Italian Music in Dakota: The Function of European Musical Theater in U.S. Culture [1 ed.] 9783737006552, 9783847106555

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Passages – Transitions – Intersections

Volume 2

General Editors: Paola Partenza (University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy) Andrea Mariani (University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy)

Advisory Board: Gianfranca Balestra (University of Siena, Italy) Barbara M. Benedict (Trinity College Connecticut, USA) Gert Buelens (University of Ghent, Belgium) Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec (University of Caen, and ICP, France) Esra Melikoglu (University of Istanbul, Turkey) Michal Peprn&k (University of Olomouc, Czech Republic) John Paul Russo (University of Miami, USA)

Andrea Mariani

Italian Music in Dakota The Function of European Musical Theater in U.S. Culture

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2365-9173 ISBN 978-3-7370-0655-2 You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our website: www.v-r.de Sponsored by the Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, Università Gabriele d’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara.  2017, V& R unipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, D-37079 Gçttingen, Germany / www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter Two: H. D. Thoreau and Herman Melville 1. Thoreau’s visual and acoustic ekphrases . . . . 2. A music of thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Herman Melville: theater plus music . . . . . . 4. The Piazza Tales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. George Templeton Strong and opera . . . . . .

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Chapter Three: Walt Whitman . Part one . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Musical theater in Whitman 2. Proud Music of the Storm . . Part two . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Italian Music in Dakota . . . 4. The Chicago Auditorium . .

Chapter One: R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe . 1. R. W. Emerson: the music of the spheres 2. Contrastive analyses: The Aeolian harp . 3. Acoustic strategies in E. A. Poe . . . . . . 4. The rhetoric of arabesque . . . . . . . . . 5. Operatic experimentations . . . . . . . . 6. The melodramatic imagination . . . . . .

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Chapter Four : Emily Dickinson, Sidney Lanier 1. The old transcendentalist debate . . . . . . 2. Close and imaginary encounters . . . . . . 3. The Self as musician . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Sidney Lanier : poetry and music . . . . . .

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Contents

5. Odes to Wagner and Beethoven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter Five: Henry James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. European opera and realistic fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Henry James’s acoustic sensitiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Isabel Archer’s “transition” from opera house to sculpture gallery

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Chapter Six: Wharton, Cather, Santayana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Edith Wharton: the experience of opera in The Age of Innocence 2. Willa Cather : larks and gayhearts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. George Santayana’s “epiphonic” moments . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter Seven: The twentieth century . . 1. William Demby and Vincent Sheean . 2. John Berryman: music, poetry, syntax 3. Music in James Merrill . . . . . . . . 4. Merrill and opera. Conclusions . . . .

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Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction

Did I do wrong in going [to the opera]? There are those who regard a theatrical representation as wrong, per se and on principle, but that view I have always thought quite unreasonable […] I have found myself today none the less able to control my thoughts and feelings at Church or at home for having heard Weber’s magnificent music last night. (George Templeton Strong, 1845)

The title of the book is an explicit tribute to Walt Whitman, who, as it will appear evident in Chapter three, is the central figure in this volume. His extraordinary – and undervalued – poem “Italian Music in Dakota”1 was published in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. At first, the title sounds (and sounded to a large majority of readers in the 1880s) paradoxical, provocative, almost oxymoronic: what did the idea of “Italian” opera, as opposed to opera generally, have to do with the cultural wilderness and the one hundred per cent “Americanness” of such a remote territory as Dakota, which was not yet a state, and not yet divided into North and South? The success of the text lies, instead, precisely in the apparently striking juxtaposition of the two terms. I will later discuss in detail its interpretation, because its lines deal with the poet’s passion for opera (Italian opera in particular), but also use opera as a structural principle, and as a repertoire of acoustic images that greatly enrich the poem’s language and the echoes with which it resounds in the reader’s consciousness. The effectiveness of the text is, in fact, multiple: it is appropriate from the point of view of the content (the message it intends to convey and its ideological background), the linguistic 1 The poem was written between 1879 and 1881, after Whitman’s trip to the West which, strangely enough, did not include Dakota. It would be interesting to see why, among other equally “wild” places that Whitman did visit on that occasion, he decided to mention a corner of the plains he did not visit. The name of the territory is of native origin and refers to the name of the Sioux (Lakota or Dakota) nation, that was introduced to the awareness of the average American of the East Coast as early as the 1830s through the paintings of George Catlin. The striking juxtaposition of the two terms (Italian vs Dakota) evidently sounded to Whitman effective and paradigmatic. And so it does nowadays.

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Introduction

strategies and sophisticated rhetorical devices it offers us, the cultural context it represents, and the author’s capacity to control an intense network of transatlantic themes. It demonstrates, in my opinion, how those who insist that Whitman’s best lyrical production must be found in the limited span of time between 1855 (first edition of Leaves of Grass) and 1865 (“Drum-taps”) are incorrect. It also demonstrates the coherence and consistency of Whitman’s taste, his devotion to some basic issues, as well as his progress towards a deeper and deeper awareness of some basic experiences and ideas, around which his imagination and his production (both in verse and in prose) unflinchingly revolved. As far as his “sympathy” for – and expertise of – opera is concerned, a wealth of literary criticism has shown that it dated back to his first years of journalism in New York, a period of intense theater going, of reviewing performances of different intellectual significance, that he, however, regularly considered worth commenting, and that never ceased to fascinate him. Whitman’s life, poetry, and rich and intriguing memoirs in prose also testify that opera, already in the 1840s, and of course much more so in the following decades, was not a marginal phenomenon in the culture of the United States. Far from being considered an imported good, which could be of some relevance only to the communities of recent immigration from Europe, and far from being limited to theaters of major cities along the East Coast (plus New Orleans), it had acquired a status and vast geographic diffusion (from New York, through Philadelphia, to Charleston, from Chicago, through St. Louis, to San Francisco, spreading, finally, even in the cultural “wilderness” of Kansas City, Dallas and Denver) and a wide popularity among all social classes. This fact could indeed astonish (and preoccupy) only members of what was rapidly becoming a minority, that is, the heirs of the Puritans in New England. The history of opera in America (both the influence of European opera and the slow, contradictory growth of a thoroughly American opera) has already been told and recent criticism has investigated almost all its aspects.2 In this book, as a European scholar of North American literature, I propose to concentrate on the intersection between European opera and some major figures in the literature of the United States – how it was received, what it meant, how it was textually “exploited” – in other words, its literary function and the role it played in helping some great masters of the canon to express themselves, their ideas, their feelings, and their Weltanschauung. I will, in addition, try to identify and explore the reasons why such diverse writers as Poe, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Lanier, James, Wharton, Santayana (as well as a number of 20th century poets and prose writers) occasionally, or regularly, found a priceless instrument 2 John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History, New Haven, CT, Yale U. P., 1993.

Introduction

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in opera that, precisely because it belonged to a different epistemological field and used different codes of expression, enabled them to say things that their language and the world of words alone would not allow them to say. This book will therefore contribute to re-affirm Jakobson’s theory not only of the possibility, but of the extraordinary use of intersemiotic translation. On a socio-historical plane, I will deal with other, equally fascinating, transcultural themes, such as the paradoxical phenomenon according to which not only the low middle classes and the non-wasp section of American society but also the upper middle classes and members of the establishment often assimilated the heritage of Elizabethan theater and of British, German and French Romanticism going to the opera house for productions of Rossini’s La donna del lago, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, von Weber’s Oberon, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Robert le diable, Bellini’s I Puritani, Auber’s Fra Diavolo, Verdi’s Ernani and Macbeth, Gounod’s Faust, Boito’s Mefistofele, Thomas’ Hamlet, rather than getting in touch with the original sources of the “stories”, that is to say Sir Walter Scott’s novels, Goethe’s poem, or Shakespeare’s, Victor Hugo’s and Schiller’s plays. The subject of the book is limited in scope but very ample in chronological terms and will therefore allow the survey of a long period in the history of AngloAmerican culture, by scrutinizing its different phases, currents, ideological attitudes and moods according to an unusual perspective. The complex phenomenology of its manifestations – the discourses it gave origin to at different periods in time – can, in fact, be described and understood not only by underlying the major forces, the most evident dialectics, the patent recurring debates and the basic documents that punctuate the context but also by adopting an “eccentric” viewpoint, in search of what Carolyn Denard3 calls “what moves at the margin” in her edition of Toni Morrison’s “non-fiction”. These “moves” are leitmotifs that do not necessarily come to the foreground but surface now and then, under given circumstances, in the works of men of letters and texts of a “secondary”, minority canon, or in less closely examined corners of the great texts of the canon. In this sense, the reader of this book should not be surprised if he/she finds out that, after dealing with major poets or novelists and their masterpieces, I include in my “scenario” names of writers who have long been “reshuffled” and no more occupy the position of center stage. Or if I re-visit some neglected pages of their works with almost monomaniac attention (and intention) – trying not to lose, in the meantime, the sense of perspective. Reshuffling the canon has been a favorite pastime in recent decades; why shouldn’t we feel authorized to reshuffle proportions within a single text (or macrotext), a 3 Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin: Selected Non-Fiction, ed. by Carolyn C. Denard, Jackson, University of Mississippi P., 2008.

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Introduction

literary genre, the story of an author’s life, or his/her ideas, production and poetics? American studies have comprised the analysis of all facets of the prismatic, multicultural, transnational and fluid American identity, including the dialectics between national and local issues, the civilization of the East and of the West Coast, such major confrontations as idealism versus realism, Transcendentalist optimism versus the decline and fall of the American dream, Puritan heritage versus frontier culture, religion of progress versus ecological awareness, machine versus garden (capitalism versus Arcadian myths)4. But acute observers of intellectual phenomena and artistic events know that, more often than not, their perceptiveness can be fruitfully applied in following the apparently stray, episodic and uneven streams of little rivulets, after having contemplated the grand flow of a powerful river, especially if one meets such rivulets as Whitman’s “Autumn Rivulets”5. Rivulets flow into large waterways, join major and minor tributaries, and contribute to the overall design of their course. A series of seemingly idiosyncratic steps can lead to unforeseen discoveries of some importance or can confirm, with the strength of their novelty, ideas that were taken for granted in the past and, being questioned no more, sounded banal. The minutest tesserae of a mosaic, in sum, are often the most precious ones. This is the method I have chosen to pursue in the present book, allowing myself the liberty to leisurely follow the connections and intertextual references that my experience of the thick network of pertinent associations suggest, authorize and support. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Salieri’s prot8g8 and court poet for Emperor Joseph II in Vienna (1781–1790), an acquaintance of Casanova’s in Dresden (1790–92) and great impresario for the King’s Theatre in London (1792–1805) after Mozart’s death (1791), had collaborated in the early 1790s with Stephen Storace, an English composer destined to great success first in London, and then in New York. Storace’s most popular comic opera No Song, No Supper, first produced in 1790, remained a favorite of both European and American audiences through the 1840s. A “man for all seasons” and of many gifts, Da Ponte arrived in America in 1805, carrying in his somewhat light luggage several priceless manuscripts of Mozart’s, among which those of the three major operas in Italian, for which he had written the libretti: Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Cos' fan tutte (1790). After a stay in Philadelphia that did not prove particularly successful, Da 4 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, Oxford U. P., 1964. 5 Walt Whitman called the cluster of poems added to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass “Autumn Rivulets”. His “Two Rivulets” are, instead, a group of pieces added to the 1876 edition of the book.

Introduction

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Ponte settled in New York, where in 1825 he was appointed Professor of Italian Language at Columbia College (afterwards Columbia University). Apart from teaching and promoting Italian culture, dealing in imported books, keeping in constant touch with Italy (following Gioacchino Rossini’s rise and fortunes as if he were in his native land), he was busy writing his memoirs (published in three volumes between 1823 and 1827) for over twenty years.6 In 1828 he met Manuel Garc&a (who had been the interpreter of Count Almaviva at the premiere of Il barbiere di Siviglia in Rome, February 1816). In the same year he became an American citizen and decided to enter the challenging (but dangerous) world of the American performing arts. In 1833 he founded the Italian Opera House, premiering Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra and producing La Cenerentola in Italian. His financial successes, unfortunately, were very short-lived; his enterprise failed in 1835. In 1838 he died.7 Although it is not correct to consider Da Ponte’s arrival in the United States as the birth date in the history of opera in North America, it is true that the presence of such a distinguished (however controversial) figure in the following three decades and his association with the Havana Company of Manuel Garc&a marked the beginning of a substantial change in the musical scene. It promoted the transition from the predominance of English traditional opera (sung in English by – generally speaking – rather modest and na"ve companies) to the triumphs of “continental” European (French, German and Italian) operas, either sung in English translation or in their original languages by real stars and staged by professional entrepreneurs.8 The vogue of Italian opera reached an acme from the late 1840s through the 1870s, when libretti of famous French and German operas, curiously enough, were translated into Italian in order to meet the taste of the snobbish public. Audiences, in fact, started considering that listening to – and “understanding” – bel canto in Italian was a sign of intellectual distinction.9 This is how Edith Wharton’s fine irony describes the situation in retrospect (New York in the 1870s, opening page of The Age of Innocence, 1920):

6 Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memorie, a c. C. Allasia e E. Malaspina, Roma, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 2005. Memoirs, transl. by Elisabeth Abbott, ed. by Arthur Livingston, pref. by Charles Rosen, New York, The New York Review of Books, 2000. The section pertaining to Da Ponte’s American stay runs from p. 340 through p. 472. 7 Rodney Bolt, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo da Ponte, New York, Bloomsbury, 2006; Anthony Holden, The Man Who Wrote Mozart, London, Orion, 2007; Luciano Paesani, Porta, Bertati, Da Ponte, Milano, LED, 2012; Lorenzo Da Ponte, Storia della lingua e della letteratura italiana a New York, a c. Lorenzo della Ch/, Milano, Il Polifilo, 2013. 8 June Ottenberg, Opera Odyssey : Towards a History of Opera in Nineteenth Century America, Westport, CT, Greenwood P., 1994. 9 Another interesting datum is the fact that Italian operas – sung in Italian – first became popular in New Orleans, not in New York or in other major cities of the East Coast.

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Introduction

Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music, in New York […] She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silverbacked brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.

In the first half of the century the context in which the first authors whom I am going to consider lived and wrote was more diversified and very stimulating: already cosmopolitan and, somehow, transcultural ante litteram. The 1820s and 1830s were the years of the vast posthumous popularity of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, derived from Friedrich Schiller’s Schauer-romantik Gothic theater,10 of James Fenimore Cooper’s pirates, noble savages and pioneers and of his well known and much emphasized rivalry with – and emulation of – Sir Walter Scott (The Spy was published in 1821, The Last of the Mohicans in 1826).11 Cooper was a great fan of opera. He followed, for instance, the seasons of Garc&a’s Havana Opera Company from 1825 onwards and was often seen at the Park Theater in New York City (in that period the most elitist of North American theaters) together with Da Ponte and other internationally well-known figures, such as Joseph Bonaparte, former king of Spain. In Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)12 European sources were easily recognized and accepted without embarrassment. The heirs of Puritan New England, as I was saying, were gradually becoming a marginal cultural force and, except in Boston, could not counterbalance the hunger for entertainment which invaded the nouveaux riches and the upper class need to be out at night. In New York churches of all denominations offered sacred music not only on Saturdays and Sundays but also on week days. Concerts halls were almost as many as churches and promoted both sacred and lay instrumental music, as well as choirs and recitals by famous singers. New theaters opened incessantly, though most of them enjoyed financial success only for a season or two (like Da Ponte’s Italian Opera House). The night scene was, in sum, rather lively ; certainly more than we would expect in a still small city. 10 For the importance of music in Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, see Annalisa Goldoni, “Charles Brockden Brown e la seduzione della musica”, in La questione romantica, 11 (2001), pp. 13–23. 11 Cooper’s novel The Spy became the first Italian opera with an American setting, when it was transcodified by Italian composer Luigi Arditi in 1856 during his fruitful stay in the United States. 12 The transcodification of Irving’s Rip Van Winkle into a thoroughly American opera occurred as late as the 1930s (music by Edward Manning, New York, 1932). Sleepy Hollow became a successful Broadway musical even later (1948).

Introduction

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To be fair, the Pilgrim Fathers and the members of Puritan theocracy who, no less than their counterparts in England, were suspicious of the theater, had imported from across the ocean the tradition of both sacred and profane music. Not only Sunday services and other religious meetings were accompanied by choirs singing Biblical or contemporary hymns; political assemblies and conventions of different kinds also included musical (above all choral) moments. What could not properly flourish in their context, however, was the concept of music as “spectacle” and complex, heterogeneous performance. This explains why the theatrical element implicit in so many musical genres could not find so full an expression as in Catholic baroque music or even in European Reformation music, from Bach to Händel. Above all the members of the Calvinist community were suspicious of the power of an enchanting melody entrusted to the “arbitrary” interpretation of a voice that, with its acrobatic “arabesques” (so thoroughly enjoyed, in Europe, for example, by Chopin, and in America, somewhat later, by Whitman), ended up by expressing a more sensual than celestial musical dimension. There is, here and there, evidence of some sort of “vocal freedom”, e. g. in the interpretation of the Psalms, thanks to which the singing could, so to say, “overflow” well beyond the boundaries of the written words and of the fixed notes of the score. But the basic suspicion remained unaltered for decades and could be overcome only when a true multicultural society emerged in the North East also.13 This is why I shall begin my excursus precisely in New England, analyzing Ralph W. Emerson’s contradictory attitude towards music.

13 Gilbert Chase, American Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, Urbana-Chicago, U. of Illinois P., 1987.

Chapter One: R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

Whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down. (R. W. Emerson, 1844) Music is essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness. (Edgar A. Poe, 1831)

1.

R. W. Emerson: the music of the spheres

Emerson seems to me the most opportune figure to start with, because his doctrine and the influence it so long exerted reveal the dynamics of contradictory forces working in favor or against the progress of opera in the United States, and of the possibility to use it as a major ingredient in intriguing intersemiotic operations. The fact is that Emerson was not only indifferent to the popularity of opera, but also ideologically suspicious of “artificial” music, produced by man in a vain, hopeless competition with the divine music of Nature. His poem “Music” offers ample evidence of his limited interest in the sense of hearing, in acoustic perception and in the realm of sounds, as well as a document of the ensuing difficulty in writing verse that could be vaguely comparable to the quality of his prose. We know that he tried, at various stages of his intellectual growth, to convince himself (and his readers) that, in order to adequately experience reality, and thence to “understand” it, the ear and the eye are equally important. In his essay “The Poet” he writes:

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R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

Whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down.1

But then, in his poem “Merlin I”, he exhorts the “kingly bard” to “smite the chords rudely and hard”, since “No jingling serenader’s art/ Nor tinkle of piano strings,/ Can make the wild blood start/ In its mystic springs”. The poet must be unencumbered “with the coil of rhythm and number”. The “eye” (whose phonic coincidence with the personal pronoun “I” he often stressed, thus exploiting the fact in philosophical terms) gradually became, in fact, the privileged organ of exploration of the world and of all physical and mental experience.2 In his prose “superb oxymorons” combine “in a severely compacted way his idealized contraries of free imagination and ordered art”, but “the wise counter-voice” never becomes a musical controcanto.3 Emerson’s idea (and use) of the eye reminds us of the “pure eye of the reason” that he found in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Yet, in its transition from Carlyle to Emerson, the “philosophical eye” of the British writer underwent a substantial metamorphosis, turning into the instrument “of the pure American vision”, an organ that, in the New World, would gain a “more earnest vision” (italics mine).4 The long critical tradition of Emerson’s studies has explained how this organ – thanks to a frequently quoted epiphanic moment – finally became the “transparent eyeball” that allowed the subject to utter the famous sentence: “I am nothing, I see all”. In comparison, Emerson’s ear (that is, obviously, more the ear of his spirit than the organ of his sense of hearing) seems more like a modest tool, that is incapable of a direct, immediate perception – therefore an epiphany, or an adequate “understanding” – and was quickly marginalized, as F. O. Matthiessen already remarked in 1941.5 1 Ralph W. Emerson, Essays: Second Series, in The Collected Works of Ralph W. Emerson, ed. by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr, Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 1983, pp. 5–6. 2 James S. Cox, “The Circles of the Eye”, in Ralph W. Emerson, ed. by Harold Bloom, New York, Chelsea House, 1985: “The metaphor instantaneously transforms being into seeing; if it does not annihilate personal consciousness, it causes the personal experience to vanish by virtue of the expansion and uplift of the essential self into infinite space” (p. 47). 3 David Porter, “The Muse Has a Deeper Secret”, in Harold Bloom, ed., Op. cit., pp. 72–73. See also Robert Hudnut, The Aesthetics of Ralph W. Emerson: The Materials and Methods of His Poetry, Lewiston, N.Y., Edwin Mellen, 1996. 4 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. by H. D. Traill, London, Chapman and Hall, 1896–99, 30 vols. Cf. Giuseppe Nori, “Emerson, il Mediterraneo e l’occhio americano”, in Orizzonti mediterranei e oltre: prospettive inglesi e americane, a c. di L. Marchetti e C. Martinez, Milano, LED, 2014, p. 146. 5 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, London-Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 1941. See also Lawrence Buell, Emerson, Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 2004: “He never mastered the poetic line as he did the prose sentence. Too much filler, too much reliance on clich8, too much syntactical contortion to fit rhyme and meter” (p. 136). His “syntactical contortion” was echoed, in the 20th century, by John Berryman, combined, however, with a much deeper musical experience (see chapter VII in this volume).

R. W. Emerson: the music of the spheres

17

In an intense contemplative moment, during his voyage across the Atlantic, before actually seeing the Mediterranean, where he was going to visit the cradle of Western civilization, Emerson looked at the clouds and, apparently, heard “an ancient hymn” coming from above. When he described, in his journal, his experience as a sort of “vocation”, he used a quotation from William Wordsworth’s “The Excursion”, even though he thought that Wordsworth cannot be considered a master, since he is “too much a poet”.6 The clouds, Emerson writes, had “silent faces”, therefore their message could not be properly heard, but read (on the page of an actual book, or on the screen of his memory), as conveyed/ translated by the Romantic poet in his lines. This, as many other similar experiences in Emerson’s life, can hardly be considered a vocation in the etymological (and Biblical) sense of the word, since it was not produced by a voice (vox) calling, or rather summoning him, by means of words that the subject could hear, but through written words, that had to be seen and/or read. Not only in this case but, more in general, as a rule, the “American scholar” overlooked or misinterpreted the meaning of the famous passage in the Bible: “verba volant, scripta manent”; a dictum which, contrary to its modern interpretation, must be understood as a praise of spoken/heard words, whose capacity to fly well above the level of daily experience can produce a vaster and deeper knowledge than that obtained by means of written/read words – words that remain crystallized, inert, stiffly identical to themselves – and must be univocally, passively accepted. Emerson, in sum, reacted to things seen more than to things heard; his imagination progressed on the basis of what his eye saw. In Italy he “was enchanted by the art and music of Florence”, but began a rich relationship with a sculptor : Horatio Greenough.7 Only sight could apparently produce in his mind a “rational emotion” (no matter how oxymoronic the expression can sound). As his writings testify, progressing from an image or a concept to the next, abstract ideas acquire concrete meaning, and the process is made possible by visual metaphors, examples and associations. But let’s confront ourselves directly with the text of the poem “Music”. As all other lyrical texts by Emerson, the three stanzas offer an explicit ideological message but do not appear adequate in terms of formal dimension, suggestiveness and capacity to present the reader with a “soundscape”:

6 William Wordsworth, “The Excursion”, Book I (1814). Cf. R. W. Emerson, Journals, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. by W. H. Gilman et al., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1960–1982, 16 vols. Vol. II, p. 106, Vol. IV, p. 104. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in Emerson’s view, were poets but not “bards” or “prophets”; they had “no idea of that species of moral truth” which he called “first philosophy” (Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, New York, AMS Press, 1985). 7 Donald Yannella, Ralph W. Emerson, Boston, Twayne, 1982, p. 5.

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R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

Let me go where’er I will I hear a sky-born music still. It sounds from all things old, It sounds from all things young, From all that’s fair, from all that’s foul, Peals out a cheerful song. It is not only in the rose, It is not only in the bird, Not only where the rainbow glows, Nor in the song of woman heard, But in the darkest, meanest things There alway, alway something sings. ’Tis not in the high stars alone, Nor in the cup of budding flowers, Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone, Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, But in the mud and scum of things There alway, alway something sings.

The music that descends from heaven and pervasively “enters” all things on earth (not only living beings), is “heard” but cannot actually be enjoyed since it must soon be “interpreted” by the subject not as a concrete, enchanting melody, but as the voice of the Oversoul that permeates the world. The poet does not make much effort to render his words smooth or harmonious, “pleasant” to hear as well as “interesting” to reflect upon, and has, therefore, difficulty in creating an acoustic “objective correlative” of his discourse. Pound would say that the message is conveyed more through logopoeia (and phanopoeia) than through melopoeia. Even though the text deals with the concept of a music which originates from both pleasing and unpleasing sources, its images are predominantly, if not exclusively, visual. In spite of a mature technical strategy which includes an abundant use of rhymes, strongly accentuated diction, the iteration of lines and half-lines (“it sounds from all things…it is not only…nor in…”) and an alliteration that is occasionally effective (fair/foul, smiles/showers, mud/scum), the poem, which should evoke a pantheistic landscape of things that “speak” or that are natural instruments through which a “superior” music is heard, paradoxically does not reach the level of “song”. Out of eight things (objects, events) introduced as examples of the source of the music that is the theme of the text (the rose, the bird, the rainbow, the song of woman, the stars, the flowers, the redbreast, “the bow that smiles in showers”), five pertain to sight (or to smell) rather than to hearing (rose, rainbow, stars, flowers, the bow): they are fascinating “spectacles”, “visions”, that, thanks to

Contrastive analyses: The Aeolian harp

19

their beauty, express a message without speaking, without uttering sounds; whereas only three can be accepted as things that emanate a music of their own (the bird, the song of woman, the mellow tone of the redbreast). The limits of Emerson’s poetic imagination are also revealed by the fact that, in the list that he compiles, three “objects” are mentioned twice, with a slight conceptual variation: a movement that results in a sense that is more of redundancy than of richness or depth. The “generic” (and rather banal) rose of the first stanza (not a rhodora, a fringed gentian, or a wild honeysuckle) becomes, in the second, the vague “cup of budding flowers”. The bird is specified as “the redbreast”, producing a “mellow tone”, and the rainbow as “the bow that smiles in showers”. Other sources of the “sky-born music” are even more generic. In the first stanza we have “things old”, “things young”, “all that’s fair” (again, sight predominates), “all that’s foul”. In the second stanza, “darkest […] things” appeal, once again, to sight. Whereas, in the third stanza, “the mud and the scum of things” must be interpreted by the reader as immediately shifting from a literal to a metaphoric dimension. The “competition” between sight and sound in Emerson can be read, therefore, as a major example of what Jim Von der Heydt calls the poet’s attitude to “disjunction” more than to “consonance”.8

2.

Contrastive analyses: The Aeolian harp

Emerson’s idea that the best possible music is that produced by Nature, as the wind blows through the chords of the “Aeolian harp”, distances him from the European romantic tradition represented, for example, by Shelley – according to whom it is the subject that wishes to be transformed into a musical instrument (“make me thy lyre…”, in “Ode to the West Wind”), played by the “autumn’s breath”. The poetic I gives up its identity, somehow sacrificing itself, in order to become the music. In so doing, however, it vindicates its essential role: without man, Nature (the wind) would not be able to fill the world with the songs that mankind so intensely needs to hear.9 In other words, Shelley does not need what I would define a sort of “safety distance”, a “chastity” that Emerson, instead, considers indispensable in order to guarantee the complete mirroring – and the impeccable operating within his consciousness – of a truth which will finally possess him. If music, as Ernst Bloch will later explain, gives voice to enigmas more than to truths, the economy of sounds interrupts the regime of the eye and 8 Jim Von der Heydt, “Emerson’s Beachcombing and the Horizon of Poetry”, in Raritan, 22, 3 (Winter 2003), pp. 113–135. 9 P. B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), in The Complete Poetical Works of P. B. Shelley, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, Oxford U. P., 1961, pp. 577–579.

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problematizes the resulting vision of the world.10 Musical sounds, powerful choirs, sensual voices that sing, were often felt as uncanny elements or events in the New World, in spite of the Puritan tradition of religious and lay hymns, which regularly accompanied all major assemblies of the community. This was due not only to the awareness of the sensuality implied in the echo of “Pan’s flute”, or of the subtle charm of the “music of the spheres” of classical heritage, but also to the suspicion towards the traumatic consequences ensuing from the ardor of faith, when it becomes voice – as in the moment of heavenly inspiration in the ceremonies of Quakers and Shakers. When, in An Oration Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College (1838) Emerson denounces the disappointing conditions of the arts in America (“The mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not but imitative, a vase of fair outline, but empty”) his silence about music betrays an implicit embarrassment before something he cannot easily accommodate in the context of his vision of the world and of the young nation11. In addition, when music and theater intertwine in a form of art (opera, melodrama) that is not only performative but physical and bodily – and therefore threats to destabilize the balance of both Puritan and Transcendentalist restraint – the only solution is to retreat into the realm of seeing, in search not only of “clear and distinct ideas”, but of clearly perceived objects, sure outlines and the neat, comforting borders of things. A contrastive analysis of Emerson’s “Music” and John Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687) could easily seem unfair, considering the difference in the specific poetic qualities of the two authors. So I am not going to proceed too far in that direction, as if I wanted to insist, somewhat sadistically, on Emerson’s faults and on his occasional clumsiness. A brief comparison can, however, be of some use, in order to clarify how difficult it is to write good poetry if one lacks that musical ear that Charles Lamb so honestly confessed to be deprived of – in his “A Chapter on Ears” (Essays of Elia, 1823) – and described with a subtle sense of humor and fine self-irony. The starting point of Dryden’s ode is an idea similar 10 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, transl. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1986 (orig. III vols., 1938–47). Iain Chambers, “La musica, la memoria, l’ascolto”, in Anterem, XXV, 61 (December 2000), pp. 62–64. In Nicola Piovani’s words, music does not use verbs or nouns, only adjectives and adverbs, which explains why it cannot actually “tell” (in the rational sense of the word); this also explains why Emerson the thinker, the Concord sage, had an altogether modest opinion of it. 11 Emerson continued to mention music at a later stage also, on several occasions. What is most relevant, however, is the absence of music as an essential expression of the spirit from the text of his most “heroic” moment: English Traits (1856), “Poetry and Imagination”, in Letters and Social Aims (1876). See Danny Heitman, “What Accounts for Emerson’s Endurance as a Writer?”, in Humanities, Vol. XXXIX, n. 3 (May–June 2013).

Contrastive analyses: The Aeolian harp

21

to Emerson’s concept of a “sky-born music”: the world (“This universal frame”), says Dryden, began from “heav’nly harmony”. Such an acoustic primum movens has little to do with the classic idea of the harmony of the spheres, introduced in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (54–51 b.C.)12 and discussed at length in Boethius’s De institutione musica (ca. 520 A.D.): it is, in fact, defined as a “tuneful voice” that, in turn, was “obeyed” by “music’s power”. The traces of the old Pythagorean theory of harmonia mundi remain only as distant echoes and what really strikes us – since, as W. H. Auden put it, “a poem does not mean: it is” – is the fascinating progress of the poem and its broad and varied rhythm of breathing, that accompanies us and makes us “visit” the phenomenological consequences of the mythical beginning. After the first stanza, the analogy between Emerson and Dryden ceases. The th 17 century poet – thanks to his professionalism, inborn poetic sensibility and technical experience – continues for another six stanzas (plus a final Chorus) dealing with the “passion” raised by music (Bloch’s voice of the musical enigma, that makes the vision of the world more problematic), the different kinds of music produced by the various instruments (the trumpet, the flute, the lute, the violin, the organ, the lyre) and the emotions that are induced, that is wonder, excitement, complaint, despair and holy love. The conclusion is what Marcello Pagnini calls an “ideophony”, that is to say, an original idea which materializes taking shape in a perfect acoustic equivalent, by means of a brilliant linguistic act.13 In fact, the poet imagines that, when Doomsday comes (“when the last and dreadful hour/ This crumbling pageant shall devour”) music (the same music that somehow created the universe and supported the world for millennia) “shall untune the sky”. As one sees music becomes a sort of conductor who, with his magic wand, finally silences the orchestra and puts an end to the concert. The polyphonic texture of Dryden’s poem includes elements of performativity and theatricality that American culture (especially in New England), early in the 19th century, had problems in accepting. Those elements are at the origins of the transcodification/translation of Dryden’s poem in a piece of real music by Händel.14 The idea of music (or sound) as the “seed” of the universe or emblem of creation runs through the history of mankind and surfaces now and then, as an acoustic hypothesis, in contrast with the visual Biblical paradigm according to 12 The so called Somnium Scipionis is the 5th and last Book (the only remaining section) of Cicero’s De re publica. 13 Marcello Pagnini, Lingua e musica: proposta per un’indagine strutturalista-semiotica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1974; Idem, Semiosi: Teoria ed ermeneutica del testo letterario, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1988. 14 George Friedrich Händel’s Cantata for St. Cecilia’s Day (for soprano, tenor, choir and orchestra) had its premiHre in London on November 22, 1739 (Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields).

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which a silent God, putting order to chaos, separated light from darkness. Was the beginning, then, a “big bang”, the A note that provided tuning for the orchestra, a discreet but most significant “singing or whispering voice” that expressed the “first meaning”; the k|cor of St. John’s Gospel, that “single sound” that appears in the priest Tosamah’s sermon in N. S. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1966)? Or was it a long speech that synesthetically describes an alternative creation, reconciling the visual and the acoustic dimension? Here is Momaday’s intriguing passage: There was darkness all around, and in the darkness something happened. Something happened! There was a single sound. There was a single sound […] It was almost nothing in itself, the smallest seed of sound – but it took hold of the darkness and there was light; it took hold of the stillness and there was motion […] It scarcely was; but it was, and everything began.15

Equally (or perhaps even more) unfair, but chronologically more consistent, could be considered the comparison between Emerson’s “Music” and Percy B. Shelley’s famous fragment “Music, when Soft Voices Die”16. But, again, a rapid parallel reading can be useful in order to detect Emerson’s position in the context of English and American early 19th century culture and to trace the development of his taste as he gradually came in contact with the most important poets and prose writers of English Romanticism. I have already mentioned Wordsworth (the poet who defined the eye as “the most despotic organ of perception”) and the impact of his verse on Emerson. I could deal at length with the contradictory influence of Coleridge (more of the Biographia Literaria, 1817, and of other pieces of his prose than of his poetry, as it is easy to imagine). I could detect fewer points of contact/intersection with Byron, Shelley and Keats, whose verse precociously revealed the first hints of what would become the late 19th century aestheticism, that is, a “vision” of the world and of art that the Concord sage could never accept. Shelley’s fragment (two quatrains for a total of eight short trochaic lines) has a different starting point from Emerson’s “Music”. The ensuing message, therefore, is also different. The incipit is a masterly example of the poet at his best: Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory…

The permanence of musical sounds, says Shelley, of songs sung by “soft voices”, is made possible by memory (the great source and depository of all arts, according to the Greek myth of Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses). 15 N. S. Momaday, House Made of Dawn, New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 91. 16 The fragment was probably written in 1821 and published in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, London, John and Henry Hunt, 1824 (pref. by Mary Shelley).

Contrastive analyses: The Aeolian harp

23

Although memory is not a passive, inert recording of things past (“the echo of a sound that is heard no more”, in William S. Merwin’s words), but a lively, vibrant intellectual and emotional exercise. As George Rochenberg observed, we listen to music “with our bodies, with our nervous systems and their parallel/serial memory functions”17. The second couple of lines shifts from the sense of hearing not to the sense of sight, but rather of smell (and taste): Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken…

It is a survival, again, as lively as that of music in the memory of the subject. The senses are, in fact, “quickened” by odors that will not fade (Proust must have agreed with a smile, when he read these lines, if he ever did, as he began writing his Recherche). The leaves of the rose can have a function also when they have withered, the poet continues: “[they can be] heap’d for the belovHd’s bed” (the idea of an act of love performed among perfumed petals of flowers is clearly implied, and seems to echo some exquisite pages of Kamasutra). Finally, the thought of a twin soul, even in absentia, can provide the foundations and the subject matter for Love itself, which is likely to fall heavily asleep on them: Love itself shall slumber on.

Evidently, the communion of the poet with his partner is absolute and includes the senses (hearing, smell, taste, erotic intimacy, not sight) and the intellect (thoughts). The text, in sum, presents us with images of “full immersion”, that exclude both the Emersonian “safety distance” we mentioned before and the disappointing attitude epitomized in England by Wordsworth’s Christianized phase. Shelley’s fragment underwent several musical transcodifications (not a major one, like Dryden’s Ode) and was felt as extraordinarily congenial, in particular in the early 20th century (Frank Bridge, 1904, Charles Wood, 1915, Samuel Barber, 1926) and in the early 21rst century (Gary Bachlund, 2009, Philip Legge, 2010). The transition from words to notes, from libretto to the full performance on stage, will keep me occupied when I deal with opera proper. For the time being, I wish to anticipate, as a sort of ballon d’essai, two or three questions I find particularly intriguing. Do musicians and composers prefer to interpret through their music words that are already “musical”, by adding tones, nuances, refrains, variations and “colors” to an existing, though vague, or virtual musicality, to a secret or patent melody that is already there, fully expressed, or in a nutshell? or does such a musicality somehow hinder their intention, limit their projects, 17 Cf. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, New York, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 212.

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condition their freedom? To what extent can they “appropriate” the text and have it sound as a creation of their own, once it has been “processed” by their imagination, in another medium, and by other artistic codes?18 Dryden’s and Shelley’s examples seem to corroborate the former hypothesis. But the question, as we shall see, is much more complex when the final product must be the staging of a musical spectacle. That is, a work of art with a story that must be performed, played, sung, acted, and enjoyed by an audience that is really there and not only physically present, interested, curious, but also ready to offer a reaction, feedback and a “contribution” to the final output. The theater, in fact, is the perfect object of the reader response theory, and easily lends itself to the interpretation of the intentio lectoris.19

3.

Acoustic strategies in E. A. Poe

A better musical ear than Emerson’s (or Lamb’s), unfortunately, is not a sufficient guarantee of a more satisfactory literary output. E. A. Poe doubtlessly had a deeper and ampler musical experience: “I am profoundly excited by music”, he wrote in a letter to a friend. “In the soul’s struggles at combination [of sounds] it is not impossible that a harp may strike notes not unfamiliar to the angels”.20 He had a finer acoustic sensitivity and tried to exploit it in order to produce great “Romantic” poetry, supporting his lines with a remarkable variety of rhythms and with an evident expertise in sophisticated linguistic techniques.21 His idea that poetry and music were the two most intimately connected forms of art is clearly expounded in his essay “The Poetic Principle” (1848). In another letter (1831) he reveals how intimate the relationships between music and poetry are: “Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitive18 See the debates implicit in such works as Salieri, Prima la musica e poi le parole (Vienna, 1786), Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Richard Strauss, Capriccio (1942). Nietzsche’s essay on Wagner (1888–89) is extremely favorable. Later Nietzsche changed his mind and said he preferred such an “anti-Wagnerian” opera as Georges Bizet’s Carmen. See Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, transl. by Shelley Fisch, London, Granta Books, 2002. 19 Umberto Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione, Milano, Bompiani, 1990. 20 Kenneth Silverman, E. A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, New York, Harper Collins, 1991, pp. 167–168. 21 The starting point for all investigations on the relationship between Poe and music are the bibliographical essays of Burton R. Pollin: “More Music to Poe”, in Music and Letters, XLIV (1973), pp. 391–404; “Music and E. A. Poe: A Second Annotated Checklist”, in Poe Studies, XV (1982), pp. 7–13; “E.A. Poe and Music: A Third Annotated Checklist”, in Poe Studies, XXVI (1993), pp. 41–58. See also Idem, Poe’s Seductive Influence on Great Writers, New York, iUniverse, 2004.

Acoustic strategies in E. A. Poe

25

ness”.22 His intelligence made him understand that music helps the production of poetry because each one of these arts proceeds “step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem”.23 Unfortunately the results, as even an admirer of his best poems (as I confess to be) must admit, were in many cases disappointing. As we shall see, some might even support the thesis that Poe’s love of music found a better expression in his most successful tales. As far as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is concerned, for example, there was an interesting debate in Italy in the early 1960s. While Gabriele Baldini considered the novel a failure, Emilio Cecchi called it a “novel of adventure / la Jules Verne”, with “a symphonic finale worthy of the best of Wagner”.24 In the context of this volume, however, it is not my purpose to discuss the absolute or relative value of Poe’s verse, but to check how his passion for music, alternatively favored or – vice versa – damaged his poetic diction and the intrinsic quality of his texts. I can limit my discourse, therefore, to a survey of a few titles, finally concentrating on just one of them, which is, in my view, thoroughly paradigmatic: “The Bells” (1849). Then I will proceed to a concise analysis of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the famous tale published in 1839, where the intersection (at various levels) between Poe and music (in particular opera and musical theater) is explicit and fruitful. As far as alliteration, onomatopoeia, the technique of rhyming, and synesthesia are concerned, Poe can be said to rival with Dryden’s baroque richness of stylistic solutions. However, he scatters his gifts unevenly through his poems, instead of concentrating his efforts on a few texts, producing, if not masterpieces, at least rewarding compositions. “The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree” (“Sonnet – To Science”, 1829–43)) has a pleasant flow, that swiftly (and softly) concludes the poem. “The weary, way-worn wanderer bore” (“To Helen”, 1831–43) is as suggestive as all good, melodious alliterations (in particular if based on semi-vowel sounds, such as w) are. A strong rhythmical pattern of stresses and rhymes well suits the frank and bold message of “Israfel” (1831–45): “Tottering above/ In her highest noon/ The enamoured moon/ Blushes with love”, “The trembling living wire/ Of those unusual strings”, “Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love […] Well may the stars be mute”.25 The first four 22 Bettina L. Knapp, Edgar Allan Poe, New York, Ungar, 1984, pp. 66–90. 23 Ibidem, p. 52. Letter of July 2, 1844, in The Letters of E. A. Poe, ed. by John Ward Ostrom, Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 1948. See also Harry Lee Poe, E. A. Poe and the Mystery of the Universe, Waco, TX, Baylor U. P., 2012: “Poe saw a strong relationship between poetry and music […] Neither art form arose as a solitary human experience […] Before there was music, there was the rhythmical chant” (p. 72). 24 Emilio Cecchi, Scrittori inglesi e americani, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1964, vol. 1, p. 84. See Massimo Bacigalupo, “Poe in Italy”, in Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities, ed. by Lois Davis Vines, Iowa City, U. of Iowa P., 1999, pp. 62–74. 25 Cristina Giorcelli, “‘Israfel’: il liuto e la lira” in L’esotismo nella letteratura angloamericana,

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lines of “Serenade” (1833) are a perfect example of the poet’s musical sensitivity : “So sweet the hour – so calm the time,/ I feel it more than half a crime/ When nature sleeps and stars are mute/ To mar the silence ev’n with lute” (an echo of Elizabethan – if not Shakespearean – melody is still recognizable, from the distance of more than two centuries). Ironically, after such an elegant, subdued incipit, the poet goes on for another twenty-one (far from memorable) lines, and does, in fact, “mar the silence” with his lute. “Eldorado” (1849) has an effective ballad rhythm, reminiscent of many medieval and Renaissance texts, as well as of their Romantic imitations, such as Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”. Hardly acceptable and awkward is the word play in the couple “chilling and killing” of “Annable Lee” (1849). “A Dream within a Dream” (1849), instead, shows a perfect balance between content/message and form, but also an exceptionally sincere (and best expressed) “confessional” intention, or movement of thought, enhanced by the spontaneous flow of rhymes (brow, now, avow / deem, seem, dream / creep, deep, weep) and, above all, by the mellow quality of the sequence of syllables in the title (I particularly like the iteration of the morbid sound dream and the insertion of within as a swift, whispered link in between) that echoes throughout the poem, concluding it as it should, that is, as it was expected. In “Ulalume” (1847) Bettina Knapp praises the “aural litanies, reminiscent of the operas of Esprit Auber, the nineteenth-century writer of witty, tuneful, and sophisticated operas, a precursor of impressionistic music who broke down tonality, paving the way for mood music”.26 The frequent use of archaic, Biblical spelling of verbs, of possessive adjectives and pronouns may, or may not, be a success: in “To – ” (1833) the alliteration almost turns into a tongue-twister, particularly hard for non-native speakers (“But that in heav’n thou had’st thy birth…”: with seven “t” or “th” sounds), but certainly not easy for native speakers, either. Unlike poems produced by poets who had a good musical ear, this text does not seem written to be read aloud, or put into music, and “sung”. In other cases, unfortunately, even as the poetic I tries to be “musical” (perhaps too musical, or hyper-musical) the compositional pattern contradicts the purpose aimed at, and results in a harsh, stiff diction, as in “Fanny” (1833): “Thus musical thy soft voice came,/ Thus trembled on thy tongue my name”. “The Haunted Palace” (1838–48) has undisputable merits, thanks to its synesthetic texture, where all senses contribute to create the “atmosphere”, that is an aura of glorious defeat. The “itinerary” of the text can be summed up as a mysterious, rapid transition from the music of a “well-tun8d” lute (lines 19–20) to the “discordant music” that accompanies a “hideous vol. 2, a c. El8mire Zolla, Roma, Lucarini, 1979, pp. 9–41. See also Bettina Knapp, Op. cit.: “Like Orpheus with his lyre, […] Israfel knows how to combine vocal and instrumental sounds in varying melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and timbres” (p. 68). 26 Bettina Knapp, Op. cit., p. 91.

Acoustic strategies in E. A. Poe

27

throng” that laughs “but smiles no more” (lines 44, 48). In other words, the transformation of the tone of the music sets the tone for the reversal of the palace’s fortunes. In between, the reader finds allusions to all modalities of perception: greenest valleys, radiant palace, banners yellow, golden, sweet day, wing8d odor, ruby glowing, sparkling, echoes “whose sweet duty was but to sing”, blushed, bloomed, “encrimsoned windows”, ghastly river. Such a simultaneous appeal to all senses, almost an orgy of accumulation, succeeds, at first, in stimulating, but in the end stuns and reduces the addressee of the rather confused message to impotence and indifference. Now, since I want to proceed towards the core of my discourse, devoting some observations to “The Bells”, I have to limit the discussion of “The Raven” to a series of minimal – but not marginal – observations. The text, in fact, is so famous, so often quoted even by detractors of Poe’s poetry, so frequently used as source for illustrations and transcodifications, that its undeniable historical and cultural significance does not need further investigation. Among its merits is the fact that it offered Roman Jakobson the occasion for one of his best critical essays.27 The refrain “nevermore” is explained by Poe (in “The Philosophy of Composition”, 1846)28 as the natural, inevitable choice. This is because it represents the synthetic response to the three major demands of the text: the acoustic dimension (the refrain had to be “sonorous, and susceptible of protracted emphasis”); compatibility with the predetermined tone of the poem (“melancholy”); and the necessity to offer an adequate semantic consistency in relation to the “variation of thought”. We should not forget, however, that the combination of “the long o as the most sonorous vowel” and the semi-consonant r (“the most producible consonant”) had inhabited Poe’s acoustic imagination for decades, since it obsessively appears, for instance, both in the sonnet “To Zante” (“Thy charms shall please no more/ Thy memory no more”, 1836) and in “Sonnet – Silence” (“his name’s ‘No more’”, 1839–45). The complex, articulated, and altogether more than satisfactory acoustic structure of the poem is made possible by other technical devices and mature stylistic strategies, whose final success was immediately recognized, in England, perhaps, more quickly than in the United States. In a letter from London (1846) Elizabeth Barrett wrote Poe that “some of my friends are taken by the fear of it [i. e. “The Raven”] and some by the music […] Mr. Robert Browning […] was struck much by the rhythm” (emphasis mine).29 The echoes of the long o and r 27 Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique g8n8rale, Paris, Minuit, 1963; see also Idem, Questions de po8tique, Paris, Seuil, 1973. 28 First published in Graham’s Magazine, April 1846. 29 Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. by Frederic G. Kenyon, 2 vols., London, SmithElder, 1897. See also “Two Creepy Centuries of Edgar Allan Poe”, in www.allmusic.com (Jan. 19, 2009).

28

R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

sounds recur through the lines, punctuating its most intense moments, and therefore working as a sort of general leitmotiv (morrow, sorrow, Lenore, door, outpour, before, bore, o’er, floor, ashore, implore, adore). A genial counterpoint consists in the numberless -ing clauses, a linguistic device that, through the use of the “continuous present”, conveys the “continuing presence” of the idea (the memory of a loss) that obsesses the protagonist’s mind: napping, rapping, tapping, dying, rustling, peering, dreaming, wondering, fearing, turning, burning, beguiling, smiling, meaning, seeing, sitting, guessing, expressing, divining, lining, parting, starting, flitting, streaming. The best acoustic results of this technique are produced when the present participles are combined in a couple, and rhyme with each other, not only at the end, but also in the middle of lines.30 Perhaps it’s opportune (to finally establish Poe’s historical significance also for what concerns this particular theme) to recall the fact that Gertrude Stein’s “discovery” of the crucial importance of the present continuous for the discourse on time in literary texts occurred almost one century later (The Making of Americans, 1910–1924).31 To conclude my short notes on the acoustic dimension of “The Raven”, I add that the text is also full of alliterations, that are as functional as the best alliterations in other titles of Poe’s lyrical macrotext: “silk, sad, uncertain rustling”, “followed fast and followed faster”, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt”, “still is sitting, still is sitting”, to quote just a few.32

4.

The rhetoric of arabesque

“The Bells” (1849),33 which I take into account keeping in mind both Dryden’s Ode and Emerson’s “Music”, offers, according to unanimous critical consent, more faults than merits, and demonstrates the inadequacy even of the most expert musical ear in absence of other ingredients that are essential to the textual and ideological success of a piece of literature.34 First of all, Poe should have 30 Tommaso Pisanti, “Il corvo e il cigno: la poesia di E. A. Poe”, in Critica letteraria, XXVIII (2000), pp. 335–343. 31 Stein wrote some major sections of the novel at the beginning of the 20th century (1903–10), frequently revising what she wrote. The text was not published until 1924, when excerpts appeared in Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review. In 1925 Contact Press published 500 copies of the novel. An abridged edition was published by Harcourt Brace in 1934. A definitive edition was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1995. 32 The best recent appreciation of “The Raven” is perhaps Richard Kopley’s and Kevin J. Hayes’ “Two Verse Masterworks: ‘The Raven’ and ‘Ulalume’” in The Cambridge Companion to E. A. Poe, ed. by K. J. Hayes, Cambridge U. Press, 2002, pp. 191–205. 33 Sartain’s Union Magazine, July 1849 (a few days after Poe’s death). 34 Among the few critics who have appreciated, or still appreciate, at least some aspects of the poem are Bettina Knapp (“the stressed, catching, pounding rhythm and the shifting me-

The rhetoric of arabesque

29

limited himself to the original idea, that is to say, a short poem (its first version consisted of 18 lines) devoted only to two kinds of messages conveyed by the sound of bells: the festive celebration of a wedding, and the sad accompaniment of a funeral. The first theme remained (section 2, after a short introduction in section 1); the second disappeared, or rather was superseded by an unrestrained phantasmagoria of images describing the triumph of the king of Ghouls (section 4) – thus forgetting the essentially realistic intention of the poem (word imitations of sounds, on the theme of ringing bells) – in a useless variation around the motif of “The Haunted Palace”. In between, another long and heterogeneous section was inserted, reproducing the effect of the tolling of the alarm bells, in particular as they are used to alert the people of a fire burst. If one can have too much of a good thing, it is easy to imagine what can be the reactions to the exaggeration of a bad thing: nausea, irritation, boredom. These are the effects on most readers of Poe’s self-referential virtuosity. The 18 lines have become 112. The great number of -ing clauses, that in “The Raven” was justified, as I said, also at the level of content, since it expressed the “duration” of the memory of a devastating loss, is redundant here. The choice of unusual, archaic words (some sound as ridiculous, unnecessary inventions of an author who has lost his awareness of the English vocabulary and shifts towards an alien, abstract linguistic dimension) adds no curiosity, no sense of novelty to the text: suffice here to quote semantic and semiotic monsters like tintinnabulation, turbulency, expostulation, to say nothing of the “Runic rhyme”, stolen from Gray’s Descent of Odin, totally out of place in the context. The word “bells” is used no less than 61 times. In the end, the “horror vacui” results in an essentially “empty” textual space, filled with the vaticinations of an unstable mind, as Wallace Stevens would say.35 The rhythm, that should be the translation of precise rhythmical patterns and tones employed by professional bell-ringers – exceeding the limits of verbal translation – is dispersed, fades away, or wanders shapeless, incoherent, pathetically purposeless. To go back to the major outlines of my analysis: “The Bells” is not a text that is inspired by music (like Dryden’s), praising music and its “transcendental” qualities (like Emerson’s), that tries to rival with the noblest (and most abstract) of arts in a fair competition (like “Israfel”), acknowledging (and avoiding) the risks that one runs when one moves (as Foucault would say) from one epistemological field to another, no matter how contiguous and (in theory) compatible the two fields are. lodious sonorities […] give the poem its remarkably dramatic auditory effect”, Op. cit., p. 96) and James M. Hutchisson, according to whom the “melodious” poem “deceives and disarms the reader, moving from an unassailable lightheartedness at the beginning [towards] the tolling of the ‘iron bells’ of a funeral” (cf. Poe, Jackson, U. of Mississippi P., 2005, p. 213). 35 Wallace Stevens: “if poetry is reduced to the vaticinations of the imagination, it soon becomes worthless”, in W. Stevens, Letters, ed. by Holly Stevens, New York, Knopf, 1966, p. 500.

30

R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

It is a text produced by a poet who certainly had a sincere interest in music and a finer than average sensibility to it, but who lost his command on structure, abused in rhetorical (blatantly acoustic) devices (that allowed J. Phelps Fruit to define Poe’s technique in this poem not as onomatopoeic but as onomatopoetic),36 discarding his central themes in favor of far-fetched, obscure innuendos. Had Poe kept faith to his original idea, or had he, at least, imitated the ample breath and perfectly balanced length of Dryden’s Ode – its combination of the plurality of tones, the intelligence of variations, the consistency of its essential message – his poem might now stand as the 19th century American equivalent of the English baroque masterpiece. Being what it is, we cannot but prefer the natural musicality of Shelley’s fragment; and perhaps, even the modest harmony of Emerson’s “Music”. Significantly enough, “The Bells” proved very tricky for all composers who, later in the 19th and even too often in the 20th century, tried to use it as a hypotext for their musical experimentations. Probably the only truly successful transcodification is Sergey Rachmaninoff ’s Choral symphony for soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus and orchestra, Op. 35 which, in order to be adequate as to the source text, yet at the same time effective and satisfactory as a work per se, does not use the original English version. Instead, it uses Kostantin Bal’mont’s Russian translation, which takes substantial liberties with the rhythm by simplifying the structure and cancelling almost all repetitions of the word “bells”.37

5.

Operatic experimentations

Poe’s peculiar sensitiveness to music, his awareness of late 18th century European composers (in his Marginalia he quotes Mozart, in a review of a concert he mentions Haydn) and of the contemporary musical scene (again in Marginalia he discusses Maria Malibran, the great soprano, reviewing her Biography by Countess Di Merlin),38 are taken for granted by critics. His spontaneous and textually successful tension towards acoustic perception is revealed, as I suggested, more than in his poetry, in his fiction, where it contributes to the effectiveness of plots, to the construction of characters, to the structure of the 36 J. Phelps Fruit, The Mind and Art of Poe’s Poetry, London, Allenson, 1971, p. VIII. 37 Harry Lee Poe, Op. cit., p. 20. Eloise M. Boyle, “Poe in Russia”, in Poe Abroad, ed. by D. Vines, cit., pp. 179–181. See also Giovanna Moracci, “Poe in Russia: la mediazione di Bal’mont”, in Il ritorno di Edgar Allan Poe & Co. 1809–2009, a. c. di A. Goldoni, A. Mariani e C. Martinez, Napoli, Liguori, 2011, pp. 149–155. 38 Memoirs and Letters of Madame Malibran, ed. by Countess Di Merlin, Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1840.

Operatic experimentations

31

narrative, and to the intelligence and depth of the message.39 The best results are those in which the passion for music and the interest in theater enter into an alliance that produces the melodramatic or rather an operatic dimension. It is a characteristic of Poe’s genius that an outdated criticism used to condemn, that instead contemporary scholarship finds particularly intriguing. The theatricality of Poe’s frame of mind, his search for the effect, his combination of introspection and performance, and of introverted and extroverted psychological traits, are the writer’s personal mark. They are the key to the understanding of his artistic procedures. Even if he did not write for the theater (his only tragedy Politian40 was left unfinished and what remains of it does not suggest that it was of any special significance), he conceived the art of writing as the construction of a “spectacle”, in which characters move like actors, playing parts entrusted to them by their destiny. Poe, according to Haletheia Hayter, was a personality “thinking in terms of the theatre”.41 The structure of all major tales includes (even in the case of very short short stories, e. g. “The Tell-tale Heart”) – as in both classic and Romantic drama, or in an early 19th century European symphony – an introduction, the “complication” of the plot, the “climactic” moment, the d8nouement, the grand finale (with a surprise, or the hoax of the reader);42 as well as, in general, a number of variations, “digressions”, and parentheses that Poe’s mind knew how to manage, without losing track of the pre-conceived effect he wanted to obtain. All these elements are controlled by an “author” who feels like a demiurge, a puppet showman, or an omnipotent conductor/director who expects, in the end, a well-deserved standing ovation. No wonder that St8phane Mallarm8 thought that the greatest gift of Poe (as a poet and as a prose writer) was the capacity to combine music and architecture, rhythm and sense of proportions, perception of space and sense of time, invention of mathematical formulae and clever solution of linguistic questions.43 Poe’s interest in the world of spectacles and entertainment in the cities where he lived and the intrinsic theatricality of his fiction have been extensively studied 39 Andrea Mariani, “Architettura musicale ed estetica dell’arabesco”, in La questione romantica, 11 (2001), pp. 25–42. 40 The fragments of Politian were published in The Raven and Other Poems (1845). See Jeffrey H. Richards, “Poe, Politian, and the Drama of Critique”, in Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. III, n. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 3–27 and Annalisa Goldoni, “Corpi spettacolo in tre racconti grotteschi di Poe”, in Il ritorno di Edgar Allan Poe & Co., cit., p. 17. 41 Haletheiea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, London, Faber & Faber, 1968, p. 138. 42 Carlo Martinez, Poe’s Balloonin’: Hoax Writing, Journalism, and the Literary Field , Napoli, Liguori, 2008; Ugo Rubeo, “Hoaxing the Novel: Parodia dei generi in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym”, in Il ritorno di Edgar Allan Poe & Co, cit., pp. 4–13. 43 St8phane Mallarm8, Oeuvres complHtes, Paris, La Pl8iade, 1945, pp. 228–230.

32

R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

by North American and European criticism. It could even be said that Poe’s texts present the reader with two hybrid literary genres, or sub-genres: that of “theatrical fiction” and “theatrical poetry”.44 His construction of plots often includes masks and masques, grand scenographic displays and costumes (the protagonist of “The Cask of Amontillado” wears the robe of a clown), stage directions, notes and discussions on the importance of voices, tones, gestures.45 The hybrid (I would add “genially hybrid”) dimension of Poe’s tales was underlined by Todorov.46 Poe often chooses to stage one-act plays, which are clearly indebted to the classical tradition of the unity of time, action, and, above all, place: the House of Usher, the castle of Prospero in the “Masque of the Red Death”, and the fantastic maison de sant8 of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether can all be interpreted along this line.47 His fiction is constellated with elements of obvious meta-theatricality, with frequent examples of the “play within the play” or the “poem within the tale” technique.48 His readings were rich and sound, including classic Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and W. A. Schlegel’s Course of Dramatic Art. His evenings spent at the theater regularly produced poignant reviews. But what counts most for the present essay is the fact that, as I was saying, Poe was not only interested in music and in the theater, but in musical theater proper. He was, for instance, a great fan of Carl Maria von Weber who, with Der Freischütz (1821), founded Romantic opera in Germany. Von Weber’s masterpiece was produced in numberless versions in the United States, generating enthusiastic responses wherever it was staged.49 It reached North America at a very suitable moment, that is, when the vogue for European (in particular German) folklore had conquered a large public of readers, creating and shaping a taste that would last for decades. Other popular operas by von Weber were Oberon and Abu Hassan. The former was obviously based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and might have appealed to Poe precisely for its imaginative Shakespearean atmosphere. The latter should have interested Poe for its exotic setting. But the preference for Der Freischütz’s solid and tense structure (that is theatrically and musically much more convincing) bears witness to the quality of Poe’s awareness of the performing arts. The balanced dialogue between melody 44 Leo Marchetti, “E. A. Poe, dalla contaminazione dei generi alla rottura dei vasi”, in Ai confini dei generi: casi di ibridismo letterario, a c. di Alberto Destro e Annamaria Sportelli, Bari, Graphis, 1999, pp. 139–146. 45 For the importance of the voice in Poe, cf. Gianfranca Balestra, Geometrie visionarie. Composizione e decomposizione in E. A. Poe, Milano, Unicopli, 1990, pp. 97–117. 46 Tsvetan Todorov, “Les limites d’Edgar A. Poe”, in Les Genres du discours, Paris, Seuil, 1978. 47 L. Marchetti, op. cit., pp. 141–143. See also Sergio Perosa, “Poetica di Poe”, in Semeia, a. c. di L. Innocenti, F. Marucci, P. Pugliatti, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1994. 48 Cf. Annalisa Goldoni, op. cit., pp. 15–26. 49 June Ottenberg, Opera Odyssey : Towards a History of Opera in Nineteenth-Century America, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1994.

The melodramatic imagination

33

and harmony in the orchestration of the opera – its recitatives, the modest presence of traditional arias, the well outlined construction of characters, all of which are at the same time psychologically reliable human beings and archetypes in the Jungian sense of the word – represented for Poe the perfect example and an apt scenario for the free play of affections, the development of events and the happy conclusion of a clear-cut plot. Der Freischütz, therefore, was not only a spectacle to go and see, but an intense experience to live, an event to face and witness, something that happened in front of the spectator’s consciousness, with such a fascination that one could scarcely refrain from feeling involved in it. Indeed, the spectator became an actor among real actors, and a singer among other singers on stage. From the musical point of view, we should also keep in mind that Weber’s masterpiece was a seminal example of Gesamtkunswerk, already employing the technique of Leitmotif. One generation later, Wagner showed to be, in fact, a great admirer of the composer and of his music, as well as of his musical esthetics, thus acknowledging their historical importance. To a certain extent, Poe’s obsessively recurring themes and his sometimes monomaniac research of certain effects can also be considered as belonging to the category of well-planned Grundtheme. The famous scene in the Wolf ’s Glen (Act II) of Der Freischütz is generically poesque, but finds a more genuinely American literary equivalent in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), though Hawthorne’s tone (even in his most Romantic or Gothic pieces) could never be defined as operatic or melodramatic.

6.

The melodramatic imagination

The epigraph to “The Fall of the House of Usher” not only alerts the reader as to the theme and tone of the story that follows, anticipating its protagonist’s temperament and peculiar malaise, but also reveals the autobiographical (I was almost going to say “auto-psychological”) source of the text (with the required coincidence of author, narrator and protagonist),50 which can easily be read as a pre-Freudian confession, an act of perceptive self-analysis on the part of Poe himself (who conveniently uses a musical metaphor): Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitit qu’on le touche il rHsonne. (De B8ranger).51

50 This is the first of a series of subsequent identifications, explicitly underlined by Poe, or left implicit: that of family with a mansion; of a house (with “vacant eye-like windows”) with mind/consciousness of the owner ; of Roderick with his twin sister Madeline; of Roderick with the anonymous first person narrator. 51 Edgar Allan Poe, Racconti sensazionali, a c. Carlo Martinez, Venezia, Marsilio, 2014, p. 305.

34

R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

After such an inscription (in whose first line one cannot miss noticing the atmosphere of suspense derived from the French word suspendu – and projected unto the text) the tale opens with one of the best examples of alliteration in Poe: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year…” , in which the sound of five d’s reproduces the disquieting absence of sounds and the ominous scarcity of light that faces the “spectator” of the scene as the curtain is raised. The scenography is essential: “the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain”. Another alliteration describes the narrator’s feelings, his “mindscape”. The iteration of the chosen sound in the sentence “there was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart” is made more effective by the -ing clauses, as we saw in “The Raven”. After a few sentences, another alliteration describes Roderick’s eyes as “large, liquid, and luminous”. Then, in a two page flash back, the narrator informs the reader of the background and context of the present situation. A summary of antecedent facts is a common feature of 19th century operas, and is particularly well used by Verdi, through a major character, as in Macbeth, that opens with Lady Macbeth reading her husband’s letter, explaining the events to which Shakespeare devotes the first four scenes of Act 1; or through a minor character, who exists only for that purpose, as in Trovatore. The ensuing description of Roderick is such a detailed close up, that it can hardly be defined “operatic”, since at the opera house singers moving on stage are generally seen at a distance. But on certain occasions, a heavy, clever make up, looks, faces, and expressions of some particularly famous prima donnas, tenors and baritones, made a special impact on the audience and reviewers reported them as if they had seen them at a short distance. It is a characteristic of melodrama and of opera, in fact, the tendency to cancel the gaps that separate stage and floor, to annihilate the differences in the roles of those who act and those who should only be voyeurs respectively. As we continue our re-reading of the tale, we must avow that operatic and non-operatic elements alternate. The fact that Roderick and the narrator spend “several days” in each other’s company without an action, is certainly a nonoperatic trait since Poe devotes a good number of pages to describe the rather long period. In operas, above all in Italian opera, the different phases of complication of plot, climax, catastrophe, d8nouement, and happy or tragic ending, usually follow each other in less than two hours (even when between Acts I and II or III several years, not days, pass). So from this perspective Poe’s tale, which still remains a rather “short” story, but progresses at uneven pace, shows affinities with the noble tradition of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. As we have remarked The incorrect accent on the last verb (“rHsonne” instead of “r8sonne”) shows how Poe’s French was amateurish. Later, we find Von Weber instead of von Weber. But the indifference to orthography and to correct spelling (of foreign words, but also in English) is a characteristic not only of Poe, or of the 19th century : Ezra Pound docet.

