klaus-Ernst Behne, Daniel Levitin), and other scholars of wide perspective (as, for instance, Christian Kaden or Bruno Nettl) have brought about epistemological alertness to similar claims. One need only think of Tarasti's idea of two epistemic groups of semiotic interpretations to find various semantic levels — he distinguishes between a 'philosophical 'style' rather than a systematic classification' and a systematic classification founded on the belief 'that all signs exist only on the basis of an order which is there before the scholar starts his/her work'1.
1 Tarasti 1997: 188-189. 'I have classified all the musical semiotic theories — in the epistemic sense — into two groups, the first of which starts with rules and grammars belonging to all music, emphasizing music's surface, which supposes that before the rules set by a theoretician there is just nothing — and consequently when the rules stop their functioning there remains nothing. This type of semiotics, as a philosophical 'style' rather than a systematic classification, I would call as 'classical' semiotics. [...] The other trend is to think that all signs exist only on the basis of an order which is there before the scholar starts his/her work and which remains there when he/she has finished. This semiotic philosophy approaches the meaning (1) as a process, i.e. supposing that signs cannot be defined without taking into account the time, place and subject (actor), (2) as something immanent, i.e. believing like Mead and Merleau-Ponty primarily that meaning is produced within a given system, body, organism, in the first place without any meaning coming from outside as a deus ex machina (like in the 'redemption' at the end of Chausson's piece, the reconciling themes do not stem from outside but are generated from the materials within the piece); (3) by giving emphasis to the content, the signified, which however, can be something non-verbal, 'ineffable', expressible only in terms of a quasi-corporeal experience.'
It is this distinction between epistemologically systematic versus more contingent description - thin vs. thick description, to use Clifford Geertz's terms - that alerts one to compare different categorical theories. For instance, it seem that not only musicology, but also interdisciplinary music research would benefit from a comparison between the concept of gesture, as it has been discussed by different semioticians of music (cf., for instance, Hatten 2004, Hatten 2005 and Middleton 1993 or 2003), with the theoretical notion of Formgehalt ('formal content') proposed by Albrecht von Massow (Massow
1998)	and, further on with the concept of universals in music, as it has been (apart from the ethnomusicological and sociological field) recently nourished primarily by cognitive psychology and, to some extent, also in music theory. To offer briefly a rationale of this suggestion, one might recall that the responses to Massow's Greimasian neologism, Formgehalt (Floros 1999, Jiranek 1999, H. de la Motte 1999, Schwab-Felisch
1999)	give an idea of how difficult it is to resolve the age-old antinomy between form (structure) and content (expression, 'meaning') in music by equalizing the two while being unable to accept the dichotomy without many reservations, whereas the concept of universals reveals a similarly telling controversial status among scholars. To indicate this, I shall mention only the work done by four scholars (although numerous other valuable studies referring to universals are at hand; cf., for instance: Grabocz 1999, Imberty 2001, Jiranek 1999a, Kon 1999, Mâche 2001, Nattiez 2004, Nettl 1977, Nettl 2001, Trehub 2001). If Bruno Nettl cautiously proposes a concentric view of universals centered in musical structures and extending over to cultural issues (Nettl 1977 and 2001), Vladimir Karbusicky finds persuasive arguments to demonstrate the universal principles of musical form along with their correlating anthropological foundations (Karbusicky 1990, 1991, 1999). Further, Leonard B. Meyer — clearly defining 'syntactic' ('perceptually discrete') and 'statistical' ('relational') 'cognitive universals' of the musical flow — has offered persuasive arguments to regard the concept of universals as having theoretical value in one of the most insightful essays on universals and music where, at the same time, he asserts: 'There are none. There are only the acoustical universals of the physical world and the bio-psychological universals of the human world.' (Meyer 1998: 6). The fourth scholar I would like to mention is Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Nattiez 2004). He has inspiringly illustrated the importance of Jean Molino's 'universals of strategy' and 'universals of substance' — as categories complementary to those of Meyer.
As different as these concepts of universals and music are, they all share a common epistemological stance. The notion of a musical universal — as Nattiez emphasizes in his account, to a certain degree acceptable for the notion of musical universals in general — implies a plea 'in favor of a well thought-out reconciliation of the universal and the relative, of the innate and the acquired, of nature and culture' (Nattiez 2004: 19). In music theory, this shift toward integration of nature and culture entities in music research is perhaps most concisely formulated in the music topic theory as developed by Hatten. Robert Hatten elegantly encompassed the epistemological range of a musical topic, the key theory in semiotic music analysis since it appeared in Leonard Ratner's Classical Music. Expression, Form, and Style (1980). Writing about four levels of interpreting musical meaning, Hatten defines the following semantic fields: 1) markedness
as an elemental phenomenon revealing a 'meaningful syntax' in music; 2) topics as 'larger style types with stable correlations and flexible interpretative ranges'; 3) trop-ing as a process of combining two (or more) topics forming a second-order topic or an 'inherently musical metaphor'; 4) musical gesture as an interdisciplinary concept of a 'comprehensive theory' that would allow one 'to capture the more synthetic character of music.' (Hatten 2005: 14-15) Is, then, the concept of music's universals a broader parallel to the music-analytical category of gesture? Although either a positive or a negative answer would be problematic, it is a fact that they both have a common goal: to grasp the 'self-emancipating sign' in music as well those kinds of meanings that can be derived from it due to its pregnancy, without which music would hardly have earned such wide popularity among the public and scholars at the same time.
Yet, the epistemological inconsistencies in music research from different perspectives seem annoying. It seems rather acceptable to deal with the 'affordance of music and the enatment of musical meaning' (E. Clarke) as with Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language: there is no perfect language, but it is nonetheless well worth pursuing. Enactments of meaning to music resemble a historiographic quandary: 'Die Musik - gegen die Musiken' (Kaden 2004: 19). Christian Kaden, whose preferences remain with the 'Konzept der Ganzheit aus Verschiedenen' acknowledging at the same time the pragmatically inevitable stance 'den Plural der Musiken gegen ihre Vereinzahlung in Schutz zu nehmen' (Kaden 2004: 39), voices the concept of etiology over axiology. Of course, one can easily object to such claims by stating that each of both approaches has its individual domain of inquiry and any hierarchy between the two epistemologies is senseless. Moreover, the objection could proceed by claiming: connections between different research paradigms have 'amoebic' disciplinary forms, and disciplines are expanding themselves gradually due to complementary heuristic processes, usually labelled with the prefix inter(disciplinarity); thus hierarchies among them are arbitrary, if not absurd. Although I agree with both objections, it seems that it is precisely a lack of hierarchies between different approaches, entailing epistemological complexities that stimulate - in Kaden's and similar appeals for transgressing historical (cultural, social) confines while searching for epistemological unity - the connections between the 'soft' and the 'hard' sciences. (To avoid misunderstanding: it is not the claim for universal, but holistic knowledge.) The result seems to be integrative idea(l)s of knowledge of music (comparable to the one mentioned by Kaden) - an epistemologi-cal trajectory consisting of notions, on the one hand, regarding music as a physically tangible phenomenon, conceived of as an aesthetic thing or bio- and physiological function, and on the other hand, of music as a social agent, as a vehicle of spiritual and ritual order on the other.
Between pleasure and enjoyment: three answers
In music research, the always surmised and indicated yet never thoroughly elaborated Kantian difference between evaluation of art and judgement of taste (as, for instance, the fifth essay in Dahlhaus 1967) - the first aiming at more objective, consensually
elaborated, somehow 'historicized' arguments from within a certain context, whereas the former gives credence to subjective truths, individual, particular stances claiming no wider validity - allows a parallel with the psychoanalytic difference between enjoyment, or better: jouissance, and pleasure. As Middleton puts it, 'Plaisir results, then, from the operation of the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself; jouissance fractures these structures.' (Middleton 1990: 261) What seems to be a complementary Cartesian split between mind and body fits easily into afield of relations, of 'Bedeutungszusammenhänge zwischen Rezeptionsstrategien und soziokulturellem Kontext' (Rösing 1994: 76) and flows over a notion of The Plural Pleasures of Music (Huron 2005), over the functions of music as agent stimulating different processes in human body and/or mind.
For instance, Rentfrow and Gosling's four factor-analytically-derived dimensions ('reflective and complex', 'intense and rebellious, ' 'upbeat and conventional' and 'energetic and rhythmic'; Rentfrow and Gosling 2003: 1421) offer a fine model regarding cognitive universals and personality features indicating cultural issues, worth pursuing further along the line of Huron's view: 'Like most other music scholars, I believe that culture is the principal factor influencing music. However, our belief in the preeminence of culture does not give us license to dismiss possible biological foundations.' Since: 'The point is that there is no pleasure apart from brains, and since brains are the product of natural selection, there is no pleasure outside of the mechanisms provided by natural selection' (Huron 2005: 5 and 3).
The biological, neurological, cognitive - in short: the 'physicalistic' - indices of responses to music seem to offer a detailed account regarding the fact that "music's 'powers' vacillate' (DeNora 2000: 151). If '[t]here is little evidence in favour of behaviourist conception of music's powers in respect to agency' (DeNora 2000: 160), it seems actually that one should consider two questions regarding music's function: instead of 'How and to what purposes people use music?', one should ask 'What does music do to people?' The question has been, of course, already in use in the questionnaires on music preferences, not to mention its historical omnipresence. But even the elementary reflection on empirical data retrieval from respondents (be it psychological, sociological, or ethnographical) points to a caveat of conditioned, in a certain way confined validity due to the complexity in which utterances on music's functions are imbedded (cf., for instance, Karbusicky 1975: 77-84; North & Hargreaves and Hargreaves 2004: 43-46; Müller 1995 et passim). This is far from claiming that neuroscientific methods (as developed by David E. Levitin, Isabelle Peretz, Robert J. Zatorre, Norman M. Weinberger, among others) could be a substitute for the common ethnographic, historiographic etc. approaches specific to the humanities. However, it seems that the question of 'affordances of music and the enactment of musical meaning' would have first to define relations between the elementary categories addressing functions of music - between, for instance: musicality (in the sense of Karbusicky 1975: 154ff or Phillips 1976), tastes (Behne 1986, Droe 2004), habits (Lehmann 1993), behavior (Walsh, Mitchell, Frenzel and Wiedmann 2003), and uses of music (Behne 1996, North, Hargreaves and Hargreaves 2004).
Nonetheless, it is difficult to resist a more concrete reflection on the relations between the main levers through which music's semanticity is wavering between the 'natural'
and 'cultural' universals, as the following Möbius strip of music's 'capacities' (derived from the table of musical functions above) indicates:
The Adornian messages in the bottle, specific to each musical culture and its products, are communicated by different means and different intensities: one may well find best in music regardles of the musical style, whereas to some the musical style is the main transmitter of the music's 'affordances.' I will focus on the stylistic differences, taking three contemporary Slovenian composers and the semantic values they ascribe to their music as pointers 'conjuring up' music's effect on a listener.
The first composer is probably the most influential Slovenian musician today, Lojze Lebic (1934). The second answer to music's affordances is offered by Uros Rojko (1954), a composer with a firm belief in modernism close to the ideals of the new complexity, comprehensively trained in the avant-garde master classes as given by Klaus Huber in Freiburg (1983-1986) and Gyorgy Ligeti (1986-1989). The third answer is given by Marko Mihevc (1957), a composer whose voice was among the first and the strongest to extol postmodernity as a chance to compose, in his words, 'more digestible' music that cannot be compared with 'conservative neo/classicism' or any other 'plagiaristic stance.'
Although one could never emphasize enough the differences among those composers, they see the context of their work from the 1980s onward as belonging to a (differently understood) modernity, for which Lebic saw as a central phenomenon an 'ecological' shift toward more telling musical narrativity' (Lebic 47/3-4, 1994: 61). Yet, apart from the general awareness of the necessity to create communicative music, their compositional means and respective aesthetics burst the common features asunder. Their respective views on semanticity could be summarized briefly while commenting on their explicit musical poetics.
Lojze Lebic has several times emphasized that his strongest lesson from his avantgarde phase is the rigorousness of thought. However, he is far from underestimating the 'common listener.' Although he would hardly assent to any pragmatic concession, he has a kind of 'second listener' before his eyes when composing: 'If [my music] is to attract the listener to seek deeper layers and hints, the surface of the work has to be understandable and covered with a sufficient number of recognizable sounds' (Dekleva 1994). However, in Lebic's music these layers evade the trap of a name. They feature prominently in his music emerging throughout tissues of complex sonoristic textures as 'hints', 'allusions,' 'evocations,' 'indications,' or 'reminiscences' of certain phenomena. Whether it be an
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cognition & perception
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social environments
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'evocation' of an archetypal feature, such as the elementary diastematic fragments in Queensland Music, an allusion to the creation of the world in Glasba za orkester - Cantico I, or its more or less apparently associatively 'permeable' sound features, such as the bucolic quality of melodic, emphasized repetitions of triads in a highly complex texture, a Mahlerian 'moment of narration' (Abbate), or a compliment to Bach's famous cadenza from the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto: these telling details are interwoven carefully in a complex musical narrative rooted in the formal universals of music.
Lebic himself defined the process of composing as a process of 'framing something from one world which is found in another' (Dekleva 1994). This is actually the most far-reaching change in his current poetics if compared to his avant-garde ideals of an abstract, arithmetical order of the musical logic: he composes by searching for 'the grammatical feeling to return to the music some of its lost ability of speech' (Dekleva 1994). Yet, he adds: 'I remain within the limits of my field. This, however, teaches me that all significant musical works - from Bach's Art of Fugue to Bartok's masterpieces with a sectio aurea - are crafted with a great architectonic consideration, that they are a junction of necessity, that the laws of these junctions may be analytically discovered just as they were consciously built; but that the impulses dictating them will be forever hidden' (Dekleva 1994).
Uros Rojko, on the other hand, two decades junior to Lebic, has a more negative experience with the 'tradition of the German and European avant-garde': he 'did not accept it' (Meh 1995), moreover, he reckoned it as 'a dead end' (Rojko 1993). Especially Ligeti, 'leading [him] with his guru-like poise into uncertainty and horrible split' (Meh 1995), has awakened Rojko to distance himself not only from the avant-garde but also from any other musical tradition. Rojko is inclined to think about (his) music in terms of an ahistorical soundscape, secluded from any semantic homologies - except from the most elemental ones appealing to the 'physicalistic' efficacy of music. 'What I've been doing now, in the last five years,' Rojko emphasized in the mid 1990's, 'is above all liberation of myself. I try to understand everything as translating, canalizing of primary energies into a palpable substance' (Meh 1995) of sound.
Basically, I am striving to achieve beauty that has something profound, that has a base. This base does not belong to our world. It is something that our world cannot offer, although it is founded thereof. I would certainly not like to bring my music to the point of a New Age or similar [cultural phenomena], where the only goal is to reach a therapeutic condition [...]. I have no therapeutic intentions with my music. My music borders more on a natural experience, it tries to reach a sense of well-being.2
However modernist a stance might be reflecting through these artistic intentions, contrary to the intellectual pretentiousness, or the semantic provocativeness, of the musical avant-garde, Rojko expects almost nothing from his listener. Persuaded of the
2 Originally the quotes read: 'Ein System sagt noch gar nichts aus, was du daraus machst ist wichtig." "Die Idee, etwas Neues zu machen, war damals, als ich mit Serialismus und Neuer Musik beschäftigte, sehr wichtig [...] Es geht mir in der Tat um Schönheit, aber diese Schönheit hat eine Tiefe, hat einen Grund. Dieser Grund liegt nicht in unserer Welt, ist etwas, was unsere Welt nicht bieten kann und was ihr dennoch zugrundeliegt. Natürlich möchte ich meine Musik nicht zu einem Punkt von New Age oder änlichem bringen, wo es nur darum geht, therapeutisch einen Zustand zu bekommen [...]. Meine Musik hat keine therapeutische Absicht, sie grenzt schon eher an ein natürliches Erlebnis, so daß man sich als Mensch wohlfühlt. [...] Mein Leben ist so gekommen, daß ich für mich eine andere Welt suche. Die Musik drückt das aus und ist ein Teil von mir.' (Lauschen auf die innere Musik. Wolfgang Rüdiger im Gespräch mit Uros Rojko, CD ARS MUSICI [AM} 1122-2, Freiburger Musik Forum 1995, 15, 18-19.)
'untranslatability' of the musical narrative, he believes that it is necessary for both - for the composer as well as for the listener - to 'let the events happen by themselves, and let music and musical material unfold by itself' (Rojko 1993). For this reason he is drawing attention to the 'innermost' of the sound, unimpeded by mimetic analogies:
The most important truths are by no means explicable, the least with words, and they cannot be analysed by the intellect. They can be reached only by experience, or perceived. (Rojko 1993)
The quoted thought should be seen as the central philosophical persuasion and aesthetic demand posed by Rojko: he wants his music to achieve the efficacy of a sublime physiological stimulus — with no semantic potential 'from without,' preferably not even from the musical past, of course. In contrast to Lebic's grammatical logic, Rojko's composition is based on some kind of 'logic of pulverization' of the sound spectrum, as his music from the last two decades indicates - a homage, as it were, to musique spectrale and Giacinto Scelsi at the same time.
As a counterpart to both the above discussed musical minds, Marko Mihevc's musical poetics demands 'the integration of the beauty, the emotions, [...] of healthy eclecticism not intended to imitate the past but to help find new, not to say palatable styles.' His favorite musical form, the symphonic poem, seemed most appropriate to develop se-mantically vivid, almost picturesque sequences. Attracted by classical Afro-Cuban dance music, as in the symphonic poem In signo tauri, developing a kind of 'urban folklorism' with sympathies for 'oriental sound,' as in the cantata In mentem venit mihi, his musical structures are anchored in the opulence of Straussian harmonic texture from the fin de si cle, transparent modal turns, and effective melodic linearity. A number of other stylistic parallelisms could be brought to attention here, yet they all reveal an poetics of alienation, an aesthetics of epicurean usufructuary of semantically loaded segments indicating a process that Mihevc described as a 'postmodernist way': a musical style of combining 'modern elements with the elements of the previous periods' (Sencur 1999) and, one might add, different cultural milieus.
Obviously enough, Lebic's, Rojko's and Mihevc's compositional apparatuses stem from different modernist traditions: Lebic's especially from the Polish avant-garde classics, Rojko's from musique spectrale, New complexity and different authorial features (comparable to those, for instance, in Giacinto Scelsi and Georgy Ligeti), Mihevc's from a typically postmodern combinatorial perspectivism of layeringfin de si cle modernism, 'Orientalistic figments,' and several sonoristic details from different avant-garde techniques.
Although firmly embedded in the twentieth century imageries of modernism, the semantic potential of their music reveals a fairly perplexed picture of modernist ideals. As their respective historical bases are evident, differences in semanticity of their music can also be demarcated rather clearly. Lebic's idiosyncratic musical flow founded on 'grammatical' logic is trying to communicate intellectual, cultural, often national - one may well say: sensuous - anthropological imagery. Rojko's musical logic of 'sonoristic pulverization' aims at universal physicalistic immersion in sound, leaving traces of multicultural semantics aside on behalf of refined, as it were, 'culturological vibrations.' To the contrary, Mihevc with his compositional logic of alienation strives to combine heterogeneous, easily perceptible 'musical commonalities'.
L. STEFANIJA • CONVOLUTIONS OF MUSICAL ... Facit
Although one should argue about the achievements and degrees of the communicative qualities of their music, a feature they share can be recognized in their aspirations to encompass wide segments of musical experience: Lebic has in mind a kind of tran-shistorical intellectual experience, Rojko's 'translating, canalizing of primary energies into a palpable substance' aims at a thorough sublimation of the senses, while Mihevc strives to gather what he believes are the most efficient musical features around. In short, they are trying to sidestep the relations between the old (the traditional as 'made after an example') and the new (the modernistic, avant-garde): they are trying to focus their musical narratives on different yet basic, elemental segments of what one may describe as an experience with music as 'a whole and belonging to all humanity' ('ein Ganzes und Gesamtmenschliches') (Blume 1974: 238).
The quoted description of classical music, borrowed from Friedrich Blume, is far from alluding to canonical stature, even less to canonization of the three composers discussed above. Yet their respective musical poetics are not to be set within the premise of the avant-garde art - modernism - traditionalism, but into a thorny question about the classical, about the 'timeless,' 'best,' 'most appreciated' values of musical structure. In contrast to the ideas of advancement, modernization, improvement and similar, more 'material,' 'factual,' 'historicistic' categories, their main artistic concern shifts the horizon toward value-conditioned, axiological ontology of music as common human experience.
Their 'messages in the bottles' do not contain or transmit metaphysical truths; instead, they thematize distinct cultural, mental and physiological commonsensical experiences, for which the main values lay in what Rudolf Bockholdt sees as three main categories of the classical: the 'ripeness' (Reife) of individual style, its 'common intelligibility' (Allgemeinverständlichkeit), and its 'claim to excellence' (Anspruch) (Bockholdt 1987).
It is necessary to view similar postulates of cognitive universals with suspicion - just as it is important to question their relevance for the concept of modernism. However, it would be difficult to diminish, let alone deny, its importance for a modernist practice of musique informelle from the 1960s, centerd, pace Gianmario Borio, in the idea of an 'appeal to the recipient's world' ('Appellcharakter [...] an die Lebenswelt des Rez-ipienten'; Borio 1993: 173). The postmodern reflection of modernism in the musical ideals of Lebic, Rojko and Mihevc seems to struggle with the same problem as musique informelle: with aspirations to surpass the fast aging of the new that formed the core of Adorno's critique of new music during its 'heroic period' in his broadcast Das Altern der neuen Musik in 1954.
Although one of the central features of their musical poetics - the 'appeal to the recipient's world' - is infallibly postmodern, the main focus of their work should be set in a line with the 'emphatically New,' not only as a concept of twentieth-century music history, but as part of a much longer tendency, a process of searching for a 'better music.' In this sense, they are but dwarfs on the shoulders of a giant standing in the period of the enlightenment. Although it is irrelevant to argue about the modernity of their
respective musical idea(l)s and compositional practices - their views and music bring hardly anything 'emphatically new' in the technical or aesthetic sense -, they should be positioned within the concept of modernism in the most elemental, basic sense, as defined, for instance, by Boris Groys: 'Das Neue ist nicht bloß das Andere, sondern es ist das wertvolle Andere.' (Groys 1992: 43). Their positions within this notion of modern as a search for the valuable, not only different with regard to the old, could be, of course, questioned further. But notwithstanding that, their musical poetics are irrefutably an autonomous contribution to the concept of twentieth-century musical modernisms as a perplexed set of streams in their search of the new between different levels of expressive symbolism (Lebic), aesthetic immediacy (Mihevc) and acoustic sensualism (Rojko). Although the line of musical ideals, comparable to those by Lebic, Rojko and Mihevc should be prolonged, it seems that these three composers offer a handy set of differences for reflecting on musical modernity as a search for values that resist aging. For whom and to what extent they resist aging, of course, is a different, yet not less important question.
If, however, one tries to translate the main messages of their music into a listener's nomenclature, in which social universals of expectation are indicated with a z-Trans-formation of 9 categories (the 0 stands for the standard deviation, thus the importance rests on the range outside of +/- 1; Neuhoff 2007: 494):
A telling relation emerges between the anthropologically conceived expressive symbolism of Lojze Lebic, toward multicultural popularity oriented aesthetic immediacy of Marko Mihevc and utterly 'visceral' acoustic sensualism of Uros Rojko. If Lebic's semanticity demands more intimacy with anthropological universals, idiosyncratic for any local culture (thus tending to the ideal of transcendental values) and Rojko's 'physicalism' wavers between stimulation and contemplation, Mihevc's music seems to fit in between Lebic's philosophical imagery and Rojko's acoustic sensualism. Mihevc's concepts of music as an 'art of digestible sound forms' emerges as a compensation for a world without extremes of a 'natural musicality,' as one may wish to understand the affordances of Rojko's music, and 'cultural artfulness,' so specific to Lebic's works.
It should be fairly easy to draw parallels with a concept of music as an integrative symbol with Lebic's views, of music as certain indexical tapestry referring to an pragmatically understood 'top of the pops' within the Western musical heritage, as Mihevc sees it, whereas Rojko's views stimulate a view of music as an auditive iconic semblance of our mental and physiological processes. Yet, do the works of the mentioned composers - pars pro toto for the contemporary musical world - ring the same bell with listeners as they do for their authors? Of course not, yet it would be difficult to deny that the variables in grasping music may not be as different if compared to those given above as the plethora of possible other semantic correlates to music might suggest.
Of course, far from being able to draw universal conclusions about the nar-rativity of music from the three composers discussed (even less to claim universal qualities of music - besides, none of those composers enjoys wide popularity even in Slovenia), it would be hardly an exaggeration to claim that their artistic volition indicates a range within which human musical capacities function. The supposedly incommensurable differences in functions of music confine them temporally, geographically, or socially, but the indicated range nevertheless emphasizes an equally rooted persuasion that 'function [the semantic potential] of music presents itself precisely as a break with any conventional notion of the 'function,' the notion that is tacitly based on utility and the economics of survival' (Dolar 2006: 11). If only the differences should be considered when discussing functions of music along with the 'commonalities' that enable music to function, one might be tempted to ask whether contemporary music, as personified here by Lebic, Mihevc and Rojko, leads the 'enactment of musical meaning' or to the many different uses of music.
Even if an answer to this question may be imagined, at the moment one thing holds true: the fact that the music researcher's agenda with its hardly surveyable list of music's formal appearances and effects - music is, after all 'irrefutably grounded in human behaviors' (Cross 2003: 5) - still has not found a fertile ground to reflect the relation between common listening capacities3 and the imagery, phantasms and ideas that guide them. Yet it may well find more invariants in the future.
3 For instance Caroline Drake and Daisy Bertrand proposed a list of five potential cognitive universals: segmentation and grouping ('We tend to group into perceptual units events that have similar physical characteristics or that occur close in time'); predisposition towards regularity ('Processing is better for regular than irregular sequences. We tend to hear as regular sequences that are not regular'); active search for regularity ('We spontaneously search for temporal regularities and organize events around this perceived regularity'); temporal zone of optimal processing ('We process information best if it arrives at an intermediate rate'); and predisposition towards simple duration ratios ('We tend to hear a time interval as twice as long as previous intervals')
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Povzetek
Prispevek prinaša pregled raziskovanja funkcij glasbe. Skozi zgodovino pogosto, zlasti v zadnjih približno treh desetletjih vedno bolj dodelano začrtana tematika o funkcijah glasbe postavlja v ospredje spoznavoslovno različnost pristopov k pomenskosti glasbe. Prispevek tematizira vprašanje vsebinskega in metodološkega obsega raziskav o funkcijah glasbe. Sopostavlja in vzporeja raziskave o funkcijah glasbe, kot jih ponujajo avtorji od Mer-riamovega znamenitega seznama desetih funkcij
glasbe (Antropologija glasbe, 1964) naprej skozi optiko različnih disciplin, do študij, ki se osredotočajo na glasbene preferenc (kot je Rentfrow-Gosling: The Do Re Mi's of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences from 2003). Ker se raziskave funkcij glasbe odvijajo po eni strani v bolj naravoslovno in po drugi v družboslovno naravnanih okvirih brez posebnega, a potrebnega povezovanja obeh pristopov, je glavna misel prispevka predvsem poziv k upoštevanju naravoslovnih in družboslovnih gledišč kot dveh plateh raziskovalnega procesa istega pojava.
UDK 78.083.3Mahler Beat A. Föllmi
Université de Strasbourg Univerza v Strasbourgu
Unheimlich bewegt Ein 'unheimlicher' Diskurs in Gustav Mahlers Humoresken aus 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'
»Grozljiv« diskurz v humoreskah Gustava Mahlerja iz »Dečkovega čudežnega roga«
Prejeto: 14. april 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: Sigmund Freud, hermenevtika, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Mahler, pripovednost
Izvleček
S Freudovo psihoanalitično in estetsko kategorijo »grozljivega« avtor obdela prvih pet Mahlerjevih pesmi iz »Dečkovega čudežnega roga«, ki so označene kot »humoreske«. Prve tri pripovedujejo o travmatičnih seksualnih srečanjih, četrta o neugna-nem užitku in zadnja o glasbi sami, ko tisto, kar je domače in dobro znano, postane grozljivo.
Received: l4th April 2009 Accepted: Ist May 2009
Keywords: Sigmund Freud, Hermeneutics, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Mahler, Narrativity
Abstract
Anhand Freuds psychoanalytischer und ästhetischer Kategorie des „Unheimlichen" werden die ersten fünf Gesänge aus Mahlers Des Knaben Wunderhorn, mit der Bezeichnung „Humoresken", untersucht. Die ersten drei erzählen von traumatischen sexuellen Begegnungen, der vierte vom hemmungslosen Genießen und der letzte von der Musik selber, wie das Heimische, Vertraute zum Unheimlichen wird.
1. Psychoanalyse als Diskurs
Freuds Distanz gegenüber der Musik als Untersuchungsfeld ist allgemein bekannt. Dies mag einerseits mit der von ihm selber als ungenügend empfundenen eigenen musikalischen Kompetenz zusammenhängen, kann aber auch durch die stark von der
Romantik geprägte ideologische Aufladung der Musik (etwa 'als dem Ort des Irrationalen'), die eine gewisse Scheu bei Nicht-Musikern erzeugt, erklärt werden.1
Nun besteht auch noch heute die grundsätzliche Schwierigkeit, dass Psychologen und Psychoanalytiker in der Regel musikwissenschaftliche Dilettanten sind und Musikwissenschaftler psychologische analytische Laien.2 Als Musikwissenschaftler möchte ich mich nur im Hinblick auf die eigene Zunft kritisch äußern. Deshalb beschränke ich mich auf die Erwähnung von musikwissenschaftlichen Analysen, die sich eines psychoanalytischen Instrumentariums bedienen wollen, ohne dabei über ein populärwissenschaftliches Niveau hinauszugelangen. Seitens der Psychoanalytiker wage ich allenfalls die mir befremdliche Bevorzugung gewisser Musikstile, beispielsweise desjenigen Mozarts in der 'Mozart-Therapie', zu kritisieren, was mir auf einen ungerechtfertigten und letztlich überheblichen Eurozentrismus hinausläuft.3
Als Musikwissenschaftler bin ich grundsätzlich weder daran interessiert noch dafür kompetent, Herkunft und Wirkung musikalischer Erfahrung wissenschaftlich zu erfassen. Forschungen über pränatale Musikerfahrung etwa oder Ergebnisse musiktherapeutischer Untersuchungen verfolge ich mit großem Interesse, glaube aber nicht, dass sie mir zur Erklärung eines musikalischen Kunstwerk - und diese erachte ich als eine der Hauptaufgabe des Musikwissenschaftlers - wesentlich hilfreich sein können.
Dies soll keine Absage an die interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit zwischen Musikwissenschaft und Psychologie sein, sondern zu einer präzisen Standortbestimmung anregen. Für den Musikwissenschaftler ist die Psychoanalyse nicht bloß eine therapeutische Methode, sondern auch eine geistesgeschichtlich verortbare 'Weltanschauung', die ihm in vielen Kunstwerken am Ende des neunzehnten und zu Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts entgegentritt.4 Schönbergs Monodram Erwartung, Bergs Lulu oder Ene-scus Sdipe etwa nehmen am Diskurs, den Freuds Schriften damals in der Gesellschaft ausgelöst haben, teil - ja die Werke sind ohne Berücksichtigung dieses Diskurses kaum hinreichend zu deuten. Somit eröffnet das Beziehungsfeld Musik und Psychoanalyse, in geistesgeschichtlicher Hinsicht, vor allem das Feld der Diskursivität.
Diese Diskursivität bezieht sich aber in erster Linie auf das Kunstwerk - und erst durch dieses indirekt (wenn überhaupt) auf seinen Autor. Hier besteht meiner Meinung nach eine große Gefahr vieler psychoanalytischer Deutungen musikalischer Kunstwerke, welche das Musikwerk als direkten 'Abdruck' der psychischen Erfahrungen seines Schöpfers - also fast im Sinne eines 'Psychogramms' - verstehen. Dies stellt einen merkwürdigen Rückfall in die von der Genieästhetik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts geprägte Hermeneutik dar.5 In dieser Hinsicht lohnt sich, auf Freuds Beschäftigung mit einem
1	Siehe beispielsweise Kurt Eissler, „Psychopathology and creativity", in: American Imago 24 (1967), p. 35-81.
2	Doppelbegabungen wie Bernd Oberhoff sind dabei die sehr glückliche Ausnahme.
3	Diese Kritik gilt natürlich explizit Alfred A. Tomatis' „Mozart-Effekt".
4	In dieser Richtung sein folgende Forschung erwähnt: Marin Marian-Balasa, „Geografii psihanalitice ale sentimentalismului §i idilismului enescian" (Psychoanalytical Geographies of Enescu's Sentimentalism and Idyllism), in: George Enescu in perspectivä contemporanä, International Symposium of Musicology „George Enescu", 2001 and 2003, Editura Institutului Cultural Roman, Bucharest 2005, p. 199-205, eine brillante Studie, der allenfalls ihre zu starke Fixierung auf das Biografische vorgeworfen werden könnte.
5	Hermann Kretzschmar, „Anregungen zur Förderung musikalischer Hermeneutik", in: Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 10 (1902), p. 45-66; „Neue Anregungen zur Förderung musikalischer Hermeneutik", in: Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 13 (1905), p. 25-85; auch veröffentlicht in : Hermann Kretzschmar, Gesammelte Aufsätze aus den Jahrbüchern der Musikbibliothek Peters (=Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik, Bd. II), Leipzig (C .F. Peters), 1911, p. 168-192 und p. 280-293. Ferner: Arnold Schering, Beethoven und die Dichtung, Berlin, 1936
'Text' hinzuschauen: Seine Analyse von E.T.A. Hoffmanns Sandmann bedient sich zwar psychoanalytischer Methodik, nie hingegen schließt Freud auf den Autor, Hoffmann, zurück.6 Sein Untersuchungsgegenstand bleibt stets der Text - salopp formuliert: nicht Mozart gehört auf die Couch, sondern seine Musik. Psychoanalytisch geprägte Ansätze, welche sich werkzentriert mit historisch eingegrenzten Werken und Repertoires beschäftigen, halte ich deshalb für sehr erfolgversprechend, so wie dies beispielsweise Sebastian Leikert für die frühe Oper im Zusammenhang des Orpheusmythos getan hat.7
Dabei wird nicht in Abrede gestellt, dass ein Zusammenhang zwischen dem Autor und seinem Werk besteht. Es soll lediglich mit Nachdruck darauf hingewiesen werden, dass ein einmal geschaffenes Kunstwerk auch ohne seinen Schöpfer vollgültig existiert. In der Begegnung mit dem Kunstwerk tritt mir ja nicht in erster Linie und ausschließlich sein Schöpfer entgegen - das wäre eine unzulässige hermeneutische Reduktion, und im übrigen für den Rezipienten eine in den meisten Fällen sehr unbefriedigende Lektüre. Mich dem Kunstwerk (Literatur, Plastik, Musik) aussetzen, ist eine Begegnung vom mir selber im Fremden, wobei selbstverständlich verschiedene Horizonte diskursiv wirksam sind: Zeitgeschichte, Ästhetik und Religion genauso wie meine persönliche Erfahrung bzw. Befindlichkeit. Genau an dieser Stelle wird auch die Psychoanalyse wieder miteingeschlossen, und zwar in doppelter Hinsicht: als einen der möglichen historischen Diskurse und als diskursives Echo meiner persönlichen psychischen Erfahrung. Gerne nehme ich hier den von Bernd Oberhoff ins Spiel gebrachten Begriff der 'Göttlichen Stimme' auf,8 der sich idealerweise an den hermeneutischen Begriff 'voice' (beispielsweise im Anschluss an Lacan oder Michel Poizat) verwenden ließe.
