Musicology and fiction Michael Saffle

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

for Karl Precoda As an aspect of human life and culture—frequently, as an overwhelmingly pervasive and problematic aspect—music has found its way into novels, plays, poems, and other forms of imaginative fiction. Musical facts (and fancies) can be found in Homer’s epics as well as the tales of aboriginal peoples; in Dante’s Commedia as well as Hindu and Arabic poetry; and in novels by Dickens, Dostoevskij, and James Joyce as well as sciencefiction stories and television screenplays. Entire dramas have been devoted to real-life musicians: Puškin’s Mocart i Sal’eri is a case in point, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus another. Other fictions describe imaginary composers and performers: consider Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer. (We shall return to Davenport, Mann, and Shaffer below.) A large number of historical, scientific, and speculative studies deal in some sense with both music and fiction. A majority of these studies have been written from imaginativeliterary perspectives. Whether Homeric verse was actually sung; why Dante referred to certain Gregorian chants; or which operas and street songs are mentioned in Ulysses— investigations of these kinds mostly map music onto fiction, rather than the other way round. A much smaller number of studies have been written from musicological Portions of the article were presented during a discussion of  “ Mozart and literature” at the colloquium “Mozart: A lasting presence” sponsored by Carleton University and held on 19 January 2006 in Ottawa, Ontario. I would like to thank Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University for financial support that enabled me to attend both this event and “Music’s intellectual history” held from 16–19 March 2005 in New York City. I would also like to thank James Deaville, Karl Precoda, and Robert Wallace for reading and commenting on portions of the present text.  Throughout the present article I mostly avoid the more general term “literature”, because it is often also used to refer to secondary sources of information, as in Fourscore classics of music literature: A guide to selected original sources on theory and other writings on music not available in English, ed. by Gustave Reese (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957). Occasionally I employ the phrase “imaginative literature” as a general term for novels, poetry, plays, short stories, and the like.  Reprinted in English as Mozart and Salieri in The poems, prose, and plays of Alexander Pushkin, trans. by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: Modern Library, 1964) 428–37. Originally published in Russian in 1830. All references to this and other fictions in the present article are to English-language texts or translations.  Peter Shaffer, Amadeus: A play (New York; London: Samuel French, 1981).  Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, as told by a friend, trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). Originally published in German in 1947.  Marcia Davenport, Of Lena Geyer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).

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perspectives. How a given poem or play has been set to music; in what ways a Mozart opera may have been influenced by literary traditions; or where (and why) text-painting appears in particular Renaissance motets or Baroque oratorios—investigations of these kinds mostly map fiction onto music. The Modern Language Association’s massive bibliography as well as a great many other reference works continue to catalog studies primarily written by and addressed to littérateurs. RILM, on the other hand, catalogs studies primarily written by and addressed to musicologists. Prior to the 1980s, musicologists mostly either ignored fictions or looked down their nose at them, instead devoting themselves exclusively to musical “facts”. Nevertheless, the number of studies devoted to musicological issues and works of imaginative literature is substantial. Several outstanding monographs have already served generations of scholars, and new contributions continually appear in print. Even if studies devoted exclusively or even primarily to opera, song, choral compositions, text-painting, and programmism are eliminated from consideration, the remaining books and articles comprise an important part of musicology’s intellectual history. The present article is devoted to exploring several issues associated with musicological investigations into imaginative literature, especially those pertaining to reception and formal organization. Most of the fictions discussed at any length have won acclaim either as canonical masterpieces (e.g., Shakespeare’s sonnets), or as popular successes (e.g., Ruth Rendell’s novel A judgement in stone10), or as models for what can and should be done in specialized forms of fiction (e.g., Bruce Sterling’s and Lewis Shiner’s sciencefiction story Mozart in mirrorshades11). Most, too, have received at least a little attention in musicological publications. As Calvin Brown is said to have observed, there is no really satisfactory way to “classify” the different possible relationships between fiction and music.12 In the pages below I move, insofar as possible, from “earlier” to “more recent” as well as from the “general” to the “specific”, beginning with factual and culturally situated references to music in selected works of imaginative literature, before then proceeding—as Steven Scher has suggested—by way of evocative references and devices to structural and stylistic parallels and principles between fiction and music.13 Scher has himself cautioned

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 See, for instance, R.B. Moberly, “The influence of French classical drama on Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito”, Music & letters 55/3 (1978) 245–67.  Timothy Dow Adams, et al., “When Euterpe meets Calliope: An annotated bibliography of music and literary style, 1945–1981”, Style 19 (1985) 151–90. Unlike many literary bibliographies, this one includes citations from Music & letters as well as the Journal of the history of ideas, the Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, and other interdisciplinary periodicals.  In recent years RILM abstracts of music literature has also incorporated references to a great many publications devoted to imaginative literature, cultural studies, and so on. RILM no longer covers unilaterally “musicological” publications, which is one of many reasons it has proven so useful to scholars in a variety of fields.  Among other “classics”, all of them in this group devoted to musical issues and English literature, see John Hollander, The untuning of the sky: Ideas of music in English poetry, 1500–1700 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961); Bruce Pattison, Music and poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Metheun and Co., 1948); and John Stevens, Music & poetry at the early Tudor court (London: Methuen and Co., 1961). Among “classics” devoted to musical issues and German literature is Scher, Verbal music in German literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 10 Ruth Rendell, A judgement in stone (London: Hutcheson, 1977; rep. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 11 Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, Mozart in mirrorshades. Originally published in Omni (September 1985). Reprinted in Mirrorshades: The cyberpunk anthology, ed. by Bruce Sterling (New York: Arbor House, 1986) 223–39. Also reprinted in The best alternate history stories of the 20th century, ed. by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg (New York: Ballantine, 2001); and other collections. Subsequent references are to the Cyberpunk anthology edition. 12 Quoted in Adams et al., “When Euterpe meets Calliope”, 151. 13 See Steven Paul Scher, “How meaningful is ‘musical’ in literary criticism?” Yearbook of comparative and general literature 21 (1972) 25–56 passim; and other studies.

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During the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the infant discipline of musicology increasingly defined itself in terms of primary sources and positivist methodologies. Western art music, especially German art music, became the sine qua non for scholarly study, in large part because this kind of music was understood as most perfectly created and preserved in writing rather than through performance or in terms of extra-notational commentary. As early as 1885 Guido Adler went so far as to dismiss musical biography for having “forced its way into the foreground” of a profession grounded in notational science rather than speculation.16 Even the “oral traditions and socialized performances” associated with folk and popular music were for decades accepted as “legitimate” only after they have been transcribed and reworked into books and articles: as such—as “forms to be dissected”—they could then be “placed in a library in a format that is deemed to be knowledge.”17 As the discipline of musicology evolved it modeled itself to some extent on the somewhat better established, yet equally “modern”, equally self-conscious disciplines of political and social history. As Monika Otter has observed, “History as scholarly inquiry concerned with archival research and documentation is only about two centuries old.” Furthermore,

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scholars against drawing “easy analogies” between music and fiction.14 On the other hand, as Thomas Campbell has pointed out, “such analogies can prove useful if they are carefully delineated.”15 I agree. In addition to identifying and evaluating useful analogies throughout the pages that follow, I have attempted to construct a few of my own.

the mental habit of regarding historiography as a transparent medium with no literary substance of its own, a self-effacing text that simply shows things “as they really were” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”), derives from nineteenth-century historicism.… To classical, medieval, and early modern Europeans, history was not a separate academic discipline, but a subsection of rhetoric (as was poetry and what we would call fictional narrative).18

For a variety of reasons, early–20th-century musicologists often did not concern themselves with “history” in the broader sense of that term.19 Instead, the centuriesScher has also observed that “organizing principles such as repetition, variation, balance, and contrast pervade both musical and literary textures; and the straightforward way they usually function in [their] respective arts yields many points of contact for legitimate comparison”. Steven Scher, “Literature and music”, Interrelations of literature, ed. by Jean-Pierre Barricelli and Joseph Gibaldi (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982) 225–50 passim. Quoted in Thomas P. Campbell, “Machaut and Chaucer: ‘A   rs nova’ and the art of narrative”, The Chaucer review 24 (1990) 287. 15 Ibid. 16 Translated from Guido Adler, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft”, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885) 10. For additional information about the boundaries of early musicology, which often excluded even such “narrative modes” of scholarly discourse as biography, see Jolanta T. Pekacz’s introduction to Musical biography: Towards new paradigms, ed. by Pekacz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) esp. 2–4. For additional information about the emergence of musicology as a “Germanic” discipline, see Alexander Rehding, “The quest for the origins of music in Germany circa 1900”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/2 (summer 2000) 345–85. 17 Alastair Williams, Constructing musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 105. 18 Monika Otter, “Functions of fiction in historical writing”, Writing medieval history, ed. by Nancy Partner (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005) 109. 19 See the introduction to Music and history: Bridging the disciplines, ed. by Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005) vii–xvii. 14

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old assumption that history was itself  “a branch of literature”20 was gradually replaced by an assumption that history, literature, and musicology are freestanding intellectual organisms, separate trees with separate disciplinary roots, branches, and intellectualecological habitats. And this, in contradistinction to Hans Robert Jauss’s contentions that the (re)emergence of historical fiction in the early 19th century abolished “the classical separation between res fictae, the realm of poetry, and res factae, the object of history”, thereby transforming “poetic fiction” into “the horizon of reality” and “historical reality” into “the horizon of poetry.”21 Rather than merge methodologies and interests with those of historians, sociologists, or other scholars, musicologists largely consecrated themselves exclusively to “the study of musical phenomena”, which they perceived as “existing in splendid isolation” from other human activities.22 What John Kimmey has called an “historical/systematic dyad” eventually developed. Traditionally, historical musicologists (some would say, “real” musicologists) have concerned themselves with the sources, documents, and practices associated with the evolution of European art music, while systematic musicologists (including ethnomusicologists) have taken pretty much everything else “musical” as their purview.23 Meanwhile, theorists (perhaps Kimmey should have used the term “triad”) have increasingly devoted themselves to diagrams, charts, and even—in the publications of Hans Keller—“wordless functional analyses”.24 In contradistinction to the scientific and mathematical methods adopted by music historians, systematists, and theorists (who, to a considerable extent, still strive to eschew subjective judgments), journalists and popularizers have often “emotionalized” the effects of music on actual men and women. A few individuals, however, have long inveighed again an exclusively positivist musicology, especially one fixated on “analysis” rather than other modes of criticism and assessment. Joseph Kerman, for example, has maintained that musicology tends to make information into an end in itself, rather than treating facts as “steps on the ladder” to “a general field theory of [musicological] criticism”.25 As early as 1965, Kerman used a then-recent anthology of musicological position papers26 as a stick to beat many of his colleagues:

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Someone has spoken about the growth of American musicology from infancy to adolescence; the metaphor is irresistible. Yet as many readers have noticed with a twinge, only Mantle Hood’s essay on ethnomusicology [published in the anthology in question] conveys the sense of horizon, excitement, experimentation, and just plain kicking around that one associates with even the most docile adolescents. Has historical musicology somehow skipped this phase? I hope instead we are still in its infancy. The 20 Lionel Gossman, “History and literature”, The writing of history: Literary form and historical understanding, ed. by Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) 23; italics in the original. 21 Hans Robert Jauss, Question and answer: Forms of dialogic understanding, ed. and trans. by Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 27. 22 John A. Kimmey, Jr., A critique of musicology: Clarifying the scope, limits, and purposes of musicology (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1988) 197. 23 Ibid., 198–204. 24 See, for example, Hans Keller, “Functional analysis: Its pure appreciation”, The music review 18 (1957) 202–06; and 19 (1958) 192–200. 25 Joseph Kerman, “A profile for American musicology”, Write all these down: Essays on music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 8. Kerman’s essay was published originally in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 18/1 (spring 1965) 61–69. 26 Musicology, ed. by Frank L. Harrison, Mantle Hood, and Claude V. Palisca (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