The melodramatic imagination

35

before, Poe could not resist digressions, parentheses, reflections “by the way”, that is, elements that regularly tend to transform his idiosyncratic fiction into essays. On the contrary, the sudden apparition, in the background, of Lady Madeline is as swift and flashy as an epiphany, (in spite of the penumbra of the space in which it happens), a flash of signification, a concentration of connotation (with as little denotation as possible), and therefore I have no hesitation in calling it a very operatic movement. The “last waltz of Von Weber” that Roderick interprets with “a certain singular perversion and amplification” is a piano piece which had become very popular in Germany in the 1820s, whose fame spread abroad, reaching the United States before the end of the decade. Does Roderick play the piece at a piano, whose existence is not mentioned in the text of the tale? Or does he use (or invent) a version for guitar, since he is described by the narrator as often spending his time with the “wild improvisations of his speaking guitar” (emphasis mine) ? The piece was, especially in America, commonly attributed to von Weber, because a manuscript containing the score had been found among Weber’s papers after his death. The attribution was also made possible by the fact that its real author, Karl Gottlieb Reissinger, was Weber’s successor as director of the Italian Opera House and Kapelmeister in Dresden.52 Poe quotes it because, being a “wild air” that sounded as the utmost Weberian piece of music, its “distortion” by Roderick can be said to be, in the narrator’s memory, almost unbearable (“I hold painfully in mind…”). It is no coincidence, therefore, that, after underlining the pain that Roderick’s music provoked in the narrator’s ears (and in his memory), the narrator should stress the fact that a “morbid condition of the auditory nerve […] rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer”. Does Roderick, then, hearing the music he produces, suffer twice? Is he immune to it, because he somehow expels it, and, thanks to it, gets rid of interior suffering? Or does he hear his music from within, not through his “auditory nerve”, but through his brain and consciousness? Whatever the answer, the reader understands that the crucial moment of the story is approaching. But, once again, as in opera, the catastrophe must be “unloaded” onto the audience after yet another moment of suspense. In this sense, the self-quotation of “The Haunted Palace” as a “rhapsody” improvised by Roderick has the function of a long romanza or a “grand aria”, possessing the elements of selfreferentiality of an interior monologue (the last line of the first stanza, by the way, mentions “the music of the spheres”). The “overflowing” of the soul’s emotions is meant to “fly over” the occasional partner in the scene, in order to 52 See the entry Karl Gottlieb Reissiger (1798–1859) in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, St. Sadie, 1991, vol. XV; cf. also T. O. Mabbott, ed., The Collected Works of E. A. Poe, vol. III, Tales and Sketches, Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 1978, p. 418, n. 9.

36

R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

directly reach the audience, provoking immediate response, sympathy and identification. Exactly as a tenor or baritone protagonist of an opera, Roderick sings it, in fact, without addressing his guest, though the narrator interprets it as a message of mental decline and desolation: “I perceived […] a full consciousness […] of the tottering of his lofty reason”. The poem/song is an evident example of the technique of mise en abyme, and a very transparent allegory. At the same time, the surreptitious manoeuvre of the poetic insertion shows Poe’s desperate desire to be recognized as a poet, as well as his readiness to experiment hybrid literary genres. The (apparent) death of Lady Madeline is more in keeping with the tradition of Greek tragedy than with that of 19th century opera. In classic theater, as we know, deaths never occurred directly before the audience, but were reported by a messenger or a minor character. We have important examples of this strategy in Shakespeare, too. Can one forget the narrative of Ophelia’s death, or the dramatic impact of the reported death of Lady Macbeth, followed by the memorable cue of Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5): “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow […] Life’s but a walking shadow […] it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing” ? But also in opera many heroes and heroines do not actually die on the stage; for example Anna Bolena, Lucrezia Borgia, Maria Stuarda, Manrico (Trovatore), Don Carlo (La forza del destino), Carlo (Don Carlos), Turiddu (Cavalleria rusticana) do not die on stage. Also Aida and Radames are not actually seen breathing their last breath. A sort of “anagn|resis”/agnitio takes place in Usher’s “region of horror” – an underground space that resembles so many similar claustrophobic spaces in Poe’s fiction (“The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Cask of Amontillado”), and in many opera settings (Fidelio, Anna Bolena, Trovatore, Don Carlos, Aida) – when the narrator, who is helping his host in the sad act of burying his sister, before “screwing” the lid of Lady Madeline’s coffin, discovers that Roderick and Lady Madeline “had been twins”. The operatic element of such a structural device hardly needs to be stressed, since it was a common feature of both comic and tragic musical theater, as well as of theater tout court, long before opera was invented. But in opera it regularly took the form of a coup de th8atre. The moment, in fact, implied a crucial – though brief – scene, with a sudden shift from the tone of suspense to that of relief, that was regularly underlined by an appropriate musical score.53 53 We should recall that ancient theater was, from the beginning, a form of musical drama that needed a choir, the “entrance and exit dances” (p#rodos and 8xodos), the contribution of various instruments during intervals, and many other elements that were considered indispensable to accompany poetry as a rite and as a religious ceremony. An “austere” and altogether poor, simple “prose theater” came in fashion rather late, in Europe and was the result of a sort of “splitting” of the genre into two sub-genres: opera, which included more

The melodramatic imagination

37

The violent storm that falls upon the tarn, the mansion, and its two inhabitants, is very much an operatic effect. It would be easy to quote dozens of similarly dramatic scenes in the history of European melodrama, in gloomy tragedies (Rigoletto), in Romantic dramas with happy ending (Der Freischütz), and in comic operas (Il barbiere di Siviglia). It was also a favorite stylistic device in German Romantic theater, to say nothing of Shakespeare (King Lear, Macbeth). In Verdi’s Otello and in Shakespeare’s The Tempest it occurs at the beginning of the play, casting an ominous light on the former, spreading a longing for relief and reconciliation through the latter. We find such a feature in Romantic and Victorian fiction (typical examples: Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss) throughout the 19th century. In fact, the feature is always characterized by a strong semantic density though, at the same time, it is seen as a traditional stylistic ingredient at an acoustic level. In music the scene of a storm offered composers the possibility to demonstrate their technical sophistication in imitating the rage of natural forces, so it had, even in the most distinguished cases (e. g. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony), an element of “acoustic challenge” analogous to the rhetorical techniques of alliteration and onomatopoeia. In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, however, the tempest is not a traditional storm, the reproduction of a natural event, but the allusion to a sort of supernatural outburst of demonic forces, which includes the conjuring up of “all terrestrial objects immediately around us […] glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion” (emphasis mine). The effects aimed at are most original and thoroughly characteristic of Poe at his best. The description is all but conventional: there is “no glimpse of the moon or stars – nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning”. The acoustic texture of Poe’s prose, in fact, does not imitate, here, the sounds of an atmospheric event, nor the often bombastic quality of its rendering in music, but a landscape of the mind, the nth invention in the exclusive province of his imagination. Before we come to the most operatic effect in the famous tale (the apparition and more singing and music (gradually giving up spoken acting, except for recitative, German Singspiel and operetta) and, in Wagner’s times, was obviously considered the most complete of arts according to the theory of Gesamtkunstwerk); and the bourgeois “prose theater” without any form of music, that dominated our Western tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries. The lure of music, though, so strongly persisted that the authors of plays, impresarios or directors often asked composers to provide for the accompaniment of some sort of stage music: see, e. g., Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843), which includes the famous wedding march. The more “austere” dramatic forms (e. g. the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Shaw, O’Neill, Williams) would have appeared dull and monotonous and surely deprived of all “sacred” connotations not only in classical times, but also to an audience, for instance, of Far Eastern culture. All attempts at reforming Western theater in the modern era (e. g. Antonin Artaud’s) took their inspiration from the suggestiveness of a “total theater”, like that of Bali, where music plays a central role.

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of Lady Madeline and the simultaneous death of brother and sister, followed by the crumbling of the house, which, obviously, cannot survive the extinction of the family), we are forced to slow down the pace of our reading, noticing that a series of strange feelings forebode the final show down, interrupting the adventures described in Sir Launcelot Canning’s “Mad Trist”. These sensations are physical, painful acoustic experiences, as well as anxieties that the old (imaginary) romance cannot appease. These “signs” seem at first to come from remote corners of the mansion and both Roderick and his guest try to ignore them. However, they become more and more evident, so much so that the two characters (and the readers of the tale) understand that they foreshadow and signify a dramatic event. In this case Poe’s operatic strategy consists in devoting much more space (and time) to the anticipation of the event than to the event itself. It is precisely what the music sometimes does, saving to itself, for a while, the role of occupying a “private” portion of the narration, while actors/singers do not speak/sing, and the action halts. It thus strains the audience’s mental disposition so much so, that the ensuing “catastrophe”, however tragic, is felt as a relief.54 The final scene, in sum, is synthetic, “condensed”, “tense”: “there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher”. When Poe published his tale, he could not have seen a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which would later become one of the most popular bel canto operas both in Europe and in the States, reaching New Orleans and New York only in 1841, two years after the composition of the short story.55 But there are striking similarities between Poe’s final scene and the famous scene of Lucia’s madness in Donizetti’s masterpiece; similarities that confirm our discourse on the operatic element of Poe’s prose. Poe, I mean, did not only imitate, or take inspiration from, European melodrama, but also somehow “foresaw” and duplicated its operations, divining, following and, in turn, shaping the taste of contemporary audiences, in a parallel quest for the same effects. Both in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Lucia the heroines appear “in a trance”, in long white robes. There is blood on them, which is perfectly normal in Lucia’s case, since she has just stabbed her husband, but largely unjustified for Lady Madeline, who was put into her sarcophagus after a long, mysterious illness, characterized not by visible blood (as would, for instance, be consumption) but, on the contrary, by pallor, weakness, malaise. The presence of 54 The structure of the narrative could equally well be defined as “cinematic”, in so far as it recalls the typical technique of Alfred Hitchcock and of all great masters of suspense. The crime itself, violence and bloodshed instead occupy a large portion of the shooting in pulp fiction and films. 55 The opera premiered in Naples, Teatro San Carlo, in 1835. It reached London in August 1839 and (with a French libretto) Paris in April 1839. It was one of the greatest successes in the 1841 season of Ferdinando Palmo Opera House at Chambers Street, New York.

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blood on her white robe, therefore, is “programmatic”, since it anticipates the violence of her “definitive” death, which also suggests her refusal of the “premature burial”,56 the aggressiveness of her desire to take revenge over her brother, and the shedding of the last drops of the family blood. In addition, both Lucia and Madeline are described as “trembling and reeling to and fro”, prey to their mad fevers and “death agonies”.57 This said, we cannot overlook the equally significant differences. But the divergence of the two texts does not refute the basic assumption of my analysis, since, in all cases, it leaves the differences circumscribed within the limits of major operatic conventions: Lucia sings her grief for almost half an hour, enriching it with acrobatic flourishes, Madeline keeps silent, expressing her grief only through a “low moaning cry”. Both ladies are indifferent to the astonished reactions of the surrounding characters. However Lucia has a whole court of gentlemen and ladies around her, singing a chorus that, like in Greek tragedies, implies and expects the spectators’ identification. On the other hand, Madeline has only two co-protagonists, who, in terror, keep as silent as she does. One is borne “to the floor a corpse” (having probably died a few seconds before his sister’s assault), the other flees “aghast”. The last period describes a scene (fulfilling the “intention” of the title: the fall of the House) that is only a corollary but presents us with the perfect “scenographic” grand finale, that is, in its condensed articulation, as effective and convincing as Wagner’s final scene of Götterdämmerung.58 Before concluding this section on Poe I want to add a few remarks, in the form of a flash forward, to what I have been saying. Further evidence that Poe’s texts possess not only a generic musical but a particular operatic dimension, is the fact that some outstanding composers tried, in the second half of the 19th century and in the 20th century, to translate them into operas. The case of Debussy’s long and 56 The obvious allusion is to the title of the famous tale of 1844 first published on the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. 57 I need to quote, in this context, Whitman’s lines from “Proud Music of the Storm”: “I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’s unnatural gleam/ Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevel’d” in order to remark the difference of tone in the two authors’ response to their heroines’ sufferings. While Poe’s narrator (and reader), struck by the uncanny element of supernatural horror, is eager to distance and detach himself from the scene he is forced to look at, Whitman’s poetic I is drawn towards the stage by a sense of sympathy and pathetic identification. Lady Madeline, in fact, though disarmed, is miserable but terrifying, whereas Whitman’s Lucia is miserable and pitiable. 58 It is not my intention, on this occasion, to engage with the slippery theme, but many critics would probably be ready to agree with me, that Poe and Wagner show a strong, intriguing affinity of taste, when they seem to court the category of Kitsch. The risk becomes very concrete when the two geniuses forget to apply the opportune strategy of safety distance in regard to their imagination; an imagination that is, as we have noticed in Poe, very powerful, but also acknowledges no sense of limits.

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R. W. Emerson and E. A. Poe

painful struggle to transcodify “The Fall of the House of Usher” (between 1908 and 1917) is well known. In a letter to one of his friends, Debussy confessed that he was identifying his physical and psychological troubles with those of Roderick Usher (another meaningful, uncanny identification!). He felt so fully immersed in the story that he was ready to accept Madeline Usher’s sudden visit to his lonely chamber with smaller surprise than the student of “The Raven” accepts the “ominous bird’s” entrance into his. A major role in the musician’s fascination with Poe in general (another text he vainly tried to turn into an opera was “The Devil in the Belfry”) and with the “House of Usher” in particular was played by the mediation of Baudelaire’s translations and of his essays on the “poHte maudit” ante litteram. The fragments of La chute de la maison Usher were used, after Debussy’s death, by Carolyn Abbate and by Juan Allende Blin in the 1970s and, in 2004, by Robert Orledge. The latter, unfortunately, decided to modify what, to me, was the most original and perceptive choice of the French composer, that is to say the idea of having three baritone roles for the three male characters (Roderick, his friend, the doctor), evidently implying that they were three faces of the same personality.59 Music, the theater and opera “constellated” Poe’s life and punctuate both his poetry and his prose works. The intersection of the three forms of artistic expression runs through his major artistic achievements and obsessively appears in his less successful literary productions. His mother was not only an actress, but a singer, as well. His wife Virginia played the flute (as did Sidney Lanier, as we shall see), the harp, and the piano. Following Poe’s encouragements, she became a tasteful singer.60 In January 1842, as she was singing, she started to bleed, showing the first symptoms of tuberculosis. She was gradually confined to home and bed, dying in January 1847. The tragic connection between music, singing, disease, and death reminds me of Hoffmann’s tale “Rath Krespel”, that became Act 2 of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann (which premiered in Paris in 1881, four months after Offenbach’s death). No matter how “spiritual” earthly music can be, it had, for Poe, a dramatic element and a clear affinity with the turmoil of the soul, as well as the dangerous – though fascinating – “telluric” characteristic later discovered by Ernst Bloch and described in his meditations on the theme. At its best, music was felt by the poet as the sublime expression of man’s capacity to raise himself above the level of commonplace daily life. It could be, however, the perfect paradigm not only of a “mathematical” but also of “dynamic” sublime (in Kantian terms). In their 59 Other operatic context and references to opera or operatic structures can be found in The Pit and the Pendulum (Fidelio), The Masque of the Red Death (Ernani, Un ballo in maschera) and The Man that Was Used-up (Les Contes d’Hoffmann). 60 Kenneth Silverman, Op. cit., p. 179.

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efforts to compete with the heavenly, “unimpassioned” songs of the archangel Israfel (“best bard, because the wisest”), poets and musicians can lose themselves, in a challenge that accepts the risk of vbqir and the consequent divine punishment.

Chapter Two: H. D. Thoreau and Herman Melville

In a world of peace and love music would be the universal language; and men would greet each other in the fields in such accents as a Beethoven now utters at rare intervals, from a distance. (Henry David Thoreau, 1840)

1.

Thoreau’s visual and acoustic ekphrases

As we have seen, the best music for Emerson was the melody produced by the “Aeolian harp”, since the instrument is perfect because it is not played by man but by the blowing of the wind. For Henry David Thoreau (a fellow transcendentalist, a pupil of Emerson’s, and his secretary) “There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music” (Walden, “Solitude”); “The strains of the Aeolian harp and of the wood thrush […] lift us up in spite of ourselves”.1 As a consequence, the best singing was that of the bird on the branch of a tree, of “chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost” (as written in the epigraph to Walden). In the funeral oration in honor of Thoreau (1862) Emerson stressed the fact that Thoreau’s eye was as open to beauty as his ear was open to music, and specified: “He found music in single strains and poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire”.2 The simultaneous mention of music and telegraph in relation to Thoreau is a brilliant insight on Emerson’s part, since it underlines the coexistence, in the author of Walden, of sincere artistic enthusiasm and ubiquitous scientific curiosity. The latter almost made him plan something similar to Emily Dickinson’s “scarlet experiment” of Poem 861, that 1 Henry D. Thoreau, Journals, in Writings of H. D. Thoreau, Walden Edition, 20 vols., Boston and New York, Houghton-Mifflin, 1906, vol. XII, p. 39. 2 R. W. Emerson, “Thoreau”, in Selection from R.W. Emerson, ed. by Stephen E. Whicher, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1957, p. 382.

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is, “Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music”.3 Not only Keats’s noble nightingale or Shelley’s divine skylark, but also the humble sparrow, the pigeon, the hawk, the brown-thrasher, the wood-pewee, the chewink, the wood-thrush, even the geese, in fact all these enchanting creatures – whose “melodies” (though sometimes harsh and lacking a conventional “musicality”) should make all musicians feel ashamed – are objects of close scrutiny and scientific analysis, no less than the “golden and silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels” (Walden, “Spring”). In Thoreau’s consciousness there is no friction, in sum, between nature, art (beauty), technology, and economics. The whistle of the train documents the progress of man and the liveliness of human activities; it can be pleasantly accepted by the ear because it sounds “like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard” (Walden, “Sounds”). On the other hand, Thoreau’s early ecological awareness led him to wish (and to promote) the establishment of what in the mid 20th century would be defined as a “balanced soundscape”, in which natural sounds, even the noises that inhabit the world that surrounds mankind, rather than being cancelled by the imperialistic invasion of artificial acoustic emissions, loud voices and an aggressive, omnipresent “artificial” music, can still have an essential role to play, in favor of a healthy environment. Thoreau, who was so fond of the silence and solitude of the woods, in fact, was ready to accept “human” music because he could read it as an emblem of the rhythm of life, that is to say, as an “outer accompaniment” that mirrors the inner pulse of our organism.: Music is the sound of the circulation in nature’s veins. It is the flux which melts nature […] The healthy ear always hears it, nearer or more remote. When I hear music, I flutter.4

Scholars have observed that Thoreau’s prose is full of ekphrases, both acoustic and visual. Appropriate and minute descriptions of events, living beings, calculations of sizes of objects, the cycles of seasons, shades of colors, challenge the reality they confront using a mature and “professional” language, which wishes to demonstrate that it can say/express almost everything. But the perfect, ideal communication is music, the language that makes men and Nature interact: What a fine and beautiful communication is Music […] It is the flower of language – thought colored and curved. The brave man is the sole patron of music: he recognizes it for his mother-tongue – a more mellifluous and articulate language than words […] In 3 Likewise, in his contemplation of the trout’s scales, the aesthetic dimension is not separated from scientific curiosity, which would have the subject dissect and eviscerate the fish, even though this experiment meant to destroy its life and beauty. Goethe’s heritage had a strong influence on such an attitude. 4 Quoted in Robert Sullivan, The Thoreau You Don’t Know, New York, Harper Collins, 2009, pp. 31–32.

Thoreau’s visual and acoustic ekphrases

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a world of peace and love music would be the universal language; and men would greet each other in the fields in such accents as a Beethoven now utters at rare intervals from a distance […] Music is either a sedative or a tonic to the soul.5

The organ of sight was for Thoreau “the Brahmin caste of the five senses”. After it, smell was almost as important and taste (often combined with smell) came third. Hearing could provide unique ecstatic moments (“When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop”)6 but was better “justified” in the context of synesthetic epiphanic experiences: As my eye rested on the blossom of the meadowsweet in a hedge, I heard the note of an autumnal cricket, and was penetrated with the sense of autumn. Was it sound? Or was it form? Or was it scent? Or was it flavor? It is now the royal month of August. When I hear this sound, I am as dry as the rye which is everywhere cut and housed, though I am drunk with the season’s wine.7

Thoreau was also intimately convinced that noises, voices, sounds (even the fascinating shriek of a solitary hawk) – and therefore also notes, songs, moving melodies and articulated harmonies – are nothing but “bubbles on the surface of silence”. This is the reason why his visual ekphrases are so much more effective than the acoustic ones. Let’s read again a memorable passage in the penultimate chapter of Walden (“Spring”), when Thoreau loses himself in contemplation of the beauty of the flight of a “slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk”. He does not mention, as on other occasions, the shriek or voice of the animal, but (only once) its chuckle. The “message” (“Out of all this beauty something must come”, as Ezra Pound would say in Pisan Cantos) must be almost exclusively visual, otherwise too much reference to the acoustic dimension would diminish the abysmal distance between observer and object of perception – a miracle that cannot be profaned by sounds: It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter like a butterfly […] but it sported in proud reliance in the fields of the air ; mounting again

5 It is strange that few critics should have paid attention to this aspect of Thoreau’s doctrine for so many decades, considering that F. B. Sanborn had already dealt with the theme in his early biography The Life of Henry D. Thoreau, Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1917, pp. 231–232. 6 Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, p. 175 (in The Writings of H. D. Thoreau, Walden Edition, 20 vols., Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1906, vol. II). His imperative, expressed in Biblical tones, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses” refers, however, to all senses and does not imply a privileged role for hearing (Journals, in Ibidem, vol. VIII, p. 40), In another intimate moment he wrote: “The creaking of the crickets seems at the very foundation of all sound” (Ibidem, vol. VIII, p. 306), confirming the primacy of natural noises as the source of all acoustic experiences. 7 Ibidem, vol. VIII, p. 370.

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and again with its strange chuckle […] turning over and over like a kite […] It was not lonely but made all the earth lonely beneath it.

And so on for some other purely descriptive sentences, until, finally, the visual ekphrasis soars as high as the hawk in its flight, becoming a gem of poetic prose: Was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow’s trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from air?

Shall we say that a man who could produce such masterpieces using only his sight did not need sounds, songs, or music, unless as ingredients of synesthetic emotions, as accompaniment, or to establish a safe distance? Music, in sum, could give Thoreau genuine emotions only when it did not want to be the protagonist of his daily experience. In his writings we find the transcription of genuine moments of acoustic happiness, as well as physical and psychological satisfaction related to a soundscape, only when sounds meet his demand for a low profile in the context of his life. This occurs, for instance, when he describes his response to the melody that spreads along the street that is coming from a humble Italian boy who plays his accordion. Thoreau met organ-grinders more than once, since they were ubiquitous, both in the North and in the South; they could be seen in the Italian section of New Orleans French Carr8 called Little Palermo as well as in remote villages along Cape Cod.8 It is interesting to analyze his ambivalent reaction to their musical “performances” in two different pages of his Journal (year 1851). The first time the boy’s moves through the streets of Concord and his music are described “as if a cheeta had skulked howling through the streets of the village with knotted trail”. In sharp contrast with this negative and fastidious impression is what Thoreau says after a second meeting: I saw an organ grinder this morning before a rich man’s house – thrilling the street with harmony – loosening the very paving stones & tearing the routine of life to rags and tatters – when the lady of the house showed up a window and in a semi-philanthropic tone inquired if he wanted anything to eat – But he very properly it seemed to me kept on grinding & paid no attention to her question – feeding her ears with melody unasked for – so the world shows up its windows and interrogates the poet – and sets him to gauging all casks, in return – It seemed to me that the music suggested that the recompense should be as fine as the gift – It would be much nobler to enjoy the music though you paid no money for it – than to presume always a beggarly relation […] It is perhaps the best instrumental music that we have.9

8 Daniel Lombardo, Images of America: Orleans, Charleston, S.C., Arcadia Publ., 2001. 9 Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, vol. 3 (1848–1851), ed. by Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson, William Rossi, Princeton, NJ, Princeton U. P., 1990, p. 237 (May 20th, 1851).

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The organ-grinders of those times were the first “musical operators” who could appreciate (and exploit) the catchy quality of the most original tunes produced in Opera Houses, where they could seldom enter. They immediately adapted them to their instruments, making them popular in all social milieus. Documents of these procedures are numerous and include the most entertaining – or pathetic – “cavatine” and “cabalette”, duets by Mozart (“L/ ci darem la mano”), Rossini (even from operas which did not permanently enter the repertoire), Meyerbeer (Robert le diable), Auber (Fra diavolo), Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, as well as the monodic arias par excellence (“Giusto ciel, in tal momento”,“Casta diva”, “Una furtiva lacrima”, “Deh non credea mirarti”). Thoreau evidently preferred to enjoy the music of melodramas after it had undergone a “democratic” transformation – for example when it had been “domesticated” by humble figures of young immigrants – rather than experiencing it first hand, directly from the productions of major opera companies and the great stars of bel canto.

2.

A music of thoughts

As much as Poe’s tales and poems gave birth to an enormous amount of musical reductions and transpositions till the turn into the 21rst century, Thoreau’s impact on the history of contemporary music in the United States was strong and lasting, due to such outstanding composers and theoricians as Charles Ives and John Cage. The former, who is the author of the memorable Concord Sonata (1919, second version 1947),10 used Thoreau as one of his “subjects”, without which the amazing structure of his work, divided into four parts (the other three being “Emerson”, “Hawthorne”, “The Alcotts”), would lose a substantial contribution. Ives was sure that Thoreau was a great musician “not because he played the flute, but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘The Symphony’. The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determinate his value as a composer”.11 Let’s check the truth of Ives’s statement by applying an adequate re-reading of the opening paragraph of Walden. Incipits, in fact, set the tone and the mood in a narrative of some length and can be analyzed as a sort of linguistic and stylistic mise-en-abyme of the rest:

10 After a semi-private premiere in Cos Cob, Connecticut, the first complete production of the composition took place in New York City Hall in 1939. 11 Charles Ives, Essays before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. by H. Boatwright, London, Calder and Boyard, 1969, p. 51.

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When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

The structure of the passage is perfect in its apparent “denotative” simplicity, but not so easy to describe. The first sentence is long and indeed well articulated. Punctuation separates a series of parenthetic clauses that provide the reader with a clear sense of space and the “situation” in which the author’s experience took place. Every sentence modifies the sentence that precedes it, correctly specifying the semantic boundaries of its meaning and/or adding new appropriate, useful information. From the point of view of the content, the central “theme” of the book (its plan or “intention”, which coincide with its overall message) is offered as a sort of mathematical major premise, in the most synthetic way : “I lived alone”, immediately followed by five “corollaries”, which are introduced as all but marginal specifications : 1. in the woods, 2. a mile from any neighbor, 3. in a house, 4. on the shore of Walden Pond, 5. in Concord, Massachusetts. No less than five spatial points of reference are deemed essential, so that the reader has no doubts concerning the importance of the location of the “story” he/she is going to read. Space, therefore, proves more important than time. In fact, information about time is vague (“When I wrote…”). What is significant is not actually when, nor how long ago the events occurred, but how long they lasted (“two years and two months”). The surplus of space finds no correlative in time, which lacks specific information. This famous incipit is important in terms of content, message, implicit ideological context and background. However, it is also important because of the organization of sentences, alternation of primary and secondary clauses, as well as the short, essential parentheses, opening and closing in keeping with the general design. All of which clearly show Thoreau’s skill in immediately detecting the right rhythm, the just pace of narration. The text thus offers an example of nonchalant elegance, undisputed good taste, and alertness as to the fundamental question of establishing as soon as possible a harmony between narrator and readers, capturing not only their attention and interest, but also their “ears”. The leitmotif (“I lived alone”) is introduced after a few bars, which create a minimal but effective suspense, increasing the expectation of the audience: “When I wrote the following pages – or rather the bulk of them” (with first and second degree of “suspension”). After that, what I called the “spatial corollaries” function as variations on the leitmotif, inviting the reader to face the manifold possibilities inscribed, as in a nutshell, in the core of the theme, in the gist of the primal impulse, that is, the primum movens that produced the “expression” and its rational organization.

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Finally, I am convinced that Walden’s incipit would not be so paradigmatic, so thoroughly accomplished and fully convincing, without the addition of the two short and factual sentences that conclude it: 1. I lived there two years and a half, 2. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. These sentences are in sharp contrast with the long and complex opening sentence we have analyzed in detail and in neat “competition” with each other. We have, on the one hand, the simple past (“I lived”); on the other, the “simple” present (“I am”), underlined, ad abundantiam, by the adverb “at present”. The result is a perfect rhythmical parallelism and a most convenient way of concluding the opening movement of the musical composition with a first class piano and a pianissimo, that is, one of those low profiles (or anticlimaxes) Thoreau was so fond of. In conclusion, the incipit we have re-read, and numberless other pages that appear in Walden, in the Journals, in The Maine Woods and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers confirm that Ives was right in praising the rhythmical pattern of Thoreau’s prose. Then Ives added a parenthetic clause I want to verify : “were there nothing else”. Was there (i. e. in Thoreau’s prose) something else? Is good rhythm, in general, sufficient to define a piece of literature as “musical”? Music, in fact, does not consist only in rhythm. There are other essential elements, or “rudiments”, such as pitch, melody and harmony, timbre and tone, volume, “color”, tempo and reverberation. Poets, novelists and prose writers of all times tried to imitate music in some of these elements or at least to recreate through words some of the “effects” of music on the ear of their readers. In many cases their successes were unintentional and therefore all the more interesting. The use of different techniques and strategies often resulted in disappointing outputs that are all but musical, precisely because they meant to be hypermusical, as we have seen in Poe’s “The Bells”. As Lessing pointed out already in the late 18th century,12 when a form of art wants to trespass its own limits, flirting with the codes of another (no matter how neighboring) form of art, the operation is risky, even illegitimate, and doomed to failure. In this respect Thoreau occupies an intermediate position since his visual imagination is regularly excited by the project of reproducing the most extraordinary phenomena that hit his eye on the page. As far as acoustic facts and events are concerned, he prefers to refrain from challenging them. As a consequence the texture of his prose can have – and in general has – rhythm but lacks other specific musical elements. When he writes poetry (a territory one wonders why he wanted to enter), he sometimes uses traditional rhetorical devices, but to little or no avail. A couple of examples follow. “I Am a Parcel” is a poem that, from the point of view of the explicit message, can perhaps be considered Thoreau’s most Emersonian piece of poetry. Thoreau adopts a complex metrical pattern: seven 12 G. E. Lessing, Laokoon, 1766.

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stanzas of six lines each, alternating long (10–11 syllables) and short (2–4 syllables) lines, most of the time iambic (“Some tender buds were left upon my stem”, “That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours”), occasionally dactylic (“Dangling this way…”, “Drinking my juices up…”), sometimes with “extra” syllables that interrupt the “rhythm” and make the reading stumble. Such an elaborated scheme is akin to Dryden’s “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day” and Poe’s “For Annie” or, even more, “Israfel”. The rhyme scheme is very unconventional: A – B – C – A – C – B (e. g. tied, together, links, wide, methinks, weather). What is the result of these efforts? The poem is, as most poems by Transcendentalists, sincere but didactic. Its intentions are not banal but foreseeable and almost na"ve. The idea, the thought that are its origin and source of inspiration, are not translated into a linguistic discourse that finds resonance as we read it, line after line. Thoreau does not aim at obtaining an “effect”, like Poe, nor does he want to get in touch with his readers in order to communicate a sentiment. At the end the message we suspected from the beginning, made explicit (“That stock […] will soon redeem its hours,/ And […] More fruits and fairer flowers/ Will bear,/ While I droop here”), does not work as an epiphany, nor makes us feel that we have shared an emotion. But to be fair to Thoreau as a poet I will now discuss “At midnight’s hour”, one of his better poems. It consists of eleven trochaic octosyllabic lines ( two or three lines have, as “I am a parcel”, an extra syllable) and seems to be on the verge of attaining the high level of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi’s “L’infinito” (“The infinite”)13 when the poetic I says: “I thought me of eternities delayed” (line 5), in connection with the noise of the wind: “The night wind rustled through the glade” (line 7), as if a sudden message (“whispered” in the silence of the night) had come from the confrontation between the thinking subject and the mystery of the outer world. Line 6 (alluding to “commands but half obeyed”) could remind a reader of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” which, as we remember, concludes with the subject who confesses “But I have promises to keep”. The last two lines make it clear, instead, that words like commands, ranks, obeyed, force of men, hero, and lance, must be interpreted literally. The final “message” is a military order proper : “Advance”. This does not mean that the poem lacks a dignified, consistent balance of content and form. Its intrinsic literary quality goes well beyond the level of “I Am a Parcel”. From the viewpoint of this study, the text can be said to weave an effective melodic thread because it progresses on the basis of a subdued dialogue between 13 Giacomo Leopardi’s L’infinito was written in 1819, published in Versi del Conte Giacomo Leopardi (Bologna, Stamperia delle Muse, 1825) and later in Canti (Firenze, Piatti, 1831). The points of contact with Thoreau’s poem are the idea of eternity derived from the sound of the wind among the leaves and the memory of past seasons fed by the present meditation on time.

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natural sounds (the owl, the foxes, the wind) and silences. Even the final, ominous human call, that might well coincide with the call of death, is not loudly pronounced, but whispered from ear to ear. John Cage considered Thoreau a major “musician” not because of the rhythm of his prose, nor for his opinions on music, but because he felt that his prose was able to reproduce the harmony of nature, the emotion of solitude, and, above all, the fascination of silence.14 Cage has long been praised for the ideological and esthetic significance of his composition 4’ 33’’ (1952), in which the audience must wait in vain for the arrival of a music that does not come. Cage meant to demonstrate that absolute silence does not exist. The “listeners”, in fact, after a moment of suspense, hear their own fits of coughing, their whispers of amazement (or disapproval), their heart beats, the background noises that are never absent, even in the most inert, the deafest, the dumbest and most neutral concert hall. His experience in the “unechoic chamber” and his studies on the physiology of our acoustic organ had allowed him to discover the impossibility of absolute silence. Silence became, therefore, an essential ingredient of his music, either as a virtual phenomenon, or as an ideal towards which all music aspires. Something even more interesting, at an ideological and artistic level, had been offered to the reflection of concert goers by a contemporary of Thoreau, that is, Robert Schumann. The German composer inserted a third pentagram, where he wrote a melody that was not supposed to be played or heard, but only “thought” and kept in mind – between the two pentagrams in violin and bass clef in his piano sonata Humoresque op. 20 (1839). This musical phrase is defined as “innere Stimme” (“inner voice”). In the sphere of music and of all psychic phenomena, Schumann implies, “under the apparent alternation of our saying and keeping silent, there is the continuous articulation of the monologue of the Other”, a “sometimes alien, sometimes familiar voice, that does not cease to resound within our minds”.15 It is a pity that Thoreau did not “hear” about Schumann’s theory because, in his preference for an intimate genre of music, in his reflection around the relationship between sound and silence, human musical production and the background, unavoidable and ever comforting music of nature, he might have established a fruitful, fascinating dialogue with the German composer who, by the way, was an heir to the idealistic aesthetics but, at the same time, forerun many 20th century debates. Thoreau’s transcendentalist education included an acquaintance with the theory of the “music of the spheres” 14 Gigliola Nocera, Il linguaggio dell’Eden. Natura e mito nell’America di Thoreau, Milano, Tranchida, 1998. 15 Giovanni Guanti, “Schumann, soldato sognatore che la guerra ha deluso”, in The Peacock’s Tale: musica e poesia borderline, Pescara, Tracce, 2004, pp. 56–57.

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that, somewhat implicitly, appears, as we have seen, in Emerson’s “Music” and, explicitly, in Poe’s “The Haunted Palace”. Also Schumann knew well what the ancient classical and Renaissance tradition (from Pythagoras, through Plato, Cicero, and Boethius, to Kepler) meant. But, exactly as in Thoreau, his starry sky “above” (that used to fill Kant with wonder and admiration) had given way to an inner, intimate firmament of self-analysis and severe, multiple examination of one’s own consciousness. What American transcendentalists (Emerson in primis, Thoreau no less than Emerson) could not accept was the fact that music is not an “abstract” artistic production, a “pure form”, an occasion, almost an excuse for philosophical speculation and symbolic interpretation, but, no less than all other arts, a synthesis of form and content, structure and function, feeling and idea – in Keats’s and Dickinson’s terms, Truth and Beauty. In this respect, they did not go deep into the core of German idealism and of its doctrine, otherwise they would have understood that the “content” of music (which of course exists only in order to be overcome, surpassed, sublimed, but must, first, be expressed) is “the felt emotion, in the verbally untranslatable totality of its essence”.16 Precisely because musical emotions cannot be translated into words, the words (in the paradoxical status of opera and of musical theater in general) do not say what music suggests or alludes to, but swerve, adding content and contributing to a double, happily hybrid artistic medium. The so called “vague harmony” acquires a concrete truth in the dramatic construction of the performance, of the “event”, in a magic moment of time and fragment of space. The “sublime” melody does not descend from heaven as perfect and paralyzing as the song of Poe’s archangel Israfel (“the giddy stars […] attend the spell/ Of his voice, all mute”). On the contrary, it is authorized to expand and penetrate human organs of perception and their souls, too, rather than ascend again. And yet, earthly conflicts and terrestrial passions (due to our world, which is a “world of sweets and sours”) must legitimate and sustain it, note after sustained note. Thoreau’s contradictory and problematic attitude towards sounds, voices and music, inscribed in his education and in the cultural context in which he wrote, appears in his poetry in the same emblematic way as it appears in Emerson. His prose, instead, as we have seen, shows evidence of well-constructed patterns and of a verbal technique whose echoes often resound in our sensibility, although “acoustic” rhetorical strategies such as anaphora, iteration, and alliteration, are used sparingly and, in general, add little to the tone, to the “aura” of the text, and of its message. As is clearly understood from the following lines: “jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root”, “when the wild river 16 Vittorio Stella, “Sentire e conoscere: per uno studio sulla musica nel pensiero di Hegel”, in Itinerari, XXXIX, 2 (2000), pp. 60–72.

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valley and the woods were…”, “pure and bright a light”, “unfathomed by us because unfathomable” (emphasis mine).

3.

Herman Melville: theater plus music

In Herman Melville music and opera had a much greater importance than in Emerson or Thoreau. Just to start with, we may recall that Moby-Dick’s opening page describes the strange call of Ishmael in terms of a “musical vocation”, “a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances” (Chapter 1, “Loomings”). As we have seen, Emerson’s “vocation” was all but a vocal call, due to his modest acoustic sensitiveness. In the arts in general “vocation” is a metaphor : in music it bears a literal meaning. In Melville’s case, the author specifies the difference between an interlude, an a solo, and an extensive performance, showing that he was well aware of how diverse musical theater could be and how the different genres and sub-genres could correspond to a number of different moods, temperaments, situations and states of mind. An “extensive performance” probably refers to the genre of French grand op8ra (such as Meyerbeer’s). An “interlude” was a musical entr’act; more specifically, a light entertainment conceived to relieve the audience during a long and demanding dramatic spectacle. An “a solo” was a recital, the “one man (or woman) show” of a star or a virtuoso who interrupted the symphonic orchestra with a piano concert or singing some popular arias. Melville was evidently interested in all these musical forms and appreciated with no supercilious embarrassment even the most hybrid ones. His great epic novel, inaugurated by a narrator who chooses to speak in a low profile, ends with a chase in three days/acts (preceded by an overture, “The Symphony”). The final shipwreck, that is to say, the final section of Act III, surpasses, for the perfect balance between symphonic orchestration and sublime melodic vein, the extraordinary finale of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (1843; first American performance, 1855). The theatrical elements in Moby-Dick, as well as those in Benito Cereno or Billy Budd, were remarked and analyzed by major critics17 and in the 20th century gave rise to a long series of extraordinary transcodifications18. What I want to stress is the fact that, no less than in Poe, the theatrical dimension of the nar17 Annalisa Goldoni (“Teatro e poesia in Moby-Dick, or, The Whale”, in Ai confini dei generi: casi di ibridismo letterario, a c. A. Destro e A. Sportelli, Bari, Graphis, 1999, pp. 147–155) stresses the function of Melville’s frequent stage directions, which become titles (“Enter Ahab; to Him Stubb; Enter Ahab: then, All”). See Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. by Harold Beaver, Penguin Classics, 1978. 18 The best is probably Robert Lowell’s Benito Cereno, in The Old Glory (first performed 1964); New York, Farrar-Straus-Giroux, 1965.

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rative has also a musical counterpart in Melville. I would not, however, consider Melville’s narratives as examples of an implicit or explicit theatricality, as in Poe, but as texts which follow the paradigms of musical theater, including opera proper, because of content, structure, language, and rhetorical strategies. In order to explain my point of view, I need to spend some time in underlining Melville’s extreme sensitivity to sounds and to the acoustic and musical elements of language, both in his prose and (to a lesser extent) in his poetry. Melville’s musical sensibility is far greater than that of Thoreau, since it includes a refined sensitivity to both the visual and the acoustic planes of things, as well as to the epic efforts of language, which – no less than in Emerson and Thoreau, but with more probabilities of success – heroically strives in order to cope with “reality”. More often and more successfully than in Emerson and Thoreau Melville’s acoustic perceptiveness materializes in such rhetorical strategies as alliteration, onomatopoeia, ekphrasis and synesthesia, though remaining within the limits of opportune restraint, which prevents the narrator (an enthusiast and a non conformist) from losing control over the text and its structure. Moby-Dick “stages” the performances of a great variety of characters: actors, preachers, thinkers, men of action, human beings in flesh and blood and, vice versa, prototypes and archetypes, defenseless emblems, doomed to be swallowed up by the destinies for which they were molded. Let’s take into account a passage which seems more visual than pertaining to hearing. When the Rachel departs after meeting the Pequod and receiving Ahab’s refusal to retrieve the captain’s son, who is lost in the ocean, the narrator comments that “you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, remained without comfort”. Melville uses the verb “saw”, but the act of crying/weeping pertains also (or more) to the sense of hearing. The same is true if we examine a preceding, equally poetic, passage: “her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs”. In fact, it’s hard to imagine the scene of boys merrily picking cherries on a tree without, at the same time, hearing their joyful voices and cheers. Melville’s elegance in “composing” his text by means of a counterpoint of modes and moods is most evident in the case of scenes described through subdued shades, where silence is as important as sounds and thoughts are more important than verbal utterances. See for instance Chapter CIX (“Queequeg in his coffin”): “he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket […] though that involved but uncertain steering and much leeway adown the dim ages”. The masterly touch of the pair dim/ages creates a unique invention, an image hovering in an intermediate region between the concrete, experiential register that faithfully describes the sea and a more imaginative register, that is intended to suggest its mysterious nature and the idea of it that is hidden in the mind of a “good savage”. Queequeg’s conception of death coincides with a slow leeway

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voyage through space and time, without the possibility of steering the way and deciding the point of landing. The brilliant alliteration adown/dim adds an acoustic nuance that happily renders the suspension of the atmosphere. A few lines before, Queequeg had explained that, for the inhabitants of Polynesia, the cloudless night sky is a “starry archipelago”, and the Milky Way is milk-white because it is the huge wave that originates when sea and sky meet and mingle. Another example of fruitful cooperation of sight and hearing, made possible by alliteration and onomatopoeia, can be found in Chapter CXXXIV (“The Chase – Third Day”). The hectic, convulsive background of the final confrontation between Ahab and the white whale does not shuffle the hierarchy of the “ingredients” of the scene nor does it blur Melville’s capacity to weave perfectly controlled linguistic threads: Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay ; but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions.

In three lines there are six progressive forms, three clever alliterations verging on onomatopoeia (rush/crash/catch, whale/wheeled, seemingly/seeing) and the explicit, symmetrical reference to sight and hearing: hearing…catching sight. But the best example of a perfect balance – due to an effective use of alliteration – between sight, silence, and hearing (with things that are seen and things that are foreseen) is the incipit period in Chapter XLVI (“The Mat-Maker”), which begins with an explicit call to the sense of sight, that soon reveals itself as inadequate in rendering the poised atmosphere of the scene: It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon, the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air…

The obsessive repetition of the s sound becomes almost an orgy, invading the text: “each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self”. The predominance of the s continues in the following paragraph, but other sounds are introduced and a further acoustic device is added: the iteration of long sounds (loom, time, weaving): I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.

I conclude this section with a quotation that brings us back to the theme of the interaction of natural and artificial (human) sounds, which occupied us when we

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were reading Thoreau, and to the issue of the verbal and musical reproduction of the storm, that surfaced when we were dealing with Poe. In the Whaleman’s Chapel at New Bradford (Moby-Dick, Chapter IX, “The Sermon”) we listen to Father Mapple’s sermon. We listen, I said, but I should rather say we witness, because we are indeed “spectators” of it. The sermon, in fact, is all the more convincing as it seems to come not so much from the mouth of a man as from a powerful source that is both natural and divine, both human and superhuman. The sermon begins as the output of a “mild voice of unassuming authority”, shifting to “prolonged solemn tones”, and finally becoming a sort of immense storm in which the rhetoric of human preaching equals the grandiosity of the real storm, that most conveniently rages outside: tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog […] we feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters […] the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself […] and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them (emphasis added).

The consonance of human and natural sounds and the voice of a God who speaks through both man and storm cancel the idea of an imperialistic mission of mankind in the context of the natural world. The mission of literature consists precisely in tuning the potentially imperialistic k|cor down, literally, to earth: to the keys of nature, that can indeed be our “criterion for tune” (Dickinson), be they the service of the ants, the song of crickets and mockingbirds, the shriek of sea-gulls and sky-hawks, the howl of the storm, or the harmony of the spheres.19 I am now going to analyze a few poems by Melville. It seems to me, in fact, that, in the light of recent criticism, it is possible to demonstrate that they are – if not great poetry – certainly good and remarkably “significant” poetry.20 Although his greatest lyrical vein is evenly and abundantly distributed in the extraordinary prose of Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, there are a 19 It is not by chance if in Melville’s Pierre (1852) we find the following sentence: “Where the deepest words end […] there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations”, in Pierre, ed. by H. Hayford, H. Parker and G. T. Tanselle, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern U. P. and Newbery Library, 1971, p. 282. The novel has the following allegorical pattern: Pierre stands for the literary dimension, Lucy for the visual and Isabel for the musical. It is significant that Pierre should more and more incline towards the latter. 20 Laurence Buell, “Melville the Poet”, in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. by Robert S. Levine, Cambridge U. P., 1998, pp. 135–156. Buell acknowledges the importance of such an old essay as Morse Peckam’s “Hawthorne and Melville as European Writers”, in Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires, ed. by Howard Vincent, Kent, OH, Kent State U. P., 1968, quoting the following passage: “Poetry, far more over-determined phonically and symmetrically than nineteenth century prose, provided the protection, the citadel that Melville needed” (p. 62).

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few substantial reasons to read and appreciate Battle-Pieces, Clarel, even Naples in the Time of Bomba. Not only is Melville’s verse superior to that of Emerson and Thoreau but, what interests us most in the context of our discourse, it shows a greater musical ear and a more confident awareness of the uses and functions of various (acoustic) rhetorical devices. It contains a series of intriguing documents in terms of historical and cultural context, personal ideology, linguistic engagement. It shows evidence of a sincere involvement both in the subject matter and in the requirements of style, if one wants it to be “personal” and innovative.21 My analysis will be limited to the formal side of the texts, not only because it is the most pertinent to my argument, but also because, in so doing, I can vindicate the importance of Melville’s poetry on the same terrain as that used by the New Critics in order to discard it. To begin with, it seems to me more than evident that, for instance, “The March into Virginia, July 1861” and “Sheridan at Cedar Creek, October 1864” adopt a complex metrical pattern, and develop it demonstrating a mature (and at the same time original) use of the rhyme, as well as a skillful oscillation between long and short lines. In the former, the poet inserts mythical, biblical and contemporary historical references (Bacchic, Fate, Moloch, Manassas), archaisms (forecasteth, belaurelled), three question marks, as if he could not spare a single “trick” in order to faithfully describe the scene and, at the same time, express its impact on the viewers’ psyche. In the latter, we find exclamation marks, dots, dashes, iterations, word plays on the quasi-homophony of pairs like Valley/volley. The result is equally interesting; the shorter text exploits the contrast between what is explicitly said, shown, described and the many things that remain unsaid, implicit, “silenced”, so to say, by an excess of emotion on the subject’s part. “The Berg” (subtitled “A Dream”) has a far simpler metrical pattern and therefore a larger freedom of “movement”. From the point of view of the acoustic dimension, it presents the reader with a series of alliterations that are all the more original because the dominant vowel or consonant sounds are not limited to the beginning of the involved lexemes but are cleverly woven inside their texture. It’s the case of the st sound in “against a stolid iceberg steer” (line 4) and of the ace sound in “lace of traceries fine” (line 13). Above all, it is the case of the extraordinary sequence lump/lumb/lumb/lub/loit/slow in lines 32–33: “Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one – / A lumbering lubbard loitering slow”. In addition, we find traditional alliterations like “grass-green gorges” (line 12) and “Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls” (line 36). “The Night-march” is, no less 21 “Melville’s strict but broken prosodic gridworks, ‘chafing against the metric bound’, as he wrote of Virgil […] have the potential […] to enrich through the very constraints they impose” (L. Buell, Op. cit., p. 137).

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than the best prose passages I have quoted, based on a sophisticated dialogue between sight and sound, where for “sound” I mean also silence. That is, not an absence of sound, but an “implicit soundtrack” reduced to a minimal degree, or a successful restraint from all inopportune sonorous disturbances. The visual background is a crystal clear night darkness that cannot prevent the spears of the soldiers from beaming, the legions from streaming and gleaming (the third and last stanza enriches the “alliteration for visual purposes” with another two -ing clauses: twinkling and shining). The acoustic context is dominated by “clarions mute” and “silence deep”, but the heroic protagonist, who lonely rides in the distance, does not need to speak aloud in order to send his mandate. The authority of his command is absolute because it is not the result of an explicit utterance but of a presence that is convincing though – or perhaps because – it is silent, detached, and far. The equivalent in opera would be the conclusion of a tense moment in the development of the plot, at the end of a crucial scene, when an actor/singer stops singing, expressing his/her authoritativeness and strong will through a simple gesture, leaving the stage without a further note: Afar, in twinkling distance lost, (So legends tell) he lonely wends And back through all that shining host His mandate sends.

If the meter were not a Sapphic strophe (or something very similar to it) but a loose free verse, I would dare to say that, in this case, Melville’s poetry rivals Whitman’s perfect atmosphere in the best “nocturnes” of his Drum-taps. The acoustic (or musical) qualities of Melville’s poetry are, in other cases, monodic, which does not imply that they are utterly inferior to the grand symphonic or polyphonic prose of his major novel. The best example of the most lyrical, elegiac mood can be found in the two stanzas of “Monody”, a sort of elegy (published in 1891) probably written in 1864, soon after visiting Hawthorne’s tomb: To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal – Ease me, a little ease, my song! By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:

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Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape.

Apart from the undeniable sincerity of emotion, I appreciate the abundance and variety of devices (anaphora, iteration, exclamation mark, dash, alliteration) which are, at the same time, the textual consequence of a sentiment deeply felt, and the way to surmount the excess of involvement through technical skill. I also need to underline the appropriateness of rhythm and tone (pure mournful melody and discreet accompaniment) in the overall result. The last two lines (lacking a governing verb) conclude the poem with the sense of an unaccomplished dialogue between two souls that are now separated forever, projecting a melancholy mood backwards, onto the whole poem.22

4.

The Piazza Tales

Another moving finale in Melville presents us with an explicit mention of one of the most famous opera houses in 19th century Europe, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. The “Piazza”, as we remember, describes the narrator’s visit to a cottage in the mountains, which he contemplated with curiosity from the veranda/ belvedere of his modest, rural residence. After an introduction that sets the temporal and spatial coordinates of the event to be “narrated”, the first section of the tale is entirely woven according to visual registers, presenting the reader with masterly touches of chiaroscuro. The strategy of the narrator consists in playing with the opposition between an object that is seldom clearly seen and an environment that seems to have the function of preventing the subject from exploring the object of his desire (though stimulating the imagination precisely because of the vagueness of what is sometimes seen): An object […] mysteriously snugged away, to all appearance, in a sort of purple breastpocket […] The spot was […] so situated as to be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain witching conditions of light and shadow…

Later on, when the reader understands that the narrator shall not resist the temptation to go and check the “truth” of the object, the text offers the most effective, poetic use of contrasting brushstrokes: “golden sparkles […] vividness […] dimmed tops of terraced foliage […] broader gleam, as of a silver buckler […] mirrored sham fights in the sky”. 22 As far as the function of silence in Battle-Pieces is concerned, cf. John Paul Russo, “The Crowd in Melville’s Battle-Pieces”, in Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, V, 9 (January 2000), pp. 123– 147. See, in particular, p. 147: “Battle-Pieces ends in respectful, even awed or Lear-like silence, on both sides, which in effect means total silence, or no side.”

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After seeing it in person and discovering that the spot which, from the distance, he had imagined as a place of secluded happiness, halfway between earth and sky, is, in fact, a space of poverty and loneliness, the narrator comes back to his dwelling and, in the dense twilight, looks towards the far spot he has visited, trying to capture again the dimension of illusion and idealization. The atmosphere in the surrounding landscape and the mood in the subject’s psyche, that the narrator wants the reader to share, are hard to explain, since they are, at the same time, of participation and distancing, of projection and understanding. The register shifts from the visual to the acoustic as the narrator uses the spatial pattern of an opera house (perhaps the opera house par excellence, for him) and the feeling that a performance in such a unique environment conveys: – Enough. Launching my yawl no more for fairy-land, I stick to the piazza. It is my boxroyal; and this amphitheatre, my theatre of San Carlo. Yes, the scenery is magical–the illusion so complete. And Madam Meadow Lark, my prima donna, plays her grand engagement here. […] But, every night, when the curtain falls, truth comes in with darkness. No light shows from the mountain. To and fro I walk the piazza deck, haunted by Marianna’s face, and many as real a story.

The emotion is expressed as sincere as it flows from the soul, the terms of the comparison make the emotion truer ; however, it is not a precise memory of an actual experience that turns a specific place into a fascinating space out of time. Melville, in fact, had not yet visited Europe (including a week in Naples) when he wrote the tale (1856). So the transposition piazza/veranda into theater-box is only made possible by a sort of premonition, the pre-conceived idea of a grand European opera house (the Teatro San Carlo was famous in America and was known in particular for having the largest stage in Europe). Fans of opera, both in Europe and in America, not only went to the opera house, but ascribed to the spectacles produced in it a long train of connotations, which were variously exploited according to the situation. In this case, the subject needs emotional and intellectual comfort and cannot convey his need unless in a poetic way. The deep interest in opera and in Italian culture (testified also by the use of the term “piazza”, square) takes hold of the individual and projects him onto the dimension of a collective ceremony he imagines and wishes to be a part of. The use of the adjective “magical” is also very telling. Only at the opera house, before an anticipated, moving performance, a sort of magic atmosphere seems to coalesce, while a suspension of concrete daily coordinates materializes. Opera provides the “spectacle” and conveys the tone of “fairy-land”, but also provides the “safety distance” that makes the spectator understand that what is staged before his eyes is all illusion. But the references to opera are not yet over. Melville specifies that, in the performance he imagines and “constructs” in the reader’s mind, “Madame

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Meadow Lark, my prima donna, plays her grand engagement here”. The song of the lark (a reference to Shelley’s skylark must not be excluded) is compared to the grand aria of a famous soprano, which is sung exclusively for the subject! It seems, at first, that Melville adopts, here, Thoreau’s doctrine (the bird as the best singer). The smiling comparison with an opera diva, however, ennobles the lark, not vice versa, as much as the comparison with a theater-box renders the belvedere of the house a unique fragment of space. The desire, the need to occupy a suspended dimension, outside all spatial and temporal constraints, lasts but a few moments: “every night, when the curtain falls, truth comes in with darkness. No light shows from the mountain”. Neither human nor natural elements can offer an adequate comfort to the subject. The landscape, in the shape of an amphitheater, is reduced to silence by the approaching night, as the cavea of the opera house when the performance is over and both spectators and singers are gone. The lark ceases to sing and so does the famous soprano, withdrawing and hiding into the anonymity of her private life. The magic of opera vanishes, the momentary support disappears, the curtain falls, the subject is as alone as he ever was. We shall soon see a similar dialectic between illusion and the impact of reality in Whitman and how opera can work as a priceless mediator. In Melville the solution to the impasse is found in the insertion of a more familiar term of comparison: the deck of a ship (another kind of “box-royal”). The final expression “to and fro I walk the piazza deck” reminds us, of course, of Ahab and of various other characters nervously pacing the deck of the Pequod, in Moby Dick, so that the end of the tale leaves a disquieting aftereffect of existential restlessness. The general mood of the prose piece and the atmosphere that pervades it are so melancholy that a few critics have seen a close connection with Melville’s life and with the anxious and often gloomy atmosphere that dominated Melville’s family in the mid-1850s. The author of Moby-Dick and Pierre had lost the readership that Typee and Omoo had ensured him; the gratifying moments in the husband/wife relationship were over and the economic situation was hardly eased by the support of relatives and friends. Some have gone as far as imagining – or taking for granted – the writer having an extra-marital affaire.23 What interests me, however, is the fact that precisely that atmosphere demonstrates the fine quality of the “tale”, that is far from being, as Harold Bloom maintains, “a trifle”.24 As Judith Slater observes, “the narrator lives in a divided realm and 23 Andrew Delbanco, Melville, His World and Work, New York, Knopf, 2005 (“Adrift”, pp. 244– 265); A Historical Guide to Herman Melville, ed. by Giles Gunn, Oxford U. P., 2005, pp. 215– 216; Michael Shelden, Melville in Love, New York, Harper Collins, 2016. 24 Harold Bloom, ed., Herman Melville. Modern Critical Views, New York, Chelsea House, 1988, p. 1. Bloom is right, instead, in thinking that “the best of The Piazza Tales show the postPierre Melville writing for himself, possibly Hawthorne, and a few strangers” (p. 1).

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suffers from his inability to reconcile the halves”; the text stages the “play of illusion and discovery of disillusion”; “the knowledge of woe […] has left its indelible mark”, and yet “the experience does broaden the narrator’s perspective. He learns to accept the dark truth of the north exposure, but is still able to enjoy the illusion of beauty”.25 According to Wyn Kelley, the story belongs to the category of povertiresque, “a flexible mode for Melville, allowing him to range from comic effects in some of his stories to more deeply challenging and unsettling ones in others”.26 To be fair, already some contemporary reviewers had appreciated the peculiar “tone” of the piece, comparing Melville’s Marianna to Tennyson’s “Marianna of the Moated Grange” and praising the “very cadence of thought – the same heart melody” (Thomas Powell in The New York News) or calling the sketch “absolute poetry” (The Republican of Springfield).27 The final need of relying on the image of the ship deck, a more “familiar” term of comparison and apt emblem, shows how perceptive Melville was in understanding that the intensity of emotion raised by an opera performance had to be balanced with a more “sedate” and “domestic” experience. As we shall see, a similar perceptive conception is revealed by Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, by Lev Tolstoy in Anna Karenina and by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence. The resulting paradigm is as follows: Melville Tolstoy James Wharton

5.

(The Piazza Tales) (Anna Karenina) (The Portrait of a Lady) (The Age of Innocence)

opera house opera house opera house opera house

vs vs vs vs

ship deck countryside sculpture museum prose theater

George Templeton Strong and opera

It would be seriously misleading to proceed taking for granted that the acceptance of opera and the rise of its fame, as well as its use in cultural and literary contexts, were unanimous, without exceptions or obstacles. The process I have hinted at was characterized, instead, by frequent oscillations. Not only in New England – with Emerson’s preference for the sense of sight and Thoreau’s invention of a poetics of silence – but also in New York and in other major cities along the East Coast, prominent members of the upper classes could, from time 25 Judith Slater, “The Domestic Adventurer in Melville’s Tales”, in On Melville: The Best from American Literature, ed. by Louis J. Budd and Edwin Cady, Durham, NC, Duke U. P., 1988, pp. 95–96. 26 Wyn Kelley, Herman Melville. An Introduction, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2008, pp. 112–113. 27 Hershel Parker, Melville. The Making of the Poet, Evanston, Il, Northwestern U. P., 2008, pp. 22, 127, 139.

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to time, show resistance, suspicion, uneasiness, or an explicit denial of the cultural significance of such an “ambiguous” artistic medium. There were intellectuals and men of letters, and sophisticated fans of music, who excluded opera from the horizon of their taste. Those were, obviously, the same members of the establishment who, as readers of poetry and fiction, could not reconcile themselves with Poe’s themes, with his sensationalist, melodramatic writing procedures, and with his operatic tones and unconventional short stories, poems, and prose pieces. They might subscribe to one of Poe’s magazines; they could read, and often enjoy, his harsh criticism, but would never admit to have fallen victims to the spell of, for instance, The Raven, unlike an intelligent and sensitive European reader as Elizabeth Barrett (see Chapter I). An intriguing case is that of George T. Strong, who lost no opportunity to ridicule the plots, to expose the superficiality of psychological delineations, to denounce the “vulgarity” or thinness of orchestration, to stress the uselessness of vocal acrobatics and, above all, the immoral ideological implications of opera.28 What is more interesting, however, is the fact that Strong, no less than the great majority of members of his social class, continued to go to the opera house all along his life, as if going to productions of old and new melodramas was not only a must and an obligation towards his friends and the ladies of his community, but also a masochistic exercise, in which a large part of his personality found a necessary expression. George Templeton Strong (1820–1875) came from a family of theater goers and fans of music. He became a successful lawyer and married Ellen Ruggles, a gifted amateur singer. A clever musical performer himself, he served as President of the New York Philharmonic Society for years. His son, George Templeton Strong Junior (1856–1948), studied music and painting in Germany and became a professional water-colorist and composer, living for over thirty years as an expatriate in Switzerland. It is perhaps not a coincidence if, in his production, generally labeled as “late” or “post-romantic”, one finds very few vocal pieces. Among symphonies and symphonic poems, piano sonatas and cello pieces, there is mention of just a cantata and a chorale. Notwithstanding the difficulties in his relationship with his father, the latter’s musical taste, so ambiguously positioned towards opera and musical theater, must have conditioned his taste. But let’s go back to Strong Senior. The 2,250 pages of his diary, retrieved in the 1930s (now in the collections of the New York Historical Society), whose first caption dates October 5, 1835, proved of the utmost importance for the history of New York and of the whole nation, as a priceless document of the North, in the dramatic years before the Civil War, during it, and in the early years of the 28 Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George T. Strong (1836–1856), Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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Reconstruction. It is an extremely significant text for my discourse as well, since, offering evidence of its author’s idiosyncratic and vehement reactions against the development of the larger public’s taste, reveals the various aspects of the musical world and the prevailing course of musical history in the United States in the mid-nineteen century ; a course that even an influential man like him could not oppose. In addition, precisely his disappointment, his complex justifications, his conservative theories, his exclamation marks, his stern judgements, turn into effective, valuable pages of prose, in their vain attempt to hinder the progress of musical history in the United States. In his text we see that opera worked in an oppositional way, as a target that excited his emotions and provoked the most sincere and lively expressions of participation in the cultural life of his city. This is true also when Strong expresses clearly absurd opinions, as when he condemns Verdi’s Traviata not because he is not convinced by the music, by the psychology of characters, or by the structure of the libretto, but because he is disgusted by the unbecoming story of a “courtesan”. In his view, all those who go to its productions and are moved by Violetta’s destiny, are immoral or irresponsible people, unworthy of the dignified origins of the country. But let’s analyze the birth and early development of his vision of the musical world in which he lived, and that was the regular context within which he operated. The very contradictions that surface day by day create, as I was saying, an intriguing textuality that reveals a psychological frame full of inner conflicts but also mirrors the debates in progress in a restless society, still uncertain about its values and destinies. On June 27, 1847 Strong goes to see Bellini’s Norma: “spirited, passionate, fascinating music it is, far the first production of its school that I’ve heard yet”.29 His opinion changes in favor of La Sonnambula, when he goes to the opera house four days later : At the opera last night. La Sonnambula – worth three of Norma. Raised my respect for modern Italian music immensely. As far as rich, flowing, voluptuous melodies can go, the opera is unsurpassable. They are thrown together with as little economy and as little apparent effect as flowers in a meadow, and Donizetti would have made sixteen operas out of it.30

The pages of his Journal for the following week show a completely different attitude: Italian music (including Rossini) seems to have lost all appeal, in a matter of a few days:

29 Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 443. 30 Ibidem, p. 444.