2. Das Unheimliche
Eine solche doppelte Diskursivität, historisch wie individuell, möchte ich folgenden am Beispiel von Freuds Kategorie des 'Unheimlichen' und Gustav Mahlers Wunderhorn-Lieder zeigen. Die Entstehungszeiten zeigen bereits, dass es sich hier nicht um eine direkte Abhängigkeit handeln kann. Mahlers fünfzehn Orchesterlieder aus Des Knaben Wunderhorn entstanden zwischen 1892-1901, während Freuds Aufsatz über den Sandmann erst 1919, also acht Jahre nach Mahlers Tod, veröffentlicht worden ist. Trotzdem ist durchaus legitim, gerade in dieser Komposition Mahlers ein musikalisches Echo auf jenes Phänomen zu sehen, das Freud zunächst an einem literarischen Beispiel festmachen wird.
Für Freud ist das 'Unheimliche' der Gegensatz zum 'Heimlichen'. Er nähert sich dem Begriffspaar zunächst durch eine heuristische Sprachanalyse, wobei er nicht nur die deutsche, sondern ebenso die lateinische, griechische, englische, französische,
Der Sandmann, erstmals veröffentlicht in Imago 5 (1919), p. 297-324; auch in: Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 10, p. 369-408; in: Gesammelte Werke Bd. 12, p. 229-268; sowie in: Studienausgabe, Psychologische Schriften Bd. 4, p. 241-274. Sebastian Leikert, „Der Ursprung des musikalischen Symbols - Der Orpheusmythos als Grundparadigma der Oper", in: Bernd Oberhoff (Hrsg.), Die seelischen Wurzeln der Musik. Psychoanalytische Erkundungen, Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag), 2005, p. 65-85.
Bernd Oberhoff, „Die fötalen Wurzeln der Musik. Musik als ,Das Große Bewegende' und ,Die Göttliche Stimme'". in: derselbe, Die seelischen Wurzeln der Musik, p. 41-63.
spanische, italienische und portugiesische Sprache berücksichtigt. 'Heimlich' heißt 'heimisch' oder 'heimelig', also vertraut und meint, was uns bekannt ist. Heimlich ist das, was zum Heim oder Haus gehört (die 'Heimlichen' oder 'Einheimischen'). Daraus abgeleitet ergibt sich eine zweite Bedeutung, die im Sprachgebrauch des heutigen Deutsch die vorherrschende ist: heimlich meint das dem allgemeinen Blick Entzogene (weil es im Haus ist), also das Versteckte, Verborgene, Geheime. Das Unheimliche wäre also das Gegenteil davon, das Nicht-Heimliche: entweder das Nicht-zum-Heim-Gehörende oder das Nicht-Verborgene (Nicht-Geheime).
Bereits diese kurze Übersicht über die Bedeutung des Begriffspaares zeigt, dass hier eine merkwürdige Ambivalenz zutage tritt. Da 'heimlich' auch verborgen, verschlossen, undurchdringlich, geheim, mystisch meint, trifft sich die Bedeutung mit der Sphäre des 'Unheimlichen' und fällt mit ihr zusammen: Das Heimliche ist zum Unheimlichen geworden. Freud vermutete hinter diesem Wechsel nicht bloß eine Laune der Sprache, sondern sah darin das Resultat eines seelischen Vorgangs. Das 'Unheimliche' sei sehr oft dann gegeben, wenn ein etwas Bekanntes sich plötzlich als Unbekanntes entpuppe. Ein solches Beispiel sei die Figur des Doppelgängers (auch Spiegel- oder Schattenbild). Niemand ist uns vertrauter ('heimlicher'), als wir uns selbst sind, doch sobald wir unserem Doppelgänger gegenüberstehen, verwandelt sich das Vertraute ins Grauenerregende ('Unheimliche').
Ähnlich verhält es sich mit Puppen oder Automaten, wo die Kategorien des Beseelten und Unbeseelten durcheinandergeraten können (siehe dazu das Beispiel der automatischen Puppe Olimpia in Hoffmanns Sandmann). Ferner zitiert Freud generelle Erfahrungen des Alltags, wo Heimliches plötzlich in Unheimliches umschlagen kann, so beispielsweise wenn eine an sich harmlose und bedeutungslose Zahl in kurzer Folge mehrere Male auftaucht und so den Anschein einer verborgenen Absicht oder einer geheimen Bedeutung evoziert. Freud deutet den Ursprung dieser Gefühlsregung, den Wechsel vom Heimlichen zum Unheimlichen, als verdrängte Komplexe. Das 'Unheimliche ist wirklich nichts Neues oder Fremdes, sondern etwas dem Seelenleben von alters her Vertrautes, das ihm nur durch den Prozess der Verdrängung entfremdet worden ist.'9
Hier stellte sich Freud die naheliegende Frage nach dem Status der Kategorie des 'Unheimlichen'. Handelt es sich tatsächlich um eine ästhetische Kategorie und in welcher Hinsicht ist sie ästhetisch? Wo liegt der Zusammenhang und die Abgrenzung gegenüber den psychoanalytischen Phänomen? Dabei unterscheidet Freud streng zwischen dem Gefühl des Unheimlichen im Erleben einer Person und dem Unheimlichen in einem Kunstwerk (bei ihm in der Dichtung). Seiner Meinung nach ist es wichtig, 'einen Unterschied zu machen zwischen dem Unheimlichen, das man erlebt, und dem Unheimlichen, das man sich bloß vorstellt oder von dem man liest.'10 Dieser vermeintlich einleuchtende Unterschied ist allerdings weniger schroff, vergegenwärtigt man sich die Erkenntnis, das ein Text ja erst durch die aktive Teilhabe des Lesers konstruiert wird. Das Unheimliche ist demnach nicht bloß auf das Werk begrenzt und wird vom Leser als ein von ihm abgegrenztes Objekt wahrgenommen, sondern das Unheimliche eines Textes
9	SA IV, S. 264.
10	Freud, Das Unheimliche, p. 269.
wird erst durch den Leser erweckt - nicht im Text also (oder gar im Erleben des Autors) ist das Unheimliche, sondern im Leser. Dies gilt ganz besonders für das musikalische Kunstwerk, das ja keine 'fiktive Persönlichkeit' unmittelbar zu konstruieren vermag, so wie die Literatur es kann.
Trotz unsere Implikation als Rezipient muss es möglich sein, die Kategorie des Unheimlichen gewissermaßen aus 'intellektueller Distanz' zu betrachten. So hat die Beschäftigung mit Mahlers Musik nicht zum Ziel, dass uns dabei unheimlich wird, sondern unsere Analyse soll die Bedingungen, unter denen das Unheimliche in der Musik auftaucht, beschreiben. So wie man sehr ernsthaft darüber reden kann, wie ein Witz funktioniert, ohne dabei dauernd in Lachen ausbrechen zu müssen.
3. Unheimlich, ironisch, schrecklich
Mahler selber nannte die ersten fünf, im Jahre 1892 komponierten WunderhornLieder 'Humoresken'. Diese Art von Humor bei Mahler wird zumeist unter dem Stichwort der Ironie abgehandelt. Deshalb muss zunächst die Frage der Abgrenzung des Unheimlichen von den verschiedenen verwandten Kategorien, wie eben Humor, Ironie oder das Schreckliche (oder Erschreckende), gestellt werden.
Das Schreckliche und Erschreckende ist in der Kunst ein beliebter Topos. Es bezieht einen großen Teil des Vergnügens, das es dem Leser, Betrachter oder Hörer bereitet, aus dem spannungsvollen Verhältnis zwischen dem ästhetischen Anspruch der Kunst und dem ästhetischen Mittel. Bereits in der Barockoper war das Erschreckende ein fester Bestandteil, so in den Höllenszenen mit Geistern und Teufeln. Zur Darstellung der Sphäre des Unheimlichen hat sich zudem eine eigene Tonsprache mit verhältnismäßig klar abgegrenzten Mitteln herausgebildet: das tiefe Register, dunkle Klangfarben, bestimmte Instrumente (das Regal, die Posaunen etc.). Insbesondere aber wird dem Schrecklichen die Übertretung des Erlaubten zugeordnet ('licentia' in der barocken Rhetorik): verbotene Akkorde oder Intervalle, unerlaubte Stimmführung. In der heutigen Tonsprache wird das Schreckliche oft unverhüllt mit dem ästhetisch Hässlichen bzw. dem, was nach allgemeinem Empfinden dafür gehalten wird, gleichgesetzt. Man denke dabei an Filmmusik oder Musik in der Werbung: Atonalität und starke Dissonanzen markieren immer das Schreckliche oder Angsteinflößende. Arnold Schönberg hat sich diese Typologie in seiner Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielscen, op. 34, (komponiert 1929-1930) zunutze gemacht. Die Untertitel der drei Sätze heißen: 'Drohende Gefahr', 'Angst' und 'Katastrophe'. Zurecht werden diese drei 'psychographischen' oder auch 'psychophotographischen' Studien in die Nähe des 1909 entstandenen Monodrams Erwartung, op. 17, gerückt. Das Angstmachende steht hier wie dort im Vordergrund, sei es als objektivierte 'Drohende Gefahr', als subjektive 'Angst' oder als Erfahrung einer 'Katastrophe'. Im Gegensatz zum 'Unheimlichen' fehlt die Doppelbödigkeit, fehlen die beiden Ebenen Vordergrund und Hintergrund, aus denen das Unheimliche erst seine Wirkung bezieht.
Die Ironie hingegen zeichnet sich gerade durch das Doppelbödige, durch verschiedene Ebenen aus. Sie entsteht dadurch, dass vorgegeben wird, dass da etwas sei, was nicht ist. Die Ironie unterscheidet sich vom Witz nur graduell, nämlich wie offen-
sichtlich die beiden Ebenen - was sein will und was wirklich ist - auseinander treten. Bei der Ironie müssen die Signale deutlich genug sein. Ist der Zweifel, ob eine andere Ebene als die offen ausgesprochene gemeint sein könnte, zu groß, kann die Ironie nicht wirksam werden.
Ein musikalisches Beispiel für Ironie wäre Stravinskijs Scherzo la russe, das er zu Beginn der 1940er Jahre als Musik zu einem (uns nicht bekannten) Film für die Jazzband von Paul Whiteman schrieb und einige Jahre später für großes Orchester orchestrierte. Beim ersten Anhören mag man an Petrouchka erinnert sein, nur dass hier, im Gegensatz zum berühmten Ballet, eben die Ironie dominiert. Das behäbige volksliedhafte Thema setzt abrupt, geradezu plump ein. Es präsentiert sich derb, scheint zu hinken - so wie das darauffolgende, von Streichern, Klavier und Harfe vorgetragene Liedchen 'Elle avait une jambe de bois' nahelegt. Hier wird eine farbenprächtige und groteske 'Jahrmarktsszene' vorgeführt. Das behäbige Bläserthemas lässt die Szenerie nicht ins Unheimliche kippen, sondern belässt sie just da, wo sie immer war: im Bereich des Komischen, Heiteren. Die Jahrmarktszene bleibt immer Jahrmarktszene. Die opulente Orchestrierung, die gelegentlichen 'ernsthaften' oder 'tragischen' Stellen unterstreichen nur die komische Wirkung: hier ist Ironie, nichts Unheimliches - ganz im Gegensatz etwa zu Petrouchka, wo die Banalität des stetig repetierten russischen Volksliedes (Bild I, 'Danse russe') in all seiner 'anheimelnden' Vertrautheit nur allzu leicht ins Unheimliche umzuschlagen droht, zumal es im Ballett ja um eine Puppe geht, die zum Leben erweckt wird (man erinnere sich an Olimpia in Hoffmanns Sandmann).
4. Die 'unheimlichen' Wunderhorn-Lieder
In Wunderhorn-Lieder von Gustav Mahler zeigt sich das „Unheimliche" in besonderer Weise: Unter der Oberfläche des doch so vertrauten Volkstümlichen, Bekannten, Heimischen drängt überall das Verdrängte hervor, in jedem Moment droht behaglich Heiteres in unheimlich Abgründiges umzuschlagen. Dabei sind es gerade die beiden existentiellen Themen Sexualität und Tod, welche dominieren.
Im folgenden werden wir uns auf die ersten fünf Lieder des Zyklus beschränken, die alle den Untertitel 'Humoreske' tragen. Mahler selbst hat sich zu dieser Bezeichnung kurz nach Abschluss derer Komposition geäußert, sie seien 'noch viel eigenartiger [...] als meine früheren - ganz und gar Humor im höchsten Sinn (ein Ding, für welches nur der ungewöhnlichste Teil der Menschheit geschaffen ist).'11 Die angesprochene Eigenartigkeit der Humoresken bezieht sich nicht nur auf Mahlers Befürchtung, die Kompositionen seinen deswegen für 'seine Schubladen' komponiert, sondern eben auch auf die Eigenartigkeit des Humoristischen selbst. Der Komponist war sich offensichtlich bewusst, es mit einer Art 'Humor' zu tun zu haben, auf den dieser Begriff nicht recht zutrifft. In der Tat kann man Freuds kurze Zeit später entwickelten Begriff des 'Unheimlichen' hier fast exemplarisch vorgezeichnet finden.
11 Gustav Mahler, Brief an seine Schwester Justine (o. Datum, nach 26. April 1892), Sammlung Alfred Rosé, London, Ontario; auch abgedruckt in: Gustav Mahler, .Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band XIV, Teilband 2, Universal Edition, Wien [2001], p. XV.
Die fünf Humoresken bilden die erste Gruppe von insgesamt vierzehn Orchestergesängen unter dem Titel Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Die heute gültige Reihenfolge entspricht weder dem Kompositionsvorgang noch der Anordnung in den zu Mahlers Lebzeiten erfolgten Aufführungen, sehr wohl aber der Nummerierung in den unter Aufsicht des Komponisten erfolgten Veröffentlichungen. Es handelt sich um:
1.	Der Schildwache Nachtlied
2.	Verlorne Müh'!
3.	Trost im Unglück
4.	Das himmlische Leben
5.	Wer hat das Liedel erdacht?
Eine durchgehende 'Handlung' lässt sich innerhalb dieser fünf Nummern nicht konstruieren (und schon gar nicht innerhalb des ganzen Zyklus), wohl aber bestehen zahlreiche Verbindungslinien, Interferenzen und intertextuelle Bezüge, welche die fünf Humoresken eng zusammenschließen.
Bei den ersten drei Humoresken handelt es sich je um einen Dialog zwischen einem ER und einer SIE (in Nr. 2 sind die Rollenbezeichnungen sogar in die Partitur eingetragen), wobei in Form des Dialogs das Thema der verdrängten Sexualität expliziert wird. Die beiden folgenden Humoresken weichen formal von diesem Muster ab, führen jedoch das zentrale Thema der Sexualität unter dem Stichwort der 'Musik' weiter aus. In der abschließenden fünften Humoreske geht es dann zusätzlich um die Transformation von Sprache in Musik. Wir wollen das im folgenden detailliert ausführen.
Nr. 1: Der Schildwache Nachtlied
Die erste Humoreske handelt vordergründig von einen Soldaten, der nachts Wache halten muss und dabei auf eine Frau trifft, die ihn verführen will. Er bleibt standhaft seinem Auftrag treu, und die liebliche Gestalt löst sich auf. Der Mann ist hier zunächst als aktives, willensstarkes Individuum gezeichnet, das 'will', 'kann' und 'muss' bzw. 'nicht will'. Zur musikalischen Charakterisierung wird gleich zu Beginn ein aufsteigendes Motiv verwendet, das einerseits an eine Fanfare erinnert (und somit die Isotopie 'Krieg' evoziert), aber auch als phallisches Ikon fungiert. Die Eingangsphrase der Schildwache exponiert das Grundthema: 'Ich kann und mag nicht fröhlich sein! Wenn alle Leute schlafen, so muss ich wachen! Ja, wachen! Muss traurig sein!' - spricht also, mit schlafen und wachen, die Sphäre des Bewussten bzw. Unbewussten an. Gleichzeitig wird die Gegensätzlichkeit zwischen 'wollen' und 'können' thematisiert sowie die Unmöglichkeit der Erfüllung. Alle demonstrativ exponierte Männlichkeit - die Musik bringt mit Trommeln und Becken einen Marschrhythmus in Gang, die Trompete bläst Fanfarenmotive - kann die Fragilität des Individuums nicht überdecken. Denn unter der Oberfläche des Wachzustandes regt sich immer wieder eine Stimme, die das kriegerische Selbstverständnis in Frage stellt. Die Musik dieser 'weiblichen' Dialogteile ist 'etwas langsamer', später 'zögernd', der Rhythmus wechselt vom vorherigen akzentuierten 4/4-Takt auf einen 6/4-Takt, die melodische Struktur zerfließt in feine Girlanden der Holzbläser und der Harfe. Die erste Aufforderung der Stimme, ihr in den Rosengarten im grünen Klee
zu folgen, weist die Schildwache mit Hinweis auf die kriegerische Pflicht zurück: den 'Waffengarten, voll Helleparten', wobei die Waffenspieße offensichtlich das phallische Motiv wiederaufnehmen. Auch die zweite Einflüsterung, welche eine Art religiöse Sublimation vorschlägt ('An Gottes Segen ist alles gelegen!'), deutet der Soldat im Sinne männlicher Aktivität um: Der Glaube befähige zum Führertum. Auf dem Höhepunkt dieser Vision schlägt alles jäh um, die Angst bemächtigt sich der Schildwache: 'Bleib' mir vom Leib!' Zum dritten Mal erscheint die weibliche Stimme und entlarvt die kriegerische Rhetorik des Soldaten als männliches Fantasma. Die Musik verlangsamt sich (molto rit.) und soll 'bis zur gänzlichen Unhörbarkeit abnehmen'.
Nr. 2: Verlorne Müh'!
In der zweiten Humoreske läuft wiederum ein Dialog ab, in dem dieses Mal der weibliche Part dominiert. Dreimal bedrängt die Frau den jungen Mann mit ihren (erotischen) Avancen: 'Büble, wir wollen...', dreimal weist er sie zurück, jeweils mit einer stereotypen Antwort wie: 'Dinterle [Dummerchen], ich mag es halt nit!" Der erste Vorschlag, nach draußen zu gehen und „unsere Lämmer besehe', ist zunächst eine Aufforderung, sich von der Wachsamkeit allfälliger Zuschauer abzusetzen, bedeutet aber auch ein Weggehen von der heimischen Sicherheit ins 'Unheimliche'. Gleichzeitig evoziert die weiche Wolle der Lämmer die weibliche Scham. Die zweite Aufforderung wird bereits deutlicher, wenn nämlich davon die Rede ist, zu naschen und in die 'Tasch' zu greifen - der mehrmals repetierte Ruf „Hol'! Hol'!" lässt nicht viel Spielraum für Ambiguität. In der dritten Aufforderung bietet die Frau ihr „Herz" und schließt überaus eindringlich, ja geradezu flehentlich mit 'Nimm's, ich bitt!'. Handelt es sich beim Büble wirklich noch um ein Kind? Dann muss es sich in der Szene um die Darstellung eines Übergriffs handeln - vieles spricht dafür. Gerade die volkstümliche Sprache, insbesondere der schwäbische Dialekt mit den vielen niedlichen Verkleinerungsformen, verdeckt nur mit Mühe die gewaltvolle Realität der Szene. In der musikalischen Umsetzung jedenfalls wird die Zurückweisung des Büble von Mal zu Mal verzweifelter: Beim ersten Mal (T. 30-33) klingt sie noch in schlichter Diatonik, beim zweiten Mal (T. 65-71) mischt sich Chromatik hinein und das Wort 'nit!' wird mit langen, hohen Noten wiederholt, beim dritten Mal (T. 102-108) steigert sich die Antwort zur richtigen Verzweiflung und endet mit einem eigentlichen Schrei auf dem hohen Gis. Das vermeintliche Spiel versteckt in Wahrheit ein erlittenes Trauma.
Nr. 3: Trost im Unglück
Die dritte Humoreske ist ein Streitgespräch zwischen Mann und Frau. In der Erstausgabe der Fassung mit Klavier wurden die Passagen dem 'Husar' (T. 12-45) und seinem 'Mädchen' (T. 53-77) bzw. am Schluss den beiden (T. 85-97) zugeteilt. In der Partitur fehlt diese Angabe - und fast scheint es, als ob der Schluss vielleicht doch dem Mann alleine zuzuteilen wäre, immerhin ist es 'seine' Musik, welche den Gesang abschließt.
Der Husar legt von Anfang an ein machistisches Gehabe zutage. Die Kampf- und Reitersprache ist nichts anderes als sexistisches Imponiergehabe: Das Pferd muss 'gesattelt' und 'geritten' sein, denn 'die Zeit ist gekommen' - unverhüllt sexuelle Anspielungen. Allerdings ist das Imponiergehabe von einer tiefen Unsicherheit bedroht: Der Mann weist seine Geliebte überheblich zurück und schwört ihr gleichzeitig 'ewig treu zu sein' (T. 43-45). Die Unsicherheit der angeblichen männlichen Überlegenheit manifestiert sich in der Musik dadurch, dass die beiden Sphären - männlich und weiblich - nicht mehr klar voneinander geschieden sind: binärer und ternärer Rhythmus sind von Anfang an ineinander verschränkt. Das verleiht der sonst so stürmisch nach vorne drängenden Musik eine eigentümliche Unsicherheit. Die Antwort der Frau bestätigt die Befürchtungen des Mannes. Sie verspottet ihn nicht nur, indem sie seine angebliche Einzigartigkeit in Frage stellt, sie trifft ihn am aller stärksten darin, dass sie ihm als 'Rivalen' die väterliche Autorität entgegenhält: 'In meines Vaters Garten wächst eine Blume drin! So lang' will ich noch warten, bis die noch größer ist!' (T. 61ff). Sie kontert seine überhebliche, aber verkrampfte Sicherheit (Dreiklangsbrechungen und Diatonik) mittels einer destabilisierenden Chromatik in kleinschrittigen Intervallen. In der Schlussstrophe versucht der Mann (oder allenfalls beide, je nach Lesart) angesichts der massiven Kränkung sein Gesicht zu wahren und der Zurückweisung mit Spott zu begegnen.
Die drei ersten Humoresken zeigen also drei Möglichkeiten traumatisch erlebter Sexualität (das in der ersten Humoreske festgestellte aufsteigende 'phallische' Dreiklangsmotiv ist in allen dreien präsent): den vergebliche Versuch der Sublimierung angesichts einer Verführung in der ersten, den gewaltsame Übergriff in der zweiten und die kränkende Zurückweisung in der dritten.
Nr. 4: Das himmlische Leben
Die nun folgende vierte Humoreske ist ganz anderer Art und scheint auf den ersten Blick nichts mit den vorangegangenen zu tun zu haben. Zum ersten Mal fehlt die Dialogform, der Sänger bedient sich der Wir-Form. Der Sänger erzählt in scheinbarer Naivität das sorglose Genießen der himmlischen Bewohner. Alles in dieser Komposition ist betont heiter und sorgenfrei - 'Heiter behaglich' lautet die Überschrift. Der Text spricht von Freuden, vom Genießen, von Ruhe. Die 'englische' Musik ergießt sich in hellen, lichten Klangfarben: Harfe, Triangel, Becken, dazu viel Holzbläser. Zudem wird ein auffällig stabiles harmonisches Gerüst vorgegeben. So verharrt die Musik beispielsweise, trotz äußerer, rhythmischer Bewegtheit, während der ganzen ersten vier Takte in der Tonika (G-Dur), vom Bass noch zusätzlich durch den stereotypen Viertelrhythmus d-g (etwa in der Art eines volkstümlichen 'Zigeunerbasses') unterstützt - eben 'Heiter behaglich'.
Der Text bedient sich einer Reihe vertrauter Bilder aus der Himmelswelt. Das ganze biblische und hagiografische Personal ist vereint, um alles in ein Maximum an Genuss zu verwandeln: elftausend himmlischen Jungfrauen, der übervolle Paradiesgarten mit seinen Köstlichkeiten, die Engelsmusik unter Cäcilias Leitung. Alles ist so schön, so vertraut 'heimisch', dass es plötzlich kippen muss. Im Mittelteil (ab T. 40) wird zur Genussbefriedigung alles, was in die Quere kommt, geschlachtet und verspeist: Sogar
ein 'geduldig's, unschuldig's, geduldig's, ein liebliches Lämmlein' wird zu Tod gebracht, wobei der Kindermörder von Bethlehem, König Herodes, als Metzger fungiert - und dieser Tod dient nicht, wie das Lamm Gottes, für die Sünde der Welt, sondern zu unser puren hedonistischen Befriedigung. Ebenso skrupellos verfährt der Evangelist Lukas, der sein 'Wappentier', den Ochsen, ohne Bedenken schlachtet. Und später laufen Rehbock und Hasen uns direkt entgegen, wann immer uns danach gelüstet. Und sollte wegen der Fastenzeit der Fleischgenuss verboten sein, würden die Fische aus der biblischen Wundergeschichte (Lk 5,4-7 bzw. Joh 21,1-14) gleich 'mit Freuden' ins Netz springen.
An diesem Punkt verwandelt sich die Behaglichkeit der 'himmlischen Freuden' in eine orgastische Musik, die sich, erst 'unmerklich' beschleunigt (T. 89), dann mit der direkten Aufforderung, 'Vorwärts!' (T. 99) immer lebhafter wird (T. 114). Die Holzbläser verzieren die raschen 16tel-Noten mit kurzen Vorschlägen, in den Streichern treten Pizzicato und Glissandi dazu. Vor allem sorgen die mal offenen, mal gestopften Hörner sowie die stetigen, rollenden Paukenwirbel für eine latente Störung der so manifesten Fröhlichkeit. Die auf raschen, fast gehämmerten Achteln basierende Musik erinnert in ihrer Klanglichkeit an die Türkenmusik des 18. Jahrhundert (Janitscharenmusik).
Auf dem Höhepunkt dieser opulenten, aber bereits „unheimlichen" Klangentfaltung wird das Thema der himmlischen Musik vorgegeben: 'Kein' Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden, die unsrer verglichen kann werden' (T. 141ff). Das enthemmte, egoistische Genießen, das im Symbol der 'Musik' zusammengefasst wird, führt nun zur Entsprachlichung: Worte werden wiederholt, Silben gedehnt und in Melismen aufgelöst - bereits beim ersten Auftreten der Singstimme (T. 13f) und vor allem am Schluss (T. 141ff). Die vierte Humoreske stellt also, nach den drei vorangehenden traumatischen Varianten, eine idealisierte Fantasie eines hemmungslosen Genussauslebens dar, die allerdings in ihrer übergroßen Behaglichkeit bedroht ist und ins 'Unheimliche' zu kippen drohen.
Nr. 5: Wer hat dies Liedel erdacht?
Genau das Thema der 'Musik', des sprachlosen Wohlgefallens, wird in der fünften Humoreske mit dem Titel Wer hat dies Liedel erdacht? thematisiert. Dass hier tatsächlich die Musik selber (das 'Liedel') im Zentrum steht, zeigt sich unter anderem auch darin, dass Mahler in den Manuskripten bzw. in einigen Drucken abweichende Titel verwendet hat, nämlich kurz: Liedel (oder Liedlein). Interessanterweise hat er bei dieser fünften Humoreske sehr stark in die Textvorlage eingegriffen, um sie seinen Vorstellungen anzupassen. Aus dem ursprünglich aus drei je fünfzeiligen Strophen bestehenden Gedicht hat er die mittlere Strophe weggebrochen und durch einige stark veränderte Zeilen aus einem anderen Wunderhorn-Lied (Wer's Lieben erdacht) ersetzt.12 Selbst die belassenen zwei Strophen sind stark bearbeitet worden, durch Wort- und Zeilenwiederholung einerseits, durch eigentliche Textänderungen andererseits - so beispielsweise wird aus dem 'wacker Mädel' in der Vorlage bei Mahler ein 'fein's, lieb's Mädel'.
12 Zu den Einzelheiten, siehe den Kritischen Bericht, in: Gustav Mahler, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band XIV, Teilband 2, Universal Edition, Wien [2001], p. 315.
Der Text scheint zunächst in volkstümlicher Weise komisch zu sein: Ein hübsches Mädchen, das Wirtstöchterlein, hat einem Burschen das Herz gebrochen. Dessen Klage ist das vorgetragene 'Liedel', das - wegen seines allzu alltäglichen Inhalts - jedermann bekannt sein sollte. Wer es noch nicht kennen sollte, dem pfeifen es die Gänse. Die Musik nimmt den Volkston vordergründig auf: ein munterer 3/4-Takt mit parallel konstruierten, einfachen und eingängigen Phrasen, mit Terzen- und Sextenseligkeit, dazu die bildhafte Ausdeutung einzelner Worte (wie das 'hohe' Haus durch hohe Noten).
Irritierend sind die ständigen Wortwiederholungen. Bereits in der ersten Phrase verdoppelt der Sänger die Worte 'in dem hohen Haus', es folgt eine instrumentale Repetition in Moll abgedunkelt. Die dritte Zeile ('Es ist nicht daheime!') wird sogar zweimal hintereinander völlig identisch gesungen. Zusätzlich suggerierte die nächste Zeile sogar noch eine weitere Wiederholung, da sie mit identischen Worten beginnt ('Es ist...').
In der zweiten Strophe erhalten die Text- (und Melodie-) Repetitionen eine abgründige Bedeutung. Die Aufzählung der Wirkungsmächtigkeit der Liebe wird zu einem 'unheimlichen' crescendo. In fünf Anläufen, jede stereotyp mit demselben Wort 'macht' beginnend, steigert sich die Singstimme in eine verzweifelte Beschwörung hinein. Aufgezählt werden jene Eigenschaften, die seit altersher der Musik nachgesagt werden: Herzen gesund zu machen, Jugend verständig, Tote lebendig13, Kranke gesund.14 Durch die Repetitionen, die ausufernde Chromatik, die kühne Enharmonik wird diese Stelle zum Drehpunkt, an dem die Musik ins 'Unheimliche' kippt. Das anfängliche Liebesleid wirkt nicht mehr 'drollig', es stellt sich vielmehr ein 'unheimlicher' Untergrund ein: Wer die 'Musik' nicht selber singen kann, dem pfeifen sie die Gänse. Die uneingeschränkte Erfüllung von Liebe und Sexualität - wie sie die vorangehende Humoreske Das himmlische Leben entfaltet - verwandelt sich hier zum Trauma angesichts des Nicht-Könnens. An diesem Punkt entgleitet die Sprache immer stärker und löst sich in Musik auf, in ein 'objet-voix', wie Michel Poizat es nennt.15 Zweimal treten ungewöhnliche lange Melismen auf, wie man sie sonst bei Mahler nicht findet: zu Beginn auf das Wort 'Haide' (T. 35-45, insgesamt 62 Noten) und auf dem letzten Wort des Gesangs überhaupt: 'Ja!' (T. 87-96, insgesamt 56 Noten).
Mahler selber nennt einmal die Musik seiner Wunderhorn-Lieder 'unheimlich', und zwar im Hinblick auf den Gesang Das irdische Leben, einen Dialog zwischen einem Kind, das hungrig nach Brot schreit, und der Mutter, die stets auf das Morgen vertröstet, solange bis das Kind verhungert ist. Er schreibt kurz nach Abschluss der Komposition über die existentielle Dimension dieser Musik: 'Und ich glaube, daß das [immerzu Vertrösten auf später] in den unheimlichen, wie im Sturm dahinsausenden Tönen der Begleitung [...] charakteristisch und furchtbar zum Ausdruck kommt.'16
Es scheint wie ein 'unheimlicher' Zufall, dass dieser Gesang mit der Tempoangabe Unheimlich bewegt überschrieben ist.
Hier verwendet Mahler sogar das Mittel der „Augenmusik", indem beim Wort „Tote" Kreuze und Doppelkreuze auftreten. Sehr schön zusammengefasst hat dies Johannes Tinctoris im Complexus effectum musices (um 1473/74), hrsg. von E. de Cous-semaker, Scriptorum de Musica Medii Aevi, Nova Series, Bd. 4, Paris 1876; Reprint: Hildesheim 1963, p. 195-200. Michel Poizat, L'Opéra ou le cri de l'ange. Essai sur la jouissance de l'amateur d'opéra, Paris 1986.
Notiz von Juli/August 1893 aus Steinbach am Attersee; ausschnittweise auch abgedruckt in: Gustav Mahler, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Band XIV, Teilband 2, Universal Edition, Wien [2001], p. 318.