Although exclusively positivist researches and several varieties of analysis still flourish, at least in certain circles, Kerman has lived to see the field of musicology transformed in a variety of ways. In the process of transformation, more than a few musicologists have embraced their own brands of self-assertiveness and “just plain kicking around”. Entire volumes, for example, have been devoted to “gay” musicology—a development no one would have predicted 40 years ago.28 Early–21st-century musicology seems to be redefining itself in terms of interdisciplinary investigations into interrelated musical and cultural issues. In the process, music scholars have become critics as well as fact-finders: students of emotion as well as cerebration, of pleasures and pains as well as precise measurements and descriptions. Referring in 1995 to “current trends in music scholarship”, Pieter Van den Toorn singled out Leo Treitler as exemplary of (inter)disciplinary redefinition, especially because of Treitler’s insistence that musicology “acknowledge more fully and openly the mundane social and political attitudes that … lie just beneath [music’s] surface”—and this, even when “the prevailing winds would seem to favor an objective knowledge of observation and fact processed in detached and impersonal tones.”29 Redefinition has not solved all problems, of course, nor will it. Even among specialists, interdisciplinary approaches to certain issues have proven themselves “both a blessing and a curse”, in part because scholars “still often talk past each other” and “overarching coherence” is seldom arrived at.30 Nevertheless, the search for what Lawrence Kramer has called “postmodern musicology” continues.31 One aspect of this search has been an increased willingness for musicologists to explore the extra-musical. Including imaginative literature. The question remains: What can fiction—which is to say, the study of fiction—do for musicology? What can novels and poems teach us about music? One answer to these questions is: nothing at all. As Kevin Korsyn puts it, playing Devil’s Advocate in the guise of an individual “who can converse intelligently about literary theory, art history, [or] film studies”: Isn’t music “just something you do? You play it, compose it, listen to it? Why, then, would anybody want to talk about it?”32 (Sometimes, instead of simply talking about music, musicology seems increasingly to be concerned with “talk[ing] about talking about music”.33) Furthermore, fiction is “false”, deceptive. Nor is it music,

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critical profile [proposed elsewhere in Kerman’s essay] for American musicology would supply some of this excitement. It would neither replace nor slight our traditional scholarly pursuits, but would on the contrary … help [fill the] gap between the scholar and the general public.27

857 27 Kerman, “A profile for American musicology”, 8. Other scholars agree with Kerman, at least to the extent of questioning analysis as a royal road to musical understanding. Gary Tomlinson, for example, has also urged musicologists to give fuller consideration to contextual elements “beyond the work itself, indeed beyond musical works in general”. Gary Tomlinson, “The web of culture: A context for musicology”, 19th-century music 7/3 (April 1984) 360. 28 See, for example, Queering the pitch: The new gay and lesbian musicology, ed. by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994). 29 Pieter Van den Toorn, Music, politics, and the academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 44. 30 Michael J. Kramer, “The multitrack model: Cultural history and the interdisciplinary study of popular music”, Music and history: Bridging the disciplines, 221. 31 See Lawrence Kramer, Classical music and postmodern knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) passim. 32 Kevin Korsyn, Decentering music: A critique of contemporary musical research (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 65; italics in the original. 33 Ibid., 34.

especially the European instrumental art music canonized by previous generations of musicologists in the form of a self-contained system of  “purely” structural coherences. On the other hand, aren’t music and fiction both aural arts? Certainly poetry is aural—although, as Karl Precoda has suggested, prose fiction is a post-aural art form, written to be read “on” the page instead of out loud.34 Whether contextually “poetic” or “prosaic”, the sounds of certain words and phrases sometimes suggest their own meanings: Poe’s “tintinnabulation”, with its evocation of bells, is a case in point; so is Tennyson’s “murmuring of innumerable bees.”35 Too, trumpet flourishes are linked acoustically to their uses: as calls to battle, say, or as proclamations of royal personages. The simplest spoken sounds are capable of evoking or even becoming music itself as well as conveying meaning: Wallace Stevens, a poet “obsessed with sound”, sometimes treated syllables as if they were “physical” phenomena—and this, even though his fictive Peter Quince suggests that “music is feeling, then, not sound.”36 To separate music and fiction altogether from each other seems silly. Simply to lump them together, however, seems equally silly. An example: As a poetic device, onomatopoeia has nothing necessarily to do with music, just as the timbres and volumes of musical instruments have nothing necessarily to do with extra-musical circumstances.37 Nor does music necessarily tell stories. Instead, as Carolyn Abbate and others have suggested, narrativity should be understood “not as the normal condition of music, but as something anomalous.”38 Or, in the opinion of Vera Micznik, degrees of narrativity separate the style and works of Beethoven (less narrative) from those of Mahler (more narrative).39 Along quite different lines, Russell Reaver has claimed that what “the aural effect of literature” actually has “in common with music” manifests itself as an “interruption of our line of logical expectation” in order to facilitate “a heightened awareness of life” as “being” or “existence.”40 In this sense, music can be considered “philosophical” and even “spiritual”—which means that, in some sense, it must also be “literary” (although not necessarily “fictional”).41 Or, as German aestheticians such as Ludwig Tieck and Franz Grillparzer put it centuries ago, music aspires to “ultimate” accomplishments beyond those of the other arts.42 In every other sense, though, music is finally, only itself. As Reaver himself puts it, the sequence [of musical events, as in the events of a story ultimately] depends on the inner dynamisms of music itself, on its expectations of movement in tonalities and Karl Precoda, in a personal communication with the present author. With regard to links in language between timbres and meanings, see Calvin S. Brown, Music and literature: A comparison of the arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948) 33–35. 36 Mervyn Nicholson, “‘The slightest sound matters’: Stevens’ sound cosmology”, The Wallace Stevens journal 18/1 (spring 1994) 63; italics in the original. “Peter Quince at the clavier” is quoted by Nicholson on this and subsequent pages. 37 Nor has onomatopoeia altogether remained in favor with littérateurs, one of whom recently described attempts to “imitate environmental sounds” in both fiction and music as “dead metaphor”. See James Guetti, Word-music: The aesthetic aspect of narrative fiction (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980) 1–41 passim. 38 Nicholas Cook, “Uncanny moments: Juxtaposition and the collage principle in music”, Approaches to meaning in music, ed. by Byron Almen and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) 112–13. 39 See Vera Micznik, “Music and narrative revisited: Degrees of narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler”, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 126 (2001) 193–249. Any additional discussion of narrative as an approach to understanding music is beyond the scope of the present article. 40 J. Russell Reaver, “How musical is literature?” Mosaic 18/4 (fall 1985) 2. 41 Ibid. 42 Quoted in Lydia Goehr, The imaginary museum of musical works: An essay in the philosophy of music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 154. 34

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In spite of music’s independence from the other arts, or even its purported supremacy over them, musicologists are sometimes required to enter the realm of imaginative literature, just as littérateurs sometimes have to enter into the realm of music. Just as it is necessary to know something about A midsummer night’s dream in order to perform, or even listen intelligently to, the orchestral works of composers as different from one other as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Sergej Prokof ’ev; so, to produce many of Shakespeare’s plays “authentically”, it is necessary to know something about the role of song in Elizabethan drama. For these and other reasons, many musical reference works boast articles on “Shakespeare”.44 But Shakespeare’s plays and poems are unusual insofar as the history of musicology is concerned. Few references to “poetry”, “drama”, “the novel”, and similar fictional forms “overall” can be found even in contemporary musicological dictionaries.45 As Robert Morgan reminds us, many musical scholars, “at least in the United States, seem uncomfortable when confronted with larger questions of intentionality, social and psychological context, or supra-musical influence”—and thus remain “stubbornly formalistic.”46 No one can understand Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag without knowing what Don Giovanni is about. Nevertheless, a great many Mozart scholars seem to understand Mozart without even having heard of Eduard Mörike’s novella.47 (We shall also return to Mörike below.) Discussions of “supra-musical influences” exist, of course, and have for decades. Consider Calvin Brown’s groundbreaking Music and literature, written during the 1940s in “hope that it might open up a field of thought which has not yet been systematically explored”: the various interrelationships between imaginative literature and music.48 Consider too the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, which, in spite of certain conservative nationalist and methodological tendencies implicit in much of its contents, boasts an excellent article on “music and musicians in fiction”—one that ranges from Homer, the Brothers Grimm, and Thomas Mann to discussions of “fictive music”,  “the lyric”, and “musical anecdotes”.49 Moreover, and for most of a century, musicological periodicals have published occasional articles about “musical” novelists or poets, or about the appearance of musical figures or issues in imaginative literature.50 Russel Reaver, “How musical is literature?”, 2–3; italics added. Christopher R. Wilson, et al., “Shakespeare”, The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie (2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 2001) vol. 23, 192–98. 45 See, for example, Musicology: The key concepts, ed. by David Beard and Kenneth Gloag (New York: Routledge, 2005), which excludes most musical-literary subjects. 46 Quoted in Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Circumstantial evidence: Musical analysis and theories of reading”, Mosaic 18/4 (December 1985) 160. See also Robert Morgan, “Theory, analysis, and criticism”, Journal of musicology 1/1 (1982) 15–18. Morgan’s words were written more than a quarter century ago; American scholars, I am convinced, have long since caught up with their European counterparts. 47 Reprinted in English as Mozart’s journey to Prague, trans. by Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim (London: John Calder, 1957; repr. ed. 1976). Originally published in German in 1855. 48 See Brown, Music and literature. 49 Uwe Schweikert, “Musik und Musiker in der Literatur”, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. by Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997) Sachteil vol. 6, cols. 801–14. 50 Three examples, identified in chronological order of publication, must suffice: Vilma Raskin Potter, “Poetry and the fiddler’s foot: Meters in Thomas Hardy’s work”, The musical quarterly 65/1 ( January 1979) 48–71; Eric Valentin, “Mozart in der französischen Dichtung”, Acta mozartiana 30/4 (1983) 71–74; and Daniel Herwitz, “The cook, his wife, the philosopher, and the librettist”, The musical quarterly 78/1 (spring 1994) 48–76. Herwitz’s article deals with interrelationships between Italian literature, the story of Don Juan, Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s opera, and

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rhythms.… Since music—even program music—never has the literalness of literature, music and literature cannot be compared example for example as though a literary phrase must mean the same as a musical phrase.43

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Finally, an increasing number of interdisciplinary publications are being devoted to “music and …” subjects, such as “music and nationalism”, “music and cultural values”, and “music and the media”.51 The time seems ripe for an overview of past and present investigations into interrelationships between fiction and music. 