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Moses in Egypt, most pitiable piece of farsical trumpery […] always stupid […] feeble and prosaic and vulgar from beginning to end […] Norma…Sonnambula…Don’t think either ranks very high, though they’re admirable of their kind […] between them and high music there’s a great gulf fixed.31

Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda raises a series of no less than six negative adjectives – four of which are superlatives – some frankly pleonastic – before being definitely condemned: “stupid and silly and the poorest, weakest, shallowest, and most wearisome production I ever was bored by”.32 Early in 1848 (January 30) Italian opera seems excluded from his cultural horizon once and for-ever, with an expression that seems to denounce the final triumph of the intellect and moral will over the lure of easy and cheap emotions: [I decided] to bite off my own nose [and] on no account to go to the opera again under any circumstances – not if they should bring out Don Giovanni itself.33

Needless to say, five days later (February 4) he is at the opera house again – not for a Don Giovanni or another example of “high music” – but for Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. The mention of Don Giovanni, however, is very telling and helps us understand what kind of musical theater Strong most appreciated. Within a couple of weeks, after another evening at the opera (February 17), Strong writes a longer note, that reveals his taste in an incontrovertible way : [Mercadante’s] Il Giuramento turns out […] to be worth all the operas they have produced in Astor Place knocked into one […] It is really good, honest, carefully written music with life and feeling and character and expression, and after hearing it I wondered how I could have tolerated, or listened to, the empty, flippant, vapid, imbecile trash that makes up two-thirds parts of Lucia or Lucrezia. […] Donizetti ought to be hanged with Lucrezia Borgia tied to his heels.34

Using vehement language, rich in lists of Anglo-Saxon and Neo-Latin lexemes, belonging to both the sophisticated vocabulary of legal language and the informal everyday idiolect (good, honest, really carefully written, life, feeling, character, expression, empty, flippant, vapid, imbecile), Strong gradually outlines 31 32 33 34

Ibidem, p. 446. Ibidem, p. 461. Ibidem, p. 498. Ibidem, p. 501. Il giuramento by Saverio Mercadante premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 1837. After touring the theaters of Europe (Vienna, Paris, London, Berlin), it reached New York in February 1847. The evening to which Strong refers could easily be the American premiere of the opera. The opera seemed almost completely forgotten until, towards the end of the 20th century, it was revived in important festivals such as the Festival Dei Due Mondi, Spoleto. Critical opinions are now strongly in favor of its structure and of the quality of its orchestration. See Tom Kaufman, “Mercadante and Verdi”, in Opera Quarterly, 13, 3 (June 1997) and Colleen Fay, “Background to Mercadante’s Il giuramento”, Program of production at the Washington Concert Opera, May 31, 2009, p. 6.

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an aesthetics of music that – although somewhat schematic – foreruns the history of the fortunes of opera in the second half of the century, when orchestration, plot verisimilitude (following the rise of realism) and psychological consistency of characters will be considered essential ingredients no less than the melodic vein, beauty of voices, and passionate interpretation. In this sense, the role of bel canto (in particular Rossini and Donizetti) will be confined to “opera buffa”. And in fact this is how Strong comments two evenings of early September 1848: September 10, 1848. At the Astor Place Opera House last week. L’elisir d’amore and La fille du regiment – both pleasant. Donizetti comic music lively and pretty – these operas worth a dozen Lucias and Lucrezias.35

The passage of Strong’s Journal that I use as a final quotation (an excerpt of which I have used as the epigraph in my Introduction) is particularly illuminating, since it describes in an emblematic way the inner conflicts of the individual consciousness, as well as the resistance in American society at large, which prevented a complete appreciation of musical theater independently of the style of operas, school, quality of score, taste of composers, richness or poverty of production, and distinction of singers and their voices. It is a prejudice that Strong cannot defend with theory but with clear awareness of his personal ethics: December 14, 1845. Last night I had the pleasure of hearing Der Freischütz, with Pete and Charley. Don’t think I ever spent a more delightful evening. Well performed, all things considered, the opera was – and as for opera itself, it’s of no use to commence writing superlatives – let it suffice to say that it’s even more glorious than my anticipations of it. Did I go wrong in going? There are those […] who regard a theatrical representation as wrong, per se and on principle, but that view I have always thought quite unreasonable […] I have found myself today none the less able to control my thoughts and feelings at church or at home for having heard Weber’s magnificent music last night (emphasis mine).36

When we shift, in the next chapter, to the analysis of Whitman’s poetry and prose, and function of opera in his production, we shall understand how little need there is to refute the heavy heritage of the Puritan tradition at an ideological level. It will prove self-evident how much Anglo-American culture would have lost, how less rich, original and fruitfully experimental American literature would have been, without Whitman’s use of his expertise of opera and without his fortunate absence of sense of guilt towards that hybrid performative art. Whitman, as we shall see, went to the opera house even during the Civil War and 35 Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Op. cit., p. 507. 36 Ibidem, p. 321.

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confessed that he enjoyed opera as a form of amusement: “So the opera is the only amusement I have gone to, for my own satisfaction, for last ten years” (emphasis mine).37

37 Letter of November 1863, in John Harmon McElroy, ed., The Sacrificial Years: A Chronicle of Walt Whitman’s Experiences in the Civil War, Boston, David R. Godine, 1999, p. 74.

Chapter Three: Walt Whitman

Part one The N YAcademy of Music […] now has some of the greatest singers in the world – the principal lady singer […] has a voice that would make you hold your breath with wonder and delight, it is like a miracle – no mocking bird nor the clearest flute can begin with it. (Walt Whitman, 1863)

1.

Musical theater in Whitman

As we have seen, European opera offered poets and prose writers thematic inspiration, symbolic content, rhetorical and metaphoric instruments as well as acoustic and structural paradigms which nourished the literary text. From a theoretical point of view, Whitman’s case is emblematic. One of the most famous sections of what was going to be known as Song of Myself (sect. 21) has the following incipit: I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul. The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself […] The latter I translate into a new tongue.

On the one hand, the pleasures/heaven dyad brings about that idea of “grafting”, which coincides with an “increase” and “improvement” on the consciousness of the poetic I (“upon myself”). The pleasures of life accepted in its totality, with no hypocritical scruples or anxieties, are grafted upon the poet’s body and on the body of his poetry. Working as they should, they will doubtless produce flowers and fruits. In these lines we read, in sum, the poet’s awareness of the passages that are necessary to turn the simple and na"ve emotion of a “wild” and “barbaric” temperament into the producer of a formally mature kind of poetry. We cannot forget, however, that, from a biological point of view, grafting implies

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sterility ; therefore future poets (see “Poets to Come”) will not be natural sons and daughters of the old bard. That is, a plant that was correctly grafted but couldn’t but remain inimitable and unique will receive his legacy and be “fruitful” only through another grafting, which implies a painful incision. Such an experience will allow the poets, in Jungian terms, to play the role of “wounded healers”. On the other hand, the coupling of pains and hell documents an operation of “translation” into a new tongue. Pains and suffering, as all Romantic poets have maintained, are more essential to the writing of poetry than pleasures and joys, since they do not need to be grafted, but can be translated. Whitman’s song, therefore, is a mixed output. It is the result of literary genre-crossing, of influences and confluences in a melting pot whose highest temperature would prevent the various ingredients from being functional, unless they underwent a process of sublimation. Reading not only Song of Myself, but the whole Leaves of Grass, we detect the chiaroscuro of the prevailing elements, and finally understand the mechanisms which control the metabolic process. It seems evident that the presence of opera and of its codes in Whitman must be included among the pleasures of heaven that need to be grafted, rather than among the pains of hell that need to be translated; although some modes of identification with the pains and grieves of its characters imply the process of sublimation I have just hinted at. In addition, we should consider the fact that, before grafting, the stem of a plant is cut open and peeled. Out of metaphor : the primal substance of the poetic imagination is fruitfully (though painfully) “barked”, so that the saps of the old and of the new tree can flow together and mix, hence creating a “different” and “contaminated” lymph. When the new season comes, the flowers and fruits will be felt, at the same time, as alien and one’s own. I will now explore some of the most relevant “loci classici” of Whitman’s macrotext1 as examples of the interactions of the various elements, starting from 1 The importance of opera in Whitman’s poetry and poetics had already been noticed by early scholars. See for instance Louise Pound, “Walt Whitman and Italian Music” in American Mercury (1925, pp. 58–63) and Robert D. Faner’s Whitman and Opera (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1951). In fact, in the light of Faner’s volume, I can concentrate on a few significant case studies within Whitman’s ample production. Further evidence of Whitman’s interest in opera and in musical theater can be found in his prose: “Plays and Operas Too”, pp. 703–705, “A Contralto Voice”, p. 876, “The Perfect Human Voice”, p. 1269, “Old Actors, Singers, Shows, etc. in N.Y.”, pp. 1288–1293 (pages refer to The Complete Poetry and Collected Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. by Justin Kaplan, New York, The Library of America, 1982). Particularly interesting is what the old poet himself said in a conversation with Horace Traubell, “A real musician running through Leaves of Grass – a philosopher musician – could put his finger on this and that anywhere in the text no doubt indicating the activity of the influences I have spoken of”. Cf. Intimate with Walt. Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubell, 1888–1892, ed. by Gary Schmidgall, Iowa City, U. of Iowa P., 2001, p. 75.

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his short essay “The Opera” (1845),2 in which the future poet underlines the difference between the music of melodrama imported from the Old Continent and the highest form of musical expression produced in America, that is to say the religious chorus: [At the opera] a liquid world rushes like a torrent through you […] and, for the first time, you receive your ideas of what the divine art of music really is.

Distancing himself from his Transcendentalist contemporaries, and in particular from his “mentor” Ralph W. Emerson, Whitman is not embarrassed by the paradox implicit in his judgment, according to which religious and sacred music are considered less “divine” than a music that is not only lay but profane and mundane. Opera is a performative “entertainment” and a “spectacle”, enacted by singers in costumes who are ready to express the contagious passions and violent conflicts of love, adultery, revenge, despair, blasphemy and sorcery. Notably, only in extremis (if ever) does this play of emotions emphasize repentance and punishment, expiation, or the triumph of moral law. Such an apparently “alien” musical genre appealed to all social classes. Later the situation changed, much to Whitman’s regret, differentiating theaters and audiences. After the Civil War, productions depended more and more on the social status of theater-goers. For most members of the upper classes being present at an opera in their private boxes became a mere status symbol. But, in a piece of the late 1880s,3 Whitman tries to forget the sad transformation, and indulges in recollecting the lively audiences, the mixture of upper and lower middle classes, the enthusiasm of artisans and young workers (the galleries were in general occupied by prostitutes, who somehow “controlled” the space from a privileged position) typical of the 1840s. He describes opera as the faithful mirror of a multicultural nation, a comprehensive art and a healthy instrument of education, reflecting a great number of collective identities: Recalling from that period […] any good night at the old Bowery, pack’d from ceiling to pit with its audience mainly of alert, well-dress’d full-blooded young and middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics – the emotional nature of the whole mass arous’d by the power and magnetism of as mighty mimes as ever trod the stage – the whole crowded auditorium, and what seeth’d in it …– bursting forth in one of those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery – no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle from perhaps 2,000 full-sinew’d men …– such sounds and scenes as here [recalled] will surely afford to many old New Yorkers some fruitful recollections. 2 “The Opera” (1845), in Walt Whitman, Prose Works, ed. by Floyd Stoval, New York U. P., 1963– 64. 3 “The Old Bowery”, in November Boughs; cf. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. by Justin Kaplan, New York, The Library of America, 1982, pp. 1185–1192.

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Whitman’s sincerely felt emotion (in spite of an evident nostalgia) contributes to the rhythm of his diction, enriching it and giving it dynamism, freedom of expression and a loose tone, all of which confirm the masterly use of prose characteristic of his work up to the end of his literary career. We find a similar “enthusiasm” in many sections of Song of Myself. For example, in section 26 Whitman appraises the uniqueness of “the violoncello (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint)” and “the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,/ It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast” till, in the end, he prefers a sort of “total immersion” in opera: I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera, Ah this indeed is music, – this suits me full. A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me, The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full […] The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies.

Here Whitman’s verse is supported by a lyrical tension that is certainly autobiographical, but, at the same time, invests the reader with a wave of sensations the poet not only wants to express, but also share.4 This tension is achieved by making use of a great variety of rhetorical devices, pushing his imagination up to the farthest limits of plausibility (the orbit of planet Uranus). In a unique set of similes, the tenor is described as “large and fresh as the creation”. It is physically imposing, well-built, heroic (a Wagnerian Heldentenor ante litteram), young and happily “na"ve”, as a new Adam on the first day of his creation. In fact, the synergy between singer and listener/spectator is so complete, that the distance between the two is annulled. The poet, no matter how far up he sits in the theater, can honestly say that he distinguishes the curve of the tenor’s mouth, that he hears the singing and feels (almost sees) it turned into a concrete stream of sound – it is an emotional, reciprocal current of participation, a surging flood that the subject would not resist. The orchestra, with its movement (that is not only a musical movement proper, but a physical motion) is heard and felt as an overwhelming source of energy, that sweeps away all residual resistance, spinning the subject around, in gradually enlarging centrifugal orbits, sending body, soul, and consciousness, far beyond the limits of earthly experience, till they meet the ultimate boundaries of the solar system. Unfortunately, exactly as it happens in Melville, opera – the sublime anesthetic – is not sufficient to guarantee a lasting condition of happiness. We only 4 George B. Hutchinson, The Ecstatic Whitman. Literary Shamanism & the Crisis of the Union, Columbus, Ohio State U. P., 1986: “[Whitman uses opera-going] to help express a true ecstasy of shamanic type, combining erotic climax […] physical suffering and laceration […] and finally re-emergence” (p. 84).

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savour it briefly (an enraptured state of ecstasy, a euphoric lack of sense of reality): “I lose my breath,/ Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death”. When the spectacle is over, or during the cruel void of intervals, the absence of music, the heaviness of the curtain, throw the subject back into the dimension of daily sufferings, of recurrent anxieties, of Hamlet’s “pangs of dispriz’d love” or, vice versa, of too much love: “My lovers suffocate me! […] Calling my name […] While […] the curtain is down at the opera”.5 Whitman’s lexicon in Leaves of Grass, particularly in Song of Myself, uses a great number of technical terms pertaining to the world of opera: “pure contralto”, “recitative”, “bravuras”, “chorus”, “grand-opera”. The poet was involved in the debate of opera-goers in favor of or against the various stars who were acclaimed in New York and along the East Coast. He had, from the beginning, fallen in love with Italian opera and bel canto, with the style of singing that gave great importance to closed forms, cabalette, arias, daccapo, acrobatic variations. The flourishing individual interpretations of great sopranos (Jenny Lind) and contraltos (Marietta Alboni) were as important as the overall performance of the orchestra. Audiences were delighted by the tradition of virtuosity – the same tradition that the greatest musicians in Europe considered of the utmost importance not only for vocal music, but for instrumental interpretation as well. Chopin suggested his pupils attend all recitals by acrobatic soprano Luigia Boccabadati, regardless of the eventually poor productions in which she sang. Whitman soon became a great connoisseur of voices, a perceptive reviewer, and a demanding spectator as far as scenography, acting and directing were concerned. He “grafted” his experience of opera “upon himself”, on his poetry and on its rhythm and diction, on the basis of a responsible poetics, which refused merely mimetic operations and banal “acoustic ekphrases”, but instead privileged a structural technique of incorporation. In his poetry, in fact, we find: the traces of lyrical sopranos’ warbles and trills, the intricate score of a concertato, duettos (dialogues between two interpreters, but also between singers and orchestra, or between melody and harmony), echoes of melancholy arias, which possess a strong compositional pattern that is well aware of the effects it wants to achieve. Gluck, the author of the famous “reform” of opera, confessed that, in writing the musical score for a melodrama, he felt more poet (and painter!) than musician. In other cases, he was the producer of an “instrumental art”, whose only aim was to “serve” the action and the words of the protagonists expressing their emotions on the stage. The office of music was, in his opinion, that of intensifying the “situation” of the fable, without interrupting or “cooling” it down 5 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, lines 1170–1175, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, cit., pp. 80–81.

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with undue additions and interventions.6 Whitman has no doubts about the fact that poetry is “the real thing”, but also knows that the verbal discourse can be enriched and intensified in the emotions and ideas that it conveys by the process of grafting it with all meta-verbal codes he is able to master. In the end, as we remember, he identifies the poet with his book, and the book and the text with his body (a body that should be touched). He remains within the limits of verbal communication, but draws further density of expression from extra-literary sources, reducing to a minimal degree the monologic texture of his poetry (in Bakhtinian terms).7 In so doing, he reaches that “excess of signification” in the interchange with his readers that, according to Paul De Man, is the distinctive mark of great literature.8 In other words, he produces more and more original phenomena of semiotic contamination, running the risk of over-production, in addition to heterogeneous composition, while obtaining polyphonic successes by experimenting unique procedures, that had much to say to the following generations, till the second half of the 20th century.

2.

Proud Music of the Storm

The long and complex poem in Whitman’s final edition of Leaves of Grass (1891– 92), first published in 18699 and revised for the 1881 edition, consists of 164 lines, divided in six sections of unequal length. The first section has 13 comparatively short lines. Section 2 and 3 are the longest (44 and 35 lines respectively), section 4 is 26 lines long, section 5 has 20 lines and section 6 has 21. References to music and to opera abound. The strategy of functionalization exemplifies the mechanism that Genette calls “transtextuality”,10 with the relationship between source text and hypertext being biunivocal, and the modality of textual “transcendence” forerunning a dimension that I have no hesitation in calling hyper6 Preface to Armida, 1777; cf. Michel Poizat, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, transl. by Arthur Denner, Ithaca, Cornell U. P., 1992, pp. 56–57. 7 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, transl. by Vern W. McGee, Austin, TX, U. of Texas P., 1986. 8 Paul De Man, Critical Writings 1953–1978, ed. by Lindsay Waters, Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota P., 1988. 9 In a letter of November 30, 1868, Whitman asked Emerson to act as his agent, offering “Proud Music of the Storm” to Fields, general editor of The Atlantic Monthy. Emerson accepted the role and Field paid the sum of 100 dollars asked by Whitman; the poem was published in the February 1869 issue of the magazine. Cf. Robert Scholnick, “Whitman and the Magazines”, in On Whitman. The Best from American Literature, ed. by Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, Durham, SC, Duke U. P., 1987, p. 173. 10 Sayyed Ali Mirenayat and Elaheh Soofastaei, “Gerard Genette and the Categorization of Textual Transcendence”, in Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6, 5 (September 2015), pp. 532–536.

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baroque. This dimension paved the way for the most extraordinary structural and formal solutions in modern and post-modern literature and art, as we shall see when we deal with John Berryman and James Merrill.11 Within the context of Todorov’s critical pattern, we can observe that Whitman’s transgression works both on the “genre” and on the “type” of the text it produces.12 In psychoanalytical terms, the poem reveals the poet’s unsolved projects, his aborted projections and materials that have turned to scum and dross before they were used. Nonetheless, Whitman knows how to cope not only with “seadrifts”,13 but also with a substance that often seems (and sounds) inert, obstinate and unmanageable. There is no “alterity” that cannot be overcome. The frightening mask of irreducible themes and moods, of unsounding walls and impermeable boundaries, gives way to a tension towards revelation.14 We witness in admiration, even in awe, the staging of a “penultimate” act, then, in the final act, the song unbinds itself. The text, so to say, “melts”, becomes liquid, as liquid as Dionysus was, according to Alexandrinian mythology.15 There is, in fact, no other Whitmanian poem which so fully belongs to the category of Dionysian and Pindaric inspiration. It is no coincidence if, in 1934, the Swedish poet and critic Roland Fridholm called Whitman a “Pindar from Paumanok”.16 But this does not mean that it is incoherent. The poetic I, in fact, articulates a discourse that can be summed up along the following lines (a scheme that I am going to use to explore the network of the text): 1. Late at night, a violent storm shakes the senses of a subject that is slumbering, originating dreams and visions, memories and associations; 2. The subject accepts to be “possessed” by his dreams, by physical stimuli and recollections, “staging” them as a series of synesthetic (visual and acoustic) “pictures”; 3. The subject’s dreams testify his age-old sensitivity to sounds, to both “natural” and “artificial” music; 4. Coalescing around the theme of “human” music, the dreams concentrate on memories pertaining to opera, which are revived, deconstructed and reconstructed, in a sort of trance; 11 John Barth, “Foreword” to The Floating Opera, New York, Doubleday-Page, 1988, p. vii; a more extensive discussion of the relationship opera/literary text is in his Once upon a Time, A Floating Opera, Boston, Little-Brown, 1994. 12 Tsvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genre”, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. by David Duff, New York, Longman, 2000. 13 Sea-drifts is the cluster of poems added to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass (it includes eleven poems written between 1859 and 1880). 14 James E. Miller, Jr, Leaves of Grass. America’s Lyric-Epic of Self and Democracy, New York, Twayne, 1992, pp. 95–96. 15 Roberto Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, Milano, Adelphi, 1988. 16 Roland Friedholm, “Pindaros fran Paumanok”, in Ord och Bild 43 (1934), pp. 437–443.

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5. The oneiric experience pays then a parallel tribute to sacred music, and to its importance in the history of the subject’s life; 6. The subject wakes up, briefly recapitulates the themes of his dreams, and imagines that his nocturnal impressions can teach him a new “rhythmus” for his diurnal poetry.

Section one As in most cases in Whitman, the poem progresses through antinomies and oppositions, which sometimes are reconciled, and sometimes are not. Even elements that, after the operation of “grafting”, finally merge, do so only by means of a painful friction. The initial dichotomy is the traditional 19th century, Romantic, transcendentalist opposition we dealt with at length in the pages on Emerson (chapter I) and Thoreau (chapter II) between (natural) noises and (artificial) sounds. However, after a few lines, the reader can hardly distinguish the two categories: Proud music of the storm, Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies…

The noise of the storm, “whistling across the prairies”, the “strong hum of forest tree-tops”, the “undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts” (observe the abundant use of alliteration, verging on onomatopoeia) are irresistibly felt as intimately linked to “artificial” sounds, according to a metaphoric line that, after the whistling of the wind and the hum of the forest, presents us with “hidden orchestras”, “chords left as by vast composers”, “choruses […] formless […] religious dances”. The speaking I is hit by undifferentiated acoustic stimuli and filled with echoes that acquire a visual dimension (“dim shapes”, “serenades of phantoms”), in a synesthetic interplay of sensations that, offered ex abrupto by the poem’s incipit, expresses the adherence of the subject to a tormented sleep. As he dives into the depths of dramatic oneiric experiences, without succumbing to them, he feels the need of “transcending” them if, when he wakes up, he wants to create poetry out of them. Images of dreams and the soundtrack of nocturnal fears find a fit accompaniment in the rage of the storm, in the rhythm of nature (but Whitman uses the classical form rhythmus in this instance), in the recollections conjured up in the subject’s unconscious by recurring anxieties. The subject chooses or refuses to choose, and operates putting into effect a clear distinction. Alternatively, he relinquishes his subjectivity and becomes a passive instrument that can only register input, sensations, impressions. In the composite texture of these lines, the form of the content is that of a multiple aggression to the senses and to the imagination of the reader, who is

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asked to identify with the poetic I. The semantic reference is to orchestras, choruses and the art of dancing (a “religious” dance, i. e. an exotic, ecstatic dance, a ritual, ceremonial trance). In the following sections the text will functionalize more intimate modes of musical production, as the great organ, strong base, violins, a soprano aria, the solo of a cornet, the trumpet, the cello, the flute and the harp enter the lines of the poem after the drums. In the second part of the section, Whitman explicitly introduces human sources of acoustic perceptions, selecting from the repertoire of his memories of the Civil War and the poems he wrote in the 1860s (Drum-taps). It is in fact another kind of aggression that is conceived to balance the predominance of natural sounds in the first lines: You sounds from distant guns with galloping cavalry, Echoes of camps with all the different bugle-calls, Trooping tumultuous…

And yet the poet continues to treat these “artificial” emissions as spontaneous outputs, that do not disturb the context of his great orchestra. Both natural and artificial sounds enter the chamber (and the brain) of the poetic I, in the middle of the night (“filling the midnight late”), de-stabilizing it, forcing the Self to “bend”, to comply (but bend has strong physical connotations, and makes us think of a soul that is subjugated by a violent onset). The section ends with a remarkable line (containing one of Whitman’s most successful alliterations), whose acoustic pattern speaks more of acceptance than of resistance: Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber, why have you seiz’d me?

In a few words, the poet provides detailed (explicit and implicit) information, making it clear that: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

he was not sleeping, but slumbering, he was alone, in a state of lazy inertia, sheltered but unquiet, pensive, in his room, his senses reacted with incredulity and resisted only for an instant, he was somehow ready to be seized, “caught”, “possessed” by the violent intrusion, he did not dislike to be filled with actual noises (the storm) and recollections of all sorts of sounds, that dispelled more unpleasant, disquieting moods, 6. the sounds were both sublime memories of the musical theater, and echoes of dramatic acoustic experiences from the war.17

17 Should somebody remark that the last line of section 1 and the first lines of section 2 testify an unconscious reminiscence of E. A. Poe’s The Raven (its incipit, the “situation” of the subject who is “nodding”, the midnight, the claustrophobic environment, the implicit and explicit anxieties that grieve the subject), I would reply that such an unaware “filiation” is not to be thoroughly excluded from the text; but I would also stress a couple of major differences between the two poems. The raven intrudes and interrupts the silence of the context as a visitor “gently rapping” at the chamber door ; later, Poe’s poetic voice, after many vain attempts at establishing a dialogue with the “late visitor”, struggles to keep the intruder (and

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Section two The second section begins with an invitation of the poetic I to the soul. The acceptance of the acoustic turmoil and of the sonorous invasion of the room asks for an act of attention, an appropriate active response, an intention towards deciphering the deepest meanings of the experiences one has to confront: “Come forward O my soul […] Listen, lose not”. Though the subject is “slumbering” throughout the poem (“Then I woke softly”, line 143), a sort of “unconscious will”, that is comparable to an instinct that is only half dormant, results in an unaware curiosity and in the act of asking questions about the messages conveyed by the dreams that overcrowd the sleep. The rest of the poem can be summed up as a series of “acoustic pictures”, “remembered scenes”, tableaus that revive the complexity of the relationship between the subject and the universe of sounds (and we should, from the beginning, keep in mind that, for him, “all sounds became music”, line 60). The structural pattern is very Whitmanian, in its oppositional/antiphonal strategies: age old music vs. contemporary music, sacred vs. profane music, western vs. oriental music, Italian music (opera) vs. German music (symphony), choral vs. monodic music, instrumental vs. vocal musical productions, self-sufficient music vs. accompaniment, playing and singing vs. dancing. The multilinguistic lexicon “grafts” on the Anglo-Saxon stem dozens of foreign lexemes: muezzin, troubadours, minnesinger, Paradiso, victoria, libertad, vina, bayadere. The Italian component prevails: cantabile, tutti, trombone, soprani, tenori, bassi. Italy remains “Italia” (line 75). 1. Although I do not want to indulge in old fashioned critical methods, I cannot avoid mentioning that the second section is further divided into nine sub-sections, in particular since these segments (that, for convenience’s sake, I will call “stanzas”) are significantly unequal in size. The first one has only 4 lines, the second 5, the third 3, the fourth again 3, the fifth 4, the sixth 19, the seventh only 2, the eighth 2 and the ninth 3. It seems evident that the first five “stanzas” are somehow preparatory to the ampler inspiration of the sixth (which starts with a solemn “Now the great organ sounds”, line 29). Stanzas number seven, eight and nine, though very brief, cannot be considered as mere corollaries that introduce marginal touches, since their enunciations are major contributions,

the ideas brought about by him) at a safety distance (“perched upon a bust of Pallas”), and finally wishes to be left alone. In Whitman, instead, there is no desire to keep a safety distance or a hiatus. In addition, of course, Poe’s visitor utters only the word “nevermore”, which is, literally, the only sound/noise/voice that is heard, whereas Whitman’s subject welcomes the numberless acoustic intrusions as elements useful to dispel the melancholy aura that surrounds him.

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structured as flashes of memory and acoustic epiphanies, or (if a neologism can be forgiven) “epiphonies”. 2. The second stanza stages “A festival song/ The duet of the bridegroom and the bride, a marriage march” (lines 18–19). There is no mention of an opera in particular, unlike section 3, where we find Norma, Lucia, Ernani, Sonnambula, and section 4, where we meet William Tell, Huguenots, The Prophet, Robert [le diable], Faust and Don Juan [Don Giovanni]. And rightly so, since a scene like this can be found in dozens of European operas, consistently with the same pattern: the festive background, the love duet between tenor and soprano, the chorus of the rejoicing “cortege swarming full of friendly faces young and old” (line 21), and the marriage-march. The most famous examples are Mendelssohn’s nuptial march for the stage music of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, and the one in Wagner’s Tannhäuser.18 The beginning of the “recollection” is, therefore, joyous. However, the rest of the poem proceeds observing a complex stylistic counterpoint and many variations of narrative planes, performative references, tones and registers. 3. The following “stanza”, in fact, shifts from the reference to opera to the memories of the war. Once again, the synesthetic technique plays explicitly with sight (“see’st thou […] the banners torn but flying?”) and hearing (“loud approaching drums”, “Hearest those shouts of a conquering army?”) but also, implicitly, with smell (“in powder-smoke”). The contrast with stanza no. 2 (also in terms of length) establishes a strategic chiaroscuro pattern of contrasts, which we shall soon see applied in the longest stanza. 4. Even more synthetic is stanza no. 4, which is entirely encapsulated in a parenthesis. It continues to deal with the theme of war, but the tone is far from heroic, since it does not show the glory of victory, but the price paid for it from the point of view of the dead, the wounded and the devastated landscape: Ah soul, the sobs of women, the wounded groaning in agony, The hiss and crackle of flames, the blacken’d ruins, the embers of cities…

Hearing predominates, nouns and verbs tend to be onomatopoeic (sobs, groaning, hiss, crackle), but sight is also present (flames, blacken’d) and, again, there is an implicit reference to smell (“embers of cities”). The last line is yet another functional alliteration, in which the three sonant d’s adequately express and amplify the psycho-physical echo of the scene staged before us: The dirge and desolation of mankind.

18 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61 (1843), William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca.1595); Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser (1845).

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5. Stanza no. 5 invites the reader to shift, again both with his/her sight and hearing, to another joyous set of scenes, following the imagination of the poetic I, who goes back (very far back) in time (and equally far in space), becoming a witness of the musical life of the middle ages. The reader is invited to share the spectacle of the semi-barbarian, “innocent” Celtic middle ages (“old harpers […] at Welsh festivals”) and of the more cultivated middle ages of France and Germany (“minnesingers singing their lays of love […] minstrels, gleemen, trobadours”). The latter is correctly interpreted as the age of courteous poetry. The “airs antique and medieval” fill the subject and, as we have seen, it is a subject that is ready to happily cancel every defense strategy, absorbing the “scene”, welcoming it, in so far as it is constructed and felt as something pleasantly penetrating the consciousness, compensating its void and anxieties. The gratifying sensations produce a last moment of quiet diction, before the “enthusiastic” long 6th stanza, which, instead, abandons all restraint, allowing the gushing out of a wild constellation of impressions, whose textual consequence is an unpremeditated sequence of apparently heterogeneous forms of input, whose “method”, though, will not be difficult to detect. 6. In stanza no. 6 the rhetorical orchestration is complex and skillful. The product of an experienced poet/musician who is far from showing signs of decline is evident. The acoustic levels of the lyrical discourse are not superimposed one upon another, but interwoven, so that the general pattern proves closely interconnected and rich in firm knots and vital ganglia, sustaining the overall architecture and preventing the text from veering in contrasting and disharmonic directions. The organ that gives way to the sequence is great but, at the same time, tremulous. It could not support the “symphony” without the base, whose pulsations are not intermittent, but regular and strong (line 38). Such a base, “as the hid footholds of the earth”, is, literally and metaphorically, the foundation of “All the shapes of beauty, grace and strength, all hues we know” (line 36), natural and artificial objects, as well as all wonderful spectacles and events, “Green blades of grass and warbling birds, children that gambol and play, the clouds of heaven above” (line 37). It is a sort of “primal instrument”, whose regular breath accompanies the unfolding of the universe and the source of a life that manifests itself in endless enchanting phenomena, arising, leaping forth from it. It is not a neutral primum movens, nor a fatherly gesture of creation, but the “maternity of all the rest” (line 39, emphasis mine). If this base is given, we can have with it every instrument in multitudes, The players playing, all the world’s musicians, The solemn hymns and masses rousing adoration, All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals…

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On top of these foundations, layer after layer of music, the richest palimpsest of sounds can develop; in fact, the “earth’s own diapason” functions as a “solvent” in this “new composite orchestra” (line 47) Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves (line 46)

(three liquid, semi-vowel w’s sounds speed the line and make it flow onward). The dissociation between art/man and Nature (“The straying […] the separation long”, line 49) can come to an end and a happy fusion can retrieve the ideal condition that only a word can adequately express (an Italian word, an implicit tribute to Dante as the father of the poets “of the far-back days”): Paradiso. 7. Then we have the three last stanzas of the section, which are three “flashes” rather than stanzas (2+2+3 lines, with three lines within parenthesis). Yet, as I said, they develop an important discourse, which is the apt conclusion to the section (of the “tempo” or movement of the symphony). Once the “alliance” between Nature and art has been re-established, and the “composite orchestra” is ready to play (“Tutti! For earth and heaven”, line 52), its structure must be firmly organized: “The Almighty leader” is obviously its conductor who “now for once has signal’d with his wand”. Immediately below his pre-eminent position, a major role is that of chorus and singers, male and female voices, “the husbands of the world,/And all the wives responding” (lines 54–55: once again, an antiphonal pattern). In the end, all other instruments follow, significantly summed up and represented by the strings, in particular by the violins, whose “tongues” (line 56) are closest to the human voice, and therefore the noblest “artificial” sounds. Besides, is it not, in fact, the first violin that provides the A key for the orchestra to tune? 8. The last stanza of the section has a coda, a parenthesis occupying two lines out of three. It contains an unexpected shift from the “extroverted” register that substantiates the glory of the reconciliation between human and natural sounds, to the most intimate dimension of the self, that the “tongue” of the violin makes possible, giving voice to the dialogue (that is nonetheless a silent utterance) of the soul with the heart: (I think O tongues ye tell this heart, that cannot tell itself, This brooding yearning heart, that cannot tell itself.)

The invocation (“O tongues”) and the “shameless” repetition in the second half of the line (“that cannot tell itself”), as well as the daring coupling of the two adjectives brooding and yearning (with no comma to separate them) seem purposely conceived in order to provoke the charge of emphatic diction and morbid narcissism. A charge I strongly refuse, and will try to refute. In fact, Whitman’s originality in using brooding and yearning as a unified couple, his intelligence in including this moment of introversion within brackets, as well as

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the choice of avoiding the risk of concluding the section in a bombastic tone – with all the instruments of the orchestra voicing a hymn to the glory of a reconciled universe of sounds – suggest instead a moment of concentrated intimacy. These features create an anticlimactic mood at the end, a most opportune low profile, whose link with the leitmotif of the text is justified by the inevitable projection of the poetic voice onto that of the violins.

Section three The third section is divided into nine segments or “stanzas” (I use the same terminology as in section two). Only the first is comparatively long (12 lines, from line 59 to line 70). Then we have a five line stanza, and seven short stanzas (varying from two to four lines). The structure is, therefore, doubtlessly different from section two. But a more remarkable difference is one in the poem’s linguistic register, because of the inevitable consequence of the change in the thematic organization. The starting point is the idea, to which I already referred, that “from a little child […] all sounds became music” to the poetic I. The following catalogue includes numerous examples of these sounds, which, in keeping with the overall ideological design, are both natural and artificial, intimate and tender, or explosive and solemn. A parenthesis stresses, in particular, the importance of the memory of women’s voices: “dearest mother’s, sister’s voices”, line 63). Both natural and artificial sounds can be soft or harsh, punctual or rhythmically repeated: the sea can rage in a tempest, but its surf beating on the sand can also be “measur’d” (line 65); birds can twitter or scream (line 66). Rarely, in the history of Anglo-American poetry, the phenomenology of sonorous events has been analyzed and displayed to such a full extent, with similar effective strategies, and similar successful outcomes. Whitman starts with noises that are only an inch above the zero degree, with the “quasi-silence” of “the growing corn” (line 64), and goes on mentioning the “wild fowl’s notes at night”, “the open air camp-meeting”, the noble “psalm in the country church” (line 68) and the equally noble “fiddler in the tavern” or “long-strung sailor song” (line 69). The second stanza shows that the hierarchical line is firm: noises are obviously less interesting than sounds, then voices come; the top level is reserved to singing voices. The ultimate experience, for the soul that hears, are the “songs of current lands”. In a swirl of cosmopolitan inspiration (with his usual passion for proper names and their resonances), Whitman presents the reader with six national musical productions; the way he exposes their characteristics (determined by the denotations and connotations attributed to each of them) is as

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historically and biographically telling, as it is convincing from a poetic point of view. a. Germany (in a broad sense, the German speaking world) is associated with “airs of friendship”, wine and love. The output of the culture that originated and nourished the noblest season in the history of classic music, spanning a period of two centuries, from Bach through Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, are interpreted as the result of frank comradeship, frequent toasting, and passionate, romantic love. b. The inclusion of Ireland and Scotland among major European musical traditions documents Whitman’s awareness of the importance of Irish and Scottish immigration to America and the musical background that immigrants “grafted” on the new continent. The poet speaks of Irish “ballads, merry jigs and dances”, acknowledging, in so doing, his appraisal of folk music, no less than of more aristocratic musical expressions. The same applies to Scotland, though the country is easily “dispatched” with the generic noun “tunes” (“Scotch tunes”). c. England and France are rapidly acknowledged, with a single noun each: warbles and chansons; the former, most likely, refers to the close connection (attributed to English songs by tradition) with the natural trills of local birds, in a natural environment characterized by the abundance and variety of singing species.19 d. Finally Whitman hastens to end his “survey” with a synthetic but irrefutable praise of Italian music: “Italia’s peerless compositions”. The line concludes the stanza in an unequivocal, lapidary tone, to which the spelling of the word in Italian contributes: “Italia” (another evidence of Whitman close acquaintance with all sorts of European immigration to America), more than the adjective peerless. Then we have seven flashes (in the true sense of the word) that stage, like minimal one-act plays, and sum up, the gist of as many crucial moments at the opera house. Rapidly projected onto the reader’s imagination, they ask for the reader’s complicity in sharing the memory of the experience, or to trust the subject’s authority and skill, as he conjures up the scene using a few masterly brushstrokes. With the exception of no. 4, each of these flashes revolves around a proper name: Norma, Lucia, Ernani, Fernando, Amina, Alboni. The names obviously provide the contextual cognitive coordinates for an immediate 19 Such an abundance never ceased to amaze North American visitors (exciting their envy) as, a few years later, Canadian painter and writer Emily Carr confessed in her autobiographical writings. See Andrea Mariani, “Emily Carr : il potere dell’albero filosofico”, in Rivista di Studi Canadesi, I, 1 (1988), pp. 69–79 and Idem, “Emily Carr, il contesto internazionale”, in Merope, VII, 16 (September 1995), pp. 43–73.

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identification of the referent: five operas (Norma, 1831, Lucia di Lammermoor, 1835, Ernani, 1844, La Favorite, 1840, Sonnambula, 1831) and Marietta Alboni, who is the singer Whitman preferred to all other great stars who toured the States in his lifetimes.20 In contrast with other sections of the poem, sight prevails over hearing in these flashes: opera enters Whitman’s text with the full weight of its performative dimension. The poetic I does not hear Norma singing in the famous scene in which she threatens to kill her children, but sees her advancing “across the stage with pallor in her face”, with the dagger in her hand, in her “lurid passion” (line 76). Lucia’s madness does not penetrate the system of hearing only, but that of sight, as well: I see poor crazed Lucia’s eyes’ unnatural gleam, Her hair down her back falls loose and dishevel’d (lines 78–79)

The spectator does not first notice, at a distance, from the gallery, the blood spots on the white robe of the inspired soprano, but stares into her eyes, judging her interpretation and, simultaneously, forgetting that it is an interpretation. In so doing, the spectator identifies with the character’s bewilderment and her “innocence in crime”. The scene is described by means of a perfect blow up. The following flash offers another climactic moment that stages a contrast as strong as that of Norma (motherly love vs desire of revenge) or Lucia (innocence vs unconscious crime): Ernani’s happiness on the eve of marriage vs his acceptance of death, due to an old, imprudent oath. In this case three senses are necessary to convey the intensity of the action and of the spectator’s participation in it. Ernani is “radiant” as he walks the bridal garden, “holding his bride by the hand”, “amid the scent of night-roses”, when he Hears the infernal call, the death-pledge of the horn. (line 82)

Verdi’s Ernani (1844), derived from Victor Hugo’s famous play Hernani, whose “preface” was the manifesto that inaugurated Romantic theater in France (1830), takes place at the court of emperor Charles V, or Carlos Primero, King of Spain. The Spanish context suggests the use of the Spanish word Libertad (with capital L) and contributes to the interpretation of the work in terms of contemporary 20 Marietta Alboni (1826–1894) toured the United States between 1851 and 1852. For Whitman’s first impression of her voice and style of interpretation see “Letter from Paumanock” no. 3, in The New York Evening Post, August 14, 1851, repr. in The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. by Emory Holloway, Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, 1972, pp. 258– 259. See also Re-Scripting Walt Whitman. An Introduction to His Life and Work, ed. by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, Malden, MA, Blackwell, Publ., 2005: “Marietta Alboni sent him into raptures: throughout his life she would remain his standard for great operatic performance, and his poem ‘To a Certain Cantatrice’ addresses her as equal of any hero” (p. 11).

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political debates that were urgent and intense in North and South America, and no less so in Italy, France or Germany. Equally correct is Whitman’s interpretation of the relationship between music and “plot”. In fact, the “trombone duo” is seen as duplicating the conflict between tenor and baritone, in the dramatic confrontation of “crossing swords and gray hairs bared to heaven” (line 83). The Spanish sequence continues in the following “flash”, which has a somewhat reduced pace, lingering in describing not only the action of an opera but also its background and scenography (“From Spanish chestnut trees’ dense shade,/ By old and heavy convent walls”, lines 86–87). The reference is to Donizetti’s La Favorite (1840), an Italian opera with French libretto, set in late medieval Spain. In this context the music accompanying the protagonist’s despair is qualified as “a wailing song/ Song of lost love […] Song of the dying swan”, even though it is not Fernando who actually dies, but his beloved L8onor.21 After such a gloomy mise-en-scHne the tone of the text fortunately turns festive, reproducing the joyous air of Amina (Bellini’s Sonnambula, 1831) that accompanies the happy ending, not by means of an acoustic/ekphrastic tour de force, but as a result of a limpid, crystal-like visual image: Copious as stars and glad as morning light the torrents of her joy. (line 91)

The section ends with the last “flash”, which is a three-line parenthesis, that exploits the image of the stars and the morning light, referring to Marietta Alboni as to “the lustrious orb, Venus contralto”. Literally, she is a star of the first magnitude, whose “lustrious orb” makes the night sky brighter. The reader cannot forget that Venus is the planet that continues to shine late in the morning, long after the sun has risen, first appearing in the vault of heaven soon after sunset, that poets of all ages, starting with Sappho (I am thinking of the famous fragment “O evening star, you, that gather home all things that bright dawn dispersed…”), have considered as the most intimate ally of a sensitive heart. The star had already appeared, in Whitman’s macrotext, as one of the protagonists in the “trinity sure” of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”.22 21 In the French libretto the correct name of the male protagonist is Fernand, that in Italian becomes Fernando; therefore Whitman evidently saw a production in Italian. Similarly, the later quotation of Willian Tell makes us think that he saw Rossini’s Guillaume Tell not in the original French version, nor in an Italian translation, but in an English version. As I anticipated in my Introduction, using Edith Wharton’s quotation from the opening page of The Age of Innocence, there were no precise rules and the language of the libretto very much depended on the kind of public that attended the performance, and/or on the nationality of its major stars. 22 The elegy that commemorates Lincoln’s death is another important text that can be interpreted along the line of the influence from opera; cf. David S. Reynolds, “Theater, Oratory, Music”, in Walt Whitman, Oxford U. P., 2005, pp. 41–56.

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Section four The section is closely connected with the previous one, due to the quotation of another six operas: Rossini’s William Tell (the correct title would be Guillaume Tell, 1829), Meyerbeer’s Huguenots (Les Huguenots, 1836), The Prophet (Le prophHte, 1849), Robert (le diable, 1831), Gounod’s Faust (1859) and Mozart’s Don Juan (1787). Interestingly enough, for this last opera Whitman uses a “Byronic” title, the correct one being Don Giovanni, since Da Ponte’s libretto, as we have seen, is in Italian. From a chronological point of view, it’s the oldest title, but Whitman prefers to quote it at the end of his catalogue, probably because he considered Mozart’s masterpiece as the perfect prototype of the kind of opera he wants to refer to in this section (with dramatic plot and strong melodramatic, “chiaroscuro” effects). This different category of acoustic registers (“odes, symphonies […] music of an arous’d and angry people”, lines 95–96) allows him to shift from the word of opera proper to that of dancing. In this case, in fact, he does not stress the pleasure derived from listening to exquisite soprano, contralto or tenor arias, and from seeing first class interpretations of singers who are also great actors. Instead, he stresses emotions typically experienced before a collective scene, a deep resounding chorus, a grand overture, and the full power of an orchestra that, without repressing the pure melodic vein of the singers, is finally allowed to set free all its symphonic, harmonic breath. After a rapid hint at the “delicious measure” of the waltz and the bolero, with its “tinkling guitars and clattering castanets” (another evidence of his interest in immigrant folk music), Whitman launches himself into a vast perusal of every possible kind of religious and sacred dance, and of many ceremonial, even barbaric musical traditions. He proceeds, as in the brief catalogue of six operas, before, in sparse chronological order. First we meet the “sound of the Hebrew lyre” (in which I read a reference to Verdi’s Nabucco, 1842). Subsequently we meet the march of the crusaders (here the reference, probably, is to Verdi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata, 1843), the ecstatic dance of the Dervishes (Emerson inserted a reference to “the barefoot Dervishes” in his poem “Days”), the religious dances of Persians and Arabs, and the modern Greeks who still dance (Whitman’s invention) in the tradition of Eleusinian rites. Following enthusiastically the unrestrainable flow of the poetic I, we see and hear the wild dance of the Corybantes and “the shrill sound of flageolets” of the ancient Roman youth. The two final segments of this section most opportunely lessen pace, returning to a more sedate kind of music: the muezzin calling and the peculiar prayer of the worshippers within the mosque. It is a religious “style” the subject evidently admires:

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nor form nor sermon, argument nor word, But silent, strange, devout, rais’d, glowing heads, ecstatic faces. (lines 114–115)

Equally suggestive of sophisticated but balanced musical traditions are the poetic voice of the “Egyptian harp of many strings”, the chants of the Nile boatmen, the imperial hymns of China, “the delicate sounds of the king (the stricken wood and stone)”, the Hindu flutes and even “A band of bayaderes”.

Section five After such a full immersion in exotic musical forms, produced in distant continents and in different historical milieus, at the beginning of section five (which has more or less the same size as section six: 21 vs 22 lines, but is divided into five segments or stanzas, whereas section six is divided into two almost symmetrical halves), the poet hears a sort of rappel / l’ordre, to which he responds with an invocation to Europe, the source and mother of his musical tradition: “Now Asia, Africa leave me, Europe seizing inflates me” (line 122). The old continent, in fact, has given proof of the greatest creative imagination in the realm of religious music. Most significant to me is Whitman’s reference to both Protestant and Catholic musical productions: Luther strong hymn, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott, Rossini’s Stabat Mater dolorosa, Or floating in some high cathedral dim with gorgeous color’d windows, The passionate Agnus dei or Gloria in excelsis. (lines 124–127)

The synesthetic effect provided by the coupling of “dim” with “gorgeous color’d” is intensified by the sense of width and depth implied in the idea of a “high cathedral”, which creates the feeling of the “expanse” of sounds propagated in the architectural third dimension. I underline the oscillation (and final balance) between festive, confident tones (the Lutheran hymn), enthusiastic gratitude (the Gloria), melancholy registers (Stabat Mater) and the “passionate” invocation of Agnus Dei. Though we cannot speak of an escalation of religious sentiment, I am inclined to read a sort of climax, testified by the position of Gloria in excelsis at the end of the segment. Before the final “act” the section proceeds somewhat tentatively, through exclamation marks (“Composers! mighty maestros!”, line 128), love declarations to “sweet singers of old lands, soprani, tenori, bassi!” (line 129, in which Italian, again, plays a major role), expressions such as “obeisance” and confessions of the overwhelming importance of sounds and hearing. In the parenthesis of lines 132–134 we have: “now it seems to me sound leads o’er all the rest” which points to the extraordinary reconstruction of musical experiences

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the poetic voice cannot have undergone. If, in fact, Whitman heard Beethoven’s symphonies, as well as Haydn’s Creation (lines 136–137), he certainly could not hear (in spite of what he explicitly says) “the annual singing of the children in St. Paul’s cathedral” (line 135). We have, therefore, to acknowledge that, no less than Emily Dickinson’s, Whitman’s imagination is also able to convey virtual experiences, and turn a reported event into a personal impression, to enrich an indirect, mediated information with the masterly invention of a true poetic genius. A further evidence of the poem’s consistent design, in the conclusion of section five the poet invokes all sounds, insisting, as several times before, on the desire to be filled “with all the voices of the universe” (line 139). The desire, however, becomes here a “madly struggling cry” (line 138). Sounds, music, as well as all natural and artificial utterances are defined “throbbings”. The dreaming – slumbering – subject receives such a paroxysm of sensations (which, once again, he would not refuse), that readers, in their wish to relieve the tension they witness and share, cannot but hope for his awakening, punctually and happily materializing in the sixth and last section.

Section six Contrary to our expectations, the poetic I’s awakening is not anxious, but soft and smooth. Most opportunely the subject, upon resuming consciousness, pauses and questions all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury, And all the songs of sopranos and tenors. (lines 145–146)

Six lines in a row begin with “And”. The “questioning” of the remains of such an intense oneiric production brings along a sense of revelation, as if the varied and often dissonant echoes of the night had unanimously spoken a single message. The subject has no doubts. In a short, serene dialogue, he tells his “silent curious soul” that he has found the clew he “sought so long” (line 151). As epiphanic as the most epiphanic literary texts in the history of western literature, the explicit of “Proud Music of the Storm” stages yet another revelation, after so many great self-discoveries in Whitman’s macrotext (“Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking” is probably the best known). The poetic I turns to a poetic body, who invites the soul to join him, as is the case in lines 152–154, that have the naturally elegant rhythm and superb weight of some of the best lines in Calamus (e. g. “As Adam early in the morning/ Walking forth from the bower, refresh’d with sleep”):

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Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day, Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real, Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.

Finale The poem is not yet over, though. The segment we have read was not its finale, but a penultimate act. It was not sufficient to receive and understand the revelation. One also needs to put the message into practice. What the soul and the body of the poet have heard in their slumber “was not the sound of winds”. Five lines beginning with “Nor” perfectly balance the lines beginning with “And” in the first part of the section: “Nor dream of raging storm […] Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,/ Nor German organ majestic […] Nor strophes of husbands and wives […] Nor flutes, nor harps”. The lines reveal the intimation of a specific mission that future poems have to accomplish: they will bridge The way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten. (line 163)

As the subject tells us, he is ready to invest his energies in this new operation, writing still unwritten poems. He discovers (and proves to us) that the operation is already in progress, handing over the poem he has just finished writing. In fact, the writing in action is the act of writing. In a similar vein, the most extraordinary outcomes in opera – when the spectator, on the threshold of the concluding scene, risks falling from ecstasy into satiety – the conductor/wizard/ conjuror’s (indeed) magic wand simultaneously provides the climax of pleasure and the relief of tension in a few moments and in half a dozen bars. My analysis should have been sufficient to clarify why, at the beginning, I said that “Proud Music of the Storm” is a Pindaric text (in this sense, comparable to Dryden’s “Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day”) able of managing a great number of themes, in shifting from one to another and going back and forth by adopting flashes forward, or retrieving remains of themes that have been already treated. It never loses the overall design, but firmly controls it, clarifying the discourse that flows beneath, in spite of (or perhaps thanks to) a rhythm that resembles the pulse of heart’s systoles and diastoles. Pindaric and “liquid” (Dionysian) as it is, it progresses through large, concentric waves of harmony, and flows like the purest melody, deeply penetrating our minds, reaching the mind’s hidden recesses and producing reverberations, epiphanies and “epiphonies”. It asks us to share memories and experiences, as it describes the revelatory moments in the speaking voice and in the poet’s psyche/soul. It balances – thanks to opera and to the mechanisms of identification and projection – the intimacy of recollections

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with the dramatic moments of extroversion, exemplifying the possibility of such an oxymoronic strategy as “symphonic/polyphonic lyricism”. As ideologically dense and profound as Emerson and Thoreau, as acoustically elaborate and convincing as Melville and Poe at their best, the poem shows a rich intertextuality, accompanied by a similarly rich intratextuality. In fact, we hear echoes of Song of Myself, Drum taps, “Out of the Cradle”, Calamus, “When Lilacs last”. Notably, the performative technique and sophisticated references to the realms of natural and artificial sounds and to classic and folk music, singing and dancing, show a fascinating intersemiotic texture, travelling through a variety of acoustic territories. I would be ready to call it simply a masterpiece, but I will use a less emphatic definition. It is an ample (and, for the reader, stimulating) puzzle, whose varied pieces finally interlock, resulting in a thoroughly satisfactory linguistic and cultural network. “Proud Music of the Storm”, finally, can also be read as a text that includes the metapoetic dimension, that is a declaration of poetics demonstrating the will to experiment a new phase in Whitman’s poetry and the discovery of a new stylistic project. The appraisal of Whitman’s later poetry greatly varies in the critical debate. What we cannot deny, however, is the fact that he had the courage to foreshadow a further level of practical and theoretical engagement. If thus far his poetry had tried to reproduce the sounds and sights of nature, the sublime spectacle of reality and the fascination of the “cosmos”, in the future it will be not an instrument, but a goal. Nature, experiences and memories from reality, will be (as in Wordsworth) the starting point, the source and the “occasion” that provides acoustic and visual stimuli, in addition to inputs that feed the poet’s imagination, so that he can, in his old age, boldly “go forth […] and write” (line 164).

Part two The lady poured out the greatest singing you ever heard – it poured like a raging river more than any thing else I could compare it to […] Her voice is so wild & high it goes through you like a knife, yet it is delicious.

3.

(Walt Whitman, 1863)

Italian Music in Dakota

The poem, whose title I have used for the title of my volume, was added to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, and belongs to the cluster called Autumn Rivulets. It is far shorter and less complex than “Proud Music of the Storm”, but

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equally relevant to this volume. In its seventeen lines I find a concentration of motifs that demand close scrutiny and much meditation. So much so that, though I want to avoid the risk of over-reading it, I find it impossible to resist the temptation of investigating its deepest structures and analyzing, layer after layer, the fully realized artistic expression and implicit cultural/contextual ideology it contains. It is divided into two unequal parts, not real “stanzas”. The first consists of twelve lines and the second of five. The first part includes a long parenthesis, spanning over half of the text: from line 5 to line 10. The second part has also a parenthesis, which coincides with its long forth line. The paratext – “The Seventeenth – the finest Regimental Band I ever heard” – offers a subtitle which is meant to alert the reader as to content and context of the poem, which, in its synthetic structure, avoids over-telling or over-explaining. Other words printed in italics are the three titles of operas mentioned within the long parenthesis of Part One (Sonnambula, Norma, Poliuto) which, from a syntactical viewpoint, has a great number of nouns, adjectives, and -ing clauses, but no governing verb. Its subject, which we find only in its last line, that is Music, suggests to the reader a verb in the passive form such as, for example, “was heard”, or “was played”, unless the “subject”, after all, is an “object” and the implicit verb is an active form, as would be “I heard”. Part Two contains the only governing verb of the whole composition, in its short last line: “Listens”. The two sections of the poem are simultaneously situated, as the conjunction “while” at the beginning of Part Two plainly indicates. This contemporaneity is essential from an ideological point of view, since it correctly inscribes the experience undergone by the poetic I in a precise, unique biographical and existential moment. At the same time, it suggests the equivalence – or intrinsic correspondence – of the subjects of the two sections: music and nature. From the point of view of location and space, as I said at the beginning of my Introduction, Whitman invents the personal experience of a territory that he never visited, because he considers it apt to represent the quintessential landscape of the plains. The coordinates of the poem are also very precise in terms of season and time of the day. It is a clear mild summer evening. The enchanting moment is suspended between light and darkness, and it is rendered through the reaction of the sight and other senses of the person who enjoys it (cf. the synesthesia implicit in the five adjectives soft, enwinding, limpid, yellow, slanting). The chromatic and sensual stimuli, as well as the response to them, are provided at the beginning and at the end of the first part: Through the soft evening air enwinding all. (line 1) Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown. (line 11)

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“Enwinding” is a graphic verb, in so far as it carries the idea that the air strongly “enfolds” the things that will soon be mentioned in the ensuing list (line 2: “Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds”), somehow adhering to them, while embracing, “possessing” them altogether, and one by one. It must be observed that, as always, when Whitman’s textual project finds the perfect solution, the “catalogue” does not consist of objects gathered at random. Rather it includes elements that characterize the landscape and the (temporary) human-scape of the place. That is to say, equally distributed natural and human items that, on the one hand, are rocks, woods and endless wilds; on the other, they are fort, cannon and pacing sentries. This parallelism, whose musical mode can again be defined as antiphonal, is impeccable and most effective: two human elements, in fact, respond to two natural ones (rocks + woods vs fort + cannon) and a natural one, followed by an adjective, responds to a human one, followed by another adjective (pacing + sentries vs endless + wilds). Line 3 introduces three musical instruments that the reader immediately associates to the band mentioned in the subtitle of the poem, so that he/she can start to understand what is happening then and there, “through the soft evening air”. The acoustic streams of the dulcet and the notes of flutes and cornets are spreading in large waves of sounds. Line 4 makes it clear that the notes of these and other instruments of the band are not banally melodious, sweet or nostalgic, but, on the contrary, “electric, pensive, turbulent” and even blatantly “artificial”. It is opportune to interpret the set of adjectives both from the point of view of those who hear the sounds and listen to the music produced by the band and that of the band which plays the instruments. Both listeners and members of the band are filled with an energetic mood (electric), are induced to meditate (pensive) and feel a sort of turmoil in their souls (turbulent). Finally, they are aware that they are experiencing something that interrupts the immemorial silence of the rocks, and does not belong to the eternal, natural soundtrack of the place (artificial). The use of the adjective artificial and its possible connotations introduce the long parenthesis that expresses the meditations of the poetic voice, as it tries to answer an implicit question, which develops one of Whitman’s leitmotifs in a most original way. What is the position of man in nature and how the poet of the self, the soul, the body, the new American Adam and democracy can vindicate the importance of intellectual and technological progress, the contribution of human history to the course of natural events, the enchanting harmony of music produced by man without forgetting the self-sufficient harmony and the perfection of a balanced environment, that does not actually need the presence of man? And, in more specific terms, what has this kind of music to do with its European heritage and such an essentially North American landscape as the wilderness of Dakota? Another interesting thing is that the definition and ex-

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plication of the kind of music played by the military band of the Seventeenth Regiment comes surprisingly late, at the end of the long parenthesis, with a clever effect of suspense. It also comes after the subject has already acknowledged that there is no real clash between the apparently alien music and the context: Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here, Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house, Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home […]

The paradox implicit in the title of the poem (Italian music vs. Dakota) finds a paradoxical corollary in a third question the poet cannot avoid asking himself: is it possible that this kind of music should work better here, in the endless outdoor spaces of the American West, than in the indoor spaces of the city? Answering yes, Whitman finalizes the process of appropriation of European opera, whose oscillation of fortune in the United States we have followed so far. If we compare Whitman’s answers to the transcendentalist Weltanschauung, we see how the poet succeeds in reconciling apparently opposite terms. As the second part of the poem clarifies, Nature is “sovereign of this gnar’d realm”, but is not jealous of man’s presence, of his “intrusion”, and of his mysterious and “unheard” production. Music is here, in sum, the emblem of the highest human expression, and represents a shift in the history of the world, it is an addition to divine creation. Nature, Whitman adds, witnesses in silence, “lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses”, like a beast controlling its territory from its lair, spying the moves of a strange, possibly threatening, new creature, that is, the incredible species of man, that is capable of giving birth to unnatural, yet sublime sounds. After an instant of anxiety, the ancient mother of us all acknowledges “rapport however far removed”, identifies the newcomer, in spite of his “foreign” accents and different notes, as a worthy member of the universe. Perhaps it is the accomplished and supreme result of evolution, something/somebody that is not alien at all, but the consequence of an age old process. I particularly like the long parenthetic line that describes such a happy discovery (an agnitio), comparing it to the tenderness of a mother who acknowledges a son of hers as she retrieves him beyond all expectations: (As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit).

When the poem ends specifying that Nature “listens well pleas’d”, we understand that in Whitman the ancient puritanical and transcendentalist suspicion before mundane music, musical theater, European musical tradition, opera and melodrama is definitely over. We also understand why, in Song of Myself

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(sect. 26), the praise of the birds’ songs sounds more complete with the use of the Italian musical term bravura (“I hear bravuras of birds…”). The three operas that are explicitly mentioned, once again, are not chosen by Whitman at random: Sonnambula and Norma by Bellini and Poliuto by Donizetti.23 Though they were created in a limited span of time (1830–1840), they belong to three different categories of Italian opera that filled with similar success the theaters of Europe and of the New Continent in the second half of the 1840s. Sonnambula (1830–31) is an arcadian/pastoral, sentimental and elegiac story with a happy ending; instead Norma (1831) and Poliuto (1838–40) are tragedies. The former is a historical tragedy with a pagan setting that stages a new version of the classical myth of Medea, transposing it to the times of the Roman conquest of the Gauls, whereas the latter deals with the persecution and sacrifice of early Christians in Armenia. The three works, however, have much in common from a musical point of view : their scores stress the absolute value of pure love, heroic coherence, loyalty, the triumph over mischievousness and the desire of revenge. In order to do that, the orchestra is often reduced to the minimal degree of complexity, and is never allowed to take the lead. Arias – especially soprano arias, such as “Ah non credea mirarti”, “Casta diva”, “Di quai soave lacrime” – flow in unrestrained arabesques of melody, possessing the souls of the listeners. The mechanism of identification of the audience with the characters, rendered by the singers’ interpretation, could not be more complete. Spectators go through a process of symbolic investment, following the parallel process of the authors (musicians, but also librettists), who have dislocated their personality in the various characters and who, in turn, become masks, archetypes, alter egos or “deuteragonists”. Whitman understands the similarities and the differences not only in the three plots, but also – what is more interesting from my viewpoint – in the texture (and significance) of the musical moments and “numbers”. As we know, he was not afraid of the category of the pathetic and, as with other sensorial and emotional stimuli, he accepted being deeply moved, applying no resistance before all sorts of spectacles, describing his surrender to them, the effects in his consciousness and the textual results. In this case he praises the music and somehow “breathes” it, while being aware of the fact that it is Italian, that it is 23 Sonnambula, by Vincenzo Bellini, premiered in Milan, Teatro Carcano, early in 1831; Norma, also by Bellini, premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in December, in the same year. Poliuto by Gaetano Donizetti was supposed to have its premiere in Naples, Teatro San Carlo, in 1838. However, it was cancelled due to political censorship and staged only two years later (1840) in Paris, with a different title: Les Martyrs, its Italian premiere taking place only in 1848 (Naples, November 30th). These operas reached American audiences in 1835 (New York, Park Theater), 1836 (New Orleans, St. Charles Theater) and 1859 (New York, Academy of Music), respectively.