13
14
Li
lé
Povzetek
Izhajajoč iz Freudove kategorije »grozljivega«, ki jo je kot psihoanalitično in estetsko kategorijo razvil na podlagi E.T.A. Hoffmannove novele Škrat (ki otrokom meče pesek v oči, da zaspijo), poizkuša prispevek analizirati prvih pet pesmi Mahlerje-vega ciklusa Iz dečkovega čudežnega roga, ki so označene kot humoreske. Pokaže se, da kategorija humorističnega, ki in kakor jo predlaga skladatelj, le deloma ustreza. Vseh pet »humoresk« bolj kaže na potlačeno »ospodje«, v katero se lahko vsak trenutek sesuje prijetno in veselo površje. Tako prve tri pesmi - v preobleki naivnih dialogov -pripovedujejo o različnih travmatičnih seksualnih
srečanjih. V prvi pesmi (Stražarjeva nočna pesem) gre za zapeljevanje in strah pred nezmožnostjo upiranja, v drugi (Izgubljeni trud) se komaj zastrto pripoveduje o samovolji, medtem ko tretja pesem (Tolažba v nesreči) govori o boleči zavrnitvi nekega meča. Četrta nam prikaža idealizirano fantazmo o »nebeškem življenju«, v katerem je neugnani užitek povezan z izrazom »glasba«. Peta humoreska (Kdo si je izmislil to pesmico?) pa ima za temo glasbo samo: navidez folklorno sceno, polno blažečih terc in sekst, moteče izstopajoče ponovitve na svoj način peljejo v prepad. V smislu Freuda postane tisto, kar je domače in dobro znano, grozljivo, in to v tistem trenutku, ko se jezik pesmi razkroji v čisti »objekt-voix«.
UDK 782Mozart:159-964.6 Bernd Oberhoff
Universität Kassel Univerza v Kasslu
Die unbewusste Sinnebene in Mozarts Oper Idomeneo
Podzavestna raven smisla v Mozartovi operi
Idomeneo
Prejeto: 11. februar 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: psihoanaliza glasbe, Mozart, psihoanaliza in opera, Idomeneo, psihoanaliza in muzikologija, Ojdipov kompleks in opera
Izvleček
Ob svojih kliničnih izkušnjah je psihoanaliza razvila nekaj metod, ki služijo razvozlavanju podzavesti in ki jih moremo koristno uporabiti ta razumevanje podzavestnih tem v glasbenih delih. Avtor predstavi dve takšni metodi - iritacijsko teorijo in analizo nasprotnega prenosa - ter pokaže, kako je s tema instrumentoma moč odkriti latetntni smisel Mozartove opera Idomeneo. Oba metodološka pristopa pokažeta, da pri opernem dogajanju, ki sicer prikazuje brezhiben odnos med očetom in sinom, gre v resnici za smrtni boj med obema.
Received: 11th February 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: Psychoanalysis of Music, Mozart, Psychoanalysis and Opera, Idomeneo, Psychoanalysis and Musicology, Oedipuscomplex and Opera
Abstract
Die Psychoanalyse hat in ihrem klinischen Erfahrungsfeld etliche Methoden zur Entzifferung des Unbewussten entwickelt, die auch für das Verstehen unbewusster Themen in Werken der Musik dienstbar gemacht werden können. Bernd Oberhoff stellt zwei solcher Methoden vor - die Irritationsanalyse und die Gegenübertragungsanalyse - und demonstriert, wie mit Hilfe dieser Instrumente ein Aufdecken eines latenten Sinnes von Mozarts Oper Idomeneo möglich ist. Beide methodischen Annäherungen lassen offenbar werden, dass unterhalt der manifesten Opernhandlung, die ein untadeliges Vater-SohnVerhältnis zur Anschauung bringt, ein mörderischer Kampf zwischen Vater und Sohn tobt.
Einleitung
Was geniale Musik auszeichnet, ist die Tatsache, dass sie aus dem Unbewussten geschöpft ist. Große Komponisten haben dies immer gewusst. Johannes Brahms hat im
Gespräch mit dem amerikanischen Musikjournalisten Abell darauf hingewiesen, dass jede wahre kompositorische Inspiration einem Raum entstammt, den 'die heutigen Psychologen das Unterbewusste nennen' (Abell 1955, S. 56 ff.). Den Akt des Komponierens charakterisiert Brahms als eine Art 'Halbtrance..., ein Zustand, in welchem das bewusste Denken vorübergehend herrenlos ist und das Unterbewusstsein herrscht, denn durch dieses ... geschieht die Inspiration' (ebd.).
Auch der Begründer der modernen Musik, Arnold Schönberg, war davon überzeugt, dass die Inspirationsquelle im Unbewussten liegt: 'Das Schaffen des Künstlers ist triebhaft. Das Bewusstsein hat wenig Einfluss darauf. Er hat das Gefühl, als wäre ihm diktiert, was er tut. Als täte er es nur nach dem Willen irgendeiner Macht in ihm, deren Gesetz er nicht kennt. Er ist nur der Ausführende eines ihm verborgenen Willens, des Instinkts, des Unbewussten in ihm' (Schönberg 1922, S. 497)
Von dieser Einsicht hat die Musikwissenschaft bislang leider wenig Gebrauch gemacht. Es scheint so, dass sie lieber der Formalästhetik eines Eduard Hanslick gefolgt ist, wonach Musik nichts weiter als 'tönend bewegte Form' (Hanslick 1854) ist. Diese Einschätzung mag für mittelmäßige, uninspirierte Kompositionen zutreffen. Doch geniale Werke zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie virulente unbewusste Themen transportieren. Und es sind diese unbewussten Themen, die den eigentlichen Reiz und die Faszination eines Musikwerkes ausmachen. Was liegt also näher, als die Musik mit den Mitteln der Wissenschaft vom Unbewussten, der Psychoanalyse, zu entziffern?
Ausgangspunkt und wesentliche Erkenntnisquelle einer psychoanalytischen Musikanalyse ist das subjektive Erleben von Musik. Da wir gemeinhin von einer wissenschaftlichen Methodik Objektivität erwarten, ist ein subjektives Erleben als Erkenntnisinstrument natürlich zunächst einmal suspekt. Der subjektive Faktor im Akt der Rezeption bringt in der Tat einige Unwägbarkeiten in eine wissenschaftliche Analyse. Es wäre jedoch töricht, ihn deswegen als unbrauchbar zu verwerfen und beiseite zu schieben, denn das wäre gleichbedeutend mit einem Verzicht darauf, die unbewussten Sinnstrukturen in einem Musikwerk erkennen und verstehen zu lernen.
Subjektivität ist nicht in jedem Fall gleichzusetzen mit Unklarheit und Verzerrung. Man kann durchaus eine geübte und reflektierte von einer ungeübten und unreflek-tierten Subjektivität unterscheiden. Je mehr ein Mensch sich über seine verborgenen Wünsche, Phantasien und Triebregungen Klarheit verschafft hat, umso leichter kann er sie als eigene Zutat beim Rezipieren eines Musikstücks erkennen und muss sie nicht der Komposition als dessen Eigenschaft unterschieben.
Wir müssen also das Wagnis eingehen, uns auf unsere subjektiven Reaktionen beim Hören einer Musik einzulassen, auch auf die Gefahr hin, zunächst einmal vornehmlich den eigenen Idiosynkrasien oder konflikthaften psychischen Strukturen zu begegnen. Wir dürfen aber getrost darauf vertrauen, dass sich im Fortgang des fachlichen Diskurses die gültigen von den subjektiv verzerrten Eindrücken und Erkenntnissen scheiden werden. Achten wir auf die Plausibilität der geschilderten Perzeptionen und verfolgen wir aufmerksam den Prozess der konsensuellen Validierung durch die Analysen verschiedener Autoren, so werden wir am Ende des Weges zu den wahren unbewussten Sinnstrukturen der Musik gelangen. Ein alternativer Weg steht uns nicht zur Verfügung. Alfred Lorenzers Feststellung hat nichts von ihrer Gültigkeit verloren: 'nur als 'subjek-
tive' Analyse lässt sich modo psychoanalytico der latente Sinn erschließen' (Lorenzer 1986, S. 68).
Welche Methoden hat die Psychoanalyse anzubieten, um die unbewussten Bedeutungsstrukturen eines Musikstückes zu entziffern? Ich werde im Folgenden an Mozarts Oper Idomeneo einmal die Anwendung zweier solcher Methoden praktizieren, um den latenten Sinn zu erschließen. Es handelt sich zum einen um die sog. Irritationsanalyse und zum anderen um die Gegenübertragungsanalyse. Beide Methoden zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie die eigenen Empfindungen im Erleben eines Musikwerkes aufmerksam zur Kenntnis nehmen und kritisch reflektieren und evaluieren.
Die manifeste Handlung des Geschehens in Mozarts Idomeneo lässt sich in Kürze folgendermaßen zusammenfassen:
Ilia, die trojanische Prinzessin, die in griechischer Gefangenschaft lebt, beklagt ihr trauriges Schicksal. Einerseits hasst sie die Griechen, weil sie Troja zerstört haben, andererseits beginnen sich in ihr Liebesgefühle gegenüber dem kretischen Prinzen Idamantes zu entwickeln, der zu ihrem Lebensretter wurde.
Idomeneo, König von Kreta, hatte, als er in Seenot geriet, Gott Neptun gegenüber einen Schwur geleistet, er werde den ersten Menschen, dem er nach seiner sicheren Rückkehr an Land begegnet, auf dem Altar opfern. Dieser erste Mensch ist dann zu seinem Schrecken sein eigener Sohn Idamantes. Um die Opferung zu umgehen, plant Idomeneo, Idamantes außer Landes zu schicken. Doch Neptun fühlt sich hintergangen und schickt ein Ungeheuer, dass sich mordend über das Königreich hermacht. Nun bleibt Idomeneo keine andere Wahl, als die Opferung des Sohnes vorzunehmen. Idamantes ist bereit, das Opfer auf sich zu nehmen, um die Götter wieder zu besänftigen, ja er fordert den zögerlichen Vater sogar dazu auf, ihm den Todesstoß zu versetzen. Im letzten Moment verhindert Ilia die grausige Tat, indem sie sich selbst als Opfer anbietet. Die Götter sind durch dieses mutige Verhalten versöhnt. Sie verzichten auf einen Menschenopfer und lassen durch eine unterirdische Stimme verkünden: 'Idomeneo sei nicht mehr König, König sei Idamantes und Ilia seine Gemahlin.' Unter Jubelgesängen und einem Ballett werden der glückliche Ausgang und die Hochzeit des jungen Paares gefeiert.
Soweit die Opernhandlung. Der Inhalt des Geschehens erscheint eindeutig. Es spricht alles für jene Exegeten, die in Mozarts Idomeneo das aus kultureller Frühzeit stammende Phänomen der Kindesopferung zum Thema erhoben finden. Mozarts Musik fällt dabei die Rolle der musikdramatischen Ausgestaltung dieses antiken Dramas zu. Dieser Einschätzung wird sicherlich niemand widersprechen wollen. Und doch erscheint es mir, als wäre damit nicht der gesamte Sinn erfasst, den diese erste große Oper Mozarts auszeichnet.
Der Übermacht des Augenscheinlichen habe ich als psychoanalytischer Musikforscher eigentlich nur eine Winzigkeit entgegenzusetzen und zwar jene Winzigkeit, die der Eth-nopsychoanalytiker Georges Devereux einmal in den schlichten Satz fasste: 'Ein leichtes Unbehagen sagte mir, dass es hier etwas zu verstehen gäbe' (Devereux 1967, S. 340).
In diesem Sinne werde ich im Folgenden einmal meinem 'leichten Unbehagen' nachspüren und mich jenen Passagen dieser Oper zuwenden, die für mich etwas
Irritierendes oder Störendes an sich haben. Ich wähle also die Methode einer Irritationsanalyse, um einer möglichen latenten Thematik auf die Spur zu kommen. Was ist irritierend an dieser Oper?
1. Der unschuldige Idamantes und Elektras mörderische Wut
Idamantes stellt gleich im 1. Akt seine edle Gesinnung unter Beweis, indem er den anlandenden trojanischen Gefangenen die Fesseln abnehmen lässt. Offen wirbt er um die Gunst Ilias. Seine erste Arie beginnt mit den Worten 'Non ho Colpa', ich habe keine Schuld. Man weiß nicht genau, worauf sich diese Feststellung bezieht, aber es geht dem Librettisten wohl schlicht und einfach darum, diesen jungen Prinzen als rein und makellos erscheinen zu lassen. Sie merken schon, wie sich bereits hier in mir ein leichter Affekt gegen diesen kretischen Prinzen einzustellen beginnt, weil mir bei dessen Edelmut und Reinheit, sowie der etwas zu oft betonten Unschuld etwas unbehaglich zumute wird.
Es erscheint Elektra, die Tochter des Griechenkönigs Agamemnon, die ebenfalls Liebesgefühle zu Idamantes hegt. Es bleibt ihr nicht verborgen, dass der Prinz mehr an der jungen Trojanerin als an ihr interessiert ist. Dieser Umstand macht sie wütend. Überwältigt von rasender Eifersucht beschwört sie in einer Rache-Arie die Furien der Unterwelt. Im B-Teil dieser Arie werden unverblümte Morddrohungen gegen die Rivalin ausgestoßen.
Dieser Rachegesang der Elektra ist eine große, dramatische Arie, die zu den eindrucksvollsten dieser Oper zählt. Man kann sagen, Mozart setzt hier einen deutlichen Akzent und gibt mit dieser kraftvollen Musik zu verstehen, dass diese heftige Affektivität nicht randständig ist, sondern ihr ein zentrales Gewicht zukommt.
So verständlich Eifersucht und Gekränktheit über Idamantes Werben um Ilias Zuwendung sein mögen, so wenig verständlich ist das Ausmaß an überbordender Aggressivität, die hier zum Ausbruch kommt. Dieses Ausmaß an kaum zu kontrollierenden und unverhüllten Aggressionen gegen Ilia lassen sich aus dem Handlungsgeschehen nicht wirklich herleiten. Ilia hat ja noch nicht einmal kund getan, ob sie Idamantes überhaupt liebt. Insofern fragt man sich, woher soviel mörderische Wut bei Elektra stammt. Hier der Text ihrer Arie (nach Angermüller 2005).
1. Akt, 6. Szene
Nr. 4 Arie („Tutte nel cor vi sento") Elektra
Euch fühl ich all ich im Herzen, Furien des dunklen Hades, fern sind so großen Leiden Liebe, Dank und Erbarmen.
Wer dieses Herz mir raubte, das Herz, das das mein verriet, soll in meinem Wüten fühlen Rache und Grausamkeit.
Unmittelbar im Anschluss an Elektras Arie braut sich auf dem Meer ein Unwetter zusammen. In der Bühnenanweisung heißt es: '...das noch bewegte Meer schlägt an die Felsen, zertrümmert Schiffe am Ufer'. Man bekommt den Eindruck, dass sich Elektras heftige Affektivität gleichsam in der äußeren Umgebung fortsetzt. Elektras innere Wut wird zu Neptuns Wüten in der äußeren Wirklichkeit. Ein eindrucksvolles Bild einer unabgegrenzten Innen/Außenwelt.
Gibt es zwischen den mörderischen Affekten Elektras und Neptuns zerstörerischem Wüten einen Zusammenhang?
2. Das Aufeinandertreffen von Vater und Sohn
In der 8. Szene begegnen wir zum ersten Mal Idomeneo, dem König von Kreta, der entgegen allen Befürchtungen nicht auf dem Meere umgekommen ist, sondern die Heimreise von Troja heil überstanden hat. 'Endlich sind wir gerettet', sind seine ersten Worte. Doch diese Einschätzung ist nur für die äußere Situation zutreffend. Die sich nach und nach einstellende Ruhe des Meeres lässt Idomeneos innere Unruhe umso lauter werden. Er denkt an seinen 'grausamen Schwur', den ersten Menschen, der ihn bei seiner Rückkehr auf Kreta begegnet, auf dem Altar zu opfern. Idomeneo wähnt die Götter offensichtlich durstig nach Menschenblut.
Die Person, die sich am Strand dem Idomeneo nähert, ist - man ahnt es schon - niemand anderer als sein eigener Sohn Idamantes. Bei Idamantes ist die Wiedersehensfreude groß, jedoch der Vater wendet sich erregt und bestürzt ab. Idamantes versteht diese Abwendung als eine brüske Zurückweisung und gibt seinen Gefühlen in der Arie 'Den geliebten Vater finde ich wieder und verliere ihn' Ausdruck.
Der Mythos bemüht sich sehr darum, diese gescheiterte Annäherung zwischen Vater und Sohn aus einer edlen Gesinnung heraus motiviert erscheinen zu lassen. Der Vater wendet sich ab aus Erschütterung und Mitleid mit dem Sohn, und der Sohn ist traurig darüber, den Vater so abweisend und bestürzt zu erleben. Tatsache ist jedoch, dass Vater und Sohn hier nicht zueinander finden. Irgendetwas steht zwischen ihnen.
Ich wurde an dieser Stelle spontan an Mozarts Beziehung zu seinem Vater Leopold erinnert, und zwar zu jener Zeit, die der Fertigstellung des Idomeneo unmittelbar vorausgeht. Ich meine Mozarts seltsames Gebaren bei seiner Rückkunft aus Paris (1779), einer Rückkunft, die er so lange es eben ging hinauszögerte. In seinen Briefen tat er stets so, als wäre es ihm das wichtigste Anliegen, seinen Vater sobald als möglich wiederzusehen. Aus Paris schrieb er: 'Das herz lacht mir wenn ich auf den glücklichen tag dencke wo ich wieder das vergnügen haben werde sie zu sehen und von ganzem herzen zu ümarmen' (Brief vom 31.7.1778, Nr. 471, Bd. II, S. 428). Doch das war wohl nur die halbe Wahrheit, gleichsam die offizielle Version, welche die darunter liegende dunklere Realität überdecken sollte. Denn Mozart tat alles dazu, den direkten Weg nach Salzburg zu verfehlen. So machte er längere Zeit Station in Straßburg, dann reiste er gegen den ausdrücklichen Willen des Vaters noch nach Mannheim, machte Zwischenstation in Kaysersheim (Kaisheim) und hielt sich länger in München auf.
Der Vater fühlte sich zum wiederholten Male an der Nase herum geführt und erlebte richtigerweise dieses unendliche Hinauszögern der Rückkunft als eine Aggression gegen seine Person. Sein Ärger darüber entlud sich dann im Brief vom 28.12.1778. Knapp und unmissverständlich lässt er seinen Sohn wissen: 'Ich will also, daß du alsogleich nach meiner vorschrift abreisest, da es abscheulich ist, und ich mich schäme alle Welt versichert zu haben, dass du auf Weihnachten ... ganz gewiß hier seyn wirst. Himmel, wie oft hast du mich zum Lügner gemacht' (Briefe II, S. 526).
Mozart reagiert auf diesen Rüffel seines Vaters in gleicher Weise wie Idamantes: 'Non ho colpa'. In seinem Schreiben vom 8.1.1779 heißt es: 'ich weis mich nichts schuldig, dass ich von ihnen vorwürfe zu befürchten hätte; - ich habe keinen fehler (...) begangen' (Briefe II, S. 536). Nun, das Libretto will es ebenfalls so, dass auch Idamantes 'sich nichts schuldig weiß" und „keinen Fehler begangen' hat.
Da wir, anders als Mozart und seine Librettist Varesco, uns nicht 100 Jahre vor Sigmund Freud sondern 100 Jahre danach befinden, sind uns bestimmte Mechanismen, die der Mensch gegen unerwünschte psychischen Regungen einsetzt durchaus bekannt und vertraut. Wir haben zudem gelernt, dass wir in mythischen Erzählungen, ähnlich wie im nächtlichen Traum, oftmals auf einen Doppelsinn treffen. Der Doppelsinn entsteht dadurch, dass ein anstößiger Gedanke vom Traumzensor so umgewandelt worden ist, dass alles Anstößige aus ihm entfernt ist. Der Gedanke hat also eine Entstellung erfahren, die man rückgängig machen muss, um den ursprünglichen oder eigentlichen Sinn zu erkennen.
Es gibt etliche solcher Entstellungsmechanismen, die in der sog. Traumarbeit Anwendung finden. Einer dieser Mechanismus ist z.B. die Verkehrung, bei der die Dinge geradezu entgegengesetzt dargestellt werden, als sie in Wirklichkeit sind: Großes erscheint ganz klein oder Dunkles ganz hell. Ist in der Darstellung Idamantes vielleicht dieser Mechanismus der Verkehrung von dunkel in hell am Werke? Wird der junge Prinz nicht die ganze Oper hindurch deshalb als makellos und strahlend hell dargestellt, um auf diese Weise von seinen dunklen Seiten abzulenken, die uns verständlich machen könnten, warum der Vater den Sohn zu töten beabsichtigt?
Aus Freuds Arbeiten über die Träume ist noch ein anderer Mechanismus bekannt, der zur Tarnung anstößiger Wahrheiten Anwendung findet, nämlich die Verschiebung. Bei der Verschiebung werden Eigenschaften oder Gefühlsregungen von einer Person auf eine andere verschoben. Auf diese Weise kann verborgen bleiben, wer der eigentliche Träger dieser Regungen ist. Wenn wir einmal diesen Mechanismus der Verschiebung in Betracht ziehen, so fällt auf, dass zwar Idamantes und auch Idomeneo ausschließlich edel und liebevoll erscheinen, um sie herum jedoch heftigste destruktive Leidenschaften lodern. Wir haben davon gerade zuvor etwas im Gesang der Elektra erlebt, wo es in ihrem 'Wüten' um 'Rache und Grausamkeit' ging, und wir erleben es bei Gott Neptun, von dessen wilden Toben in dieser Oper immer wieder die Rede sein wird. Ist es möglich, dass es sich bei diesen aggressiven Energien um Affekte im Innern von Idomeneo und Idamantes handelt, die nur auf Elektra bzw. Neptun verschoben sind und von diesen Personen stellvertretend ausgedrückt werden?
3. Ilia, eine Geliebte von Vater und Sohn?
Wir gehen über zur 2. Szene des 2. Aktes, die, wenngleich äußerst knapp und nahezu unscheinbar, eine ganz neue und völlig unerwartete Perspektive auf das Operngeschehen wirft.
In dieser Szene treffen erstmalig der kretische König Idomeneo und die trojanische Prinzessin Ilia aufeinander, und es entwickelt sich auf engstem Raum zwischen den beiden eine emotionale Nähe und Innigkeit, die man so nicht erwartet hätte. Diese beiden Personen scheinen sich nicht gleichgültig zu sein. Ähnlich wie in der Zauberflöte die Beziehung zwischen Pamina und Sarastro, so besitzt auch diese Beziehung eine gewisse erotische Qualität. Das Libretto des Abbate Varesco bemüht sich zwar, diese als eine Vater-Tochter-Erotik erscheinen zu lassen. Aber es ist unübersehbar, dass Idomeneo der hübschen Trojanerin recht weitgehende Angebote macht. So hören wir aus seinem Munde an Ilia gewandt: 'Über mich, über meine Schätze, verfüge, Ilia, und ich werde sorgen, dir deutliche Beweise meiner Freundschaft zu geben.' Darüber hinaus gibt es Anzeichen dafür, dass Idomeneo in Konkurrenz zu seinem Sohn um die Gunst Ilias buhlt. Wir erleben, wie Idomeneo gegenüber Ilia die Rettungstat seines Sohnes herunterspielt und stattdessen sein eigenes Verdienst daran herausstreicht: 'Als mein Sohn Idamantes dir die Freiheit schenkte, war er nur der glückliche Vollbringer des väterlichen Willens. Wenn er mir dabei zuvorgekommen ist, bestätige ich alles, was er tat, dir nützlich zu sein'.
Dieses Werben um die Zuneigung der trojanischen Prinzessin muss aufhorchen lassen. Und wenn wir dann noch erfahren, dass in der französischen Vorlage zu diesem Libretto, in Antoine Danchets Tragédie lyrique Idoménée Ilia ganz real die Geliebte des Idomeneo war, so taucht plötzlich eine Konstellation auf, die wir auf Grund des bisherigen Geschehens nicht unbedingt vermutet hätten. Gemeint ist das hier sich andeutende ödipale Dreieck zwischen Idomeneo-Ilia-Idamantes.
Wenn ich diese Konstellation ödipal benenne, dürfen wir nicht aus den Augen verlieren, dass wir uns in vorfreudianischer Zeit befinden, in der man solche Affekte und Phantasien noch nicht begrifflich und psychologisch einzuordnen wusste. Infolgedessen wird man sich von den mit diesem Komplex verbundenen heftigen libidinösen wie auch aggressiven Affekten äußerst bedroht gefühlt und sie tunlichst von seinem Bewusstsein ferngehalten haben. Aber es gab im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert auch die gegensätzliche Tendenz. Die Menschen begannen sich für das innerpsychische Geschehen zu interessieren. In der Nachfolge von Jean Jacques Rousseau richteten sie ihren Blick auf ihr Inneres, um dort in Kontakt mit der Stimme der Natur, d.h in Kontakt mit ihrer psychischen Realität zu gelangen. Was die Zuwendung zur inneren psychischen Realität angeht, gab es also widerstreitende Tendenzen. Man war einerseits neugierig, interessiert, ja fasziniert, aber man hatte auch Angst vor einer Konfrontation mit bedrohlichen und überfordernden Affekten und Phantasien.
Genau solch eine Ambitendenz zwischen Neugierhaltung und ängstlichen Zurückschrecken erleben wir hier im Idomeneo. Die ödipale Thematik wird einerseits auf die Bühne gebracht, aber sogleich alles dafür getan, dass sie unerkannt bleibt. Den ödipalen Konflikt kann man erahnen, aber noch nicht wirklich dingfest machen, d.h. das Ödipale lebt nur in der Latenz.
Der Librettist Abbate Varesco ist ganz offensichtlich darum bemüht, die Fährte des Ödipalen, die er in die Oper hineingebracht hat, sogleich wieder abzuschwächen und zu vernebeln. Wie wir noch sehen werden, wird ihm Mozart dabei seine entschiedene Gefolgschaft anbieten.
Ilia beantwortet die libidinöse Zugewandtheit des Königs mit gleichartigen Gefühlen. Ihre Arie 'Da ich den Vater verlor' ist eine schöne, sehr persönliche und intime Arie.
Arnold Werner-Jensen (2001) spricht bezeichnender Weise von 'geheimen Neigungen' und 'unaussprechlichen Gefühlen', die sich in der Musik dieser Arie ausdrücken: Bereits das zart durchbrochene Vorspiel... markiert die Atmosphäre der Liebessehnsucht. Dritter und vierter Takt weisen voraus auf Taminos stimmungsvolle 'Bildnis'-Arie ('Ich fühl es, ich fühl es...') (Werner-Jensen 2001, S. 130). Flöte und Oboe schildern in warmen Klangfarben das zärtliche Gefühl, das im Innern Ilias gegenüber Idomeneo erblüht ist.
2.	Akt, 2. Szene
Nr. 11 Arie („Se il padre perdei") Ilia
Da ich den Vater verlor, die Heimat, die Ruhe, (zu Idomeneo) bist du mir jetzt Vater, geliebte Heimat ist Kreta für mich.
Jetzt denk ich nicht mehr an Sorgen und Kummer, da Freude und Friede anstatt meiner Leiden der Himmel mir gab. (Geht ab.)
Indem Ilia in die Rolle einer sowohl vom Vater als auch vom Sohn geliebten Frau gerät, bekommt ihre Person von diesem Punkt an etwas Schillerndes. Idamantes fühlt sich einerseits heftig zu ihr hingezogen, doch diese Liebe macht ihn zugleich immer unruhiger und verwirrter.
Um der tödlichen Konfrontation mit dem Sohn auszuweichen, denkt Idomeneo daran, Idamantes mit Elektra außer Landes zu schicken, in der Hoffnung, dass die Götter sich daraufhin beruhigen. Doch es erhebt sich urplötzlich ein Sturm und dem Meer entsteigt ein furchtbares Ungeheuer, das Tod und Verwüstung über das Land bringt. Mit dem Auftauchen dieses Untiers sind alle Pläne dahin, durch eine Flucht dem Willen der Götter zu entkommen.
Damit ist auch Idamantes gezwungen, sich weiterhin im ödipalen Dreieck auseinandersetzen. So äußert er gegenüber Ilia
3.	Akt, 2. Szene Rezitativ
Idamantes
Mein Vater, voll Raserei und Zorn, blickt finster mich an und meidet mich und verbirgt mir den Grund. Von deinen Banden gefesselt setzt mich deine Härte neuen Leiden
aus. Ein wildes Ungeheuer schafft überall furchtbare Verheerung. Ich gehe, um es
zu bekämpfen und versuche es zu besiegen oder der Tod beende meine Qualen.
Wir erleben in diesen Worten die drei zentralen Ängste der ödipalen Situation ausgedrückt 1. die Angst vor der Aggression des Vaters ('Mein Vater, voll Raserei und Zorn, blickt finster mich an') 2. die Unsicherheit, ob es gelingt, die Liebe der Mutter zu erringen ('Von deinen Banden gefesselt setzt mich deine Härte neuen Leiden aus') und 3. die Angst vor den eigenen Todesphantasien gegen den Vater ('Ein wildes Ungeheuer schafft überall furchtbare Verheerung. Ich gehe, um es zu bekämpfen und versuche es zu besiegen'). Mit anderen Worten, dieses wilde Ungeheuer stellt eine Symbolisierung dar, und zwar eine Symbolisierung der ödipalen Tötungswünsche Idamantes' gegen den Vater.
In dieser Drucksituation gesteht Ilia Idamantes offen ihre Liebe, was Idamantes einerseits erfreut, aber zugleich die ödipale Situation zuspitzt. Als Idomeneo auftritt und Zeuge der Liebesbezeigungen von Idamantes und Ilia wird, reagiert er übertrieben erschreckt, so als sähe er etwas Verbotenes oder Ärgerliches. Idomeneos 'Himmel, was seh ich' und 'Ich habe die Wahrheit geahnt...' und auf der anderen Seite Ilias ängstliches 'Ach, wir sind entdeckt' und Idamantes 'Fürchte dich nicht, Geliebte', wo er sich schützend vor Ilia stellt, lassen sich stimmiger auf die zweite Sinnebene einer latenten Rivalität im Dreieck Idamantes-Ilia-Idomeneo beziehen als auf die manifeste Ebene zaghafter Liebesgesten zweier junger Menschen.
Idamantes empfindet die latente Aggression in der Beziehung zum Vater zunehmend als belastend, so dass er beginnt, das Vater-Sohn-Verhältnis in Frage zu stellen. Zu Ido-meneo gewandt, äußert er: 'Herr, schon wage ich es nicht mehr, dich Vater zu nennen'. Und er fährt fort: 'Womit habe ich dich je beleidigt? Weshalb meidest du mich?... hasst und verabscheust mich?'
Hier wird die Aggression des Vaters gegenüber dem Sohn erstmals konkret ausgesprochen, obwohl Idomeneo diese doch stets verneint. Das moderne Verständnis des Ödipuskomplexes geht eh davon aus, dass die Aggression nicht nur in einer Richtung als eine Todeswunschphantasie des Sohnes gegen den Vater besteht, sondern es auch im Vater eine Aggression gegen den Sohn gibt, die entweder auf Grund eines eigenen nicht gut gelösten ödipalen Konflikts besteht oder aber sich als eine Gegenaggression gegen die Aggression des Sohne einstellt. Idamantes spricht hier die Aggression oder Gegenaggression des Vaters in seiner Frage offen an: 'Weshalb hasst und verabscheust du mich?'
Die Parallelen zum Ödipusmythos sind in dieser Szene unübersehbar. Ödipus, der unwissentlich seinen Vater Laios getötet und seine Mutter Jokaste heiratet, herrscht an der Seite seiner Mutter lange Zeit über sein Königreich Theben, bis eines Tages eine furchtbare Pest über das Land hereinbricht. Die Priester befragen das Orakel und erhalten zur Antwort, dass die Pest verschwinden würde, wenn der Mörder des Königs Laios aus dem Lande getrieben sei.
Auch hier im Idomeneo ist eine Plage über das Land gefallen und der Schuldige soll außer Landes geschickt werden. Bei Ödipus diente das Außer-Landes-Gehen als Sühne für Vatermord und Blutschande, offenbar erhofft man sich hier Gleichartiges.
Idamantes spürt (wie Ödipus) sehr richtig, dass er mit dem Erscheinen des Ungeheuers irgendetwas zu tun hat. Deshalb die bange Frage an seinen Vater: 'Vielleicht erzürnte Neptun meinetwegen? Doch was ist meine Schuld?' Verstünde er die Sprache der Symbole, so könnte er in dem wilden Ungeheuer die Manifestation seiner verdrängten Aggressionen gegen den Vater gewahr werden.
In der folgenden 7. Szene wechselt der Schauplatz vom Königspalast unmittelbar in das Innere des Opfertempels. Idomeneo tut gehorsam und gottergeben seine Pflicht und eröffnet die Zeremonie mit den Worten: 'Empfange unser Opfer, o König des Meeres'.
Als Arbaces hereinstürzt und verkündet, dass Idamantes das grauenerregende Untier besiegt hat, dürfte man erwarten, dass ein allgemeiner Jubel einsetzt. Doch nichts geschieht. Man geht achselzuckend über diese Heldentat hinweg und fährt in der Vorbereitung der Opferzeremonie fort. Warum findet diese Tat so wenig Beachtung?
Diese Szene ist allein vom psychologischen Gehalt her sinnvoll zu interpretieren. Die Heldentat ist deshalb bedeutungslos, weil sich die ödipale Aggression innen und nicht außen befindet. Es hilft wenig, im Außen ein Ungeheuer zu besiegen. Dieser Sieg beseitigt nicht das eigentlich Ungeheure: die mörderischen Phantasien gegen den Vater im Innern von Idamantes.
Idamantes wird im weißen Opfergewand hereingeführt und erklärt seine freudige Bereitschaft, den Opfertod zu erleiden. Er fordert den Vater zum Todesstoß auf. Es ist nur allzu klar, dass Idamantes mit dieser erhabenen Geste sowohl vor seinen Vatermordphantasien als auch vor seinen Kastrationsängsten ausweicht.
Im entscheidenden Moment erscheint Ilia am Opferaltar und verhindert mit den Worten 'Halt ein, o König, was tust du?' den Todesstoß des Vaters gegen den Sohn. Sie bietet sich selbst an Stelle von Idamantes als Götteropfer an. Mit Ilias mutiger Tat sind auch die Götter aufgerufen, in die Handlung einzugreifen. Eine unterirdische Stimme verkündet aus der Tiefe der Bühne den göttlichen Ratschluss: 'Idomeneo sei nicht mehr König. König sei Idamantes und Ilia seine Gemahlin.'
Der Mord am Sohn findet also nicht statt, stattdessen wird der Sohn sogar mit der Königswürde und der Hochzeit mit Ilia belohnt. Alle Umstehenden - mit Ausnahme von Elektra - sind hoch erfreut. Idomeneo verkündet in einer staatsmännischen Rede seine Abdankung und indem sich die Hochzeitsfeier von Idamantes und Ilia unmittelbar anschließt, gibt es genügend Gründe, die Oper mit überschwänglichen Jubelgesängen und einer prachtvollen Hochzeitsfeier enden zu lassen.