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Fictions may (or may not) be “musical”. If “musical”, however, are they necessarily “unusual”? Or do “musical” fictions merely “prove the rule”: viz., that imaginative literature has, for the most part, little to teach musicologists? Three authors—Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Hardy—produced imaginative literature that has been read as “musical” in one way or another. A few of their poems illustrate certain of the possibilities and limitations inherent in examining fiction as a source of musicological fact. In his verse, including portions of his celebrated Canterbury tales, Chaucer often refers music. Although he names no contemporary composer in his writings and mentions only one theorist, Boethius (whose treatise on music he himself translated), Chaucer demonstrated his considerable musical knowledge primarily through a “large and varied assortment of figures of speech based on music”, especially those of everyday experience.52 Consider the opening of the “Pardoner’s tale”, which describes “syngeres with harpes” and … a compaignye Of yonge folks that haunteden folye, As riot, hazard, stywes, and taverns, Where as with harpes, lutes, and gyternes They daunce and playen at dees both day and nyght, And eten also and drynken over hir myght …53

(Adolescents, it seems, have long been beer-addled pop-music fans.) Furthermore, Chaucer’s knowledge especially of Guillaume de Machaut’s literary and musical output unquestionably influenced his own verse. Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, for example, “is dependent upon no [fewer] than four of Machaut’s narrative dits for its general subject matter; and hundreds of specific lines can be traced to Machaut” in this and other of Chaucer’s poems.54 In comparing The parliament of fowls 860 Kierkegaard’s Enten/eller (see note 83). 51 In recent years German nationalism has often been discussed in conjunction with Wagner, Hitler, and National Socialism. See, for example, Thomas S. Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as national opera (1868–1945)”, Music and German national identity, ed. by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2002) 78–104. See also Potter, Most German of the arts: Musicology and society from the Weimar Republic to the end of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1998). Finally, see Vaget’s “Wagner-Kult” essay, cited in note 162. 52 Clair C. Olson, “Chaucer and music of the fourteenth century”, Speculum 16/1 ( January 1941) 71, 85. See also Robert Boenig, “Musical irony in the Pardoner’s tale”, The Chaucer review 24 (1990) 253–58; D.S. Brewer, “Chaucer’s attitudes to music”, Poetica: An international journal of linguistic-literary studies 15–16 (1981) 128–35; David Chamberlain, “Musical signs and symbols in Chaucer: Convention and originality”, Signs and symbols in Chaucer’s poetry, ed. by John P. Hermann and John J. Burke (University, Ala.; University of Alabama Press, 1981) 43–80; and David Leon Higdon, “Diverse melodies in Chaucer’s General prologue”, Criticism 14 (1972) 97–108. 53 Quoted from The complete poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by John H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989) 224. 54 Campbell, “Machaut and Chaucer”, 276.



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and the “Miller’s tale” with the music and verse of Machaut’s Je puis trop bien, Thomas Campbell has identified links between words and music, including: (1) a reluctance “to resolve ambiguities or to justify the presentation of disparate, even exclusive, solutions to a problem”; (2) a preference “for the simultaneous, rather than the serial, depiction of related events”; and (3) a preference “for concatenation, where several perspectives, situations, or scenes are deftly nestled beside, or inside, one another.”55 In other words, Chaucer’s poetry incorporates “literary” processes analogous to “musical” dissonance, polyphony, and cadences. Like Machaut’s Je puis, several of Chaucer’s poems—or so Campbell argues—approximate the separate medieval systems of musique naturelle (poetry) and musique artificielle (music) in that they “respond to or decorate one another, while simultaneously remaining independent.”56 Thus, in the “Miller’s tale”, the complexities of the several overlapping plots are suddenly resolved and “climax together … within twenty short, snappy lines” that call to mind “simultaneous, separate [musical] themes which occur in parallel, but not harmonic relationship”.57 Thus, within Chaucer’s poetry, music functions as an organizational metaphor, not merely as an experiential and cultural metonymy. Like many of Chaucer’s poems, several of Shakespeare’s sonnets deal explicitly with musical issues. Consider no. 128, which describes a girl playing a keyboard instrument58 and begins: How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st, Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap To kiss the tender inward of thy hand59

In Renaissance sonnets and sonnet sequences, music was often linked with sexuality and gender.60 Throughout Shakespeare’s poem, music serves as a metaphor for heterosexual love—more specifically, as a synecdoche (the “trope par excellence of reduction”) for jealousy.61 In line 1, for example, the poet lays claim to “his” music (the girl); and in lines 5–6 he envies the “nimble jacks” who kiss her hand. Helen Vendler begins her description of the “metaphor of music” present throughout this sonnet with an introductory reference to the “tonic note” of the poet’s “opening sigh”; she also observes that the poem as a whole “exists to amplify the sense through which, by synecdoche, the 861 Ibid., 277–78. Ibid., 283. 57 Ibid., 286. 58 According to John Benson, who wrote in 1640, as well as many subsequent scholars, Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets were addressed originally “to a male”, with “masculine pronouns [changed] to feminine” and titles introduced “which directed sonnets to the young man to a mistress”. Even if true—and more than one scholar has contested Benson’s claim—sonnet no. 128 falls historically into another group of poems. See Margreta de Grazia, “The scandal of Shakespeare’s sonnets”, Shakespeare’s sonnets: Critical essays, ed. by James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 2000) 89. 59 Quoted from The unabridged William Shakespeare, ed. by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1989) 1304. Other editions may differ in spelling or punctuation. 60 See, for example, William J. Kennedy, “Petrarchan textuality: Commentaries and gender revisions”, Discourse of authority in medieval and Renaissance literature, ed. by Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989) 151–68 passim. 61 See Helen Vendler’s essay on sonnet 128 in Vendler, The art of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1997) 543. 55 56

lady can be called the lover’s music”—and this largely in terms of two “erogenous zones”: lips and fingers.62 Clearly Shakespeare’s sonnet is “about” music, even if it may not be as “contrapuntal” as some of Chaucer’s verse. To what extent, however, is it factually reliable in terms of musicological information? Students of Renaissance performance practices would probably consider sonnet no. 128 a poorly written—or, at best, an eccentric—description of how an actual virginal works. In line 2, for example, Shakespeare seems to confuse the wooden soundboard of the instrument (the poet’s metaphorical rival in love63) with its wooden keys, either by mistake or through “a kind of metonymy” in which wood is associated with the poet’s rival.64 In line 3 Shakespeare describes the girl as swaying unnecessarily from side to side—although “sway’st” may also refer to control or mastery exercised by that rival. In line 5 he seems to confuse “jacks”, the quills that pluck the strings, with the keys the lady depresses to work the jacks. (Or does he? Shakespeare’s description takes into account the optical illusion of keys rising, instead of being struck, to “kiss” the girl’s hand. It is also possible, as David Crookes has done, to read Shakespeare’s reference to jacks metaphorically, in terms of a “ceremonial greeting to a superior.”65). And so on. In the last analysis, however, sonnet 128 has little or nothing to teach us about actual music-making, save in the realms of poetic license and imagery. Another reading of this poem, however—this one proposed by Fred Blick—links sonnet no. 128 with other portions of Shakespeare’s literary output by way of esoteric internal references to the Pythagorean tradition of “mathematical” music. According to Blick, the locations within Shakespeare’s cycle of both sonnets 8 and 128 (those most explicitly devoted to musical issues) reveal the poet’s awareness of “the general Pythagorean philosophy of numbers” also cited in act 5, scene 1, of The merchant of Venice.66 Since the number “128” calls to mind vis-à-vis “8” the ratio of a given tone to another tone precisely four octaves lower (128:8::16:1); since, too, “four octaves was the range of the virginal in Shakespeare’s time”; and, finally, since another of the sonnets (no. 141) employs a pun on “base” (i.e., physically and morally “low”) and “bass”: therefore— or so Blick’s argument concludes—Shakespeare’s sonnet “conjures up the image of a fortunate keyboard “tikled” erotically by the fingers of the Dark Lady [herself a “base” figure] in the presence of the unhappily envious poet.”67 For John Hollander, aspects of sonnet no. 8 also suggest the realm of musica speculativa: of  “sympathetic vibrations” as

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Vendler, The art of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 546–47. Renaissance commentaries on contemporaneous sonnets, including Petrarch’s, associated certain “rhetorical situations” with “male competition”. Kennedy, “Petrarchan textuality”, 163. 64 Hollander, The untuning of the sky, 136. 65 See David Z. Crookes, “Shakespeare’s sonnet 128”, Explicator 43/2 (winter 1985) 14–15. Crookes also refers to Richard II, act 3, scene 3, and provides a diagram showing “how an individual virginal-key operates” mechanically. 66 Fred Blick, “Shakespeare’s musical sonnets: Numbers 8, 128, and Pythagoras”, The upstart crow 19 (1999) 155. For additional information about Elizabethan poetry and metaphorical images of musical instruments, including references to Pythagorean theory, see Gretchen L. Finney, “A world of instruments”, ELH 20 (1953) 87–120. Regarding sonnet 8, see Kennedy, “Petrarchan textuality”, 164–65. 67 Blick, “Shakespeare’s musical sonnets”, 161–62. The “Dark lady” is one of three “characters” in the poet’s sonnets and is first introduced in sonnet no. 127. An even more complex argument about the placement of sonnet 128 (among others) in the whole of Shakespeare’s sonnets may be found in Thomas P. Roche, Petrarch and the English sonnet sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989) 456 and elsewhere. See too Claes Schaar, Elizabethan sonnet themes and the dating of Shakespeare’s “sonnets” (Lund: Håkan Ohlssons, 1962); and Brents Stirling, The Shakespeare sonnet order: Poems and groups (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 62 63

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well as the “three-part polyphony of the familial unit” described as “sier, and child, and happy mother” mentioned in line 11.68 If Shakespeare’s sonnet can be more perfectly understood in terms of insights into musical instruments and Pythagorean arcana, Thomas Hardy’s “Lines to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony” can perhaps be better understood in terms of scansion and melody. At first glance, however, “Lines” appears to lack any meaningful musical content. For one thing, only its title mentions “music” (a Mozart symphony); the poem itself—the first of its four stanzas is reprinted below—seemingly has nothing to do with music in general or Mozart in particular: Show me again the time When in the Junetide’s prime We flew by meads and mountains northerly! – Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fullness, fineness, freeness, Love lures life on.69

To complicate things, the very existence of a poem about “art” music flies in the face of statements by several of his biographers that Hardy only enjoyed “folk” tunes.70 In point of fact, Hardy knew more than a little about classical music.71 Furthermore, Robert Gittings has suggested that “Lines” constituted “an attempt [by Hardy] to fit words to Mozart’s well-known symphony in E-flat, the minuet and trio movement.”72 If Gittings is correct, a musicological puzzle would appear to be embedded in Hardy’s imaginativeliterary text, with the title providing a clue to its solution. Of the four canonical works in that key,73 no. 39, K.543, would appear the most plausible link with Hardy’s “Lines”, if only because that symphony has always been the most frequently performed of Mozart’s “E-flat” symphonies. Unfortunately, the poem cannot in any way be made to “fit” (whatever that might mean) the minuet-and-trio movements in any relevant Mozart symphony, including K.543. Instead, according to Colin Boone, the poem incorporates distinctive rhythmic patterns derived from the principal theme of the second (or “Andante”) movement of Mozart’s symphony no. 19, K.132.74 Although not entirely convincing, Boone’s argument makes sense. Compare, for example, Hardy’s first line, which Boone reads as:

Show-- / --- / me-a / gain-the / time-- / --

Hollander, The untuning of the sky, 136–137. Quoted from The complete poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976) 458. 70 Vera Mardon claims that Hardy“never wished to discuss classical music or composers”, even though she acknowledges that “classical composers and their music … formed themes for some of his poems”. Colin C. Boone, “Hardy’s poem Lines to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony – Which symphony?” The Thomas Hardy journal 6/1 (February 1990) 63. See also Mardon, with James Stevens-Cox, Thomas Hardy as a musician (Beaminster, Dorset: Stevens-Cox, 1964) 21. On the other hand, folk songs, singers, and instrumentalists figure in many of Hardy’s works, often as symbols of  “old” English ways and rural cultures. See Harold Toliver, “The dance under the greenwood tree: Hardy’s bucolics”, Nineteenth-century fiction 17 (1962) 57–68; and other studies. 71 Hardy is known to have attended classical concerts in London during the 1890s and 1900s. See F.B. Pinion, A Hardy companion: A guide to the works of Thomas Hardy and their backbround (London: Macmillan, 1968) 187–93 passim. 72 Robert Gittings, The older Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1978) 96. 73 Four E-flat symphonies by Mozart are considered genuine: nos. 1 (K.16), 19 (K.132), 26 (K.186), and 39 (K.543). A fifth work, identified in some iterations of the Köchel catalogue as K.18 and sometimes referred to as “no. 0”, was actually composed by Carl Friedrich Abel. See Neal Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies: Context, performance practice, reception (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), passim. 74 See Boone, “Hardy’s poem Lines to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony”, 61–69. Mozart composed two slow movements for K.132, the second designated andantino grazioso. See Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies, 233. 68 69

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with the opening measures of Mozart’s melody:

Example 1: Mozart, symphony no. 19, andante, mm. 1–6 (first violin part)

Each syllable or hyphen in Boone’s reading indicates a beat in Mozart’s tune; each diagonal slash indicates the end of one measure and the beginning of another.75 In order to make this first example work, however, one must ignore the tie at the beginning of measure 3. Similarly, Boone maintains that lines 4–5 can be read (with some alterations) as

Yea-- / to-such / freshness- /-fairness / full-ness / Love lures life / on--

These lines recall subsequent portions of Mozart’s tune:

Example 2: Mozart, symphony no. 19, andante, mm. 13–19 (first violin part)

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The fact that Hardy called his poem “Lines to a movement”, rather than “Lines to a minuet”76 (as Gittings erroneously implies), also argues for the andante in question. Finally, we should remember that Hardy was under no compulsion to follow Mozart’s metrics precisely.77 Coincidentally, perhaps, Mozart’s andante is an unusually long and complicated composition. Its reputation too is unusual: Alfred Einstein considered it “full of spiritual unrest and rebellion”, while Luigi Della Croce and Neal Zaslaw have described it as “exceptional” and so “personal” as to call for replacement within K.132.78 In addition, the opening of Mozart’s melody “reproduces the incipit of a Gregorian Credo”, while its later phrases reproduce part of  “a popular German Christmas carol, Joseph lieber, Joseph mein”.79 Although symphonies were sometimes performed during church services, the presence of similar “liturgical” references in the subsequent, “all-too-worldly” minuetand-trio suggest an “ironic or parodistic” (rather than “sacred”) interpretation.80 Did Hardy agree with any of these experts? Was he even aware of the facts they cite? Probably not. What ultimately makes most of Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, and Hardy’s fiction musicologically significant is not references to or incorporations of particular compositional strategies, instruments, mathematical ratios, or tunes. Instead, and for Boone, “Hardy’s poem Lines to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony”, 67–68. See The variorum edition of the complete poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979) no. 388 (p. 458). 77 Nor may Boone’s thesis help littérateurs read Hardy’s poetry. In Calvin Brown’s opinion, employing musical notation to “explain” English verse is “in general more of a nuisance than a help”. Calvin Brown, “Can musical notation help English scansion?” Journal of aesthetics and art criticism 23 (1965) 333. 78 Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His character, his work (London: Oxford University Press, 1945) 222; and Luigi Della Croce, Le 75 sinfonie di Mozart: Guida e analisi critica (Torino: Eda, 1977) 145. Quoted in Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies, 236. 79 Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies, 233–34. 80 Ibid., 83. 75 76

81 For a general review of musical reception, especially insofar as 1980s European musicology is concerned, see Rezeptionsästhetik und Rezeptionsgeschichte in der Musikwissenschaft, ed. by Friedheim Krummacher and Hermann Danuser (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1991). 82 Examples of such studies include Belinda Cannone, La réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse parisienne (1793– 1829) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991); Ulrich Drüener, “Die Frührezeption von Mozarts Werken im Musikaliendruck”, Acta mozartiana 40/2 (1993) 39–49; and M. Schmidt, “‘Dreams of flying’: Zur Mozart-Reception in Schönbergs ‘Spätstil’”, Acta mozartiana 52 ( June 2005) 81–93. 83 Reprinted in English as Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Originally published in Danish in 1843. Among studies of Mozart and Kierkegaard, see Jörg Zimmermann, “Philosophische Musikrezeption im Zeichen des spekulativ-erotischen Ohrs: Sören [sic] Kierkegaard hört Mozart’s Don Juan”, Rezeptionsästhetik und Rezeptionsgeschichte, 73–103. 84 Reprinted in English in The case of Wagner / Nietzsche contra Wagner / Selected aphorisms, trans. by Anthony M. Ludovici. The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche 8 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). Der Fall Wagner was originally published in German in 1888. 85 Reprinted in English as Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe, trans. by Gilbert Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1938). Originally published serially in French in 1905–06. 86 Rolland’s Beethoven-Bild has recently received attention from German musicologists. Among other studies, see Stefan Hanheide, “Die Beethoven-Interpretation von Romain Rolland und ihre methodischen Grundlagen”, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 61/4 (2004) 255–74; and Maria Hülle-Keeding, Romain Rollands visionäres Beethovenbild im JeanChristoph (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). 87 A very few of these fictions, including works by Hermann Hesse, are identified and described in Carol Wootton, “Literary portraits of Mozart”, Mosaic 18/2 (fall 1985) 77–84. See also Erich Valentin, Die goldene Spur: Mozart in der Dichtung Hermann Hesses (Augsburg: Die Brigg, 1966); and Paulina Salz Pollak, “The influence of Mozart’s The Magic Flute on Hesse’s Steppenwolf ”, Proteus 8/2 (fall 1991) 50–56. Other surveys, similar in certain respects to Wootton’s, ignore Hesse in favor of Mörike, Puškin, and Shaffer’s Amadeus. See, for example, Gerhard Vom Hofe, “Mozart-Bilder in der Literatur”, Mozart: Ansichten, ed. by Gerhard Sauder (St. Inberg: Röhrig, 1995) 101–27. 88 Stephanie Cowell, Marrying Mozart: A novel (New York: Viking, 2004).

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many readers, the principal musical value of fiction involves reception. Like hundreds, possibly thousands of other literary works—and not only essays, articles, and reviews, but novels, plays, short stories, and so on—the poems examined above tell us how their authors and contemporaries “heard” music.81 In other words, all “musical” fiction may be grist for reception-oriented musicological millers. Today, for instance, every student of Mozart’s 19th- and early 20th-century repu­ tation turns to reviews of performances preserved in magazines and newspapers, as well as to portraits, scores, and other form of cultural documentation.82 The same students might also turn—and, increasingly, are turning—to Søren Kierkegaard’s Enten/eller,83 Friedrich Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner,84 and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe85 for additional information and insights. Although Nietzsche mostly uses Mozart as a stick for Wagner-beating (at least in his later writings), and although Rolland is better known for his opinions about Beethoven,86 all three authors have more than a few things to say about how their contemporaries and themselves understood and enjoyed “their” Mozart. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an especially interesting figure insofar as imaginative fiction and reception issues are concerned, because an unusually large number of novels, poems, plays, and short stories mention him and his music.87 More than a few of these fictions devolve upon the composer’s real or imagined personality or social circumstances: Mozart as prodigy, profligate, or pauper. In Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag, for example, Mörike depicts the composer as good-natured, sensual, and somewhat absent-minded, a man fascinated by beauty of all kinds: at once an embodiment of Biedermeier domesticity and a proto-Romantic critic of late–18th-century Europe’s stifling social order. In Marrying Mozart, on the other hand, Stephanie Cowell depicts her protagonist as a rebellious, aloof, and sexually compelling youth.88 Mörike addressed his novella to a small, highly sophisticated readership, one sympathetic to subtle ironies and romantic inflections; his knowledge of the composer’s music informs much of his

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Fig. 1: C.D. Bradlee, Mozart: A poem (Boston: privately printed, 1883). Brown University Library.

89 Richard Howard, “After K452”, Like most revelations: New poems (New York: Pantheon, 1994) 57–58. Originally published in 1991 in The New Yorker. 90 Arthur Margolin, “Mozart’s D major string quintet, K.593, 2nd movement, mm. 53–56”, Perspectives of new music 18/1–2 (1979–80) 381, 383–90. 91 See Charles Renouvier, Uchronie 1876: Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (repr. ed., Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1988). 92 Bernard Bastable, Dead, Mr. Mozart (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). 93 Leon Botstein, “Aesthetics and ideology in the fin-de-siècle Mozart revival”, Current musicology 51 (1993) 6, 10. 94 Ibid., 13. 95 C.D. Bradlee, Mozart: A poem (Boston: privately printed, 1883). The author thanks the trustees of Brown University Library for permission to reprint in facsimile this unique document. 96 Richard Specht, Mozart: Zwölf Gedichte, illus. by Heinrich Lefler (Wien: M. Munk, ca. 1910). The volume is unpaginated.

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story. Cowell’s larger readership probably consists mostly of  “true romance” enthusiasts, and she employs tropes from that genre as well as from historical novels of several kinds. She has little to say about music, however. Other fictions deal primarily with one or more of Mozart’s compositions. “After K452” by Richard Howard89 and “Mozart’s D major string quintet K.593, 2nd movement, mm. 53–56” by Arthur Margolin90 are cases in point. (Die Zauberflöte, Don Giovanni, and the Requiem have been much more frequently fictionalized.) Musicologists may not care for Howard’s and Margolin’s poems, however, because neither actually mentions “music”—and this, in spite of the fact that Margolin’s effort was published in Perspectives, a professional, peer-reviewed journal. Still other novels and stories about Mozart belong to the literary genre 19th-century fantasist Charles Renouvier dubbed uchronias: “alternate” histories of imaginary futures.91 Imagine that Mozart moved to England in his youth and lived there into his sixties, where he composed an opera entitled Susan and Michael but never wrote a Requiem: this is the premise of Bernard Bastable’s novel Dead, Mr. Mozart.92 Bastable’s book is primarily a crime thriller, whereas Mozart in mirrorshades—as we shall see below—combines distopian uchronia with pointed social satire. Comparatively few and far between, early–19th-century fictions often praised Mozart for moral as well as musical qualities. This made sense for several reasons— chief among them the fact that, prior to the last one hundred years or so, only a handful of Mozart’s works were performed with any frequency. As Leon Botstein has explained, his subject’s reputation was transformed during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Mozart was perceived as an “ideal candidate for aesthetic renewal” because of his innocence, stylistically “sweet” compositional style, universal appeal, and psychological profundity.93 These qualities eventually led to what Botstein has epitomized as “an almost unbearable excess” of late–20th-century “Mostly Mozart” broadcasts, festivals, and recordings.94 Botstein supports his arguments largely with references to musical journalism and the opinions of musicologists and conductors, including such “antique” authorities as Eduard Hanslick and Richard Strauss; he eschews fiction in favor of belles letters as a source of information. Nevertheless, novelists and poets have also helped remake Mozart in their own images. Consider the poem published in 1883 by Boston’s C.D. Bradlee, which refers to the composer as a “perfect artist” and possessed of  “a great, uplifting, holy grace” [fig. 1].”95 Richard Specht, who later edited Der Merkur, published an early–20thcentury tribute of his own: twelve “Mozart poems” epitomizing and exalting individual operatic characters [fig. 2].96 By World War I, in other words, Mozart as international musical superstar had “arrived”.