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opera, and that it is a very special kind of opera (bel canto), the historical production of a specific cultural heritage. Then he appropriates it with the invention of its performance by an American band in the American West. Finally, he specifies what he likes best, in the three operas, differentiating them in spite of their belonging to the same cultural and stylistic background, capturing the specificity of the features that, in each of the three, most appeal to his “affective attention”, and provoking his ample and deep response: Sonnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish, And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;

In Sonnambula Whitman finds a paradigm onto which he can project his reliance on the possibility of love to overcome suspicion and misdemeanors. The protagonist, in a state of somnambulism, reveals her innocence not only to her lover, but to the whole village, as she sings “Ah non credea mirarti” (“I did not think to look at you…”), contemplating the withered flower that is an apt symbol of frailty, defenselessness and naivet8. In Norma he chooses to allude to the emotional tension concentrated in the triangular relationship among two native women (Norma, Adalgisa) and the Roman general (Pollione) who oscillates with his selfish love between them, redeeming himself only at the end of the story. It is, therefore, most opportune that he should make reference to those “trios” that, in fact, along with the masterly finale, are Bellini’s most extraordinary contribution to the history of opera. In Poliuto the chorus that conquers Whitman is not a martial war chorus (like those in Norma) or the nostalgic (and political) choruses sung by the members of exiled or oppressed nations, as can be found in early Verdi (Nabucco, “Va’ pensiero”, Macbeth, “O patria oppressa”), but the ecstatic chorus (“Celeste un’aura”, “A heavenly air”, from Act 2) that expresses the protagonist’s faith in a new, just God and his readiness to accept death in his name. The military band of the regiment, that Whitman heard, must indeed have been an exceptionally well trained band, if it was able to render such a varied range of musical effects, with poetic implications, without the use of string instruments. Lastly, in the long parenthesis of section 1, Whitman’s intent proves to be that of trying to convince the reader that the music played by the Regimental Band was (however “strangely”) “fitting” the context, “as if born here, related here,/ Not to the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house”, and again, “as really here at home”. The paradox that we have noticed from the beginning is therefore double. The opposition in the title (Italian music vs Dakota, or European tradition/East Coast vs United States/the Wild West) is intensified by another, equally astonishing opposition: indoor space of opera house vs outdoor space of the prairies or plains. We obviously know that opera is a musical genre which was born in indoor

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spaces, that it was first staged in the small private theaters of aristocratic families and musical academies, and later, in large theaters built expressly for it. We also know that, whenever nowadays (mainly for touristic purposes) it is performed in open air arenas or public parks, the acoustics are dramatically poor and singers and orchestras have to make use of microphones and amplifiers. But Whitman wants to defy his readers’ preconceptions and, in order to emphasize the universal appeal of opera, the possibility of considering it not an “alien” product but something that fully belongs to the national experience, he does not say that it fits the American landscape equally well – but better than the European indoor cityscape: “subtler than ever, more harmony…”; further, because of the environment, such music produces “meanings unknown before”. The great poet who loved contradictions contradicts himself for the nth time, since he never ceased going to the theater and being a very fine judge of musical scores and interpretations of orchestras, which is something one can hardly do when the music expands in every direction, when a human production loses itself in natural spaces. But his contradiction makes the transformation of music into the emblematic expression of man’s desire to merge with the rhythm and pulse of the earth possible, in a context that does not want to distinguish among the sources of the vital breath which governs the universe. Before concluding this section, I feel I should add that a similar conception emerges from many other famous poems by Whitman, for example from “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”. Though opera is not mentioned in these poems, their structures show a deep and vast exploitation of opera. In particular, “Out of the Cradle” possesses an operatic dimension, since it is divided in “scenes” or segments, in which the alter ego of the poetic voice (the bird) literally sings a grand aria (printed in italics), that is the “operatic song of loss” which, according to Sandra Gilbert, “would seem in its pathos too domestic, even too sentimental” and is, instead, capable of expressing the poet’s “aesthetic resurrection”:24

24 Sandra Gilbert, “Now in a Moment I Know What I Am for : Rites of Passage in Whitman and Dickinson”, in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection, ed. by Geoffrey M. Sill, Knoxville, The U. of Tennessee P., 1994, pp. 172–173. See also William F. Mayhan, “The Idea of Music in ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’”, in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 13, 3 (1996), pp. 113–128 and George B. Hutchison, Op. cit., pp. 124–125, with the interesting discussion of Whitman’s functionalization of his hearing of La Favorita with Alessandro Bettini and Marietta Alboni (“Letter from Paumanok” no. 3, in The New York Evening Post, 14 August 1851, cit., pp. 258–259). David S. Reynolds (“Theater, Oratory, Music”, cit., pp. 41–56) underlines the importance of Whitman’s memory of tenor Pasquale Brignole (“The Dead Tenor”, 1884).

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Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth,great sun! While we bask, we two together (lines 34–36)

The aria, as many times in Italian (but also, or perhaps even more, in Wagnerian) operas, making a preliminary entrance in the context of the acoustic dimension, seems interrupted before it can soar on wing and is resumed for a second tentative beginning: Blow! Blow! Blow! Blow up sea-winds along the Paumanock shore; I wait and wait till you blow my mate to me (lines 52–54)

Exclamation marks contribute to render the participation of the poetic voice in the message conveyed by the bird’s song, that is its condition of implicit dialogue, its common feeling and desire of expression. The aria finally surges and develops for no less than 59 lines, full of exclamation marks, iterations (Soothe! soothe! soothe! […] Loud! loud! loud! […] Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!), and an effective alternation of long and short lines. The long ones (“But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me”, line 109) form a vocal pattern that could be sung in a single breath only by a consummate tenor. The short ones (“O rising stars!”, “shake out carols!”, “Hither my love!”, “O darkness! O in vain!”) would require the prolongation of the vocal utterance of the last syllable that is signaled by the exclamation mark. When the grand aria ends (“The aria sinking”, line 129), it does not vanish, as if swallowed up by the sounds of nature (“All else continuing, the stars shining,/ The winds blowing”, line 130). On the contrary, “the notes of the bird continuous echoing” can be interpreted as the major “meaning” of the multiple messages intersecting each other in the unique moment (line 137: “The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing”). What had been an intense listening becomes “a colloquy” or, with a more explicit reference to musical theater, a “trio” (line 139) with three singers: the bird, the boy and “the savage old mother [nature] incessantly crying” (line 140). Evidently the technical language of opera helps the poet to stress, once more, the necessary consonance between natural and artificial sounds, among natural noises and voices. Only such a cooperation can produce true “understanding”: in this case, the revelation of the necessity to accept loss and death no less than life. Not an “epiphanic”, sudden flash of truth, but the surfacing of a truth that slowly dawns on the subject, through an “epiphonic” experience.

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Walt Whitman

The Chicago Auditorium

The interaction between Walt Whitman and opera had a formal seal, so to say, shortly before Whitman’s death, when young architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, financed by magnate Ferdinand Peck, planned the new Chicago Auditorium Theater.25 The enormous space, which was conceived, from the beginning, as an instrument for promoting opera in the city and as the permanent residence of a Chicago Opera Company, was unanimously praised by the press for being the most democratic theater in the world, in opposition to the “royal or imperial theatres of Europe”. Peck had planned a hotel and large office spaces to provide for the maintenance of the theater and for keeping the price of tickets sufficiently low.26 During the preparatory phase in the construction of the building, Sullivan sent a letter to Walt Whitman (February 3rd, 1887), paying explicit homage to the old poet, acknowledging the importance of his figure as a personal source of inspiration and as an emblem of a new kind of artistic production in the United States. In Sullivan’s words, not only poetry, but music, architecture, and painting owed much to the old bard: It is less than a year ago that I made your acquaintance so to speak, quite by accident, searching among the shelves of a book store. I was attracted by the curious title: Leaves of Grass, opened the book at random and my eyes met the lines of ‘Elemental Drifts’. You then and there entered my soul, have not departed, and never will depart.27

Modern criticism has stressed the ideological and political affinities between Sullivan and the poet. Both wanted to create an “egalitarian” form of art, that not only addressed the people of all social classes, but also called for an active contribution on the part of those for whom the artistic product was meant. In other words, “the common people” were the privileged subject, the major addressees, and the cooperative authors of an art that only America could produce.28 25 The Chicago Auditorium Theater and Hotel Building is on South Michigan Avenue at Congress Parkway. Its construction began in 1886 and the inauguration took place in 1889. When the project was launched, Dankmar Adler was 42 and Louis Sullivan, whom Adler had recently taken on as an associate in his firm, was 30. Frank L. Wright, who worked as an apprentice draftsman, was scarcely twenty years old. The Theater can host some 3900 people (the new Metropolitan House on Lincoln Center, New York, has 3600 seats, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples 3280, La Scala in Milan ca. 3000, the modern Op8ra Bastille in Paris 2950, Sydney Opera House ca. 2700). 26 John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1993. 27 The letter is entirely reproduced in Sherman Paul, Louis Sullivan: An Architect of American Thought, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, 1962, pp. 3–4. 28 Lauren S. Weingarden, “Naturalized Technology : Louis H. Sullivan’s Whitmanesque Skyscrapers”, Centennial Review, 30 (Fall 1986), pp. 480–495.

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Kevin Murphy’s essay on the theme is, generally speaking, convincing. It wants to demonstrate, however, that the analogies between the two artists also include a similar interaction of function and ornamentation. Such a fruitful interplay is, in fact, amply documented in Sullivan’s projects, such as the Wainwright Building (St. Louis, 1891) and the Guaranty Building (Buffalo, 1896), and can be interpreted as a means to reconcile the vertical and the horizontal tensions in the architectural artifact. In Whitman, however, I do not see any dialogue between function and ornamentation. For instance, there is nothing comparable to the interweaving of grotesque and arabesque in Poe’s poetry and short fiction, which is a structural device that can certainly be read as the imitation of a musical pattern.29 It is true that, as most lyrical texts, Whitman’s poems can also be seen as organized according to the vertical and the horizontal axes; but the ensuing, fruitful tension can better be defined as the cooperation of the diachronic and the synchronic “movement”. On the one hand, we have the long free verse, so typical of his diction, which flows uninterruptedly, exploiting the paratactic scheme (catalogues). On the other hand, we have the sequence of clusters that, basing their strength on the syntactic cohesion of progressive forms, create a sort of chain reaction that is rich in surprising linguistic and thematic explosions (I am referring here to Lotman’s theory of vzryv, 1992).30 In fact Sullivan did more than merely write a letter.31 He insisted that, in the triumphal arch that separates the hall from the stage, and left and right of the rear of the Gallery, there be inserted three “Whitmanian murals”. The most important one, from an ideological point of view, is the mural on the majestic, scenic arch, because, in Sullivan’s aesthetics, the arch is the culmination of the art and science of construction. It is a triumph over an abyss and the very crystallization of that abyss itself .32

The painting is by Charles Holloway and stages the progress of man’s existence, somewhat still echoing Thomas Cole’s four canvases titled The Voyage of Life (1842, Washington, National Gallery of Art). From a stylistic point of view, however, we can hardly detect a Whitmanian source, since the scene shows, instead, the influence of that “international taste” that in the United States imitated European Art Nouveau. The “story” of life begins, strangely enough, on 29 Andrea Mariani, “Architettura musicale ed estetica dell’arabesco nella poesia di E. A. Poe”, in La Questione Romantica, n. 11 (Primavera 2001), pp. 25–42. 30 Jurij M. Lotman, Kul’tura y vzryv, (orig. 1992), Culture and Explosion, ed. by Marina Grishakova, Engl. transl. by Wilma Clark, Berlin, De Gruyter Mouton, 2009. 31 Kevin Murphy, “Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetic of Egalitarianism”, in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 6, 1 (1988), pp. 1–15. 32 Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, ed. by Isabella Athey, New York, Witterbarn, 1947, pp. 121–122.

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the right side, goes up, and then declines towards the left, where a sinister group of mourners alludes to death. On the right and at the top, a few rather explicit nudes recall indeed Whitman’s sensual and bold confidence in the natural “cleanness” of the human body and its “healthy” beauty. When the Auditorium was inaugurated the nudes raised strong objections on the part of the affluent but prude citizens of Chicago. There was a short debate and some suggested that they should be removed or “veiled” (like Michelangelo’s nudes in the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel). Sullivan insisted that he could not accept to mar the mural, betraying the spirit of Whitman’s vision of the world. Recently restored, they stand now as sensual and innocent as in the late 19th century. The author of the two symmetrical landscapes is Albert Francis Fleury, who shows, instead, the influence of Jean-FranÅois Millet and the Barbizon School. Whitman’s taste somehow presides over these murals, since Millet was by all means his favorite painter.33 Another painter whom Whitman appreciated very much was George Inness, who in fact was, in turn, influenced by Millet, and who, by no coincidence, was a member of the Committee that had to commission the Auditorium murals. The landscape on the right side (facing the proscenium) represents “Spring” and has a single figure facing the public. The landscape on the left represents “Autumn”, and the thin figure that occupies its center shows its back to the public. The inoffensive but unimpressive lines inscribed under the two murals, unfortunately, are not quotations from Whitman, but excerpts from Sullivan’s poem “Inspiration”: “O, soft, melodious spring time! First born of life and love” for Spring, and “A great life has passed into the tomb and there awaits the requiem of winter’s snows” for “Autumn”, respectively. In a moment of selfindulgence the architect thought that his passionate readings of Whitman’s poems had finally given his amateurish verse a sufficient technical skill and poetic afflatus, so that the complexity and versatility of his genius could include a literary side as well. It is not so, obviously, but the occasional bad taste does not spoil the overall cultural importance of the Auditorium. Today the performances of opera take place in the Chicago Opera House, and the Auditorium, which can still host an impressive audience, is the aula magna (“magna” indeed) of the Roosevelt University, as well as the home of the Robert Joffrey Ballet and Dance Company. When conference goers and fans of musicals, classical and modern ballet and famous pop and rock stars enter the immense hall, they may or may not be aware of Whitmanian associations. However, they are more or less aware – and feel – that, in the few hours of the performance, they occupy a magic space surrounded by – and immersed in – an intersemiotic

33 Cf. Intimate with Walt. Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubell, 1888–1892, ed. by Gary Schmidgall, Iowa City,U. of Iowa P., 2001, p. 78.

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dimension, originating in the fortunate intersection of architecture, music, poetry and painting.34

34 Robert D. Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1951.

Chapter Four: Emily Dickinson, Sidney Lanier

Those celestial evenings in the Library – the blazing wood fire – Emily – Austin – the music – the rampant fun. [Emily] often at the piano playing weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration. (Catherine Scott Turner, 1890s) We sang tune after tune […] chants, rounds, fugues, anthems, etc. etc., we sang and sang, till the valley rang with our hymns of lofty cheer. (Amelia D. Jones, 1858)

1.

The old transcendentalist debate

In Whitman, as we have seen, opera produces emotional responses and convincing literary outputs even when it is projected onto contexts that could not be more alien (e. g. “Italian Music in Dakota”). When it appears in Dickinson, we notice that it must undergo an assimilation process, after which it becomes an integral part of a system of signs that could hardly be more consistent and homogeneous. In general, however, it presents itself as a virtual experience, integrated in the text by means of clever paradoxes, after a personal re-invention, in which what is reported and mediated can work as a promoter of the imagination, no less than what is experienced in the first person. Opera, in sum, belongs to that category of data, that can be caught and persuaded to enter the poetic discourse although they are extraneous, or precisely because they are felt as such, following a mechanism of attack and defense before reality, in which the vital rhythm of Dickinson’s production consists. I start from the observation that it would be a mistake to consider that Dickinson’s musical experience was indirect and mediated.1 We know, for in1 Carlton Lowenberg, Musicians Wrestle Everywhere: Emily Dickinson and Music, Berkeley, California, Fallen Leaf Press, 1992; Peter Dickinson, “Emily Dickinson and Music”, Music and Letters, vol. 75, no. 2 (May 1994), pp. 241–245.

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stance, that, since she was ten, she received piano lessons from Aunt Selby, and that her piano had always been a source of pleasure. Later, she composed “weird & beautiful melodies”, as we read in a letter by Kate Anthon Turner, a friend of Susan’s.2 When she grew into a mature pianist, she loved to improvise, in particular entertain the children who sometimes interrupted her – evidently not absolute – solitude. When at Mount Holyoke, she studied vocal music, becoming a member of the choir and gradually acquiring the remarkable hymnological culture that is heard as a distinctive echo and structural principle at the core of her poetic diction.3 But her musical culture was also lay and mundane. There is evidence of her love for Mozart.4 In the Library at Amherst there are her autograph comments on a volume which contains the war march from Bellini’s Norma, the famous waltz attributed to von Weber, that we met when we were dealing with E. A. Poe, and a polka from Offenbach.5 In 2013 the Houghton Library of Harvard University published Dickinson’s music binder’s book, which includes some 100 pieces collected by the poet between 1844 and 1852.6 Transcendentalist influence on Dickinson was very strong. Not only on her ideas and poetics, but on her lines, which were produced often tiptoe, in an attitude of reverence towards nature. Yet, this attitude is rather, sometimes, of competition and almost rage, against a world whose elusiveness did not cease to embarrass her, exciting her doubts and rebellion.7 Therefore the old transcendentalist debate around nature and art continued to be a major theme – with contradictory outcomes – in her poems and letters. Judy Jo Small has many perceptive pages concerning the influence of Emerson on Dickinson, but also the basic difference between the two.8 An uncompromising acknowledgment of the 2 Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 1998, p. 407n. Cf. also Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, New York, Random House, 2001. 3 Roger Lundin (Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, Grand Rapids, MI, Erdman’s Publ. Co., 1998) quotes and comments extensively the splendid episode, reported by Amelia D. Jones, a friend of Emily’s, class of 1849 at Mount Holyoke, when Dickinson and a friend of hers went singing in the woods: “We sang tune after tune […] chants, rounds, fugues, anthems, etc., etc. We sang and sang till the valley rang with our hymns of lofty cheer” (pp. 142–143). See also Judy Jo Small, Positive as Sound: Emily Dickinson and Rhyme, Athens, U. of Georgia P., 1990, p. 49. 4 Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. P., 2004, p. 95. 5 In a letter of 1849 (a Valentine to a recent Amherst graduate) Emily writes: “The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like snowflakes” (Roger Lundin, Op. cit., p. 75). 6 See George Boziwick, The Houghton Library Blog, September 5th, 2013. 7 Wendy Martin discusses the poem “There’s a certain Slant of light” as a clear example of Dickinson’s acceptance of an inimical nature, cf. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson, Cambridge U. P., 2007, pp. 96–97. 8 Judy Jo Small, Op. cit., pp. 36–39. However, Dickinson’s “unconventional experiments” in rhyme seem to have more affinity, according to Small, with those of Gerald Manley Hopkins.

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superiority of natural sounds over artificial acoustic production surfaces in Letter 261, when Emily confesses to Thomas W. Higginson that “the noise in the Pool, at Noon – excels my Piano”. There are no natural noises that can be considered humble or vulgar. Even the croaking of frogs in a muddy puddle, on a lazy summer night, is more pleasant/pleasing, than the music coming from a piano. This motif seems evidently in keeping with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s preference for the sublime melodies of the surrounding universe, that I have analyzed in Chapters One and Two. The following lines from Poem no. 321 (ca. 1862) also seem in perfect keeping with it:9 Of all the Sounds despatched abroad, There’s not a Charge to me Like that old measure in the Boughs – That phraseless Melody – The Wind does – working like a Hand, Whose fingers Comb the Sky – Then quiver down – with tufts of Tune […] And Birds take place overhead To bear them orchestra.

However, there are substantial differences. First of all, as we read here, natural sounds can “charge” the subject (more or less violently, but the verb charge reminds us both of a military charge, and a heavy charge/load on the body and on the soul), impress, and shock it, as if they were artificial sounds, or human productions. The tendency to describe natural acoustic productions in terms of human ones (not vice versa, in the true Romantic tradition) demonstrates Dickinson’s preference for the former from an ideological point of view, but also her awareness of both, and, above all, of their function as instruments to be used in the language of poetry. If, for instance, the sound of the wind can be defined as a “phraseless Melody”, it is because the subject knows that melodies are not “phraseless”, but follow precise rules, rhythms, conventions; the Music of the birds, in Poem no. 783, is not “phraseless” but “measureless as Noon” (line 4). The direct experience of the wind that “combs the Sky” with its fingers can inspire (literally, with its breath) the production of poetry and the expression of emotions, not only for its intrinsic charm, but because it reminds the poetic voice of other kinds of music. In the second stanza (lines 16–20) the scene turns almost surreal, when the poetic I presents us with a vision of the Netherworld, in which the dear ones who have left us can still feel the “Bands” of the winds going “round and round” and thrumming on the doors. Finally, this musical per9 For Dickinson’s poems, I follow Thomas H. Johnson’s edition The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, in one volume, Boston, Little Brown, 1960.

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formance of natural elements needs an ampler orchestra, so the birds are asked to join, taking part in an event that is offered both to the living and to the dead. The third (shorter) stanza concludes pitying those who have not heard “that Fleshless Chant”. Dickinson feels happy because she heard it, but even happier because she also heard fleshy chants. What I want to stress is the fact that, in lines like these, Dickinson praises the beauty, energy and seductiveness of a natural melody, a natural orchestra, but also implicitly expresses her opinion (that we find in many other poems, with reference not only to the universe of sounds, but to that of other senses) that poetry, music and painting should never be judged as in competition with Nature. Art, in fact, is not a challenge to God’s creation, or the production of man’s pride, but the ultimate accomplishment of a being that is a natural creature, an offspring of the common Father. It is not a bird, yet it has learnt to “sing”, inventing its own melodies and orchestras. The only important thing is, therefore, as in the ancient times of the Greeks, to refrain from the sin of vbqir, that is, the worst offence to the Gods and to the Muses (cf. the myths of Aracne, Marsyas, Mida). In many of Dickinson’s poems we understand that she thought that the celestial beauty that permeates the world is a reflection of “the world of ideas”, where the harmony of the spheres dominates. But if man keeps within the boundaries of his pertinence, the sounds and notes that he produces can reach an expressive level that no lover of Nature can deny, and the poet can confess the appeal of “melodies” that are not super-human, “phraseless”. The traces of such ideas can easily be found in texts whose power Dickinson understood with extreme awareness, and that intimately satisfied her no less than they satisfy us now. Perhaps the best epitome of Dickinson’s warning against the danger of pride is to be found in Poem no. 505 (“I would not paint – a picture – ”, ca. 1862) which, however, is full, at an ideological level, of oxymora and paradoxes. The major paradox is that of an artist who says that he/she prefers to refrain from producing his/her art, because it is better to dwell in a “bright impossibility”. The image is conveyed by a splendid oxymoron, which betrays a sense of inferiority and impotence, as well as the awareness of one’s own brilliant intelligence. Giving up painting, music (the “Cornets”, line 9) and even poetry (line 17), the subject declares that the most delicious sensations are immaterial, ethereal. It’s better to be passive, with an “Enamored – impotent – content –” ear (line 19 presents us with another oxymoron of great originality, but not, in my opinion, a premonition of a decadent, late 19th century attitude). The close of the poem includes an exclamation mark that, from a rhetorical point of view, signals – in the dialogue within the self – the acknowledgment of an obvious truth, rather than an exhortation that tries to convince an “external” addressee:

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What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody!

Not even the best poet or the best musician are allowed to boast of their accomplishments, because their production (when it is comparable to the violent, and dangerous, flash of a lightning) and the way it would make them feel too proud of themselves, could blunt their minds (stun) and their sense of reality, making more and more uncertain the idea of their position in the world. In other words, they would not be real artists, respectful of the natural balance of the universe. After clarifying the form of the content, we cannot forget the originality of Dickinson’s procedures, when she accompanies her “discourse” with images that appeal to at least three senses and are symmetrical to the quotations of the three sister arts (painting, music, poetry): sight (with terms like picture, bright, celestial, Balloon), hearing (talk, Cornets, lip, Ear, Melody) and, most original of all, touch (fingers, feel, stir, softly). As in Whitman, her sensitivity to all organs of perception is so great, that she refers to consecutive or simultaneous acts of perception, even when she does not produce real synesthesias. Another reason for putting aside one’s own artistic production (be it poetry or music) is, obviously, a situation of mourning, when the sense of loss, and the enormity of grief, demand silence, solitude, inactivity. This is why, in Poem no. 261 (“Put up my Lute!”, ca. 1861), the poetic voice decides to give up the musical instrument that, according to Western tradition, is the fittest to accompany the human voice that sings.10 The text, as many other poems that deal with the theme of music, documents a strong use of the exclamation mark (four in the ten lines of the two stanzas). In line 2 “my Music” has a small m in the possessive adjective, whereas in line 4 it has two capital M’s: “My Music”. The “ownership” of the art is emphasized the very moment that art is declared useless, or inopportune, as if to express the sacrifice the fact implies. The only person whom the musician wanted to please is “Passive – as Granite – ”, indifferent to music. He “laps” it, so that “sobbing” suits him “as well as psalm”. The discourse continues to pursue the theme of the vanity of communication, since, no matter how sublime, sincere and intense music is, it still belongs to the world of the living. In the meantime, the dear one dwells now in an incommensurable “difference”, beyond an abyss whose gap no art can bridge. The second stanza introduces the idea that there is a “strain” that could “Maybe […] awaken – them!”, with a strong, but not surprising variatio, from the singular “sole ear” of line 3 to the plural them, that extends the wish/illusion 10 See E. A. Poe’s “Israfel”. Cristina Giorcelli (“Israfel: il liuto e la lira”, cit.) maintains that the two musical instruments are not synonymous.

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of communication to all the dear ones who have died. The lexeme “strain” suggests the tension, strength and almost painful quality of the only tune that should be able to produce the miracle of a collective resurrection, as if played by the trumpets of Doomsday. The learned reference, that confirms Dickinson’s intelligent dialogue with her father’s library, is to the Greek hero Memnon, son of Eos (the Latin Aurora, goddess of Sunrise), King of Persia and, later, of Ethiopia, whose funeral monument the ancient travelers in Egypt identified with one of the two colossal statues standing in the desert, near Luxor.11 An old legend, spread in the Western world, reported in several Dictionaries of Greek Mythology, said that every morning the statue – because of the wind that went through it – uttered a mysterious sound, as if it were a voice, paying tribute to Memnon’s mother. But Dickinson chooses to use a secondary version of the myth, according to which, instead, Memnon was “vanquished” by a terrible sound, that made him surrender “to the Sunrise” (line 9), thus joining his mother and enjoying immortality among the Gods. That arcane sound, which evidently worked to influence both the kingdom of the living and the underworld, might, perhaps, summon the dead and call them back to life. We are, in sum, presented with another example of Dickinson’s liberty of choice among the images that were stored in the repertoire of received culture, and trust in the power of all sorts of acoustic production.

2.

Close and imaginary encounters

Dickinson’s close encounter with opera materialized only once. In a letter of July 6, 1851, Emily reports that she went to Northampton, and was a member of the audience that listened to a recital by Jenny Lind, the virtuoso soprano, also known as the “mechanic nightingale”, who had never fully convinced Whitman.12 Dickinson is more blushful and somewhat less strict than Whitman, in her judgement. She had, by the way, no terms of comparison, whereas in Whitman Lind is often mentioned in opposition to contralto Marietta Alboni. However, she confessed her embarrassment in front of a voice that was technically flawless, but metallic: 11 The statue is, instead, a gigantic portrait of a pharaoh, probably Amenhotep III (XVIII dynasty, ca. 1350 b.C.). 12 In Good-Bye My Fancy Whitman compares Jenny Lind to “the canary, and several other sweet birds […] but there is something in song that goes deeper – isn’t there?”. See Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892, ed. by Floyd Stoval, New York U. P., 1963–64, p. 696, and Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, Berkeley, U. of California P., 1999, pp. 166–167.

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It was very fine – but I’d rather have a Yankee (Letter 46)13

In the first part of the sentence, the presence of “very” could make us suppose that she was, after all, “absolutely” satisfied. But the generic adjective fine suggests an experience that cannot be defined as memorable. In fact, no other qualification explains why the evening should remain as a major moment in her life. In the second part of the concise sentence, following the dash, Dickinson expresses a patriotic idea, indicating that her impression of the faults in Lind’s voice was due to the European origins and training of the singer. She takes for granted that a genuine Yankee voice would sound more naturally trained, beautiful and spontaneous in its flow and would contain no affectation. Less concise – and extremely entertaining – is Dickinson’s humorous description of her family members’ reaction to Lind’s performance. Her brother “Austin was one of the few not overwhelmed”. The rest of the family “were unimpressed” (the insistence on litotes is very telling); her father, whose “performance” was evidently more interesting to Emily than Jenny Lind’s, was restless, “mad”, “silly”, “amused”, “sarcastic” but not “disdainful”, as if old Abraham had come to see the show, and thought it was all very well, but a little excess of Monkey.

We can hardly guess how far Emily shared her father’s sarcasm and disdain, but an interesting clue is offered by the fact that, at the end of the letter, in a semiserious mood, she calls them “virtues”.14 Another letter (no. 118) refers to the performance of the Germania Serenade Band, which Dickinson heard at the Spring Exhibition in Amherst (April 1853): “I never heard such sounds before”.15 Her occasions to listen to a proper symphonic orchestral concert were obviously few (though the word orchestra occurs several times in her macrotext), so she had to be content with a band. But we have seen how moving and inspiring the music played by a good band could be for an American poet of the mid-nineteenth century. In this case it was not a military band, like that of Whitman’s “Italian Music in Dakota”, but a better one, a European (German) band, in front of which the writer could not be as nationalistic as she was towards Jenny Lind’s art of singing (in Poem no. 783 the music of the birds, singing “at Four o’clock” is also called “Band”, line 20). Unlike Whitman, Dickinson does not specify the musical pieces the Band played, but we can take it for granted that they were not excerpts from Italian operas. Also the 13 The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 1958. 14 Alfred Habegger, Op. cit., p. 275. 15 See also Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters: Critical Essays, ed. by Jane D. Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie, Amherst, MA, U. of Massachusetts P., 2009.

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emotion felt by the subject is not made explicit or qualified, but simply acknowledged and interiorized – stored as precious material for subsequent use in the poems. However, the fact that it was a German band, and that it made such a strong impression on her soul, can be used to introduce an issue that is central in the study of Dickinson’s relationship with music. In fact, in a poem that apparently has little to do with music, and even less with opera, we find a sort of “premonition” of a more modern opera, and of a grander, more complex orchestration. Poem no. 593 (ca. 1862) is a tribute (like Poem no. 312) to Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the occasion of her death. The lines show an utterly modern surrealistic technique, that is, a strategy that proves the only appropriate way to express the emotion felt when the news of the event reached the subject, as well as the thoughts that follow, when the subject tries to elaborate the enormity of an event. The incipit is based on memory and refers to the early stage of young Dickinson’s acquaintance with Barrett’s poetry : I think I was enchanted When first a somber Girl – I read that Foreign Lady – The Dark – felt beautiful –16

Then, stanza after stanza, the discourse proceeds through a train of oneiric images that transform the data of the past (sweet remembrances, emotions in reading the poems of the revered English lady, news about her life, marriage, move to Italy) into amazing presences. The second stanza conveys the idea that the subject has no points of reference any longer, that everything (space, time, memory, and consciousness) has gone astray. It is, in fact, impossible to say “whether it was noon at night – / Or only Heaven – at Noon – ” (lines 5–6). Starting with the third stanza, the pattern is clearer and more consistent. Minor things, minimal facts and details are magnified in the speaking voice’s mind. Bees become butterflies, butterflies look like swans. Animals whose attitude the subject should be able to foretell, change their habits, spurning “the narrow Grass” (i. e.: the grass that suddenly seems too narrow). The fourth stanza concerns us directly, as it enters the realm of an elated acoustic experience: the “meanest Tunes” (line 12) That Nature murmured to herself To keep herself in Cheer – I took for Giants – practicing Titanic Opera –

16 A strange, recurrent “nationalism” surfaces even here: as if the exceptional impression raised by Barrett’s verse were increased by her being a “Foreign” Lady.

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Here, as one sees, the almost imperceptible natural noises, those that only poets confess to hear – see Whitman’s hint at the noise of “the growing corn”, in “Proud Music of the Storm”, line 64 – are not perceived as whispers, or as tunes sung by heart, in one’s own company. Rather, they are perceived as the loudest production of a chorus of giants, nay, of “Titans”, who rehearse their roles in the production of a grand (German) opera. This is what I call a brilliant “premonition” of Wagner. But it is an uncanny premonition, since Das Rheingold (1854), that seems to be the direct reference in Dickinson’s lines, reached the United States only in 1889. Already in the 1860s, however, the debate around the revolutionary music of Wagner had crossed the Atlantic, splitting the musical world in two factions. Unfortunately both the party of fans of the German composer and that of his adversaries based their arguments on his writings (1849–52) more than on the notes they heard. Only very few of them were direct witnesses of Wagnerian productions in Europe. Pieces from Tannhäuser (1845) were heard in the United States as early as 1856 and the famous nuptial march from Lohengrin (1850) the year before. But the first part of the Tetralogy (Die Walküre, 1856) was finally staged only in 1878 (New York, Metropolitan Opera House). Sidney Lanier’s ode “To Wagner”, as we shall see, was published in 1877. The lines I have quoted, therefore, literally foresee/forehear a new style in opera and react to it, as if they could envisage and “feel” it “in the air”. Such an opera will later be defined as Drama. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, from an ideological point of view, indeed suits Dickinson’s synesthetic strategies and her capacity to write a poetry that appeals to all the spectator’s senses, no less than Whitman’s, but with a totally different technique, that is based on selection and synthesis rather than on accumulation. In other words, it is a musical experience that could be welcomed as the “natural” result of the development of the “protestant” vein, with which so many of Dickinson’s lines seem imbued. Whitman was, so to say, “bipartisan”, and appreciated the outcomes of both the Reform and the Catholic heritage. Instead Dickinson felt a greater affinity with German and English hymnology, with choruses sung in those Gothic cathedrals that (once again) she never visited, but which could inspire such perfect acoustic images as these: There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes –

(Poem no. 258)

One last observation on this, longer than usual, poem. The affinities with Wagner’s aesthetic thought and with his conception of opera as a sort of gigantic sacred ceremony, performed in a mystic space (Bayreuth Festspielhaus), reviving age old myths of Nordic folk tradition, are re-inforced in our minds by the

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use of lexemes such as Divine, Insanity, Antidote, Witchcraft, Magicians, Magic, Deity (all of which, interestingly enough, are written as proper nouns in capital letters). These words recall not only Der Ring des Nibelungen but also the great amount of sorceries and mysterious events in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Surprisingly (and movingly) these terms are not used by Dickinson to describe and express heroic deeds, nor acts of seduction on the part of mischievous characters, or the revelation of the power of Fate, the intrinsic frailty of man and the impossibility of Love. They suggest the “Conversion of the Mind” (line 22) that “Is witnessed – not explained – ” (line 24), that is, what takes place when we meet, in a sudden, shocking confrontation, the truth and beauty of great poetry. Another poem (no. 595) of the same period (ca. 1862) does not mention opera, nor music, and seems almost exclusively to be based on sight (and what a sight!), but uses terms that suggest the direct experience before a great performance in a theater that indeed recalls the grandeur of a prestigious Opera House. The scene described is either sunrise or sunset, two of the most majestic spectacles that nature can stage. In Poem no. 1045 the poet declares that “Nature rarer uses Yellow/ Than another Hue./ Saves she all of that for Sunsets”, while here, instead, the color that prevails is red. We can thus incline towards the description of a terse and triumphal rising of the sun, seen as the manifestation of God in person (“Myself distinguished God – ”, line 8). The incipit, once again, equals a natural phenomenon to a human production, namely the sudden turning on of the brightest illumination, at the beginning of a show in which the budget was not spared: Like Mighty Foot Lights – burned the Red At Bases of the Trees –

But the two following lines are even more closely connected with the (virtual) experience in a theater : The far Theatricals of Day Exhibiting – to These –

in which we perceive the sense of the third dimension, that is, the magic effect at which all stage directors aim. The whole universe seems to enthusiastically applaud the rising of the curtains (if it were a sunset, the lights would be turned off, the curtains would be pulled down) and the appearance, at center stage, of the great star. The sun wears the most splendid costume (“Enabled by his Royal Dress”, line 7) as to impress the audience at first sight. Unlike the music of the birds in Poem no. 783 (“The Birds begun at Four o’clock”, ca. 1863), where the joy of the little animals does not need any feed back (“Their Listener was none –”, line 9, “Nor was it for applause”, line 13), in this case the glorious natural event,

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no less than a human production, seems to need a response that confirms success. If we were reading Edgar Allan Poe, we would say that the text is distinctively operatic. But I have no problem in applying the same definition to the effects produced by this poem, since I have refused the negative connotations of the adjective in Poe’s case. I conclude this section reading another poem that, though short, offers further evidence of the fact that Dickinson is fond of all kinds of music: natural, human and intimate (like that of the phoebe, that “fitted into place”, “The little note that others dropt”, Poem no. 1009, ca. 1865) or grand, choral, and performative. It shows that she does not withdraw before rhetorical strategies in which even her own private music is expressed and defined as ecstatic, extroverted, “noisy”, rhapsodic – all but inward, deep-seated and subdued. Poem no. 1003 (“Dying at my music!”, ca. 1865), in six lines, hosts eight exclamation marks. The subject is so immersed in his/her music, that he/she wishes to die with it, within it, producing it and offering it as a gift, a sort of heritage for the world. The Self swells, bubbles (line 2), risks to lose touch with reality (and with the instrument) and asks for help (“Hold me till the Octave’s run!”, line 3). The windows seem to burst, the intimate space of the room explodes, boundaries are cancelled by the enthusiasm of the player. It is necessary to change the pace of the interpretation and the rhythm of the performance before the final act of transformation and flight (perhaps) into nothingness. Line 5 consists of the only technical term (Italian) “ritardando!”. As the head is spinning, the event, that is not specified, takes place, leaving two crucial remains: “Phials left, and the Sun!” (line 6), that we can interpret as two opposite symbols of life, and of the world. They are the small but significant object which contains the distilled “essence” of reality (a phial) and the largest possible object we can have experience of (the sun). In its concision, the text presents us with a climax that verges on paroxysm and, just before annihilation, a sudden anticlimax that avoids an emphatic conclusion. The “movement” reminds me of the conclusion of Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Storm”. In works of both poets, the discourse would not have proceeded very far, without the prolonged and sustained (in Whitman), sudden and concentrated (in Dickinson) metaphor of music.

3.

The Self as musician

At the end of Poem no. 635 (“I think the longest Hour of all”, ca. 1862) the poetic I describes itself as a fiddler who, after having “done” his “timid service” (“Tho’ service ’twas, of Love”, line 14)) moves “further North”, taking his “little Violin”. The woman poet who, as we have seen, played the piano with some competence and evident pleasure, in this case uses the metaphor of the violin, as the in-

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strument that is less an “instrument” and more a “voice” and “means” through which the self can find the best expression of an emotion. The text of the poem, in fact, deals with a particular emotion, that is, the expectation before a crucial moment (probably a funeral: “when the Cars have come”, line 2, but not yet the Coach). Time never seems to pass or, to be more precise, “Time” seems to have a will of its own, and reveals a malignant intention to prevent the seconds from passing. The clock, with its “Gilded Hands”, is blocked; only the “Pendulum begins to count”. The tension reaches a climax when “The Heart begins to crowd”. Exactly then, the speaking I goes away, with the conviction that the service offered (the discreet musical accompaniment by means of a little violin) is over. In this poem music plays the role of a gentle art practiced in a corner of “the Hall”; the insistence is on the total absence of narcissism. In so doing, the poet exemplifies two apparently oppositional movements. On the one hand, if the artist/fiddler refrains from a violent intrusion, from an aggression operated as by a star playing center stage, the “artificial” notes produced by man succeed in not disturbing the balance that reigns in the natural soundscape and silent environment, when people are in a delicate psychological state. On the other hand, music proves essential as “accompaniment”, adding significance and density to natural events or human ceremonies, but also soothing and easing their crucial “density”, turning something that is hard to sustain by a sensitive psyche into occurrences that can be endured. In this case, the tension is dispelled and the suspense turns into relief by virtue of the “little violin”. The ideological implication of Dickinson’s discourse here is perfectly in tune with the line which runs from Gluck, to Kierkegaard17 and Wagner. Music is at its best when it does not cover, or suffocate, the “story” (be it a natural fact, an action, a song sung by a voice) but, instead, accompanies it. An earlier poem (no. 157, “Musician wrestle everywhere – ”, ca. 1860) stages a similar situation, but of inverse sign. In this case, in fact, the subject hears a musical turmoil – a confusion of strong, solemn and mysterious sounds, that spread and break “upon the town” – but cannot distinguish the origin of such an acoustic “invasion” (I use the term also in its Jungian sense): “it is not Bird […] nor ‘Band’ […] nor Tamborin […] not Hymn from pulpit read.” (lines 7–10). The idea that everything seems to have started from the “Morning Stars” (not the singular morning star, Venus, we have met in Whitman) is particularly original. Yet it did not start at dawn, rather “On Time’s first Afternoon!” (line 12). Interpretations of such an overwhelming music vary among the listeners: “Some 17 Cf. in particular the essay by Søren Kierkegaard, published in Faedrelandet I–II, nn. 1890–91 (May 19 and 20, 1845): “En flygtig Bemaerkning betraeffende en Enkelthed i Don Juan (“A Fleeting Observation upon a Minor Detail in Don Juan”). Also great contemporary conductors, such as Sir Georg Solti, maintain that, even in Wagner’s Tetralogy, the singers must be “protected” against the danger of an “invasion” of instruments from the orchestra.

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– say – it is “the Spheres” – at play!” (line 13: the spheres take a break and play like children at recreation). The conclusion is inconclusive, vaguely suggesting a positive explanation: “Some – think it service” in Paradise, the place where we (“Please God”) will go, with our “late – celestial face”. I consider the use of “service”, taking us back to the last lines of the previous poem, very interesting. However, in that poem a humble individual was described as the author of a precious service, accompanying a grand event and, with the voice of his/her violin, as the source of deep feelings. In Poem no 155, instead, we are presented with the grand service of a heavenly (but aggressive) music that can be mistaken for a universal wrestle, and human beings can only accept their limits and doubts. Evidently, not only human music, but also the “music of the spheres” can be preposterous and invasive. Reading all Dickinson’s poems in which music plays an important role would take dozens of pages; further, it has be done already, with remarkable results. This is why, as in the case of Whitman, I prefer to concentrate on a few paradigmatic texts, trying to derive from them some general rules, which apply to the rest of the macrotext. For the moment, what we have stressed is the presence of a strong transcendentalist influence, which sometimes would induce the reader to assimilate Dickinson’s poetics to that of Emerson and Thoreau. Among the few poems that were published in her lifetime, “Pink – small – and punctual”, no. 1332, was attributed to Emerson by George Santayana, a fine interpreter of 19th century American poetry.18 But explicit and implicit differences in the discourses of the three authors are many. Dickinson cannot, in the end, give up her faith and trust in the poetic vein that she feels surfacing from her inner Self, among – and not in competition with – the universe of natural and artificial sounds. If she compares her poetry (as that of all other sincere poets) to the song of the bird, it is because she wants to vindicate the beauty of human acoustic productions of the imagination. On the other hand, how could anybody decide the pre-eminence of one of the two categories, if the success, efficacy, and convincing qualities of those productions very much depend on the ears of those who listen? Poem no. 526 (“To hear an Oriole sing”, ca. 1862) develops the same concept, on a pattern that follows the line of the conventional and consolidated opinion according to which “Beauty depends on the observer’s eye”. As a proof of her interest in hearing and of her acquaintance with acoustic perception (particularly evident, as one may have observed, in the years of composition of the poems I have been reading), Dickinson takes away from the singing bird the glory of its song, insisting that the tune is not “in the Tree” or in the bird that 18 W. White, “Santayana’s Copy of Emily Dickinson’s Poems”, in The Emily Dickinson Bulletin, 7, 11 (1969), pp. 43–44.

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warbles on the branch, but in the consciousness of those who enjoy it. This explains why the bird’s song may sound, according to circumstances, “a common thing – / Or only a divine” (lines 1–3). It can be perceived “In Dun, or fair” (line 9) and considered an emblem or a “sign” rich in mysterious meaning (a “Rune”, line10) or, better still, more mysterious because apparently deprived of meaning. The Bird, after all, “sings the same, unheard,/ As unto Crowd” (lines 5– 6). The same applies to poets, who can meet the readers’ sensibility with productions deeply resonating in their souls or, vice versa, leaving the addressee cold and indifferent. Writing poetry is troublesome and risky, in particular if one wants to keep an impeccable honesty, accepting no compromises. When we move to Poem no. 326 (“I cannot dance upon my Toes –”, ca. 1862), we see that the female poet, though confessing her inability to dance, imagines to be able to conquer the audience of a grand ballet theater with an incredible exhibition of pirouettes, “to blanch a Troupe – / Or lay a Prima, mad” (line 7). The use of French words such as ballet, pirouette, troupe, encore, placard (and of the Italian “Prima [donna]”) creates and conjures up a constellation of emotional and linguistic “gestures” in the text, that produce a specific “aura”. The atmosphere we breathe is that of a special soir8e at the Opera House, with an incredible 8toile, who dances in a state of ecstasy and surmounts all technical problems despite her lack of training. She convinces the spectators to applaud her, to encore her in trance, because she dances possessed by a “Glee” of unknown origin, that sustains her daring performance, “sans la notion de la cause” (as Jean Paul Sartre would have it).19 Even though nobody knows the name of the dancer – no play-bill advertised her show – the theater is “full as Opera”, for a previously unheard of success. The word opera in such an important position, at the end of the poem/performance, is a password that concentrates and distills meaning, carrying with it a train a connections, allusions and connotations. It suggests a peculiar dimension that is, at the same time, realistic and surreal. It is realistic in so far as it is nourished by a pertinent “international”, interlinguistic and technical vocabulary, typical of a theater reviewer. It is surreal because it stages an almost grotesque event (a compensation for too many hours in which the introverted subject suffers an inferiority complex), materializing the dream of a girl who finds Aladdin’s lamp or meets a fairy with the magic wand. I did not use the word “grotesque” by chance. I am convinced, in fact, that, among many virtues in Dickinson’s poetry (and in her letters, as well) there is a subtle, often subterranean irony, in general an extremely intelligent self-irony, through which she creates an image of her private and public self that is characterized by many clumsy, awkward traits. Critical enquiries have underlined, above all, poems and pages in which Dickinson describes herself as a little 19 Franca Ruggeri, “La letteratura come nuova retorica”, in Merope, 45 (2007), pp. 17–50.

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“debauchee”, a spinster, a furtive animal afraid of everything, a gnome, and so on. These images are necessary in order to balance the moments when she feels a giant, a hawk, a bold preacher of a personal religion, or a “vox clamantis in deserto”. In this poem she invents a triumph on stage of a strange creature, half woman, half bird (“One Claw upon the Air”, line 12), eager to please the spectators with pirouettes, legs uplifted in acrobatic uncomfortable motions, tossing her “shape in Eider Balls” (line 13) and rolling “on wheels of snow” (line 14). Therefore, the end of the text is even more original, since the Opera House, which is the most noble of theaters, has “housed” the one woman show of a very peculiar “vedette”, who not only boasts of her success, but also smiles at the audience that was thoroughly convinced by such a dilettante. Another early poem helps us understand even better the substantial difference between Dickinson’s idea of herself, poetry, music, and that of her transcendentalist “fathers”. Poem 161 (“A feather from the Whippoorwill”, ca. 1860) is more a fragment of verse than a poem; further, it is not divided in stanzas. Its subject (“A feather”) has six relative clauses attached to it, but finds no explicit verb. It is an invocation, a wish, a dream, and has, in fact, two ecstatic exclamation marks (line 2 and line 8, the concluding line). It describes the bird – the enchantment it produces in the poetic I – and its everlasting song, its nest and its eggs with Dickinson’s detailed precision, in addition to an affective attention, which is a motion of the soul. This direct, immediate experience, is then compared to mediate experiences, to imagined facts or events. The bird becomes a singer that is never tired of singing and who offers himself to the public all but sparingly, Whose galleries – are Sunrise – Whose Opera – the Springs –

No less than the first triumphal lights of the rising sun welcome the protagonist’s performance, and the seasons flow, witnessing success after success. The theater that houses them is far larger than any Opera House, since it is the long cycle of recurring springs. At first we would be tempted to read in the triple comparison (bird/singer, galleries/sunrise, opera/springs) another example of an uneven confrontation in which nature prevails and man can only acknowledge his inadequacy. Who sings better, without effort, with no need of training, no affectation and a never ending melody than the whippoorwill? What galleries, what audience, can be compared to the infinite and solemn beauty of sunrise (whose silent approval is more precious than any enthusiastic human applause)? What ancient and noble Opera House could satisfy and gratify an artist, more than the springs that regularly come, hosting and enjoying the art of the bird? But this is only the first layer of the short, complex and dense text, and the form of its

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explicit message. The deeper structure reveals a different semantic pattern, more similar to the one we detected in Melville’s “The Piazza”. In putting on the lights on such an extraordinary (though ever recurring) performance – that sees at the center the minimal body of the bird, and all around the concentric circles of the imaginary galleries and boxes, expanding through space following the acoustic waves of the singer – the poet is far from suggesting a hierarchy of values. Precisely the choice of “galleries” and “Opera” as terms of the comparison with “Sunrise” and “Springs” confirms, in fact, the highest consideration that Dickinson had of a magic and precious world, which offered a further emotional dimension to the urge of her creativity. Which, as I have no hesitation in maintaining, in spite of all its reliance on reality, humble details and personal observation of minor and major natural spectacles (the clover and aurora borealis) would never be satisfied if it had to confine itself within the limits of daily experience, giving up the freedom of dealing with remote, “alien”, “reported” spectacles: volcanic eruptions, maelstroms, “Mediterranean intonations”, “planetary forces”, “memories of palm”. Dickinson’s interest in music continued through the years, and can be traced up to the last phase of her production. For example, it is possible in Poem no. 1480 (“The fascinating chill that music leaves”, ca. 1879) to recognize her surprising strategy of using music for different purposes, though startlingly unconventional, and consistently integrating it in the various discourses she wanted to develop. Music (both natural and artificial) can leave a “fascinating chill” in the listener’s soul, demonstrating “Ecstasy’s impediment”, that is, the limits of human possibility to reach a stage of total happiness. It fosters, instead, the “germination” through “rapture” of a “fine – estranging creature –” in the “timid and tumultuous soil” of our soul (paradigmatic oxymoron, with alliteration). This beautiful and strange being “woos” us upwards, towards some superior goal but (almost a blasphemous concept) “not to our Creator –”. Music indeed, as Ernst Bloch remarked, is utopian and “seismographic” at the same time, “it reflects cracks under the surface, expresses wishes for change”.20 It has a disquieting, seductive power that confounds and de-stabilizes us, showing us dimensions and targets that go beyond the dutiful aspiration towards God. I conclude my survey reading Poem no. 503 (ca. 1862) which shows, once again, Dickinson’s awareness of music, her ambivalent attitude towards – and reaction to – different kinds of music. The text confirms her ability to weave fascinating metaphors and similes into it, her tendency to connect music with poetry and other languages of the soul, as well as to prefer and cherish the intimate experience of it. In six stanzas full of conventional and unconventional 20 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, transl. by N. Plaice, S. Plaice, P. Knight, Cambridge, MA, M.I.T. Press, 1986, p. 1066.

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rhymes (see the “Keyless Rhyme” of line 8), featuring lines that are regularly interrupted by strong and violent dashes, she confesses that she would like to – but cannot – describe the impression received by a music that was “Better – than Music!”. She cannot express how she reacted to something she had never heard before, and that therefore is difficult to render in words, unless by means of a syncopated rhythm. Certainly it does not resemble the “natural” music produced by the song of a bird, nor the “human” music contained in a stanza or the music of a score that can be played again and again (the mysterious author, “perfect Mozart”, disappears, line 7). It is, in fact, superior to the music played in our churches during the most important ceremonies, and surpasses even the heavenly music produced “When the Redemption strikes her Bells” (line 20). However, the voice of the woman poet insists that it was a “tune” that she really heard (line 16) – not a dream or the memory of a myth, like the juvenile legend of “Brooks in Eden”, which bubble a perfect melody. So the only wise choice is to refrain from trying to reproduce it, “discuss” or “translate” it in words, in order to “communicate” it and share the experience it produced. At the beginning of the poem, in lines 3–4, the speaking voice had explained that it already was a “Translation – / Of all the tunes” she knew, “and more”. Best to hum it “when alone”, Humming – until my faint Rehearsal – Drop into tune – around the Throne –.

I add a corollary. Further evidence of the varieties of musical experience in Dickinson and of the complexity of acoustic operations in her poetry surfaces when we consider the heritage she left to North American musical culture, discovering that, surprisingly enough, it worked both on the melodic and on the symphonic axis. Among the first American musicians to use her verse was Arthur Farwell, who started as early as 1907. In his “Dickinsonian” compositions we find the light of the purest soprano voice, and the accompaniment of an orchestra that cannot be defined Wagnerian (nor Straussian), but is certainly rich in chromatic solutions and in harmonic density.21 Aaron Copland seems to me the composer who best could locate and capture in Dickinson’s poetry the simultaneous (or alternate) presence of an absolute, distilled lyrical vein, symphonic polychromy, classical austerity, a comic mood verging on grotesque, religious intimacy and “spectacular” musicality. In Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1949–50),22 for instance, he succeeded in inserting opportune ele21 Carolyn Lindley Cooley, The Music of Emily Dickinson’s Poems and Letters, Jefferson, NC, MacFarland, 2003, p. 127. 22 Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1949–50) are perceptively analyzed by Dorothy Zayatz Baker in her “Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: A Reading of Dissonance and Harmony”, The Emily Dickinson Journal 12, 1 (2003), pp. 1–24.

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ments of surprise (and many shocks of recognitions) into the branching harmonic and melodic variations, reproducing and reviving the marvelous texture of suspense, riddle and sleigh-at-hand, upon which the great art of the woman poet revolves and articulates.

4.

Sidney Lanier: poetry and music

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) occupies an intermediate position in the history of Anglo-American poetry, having produced his texts in the span of time that divides Whitman’s major clusters from the posthumous publication of the first collection of Dickinson’s lyrics (1891). From the perspective of my discourse, Lanier represents another transition, too, that is, from Whitman’s vague suspicions about Wagner’s music (and about the alleged similarities of his own poems with the aesthetics of Gesamtkunstwerk), through Dickinson’s “premonition” of a grander, “Titanic” opera destined to also flourish in America, through the Wagnerian triumphs in the last decade of the 19th century. Lanier lived in a milieu and in a landscape completely different from those of Whitman (cosmopolitan, transnational New York City) and Dickinson (New England, with its Puritan heritage, transcendentalist philosophy, and the Brahmins). His background was the South of the Reconstruction with its mythologies of aristocratic life style and heroic defeat. His love of nature was no less sincere than Whitman’s or Dickinson’s – his poems are full of hymns to the songs of birds and the beauty of solitary sub-tropical landscapes, that Whitman also knew and sang, as in “I Saw in Louisiana a Wild Oak Growing” – with the difference that, in a few circumstances, he seems inclined to prefer artificial to natural music, as the following lines from his poem “The Symphony” suggest: Where Nature spreads her wild blue sky For Art to make into melody!

Unfortunately, Lanier did not have Dickinson’s capacity to stage grand or dramatic scenes in imaginary spaces, making them as alive as if the subject had experienced them in the first person. He kept within the limits of his personal experience although, by a paradoxical coincidence, the limits of the poet’s experience is exactly what Lanier censures in his favorite American author : E. A. Poe. As a consequence, his poetry often seems the corollary of a long meditation on his exclusive inner world. His landscapes, in fact, frequently look like “occasions” for the composition of a poem; a fact that, of course, never happens in Whitman or Dickinson. Lanier was acclaimed, during his life, by important poets and men of letters, first of all by Bayard Taylor, who was instrumental for him in obtaining the

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commission for the solemn “cantata” (later titled “Centennial Meditation of Columbia”) at the inauguration of Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (1876).23 Though he never was completely marginalized in the canon, it is difficult to reevaluate his intrinsic literary stature today, after the modernist revolution and the experimentations of the 20th century – most of which were based on the heritage of either Whitman or Dickinson. He can be included in my study, however, because he was also a gifted composer and a virtuoso player of the flute, writing poems with the specific intention to show the close kinship between music and poetry. He regularly invented technical patterns in order to demonstrate the sound basis of his aesthetic thought, according to which the two forms of art (acoustic and linguistic) are parallel productions, working in total “solidarity”. It is indeed interesting to follow Lanier’s attempts at going deep into theoretical issues, in spite of his modest philosophical background. A passage from a letter he sent to Whitman (May 5th, 1878) offers clear evidence of his ideological contradictions, and of the consequent difficulties in expressing his theories. On the one hand, he confesses his enthusiasm about “such large and substantial thoughts”; he adds: “I spent a night of glory and delight upon it [i. e. Leaves of Grass]”. Then he stresses again the idea of an “unbounded delight […] in the bigness and bravery of all your ways and thoughts. It is not known to me where I can find another modern song at once so large and so na"ve.” A few lines after this initial enthusiasm, the letter goes back and forth between contrasting feelings and expressions of praise and objection, revolving again around the concept of “strong and beautiful rhythms”. But in the end he makes it clear : I entirely disagree with you in all points connected with artistic form, and in so much of the outcome of your doctrine as is involved in those poetic exposures of the person which your pages so unreservedly make.24

The obvious desire to express his admiration for what he liked in Whitman’s poetry (and in his “doctrine”) creates a linguistic and intellectual clash with his intention to also express his doubts and reserves. The emotion that ensues prevents the younger poet from organizing his opinion along consistent critical lines (large and substantial thoughts/ bigness and bravery of thoughts /large/ na"ve/ strong and beautiful rhythms). The play of contradictions and his steps in opposite directions may have its charm as a clear document of Lanier’s tensions towards the production of a poetics of his own, but does not ease an objective 23 For a eulogistic, but very well informed synopsis of Lanier’s life, see “Memorial” by William Hayes Ward in Poems of Sidney Lanier, ed. by Mary D. Lanier, New York, Scribner’s, 1885; reprint. Ann Arbor, U. of Michigan P., 2005, pp. xi–xli. 24 Sidney Lanier, Poems and Letters, ed. by Charles B. Anderson, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins U. P., 1969, p. 190.

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analysis of the text – of the background and context – and of its implications. All in all, what surfaces with the greatest evidence is his objection as to the “exposures of the person” “so unreservedly” made by the older poet. All things that such a reserved author (and musician) as Lanier could in no ways accept. Apart from these understandable incompatibilities between the two personalities and frames of mind, what I most regret is Lanier’s obsessive insistence on the core of a discourse that most poets simply took for granted. Who ever undervalued the analogies in nature, production, procedure, of poetry and music? The two codes have been acknowledged as “sister arts” since they appeared together in the history of mankind. In many cases, Lanier seems to discover obvious truths. Both in the Ancient East and in the early Western World the coincidence of purposes and analogies between poetry, song and music were for centuries taken for granted. We should marvel, therefore, not so much at the recurring appearance of theories that tried to revive the intrinsic original unity, but at the investment of intellectual and ethical energies, and at the invention of clever rhetorical devices, deemed necessary to convince us of something we never doubted about. My opinion is that Lanier was not unaware of the cultural context and of the phenomenology of the discourse, but was extremely curious about when and how the splitting began, and why it was so difficult to reestablish the “alliance” and retrieve the mechanisms of integration, producing persuasive manifestos. Lanier’s “manifesto” was published in 1880 with the misleading title of The Science of English Verse. The essay, in fact, is not a scientific contribution to the long debate around the theme, but an a posteriori organization of his personal thoughts on his own poetry and on why his verse always tended to use particular prosodic and metrical techniques. It would be interesting to pursue a contrastive analysis of Poe’s and Lanier’s aesthetic thoughts and poetic practices. We would find many points of contact, significant coincidences and much overlapping. However, Lanier is rarely as convincing as Poe is when he is at his best, although never as disappointing as Poe is, for example, in “The Bells”. Most of Lanier’s technical “inventions” are pleasant to hear and to read because they do not differ from other similar strategies used by most major poets who preceded him, or because they produce effects that the reader’s ear accepts as rhythms similar to many, in the history of English poetic diction. In order to have an idea of Lanier’s use of tools that could render poetry as similar to music as possible, one does not need to run through a great number of poems.25 It is sufficient to acknowledge merits and faults in a few lyrics of his, 25 Charles R. Anderson, in his “Introduction” to Sidney Lanier, Op. cit., underlines the influences of very diverse poets (Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats), Lanier’s late discovery, after Whitman, of Emerson; and Lanier’s revealing experience of the landscape as major source

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and to acknowledge the fact that he appreciated the advantages of local color, experimenting the original solutions offered by the use of regional dialects, such as the Georgia cracker speech he was the first to exploit for stylistic purposes. I will concentrate, first, on two of his major compositions, which somehow sum up his strategies, standing today as paradigmatic results of his work: “The Symphony” (1875) and “The Marshes of Glynn” (1878). Then I will move to the analysis of his odes to Beethoven and Wagner. “The Symphony” is a tour de force whose 350 lines or so pursue the project of translating in words the music produced by all major instruments of a symphonic orchestra. The instruments give voice to a revolt against “Trade” (the opening word of the poem), materialism and a vision of life (imposed by the North) in which the religion of economic progress and the myths of democratic egalitarianism destroy all other values. The ideological content is neat, in harmony with the polemics of the defeated Old South against the federal administration, in particular against the management of a territory conquered, radically transformed and estranged from its roots. But the technical and stylistic aspects of the text are not an excuse to convey the message; they represent, instead, the sincerest expression of another crucial issue in the author’s mind. If, as Lanier maintained, the most serious troubles of the Reconstruction were due to the fact that the North had an “unharmonious education”, the invention of a new musical style in poetry could be seen as a precious means through which the most responsible minds could educate the younger generations. The personal investment in search of new stylistic and rhetorical solutions was not felt, therefore, as a self-referential formal exercise. The question is that his intentions brought him too far, that is, to the composition of a poem that is too long, ambitious and uneven. Its prosodic and metrical patterns sound interesting and original at first, but after a while become repetitive, losing their connection with the “content”, which should be their raison d’Þtre. The voices of the violins are given the first word, since violins (as all strings, in general) were considered by Lanier the most aggressive, passionate and penetrating instruments of the orchestra. In Lanier’s only novel (Tiger-Lilies, 1867) the hero Peter Sterling plays the flute (an instrument that, in human language, corresponds – so Lanier thought – to vowels), while his adversary in the plot, John Cranston, plays the violin (strings correspond to consonants). Those who are not immediately convinced by such an idiosyncratic association, should remember John Updike’s memorable scene in The Witches of Eastwick, in which Satan in person teaches one of the three female protagonists to play the cello with for poetry : “In Florida […] the world of eye and ear thronged upon his outward senses […] informed with a new spirit that came from his discovery of a kindred author […] Emerson” (pp. 5–9).

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a demonic satisfaction.26 Then other strings join the violins, as the initial meter remains the same. The long sequence of alternate iambic and trochaic lines consists of nine syllables, with an occasional addition of an extra syllable (lines 6, 20, 24) and a pattern of three lines ending with the same rhyme. These are followed by two lines rhyming in pairs (dead/head/said// tale/bale; hope/slope/ grope// won/sun). Biblical references and quotations add an archaic, oratorical register : cometh, saith, “Man shall not live by bread alone”, thereat. Passages typed in italics report utterances that are not the instruments’. Iteration emphasizes the centrality of some concepts, corresponding to the use of the piano pedal in coincidence with some leitmotif: Look up the land, look down the land The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand (lines 21–22),

while there are lines that end with minimal acoustic variations: name it so/less will shame it so/less will blame it so. When the throbbing of the strings becomes a “motherly” sobbing (followed by a cascade of -ing clauses: opening, sleeping, stirring, demurring) we cannot help hearing distant echoes of Poe’s “The Raven”. The sound pattern is not only musical but theatrical, and the scenes described are pathetic and melodramatic. The echoes from “The Raven” become a punctual appeal to our stored memories of “other voices, other rooms”. But then the text suddenly interrupts the comparison of the now subdued music of the strings with the murmuring waters of a tranquil brook, and throws before our eyes and ears a short line like this: But presently,

after which, as in “The Raven”, we are authorized to expect a change in tone and mood. In fact, here comes the “velvet flute-note” which fell Upon the bosom of that harmony, And sailed and sailed incessantly, As if a petal from a wild-rose blown Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone […] And floated down the glassy tide…

The synesthetic quality of the simile is, unfortunately, spoilt by its diffuse narrative element, and by the addition of correct, but pleonastic details.27 The same 26 John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick (orig. publ. 1984), Penguin Classics, 2007. 27 Charles R. Anderson, Op. cit., describes the best moments of the poet’s production along the lines of his use of synesthetic strategies: “Lanier was also a musician interested in the ‘colors’ of verse, not only rhyme and alliteration but consonant-sequence and vowel distribution, qualities he had admired in Tennyson and Swinburne. Out of all this came the orchestral effects he needed to give shape to his vision of religious values that he had found in the forests and marshes of the Southern Coast” (p. 11).

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is true of the double, intertwined simile: “warm, concave […] fluted note […] half song, half odor […] As if a rose might somehow be a throat”, where I find an anticipation of images worthy of Sylvia Plath (“The Edge”)28 and of Georgia O’Keeffe’s blow-ups. However, the cautious term “somehow” is particularly disappointing. It reveals Lanier’s insufficient reliance on his poetic imagination and reluctance to trust the images that abundantly came to his mind, but did not have the courage to stamp themselves on the written page without the need of a “justification”. This is true all the way down to the end. Good “acoustic ideas” and original technical inventions are spread through the text, but the cooperation of sight, sound and k|cor rarely reaches the level of a balanced “ideophony”.29 A meticulous reading of the poem would risk killing it, erasing it for good in the contemporary reader’s consciousness. The evocation of the chivalric world is very banal. Its stereotyped lexicon is full of knights, ladies and sweethearts who are worshipping, kneeling, and the like. Its intersection with “tender” memories from the Gospels, as in devout Victorian literature at its worst, is also disturbing. My suggestion is to apply a cursory reading, so as to let our sensibility free to “grasp” the occasional pleasant alliterations (“grasses and grains in ranks and sheaves”, “piquancies of prickly burs”, “fibre-spirallings,/ Fern-wavings and leaf-flickerings”, “silence breeds/ A little breeze among the reeds”), paradoxes and oxymora (“a thrilling calm”), consonances and assonances (poor/door, present/instrument, heard/word, won/sun), synesthesias (“velvet flute note”, “the melting clarionet”) or the oscillation between long and short lines. The line “And streams and clouds and suns and birds and bees”, for instance, is more a hendecasyllable than a iambic pentameter, in spite of the five strong stresses that lead to an increasingly climactic cadence. “Change thy ways” has only three stresses, but, emphatically repeated, has almost the strength of such moral imperatives as “Make it new” in Pound’s Cantos, or “Make sense of it” in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover.30 The sound of the clarinet is described as a female voice full of tears. That of the horn is “straightforward” and masculine, and speaks by means of short stanzas 28 Sylvia Plath, Poems, ed. by Ted Hughes, London, Faber & Faber, 1981; Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Georgia O’Keeffe became famous for her “erotic” blow ups of flowers when she produced such canvases as Black Iris (New York, Metropolitan Museum, 1926), Jimson Weed (Santa Fe, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 1932), Belladonna (Private Collection, 1939), Datura and Pedernal (Orlando Museum of Art, 1940). The artist, however, always resented an erotic interpretation of her works. 29 Marcello Pagnini, Semiosi. Teoria ed ermeneutica del testo letterario, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1988. 30 Ezra Pound, Cantos, London, Faber & Faber, 2003; Louis Menand, “The Pound Error : The Elusive Master of Allusion”, in The New Yorker, June 9 and 16, 2008; James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, New York, Atheneum, 1982.