4. Elektra als Sprachrohr der abgewehrten mörderischen Energien
Dass hier am Ende der Oper keineswegs alles in bester Ordnung ist, macht wieder einmal Elektra deutlich, unsere Seismographin für verdrängte Affekte. Während der Orakelspruch bei allen Umstehenden Freude und Erleichterung auslöst, erleben wir bei Elektra eine völlig gegensätzliche Reaktion, die sie in höchst erregter und drama-
tischer Deklamation in Rezitativ und Arie zu Gehör bringt. Sie beschwört die Furien der Unterwelt und will ihrem Bruder Orest in das Todesreich folgen. Die Arie beginnt mit den Worten: 'Von Orest und Ajax trag ich im Herzen die Qualen.' Es ist vermutlich nicht rein zufällig, dass sie mit Orest und Ajax den Mord am eigenen Vater und an der Mutter in Erinnerung ruft.
Nr. 29a Arie ('D'Oreste, d'Aiace')
Elektra
Orestes und Ajax!
Ich fühl eure Qualen!
Die Fackel Alektos' gibt mir schon den Tod.
Zerfleischet das Herz mir,
ihr Nattern und Schlangen,
oder ein Dolch wird das Leiden in mir beenden.
(Sie geht voll Zorn ab.)
Kehren wir noch einmal zur unterirdischen Stimme zurück. Zunächst einmal klingt der Orakelspruch recht unverfänglich. Doch wenn wir einmal den Ratschluss der Götter am Ende von Glucks Iphigenie auf Tauris zum Vergleich heran ziehen, so fällt auf, dass dort die vom Himmel herabschwebende Göttin Diana, sich darauf beschränkt, zu verkünden, dass die Götter durch das mutige Verhalten der Protagonisten ausgesöhnt sind und auf ein Menschenopfer verzichten. Dieser humane Schiedsspruch hätte sich auch hier angeboten. Doch der göttliche Ratschluss in Mozarts Idomeneo begnügt sich nicht damit, sondern fordert noch etwas Zusätzliches, nämlich, die Entmachtung Idomeneos. In dieser zusätzlichen Verfügung steckt die eigentliche Brisanz und das psychologisch Bemerkenswerte dieses Spruchs der Himmlischen.
Die Götter verbünden sich offensichtlich mit den ödipalen Wunschphantasien, die in Idamantes Seele lebendig sind und sorgen dafür, dass sie in Erfüllung gehen: der Vater wird aus dem Weg geräumt, der Sohn tritt an seine Stelle und bekommt die von Vater und Sohn gleichermaßen geliebte Frau zugesprochen. Wir erleben zwar keinen de facto Vatermord, wie später im Don Giovanni, aber der hier gewählten abgemilderten Fassung einer Entmachtung des Vaters und der Machtübernahme durch den Sohn kommt traumsymbolisch die gleiche Bedeutung zu.
Soweit die Ergebnisse meiner Irritationsanalyse, die als latenten Sinn dieser Oper eine ödipale Konfliktproblematik ans Tageslicht gefördert hat. Nun mag es sein, dass dem einen oder anderen Leser die aufgeführten Belege für die latente Ödipalität in dieser Oper noch nicht ausreichend erscheinen und er noch weitere geliefert haben möchte, möglichst welche, die unabhängig vom persönlichen Empfinden des Autors existieren.
Nun gut. Wenn es zutrifft, dass eine ödipale Dynamik in dieser Oper virulent ist, so müsste sich diese auch in Gegenübertragungsreaktionen von Menschen bemerkbar machen, die mit diesem Werk intensiv befasst sind, also z.B. Dirigenten oder Regisseure. Wechseln wir also das diagnostische Instrumentarium und gehen einmal von einer Irritationsanalyse über zu einer Gegenübertragungsanalyse.
5. Gegenübertragungsreaktionen auf Mozarts Idomeneo
Die klinische Erfahrung hat gelehrt, dass in einem psychotherapeutischen Prozess das Unbewusste des Patienten auf das Unbewusste des Therapeuten Einfluss zu nehmen versucht. Dieser Vorgang birgt für den Therapeuten die Gefahr, dass er, ohne dass ihm dies bewusst wird, in etwas hineingezogen und verwickelt wird, das ihn daran hindert, seine neutrale Position aufrechtzuerhalten. Gelingt es ihm jedoch, die vom Patienten induzierten Phantasien, Gefühle, Handlungsimpulse etc. wahrzunehmen und einer kritische Begutachtung zu unterziehen, so bietet sich ihm die Chance, Bedeutsames über unbewusst virulente Themen im Patienten oder in der Beziehung zum Patienten in Erfahrung zu bringen. Sigmund Freud hat deshalb seinen Kollegen den Rat gegeben: 'er [der Arzt] soll dem gebenden Unbewussten des Kranken sein eigenes Unbewusstes als empfangendes Organ zuwenden' (Freud 1912, S. 381). Was der Arzt in seinem Inneren dann empfängt, ist gleichsam das Gegenstück zur Übertragung des Patienten und wird als Gegenübertragung bezeichnet.
Solche Gegenübertragungen lassen sich auch für das Gebiet des Musikpsychoanalyse nutzbar machen. Auch Musik, bzw. das Gesamt von Musik und Szene kann im Hörer Gegenübertragungsreaktionen auslösen, die etwas über den latenten Sinn des Musikwerkes aussagen. Wenn solche induzierten Gegenübertragungsimpulse nicht lege artis reflektiert und kontrolliert werden, haben sie die Tendenz, sich in spontane Handlungen umzusetzen. Von solchen Gegenübertragungshandlungen soll im Folgenden die Rede sein. Wir werden sie bei Dirigenten, Regisseuren, ja beim Komponisten selbst finden und einer kritischen Analyse unterziehen. Mit anderen Worten, wir werden uns im Folgenden der Aufführungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte dieser Oper zuwenden, um uns von dieser Seite her dem unbewussten Sinn des Idomeneo zu nähern.
5.1. Mozarts Problem mit der unterirdischen Stimme
Als einen ersten Gegenübertragungsakteur darf ich Mozart höchst persönlich vorstellen. Ich hatte bereits erwähnt, dass Librettist und Komponist das Ödipale einerseits in die Oper hinein gebracht, andererseits aber auch viel dafür getan haben, dass diese Thematik nicht über die Schwelle des Bewusstseins tritt. Wie sehr Mozart durch das Ödipale in dieser Oper beunruhigt war und wie er sich an dessen Verdrängung aktiv beteiligt hat, zeigt sich an zwei Ereignissen: 1. an seinen kurz vor der Uraufführung vorgenommenen beträchtlichen Kürzungen und 2. an Mozarts Problem mit dem Orakelspruch. Auf Mozarts Kürzungen werde ich hier nicht näher eingehen. Dazu kann man an anderer Stelle etwas nachlesen (Oberhoff 2008). Beschäftigen möchte ich mich im Folgenden mit Mozarts Schwierigkeiten mit dem Orakelspruch.
Über kein Detail dieser Oper hat Mozart mit Vater Leopold mehr korrespondiert als über die Orakelszene. Schon diese Tatsache allein mag als ein Hinweis darauf gelten, dass in diesem Orakelspruch eine Vater-Sohn-Thematik lebendig ist, die sich nicht nur auf der Opernbühne, sondern auch im konkreten Leben Mozarts zeigen sollte. Mozarts
Reise nach München zur Einstudierung seines Idomeneo ist - ohne dass er es zu diesem Zeitpunkt selbst weiß - bereits sein Abschied von Salzburg und damit auch vom Vater. Er wird in sein Dienstverhältnis nach Salzburg nicht mehr zurückkehren, sondern fern der Heimat in Wien sein Leben in die eigene Hände nehmen und eine Frau heiraten, mit der der Vater nicht einverstanden ist.
Doch bleiben wir beim Orakelspruch. Mozart hatte ernstliche Probleme mit dem, was die unterirdische Stimme verkündet. Am 29. November 1780 schreibt er an den Vater:
'Sagen Sie mir, finden Sie nicht, dass die Rede von der unterirdischen Stimme zu lang ist? Ueberlegen Sie es recht. - Stellen Sie sich das Theater vor, die Stimme muss schreckbar seyn - sie muss eindringen - man muss glauben, es sey wirklich so - wie kann sie das bewirken, wenn die Rede zu lang ist, durch welche Länge die Zuhörer immer mehr von dessen Nichtigkeit überzeugt werden? - Wäre im Hamlet die Rede des Geistes nicht so lang, sie würde noch von besserer Wirkung seyn. - Diese Rede hier ist auch ganz leicht abzukürzen, sie gewinnt mehr dadurch, als sie verliert.' (Briefe III, S. 34f.)
Vater Leopold stimmt im Antwortbrief den Bedenken des Sohnes zu und übermittelt an den Librettisten Varesco die Bitte, den Orakelspruch zu kürzen.
Doch Varescos verkürzte Fassung ist Mozart noch nicht kurz genug. Einige Wochen danach heißt es im Brief an den Vater: '... der orackel spruch ist auch noch viel zu lange - ich habe es abgekürzt' (Brief vom 18. Januar 1781, Bd. III, S. 90).
Doch noch immer schien ihm der Spruch der Himmlischen nicht richtig, so dass er noch eine weitergehende Kürzung vornimmt. Was von Varescos Urfassung durch Mozarts Kürzungsaktivitäten schließlich übrig blieb, veranschaulicht die folgende Übersicht.
Die Originalgestalt im Libretto von Abbate Varesco lautete folgendermaßen:
Amor hat gesiegt ... Idomeneo wird das schwere Vergehen vom Himmel vergeben, aber nicht dem König, der seine Versprechen halten muss ... er sei nicht mehr König ... es sei Idamantes ... und Ilia seine Gemahlin, Neptun sei beruhigt, der Himmel zufrieden, die Unschuld belohnt. Dem Reich Kreta schenke er Frieden. Im Himmel beschlossen ist ein so würdiger Bund.
Die gekürzte Version Varescos:
Idomeneo wird das schwere Verbrechen vom Himmel vergeben, aber nicht dem König, König sei Idamantes ... und Ilia seine Gemahlin; dem Reich Kretas schenke er wieder Frieden. Im Himmel beschlossen ist ein so würdiger Bund.
Mozarts weitere Kürzung:
Amor hat gesiegt ... Idomeneo sei nicht mehr König ... es sei Idamantes ... und Ilia seine Gemahlin, Neptun sei beruhigt, der Himmel zufrieden, die Unschuld belohnt.
Mozart noch weitergehende Kürzung (die schließlich zur Aufführung gelangte):
Idomeneo sei nicht mehr König, König sei Idamantes und Ilia seine Gemahlin.
Es ist nicht wirklich nachzuvollziehen, warum die erste Version Varescos weniger bühnenwirksam sein soll als Mozarts letzte Fassung. In Glucks Iphigenie auf Tauris spricht die herabschwebende Göttin Diana mindestens soviel Text wie Varescos 1. Fassung und man kann nicht sagen, dass ihr Auftritt nicht wirksam ist. Im Gegenteil erhält ihr Erscheinen durch den längeren Text noch ein größeres Gewicht. Es muss also einen anderen Grund haben, warum Mozart soviel Schwierigkeiten mit dieser unterirdischen Stimme hatte und sie womöglich am liebsten ganz gestrichen hätte. Darüberhinaus ist auch nicht unbedingt nachvollziehbar, dass diese Stimme 'schreckbar seyn' muss, wie Mozart meint. Sie könnte ja auch erlösend und befreiend sein, wie es Diana in Glucks Iphigenie ist. Auch diese düstere Vorstellung weist darauf hin, dass die Stimme offensichtlich etwas Bedrohliches mitzuteilen hat, etwas so Bedrohliches, dass Mozart es möglichst kurz haben möchte. So wie Idamantes gegen das bedrohliche Ungeheuer in den Kampf zieht, so zieht Mozart gegen diesen Orakelspruch zu Felde.
Mozart selbst gibt uns einen Tipp, wo möglicherweise die Hintergründe für seinen Kürzungswahn zu suchen sind. Im zitierten Brief vom 29.11.1780 kommt ihm bezüglich dieser unterirdischen Stimme eine Assoziation in den Sinn, die da heißt: Hamlet. Ihm hat bei diesem Theaterstück nicht gefallen, dass der Geist so lange auf der Bühne präsent ist: 'Wäre im Hamlet die Rede des Geistes nicht so lang, sie würde noch von besserer Wirkung seyn.'
Der Geist in Shakespeares Drama fordert bekanntlich vom Prinzen Hamlet, dass er den Mann an der Seite seiner Mutter ermorden soll, um selbst die Nachfolge des Vaters als König anzutreten. Sigmund Freud hat Hamlet immer wieder gern als ein Beispiel eines ödipalen Dramas par excellence angeführt. Hamlet zeigt eine sichtliche Hemmung, diesen Mordauftrag zu vollziehen. Dazu Freud: 'Hamlet kann alles, nur nicht die Rache an dem Mann vollziehen, der seinen Vater beseitigt und bei seiner Mutter dessen Stelle eingenommen hat, an dem Mann [also], der ihm die Realisierung seiner verdrängten Kinderwünsche zeigt' (Freud 1900, S. 272). Die Geisterstimme mit ihrem Mordauftrag hat Hamlet gleichsam mit seinen eigenen verdrängten ödipalen Wünschen konfrontiert.
Tut nicht die unterirdische Stimme im Idomeneo das Gleiche? Auf der manifesten Handlungsebene erlebt der Zuschauer zwar nur eine Entmachtung des Vaters und die Heirat einer sowohl vom Vater als auch dem Sohn geliebten Frau. Auf der unbewussten Sinnebene jedoch sorgt der Orakelspruch für die vollständige Erfüllung der ödipalen Wünsche, wie wir sie in Idamantes vermuten dürfen: den Vater aus dem Weg räumen und die Mutter heiraten.
Wenn man es recht bedenkt, so ist die kürzeste Fassung, die eigentlich das Ödipale minimieren soll, diejenige, die es am deutlichsten - im Sinne von kurz und knapp - ausspricht: 'Idomeneo sei nicht mehr König, König sei Idamantes und Ilia seine Gemahlin'.
So scheint Mozart auch in seiner Kürzungswut unbewusst Shakespeare gefolgt zu sein, der den alten Schwätzer Polonius an einer Stelle (2. Akt, 2. Szene) sagen lässt:
Weil Kürze denn des Witzes Seele ist,
Weitschweifigkeit der Leib und äußre Zierrat,
Fass' ich mich kurz.
Und dass der Witz in ganz bevorzugter Weise und vor allem in aller Kürze das Verborgene und Verdrängte aus dem Unbewussten hervorholt, hat uns nicht zuletzt Freud in seiner Schrift 'Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten' (1905) nahegebracht.
Soweit Mozarts Probleme mit der unterirdischen Stimme. Doch werfen wir noch einen Blick auf andere Gegenübertragungsreaktionen gegenüber dieser Oper, und zwar auf solche von Dirigenten und Regisseuren in der weiteren Aufführungsgeschichte des Idomeneo.
5.2. Von Kürzungen und anderen Kastrationen
Es gibt keine Oper von Mozart, an deren Libretto oder an dessen Musik von nachgeborenen Komponisten und Dirigenten so viel verändert, um- und neugeschrieben wurde wie beim Idomeneo. Etliche dieser Kürzungen kommen durchaus Kastrationen gleich.
So hat z.B. Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari bei seiner Münchner Aufführung im Jahre 1931 nicht nur große Teile der Rezitative, sondern auch ganze 8 der 14 Arien (60%) gestrichen. Solch ein tollkühner Eingriff stellt nun wirklich bereits eine grobe Verstümmelung dar.
Die Krönung liefert jedoch Richard Strauß. Strauß schrieb 65 Partiturseiten eigener Musik, die er in die Oper einfügte und darüber hinaus benannte er Elektra eigenmächtig in „Ismene" um. Strauß war sich immerhin seiner Ungeheuerlichkeit bewusst, denn er äußert seine Bereitschaft, falls nötig, sich dereinst im Jenseits wegen dieser Pietätlo-sigkeit persönlich gegenüber Mozart zu verantworten. Alfred Einstein hielt mit seiner Entrüstung über dieses Vorgehen nicht hinterm Berg und sprach von 'Vergewaltigung'. Ich denke, wir können diesen Vorgang nun präziser als eine (versuchte) Kastration Mozarts durch einen nachgeborenen Sohn benennen. Die beiden gerade namentlich genannten Nachfahren des Urvaters Mozart haben sich auf des Meisters Stuhl gesetzt und an dessen Potenz herumgeschnippelt.
Richard Strauß trifft mit seiner eigenmächtigen Umbenennung der 'Elektra' in 'Ismene' das unbewusste Geschehen dieser Oper mit instinktiver Sicherheit, denn Ismene ist bekanntlich die inzestuös gezeugte Tochter des Ödipus. Wahrscheinlich mehr intuitiv als bewusst drückt Strauß damit aus, dass Elektra ein Sprachrohr für das Ödipale in dieser Oper ist. Und damit dieses Faktum auch deutlich wird, hat er sie in Ismene umbenannt.
In dieser Genealogie der Kürzungen, die Kastrationen gleichkommen, ist noch eine weitere Inszenierung aus jüngster Zeit anzufügen, und zwar die Neuenfels-Inszenierung an der Deutschen Oper in Berlin aus dem Jahr 2006. Diese Idomeneo-Inszenierung ist deswegen in die Schlagzeilen geraten, weil Ende 2006 Anschläge von islamistischen Terroristen befürchtet wurden. Die Intendantin der Deutschen Oper Berlin hatte aus Sicherheitsgründen weitere Aufführungen des Idomeneo ausgesetzt. Doch auf öffentlichen Druck hin, wurden die Aufführungen im Dezember 2006 wieder aufgenommen. Ich habe es mir nicht nehmen lassen, zur letzten Aufführung am 29.12.2006 nach Berlin zu reisen. Vor dem Haus ein großes Polizeiaufgebot und drinnen eine Sicherheitskontrolle
wie an einem amerikanischen Flughafen. Jeder Besucher musste eine Sicherheitsschleuse passieren und wurde auf verdächtige Gegenstände hin durchleuchtet. Das war in der Tat ein besonderes Erlebnis. Eine Oper unter Polizeischutz! Auch darin deutet sich recht bildhaft an, dass diese Oper offenbar etwas äußerst Gefährliches in sich birgt.
Was war der Stein des Anstoßes?
Der Regisseur Hans Neuenfels hatte in seiner Inszenierung wahrhaftige Götter auf der Bühne auftreten lassen, nicht nur Neptun, sondern auch Buddha, Jesus und Mohammed.
Allein das Auftreten dieser Götter stellte noch kein Ärgernis dar, zumal man dem Propheten Mohammed das Gesicht mit einem Schleier verhüllt hatte. Nein, das Ärgernis war Folgendes: Nach dem Verklingen der letzten Töne des Schlusschors öffnet sich noch einmal der Hintergrund der Bühne und der zurückweichende Chor macht dem auf die Bühne taumelnden Idomeneo Platz, der aus einem Plastiksack die abgeschlagenen Köpfe von Buddha, Jesus und Mohammed hervorholt und jeweils auf einen Stuhl platziert. Idomeneo schnauft und keucht bei dieser Präsentation seiner Mordopfer und fällt nach vollendeter Tat halb wahnsinnig zu Boden.
Also, auch hier wird drei Mal 'gekürzt'. Hatte sich Mozart das Kürzen nur am Spruch der Götter erlaubt, so tut dies Neuenfels an den Göttern selbst. Das Thema, vor dem Librettist und Komponist bis zuletzt zurückgeschreckt sind und das nur durch Traummechanismen abgemildert und entstellt auf der Schattenbühne mitleben durfte, wird in dieser angehängten scena ultima von Neuenfels in all seinem Schrecken, den es für die menschliche Seele hat, und in unbarmherziger Offenheit präsentiert: Die ödipalen Todeswünsche gegen den Vater und gegen das väterliche Gesetz.
Bibliography
Abell, Arthur (1955): Gespräche mit berühmten Komponisten. So entstanden ihre unsterblichen Meisterwerke. Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Schröder-Verlag) 1962.
Angermüller, Rudolph (Hg.) (2005): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Sämtliche Opernlibretti. Stuttgart (Reclam).
Devereux, Georges (1967): Angst und Methode in den Verhaltenswissenschaften. München.
Freud, Sigmund (1905): Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. GW Bd. VI. Frankfurt (S. Fischer).
Freud, Sigmund (1912): Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung. GW Bd. VIII. Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer
Gluck, Christoph Willibald (1987): Gluck-Gesamtausgabe: Iphigenie en Tauride I/5. Kassel (Bärenreiter).
Hanslick, Eduard (1854): Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Darmstadt) 1991.
Lorenzer, Alfred (1986): Kultur-Analysen. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (2005): Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Gesamtausgabe. Kassel und München (Bärenreiter und dtv).
Oberhoff, Bernd (2007): Christoph W. Gluck: Iphigenie auf Tauris. Ein psychoanalytischer Opernführer. Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag).
Oberhoff, Bernd (2008): Mozart. Eine musikpsychoanalytische Studie. Gießen (Psychosozial-Verlag).
Schönberg, Arnold (1922): Harmonielehre. Wien (Universal Edition). Shakespeare, William (1958): Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark. Werke in 2 Bänden. München (Th. Knaur Nachf.).
Werner-Jensen, Arnold (2001): Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Musikführer. 2 Bde. Stuttgart, Leipzig (Reclam).
Povzetek
Brahms sploh ni dvomil, da je izvor kompozicijskega navdiha v podzavesti, in Arnold Schonberg ga je dopolnil z mislijo, da je skladatelj samo izvajalec volje, ki je skrita v njegovi podzavesti. Toliko bolj preseneča, da se je to spoznanje v muzikologiji komaj upoštevalo, verjetno zato, ker se je doumelo, da tako raziskovanje zahteva sodelovanje s psihoanalitiki, še posebej glasbenimi. Tudi psihoanaliza se je v svoji stoletni zgodovini le tu in tam ukvarjala z glasbo. Ob svojih kliničnih izkušnjah je psihoanaliza razvila nekaj metod, ki rabijo razvozlavanju podzavesti in ki jih moremo koristno uporabiti za razumevanje podzavestnih tem v glasbenih delih.
Nemški glasbeni psihoanalitik Bernd Oberhoff predstavlja dve taki metodi - iritacijsko analizo nasprotnega prenosa - ter pokaže, kako je s tema instrumentoma moč odkriti latentni smisel Mozartove opere Idomeneo. Oba metodološka pristopa kažeta, da pri opernem dogajanju, ki sicer prikazuje brezhiben odnos med očetom in sinom, gre v resnici za smrtni boj med obema. Oberhoffova analiza jasno kaže, da gre pri libretistu Varescu kot pri skladatelju Mozartu za močno ambivalentnost glede ojdipovsko konfliktne tematike, ki se kaže tako, da je kot podzavestna tema na odru sicer prisotna, vendar ob velikem prizadevanju, da bi se kot taka obdržala pod pragom zavesti oziroma zavestnega.
UDK 78 Rochberger:159.9 David Schwarz
University of North Texas Univerza North Texas
A (Dis)Pleasure of Influence: George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (1973)
(Ne)ugodje vplivanja: Georg Rochbergove Kapriciozne variacije za violino brez spremljave (1973)
Prejeto: 13. marca 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: vpliv in glasba, glasba in pogled, hipotaksa in parataksa, glasba in kolaž, glasba in pentlje, ugodje in neugodje, princip resničnosti in princip ugodja, želja in težnja
Izvleček
V sestavku soočam Herolda Blooma »Strašljivost vplivanja« z vrsto novejših in še zlasti uspešnih glasbenih adaptacij Blooma, pri čemer ponujam teorijo glasbenega (ne)ugodja na podlagi postla-canovske psihoanalize.
Received: 13th March 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: influence and music, music and the gaze, hypotaxis and parataxis, music and collage, music and loops, pleasure and displeasure, the reality principle and the pleasure principle, desire and drive
Abstract
In 'A (Dis)Pleasure of Influence: George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (1973)' I bring together Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, several recent and particularly successful adaptations of Bloom to music, and offer a theory of musical (dis)pleasure informed by post-Lacanian psychoanalysis.
This paper will bring two texts into a close conversation with one another and with the traditions out of which they arose—George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for
Unaccompanied Violin and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, both published in 1973.1 I will discuss first Bloom, then Rochberg.
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence
The Anxiety of Influence (according to its own subtitle 'A Theory of Poetry') outlines a complex, arcane, and highly controversial theory of poetry. Better—it outlines a theory of modern poetry; better still—it outlines a theory of modern poetry in the Romantic tradition; and better yet—it outlines a theory of modern poetry in Romantic, Anglo-American traditions.2 The publication of a second edition in 1997 attests to the work's staying power. Harold Bloom's work is an implicit response to several aspects of mid twentieth-century literary and cultural criticism in the Anglo-American tradition: 1) the techniques and aesthetics of source study, 2) the analytical techniques of the New Criticism, 3) the imperatives of post-structuralism and particularly deconstruction, and 4) late 1960s / early 1970s feminism.3
I read The Anxiety of Influence as a Theory of Poetry which creates its territory against the above four traditions. Bloom argues throughout his book that his theory has nothing to do with the techniques and aesthetics of source study; Bloom asserts '[s]ource study is wholly irrelevant here; we are dealing with primal words, but antithetical meanings, and an ephebe [poetic latecomer who must struggle against predecessors] best misinterpretations may well be of poems he has never read' (Bloom 70). Bloom implicitly distances himself from New Criticism by suggesting that '[l]et us give up the failed enterprise of seeking to 'understand' any single poem as an entity in itself' (Bloom 43). Bloom's dismissal of post-structuralism and deconstruction is implicit in the following sentiment: 'I am made aware of the mind's effort to overcome the anti-humanistic plain dreariness of all those developments in European criticism that have yet to demonstrate that they can aid in reading any one poem by any poet whatsoever' (Bloom 12-13). I cannot objectively document my claim that The Anxiety of Influence is an indirect response to late 60s / early 70s feminism; Bloom might well have written his book had late 60s / early 70s feminism not happened. But currents of defensive explorations of masculinity on many levels in The Anxiety of Influence run all the stronger against the backdrop of the power of feminist discourses that were
1	For an early review, see Merle E. Brown, "Review: Theory of Poetry" in Contemporary Literature, Volume 16, number 2 (Spring 1975). Brown emphasizes the connections between Bloom's book and W. Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970). Bloom discusses Bate at the outset of The Anxiety of Influence and Brown argues that Bloom's debt to Bate is substantial and pervasive. Reviews by Geoffrey Hartmann and Paul de Man will be discussed in a section of this chapter below entitled "Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and the Gaze."
2	The book argues, in a nutshell, that the modern era (Enlightenment to the present in the Anglo-American traditions) has produced a history in which "strong" poets cast dark and anxious shadows over their followers, who, in order to become "strong" poets themselves, must paradoxically absorb and distance themselves and, much more crucially for Bloom, their work from the works of their "strong" masters. Bloom's six "revisionary ratios" describe how this absorption / distance is negotiated.
3	Briefly, source study will tend to locate meanings in direct relationship to evidence from source sketches and other materials; the New Critics sought to keep a poet's biography or personality out of criticism in favor of describing the structure of a poem on its own terms, creating one work of art in service of another; deconstruction seeks to reveal the structures in social space that make it possible for a work of art to come into being in the first place by "pulling" at a telltale surface detail till the entire structure of complicity unravels; and feminism seeks to understand much western culture predicated on the prestige of patriarchy, explicitly or implicitly embodied in many if not all western cultural, social, and artistic levels of life.
forceful, focused, and quite audible in major universities at the time of the composition of Bloom's book.4
The paragraph above describes negatively what the book isn't; it is, in Bloom's own words the positive product of Nietzsche and Freud, shot through with evocative imagery from Judeo-Christian traditions.5 Bloom's Freud is odd indeed. The Oedipal underpinning of his theory is obvious, and it is there that the essentially phallocentric nature of his thought can be seen. But as Lloyd Whitesell remarks in his blistering critique: 'Bloom's theory takes its momentum from a primal scene of Oedipalized relations between men. The classical Freudian Oedipal narrative elaborates a triangular relation of rivalry and desire, with a woman cast in the mediating role. The men in this narrative establish a bond of rivalry by vying for the same feminine object of desire. With Bloom, however, the loss of woman's role collapses the triangle into a pas de deux. This means that the channels of masculine competition and desire are no longer separately routed; the manly clinch now stands for both struggle and embrace.'6
Anyone writing about The Anxiety of Influence can get caught between imaginary mirrors of infinite regress in which various (mis)readings replicate each other at different levels; for example, since Bloom says so much about (mis)reading, one could (mis) read his (mis)reading of Freud as oddly intentional, or at least in the spirit of one critic (mis)reading another critic, as one poet (mis)reads another poet. Not that an articulation of such a spectacular trap would be neither interesting nor valid. But it would miss the issue that I think it is important for us to face head on: is Whitesell right in arguing that Bloom's work is underwritten by a homophobic homoeroticism that pervades at least much modern western culture, at least implicitly? If so, what does that mean? I think it means two things (and they are both relevant for music criticism towards which we are heading): 1) Bloom has touched upon something in the culture of western patriarchal modernism, and 2) Bloom's critical stance has either exposed or glorified such a tradition. Whitesell (and the feminist critics upon whom he depends) have shown us that Bloom is writing about a tradition in which homophobic homoeroticism functions, sometimes openly, sometimes hidden. Is Bloom critical of homophobic homoeroticism or is he complicit with it? Whitesell asserts (and I agree) that he is complicit with it: '[b]y glamourizing the Oedipal dilemma, the Bloomian model precludes any perspective from which to analyze the intersections of gender and power that are at issue' (Whitesell 165). My (re)reading of Bloom and my study of George Rochberg will not depend directly on issues of gender; still, as I will show below, in negotiating a shift from Bloom (and poetry) to Rochberg (and music) issues of gender are crucial at one precise juncture.
Feminists read patriarchy in Bloom's work early on. For a nuanced reading of Bloom from the point of view of women's literature (particularly Charlotte Perkins Oilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"), see Annette Kolodny, "A Map for Misreading, or Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts" in New Literary History, Volume 11, number 3 (Spring 1980). For a more aggressive feminist critique on the patriarchal underpinnings of Bloom's work, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Author and the Anxiety of Authorship" The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, 2000), pp. 45-53. For a critique of Bloom through the lens of a more general consideration of the "Yale School", see Barbara Johnson, "Gender and the Yale School" in Speaking of Gender Ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 45-55. "Nietzsche and Freud are, so far as I can tell, the prime influences upon the theory of influence presented in this book" (Bloom 8).
Lloyd Whitesell, "Men with a Past: Music and 'The Anxiety of Influence'" in 19th-Century Music. Volume 18, number 2 (Autumn 1994), p. 161.
This juncture is the historically-specific 'moment' of gender trouble in mid 19th-century European culture; there is also a psychoanalytic 'edge' to this juncture, and that is the post-Lacanian structure of the gaze in its castrating dimension.
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and the Gaze
In a review of The Anxiety of Influence, Geoffrey Hartman focuses on the singular and oppressive nature of Bloom's vision of history: '[w]ith an audacity and pathos hard to parallel in modern scholarship, Bloom apprehends English literary history from Milton to the present as a single movement, calls it Romanticism, and, even while making it exemplary of the burdens of Freudian or Psychological Man, dooms it to a precession which looks toward the death of poetry more firmly than Hegel does.'7 And '[h]is 'misprision' makes sense only in a world with family dimensions of gothic intensity, where the individual is bounded by others, all motion is accountable, and we can scarcely stir because of the protective or oppressive air' (Hartman 29). Hartman's language suggests to me that for Bloom (or Bloom through the eyes of Hartman), modernity is a landscape at whose vanishing point resides the irrevocable gaze of the dead, supreme master. Lacan and post-Lacanian writers have described the gaze at length as a displaced look, as a sense in which an object can be sensed impossibly 'looking at one', as a primary agent embodying symbolic, castrating power. Indeed, the most powerful gazes often do not emanate from live eyes at all, but from the orbs of a blind man, a sardine can floating in the water, a building whose windows seem to gaze out at us from the screen, or, the gaze of a woman.8
Hartman reads Bloom as highly-mediated Freud. According to Hartman, 'Freud sees life as possessing a binary structure through the mercy of time: childhood / adolescence, mother / wife, father / husband. This repetition, or second chance, is essential for development; to collapse the binary poles (and subtler oppositions) is fatal. Through this repetition we can redirect our needs by substitution or sublimation. Family Romance, in the child, his quest for new or the real parents, is a figurative prophecy of the loss to come and of the imaginative capacity for substitutes' (Hartman 29). But according to Hartman, Bloom forecloses Freud: 'Bloom's overcondensation takes away the second chance: literary history is for him like a human life, a polymorphous quest-romance collapsing always into one tragic recognition. Flight from the precursor leads to him by fatal prolepsis, nature always defeats imagination, history is the repetition of one story and one story only.' (Hartman 30). For me, Hartman suggests that Bloom's reading of
Geoffrey Hartman, " Reviewed Work(s): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom in Diacritics, volume 3, number 1 (Spring 1973), p. 27.
For the well-known account of the gaze and the other, see Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton: 1981), pp. 95-97. For a discussion of the horror explicit in a pure gaze, see Slavoj Žižek Enjoy Your .Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 126-127. For a discussion of the relationship between the look and the gaze in film theory and in Lacan, especially of the gaze as disembodied look, see Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (Chapter 4) (New York: Routledge, 1996). For a discussion of how a woman's gaze can trigger castration anxiety in fiction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and women's studies, see Beth Newman, "The Situation of the Looker-on: Gender, Narration, and the Gaze in Wuthering Heights" in PMLA Volume 105, number 5 (October 1990), pp. 1029-1041.