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Fig. 2: Richard Specht, Requiem from Mozart: Zwölf Gedichte (Wien: M. Munk, ca. 1910).



We know the Mozart of our fathers’ time Was gay, rococo, sweet, but not sublime, A Viennese Italian; that is changed Since music critics learned to feel ‘estranged’; Now it’s the Germans he is classed amongst, A Geist whose music was composed from Angst, At International Festivals enjoys An equal status with the Twelve-Tone Boys.97

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In 1956, to cite a more recent example, W.H. Auden published his Metalogue to “The magic flute”. An assessment of the composer’s character as well as his music, Auden’s Metalogue reflects its author’s expert knowledge of 18th-century opera and verse: it was Auden who, together with Chester Kallman, wrote the libretto for The rake’s progress. In one passage Auden facetiously summarizes a century and more of Mozart-Rezeptionsgeschichte in terms of national identities, with a little mid–20thcentury Existentialism thrown in:

(Or possibly, as Botstein has suggested, a position of cultural superiority—rather than mere equality—insofar as Schoenberg’s and Webern’s 21st-century reputations are concerned.) In another part of his Metalogue, Auden brings the story of Die Zauberflöte up-to-date, costuming its cast as American academics. The Queen of the Night, for example, is presented as “A highly paid and most efficient Dean / (Who, as we all know, really runs the College).” Sarastro—the poet’s “voice”—finds himself “Teaching the History of Ancient Myth / At Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Bennington or Smith”.98 Pamina, in the meantime, works as a fact-checker for Time magazine, while her graduate-student husband acquires “manly wisdom as he wishes / While changing diapers and doing dishes”—a suburban adaptation of Tamino’s Trials by Fire and Water.99 Of importance especially to the post-1970s Mozart reception has been the success of Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of Shaffer’s stage play.100 Auden’s Mozart, who “indulged in toilet humour with his cousin” even as he “created masterpieces by the dozen”, anticipates Forman’s film portrait and, in this, anticipated a thousand Salzburg gift-shop souvenirs. Because it presents the composer as a “wild and crazy guy”, freespirited and sexy (even as it preserves and reinforces his status as creative culture-god), Amadeus transformed Mozart into a pop icon, a composer of movie music and cell-phone ring tones.101 Thanks to Forman and other Hollywood film-makers, compositions such 869 97 W.H. Auden, Metalogue to “The magic flute”. Repr. in Auden, Selected poetry (2nd ed., New York: Vintage, 1970) 174. The use of music as a way of situating fictions in terms of national cultures as well as ethnic political causes is becoming ever more widespread. See, for example, Sean V. Golden, “Traditional Irish music in contemporary Irish literature”, Mosaic 12 (1979) 1–23. 98 Auden, “Metalogue”, 175. 99 Ibid., 175–76. 100 Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman (1984). 101 Although they have little to do with imaginative literature, “classical” ring tones have become important to students of postmodern culture. As Erkki Pekkilä explains, “a high-pitched musical fragment from a Mozart symphony”, when employed as a ring-tone—today a downloadable source of musical information—transforms its users and listeners into “creators or conveyers of new cultural signifiers”. Erkki Pekkilä, “A theme (and world) of one’s own: The semiotics and ownership of cell-phone ring tones”: a paper presented at the 17th congress of the International Musicological Society, Leuven, and summarized in IMS 2002: 17th International Congress. Programme abstracts, the congress program (Leuven: Alamire Foundation, 2002) 166.

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as Eine kleine Nachtmusik and portions of the Requiem have become almost as familiar in pop-culture circles as certain songs by Irving Berlin and the Beatles.102 The various ways Mozart’s career and creations have been described, distorted, or speculated upon in post-Amadeus imaginative literature also exemplify aspects of the composer’s emerging postmodern reputation and influence. Consider three recent Mozart fictions: the bizarre “alternative” Künstlerporträt of Sterling’s and Shiner’s Mozart in mirrorshades; Rendell’s A judgement in stone, with its sophisticated and ironic references to Don Giovanni; and the academically precise playfulness of The Mozart forgeries, a “caper novel” by Daniel Leeson.103 Mozart in mirrorshades satirizes the retroactive corruption of a lost and lovely past by an unspeakably awful “present”. For its authors, Mozart’s status as postmodern media “star” personalizes a tale of endless “alternative” Europes ready and waiting to be looted by late-capitalist American corporations. Before the end of the story the young musician manages to secure a green card and escapes to the United States, where one of his pop tunes has already reached “number five on the Billboard charts! Number five!”104 The very existence of science fiction “about” classical music suggests that “pop culture” is becoming a synonym for “culture”. Unlike many other recent fictions, Sterling’s and Shiner’s story has even been evaluated in a professional musicological periodical.105 A judgement in stone, on the other hand, draws upon the stern justice meted out in Don Giovanni as well as upon Mozart’s reputation as a “classy” composer, one that up-todate, well-to-do people ought to—and often do—listen to. The Statue that confronts Da Ponte’s fictional libertine is transformed by Rendell into “a stone that breathed”:106 housemaid Eunice Parchman. An illiterate, lower-class servant, Eunice murders her sophisticated employers the Cloverdales (husband George, wife Jacqueline, daughter Melinda, and adopted son Giles) because they live a life of pleasure she can neither understand nor sympathize with. Rendell coordinates Eunice’s fictional butchery with a televised broadcast of Mozart’s dramma giocoso. Thus, as a van driven by Joan Smith, Eunice’s partner in crime, enters the Cloverdale’s drive, we “hear” the Don singing “O guarda, guarda” (Look, look!).107 A few minutes later, Jacqueline—who declines to accompany her husband into the kitchen, where Eunice and Joan are preparing to kill the entire family—settles “back against the sofa cushions” as act 2 begins with the quarrel between Leporello and the Don: “Ma che ho ti fatto, che vuoi lasciarmi?” (But what have I done to you that you wish to leave me?).108 In the kitchen, as Eunice and Joan shoot George in the neck with a shotgun, we hear in the background, “O, taci inguisto core” (Be silent, treacherous heart).109 Although it predates Amadeus by seven years, A judgement in stone is perhaps even more critical of social stereotypes associated with music than 102 See Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, Amadeus: Milos Formans Film als musikhistorisches Phänomen (Graz: Akademische Drunk- und Verlagsanstalt, 1999). 103 Daniel N. Leeson, The Mozart forgeries: A caper novel for the serious Mozart aficionado (New York: iUniverse, 2004). 104 Sterling and Shiner, Mozart in mirrorshades, 238. 105 See René T.A. Lysloff,  “Mozart in mirrorshades: Ethnomusicology, technology, and the politics of representation”, Ethnomusicology: Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology 41/2 (1997) 206–17. A few other works of speculative fiction, including Philip K. Dick’s influential novel Do androids dream of electric sheep? (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), may also have been influenced by Mozart. See Patrick A. McCarthy, “Do androids dream of magic flutes?” Paradoxa: Studies in world literary genres 5/13–14 (1999–2000) 344–52. 106 Rendell, A judgement in stone, 156. 107 Ibid., 147. 108 Ibid., 153. 109 Ibid.

See, for example, Leeson, “The miracle of the Mozart manuscripts”, Musical America 111/1 ( January 1991) 23–25. An especially interesting review of The Mozart forgeries, written by D.W. Krummel, appeared in Notes 61/3 (March 2005) 777–78. See also, The clarinet 32 ( June 2005) 76. 112 Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (London: Chatto & Windus, 1923). 113 See John Aplin, “Aldous Huxley’s music criticism: Some sources for the fiction”, English language notes 21/1 (September 1983) 58–62. Aplin also comments on “comparable passages” devoted to Bach and Beethoven in Point counter point (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), and on adaptations from Huxley’s reportage in his story “Young Archimedes”. See also Zack Bowen, “Allusions to musical works in [Huxley’s] Point counter point”, Studies in the novel 9 (1977) 488– 508. Finally, see Werner Wolf, “‘The Musicalization of Fiction’: Versuche intermedialer Grenzüberschreitung zwischen Musik und Literatur im englischen Erzählen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts”, Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets, ed. by Jörg Helbig (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1998) 133–64; Wolf ’s essay considers not only Huxley’s novel, but “fugal” works by Thomas de Quincey and Gabriel Josipovici. 114 See E.M. Forster, Howard’s end, ed. by Alistair M. Duckworth (New York: Bedford; St. Martin’s, 1997) esp. 42–52. Forster’s novel was originally published in 1910. 115 Reprinted in The collected tales of E.M. Forster (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) and other anthologies. 116 Willa Cather, The song of the lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915). 117 In spite of the importance of music within her novels and short stories, Cather “recognized fully her own limitations where music was concerned”. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living: A personal record (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) 48. Although she took piano lessons as a child, Cather “was more interested in what her teacher could tell her about other things, especially his European past, than she was in playing” the instrument itself. Richard Giannone, Music in Willa Cather’s fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968) 4. Cather’s real-life interest in her foreign-born teacher suggests Thea’s interest in Andor Harsanyi’s invented background and knowledge of poetry.

