A rather juvenile narrative poem (below) I once wrote, inspired by Chopin's Fourth Ballade, is prefaced by a disclaimer that it is certainly only one of the infinite possible interpretations of that piece. The disclaimer was originally meant to be a full-blown article on the knotty question of musical narratives- an article I never finished writing, but off which I blew the dust today in the light of reading Wallace Stevens's The Idea of Order at Key West. So here it is, updated:
Over any poor soul attempting to extract concrete imagery from Chopin hang the words of the composer himself, famously contemptuous of “programmatic” analysis of his music. ‘After a vast preamble,’ he complains of Friedrich Wieck’s gushing review of Op. 2, ‘he sets about dissecting [the Variations] bar by bar. He explains that it is some fantastical tableau. Of the second Variation, he says that Don Juan is running with Leporello, of the third that he is squeezing Zerlina and that Masetto – in the left hand – is angry, of the fifth bar of the adagio he declares that Don Juan is kissing Zerlina in D flat major. To die from a German’s imagination!’ Years later, he flew into a rage when George Sand suggested that the throbbing pulse of his 15th prelude resembled that of the rain outside. 'He protested with all his might – and he was right to – against the childishness of such aural imitations,' wrote Sand. 'His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds.' It was a view echoed in the twentieth century by Artur Rubinstein, who was firm that Chopin's music 'is not 'Romantic music' in the Byronic sense. It does not tell stories or paint pictures. It is expressive and personal, but still a pure art.’
There is much merit in this scorn, but also much to be careful of. When analysing whether a piece of music is “narrative,” we may use Nattiez’s three-way distinction, as cited by Klein (2004). Nattiez distinguishes between poietic, immanent and aesthetic musical narration. Poietic narration is that intended by the composer. Immanent narrative is inherent in the music, independent of the composer’s will. Aesthetic narration is that sought by the listener. What makes music so fascinating is this intersection of viewpoints, of meanings, of intentions. It has an inherent shape and logic which lends itself to vagaries of narration, evocation and expression ('immanent narrative' as Klein calls it) without ever, as Oscar Wilde observes, revealing its ‘ultimate secret.' I've always been intrigued by people's ability to agree on certain, oddly specific things about a piece (not just its "sadness" or "tenderness," say). In a now-taken-down video of Rubinstein playing Chopin's E major nocturne, for example, practically everyone in the comments section, including me, agreed the piece has a valedictory feel. Yet how on earth can such a specific type of sadness be conveyed to so many without words? Call me controversial but I don't think it's just knowledge that it's his last nocturne; even if I didn't know that was his last published nocturne, I'd still feel the same way about the message of that piece.
It's a mystery Wallace Stevens captures so beautifully, well before the time of Klein's paper, in his poem The Idea of Order at Key West:
'She sang beyond the genius of the sea,
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.'
'[T]he mysterious sounds of nature,' as Sand writes, find their musical form, transcending the 'genius' of their concrete bodies but maintaining some liminal link with them- possibly imitating them, possibly brushing close to evoking a 'body wholly body,' but preferring to stop shy of doing so, dwelling instead in a suggestive language 'not ours,' but whose gist we somehow grasp all too well.
Later in the poem, Stevens homes in on the musician:
'It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.'
Here is the artist-first interpretation of music, Rubinstein's 'expressive and personal' music, the non-Byronic Romanticism which deals with pure individual expression, not with imagistic fluff.
But the poet is not yet content, and continues to search for the root of the music, which he knows (rightfully) troubles us.
'Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.'
It was not 'only the dark voice of the sea,' or the 'outer voice of sky/And cloud,' decides the poet
'[...] [i]t was more than that.
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.'
The poet rejects the imitative, the composer-centric and the listener-centric approach as definitive, instead dwelling on the music's ability to transcend them all.
However, this unfathomability does not stop us from trying to express it, to respond, in some humble way, to its infinite generosity; indeed, quite the reverse.* As the great Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia puts it, ‘Would this eternal search exist if the thing to be found existed?’
*The American poet Billy Collins summarises, quite nicely, what can be done with a poem without hunting down 'what it really means,' in advice easily applicable to music.
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