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whose first four lines end with the same rhyme, while the fifth and shortest line (only two syllables) is an obsessive refrain repeated (till it sounds like a mantra) fourteen times and is always followed by a question mark. The hautboy has a “smiling” sound, like the voice of a “large-eyed child/ Cool-hearted and all undefiled”. The bassoons are “ancient” and “wise”. The final message of this “sea-fugue, writ from east to west” is a hymn to Love, reminiscent of Emerson’s “Give All to Love”31 in content and form (short, rapid lines, easy rhyming, a chain reaction of apodictic commands). It also reminds me of Whitman’s accumulation of data, in lines beginning with the same words: “And never to lose […] And ever to solve […] And ever Love hears […] And ever Love hears […] And ever sweet […] And ever wise”. All in all, one should not surrender, discarding the text shortly before the final lines, because in so doing one would miss the definition of life as a “weltering palimpsest”, which is probably the poem’s best heritage to the history of 20th century poetry, which was not too far ahead.32 “The Marshes of Glynn”, the only poem by Lanier which still enjoys an almost unanimous praise in the community of scholars, has an equally remarkable variety of sound patterns but, what is most important, does not clash with the ideological and thematic implications of the spontaneously harmonious text. The author reaches a perfect balance between his desire to produce variations that render the dozens of tones and shades in a vast and cherished landscape of his native environment, and the necessity to avoid a loose structure deprived of a consistent design. I would use the term “impressionism” to define the result of such a technique, if I did not fear suggesting an undue reference to French impressionism, which had hardly been born in those years.33 Lanier succeeds by inserting dominant sonorities that ease the reader’s navigation through the text, never boring him, never stressing his attention – or blurring the author’s intention. If, as the last line of “The Symphony” proclaims, “Music is Love in search of a word”, poetry (good poetry) is the “right” word (a moral password) offered to music. The result of the cooperation is ethic and educational. Though vindicating the primacy of feeling, Lanier had an unflinching trust in the morality of literature and in the pedagogical importance of music. The musicality of a poem, therefore, was essential in order to express an emotion that the reader could share, while, at the same time, the author could convey a moral message. The 31 Ralph W. Emerson, “Give All to Love”: “Obey thy heart […] Nothing refuse […] Leave all for love […] When half-gods go,/ The gods arrive”, in The Poems of R. W. Emerson, ed. by Edward W. Emerson, Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1904; see also Joel Benton, Emerson as a Poet, New York, Holbrook & Co., 1883. 32 G8rard Genette, Palimpsestes. La litt8rature au second degr8, Paris, Seuil, 1982. 33 The date of birth of French Impressionism coincides, in fact, with the painting of Claude Monet’s Impression: soleil l8vant, (Paris, Mus8e Marmottan), a small canvas inspired by a period spent at Le Havre in 1872, but never exhibited until 1874.

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problem is always the same, that is, how to convey the message without heavily superimposing it to the text and preventing the reader from enjoying its literary qualities apart from the intuition or understanding of the message. Unlike “The Symphony”, “The Marshes of Glynn” obtains such a result in 103 lines (the Poesque perfect size). Lanier continues his experimentations with prosody and meter, but gives up all pre-conceived impositions of sound patterns. The text, therefore, flows line after long line, in an almost Whitmanian stream of images, pictures and ideas. Almost Whitmanian, I said, because we are not in front of free verse, but of lines traditionally rhyming in pairs. Such a technique feels and sounds “natural” and fluid, because the lines are long enough to create other resonances and reverberations before they end, apparently relying on the final rhyme only in order to ease the appropriation of rhythm and cadences on the reader’s part. Sudden couples of very short lines sometimes interrupt the stanzas, without a rigid plan, so that they do not break the continuity of the formal discourse and the elegance of the composition. Towards the end, a quatrain of short lines – rhyming in pairs – introduces a scene possessing a touch of genuine romantic lyricism, vaguely reminiscent of Byron’s nocturne “So we’ll go no more a-roving”.34 The tide is personified and, in a masculine tension, “in his ecstasy […] at his highest height”, surges towards the night, the female counterpart. But such an “intercourse” does not upset the surface of the marshes: How still the plains of the waters be!

And yet, a disturbing thought concludes, in a surprisingly disquieting tone, the poem, which seemed ready to end in a traditional way, confirming the harmony of a landscape that mirrors the power and mercy of God. For the whole day and late into the night, before falling asleep, man could feel at ease in such an extraordinary environment, that spoke the language of the Lord as if creation was still in progress. But in the darkest hours “the waters of sleep [will] / Roll in on the souls of men”, suggesting the presence, in their depths, of “forms that swim […] and shapes that creep”. Shapes and forms that the text confesses to be unable to figure; and in fact it stops, with an ominous question mark, before the allusion to an unspeakable mystery. I have dealt with the concluding section more than with the rest of the poem because I am convinced that, reminding us of the fullness of Romanticism but, at the same time, foreshadowing the anxieties of our modernist and post-modernist seasons (e. g. a poem like “Leviathan” by

34 The poem “So we’ll go no more a-roving” appears in a letter Byron sent to Thomas Moore (Venice, 28 February 1817). It was then published by Moore in his edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals, London, Murray, 1830.

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William S. Merwin),35 it is historically and ideologically the most original segment of poetry Lanier ever produced.36

5.

Odes to Wagner and Beethoven

I can’t postpone, now, the analysis of the texts that are the major reason why I have included Lanier in this study : “To Wagner” and “To Beethoven”. The former consists of six regular octaves whose iambic rhythm sometimes shifts to irregular trochaic cadences, as we see (or rather hear) at the beginning of octave no. 3: And I beheld high scaffoldings of creeds Crumbling from round Religion’s perfect Fane.

The rhyming pattern is traditional: ABABABCC, offering evidence of Lanier’s interest in Renaissance poetry, both Italian and English. Notwithstanding the use of such a noble meter, that inevitably brings us back – once more – to the mythic age of the “good ancient knights”,37 the tone is all but nostalgic. On the contrary, a distinct vein of originality (I could even say “modernity”) runs through the text, unfortunately sometimes encumbered by an excessive emphasis – revealed by unnecessary exclamation marks – that does not find an appropriate “recollection in tranquility”. The poem’s incipit is strong and effective; it is one of its best effects, presenting us with an image structured on the basis of a “collision” between two contrasting semantic and symbolic territories: I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime.

Such a start (the surreal image foreruns the canvases of Charles Burchfield and the surrealistic phase of Georgia O’Keeffe, both produced well into the 20th century) sets the tone of the whole composition, alerting us circa the way the speaker (sometimes a preacher, always a sincere promoter) wants to construct his discourse in praise of Wagner. We understand that the design of the text will evidently proceed through juxtapositions, in a tense dialectic meant to dem35 William S. Merwin, “The Leviathan”, originally in Green with Beasts (1956), now in Migrations: New and Selected Poems, Port Townsend, WA, Copper Canyon Press, 2005, pp. 29– 30. 36 Charles R. Anderson, Op. cit., suggests the importance of one of Lanier’s last poems (“A Ballad of Trees and the Master”) : “Here is the conscious architecture of the musician-poet – its melody the product of a haunting refrain, of strong substantives, of adjectives few and quiet” (p. 15). 37 I allude to Ariosto’s famous stanza: “O gran bont/ de’ cavallieri antiqui”, in Orlando Furioso (1532), Canto I, 22, 1–6: “O wondrous uprightness of ancient knights!”. See complete translation in English prose, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

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onstrate the appearance of Wagner as a sort of “arbiter” and prophet, and perhaps even the avatar of a just God. He will put an end to human sufferings, vindicating the wrongs that mankind was forced to bear for centuries, in particular in recent times. The origin of all evil, in fact, seems at first to be that same Trade against which Lanier had addressed his violent criticism in “The Symphony”. A major difference, however, surfaces as we continue to read, since, in this case, Trade has both a negative and a positive aspect. Playing, indeed, with oppositions, the speaking voice describes a coruscant landscape of glory and sweat, of “Mixt fuels – Labor’s Right and Labor’s Crime – ”. In a soundscape of “rich music in the rattling mills”, one hears noises “of rights, wrongs, powers, needs”, a clash of “upper against lower greeds”, sighs and shouts. In the end, everything is soothed, finding its place, in the calm that reigns Below that stream of golden fire that broke, Mottled with red, above the seas of smoke.

Gradually, references to Wagner’s operas become more precise and poignant. We do not actually “hear”, in Lanier’s verse, the music; as already stated, Wagner was acquiring a prominent position not so much for his music, as for his theoretical writings, for scanty “impressions” reported from Europe by the happy few who actually went to the theaters where his operas were produced. But we feel the enthusiasm and the sense of relief of a young man who, tired of old fashioned musical traditions, was struck by the flashes of a truth he could only imperfectly possess, though he could envisage its consonance with his own tastes, predicaments and system of thought. The last three octaves are inhabited by processions of “strange Ministrants”, (Tannhäuser, 1845), minstrelsies (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 1868), ladies and knights of “Fatherland”, “sad mariners, no harbor e’er may hold” (Der Fliegende Holländer, 1843), “A swan soft floating tow’rds a magic strand” (Lohengrin, 1850), and all the variously disquieting characters of the Tetralogy (1869–76): Gray sorcery ; magic cloaks and rings and rods; Valkyries, heroes, Rhinemaids, giants, gods!

The final stanza introduces an invocation to Wagner, an invitation to bring his “heavenly art” (not by chance “art”, rather than “music”) westward, cooperating with the progress of civilization and culture, in the “sea-fugue” from east to west of “The Symphony”. We shall see Wagner’s heroes transplanted to the new continent. Siegfried and Wotan will inspire not only a new music, but “big ballads of the modern heart”. Wagner’s modernity is then defined as the capacity to reproduce the voice of “airy cloud and wave and tree” (as music and poetry always did in the past) as well as the “Voice of the monstrous mill, the shouting

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mart”. The most remarkable lines come at the end when Lanier produces a “definition” of Wagner and of his historical importance, perfectly balancing the ideological content of his lines to the form his ideas take as they are produced. These ideas may sound somewhat vague and structurally disorganized, but are sincere and, eventually, operative: Thou, thou, if even to thyself unknown, Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone.

We know that Time (in the philosophical sense of the word, as philosophical context of the Ring cycle, and in a musical sense proper) has been considered – by generations of professional critics and by poets who confessed having absorbed Wagner’s influence – the essential element in the revolution that Wagner brought about in the history of both theater and music. So we cannot but congratulate Lanier’s insight and his instinct for the centrality of some cultural issues in the debates which were taking shape around him. We forgive him for the disturbing alliteration of the ten t’s (Thou, thou, to, thyself, hast, to, the, time, terms, tone), since beneath and beyond it, there is the intuition that Wagner solved (or tried to solve) the major themes of the mythical past (Time), religious tradition and human destiny, through music, drama, singing, and performance. In comparison, the ode “To Beethoven” is less convincing and less pertinent, probably because Lanier’s enthusiasm for Wagner was, indeed, superior to his appreciation of Beethoven. In fact, a real revolution in the world of music, that could pave the way for a grand social and cultural transformation, needed, as Wagner preached, a total reform of musical theater, of opera and melodrama. In this sense, the role of symphonic music was less important, even though it has the power of Beethoven’s major symphonies and the political implications of, say, Symphony no. 3 (“Heroic”). This explains why Lanier’s praise of Beethoven is less vibrant and the prosodic pattern of this second ode less / propos. A traditional scheme of 16 quatrains of iambic tetrameters with alternate rhymes (e. g. strong/strife/wrong/life) aims at expressing the reasons why Beethoven’s music has the power to “set at ease” the world of the poetic I, to “melt” the passions and “sooth” the accusations “in satisfying symphonies”. Here we have to charge the word “satisfying” with its full etymological import. Beethoven’s symphonies, in fact, completely gratify the needs of an unquiet soul, in particular the need of relief from pains and anxieties. They work as instruments that make the subject forget, for the duration of a sublime moment, the long Hamletlike list of injustices offered by life, that is, stain of death, pain of power, lies, indifferent smiles and frowns of Nature, delays, crimes and shames. There is no project of rendering – in the lines that rhythmically, and even too fluently, progress toward the end – the novelty and the revolutionary characteristics of the symphonies. What really interests the subject is emphasizing the enormous

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impact of an “almighty” art, which can mysteriously compensate (“I know not how, I care not why”) the incredible amount of wrongs registered, so to say, in a masochistic, obsessive urge. Then, as I did in the case of other hardly convincing texts, I must stress the few merits in this ode. The opening image, for instance, is not generic, or inadequate, though the diction and the vocabulary can sound clumsy : In o’er-strict calyx lingering, Lay music’s bud too long unblown, Till thou, Beethoven, breathed the spring: Then bloomed the perfect rose of tone.

The idea of the great musician who breathes a spring-like energy into the unblown bud of music is not to be dismissed with a superficial shrug, in so far as it corresponds to a sophisticated 20th century theory, according to which there are two kinds of geniuses. That is, those who blossom all of a sudden, effortlessly, like Mozart, and those who grow more gradually, and finally “explode” with unimaginable strength, like Beethoven.38 The list of wrongs is also less banal than it appears at first and, once again, reveals Lanier’s interests in philosophical speculation, religion, sociological issues, politics and psychology. The moral qualities of his personality and the seriousness of his artistic concerns are confirmed by the fact that he confesses suffering: 1. for “The yea-nay of Freewill and Fate/ Whereof both cannot be, yet are”, 2. when the “luminous lightnings […] strangely strike// The sailor praying on his knees”, 3. because “babes and widows starve and freeze”, 4. when he notices “The lies that serve great parties well”, 5. seeing people who “look with pleasure upon pain”. Beethoven’s music alone, in sum, can help man endure “the thousand natural shocks/ that flesh is heir to” (Hamlet, III, 1, 62–63). The German musician is destined to become the “Psalmist of the weak, the strong”, a “Troubadour of love and strife”, a “Co–Litanist of right and wrong”. Not a defender of justice against crime or of the weak against their oppressors, nor a singer of love who condemns striving, but (the concept is intriguing also for those who do not share Lanier’s opinion) the “Sole Hymner of the whole of life”. In conclusion, Beethoven is seen as a great master who teaches a suffering individual (and mankind in general) to accept life’s contradictory aspects; his hard existence of “passive” heroism serves as a model. The awareness of Beethoven’s biography contributes, more than the appreciation of his music, to the portrait of the great man as a paradigm of resistance. The much more sophisticated lines of John Berryman’s Beethoven Triumphant, which I am going to 38 David Lehman, “Elemental Bravery : The Unity of James Merrill’s Poetry”, in David Lehman and Charles Berger, eds., James Merrill: Essays in Criticism. Ithaca, Cornell U. P., 1983, pp. 23–60.

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analyze in Chapter Seven, do not offer a deeper insight. But Wagner – as we now clearly understand Lanier’s parallel interpretation – is the emblem of a less generic, more political, revolutionary power. His music aimed at more concrete interventions and was capable not so much of “soothing” and “melting” passions, as of raising men’s souls and intentions, exciting them (again, in Shakespearean terms) “to take arms against a sea of troubles”.

Chapter Five: Henry James

It was a feast of vocalism […] I enjoyed very profusely the somewhat obstreperous (from the Italian point of view exotic) music of A"da. (Henry James, 1874) Joukowsky thinks [Wagner] the greatest and wisest of men. He endeavoured to m’attirer chez lui […] but I kept away because Wagner speaks no French and I no German. (Henry James, 1880)

1.

European opera and realistic fiction

Some of the most popular and/or critically acclaimed novels of the 19th century in French and Russian literature have important sections devoted to opera and its significance to their major characters. Therefore it is easier to understand why opera played a fundamental role also in some emblematic texts in the literature of the United States, in a period (last decades of the 19th century and first years of the 20th century) in which the debates around the various forms of realism (native or imported) – and the transatlantic fortunes of European fiction – were of primary importance. This is why I think opportune to start this chapter on Henry James with a brief discourse on the modalities of “integration” of opera within the context of European realistic narratives. Not to digress too much in territories that do not pertain to my specific field, I will limit myself to synthetic analyses of three paradigmatic novels: Alexander Dumas’ Le comte de Monte-Cristo (1844–46), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1854–56), and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–1877).

134 I.

Henry James

Le comte de Monte-Cristo

Dumas’s novel enjoyed extraordinary success not only in France but, on being translated, in the rest of Europe and in the United States. It is difficult to refute the “highbrow” critical opinion that it is a grand pastiche – that it is a hypertrophic text crowded with contradictory, only partially convincing characters and themes – whose scenarios cover the largest possible geographical space, from France, through to Italy and the Levant, in the wake of Byron’s exoticist masterpiece, Don Juan. And yet the adventurous “revenge tragedy” has been praised by some authoritative 19th and 20th century readers for a number of reasons. Robert Louis Stevenson was conquered by the perfection of plot and atmosphere in the first section, judging it the quintessential novel written for the rising middle classes; but subsequently refused the plausibility of the other parts. Antonio Gramsci defined it an “opiate” or “opiaceous” novel, yet he thought that it illuminated the social structure and the class dynamics of Paris as “the capital of the 19th century” in a paradigmatic way.1 Umberto Eco wrote an “Elogio di Montecristo” (“In praise of M.”) and insisted that, in spite of its faults (especially linguistic and rhetorical), it is one of the most thrilling novels ever written.2 Twenty years ago, the most important scholar of Alexandre Dumas, Claude Schopp, carefully described the story of its composition and fortune, demonstrating its contextual significance as a real masterpiece. It is, in fact, a text that mirrors, interprets and offers a moral commentary on an enormous quantity of facts and ideas, in addition to political and ethical issues.3 According to Vittorio Frigerio, the novel finds a fascinating pivot in its protagonist, who is depicted as a powerful example of an original fictional figure and described as an individual who moves and acts half way between the generation of hyper-romantic heroes and that of middle class adventurers. It is a figure who refuses to accept what Mario Praz called “the eclipse of the hero”, a common feature in the novels of the mid-19th century.4 I claim that the ubiquitous presence of opera in the text precisely depends on the double nature of Edmond DantHs and of the world in which he lives, that he reflects or wants to 1 Antonio Gramsci, “Cik che H ‘interessante’ nell’arte”, in Letteratura e vita nazionale, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1996. 2 Umberto Eco, “Elogio di Montecristo”, in Sugli specchi e altri saggi, Milano, Bompiani, 2001. Pietro Citati applies to the novel the classical rhetorical term of “hylarotragoedia”, thus stressing its irony, and defining its musical rhythm as that of an “allegretto”. The suggestion is all the more useful, if it helps us understand and appreciate the pervasive presence of music (and of opera); cf. P. Citati, “Il conte di Montecristo”, in La Repubblica, June 7, 2010, pp. 34–35. 3 Claude Schopp, “Preface” to Alexandre Dumas pHre, Le Comte de Monte Cristo, critical edition, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1993. 4 Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, transl. by Angus Davidson, New York, Oxford U. P., 1956.

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forge, as a demiurge or an angel of revenge. Opera, in fact, is used by Dumas as a sort of passepartout. It works as the perfect background for staging climactic events such as (in chapter 89, “The Insult”) the challenge issued by Albert to Monte Cristo, or for introducing to the readers exotic and mysterious people, like Ali or the Greek slave Hayd8e – both of whom DantHs accompanies to the theater in their best attire, with the consequence of provoking rumors of all sorts. In many novels of the late 18th century (such as Les liaisons dangereuses by Laclos), the early 19th century (see, in particular, Balzac) and the early 20th century (The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, 1920, but set between 1870 and 1880) the mere appearance of a character at the opera house acquires a symbolic meaning and provokes close scrutiny or harsh censure. This is typical of all major characters in Dumas’s work. When DantHs is in Rome, he cannot but go as often as possible to the Teatro Argentina. In some cases, opera is the occasion for the display of the stereotypical “italianit8 carnavalesque”5, a category that the cosmopolitan reader will meet again in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). When DantHs is in Paris, he uses the opera house for a wide variety of “engagements”. From chapter 53 (whose title is “Robert le diable” – with a double reference to the plot of Auber’s famous opera and to the character who is going to be the protagonist in that scene) we understand that not only the most aristocratic members of Parisian society, but every rich man had a box or a permanent seat – and that real stars attracted “le tout Paris”. We also learn that the common habit was of arriving late, so that the first act of an opera was summarily performed, sometimes almost without an audience (see, again, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence). Music and drama were merely as an excuse, no less than the plot of a play in Shakespeare’s times and, again, to a certain extent, in Wharton’s New York. Chapter 88 lets us know that the opera house was regularly used as a meeting place, for important business as well as for gossip and other worldly activities, as we shall see in James’ The Portrait of a Lady. In Chapter 34 we meet the epithet of “loge infernale” by which Dumas defines (with a spatial inversion from lower to upper space) the gallery, where the low classes, and people of dubious morality – even the prostitutes – sat. The Count of Montecristo explains, in sum, the conventions that ruled opera and the relationship with its public, forerunning the idea of opera in the minds of Madame Bovary and of all those who, after Flaubert’s novel, were labeled as victims of bovarysme.

5 Timoth8e Picard, La civilisation de l’Op8ra: sur les traces d’un fantime, Paris, ArthHme Fayard, 2016. Picard praises Dumas’ interpretation of opera as “le moment sociocultural absolu […] sous sa forme la plus etincellante et la plus aboutie”.

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Madame Bovary

As for the role of opera in Madame Bovary, an issue that a long critical tradition has analyzed in full, I am not going to deal with the theme as such. Instead, I will use it for a contrastive analysis with Dumas, Tolstoy and, of course, James and Wharton. I am interested, in fact, in trying to appreciate similarities and differences, evaluating them in the context of the development of realistic aesthetics.6 In Flaubert’s novel opera is by no means as pervasive as in Dumas’s; nonetheless, it occupies a whole chapter : chapter XV, the last in section II of the text. It is a strategic position, as are the meaningful scenes at the opera in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and in James’ The Portrait of a Lady. It concentrates a palimpsest of references, as it stages the visit of Charles and Emma Bovary to the Opera House in Rouen for a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The chapter, devoted to the various moments of the spectacle and to Emma’s changing reactions to it can be defined a visual and acoustic ekphrasis. Indeed, a splendid example of how a really effective ekphrasis should be. The strategy of verisimilitude, a revolutionary characteristic of Flaubert’s style, in fact, spares no detail in describing the special evening at the provincial theater and provides names of streets and singers, as well as the precise references to time, until the couple says goodbye to L8on, whom Charles has met during an intermission. The reader immediately understands that the purpose of the novelist is not that of rendering the surface of facts, nor even the atmosphere surrounding them, but the impression on Emma’s consciousness of what she perceives and feels. In so doing, he reveals that the text is the result of the author’s imagination, only vaguely derived from direct memories of first hand experiences. Moreover, he reveals that it has a clear purpose, aiming at a precise “effect”, no less than those of Poe’s imagination, which seem much more na"vely exposed. At the beginning, Emma is in a euphoric state, and needs to walk for a while before entering the hall, where “de gigantesques affiches r8p8taient en characters baroques: «Lucie de Lammermoor…Lagardy…Op8ra…etc.»”. The title of the opera is in French, so we take it for granted that the libretto had been translated into French (we are not at the Op8ra in Paris, nor at the Op8ra comique, where 6 The novel was written by Flaubert between 1851 and 1856, but it is set in the period of the “Restauration” (1827–1846), slightly after the years described by Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo (though the heritage of Napoleon and of the first empire seems to have completely disappeared from the memory of most characters); in addition, what counts more is that there is very little premonition of the “revolution” of 1848 and the advent of the “deuxiHme r8publique”. The ideals of renovation and the ethic implications that nourished the latter do not rise above the horizon of the story. In Flaubert’s aesthetic thought there is no opposition between his realistic tension and his love of opera, even in its most “abstract” aspects. Biographers have underlined his passion for the acrobatic flourishings (“pleines de sanglots et de baisers”) of soprano Luigia Boccabadati.

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the original Italian language was a rule). This explains why Emma has no problem in following the plot; in addition, we are informed that she has read (and remembers only too well) Walter Scott’s novel, which is the source of the melodrama. The very lexeme “opera” exerts a deep fascination on the restless lady. When the characters go in the theater, we are explained that the business men of the upper classes, who occupy the most prestigious seats, do not forget their “affaires”. Probably Emma is, at least at first, the only spectator who is there to “forget” and who wants to withdraw, for the space of a few hours, from the mediocre routine of her life. Unlike Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, she does not want to enjoy a form of art that she loves, or a musical and social “ceremony”. She knows the story, but not the score; there are no arias she has learnt by heart. She is much more interested in the singers, in their faces, “bodies” and gestures, and in their expressions and costumes: Elle n’avait pas assez d’yeux pour contempler les costumes, les d8cors, les personnages,

Flaubert’s irony notices that Emma looked with curiosity at and was even transported by the trees, which did not oscillate for the wind but for the heavy steps of the protagonist. (A few decades before, Stendhal had told the readers of his Life of Rossini that the fascination of opera does not consist only in the excellence of the combination between music and drama, but in all the elements that contribute to the atmosphere).7 When the tenor, the famous Edgar Lagardy, appears, the narrator spends some time describing his physique (pale but well-built and solemn like a statue) and reports the rumors about his private life, his love affairs with a Polish princess and with other ladies, however does not allude to Emma’s impressions. On the contrary, as the soprano who is interpreting Lucia (whose name and background we are not allowed to know) advances and starts expressing her pains and anxieties, she immediately identifies with her. The soprano (precisely because she has no name, fame or story of her own) becomes the echo of Emma’s consciousness, the speaker of her grieves; after a final acuto of hers, Emma’s “cri aigu se confondit avec la vibration des derniers accords”. Flaubert’s treatment of the psychological and emotional consequences of Emma’s experience at the Opera House is very subtle, advancing, as it does, at a slow pace, and following the variety of his heroine’s thoughts and moods. After the initial phase, when opera is a world of enchanting “escape”, the moment comes in which the lady wants to follow the plot, feeling a shock of recognition as she remembers the novels of Walter Scott she has read in her youth. Then, after the identification with the soprano, in whom she finds a spokesperson for her sufferings, Emma undergoes a brief phase of detachment in which she tries to 7 Stendhal, Vie de Rossini, Paris, Auguste Boulland, 1824.

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distance herself from what she sees and hears as “exaggerations”. She even shows a certain amount of self-irony and seems to acquire a sense of proportions. It is a very brief phase. When the tenor sings and acts at his best the most important segment of his part, Emma forgets the character and falls in love with the interpreter (now we understand why the narrator has dealt at length with his look and gestures). To be more precise, Emma is now ravished not by that individual man, but by the “idea” of a Man. The interval comes as she is lost in her infatuation. Her husband returns to the box with the news that he has met L8on. L8on pays a visit to Emma, who is overwhelmed by the memories of their “innocent” relationship of many years ago. From then on opera (that particular opera, that performance, but also opera in general, as entertainment and as occasion for the projection of movements of the soul) loses all interest before her eyes and ears. The celebrated scene of Lucia’s madness becomes intolerable, not, as before, for an excess of identification, but because it distracts her thoughts and emotions from the reality of the sudden revival of affections. “Elle crie trop fort”, says Emma to Charles, and asks him to quit the theater even though the tenor – who had so much appealed to her a few moments before – has not yet sung the famous final aria “Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali”. From a psychological point of view, it is obvious that Emma does not want to witness (and interiorize) the heroine’s folie, her death, her lover’s suicide and the end of such a hyper-romantic love affair. From a sociopolitical point of view, she cannot accept being forced to feel, so many centuries after the Scottish Middle-ages, yet another victim of a repressive patriarchal society. At this stage it would be easy to conclude that, after offering Emma all varieties of experiences, making it possible the expression of various aspects of her moody temper, opera is finally reduced to a disturbing obstacle with no capacity to enrich her inner world. The truth is that, in the end, as she “escapes” from the present and chooses to find a temporary shelter in the memories of her past relationship with L8on, Emma simply substitutes one escape for another, remaining equally alienated from the present, that she utterly refuses to accept. In addition, precisely the fact that she has not seen and heard Lagarde in the last scene, because she has shifted from a romantic interest in the tenor on stage to the (apparently) more concrete interest in the young man beside her, provides Emma and L8on with an excuse for meeting again the day after, when Charles has gone back home. So, for more than one reason, opera, like an unconscious demiurge, plays the role of changing the direction of the protagonist’s destiny. The role of opera in the novel has also important rhetorical and linguistic significance, because it cooperates in confirming Flaubert’s distrust in the possibility of communication. In the novelist’s discourse, in fact, not only verbal language, gestures and facial expressions are dramatically inadequate (hence the

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unflinching but, generally speaking, vain struggle for the “mot juste”). Even the theater – an ancestral collective rite that both Eastern and Western cultures have regularly used to communicate the need of social cohesion and adherence to the same beliefs – and music are to no avail. Emma’s oscillation between opposite reactions or, to be more precise, her gradual transformation, that finally excludes all possibility of dialogue between audience and performers, enhance the consistency of such a discourse. Like the frequent, punctual allusions to opera that constellate Dumas’s novel, opera is instrumental in many ways but is not really “inspiring” nor favors a deep interpersonal communication.8

III.

Anna Karenina

In Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–77)9 opera is as pervasive as in Dumas’s novel, but it also offers its author the occasion for the creation of a memorable chapter and of an unforgettable scene, through which different messages are conveyed. I shall, therefore, mention very rapidly some of its occurrences in various moments of the story, in order to demonstrate how socially and ideologically important opera was for the society that is so masterly reproduced by the Russian novelist. Then I will concentrate on the crucial moment, at the end of Part 5 (Chapter 33), when the protagonist Anna decides to go to the Opera House in St. Petersburgh, to check (and challenge) the reaction of the city high society. It is a most delicate passage and opera provides the most opportune background for the event, enlarging and increasing the waves of resonance in the characters’ consciences and in the community to which they surely belong, even if, and when, they want to distance themselves from it. Opera, as the most codified “spectacle”, a mandatory entertainment for the Russian nobility in the second half of the 19th century, is mentioned and made use of before the scene I am alluding to, and after. But in no case does it have such a semantic density and such a functionality in the economy of the text, as in the scene that I am going to comment at length. The narrator often quotes it en passant, says that a certain character has gone to what undoubtedly was the theater par excellence or that two characters have met there, engaging in long discussions about this and that. Also in Russia, obviously, the plot – however dramatic – , text, music and even the singers were often treated as alibis, excuses or, at most, happy occasions and coincidences. Tolstoy’s characters, like Dumas’ 8 The novel was transcodified by Emanuel Bondeville and became an opera, which premiered at the Op8ra Comique, Paris, June 1, 1951, with Albert Wolff as conductor. 9 The novel was serialized in The Russian Messanger (1875–77) and finally published in volume in 1878.

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and Wharton’s, go to the opera late, when the first act is over and go back home before the end of the musical drama due to the urge of some sudden need or simply following the mutability of their whims. It should not be forgotten that most members of the rich and aristocratic society that act in the novel are described as enfants gat8es, often bored to death by the rites in which their lives were kept occupied; in other words, by the “customs of the country” (in Edith Wharton’s words). Very rarely the conversations that take place during the intermissions or during the performances have a serious theme. Opera is never, in sum, a meaningful soundtrack that excites important considerations, nor a “basso continuo” that allows the construction of a dialogue, but a generic background musical accompaniment. When Vronsky visits Anna’s house for the first time (Part 4, Chapter 2), he meets Karenin on his way to the “Italian” opera. Anna’s husband (Chapter 4) leaves the theater after two acts, unable to forget that a meeting of his wife and her lover is taking place in his house. His disquietude and sudden uneasiness lead to an unbearable desire to conclude the evening before the conclusion of the spectacle; but, at the same time, he does not want to meet Vronsky again. In Part 2, Chapter 6, Princess Tverskaya goes to the opera house despite knowing that, in order to prepare for the later part of the evening, she will have to leave the theater after a while. Being at the opera, seeing and being seen, confirming one’s own presence just to say that one can not stay any longer, was like calling on a friend, having a cup of tea, exchanging a few bits of conversation and moving elsewhere. All this, obviously, did not exclude the appreciation of opera by real connoisseurs, the genuine interest in foreign operas touring the Imperial Theaters and, in particular, in the explosion of a contemporary Russian operatic tradition. That was the golden age of Russian musical theater, which saw the premiHres of such masterpieces as Tchaikovsky’s Oneghin (1879) and The Maid of Orl8ans (1881), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (revised in 1874), Rimsky Korsakov’s May Night (1879) and The Snow Maiden (1881) and Borodin’s Prince Igor (completed in 1887). Even after the crucial scene at the opera, that I am going to analyze at some length, Vronsky continues to go to the opera, well knowing that Anna has been ostracized forever. The reader is brought to wonder why he shows such a blatant indifference to his companion’s feelings. We can easily interpret his evenings there as an escape from Anna’s obsessive jealousy, a punishment of her imprudent rebellion and a revenge for her unwillingness to follow his advice. Opera becomes, in this case, the emblematic space of inclusion (for a man, who is considered less guilty than his partner in sin, because he is not married, and because he is a man) and of exclusion (for a lady who is considered, by then, a fallen woman). Earlier in the novel (Part 1, Chapter 7) Vronsky’s love for Anna was an object of gossip and of light conversation at the opera house, with no

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particular emphasis on guilt or on the risks of the situation. The theater was the opportune “neutral” environment, where the members of the beau monde could suspend all moral judgment and consider the vicissitudes of friends and acquaintances simply as part of the “spectacle” of their lives. Now I come to Part 5, Chapters 32 and 33, where the famous scene I alluded to is staged. Vronsky and Anna are living together in St. Petersbourgh, in a boarding house which obviously does not satisfy the taste of the aristocratic woman. But the relationship between the two protagonists seems, for the moment, balanced and gratifying, in spite of the ostracism that society has decreed upon them – an ostracism that Anna cannot accept. When she decides to go to the opera house, therefore, she goes, first of all, because she wants to know and see in person the extent of her exclusion, as well as the density of moral judgment that people impose on her. She hopes to find out that her personality still has the power to counterbalance, at least in part, the pruderie and the shortsightedness of the “right-thinking”. Vronsky who, as a man (as we have seen) has much more freedom of movement, can easily foresee the consequences of Anna’s appearance in public in such a special place. Therefore he insists in trying to dissuade her. And yet he does not have the courage to explain why or to verbalize the reasons of his feelings, as if speaking them before Anna’s apparently innocent questions should correspond to sharing the general opinion. Anna’s insistence in going to the opera house occupies the last pages of Chapter 32. She so much wants to go, that she has put in motion a complex strategy, which includes the complicity of her aunt, the old (unmarried) Princess Varvara Oblonskaya. She will accompany her (if, as she suspects, Vronsky is not coming with her). Yashvin will buy the tickets for the box and will guarantee the “decency” of the whole operation. Anna explains to Vronsky that Yashvin “n’est pas compromettant”, using French, as in other occasions most of the characters do, for a “euphemistic” way of putting things.10 Vronsky is particularly upset because he cannot cancel the seductive effect on him of Anna’s splendid evening dress, when she is ready to leave. Anna’s attire is not only elegant and glamorous, but “particularly becoming, showing up her dazzling beauty”. In other words, Anna’s good taste and her natural charm are undeniable, even under the pressure of such tough circumstances. It is not the first time that Vronsky is dramatically divided between his love and admiration for Anna and a deep sense of frustration, derived from the difficulty in understanding her and in following her changes of mood. But here the aroused contrasting feelings are analyzed by the narrator in detail. So much so that, contrary to the reader’s expectations, we are not shown the moment when Anna enters the hall of the opera house, but are invited to pay attention to 10 Quotations are from the English translation of Constance Garnett, Planet PDF, e-book.

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the man’s inner conflicts, as he decides not to follow Anna to the theater. The reader wonders whether he wants to punish her, leaving her to suffer the consequences of her obstinacy or, at least in part, in an extreme act of wishful thinking, he hopes the reactions of the “high society” will prove less bitter than expected. When Anna is actually offended by the lady in the box near hers, we shall discover that there still are a few friends who stay on her side. Chapter 33 opens with a desperate Vronsky who finally rushes to the theater, when “the performance was in full swing”. Adelina Patti, the famous Italian soprano, is singing. The hall is “brilliantly lighted with chandeliers and gas jets”, preventing privacy. Vronsky hates the light that so cruelly “exposes” Anna to the public judgment, revealing to all curious eyes the humiliation she has just undergone. He still knows nothing about that, but cannot bear to look up, towards the box where his companion sits (“He purposely avoided looking in her direction”). He examines the various sections of the place, seeing with disgust “the same dirty crowd in the upper gallery” (a crowd that, significantly, he had always hardly borne; notice the adjective same).11 He finally dares to look, using his opera glasses probably not to see better, but to see through a lens that works as a defensive screen. When, again, he notices the “restrained excitement and brilliance” of Anna’s eyes, “her beauty […] gave him a sense of injury”. Only a few moments before, Anna was insulted by Mme Kartasova, who occupies, with her husband, the box on her right. The “thin little woman” is standing, urging her husband to abandon the theater. The expression in Anna’s face changes rapidly. Vronsky feels “a thrill of agonizing anxiety”, but does not go to Anna’s rescue. He meets his mother who, “with her steel-gray curls”, is an emblem of cruelty and notices that she cannot suppress a smile of delight. The old lady comments, again in French: “Elle fait sensation. On oublie la Patti pour elle”. When Vronsky reaches Anna’s box, he finds Yashvin trying to distract Anna, expressing the opinion that “Patti sings too loud”. It is exactly the same opinion expressed about the soprano by Emma Bovary, in Flaubert’s novel; a Russian aristocrat of the late 1870s could evidently be as banal as a low middle class Frenchman of the late 1840s. Unless, of course, we consider that, metaphorically, the high notes of the celebrated soprano, piercing Anna’s suffering soul and, in sympathy, that of her cavalier, could sound aggressive and utterly disturbing. Anna’s bitter experience is too real and too recent to allow for the soothing effect of notes sung by a prima donna in her glory and utmost success. She leaves the theater during the intermission, but Vronsky does not want to be seen going with her. He waits for the beginning of the next act, evidently with the intention of 11 This is additional evidence of the fact that even in Russia, where opera was the aristocratic social ceremony par excellence, there was a large percentage of the audience which belonged to the low middle class.

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eloping unnoticed. Instead, when he goes, he rouses “indignant ‘hushes’ in the silent audience”. These, most likely, coincide with a movement of general reprobation both for his liaison with Mme Karenina and for his awkward behavior in a difficult moment like the one everybody has witnessed. Back at home, Anna is furious with Vronsky because he did not prevent her from going. In reality, she cannot accept his refusal to go with her and stand at her side, his delay in showing up at the opera house and his decision not to go back home with her. But Tolstoy’s supreme treatment of his characters has a different conclusion of the chapter (and of the whole fifth part) to spare from the one we expect. The tension in Anna’s consciousness and within the couple, which seemed on the verge of bursting dramatically, is released all of a sudden. The synthetic last sentence of the chapter reads: She gradually became calmer. The next day, completely reconciled, they left for the country.

Obviously, it would be wrong to take it for granted that the countryside, as an oppositional space of tranquility and solitude, can sooth Anna’s restlessness and cure her wounds for more than a few days. In Part 6 we find her as unhappy as ever, ready to go back to the city (not to the opera, though, whence she has been excluded for good, nor to any other – especially indoor – “public” event). In this sense, as we shall see, the dialectics between the space of opera and another oppositional space (the sculpture gallery) are much more interesting and fruitful in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. But, before shifting to James, I want to draw attention to the remarkable, and for some aspects rather surprising, function of opera in realistic fictions, in Europe and, as we shall see, in the United States, that the texts I have analyzed document. Though the societies described in Dumas, Flaubert and Tolstoy are different and therefore the role of opera varies from Western to Eastern Europe and from the first to the second half of the century, there is common ground for interpretation. Opera was employed for specific purposes in the different cultural backgrounds and in the different texts, but was also assumed, in general, as a very special espace de la diff8rence. Since it was a paradigmatic “performative” art, the intersection of fiction and performance regularly resulted in textual operations of sure experimental quality. The average readers of a “realistic” piece of fiction (the typical members of the middle class who would never read poetry) were, at the same time, ready to appreciate the direct depiction of a reality that surrounded them daily and the occasional (but functional) exploitation of a different artistic (and linguistic) medium, which reminded them of different epistemological and ethical categories. In narratives emphasizing the search for the “mot juste”, for the appropriate “cyphers” or markers capable of rendering an effective “impression” of reality,

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the territories of opera (the music, the romantic stories, the magic space of the theaters and the famous singers/actors with all their mythologies) offered their readers an alternative version of the world. They created the occasion for them to go beyond the limits of a proto-capitalistic, materialistic everyday life and to believe in the dream of a flight from the gray routine towards a physical and metaphorical location, upon which numberless inclinations (or velleities) could be projected. In French culture opera embodied a universe in which imagination, ideals, hopes and passions were more important than profits, calculations, or the struggle for social climbing. It proved an opportune instrument that could help reveal the faults, shortcomings and narrowness of mind of a bourgeoisie that lived in a practical world of obsessive economic interests, and whose vain purpose was to imitate the old habits of a disappeared or decayed aristocracy. In Russia, in Tolstoy’s times, a strong aristocracy still existed and the middle class was not yet ready to play a relevant role in society ; but opera nonetheless had a revelatory function. Apart from a few exceptions, it made manifest the impossibility to develop a reform of the social classes based exclusively on the intelligence and willingness of a few enlightened figures, such as Levin in Anna Karenina. He, as we know, significantly enough, concentrates on his estate in the countryside and does not feel at ease in the city or in the context of the empty ceremonies of the nobility. According to Tolstoy’s utopian thought, in fact, a positive evolution of Russian society could be produced by a reflexive minority of citizens, who operated investing their lives in the improvement and enlargement of the national horizon. Unlike in Italy (with Verdi and the ideological and symbolic use of his works) or in Germany (with Wagner’s nationalistic revolution), opera never acquired the status of a political manifesto. In its most genuine appeals to the historical heritage, as those that characterized the production of the Balakirev circle, or group of Five, it expressed the need to reconcile the implicit (destined soon to become explicit) turbulences of the present with the gist and the roots of the Slavic soul.

2.

Henry James’s acoustic sensitiveness

In the context of my discourse, Henry James plays a role of some importance, though, as scholarship has sufficiently proven, his interest in – and his sensitiveness to – music was far less developed than his experience of the visual arts or his responsiveness to architecture, sculpture and, above all, painting. In spite of his long periods of residence in Europe and his participation in the collective ceremonies of English high society, there are scanty mentions, in his works (including his journals and letters), of composers, musical pieces and evenings at the opera house, with the notable exception of a few pages in A Small Boy and

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Others (1913) which, however, refer to an early phase of his education. It is impossible, therefore, to refute the critical opinion according to which James – a former pupil of painter John La Farge in his Newport years and a student of architecture in Geneva, before deciding to pursue a literary career (1859) – had a preeminently “visual” frame of mind. Although he would never say, like Emerson, “I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing; I see all” (“Nature”, 1836), his eye was incessantly – often obsessively – engaged in perceiving, observing, discriminating and seeing into “secret selves” (including his own). His ear, instead, was slightly more responsive to the acoustic universe than that of Charles Lamb. It certainly had more difficulties in coping with sounds than that of all other authors I have taken into account in this study – except Emerson, perhaps – as we shall see analyzing some of his incipits. It obviously was more a psychological question than a physical matter of fact. The structure of James’s mind brought him to develop his “painterly eye” and the “pictorial tone” so largely documented in his fiction and enabled him to compete with French and American impressionists in the project of describing the outer and inner traits of cosmopolitan transatlantic society. As the idiosyncratic but perceptive Roman Count Marco Valerii, the protagonist of an early tale (The Last of the Valerii, 1874), makes it clear, English and American expatriates and tourists in Italy (the forestieri) go about with their red books and their opera-glasses, and read about this and that, and think they know it. Ah! You must feel it…

James knew his limits and how hard it was for him to feel through music. However, precisely because of this, his rare “incursions” in the realms of sounds, his whimsical reports of fleeting contacts with the universe of hearing – with its metaphoric potentialities – as well as his few, but apt references to opera, acquire a special significance and must be carefully analyzed. James was only partially convinced by Verdi’s Aida (seen at the Salle Ventadour, Paris, in 1876)12, evidently unable to overcome what he defines the “obstreperous (from the Italian point of view exotic) music” and the emphatic quality of Radames’s aria “Celeste Aida” and of the “triumph”, which continues to be so popular nowadays. He was disturbed by the martial rhythm of the trumpets and indifferent towards the paraphernalia of that late Egyptian exoticism that William Demby’s characters will have to face in the 20th century (in 12 Henry James, Parisian Sketches, ed. by Leon Edel and Ilse D. Lind, London, Rupert HartDavis, 1958, pp. 168, 174–175; Cristina Giorcelli, Henry James e l’Italia, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1968, p. 97. The performance was indeed exceptional, since the cast included “Verdi’s favorite singers: soprano Rosine Stolz, mezzo soprano Maria Waldmann, baritone Paolo Medini, tenor Angelo Masini”; cf. Peter Brooks, Henry James Goes to Paris, Princeton, NJ, Princeton U. P., 2007, p. 33.

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The Catacombs, as we shall see). More disappointing is the fact that he also proved totally deaf to the masterly duettos and lyrical beauty of Acts 3 and 4 and to the dramatic intensity of a character such as Amneris (probably the real protagonist of Aida), although the “grand” opera was “conducted by the composer himself with a certain passionate manner and performed by the singers for whom the music had been written”.13 All in all, we have to acknowledge that, more than other, intimate melodramas of early Verdi, Aida was indeed too much for James’ introverted, idiosyncratic taste. It could not offer an easy occasion for a “clever” and meaningful exchange of conversation as the one James stages in The Portrait of a Lady (Chapter XXVIII). On the contrary, we must ascribe to the writer’s merit the fact that he liked Verdi’s Requiem which, first performed in 1874 (Milan, Church of St. Mark’s) on the first anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni’s death, immediately reached an international audience. In a long letter from Florence to his sister Alice (25 April 1880) James describes his friend Joukowsky : Joukowsky […] is the same impracticable and indeed ridiculous mixture of Nihilism and bric / brac as before, and […] is living in great intimacy with Richard Wagner, the composer […] whom Joukowsky thinks the greatest and wisest of men. He endeavoured to m’attirer chez lui […] but I kept away because Wagner speaks no French and I no German.14

In a very concise passage of his notebook (Saturday, February 7th, 1914) James writes: “Joined Mrs. Hunter in her box at Parsifal 5. Dined with her at Savoy (Mrs. Swinton and Colonel Hippesley then went back to opera for 1 hour)”, from which we understand that 1. aged seventy-one, he had the habit of arriving late at the opera, as many characters in novels I have mentioned, 2. also lovers of opera took time for dinner breaks before eventually going back to the opera house, 3. he remained basically indifferent to Wagner’s masterpiece (both its music and its dense ideological implications).15 From a theoretical point of view, James could hardly accept without irritation the contamination of drama, libretto, singing, musical score and performance, whereas the dialogue/intersection between writing and painting was, to him, a natural and fruitful cooperation. In addition, he must have considered the opera house, with the mixed audience we have described more than once, an unbecoming space of promiscuity inappropriate to his selective taste. In fact, for 13 Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master, New York, Random House, 1996, p. 33. 14 Henry James, Letters, ed. by Leon Edel, 4 vols., Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 1974–1984, vol. 2, p. 287. See also Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother and the Middle Years: A Critical Edition, ed. by Peter Collister, Charlottesville, U. of Virginia P., 2011, pp. 26–27, note 49. 15 The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, New York, Oxford U. P., 1987, p. 391.

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him, the theater (the source of a “rare intensity”) could only be prose theater, a literary genre he incessantly kept in mind in writing his fiction. In fact it is impossible to forget the imperative expressed in his “Prefaces”: “dramatize dramatize”. When he experienced prose theater in the first person, he faced repeated and frustrating failures.16 When, again in the “Prefaces”, James stresses the importance of an absolute synergy between the text and its reader, adding that the reader’s consciousness is the theater of the mind, he refers to prose theater. That literary genre is characterized by concentration, dynamic dialogue and realistic confrontation among human beings in the context of a complex network of thoughts, feelings, manners and social conventions. This is also true with opera at its best, although sometimes singers/actors seem to concentrate only on themselves and their “bravuras” and only pursue applauses and encores. In The Sacred Fount (1901) the narrator compares himself to King Ludwig of Bavaria – the greatest patron of Wagner and promoter of his music – watching Parsifal in his private theater. The mention of opera, however, is functional to the description of the man’s psychological condition but offers no help towards our understanding of James’s opinion on the work. In The Beast in the Jungle (1903) the male protagonist, John Marcher, enjoying his old friend May Bartram’s company more and more, first takes her to “the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum”, which opened in 1857, and in 1899 was renamed Victoria and Albert Museum. Then, as the relationship becomes gradually more intimate (never, unfortunately, reaching the condition of real intimacy), he thinks that he can “repair” the fault of his selfishness by inviting his friend to accompany him to the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn’t wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. (Chapter 3).

As one sees, a passage from a piece of high literature, no matter how brief, is characterized by much “informativeness”. According to Marcher (what an irony in his name!) opera can serve the purpose of “repairing” the many faults of egotism. But we need to be careful in our interpretation, as the narrator does not say that he took the lady to the opera, nor does he say because he knew that she liked to go there. In James’ phrasing, he “invited” May to accompany him; in other words, he “allowed” her to go with him – he being obviously the most important of the two terms. He thinks that opera is good food for the lady’s mind; he thinks that she deserves a variety of experiences at the opera house; he invites her to go there almost every other day. In sum, he (always subject of the sentence) does not seem to care to ask her (always object) if she is happy with 16 Mirella Vallone, Quella rara intensit/: Henry James tra narrativa e teatro, Pescara, Campus, 2003.

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such a demanding, almost obsessive full immersion in musical theater. Going to the opera house, in this case, is a means to prevent a deeper exchange of ideas, closer encounters and expressions of sincere emotions. The narrator does not add whether May (or Marcher) enjoyed at least one of the productions they saw, or whether there was a story, a situation, or a singer to whom or which they reacted the same way ; that is, whether, in sum, going to the opera was the occasion to share a magic moment in their lives. The narrator specifies that, after the spectacle, the couple (that never actually becomes a couple) sometimes went to May’s apartment, where it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera together.

However, these aprHs th8atre hours and this playing (perhaps also singing or humming) together passages of the opera they have just seen – after a “frugal” but pleasant meal – never create intense communication between them. And in fact, in one particularly tense occasion, just as the reader feels that – perhaps – the gap, indeed the abyss, of Marcher’s egotism can be finally replenished, the man starts to question his “friend” again about himself, his future and his destiny. Though I do not want to apply an easy autobiographical interpretation of the short story – James being so notoriously “resistant to biography”17 – I must confess that it would be tempting to use the short story as a paradigm of James’ inadequate sensitivity to the world of sounds and as a document of his ambivalent relationship with female figures of high intellectual stature. The predominance of sight was an inborn trait of his frame of mind and, when projected onto his prose, prevented his prose from effectively contributing to the construction of a rich acoustic “textual environment”. In Emerson’s case I ventured to say that only the experience of sight could produce in his consciousness a “rational emotion”. In James’ case I prefer to avoid the use of such an oxymoron, in particular since his emotions (and the strategies of textual production) were ethic and esthetic, more than rational and intellectual. In Chapter I, I think I succeeded in demonstrating that Emerson used visual images when he wanted also to express his participation in an acoustic experience (“Music”). James, instead, especially in his mature years, was finally in full possession of a style that enabled him to express all aspects of reality, at least until he engaged in what is defined his “experimental phase”. At the end of his career, his final phase seems to court the self-referentiality of language. The hypertrophy of words, details, symbols, tr|poi and nuances, instead of giving the impression of a 17 Michael Anesko, Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship, Stanford U. P., 2012, p. 1.

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reality that can be conveyed to the reader, ends up by entwisting sentences around themselves, almost paralyzing his characters, like monads in ghettos of incomprehension. So much so that the reader is authorized to think that the next step in the author’s rhetoric of fiction would be the aesthetics of silence. Apparently silence, for James, was not (as for Thoreau) at the beginning of everything – encircling the universe of sounds as the great snake ok8anos surrounded the archaic Greek universe, after “producing” it from its egg. Rather it was an end, comparable to a great un-acoustic ocean that subsides, after swallowing up the proud, disturbing, nonsensical confusion of human voices, struggles and complaints. In so doing James, like Dante, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickinson (and probably all the greatest writers) seems to progress towards a religion – or perhaps a ceremony – of silence as sole expression of unspeakable truths. So it is no wonder if, reading James from the perspective of sound production, we are reminded of Thoreau’s idea that all noises and acoustic utterances are nothing more than bubbles on the surface of silence. In James even the most sophisticated dialogues between speakers who best master the supreme art of English conversation result in a fragmented communication or in frustrating misunderstandings. Suspension points and parentheses that heavily encumber and finally obstruct the rationale of cues abound. Punctual black holes literally fray the texture/tissue of the verbal network. In Thoreau, however, in spite of his radical theory of silence as the uttermost reality and foundation of all natural and artificial acoustic outputs, we meet, as I have shown, a great number of successful acoustic – as well as visual – ekphrases. We see (and hear) a style that originates and slowly surfaces from the depths of a profound mind, expressing an “animal faith” (in George Santayana’s words) in the gratifying exchange/ interchange of emotions and impressions. Thoreau’s style, right from the incipit of a text (e. g. Walden) proposes to find the ideal rhythm to capture the reader’s sympathy, so that he/she may stay tuned as long as possible. Let’s see, now, what happens in some Jamesian incipits. Let’s investigate how much “intentional and communicative rhythm”, acoustic tension and density contribute to the textual discourse. Let’s verify to what extent the author or his narrator appeal to our sense of hearing, before, or after trying to convince and/ or seduce us through the sense of sight.

I. Proceeding in chronological order, I read the opening section of The American (1877), where the following “portrait” of a young man appears (a portrait that is all the more interesting, since it takes him unaware, in an unfavorable moment: “he is by no means sitting for his portrait”):

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On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carr8, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed […] but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot […] He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guidebook and an opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking […] he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar ; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigor that is commonly known as “toughness”.

Before introducing the character, the “objective” narrator designates the space (Salon Carr8, Louvre) and locates the time (month, year), adding a few unnecessary details (“This commodious ottoman has since been removed”). He informs us about the attitude and gestures of the gentleman; then, at a third denotative level, he provides us with the description of his look or, what is more important, with the impression that his body and movements would have on a neutral (but “discriminating”) observer. This time he gazes at him, as we imply, at a distance. The following paragraph offers a more precise (over-detailed and over-determined) description of a man who, as we are told, is “a powerful specimen of American”. It is a fine, healthy, strong, muscular (for the second time) and temperate man, with a well-formed head, dry brown hair, cold gray eyes, flat jaws… and so forth for a whole page. The readers are invited to see him, as much as he has been forced to see the masterpieces of the museum. The art object before his eyes (“Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna”) should alert us as to the symbolic implication of the writer’s choice. We must have also taken note of the fact that the young man “had removed his hat [as in church], and flung down beside him […] an opera-glass”. The protagonist of the scene has visited the whole picture gallery with scrupulous intention, looking “at all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed […] in his Bädeker”. His eyes have been dazzled, he has fallen victim, if not to a fit of the Stendhal syndrome, to an “aesthetic headache”. In other words, he over-forced himself to perceive with his sight. Given the relative solitude of the young man (there are, here and there, only a few ladies copying the most important canvases), and the peaceful atmosphere in the shady halls, we do not expect the narrator to introduce details pertaining to hearing. In fact, he does not; neither does he mention the silence of the environment. The point is that the acoustic dimension is not only absent but, apparently, un-interesting. Even when the dialogue between the man and a copyist breaks the silence, it is easy to acknowledge that it is an exchange of looks, glances, gestures – in a word, visual more than acoustic, messages (illuminate, stared, shrugged, write it here, showed, reflecting, trying to look indifferent, fixed, perceptive eye). This does not depend on the fact that, at first, the man feels embarrassed by his rudimental knowledge of French. Judging from

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this incipit, can we have doubts in suspecting that that gentleman seldom uses his opera-glass at the opera house? Or that, at the opera, he would, indeed, look more than listen?

II. In 1878 James published The Europeans, a novel that critics have unanimously praised through the years, in which the clear influence of Jane Austen results in a much more sophisticated rendering of dialogues compared with the opening scene of The American. A dialogue actually takes place, as in the former novel, after a couple of pages, but the text cannot begin without the introductory references to points in time (“thirty years since”, “12th of May”), space (Boston, grave-yard, inn/hotel), environment and atmosphere: A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time on object of enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the mouldy tombstones and funeral umbrage have received the ineffectual refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall […] This fact was keenly felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of thirty years since, by a lady who stood looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in the ancient city of Boston […] In the chimney-place was a red-hot fire, which emitted a small blue flame! […] An attentive observer might have fancied that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her [the woman’s] face forgot its melancholy ; but as soon as she neared the window again it began to proclaim that she was a very ill-pleased woman.

Again the situation is such that the reader cannot expect to find much reference to hearing. The restlessness of the lady does not produce the noise of her nervous steps as she moves back and forth from window to mirror. But precisely the window and the mirror clearly indicate that the two poles around which the situation, for the moment, revolves are two symmetrical and complementary instruments of “vision”. The adjective bustling, which might have raised an “acoustic consequence” upon the text, is counterbalanced and somehow cancelled by indifferent, that immediately follows it. All other lexemes belong to the semantic (and etymological) territory of seeing/looking: seen, gloomy-looking, spectacle, umbrage, looking out, self-inspection. Notwithstanding the gloominess of the room, we are granted two color brushstrokes: the red of the fire and the blue of the flame in the fire-place. Later we shall find (in the exterior space) another touch of red (“red-brick houses”) and one of white: “a church spire, painted white”. The second character occupying the room of the modest hotel is, if possible, more silent than the lady and is obsessively concentrated on his small pieces of paper, which he covers with “pictorial designs”. These “strangelooking figures” and graphic sketches are introduced as the hieroglyphs of a

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monomaniac, self-absorbed artist. The “discriminating” observer of The American is invited here to become an “attentive” observer. But then an effective description – that is at the same time visual and acoustic – interrupts the “regime of the eye” that was so far exclusive, introducing the arrival of such a vehicle as the lady at the window […] had never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colours, and decorated apparently with jingling bells […] dragged, with a great deal of rumbling, bouncing, and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small horses.

The description of the omnibus by means of lively and ironic traits, based on the cooperation of sight and hearing, shows how productive the interaction of senses can be, foreshadowing the exquisite synesthetic technique that James will (sparingly, but operationally) use in his mature phase. I particularly appreciate the discreet but convincing alliteration created by the three -ing clauses – rumbling, bouncing, scratching – which almost verges on onomatopoeia. The “vehicle”, then, seems to (literally) “break the ice”, causing a chain reaction. The lady, whose physique and temperament are finally taken care of (more synthetically than in the previous novel, but with the usual precision of detail), stops pacing back and forth and speaks. The man answers, a dialogue is activated and the text develops with acoustic sensitiveness. It registers not only words but exclamation marks (signs of irritation on the woman’s part), French epithets perfectly pronounced (affreux, ce sera clair, au moins) as well as “bitter”, “fresh”, “joyous”, “animated” laughs and smiles. The dialogue between brother and sister is fluent, expressive and well-constructed. From my point of view, it is particularly interesting because it documents not only James’ gift in using “spoken” (virtual, reported) words, as well as “written” words, but also his occasional interest in sounds. His greater sensitivity to sight, however, surfaces again in the last cue of the dialogue, when the draftsman, who has so far never lifted his eyes from his sketches, inspired by his first look outside, says: “Look here! […] As a portent, even while I speak, the sky is turning the colour of gold; the day is going to be splendid.”

The color of the sky obviously promises more than good weather. Its golden hue promises money, since the day after the two are going to meet their relatives, whom they hope to find very rich. This is further evidence of James’s great symbolic and metaphoric imagination and his acquaintance with the productivity of colors, within the context of the realm of sight.

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III. Washington Square (published in 1880) has quite a different incipit, since the narrator cannot start “in medias res” but needs to provide a different set of coordinates. The background of his “story” will enable the reader to follow the events that will materialize in the present of the text. As is often the case with James, the preceding facts are dealt with in a successfully cursory narration. An uninterrupted flow of brilliant prose (less encumbered than usual by analyses of feelings, moods and emotions) occupies two pleasantly short chapters. So far, the essentially diachronic axis of narration had no necessity to appeal to either sight or hearing. Chapter three invests much of its span in giving account of Doctor Sloper’s family’s move uptown, of its settling on Washington Square and of the building of the “handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing room windows”, that so closely resembles the house the James family occupied on the “most delectable” square. The action of the novel actually starts with Chapter four, which can, therefore, be considered as the real incipit of the text: Mrs Penniman, with more buckles and bangles than ever, came, of course, to the entertainment, accompanied by her niece; the Doctor, too, had promised to look in later in the evening. There was to be a good deal of dancing, and before it had gone very far Marian Almond came up to Catherine, in company with a tall young man. She introduced the young man as a person who had a great desire to make our heroine’s acquaintance, and as a cousin of Arthur Townsend, her own intended. Marian Almond […] made a long speech about Mr Townsend’s cousin, to whom she administered a tap with her fan before turning away to other cares. Catherine had not understood all that she said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian’s ease of manners and flow of ideas, and to looking at the young man, who was remarkably handsome.

First of all, let me underline the opportune presence of the alliteration “buckles and bangles”, which is instrumental in depicting not only Mrs Penniman’s look but also the way she “sounds”, as she naively moves, proceeding in full attire towards a place and an event she anticipates as pleasantly different from her life routine. When the party (which there is no necessity to treat at length) is on its way, the narrator introduces the reader to another specimen of tall, young, handsome American; or, to be more precise, as Catherine “phrased it to herself, so beautiful”. The rhythm of the dance, to which the young lady is invited by Townsend, is specified as “the harmonious rotation of the polka”. Catherine, however, pays as little attention to it as she had paid to what her cousin had said. She is enchanted by the gentleman and so blushes. In order to keep her selfcontrol, she must stop looking at him by concentrating, instead, on the flowers of her fan. Before the description of Townsend is even roughly sketched, we already know all we need to know : his strong appeal on the female character.

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When the narrator feels it useful to add a few further details, he can be much more synthetic than in the case of The American. Interestingly enough, Catherine (and therefore the reader) sees him through the lenses of art, that is painting (“He had features like young men in pictures […] so chiseled and finished”; a portrait by Bronzino?) and sculpture: “Catherine thought he looked like a statue but [as the young lady naively continues to confess to herself] a statue […] would not have eyes of so rare a colour”. The dialogue that, in pure Jamesian style, cannot be too late to develop, is unbalanced, since the man does much of the talking. The acoustic texture is not very interesting, as the major purpose of the narrator is to emphasize the girl’s shyness, silence and romantic interest in the man. She also speaks very little on her way home, in the carriage, although her father and aunt enquire about the name of the gentleman she has just met. At the end of the chapter, Catherine does something more “serious” than simply keeping silent or showing her uneasiness: for the first time in her life, she lies.

IV. In a matter of a few years James overcame the rather conventional way of opening his novels with the pattern I have underlined. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), for example, he starts in medias res, introducing Miss Pynsent, a “humble dressmaker” who desperately wants to find a child, whom a “high and rather terrible personage” has come to visit. The names of the characters (after Miss Pynsent, Mrs Bowerbank, Hyacinth Robinson, Millicent Henning, Mrs Chipperfield) are given “by the way”, without or before any appropriate physical description, while the action unfolds, in a disorderly way that mirrors the disorder in which Miss Pynsent’s little parlor is found by the imposing visitor. Likewise the bits of dialogue between Miss Pynsent and young Millicent are purposely designed as fragmented and “casual”. Though the interest in sounds and voices does not prevail over the visual dimension, one has to acknowledge that there is a new, fresh rhythm, deriving from a strategy of cooperation, a sort of momentary alliance between sight and sound, in view of a shared target that must be quickly hit. The two senses must render a very peculiar environment, not often found in James’ fiction. The narrator needs to use very special tools and tricks, in order to alert the reader to the “uncanny” originality of the spaces where the characters will move, which are going to include London slums, prisons, and working-class pubs.