Saffle | Musicology and fiction

Mozart in mirrorshades. Throughout Rendell’s pages, gendered depictions of power are consistently inverted: It is the Cloverdales, men and women alike, who are “feminized” in terms of their cultivated tastes, while Eunice, their murderer, is “masculinized” in terms of her appearance, strength, and unshakable Philistinism. Finally, The Mozart forgeries. Reminiscent of situations scattered throughout detective stories from the 1960s to the present day, Leeson’s novel pursues to the bitter (hypothetical) end the problems inherent in faking and selling not mere copies of extant Mozart manuscripts, but newly “created” 21st-century holographs of the clarinet quintet, K.581, and clarinet concerto, K.622. Filled with musicological facts, including the titles of actual reference works, The Mozart forgeries also mentions such real-life musicologists as J. Rigbie Turner, recently of The Morgan Library and Museum; some of the novel’s most exciting scenes are set in or near Sotheby’s and Christie’s actual New York auction houses. Leeson is not only himself a Mozart expert110 but a storyteller who entertains us with his expertise. His novel remains one of a very few contemporary fictions to have been acclaimed in the professional musicological press.111 With the exception of a few novels, including Davenport’s and Leeson’s, “musical” fictions have mostly been written by musical amateurs. This is not to argue, however, that educated and even expert musical opinions are rare in fiction. Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay,112 for instance, contains a scene adapted from a review of Mozart’s G-minor string quintet, K.516, written in 1922–23, when Huxley served as music critic for the Westminster gazette.113 The celebrated fifth chapter of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s end wittily “reviews” an imaginary performance of Beethoven’s fifth symphony as well as masterpieces by Brahms, Debussy, and Elgar.114 “Coordination”, another of Forster’s stories, even includes Beethoven as a character.115 Finally, Willa Cather’s Song of the lark—the story of a Great Plains farm girl who becomes a celebrated singer—incorporates conductor Theodore Thomas, singer Lilli Lehmann, and other real-life musicians into its cast of characters.116 The song of the lark, however, penetrates farther into music than do Forster’s and Huxley’s fictions.117 So does Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer. Thea Kronborg, Cather’s protagonist, is modeled on Olive Fremstad, a Swedish-born Wagnerian soprano raised 110

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in Minnesota;118 other characters and incidents recall Cather’s own Nebraska girlhood. In addition to exploring the possibilities of musical biography in her conjoined TheaFremstad heroine, Cather attempts at least once in The song of the lark to “reproduce the emotional effect of the Wagner operas upon the printed page.”119 Of eight short stories published by Cather between 1915 and 1920, four portray “artists who live by their voice[es], whose singing is their work” in life.120 One of these stories, A Wagner matinée, has been called “the most poignant account of Wagner’s music jarring awake dormant feeling” in American women filled with “fin de siècle ferment”.121 Perry Meisel approaches The song of the lark and other fictions from a quite different but equally interesting perspective. For him, Cather’s novels, including The song of the lark, “dramatize in thematic as well as rhetorical ways” the same “loops or crossings” he perceives “at work in electric blues and rhythm and blues”: chiasmi (in the language of classical rhetoric) that reveal the problematic paired illusions “of deep mind and open space, interior and exterior, inside and outside, dandy and cowboy, East and West”.122 In other words, as Thea travels from rural Colorado to Chicago (and back), she dramatizes—as do the blues and rock ’n’ roll—certain key conflicts in America’s cultural and social development. Of Lena Geyer is also exceptionally “musical”, especially insofar as it embodies its author’s intimate personal knowledge of composers, performers, and works associated with the operatic stage. Davenport’s novel is full of precisely phrased musical history, including descriptions of Vienna at the turn of the last century and of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Herself the daughter of celebrated diva Alma Gluck, Davenport contributed columns about music to The New Yorker magazine and published a wellknown biography of Mozart.123 Yet surprisingly few musicologists have taken her seriously.124 True, Davenport distanced herself from certain autobiographical aspects of her novel, asserting that Geyer was not her mother and reducing Guido Vestri, Geyer’s fictional conductor, coach, and lover, to the significance of  “a wooden Indian” who “leaks sawdust”.125 In explaining how she struggled to complete her book, however, Davenport confessed that, unless she “could recreate the authenticity of the several years between 1908 and 1915 when Maestro [Arturo Toscanini] at the Metropolitan made operatic history that has no parallel, there [would have been] no novel.”126 (Of Lena Geyer also includes Gustav Mahler among its personnel.) Even Joseph Horowitz, who sought out almost every existing source of information about the impact of Toscanini’s conducting on American culture, scarcely acknowledges Davenport’s existence in his “culture god” 872 See Cather, “Three American singers”, McClure’s magazine 42 (December 1913) 33–48. Quoted from Cather’s preface to Gertrude Hall, The Wagnerian romances (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925) vii. 120 Giannone, Music in Willa Cather’s fiction, 99. 121 Joseph Horowitz, “Finding a ‘real self ’: American women and the Wagner cult of the late nineteenth century”, The musical quarterly 78/2 (summer 1994) 191, 195. 122 Perry Meisel, The cowboy and the dandy: Crossing over from romanticism to rock and roll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 85–86. 123 See Davenport, Mozart (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). 124 With reference to Geyer as a fictional diva and from a feminist perspective, see Susan J. Leonardi, “To have a voice: The politics of the diva”, Perspectives on contemporary literature 13 (1987) 65–72. An essay of my own considers Davenport’s novel as an exemplar of America’s fondness for and reception of Viennese operetta traditions. See Michael Saffle, “‘Do you ever dream of Vienna?’ America’s glorification of musical central Europe, 1865–1965”, Identität – Kultur – Raum: Kulturelle Praktiken und die Ausbildung von Imagined Communities in Nordamerika und Zentraleuropa, ed. by Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner, and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2001) 59–76 passim. 125 Davenport, Too strong for fantasy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967) 216–17. 126 Ibid., 217. 118 119

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study.127 And this, even though descriptions of a “fictional” Vestri caused a furious reallife Toscanini to exclaim, “It is not me, not at all. Vergogna! Shame on you!”128 One feels the Maestro may have protested too much. Save, perhaps, for some of Chaucer’s poetry and for Hardy’s “Lines”, none of the imaginative literary works discussed above appears to incorporate anything essentially or especially “musical” in its organization or style. Even if Meisel is correct and Cather’s fiction in some sense “works” like rock and the blues, The song of the lark is far more “about” music than “of ” it. Can fiction be put together “like” music? If so, how? Four pairs of works, each composed of a fiction and a musical composition, appear to share formal, expressive, or stylistic similarities: Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations and Bach’s eponymous masterpiece; Eduard Mörike’s Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag and Don Giovanni; Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice and Mozart’s piano concerto no. 9, K.271; and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Beethoven’s sonata op. 111. A fifth work of fiction, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, can be read in terms of the musical as well as more broadly cultural traditions that inform its contents and textures. 

For centuries, speakers of English have used the word “form” to refer to shapes as well as boundaries, collections, populations, and regulations; “form” is also understood as suggesting a “style of expressing the thoughts and ideas in literary or musical composition, including the arrangement and order” of their “different parts”.129 For Carl Dahlhaus, musical form involves structural coherence on a large scale—the overall coherence, for example, of a sonata movement rather than the significance of particular chords, key changes, timbres, or tunes within it.130 In this sense musical form seems to exist independently of individual composers or styles. Melodies and modulations, for example, may come and go, but the “sonata idea” (to borrow a phrase from William S. Newman) persists—if not forever, at least for quite a while.131 On the other hand, musical coherence may exist outside of, or in addition to, formal traditions and patterns. A piano piece may be called “sonata” but have nothing to do with so-called “sonata form”. In describing his own evolution as an author of imaginative literature, Gabriel Josipovici has already answered the first question posed above (“Can fiction be put together ‘like’ music?”) with a qualified “yes”.132 What’s more, in Goldberg: Variations he See Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How he became an American culture-god and helped create a new audience for old music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). Horowitz mentions Davenport twice (ibid., 153 and 187n); on both occasions, however, he acknowledges her only at second-hand. 128 Quoted in Barry Paris, “Unconquerable (Marcia Davenport)”, The New Yorker 67/9 (22 April 1991) 66. For a more detailed account of the author’s encounter with Toscanini, see Davenport, Too strong for fantasy, 222–23. 129 The Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) vol. 6, 78–82. 130 Among a host of publications in which he considered formal aspects of musical compositions, see Carl Dahlhaus, Between romanticism and modernism: Four studies in the music of the later nineteenth century, trans. by Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) passim. 131 See, for example, William S. Newman, The sonata since Beethoven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), as well as other volumes and editions of Newman’s “History of the sonata idea”. 132 See Gabriel Josipovici, “Music and literary form”, Contemporary music review 5 (1989) 65–75. I write “qualified”, because “Music and literary form” was published in 1989, Goldberg: Variations in 2002. Nevertheless, Josipovici seems always to have taken seriously the musical possibilities of fiction. Among other things he explains that Stravinsky was the “presiding genius” over his own ( Josipovici’s) first novel, which he constructed out of dialogue and lists instead of narrative prose. Josipovici’s realization that such a thing was possible called to his mind Stravinsky’s “recognition of the musical possibilities” inherent in ignoring conventional Russian syntax when setting Russian verse to music. For Stravinsky, this “was one of the most rejoicing discoveries of my life. I was like a man who suddenly finds that his finger 127

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answers the second question (“If so, how?”) by way of demonstration.133 As Werner Wolf has explained, Josipovici’s novel embodies more than “structural analogies between textual and musical form.”134 Instead, it constitutes one of the most remarkable additions to the field in which fiction attempts to meet music.… [It] not only discusses music, as countless other authors before [ Josipovici] have done, mostly on the basis of fictional biographies of musicians and composers … but also aspires to the condition of music … in a much subtler way and moves beyond a merely plot-related concentration on music.135

Here is a work of imaginative literature that, at least to some extent, can be “read” (listened to) as if it were a piece of music: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Aria mit verschiedenen Veraenderungen, BWV 988,136 popularly known as the “Goldberg variations” (after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, musician to one of Bach’s patrons, Count Keyserling of Dresden). In its division into thirty chapters, for example, Josipovici’s novel resembles Bach’s composition—itself made up of 30 variations, as well as a binary theme or“Aria” presented before the variations begin and repeated after they end.137 Even the novel’s absence of “theme”—there is no “aria”—is analogous to a musical puzzle pointed out recently by Peter Williams. If Bach’s “thirty movements” are variations on a given theme, Williams asks, “why is [that theme] never heard again or even hinted at … until it is repeated, sans différence, at the end” of the entire cycle?138 Does Josipovici’s novel even have a theme? If so, what is it? In part paraphrasing Stephen Abell, Wolf insists that “there is not a single chapter [of Goldberg: Variations] that cannot in some way be related” to “creative capacity”, and hardly any chapters “in which emotional human relations do not play a role.”139 Josipovici, however, does not anywhere identify either of these “themes” (or single two-part theme) as such. Nor are all of his chapters as unmistakably concerned “thematically” with creativity or human relations as Bach’s variations are constructed upon a common fundamental harmonic progression that begins

Example 3: Harmonic foundation of Bach’s “Goldberg variations”, mm. 1–8

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can be bent from the second joint as well as from the first” (quoted in “Music and literary form”, 67). Later, Josipovici also explains that other works were influenced by particular compositions, including a performance of Harrison Birtwistle’s The triumph of time (ibid., 69–70). 133 Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations (London: Carcanet, 2002). 134 Werner Wolf, “The role of music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations”, Style 37 (2003) 295. 135 Ibid., 294–95. 136 In full, and in the original German: Clavier Übung bestehend in einer Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen vors Clavicimbal mit 2 Manualen. See Peter Williams, Bach: The Goldberg variations (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 3–4. Like Bach’s Count, Josipovici’s Mr. Westfield asks his own Goldberg to “read to him till dawn or else till I am sure he is asleep, whichever is the first”. Josipovici, Goldberg, 1. 137 For a general discussion of fiction in terms of variations form, see Brown, “Theme and variations as a literary form”, Yearbook of comparative and general literature 27 (1978) 35–43. This intriguing article suggests that both Eve’s morning song to Adam in John Milton’s Paradise lost, as well as the whole of Robert Browning’s Ring and the book, are in certain ways analogous to musical theme-and-variations form. Wolf, on the other hand, compares only Bach’s individual variations to Josipovici’s individual chapters. 138 Williams, Bach: The Goldberg variations, 35. 139 Quoted in Wolf, “The role of music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations”, 302. See also Stephen Abell, “Scales, trills and runs: Gabriel Josipovici, ‘Goldberg Variations’”, Times literary supplement (20 December 2002) 21.

Finally, Bach’s variations are arranged in ten groups of three variations each, with every third variation a canon.140 No such subdivisions are present in Josipovici’s novel, even though some of its chapters are called “canons”.