Freud suggests that modernity is a large-scale, infantile, foreclosed Oedipal drama, and (as Whitesell has mentioned) one in which the mother is utterly absent. It is thus not a triangular drama with threatening and reassuring dimensions that undergoes a second chance with substitutions along the pairs of signifiers: child / adolescent; mother / wife; father / husband, but rather a one-on-one, male-on-male, father(once son)-on-son(to be father) battle always-already lost.9 Hartman hears a castrating dimension to Bloom: 'Bloom is equally puritan in his conception of greatness and not less pessimistic about the future. He also implies a diminished succession of the great ages of English poetry: Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernism. The emasculating burden of the past or an effeminate embarrassment of riches take their toll. Someone was there before us [emphasis Hartman's]' (Hartman 30).10
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and Music Studies
We must be very careful crossing the divide between Literary History and Music History. Literature and the critical approaches to literature, for one thing, are made of the same kinds of signifiers—those of the language of this essay, marks on a page with signifiers and the concepts of signifieds triggered by them in the mind of a reader in social space.11 While music signifies in a wide variety of ways in a wide variety of contexts, there is a 'new' structure of difference in the musical sign—the signifier on a page points to a signified in the ear and mind of a listening subject in social space.12
For me, the most telling feature of this difference is in music's (dis)ability at irony. In language, irony depends on signifiers which can flip the meaning of a signified along
For a review of Bloom that avoids all implications of the Oedipal drama and focuses on The Anxiety of Influence as a metaphor for the "circuitous journey of Romanticism," see Nannette Altevers, "The Revisionary Company: Harold Bloom's 'Last Romanticism'" in New Literary History, Volume 23, number 2, Revising Historical Understanding (Spring 1992).
For a fascinating and very different account of Bloom, see Paul de Man, "Reviewed Work(s): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom in Comparative Literature, Volume 26, number 3 (Summer 1974). For de Man "The substantial emphasis, in the description of the six ratios, falls on temporal priority: a polarity of strength and weakness...is correlated with a temporal polarity that pits early against late. The effort of the late poet's revisionary reading is to achieve a reversal in which lateness will become associated with strength instead of with weakness.. If the substantial emphasis is temporal, the structural stress entirely falls on substitution as a key concept. And from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models; one can always substitute one word for another but one cannot, by a mere act of will, substitute night for day or bliss for gloom" (de Man 274). For de Man, Bloom's Theory of Poetry is a theory of relations between text (the precursor) and reader (the latecomer) (273).
This overly schematized pass at the elementary structure of the sign derives from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated and annotated by Roy Harris. (LaSalle, 1ll: Open Court Press, 1986). Saussure's notion that the signified does not represent an object but a concept of an object (or idea) in the mind of a subject in social space opened the way for the structuralism of early to mid 20th-Century literary criticism and anthropology, together with the notion that signifiers owe their integrity to differences along a signifying chain. Jonathan Culler discusses the global structuralism in light of these features of his work in Ferdinand de Saussure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). For an overview of Saussure's role in 20th-Century semiotics, see Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). For a reading of Saussure that marks a milestone in the development of deconstruction, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Translated and Edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
For an introduction to music and semiotics, see Eero Tarasti, Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002); Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart; Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Jean Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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a symmetrical axis—flipping a positive to a negative, or a negative to a positive. The linguistic signifier negates either explicitly with a syntactic 'no' or 'not' or prefix that flips as in 'a—' (e.g. 'atonal'), or a flip in meaning depends implicitly on contextual evidence of 'not-ness', such as exaggeration. Music parodies; music makes structures based on earlier structures; music quote itself, other pieces; music (re)composes itself; music, in fact, constitutively does all of these things in many different styles. But given the difference in logical classes between the (linguistic) signifier and the (linguistic/musical) signified, can music flip meaning along a symmetrical binary axis? Is it possible to write a non-F-sharp, for example? The answer is a qualified 'yes.' But since music does not have a 'no' or 'not' in its signifying chain, it must borrow its 'no' or 'not' from language, from context, from the (linguistic) language of criticism.13
Putting aside this difference between the linguistic and the musical sign for a moment, applications of Bloom to music seem to work as theories of (romantic) modernism writ-large. Bloom implicitly reads western culture building to its pre-Enlightenment apex, to decline spectacularly in the Nineteenth Century and to come to rest in the Twentieth Century. If one understands music history in a similar way, an application of Bloom to such a history might sound like this: canonical western music history builds to its apex in the late 18th Century to decline in anxious romanticism in the 19th Century and come to rest in the 20th Century; while Bloom's master poet is John Milton; music's master composer is Beethoven.14 I approach applications of Bloom to music studies by examining the theoretical, historical, and analytical choices made in two particularly successful studies.15
For a simple example, consider a piece in which a pattern is established and then violated. An analytical statement of the form "in this piece, instead of (x), the composer has given us (y)." Such a statement poses two levels of meaning—an expectation latent in a piece and a divergence from that expectation. This elementary structure of Gestalt psychology underwrites Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1956); Meyer's theories persist in the music-critical community; for a more recent version, see Eugene Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Neither Bonds nor Korsyn explicitly theorize the difference(s) between irony in literature and irony in music, though they are crucial. Instead, by example, Bonds and Korsyn show contextual illustrations of ways in which music comments on itself. For me the absence of a musical "no" or "not" is not necessary; it is contingent. That is, for whatever reasons, we have never felt it necessary to have a musical "no" or "not"; it is easy to imagine one. We are used to making temporal space for grace notes—pitches that impinge upon the signifying chain of rhythm. One can imagine a notation which would mean that pitches are played in such a way that they "don't count" as pitches, as graces notes "don't count" as rhythmic entities. For a large-scale historical claim that the masterwork arrives in the late 18th Century as fundamental component of the canon and new music history, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Mark Evan Bonds, "Sinfonia anti-eroica: Berlioz's Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven's Influence" in The Journal of Musicology Volume 10, number 4 (Autumn 1992) republished in Mark Evan Bonds, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Kevin Korsyn, "Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence" in Music Analysis Volume 10, numbers 1/2 (March - July 1991).
For a theory of musical influence that locates the tonal tradition as symbolic antecedent and atonal / serial departures of the early 20th Century as latecomer(s), see Joseph N. Straus, "The 'Anxiety of Influence' in Twentieth-Century Music" in The Journal of Musicology Volume 9, number 4 (Autumn 1991); Straus' application works to the extent that one imagines early 20th-Century atonality / serialism as extensions of the chromatic late-Romanticism of the 19th Century. Straus's application seems somehow wrong if one does not imagine early 20th-Century atonality / serialism as extension of the chromatic late-Romanticism of the 19th Century.
In his book, Remaking the Past, Straus offers an expansive reading of both "progressive" and "classicist" early twentieth-century music as a response to an anxiety of influence in music. Straus offers 8 "musical revisionary ratios" that are structurally fascinating, though void of any trace of Bloomian anxiety. For well-understood applications of Bloom's ratios to music, see pages 57-58 (for a discussion of askesis) and page 134 (for a discussion of apophrades) that are theoretically and musically astute. See Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Most theorists and musicologists would agree that if Bloom's theory obtains to music, Beethoven is music history's "strong poet." In a fascinating study, Jeremy Judkin traces a musical debt Beethoven owed to Mozart; his is a story of a founding mo-
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D. SCHWARZ » A ( D I S ) P LEA S U RE OF .... Music and Influence: Mark Evan Bonds
In his application of Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence to music, Mark Evan Bonds points to very strong structural similarities between Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Berlioz' Harold in Italy that 'invite—and indeed, virtually...demand—a comparison between the two works' (Bonds 419). Bonds is referring to the beginnings of each work's fourth movement. In Beethoven, the orchestra recalls moments from the earlier movements—a unique example in the canon of a work of music remembering the stages of its own unfolding in time. In Berlioz '[t]he viola systematically recalls themes from each of the three previous movements, and the orchestra, just as systematically, rejects each one' (Bonds 418).16 But Bonds points out that for Berlioz, the homage is fraught with ambivalence, and it is here that Bonds turns to Bloom. Bonds does not apply each of Bloom's six revisionary ratios to music; rather he generally refers to compositional debt and the charges of ambivalence in the score of Harold in Italy. One of Bonds' strongest points is that while the self-quotation in Beethoven is followed by the heroic 'Ode to Joy', the analogous moment in Berlioz is anti-heroic. Bonds provides very strong evidence for this assertion. For one thing, no new theme bursts forth in Berlioz; in fact we hear only the old and familiar 'Harold' theme: 'When the viola's idée fixe does arrive in m. 80, it returns not in the anticipated guise of transcendence but in a remarkably tentative form—so tentative, in fact, that it is given largely to the clarinets rather than the viola solo' (Bonds 427). For another, in the finale, 'the viola disappears for no fewer than 373 measures. It is silent, in other words, for more than three-fifths of the finale and for almost all of the work's final ten minutes. Its reappearance shortly before the end, moreover, is brief, tentative, and strangely anticlimactic' (Bonds 418).
Bonds argues that a large-scale repetition of material in the finale serves to delay the return of the viola—a further sign of anti-heroism in the work: '[t]he purpose of this particular repeat goes beyond the issue of intelligibility. Given the allusion to Beethoven's Ninth and the concomitant strategy to thwart the arrival of any transcendent theme, the middle portion of the finale must fulfill two demands: it must counterbalance the weight and size of the introduction, with the reminiscences; and it must extend the length of time during which the soloist is consigned to the role of non-participant. While Berlioz could have expanded the finale at this point through any number of means, the solution he chose was a literal repetition of the exposition, followed by a relatively brief development section. Had he presented either an extended new development or even a varied reprise of the exposition, the focus of our attention within this movement would necessarily have been drawn toward the evolution of ideas associated with the brigands'orgy. But the primary function of this part of the movement is less to develop ideas than to delay the anticipated return of the viola. In spite of its prominence, the
ment in influence studies at the dawn of its anxious dimension. See Jeremy Judkin, "Beethoven's 'Mozart' Quartet" in Journal of the American Musicological Society Volume 45, number 1 (Spring 1992). For a study of influence in which Wagner is the "strong poet," see E. Douglas Bomberger, "Chadwick's 'Melpomene' and the Anxiety of Influence" in American Music Volume 21, number 3, Nineteenth-Century Special Issue (Autumn 2003). 16 This idea of the orchestra "rejecting" what a soloist "says" in a concerto suggests a musical form of comment close to irony. For another example, see the beginning of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.
brigands' music is not the main event of the finale; Harold's failure to reassert himself is' (Bonds 440).17
Bonds is a cautious reader of Bloom's six revisionary ratios, seldom invoking them explicitly: 'Harold preserves the terms of reference established by Beethoven, only to reverse them. In so doing, it represents what Bloom calls the tessera or 'antithetical completion' of a precursor's work. It is a product of 'creative revisionism,' a 'deliberate, even perverse revisionism' (Bonds 454). Bonds strengthens his argument with plentiful historical evidence that Berlioz was self-consciously aware of working in Beethoven's shadow, and Bonds' article is a repository of evidence as well that Brahms composed as well in the same shadow.18
Music and Influence: Kevin Korsyn
Like Bonds, Korsyn discusses within the nineteenth century, Brahms' Romanze Opus 118, no. 5 in the light of a precursor—Chopin's Berceuse, Opus 57.19 Before beginning his analysis, Korsyn reads Bloom in much greater detail than Bonds. Korsyn will eventually apply each of Bloom's six revisionary ratios to the inter-textual echoes between Chopin and Brahms.20 Korsyn begins by connecting an aspect of Bloom's thought to Kant: 'Kant distinguishes genius from mere imitation, arguing that the primary property of genius is originality. He goes on, however, to add something quite paradoxical; there is an original kind of imitation; one genius can liberate the originality of another providing a model for originality. This paradox of original imitation, of one genius liberating the originality of another, is an ancestor of Bloom's strong poets influencing strong poets, but without the anxious tone that permeates Bloom's writings' (Korsyn 10). And Korsyn sees another ancestor of Bloom's thoughts: 'Just as Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, shows how consciousness comes to know itself, becomes self-consciousness, by encountering otherness, Bloom shows how poems become unique by encountering other poems' (Korsyn 13). And, as Korsyn nears his adaptation of Bloom to music (including one-to-one transformations of a poetic ratio into a musical ratio), Korsyn astutely asserts that '[t]o appropriate Bloom, we must misread him, becoming Bloom-ian revisionists; we must productively misread him as we figuratively extend his ideas' (Korsyn 14). Korsyn builds his analysis in careful stages, first making 'conspicuous allusions' the level of obvious similarity (Korsyn 22).
17	Bonds suggests elsewhere that the viola itself has an anti-heroic quality: "[w]ithin the family of stringed instruments, it lacks the projective power of the violin or cello, and within the conventions of four-part string writing, it is the one voice least likely to play a leading role" (Bonds 448).
18	Berlioz wrote in 1829 "[n]ow that I have heard that terrifying giant Beethoven, I know exactly where musical art stands; the issue now is to take it from there and push it farther...not further, that is impossible—he has reached the limits of the art—but as far along a different route" (quoted in Bonds) p. 450. And there's the well-known statement of Brahms at 40 in reference to Beethoven: "I shall never compose a symphony! You [Hermann Levi] have no idea how it feels to our kind [i.e. composers] when one always hears such a giant marching behind one" (quoted in Bonds) pp. 419-420.
19	Korsyn outlines historical evidence for Brahms knowing Chopin's music; although there is some evidence to suggest an "anxiety of influence", Korsyn's argument will rely on internal structural similarities and differences between the two works.
20	It is curious to read such an extended argument in which Chopin occupies the position of the strong father to whom an anxious son must cast his glance. Chopin has long been associated with femininity, after all. See Jeffery Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
For Korsyn, surface 'conspicuous allusion' is that which can be represented on the upper levels of a Schenkerian graph.21 Korsyn makes an imaginative leap by saying that what happens on deeper levels of structure are unconscious transformations—at which levels the most interesting traces of influence can be found.22 Korsyn makes his argument at this binary opposition of structural levels: on the surface are conspicuous allusions between Chopin and Brahms; at deeper levels, particularly of the Brahms, transformed versions of Bloom's ratios (thanks to Korsyn) can be seen and heard to operate. Korsyn's graphs and the musical-analytical points are magnificent and convincing.
Of the binary oppositions between Schenkerian surface and depth, Korsyn contributes to a topic left open above—irony in language and music. For Korsyn '[i]rony is to say one thing and mean another; it involves a conflict of levels, a disparity between surface meaning and deeper intention. In music, we have a theoretical model that has the potential to reproduce the structure of irony, although I doubt anyone has so read it: Schenker's theory of structural levels. In a Schenkerian voice-leading hierarchy, dissonance at one level can become consonant at the next; a passing note, for example, can be composed-out at the next level, becoming a local consonance. A passage can, in effect, say one thing ('consonance') and mean another ('dissonance')' (Korsyn 34). For me, what Korsyn is saying about the difference between structural levels works as a feature of Schenker's global structuralism, and it works as component of an application / adaptation (mis-reading) of Bloom to music, as described above. It maps imperfectly onto linguistic / literary irony, however.
For me (and Korsyn says this) irony involves saying one thing and meaning something else. But that else, is, first of all, in a mutually exclusive binary relationship with what is said. There is a bit-flipping quality of irony in language, and that bit-flipping is felicitous in language due to the ability of language to negate. If Schenkerian voice-leading involved two levels in a similar mutually-exclusive structure, then perhaps irony might obtain to describe musical structure. But Schenkerian sketches of even the simplest pieces involve many levels. Also, irony in language depends on the dual articulation of syntax and semantics. Meaning in language can flip its bit due to the inter-dependence and independence of these articulations. For example, Chomsky's famous non-sense sentence has a crystal clear syntax and minimal semantic dimension: 'colorless green
Schenker developed a technique of graphing the structural levels of movements of tonal music. At the "deepest" level, there is the established key and a large-scale motion to the dominant—usually the next to last chord in the piece; the piece then "closes" at the deepest level with the last tonic chord after the dominant. Everything that happens between the initial tonic chord and the penultimate dominant is represented on "higher" and "higher" structural levels. At the "top" is the surface of the piece itself. You can think of this according to a transformational metaphor. At the "deep" level of any and all sentences ever spoken, written, thought and not spoken, written, thought is a subject - verb binary opposition. Then, moving "up" through deep structure, there are rules of simple transformation—negation, active - passive, question, etc. At "higher" levels there are dependent clauses, phrases, adjectives, adverbs. At the "top" is the chain of words themselves.
Korsyn points out that "Schenker's system, however, discloses both hierarchical reduplication and its opposite [emphases Korsyn's], showing both the possibility of a rapport between levels, as when the same motive appears in both the foreground and middleground, and a tension or contradiction between levels, as when a dissonance on one level becomes a consonance at the next" (Korsyn 27). This is a version of how I think structural models work in the spirit of "global structuralism" described by Jonathan Culler. Culler describes "global structuralism" as a central European phenomenon at the turn of the 20th Century in which Saussure (linguistics) Freud (psychoanalysis) and Durkheim (sociology) developed theories of latent content beneath manifest content in texts of their respective disciplines. To this list I would add Schenker, and to Culler's description, I would add a threshold of perceptibility above which lies the manifest content and beneath which, at times counter-intuitively, the latent content and unconscious mechanisms work.

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ideas sleep furiously.' One of the symptoms of music's difficulty with irony is that such a non-sense sentence is extremely difficult to write; in music (not necessarily but contingently) the syntactic and semantic dimensions are fused, or not yet distinguishable from one another.23 I think music can produce a binary bit-flip with great difficulty; but music has no difficulty being ironic along a continuum of no ironic distance (at one imaginary end) and great ironic distance (at the other).
Korsyn concludes his nuanced and fascinating study with a general statement about music of the 19th century and Bloom's last revisionary ratio—apophrades or the return of the dead. For me, this is one of the most interesting and elusive of the six ratios. It produces, to overstate the matter, the illusion that the latecomer has influenced his predecessor. In the language of the present study then, it would suggest that at one level of meaning Brahms has influenced Chopin. It is perhaps this kind of paradox that Korsyn was after when he quoted Kant's paradox of the original imitation. Korsyn says of this ratio '[the] open-endedness is a quality the Romanze shares with many Romantic pieces. More than one critic has noted that many nineteenth-century works seem less closed, less self-contained, than works of the classical period. In the context of Bloom's theory, we could interpret this open-endedness as an introjection of futurity' (Korsyn 57).
Anxiety and Influence in Historical Modernism
There are many musics of the mid-to-late 20th Century—extensions of serialism, computer music, music concrete, new minimal music, interactive electronic music, new romantic music, popular music, film music, and the enormity of how all of these musics are becoming refigured on the internet. Whenever one 'zooms out' and makes a historical claim much information gets lost, just as a Google-earth 'zoom out' from a neighborhood causes the viewer to loose sight of cars, trees, houses as larger elements of a landscape emerge into view. Bloom's theory and its most successful applications to music can be understood as theories of modernism writ-large, of the period roughly of the late 18th Century...till when? In the last quarter of the 20th Century, we would have said 'to the present.' I think that the mid to late 20th Century is the 'other end' of a certain dimension of modernity, just as the late 18th Century had been its point of origin. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we are still perhaps too close to such an 'other end' to see it clearly. Perhaps it doesn't exist, or perhaps people in half a century will adjust my claim as culture develops in a certain direction. Still, I think two coinciding development in histories makes the claim a legitimate starting point for a discussion.
In music history, one can understand the following trajectory: from early 19 th century diatonic tonality, the binary opposition of tonic and dominant yields more and more throughout the 19th Century to chromaticism, to thirds, to double tonic complexes, to
23 I am playfully suggesting that if we decided collectively to function in social space using music as deeply as we function in language, perhaps we would thereby cause a space to emerge into which we might perceive an inter-dependence and independence of the dual articulations.
a growing emphasis on color and orchestration and, as the 20th century approaches to anti-naturalist sonorities (sonorities that are not arranged according to the principles of the overtone series). Atonal music is a rough analogue for analytic cubism, as serial-ism is a rough analogue for synthetic cubism (see note 25 below). The end point of this Googled-out history is 4' 33" of John Cage—an acoustic analogue to the color field paintings of Rothko. I have done nothing more nor less than sketch two twin (imperfectly parallel) trajectories (in art and in music) of romanticism / modernism as it becomes transformed into postmodernism.24 It is as if we can hear in this large-scale modernism an ache of regret at the loss of representational realism in the visual arts, and the clarity of diatonic tonality in music. This imaginary ache is at the heart of the anxiety of influence described by Bloom.25
We have not lived enough culture after Cage and Rothko to know if postmodernism, posthumanism and other theories of the 'present' are resonances of the end of this modernism writ-large or the initial edges of something new; nevertheless, I would like to suggest here that while there are immense (even dominant) kinds influences at work in the arts of the late 20th / early 21st Centuries, there may or may not be evidence for Bloomian anxiety.
Quotation has become one of the most essential features of music in the late 20th / early 21st Centuries. It would be more true than false to say that the compositional act of writing pitches on staff paper has been replaced in the late 20th / early 21st Centuries by cutting and pasting (more command-C / command-V than pre-digital cutting and pasting literally) on a screen. One can understand quotation in music as an extension of collage techniques , or, one can understand quotation in music as a counter-intuitive return of music to its first method of instruction and exercise— copying.
As far as I know there has been no study of the music of the late 20th / early 21st Centuries from the point of view of influence, despite the fact that perhaps the most common feature of this music is quotation, copying, (re)composing. I choose George Rochberg for several reasons: 1) I love his music and find it compelling, 2) he uses quotation, copying, (re)composition in most of his music written from roughly 1973 to his death in 2005, and 3) his Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (1973) is a piece that offers a precise version of quotation, copying, (re)composition that has never been studied before.
For an introduction to postmoderism in culture, see Fredric Jameson "Post-modernism and Consumer Society" in The Anti-Aesthetic, Edited by Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983). For a study of postmodernism and music, see Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. Edited by Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge 2002).
In art history, one can understand a similar trajectory: from early 19th century realism, the object of painterly representation becomes more and more mediated; light becomes an object of interest more and more for its own sake, and finally, by the early 20th Century, the object of painterly representation has become more internal states of mind than external objects, more abstraction than realist representation. Analytic and synthetic cubism lead to a greater role of collage techniques and (zooming out still further) the primacy of the brush stroke is falling apart in favor of other means of applying paint (and other "objects") to the canvas. The end point of this Googled-out history is the monochromatic paintings of Mark Rothko and the color field painters of post World-War II Europe and America.
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MUZIKOLOSKI ZBORNIK • MUSICOLOGICAL ANNUAL XLV/2 Rochberg on Rochberg and Influence
The discussions of anxiety of influence in music above (Beethoven / Berlioz; Chopin / Brahms) were strengthened by anecdotal evidence in the form of letters in which composers expressed self-conscious awareness of a shadow in which they were living and working. The statements of an artist must always be taken to be at least potentially the words of an unreliable narrator, however. Some artists are spectacularly articulate about their work; some are spectacularly inarticulate about their work; some have things (consciously or unconsciously) to hide. But most significantly, the great artists in the canonic tradition(s) are great precisely because their works transcend the limits of what any artist could be capable of articulating about his / her works within the limits of a 'moment'; they are great precisely because they say something about the history of which they are an expression and which they help to create. Psychoanalytically, greatness is that within a work which is more than the work itself. We can read the statements of such unreliable narrators with an awareness of a necessary lack of one-to-one correspondence between utterance and truth value, connecting their words to our understanding of their relevance and context(s).
Take the words of Rochberg with regards to his own career: '[m]ost recently, [Rochberg is writing in the late 1960s / early 1970s] my search has led to an ongoing reconsideration of what the past (musical or otherwise) means. Current biological research corroborates Darwin: we bear the past in us. We do not, cannot, begin all over again in each generation, because the past is indelibly printed on our central nervous systems. Each of us is part of a vast physical-mental-spiritual web of previous lives, existences, modes of thought, behavior, and perceptions; of actions and feelings reaching much further back than what we call history.26 Remembering that Rochberg's Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence were both published in 1973, the above passage from Rochberg suggests a very much inverted view of the relationship between a creative artist and his past. While Bloom argues for a monumental and necessary, (foreshortened) Oedipal struggle, Rochberg calls for a re-connection with the past. His is a desire for influence. What if such a desire is an emblem for a larger historical move? What if Rochberg desire is characteristic of much late 20th-, early 21st- century music? What if post-World War II extensions of serialism, and the music of the avant garde are, in the minds and hearts of composers such as Rochberg, signs, or causes of paternal loss? One way of understanding Roch-berg's music composed after 1973 is to hear it as a single gesture of trying to regain a lost paternal signifier.
Rochberg gives an account of the history of his own music as follows: 'Not yet ready to re-embrace tonality without reserve, I began to approach it first by quoting tonal music of the past, in assemblages or collages of different musics (Contra Mortem et Tempus and Music for the Magic Theater, both 1965), and in commentaries on works of the past (Nach Bach, 1966); later, I would compose sections of movements or whole movements in the language of tonality (Symphony no. 3 1966-69). By 1972 I had arrived
26 George Rochberg, String Quartet no. 3, the Concord String Quartet (Nonesuch 1973). LP liner notes.
at the possibility not only of a real and personal rapprochment with the past (which had become of primary importance), but also of the combination of different gestures and languages within the frame of a single work.'
Writing of his landmark String Quartet no. 3, Rochberg states: 'I draw heavily on the melodic-harmonic language of the 19th Century..., but in this open ambience tonal and atonal can live side-by-side—the decision of which to use depends entirely on the character and essence of the musical gesture. In this way, the inner spectrum of the music is enlarged and expanded; many musical languages are spoken in order to make the larger statement convincing.' And: '[w]e are filaments of a universal mind; we dream each other's dreams and those of our ancestors. Time, thus, is not linear, but radial.' Rochberg's phrase 'tonal and atonal can live side-by-side' implicitly acknowledges the constitutive friction of placing tonal and atonal together: tonal pieces project a centripedal force of all musical materials to a tonal center; atonal pieces project a centrifugal force of all musical materials away from a tonal center. And his word 'can' suggests, nevertheless, that tonal and atonal can be placed side-by-side.
'Side-by-side' is a phrase that has become loaded with narrative implications. It has been applied to grammatical elements in poetry as a sign of emerging, modern, parataxis.27 The hypotaxis of subordination can be thought of as an emblem for tonality; the parataxis of coordination can be thought of as an emblem for atonality (I will comment at greater length on the parataxis / hypotaxis binary below). One of Roch-bergis tasks in his Caprice Variations, as I will explore below, is to examine how the hypotactic subordination of musical materials in tonality can exist side-by-side with the paratactic coordination of musical materials in atonality. But more importantly, what do Rochberg's choices in this piece suggest about his / his music's relationship to influence? I will now begin to listen closely to the music in order to address some of these questions.
Rochberg's Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (1973)
On his recording of the Caprice Variations, Zvi Zeitlin re-arranges the Caprices according to the table below. The numbers on the top correspond to the order of tracks on the compact disk; the numbers on the bottom correspond to the numbered Caprices in the score.28 Zeitlin omits Caprice no. 11, 'after Brahms Opus 35, Bk I, no. 11.' Such a re-ordering is very much within the style of the work. In an 'Afterword to the Performer', Rochberg says '[i]f the player chooses not to perform the entire set, he is at liberty to select those sections which will add up to a satisfying whole in musical terms and still represent the intentions of the work. In a shortened performance version, it is strongly urged, though, that the performer include as many of variations 5, 18, 19, 33, 34, 35, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 49 and 50 as possible, so as to preserve a balance in the stylistic spread
27	See Eric L. Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). See also Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis" in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).
28	The liner notes that accompany this CD are flawed. They are correct through track 13; every other track is listed incorrectly. The table below is correct and complete.
which is a fundamental premise of this work'.29
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	49	42
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
19	9	10	12	13	14	41	47	34	35
21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30
20	32	15	30	33	45	18	16	17	46
31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40
43	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29
41	42	43	44	45	46	47	48	49	50
30	31	40	48	37	38	44	39	50	51
The caprices are like points along an imaginary continuum with direct and transparent transcription at the left and original composition at the right. At the far left is the last caprice of the set—caprice no. 51 (Paganini's Caprice XXIV).30 This piece is almost an exact transcription; Rochberg has added a few grace notes, accents, and forte dynamic marks.31 I will address the appearance of the Paganini (near perfect) transcription more fully at the end of this essay.
Moving one notch to the right on our imaginary continuum, there are near-transcriptions including caprice 7 ('After Beethoven Op. 74, Scherzo'), caprice 8 ('After Schubert, Waltz Op. 9, no. 22'), caprice 9 ('After Brahms Op. 35, Bk. I, no. 2'), caprice 10 ('After Brahms Op. 35, Bk. I, no. 3'), caprice 11 ('After Brahms Op. 35, Bk. I, no. 11'), caprice 12 ('After Brahms, Op. 35, Bk I, no. 12'), caprice 13 ('After Brahms Op. 35, Bk. II, no. 10'), and caprice 21 ('After Beethoven Symphony no. 7, Finale'). In all of the above cases, music for instrument or ensemble other than a solo violin, means that the sounds of the near-transcriptions will always sound mediated to a listener familiar with the original. All of the pieces that have been transposed have been transposed to the same pitch level (also to be discussed at the end of the chapter). It is curious indeed that two of the composers associated with applications of Bloom's theory of influence to music are represented here Beethoven and Brahms. Schubert is also commonly assumed to have been overwhelmed to work in Beethoven's shadow. Finding Beethoven
George Rochberg, "Afterword to the Performer" Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (New York: Galaxy Music, 1973), p. 52.
I would like to refer to Rochberg's work at hand as a whole with the term "set." The term set comprises pieces "to the right" of a "left" delimiter and "to the left" of a "right" delimiter. Thus, the set [1,2,3,4,5] contains the elements 1,2,3,4, and 5. I would like to avoid the term "cycle", since that term evokes organic principles of voice-leading, key-scheme, and mode-scheme unity found in works such as Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin (1823-1824), and Winterreise (1827).
Rochberg's note to this piece says "[i]t is understood that both the form and performance style of Paganini's theme, the concluding music of the Caprice Variations, have been altered somewhat in order to provide a fitting envoi for this work" (Rochberg Caprice Variations 52).
29
30
and Brahms both in works of scholarship exploring anxiety and influence in music and in near-transcriptions in Rochberg's work means that Rochberg, in his urge to connect his new music from the early 1970s on to the past, brought him right to the heart of the common-practice canon.
There are two things worth mentioning in these near-transcriptions. Rochberg is witty in his near-transcription of Brahms. Brahms wrote two books of variations for piano on the theme of the caprice XXIV of Paganini, and Rochberg is writing variations of variations on the same theme. Also Rochberg, in his attempt to capture 'stylistic spread' across his set, is not interested in having a single caprice explore a single style. There are mini-sets within the larger one; caprices 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 are all 'takes' on Brahms, for example.32
Moving one more notch to the right on our imaginary continuum, there are two caprices that heavily borrow musical materials from previous pieces but are not transcriptions of them. Caprice 41 ('After Webern, Passacaglia, Op. 1') is based on a transposed version of the idea that begins at the Sehr Lebhaft section of the Passacaglia four measures before rehearsal 6 in the score. Caprice 44 ('After Mahler Symphony No. 5, Scherzo') is based on the fugatto theme that appears from the pickup to measure 40 through measure 46. The rest of this chapter will address pieces that gradually move to the right of our imaginary continuum. Caprice 24 embodies an oscillation between two bits of musical materials.
Rochberg's Caprice 24
Rochberg's caprice 24 embodies a particularly late 20th Century version of parataxis. Parataxis means side-by-sideness, juxtaposition, coordination. Its complementary term, hypotaxis means the principle of hierarchy, subordination. Taking Adorno as his lead, Eric Santner has discussed the paratactic quality of diction in the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. For Santner, parataxis signifies a breakdown of traditional hierarchical forms of both grammar and subject formations at the dawn of modernism.33 In the 'New Romantic' style of the late 20th Century, composers such as Rochberg and Jakob Druck-man used paratactic juxtaposition to place bits of quoted material side-by-side to create texts that undermine closed narrative structures. See example 1 for a transcription of Rochberg's caprice 24.
Also, the set contains even smaller sets of variations of variations; for example caprice 17 is a clear and consistent variation of caprice 16, and caprice 4 is a variation of caprice 3.
A musical correlate of parataxis in Hölderlin might be chromaticism as it seeps into deeper and deeper levels of structure in music in the late 19th Century. Free atonality (roughly 1905 to 1923) suggests paratactic side-by-sideness of a negative variety; composers of the Second Viennese School sought to distance the 12 pitches as much as possible from one another, not repeating a pitch until all 12 had been used. Serial techniques (1923 to the present) suggests paratactic side-by-sideness of a positive variety; the 12 pitches are arranged as a fixed row, with prime, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion operations enacted upon it. Depending on the precise nature of musical materials, and the design and nature of a piece, atonal and serial music can stress paratactic juxtaposition or it can introduce at the will of the composer, elements of hypotaxis or subordinating hierarchy.
32
senza sord.
Allegretto
(J =76-80}
$
H^H V n

ffl^l tOS n¿L|"rÉÉ¡i
mf dolce
pz
pizz
arco
Example 1. George Rochberg Caprice no. 24.
Many of Rochberg's caprices are in simple binary form with each part repeated. As shown in Example 2, the A section typically alternates between tonic and dominant; the B section moves to the subdominant, mediant, supertonic sonorities before the structural dominant that closes the form on tonic. See Example 2.
A section (sometimes repeated)	B section (sometimes repeated)
i or I	Vorv 'II' iv	III	ii diminished orflat-ll	V	iorl
Example 2. A Sketch of the Form and Harmonic Design for Many of Rochberg's Caprices.
In accord with the sketch above, Rochberg's caprice 24 moves back and forth between tonic and dominant in the A section; the B section touches on D and then C (the harmonics in measures 6 and 8 respectively), and then moves to a close with an E to A cadential gesture.
Although Rochberg's caprice 24 bears no motto of musical debt, I hear the work as a paratactic juxtaposition of two bits of music within this general AB form: 1) a descending perfect fifth (once a perfect fourth) filled in diatonically and played pizzicato; the first four notes are thirty-second notes and the fifth note is an eighth note, and 2) a slightly varied pattern of three gestures of three notes each-two sixteenth notes followed by an eighth note. I will first discuss the paratactic dimension of these two bits and then discuss what elements of hypotaxis tie them together.
The first bit sounds like a passage from Paganini's caprice 9 (see example 3):
Example 3. Paganini Caprice no. 9, mm. 61-68.
The second bit sounds like a passage from the Brahms Violin Concerto; see Example
4:
j	r/t^
r#r t n
mMMhM^M
p leggiero ma espressivo (grazioso)
/yjti?bf £T.E-Ëf^r gtifTrrtif^ rr^r rrLg.
Example 4. Brahms, Violin Concerto, first movement mm. 307-314.
The second passage in Rochberg's mm. 7-8 is a direct quote from the Brahms Violin Concerto, measure 307. The Brahms begins in the C minor of measure 307-the harmony Rochberg reaches in his mm. 7-8 as he moves from D through C towards the dominant gesture E-A at the end.