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V. In The Aspern Papers (1888) a first person narrator not only sums up, to the readers’s advantage, the background of the story and the spatial setting (Venice), but also, in a few paragraphs, introduces (obviously implying – and imposing – his circumscribed, limited, “biased” point of view) the major characters, fragments of their stories, their temperaments and several rumors about them. The fast pace of this incipit certainly depends on the author’s intention to write a novelette full of tension and suspense as opposed to another full scale novel. The consequence is that there is little space and time for “descriptions”, in the traditional sense of the word. All data that are provided, originate in – and depend upon – the structure and the boundaries of the narrator’s mind and on his capacity – or incapacity – to see, hear, guess and understand. The minimal descriptive touches surface almost by chance, en passant, as is revealed by a sentence like this: “the little one, as Mrs Prest called the niece” proved afterwards to be “considerably the bigger of the two”. But it is most evident that the only “concrete” facts that are of interest to the narrator (and, through him, to the curiosity of his friend, Mrs Prest) are “the Aspern papers”. No physical or metaphorical sound emerges from the depths of the protagonist’s consciousness. However the rhythm of this incipit is particularly satisfying, expressing, so to say, a “diegetic urge” that is somehow self-sufficient and would not ask for more sensorial data. The first person narrator, obviously, does not describe himself and thus, not knowing the direction the plot will take – judging from what we can surmise in this initial phase – we imply that he does not have the necessity to be as handsome and muscular as the other “specimens” of American young men we have met in other Jamesian novels. James’ interest in the acoustic dimension, in sum, like Thoreau’s, seems limited, once again, to the question of choosing the best rhythm through which the reader can be captured and held at his/her desk, reading the text in perfect “sympathy” with the author.

3.

Isabel Archer’s “transition” from opera house to sculpture gallery

In Chapter XVIII of The Portrait of the Lady (1881) readers find themselves at Gardencourt, where Mr Touchett is very ill. Coming back from London, travelling with her cousin Ralph, Isabel Archer has kept silent in the carriage during the whole trip. Once she is in the big country residence, she notes “throughout the house that perceptible hush which precedes a crisis”. The acoustic dimension is present, in so far as the narrator underlines the ominous and significant

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absence of sounds and voices. After an hour spent in her room, Isabel goes down, in search of updated information about her uncle’s health. From the library, she hears “an unexpected sound – the sound of low music proceeding apparently from the saloon”. The sound is unexpected not only because the circumstances are the way they are, but also because the piano, whence the sound comes, is seldom used by members of the family. Music, in fact, is not their major interest or occupation. Although the sound is immediately better qualified as a harmony, when Isabel enters the large room and sees the back of the person who is playing the piano, she stops reacting to the acoustic stimulus and shifts to the use of her sense of sight. In fact, she is distracted by her “visual” curiosity, noticing that the back of the lady is “ample and well-dressed”. The piano piece is “something [a sonata?] of Schubert”, but what captures the protagonist’s attention is the identity of the person who plays and the way she plays, as a clue to her personality : She became aware that the lady at the piano played remarkably well. She was playing something of Schubert’s […] and touched the piano with a discretion of her own. It showed skill, it showed feeling.

Isabel is ready to interpret the lady’s interpretation as a sign of both skill and feeling. Her innocence feeds her tendency to react in a favorable way to novelties (including the presence of strangers). Her self-confidence convinces her that she can judge a person after a few glances and a few notes at the piano. A formal but somehow already “intimate” and sympathetic dialogue ensues. Isabel goes as far as to say that the harmony produced by the lady’s fingers might sooth her uncle’s sufferings: ‘I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better’.

Madame Merle replies in a sentence that betrays her bitter – and self-pitying – attitude towards life that interestingly is interpreted by Isabel as the evidence of a sensitive soul: ‘There are moments in life when even Schubert has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst’

At this stage of the story Miss Archer is most self-centered and takes the lady’s last words as referring to herself, misinterpreting her allusion to a vaguely mysterious context in which the lady must have experienced very bad “moments”. The partial and oblique confession is also meant to intrigue the young interlocutor and her na"ve disposition: ‘I’m not in that state now then […] On the contrary I should be so glad if you would play something more’

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The lady starts to play again but soon finds it more important to inquire about the younger lady’s identity (which she must have guessed already). The exchange of glances over each other’s shoulders confirms the prevalence of the inquisitive sense of sight over the sense of hearing, which would enable a different, slower but perhaps less superficial understanding of temperaments, moods and motifs. The two adjectives that define the way Madame Merle plays for another few moments (“softly and solemnly”) create an oxymoronic alliteration that demonstrates James’ intention to exploit every minimal, punctual segment of text in order to provide his reader with every useful bit of information. His construction of the scene is so clever that we have to blame only ourselves if we have not yet grasped the “fundamentals” of the plot, as it so clearly unfolds before us. Though “the shadows deepened in the room”, Isabel is able to scrutinize the older lady’s look. More than in other cases, here the “description” of the woman is conceived as an “interpretation” pursued by a less experienced person who was conquered “at first sight” (again, sight!). As Isabel compares the “classical” arrangement of her hair to “a Bust […] – a Juno or a Niobe”, she reveals her ignorance in matters of classical sculpture and mythology, Juno and Niobe being two totally different archetypes. Unless we want to believe that her insight is as brilliant as to have caught the (once again) oxymoronic overlapping, in Madame Merle’s personality (and in the story of her life), of the powerful emblem of a divine wife (Juno) and of the opposite emblem of extreme motherly impotence and suffering (Niobe). Isabel’s fascination with Madame Merle’s “large white hands, of a perfect shape, a shape so perfect that their possessor […] wore no jeweled rings” is particularly interesting for me. Why doesn’t she stop a moment to wonder about the strange coincidence between these large hands and their apparent ability to play Schubert? After exploring James’ limited (but functional) interest in music in a significant fragment of the novel, I proceed to a close reading of the long scene in which Isabel is at the opera house. I will also try a contrastive analysis with the two scenes that I have read in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.18 In Chapter XXVIII of the novel we are in Rome. The role of opera in this section must be strongly underlined, in so far as the chapter marks the beginning of part II in the first hard cover edition of the book: On the morrow, in the evening, Lord Warburton went again to see his friends at their hotel, and at this establishment he learned that they had gone to the opera. He drove to the opera with the idea of paying them a visit in their box after the easy Italian fashion; and when he had obtained his admittance – it was one of the secondary theatres – 18 A fleeting comparison of Isabel Archer with Anna Karenina appears in Harold Bloom, ed., Isabel Archer, New York, Chelsea House, 1992, p. 87. See also Harold Bloom, ed., Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, New York, Chelsea House, 1999.

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looked about the large, bare, ill–lighted house. An act had just terminated and he was at liberty to pursue his quest.

Lord Warburton has no hesitation in joining his friends at the opera house, though the performance has long begun. He conforms to “the easy Italian fashion”. However, we have seen that the fashion was as easy as that everywhere, in Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic. He is lucky enough to arrive during an intermission. Rome, in the second half of the 19th century, had not, like Milan (La Scala) or Naples (San Carlo), a single grand opera house, but many theaters with varying degrees of prestige.19 The most important one was the Teatro Argentina, which saw several major premieres, among which operas by Scarlatti, Cimarosa, Mercadante, Rossini (Il barbiere di Siviglia). Verdi’s Il trovatore and Un ballo in maschera had their premieres in the Teatro Apollo. The fact that more than just one theater could afford a “season” confirms the wide popularity of melodrama even in the capital of Catholicism. In this case, “it was one of the secondary [not small] theaters”. In a few touches the narrator hints at the modesty of the environment, preparing the reader not to expect a remarkable show. Isabel’s and Osmond’s expectations must not have been very great either, since the news of successes and disappointments quickly spread in town. They had evidently gone for social reasons, to spend the evening in a leisurely, “uncompromising” way. When Warburton (and the reader through him) sees Isabel, he notices that she is alone in the box with Osmond. A shade of jealousy and envy crosses his mind. Isabel faces the stage, though the curtain is down, as if she was still somehow absorbed in the emotions provoked by the preceding act. She is partly “screened” (i. e. metaphorically still undecipherable), self-confident but dangerously vulnerable to Osmond, who sits behind her, “leaning” in a nonchalant attitude that nonetheless betrays his schemes: After scanning two or three tiers of boxes he perceived in one of the largest of these receptacles a lady whom he easily recognized. Miss Archer was seated facing the stage and partly screened by the curtain of the box, and beside her, leaning back in his chair, was Mr Gilbert Osmond. They appeared to have the place to themselves, and Warburton supposed their companions had taken advantage of the recess to enjoy the relative coolness of the lobby.

The “harmony” that Warburton detects in the quiet atmosphere surrounding “the pair” (not yet “a couple”) is an output of his personal vision of the scene. A more “discerning” observer (or reader) would rather detect a distance between the two and, what counts most, a difference in attitude. Osmond has no interest in the spectacle: he is evidently there in order to pursue his plans concerning

19 Alessandro Gebbia, La citt/ teatrale, Roma, Officina, 1985.

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Isabel. The insistence on the visual dimension is, once again, evident and exclusive: He stood a while with his eyes on the interesting pair ; he asked himself if he should go up and interrupt the harmony. He took his way to the upper regions and on the staircase he met Ralph Touchett slowly descending, his hat at the inclination of ennui and his hands where they usually were.

As in other scenes at the opera that we have met, people feel free to come late, to go before the end, to spend more time in the lobby than in front of the performance, to engage in conversations, to gossip and to “observe” the members of the audience. So the fact that Miss Stackpole and Bantling “have gone out to a caf8 to eat an ice” is not primarily due to the poor quality of orchestra, singers and scenario. Ralph also goes away in advance and justifies his “defection” describing the performance in terms that mix the highbrow mood of a supposedly real connoisseur and the upper class disgust with vulgarity in general. Yet we understand that the real reason for him to go is the fact that he feels “very low”, a feeling that has much to do with the presence of Osmond and the apparently “indifferent” satisfaction with which Isabel bears the man’s company : “The opera’s very bad: the women look like laundresses and sing like peacocks. I felt very low.”

The pre-eminence of sight over hearing is confirmed by Ralph, who mentions “look like laundresses” before “sing like peacocks”. If in Flaubert and Tolstoy the sopranos sang too loud, here they sing (or rather shriek) like the birds that, in contrast with the beauty of plumage, have an all but harmonious voice. Warburton does not give up his intention to visit Isabel and finds her, at the same time, cold, vaguely “absent”, “radiant” and “exalted”. The contradictory mood and look of the young lady have nothing of the dramatic inner conflict, that includes both charm and irritation, in Vronsky’s impression of Anna Karenina. Yet they suggest similarly mixed feelings in the beholder’s consciousness, as well as similarly “perverse” intentions in the lady’s mind: Isabel’s welcome was as to a friend so honourably old that he vaguely asked himself what queer temporal province she was annexing […] It struck her […] visitor that Miss Archer had, in operatic conditions, a radiance, even a slight exaltation; as she was, however, at all times a keenly glancing quickly moving, completely animated young woman, he may have been mistaken on this point. Her talk with him moreover pointed to presence of mind; it expressed a kindness so ingenious and deliberate as to indicate that she was in undisturbed possession of her faculties.

What Warburton interprets as Isabel’s “undisturbed possession of her faculties” will appear, in retrospect, a more complex system of behavior. It is a self-congratulatory satisfaction in decisions taken or, perhaps even more, an element of

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pride in believing that one finally knows on what basis decisions must be taken. In all cases, such an obstinacy of impeccability will be the obsessive trait in the remainders of her story. All in all, Warburton is right in thinking that Isabel is simultaneously sincere and tricky, although he does not understand the reasons for such a behavior : “Her voice had tricks of sweetness, but why play them on him?”. When the opera begins again, he stays as long as his suffering and bewildered soul allows him to stay, sitting back in the darkest corner of the box. Then, at the next intermission, he gets up and goes home: The bare, familiar, trivial opera began again […] Lord Warburton heard nothing, and from his gloomy corner saw nothing but the clear profile of this young lady defined against the dim illumination of the house […] Verdi’s music did little to comfort him, and he left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the tortuous, tragic streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.

The performance is (to him) “bare”, the story only too well known, offering no interest; the mise-en-scHne is “trivial”. We have heard of Ralph’s disgust for the singers and also that he music is of no use, though it is Verdi’s. There is no mention of the title of the opera, but it would make no difference. Even one of Verdi’s masterpieces, with the best orchestra and the best singers, would offer him no comfort. In the end the English peer is in a much worse mood than he was when he entered the opera house. Walking home through the stereotypical Roman labyrinth he feels the streets to be “tragic”. Notwithstanding his awareness that “heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars”, he masochistically takes pleasure in being one of those “romantic sufferers”, losing himself in the nightmarish city. Well, this was Lord Warburton, unable to be in harmony with a space that, if not, properly speaking, “antagonist”, is certainly an “alien” environment, unresponsive to his demands, as much as he is unresponsive to performance, singers and music. There is no trace of mutual communication, no hope of getting in touch with musicians, actors or singers, nor with the human prototypes they embody or with other fellow members of the audience. Compressed between the enormous void of the theater’s “black hole” – an abyss towards which he refuses to lean – and the density of contrasting, unexpressed feelings, moods and thoughts in the claustrophobic and overcrowded concentration of the (however large) box, Isabel’s suitor cannot “understand” her nor himself and therefore cannot decide, one way or another. In fact, we shall meet him again the morning after, at the Capitoline Museums, a prey to the same doubts and haziness of vision. But how does Isabel react to her evening at the opera – if she, indeed, reacts at all? We are enabled to guess, after Warburton leaves the premises, through the

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two-page conversation exchanged among the five characters who stay on (which might be for the opera or to comment Lord Warburton’s visit). Isabel, Osmond, Ralph, Henrietta and Bantling stage a sort of “play within the play” or, to be more precise, a play in contrast with or alternative to the performance of the opera, to which none of them pays the least attention. Considering the sophistication of the conversation, the abundance of innuendos, suspension points, exclamation marks, rhetorical questions, affected answers and feigned or sincere misunderstandings, it is legitimate to imagine that it lasts longer than the intermission which it had made possible for Warburton to leave (unlike Tolstoy’s Vronsky) without disturbing the performance. The last words are pronounced by Henrietta “while the curtain rose for the ballet” and, since the ballet usually came after the end of the melodrama, as a sort of “treat”, we understand that the final act did not impress anybody, in the small “circle” of Anglophone spectators. Why Osmond or Ralph, Henrietta or Bantling did not pay attention to it, in part we know, in part we are not interested in knowing. Isabel’s reaction (or lack of reaction) is more intriguing since, at the beginning of the chapter, we have seen her “facing the scene” even during an intermission. Unlike Osmond, who sat in the back, “leaning back”, she confronted the curtain as if waiting with anticipation for the play to start again. We have not heard a word of complaint about the mediocrity of the performance from her. Unlike Henrietta and Bantling, she did not leave her seat, in search of an ice cream or for “the relative coolness of the lobby”. During the whole conversation, Isabel’s profile remains “clear” and “defined”, impeccable, “against the dim illumination of the house”. She does not seem to move a muscle in her head. She speaks less than Henrietta and replies to Osmond’s questions with quick, clear-cut answers, as if she did not want to disturb (the performance) or be disturbed (in her own “performance”). To what extent do the context (the opera house) and the opera influence her utterances, the tone of her words, the content of the exchange with Osmond? How much do the conventions of opera suggest, by contrast, or even ease the free expression of an anti-conventional inner world, as well as the confession of a non-conformist frame of mind? The unique space, I believe, that is so dull, obstinate and unmanageable for Warburton and so unmeaningful for the other four people in Isabel’s company, plays a significant role in the development of her selfawareness. It physically shelters and “screens” her in the friendly penumbra of a “box”, making her feel – in a suspended world outside time and space – free from the limitations of her place in society. At the same time, it offers the opportunity to be more sincere than ever, also towards herself. If we compare Isabel at the opera house with the young lady who first meets Madame Merle, we see how far the construction of her temperament and personality has developed. She is no more the na"ve, provincial American girl who

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so easily falls in love at first sight/sound with the mature, supposedly European, madame. Although she has not yet become “one of the most magnificent figures in the large and sprawling house of fiction”,20 she has “chosen” the direction of her life, overcoming the ancient habit of postponing decisions and choices.21 Her contribution to the dialogue in the theater box exemplifies a new stage in her Bildung, even though it still documents bits of almost childish provocative traits (‘I like to like him’) and shades of obstinate ambiguity. In fact she treats Warburton with “a kindness so ingenious and deliberate” that it can be mistaken for a sort of half inadvertent desire to continue to flirt with him (“what business had she then with such arts and such felicities, above all with such tones of reparation – preparation?”). At the same time, she engages in a risky verbal skirmish with Gilbert Osmond (‘Do you know him well?’ […] ‘Well enough for all the use I have for him’. ‘And how much of a use is that?’), failing to notice – or deliberately overlooking/overhearing – the bitterness of his remarks and the implied aggressiveness of his questions. If we keep in mind that, throughout the dialogue, we are in a “theater”, we can rightly suspect that, in most of her sentences, Isabel is acting, interpreting the part of a “woman of the world” who can, with no embarrassment, praise an attractive, aristocratic and rich gentleman, whom she has hurt, in the face of another man who is evidently courting her and who is neither aristocratic nor rich and less attractive and young.22 Isabel’s ability to master her words, however, as well as her feelings and moods, are evidently incomplete. She is clearly seen (and heard) in a “transitional” moment of her development as a woman and as a “round” fictional character. This leads to a somewhat inconsistent conclusion of the conversation, in which the various “actors” confusingly mention the Pope and questions of envy, wealth and fortune. In the end, the most sincere in the group is the most devious speaker, Osmond, who confesses: ‘I don’t want to destroy the people – I only want to be them’. Is not the wish to “enter” a person, stealing an identity and a role, the worst form of appropriation and violence? Isabel’s growth needs further steps, but the friendly penumbra of the opera house seems to start working in favor of that growth. If “the self-reliant individual” she is has so far “cohabited with Emma Bovary and her numberless 20 All a Novelist Needs: Colm T|ib&n on Henry James, ed. by Susan M. Griffin, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins U. P., 2010, p. 78. 21 Lyall H. Powers, The Portrait of a Lady: Maiden, Woman, and Heroine, Boston, Twayne, 1991, p. 37. 22 This behavior can be ascribed to the psychological category of “narcissism”. There are scholars who emphasize this category in Isabel’s “transitional” phase, the one to which the scene at the Opera House in Rome belongs; see Beth Sharon Ash, “Frail Vessels and Vast Designs: A Psychoanalytic Portrait of Isabel Archer”, in Joel Porte, ed., New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, Cambridge U. P., 1990, p. 131.

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colleagues and emulators in sentimental novels”,23 we are authorized to suspect that, from now on, she will acquire a more mature self-awareness and, above all, that her story is not going to end – like Emma’s and Anna’s – in suicide. Of course this does not imply that she will make no more “mistakes”. I am convinced, anyhow, that it is not a coincidence if the transition from one stage of her psyche to the next is outlined in this “scene”.24 Melodrama and, perhaps even more, the melodramatic imagination and modality of textual construction – more frequent in James than it is generally acknowledged – work here in an emblematic way, because they correspond to the space of coincidence between “the ethic and the theoretical dimension, […] the crucial intersection of understanding and self-revelation in the subjectivity of characters, no less than in the self-consciousness of the text”.25 The “perceptive” reader cannot miss noticing that the second part of Chapter XXVIII, with a transition of just two lines (“Isabel saw no more of him [Warburton] for the next twenty-four hours, but on the second day after the visit to the opera, she encountered him…”) presents the same party of friends in a totally different environment, that is, the sculpture gallery of the Capitoline Museums. There they are less constrained to be a group; in fact, they walk around at uneven paces, free to contemplate this or that piece in the various rooms. Clearly a space of silence and concentration, the museum can, however, allow a very special kind of conversation, since there is no fear of disturbing an audience willing to see, hear and enjoy a show. From an acoustic point of view, the museum is the negation of sound interaction, the paradigmatic example of a different kind of communication between visitors and works of art. As all American fans of European galleries and art collections (in particular of galleries in which statues prevailed over paintings) noticed in the 19th century, both connoisseurs and amateurs experienced a series of dialogues with silence, in which the dumb (but often too significant) statues challenged their human counterparts with dense messages they found impossible not to react to. This seems particularly true with Hawthorne who, in contemplating Praxiteles’ Resting Faun in the same gallery where James has his characters move – or visiting a newly found statue of Venus on the Via Portuense – seems to detect smiles that ask for “a responsive smile” on the onlooker’s part. It is also true with Melville who, in his lecture “Statues in Rome”, confesses that, upon seeing the

23 Donatella Izzo, “Nel segno di Isabel Archer”, in ]coma V, 12 (Winter 1998), p. 43. 24 Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge, MA, Harvard U. P., 1991: “The novel has many plots – everybody plots against Isabel – she is victimized by people plotting against her […] belated revelations and designs […] and various subsidiary actions, all make for melodrama, plot at its most egregious” (p. 85). 25 Donatella Izzo, “Ancora su Isabel Archer”, in ]coma, V, 14 (Summer-Fall 1998), pp. 92–93.

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Apollo Belvedere for the first time, he reacted with a mixed feeling of admiration and awe.26 At the opera house, as we have seen, Isabel was (or seemed to be) in perfect control of her faculties. Interested in the opera, though poorly produced, she was unfortunately disturbed and distracted by her friends, who talked too much, and about matters she had not yet solved within herself. She could not, therefore, appreciate the story, find a sympathy with the singers, or enjoy the deep resonance of Verdi’s music in the “acoustic chambers of her mind”.27 Considering the difficulties in coming to terms with her novel situation – with the impressions that life made upon her in her new role of a heiress – and the limited cooperation of her friends (in this particular scene even Ralph seems to be nonchalantly distant from her inner world), Isabel is unable to fully profit (one way or another) from an experience that, as we have seen, meant much for other great heroines of 19th century fiction. As a consequence of her “transitional” psychological phase, there is no need, for James, to quote the theater, the opera that was performed, the singers or the conductor. That is to say, all the coordinates that Edith Wharton, as we shall soon see, thinks necessary to provide in the opening page of The Age of Innocence. We understand, therefore, why Isabel feels more at ease among the masterpieces of the sculpture museum, as she stops in front of every important statue, starting with the Dying Gladiator (a sympathy which possibly foreshadows her doom). Unlike in the scene at the opera house, here James chooses to be more detailed, giving the reader all the information he withdrew in the preceding scene. The statues are defined as “presences”, with “beautiful blank faces”. Isabel can “listen” to their eternal silence and is particularly glad when she finds herself alone. When Gilbert Osmond appears, saying: “ ‘I’m surprised to find you alone, I thought you had company’”, Isabel can frankly answer : “ ‘So I have – the best’. And she glanced at the Antinous and the Faun”. She speaks “a little dryly” but shows much better control of her faculties than the day before. So much so that Osmond understands that it’s better not to insist with his inquisitive mood about her relationship with Warburton. The intense but peaceful atmosphere of the museum has a positive effect on both. Reading Osmond’s thoughts, the narrator explains that the man congratulates himself for selecting, as prospective wife, the rare example of a lady who declined the hand of an English 26 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1860; Idem, The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. by Sophia Hawthorne, Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1871. Cf. Andrea Mariani, Il sorriso del fauno: la scultura classica in Hawthorne, Melville e James. Chieti, Solfanelli, 1992. 27 I am particularly fond of this expression, that I find in James Merrill’s Recitative. I will use it again when I analyze Merrill’s relationship with music and opera, in the last chapter of this volume.

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peer. It is a thought that turns him into the most amiable, “delightful associate”, as Ralph himself will acknowledge, in the course of the next chapter, and that will precipitate Isabel’s decision to accept his offer.

Chapter Six: Wharton, Cather, Santayana

I liked this music […] It transports; the means may be at times inferior, but the end is attained. The end is to escape to another world, to live freely for a while in a medium made by us and fit for us to live in. (George Santayana, 1944–45)

In the late 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century opera continued to be an essential part of North American, no less than of European, cultural life. The massive flow of immigration from the Old Continent and the diversified multiethnic background of the newcomers considerably increased the demand for intercultural experiences that could permit the formation of national collective identifications and, at the same time, provide an ample scenario in whose context integration and the construction of a pluralistic country could be thought of as a feasible project. In the late 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century English, French and Italian operas had extensively entered the culture of entertainment in the country – during the process of assimilation to which we have already alluded – and were less and less felt as an imported good. This is why the project of creating a tradition of genuine American opera met serious obstacles. In the following historical phase, however, European and American operas shared the ample cultural panorama without major conflicts. The creation of an American opera was unfortunately pursued through mistakes and misunderstandings, for instance imitating romantic, Beethovenian musical models (Leonora by William H. Fry, 1845), or confining the originality of operas to themes. In spite of their historical importance as early documents, The Fourth of July by Pelissier (1799), The Champions of Freedom by Charles Gilfert (1816), Enterprise by Arthur Clifton (1820), Rip Van Winkle by George F. Bristow (1855), Evangeline and Hiawatha by Edward E. Rice (1874, 1880) and Sleepy Hollow by Max Maretzek (1879) have disappeared from the repertoire. Operas with Indian themes enjoyed a wider and longer lasting

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popularity ; suffice it to mention The Indian Princess by John Bray (1808) and Pocahontas, or The Gentle Princess, by John Brougham (1855).1 An interesting case study is Walter Damrosch’s The Scarlet Letter which, notwithstanding George Parsons Lathrop (Hawthorne’s son in law)’s libretto, was an epic fiasco when it premiered in Boston (1896). Damrosch’s Wagnerian enthusiasm projected Hawthorne’s masterpiece onto a mythical, generic protoGermanic background. Days following the premiere, reviewers remarked the uncanny presence of girls too similar to the Rhein Maidens (Das Rheingold) near the modest dwelling of Hester Prynne. Hester herself, according to Henry Krehbiel, looked like an Elsa (from Lohengrin) who had hastily stitched an A on her robe. Unlike the protagonist of the classic American novel, she was not allowed to survive her partner ; at the end, the two died in a very Tristan und Isolde way. The opera was soon nicknamed The Nibelungen of New England. The major fault was certainly Damrosch’s, but the failure demonstrated something that contemporary critics should have clearly understood. That is the resistance of Hawthorne’s texts to transcodification from page to stage, the refusal of his novels to be set in music and of his “stories” and characters to be “exposed” and “spread” before a public that, also in the best cases, wanted above all a “show”.2 Most critics consider The Saw Mill by Micah Hawkins (1824) the first distinguished American opera, in particular as it uses recitative and melodies in a balanced way, forerunning the structure and the effective theatrical strategies of the musical comedies which became immensely popular after the Civil War. After the war, the public could choose between two completely different kinds of entertainment: the sophisticated operas of the European tradition and the “modern” production of the American genius. The interesting phenomenon was that both musical genres attracted audiences of all social classes, exactly as opera had always done. The musical comedies, however, became distinguished products and, in some cases, real masterpieces, only late in the 19th century or early in the 20th century, thanks to the acquired maturity of American music proper. American music, in fact, also before, but above all after the explosion of jazz, finally made concrete use of native folklore and the African American heritage. The best example of these successful musical comedies is Showboat by Jerome Kern, whose text, written by Oscar Hammerstein II, derives from Edna Ferber’s homonymous novel (1927). As critics immediately understood, Showboat was no more simple entertainment but an organic work of art. It held the scenes for decades, visited all major theaters of the United States and Europe, became not one but three convincing films and is always ready to be staged again, in nos1 Katherine K. Preston, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–1860, Urbana-Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1992. 2 Edith Borroff, American Operas: A Checklist, Warren, Michigan, Harmonic Park Press, 1992.

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talgic revivals that can hardly surpass the original production. In the 1930s, at last, there were musicals that were so well conceived and so rich in terms of score, choreography and narrative structure, that some critics tend to label them as real “operas”. A perfect example of such a happily ambiguous category of musical products is Lady in the Dark by Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart (1941).3 After this premise and keeping in mind its background I proceed now to analyze the function of opera in three early 20th century writers, who present us with three different uses of opera in writing. The expatriate Edith Wharton uses opera in a novel (The Age of Innocence, 1920) which looks in retrospect (with some nostalgia, as well as with a keenly critical eye) to the habits, customs and conventions of New York society in the late 19th century. In order to exemplify the transition from one to another phase in the development of the American musical taste, precisely from the beginning of her text Wharton mentions an opera from the “new” French repertoire, that is Gounod’s Faust (Paris, Th8atre Lirique, 1859). Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) and Lucy Gayheart (1935) demonstrate to what extent the same issues and similar stylistic and rhetorical strategies can result in success or failure. Instead, George Santayana’s impressive macrotext mentions opera only in marginal observations. But there is at least a fragment of his that, in a poetic epiphanic/epiphonic moment, sums up much of what I have said so far. Moreover, this fragment proves how effective and fruitful the fascination with opera can be, in a writer/philosopher who accepts the passing of time remaining equidistant between an immemorial past, with its “classic” traditions, and a future that mankind must welcome and face with a bold “animal faith”.

1.

Edith Wharton: the experience of opera in The Age of Innocence

In my introduction I already quoted an initial passage from the first chapter of The Age of Innocence (1920) in order to show how important an issue opera was for Americans of different social and cultural backgrounds in the 19th century. The experience of patronizing the opera house was a palimpsest of attitudes, habits and conventions deposited on top of each other, on the basis of the heterogeneity of the public, national origins and cultural intersections. I think it useful to provide the passage more extensively, for an appropriate commentary : 3 The major teachings of Freudian psychology are successfully staged in this “opera” by Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart, that premiered at the Alvin Theater, New York, 23 January, 1941.

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On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music, in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in the remote metropolitan distances “above the Forties” of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” […] and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustic, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music. It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter […] Newland Archer […] could not have entered the Academy at a more significant moment than just as she was singing: “He loves me – he loves me not – HE LOVES ME!” and sprinkling the falling daisy petals with notes as clear as dew. She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silverbacked brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.

As far as the last paragraph is concerned, Wharton’s irony and her love of paradox make us smile, but both are doubtlessly exaggerated; they are too open, easy and even, in some respect, incorrect. Who could allow – when and where did an audience ever allow – a Swedish soprano, a Spanish tenor or a Russian basso to sing in their own language, unless the opera they sung had a libretto in that language? The amazing fact, instead, was the translation of French, German and English librettos into Italian, in the period of the greatest flourishing of Italian opera (1840–1870). The widespread opinion (although not always and everywhere “unquestioned”) was that real opera (the bel canto tradition) was Italian and that Italian was the most musical of languages. Therefore, as a tribute to that tradition, all operas should be sung in Italian. There was, in fact, a phase in which it was taken for granted that all spectators – not only members of the upper classes – should be able to follow the action, although they could not understand the foreign words uttered on the stage. The few who went to see an opera for the first time, would, on the other hand, have had some information about the story or would buy the text and become acquainted with it before the evening of the performance. The most expert lovers of opera, even now, know that sung words, in the agitation of a concertato but also in the melodious and “liquid” flow of an aria, are difficult to decipher even by native speakers; whence the importance of teaching singers not only the art of singing but also diction and, literally, pronunciation. As I was saying, Wharton published her novel in 1920 (winning the Pulitzer

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Prize, for the first time granted to a woman writer, in 1921) but set the greatest part of the story in the early 1870s. This leads her readers to think that in that decade Italian opera was still the undisputed ruler of the musical scene and Italian the only accepted language in melodrama. That is incorrect, since, as we have seen, that was precisely the moment when – particularly due to Walter Damrosch at the Metropolitan Opera House – Wagner, German opera and German language rose to the highest level of prestige. Wharton confirms the prevalence of Wagner’s fame and implicitly contradicts herself when, later in the chapter, she hints at Archer’s imagination of his wedding ceremony, accompanied not by Mendelssohn’s march from A Midsummer Night’s Dream but by “the march from Lohengrin”. Christine Nilsson, Adelina Patti’s rival in the Victorian era, was born in 1843 and made her d8but as Violetta (La Traviata) in Paris in 1863. In the 1870s she was at the apex of her career, touring the most important theaters of Europe and North America, including St. Petersburgh (she is, in fact, mentioned in Anna Karenina, though in an episode not as central as the one in which Vronsky’s mother mentions Patti) and New York. In the early 1880s she sung at the inauguration of the new Metropolitan Opera House (October 22, 1883). Her personality (and her name) probably inspired the role of Christine Daa8 in Gaston Leroux’s Le Phantime de l’Op8ra (1910).4 She must have made a strong impression on young Wharton, who certainly heard her in the United States. But we know that she did not sing at the Academy of Music in the period (however vague) Wharton chooses for the beginning of her novel. The passage is also interesting for what it says about the overlapping of – and coincidence between – individual and collective conventions that make up the personality and govern the life of the protagonist, Newland Archer. Opera was full of conventions. Going to the opera house was not only a social convention, but a must. The way one dressed for an evening at the opera – more than for other moments “in society” – was also a complex web of conventions. Archer’s preference for a special kind of flower to wear in his jacket buttonhole is – more than a convention or a matter of personal taste – almost an obsession. What Wharton says in this incipit contributes to the construction of a character whose major problem will likely be that of freeing himself from conventions.5 Newland arrives 4 Gaston Leroux’s Le phantime de l’op8ra was published in 1910, but a rather long introduction explains the preceding events of the story, which span over several years of the late 19th century. As in the case of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, it seems that the “new” 20th century could not be understood unless one went back in time to the previous generation. 5 Critical opinions on the character of Newland Archer differ very much. Here are two contrasting examples: according to Susan Goodman (Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle, Austin, The U. of Texas P., 1994) he “remains behind, trapped by familiar obligations and social conventions […] powerless to envision a new life […] He lives in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies […] where passion and pain have no voice” (p. 108; emphasis mine); according to Kathy A. Fedorko (Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton, Tuscaloosa, U. of

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at the opera house later than Tolstoy’s Vronsky and James’ Lord Warburton. In Gounod’s Faust the “garden scene” takes place at the beginning of Act Three, but Newland is happy to arrive just when the act begins. He is “perfectly aware that in metropolises it was ‘not the thing’ to arrive early at the opera”. This was true also in Italian regional capitals, or in Rome, as James shows us, for that matter ; moreover, nobody thought it scandalous to leave before the end, as Emma Bovary and her husband do, in provincial Rouen. The narrator underlines the kitsch quality of scenography and setting: No expense had been spared on the setting […] The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of wolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orangetrees but studded with large pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses […] sprang from the moss beneath the rose-trees…

In our itinerary, we never found such an insistence on the setting of an opera production. The message is multiple. On the one hand, with her detailed report and an unparalleled insistence on what the audience saw, Wharton wants to demonstrate her neat memory and first hand experience of the operatic scene in the period she describes; she uses the visual register more than the acoustic one, as we have noticed in many cases. On the other, she wants to withdraw from all vulgar aspects in the life of old and new upper classes (of that time), denouncing vices, flaws, bad taste and ignorance. Finally, she proposes to organize a perfect background for the scene she is going to set in motion, mirroring the superficial dimension of behaviors and events, conversation and stereotyped gestures, thus duplicating the theatrical elements she displays before her readers. A similarly obsessive precision of details is revealed in the account of Madame Nilsson’s attire: Madame Nilsson, in white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes……

Suddenly shifting from his superficial curiosity towards the stage to the observation of the box occupied by his fianc8e, Newland Archer confirms that he has no interest whatsoever in hearing the soprano, or in looking at the garden scene. Like Vronsky in Tolstoy and Warburton in James, he does not immediately reach the box where the lady who is the object of his visit to the opera sits. The three men, in fact, look at their ladies from a distance, considering the “effect” of their charme in the context of the whole theater, preferring, for longer or shorter Alabama P., 1995) the man “comes perilously close to losing his convention-bound self” but in the end understands that he must “step back from the abyss […] sacrificing himself”. He cannot learn anything from the Opera House, and has his epiphanies “in the Archer’s Gothic library and in his study, ‘with its rows and rows of books’” (p. 93).

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moments, to behave as ordinary members of the audience. Only later do they “climb” the stairs, joining, so to say, their Juliets on their balconies. In addition, we saw that Vronsky and Warburton needed some time to calm their anxieties (of different kinds, although equally enervating) before being ready to face the people they were going to meet and showing some self control in the conversation that, in spite of the opera, would certainly follow. Archer, too, needs some time, although for a totally different reason. He enjoys in lingering as long as possible in contemplation of the immaculate girl with “the immense bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee”, confessing to himself “a breath of satisfied vanity” and seeing the girl he is going to marry as a sort of personal creation. The young gentleman understands, from the vantage point of his safety distance, that the girl, who so graciously looks towards the stage, “doesn’t even guess what it’s all about”. The thing does not disturb him since, in a fit of Pygmalion syndrome, he imagines that he shall instruct and educate his betrothed of “abysmal purity” (please notice the equivalence innocence = ignorance) reading “Faust together…by the Italian lakes…”. A Jamesian “discerning reader” would smile at the inconsistency of the coupling Faust/Italian lakes (is Faust, by the way, an opportune reading during a honeymoon?) but Wharton is only partially smiling as she qualifies Archer’s “enlightening companionship” as a sense of “possessiveness” and pride. Archer’s fianc8e, however, is not completely lost before what is happening on the stage and probably understands as much as the average spectator of an opera in a foreign language would understand. When the soprano launches herself in the famous aria (“the boxes always stopped talking during the Daisy Song”), she shows a neat reaction of sympathy, participation in what the female protagonist of Faust feels and in the sentiments she expresses. In other words, she does something that none of the much more sophisticated and intellectually equipped heroines (Anna and Isabel in Tolstoy and James) do. That is to say, she “accepts” the invitation from the stage, identifies with the singer/actress and enters a circle of communication, using what is the pretention of a soul’s expression (well interpreted by a first class star) in order to live her own soul’s motions: a warm pink mounted to the girl’s cheeks, mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her breast.

The passage confirms another characteristic of musical theater, of the way it was conceived and its fruition. The climactic moment of attention was the famous soprano aria, the aria which would be remembered by every sensitive spectator, played or sung by aristocratic girls during their piano or singing lessons and by ladies of the lower classes during their daily routine, whistled by young men in love and accommodated for their humble instruments by organ-grinders on the streets (as we have seen in Thoreau). The moment when all boxes kept silent was,

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in sum, the aria with which a whole opera was sometimes identified, the trial according to which a soprano would be judged, meeting triumph or failure. The tranquil flow of emotions, the enacting of social conventions and the vagaries about his future matrimonial happiness in Archer’s self- congratulatory thoughts, during what should have been the first part of a long, pleasant and gratifying evening (as a rule, going to the opera was not sufficient to completely satisfy the demands of the upper classes) are suddenly interrupted but Lawrence Lefferts’ exclamation: “Well – upon my soul!”. The exclamation sounds as a sort of rappel / l’ordre, a call to reality and the descent from the enchanted atmosphere of a dream world down to the prose of gossip and judgments about “forms” and intrigues. The intensified, almost hectic use of opera-glasses towards the box of Mrs. Mingott (the same box where Archer’s fianc8e is sitting) signals that the perfect sketch of conventional balance in the box has been disrupted “by the entry of a new figure” who will catalyze the attention of all members of the club box till the end of the chapter. No less than Anna Karenina, who is, in Vronsky’s mother’s words, the center of everybody’s attention much more than Adelina Patti singing and acting in Lucia di Lammermoor, the “new figure” becomes the protagonist of a memorable social “incident”. She reappears in public after years of absence, during which New York society had tried to forget her and the “curious” vicissitudes of her life. The description of this lady, though seen at a distance (but with the aid of avid and pitiless opera-glasses) cannot but be careful and exhaustive: A slim young woman, a little less tall than May Welland, with brown hair growing in close curls about her temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds. The suggestion of this headdress, which gave her what was then called a “Josephine look”, was carried out in the cut of the dark blue velvet gown rather theatrically caught up under her bosom by a girdle with a large old-fashioned clasp. The wearer of this unusual dress, who seemed quite unconscious of the attention it was attracting, stood a moment in the centre of the box […] then she yielded with a slight smile, and seated herself in line with Mrs. Welland’s sister-in–law, Mrs. Lovell Mingott, who was installed in the opposite corner.

The lady (who has arrived even later than Archer) still appears young, irrespective of her long being absent from the New York scene. She is thin and not very tall, her hair is (alas!) brown, but what most counts is her attire. The narrow band of diamonds and discreet elegance (narrow) suggest she is of noble origin; the fact that she has a “Josephine look” hints at a somewhat outdated aspect (the look took its name from Josephine, Napoleon’s wife, and was in vogue in Europe and in America for several decades, but no longer so at the onset of the 1850s). The cut of her dress – as even a group of gentlemen could tell from a distance – is also old fashioned; in addition, it is “rather theatrically caught up under her bosom…”. Since we are in a theater (the theater par excellence), the adverb

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theatrically seems to signal exaggerated attention, on the lady’s part, to the exteriority of the social ceremony that is taking place (that is already theatrical enough). Her will to appear up to the level of the audience’s expectations, in fact, duplicates the tone and the register dominating the environment. Unless, as I tend to believe, Wharton’s esprit de finesse wants to show not only the lady’s intentions but also the way she was “interpreted” in her rentr8e by male and female members of the upper class. The development of the story will demonstrate the moral aridity and the lack of feeling of most of those members. For the moment the narrator’s message concentrates in stressing the “difference”, that is, the gap – at various levels – between the “new figure” and “old New York”. The opera house offers itself as the perfect scenario for an event that will soon prove seminal from a diegetic point of view, as well as crucial to “expose” the dynamics of actions and reactions in the complex – though apparently crystallized – network of social relationships. An interesting datum – given by the way as marginal information – emerges from the following paragraph. I cannot overlook it, since it is, once again, significant from the perspective of the general outline of my analysis. When the narrator thinks it opportune to open a parenthesis on Mr. Sillerton Jackson’s “experience” of old New York society and on his memory of “scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface” of the city establishment, the reader happens to hear about another opera house. In “the old Opera-house on the Battery […] a beautiful Spanish dancer […] had been delighting thronged audiences” for months, before taking ship to Cuba, in coincidence with the mysterious disappearance of “handsome Bob Spicer”. The irony is, once again, transparent and rather inoffensive. However, the hint at the “other” opera house, literally on the southernmost tip of Manhattan (“on the Battery”), surrounded by the mixed society that patronized the harbor, reminds us that the Academy of Music, where the opening scene of the novel takes place is, geographically, culturally and chronologically, half way between an old, much less aristocratic, theater (south) and a new one, the Metropolitan Opera House (north). The latter, as we were informed in the first paragraph of the chapter, was still under construction “above the Forties” and promised to be larger, more “comprehensive” and democratic. Wharton thus successfully provides us with a graphic account of the social and cultural transformation in progress by mentioning three opera houses and what they meant in three different contexts of space and time. The scene at the opera house in Wharton’s novel, unlike those in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and The Portrait of a Lady, is not only a fundamental segment of the plot, but the “inauguration”, so to say, or the launching of the narrative mechanism. A sort of primum movens and, at the same time, the occasion to alert the reader to the occurrence of the incoming events. It also

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provides him/her with the basic references to the text; which, as I hope I was able to show, is as complex and rich in layers of meaning, as a first hand document of the Reconstruction period – “reconstructed” after four or five decades – can be. The importance given to opera at the beginning of the text probably seemed, after a while, excessive, “overdetermined”. This is why Wharton felt the need to balance the opening scene at the Academy of Music with a scene at the prose theater (territory of words sung vs territory of words spoken).6 As I anticipated in the section on Melville, in “The Piazza” a royal box at the Opera House is balanced with a more “familiar” ship deck (indoor space vs outdoor space); in James, with the Sculpture Museum (space of sound vs space of silence).7 Before I close this section on Wharton, let me now analyze the chapter along the lines I followed for some of James’ incipits, that is to say, according to its acoustic and musical texture.8 It would, indeed, be very disappointing to find out that Wharton’s acquaintance with the sense of hearing, especially in her mature phase, when she produced one of her best novels, was more limited than her visual perception and her experience of the sense of sight. I start noticing the great amount of precise reference points she gives us, through the use of proper names: the name of the singer, her nationality, the opera produced (its original language), the theater and the city. This precise spatial order, moving concentrically from the smallest unit (the soprano) to the largest (New York), in the opening page of the novel, provides it from the beginning with a solid structure,

6 Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance; A Biography of Edith Wharton, New York, Macmillan, 1994, p. 360. 7 The play of oppositions and balances is, in Wharton, often openly intersemiotic. Helen Killoran (Edith Wharton, Art and Allusion, Tuscaloosa, The U. of Alabama P., 1996) has an extremely perceptive chapter on The Glimpses of the Moon, a novel in which intertextual, intratextual and intersemiotic “translations” are most significant. Music, in general, enters the text (and the various characters’ minds and souls) through other artistic codes, introduced by allusions to diverse hypotexts: toccatas by Galluppi via Robert Browning, Mozart’s Don Giovanni via Tirso de Molina and Byron’s Don Juan, 18th century chamber concerts via Fragonard’s The Music Lesson. There are moments when the imaginative puzzle whose pieces are Henry Vaughan, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Correggio, Van Dyck, and Sheridan LeFanu seems ready to disintegrate. In fact, it is held together only by an Ur-hypertext: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (see pp. 70–92). 8 Hermione Lee (Edith Wharton, New York, Knopf, 2007) confirms that “In music [Wharton] had wide-ranging tastes”; but then she exemplifies her statement mentioning C8sar Franck, Debussy, Ravel (also in this respect we meet many French connections in Wharton’s tastes) and Isadora Duncan (“the dance I had always dreamed of, a flowing of movement into movement”, p. 307). Lee also notices Wharton’s later shift towards German music: “Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Weber, Wagner” (Ibidem, p. 708). As far as opera is concerned, “she often referred to the wonderful moment in Wagner’s Die Walküre in which the spring bursts into the room of the lovers” (Ibidem, p. 360). However, from an ideological point of view, “she preferred Rheingold to the Walküre because of its ‘treatment of human society and situation’” (Ibidem, p. 420).

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upon which it will be easier to weave the more intricate and subtle plots of facts and sentiments, of spoken and unspoken actions and reactions. In this sense, the acoustic level is, initially, discreet and well balanced, with a few alliterations (unalterable/unquestioned, silver-backed brushes), and an equally balanced use of Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek words (monogram, metropolitan, acoustics), as the rhythm and the pace of sentences fluently proceed, naturally surmounting the obstacles of proper nouns, parentheses, inverted commas, dashes, hyphens, exclamation marks and bold letters (“HE LOVES ME!”). Another important stylistic trait we must not overlook is the variatio, or sudden shift from one syntactic pattern to a different one. That is a move that lets the first part of a sentence be followed by an unexpected second part, as in “on this occasion the moment he looked forward was so rare and exquisite in quality that – well, if he had timed his arrival…”. It is a rhetorical strategy that intends to imitate the variations, sudden intersections and overlapping of ideas in a character’s thoughts and in spoken language, but in fact creates original written discourse. The black and white of the background (the evening suits of gentlemen, the gardenias, the lilies-of-the-valley) is slowly enriched by colors and shades of color : blue enamel, purple velvet, warm pink, dark blue velvet, filmy blue eyes. When the text describes the setting, the visual dimension seems to prevail once and forever : emerald green cloth, woolly green moss, pink and red roses, white cashmere, pale blue satin. Simple, pure colors are regularly modified by hues and, even more interestingly, by qualifiers of sensations pertaining to touch, deriving from tissues or materials, so that the synesthetic quality of descriptions finally emerges between the lines. An original acoustic invention lies in the use of many compound nouns in the same sentence (“carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen”). This gives the text of the chapter the aspect and sound of learnedness, not unlike a piece of German prose, in which non native speakers appreciate long and complex nouns in their complexity, before they can fully decipher them. I also appreciate anaphoras and resounding repetitions (“he had read more, thought more, seen more…”), as well as the coupling of erudite forms and of sudden explosions of phrasal verbs and idiomatic phrases pertaining to the language of daily life, such as “He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome […] to strike out for himself”. These informal expressions should document the reconstruction of linguistic conventions typical of the 1870s, but reproduce, instead, idioms of the early 20th century. The second last paragraph of the chapter is literally invaded by geographical and family names and proper nouns – such as Sillerton Jackson Lawrence Lefferts Mingotts Thorleys Dallases South Carolina Philadelphia Albany Chiverses Manson University Place Long Island and Rushworths. The result is a labyrinth of intricate and harsh sounds, upon which the reader tends to stump, especially if

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he/she tries to read the passage aloud, in the hope of getting a better orientation through the family “ramifications”. The page is also the example of a tour de force that turns to a divertissement. In particular if we think that most of the family names are a pure invention of Wharton’s, who, though after many years, did not want to risk resentment and dry reactions from the heirs of that generation of New Yorkers.9 The best way to conclude my reading of this chapter (a real locus classicus in my discussion), confessing my total appreciation, is to underline the opportune presence of an original and intelligent synesthetic movement, documented in the sentence concluding its fourth paragraph: sprinkling the falling daisy petals with notes as clear as dew.

2.

Willa Cather: larks and gayhearts

Willa Carther was born in 1873. So she was eleven years younger than Wharton (born in 1862) and started publishing her short stories six years after Wharton’s first novel came out (The Touchstone, 1900). In the following years, in particular until the publication of My ]ntonia (1918), critics had no hesitation is considering her an imitator of Wharton’s models. H. L. Mencken, who had been one of them, regretted that he had expressed such a limited opinion on the writer and became afterwards an enthusiastic follower of her subsequent novels. In 1922, the year after Wharton obtained the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, Cather was granted the same award for One of Ours. In the meantime, she had published the second novel of the so called “Prairie Trilogy”, The Song of the Lark (1915), in which opera has an outstanding structural, symbolic and thematic importance. Her Scandinavian origins and the lively atmosphere created in the mid 1880s around Red Cloud Opera House in Nebraska (where Cather lived the most significant segment of her early life) inspired her keen interest in opera and, above all, a distinct preference for German musicians – such as Gluck, Mozart, Wagner – that was in keeping with the changing musical taste which brought the Wagnerian phase of the Metropolitan Opera House. She filled some of her best short stories (such as “AWagner Matinee”, in The Troll Garden, 1905) and some of her major novels with themes and motives pertaining to opera, not only in terms of content and plot, but also in the ideological and structural sense. The 9 Shari Benstock, Op. cit. : “For its large cast of characters, Edith drew freely on her family and friends, mixing and matching their qualities […]. Ruger Bleecker Jewett [Wharton’s editor at Appleton, New York] wrote to Wharton that “Society (spelled with a capital ‘S’) is trying to fit familiar New York names to your characters”. Edith denied that she had taken her subjects direct from real life, but there are many clear echoes of people and events” (pp. 358–359).

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function of these operations of “grafting” (as Whitman would say) has been sufficiently stressed by critics: the singing of “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma (in My Mortal Enemy), the use of the whole Ring cycle in “Uncle Valentine”, the excerpts from Traviata in My ]ntonia (“so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heartbreaking”).10 In The Professor’s House (1925) a deep resonance in a character’s soul finds its source in the most famous aria in Thomas’ Mignon (1866), based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–6): “Connais tu le pays oF fleurit l’oranger?” (Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn?”). However, the most important intersemiotic dialogue is based on the intersection between literature and the visual arts. Cather regularly took sides and was ready to justify her opinions and tastes (sometimes sharply unconventional) as regards even the most famous sopranos (Nellie Melba, Emma Calv8) or contraltos (Clara Butt). The “connection” between painting and music, instead, justifies the title of The Song of the Lark, which derives from a canvas by French painter Jules Breton (1884).11 In this painting a humble peasant girl, with a scythe in her right hand, shows her back to the rising sun, looking upwards, evidently enchanted by the song of the bird that, as Romeo and Juliet taught us when we were teen-agers, is “the herald of the morn” (Act III, V, 6). The painting (as several details in Cather’s novel) is obviously indebted to Percy B. Shelley’s ode To a Skylark (1820) and perhaps also to Meredith’s The Lark Ascending (1881).12 Romantic and Victorian poets used the bird as the perennial symbol of innocent, “natural”, 10 Edward Wagenknecht, Willa Cather, New York, Continuum, 1994. Cather found Rossini’s Barber of Seville lacking in “dramatic coherency” while, as for Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (so strictly judged by highbrow critics), she found that it meant “more than pleasing sound” (pp. 38–39). Peter Sullivan shares Richard Giannone’s opinion in underlining the fact that the influence of Wagner’s music on heroes and heroines of Cather’s fiction is not necessarily positive; “The Garden Lodge” in The Troll Garden uses a “Wagnerian storm” as a symbol of Caroline’s disaster. Cf. Richard Giannone, Music in Willa Cather’s Fiction, Lincoln, U. of Nebraska P., 1968 and Peter M. Sullivan, “Cather’s German Associations”, in Cather Studies, vol. 4, ed. by Robert Thacker and Michael A. Peterman, Lincoln, U. of Nebraska P., 1999, pp. 319–329. Cather’s strategy of assimilation of Wagner’s music into her fiction assigned an essential intermediate function to Gertude Halls’s The Wagnerian Romances. See Gary Brienzo, Willa Cather’s Transforming Vision, Cranbury, NJ, Associated U. P., 1994, p. 327. 11 It is interesting to discover that in 1908 (seven years before the publication of The Song of the Lark), Cather sent her brother Rosco Cather a reproduction of the painting by Breton, expressing an ambivalent opinion about the canvas (“I got the Song of the Lark because Jessie said you like it. Personally, I would rather have sent you all brown photogravures of French and Dutch pictures that I like, but I thought you might like some of the real modern fellows better”, Letter of March 2, 1908, in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, New York, Knopf, p. 106). She could not foresee that she would choose the title of the painting for an important novel of hers. 12 Meredith’s poem was put into music by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1914. A second version (for violin solo and orchestra) premiered in 1921.

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musical joy and happiness. The bird, according to Juliet, “sings so out of tune,/ Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps” (lines 27–28), because it suggests that Romeo must soon leave the bridal room. For Shelley, the lark is not even a bird (“Bird thou never wert”, line 3) but a “presence” that “showers a rain of melody” (line 35), a scent that “Makes faint with too much sweet” (a synesthetic image, line 55). In Melville’s “The Piazza”, as we have seen in Chapter Two, “Madame Skylark” is a prima donna who sings for the exclusive satisfaction of the narrator. Evidently the skylark, more than any other singing bird, was associated with music in general as well as opera and the art of singing on stage. All the more cruel is, as we see in Emily Dickinson, the “scarlet experiment” of splitting the lark (Poem 861) to catch the mysterious origin of its singing, supposedly hidden at the center of the small organism. The fact, acknowledged by most criticism on Cather, that there is such a strong late Romantic influence on the novelist, brings us back to the very first steps of our itinerary and to the importance of the music/poetry nexus. It would be easy to imagine Red Cloud, Nebraska, around the turn into the 20th century, as a modest, extremely provincial town, deprived of cultural life. It was, instead, very stimulating, as a consequence of the multicultural milieu, nourished by the mixed heritage of immigrants coming from different parts of Europe and French Canada. Teen-ager Willa was very much influenced, as I was saying, by the existence of a lively musical environment and by the presence of the Opera House, where she delivered her high school graduation oration in 1890. There the girl was offered a great number of occasions to enjoy and to interiorize the experience of melodrama. Opera and the theater were among her fondest and most lasting memories, as she wrote when the Omaha World Herald celebrated its diamond jubilee (October 1929):13 A traveling stock company […] thrilled and entertained us for a week. That was a wonderful week for children. The excitement began when the advance man came to town and posted the bills […] in the ‘plate glass’ windows of drug stores and grocery stores. My playmates and I used to stand for an hour after school, studying every word of those posters; the names of the plays and the nights on which each would be given […] there was the question of how far we could prevail upon our parents. Would they let us go every night, or only on opening and closing nights?

These words testify that the emotions related to opera started well before the young spectators entered the opera house. The magic of opera was very much in the expectations and anticipation of the performance, in reading the bills, in deciding when to go (evidently, as often as possible, even every night) and in 13 Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters, ed. by L. Brent Bohlke, Lincoln, U. of Nebraska P., 1986, pp. 185–187. See also “Red Cloud Opera House”, The Willa Cather Foundation (www.willacather.org, November 24th, 2016).

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negotiating with parents the “investment” of money. It was a collective rite, a shared experience and a way of exchanging impressions and reactions among members of a community which, though heterogeneous, was “dialogically” integrated, in the name of values that were not merely economical. Cather continues: How good some of those old traveling companies were, and how honestly they did their work and tried to put on a creditable performance. There was the Andrews Opera Company, for example; they usually had a good voice or two among them, a small orchestra and a painstaking conductor, who was also the pianist. What good luck for a country child to hear those tuneful old operas sung by people who were doing their best: The Bohemian Girl, The Chimes of Normandy, Martha, The Mikado. Nothing takes hold of a child like living people.

Exactly as the modest production of one of Verdi’s minor operas in a marginal opera house in Rome could be an important inner experience for Isabel Archer, so these very provincial traveling companies – which had sometimes only one or two good voices and a small orchestra, but which were honest, reliable and with a painstaking conductor/pianist (probably also general manager and impresario) – stimulated the imagination of young people, who could vicariously live the adventures of heroes and heroines on stage. I consider the last expression and the use of the verb “take hold” in Cather’s passage very significant. These country boys and girls were literally taken and firmly held by the plot, singers’ interpretation and melody of tunes they could soon learn and later sing, in their long days of work and school in the plains: Children have about a hundred years of unlived life wound up in them, and they want to be living some of it […]. Even the very poorest [companies] had living bloodhounds. How the barking of these dogs behind the scenes used to make us catch our breath! That alone was worth the price of admission, as the star used to say, when he came before the curtain.

We never met, till now, such an intense and moving description of the meaning of opera for young and sensitive people in a remote corner of the nation. No wonder if, after a youth so deeply marked by musical theater (the great experience that nourished their dreams, their expectations and their future attitude towards life), these men and women would not be satisfied with a pursuit of happiness that contemplated only financial success. After leaving Red Cloud, Cather enjoyed an endless series of rich musical experiences in the various cities where she established her more or less temporary residence. Even Pittsburgh offered many examples of satisfactory productions and tours of distinguished singers. “Safonoff, the new conductor of the Philharmonic, and the opera are the only things that save my soul from death”; “I

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began to go to the opera twice a week and feel the world go round again”.14 But Chicago (with the extraordinary “Whitmanian” Auditorium I have described in Chapter Three) proved almost as gratifying as New York will in a later phase. There she was exposed to Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer), Rom8o et Juliette (Gounod), and to “mature” Verdi with Aida, Otello, Falstaff. In a splendid, extended review of the latter for the Nebraska State Journal (March 31, 1895, p. 13) a twenty-two year-old Cather demonstrates her full understanding of what makes a piece of musical theater a masterpiece: As to the opera Falstaff itself, it seems almost as wonderful that it should have come from Verdi as it is impossible that it should have come from any other man living. The greatness, the titanic comprehensiveness of the work is Verdi’s own, but the central motif, the clever elaboration of the orchestration, the wonderful handling of his thematic matter, the decided flavor of the op8ra comique separate it from Verdi’s earlier work by all the length and breadth that lies between rollicking comedy and fervid romance.15

In The Song of the Lark we find the simultaneous working of a down-to-earth realism (very similar to that expressed in the all but idealized features of the girl, in Breton’s painting, and of the solitary and harsh countryside where she is situated) and invincible idealism, which enables the heroine to surmount all obstacles in the course of her Bildung. Autobiographical elements are transparent and functional. The life of the protagonist exploits that of famous Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, whom Cather admired immensely, as a model. The conclusion of the novel appears to some scholars ambiguous and, to a certain extent, contradictory, as it seems on the verge of an incongruous sentimental happy ending. But the gist of the message remains unaltered. Thea Kronborg, in spite of her marriage, will choose a sacramental attitude, finding her mission in accepting her career as a dutiful act of devotion to art. What is important, in the end, is not that she should become a great opera singer, but that she should reach a condition of reasonable, mature and well balanced gratification, without regrets or sense of guilt. Also Cather, like Wharton, starts the telling of the story several years before the present tense of the text (in the 1890s) and goes on for ten years, following 14 The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, cit., p. 102 and p. 171. Later, in New York, she had the privilege of going to the Metropolitan Opera House in the precious company of Yehudi Menuhin: “Last Thursday night we had a grand Opera party ; Yehudi took his two sisters, Edith and me to hear Lohengrin. On January 29 we have another opera party to hear Tristan and Isolde” (Letter of January 24, 1938, pp. 543–544). 15 William M. Curtin, ed., The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews: 1893–1902, Lincoln, U. of Nebraska P., 1970, p. 182. Cather’s praise of Falstaff does not annul her appraisal of “the rich arias and beautiful romanzas which abound in Il Trovatore, Aida and La Traviata” (p. 179).

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step by step Thea from Colorado to Chicago, through Europe and back to the States, where she finally sings with unanimous acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera House (Wharton’s “new house” somewhere, “above the Forties”), now the center of the New York musical scene. No less than Shelley’s skylark, Thea pursues her career, from the moment she understands what she wants to obtain and what is her destiny in life, in a “natural” way. What is more, she never forgets her origins and her affections, in particular towards her land. Since the section that most embarrasses Cather’s scholars is the novel’s conclusion, I will now concentrate on it, providing an excerpt which is among the most interesting passages from the perspective of my study and which also sheds light on the overall value of the novel: While she was on the stage she was conscious that every movement was the right movement, that her body was absolutely the instrument of her idea. Not for nothing had she kept it so severely, kept it filled with such energy and fire. All that deep-rooted vitality flowered in her voice, her face, in her very finger-tips. She felt like a tree bursting into bloom. And her voice was as flexible as her body ; equal to any demand, capable of every nuance. With the sense of its perfect companionship, its entire trustworthiness, she had been able to throw herself into the dramatic exigencies of the part, everything in her at its best and everything working together.

In the autobiographical passage from the article for the Omaha Herald we found moving words about the response to opera in the souls of provincial teen-agers. Here we find an even more original description of something that cannot have an autobiographical source. Cather, who never was an opera singer, is able to construct a perfect page imagining the feelings of a young artist who finally reaches the triumph she deserves. The portrait of the protagonist of her novel could not be more consummate and consistent. The reader understands why, hundreds of pages before, in another memorable scene, the narrator had staged the physical and psychological “awakening” of Thea, reporting her happiness and sense of freedom as she bathes in the nude, in the pure waters of a mesa stream. Singing the extremely demanding role of Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre (1870), Thea “renders” the mythical (but very human) character – the situation and her relationship with Siegmund – with all her body, movements, energy and fire she has reserved for her decisive debut. The voice that flows out of her whole self is like a flower opening its petals, in a tree in full bloom. She is in complete command of her emission and of her gestures. All the tensions of the night before have disappeared, no emotion disturbs the perfection of the moment. She is dwelling in a deep awareness of doing supremely well (and in an absolutely natural way) what she has trained herself to do. Everything demonstrates (to her consciousness, first of all) that she was right in the honesty she applied when she chose her career, pursuing it

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unflinchingly. The relationship of the singer to her voice can be defined in no other way than “companionship”. A great soprano voice will obviously be forever her real and only “companion”. Then Cather uses a long and somewhat awkward lexeme to explain (almost in a scientific way) the nature of the relationship between the gift and the person who possesses it: trustworthiness. The word reveals how this gift, originally a gratuitous, undeserved dowry received from heaven, had to be turned into a refined “instrument”, that would offer and ask for absolute reciprocal loyalty and a sacramental faithfulness. Once Thea has acquired this state of grace, singing one of the hardest roles in the history of opera seems like swimming – nay, floating – in the calmest of waters, like bathing in a crystal clear mountain stream: The third act came on, and the afternoon slipped by. Thea Kronborg’s friends, old and new, seated about the house on different floors and levels, enjoyed her triumph according to their natures. There was one there, whom nobody knew […] Up in the top gallery a gray-haired little Mexican, withered and bright as a string of peppers beside a ’dobe door, kept praying and cursing under his breath, beating on the brass railing and shouting “Bravo! Bravo!”, until he was repressed by his neighbors.

The “little Mexican” is Spanish Johnny, who is not a marginal character in the first part of the novel. Though a humble harness maker, he is also a painter and a mandolin player. His enthusiasm for Thea’s success and his devotion are almost pathetic, but Cather knows better than concluding the story of her heroine in a pathetic way. It is important that the narrator should say (twice) that “she would have known him”, though the man has changed and now belongs to an irretrievable past. However, it is more important that the two should not meet. Johnny’s smile – that is the sign of his thankfulness for the plenitude of the experience received – gives Thea’s triumph a deeper and fuller meaning, since it frees the singer’s gratification of its self-sufficiency, connoting it with a distinct touch of generosity. Thea will, one day, feel the importance of her voice as if it were an instrument for the transmission of joy : And she would have known him, changed as he was. His lustrous black hair was full of gray, and his face was a good deal worn by the EXTASI, so that it seemed to have shrunk away from his shining eyes and teeth and left them too prominent. But she would have known him. She passed so near that he could have touched her, and he did not put on his hat until her taxi had snorted away. Then he walked down Broadway with his hands in his overcoat pockets, wearing a smile which embraced all the stream of life that passed him and the lighted towers that rose into the limpid blue of the evening sky. If the singer, going home exhausted in her cab, was wondering what was the good of it all, that smile, could she have seen it, would have answered her. It is the only commensurate answer.

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The final message is emphasized in the last paragraph of the “Epilogue”, when the people of Moonstone happily talk about the fact that at least two “children” of the town have reached success, one becoming an important entrepreneur, the other (Thea) gaining fame as a great opera singer and even, in London, “singing for the King”: A boy grew up on one of those streets who went to Omaha and built up a great business, and is now very rich. Moonstone people always speak of him and Thea together, as examples of Moonstone enterprise.