The first two sections of [the novella] present Mozart in his encounter with the rococo, showing how it wastes his human resources but bears splendid fruit in that part of his musical creation which was adaptable to rococo style. The last two sections present the Mozart whose warm humanity transcends the limits of the rococo and whose tragic genius transcends human comprehension. The balance of gaiety and tragedy, harmony and conflict … is symbolized within each part in a pair of thematic images: spilling liquid and spontaneous growth, the artfully nurtured tree and the symmetrically

140 See Williams, Bach: The Goldberg variations, 41–42 and elsewhere for tables and charts of organizational materials and principles in Bach’s composition. 141 Josipovici, Goldberg, 112. 142 Wolf, “The role of music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations”, 300; italics in the original. 143 Ibid., 298. Interestingly enough, Wolf begins his lengthy article with a quotation from Walter Pater: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”. Ibid., 294. 144 Raymond Immerwahr, “Narrative and ‘musical’ structure in Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag”, Studies in Germanic languages and literatures: In memory of Fred O. Nolte, ed. by Erich Hofacker and Liselotte Dieckmann (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1963) 103. 145 Ibid., 106. 146 Ibid.; italics added.

Saffle | Musicology and fiction

On the other hand, aspects of Josipovici’s fiction point unmistakably and imaginatively toward certain of Bach’s variations. The greater length, stylistic stance, and unusual “sectionality” of chapter 16, for example, suggests the greater length, ceremonial rhythms, and sectional divisions of Bach’s sixteenth variation. It is precisely this chapter that alludes in its “plot” to the historical origins of Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer, BWV 1079. Just as Bach was asked to improvise on a musical theme provided him by Frederick the Great, so Josipovici’s protagonist Samuel Goldberg is asked to improvise on a verbal theme: “A man who had enough wanted everything…. As a result he was left with nothing. Treat this not as a morality but as a tragedy.”141 Wolf epitomizes this scene as “a mise en abyme” that comprises “a complete imitation of the form” of Bach’s variation, itself a French overture.142 Explicit references to appropriate musical materials and processes also occur throughout Josipovici’s novel. Among these is a discussion of fugue—itself, perhaps, a kind of verbal fugue—in chapter 18, which suggests at least something of the contrapuntal structure of Bach’s 18th variation. Wolf has argued that a verbal text “can never really be musicalized”.143 Nevertheless, Josipovici makes numerous gestures toward a kind of fictive “musicalization”. Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag refers to Don Giovanni in several places, but Mörike never claimed to have modeled his novella on Mozart’s opera. According to Raymond Immerwahr, however, Mörike’s “unique achievement”—which in large part resides in a fictional “evocation of creative genius in another art” (i.e., music)—embodies certain “formal principles” evocative of Mozart and his age.144 Furthermore, “in each of the [novella’s] two climactic sections, the crux of the narrative is Mozart’s creation of music for Don Giovanni: in the one the rustic wedding dance, in the other the music of the statue and of infernal retribution.”145 Immerwahr finally insists that a “two-peaked structure was … imposed upon Mörike by the musical subject of his novella”, modeled upon the four halves of Mozart’s two acts:146

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ordered fountain, solid handicraft and agrarian cultivation, consuming fire and icy cold.147

Like other students of  “musical” fiction, Immerwahr considers themes and motifs. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, he seems more interested in “spirit and structure”.148 In other words, he moves from structure and motif (liquid, tree, fountain, and so on) to overall “style” and sensibility. For Wallis Field, on the other hand, particular “colour relationships and symbolism” provide a way of uncovering Mörike’s underlying “symmetry of themes and form”.149 Field’s discussion suggests a fugal analysis that begins with the locations and harmonic characteristics of the novella’s subjects, counter-subjects, and episodes. Immerwahr’s suggests a Schenkerian reduction from which details have been removed, rather than located, in order to reveal an underlying “line”. Incidentally, no one seems to have read Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag in terms of musical form per se, but Immerwahr himself published another, quite different interpretation of Mörike’s masterpiece.150 All this aside, can fictions like Goldberg: Variations and Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag actually help us understand music? The answer would seem to be no, at least not insofar as Josipovici’s and Mörike’s literary relationships with Bach’s and Mozart’s scores are concerned. If, however, one thinks of music as more or other than “scores”, the answer would seem to be yes. Our perception and reception of music involves a great deal more than music “itself ”. As Nicholas Cook has suggested, music and especially (but not exclusively) musical performances should be understood as scripts rather than texts.151 Scores may exist in splendid isolation from everyday experience, but music heard, felt, and thought about does not and cannot. Cook’s arguments call to mind drama theorist Baz Kershaw’s assertion that “no item in the environment of performance”, even what happens “off-stage”, “can be discounted as irrelevant”.152 Just as every performance contributes to the reception of a given composer or conductor or soloist, so every reading—and reader—contributes, consciously or unconsciously, to new ways of understanding a given literary device or character or cultural circumstance. Many post­ structuralist critics would agree that reading is itself a form of  “performance”.153 Robert Wallace has argued that Jane Austen’s novels share what he calls “general stylistic achievements” with Mozart’s music, especially with certain piano concertos, and that both kinds of works can better be understood in terms of each other.154 For Wallace, Mozart and Austen employ the same or similar “essential forms” of expression; 876

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 118. 149 G. Wallis Field, “Silver and oranges: Notes on Mörike’s Mozart-Novelle”, Seminar: A journal of Germanic studies 14/4 (1978) 244. 150 See Raymond Immerwahr, “Apocalyptic trumpets: The inception of Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag”, PMLA 70 (1955) 390–407. Still other scholars have examined Mörike’s novella from a psychological angle in order to foreground issues of creativity. See, for example, Ursula Mahlendorf,  “ Eduard Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague: Stages and outcomes of the creative experience”, Mörike’s muses: Critical essays on Eduard Mörike, ed. by Jeffrey Adams (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1990) 95–111. 151 See Nicholas Cook, “Music as performance”, The cultural study of music, ed. by Martin Clayton, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2003) 204–14 passim. 152 Baz Kershaw, The politics of performance: Radical theater as cultural intervention (New York: Routledge, 1992) 22. 153 What is sometimes called “reader-response criticism” has a lengthy history. See, for example, Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as exploration (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938). Nevertheless, such criticism is sometimes claimed by poststructuralist theorists as a method of their own. 154 Robert K. Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart: Classical equilibrium in fiction and music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). 147 148

Ibid., 2, 5. Ibid., 45. 157 Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Originally published in 1813, in three volumes. 158 Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart, 45–46 and 93. 159 Information about these subjects may be found in Patrick Piggott, “Music”, The Jane Austen companion, ed. by J. David Grey, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1986) 314–16. For information especially about Pride and prejudice, see Patrick Piggott, The innocent diversion: A study of music in the life and writings of Jane Austen (London: Clover Hill, 1979) 50–63. More than a few scholars have devoted themselves to issues associated with music, culture, class, and gender in Austen’s fictions. See, for example, Hélène La Rue, “Music, literature and etiquette: Musical instruments and social identity from Castiglione to Austen”, Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place, ed. by Martin Stokes (Oxford: Berg, 1994) 189–205; Kathryn L. Shanks Libin, “Music, character, and social standing in Jane Austen’s Emma”, Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 22 (2000) 15–30; and Mollie Sandock, “‘I burn with contempt for my foes’: Jane Austen’s music collections and women’s lives in regency England”, Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 23 (2001) 105–17. 160 Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart, 5, 83. 155 156

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As a consequence, their compositions and fictions resemble each other as exemplars of “classical equilibrium”.155 In effect, Wallace postulates a sophisticated pedagogy that uses fiction to “explain” music. And vice versa: Wallace argues that we may be able to learn more about either music or fiction (or particular works of music or fiction, or the epochs in which they were created) if we compare them with one another. More specifically, Wallace suggests that Mozart’s works tend to remain “within boundaries” and “close” to home keys, just as Austen’s characters tend to “remain indoors, seldom venturing out—or far—for travel”.156 If  “ home” and “indoors” are analogous to a “home key”, the shift in locale from Longbourne to Netherfield in chapter 7 of Pride and prejudice157 may be said to resemble (as Wallace suggests) the harmonic transition from tonic to dominant in the opening movement of Mozart’s E-flat major piano concerto, K.271.158 In presenting and defending these analogies, Wallace pays comparatively little attention either to the music Austen owned and probably played, or to musical references in her novels.159 He appears less interested in content than in structure, and less interested even in broad-based structural principles than in his readers’ appreciation of  “essential” expressive devices and stylistic gestures. Taken at face value, some of Wallace’s assertions are musicologically problematic. He implies, for example, that Mozart’s harmonies seldom or never wander far from home. But how far is “far”? In Mozart’s C-minor concerto, K.491, the first movement wanders all the way from that key to F-sharp minor, about as far around the circle of fifths as tonal music can go. Again: if chapters 1–10 of Pride and prejudice are compared in functional-harmonic terms to the first movement of Mozart’s E-flat concerto, the “modulation” from Longbourne to Netherfield takes place much too late to match the analogous portion of Mozart’s exposition. Wallace, however, readily admits both that Austen “did not consciously model her works on the structure of Mozart’s”, and that “many Mozart concertos would have served about as well as K.271” insofar as his discussion of Pride and prejudice is concerned.160 In other respects, Wallace is perhaps more “musicological” (as well as more interdisciplinary) than many of his colleagues. He does not merely refer to compositions, but reproduces examples from them on his pages and discusses those examples as a professional musicologist might. As a teacher of music and fiction, Wallace asks “whether the kind of juxtapositions we often find on parallel time charts of the arts [can] be given more precise meaning” by avoiding “influence studies”; he encourages his students to