The paratactic dimension of the caprice involves its juxtaposition of bits of Paganini and bits of Brahms. The hypotactic dimension is very strong as well, however. The sketch of the piece below shows that each first and second bit clearly outline the harmonic pattern shown in Example 2. And one can hear a steady motion of eighth notes throughout, as if the piece were written in 4/8; 4/8 'beats' 1 and 3 are always eighth notes; 4/8 'beats' 2 and 4 are always subdivided—at first into Paganini-like 32nd notes, and then into Brahms-like sixteenth notes. Further, the Paganini-like pitches are diatonic; the Brahms-like pitches are chromatic. Together, they mesh into one composed-out version of the progression outlined in Example 2. Paganini-like notes have downwards stems; Brahms-like notes have upwards stems; see Example 5.
307
...6 m
V i
Example 5. Sketch of Paganini-like bit and Brahms-like bit Meshing in Rochberg's caprice 24.
Moving to the 'right' of our imaginary continuum from caprice 24, there are two kinds of caprices: works that compose out the basic harmonic and formal design of example 2 with spiral-like repetition, and works evocative of the avant garde of the 1970s with extended violin techniques and their notation.
Rochberg and the Spiral
Tonal works have often repeated themselves, and indeed the formal design suggested in Example 2 grounds these pieces precisely in one of the most repetitive forms in music history—the baroque binary dance form. Anyone who has played an instrument remembers being told by a teacher, however, that the second time you play a repeated passage, your performance must bear the effects of its repetition. And, moving away from repetition as simply 'playing it one more time' to 'interpreting it one more (different) time', there are repetitions that are re-contextualized—such as the 'repetition' of the first thematic area of group in the recapitulation of a common-practice sonata form.
There are many kinds of cyclical formations in tonal music as well from the cycle of fifths to versions of 'devil's circles' in music.34 In the pieces at hand, Rochberg composes out, as it were, a continuum between circles (like the circle of fifths that closes on itself
34 The circle of fifths is a "circle" in the equal-tempered universe. That is, if you move clockwise around the circle, you gain a sharp at every notch (D / A / E...) and then, at some point you "flip" to the flat side and subtract flats (A-flat / E-flat / B-flat / F...) and you end up where you began—at C. You can accomplish the same thing in the reverse track, moving counterclockwise: you start out at C and add flats (C / F / B-flat.) and then, at some point you "flip" to the sharp side and subtract sharps (E / A / D...) and you end up where you began—at C. On the other hand in the harmonic world "before" equal temperament, if you move clockwise around the "circle" of fifths, you never get back to C; you keep adding sharps infinitely. This is a spiral, and when you get to B-sharp you can imagine turning the spiral on its side and seeing the space between C and B-sharp; another pass would increase this distance to A-triple sharp, etc. Similarly, if you move counterclockwise, you would never get to C but rather to D-double flat. If B-sharp is "above" C, then D-double-flat is "below" and one infinite spiral of sharps moves "up" away from C and one infinite spiral of flats moves "down" away from C.
There are well-known examples of progressions that embody such spirals that become circles through equal-temperment's enharmonic re-spelling. One of my favorites is the devil's mill from Schubert's "Der Wegweiser" from Winterreise (1827).
4
2
3
5
6
12
7
8
9
10
11
w
through enharmonic re-spelling) and spirals (like the circle of fifths without enharmonic re-spelling). Caprice 2 sounds, on first listening, and indeed, on subsequent listenings, to 'stop' and not 'conclude.' Indeed, pieces that are hypotactic tend to conclude (the hierarchically organized subordination of materials leads to a logical conclusion or cadence); pieces that are paratactic tend to stop (the side-by-sideness implies no necessary closure). See Example 6.
Example 6. Rochberg Caprice no. 2.
For the A section of the form, the music moves as expected between tonic and dominant, with a conventional terraced dynamic piano for the repeat of music played forte the first time. For the B section, Rochberg composes a spiral in which the music nearly but crucially not quite closes back on itself. The B section involves an alternation of exact and near quotes with itself according to the scheme shown in example 7:
9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
=	!	=	!	=	!	=	!	=	!	=	!	!	!	=	!
25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40
Example 7. Exact and Near Cross-References in the B Section of Caprice 2.
Measure 25 is an exact repetition of measure 9; measure 27 is an exact repetition of measure 11, etc. Measure 26 varies the texture of but maintains the harmonic implications
of measure 10; measure 28 varies the texture of but maintains the harmonic implications of measure 12, etc. If the pattern had continued, a hypothetical measure 41 might have either been a repetition of measure 25 = measure 9; or a hypothetical measure 41 might have altered the pattern. If hypothetical measure 41 would have equaled measure 25 equals measure 9, then the pattern of the B section would have resembled an equal-tempered cycle; if hypothetical measure 41 would not have equaled measure 25 equals measure 9, then the pattern of the B section would have resembled a non-equal-tempered spiral of key relations. The piece ends with a paratactic gesture of tearing off, brought out by Rochberg's senza rit. performance direction.
Rochberg composed another caprice with a varied return to the beginning; see Example 8 for a transcription of caprice 15.
There is compound, stepwise motion generating a structure that holds this piece together. That two-voice counterpoint (with some inner voices) is represented in Example 9.
1	2	3-4	5	6	7
Example 9. Two-voice framework for Rochberg's Caprice 15.
The sketch shows what I hear in the music—a series of 10ths from mm. 1-4 to the double bar. These 10ths prolong the diminished fourth C-sharp / D-natural / E-natural / F-natural in the upper voice; underneath these notes, in order are A-natural / B-natural / B-sharp / C-sharp / D-natural. The inner voice motion A-natural / B-flat / B-natural in mm. 3-4 brings the A section of the piece back to the B-sharp at the beginning for a smooth and closed cyclical structure upon repeat of the A section.
The sketch shows that for the B section, Rochberg composes a series of 6ths between the upper and inner voices. The upper voice in mm. 5-7 is a variant of the upper voice from mm. 1-4. From mm. 5-7 it prolongs the perfect fourth C-sharp / D-natural / D-sharp / E-natural / F-sharp. In the middle voice, underneath these pitches (forming a series of parallel 6ths, beginning under D-natural) is F-natural / F-sharp / G-natural / A-natural. From mm. 8-9 the upper voice prolongs a minor third: G-sharp / A-natural / B-natural; underneath these notes in an inner voice another series of 6ths is created with B-natural / C-natural / D-natural.
In measure 9, the b-natural2 in the first triplets is transferred down an octave in the second triplets. From the second half of measure 9 on, the music like an indirect repetition of the opening of the piece. Herein lies a spiraling dimension of caprice 15. On the one hand measure 9 does not repeat measure 1; on the other hand, the sketch above brings out the voice-leading that makes a kind of repetition (as if on a different 'plane') quite audible.
The sketch shows that the piece begins with a neighboring B-sharp resolving to C-sharp supported by A-natural. The C-sharp supported by A-natural interval initiates a series of ascending 10ths as discussed above. The second half of measure 9 into measure 10 'repeats' this gesture: measure 9's B-natural moves to C-natural (an enharmonic equivalent of the opening B-sharp) which resolves to C-sharp supported here not by A-natural but A-sharp, likewise initiating a series of ascending 10ths. The 10ths from mm. 10-14 expand the 10ths from mm. 1-4. The internal slurs from mm. 9-11 show the motion in the B section that parallels (as if on a different 'plane') the music from mm. 1-4; the larger slurs show the entire series of 10ths culminating in an implied augmented sixth chord at the end of measure 14. As in all common-practice augmented sixth chords the F-natural in the lower voice is heard as flat-6 ('Le') that resolves into measure 15 to E-natural; the sharp-4 ('Fi') at the end of measure 14, likewise resolves to E.
The A minor triad is full and clearly realized in the second group of sixteenth notes of measure 15. Now the C-natural in this triad, again, sounds like a veiled return to the
opening B-sharp (remembering the enharmonic equivalence between B-sharp and C-natural). Rochberg is for a second time taking on a transformed 'pass' at the opening. Note (not on the sketch) the 10ths in mm. 15-17. The upper voice prolongs C-sharp / D-natural / D-sharp (m. 15) / E-natural / E-sharp (m. 16) / F-sharp (mm. 17-18); underneath these notes in the lower voice Rochberg prolongs A-natural / B-natural (m. 15) / B-sharp / C-sharp (m. 16) / D-natural (mm. 17-18). This motion parallels the 10ths in mm. 1-4.
With the 'piu tranquillo' of measure 19, Rochberg makes another, more distant pass at the beginning; here the A-natural / B-natural / C-sharp / D-natural motion of the lower voice of mm. 1-4 is foreshortened in an inner voice (the piece sounds like a winding-down clock at its end) to A-natural / B-natural / C-sharp. Rochberg thus begins in measure 1, composes a veiled return at measure 15, and yet another veiled return at measure 19. I hear this structure as a spiral with two passes at a beginning. See example 10 below for a sketch of these passes.
measure 19	(re)calls	measure 15	(re)calls	measure 1
measure 20	(re)calls	measure 16	(re)calls	measure 2
		measure 17	(re)calls	measure 3
		measure 18	(re)calls	measure 4
Example 10. A Sketch of Cross-Referential 'passes' at the Beginning of Caprice 15.
Caprice 29 is a heavily chromatic example of a work which refers at its ending to its beginning. Unlike caprice 15, caprice 29 (re)approaches its beginning at its end in a retrograde gesture to be described below. See Example 11 for a transcription of the work.
dolciss.
Example 11. Transcription of Caprice 29.
The top line of measures 1-2 unfold a falling minor second motive: c-sharp2 / c-natural2 / b-natural1 (with the b-natural1 moving to an inner voice below f-sharp2 on the downbeat of measure 2). This falling semitone idea is supported by a-natural throughout producing a two-voice counterpoint of 10-10-9. I hear this two-voice counterpoint with its goal as the 9th between a-natural and b-natural1 as the basic material of the caprice. An additional voice doubles the falling minor second idea a sixth below as shown in Example 12.
1 2
Example 12. Reduction of mm. 1-2 of caprice 29.
The 10-10-9 two-voice oblique counterpoint represented in Example 12 sounds Wagnerian in its semitonal descent. After the double bar a thoroughly internalized version of the Tristan chord / progression appears, magnificently veiled. See Example 13.
Tristan-esque Progression in Rochberg	The same Tristanesque Progression in
with interpolated chord in parentheses.	Rochberg transposed down a minor second
followed by a cadential motion to B major.
Example 13. Transformations of the Tristan chord/progression in Caprice 29.
Example 13 shows to the extreme left the middle of the three Tristan Progressions from the very beginning of the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner. The example shows, moving to the right, a thoroughly veiled (re)composition of the progression by George Rochberg in the caprice at hand. The chord in parentheses is an interpolated sonority; the three-chord progression is an audible expansion of the famous Tristan-to-dominant seventh chord progression. The dotted slur shows that Rochberg omits the B and in favor of C (enharmonically respelled as B-sharp); the dotted line shows similarly that he omits the C-sharp in favor of the D—moved to an inner voice. The example shows to its extreme right, the Wagner-esque transposition of the Tristan-esque progression down a half-step.35 At the asterisk, Rochberg writes a C-natural instead of a C-sharp. The change makes the music sound like an augmented-sixth chord resolving directly to tonic.
35 Robert Bailey has described the prevalence of semitonal voice-leading in Wagner. See Robert Bailey, "Analytical Study" in Wagner, Prelude and Transfiguration. Ed. Robert Baily (New York: WW Norton and Co, 1985).
Once Rochberg arrives at B major in measure 12, the music moves down in a sequence of 10ths to the downbeat of measure 15 as shown in Example 14.
12	13	14	15
Example 14. Rochberg caprice 29, motion from mm. 12-15.
The two-voice counterpoint is an expansion of the 10-10-9 motion that we heard earlier (see Example 12, above). This motion (the 10-10-9 of measures 1-2 and the 10-1010-10-10-10-9 of measures 12-15), suggests that the ninth a-natural / b-natural1 is a goal. From mm. 1-2 the melodic motion c-sharp2 / c-natural2 / b-natural1 takes place over a pedal a-natural; from mm. 12-15 the approach to b-natural1 takes place with a series of parallel 10ths. Measures 15-19 reverse the motion of mm. 1-2, as shown in Example 15.
*
=Pt
£
Tí

r
becomes

J1
Example 15. Cross-Referential Representation of Rochberg caprice 29, mm. 1-2 and mm. 15-19.
2
19
19
1
Example 15 compresses an idea that might be demonstrated more thoroughly—that measures 15-18 prolong b-natural1. Indeed, I hear mm. 15-18 prolonging not only b-natural1, but the ninth a-natural / b-natural1. Example 15 shows that I hear the initial melodic motion in mm. 1-2 c-sharp2 / c-natural2 / b-natural1 reversed in the melodic motion in mm. 15-19-b-natural1 / b-sharp1 (enharmonically equivalent to c-natural2) / c-sharp2. The end of this piece sounds like a return to its beginning, but not its very beginning, its just-having begun (so to speak); from the b-natural1 in measure 2 (mm. 15-18), the music backs up to the c-natural on the second beat of measure 1 (the b-sharp1 on the first beat of measure 19) and backs up again to the c-sharp2 (the c-sharp2 on the second beat of measure 19). Or, one could say it the other way around; from the b-natural1 of measures 15-18 (the b-natural1 of measure 2), the music backs up to the b-sharp1 on the first beat of measure 19 (the c-natural2 on the second beat of measure 1) to the c-sharp2 of the second beat of measure 19 (the c-sharp2 on the first beat of measure 1). The fer-matas on the b-sharp1 and c-sharp2 of measure 19 draw the ear to the temporal play in the work between beginning and ending.
Rochberg's caprice 31 is composed of intricate and imbricated loops. See Example 16 for a transcription of the work.
Molto Adagio (. = ca. 40)
TIRJ
HJU . r—-r Y- T
!	!	pocof
. ! p>


piu dolciss. (quasi echo')
U ^U VQ ^ l-LS
vms
J>


llt j=r •- tr LLT

!	pocof
Example 16. Transcription of Rochberg, Caprice 31.
The piece involves two textures: a slow motion of descending sixths with accompanying 'restless; rubato; threatening' iterated pitches mm. 1- 24 and mm. 41-49, and the passage in triplets at Unpocopiu mosso mm. 25-40. These two different textures are united by transposition of an opening melodic fragment f-natural2 / g-flat2 / e-flat2; the accent marks in the Un poco piu mosso section reveal a continuity of ascending step followed by descending third. It turns out that these different passages are even more intimately related as I will show below. I hear measure one as a sixth with an upper neighbor leading to a more structural sixth on the downbeat of measure 2. Measures 1-6 thus prolong a fully-diminished chord built on G-flat (G-flat / B-double-flat / C-natural / E-flat). The G-flat / B-double-flat / E-flat are present in measures 2-3; the C-natural is added to the chord in measure 5. It is possible to hear the passage in other ways, and those ways would produce different but analogous results. Measures 7-12 transpose this progression down four half steps to prolong a new fully-diminished seventh chord (A-flat / B-natural / D-natural / F-natural). The progression is transposed down another four half steps; now mm. 13-18 prolong the other (and final) fully-diminished seventh chord in the tonal universe: (B-flat (or A-sharp) / D-flat / F-flat (or E-natural) / G-natural). Measures 1-18 prolong what is often called in tonal music a Teufelsmuhle, or Devil's Mill—a progression that closes on itself like the musical equivalent of a snake eating its own tail. Devil's Mills are progressions that are specific to tonal / chromatic music, usually vocal.

For the purposes of this study, I will refer to their larger class of structures—loops. See Example 17.
12	45	7 8	10 11	13 14	16 17
_jp-¡n^i^b,-		Q				h.H7\				
										
J	7 '1		7 1 ^-J-^J					v—		5
F-sharp / G-flat VÜ°7	G-sharp / A-flat VÜ°7	A-sharp / B-flat VU°7
Example 17. A Loop in Rochberg's Caprice 31.
The 'chord tones' of the fully-diminished seventh chords are represented in the sketch by hollow note heads; the solid note heads are like 'dissonances' that decorate them. I hear two levels of structure in this loop: 1) the prolonged fully-diminished seventh chords, and 2) on a 'deeper' structural level, an augmented triad. The augmented triad represents the levels at which the fully-diminished seventh chord is transposed—four half steps or major thirds. This augmented triad is quite audible in the music; it is embodied in the 'restless; rubato; threatening' pitches—B-double-flat / F-natural / D-flat.
Rochberg lets the loop close back upon itself and begin to repeat; measures 19-24 = measures 1-6. The repetition seems to break off at the beginning of measure 25 with the Un poco piu mosso; in fact, it continues after the Un pocco piu mosso passage which functions as an interpolation. See Example 18 for a chart of correspondences between measures 1-18 and the rest of the piece.
measure 47	equals	measure 19	equals	measure 1
measure 48	equals	measure 20	equals	measure 2
measure 49	equals	measure 21	equals	measure 3
		measure 22	equals	measure 4
		measure 23	equals	measure 5
		measure 24	equals	measure 6
				
		measure 41	equals	measure 7
		measure 42	equals	measure 8
		measure 43	equals	measure 9
		measure 44	rather equals	measure 10
		measure 45	rather equals	measure 11
		measure 46	rather equals	measure 12
				measure 13
				measure 14
				measure 15
				measure 16
				measure 17
				measure 18
Example 18. Cross references among measures in Caprice 31.
The column to the right represents how the music unfolds in time, moving top to bottom; measure 1-18 unfold the loop represented in Example 17. Measures 19-24 repeat measures 1-6 as shown by the middle column, moving top to bottom. The row left blank represents the interpolated Un poco piu mosso section, and the repetition of initial music continues with measure 41. Measure 44-46 'rather equal' measure 10-12; measures 44-46 color the note names of measures 10-12 differently (the C-sharp of measure 10 becomes a C-natural in measure 44, etc). The piece stops with a second return pass at its beginning (measures 47-49 = 19-21 = 1-3).
The Un poco piu mosso section of the piece re-works the loop of measures 1-18; see Example 19.
25 26	29 30	33 34
F-sharp / G-flat U"	G-sharp / A-flat	A-shaip / B-flat U"
Example 19. A Loop (re)worked in the Un poco piu mosso section of Caprice 31.
Rochberg composes the Un poco piu mosso section as a variant of his initial idea, with the a-flat1 / b-double-flat1 / g-flat1 of measures 25-26 re-working the f-natural2 / g-flat2 / e-flat2 of measures 1-2. The Un pocco piu mosso section sounds a bit different from mm. 1-18, but the materials are the same. Put another way, one level of the music prolongs fully-diminished seventh chords in both passages—mm. 1-6 are to mm. 25-28 (F-sharp / G-flat fully-diminished seventh chord) as mm. 7-12 are to mm. 29-32 (G-sharp / A-flat fully-diminished seventh chord) as mm. 13-18 is to mm. 33-36 (A-sharp / B-flat fully-diminished seventh chord). On a 'deeper level' these fully-diminished seventh chords sound different because they are transposed down not a major third (to prolong an augmented triad) but in half steps. Note the beamed and hollow notes in Example 19 that shows a G-flat / F-natural / E-natural motion across mm. 25-36.
Just as Rochberg had let his loop of mm. 1-18 fold back in upon itself with mm. 19-24 'recalling' mm. 1-6 (the first fully-diminished seventh chord of the loop), so, too, in the Un pocco piu mosso section, he lets his loop once again fold back in upon itself with mm. 37-40 'recalling' measures 25-28. But there is a difference; mm. 19-24 repeat mm. 1-6 while mm. 37-40 rework mm. 25-28; mm. 37-40 prolong the same fully-diminished seventh chord as mm. 25-28. Measure 26 emphasizes, for instance, the pitch-class G-flat while measure 38, for instance, emphasizes the pitch-class E-flat.
In the Un poco piu mosso section, Rochberg is re-working his loop in a compressed form with six measures of earlier music compressed into four. See Example 20.
measures 25-28	rework	measures 1-6	which prolong	F-sharp / G-flat fully- diminished seventh
measures 29-32	rework	measures 7-12	which prolong	G-sharp / A-flat fully- diminished seventh
measures 33-36	rework	measures 13-18	which prolong	A-sharp / B-flat fully- diminished seventh
Example 20. A Loop in Caprice 31 in mm. 1-18 and mm. 25-36.
The information presented in Example 20 above shows what happens in the blank row of Example 18. Now we can see that Rochberg in fact takes three return passes through the beginning of the piece. Thus the return passes are not measures 47-49 = 19-21 = 1-3, but measures 47-49 repeat 19-21 which repeat 1-3 while measures 25-28 and measure 37-40 rework measures 1-3.
The first time we hear mm. 1-3 they suggest the beginning of a piece; with measures 19, 25, and 47, however, measures 1-3 sound like a window through which we hear dif-
rrrrr
* play 1/4 tone below the pitch
Example 21. Rochberg, Caprice 42.
ferent passes through a loop. While caprice 31 contains a loop within its own (re)com-posed 'tonal' loop (with a fully-diminished seventh chord at its point of origin), Caprice 42 contains a loop (with an atonal pitch-class set at its point of origin) and avant-garde violin techniques. See Example 21.36
If one understands phrases as melodic gestures whose end-fermatas provide a caden-tial closure, and atonal pitch-class set theory as a way of understanding the pitch-class content of these phrases, the structure of the piece emerges. See Example 22.
VIII pitch-class set {2,4,8,10} member of set class (0,2,6,8)
	
	
& n* IX pitch-class set {7,8,9,1,2,3} member of set class (0,1,2,6,7,8)	
Example 22. An atonal pitch-class segmentation of the phrases of Caprice 42.
Example 22 reveals an atonal pun on tonal procedures in the A section of the work before the first repeat. Throughout the Caprices, Rochberg has moved from tonic to dominant in the A sections; in Caprice 42, the pitch-class set I gets transposed up 7 half-steps (as if to its 'dominant') to form pitch-class set II. After the repeat, Rochberg composes an atonal pitch-class loop whose close in upon itself in pitch-class set IX is baroque (as in baroque pearls whose imperfections are openly displayed). While the pitch-class sets of the A section are members of the set class (0,2,6), the pitch-class sets of the B section's loop are members of the set class (0,2,6,8)-an expansion. Pitch-class sets III through VIII comprise the complete loop. Example 23 represents this loop:
36 The work is written in a kind of loose spatial notation with regard to duration; the length between pitches roughly indicates the length each pitch should be held; Example 21 is an only approximate representation of this aspect of the work, though I have tried to reproduce the durations implied in Rochberg's score.
pitch-class set III	{7,9,1,3}
pitch-class set IV	{6,8,0,2}
pitch-class set V	{5,7,11,1}
pitch-class set VI	{4,6,10,0}
pitch-class set VII	{3,5,9,11}
pitch-class set VIII	{2,4,8,10}
1) continued T-1	{1,3,7,9}
2) continued T-1	{0,2,6,8}
3) continued T-1	{11,1,5,7}
4) continued T-1	{10,0,4,6}
5) continued T-1	{9,11,3,5}
6) continued T-1	{8,10,2,4}
Example 23. The Atonal Loop in the B section of Rochberg's Caprice 42.
The left column shows the pitch-class sets III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII as they occur in the music. 1) continued T-1 shows what Rochberg would have reached had he continued to transpose his sets down by half-step; he would begin to duplicate the pitch-class structure of his sets. Notice that the 1) continued T-1 set would have been pitch-class set {1,3,7,9} mirroring the pitch-class content of pitch-class set III with dyads reversed. 2) continued T-1 would have (re)produced pitch-class set IV, with similar dyad reversals, etc.
Above I refer to the 'baroque pearl' of pitch-class set IX. Pitch-class set IX does in fact close the loop back upon itself, with pitch-class set III embedded as every other pitch-class; pitch-class set III {7,9,1,3} is a subset of pitch-class set IX {7,8,9,1,2,3}. But this is a distortion of a distortion; Pitch-classes 8 (A-flat) and 3 (E-flat) sound a quarter tone low! So pitch-class set IX would be better represented as {7, 7.5, 9, 1, 2, 2.5}. Even this somewhat whimsical pitch-class set with pitch-class 'fractions' isn't necessarily accurate, since it implies an equal-tempered quarter-tone—one that splits every equal-tempered half step into exact halves. An expressive tuning of these quarter tones might have the 'a-flat' lower than half way between an equal-tempered pitch-class 8 and 7 (since it might 'yearn' for G 'darkly' rather than 'yearn' for A 'brightly' as a G-sharp), and the 'e-flat' lower than half way between an equal-tempered pitch-class 4 and 2 (since it might 'yearn' for D 'darkly' rather than 'yearn' for E 'brightly' as a D-sharp).
Rochberg closes Caprice 42 with a transformed version of the beginning of the B section—at once 'the same' and at a remove from 'the same'—through his quarter-tone 'aflat' and 'e-flat' and through an embedded pitch-class set III within pitch-class set IX.
Conclusions
In drawing these remarks together, I will consider three points: 1) cultural conditions underlying claims of anxiety of influence as they obtain to George Rochberg, 2) the words Rochberg himself, and 3) intrinsic evidence of anxiety in the Caprice Variations.
As suggested earlier, at the present writing, we may still be too close to the period under discussion to draw conclusions. If one wrote in 1809 in Vienna about the nature of
the 'masterpiece' in music there would be plenty of evidence upon which to write, but a lack of perspective that would allow one to separate significant from insignificant events, texts, trends. And if one wrote in 1909 about the significance of Schoenberg's 'liberation of the dissonance' a similar condition might arise. Of course 'too close' depends not only on chronological proximity; 'too close' will be minimized in an era of slow communications; 'too close' is really too close in the 'present' with global communications.
I would suggest that the late 20th Century is a time in which composers in the western Anglo-European tradition more or less freely cannibalize the standard repertoire. Composers such as George Rochberg, Jakob Druckman, Luciano Berio fill-out an imaginary continuum from transcription to quotation (direct and indirect) to original composition in their works).
I sense no large-scale historical anxiety as a cultural context for the music of George Rochberg's Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin; I would suggest that while the mid 19th Century is an era in which the figures of Beethoven and Wagner cast a shadow on the lives of belated latecomers, the mid-to-late 20th Century (at least in the music under discussion and others like it in the 'New Romanticism' category) is not an age of anxiety. To put it perhaps too crudely, Rochberg (and other New Romantic composers) seem to glorify in the floodgates of possibilities inherent in their turn to the past.
So what would it mean to say that the mid-to-late 20th Century (as the cultural context for Rochberg's work at hand) was an era free of anxiety? Was it an era of pleasure? A 'Pleasure of Influence' would be suggestive given the frequency with which composers transcribe, digitize, quote, distort, steal, borrow from the musical materials of the standard repertoire. If the mid-to-late 20th Century were an age of a pleasure of influence, then, to connect our speculations with the fundamental assumptions of Bloom's argument, the belated latecomer will have emerged into a world free of the Oedipal complex.37 For me, much of the music we might be tempted to call 'pleasure-ful' contains a pleasure that requires a more refined definition. Let me move back into the words of Rochberg and the musical materials of his piece for evidence of a pleasure of influence.
I quoted the well-known liner notes of Rochberg's String Quartet no. 3 above. Recall that Rochberg turns in the 60s and 70s 'back' to the past for inspiration, suggesting desire for, not anxiety about, the influence of masters. But what about evidence in the Caprice Variations of pleasure?
A Pleasure of Influence
The psychoanalytic structure of pleasure is complex. Let us imagine a linear narrative of developing subjectivity: the sonorous envelope, the mirror stage, and the language acquisition.38 Sonorous pleasure is a fantasy of one-ness with sensations of
What would it mean to suggest a psychic formation "free" of the Oedipal Complex? First, there is a traditional Freudian freedom from the Oedipus Complex that boys experience when they enter latency. Second, within the regime of the Oedipal Complex, one can become psychotically "free" of it through disavowal (a frightening fantasy indeed). Third, freedom from the Oedipus Complex might one day suggest a new theory of psycho-sexuality not based on the penis or its signifier—the phallus. See Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Throughout the following discussion I will discuss Freud and Lacan side-by-side. The notion of a "narrative" like this is simul-

the mother; it is a retrospective fantasy of wholeness before the series of experiences and their representation that split the subject from his / her object of desire. Mirror pleasure is the result of a profound split in the life of the child as he / she at first sees its perfect, full presence in the mirror (an actual mirror or face or projection of a face (mis)perceived as the ideal self). Mirror pleasure is more precisely called (in Lacanian terminology) imaginary plentitude. Imaginary plenitude is the pole of experience and its representation that oscillates back and forth in the life of a subject with its binary opposite—imaginary lack. It can be indicated by the child feeding at the mother's breast (imaginary plentitude) and the hungry child without the breast (imaginary lack). Mutually exclusive binary oppositions of fullness / lack; presence / absence reside in mature life as remnants of this imaginary, binary opposition.39
For Freud, the famous 'fort-da' game in which a child compensates for the missing object of desire (the mother) through a symbolic action (the game itself) inaugurates the subject into culture and language.40 For Lacan, a similar transformation occurs as the mutually exclusive binary oppositions of the mirror stage become mediated through language. I think of this transformation in the life of the subject as follows: although language will never provide the subject with imaginary plenitude, it will always protect the subject from imaginary lack. Let me take another pass at this developmental narrative in order to focus on pleasure.
For Freud, the life of the subject is governed by two principles—the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In the former, tension in the psyche brought about by excitation is lowered; 'an avoidance of unpleasure' produces pleasure (Freud 3). For Freud, the pleasure principle becomes modified by the subject's 'reality principle': 'This latter principle does not abandon the intention of the ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure' (Freud 7).
In the process of developing his ideas on the pleasure and reality principles, Freud famously defines the differences among fear, anxiety, and shock: ''Anxiety' describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. 'Fear' requires a definite object of which to be afraid. 'Fright', however,
taneously valid and invalid. It is valid since children do seem to develop out of a state of undifferentiated body parts in which the mother and child are contained within one amorphous envelope of sensations (see Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego Trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and then moves into and through the mirror phase (see Jacques Lacan "The Mirror Stage" in Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: WW Norton, 2007) and then into language acquisition-described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the "fort-da" game on pp. 12-15, and described throughout Lacan's writings as entry into the Symbolic Order. The notion of a "narrative" like this is invalid, since the signifiers pointing to it are retrospective fantasies from a position of symbolic mastery and since sonorous, mirror, and language traces are more like dolls within dolls than elements of a sequential narrative. Put crudely, sonorous elements are present within mirror elements, are present within language; put more subtly, sonorous elements are transformed as they are partially incorporated within mirror elements, which are transformed as they are partially incorporated into language.
A point of clarification. Elsewhere in this chapter I refer to an "imaginary" continuum; by "imaginary" continuum, I mean to suggest a hypothetical continuum along the points of which varying degrees of transcription (left) / quotation (middle) / original composition (right) reside. Elsewhere I speak of the imaginary (as above) implying Lacan's Imaginary Order—the larger logical class in which the mirror stage belongs. The Imaginary Order is that phase of development and representation governed by mutually exclusive binary oppositions.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated and Edited by James Strachey (New York and London: WW Norton and Co., 1961), p. 12-15.
Î9
is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise' (Freud 11). 'Fright' foreshadows the notion of trauma, so key to the notion of the death drive he is about to discover. For Freud, only the death drive can explain the psychic logic of recurrent nightmares of war veterans, (and others who have suffered traumatic shock) for whom nightmares cannot transparently serve the logic of wish fulfillment.
The drives have a different meaning in Freud and in Lacan. For Freud, the drives are at the heart of sexuality based on biological instinct; for Lacan, the drives are not connected to biology-they are symbolic constructs that are constitutionally resistant to closure.41 Many have used Lacan's famous broken circle as a representation of drive, as shown in Example 24.
Example 24. Lacan's broken circle.
In much of the psychoanalytic literature, actions and representations of actions that involve continual circulation around the broken circle in repeating loops (despite / because of the bar that necessarily breaks imaginary plenitude) suggest the dimension of drive. Actions, representations of actions that in some way 'obey' the block (within which the object cause of desire resides) and richochet into the space of the break suggest desire and its symbolic surrogates (with the sublime at its upper edge, beauty in the middle, and the abject at its bottom edge) as shown in Example 25.
desire
Example 25. Lacan's broken circle of the drives and desires.
41 See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 46.
Desire and Drive can be inscribed in art in a wide variety of ways. And desire and drive can be inscribed in music in a wide variety of ways. I would like to focus on one of them—repetition. Repetition in the service of symbolic mastery tends to suggest desire; repetition that involves reiteration tends to suggest drive—as if iterations of an event don't hear one another but keep going over and over again, like a cursor on a screen (drive drained of affect). Rochberg has composed a musical embodiment of reiterative drive in his Caprice 35 as shown in its entirety in Example 26.
Repeat ad. lib. until maximum intensity and break off
Example 26. Rochberg Caprice 35.
This is an extraordinarily reiterative piece. A 'wild' stabbing motion articulates grace notes to a-natural1 with twin neighbor notes—G-sharp and B-flat; an alternate stab articulates a-natural1 / g-sharp2 with a high G-natural.42 At the beginning of the second system and at the end of the last system there are passages that are repeated as often as the performer can bear it; for the first of these miniature loops, the performance directions states 'repeat ad. lib. until almost unbearable intensity and break off'; for the
42 The first stab is pitch-class set (8,9,10}member of set class (0,1,2); the second stab is pitch-class set (7,8,9} member of set class (0,1,2)—transposed down a half step. The pitch-class material of the caprice expands pitch-class sets that are members of set class (0,1,2) to the e-flat1 / a-natural1 / d-natural2 / g-sharp2 set or pitch-class set (2,3,7,8} member of set class (0,1,6,7) that you can see in the lower left-hand corner of the transcription.
second of these miniature loops with which the piece stops, the performance direction states 'repeat ad. lib. until maximum intensity and break off.' The Lacanian term for a pleasure like this is enjoyment, or its French equivalent jouissance. Enjoyment of this nature has little to do with pleasure that is positive in its affective charge; enjoyment of this nature is more like pleasure in displeasure, or (dis)pleasure-a pleasure that derives from the energy around Lacan's broken circle that refuses to be blocked by the objet petit a and refuses sublimation into deferred forms of partial, symbolic mastery through the sublime, the beautiful, or the abject. It is as if the energy gains in intensity each time it would be blocked by the cut in the circle and enjoyment derives from the reiterative intensity of a motion that can only move in the same way, over and over again, without conclusion.
