Sublime after midnight
Originally published in the TLS, April 02, 2004
CHOPIN’S FUNERAL. By Benita Eisler. 230pp. Little, Brown. Pounds 16.99.
- 0 316
86021 2
VIRTUOSITY AND THE MUSICAL WORK. The Transcendental Studies of Liszt. By Jim Samson. 240pp. Cambridge University Press. Pounds 47.50 (US $75). - 0 521 81494 4
To help you make up your mind to come this evening I must tell you that Chopin will play to a small group of us, quite informally; and it is at such times that he is really sublime. Come at midnight …
(George Sand writing to Eugene Delacroix in 1838) The French Restoration was stultifying, politically and culturally, and seemed entrenched, until the July Revolution of 1830 wiped it away and opened the floodgates of creativity for artists such as Delacroix, Musset, Chopin and Liszt, all living in Paris, and all connected in a network of friendship and love through George Sand. This is the world of Chopin’s Funeral by Benita Eisler, and the funeral’s description, with which the book opens, is immediate in its effect and fascinating in its details. The problems begin when Eisler returns to the living, stertorously breathing composer. Books like Eisler’s are not meant to be academic studies; they need to uncover no new sources, but to review the known ones well and to give us some of the good bits. More important, they need to synthesize the sources to bring the period and its people to life. I can still remember the American television show You Are There, which purported to put viewers on the scene of some historic event, in the company of an eye witness reporter (”Mr Jefferson, Mr Jefferson? Could you spare us a moment?… ”)
A book like this should be a You Are There - a substitute for time travel, transporting us to Sand’s drawing room after midnight, when Chopin was “sublime”. But Eisler’s Chopin never comes into focus. Is he petulant, racist, pseudo-aristocratic? Tormented, diseased? Witty and self-mocking? The book leans one way, and then another; a three-dimensional character never emerges.
And there are moments which lead one to doubt Eisler’s strength as a historian:
I don’t believe the banquets of 1848 were planned by the regime; or that Chopin’s father, described as “a peasant from the Vosges region of northern France”, could have “left his home and country in 1787, probably to avoid conscription into the army during the violent years of the revolution”. If he did, he was the most prescient sixteen-year-old peasant in France.
Is having a sad life more tragic if you’re a genius? Much of Eisler’s book concerns itself with the Sand-Chopin relationship, which came to a sad and difficult end, Chopin caught in the cross-fire between Sand and her daughter Solange. This is in many ways a typical story of a family quarrel and its consequences. Couples break up, people get hurt. There’s nothing exceptional about it, except that at least one of the parties here was a genius, which means that unlike the average person, Chopin knew the joy of abundant creation.
Is having a sad life more tragic if you’re a genius?
It is no small thing to create a masterwork, or many of them; to know you have created them, and to know that the world knows.
Whether Franz Liszt was secure in the knowledge of having produced masterworks is not quite so certain. That he was a great virtuoso, and that he wrote works demanding great virtuosity, is beyond question, but in a sceptical age we have become suspicious of such works. We suspect that art which is full of sound and fury perhaps signifies nothing; that the presence of virtuosity may cover the absence of profundity.
Virtuosi can be identified by the sense they radiate of total command. All of the sounds their instrument is capable of producing, every gradation and inflection of every sound, are available to them at any moment. Liszt’s Transcendental Studies give the player the chance to demonstrate just this kind of mastery. They are up and down and all over the keyboard, covering every dynamic and tonal range, from stretched out single-note melodies to great chords, from shimmering filigree to hammered octaves: notes in torrents, cascades, waterfalls.
And it is not enough to play the notes. For the Romantic illusion is that the music we hear is being born as we hear it -it flows from the mind of the creator straight out through his fingers to our hearts. We -if we are a Romantic audience -don’t want a sense of balance, the feeling that things were planned in advance; we want instead the spontaneous and the improvised. We want to be swept away. Of course, we know that the piece was actually written out and laboriously practised, but as we listen we suspend our disbelief and react as though what we hear is being heard for the first -and the last -time. Music in the air, the most evanescent of arts: when it has gone, we can’t even talk about it. If we try, we find that we’re talking about memories of what we heard, and we may not know how to identify individual events from among those memories, or how to describe them.
So we break the illusion, and look at the score, which is where we encounter difficulties.
Michel de Certeau made a distinction between the “scopic eye”, which looks down at a city from 100 floors up and sees patterns, structures and functions, and simply walking in the city with all of the specific and particular knowledge which that act implies: Baudelaire, for instance, noticing a woman’s ankle.
Analysis - harmonic and formal -focuses a scopic eye on music. It sees through such incidentals as momentary dissonance, rhythmic ambiguity, or melodic eccentricity in order to discern underlying functions, structures and patterns.
It is precisely the virtuosic elements of a musical work that the scopic eye is trained to make transparent.
It is precisely the virtuosic elements of a musical work that the scopic eye is trained to make transparent. Jim Samson’s aim in focusing on the momentary, the decorative, the inessential -which are the materials of the virtuoso etude -is to restore the street-level view of music.
In Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The “Transcendental Studies” of Liszt, Samson shows mastery of an enormous range of sources, a deep acquaintance with the music, and he writes with clarity and style. His exposition of Liszt’s development of the etudes over a period of many years -they began as youthful though charming exercises -is especially effective.
I have no doubt that this will be the standard work on the Transcendental Studies for years to come. Nevertheless, it is a frustrating book. In practice, Samson seems to shy away from his purpose, devoting the heart of the book to conventional musical analysis which answers none of the questions that come into the mind of a listener to a virtuosic work: questions about rhythmic complexity and ambiguity, the shape and length of phrases, whether the melody is located well within or at the edges of its accompanying harmonies, the extraordinary flexibility of time (rubato), the concomitantly rare appearance of predictable, dance-like rhythms, the rapid variation in textures, quickly thickening and just as suddenly thinning again. Nor does conventional analysis answer that all- important question raised by Robert Browning in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”: “What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, / Told them something?”. These patterns so laboriously teased out of the music -do they have meaning? Browning believes they do, and Samson agrees at least to the extent of offering a superb reading of the “Eroica” etude. Though voiced somewhat timidly and hedged about with “mights”, in these few pages harmonic and thematic analysis descends from the abstract plane to reveal the music’s essential drama. For a moment, analysis is heard rather than seen. To make that reading the model rather than the exception would have been truer to the book’s ultimate aim.
In the end, Liszt lacks a certain magic that stays with Chopin. It is as though there were something in Chopin’s music like a drug particularly well designed to fit already existing receptors in the brain. Liszt’s etudes may have transcendent technique, but Chopin’s music transcends time. We don’t need a time machine to revisit his golden age; a few minutes alone with one of his nocturnes should do the trick.