But Thea’s career and her personal success seem even more precious, indeed a gift for the whole community to which Thea, after all, will always belong: They do, however, talk oftener of Thea. Avoice has even a wider appeal than a fortune. It is the one gift that all creatures would possess if they could. Dreary Maggie Evans, dead nearly twenty years, is still remembered because Thea sang at her funeral “after she had studied in Chicago.”16

Twenty years after The Song of the Lark, Cather published another novel entirely woven on the central theme of music: Lucy Gayheart (1935). The shorter text and much less successful story, as I said, testifies that the same issue, the same leitmotif, the same first-hand experience of a subject, as well as the same fond memories of a mythical past, can lead to opposite results. Cather’s idea of the world, her preoccupation with the rise of Nazism in Germany, the view of the country during the years of the Great Depression – before the New Deal could revive American hopes – and the end of the great American dream, so well described by Francis S. Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925), contributed to enhance her pessimism, which is projected – unfortunately without any suggestion of a possible redemption – on the novel’s plot and, above all, on its protagonist.17 Who, by the way, dies at the end of Book Two. After it there is a whole Book Three in which, through a change of perspective and narrator, twenty five years after Lucy’s death (1902), readers can understand Harry Gordon, the co-protagonist of the story, who had so harshly resented Lucy’s refusal to marry him. As one sees, from a structural point of view the novel is interesting, as an entire first section of the story is told in retrospect. 16 From a structural point of view, Cather’s appropriation of Wagner in The Song of the Lark is very functional: “It may even be that the shape of the novel, with its detailed, prolonged, scenic story of aspiration erupting into triumph, was meant to replicate Wagner’s methods, which Cater later described as ‘trying out to the uttermost […] the value of scenic literalness’” (Willa Cather, Not Under Forty, New York, Knopf, 1949, p. 32; quoted in Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: A Life Saved up, London, Virago P., revis. edit., 2008, p. 125). 17 “Cather engages very deeply with Lucy’s impossible romanticism, and doesn’t mean us to be detracted from it. She tries to make those yearnings into the literary equivalent of a particular kind of music. Instead of a Wagnerian opera, Cather wanted this time to rewrite a Romantic song cycle.” Hermione Lee, Op. cit., p. 326.

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There are changes in the narrator, who is sometimes first person plural, sometimes third person. Stylistic devices and the rhetorical structure of the text show Cather’s awareness of the development of late modernism and her acceptance of a different conception of time in works of fiction. She uses, for instance, long gaps and re-tells the story from a different angle, as happens in Pirandello, Cather’s contemporary, and will later happen in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. From a strictly formal viewpoint, the text can, therefore, be judged more positively (as Linda Chown and John J. Murphy tried to convince us to do) than the critical tradition has done up to now.18 What puzzles the contemporary reader is the atmosphere that surrounds the events, half way between d8ja vu and endless attempts at further experimentation, as the language vainly tries to find balanced attention to both public and private life of Lucy (something Cather was so “naturally” able to do with Thea Kronborg). A close analysis of the novel is not pertinent to the present study ; suffice it to say that it is literally immersed in the world of music, with many important references to opera proper, sometimes, unfortunately, without a precise expressive function. Not only Rossini, with his over-famous Barber of Seville, but also Massenet, with his much less popular H8rodiade, and even Mendelssohn, with his almost completely forgotten Elijah, are mentioned in the course of the diegesis. Harry Gordon takes Lucy to the opera, to see/hear Traviata, Aida, Otello, Lohengrin, but these operas never actually cause personal growth or a mature understanding in the young woman. Neither do they nurture a deeper communication between the two. I shall, therefore, concentrate my attention on the passage in Book Two, Chapter 7, when Lucy’s father takes his two daughters to one of the most widely produced operas in the 19th and early 20th century. These pages offer yet another perspective on the world of opera and functionalize it as a most significant emblem in the context of explicit and implicit messages. Other pages in which opera appears would only prove the modest role that opera can play in a literary text, if it is not “organized” with keen intention in a consistent web of references. The opera that is mentioned, in this case, is somewhat old fashioned (as Mr Gayheart affably acknowledges). Michael William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl, after premiering in London at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1843, delighting enthusiastic audiences for hundreds of replicas, was immediately translated and exported to the Continent and to the United States, reaching New York and Philadelphia in 1844. Due to its captivating melodies reminiscent of Irish folk 18 Linda Chown, “It Came Closer than That: Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart”, Willa Cather Studies, vol. 2 (1993), pp. 118–139; John J. Murphy, “Exterior – Time in Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach”, in Willa Cather Studies & Review, 55, 1 (Summer 2011), pp. 18–23.

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songs, Italianate accents, and romantic Austrian setting, it remained as an all time favorite for decades. When the conductor, who was also the pianist, appeared, Mr.Gayheart settled back with satisfaction, and the curtain rose on the hunting scene. The chorus was fair, the tenor had his good points; but before the first act was over, the three Gayhearts were greatly interested in the soprano.

The soprano who sings the part of young Arline (an eighteen year old girl) “was a fair-skinned woman, slender and graceful, but far from young”. She does not want to conceal the difference of age between herself and the character, nor her vocal shortcomings. On the contrary, she tries to make the best of them, investing her experienced skill in a superior interpretation, full of nuances: She sang so well that Lucy wondered how she had ever drifted into a little road company like this one. Her voice was worn, to be sure, like her face, and there was not much physical sweetness left in it. But there was another kind of sweetness; a sympathy, a tolerant understanding. She gave the old songs, even the most hackneyed, their full value. When she sang: “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,” she glided delicately over the too regular stresses, and subtly varied the rhythm. She gave freshness to the foolish old words because she phrased intelligently ; she was tender with their sentimentality, as if they were pressed flowers which might fall apart if roughly handled.

Lucy’s emotion is almost overwhelming. She not only appreciates the art of the soprano, but also understands why she likes it. The intelligence of the elderly lady enhances her own intelligence, till she tries to go deeper into her thoughts and feelings, forcing her reactions to clarify and justify themselves: Why was it worth her while, Lucy wondered. Singing this humdrum music to humdrum people, why was it worth while? This poor little singer had lost everything: youth, good looks, position, the high notes of her voice. And yet she sang so well! Lucy wanted to be up there on the stage with her, helping her do it. A wild kind of excitement flared up in her.

The passage adds two prototypes to the gallery of literary characters variously influenced by the intersection of their lives with opera, whom we have met on our way. On the one hand, we have the moving (though not pathetic) elderly soprano whose voice is declining but who more than compensates her difficulties with her extraordinary interpretation, sincere “exposition” of her limits and a supreme expertise. On the other, there is the young female admirer, Lucy, who is enthusiastic but also intimately aware of her own technical and (above all) psychological limits. Unlike Thea Kronborg, she does not dream of occupying a glamourous position of center stage in the future – surrounded by the applause and encore of friends and fans – but imagines that she would be satisfied with the role of a handmaiden, a faithful and precious “assistant” in the service of a consummate star.

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The differences between the two novels, as I said, are many, and their respective qualities are uneven. The Song of the Lark is more successful, above all, in ideological terms. Music (in particular singing a major role in an important opera, in front of a distinguished public, in the most prestigious opera house in town) is fundamental for freeing the whole personality of the protagonist, her body and soul, her energies and sentiments. The Whitmanian fusion of body and soul brought about by the sublime melody, accompanied by the harmonic density of the orchestra, resembles and foresees a similar enthusiastic response to music (as accompaniment to dancing) in Isadora Duncan, who used it as a political and social project. In Lucy Gayheart music fosters the liberation from the body and, together with religion, shapes a mystic faith that goes beyond the idea of art as an exclusive mission. In the former novel Thea, who never depends on men, ends up by being master of her own destiny, as men acknowledge her success without resenting it. In the latter, Lucy always depends on more powerful men, lies to them, is “betrayed” by them and finally dies because of a man. In the moment of the deepest communication with a singer, she has no illumination but only an instinctual reaction, an elementary “movement of the soul” and imagines being on stage with the prima donna, in order to be of “service” to her. We should remember that her only role as a pianist had been, all the time, that of accompanying the protagonist in a concert. Her tragic (but, unfortunately, textually speaking, awkward and clumsy) death can thus be read as the natural consequence of her frailty of character, inadequate sense of herself and a collective and social consciousness that can no longer believe in the great individual dreams of the past generations.19

3.

George Santayana’s “epiphonic” moments

In the course of the present volume I have sometimes used a neologism, epiphony, which I consider as the acoustic equivalent of the classic term epiphany, that, etymologically and when used in current literary criticism, pertains to the dimension of sight. Epiphany in fact defines the unique moment in which a flash of truth, a satori – the Japanese term so popular among the members of the beat generation – or a revelation interrupts the routine of a character’s inner life, making it possible for him/her (and for the reader of a literary text) to grasp a deeper level of signification, a wider horizon of meaning and a profoundly harmonious relationship with the world. Likewise, epiphony can define the same 19 According to Gary Brienzo, Lucy Gayheart’s story “is in most ways one of art failed and doomed by a lack of interaction and belonging”, Op. cit., pp. 85–86.

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kind of experience and poetics, due to – and based on – the sense of hearing. A sound, a voice, the memory of words spoken, songs heard in the past, a music that deeply penetrates in our consciousness and tunes half forgotten, yet not entirely lost, activate a “shock of recognition” and a textual strategy appropriate to its expression. Scholarship has dealt with the theme of “epiphanic poetics”, in particular since such a poetics proved central in James Joyce. A paradigmatic example of the function of both mechanisms can be found in Joyce’s “The Dead”, the last, and most famous, short story in Dubliners (1914). As most critics have maintained, the final section of the story, with the “revelation” that Gretta, when a teen-ager, had a boyfriend in Galway, who loved her so much that he did not fear challenging death to see her before she departed for Dublin, is a classic epiphanic moment for her husband Gabriel. The whole scene that describes husband and wife as they are back in their bedroom after the party is, in fact, insistently based on the sense of sight, with the falling snow that deadens noises and cancels sounds, except the heavy sounds of the important words spoken in their intimate dialogue: “I can see him so plainly […] such eyes he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them – an expression!” […] Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward […] To see him […] She looked away from him […] along the shaft of light […] Towards the window in silence […] He had caught a glimpse of in the mirror […] That image of her lover’s eyes […] Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes […] His eyes moved to the chair […] His curious eyes rested long upon her face […] He turned his back more to the light lest she might see […] I can see his eyes […] (italics mine)

Significantly enough, although the last words of the text render a space that is experienced through the penumbra of a “partial darkness”, the second last sentence explains that Gabriel “watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight”. However the revelation, or epiphanic moment, is made possible, as one should remember, by the singing of a song: The lass of Aughrim, that Gretta heard at the party. That is the same song that her boyfriend used to sing. It is that song that revives an apparently deep buried past in Gretta’s memory, connecting the past to the present and to Gabriel’s thought of the future. The last sentence of Joyce’s masterpiece, with its alliterations (and iterations) of s and f sounds (as well as the assonance/consonance end/dead) accentuates the central function of hearing: His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Joyce no doubts belongs to the category of writers we have discussed, who must be considered great masters of English language because of their perfectly balanced sensitiveness to both acoustic and visual inputs. Another great master of English language (originally a Spaniard, not a native speaker, but a man of letters

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who gradually spoke – and wrote – a perfect “Queen’s English”), equally sensitive to sight and hearing, was George Santayana. His early poems have been strongly criticized because they are the evident output of a person who learnt the English language after childhood. They lack the echo of nursery rhymes, folklore and bedtime fairy tales. With the passing of time, the more Santayana was aware that English was not his native language, the more he struggled to speak and write it in the most professional way. His efforts gave birth to a splendid prose, impeccable and formal in its rhythms and sounds. It is a prose rich in lexemes of Latin origin, perfectly integrated in the context of Anglo-Saxon words, based on sentences longer than the average but nonetheless smooth and fluid. His spoken English, especially when he taught his pupils from his Harvard chair, was elegant, symmetrical, neoclassical and even “incantatory”; so much so that T. S. Eliot, one of his students, once defined it “soporific”. Santayana could become a master of English prose, in spite of his “foreign” linguistic background, because he had an extraordinary acoustic sensitiveness and gradually acquired a vast musical experience. In his youth in Boston he used to go to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where There was florid music: organist and choir attempted the most pretentious masses, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, and on occasions threw in Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Gounod’s Ave Maria. On the great feasts we even had an orchestra in addition. I liked this rococo music […] It transports; the means may be at times inferior, but the end is attained. The end is to escape to another world, to live freely for a while in a medium made by us and fit for us to live in.20

Later, when he was in Germany on a grant from Harvard University, he was exposed to opera proper and, obviously, to Wagner : We had an ample feast of Wagner, with Gudehus and Malten: old stand-bys but still adequate, singing and acting with a devout enthusiasm that was contagious.21

Wagner’s music satisfied his ear, but could not convince him from an ideological point of view because, in the great composer’s vision of the world and of human destinies, love and death are even more closely associated than in Freud’s meditations on the human psyche:

20 George Santayana, Persons and Places, critical edition, ed. by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr, Cambridge, MA, M. I. T. Press, 1986, p. 161. 21 Ibidem, p. 254. In a few years he acknowledged that his most congenial music was Italian opera: “He preferred Italian opera, in particular Verdi, to other forms of music. In Persons and Places he wrote of having spoken in Boston with Marcella Sembrich and Emma Eames, and with Mme Paderewska; he also describes having been so affected by the scene of torture offstage in Tosca that he was forced to leave the performance” (John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography, New York, Knopf, 1987, p. 157).

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When love is absolute it feels a profound impulse to welcome death, and even, by a transcendental confusion, to invoke the end of the universe.22

In addition, Wagner’s compositional strategies were felt by Santayana as the perfect counterpart of “the idea of evolution as progress to later and better stages”, an idea that he thought simply brutal to the facts. Evolution without an end or goal is wiser […] The idea of life [and art] as process having no end is deeply romantic, accounting among other things for inconclusive narratives in the manner of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and the Wagnerian ecstatic melodic line.23

In old age, when he had settled in Italy for good, Santayana preferred to listen to music in outdoor spaces, enjoying unique moments like those described by Whitman in “Italian Music in Dakota”: Music bores me if I am sitting penned in among a crowd in a hot place, with bright artificial lights and a general pretense of intelligent interest, whether such interest exists or not […] At the opera I can forget this discomfort because the impression, visual as well as auditory, is violent enough to hold my attention.24

In his prose, no less than in his reviews and short articles on music and poetry, Santayana used a great variety of both visual and acoustic techniques. The result was the creation of original images, metaphors, alliterations and similes. This is true for his philosophical essays and treaties, as well as for his Autobiography (Persons and Places, 3 vols, 1944–53) and his novel The Last Puritan (1935).25 A crucial moment in the development of the protagonist’s self-awareness is a “phantasmagoric dream sequence of his own as Gilda, the tragic heroine in Verdi’s Rigoletto, who sacrifices herself in an act of love and spiritual renunciation”.26 The writer’s experience was reinforced by a constant study of the language and the rhetoric of the great classics, from those of ancient Greece and Rome to the medieval masterpieces of Dante and Petrarch, the Renaissance (Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare) and down to the great romantic period (which did not appeal to him much, except for a few names: Goethe and 22 George Santayana, Reason in Society, New York, Scribner’s, 1905, p. 11. Cf. Irving Singer, George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, New Haven, CT, Yale U. P., 2000: “When […] Santayana talks of “love” and of its strength when it is vehement and fulfilled, he exemplifies his discourse with Siegfried’s paean to Liebestod at the moment when he and Brünnehilde merge with each other in Wagner’s Ring”. See also David A. Carter, George Santayana, New York, Chelsea House, 1992. 23 John McCormick, Op. cit., p. 174. 24 George Santayana, “Old Age in Italy”, in Persons and Places, cit., p. 531. 25 The novel, which is more than 700 pages long, published first in London (1935) and then in the United States, was a surprising best seller in 1936, second only to Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. 26 Irving Singer, Op. cit., p. 153.

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Leopardi). He could read all these authors in the original language. The even flow of his discourse, in fact, integrates contributions from different cultures producing interior monologues, translations, “soliloquies” and “dialogues in limbo” (I use the titles of two of his major collections). Even when he apparently speaks only to himself or addresses an audience of great dead men and a community of kindred spirits from the past, his ear is sensitive and alert. His sentences are convincing for their content and ideological implications, but also because of the harmonious sequence of phonemes: “The wind of inspiration carries our dreams before it and constantly refashions them like clouds”, “To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it”, “By this union of disparate things having a common overtone of feeling, the feeling is itself evoked in all its strength”, “The white heat of his anguish burned all anguish away, and cleared the air”, “Beneath the glorious monotony of the stars he saw the universal mutation of earthly things”.

Indeed, his prose is characterized by the fruitful interaction of a “refashioning inspiration”, an “overtone of feeling” and the capacity to “clear the air” thanks to the tension between a “glorious monotony” and the sense of a “universal mutation”. Santayana’s prose is slightly less formal in his letters and always full of selfcontrol. We notice the use of more interruptions, nervous commas, iterations and fewer words of Latin origin, like in this passage from a letter to C. J. Ducasse: I still notice and enjoy the beautiful, but seldom in works of art; rather in light, and the effect of light, casual and momentary, on objects, whether the dome of St. Peter’s or the Italian flag hanging in the streets.27

In the passage that I am going to read Santayana, in his sophisticated language and with his sense of psychic balance (derived from his humane and “neutral”, unimpassioned skepticism) is able to communicate to his reader a remarkable “epiphonic” moment, in which opera plays a major role and therefore deserves to be analyzed in detail. In his “Foreword” to Iris Origo’s book on Leopardi (1935)28 the philosopher, a great admirer of the Italian romantic poet, seems to have difficulty in expressing the intrinsic literary qualities of his verse. He had always stressed the opinion that poetry begins in the realm of sounds: “Its elementary pleasantness comes from its response to the demands of the ear”, although he added that “its deepest beauty comes from its response to the ultimate demands of the soul”.29 In the end poetry, philosophy and religion 27 Letter to C. J. Ducasse, Rome, November 24, 1928, in George Santayana, Letters, ed. by Daniel Cory, New York, Scribner’s Sons, 1955. 28 George Santayana, “Foreword” to Iris Origo, Leopardi, Oxford University Press, 1935. 29 George Santayana, “Preface” to Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, New York, Harper & Bros., 1911, p. VI.

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overlap and coalesce in the greatest minds (Lucretius, Dante, Goethe), therefore it is not difficult to understand the premises of his discourse on Leopardi: The student, the writer, the sufferer, the wanderer was only Conte Giacomo Leopardi, but the poet was Orpheus himself. Long passages are fit to repeat in lieu of prayers through all the watches of the night.

Soon the thinker, critic and essayist, who happily cohabit in his person, turn into a poet, producing a memorable piece of creative writing, inspired by – and almost in competition with – the style of the poet that is the object of his essay. One should not forget, by the way, the fact that Leopardi was the perfect model for Santayana, in so far as he was a great poet in his prose pieces (Operette Morali, 1827–35 and Zibaldone, 1817–32) as he was a great thinker in his poems: Suppose you were held up in some minor Italian town where by chance an itinerant company was to perform Il trovatore. Suppose that […] you strolled into the theatre, resigned in advance to a meagre stage setting, a harsh orchestra […] But suppose also that […] suddenly you heard, coming from behind the wings, an unexampled heavenly voice […] pure as moonlight, rich as sorrow, firm as truth, singing Solo in terra […] no matter how commonplace the singer might look, or even ridiculous […] if ever that sheer music sounded again, there would be something not himself that sang and something not yourself that listened.30

Santayana’s words and his hypothesis (“Suppose…”) certainly derive from the memory of a concrete event, exploiting it as the emblem of a fortunate coincidence and ecstatic “participation” that can serve the purpose of exemplifying the encounter with great poetry. Evidently, in this case, opera becomes the paradigm of an experience that transfigures an ordinary, banal and unpromising day of our lives into one of contact with beauty and truth, Platonic ideas and the Absolute. The “epiphonic” moment provokes in men’s souls the explosion of the archetype (“something not himself that sang and something not yourself that listened”). As we shall see when we discuss James Merrill’s opinion about the function of opera, at least initially there is no necessity of verisimilitude, since the spectators want to come in touch with the intriguing play of archetypes, with which all should be able to identify, to reach (in Jungian terms) the stage of “individuation”. A profound investigation of the characters’ s psychology is what hopefully is added in a second phase, due, above all, to the interpretation of singers/actors. Only in this later phase the spectator “tunes” with moving and 30 The famous tenor’s aria from Act I, Scene III of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (1853) does not start with “Solo in terra” but with “Deserto sulla terra”, which means “forsaken on earth” more than “alone on the earth”. Santayana’s error demonstrates the number of years which have passed between the direct experience and the memory of it, but also confirms his knowledge of Italian, since the two expressions are almost synonymous.

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credible representatives of the human lot, sympathizing with them and renewing the “solidarity pact” with all members of mankind. As I maintained from the beginning, music breaks all resistance. The voice of the tenor, in Santayana’s case (in other cases of the soprano, in Whitman of the contralto) does not sound as something that belongs to a “commonplace”, perhaps “ridiculous” human being, but seems to flow from a higher plane of reality. Like the poor production of Verdi in The Portrait of a Lady, the modest traveling company visiting Red Cloud, Nebraska in Cather’s memoir, the pathetic but unvanquished elderly soprano in Lucy Gayheart, this unknown tenor in a far off Italian provincial town does not prevent but enhances the communication between stage and audience, creating the miracle of a suspended and unrealistic “aura”. The spectator enjoys the voice “as pure as moonlight” and perhaps notices the silver splendor of the moon hanging on the outdoor theater. We shall see that in James Merrill’s The Ring Cycle the two singers who play the part of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, “painted, overweight” (they will “joke at supper side by side”), are so convincing “that one old stagehand cries”. Santayana’s fragment includes a further observation that I could use to resume the general theme of the relationship of poetry and music, words and sounds, though I feel that I share his opinion only up to a certain extent: I speak of voice and of music, but that is only a metaphor. What works the miracle in Leopardi is far from being mere sound or diction or the enigmatic suggestion of strange words. His versification is remarkable only when a divine afflatus blows through it […] This afflatus is intellectual, this music is a flood of thoughts. We are transported out of ourselves ascetically, by the vision of truth. […] Through the bars of his prison he beheld the same classic earth and Olympian sky that had been visible to Homer, Pindar, and Sophocles.[…] the truth of human destiny is always clear (emphasis mine).

Before a passage like this, reading these words written – listening to these sounds spoken – by a philosopher turned into a creative writer, we can, once again, suspend our disbelief and dispel all embarrassment, going back to our early dialogues with Emerson and Thoreau. If we cannot hear the “music of the spheres” unless after death, we can hear and enjoy what I called the “music of thoughts”. I believe that the best way to conclude this section on Santayana is to refer to Wallace Stevens’ intense poem To an Old Philosopher in Rome (1952). In it, the former student of the Harvard sage, who never visited his old master in Rome, pays tribute to the great soul – in what has been defined a “pre-elegiac affirmation”31 – imagining the significance of the last phase of his life “sub specie aeternitatis”. What is relevant to what I have argued so far is the fact that the 31 Lea Baechler, “Pre-Elegiac Affirmation in ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’”, Wallace Stevens Journal, 14, 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 141–152.

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reconstruction of Santayana’s last days, in the quiet monastery of the Blue Sisters, who hosted and took care of him for almost twenty years, proceeds following an acoustic more than a visual pattern. In particular Stevens insists in refuting the idea that an old and wise man’s solitude should imply a total renunciation of vital noises and that, when death approaches, “the rest is silence”. What most counts, obviously, is not the amount of sounds that one can hear, but their quality, gradation and tone: […] men growing small in the distances of space, Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound […] The sounds drift in […] The bells keep on repeating solemn names In choruses and choirs of choruses, Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery Of silence, that any solitude of sense Should give you more than their peculiar chords And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

The poem coincides, as one sees, with a vindication of all kinds of music, starting with the singing of men, through subdued acoustic utterances (“smaller and […] smaller sound”) and the sounds/noises of the bells – that are, on the contrary, invasive, festive and choral – to the echoes and reverberations of sounds and whispering voices. It is a complex acoustic texture in fruitful dialogue with a merciful but not completely “empty” silence. It seems that Stevens had long meditated on the function of sounds and music in Santayana’s life and on the modalities of expression of his thought, which was translated into a prose whose unique musical quality contributes to the understanding of a philosophical message, that is no less convincing for being thoroughly personal.

Chapter Seven: The twentieth century

The score, when finally recorded, grew to enchant me as much for its angelic surprise and invention as for its diabolical way with pastiche […] The scene was a triumph […] From this pinnacle the rest of the twentieth century would be a downfall. (James Merrill, 1993)

In the 20th century European opera continued to have a remarkable importance in Anglo-American culture, in spite of the competition with other, more genuinely American forms of musical entertainment. However, as we have seen, opera also had to cope with such competition in the phase of its greatest popularity. Vaudevilles, minstrel shows, burlesques and “pageants” had their fans in members of all social classes and ethnic backgrounds. Members of the high society were deeply comforted by the possibility of choosing among a wide range of night life entertainments, so that they could, evening after evening, patronize comic, dramatic, intersemiotic or exclusively musical events in a compulsive urge similar to the one that obsesses the jet society of our days. Going out to see, hear, be seen, talk and meet – regardless of the object or “spectacle” proper – was a social must and a status symbol, especially during the Reconstruction, towards the turn into the 20th century and up to the mythical “roaring twenties”; and again, in the so called (but never quite) “tranquillized” 1950s. In order to understand the presence and the function of opera in the second half of the 20th century, it is useful to conduct a quick overview of the history of contemporary cinema and soundtracks. This overview provides clear evidence of the intrinsic – implicit or explicit – permanence of the noble art of melodrama in the urban scenario, in the most widespread mass media and in the lives of almost all sections of the multicultural American panorama. In Gary Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990) the peak of Richard Gere’s fascination is reached when he takes Julia Roberts, in a splendid red evening dress, to a performance of Verdi’s Traviata at the San Francisco War Memorial Theater. The young lady, on her introduction to the experience of the glamorous context and emotion of the tragic death of the heroine, reacts in a “visceral” way, expressing her reaction in

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an unconventional language that startles the members of a different social milieu. She shows, however, an unsuspected appreciation of the “ceremonial” spectacle, even though, as many characters in the stories we have examined, she certainly could not follow the plot and the dialogues in detail. In Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (1987) Cher and Nicolas Cage discover the irresistible nature of their mutual attraction as they go to the Met for Puccini’s La BohHme. No matter how different their temperaments are and obstinate their will to not surrender to a conventional flow of passion is, opera works as a unifying experience that destroys their defense strategies, driving their destinies towards a common (happy) ending. The fact that the film is situated in the life of an ItalianAmerican family with a tradition of melodrama and bel canto cannot be ignored. In Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994) – a film that describes the hard trial of a man (Tim Robins) unjustly detained in a top security prison – the only “redeeming” moments for the prisoners are offered by the protagonist, who manages to provide them with a radio broadcast – to the unexpected enjoyment of the entire population of convicts – of the sublime notes of the duet between Susanna and Contessa in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (“Sull’aria…Che soave zeffiretto”). The protagonist does not understand Italian and therefore does not know what the two ladies are talking about, nonetheless he is so conquered by the music that he imagines the theme of the dialogue to be “something too beautiful to be expressed in words”. In Mozart’s opera, instead, the two ladies, as we know, are plotting against their husbands. However, the function of opera (not only in this case) is precisely that of helping sensitive members of the audience to come in touch with and enjoy an emotion “that surpasseth understanding”. Surprisingly, other films produced in 1993 have opera as an important subtext, if not throughout their stories, in crucial moments of the plot. In Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet one of the most significant segments in which the intercultural discourse takes shape is the episode in which the Chinese “betrothed” of one of the two male protagonists shows how fully she can accommodate to the syncretic New York community, a member of which she is supposed to become. She sings, in fact, an aria from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in front of the skyline of Manhattan skyscrapers. Also films addressing highbrow audiences exploit the multiple function of opera, as is the case with Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In a memorable scene the protagonist, walking across the main square of Lincoln Center in the direction of the Met, warns a friend of his that, in going to a Wagner opera and listening to his music, he might feel like invading Poland. Finally, in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, Denzel Washington ceases to worry about Tom Hanks’s capacity to defend his position in court when he witnesses the extraordinary transfiguration that Maria Callas’s voice offers his client, with the immortal diva’s interpretation of the most popular aria from

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Giordano’s Andrea Ch8nier (1896). In this case, opera serves a very subtle function. It fosters the acceptance of the inevitability of pain (through a full immersion in cosmic suffering) and, at the same time, allows the emergence of a moral strength that fears no trial, however demanding. On the other hand, Gaston Leroux’s Le fantime de l’op8ra was cleverly “transcodified” by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart in 1986, becoming one of the most successful Broadway musicals of recent times. Two decades later (2004) it was turned into yet another film, directed by Joel Schumacher, in a long series of screen adaptations which, paradoxically, even include a silent movie (directed by Rupert Julian in 1925).1 All this confirms the permanent function of the interplay between musical theater and literary texts, albeit it being the opposite to the one I have taken into account. In this case, in fact, it is not opera that enters a literary text but literature that is turned into musical performance. The same is true for Cats (from T.S.Eliot’s The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, 1939) or Les Mis8rables (from Victor Hugo’s immortal novel of 1862) as it was, in the 18th century, for Da Ponte-Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, (from Beaumarchais’ comedy, 1778–84), for their Don Giovanni (from Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla, 1630) and, in the 19th century, for Ernani (from Hugo’s famous play of 1830), Rigoletto (from Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, 1832), Traviata (from Dumas fils’s La dame aux camelias, 1848) and Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, from Hoffmann’s tales, via Barbier and Carr8’s piHce of 1851. Later, just to mention only titles which help us go back to the context of American culture, it was the turn of Belasco’s Madame Butterfly (1900) and The Girl of the Golden West (1905), which were both used by Giacomo Puccini as hypotexts for his Madama Butterfly (1904) and La fanciulla del west (1910). The two forms of artistic expression, in sum, regularly proved fruitfully “permeable” and cooperative.2 Also TV soap operas and their soundtracks are full of arias from the history of opera, in particular, understandably, those revolving around the Italian-Amer1 The film was twice reviewed by Carl Sanburg. The first time the poet acknowledged the effective tension created by the director and the suspense conveyed to spectators. The second time, a few weeks later, he confessed the inadequacies of the overall operation. A Phantom of the Opera of marginal importance was directed by Arthur Lubin in 1943. 2 As I have underlined more than once, large audiences preferred to meet the great heroes and heroines of Shakespeare (Romeo, Juliet, Macbeth, Oberon, Titania, Hamlet, Othello, Falstaff), Walter Scott (The Lady of the Lake, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, The Bride of Lammermoor), Goethe (Faust, Mephistopheles) and Victor Hugo at the opera house, rather than directly in literary texts or as original plays for the theater. This fact disturbed and scandalized sophisticated fans of classical music, totally indifferent to opera or suspicious of its unrealistic plots. The “implausibility” of opera, its shocking (but necessary) simplification of texts that inspired its plots, and characters’ psychology, offended the aristocratic writer Tomasi di Lampedusa (The Leopard) in the 20th century. He wrote: “This unfathomable stupidity […] was passed off as Art, real Art” but, in the end, had to confess: “Alas! It often was real Art!”. Cf. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Shakespeare, Milano, Mondadori, 1995, pp. 74–75.

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ican experience. In The Sopranos opera goes as far as “invading” the title of the series becoming an ethnic identity label par excellence. The protagonist of the series, Tony Soprano (interpreted by James Gandolfini) has been defined as a sort of Emma Bovary of contemporary New Jersey and shows, in fact, a similar nervous sensitivity, upon which opera has a strong influence. Some years ago, a CD-ROM offered a new interactive game called Opera Fatal, advertising it this way : “the players will explore the mysterious recesses of the Opera House, a labyrinth full of traps, false hints, riddles, enigmas and extreme situations. Their only help will be in the library.”3 In these words I read the revival of the old dichotomy between culture of performance and entertainment and culture of the written text, storage and crystallized heritage.

1.

William Demby and Vincent Sheean

Following a method that I think proved fruitful and revealing, I will analyze now two prose works which did not enjoy a large readership nor a vast critical echo. Then I will move onto the interpretation of the works of two distinguished poets who are among the greatest contributors to the history of 20th century AngloAmerican poetry. In the first case, the novel by William Demby (The Catacombs, 1965) and the “autobiography of a life in music” by Vincent Sheean (First and Last Love, 1956) will be considered as useful documents on the presence of opera in U. S. culture, in texts that can hardly be considered first class literary achievements. Because of opera and the dense network of intersemiotic references, however, these texts become extremely significant from a cultural studies point of view. In the second case, the great poetry of two masters of contemporary Anglo-American language (John Berryman and James Merrill) will offer evidence of the fact that music and opera continue to work together to enrich the substance and enhance the stature of literary works that would be considered remarkable texts even without reference to opera. For the former poet opera is not the essential musical experience and occasionally inhabits his texts only because it still is an undeniable part of U. S. musical life. For the latter opera is the quintessential acoustic and performative act, consisting in a “ceremonial” operation which can produce richer and denser poetic results.

3 “Opera Fatal” was a joint venture Telecom Italia and La Repubblica. It was an Italian production which enjoyed a period of wide popularity (1997–99) abroad also. Again, it is an interesting coincidence that the New York Public Library on 42nd street should so often feature as a central landmark, dense in symbolic implications, in contemporary films.

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I. The Catacombs by William Demby exemplifies the close connection between opera and cinema I have explained above. That is the intersections of these forms of art, the transcodifications they gave birth to and their appropriation on the part of mass media and popular culture, in an intriguing puzzle in which highbrow and lowbrow responses exchange roles. The novel was published in the last phase of what was called “Hollywood on the Tiber”. Its author is an odd example of an African American expatriate who preferred to settle in Rome rather than in Paris, like Richard Wright, or London. His choice was motivated by his interests in the film industry. He worked for both Hollywood and Cinecitt/ (the Italian equivalent of Hollywood), cooperating with several directors (Rossellini, Fellini), writing and translating scripts and dialogues, and experiencing “la dolce vita” in the capital in a very carefree manner. From a stylistic point of view, the experimental novel – whose title obviously reminds us of Hawthorne’s fascination with the dark side of papal Rome and reconstruction of its hidden, underground secrets in The Marble Faun (1860) – follows the French model of nouveau roman. It includes frequent metanarrative passages, discussions about contemporary American and Italian men of letters and the world of visual arts and opera. The visual arts, in particular, offer a system of structural patterns that the narrative chooses to follow to balance the absence of a traditional plot or the incapacity to find satisfaction in writing a traditional novel. The progress of the text can, therefore, be summed up as the transition from a modernist (cubist) to a postmodernist (abstract expressionist) poetics.4 No less than Le comte de Monte-Cristo, The Catacombs is full of precise references to opera, composers, singers, single performances, costumes and widespread interpretations of archetypal characters who have entered Italian popular culture since the 19th century. However, again like Dumas’s novel and unlike Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, there is no single memorable scene or episode in which opera plays a major role. The function of opera must thus be inferred collecting and putting together its various allusions scattered throughout the text. Opera’s raison d’Þtre is “seminal” in so far as almost every single reference suggests a train of semantic consequences. The action takes place between 1962 and 1964 and includes frequent quotations from American and Italian newspapers. Through their titles the major events of those dramatic 4 Andrea Mariani, “The Catacombs di William Demby : dal cubismo all’espressionismo astratto”, in Letterature d’America, XV, 60 (1995), pp. 81–106. See also Ugo Rubeo, “William Demby nelle ‘Catacombe’ di Roma”, in Il Veltro, 1–2, XLIV (Gennaio-Aprile 2000), pp. 247–253.

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cold war years are vividly “conjured up”, neutrally exposed and never emphatically “exploited” in their historical or human importance. Doris, the female protagonist of the novel, with whom the narrator – the writer’s transparent alter ego – has an affaire or perhaps a “relationship” (though full of ups and downs on both parts), is one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens in Twenty Century-Fox’s colossal production starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.5 In the meantime, Verdi’s Aida is staged several times at the outdoor arena of the Baths of Caracalla. The double identification of the beautiful young African American starlet with both the queen of Egypt who seduced Caesar and Mark Anthony and the Ethiopian princess who conquers Radames’s love is made explicit from the beginning: [Doris] insists in wearing the grotesquely exotic – but, in her case, strangely appropriate – make-up she wears before the cameras; her hairdo, too, is authentically ancient Egyptian […] a magical fertility symbol floating detachedly over the masklike beauty of her enchanted, nut-brown […] face. (p.13)

A few pages later, Doris explains that ever since she was in college she had to fight against the idea that she was either an African queen or the protagonist of Verdi’s opera. Her humanities professor, for instance, trying a clumsy approach that was all but politically correct, said that she “reminded him of Aida – she’s an Ethiopian queen” (p. 18). Before coming to Rome, therefore, Doris, in her late teens, already knew something about Aida. It is not difficult to understand why the middle-aged professor (of European lineage) projects the protagonist of the melodrama onto the student whose sympathy he wants to captivate. However, what is more interesting is the fact that the girl is ready to understand the text and context and reacts by accepting the identification but refusing the teacher’s avances. In Rome Doris walks around feeling not like Cleopatra’s or Aida’s handmaiden but as Cleopatra or Aida themselves: “she wore the black-edged Cleopatra’s hieroglyphics around her eyes” (p. 46) although she would prefer to be free of wearing a mask and make up by personal choice, instead of being forced by “these Europeans [who] expect us all [African Americans] to be African queens or kings” (p. 107). A third identification is offered by the production of another film. In Venere Imperiale (Imperial Venus, directed by Jean Delannoy, 1963), starring Gina Lollobrigida, another charismatic female figure, Paolina, Napoleon’s sister and wife of the Roman Prince Borghese, fills the screen and the spectators’s imagination. In this latter case, however, the identification is more “by contrast”. Paolina Borghese, in fact, is by no means a colored young lady and has taken hold 5 Cleopatra, dir. by Joseph L. Mankiewitz, prod. by Twentieth-Century Fox, starring E. Taylor, R. Burton, R. Harrison, M. Landau (1963).

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of the city’s collective imagination since she was portrayed (in the perfection of the whitest neoclassical nude) by sculptor Antonio Canova (1808). The intersections between cinema and opera, therefore, can sometimes seem awkward. For example, reading an article on retired Greta Garbo’s seclusion, the narrator calls her Casta Diva, “though she is anything but divine […] she continues to cling […] to the vine of her myth” (p. 128). The irony implicit in the use of the couple divine/vine does not resonate as a pun of the highest quality. The allusion is obviously to the famous aria sung by the Celtic priestess (another strong, charismatic female character) at the beginning of Bellini’s Norma. The gallery of prima donnas is not yet over, since after Cleopatra, Taylor, Aida, Paolina, Lollobrigida, Garbo and Norma, we meet Maria Callas, the real diva, a star of the first magnitude in the history of opera and in the collective imagination of both European and American audiences. What is particularly interesting, however, is the fact that Callas is mentioned not as the protagonist of a performance or the celebrated singer/actress who revolutionized the tradition of bel canto – as she gives one of her extraordinarily intense interpretations on stage – but as an “immaterial” voice in an lp record of Rossini’s Il turco in Italia, that Bill is listening to in a rare moment of introversion and gratifying solitude: I listened to, and carefully read the libretto of (La Callas singing the female lead) a very fine recording of Rossini’s Il turco in Italia. (p. 129)

The two short lines are full of information. The African American man writing a novel and working for the film industry in Rome has, for the moment, become thoroughly italianate. He enjoys opera not only at the opera house or at the outdoor arena but also as an intrinsic musical product, listening to a record which deprives opera (and its protagonists) of all performative and visual elements. In addition the narrator shows a remarkable command of – and interest in – the local language, buying and carefully reading the libretto, that is a text written in an early 19th century Italian6 and sung by Callas (a singer who never spoke a completely native Italian) and by a mixed cast of Italian and foreign singers (the tenor is Nicolai Gedda, a Swedish-Russian).7 Of note, Maria Callas is referred to as “La Callas”, that is to say, in the informal, familiar way in which her Italian fans used to call her, contributing to the creation of the myth of the soprano par excellence. Demby’s novel, which, as I said at the beginning, cannot be considered an altogether successful piece of writing, can still offer ground for intriguing intercultural and interlinguistic discussions. Mentioning Naples and trying to sum up vices and virtues, beauties and flaws 6 Rossini’s opera premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1814. Its libretto is by Felice Romano. The first American production took place in New York in 1826. 7 The lp was produced in 1954 by EMI Classics; conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni, orchestra of Teatro La Scala, Milan.

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of the incredible city the narrator gives us a list of world famous highlights, based on ancient and contemporary history, philosophy, folklore, cinema and opera: Naples province of pessimism and song. Vesuvius, the Sixth Fleet, and domestic hankypanky […] shoe-shine boys and barbers, fraud and scandal, the miracle of the blood, street singers: San Carlo Opera House! There I went with Gottfried von Einem for the premiHre of his opera Danton Tod, the derisive laughter of Neapolitan duchesses and dukes. (p. 160)

As one sees, the San Carlo Theater is the climax of the list and, emphasized by a final exclamation mark, concludes the good and the bad things the city can offer, above all, to the sophisticated cosmopolitan expatriate rather than the ordinary tourist. In spite of the evident proofs of post World War Two decay, Naples can still boast a major Opera House where it is not only possible to enjoy the traditional pleasures of 19th century operas from the repertoire but also the emotions of the production of a contemporary brand new work. The opera Dantons Tod (The Death of Danton, 1947, revised in 1955) by Austrian composer Gottfried von Einem obviously elicited the derision of a conservative audience but renewed the fame of the theater as an institution open to worthy international experimentations. Before the novel ends, without letting the reader understand whether the narrator will ever succeed in finding the way to conclude the novel he pretends to be writing, the protagonist goes back to the States but his love of opera continues to work in many ways. Opera provides him with cherished memories of enchanting moments during his Italian stay and makes it possible for him to revive them, for example, playing an album of Puccini’s La BohHme: Torre del Lago, where Puccini lived and composed […] Two years later […] I bought an album of Puccini’s La BohHme, and would turn the phonograph thunderously loud, ‘Che gelida manina’.

The passage reminds me of the scene in Philadelphia, quoted above, in which Tom Hanks finds the moral energy to react to his illness – and the perverse fraud he risks to fall victim to – through a full immersion in a grand aria of a famous late Romantic opera. The pathetic moment is redeemed by the subject’s courage to accept his destiny. The strategy he applies cancels his fears and obsessions of personal responsibility as the self merges into a cosmic flow of over-determined sentiment, represented by the excess of volume in the music he listens to. A significant difference between the film and novel, though, is the fact that the protagonist of the former loses himself in the melody sung by a soprano, whereas the protagonist of the latter identifies with a tenor. This, from gender studies perspective, seems perfectly in keeping with the sexual identity of the two men.

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II. Vincent Sheean can be considered the equivalent, for the 20th century, of George Templeton Strong, whose journal I mentioned and briefly commented in Chapter Two. A writer who deserves to be reconsidered for inclusion in the transatlantic canon, Sheean is the author of novels (The Tide, 1933, Rage of the Soul, 1952)8, in particular historical novels (Sanfelice, 1936), war reportages (Between the Thunder and the Sun, 1943), essays on dramatic contemporary issues (Lead, Kindly Lead: Gandhi & the Way to Peace, 1949) and biographies (among which that of Oscar Hammerstein I: Life and Exploits of an Impresario, 1955). Sheean went to concert halls and opera houses all his life long just as did Poe, Strong, Whitman, Cather, Berryman and Merrill. However, unlike Strong, he preferred vocal to instrumental music. His First and Last Love (1956), an autobiographical text based on a series of personal notes, articles and reviews concerning North American and European musical life, has music as its main content and basic structural pattern, and is therefore obviously conditioned by it. In the case of Strong I have argued that opera – although never fully accepted within the ideological boundaries of his sophisticated and snobbish cultural world – was, paradoxically, influential in giving an unsuspected energy and literary – or at least linguistic – efficacy to a style that, in general, is frankly commonplace and far from original. In the case of Sheean I would maintain that opera provides a “plot” as well as theoretical frame to a book that would otherwise be little more than a record of the author’s responses to hundreds of musical experiences. In this sense Sheean’s volume becomes much more than the personal confession of an entire life devoted to music (even more than to literature, in spite of his profession as novelist), as the title would suggest, and acquires the status of its British counterpart, that is Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz: A Record Diary.9 The book consists of eight chapters, that run through the life of the author/ protagonist/narrator for over forty years; Sheean, in fact, was born in 1899 and the first page of this peculiar autobiography has as inscription a dedication “to Madame Lotte Lehmann, Rome 1956”.10 The chronological sequence corresponds to a perfect logical order, as the narrative follows the growth and “in8 In a memorable scene of Rage of the Soul an American opera singer succeeds in defeating the hostility of a politically biased group who were in the audience by persisting to sing in a performance of Aida at the Baths of Caracalla. 9 Philip Larkin, All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961–68, London, Faber and Faber, 1970 (revised and enlarged edition [1961–70], 1985). 10 Lotte Lehmann, a German born soprano (1888–1976), moved from Austria to the United States in 1938. She was a great interpreter of Mozart, Beethoven (Fidelio), Wagner, Strauss, but also Massenet and Puccini.

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dividuation” (in Jungian terms) of Sheean’s personality and musical expertise. If the text can be read as a sort of Bildungsroman, it is because music provides all the instruments for the protagonist’s Bildung, offering, at the same time, the background in which the Bildung was happily “staged” and performed. Memories of sounds, voices and major acoustic events echo in the young (and, later, mature) man’s psyche, producing a fascinating texture that develops according to a three dimensional scheme. Facts, “meetings with remarkable men (and women)”, unique evenings, magic atmospheres created and permanently recorded in Sheean’s mind cover the surface of his life, weaving appealing threads that become even more fascinating as music adds the third dimension and allows the consciousness of the subject to go deeper, in search of values and meanings. In so doing, music operates, as we shall see in Merrill, as a “sounding board”, but also as a means of profound self-analysis (the distance from Emerson’s mechanism of introspection could not be greater). This analysis gradually involves the reader to a greater extent, because the individual itinerary is regularly immersed in the social context and in the history of the first half of the 20th century. The appropriate structural pattern finds a perfect counterpart in the intersemiotic, comparative and intertextual method (akin to that of so many writers we considered in this study) according to which, for instance, the discovery of Wagner’s music is described as the obvious consequence of the subject’s long acquaintance with Proust’s Recherche, or the keen, parallel interest in literature and music is easily justified as the result of a “natural” linguistic ear. Sheean’s is a happy, tuneful ear that enjoyed and considered the sounds of words, the variety of accents, the melodic fluency of dictions, as an “acoustic feast” accompanying, as a captivating soundtrack, the author’s emotions and his passionate responses to a rich and rewarding life. The text’s incredible richness in intriguing anecdotes and its stylistic efficacy – that make the protagonists revive before the readers, sometimes larger than life, as heroes of an alternative history of mankind – are, in sum, worthy of attention. In the gallery of characters (not all belonging to the world of music, but intimately connected to it) there are protagonists (living or dead) who occupy a center stage position, such as Wagner and Proust, Benjamin Britten and Schopenhauer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and G. B. Shaw, Karl Marx and Kirsten Flagstad, Debussy and Toscanini, deuteragonists who move in the background, ready to appear at the right moment to share the applause, and antagonists who cannot be convinced of the essential importance of music. The book’s “Envoi” includes a pertinent and well-conceived debate with William James and his idea that our listening to music must not be “inert”, in the sense that some “moral deed” must grow out of the way we listen; a fact that seems to Sheean “a combination of pragmatism and puritanical heritage”.11 11 Vincent Sheean, First and Last Love, New York, Random House, 1956, pp. 290–291. Another

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Sheean’s enthusiasm for Wagner does not marvel us, since, as I have pointed out so often, it is in total harmony with the fashion and taste of the late 19th and the turn of the 20th centuries. It pleasantly surprises us because it never becomes an intolerant exclusion of other forms of music and musical theater. The chapter devoted to Sheean’s discovery of the revolutionary music of the great composer from Leipzig is called, in fact, “An Imperfect Wagnerite”. At first, it acknowledges the overwhelming impact of Wagner’s Grundtheme and his Gesamtkunstwerk Theorie: [My enthusiasm] reached the point […] at which it virtually excluded all other works (Pell8as, Boris and Der Rosenkavalier excepted), so that I actually for some years heard and saw practically nothing but the later works of Wagner.12

However, it soon makes us understand that the subject’s ear, so naturally and perceptively tuned, could not become deaf or indifferent to so many other fascinating musical realities, by giving up a large portion of the enormous heritage of European musical tradition. So, immediately after the chapter on Wagner’s influence, we have an equally interesting chapter on the close relationship between church and theater, which explains many characteristics of Italian musical tradition and the Italian/Catholic conception of religious ceremonies as “spectacles”.13 As if Sheean’s text were conceived as a series of examples of most of the things I have discussed in this volume, in First and Last Love we meet a moving description of the early passion for music in the mind of a child growing up in a marginal town of the Midwest (Pana, Illinois), whose only “opera house” was an outdoor space that, once a year, hosted a music festival; a community which reminds us of Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska (Chapter 1. “The Chautauqua”). We also find the reconstruction of the importance of the Chicago Auditorium (Chapter 2, “The Shore of the Lake”), the fruitful cultural interaction between the two shores of the Atlantic in the 1910s and 1920s (Chapter 3, “The Wine-Dark Sea”) and the analysis of the inescapable connection between music and political and social context (Chapter 7, “The Troubled Times”). But there is also something that I cannot have mentioned, because of chronological and thematic reasons, a section that alone would justify the significance of the whole book, as well as the relative but far from minor worth of its author : the report of “antagonist” Sheean could never reconcile himself with was George Meredith, whose Italian novels, so full of operas, he totally disliked. See in particular Sandra Belloni (1864–1887) and Vittoria (1867). Cf. J. A. Hammerton, “Literary Characteristics”, in George Meredith: His Life and Art in Anecdote and Criticism, New York, Haskell House, 1971, pp. 172–173 and Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica. English Romantics and Italian Freedom, London, Tauris, 2005. 12 Vincent Sheean, Op. cit., p. 96. 13 Chapter 5. “The Church and the Theatre”, Ibidem.

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Arturo Toscanini’s farewell concert, including the eye-witness transcription of the famous/infamous general rehearsal the night before the concert (Chapter 8. “Music in the Air”). The episode is so well known among both professional musicologists and ordinary lovers of music, that I can summarize it in brief. In 1954 Toscanini, the great conductor who had settled in New York in the last phase of his career, was eighty-seven years old and ready to retire, although he postponed his decision because he knew that the legendary orchestra created expressly for him (The N.B.C. Orchestra) would disperse soon after his retirement. On the 3rd of April the general rehearsal of what was going to be his last concert was under way at Carnegie Hall, New York City, the programme including excerpts from Lohengrin, Siegfried and Tannhäuser. Sheean, a great fan of the Italian maestro, had obtained admission and was listening with his usual attention, as well as much pathos, due to the affective and symbolic implications of the event. Toscanini went on a fury in a difficult part in Tannhäuser and bitterly reproached the orchestra, though he probably knew that the “mistake” had been his fault. The inflexible perfectionist could not recover from the breaking of the age old reliance on “his” orchestra (and on himself), interrupted the rehearsal, and went home. On the following day the concert did take place as announced. Sheean was again a member of the audience, obviously more attentive and anxious than the evening before. Exactly at the same moment as the one of the previous night’s “unfortunate incident”, Toscanini had a memory void for fourteen endless seconds and the first violin had to save the situation. Guido Cantelli, in the recording room, lowered the microphones and saved the whole recording.14 Sheean’s splendid pages render the way the episode was experienced by the subject, but enlarge it, turning it into the emblem of the end of a myth and an era. The reader has the impression that the episode went well beyond the limits of the musical world. Sheean is as objective as a witness before a grand jury (using words almost crystallized in a legal language that wants to tell the truth, all the truth, nothing but the truth) and, at the same time, as involved and powerless as a deeply affected spectator of the last scene in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. In a few weeks the N.B.C. Orchestra was actually dissolved and voices in objection to Toscanini and his style prevailed, following the opinions of Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson.15 Another era in the history of music, conducting, and musical criticism had begun.

14 Cf. Arturo Toscanini Recording Association, A.T.R.A. no. 3008. 15 “Il genio Toscanini”, in L’idea Magazine, New York, n. 29, II, 2007 (retrieved from https://op eraamormio.wordpress.com/, 13 August 2013).

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The poetry of John Berryman and that of James Merrill are – to use Shakespeare’s famous words from The Tempest – islands full of sounds. They can fruitfully be used as a link between what I have said about 19th century poetry (Whitman, Dickinson and Lanier) and what I am going to say in the concluding remarks. Therefore I am going to read them not only intersemiotically but intertextually. In addition, the themes both poets develop and the linguistic strategies they adopt are so much indebted to European (English, French, Italian and German) culture that they can be taken as paradigmatic cases in the realm of transatlantic studies, an area to which all that I stated in this volume belongs. Berryman is certainly a man and artist typical of the 20th century but, at the same time, sums up the entire history of Western poetry in its intersections with other forms of art, in particular with music. In addition, he is the author of an ode to Beethoven (Beethoven Triumphant) that I will use as parallel reading with Lanier’s Ode to Beethoven, which is the companion piece to the Ode to Wagner which I claimed as an important text – in particular from a sociological/pedagogical point of view – and therefore analyzed in detail. Berryman was – no less than Whitman, Dickinson, Lanier and Merrill – not only deeply influenced but also somehow “conditioned” by music, since, as a poet, he was convinced that “we write poetry with our ears”16. He thought, for instance, that Song of Myself was entirely conceived under the influence of music. In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Helen Vendler remarks that “Berryman was an orchestra all by himself, in which one instrument after another prevails. In a single stanza, an insisting percussion […] suddenly pivots into the silent writing-voices of a dismembered body”.17 Then the dean of scholars of Anglo-American poetry adds that Berryman would have agreed with Wallace Stevens who, in “The Creation of Sound”, proclaimed that “Speech is not dirty silence/ Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier”. Even in his most abundant moments of poetic production, in fact, Berryman’s discourse deals as much about silence as it does about sounds; this inscribes his texts and his poetics in line with what we have seen at work from the beginning of this volume, from Thoreau through to Dickinson and Lanier, John Cage and James Merrill. I believe that the comparison between Berryman’s texts and those of poets who wrote before him or during his lifetime will prove as interesting and gratifying as the one I produced at the beginning of the present volume, when I tried 16 Maria Johnston, “We Write Verse with Our Ears: Berryman’s Music” in “After Thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman, ed. by Philip Coleman and Philip McGowan, Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 191–208. 17 Helen Vendler, “Berryman: Tragedy and Comedy together”, in The New York Review of Books, June 4, 2015.

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to demonstrate the usefulness of such operations in spite of the temporal gaps and great cultural differences among Emerson, Dryden, Shelley and Poe (see Chapter I). Before investigating the specific texts, however, it is necessary to rapidly introduce not Berryman, the poet who is finally enjoying well-deserved critical appreciation, rather his interests in music, the extraordinary musical quality of his verse and his close attention to the acoustic dimension which characterized his production from the early years of his career down to the tragic end of his life. Scholars agree that, up to a few decades ago, criticism on Berryman had concentrated on other aspects of his poetry and poetics, overlooking or only incidentally mentioning music, perhaps the most meaningful “substance” of his work.18 Now, after some recent distinguished essays on the theme, we have a considerable number of contributions available to us for a richer critical debate and can therefore choose a personal perspective to reconstruct a puzzle that is not easy to render in its complexity. In the context of such a puzzle we meet quite a number of pieces that exploit the strategy of mentioning famous composers. Featuring names is often sufficient to produce a halo of connotations and train of acoustic consequences. Berryman is thoroughly comprehensive and includes Monteverdi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, as well as, last but not least, blues and jazz (Bessy Smith above all). Such an abundance of multiple quotations is mirrored in the musical scores of musicians who translated Berryman’s poems into musical pieces (e. g. Joseph Coroniti and Erich Chasalow) in so far as they found it impossible to pursue their projects without including a similar abundance of quotations from other musicians of the Western tradition – even those who are not explicitly mentioned by Berryman but somehow lie as implicit hypotexts within his poetry. I will proceed by 1. analyzing the emergence of Berryman’s “musical ear” in some of his early poems, in particular if they have not been analyzed from this viewpoint; 2. summarizing some of Berryman’s acoustic strategies and his inventions of incredibly original sound patterns, in the various phases of his production; 3. stressing his involvement and compromising dialogues with some major European composers;

18 Even Paul Mariani (Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman, New York, Morrow, 1990) does not sufficiently account for the importance of musical experiences in the poet’s life and macrotext. He limits himself to providing evidence of Berryman’s interests in Bach (Brandenburg Concerts), Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, C8sar Franck, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (pp. 81–82) and aversion towards an “ugly” B8la Bart|k sonata that, while taken by bad mood, Berryman defined “extermination camp music”, forgetting Bart|k’s strong position against Nazi politics (p. 197).

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4. finally concentrating on “Beethoven Triumphant”, a poem belonging to his late period, trying to see whether there are contact zones with Lanier’s ode. In this last endeavor I will use another procedure that I have often found useful, that is the comparison of literary texts of uneven quality. This intertextual method can not only clarify the reasons for the success of texts that doubtlessly are of superior quality but also reveal unforeseen positive elements in less convincing texts, vindicating for them a significant role, if not at the center of the canon, at least not in a marginal position. 1. “Parting as Descent” consists of four quatrains of iambic trimeters (e. g. “Beg/n to move I s/w you turn aw/y/And v/nish and the vHssels in my br/in”, lines 7–8), replaced sometimes by trochaic trimeters: “BFrst, the train rkared, the other tr/velers” (line 9). Rhymes are fewer than assonances: flew/Waterloo, clock/track, caf8/away, travelers/curse. Sentences are initially short, the mood is self-contained and the atmosphere rarefied. The second half of the text has a single long sentence with a governing clause (“I saw you turn away”) that is followed by a series of coordinates (“And vanish, and the vessels […] Burst, the train roared […] travelers/ In flames leapt […] I heard the devils curse”), a solution that perfectly renders the breaking of emotional balance and the sudden explosion of long concealed, crystallized feelings. The situation is a classic: a farewell at the railway station (an uncanny space “beyond prayer”, line 12). The way it is treated is all but imitative (except, perhaps, for a vague tone reminiscent of Eliot and Pound), starting with the violent rise of an enemy sun: “The sun rushed up the sky” (line 1). The inevitability of the separation and the full awareness of the pain it causes coincide with the initial slow movement of the train. From that moment on the scene stops being realistic and becomes surreal (a disquieting sense of uneasiness had been anticipated by the “kind of fever on the clock”, line 2) as a consequence of a psychological “burst”. Other travelers “leap” in flames, the air is “tilted” and the subject hears the devils “shriek with joy”. The intelligence and originality of the acoustic dimension is evident, in particular, in the last images, in which sight and hearing effectively cooperate turning Waterloo station into the corner of a hellish circle, where flames, devils’ curses and shrieks frighten the souls and make them suffer. An Italian scholar like me cannot avoid commenting the special significance of the three words at the beginning of line 11 (“Che si cruccia”) derived from Dante’s Inferno, XIX, 31: “Chi H colui, maestro, che si cruccia/ guizzando piF che li altri suoi consorti?”.19 19 “Say, Master, who is he that shows his grief,/ More wildly kicking than his suffering mates/ And feeds a hungrier and darker flame?”, Dante, Inferno, Canto XIX, lines 30–32, transl. by Thomas G. Bergin, New York, Grossman Publishers, 1969.

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They offer, in fact, evidence of Berryman’s acquaintance with Dante, his ability in making use of a fragment extrapolated from the context and sophisticated manipulation of sound patterns. From a morphological/syntactical point of view we observe that the verb “crucciare” (“to torment” more than “to trouble” in medieval Italian) defines the kind of pain destined to Niccolk III, a simonist pope, whose soles are “tickled” by devouring flames. In the context of Berryman’s poem the subject of the verb is not a person suffering among the condemned souls but the “tilted air” that “torments” the two lovers who are leaving one another. Berryman, in sum, is not afraid of transforming Dante’s reflexive verb into an active one, interpreting the particle “si” (“himself”) as if it were “ci” (“us”). The learned quotation reveals that the poem is addressed to a very limited group of readers, perhaps only to the I and you in the text, whose emotions really matter. From the point of view of acoustics the sequence of harsh sounds k/ c/ kr/ cc/ adds yet another unpleasant musical notation to roar, curse, shriek, especially if we imagine that Berryman was able to pronounce it correctly, according to Italian phonetics, that is with a rotating r and a double c, stronger than an English final tch. “Winter Landscape” presents a different metrical pattern and acoustic strategy.20 Five stanzas of five lines each follow one another without proper rhymes but with assonances (hounds/town/brown/brow/straw) and key words that tend to recur at the end of lines: hounds and hill in stanzas 1 and 5, trees in stanzas 1 and 4. The diction is plain and apparently as objectively descriptive as all ekphrases should be. The very title makes us suspect that we are in front of a poem inspired by the contemplation of a painting, for instance a winter scene of the Flemish school, a school that deeply appealed to many fellow poets in Berryman’s times, above all William Carlos Williams. In this sense the visual dimension should be predominant and indeed so it seems, considering the accurate notation of colors and shades: the men in brown, the blue light, the shadow, the twilit street, the red houses. However, although silence and a sort of “gentle” suspense dominate the text, before long we “hear” implicit sounds – only partially mitigated by the cold atmosphere of the season – such as the barking or at least the heavy breathing of the hounds, the voices of children skating on the “lively” rink and the noise of the “fourth bird” that flies, concluding the meticulous and moving description. The success of the text lies, in fact, in the capacity to turn a “scene”, a view, into the source of meditation on the permanence of the substance and memory of things, as well as on the passing of time, exactly as it happens in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian 20 According to Daniel Swift, “Introduction” to John Berryman, The Heart’s Strange: New Selected Poems, New York, Farrar-Straus-Giroux, 2014, p. XVI, the poem is a variation on “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” by Dylan Thomas.

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Urn” (another famous ekphrastic poem) or in Wallace Stevens’s “Vacancy in the Park” (a notional ekphrasis).21 The ideological proximity with the paradigmatic Romantic poet is proven by Berryman’s allusion to the fact that the “three men coming down the winter hill” (line 1) “can never reach” their “long companions” (line 8) so that they “will be seen upon the brow/ Of that same hill” for-ever (lines 13–14). An original “movement” is then added and the poem becomes more thoroughly Berryman’s. It is an element that has to do with saying/hearing more than with seeing. The three men “will say” (“will tell” the observers, line 17) “What place, what time, what morning occasion// Sent them into the wood” (lines 20–21). There is, in sum, no crystallization of gestures in potentia, no damnation to eternal silence but the possibility of an explicit communication with the onlooker : an eventual message which might be the revelation of an important truth or, no less important, simply the explanation of an “ordinary” fact, a story or daily routine. “Conversation” experiments in yet another metrical scheme, consisting of four octaves ending, in general, with real rhymes (sure/endure, how/now, brought/thought) but also, occasionally, with assonances or consonances (men/ again, invisible/tell, coast/faced, hearth/forth). Longer and shorter lines, whose number of syllables varies from nine to eleven, have a prevailing rhythm of iambic trimeters (“The sHa is dark and wH are told it’s dHep”, line 8), sometimes lacking a syllable (“But argument held one thing sure”, line 3) and sometimes turning to a trochaic cadence (“T|ok the alarming p|stures of our f8ar”, line 28), as if the breaking of a conventional metrical pattern was functional to rendering a sense of uncertainty, a dialogue that is all but fluent about facts and things that are perhaps only “impressions” and ideas that are rather tentative “opinions”. The “navigation” of the poetic I (or, to be more precise, of the poetic we) in such an uneasy network is hard; the pilot has few references and the officer probably does not know the coast. The scene is an indoor space but there is no sense of home, the fireplace is lit but there is no warmth. “The embers cool” (line 21) bringing bad thoughts Of cities stripped of knowledge, men, Our continent a wilderness again (lines 23–24).

Against these bad thoughts the ‘we’ who speak or painfully remember turn to alcohol with no satisfaction. After the effective images we have met thus far, here slowly and eerily comes the “smoke in the air” that takes “the alarming postures of our fears”. A ghost floats overhead as an ominous and silent interlocutor, 21 Wallace Stevens, “Vacancy in the Park”, originally in The Rock (1954), then in Collected Poems, New York, Knopf, 1967, p. 511. For the concept of notional ekphrasis see John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, University of Chicago P., 1995.