A Musical Gaze
Rochberg's Caprices also embody a uniquely obsessive dimension that causes, for me, their pleasure to narrow into a reiterative musical squint, or gaze. The entire cycle, and each of the caprices is 'in' A; the pitch-class A-natural (pitch-class 9), and often the pitch a-natural1 (A 440) pervades the piece as a single red thread of continuity. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the gaze bears more symbolic weight than any simple look could bear. All of Rochberg's transcriptions and near-transcriptions are transposed to A (major / minor) and all of the atonal pieces (and even one with serial implications)43 focus on the pitch-class A natural (pitch-class 9) and / or pitch a-natural1. The gaze of A-natural in Rochberg's caprices is extraordinary; played in its entirety, the caprices take well over an hour to play.
On the one hand, A-natural provides Rochberg with a red-thread of continuity that guarantees unity in an extraordinarily heterogeneous sampling of styles from the baroque, classical, romantic, high modern, to the mid-20th Century avant garde. A-natural is also the note par-excellence; it is the note to which symphony orchestras tune; it is mentioned in Mallarmé's 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,' and it is the title of an American poetic classic, Louis Zukovsky's book-length poem A. In addition, the re-iterated A-natural is an embodiment of Rochberg's gaze back at the history of music.
Rochberg's Paganini
There is something odd about the sound of the theme of Paganini's Caprice 24 at the end of Rochberg's Caprice Variations. For one thing, Paganini seems to the barely disguised core of this music from the beginning. For me, the entire work springs aestheti-callyfrom, and at the same time aspires to, the Paganini Caprices. Hearing the minimally altered theme of the Paganini Caprice 24 itself at the end is witty on one level, and reveal-
43 Only one of the caprices uses rigorously serial techniques—caprice 42. In this work Rochberg creates a 12-tone circle of fifths progression with the hexachord <10, 11, 5, 9, 1, 7> transposed up a perfect fourth three times to <3, 4, 10, 2, 6, 0>, <8, (wrong note), 3, 7, 11, 5>, <1, 2, 8, 0, 4, 10>.
ing in an uncanny way, on the other—like Dorothy and the viewer behind her realizing that the Wizard is just a little man behind a screen at the end of the film The Wizard of Oz. Or, it is as if an odd bit of reality impinged itself on a world of representation; or as if an object fit just right in the space of the objetpetit a of Examples 24 and 25. Of course, were such a thing to happen, the psychic apparatus would wind down like a loop without a break statement.
Or imagine what we see when we stand between two mirrors—reflections bend in twin and complementary directions into infinity. Hearing the Rochberg's Paganini at the end of his Caprice Variations is like suddenly having a transparent head (no longer in the way); it is as if we could stand and look squarely into the opposing mirrors and see all the way to a single vanishing point at the center of our eyes / mirrors.
Povzetek
V	sestavku začenjam s ponovnim branjem Herolda Blooma »Strašljivost vplivanja« (1973). Postavim jo v kontekst anglo-ameriške literarne kritike in ponovno preučim razburljiv sprejem od njene izdaje leta 1973 dalje, upoštevaje njeno novo izdajo 1997. ter njeno aplikacijo v glasbi. Osredotočim se na novejša in še zlasti uspešne glasbene adaptacije Blooma, nakar razpravljam o tem, kaj bi pomenila aplikacija tega modela vpliva na glasbena dela poznega 20. stoletja.
V	drugi polovici razpravljanja se osredotočim na podrobno analizo George Rochbergovih Kapricioznih variacij za violino brez spremljave
(1972). Znano je, kako se je Rochberg v poznih 60. in zgodnjih 70. letih vrnil k svojim predhodnikom; nj egov 3. godalni kvartet in Kapriciozne variacije utelešajo posledice te vrnitve oziroma zaobr-nitve. Taka poteza vsebuje bogate zgodovinske in teoretske implikacije za umeščanje Blooma v glasbo. Sprva se zdi, da Rochberg v zgodovini glasbe svobodno in veselo nabira gradivo za svoje delo. In vendar to svobodo in veselje blažijo znaki bolestne pokorščine večjim elementom oblikovne enovitosti in tesnih medsebojnih povezav v makrostrukturi dela. Poglavje sklene vprašanje, kaj bi pomenilo govoriti o možnosti, da je pri Rochbergu na delu vpliv ugodja oziroma neugodja.
UDK 78.082.1Haydn Kevin Korsyn
University of Michigan Univerza v Michiganu
Reception History and the Trauma
of Real History: Decoding the Pantomime in Haydn's 'Farewell'
Symphony
Zgodovina recepcije in travma resnične zgodovine: dekodiranje pantomime v Haydnovi »Simfoniji slovesa«
Prejeto: 30. marec 2009 Sprejeto: 1. maj 2009
Ključne besede: Sigmund Freud, Joseph Haydn, Jacques Lacan, pantomime, politika, zgodovina recepcije, spominjanje in ponavljanje, travma, Slavoj Žižek
Izvleček
Haydnova vključitev pantomime v finale »Simfonije slovesa« predstavlja radikalno kršitev splošnih pričakovanj, podobno kot Beethovnova uvedba zbora v IX. Simfonijo, pa vendar ni še nobeden analiziral te pantomime ali dekodiral njene pomene. Zgodovina recepcije te skladbe vsiljuje misel o paradoksalni mešanici stopnjevanja zgodovinskega spominjanja in nekakšne hotene amnezije.
Received: 30th March 2009 Accepted: 1st May 2009
Keywords: Sigmund Freud, Joseph Haydn, Jacques Lacan, pantomime, politics, reception history, remembering and repetition, trauma, Slavoj Žižek
Abstract
Haydn's incorporation of a pantomime into the finale of the 'Farewell' Symphony constitutes as radical a violation of generic expectations as Beethoven's introduction of a chorus in the Ninth Symphony, yet until now no one has analyzed this pantomime or decoded its meanings. The reception history of this piece suggests a paradoxical mixture of heightened historical recollection with a sort of willed amnesia.
Despite the resurgence of interest in Haydn over the last century and the explosion of Haydn scholarship, the reception history of his music suggests a curious sort of
deadlock; certain reductive images of Haydn, many of them dating from the nineteenth century, have persisted in the face of all contrary evidence—not only the smiling face of 'Papa Haydn,' but also the stereotypes of his music as representing childlike innocence, cheerfulness, and the like. To be sure, these notions have served a variety of ideological functions over time, and James Garratt is right to stress the differences that metaphors such as fatherhood played in constructing images of Haydn in different cultural situations (Garratt 2005, 228). Nevertheless, it is hard to dispute Michael Spitzer's conclusion that at least by comparison with widespread evaluations of Mozart and Beethoven, 'our conceptual framework really does appear to have a blind spot' where Haydn is concerned (Spitzer 1998, 177). Certainly Haydn's position in musical culture has suffered since his virtual apotheosis at the end of the eighteenth century.
Although musicologists sometimes blame romanticism for this shift in Haydn's fortunes, this move tends to idealize his contemporaries, imagining an almost perfect state of communication between Haydn and his eighteenth-century listeners. Leon Botstein, for example, links the decline of Haydn's reputation in the nineteenth century to a number of factors, including what he calls 'the demise of philosophical listening.' In his view, eighteenth-century audiences were uniquely attuned to Haydn's meaning because they were accustomed to interpret music as a rational argument, so that 'a Haydn symphony therefore became a philosophical argument whose command of the sense of beauty and the sublime, the rational and the emotional, mirrored back to the listener through total engagement in the moment of hearing . . . the fundamental coincidence of truthfulness and rationality in the world and in the mind' (Botstein 1998, 29). This mode of engagement was more than aesthetic, because it included 'the capacity of the perceiver to recognize and respond to intrinsic structural parallels between truth and beauty' (Botstein 1998, p. 29). Ironically, for all his suspicion of romanticism, the story he tells here betrays a romantic nostalgia for a lost organic community, because the change he describes goes beyond any musical criteria to suggest nothing less than a fraying of the social bond itself, as 'music-making and listening became analogous to the experience of reading alone' (Botstein 1998, 32). As valuable as Botstein's research is, therefore, I wonder whether this notion of philosophical listening truly represents a model to emulate, and whether we should cede so much authority to Haydn's contemporaries as the ideal audience for his music. Supplementing Botstein's 'philosophical listening' with what we might call 'psychoanalytic listening' might allow us to question the way that he invites us to identify with certain images of the eighteenth-century listener. The idea that a Haydn symphony 'mirrored back to the listener . . . the fundamental coincidence of truth and rationality in the world and in the mind' provides the sort of reassuring image of wholeness that Lacan associates with the mirror stage. By locating the true meaning of Haydn's music in the past, it also condemns us to searching for a lost object, for a vanished time when truth coincided with beauty.
Perhaps what time effaces through the transmission of works of art is not necessarily beauty but rather its dark twin, neither harmony nor balance nor perfection nor any of the attributes traditionally associated with beauty, but instead something unbalanced, out of joint, something from which we might even recoil. If this is true, then the reception history of art would resemble a series of failed encounters or attempts to neutralize
or domesticate the thing that Gertrude Stein identified when she remarked that 'every masterpiece came into the world with a measure of ugliness in it' which results from 'the creator's struggle to say a new thing in a new way.' Faced with a painting like the Sistine Madonna, often considered a touchstone of beauty, Stein believed that 'it's our business as critics to stand in front of it and recover its ugliness' (quoted in Wilder 1986, 29). The creative struggle to which Stein refers is more than a search for novel artistic techniques; it also involves an encounter with what Adorno calls 'real history itself, with all its suffering and all its contradiction' (Adorno 2002, 147). If Haydn, despite his obvious ability to please his audience, nevertheless registered the contradictions and antagonisms of his age, there may be elements in his work that foster resistance because they expose the gap between truth and beauty; in such cases, the only privilege afforded an artist's contemporaries is to be witnesses to this 'ugliness.' Both the monumentalization and the trivialization to which he has been alternately subjected may constitute defensive reactions against this form of artistic truth.
If 'ugliness' is something that we must retrieve from the oblivion of time, this suggests that reception history can involve acts of forgetting and distorted memory that Ricoeur finds in historical experience, and which he describes as 'too much memory here, not enough memory there,' processes he explains through the transfer of Freudian notions from the clinical to the collective level (Ricoeur 2004, p. 79; emphasis original). One arena for such forgetting involves the generic frameworks through which we classify and interpret art; the very identity of a work can change if we alter the network of genres in which we position it, as when a satire like Gulliver's Travels is read as a children's book. As Fredric Jameson has shown, it is through these networks that real history can impinge on the work of art, so that 'the coexistence or tension between several generic modes or strands' can allow a text to function as 'a socially symbolic act—as the ideological, but formal and immanent—response to a historical dilemma' (Jameson 1981, 141, 139). Haydn's experimentation with genres—inventing new ones, combining or subverting old ones—may be one place where his works encounter real history; a quest to discover how the ugliness of real history scars the musical event via the conflict of genres may enable us to reverse the deadlock that seems to characterize the reception history of Haydn's music.
II
A test case here might be Haydn's Symphony No. 45 in F# minor, composed in 1772 and known as the 'Farewell' for its famous ending in which the musicians gradually depart until only two muted violins remain, an effect that persuaded Haydn's patron, Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy, to allow his musicians to leave Eszterhaza Castle, where the Prince had extended his usual summer sojourn, so they could rejoin their families in Eisenstadt. Although Nicholas Mathew rightly observes that Haydn's works often straddle the divide between the occasional work and the emerging 'work concept' (Mathew 2007), the 'Farewell' bears the traces of its occasion to an unusual degree. Indeed, Richard Taruskin believes that 'the concluding movement is so outlandish that without
knowledge of the circumstances of its composition it would be altogether baffling' (Taruskin 2004, 528). The piece was effectively composed for an audience of one, Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy; it was performed only once under Haydn's direction, and there is no record that he ever saw fit to revive it. Like the play within the play in Hamlet, the 'Farewell' was written to catch the conscience of the King—or in this case the Prince. By staging a protest—however coded and concealed—on behalf of his musicians, Haydn effectively inscribes the politics of the event into the very fabric of the piece, sending this message by violating the conventions of genres that Haydn himself had done so much to establish. The reception history of this piece suggests a paradoxical mixture of heightened historical recollection and a sort of willed amnesia, a surfeit of memory on the one hand and a dearth of it on the other.
Consider, for example, the frequent attempts to recreate the external circumstances of the first performance in great detail, starting at least as early as Mendelssohn's revival of the piece at one of his 'historical concerts' in Leipzig on February 22, 1838, in which the musicians blew out their candles before leaving the stage. Later performances have even dressed the musicians in powdered wigs and knee-breeches, as happened at a well-publicized concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky at Carnegie Hall in 1939, where even the ushers were dressed in 18th-century attire: 'without batting an eye, poker-faced Koussevitzky led his men through Haydn's rococo whimsy, bowed gravely, pinched out his candle and left the stage' (Time, February 20, 1939). Freud's distinction between 'remembering' and 'repetition' can illuminate these appropriations of the symphony as a vehicle for nostalgic evocations of the eighteenth century as a world of 'rococo whimsy.' A failure to remember the meaning of past events can lead to an unconscious repetition or 'acting out' of the event, in which the patient 'reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it' (Freud 1958a, 150). The costumed reenactments of the symphony not only romanticize the ancien régime as a realm of quaint manners and candlelit charm, but also unconsciously act out its aristocratic fantasies of role playing and make-believe; after all, it was Marie Antoinette who played at being a shepherdess, and the entertainments at Eszterhaza not only included masquerade balls but also mock battles staged by the Prince's grenadiers, as well as crowds of gaily attired peasants who were exploited to foster an illusion of social harmony, but whose actual living conditions were vastly different (Gates-Coon, 53-54, 114). In 1773, Haydn's musicians even wore Chinese costumes when they performed for Empress Maria Theresia (Tolley 2001, 358). Ricoeur makes the case that the relationship between personal and community identity allows us to transfer such Freudian concepts from the level of individual memory to that of collective memory (Ricoeur 2004, 78). The costumed reenactments of the symphony constitute a failure of collective memory and suggest an inability to remember the meaning of history. Far from being the expression of an idyllic age, the 'Farewell' was composed during a time of intense class antagonism in the Esterhazy lands; in 1766, for example, Prince Nicolaus was forced to flee one of his palaces when it was surrounded and then briefly occupied by an angry mob of peasant women (Gates-Coon 1994, 74). These performances in eighteenth-century garb also superimpose a new genre onto the piece, which becomes an example of historical reenactment, a genre that includes
such diverse phenomena as Civil War reenactments, living history museums, and the revival of medieval tournaments by hobbyists (During 2007, 313).
In contrast to this fixation on external details, the evidence for the actual circumstances of the first performance has often been ignored or misinterpreted, even by scholars whose respect for historical data is otherwise punctilious. Here the work of James Webster is especially instructive. In Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style, Webster seeks to revise the categories through which we hear the symphony; instead of classifying it as absolute music, he wants us to hear it as a programmatic symphony, and also believes it is a 'through-composed' piece that anticipates the design of such later multi-movement structures as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Webster rightly regards Georg August Griesinger's early Haydn biography as the most reliable account of the origins of the symphony:
One year, against his usual custom, the prince determined to stay in Eszterhaza for several weeks. The ardent married men, thrown into utter consternation, turned to Haydn and asked him to help. Haydn hit upon the idea of writing a symphony in which, one after the other, the instruments fall silent. At the first opportunity, this symphony was performed in the prince's presence. Each of the musicians was instructed that, as soon as his part had come to an end, he should extinguish his light, pack up his music, and leave with his instrument under his arm. The prince and the audience at once understood the point of this pantomime; the next day came the order for the departure from Eszterhaza. Thus Haydn related the occasion for the Farewell Symphony to me; the other version, that Haydn thereby dissuaded his prince from his intention to dissolve the entire Kapelle, . . . is to be sure more poetic, but not historically correct. (Griesinger 1963, 19, quoted in Webster 1991, 1)
Griesinger's account becomes the basis for Webster's program, which he portrays as 'the musician's journey home from the wilderness of F-sharp minor to their safe and comfortable family hearths in Eisenstadt' (Webster 1991, 117).
Despite the authority that he ascribes to Haydn's early biographer, however, Webster is not a very careful reader of Griesinger, whose description of the men as 'ardent' hints at an element of sexual frustration that Webster does not acknowledge. The erotic motif is even more pronounced in the first sentence of Griesinger's account, a sentence that Webster omitted, indeed, the only part of the story he failed to quote: 'Among Prince Esterhazy's Kapelle there were several vigorous young married men who in summer, when the Prince stayed at Eszterhaza, were obliged to leave their wives behind in Eisenstadt' (Griesinger 1963, 19).
If Webster omitted this sentence, perhaps it was because it clashed with the narrative of bourgeois domesticity he constructs, in which the musicians are merely longing for 'their safe and comfortable family hearths' and the piece is about 'a desperately longed-for journey home.' Albert Christoph Dies, another early Haydn biographer, is even more explicit about the theme of erotic longing and frustration:
They were all spirited young men who looked longingly toward the last month, the day, the hour of departure, and filled the palace with lovelorn sighs. 'I was young and gay and consequently no better than the rest,' said Haydn with a smile. (Dies 1963, 100).
There is no mention of children and hearths, nothing like the rather Victorian idealization of the nuclear family that seems to color Webster's analysis. Ignoring the specific conflicts to which the historical record attests, he tries to universalize the meaning of the symphony, in the belief that 'feelings of homesickness are well-nigh universal' (Webster 1991, 119). This G-rated version of the 'Farewell,' like a film suitable for general audiences, not only represses the libidinal energy of the piece, but may also distort the political stakes involved, sentimentalizing what may have been a more charged form of protest.
Another curious distortion in the reception history of the 'Farewell' involves mistakenly viewing the finale as a comic piece, as one of Haydn's jokes. This is evident even in the inventory of Haydn's estate prepared immediately after his death, which calls it the symphony 'with the joking finale' (Quoted in Webster 1991, 2), and it continues to the present day. A New Year's Day concert in Vienna in 2009, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, demonstrated how firmly entrenched the comic image of the piece may be; feigning surprise at the departure of each musician, Barenboim mugged for the amused audience, shrugging his shoulders in comic disbelief, and eventually sitting down next to one of the two remaining violinists as if to encourage him to stay (Barenboim 2009). Webster is surely correct, however, to characterize the ending as sublime and solemn rather than humorous. If laughter often functions as a mode of psychic defense, one has to wonder what these joking versions of the finale are defending against. Once again, we see that reception history can transform the genres through which we understand a work; the comic performances of the piece view it through the lens of parody. Even these parodic renditions, however, can disclose certain truths about our present situation. By ending with Barenboim conducting an empty stage, for example, his performance inverts the image of the conductor as a tyrannical father figure (think of Toscanni, Koussevitzky, Karl Muck, and other authoritarian conductors), so that father is now unmasked as an impotent, ridiculous figure, and thus well suited to our current society, in which 'the very symbolic function of the father. . . is increasingly undermined' (Žižek 1999, 334).
Perhaps the most striking omission in the reception history of the piece, however, is the almost total failure by musicologists to interpret the finale as a dramatic event, as an experiment in theater. The mid-eighteenth century saw a revival, or perhaps a reinvention, of the ancient genre of serious pantomime; this species of wordless acting accompanied by music would have been well known to Haydn. The idea of including a pantomime in a symphony may have been as radical an innovation as Beethoven including a chorus in the Ninth, yet almost no one has taken this pantomime seriously or analyzed its layers of meaning (or its resistance to meaning). Even Webster, whose monograph on the piece aspires to be exhaustive, did not have a word to say about its visual aspects in almost 400 pages. Spitzer said more than he knew when he complained about our 'blind spot' for Haydn; this pantomime has remained almost invisible to scholars, hidden in plain sight. Only Thomas Tolley, who has examined the influence of the visual arts on Haydn, constitutes a partial exception here; his work will be discussed below (Tolley 2001). There is evidence that at least some of Haydn's contemporaries were sensitive to the theatrical effects
of the piece. Dies, for example, who knew Haydn quite well, wrote that 'Haydn wisely had recourse to acting. The putting out of the lights, the going away, and the like, were actions that spoke to assist the music and earn it the nickname Farewell Symphony' (Dies 1963, 102). At least the comic interpretations of the finale have a grain of truth in that they stage the ending as a dramatic event even as they reduce it to a silly prank.
The sudden intrusion of a pantomime into a symphony constitutes a radical change of genre, subverting our expectations and violating the social contract between author and audience that the concept of genre implies. In the 'Farewell,' our experience as listeners undergoes a radical transformation, since we are suddenly forced to look as well as listen, to move from a mode of perception in which vision plays a subordinate role to one in which the eye demands equality with the ear. Challenging Botstein's description of listening to a Haydn symphony as an act of 'total engagement in the moment of hearing,' the pantomime jolts us out of our immersion in aural experience, and may even engage our tactile and kinesthetic senses. As Žižek has shown, such changes of genre 'can unleash a tremendous ideologico-critical potential' (Žižek 1992a, 267). The visual aspects of the pantomime invite new modes of identification and new possibilities for reflecting on our experience, and the pantomime may not be the only new genre that erupts into the piece at this point.
A series of significant blind spots have emerged in analyzing the reception history of the finale. Attempts at a literal recreation of the first performance coexist with amnesia about the actual circumstances of that event, resurrecting an idealized image of the past without the erotic frustration and inequities of power found in the historical sources. The eruption of a pantomime during the finale, the actual presence of bodies in motion, is either rendered invisible, sublimated into the philosophical contemplation of an imaginary program, or reduced to the low comedy of a prank. Since these problems of reception history revolve around the notion of genre, an attempt to recover what I have called the ugliness of real history in this piece might begin by reconstructing the unique constellation of genres at work in the finale.
III
Before addressing the topic of genre, however, we need to do some preliminary work to clarify the historical situation in which the symphony was composed. In many respects, the 'Farewell' resembles some forms of modern conceptual or performance art in which the identity of the event depends on an archive. Like the Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow in the late 1950's and early 1960's, 'what might otherwise be considered mere collateral archival materials are integral to the phenomenal qualities of the work of art we conjure up in our mind's eye' (Potts 2008, 120). The performance directions for the ending are scanty; the only evidence for the exit of the players in the score itself are the words 'nichts mehr' in two of the instrumental parts in the autograph. The anecdotes about the piece related by Griesinger and Dies, and apparently sanctioned by Haydn, therefore, are an important source for reconstructing the ending. Understand-
ing the dynamics between Haydn, his musicians, and their patron may also provide a vital point of entry to this piece, allowing us to understand how the structure of the piece might reflect and critique specific power relationships at the Esterhazy court. This exercise in history, however, will not aim so much at reviving eighteenth-century habits of spectatorship but rather at finding what elements of the piece might have provoked resistance in the audience.
Let us start by considering social life at Ezsterhaza more closely; we will better understand the predicament in which Haydn's men found themselves—and all the players in Haydn's Kapelle were men—if we examine their working conditions. They were forced to follow a strict code of courtly etiquette to which Haydn's contract of 1 May 1761 alludes: Haydn 'and his subordinates shall always be in uniform, and said Joseph Heyden himself shall not only present a proper appearance but [he] shall also require his subordinates to make their appearance in white stockings, white linen, powdered, with either pigtail or hairbag, all of them just alike, following the instructions which have been given to them' (quoted in Gates-Coon 1994, 165). The Prince's control over his men not only involved docking their pay for minor infractions, but in one instance even included public flogging and jail time for one of Haydn's singers (Gates-Coon 1994, 173). This control even extended to their sex lives, because he not only forced them to leave their wives at Eisenstadt for months at a time, but also required them to ask his permission to marry.
Although Haydn was allowed to bring his wife with him to Eszterhaza (not necessarily a favor, given the strains of their relationship), he was bound to Eszterhaza just as much as the men, and could not leave without the Prince's permission—permission which was seldom granted. Despite his later rationalization that the remoteness of Eszterhaza forced him to become original, he complained about his 'wasteland,' his Einöde, on more than one occasion, and his access to hearing the best recent music in Vienna and elsewhere was certainly constrained by this. For a composer eager to understand the changing tastes of contemporary audiences and the latest trends in compositional style, this must have been a source of frustration. If we consider the relationship that is often drawn between sex and creativity, the Prince exerted a control over Haydn's creative life that paralleled his control over the sex lives of his musicians. Indeed, Haydn's first contract formally gave his employer control over Haydn's creative work, because all of his compositions were the Prince's property:
At any time, upon command of His Princely Highness, the Vice-Capel-Meister is obligated to compose whatever music His Highness shall require, [nor] is he to communicate such new compositions with anyone, much less allow them to be copied, but rather reserve them for His Highness exclusively, and most particularly [he should] not compose anything for anyone else without knowledge and gracious permission of His Highness. (quoted in Gates-Coon 1994, 165-66)
Regardless of whether this clause in the contract was strictly enforced, it constituted a symbolic claim to ownership of Haydn's imagination and intellectual labor. These conditions did not change until Haydn signed a new contract on 1 January 1779, seven years after the 'Farewell' was composed.
The constraints under which Haydn and his men worked are perhaps best seen by contrast to the conditions under which actors lived at Eszterhaza. The Prince was very fond of theater, apparently preferring indelicate farces and pantomimes, so he often kept a troop of actors at his disposal; Haydn was often required to write incidental music for their performances. Unlike the musicians, however, the actors were not required to wear livery, and they could even appear unshaved; they seemed to occupy a position outside the court hierarchy, one that gave them greater freedom of movement. An account by Baron Riesbeck, published in 1784, confirms this: 'He often engages a troupe of players for months at a time, and apart from some servants he is the whole audience. They have his permission to appear uncombed, drunk, and disheveled' (quoted in Landon 1978, 99-100). Even more significantly from the perspective I am sketching here, the actors were less confined in their domestic arrangements, and could bring their wives with them to Eszterhaza.
IV
With this historical background in mind, let's look at the finale—and I have promised to look at it as well as listen to it. Here we must resist the easy familiarity of the stories we've heard about the piece; we think we know what the ending means only because we've been told so many times. We have to recover the shock of the first performance, the sheer astonishment of the Prince at the departure of the first musicians, the perplexity of the audience witnessing something for which there was really no precedent. Eventually the Prince may have ended his hermeneutic doubt by concluding that this was Haydn's discreet way of asking permission for the musicians to leave Eszterhaza, but that moment of closure, which is now the standard story about the piece, would only have come after a long period of uncertainty in which conflicting interpretations competed for attention; not all of these were subject to Haydn's control.
Even before the pantomime begins, the piece displays a series of drastic disruptions and discontinuities. There is some controversy over whether this symphony has four movements or five; some commentators regard the concluding Adagio an as independent fifth movement, while others consider it part of the fourth movement, a Presto in F# minor. Both views can find support in the text. The Presto, which is in sonata form, shows every sign of hurtling to a conclusion. We have heard a complete exposition, which is repeated, followed by a development and partial recapitulation; if the design were completed according to our expectations, the finale would resemble several of Haydn's other minor-keyed symphonic finales of the 1770s, including No. 44 in E minor and no. 49 in F minor ('La Passione'). Instead, Haydn interrupts the progress of the recapitulation, prolonging the dominant from m. 144 to m. 150, followed by a lengthy silence. An Adagio begins in A major, 3/8 time, in the guise of a slow minuet. Since the Presto is never resumed and its sonata design is never completed, one can see why some consider the Adagio a separate movement. Yet the harmonic plan of the Adagio is not what we would expect in an independent movement; since it ends in F# major rather than A major, its tonal trajectory provides tonal closure to both the Presto and to the symphony
as a whole. Thus its status as a complete movement is ambiguous, and this may be the point. In any case, the Adagio constitutes an excess, an unexpected surplus.
As in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which introduces an orchestral version of the 'Ode to Joy' theme before allowing the human voice to sing it, Haydn prepares the radical disruption of his pantomime by starting the Adagio as a purely instrumental piece. When the pantomime begins, we see a carefully choreographed series of exits. The winds leave first, starting with Oboe I and Horn II, which play their last notes in m. 32. The bassoon finishes in m. 47, followed by Oboe II in m. 54 and Horn I in m. 55. Then the strings start to leave, thinning out from the bottom up. After a lengthy solo, the double basses leave in m. 67, followed by the cellos in m. 77. During this concluding section, the violins are divided into four parts, so that each part would have been played by a single instrument in Haydn's Kapelle. Violins III and IV finish in m. 85 and depart, followed by the violas in m. 93, leaving only Violins I and II, which continue to the end, playingpp and with mutes. Since the men were instructed to pack up their music, blow out their candles, and leave with their instruments under their arms, we see an orderly and repeated series of actions. Although these gestures would be unremarkable in the course of the musicians' daily lives, by detaching them from their normal context and making them part of the piece, Haydn effectively brings the external circumstances of the performance into the work itself, making the 'outside' part of the 'inside.'
The fact that Haydn's men execute a pantomime turns them into actors, and they become like the actors at Eszterhaza, freed for a moment from the constraints of court life. One of the uncanny things here is that although Haydn's men become actors, they are impersonating themselves rather than portraying fictional characters as we might expect in a play or in the other forms of drama with music such as opera or ballet. The space of the performance does not represent a fictional space; we are not in Denmark or Verona or Troy. In theater the difference between the bodies onstage and their dramatic roles, along with the scenery and the entire fictional apparatus, creates a comfortable distance for the spectator, who becomes free to identify with one character or another, or even to identify with 'him- or herself as pure gaze—that is, with the abstract point which gazes upon the scene' (Žižek 1992a, 223). In the 'Farewell' we have theater without illusion, so that this invisible barrier between performers and spectators is decisively breached. This transgression of barriers can foster anxiety, making us sense our implication in the performance, and making us unsure of what to identify with. The dreamlike qualities of pantomime, to which Arthur Symons, an important Symbolist poet and critic, has called attention, also come into play here. According to Symons, pantomime can create a dreamlike sense of irreality, in which speech seems to be not simply missing but prohibited (Symons 1906, 383). The actions that the musicians execute are simply performed without explanation; there are no words, as in opera, nor even a scenario, as in ballet, to explain what is going on. The uncanny potential of this prohibition of speech becomes clear if we recall Freud's insight that 'in dreams dumbness is a common representation of death' (Freud 1958b, 294).
This transgression of barriers between audience and performers explains why modern performances in 18-century garb reduce the piece to kitsch; transforming a contemporary concert hall into the Esterhazy court introduces the very element of
theatrical illusion that the 'Farewell' was designed to subvert, turning the piece into an exercise in nostalgia. Žižek has analyzed the phenomenon of nostalgia in the reception history of certain cinematic genres such as film noir, in which 'we are fascinated by the gaze of the mythic 'naive' spectator . . . who was 'still able to take it seriously'' (Žižek 1992b, 114). In costumed reenactments of the 'Farewell,' we are split between our own ironic distance and our identification with the gaze of an eighteenth-century spectator who could still take Haydn's 'rococo whimsy' seriously.
From the standpoint of the rigid social hierarchy of the Esterházy court, the ending of the piece, in which the men gradually leave the hall before the piece is over, would have constituted a symbolic violation of court etiquette. Normally the men, who performed standing, would remain standing until the Prince left, a ritual that reinforced his status as the one with power over movement, a power he had lately demonstrated by his decision to keep the men at Eszterháza. As Norbert Elias emphasized in his classic study of court etiquette, such rituals were meant to make power visible, to represent it in concrete, physical terms, so that we don't merely know who is in charge, we also experience it in the very disposition of our bodies and the arrangement of our physical space (Elias 1983). Under the cover of art, however, Haydn reverses this relationship; the men are suddenly free to leave, while the Prince is immobilized as spectator. As the men depart one after another, they are suddenly visible as individuals, a fact emphasized by Haydn giving some of them solos just before they depart. This recognition of individuality once again represents a reversal of norms, because life at Eszterháza revolved around the individuality and whims of its Prince. This inversion of the social hierarchy, however, does not suggest the element of parody that Bakhtin associated with carnival; it is solemn rather than parodic, and is certainly very far from the grotesque celebration of the lower body found in carnival.
The fact that the Adagio represents a genre associated with the decorum and hierarchy of the ancien régime—the minuet—affiliates this finale with what some have called the rituals of the upper body. According to Wye Jameson Allanbrook, 'by 1770 [the minuet] had split into two distinguishable types,' one relatively quick in tempo, the other noticeably slower; she associates the slower type with the stage, and the need to exaggerate the gestures of the dance to project it 'beyond the proscenium' (Allanbrook 1983, 33). From the perspective of the tensions between the power of the ruling elite and the protest staged by this piece on behalf of the performers, the fact that Haydn's men depart to the strains of an aristocratic dance seems especially significant; it confers an aura of nobility on them even as it reminds us that they are excluded from the world of privilege associated with this dance. Although we hear a minuet, the musicians are walking rather than dancing. Normally in a symphony, we would not expect a minuet to be danced, but given the movements of the performers here, it is natural to question the relation of their gestures to the music. Given the femininity that much eighteenth-century discourse attributes to the minuet as a genre (Head 1995), the use of a minuet here may call to mind the longing of the musicians for their wives (and again we must recall that all of Haydn's Kapelle were men).
As the minuet progresses, we gradually become aware of another new genre in the finale: as the musicians depart, we move from the public world of the symphony to the
intimate sphere of chamber music; after starting with a relatively small but powerful orchestra, the piece ends with an extended duet for two solo violins. As Adorno and others have noted, the social economy of chamber music involves equality and dialogue, in which all performers are on an equal footing and are individualized. Ending with two violins might recall the moments when Haydn played chamber music with his patron, moments of temporary equality; the ending reflects sociability rather than isolation—two violins cooperating, rather than just one, two individuals in harmony. Indeed, Haydn himself may have played one of these violin parts at the first performance. Although this equality was only possible in the private sphere of chamber music, its representation here allows us to glimpse a utopian future.
This utopian moment, however, may not be Haydn's last word, and the conclusion may be charged with ambivalence. If we imagine the last two violinists duplicating the gestures of the other musicians—packing up their music, blowing out their candles, and so on—then the pantomime continues in silence. Several commentators, including Webster, have remarked on the 'insubstantiality' and 'incompleteness' created by Haydn's decision to end the music not on the usual root position tonic triad, but on the less stable I6. What they may not realize, however, is this incompleteness may signal that the end of the music is not the end of piece. In describing Georges Balanchine's staging of an orchestral piece by Webern, in which the performers continued to dance after the music stopped, Žižek compares the dancers to 'the living dead, who dwell in an interstice of empty time; their movements, which lack vocal support, allow us to see not only the voice but silence itself' (Žižek 2009, XXX). In much the same way, the silent pantomime makes silence visible; it is like the void, the empty place of the Thing, that Lacan considered the origin of the work of art (Lacan 1992, 130).