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compare works “as isolated art objects” even before they turn to “the history of style in the separate arts.”161 Whether Mörike strove in Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag to suggest the alternating emotional currents of Don Giovanni is uncertain, although his novella is certainly “about” Mozart and his opera. Thomas Mann, on the other hand, openly acknowledged that he modeled—or remodeled—his Doktor Faustus on Beethoven’s sonata in C minor, op. 111. Mann’s several musical fictions, including the novellas Der kleine Herr Friedemann and Tonio Kröger, have several times been examined in light of Wagnerian leitmotive162 and dodecaphonic compositional techniques.163 In his earlier works, “love-deaths” were themselves a kind of leitmotif for Mann. At the climax of his novella Tristan, for instance, Gabriele plays fragments of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—including the “Liebestod”—on the piano; a day later “her condition worsens, and, like Hanno after the exertions of his improvisation in Buddenbrooks, she dies.”164 Later, Mann sometimes positioned musical modernism in juxtaposition with cultural decline: Much of chapter XXII in Doktor Faustus, for example, is devoted to a detailed explanation of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, while the novel’s concluding chapters chart the catastrophic results of German nationalism under Hitler. At the same time Faustus also consists of a series of carefully constructed fictional “themes”, “keys”, and “modulations”, articulated by means of mostly unambiguous sectional divisions, some of which mirror (as well as refer to) both the sonata-allegro form of Beethoven’s op. 111 first movement and the theme-and-variations form of his second.165 Several kinds of evidence bear witness to Mann’s extraordinary juxtaposition of fictional and musical materials. First, in chapter VIII of Doktor Faustus, Mann has Wendell Kretzschmar, one of his minor characters, deliver lectures on Beethoven’s sonata and other late works. So vivid is Kretschmar’s lecture that portions of it have been reprinted in musicological reference works.166 Second, fragments from that lecture Robert K. Wallace, “Teaching music and fiction: Austen and Mozart, Brontë and Beethoven”, Ars lyrica 6 (1992) 18. See also idem, “Nineteenth-century fiction, music, and painting”, Teaching literature and the other arts, ed. by JeannePierre Barricelli, Joseph Gibaldi, and Estella Lauter (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990) 103–07. 162 See, for example, George W. Reinhardt, “Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: A Wagnerian novel”, Mosaic 18/4 (December 1985) 109–23. Other studies of Mann and Wagner include Erkhard Hefrich, “Richard Wagner in Thomas Manns Joseph-Tetralogie”, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch. Neue Folge 35 (1994) 275–90; Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Im Schatten Wagners: Thomas Mann über Richard Wagner. Texte und Zeugnisse, 1895–1955”, Thomas Mann, ed. by Hans Rudolf Vaget (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999) 301–36; and Ette Wolfram, “Vom Ursprung weg und in den Ursprung hinein: Zum Mythos bei Wagner und Thomas Mann”, Richard Wagner: Konstrukteur der Modern, ed. by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999) 227–59. Another of Vaget’s essays, this one entitled “WagnerKult und nationalsozialistische Herrschaft: Hitler, Wagner, Thomas Mann, und die ‘nationale Erhebung’” [published in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloß-Elmau-Symposion, ed. by Saul Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (München: Beck, 2000) 264–82], exemplifies recent studies in the conjoined fields of German nationalism, music, and the Nazis. 163 Examples include Michael Neumann, “Zwölftontechnik? Adrian Leverkühn zwischen Schönberg und Wagner”, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch im Auftrage der Görres-Gesellschaft 43 (2002) 193–211; and H.J. Schaal, “Thomas Manns Musikerroman Doktor Faustus: Der Einfluss von Arnold Schönberg und Theodor W. Adorno”, Das Orchester 46/1 ( January 1998) 2–7. Like the books and articles identified above in note 162, all of these studies appeared in print since the completion, but not necessarily since the publication, of Michael Saffle, “Text as music / Music as text: Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Beethoven’s sonata, op. 111”, Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ed. by Hermann Danuser, et al. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1999) 215–21. 164 Walter Frisch, German modernism: Music and the arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 196. 165 Again, see Saffle, “Text as music / Music as text”, passim. 166 See, for example, The Beethoven companion, ed. by Thomas K. Scherman and Louis Biancolli (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972) 1051–55. Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune refer in passing to Kretzschmar’s lecture (although they misspell the character’s name); they also mention the op. 111 sonata as “provok[ing] a particularly moving passage” in Mann’s novel “that is meant to reveal its effect on the state of mind of the German avant-garde” prior to World War II. 161

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are reproduced not merely “elsewhere” in Faustus, but mirror in their locations and uses analogous passages from Beethoven’s sonata. One of these fictive-musical fragments is the German word Wiesengrün (“meadow green”), which calls to mind the middle name of Frankfurt School cultural critic and musicologist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. We know Adorno helped Mann write Faustus, because Mann says so in a second book: his Story of a novel.167 The passage is worth reproducing in its entirety, because Mann rarely revealed his often ironic and subtle aesthetic intentions as straightforwardly as he does here—and because one of his intentions in Faustus was, unmistakably, Beethoven’s sonata: Adorno sat down at the piano and, while I stood by and watched, played for me the entire Sonata opus 111 in a highly instructive fashion. I have never been more attentive. I rose early the following morning and for the next three days immersed myself in a thorough revision and extension of the lecture on the sonata, which became a significant enrichment and embellishment of [chapter 8] and indeed of the whole book.168

Third, Beethoven’s sonata has two movements; the lecture refers to “Wiesengrün” in that the three syllables “Wie-sen-grün” are conjoined with the motif C–G–G in the second movement of Beethoven’s sonata:

Example 4: Beethoven, sonata in C minor, op. 111, 2nd movement, mm. 1–2

This motif, together with its conjoined musical-fictional implications, serves as the “theme” for an interlocked series of  “variations” that comprise most of the second half of Mann’s novel. It is here (in chapters XXVI–XLVII and epilogue), too, that most of the references to both the word “Wiesengrün” and Beethoven’s motif appear. A great many other structural similarities and devices link sonata and novel. Among them is a long-term “modulation” associated with the youth and early manhood of Mann’s protagonist Adrian Leverkühn. This modulation, which mimics the I–V/ The Beethoven companion, ed. by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (London: Faber & Faber, 1971) 146 and 524. 167 See Thomas Mann, The story of a novel: The genesis of  ‘Doctor Faustus’, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). Also published in England as The genesis of a novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961). For a detailed comparison of Mann’s Faustus and story (with references to both editions), see Patrick Carnegy, Faust as musician: A study of Thomas Mann’s novel “Doctor Faustus” (New York: New Directions, 1975). 168 Mann, The story of a novel, 48; italics added. Adorno’s influence on Mann’s novel was enormous. In addition to Schaal’s essay (cited in note 164), see HansJörg Dörr, “Thomas Mann und Adorno: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des Doktor Faustus”, Thomas Manns “Dr. Faustus” und die Wirkung, ed. by Rudolf Wolff (Bonn: Douvier, 1983) vol. 2, 48–91. Dörr provides matching columns of textual parallels (ibid., 69–83) between Faustus and such books and articles by Adorno as Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1949), and “Über den Fetisch-Charakter der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”. The former work has been reprinted as Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of modern music, trans. by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum, 2003); the latter as “On the fetish-character of music and the regression of listening”, in idem, Essays on music, ed. by Richard Leppert; trans. by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 288–317.

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X–I harmonic organization of classical sonata movements,169 takes place in the novel’s first half as Leverkühn at first embraces (in chapters III–IX or “exposition”) and then abandons music (in chapters X–XVII or “development”), only to return to it after his university studies in theology are over (in chapters XVIII–XXIV or “recapitulation”). Furthermore, Mann’s fictional “first movement” is separated from the second by a “document” (chapter XXV) that stands outside the rest of the novel’s unfolding story: an account of Leverkühn’s encounter, real or imagined, with the Devil. Interruptions in the opening chapters resemble the breaks in mm. 2 and 4 of Beethoven’s first movement, while narrator Serenus Zeitblom’s high-flown literary style is suggestive of  “antique” (i.e., French overture) gestures in Beethoven’s introduction (mm. 1–16). Finally, overlapping stories of lost love and innocence echo aspects of Beethoven’s second movement, with its references to “heav-en’s blue, lov-ers’ pain, fare-thee well.”170 In conclusion, Toni Morrison’s Jazz.171 This novel poses special problems, because there is no musical “form” in jazz—at least, not insofar as widely accepted sectional divisions, prescribed modulations, and the like are concerned. There is, however, a social form of jazz (or, rather, several such forms), and throughout Morrison’s novel they are often expressed in terms of gender as well as class and race. And there are jazz styles. As a genre, jazz is widely understood and enjoyed as a collection of variegated and often individualistic gestures and tropes: rhythmic patterns, performance practices, chord progressions, and so on. A talented performer can “jazz” anything, even though that “anything”—a familiar popular song, perhaps, or a chord progression—may not itself “be” jazz. And style is elusive: no question about that. Scholars appreciate Beethoven’s contributions to the sinfonia characteristica tradition,172 but none of them has yet written a second, equally accomplished “Pastoral” symphony. Nor has anyone put Charlie Parker’s distinctive spin on a stylistically analogous but otherwise new performance of Koko. According to Tracey Sherard, Morrison’s novel is about the blues and black women’s narratives.173 For Sherard, the medium or form through which the blues as a “specifically female cultural form” of music is disseminated is the phonograph record.174 Jon Panish emphasizes race rather than (or in addition to) gender. In his discussions of still other jazz novels, including The horn by John Clellon Holmes, Panish emphasizes the “primary performer/audience nexus” that comprises “the slowly dissipating [black] saxophone legend Edgar Pool, the ‘horn’, and two white hipsters.”175 Jurgen Grandt, on the other hand, argues that Morrison’s novel employs narrative strategies of style and structure similar to those in another Jazz: a novel by Czech author Hans Janowitz.176 Finally, 880

169 See Leonard Ratner, Classic music: Expression, form, and style (New York: G. Schirmer, 1985) 217–47 passim. Ratner’s emphasis on keys rather than themes as defining 18th- and early–19th-century sonata practices is crucial to understanding both sonata-form traditions and ways in which sonata form may be appropriated in works of imaginative literature. 170 Mann, Doctor Faustus, 54. 171 Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 172 See F.E. Kirby, “Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ symphony as a ‘sinfonia caracteristica’”, The musical quarterly 56/4 (October 1970) 605–23. 173 Tracy Sherard, “Women’s classic blues in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”, Genders 31 (2000). Available at www .genders .org/g3/g31_sherard.html. 174 Ibid. 175 Jon Panish, The color of jazz: Race and representation in postwar American culture ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997) 89. See also John Clellon Holmes, The horn (New York: Random House, 1953). 176 Jurgen E. Grandt, “Kinds of blue: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the jazz aesthetic”, African American review 38/2 (summer 2004) 303–22. See Hans Janowitz, Jazz (Berlin: Verlag die Schmiede, 1927; repr. ed., Bonn: Weidle, 1999). A Czech Jew who turned to pacifism after World War I, Janowitz is best known for his collaboration with Carl Mayer on the script for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, a film directed by Robert Wiene (1920).

Saffle | Musicology and fiction

for Dirk Ludigkeit, Morrison’s novel is “above all an experiment in narrative designed to reconfigure the relationship between the text and the reader”, based on “patterns of adaptation created in black music”.177 Ludigkeit’s observations have perhaps the greatest immediate relevance for musicologists, because they examine Morrison’s fiction as if it were music. Ludigkeit likens the novel’s narrator to a “jazz performer” who him/herself introduces three main characters (the “ensemble”), and he epitomizes “the City in 1926” as a setting that “determines the course of events [in Jazz] in much the same way that the harmonic structure of a tonal musical composition proscribes the possibilities for melodic variations.”178 Finally, rather like the leader of a collectively improvising ensemble, the narrator structures the performance to allow shifts in emphasis, foregrounding first one, then [“than” in the original] another of the voices within the collective…. These shifts in focus are sometimes condensed into subtle variations even within longer passages to highlight different interpretations of the same events … an extension of improvisational tech­ nique … [recalling] a variation of basic call-and-response techniques … prominent in African music.179

In short, Morrison’s Jazz is not merely multi-formal in that it can be read in terms of musical, social, and technological practices. Nor is it necessarily altogether “original”, in that aspects of its dense and lively African-American story may have been adapted from (or, at the very least, resemble those of ) a European model. Instead, Jazz is metafictional in that it can be read in terms of narratives that enclose other narratives, as a jazz performance encloses—but does not necessarily shape or “standardize”—a wealth of melodies and musical devices. For critics such as Grandt, Ludigkeit, and Sherard—as well as for novelists such as Holmes, Janowitz, and Morrison—jazz music itself provides us with new ways of understanding musical form, social as well as musical. Which is to say, it provides us with ways of understanding how musical style functions outside music or in addition to it, as well as ways of exploring metastructural issues through musicalfictional representations of race, class, and gender.

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177 Dirk Ludigkeit, “Collective improvisation and narrative structure in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”, LIT: Literature, interpretation, theory 12/2 ( June 2001) 165–87. 178 Ibid., 176. 179 Ibid., 176–77.