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threatening a space that in the last line is defined “delicate and dangerous”. This is an early example of elegant oxymoronic alliteration; other similarly successful alliterations (though very few simply “elegant”) will abound in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956: “in the rain of pain […] whom my lost candle like the firefly loves”) and in Dream Songs: “He is a human American man”. Berryman’s most famous alliteration is the one that somehow sets in motion the whole sequence of Dream Songs: “Huffy Henry hid the day” (I, 1). 2. In the central part of his literary career, Berryman experimented much more than “elegant alliterations”, in a linguistic and prosodic tension that often seems to obsessively fight against the technical and acoustic inadequacies of the poetic language. His strategy can be defined as the struggle of the musical dimension (as an instrument of “total poetic expression”) against the resistance of the English syntax.22 He followed – as heterogeneous and often contradictory models – various authors of the 19th and 20th century : Lewis Carroll, Browning, Meredith of Modern Love, Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Frost, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas – writers who sounded modern enough to his ear in spite of what critical schools assumed. Then he manipulated his “sonnets” and practiced bricolage with his poetic heritage, going as far back in history as the middle ages and reviving the forms of Irish meter that were used from the VIII to the X century. He introduced contemporary lexemes in traditional contexts, archaisms, old fashioned words, references to far fetched historical characters or to the history of cinema (“cadmium shine”, “utraquist”, “Ciro”, “Chaplin”), pretending to take for granted his readers’ awareness of the difference between “Jitterburg” and “pavanne” (Sonnet 87) or confessing: “I prod our English: cough me up a word/ Slip me an epithet”. He also proclaimed that he was not ashamed of Crumpling a syntax at a sudden need, Stridor of English softening to plead O to you plainly lest you more resist. (Sonnet 47)

22 Rob Jackman, Broken English/Breaking English, Madison, Wisconsin., Farleigh Dickinson U. P., 2003; see also Peter Stitt, “John Berryman, His Teachings, His Scholarship, His Poetry”, in Recovering Berryman: Essays on a Poet, ed. by Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop, Ann Arbor, U. of Michigan P., 1993: “the most distinctive quality of Berryman’s style lies in his manipulation of syntax, a characteristic that accounts […] for much of his stylistic brilliance […] This regard for syntactical complexity shows up everywhere and takes many forms. Most often and most obviously it can be seen in a word order that is simply inverted from the normal pattern […] Such a style, when taken to the extreme, can be counterproductive” (pp. 52–53). In addition, Stitt quotes Robert Lowell’s review of 77 Dream Songs (The New York Review of Books, May 1964), which concludes with the older poet’s surrender to “so much darkness, disorder, and oddness” (Stitt, p. 58).

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Still later, he did not simply “prod” the language nor did he care to “soften” his diction; unable to succeed in pleading to the few people he wanted to please, he gave up all banal and traditional attempts at communicating with the greater part of his readership which, as was inevitable, included people of the kind no poet like Berryman ever wanted to seduce. Other frequent “movements” were: a. the inversion of subject and verb, which proves particularly surprising and effective when used at the beginning of a poem: “In the night reaches dreamed he”, “In slack times visit I the violent dead”; “Thought I much then on perforated daddy” (“Freshman’s Blues”, in Love & Fame, 1970); b. the use of hyperbolic images in contrast with the typical everyday life diction: “your high-jinks delighted the continent and our ears:/ You had so many girls your life was a triumph” (addressing a dead W. B. Yeats, in Dream Song 325); c. the increase of distance between subject and verb: “I only as far as gratitude & awe/ confidently & absolutely go” (“Eleven Addresses to the Lord”, in Love & Fame, 1970); d. the insertion of contradictions expressed (unlike Whitman’s) in an epigrammatic way : “I love great men I love. Nobody’s great” (Dream Song 230); e. the addition of “alien” lexemes between the two halves of a stereotypical locution (“All the black same I dance my blue head off!” (“King David Dances”, in Delusions, Etc., 1972).23 3. His beloved (Lisa), evidently a more passionate lover of classical music than Berryman himself, is described in John Berryman’s Sonnets as indifferent to his attentions and preferring a self-referential concentration on a “tetragrammaton”, that is four mythical figures of the past: “Bach, Mozart, Beethoven & Schubert” (Sonnet 92). The poetic I discovers that, as a “theme” of conversation, an excuse to avoid involvement or a passion that is not evenly shared between two lovers, music can be an enemy, obstruct loving and hinder the suffering man who wears the mask of the “singer”. But, at the same time, music gives rise to poetic production and stimulates the invention of new linguistic 23 Very often in interviews, notes, and letters, Berryman revealed his enthusiasm for writers (novelists or poets) whose style is complex and hard to “digest”. See for instance this passage from a letter to his mother (November 28, 1936) : “[James’s] famous late style is surely extraordinary, little statement and continual qualification by clause and phrase, amazingly involved, terribly difficult, ambiguous in the extreme”; cf. John Berryman, We Dream of Honor: Letters to His Mother, ed. by Richard J. Kelly, New York, Norton, 1988, p. 75. Berryman’s strategies of poetical evolution through syntactical involution also show the influence of two apparently contradictory models: the “convoluted phrasing” of late Shakespearean plays and the common errors in the language of American children, analyzed by H. L. Mencken in his The American Language (1919); revised edition, New York, Knopf, 2006 (cf. Swift, Op. cit., pp. xxviii–xxix).

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devices and verbal strategies. In lines written at a short distance of time, in lists of nouns or adjectives, Berryman used a traditional punctuation: “Impressions, structures, tales” (“Message”, in Love and Fame, 1969) or completely abolished it: “I am busy tired mad lonely & old” (“Damned”, Ibidem). In this late, particularly controversial collection, his stylistic procedures risked contradicting the very title from the beginning, as he acknowledged in his “Afterword” to the London Edition (1971). But scholarship on Berryman should not limit its attention to his poetry, since his passion for music and his interest in opera surface in the most unexpected corners of his prose pieces as well. In reviewing W. H. Auden’s collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand (1963), for example, he limits his quotations from the book to two or three short passages but cannot resist quoting Auden’s opinion according to which “the essential Falstaff is the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Verdi’s opera”; an opinion he evidently shared and which demonstrates how sensitive both poets were to the transcodifications of Shakespeare’s plays in melodrama.24 Recently Henry Cole concluded a short article on Berryman in The New Yorker quoting Berryman’s opinion that Mozart’s life “was at the merci of his art” and used it to define Berryman’s own obsessive devotion to his profession. 4. Beethoven triumphant is included in Delusions, Etc. of John Berryman (1972). As I stated, Berryman’s ecumenical and comprehensive taste appreciated all phases in the history of music. But since my purpose is now to try a contrast with Lanier’s ode, I will concentrate on this poem, which belongs to the last years of Berryman’s production and therefore exemplifies the last phase in his relationship with music in general and with the German master in particular. We find another four poems dedicated to as many historical or literary figures in this collection (George Washington, Emily Dickinson, Georg Trackl, Dylan Thomas), but only the ode to Beethoven is a complex and obscure text that can be read as a palimpsest. Its 27 stanzas (mostly quatrains) present (in 120 short lines) a great number of semantic layers, frequent variations and examples of ceaseless experimentation, offering ample evidence of Berryman’s imaginative power in a period that critics tend to judge negatively. A period rich as always in authentic tension, in which the poet was apparently unable (or unwilling) to move forward, in the context of a world that made him feel an estranged survivor. Delusions, Etc., in fact, was published in the year of the author’s death and can be interpreted as the continuation of Love and Fame. Beethoven had been frequently mentioned in Berryman’s poems, prose and 24 John Berryman, “Auden’s Prose” in The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays, New York, Random House, 1962.

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interviews. The poet was convinced that the German composer was a key figure not only in the history of music but in the history of poetry. In a talk at the California Writers Conference he asked his audience: “Without Beethoven, could Eliot have so shaped ‘The Wasteland?’”. In a more or less unconscious response to Lanier, whose ode had mentioned only Beethoven’s symphonies, Berryman chooses to mention a great number of compositions, in particular those that are the favorite pieces in the small world of real connoisseurs rather than popular with the public at large. So the paradox is that a professional musician and composer, as Lanier was, did not exploit his first hand experience of the great master’s music, whereas a man who had little practical knowledge of it and who had gradually become a great “listener”, developing an exceptionally appreciative ear, acted as a highbrow critic and an idiosyncratic man-abouttown. It all depends on the kind of public the two authors wanted to address. Lanier used Beethoven, Wagner and music in general, similarly to all other issues he dealt with, pursuing a moral and pedagogical mission, open to a large community of fellow-citizens, whom he hoped to educate. Berryman is the typical 20th century “poets’ poet” or even a “critics’ poet” who, living in the age of anxiety, has no hope of embodying the figure of a teacher or a master. The title of the poem is somewhat misleading, in so far as the fragmentary text is not properly an “ode” in praise of Beethoven’s greatness. Rather it is a tribute interspersed with notes and comments on the dark side of the composer’s personality. Berryman shows a complete knowledge of Beethoven’s compositions and long acquaintance with biographic texts and the myth of the solitary giant, the vulnerable and touchy man. Reported anecdotes are given the same space as interpretations of musical pieces; famous answers to stupid questions and objections vindicate the profile of an often “awkward and plangent” man who defended his inner world “pretending” to be absent-minded. In Berryman’s view, Beethoven, in spite of his deafness, heard – and was deeply disturbed by – a “botched rehearsal of the Eighth” (stanza 7). His stature is shown indirectly, through frequent comparisons with other men in the history of mankind whom, notwithstanding their flaws and faults, the poet considered exceptional or indeed “unique”: Napoleon, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Samuel Johnson. The strategic use of paradoxes and oxymora creates a chiaroscuro that carves a three-dimensional portrait, conveying the significance of the great musician for the poetic I: “You built-in the improbable […] you clowned/ You made throats swallow/ And shivered the backs of necks” (stanza 15), “He is an unlicked bear”, “encrusted”. Unlike Mozart, his “lingering” music is full of “fumbling notes” and of ups and downs. The climax of the text is reached in stanzas 16–24 when, after confessing that both blues and Haydn “touch – but they don’t ache me”, the poet discovers a dramatic kinship that gives rise to an “interference” of two souls: “You interfere./ O yes we interfere”. (I particularly appreciate the shift

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from “you” to “we interfere”). Listening to Beethoven’s music turns, therefore, into a journey through one’s own psyche. The notes that “penetrate” (only apparently from outside) the modern man’s consciousness are the instruments of an “inter-penetration” and a mutual shock of recognition: “Am I this tutti, am I this rallentando?/ This entrance of the oboe?/ I am all these” (stanza 18). The acme of the text corresponds, I believe, to the splendid distich in stanza 24, in which the identification with the musician (with his destiny oscillating between unhappiness and joy) finally surfaces, finding an appropriate form in unusually long lines: The mysteries of Oedipus old were not beyond you. Islands of suffering & disenchantment & enchantment.

After such an intense moment the last stanza expresses Beethoven’s immortality in suitably plain words: “They say you died […] It’s a lie. You are all over my wall!/ You move and chant around here! I hear your thighs” (stanza 27). The two exclamation marks do not disturb the balanced diction, adding a tone of wonder and intimate surprise. Equally effective is the idea of combining move and chant in addition to the original hypothesis of posthumously hearing the thighs of the great man who could not hear his own music. In conclusion for Berryman Beethoven is an emblem of heroic survival, unflinching stance against an inert cultural context and human imperfection that becomes sheer genius. In Lanier, as we have seen, Beethoven was one of the two poles around which his musical experience (and expertise) revolved, the other one being Wagner, toward whom his taste inclined, though less for musical reasons than for the contextual consequences of the composer’s attention to history and ideology. Berryman preferred instrumental music, symphonies and, above all, concerts and trios; he stressed the fact that Beethoven was scarcely interested in opera (“whatever his kindness to Rossini and contempt for Italians”, stanza 7). Though writing a masterpiece in the history of opera (Fidelio), Beethoven would have never agreed with Wagner and Lanier, that musical theater could be the agent of national or social reform. And neither did Berryman. Who, as the title of his last collection suggests, ended his poetic career in “disenchantment” and “delusion” and his life in suicide.25

25 Paul Mariani, Dream Song: A Life of John Berryman, Amherst, U. of Massachusetts P., 1996, p. 360.

Music in James Merrill

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Italian opera did not seem vulgar, “superficial” or too easy to James Merrill. Verdi’s arias and leitmotifs sounded like stimulating “riddles” he could “whistle but not solve”. However, his favorite opera composer was Wagner, who is a totally different prototype from Verdi and, in fact, appealed to him as “significance itself”. No other poet we met in this volume acknowledged so plainly his indebtedness to a great musical father figure who, producing “A music in whose folds the mind, at twelve,/ Came to its senses”, fostered the grand beginning of “everything”: “The world’s life. Mine.” (“The Ring Cycle”, in A Scattering of Salts, 1995). No other feature better exemplifies the differences – in taste, diction, ideological implications – between Berryman and Merrill than the fact that the former embraced the heritage of Beethoven, who only wrote an opera and a few overtures, whereas the latter accepted a full immersion in the musical world of Stravinsky, Mozart, Verdi and, above all, Wagner, the great advocate of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk. As I said, I will consider Merrill both per se, as an extremely important model of a poet who, in general, was inspired by music – and, in particular, used opera in his literary production – and as a means through which I can sum up most of the themes I discussed, drawing some conclusions as I finalize my literary excursion through the lens of music. In analyzing his poems (and some prose passages) I will use an intertextual contrastive method, considering them with reference to other literary figures who were objects of this study or who, in the 20th century, showed a similar inclination towards the world of opera. One could easily write a book entirely devoted to Merrill’s love of music, to the development of his taste, to his friends – who regularly belonged to the musical world or lived in touch with it – and to the functionalization of opera – in all its aspects – in his poetry and prose. So my preliminary remarks on the poet’s acoustic sensitivity, his use of the sense of hearing and the expressions of his musical preferences will need be concise. There are, however, a few important points I want to stress, in order to clarify my discussion of differences and analogies between Merrill, Berryman and other 20th century poets: 1. Merrill’s musical taste, like Berryman’s, was comprehensive, but with a clear preference for musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century ; 2. opera provoked a stronger reaction in his psyche and, since he (more than Berryman) can be considered a post-modern poet,26 this reaction results in more frequent quotations and textual manipulations;

26 Andrea Mariani, “James Merrill: A Postmodern Poet? Yes & No”, in R.S.A. Journal, IV (1993), pp. 31–56.

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3. due to Merrill’s acceptance of an aesthetics – that Berryman, in spite of his radical innovations, would have refused – that can be defined “of pastiche”, highbrow and lowbrow musical productions mix, work together in synergy and prove equally productive in his texts. I start assuming that Merrill seldom uses music as a sort of grand structural pattern; it is rather an alternative register and a complementary acoustic ingredient in his compositional strategies which enable him to obtain the most varied rhythmical results, translating the soundscapes that inhabit his mind into appropriate verbal utterances. This explains, for instance, the title of the “Coda” which concludes his trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover (1976–82): “The Higher Keys”. The last segment of the monumental poem includes, in fact, a long passage (“The Music to Come”) in which voices of people who have recently died and spirits who are ready to come to earth again discuss the fact that the whole process of metempsychosis is made possible by the musical dimension of the universe; if one wants to “make sense of it”, the “scribe” (the poet) needs to use “higher [musical] keys”. Before being re-incarnated, the noble spirits have to demonstrate their musical expertise, for instance composing “500 VARIATIONS / ON THREE NOTES […] AND MUST BE LINKED FIRST TO THEIR FREQUENCIES/ IN WESTERN MUSIC (SCHUMANN, BACH, JOSQUIN)”. Equally important is the ability to play a “primeval”, fairy-tale kind of innocent music, like that played by “A PURE PIED PIPER IN THE WESTERN LAND/ WHO’LL CHARM THE RATS AWAY”. With a pun typical of Merrill’s taste, the most sophisticated musical keys coincide, in the end, with the keys which open the doors of a “superior” house. Only a few wise spirits understand that it is as essential to use them to enter it as it is to give them away, giving up all sense of “possession”. As Mr E (Ephraim/Eros, patron and guardian spirit) reveals in a final lesson, music is a fourth dimension, a pervasive resonance and a “register compelling harmonies”, that is the only apt accompaniment for God’s creation of the world and for man’s cooperation in the endeavor. This is what we are told at the conclusion of the poem. Already at the beginning of it (The Book of Ephraim, in Divine Comedies, 1976) we were informed that strong musical references are the only strategy that can prevent the poet’s verse from relying too much on an impressionistic “word painting”: My downfall was “word painting”. Exquisite Peek-a-boo plumage, limbs aflush from sheer Bombast unfurling through the troposphere… (Canto A).

In a dramatic moment of initial uncertainty, the poet wonders whether prose would be a better choice (“The baldest prose/ Reportage […] would reach/ The

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widest public in the shortest time”). Soon after that, however, Merrill understands that “Since it had never truly fit, why wear/ The shoe of prose?” and boldly sets on move to write “The Book of a Thousand and One Evening Spent/ With David Jackson at the Ouija Board”. The poetry/music nexus allows the author to experiment every possible linguistic and technical solution, in an endless variation of motifs. He also uses, when necessary, the “word painting” that seemed at first so dangerous, but without falling victim to it and to a manneristic style that would deprive the whole enterprise of its ethical message. Music conjures up pictures from the sounds of life; after this process, pictures can be “sounded in language”.27 As the spirits reveal in Mirabell 6. 6, even light and colors derive from sounds: ONLY MUSIC & WORDS IMPLICATE THAT LIGHT WHICH BOTH SHEDS & ATTRACTS THAT LIGHT IN WHICH ALONE TRUE COLOR IS SEEN.

Critics agree that in the whole The Book of Ephraim a good musical ear can detect “calibrations along a tonal scale”.28 Merrill, in fact, was well aware of Schoenberg’s revolutionary theories but (as the spirits remark) “HE GRASPED THE MOULD-/BREAKING IDEA BUT LEFT US WITH THE OLD” (again in “The Music to Come”). Music helps Merrill in two further extremely difficult tasks: 1. the discourse on memory, time and retrieving of the past, and 2. the expression of a complex metaphysical system. The former process is made easier by the device according to which the past functions as a “sounding board”. History (personal and collective) would have no meaning without an acoustic memory which stores and re-presents to the mind the different tempos and motifs that characterize our lives and the (only apparently “immemorial”) life of the planet. The spiral-like movements of such music may often appear as endless operations on an inert loom, but all of a sudden events (that may look like coincidences, but are not, since “there is no accident”) coalesce and Mother Nature (“a ruthless force at once fecund & lazy”, Mirabell 7. 3) leaps forward into a new “phase” or era. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Trilogy – a poem which is often impervious and occasionally boring – is precisely the outburst of memories, the play of recollections, the discovery of the meaning of (false) coincidences, the overlapping of oppositional patterns and the debate between JM and his partner DJ about things half remembered and half forgotten, that an indulgent guide like 27 James Baird, “James Merrill’s Sound of Feeling: Language and Music”, in Southwest Review, 74, 3 (1989), p. 361. 28 Willard Spiegelman, “Breaking the Mirror : Interruption in Merrill’s Trilogy.” In Lehman and Berger, eds., cit., pp. 186–210. Cf. also Bianca Tarozzi, “La strada per il Paradiso,” in In forma di parole 5, 2 (April-June 1984), pp. 247–73.

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Ephraim smilingly explains before it should be too late. All this is literally “accompanied” by what Poe would call musical “arabesques” and “grotesque” solutions. As concerns Merrill’s expression of a metaphysical system, I should rather refer to it as to a series of systems. At an early stage of The Changing Light at Sandover, in fact, it proves that the poet’s vision of this and of the other/netherworld, is ambivalent and endlessly re-formulated. Musical counterpoint is the only technique that can describe or at least suggest it, no matter how grand the poet’s orchestration sounds and how numerous the voices and instruments that take part in the concert are. Every single voice and every instrument follow a melody of their own that may or may not intersect, overlap and diverge from the others. Merrill’s polyphony, however, is more on the side of Bach than of Pierluigi da Palestrina, in so far as it seemingly starts with an implicit harmony, which is then “pierced” by rising melodies, rather than vice versa. In many collective “scenes”, performances and “ceremonies” the phantasmagoria of sounds and lights (characters crowded in a parlor, anxious to speak, faces and silhouettes in a mirror, strange mythical figures, dark angels and bats crossing the sky routes) resembles, for instance, the moving dramatic finale of Act Three in Verdi’s Otello, when seven characters sing simultaneously (Desdemona, Emilia, Lodovico, Cassio, Roderigo, Otello, Iago, plus chorus). But each sings his or her own part, expressing different emotions: despair, pity, mercy, wonder, sympathy, rage, hatred. The conductor must be extremely careful in securing that the general impression received by spectators is not that of a “shared convulsion” but of the intersection of several sinusoids whose success lies precisely in not running parallel nor merging into each other. The meaning is not the algebraic addition of pluses and minuses but the permanence of sounds, roles and messages that do not annul one another reciprocally. The final coherence of heterogeneous materials produces the expression of a metaphysical dimension that, although somewhat outdated, can seem/sound acceptable (as an extended metaphor, for example) to a large number of persons, even in a postmodern skeptical world. Before and after the Trilogy, in keeping with the technique of counterpoint, Merrill wrote dozens of poems that are the equivalent of fugues or are based on variations. “Willowware Cup” (Braving the Elements, 1972) clearly shows how the poet exploits this technique. The thirteen couplets describe decorations and figures in a set of porcelain, interpreting every minimal detail (such as “the gnatsized lovers”). The result is a chain of “stories” which take shape, surface and disperse in centrifugal movements, that disappear or become concentrated, crowding centripetally in order to convey a doubtful, utopian message (“They represent, I fancy, a version of heaven”). Line 5 documents one of the best examples of alliteration in Merrill (pl-bl-p-bl-b-pl-w-ll-w):

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Plum in bloom, pagoda, blue birds, plume of willow –

“Trees Listening to Bach” (Late Settings, 1985) is an explicit tribute to Bach and to his art of the fugue; its incipit consists in an operatic gesture: “Overture. A shutter opens. Down/ Goes the light”. Then comes the list of trees that seem to not be only listening but reacting to a piece of Bach (which includes Courante, Sarabande, Gigue). The fact is that each tree (Norfolk Island pine, jade tree, chestnut…) reacts in a different way (breathing, resigning, revolving, quickening, champing, manes tossing) and thus enhances the polyphony of Bach’s music. After such a mixed (and productive) response, the music ends (“the Gigue dismounts”) but the emotion stays in the air, projecting itself far beyond the limits of the text: “The stillness reaches “to the skies”// On the used plate a wash of silver dries”. As in Thoreau and Lanier, in Merrill silence is essential not only for the appreciation of music, after the sounds are dispelled, but for its construction. And so it is for poetry. We should not forget that the immensely long Trilogy (over 17,000 lines) ends at sunset, before a broken mirror and broken language: the rest, as Hamlet would say, is silence. As in Thoreau, the influence of Hindu metaphysics and of the theory of dhva¯ni (“the ineffable”) is evident. If, after the exhausting effort of the longest poem, the poet decides to continue to write poetry, he will privilege “neither the sound nor the meaning of the word […] but its suffusion, the vibrating psychic halo around it”.29 Merrill was already experimenting the counterpoint/fugue/variation technique in the 1950s, although he sometimes had problems in fully realizing his intentions. “Variations: The Air is Sweetest That a Thistle Guards” (First Poems, 1951) consists of six sections, each with an increasing number of stanzas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, until the sixth has, again, only one), each with a different metrical scheme: long or short lines, with or without rhymes and assonances. At this stage, however, Merrill believed that all major themes for poetry (“time and love and doom”) can be defined as Those great blue grottos of feeling where the rank intruder Is moved to think in rhyme (stanza no. 4).

The overall impression is that different voices interpret different themes. Different seasons, moments of the day and (indoor, outdoor) landscapes cooperate, without actually dialoguing with each other. It is not a “concordia discors” but an early postmodern “discordia concors”. The poetic I accepts memories and concrete facts, sudden pains and unexpected joys, puzzles and epiphanies30 with 29 El8mire Zolla, “Poetry and Silence”, in Poetic Knowledge, ed. by R. Hagenbüchle and J. T. Swann, Bonn, Bouvier, 1978, p. 169. 30 According to Frank Kermode, the literature of the 20th century is characterized by the tension

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no sense of fragmentation. The conclusion is utterly positive; the complex intersection, antiphonal response or mutual distancing of voices, motifs, images from the past and “stories” witnessed or reported, bring about a potent revelation, which is going to accompany the Self for ever: Love merely as the best There is […] To say at the end, however we find it, good Bad, or indifferent, it helps us, and the air Is sweetest there.

“Variations and Elegy : White Stag, Black Bear” (again in First Poems) is based on a striking difference in acoustic technique between the first part (six short variations on the theme of a conflictual father/son relationship) and the final, much longer “elegy” which, in a unified melody, tries to sum up and reconcile the different motifs. In both movements it is possible to detect that early Whitmanian influence that seemed to disappear from Merrill’s poetic practice in the decades spanning 1960–1980 but surfaced again as he approached the composition of the last section of the Trilogy. Whitman, in fact, has an important position in the circle of “remarkable poets” (sort of Dante’s “spiriti magni”) who convene in the last scene and listen to the whole poem, read by JM in a solemn “pre-view” or better “pre-hearing”. As critics have underlined, Merrill is more concerned with musical tempo than with rhythm. Baird detects a clear “andante sostenuto” in “Olive Grove” (The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, 1959, rev. ed. 1970) and in “The Lovers” (Ibidem). That it is andante there is no doubt; that it is sostenuto depends on how we read the text, especially if we read it aloud. The five quatrains flow with no interruption, “naturally” following each other. They are connected with each other by rhymes and assonances that peep here and there (brow, bough, now, bestows, grown, alone). The lines are linked by many enjambements (“her father slept/ Sleep of the blue wave”, “to wean/ Roots from deep earth”, “have grown/ Out of that molten center”). There is never a suspicion of increasing or decreasing pace: the breathing, the pulse, so to say, of the poem is uniform, self-contained and self-confident. Perhaps more clearly sostenuto is the andante of “The Lovers”; the six-line stanzas develop the initial simile (“They met in loving like the hands of one…”) in such a fluent way, that it seems impossible (or unbecoming) to interrupt the reading of the poem before reaching its conclusion. There is an “articulation” but also an “accumulation” of discourses – that intersect and tend to flee from the gist of the question the text deals with – making it hard to “comprehend” the message at first reading. However, the mere reading of the technically impeccable lines is so gratifying between these two structures: see his Puzzles and Epiphanies. Essays and Reviews: 1958–1961, New York, Chilmark, 1962.

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that it makes it easier to accept the idea of postponing the rational examination of the message. If Thoreau and Lanier played the flute well, Merrill, no less than Dickinson, was a dedicated pianist and practiced the piano with much intensity and more serious efforts than one usually devotes to a hobby, however prestigious. In his poem “Angel” (in Water Street, 1962) he confesses that a passage from Erik Satie’s Sarabande No. 1 proves particularly hard to master, although it has “already, and effortlessly, mastered me”. The play on the double use of “master” is another evidence of his tendency towards ambiguities and mots d’esprit. However, what counts most, in this case, is the content of the message. Both God’s world and Satie’s music (“Each glimpsed through veils, but whole,/ Radiant and willed”) demand praise and surrender; as in Whitman, nature and art (the false opposition between natural and artificial products) must be reconciled and felt as “whole”. The poem continues with a touch of self irony, staging the doubts of the poet who refuses to “contemplate” the wonders of creation by looking out of the window but cannot accept his limits before the score of Satie. He has reserves in his mind (“I could mention/ Flaws in God’s world, or Satie’s”) and does not give up his art, that is the few words he puts down as he tries to write “these few lines”. At the beginning of the poem the angel of the title is described as a little angel “school of Van Eyck”, so Merrill’s discourse is, from the beginning, intrinsically and effortlessly intersemiotic. The combination of nature and art, of music, painting and poetry, suggests the “atmosphere”. In fact, in Merrill we never find certainties, absolute truths, revelations, epiphanies or epiphonies: reality (above all metaphysical reality) is always only “glimpsed through veils”. Men must accept to live and survive satisfied with vague ideas or “impressions” that something is more this than the other way. Every time the mind and the soul seem to find a final answer or an explicit message the whole universe of signs (in all codes) takes upon itself to discourage all illusion. This assumption is documented both in short lyrical poems like “Angel” and in the monumental Trilogy which was dictated by heavenly “powers” appearing during the long s8ances at the Ouija Board. In conclusion, the fugue and the counterpoint testify a procedure that confirms the binary nature of Merrill’s production and his deep psyche. His musical taste, as I claim, is happily comprehensive; his quotations and references and his dialogues and encounters include Ravel, Faur8, Debussy, Stravinsky, Satie, Verdi as well as Wagner ; Maria Callas as well as Dame Maggie Teyte and Kristen Flagstad. I am not implying that Merrill’s musical habits and the acoustic companies he chose to consort with were promiscuous, confused and incoherent. In fact, he regularly chose the most stimulating aspects for a man of his century from all composers and the most revolutionary traits they left as a heritage for future generations. Borrowing an expression from Helen Vendler, I

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dare say that in Merrill music is always “operative”, factual, concrete, personalized and interiorized. It is a music of events and productions, not a music “that just happens” but “the music of what happens”31, that is the music that accompanies his life and poetry as they happen to develop. Before shifting to the role played by opera proper, I want to stress that music has the same importance in Merrill’s prose pieces – such as, for example, the short story “Rose” (in Recitative, 1986), a text that reminds me of the pervasive atmosphere surrounding the fascinating pages of Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (e. g. “Ellen Terhune”).32 In texts like these, music is suggestive and penetrating at the same time, often frankly uncanny but able to support the narrative tension till the final d8nouement. It is what remains in the reader’s mind closely associated to the text as it is interiorized. Merrill’s second novel, The (Diblos) Notebooks,33 which tried to import into the United States some of the techniques of nouveau roman, was soon defined the partially successful attempt at reproducing “the hesitation waltz of creation”. The term “creation” obviously refers both to the chain of events assembled in the artist’s mind as he organizes the plot and the stylistic instruments through which the “story” is produced and fixed on the page. It is a technique of writing and cancelling: two steps forward and one step back. Not Penelope’s web, however, since things also cancelled are kept on the page as traces of “pentimentos” which do not deserve to be swallowed up by oblivion. Perhaps poetry was chosen by Merrill as his expressive medium because – since, as Recitative has it, we all have “acoustic chambers” in our minds – its echoes, unlike music’s, are not destined to be absorbed by space and time but remain as layers of our acoustic palimpsest and, written on a page, as indelible inscriptions, hieroglyphs and pictograms in our mind’s eye.

4.

Merrill and opera. Conclusions

Opera filled Merrill’s life and overflowed into his writings, according to a spontaneous but extremely careful method, typical of confessional poetry. It constellated the various phases of the growth of his personality, contributing to 31 Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, Cambridge, Harvard U. P., 1987. 32 Edmund Wilson, “Ellen Terhune”, in Memoirs of Hecate County, New York, Octagon & Page, 1959. 33 James Merrill, The (Diblos) Notebook, New York, Atheneum, 1965; repr., with a post-script of the author, MacLean, IL, Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. Cf. Morris Eaves, “Decision and Revision in James Merrill’s (Diblos) Notebook”, Contemporary Literature, 12, 2 (Spring 1971), pp. 156–165.

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the shaping of his mature psyche. It provided some of the most enduring emotions, serving as accompaniment for his most cherished remembrances.34 All aspects of the opera world became more and more familiar to his consciousness. He was exposed to it in his early childhood. The “Mademoiselle” who took care of him during an important summer vacation told him the dramatic story of Pagliacci (1892) and played Leoncavallo’s “Prologue” for him.35 His mother took him to the Met for unforgettable productions of Wagner’s Tetralogy ; his father taught him to whistle Verdi’s arias, which he later called “riddles” because, in their apparent simplicity, they proved as easy to memorize as difficult to solve. Opera helped him to accept his life as a “pageant subsumed in music”36 and is reflected, therefore, in particular in the third section of his Trilogy : Scripts for the Pageant (1980–82).37 Merrill shared his passion for opera with his friends, a circle of cosmopolitan artists and actors, musicians, experimental novelists and fellow poets. An intense profile of Maria Callas (with heavy sunglasses) is included among the eight photographs that enrich the thick volume of The Changing Light at Sandover. Unlike in Demby, in Merrill Callas is not only the mythical figure of the greatest soprano but a long time friend, even (and perhaps above all) in the period of her decline. When she is conjured up in a climactic moment of Scripts for the Pageant (No, “Exits and Entrances”) she is acknowledged as “La Divina/ Callas herself fresh from her greatest role”. Then we soon understand that the poetic I knew her in person since, when she speaks, she acts and speaks as a demanding prima donna: THEY CALL THIS THE STAR’S DRESSING ROOM? THIS HOLE?

34 Cf. Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art, New York, Knopf, 2015: “Opera made him aware of art’s potential to give voice to the most profound feelings – and aware of the rhetorical, performed nature of any expression of such feeling. It was a way to study, within the safe frame of the proscenium, the passions and intrigues that his parents had set before him at home. Opera’s people were prey to primitive, dreamlike violence, but always as an effect of visible artistic choices (stage, business, lighting, props), and their characters were safely caricatures – larger than life” (p. 49). 35 Strangely enough, Leoncavallo, whose critical fame is now reduced to a minimal degree, continued to interest Merrill’s frame of mind, even with such minor operas as Zaz/ (premiere Milan, Teatro Lirico, 1900). See Langdon Hammer, Op. cit., p. 123. Merrill’s comprehensive curiosity for all sorts of classic and modern operas resulted in brief, sudden visits to New York City from Stonington, Connecticut (where he lived a relative quiet life after completing the Trilogy) for rare productions of operas which had never entered the major “repertoire”, such as Berlioz’s Les Troyens (premiere Paris, T8atre de la Ville, 1863). Cf. Ibidem, p. 664. 36 Baird, Op. cit., p. 375. 37 Langdon Hammer provides us with the information that, in his bed in hospital, the day before he died, Merrill was listening to Schubert’s Impromptus, Maggie Teyte singing French songs, dances by Federico Monpou and Clara Haskil playing Mozart (Op. cit., p. 790).

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According to Merrill, one of the most astonishing gifts of mankind is the capacity to sing. Singing convinces even the sternest judge, Mother Nature, that mankind deserves to be saved, after all; in fact she is, in the end, more merciful than angry : BUT THEN THE APE SINGS, HE TOUCHES MY HEART, MOVING SHADOWLY ABOUT IN HIS LIGHTED TENT […] I CLOSE THE LID AND SMILE (Scripts for the Pageant, & , “The Middle Lessons”, 5).

As Merrill confesses in his “Forword” to Recitative (the 1989 collection of his prose pieces), prose always seemed “as a mildly nightmarish medium, to which there is no end”; whereas a given line of poetry creates the desire for another, and renews […] the musical attack. With prose […] the aria never came. All was recitative. […] I held out for song, for opera, for opera – works no longer made up of set pieces but durchkomponiert according to the best post-Wagnerian models. (Recitative, “Forword”, p. XIII)

Opera appealed to him for its intrinsic musical and dramatic values but also (as is the case in Whitman) because, in its operations, music ceases to be the abstract output of a great, inspired “soul”, becoming, instead, as concrete, indeed “physical”, as performative art can be. The score becomes a set of voices and a number of bodies moving on stage, with their gestures, expressions and presence.38 The result, when it is successful, is the result of a miraculous collaboration among the librettist, the writer who originally wrote the story that served as a source, the musician who added the score (orchestration, arias, duettos), the orchestra, the singers, the stage director, the conductor, the costume designers and, last but not least, the audience. All these “contributors” are members of a team that crosses time and space, overcoming the transformations of fashions and tastes, as well as the oscillations of ideologies that influence cultural contexts. A similar effect of multiple/multi-tonal, though heterogeneous, human and superhuman cooperation – as in Dante’s “poema sacro/ a cui han posto mano e cielo e terra” (Paradiso, XXV, 1–2)39 – is what Merrill is intent on achieving in his magnum opus. As I have mentioned, The Book of Ephraim (the first part of the trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover) opens in an atmosphere of doubts: would a novel (or a journalistic prose) be more convenient than a long poem? The only thing the poetic I is sure of is that a very special tone was needed:

38 John Paul Russo, “An Opportune Game: The Ouija Board in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover”, in Letterature d’America, 7, 33–34 (1986), pp. 140–171. 39 “The sacred poem –/ Whereto both heaven and earth have so set hand”, in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, transl. by Thomas G. Bergin, New York, Grossman Publishers, 1969, vol. III, p. 193.

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I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling found In legends, in fairy tales, a tone licked clean Over the centuries by mild old tongues, Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.

The characters of the “story” told and “performed” must be “conventional stock figures/ Afflicted to a minimal degree/ With personality and past experience”: A witch, a hermit, innocent young lovers, The kinds of being we recall from Grimm, Jung, Verdi, and the commedia dell’arte.

The list is very well conceived. It implies the recognition of the fact that the world of melodrama belongs to the same category as the tradition of folklore and fairy tales, a cultural heritage that Carl Gustav Jung interpreted as essential to the analysis of the collective unconscious. Opera stages the interplay of characters who are at the same time human beings, dramatically suffering, and archetypes of psychological structures, exactly as the traditional figures of the commedia dell’arte (Santayana would thoroughly agree). Opera is not based on improvisation but produces in the audience a similar sense of immediacy and almost automatic response to the sudden turns of events (something that regularly happens in Italian opera and, in particular, in Verdi). Merrill’s texts are full of surprising turns, anagn|reses, afterthoughts and re-considerations. I cannot define them revelations, epiphanic or epiphonic moments since, as I said before, there is never anything “definite”: there is no truth that shines without the opposition of shades of doubts. But the reader concludes his/her demanding act of reading with a sort of relief, as if after a cathartic experience. For all its length, Merrill’s Trilogy gives the impression of concentration and coalescence around the “gist” of essential questions, more than of dilution, dispersion, inanity and despair. On the other hand, as Merrill’s friend and colleague William S. Merwin put it, “absolute despair has no art”. When a “voice from above” enumerates the precise quantities and the number of ingredients necessary to mould a perfect musician before a reincarnation, we hear that one needs “A HALF CUP” of Stravinsky, “A TEASPOON/ OF MOZART/ DOLLOP OF VERDI” (Scripts, No, “The Sermon at Ephesus”). The interludes between supremely delicate “ceremonies” and the accompaniments that provide their becoming atmosphere must include exquisite musical moments: An interlude Out of Rossini. Strings in sullen mood Manage by veiled threats, to recruit a low Pressure drum and lightning piccolo (Mirabell, 8.1)

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What is the music? STRAUSS I MEAN THEY ARE SWEET TO REMEMBER ROSENKAVALIER SIDE ONE GO PUT IT ON DEAR BOY I do (Scripts, Yes, “The Ascent to Nine”)

The experience and memory of concrete opera performances create balanced, deep and vast three-dimensional soundscapes in the text that fill the entire space of our minds, adding an extra value to linguistic textures that would otherwise be manneristic, heavily baroque, self-referential or deprived of ethical intensity. Opera gives value to major and minor remembrances, offers allegories and emblems to explain events and their significance in the individual life and in the life and history of the world. So the texts produced following its models sum up and stage (often through an eccentric perspective) the teachings of experience and the permanence of basic beliefs, such as the idea that “love is simply the greatest good” (“The Air is Sweetest That a Thistle Guards”).40 Through the years, Merrill never disavowed this elemental certainty ; on the contrary, he reinforced it with the strength of his mature personality. In The Book of Ephraim (Canto Q, “Quotations”) he stresses the importance of the following unequivocal (though desperate) statement of Brünnhilde (from Götterdämmerung, Act I, Scene 3): Geh’ hin zu der Gotter heiligem Rat! Von meinem Ringe raune ihnen zu: Die Liebe liesse ich nie, mir nähmen nie sie die Liebe, stürzt’ auch in Trümmern Walhalls strahlende Pracht!41

An inspired soprano’s interpretation of a passage that, however pleasant or clever, might sound like a transient acoustic achievement even to the most expert members of a Wagnerian audience, becomes for Merrill the “sign” of a deeper meaning. Wagner’s music, as I said, always was “significance itself” (in the often quoted poem “The Ring Cycle”): “Schwarzkopf […] had doubled a high/ C in that late Tristan Flagstad made” (Scripts, Yes, “The Ascent to Nine”). In Merrill’s poetics poetry, just like music, aims at reaching the level of “significance itself”, exploiting the rhetorical strategy of a Wagnerian “extensive performance” (as in Melville’s opening page of Moby-Dick, or in the novel’s three final chapters) or a stimulation of “riddles”, as in Verdi. Wagnerian sopranos (sopranos in general, I should say, including Callas, as we have seen, and Zinka Milanov, Ljuba Welitsch, Maggie Teyte, Hildegard 40 In First Poems, 1951 (quoted above). 41 “Go back to the gods’/ holy council./ Tell them this/ about my ring:/ I will never/ renounce love,/ and they shall never wrest love from me,/ though Valhalla’s sublime splendor / collapse in ruins!”; cf. www.rwagner.net/libretti.

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Behrens, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) made Merrill’s consciousness vibrate in a special way. A well sung grand aria is the perfect model for an artistic expression that frees itself of the “story” and the diegetic interaction with other characters, addressing the audience in a suspense that interrupts the often commonplace plot and adds a meta-literary dimension. Flagstad at her best, in the role of Leonora, at a Salzburg Festival rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio, “left also the Greek dramatists in the dust and Shakespeare in the shade”.42 In Götterdämmerung she balanced the “indefinable silliness” of a French production in the early 1950s: a “trivialization”, “as when the Bible is read in the language of Marivaux and Voltaire”.43 “Next to the powers of such a woman, all male activity – Siegfried’s dragon slaying, Einstein’s theorizing […] seemed tame and puerile”.44 The paradigms of opera help the text persuade the reader not so much for its content or ideological background as for its intrinsic deeply convincing beauty. Opera-contaminated poetry brings about “suspension of disbelief”, emotional, however momentary, comfort (as in Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Storm” or in Melville’s “The Piazza”) and enthusiasm, as well as the fascinating dialectics between a full immersion in a ceremonial performance and acquisition of an opportune safety distance (as in James and Cather). Thus an idiosyncratic poet of the late 20th century can come to terms with the heritage of mainstream culture. The apparent heterogeneity of his mixed-media postmodern literary works proves a thick and varied palimpsest of performative elements derived from the transatlantic tradition. Merrill could easily accept those moments in Wagner’s musical theater that can embarrass a few historians of taste. What is more, he openly exploited them in his texts, since he found them in keeping with his poetics of puzzle/pastiche, which includes highbrow and lowbrow materials and even, often, courts the category of kitsch. In Mirabell 6.3, when a dialogue with W. H. Auden needs an example for clarification, JM, the “scribe”, introduces the image of “Maidens from Act II of Parsifal/ Whom the Enchanter waters into bloom”. An underground fil rouge of irony (not unlike Edith Wharton’s in the pages of The Age of Innocence that we have read) and a passion for wit, jeux d’esprit and boutades run through the whole macrotext and surface, more than elsewhere, in the operatic context. As J. D. McClatchy testifies, this is how Merrill commented the substitution of the leading soprano (Carol Vaness) in a late production of Verdi’s Otello at the Met: “Poor Desdemona! She changed the color of her hair, but it didn’t save her marriage”.45 As all lovers of opera, Merrill knew that in it 42 43 44 45

James Merrill, A Different Person: A Memoir, New York, Knopf, 1993, p. 56. Ibidem, p. 74. Ibidem, p. 113. Critical Essays on James Merrill, ed. by J.D. McClatchy, New York, G. K. Hall, 1996, p. 232.

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more frequently than in any other artistic medium the category of the sublime and that of the ridiculous risk crossing and blurring. But that was yet another essential source for his overexcited inspiration. In his memoir A Different Person (1993) some of the most entertaining pages are devoted to the description of a group of friends Merrill included who enthusiastically decide to go to Venice for the premiere of Stravinsky-Auden-Kallman’s The Rake’s Progress (1951). That is a contemporary opera which, on the one hand, demonstrated that that form of art was still alive and, on the other, that, in the middle 20th century, it could be entirely based on an ironic re-writing of an 18th century hypotext (a multiple transcodification par excellence, if one considers Hogarth’s cycle of paintings): We […] found the libretto in a music store and within hours knew much of it by heart […] For the premiere the world’s prettiest theater had been further titivated by a bouquet of red and white roses on the bosom of each box. The house was full, we were all in evening dress […] The score grew to enchant me as much for its angelic surprise and invention as for its diabolical way with pastiche” (poetics of pastiche!). (A Different Person, Chapter X)

Stendhal’s opinion about the importance not only of music but of everything that contributes to the overall experience of opera is thus reinforced in a page of the late 20th century. Merrill’s enthusiasm for the premiere of a modern opera, in an Italian famous (supposedly traditional) opera house in the early 1950s, foreruns William Demby’s enthusiasm at the San Carlo theater in Naples in the early 1960s for Danton Tod by von Einem. A final observation: opera helps Merrill (as all other literary figures included in this volume) explain and express feelings, emotions and desires, projections and impersonations, the plenitude of life and the struggle for liberty and justice; however, opera also reveals the limits of every human experience and art itself. At the end of his short “Foreword” to Recitative, the poet/musician/singer confesses that the publication of his prose pieces can be useful because sometimes Una voce poco fa finds itself with nothing to say, or Il mio tesoro falls outside the tenor’s range.46

46 Una voce poco fa, Rosina’s famous aria from Act One of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, should be sung by a mezzosoprano, but was also frequently sung by sopranos. Its fine irony expresses the intention of the character to use all the instruments in her power to obtain what she wants. With equally fine irony Merrill uses it to allude to the fact that even the person who thinks he/she is in full possession of his/her own means, must admit his/her impotence in front of a lack of inspiration. Il mio tesoro intanto is a tenor’s aria sung by Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Merrill uses it as an emblematic warning: even the most selfconfident tenor must acknowledge that sometimes his voice is not up to the demanding task of singing a difficult aria.

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The migration of European opera across the Atlantic, in sum, provided American authors with an extra medium of expression, enhancing the possibility of conveying feelings and emotions that the naked words (even Flaubert’s “mot juste”) could not communicate.47 It promoted the application of more and more sophisticated intersemiotic techniques, making it finally possible to overcome the traditional predominance of Wordsworth’s despotic organ of sight – Emerson’s imperialistic, totalizing “transparent eyeball”. In particular in the second half of the 19th century the collaboration and interaction of literature and music, written text and song, sight, hearing and performance, paved the way for the liberation of mind and language from the all-pervasive prevalence of the vision. They forerun the programs of the historical avant-gardes and the later philosophical debates we would meet in Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida.48 The fruitful entrance of opera in literary texts reduced to a minimal degree the debate between natural and artificial sounds. It helped Americans to overcome old dichotomies, such as those between Europe and the New World, nature and culture, sacred and profane music. It refuted the traditional idea that singing and vocal music are intrinsically inferior to instrumental music, confirming Rousseau’s opinion that music without words risks sounding like a superficial or useless acoustic arabesque. All authors considered in this volume – above all Poe, Whitman, Wharton, Cather, Santayana, Demby and Merrill – would agree with Søren Kierkegaard and his short but illuminating essay on Don Giovanni, according to which, when vocal music attains the highest level of perfection and the singer, thanks to his/her voice, but also to his/her gestures, succeeds in expressing the idea and the implicit message, its combination of ingredients can produce a deeper level of signification.49 Opera allowed even introverted, hypersensitive and non-conformist souls, such as Poe, Dickinson and Lanier, to imagine and draw inspiration from larger musical and performative worlds, incorporating them into their poetry. Prose writers enjoyed the “panoramic” and scenographic view of life that opera irresistibly displayed and invited them to use, as well as the many occasions it offered to construct texts possessing more articulated and tense vectors of meaning that 47 A. Herschberg Pierrot, Flaubert. Ptique et esth8tique, Saint Denis, P. U. V., 2013; Muriel Berthou Crestey, “La beaut8 du mot juste chez Flaubert”, Acta fabula, 14, 8 (Nov.–Dec. 2013), pp. 1–28. 48 See for instance the extraordinary poetics of Rosemarie Waldrop – another contemporary author who also would find a place in this volume – whose poetics is so perceptively analyzed by Floriana Puglisi in her Extremes of Otherness, Urbino, Quattroventi, 2015. 49 See, in particular, Søren Kierkegaard’s “Brief remarks on a detail from Don Giovanni”, in Fraedelandet, I–II nn. 1890–91 (May 1845); Simonella Davini, ed., Arte e critica nell’estetica di Kierkegaard, 69 (December 2006), pp. 71–78.

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would orientate the reader into the complex network of political issues. It is hard to conceive a more graphic representation of social conditions (both in Europe and in the United States) and of class dynamics than that offered by Flaubert, Tolstoy, James, Wharton or Cather in their mises-en-scHne of evenings at the opera. The opera house functioned, in this respect, as the space of coincidence and the point of intersection of phenomena pertaining to the psychic responses of individual characters, as well as to the interplay of relations within coherent communities and society at large. I like the idea of concluding my excursus in the name of Whitman – with whose quotations I started and who provided the title for my book – stressing once again the importance of his appropriation of the languages and ideological structures of opera. A performance of opera, as we have seen, was for him a grand parenthesis open in the middle of his daily experience. It allowed his consciousness to enjoy ultimate, deeply felt emotions and his mind to express them in revolutionary texts that surpassed and overcame the single-sided, derivative nature of 19th century Anglo-American poetry. No less than the raising of the curtain at the opera house in the “real” world of his life, the introduction of opera in his verse, the images it produced and the adherence/adhesiveness of form and content regularly corresponded to the enhancing of the poetic tension. It gave birth to the coalescence of a surplus of poetic value, as well as to the acquisition of a perfect emotional and linguistic maturity through a complex and multilayered cooperation of signs. When the curtain fell and images, metaphors and linguistic expressions derived from opera were dispelled, the special “aura” did not abandon Whitman’s verse. It took time before the text should turn to a more opaque or unstable output, mirroring the uncertainties of the self, the lack of a sustained psychological balance and a sure continuity of inspiration. Although not always with the same intensity, opera worked in a similar way in all the authors I have considered. The choice of opera as an occasion for textual production, as a structural pattern, as an emblem of the ways in which society works and as an apt scenario for the interaction of characters was never due to chance and in fact resulted in memorable pages of high literature. Its function reverberated long after the parentheses it opened were closed, leaving long lasting echoes, precious leitmotifs, exquisite memories of punctual notes, “pure as dew drops”, musical phrases, waves of sounds and slow swelling and slow subsiding tides of acoustic patterns. In conclusion, I have no doubts in maintaining that opera is one of the great cultural models and archetypal modalities of artistic expression, whose intertwining with literature can reveal the continuing use of transatlantic, transcultural and comparative criticism.

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Index of Names

Ackerman, Diane 23 Adorno, Theodor 208 Alboni, Marietta 73, 83–85, 96, 108 Alighieri, Dante 149, 193, 211seq., 228 Allen, Woody 198 Allende Blin, Juan 40 Anderson, C. R. 121seq., 124, 128 Anesko, Michael 148 Ariosto, Ludovico 128 Artaud, Antonin 37 Auber, Daniel FranÅois Esprit 9, 26, 47, 135 Auden, Wynstan Hugh 21, 214, 216, 231seq. Bach, Johan Sebastian 13, 83, 176, 190, 210, 215, 222seq. Bachlund, Gary 23 Bacigalupo, Massimo 25 Baechler, Lea 194 Baird, James 221, 224, 227 Bakhtin, Mikhail 74 Balestra, Gianfranca 32 Balfe, Michael William 186 Bal’mont, Konstantin Dmitrievicˇ 30 Barber, Samuel 23, 179, 186 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 27, 110 Barth, John 75 Bart|k, B8la Victor J#nos 210 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 199

Beethoven, Ludwig van 37, 43, 45, 83, 88, 123, 128, 130seq., 205, 209–211, 215– 219, 231 Behrens, Hildegard 231 Belasco, David 199 Bell, Millicent 163 Bellini, Vincenzo 9, 47, 64seq., 85, 94seq., 104, 179, 203 Benstock, Shari 176, 178 Berger, Charles 131, 221 Berlioz, Hector 210, 227 Berryman, John 16, 75, 131, 200, 205, 209seq., 212–220 Bloch, Ernst 19–21, 40, 118 Bloom, Harold 16, 61, 85, 96, 157 Boccabadati, Luigia 73, 136 Boethius, Severinus 21, 52 Boito, Arrigo 9 Bondeville, Emmanuel 139 Borghese, Bonaparte, Paolina 202 Borodin, Aleksandr Porfirevicˇ 140 Borroff, Edith 168 Bray, John 168 Brienzo, Gary 179, 188 Britten, Benjamin 206 Brockden Brown, Charles 12 Brodsky Lawrence, Vera 63, 66 Bronzino, Agnolo 154 Browning, Robert 27, 176, 214 Buell, Lawrence 16, 56seq. Burchfield, Charles 128 Burton, Richard 202

246 Byron, George Gordon Lord 22, 127, 134, 176 Cage, John 47, 51, 209 Cage, Nicolas 198 Callas, Maria 198, 203, 225, 227, 230 Canova, Antonio 203 Cantelli, Guido 208 Carlyle, Thomas 16 Carr, Emily 16, 83 Catlin, George 7 Cecchi, Emilio 25 Cervantes, Miguel de Saavedra 191 Chaplin, Charley 214 Chasalow, Eric 210 Chaucer, Geoffrey 122 Cher 198 Chopin, Fredrik 13, 73 Chown, Linda 186 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 21, 52 Cimarosa, Domenico 158 Citati, Pietro 134 Cole, Thomas 99, 216 Coleman, Philip 209 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 17, 22 Cooper, James Fenimore 12 Copland, Aaron 119 Coroniti, Joseph 210 Correggio, Antonio Allegri 176 Crane, Hart 214 Curtin, William Martin 182 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 10–12, 86, 199 Damrosch, Walter 168, 171 Dante Alighieri 149, 193, 211seq., 228 Darabont, Frank 198 De Man, Paul 74 Delannoy, Jean 202 Delbanco, Andrew 61 Deleuze, Gilles 233 Demby, William 145, 200seq., 203, 227, 232seq. Demme, Jonathan 198 Denard, Carolyn C. 9 Derrida, Jacques 233 Despez, Josquin 220

Index of Names

Destro, Alberto 32, 53 Dickinson, Emily 8, 52, 56, 96, 103–121, 149, 209, 214, 225, 233 Dickinson, Peter 103 Dizikes, John 8, 98 Donizetti, Gaetano 9, 38, 47, 64–66, 85, 94, 136 Dryden, John 20seq., 23–25, 28–30, 50, 89, 210 Dumas, Alexandre fils 199 Dumas, Alexandre pHre 133–136, 139, 143, 201 Duncan, Isadora 176, 188 Eberwein, Jane Donahue 109 Eco, Umberto 24, 134 Edel, Leon 145seq. Einem, Gottfried von 204, 232 Einstein, Albert 231 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 190, 199, 211, 217 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 13, 15–17, 19–22, 24, 28–30, 43, 47, 52–54, 57, 62, 71, 74, 76, 86, 90, 104seq., 115, 122seq., 126, 145, 148, 194, 206, 210, 233 Faner, Robert D. 70, 101 Farr, Judith 104 Farwell, Arthur 119 Faur8, Gabriel 225 Fedorko, Kathy A. 171 Fellini, Federico 201 Ferber, Edna 168 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott 185 Flagstad, Kristen 206, 225, 230seq. Flaubert, Gustave 133, 135–138, 142seq., 157, 159, 233seq. Fleury, Albert Francis 100 Folsom, Ed 84 Foucault, Michel 29, 233 Fragonard, Jean-Honor8 176 Franck, C8sar 176, 210 Fremstad, Olive 182 Fridholm, Roland 75 Frost, Robert 50, 214 Galluppi, Pasquale

176

247

Index of Names

Gandolfini, James 200 Garbo, Greta 203 Garc&a, Manuel 11seq. Gavazzeni, Gianandrea 203 Gebbia, Alessandro 158 Gedda, Nicolaj 203 Genette, Gerard 74, 126 Gere, Richard 197 Gershwin, Ira 169 Giannone, Robert 179 Gilbert, Sandra 13, 96, 158, 162, 164 Giorcelli, Cristina 25, 107, 145 Giordano, Andrea 199 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 73, 114, 178 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 9, 44, 179, 191, 193, 199 Goldoni, Annalisa 12, 30–32, 53 Goodman, Susan 33, 171 Gounod, Charles 9, 86, 169, 172, 182, 190 Gramsci, Antonio 134 Gray, Thomas 29, 129 Greenough, Horatio 17 Griffin, Susan M. 162 Guanti, Giovanni 51 Hammer, Langdon 227 Hammerstein I, Oscar 205 Hammerstein II, Oscar 168 Händel, Georg Friedrich 13, 21 Hanks, Tom 198, 204 Hart, Moss 30, 145, 169, 199 Haskil, Clara 227 Hawkins, Micah 168 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 33, 47, 56, 58, 61, 135, 163seq., 168, 201 Haydn, Franz Joseph 30, 88, 176, 210, 217 Hayter, Haletheia 31 Higginson, Thomas W. 105 Hitchcock, Alfred 38 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus 40, 199 Holloway, Charles 99 Holloway, Emory 84 Homer 194 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 104, 121, 162, 214

Hugo, Victor 9, 84, 199 Hutchinson, G. B. 19, 72 Hutchisson, James M. 29 Ibsen, Henrik 37 Inness, George 100 Irving, Washington 12, 191 Ives, Charles 47, 49 Izzo, Donatella 163 Jackman, Rob 214 Jackson, David 9, 29, 175, 177, 221 Jakobson, Roman 9, 27 James, Henry 8, 16, 62, 131, 135seq., 143, 145–149, 151–155, 157, 163seq., 172seq., 176, 215, 231, 234 Jewell, Andrew 179, 182 Jewison, Norman 198 Joffrey, Robert 100 Johnson, Samuel 217 Johnson, Thomas H. 105, 109 Josquin Despez 220 Joyce, James 189 Kallman, Chester 232 Kaplan, J. 70seq., 73 Keats, John 22, 26, 44, 52, 122, 212 Kelly, Richard 214seq. Kelly, Wyn 214seq. Kepler, Johannes 52 Kermode, Frank 223 Kierkegaard, Søren 114, 233 Killoran, Helen 176 Knapp, Bettina 25seq., 28 Kopley, Richard 28 Krehbiel, Henry Edward 168 Kurosawa, Akira 186 La Farge, John 145 Lamb, Charles 20, 24, 145 Lanier, Sidney 8, 40, 103, 111, 120–132, 209, 211, 216–218, 223, 225, 233 Larkin, Philip 205 Lathrop, J. P. 168, 214 LeFanu, Sheridan 176 Lee, Hermione 26, 176, 185, 198

248

Index of Names

Legge, Philip 23 Lehman, David 131, 205, 221 Leopardi, Giacomo 50, 192–194 Leroux, Gaston 171, 199 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 49 Levine, Robert S. 56 Lind, Jenny 73, 108seq., 145 Lindley Cooley, Carolyn 119 Lollobrigida, Gina 202seq. Lotman, Jury Mihajlovicˇ 99 Loving, Jerome 108 Lowell, Robert 53, 214 Lowenberg, Carlton 103 Lundin, Roger 104

Mitchell, Margareth 191 Molina, Tirso de 176, 199 Momaday, Neville Scott 22 Monet, Claude 126 Monpou, Federico 227 Moracci, Giovanna 30 Morrison, Toni 9 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 10seq., 30, 47, 83, 86, 104, 119, 131, 176, 178, 190, 198seq., 205, 210, 215–217, 219, 227, 232 Murillo, B. Esteban 150 Murphy, John J. 186 Murphy, Kevin 99 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovicˇ 140

Malibran, Maria 30 Mallarm8, St8phane 31 Manzoni, Alessandro 146 Marchetti, Leo 16, 32 Maretzek, Max 167 Mariani, Paul 30seq., 83, 99, 164, 201, 210, 218seq. Marivaux, Pierre de 231 Martinez, Carlo 16, 30seq., 33 Marx, Karl 206 Marx, Leo 10 Mascagni, Pietro 179 Massenet, Jules 186, 205 Matthiessen, Francis Otto 16 McClatchy, J. D. 231 McElroy, John H. 67 McGowan, Philip 209 Melville, Herman 8, 43, 53–62, 72, 90, 118, 149, 163seq., 176, 180, 230seq. Mencken, Henry Louis 178, 215 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix 79 Menuhin, Yehudi 182 Mercadante, Saverio 65, 158 Meredith, George 179, 207, 214 Merrill, James 75, 125, 131, 164, 193seq., 197, 200, 205seq., 209, 219–233 Merwin, William Stanley 23, 128, 229 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 9, 47, 53, 86, 182 Milanov, Zinka 230 Miller, James E. 75 Millet, Jean-FranÅois 100

Nocera, Gigliola 51 Nori, Giuseppe 16 Offenbach, Jacques 40, 104, 199 O’Keeffe, Georgia 125, 128 O’Neill, Eugene 37 Origo, Iris 192 Orledge, Robert 40 Ottenberg, June 11, 32 Pagnini, Marcello 21, 125 Palestrina, G. Pierluigi da 222 Parker, Hershel 56, 62 Pater, Walter 176 Patti, Adelina 142, 171, 174 Perosa, Sergio 32 Petrarch, Francesco 191 Phelps, Fruit J. 30 Pindar, 194 Pirandello, Luigi 37, 186 Pisanti, Tommaso 28 Plath, Sylvia 125 Plato, 52 Poe, Edgar Allan 8, 15, 24seq., 27–40, 43, 47, 49seq., 52–54, 56, 63, 77seq., 90, 99, 104–107, 109–113, 115–118, 120, 122, 124, 136, 180, 205, 210, 222, 233 Poe, Harry Lee 30 Pollin, Burton R. 24 Pope, Alexander 162, 176 Porte, Joel 16seq., 162

249

Index of Names

Pound, Ezra 18, 125, 211 Praxiteles 163 Praz, Mario 134 Proust, Marcel 23, 206 Puccini, Giacomo 198seq., 204seq. Puglisi, Floriana 233 Rabelais, FranÅois 191 Rachmaninoff, Serghej 30 Ravel, Maurice 176, 225 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 206 Reynolds, David S. 85, 96 Richards, Jeffrey H. 31 Rimsky Korsakov, Nikolaj Andreevicˇ 140 Robins, Tim 198 Rossellini, Roberto 201 Rossini, Gioacchino 9, 11, 47, 64, 66, 85– 87, 137, 158, 179, 186, 190, 203, 218, 229, 232 Rubeo, Ugo 31, 201 Ruggeri, Franca 116 Russo, John Paul 59, 228 Salieri, Antonio 10, 24 Sandburg, Carl 199 Santayana, George 8, 115, 149, 167, 169, 188, 190–195, 229, 233 Satie, Erik 225 Scarlatti, Domenico 158 Schiller, Friedrich 9, 12 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 32 Schmidgall, Gary 70, 100 Schoenberg, Arnold 221 Schopenhauer, Arthur 206 Schumann, Robert 51seq. Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth 230seq. Scott, sir Walter 9, 12, 137, 199 Scott Turner, C. 103 Sewall, Richard 104 Shakespeare, William 9, 32, 34, 36seq., 79, 122, 135, 149, 176, 191, 199, 209, 216seq., 231 Shaw, George Bernard 37, 206 Sheean, Vincent 200, 205–208 Shelden, Michael 61

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 19, 22–24, 30, 44, 61, 179seq., 183, 210 Silverman, Kaja 24, 40 Small, Judy Joe 104, 144 Solti, Georg 114 Sophocles 194 Spiegelman, Willard 221 Sportelli, Annamaria 32, 53 Stein, Gertrude 28 Stella, Vittorio 52 Stendhal, Henri Beyle dit 137, 150, 232 Stern, Laurence 34 Stevens, Wallace 29, 194seq., 209, 213 Stevenson, Robert Louis 134 Storace, Stephen 10 Strauss, Richard 24, 205 Stravinsky, Igor 219, 225, 229, 232 Strindberg, August 37 Strong, George Templeton Jr 63 Strong George Templeton Sr 7, 62–66, 205 Sullivan, Louis 98–100 Sullivan, Peter M. 179 Sullivan, Robert 44 Tarozzi, Bianca 221 Taylor, Bayard 120, 202seq. Teyte, Maggie 225, 227, 230 Thomas, Ambroise 9, 179 Thomas, Dylan 212, 214, 216 Todorov, Tsvetan 32, 75 T|ib&n, Colm 162 Tolstoy, Lev 62, 133, 136, 139, 143seq., 157, 159, 161, 172seq., 217, 234 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 199 Toscanini, Arturo 206, 208 Trackl, Georg 216 Traubell, Horace 70, 100 Updike, John

123seq.

Vallone, Mirella 147 Van Dyck, Anton 176 Vendler, Helen 209, 225seq. Verdi, Giuseppe 9, 34, 37, 47, 64seq., 84, 86, 95, 144–146, 158, 160, 164, 181seq.,

250 190seq., 193seq., 197, 202, 216, 219, 222, 225, 227, 229–231 Voltaire, Jean Marie Arouet 231 Von der Heydt, Jim 19 Wagenknecht, Edward 179 Wagner, Richard 24seq., 33, 37, 39, 53, 72, 79, 83, 97, 111, 114, 119seq., 123, 128– 133, 144, 146seq., 168, 171, 176, 178seq., 182seq., 185, 190seq., 198, 205–209, 217–219, 225, 227seq., 230seq. Waldrop, Rosemarie 233 Washington, Denzel 198 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 199 Weber, Carl Maria von 7, 9, 32–35, 66, 104, 176 Weill, Kurt 169 Welitsch, Ljuba 230

Index of Names

Wharton, Edith 8, 11, 62, 85, 135seq., 140, 164, 167, 169–173, 175seq., 178, 182seq., 231, 233seq. Whitman, Walt 7seq., 10, 13, 39, 58, 61, 66seq., 69–78, 81–88, 90–96, 98–101, 103, 107–109, 111, 113–115, 120–122, 126, 179, 191, 194, 205, 209, 215, 224seq., 228, 231, 233seq. Williams, Tennessee 37, 179 Wilson, Edmund 226 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 233 Wordsworth, William 17, 22seq., 90, 233 Wright, Frank Lloyd 98 Wright, Richard 201 Yeats, William Butler Zolla, El8mire

214seq.

26, 223