V
We have not yet exhausted the meanings of this pantomime, nor have we uncovered all of its generic associations. So far, we have discussed how the repetitive actions of the piece might evoke social rituals; these same actions, however, might also echo certain religious rituals with which Haydn was familiar. Indeed, Thomas Tolley, who is the only scholar who has addressed visual elements in the 'Farewell,' relates the gradual extinguishing of candles in the last movement to the Catholic ritual known as Tenebrae, performed on the eves of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday during Lent. In this ceremony, a series of candles (usually fifteen, although the precise number has varied over time) is extinguished one by one, until only a single candle remains, representing Christ. Psalms are sung after putting out each candle, so the parallel to the 'Farewell' is significant, since in each case candles are extinguished to a musical accompaniment. Tolley's discovery allows him to explain the presence of a Gregorian chant in the Trio of the Minuet (mm. 41-46), because this chant, which Haydn also used and explicitly marked in his Symphony No. 26, the 'Lamentatione,' is one associated with the Tenebrae ritual (Tolley 2001, 86-87). Although Webster has noted the possible presence of a chant
here, he does not explain its significance, nor does it play a role in the elaborate program he constructs for the symphony (Webster 1991, 67).
Since Tolley's primary concern involves the influence of the visual arts on Haydn, he treats the finale more as a static tableau than as a series of actions; in focusing on darkness as a symbol of farewell, he does not analyze the piece as a pantomime, nor does he decode other meanings as I have done. His insight allows us, however, to reinforce the connections I have drawn between this symphony and the consternation that both Griesinger and Dies attribute to the 'ardent husbands' among Haydn's men. Practices of abstinence, including sexual abstinence, are associated with Lent, and the extinguishing of candles in the finale would have called these Lenten privations to mind. This interpretation of the ending as a sort of religious ritual does not abrogate the secular meanings I proposed earlier; as Mladen Dolar has suggested, there is a 'close link between the erotic and the religious function that inhabits the very core of music' (Dolar 2002, 93).
VI
A pantomime that invades a symphony; a symphony that turns into chamber music; a quasi-religious ritual performed to an aristocratic dance; these are some of the unexpected genres that emerge and interact in the finale. There is still at least one more genre at work here, and I have already alluded to it above: even though he was writing in the eighteenth century, Haydn anticipates the modern notion of performance art, a phenomenon usually associated with the twentieth century and beyond, in some uncanny ways. Haydn's violation of the conventions of performance and his transgression of the boundaries between what is 'inside' the piece and what is 'outside' it looks ahead to later experiments such as Berio's Sequenza III, in which the singer laughs, or Stockhausen's Momente, in which the piece begins with the performers applauding; in these works of the twentieth-century avant-garde, the performers usurp functions usually reserved for the audience. As Lyotard explains in his essay on Sequenza III, 'in the course of concerts as we know them, laughter is limited to the audience, to the public side . . . . Placing the laughter on the stage violates the sacred space in which musicians play' (Lyotard1993, 52). Similarly, in the course of concerts as we know them, musicians do not walk out while the piece is being played; this is a privilege reserved for the audience, who may signal their displeasure in this manner, but the 'Farewell' stands this convention on its head.
There are at least eight features that the 'Farewell' shares with many examples of performance art:
1)	Unlike opera or ballet, which represent relatively standardized and institutionalized modes of combining music and theater, the 'Farewell' stages a unique experiment in mixing media, looking ahead to later experiments.
2)	The fact that the symphony took place in the same room which had been consecrated by court ceremonial, and which was at the very center of the Prince's palace, is integral to what I have called the symbolic violation of court etiquette staged by this piece, making the performance space part of the work/event. In this respect the 'Fare-
well' resembles what we now call 'site-specific' art.
3)	As in many examples of performance art, the performance space does not represent a fictive space, and does not create an illusion.
4)	As in many examples of performance art, the actors do not impersonate anyone.
5)	Both the 'Farewell' and performance art contain ritualized actions, ordinary gestures that are taken out of their everyday contexts and framed as an object of attention.
6)	In executing these actions, the performers' bodies become part of the work/event rather than incidental vehicles for it; the actual musicians who had been interchangeable servants walk out as if to demonstrate that the music we have been consuming and taking for granted was actually produced by real human beings, by these actual bodies.
7)	All of these qualities give the 'Farewell' something of the same 'political edge' that many critics associate with performance art.
8)	Finally, all of these qualities, including the site-specific nature of the piece, turn the symphony into an unrepeatable event, much like the 'oneoff' sort of event that Kaprow intended each of his Happenings to be. If this comparison seems anachronistic, this cuts both ways: although it imports a twentieth-century concept to explain an eighteenth-century phenomenon, it also suggests that the modern concept may not be quite as novel as we had thought.
In a very real sense, the finale of the 'Farewell' is so closely connected to the circumstances of the first performance that it cannot be repeated—it can only be remembered or commemorated in performances that acknowledge their distance from the original event; it can only be reconstructed through a kind of archive. Attempts to repeat the original performance in powdered wigs and knee-breeches stage a kind of failure of our collective, cultural memory, our inability to remember what was shocking about that performance. Thinking of the 'Farewell' in these terms may enable us to resist the habits of reception that have dogged Haydn's music and allow us to discover its uncanny futurity.
If the 'Farewell' represents some sort of performance art avant la lettre, one can see why it has suffered so many misappropriations, however well intended. Haydn created a new genre in this piece; the categories needed to comprehend the piece did not exist until the piece was composed. This sort of radical originality is what Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote that 'every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished' (Wordsworth 1984, 103). Haydn is still waiting for our taste to catch up with him.
Bibliography
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Allanbrook, Wye Jamison. 1983. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barenboim, Daniel. 2009. "Vienna New Year's Day Concert, Haydn Symphony No. 45." http://pop.youtube.com/watch?v=icItGTp7zTY&feature=PlayList&p=D1DD574DC 2C8C388&index=14, accessed March 17, 2009.
Botstein, Leon. 1998. "The Consequences of Presumed Innocence: The Nineteenth-Century Reception of Haydn." In Haydn Studies, ed. W. Dean Sutcliffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dies, Albert Christoph. 1963. "Biographical Accounts of Joseph Haydn." In Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius, ed. and trans. Vernon Gotwals. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dolar, Mladen. 2002. "If Music Be the Food of Love." In Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, Opera's Second Death, 1-102. London and New York: Routledge.
During, Simon. 2007. "Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment." Rethinking History, 11/3: 313-333.
Elias, Norbert. 1983. The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Freud, Sigmund. 1958a. "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through." Standard Edition, Vol. 12: 147-156, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
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Garratt, James. 2005. "Haydn and Posterity: The Long Nineteenth Century." In The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Leslie Clark, 226-238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gates-Coon, Rebecca. 1994. The Landed Estates of the Esterhazy Princes: Hungary During the Reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph II. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Griesinger, Georg August. 1963. "Biographical Notes Concerning Joseph Haydn." In Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius, ed. and trans. Vernon Gotwals. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Head, Matthew. 1995. "'Like Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man': Gender in Eighteenth-Century North German Discourse on Genre," The Journal ofMusicology 13/2: 143-67.
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Povzetek
Zgodovina recepcije Haydnove »Simfonije slovesa« razkriva vrsto pomembnih belih lis. Poizkusi natančno poustvariti prvo izvedbo v noši 18. stoletja obstajajo sočasno z amnezijo, ki zadeva resnične okoliščine dogodka; na eni strani obnavljajo idealizirano podobo preteklosti, pri čemer pa ignorirajo erotično frustracijo in nepravičnosti moči, o katerih govorijo zgodovinski viri. Freudovo razlikovanje med »spominjanjem« in »ponavljanjem« more osve-
tliti polastitev simfonije kot sredstva za nostalgično obujanje preteklosti. Izbruh pantomime v finalu, to je resnična prisotnost teles v gibanju, se ali napravi nevidno, sublimirano v filozofski kontemplaciji imaginarnega programa, ali pa zreducira na raven komedijantske potegavščine. Ker se ta vprašanja zgodovinske recepcije vrtijo okrog pojma zvrsti oziroma žanra, bi poizkus obnove skaženosti resnične zgodovine kazalo začeti z rekonstrukcijo enkratne konstalacije žanrov, ki so bili na delu v finalu.
Imensko kazalo • Index
Abbate, Carolyn	65
Abell, Arthur	90, 104
Adler, Alfred	34, 40
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund	17, 48, 67, 119, 121, 148, 154, 156
Allanbrook, Wye Jameson	153, 156
Altevers, Nannette	111
Althusser, Louis	11
Angermüller, Rudolph	92, 104
Anzieu, Didier	138
Auner, Joseph	117
Austin, J. L.	37
Bach, Johann Sebastian	49, 52, 65, 118
Bailey, Robert	129
Bakhtin, Mikhail	153
Balanchine, Georges	30, 154
Balasa, Marin Marian	78
Bally, Charles	111
Barenboim, Daniel	148, 157
Baroni, Mario	74
Bate, W. Jackson	108
Baucis	26
Beaumont, Anthony	28, 29
Beethoven, Ludwig van	34, 47-49, 52, 54, 72, 78, 111-114, 118, 120,
	137, 143, 144, 148, 152
Behne, Klaus-Ernst	56, 57, 60, 63, 70
Bellini, Vincenzo	13
Benjamin, Walter	18
Berg, Alban	29, 78
Bergman, Ingmar	31
Bergson, Henri	10-12
Berio, Luciano	137, 155
Berlioz, Hector	18, 112-114, 118
Bernheimer, Charles	35
Bersch-Burauel, Antje	56, 70
Bertrand, Daisy	69, 70, 71
Bielefeldt, Christian	5, 6, 53
Biermann, Wolf	25
Bizet, Georges	34
Black, Leo	34
Blacking, John	70, 74
Blamey, Kathleen	158
Blaukopf, Kurt	70
Bloch, Ernest	60
Bloom, Herold	107-118, 120, 137, 142, 158
Blume, Friedrich	67, 70
Bockholdt, Rudolf	67, 70
Boito, Arrigo	18
Bomberger, E. Douglas	113
Bonds, Mark Evan	112-114
Borio, Gianmario	67, 70
Born, Georgina	74
Botstein, Leon	144, 149, 157
Boyle, J. David	56, 58, 75
Brahms, Johannes	89, 90, 105, 114-116, 118-121, 123, 124
Brandl, Rudolf Maria	60, 70
Brecht, Bertolt	18
Bregman, Albert S.	60
Britten, Benjamin	34
Bronfen, Elisabeth	137
Brown, James	52
Brown, Merle E.	108
Brown, Steven	72-75
Bruhn, Herbert	60, 70
Brunson, William	72
Buddha, Siddhärtha Gautama	23, 104
Bujic, Bojan	59, 70
Busoni, Ferruccio	5, 6, 17-23, 26-30, 32, 158
Butler, Judith	37, 38
Cage, John	117
Casanova, Giacomo	23
Chausson, Ernest	60
Chomsky, Noam	115
Chopin, Frédéric	114-116, 118
Clark, Caryl Leslie	157
Clarke, David	59, 70
Clarke, Eric F.	56, 62, 70
Clayton, Martin	70, 71, 74
Clément, Catherine	13
Cook, Nicolas	58, 89, 60, 70
Coussemaker, Edmond de	87
Cross, Ian	60, 69, 71
Culler, Jonathan	111, 115
Dahlhaus, Carl	62, 71
Dalila (Delilah)	24
Dalmonte, Rossana	74
Danchet, Antoine	95
Danuser, Hermann	70
Darwin, Charles	118
Dekleva, Milan	64, 65, 71
DeNora, Tia	56, 59, 63, 71
Derrida, Jacques	111
Descartes, René (Cartesius)	63
Devereux, Georges	91, 104
Dies, Albert Christoph	147, 149, 155, 157
Dolar, Mladen	5, 6, 69, 71, 155, 157
Dörr, Volker C.	19
Douglas, Phillipe	71
Drake, Caroline	69-71
Droe, Kevin	63, 71
Druckman, Jacob	121, 137
During, Simon	147, 157
Durkheim, Emile	115
Eco, Umberto	62, 71
Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich	58, 71
Eissler, Kurt	78
Elias, Norbert	153, 157
Enescu, George	78
Engel, Gerhard	59, 71
Esterhazy, princ Nicolaus	145-147, 152, 153, 157
Evans, Dylan	139
Fauré, Gabriel	41
Ferenci, Sandor	40
Fincher, David	24
Fink, Bruce	138
Fleissner, Jennifer	44
Fliess, Wilhelm	40
Floros, Constantin	61, 71
Föllmi, Beat A.	5, 6
Foster, Hal	117
Frankfurt, Harry	23
Frenzel, Tobias	63, 75
Freud, Sigmund	5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 19, 26-28, 33-40, 42-44,
	47, 49, 53, 77-80, 83, 85, 86, 88, 93-96, 98,
Frith, Simon
100, 102-104, 109-111, 115, 137-139, 143, 145, 146, 152, 157, 158 57, 59, 71
Garratt, James Gaston, Thayer F. Gates-Coon, Rebecca Gaver, William Gay, Peter Geertz, Clifford Gilbert, Sandra M. Gillespie, Susan H. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Glasser, Mervin Gluck, Christoph Willibald Goehr, Lydia Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Gosling, Samuel D. Gotwals, Vernon Gounod, Charles Grabocz, Marta Griesinger, Georg August Groys, Boris Gubar, Susan
144, 157
57,	58, 71
146,	150, 157
58,	72 34, 40 61 109 156 109 47
8, 9, 16, 26, 99, 102, 104, 105 112
18-21, 23, 25, 26, 32 63, 75, 76 157 18
61, 72
147,	149, 155, 157 68, 72
109
Haesler, Ludwig Hanslick, Eduard Hargreaves, David J.
Hargreaves, Jon J. Hartmann, Geoffrey Harvey, Robert Hascher, Xavier Hatten, Robert S. Haydn, Joseph Head, Matthew Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin Henze, Hans Werner Herbert, Trevor Herod (Herodes), kralj Hesmondhalgh, David Hill, Alan G.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Jürgen
55, 56, 72 90, 104 56-58, 63, 74 56-58, 63, 74 108
157 72, 73
60-62, 72, 73, 111
143-158
153, 157
11, 17, 22, 110, 114 19, 21, 30, 31 53
70, 71, 74
29, 37, 38, 41, 42, 86 74
158
21, 32, 77, 79, 80, 82, 88 47, 53
Hölderlin, Friedrich	119, 121
Holloway, Robin	41
Holly, Michael Ann	158
Horkheimer, Max	16
Huber, Klaus	64
Hübner, Kurt	59, 72
Huron, David	59, 60, 63, 70, 72
Hutcheon, Linda	38
Hutcheon, Michael	38
Idamante (Idamantes)	91-99, 101, 102
Idomeneo (Idomeneus)	9, 15, 89, 91, 93-105
Ilia	91, 92, 95-98, 101, 102
Imberty, Michel	61, 72
Izolda (Isolde)	12, 13, 28, 33-35, 42, 43, 129
Jameson, Fredric	117, 145, 157
Janez Krstnik (John the Baptist)	
(Jochanaan)	24, 35-38, 41, 44
Jarnach, Phillip	28, 29
Jephcott, Edmund	157
Jezus Kristus (Jesus Christ)	15, 26, 29, 30, 154
Jiranek, Jaroslav	61, 72
Johnson, Barbara	109
Joyce, James	49, 51
Jožef II. Habsburško-Lotarinški,	
rimsko-nemškicesar	16, 157
Judkin, Jeremy	112, 113
Jung, Carl	34, 40
Kaden, Christian	60, 62, 71-73
Kafka, Franz	27
Kahane, Claire	35
Kallberg, Jeffery	114
Kant, Immanuel	10, 14, 20, 27, 47, 62, 114, 116
Kaplan, Max	57, 72
Kaprow, Allan	149, 156
Karbusicky, Vladimir	57, 58, 61, 63, 72, 73
Karlin, Fred	73
Kierkegaard, Soren Aabye	11
King, Stephen	27, 32
Klein, Melanie	5, 6
Kleist, Heinrich von	20, 21, 32
Koch, Heinrich Christoph	58
Kolleritsch, Otto 73 Kolodny, Annette 109 Kon, Joseph 61, 73 Korsyn, Kevin 5, 6, 112, 114-116 Koussevitzky, Serge 146, 148 Kramer, Lawrence 5, 6, 35 Kretzschmar, Hermann 78 Krüger, Michael 72
Lacan, Jacques
Landon, H. C. Robbins Lazarsfeld, Paul F. Lebic, Lojze Lehmann, Andreas C. Leikert, Sebastian Lenin, Vladimir Iljic Uljanov Leone, Sergio Leopold II. Habsbursko-Lotarinski, rimsko-nemski cesar Leopold, Silke Leppert, Richard Leppert, Richard Levi, Hermann Levitin, Daniel J. Lidov, David Ligeti, György Liszt, Franz Lochhead, Judy Lohengrin Lorenzer, Alfred Luka (Lukas), evangelist Lynch, David
5-7, 14-24, 26, 27, 36, 45, 4-51, 53, 54, 79, 107, 110, 137-139, 141, 143, 144, 154, 157, 158 151, 157 57
64-69, 73 63, 73
45, 48-54, 79 18 29
16
71, 73 71, 156 71, 156 114
59, 60, 63, 73 59, 73 64-66 9
117
8
90, 91 86 29
Mâche, François-Bernard Mackensen, Karsten Macy, Laura Magrini, Tullia Mahler, Gustav Mahler, Justine Mallarmé, Stéphane Man, Paul de Mann, Thomas Mannoni, Octave
61, 73 71, 73 74 73
25, 33, 34, 65, 77, 79, 81-83, 86-88, 121 82 141 108, 111 39 23
Manuel, Peter Marie Antoinette, francoska kraljica Marieanu, Costin Marija Terezija (Maria Theresia), cesarica Marx, Groucho Massow, Albrecht von Mathew, Nicholas Mätzler, Ruth McAllester, David McClary, Susan Mead, George Herbert Meh, Srecko Mendelssohn, Felix Bartholdy Merker, Björn Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Merriam, Allan P. Merton, Robert K. Meyer, Leonard B. Middleton, Richard Mihevc, Marko Miller, Jacques-Alain Milton, John Mitchell, Stephen A. Mitchell, Vincent-Wayne Möbius, August Ferdinand Mohammed Moliere, Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molino, Jean Monelle, Raymond Monteverdi, Claudio Moreau, Gustave Motte, Helga de la Mozart, Constanze Mozart, Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Muck, Karl Müller, Heiner Müller, Renate Munch, Edvard
74 146
60,	72, 73 146, 157 5, 6
47, 54, 61, 73 145, 157 47, 54 57 71 60
65, 73 146 72-75 60
56-58, 74, 76 57
58, 61, 74, 112 57, 59, 61, 63, 70, 71, 74 64, 66-69 110, 157 110, 112 47, 63 63, 75 64 104 10 61 60, 111 8, 9, 16 41
61,	74 10
93, 100, 101
5-7, 9-16, 34, 40, 72, 78, 79, 89, 91-94, 96, 99-105, 111-113, 144, 156 148 20
63, 74 31, 32
Nagel, Ivan 9 Narmour, Eugene 112 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 59, 61, 74, 111
Nettl, Bruno Neuenfels, Hans Neuhoff, Hans Newman, Beth Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm North, Adrian C.
Oberhoff, Bernd Oellers, Norbert Oerter, Rolf Ojdip (Oedipus, Ödipus)
Orbison, Roy
Paganini, Niccolo Parry, R. Mitchell Pascal, Blaise Pellauer, David Perelberg, Rosine Jozef Peretz, Isabelle Philemon Picht, Johannes Pike, Kenneth Poizat, Michel Porter, Dennis Potts, Alex Powell, Colin Proust, Marcel Puccini, Giacomo Puffett, Derek
Radocy, Rudolf E. Ratner, Leonard G. Rentfrow, Peter J. Ricoeur, Paul Rieff, Philip Riesbeck, baron Johann Caspar Rimbaud, Arthur Roberts, Mark S. Rochberg, George Rojko, Uros Rösing, Helmut Rossini, Gioachino Rothko, Mark
57,	60, 61, 74 103, 104
68, 74 110
21, 29, 109 56-58, 63, 74
5, 6, 47, 54, 72, 78, 79, 89, 100, 105
19
70
34,	49, 89, 95-98, 100, 102-104, 109, 111, 118, 137
30
120-124, 141, 142
58,	75 10-12 158 47
63, 71 26
45-48, 52, 54 59
79, 87 157
149, 157 22 41 29 41
56, 58, 75 61
63, 75, 76 145, 146, 158
35,	43 151 21 157
107-109, 117-137, 140-142
64-69, 73, 75
60, 63, 70, 75
14
117
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 95 Rüdiger, Wolfgang 65
Sabbadini, Andrea Sablich, Sergio Sabska kraljica (Sheba) Sachs, Hans Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Markiz de Said, Edward W.
Salecl, Renata Saloma (Salome) Salomon (Solomon) Samson Santner, Eric Saussure, Ferdinand de Scelsi, Giacinto Schenker, Heinrich Schering, Arnold Schiller, Friedrich Schmoll-Barthel, Jutta Schönberg, Arnold Schopenhauer, Arthur Schreber, Daniel Paul Schubert, Franz Schwab-Felisch, Oliver Schwarz, David Scott, Ridley Sechehaye, Albert Sellars, Peter Sencur, Eva Shakespeare, William Shepherd, John Showalter, Elaine Silverman, Kaja Smart, Mary, Ann Smith, Marquard Spitzer, Michael Stalin, Josip Visarijonovic D2ugasvili Stefanija, Leon Stein, Gertrude Stein, Leonard Stewart, Ian Stockhausen, Karlheinz
47 29 24 42
10 10
5, 6
24, 29, 33, 35, 36-44
24
24
44, 119, 121
111,	115 66
112,	115 78
19
71,	73
34, 78, 81, 90, 105, 137 12, 28-30 33, 43, 44
72,	111, 120, 124 61, 75
5, 6, 59, 75 27 111 12
66, 75 102, 105 59, 75 109 110, 111 38 158
144,	148, 158 15, 25, 29
5, 6
145,	158 34
75 155
Stokes, Martin Strachey, James Straus, Joseph B. Strauss, Richard Stravinski, Igor Fjodorovic Straw, Will Sundberg, Johan Sutcliffe, W. Dean Symons, Arthur
Tarasti, Eero Taruskin, Richard Theweleit, Klaus Tinctoris, Johannes Tolley, Thomas Tomatis, Alfred A.
Toop, Richard Toscanini, Arturo Trakl, Georg Trehub, Sandra Tristan Turner, Chris
70, 75
35, 43, 138, 157 112
29, 33, 35, 36, 38-42, 44, 66, 103 34, 82 75 72
157, 158 152, 158
60,	75, 111
145,	146, 158 8
87
146,	148, 154, 155, 158 78
58, 75
148
30-32
61,	75
12, 13, 20, 28, 29, 33, 34, 42, 43, 129 138
Varesco, Abbate (Giovanni Battista) Verdi, Giuseppe
Wagner, Richard
Wallin, Niels L. Walsh, Gianfranco Webern, Anton Webster, James Weinberger, Norman M. Werner-Jensen, Arnold Whitesell, Lloyd Wicke, Peter Wiedmann, Klaus-Peter Wilde, Oscar Wilder, Thorton Winnicott, Donald W.
Wolf, Hugo Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno Wordsworth, William Wotan
94-96, 101, 102 12, 49
8, 9, 12, 13, 22, 27-29, 33-35, 39, 40, 42-44, 113, 129, 137 72-75 63, 75 30, 121, 154 147, 148, 154, 155, 158 63 96 109, 111 59, 75 63, 75 35
145, 158 47 34 103 156, 158 28
Wright, James Wright, Rayburn
Zaminer, Frieder Zatorre, Robert J. Zeitlin, Zvi Zukovsky, Louis Zupančič, Alenka Žižek, Slavoj
60, 73 73
71
63, 71 119 141 5, 6
5, 6, 110, 143, 148, 149, 152-154, 157, 158
Avtorji • Contributors
Christian BIELEFELDT (bielefeldt.chr@gmail.com) je študiral muzikologijo, glasbeno pedagogiko in germanistiko v Hamburgu, v letih 1998-2001 je deloval kot štipendist Nemške raziskovalne skupnosti ter istega leta končal doktorsko disertacijo o sodelovanju skladatelja Hansa Wernerja Henzeja z avstrijsko pisateljico Ingeborg Bachmann. Po dveh letih glasbenega učiteljevanja je deloval na Fakulteti za pedagogiko, kulturo in sociologijo Univerze v Lüneburgu. Osrednji področji njegovega raziskovanja sta sodobna in popularna glasba, zlasti nemške in črnsko-ameriške provenience.
Christian BIELEFELDT (bielefeldt.chr@gmail.com) studied Musicology, Music Pedagogy and German literature in Hamburg, worked 1998-2001 as a fellow of a DFGcollege and finished his dissertation about the cooperation between the composer Hans Werner Henze and the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann in the same year. After two years working as a school teacher he joined the University of Lüneburg, Faculty of Education, Culture and Sociology in 2004. His main topics are contemporary music and popular music, namely of German and Black US-American provenance.
Beat A. FÖLLMI (bfollmi@unistra.fr) je izredni profesor muzikologije na Oddelku za protestantsko teologijo Univerze v Strasbourgu. Muzikologijo in teologijo je študiral na univerzah v Zürichu in Strasbourgu z disertacijo »Tradicija kot hermenevtična kategorija v delih Arnolda Schönberga«. Istočasno je urednik kritične izdaje zbranih del švicarskega skladatelja Othmarja Schoecka, kar mu je prineslo izvolitev v Švicarsko akademijo humanističnih in družbenih ved. Bil je tudi član svetovalnega odbora za gesla, ki zadevajo Švico v zadnji izdaji enciklopedije MGG.
Beat A. FÖLLMI (bfollmi@unistra.fr) Beat A. Föllmi is Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) of Musicology at the University of Strasbourg's Department of Protestant Theology. He completed his studies of musicology and theology at the universities of Zurich and Strasbourg with a dissertation on "Tradition as a Hermeneutic Category in the Work of Arnold Schönberg". Concurrently, he is the editor of the critical edition of the complete works of the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck and in this capacity has been elected to membership in the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. He also served on the advisory board for entries concerning Switzerland in the latest edition of the encyclopedia Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Kevin KORSYN (kkorsyn@umich.edu) je profesor glasbene teorije na Michiganski univerzi. Njegova knjiga Razsrediščenje glasbe: kritika sodobnega glasbenega raziskovanja (OUP, 2003) je bila predmet kritičnih simpozijev v reviji Teorija in praksa kakor tudi v njegovih napovedanih Pristopih h glasbenemu raziskovanju: med prakso in epistemologijo. Za njegovo knjižno izdajo ga je nagradilo Društvo za glasbeno teorijo, Michigansko združenje upravnih odborov mu je podelilo Fakultetno priznanje za zasluge, bil pa je tudi izvoljen v Michigansko društvo sodelavcev
leta 2003. Njegovi članki so bili natisnjeni v številnih vodilnih revijah, kot so JAMS, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Beethoven Forum, Intégral, The Music Times, Theoria, Notes, in druge.
Kevin KORSYN (kkorsyn@umich.edu) is Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan. His book Decentring Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (Oxford University Press, 2003) has been the subject of critical symposia in the journal Theory and Practice and the forthcoming book Approaches to Musical Research: Between Practice and Epistemology. He received a publication award from the Society for Music Theory and the Distinguished Faculty Award from the Michigan Association of Governing Boards and was elected to the Michigan Society of Fellows in 2003. His articles and reviews have appeared in a number of leading journals, including JAMS, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Beethoven Forum, Intégral, The Musical Times, Theoria, Notes, and elsewhere.
Lawrence KRAMER (lkramer@fordham.edu) je profesor angleščine in glasbe na Fordhamski univerzi v New Yorku ter urednik revije »Glasba 19. stoletja«. Med številnimi knjigami o glasbi in kulturi so med najnovejšimi Glasbeni pomen: prispevek h kritični zgodovini (California, 2002), Opera in moderna kultura: Wagner in Strauss (California, 2004), Kritična muzikologija in odgovornost reagiranja: izbrani eseji (Ashgate,
2006),	Zakaj je klasična glasba še vedno pomembna (California, 2007) in Interpretacija glasbe (California, 2011, v tisku). Glasbeni pomen in človeške vrednote (Fordham, 2009), sourednik Keith Chapin, je zbornik mednarodnega srečanja v čast L. Kramerja leta 2007. Ob tem srečanju je bilo izvedenih devet pesmi iz ciklusa Popotnik in njegova senca na besedila, prirejena po Nietzschejevi Veseli znanosti. Med novejšimi izvedbami je omeniti »Obroč svetlobe« (ciklus pesmi) in »Pet pesmi in epilog iz Golobjih kril« (Edinburcg,
2007);	»Peščene sipine« (flavta solo, New York, 2008); »Pesemska dejanja« (Dunaj, 2009); in »Ecstasis« (klavir solo, Keele, 2009). Ciklus pesmi »Ta osamljena piščalka« bo izveden prvič aprila 2010 v New Yorku.
Lawrence KRAMER (lkramer@fordham.edu) is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University in New York and editor of the journal 19th-century Music. His numerous books on music and culture include, most recently, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (California, 2002), Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (California, 2004), Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Ashgate, 2006), Why Classical Music Still Matters (California, 2007), and the forthcoming Interpreting Music (California, 2010). Musical Meaning and Human Values (Fordham 2009), co-edited with Keith Chapin, is a collection based on an international conference held in Kramer's honor in 2007. The conference featured the premiere of nine songs from his cycle The Wanderer and his Shadow to texts adapted from Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Recent performances include 'A Ring of Light' (song cycle) and 'Five Songs and an Epilogue from The Wings of the Dove' (Edinburgh, 2007); 'Sand Dunes' (solo flute, New York, 2008); 'Song Acts' (Vienna, 2009); and 'Ecstasis' (solo piano, Keele, 2009). Another song cycle, 'That Lonesome Whistle,' will premiere in New York in April 2010.
Bernd OBERHOFF (oberhoff@t-online.de), rojen 1943, dr. phil., psiholog, glasbeni psihoanalitik, skupinski analitik (DAGG), privatni docent za socialno terapijo na univerzi v Kasslu, inšpektor sodobne prakse v Münstru. Član upravnega idbora Nemškega društva za psihoanalizo in glasbo. Napisal vrsto knjig s področja glasbene psihoanalize, med temi deset psihoanalitičnih opernih vodičev k operam Mozarta, Glucka in von Webra ter tri psihoanalitične študije o Christophu Willibaldu Glucku (1999), Heinrichu Schützu (2006) in Wolfgangu Amadeusu Mozartu (2008).
Bernd OBERHOFF (oberhoff@t-online.de), Jg. 1943, PD Dr. Phil., Diplom-Psychologe, Musikpsychoanalytiker, Gruppenanalytiker (DAGG), Privatdozent für Soziale Therapie an der Universität Kassel, Supervisor in freier Praxis in Münster. Vorstandsmitglied der 'Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse und Musik' Zahlreiche BuchVeröffentlichungen im Bereich 'Musikpsychoanalyse', darunter zehn psychoanalytische Opernführer zu Opern von Mozart, Gluck und v. Weber, sowie drei musikpsychoana-lytische Studien über Christoph Willibald Gluck (1999), Heinrich Schütz (2006) und Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (2008).
David SCHWARZ (bluecomposition@gmail.com) je diplomiral angleščino, primerjalno književnost, nemščino (kot tuj jezik), interaktivne telekomunikacije in glasbeno teorijo. Izdal je dve knjigi: Poslušajoči subjekti: glasba, psihoanaliza, kultura (Duke 1997) in Napačno poslušanje: glasba in drugačnost v nemški kulturi (Minnesota 1006). Trenutno je izredni professor glasbene teorije na glasbeni akademiji universe North Texas, USA.
David SCHWARZ (bluecomposition@gmail.com) has degrees in English, Comparative Literature, German (Zeugnis - Deutsch als Fremdsprache), Interactive Telecommunications, and Music Theory. He has published two books: Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Duke 1997) and Listening Awry: Music and Alterity in German Culture (Minnesota 2006). He is currently Associate Professor of Music Theory in the College of Music, the University of North Texas, USA.
Leon STEFANIJA (Leon.Stefanija@ff.uni-lj.si) je od leta 1995 zaposlen na Oddelku za muzikologijo Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani. Od leta 2008 je predstojnik oddelka. Glavna področja njegovega raziskovanja in poučevanja so epistemologija raziskovanja glasbe, sodobna (predvsem slovenska) glasba in sociologija glasbe. Glasbene publikacije: O novem v glasbi (2001), Metode glasbene analize: zgodovina in teoretski pregled (2004), Sociologija glasbe - učbenik (2009) in Prispevek k analizi glasbenih ustanov v Sloveniji 20. stoletja (2010).
Leon STEFANIJA (Leon.Stefanija@ff.uni-lj.si) joined the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana in 1995. Since 2008 he serves as the chair of the Department of Musicology. His main research and teaching areas are epsietmology of music research, contemporary (pimarely Slovenian) music, sociology of music. Main publications: On The New In Music (2001), Methods of Music Analysis: A Historical And Theoretical Survey (2004), Sociology of music - a texbook (2009), and Contribution to the Analysis of the Musical Institutions in 20th-century Slovenia (2010).
Slavoj ŽIŽEK (slavoj.zizek@guest.arnes.si) se je rodil leta 1949 v Ljubljani. Tu je opravil vse šole. Diplomiral (1971), magistriral (1971) in doktoriral (1981) je na oddelku za filozofijo Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani. Doktorsko disertacijo iz psihoanalize pa je 1985 ubranil v Franciji, na univerzi Paris VII. Od 1979 do 1998 je bil raziskovalec na Inštitutu za sociologijo in filozofijo in na Fakulteti za družbene vede, od 1998 je raziskovalec na filozofskem oddelku Filozofske fakultete v Ljubljani. Akademsko stopnjo rednega profesorja za filozofijo in teoretsko psihoanalizo je dosegel leta 1985. Leta 1991 je dobil naziv ambasadorja znanosti Republike Slovenije. Od 5. maja 2005 je izredni član SAZU.
Slavoj ŽIŽEK (slavoj.zizek@guest.arnes.si) was born in Ljubljana in 1949. Here he received his education: taking a degree (1971), an obtained a MA (1971) and PhD (1981) from the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He defended his dissertation in psychoanalysis at the Paris VII University in 1985. From 1979 to 1998 he did research at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy and the Faculty of Social Studies, and from 1998 onward in the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts. In 1985 he became full professor of philosophy and theoretic psychoanalysis. In 1991 he won the title of an Ambassador of Scholarship of the Republic of Slovenia. Since May 5, 2005, he has been associate member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
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