1,296 29 26MB
English Pages [813] Year 2018
Antonio Baldassarre and Tatjana Marković, editors
MUSIC CULTURES IN SOUNDS, WORDS Essays in honor of AND IMAGES ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ
heder
MUSIC CULTURES IN SOUNDS, WORDS AND IMAGES Essays in Honor of ZDRAVKO BLAŽEKOVIĆ edited by
Antonio Baldassarre & Tatjana Marković
1
heder
2
heder
Zdravko Blažeković fishing in Kazakhstan, July 2015. © Tatjana Marković
3
heder Copy-editing: Diane Glazer, Antonio Baldassarre, Tatjana Marković Layout: Nikola Stevanović Printed and bound in the EU Cover image: Nikola Stevanović
Antonio Baldassarre and Tatjana Marković: Music Cultures in Sounds, Words and Images. Essays in Honor of Zdravko Blažeković. Wien: HOLLITZER Verlag, 2018
© HOLLITZER Verlag, Wien 2018
HOLLITZER Verlag a division of HOLLITZER Baustoffwerke Graz GmbH, Wien www.hollitzer.at
All rights reserved. Execpt for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means, digital, electronic or mechanical, or by photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher. Responsibility for the content and for questions of copyright lies with the author. ISBN 978-3-99012-451-2 (print) ISBN 978-3-99012-504-5 (PDF) (PDf)
4
heder Table of Contents
Antonio Baldassarre & Tatjana Marković Introduction 13
SOUNDS OF NATIONS 17 Beata Navratil Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s Anush
19
Tatjana Marković “Croatness” in music: Songfully Italian, Solidly German, a Little Bit “Oriental” and Above All Slavic
35
Ira Prodanov Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti
59
Alexandros Charkiolakis Ideological Schemes and National Perspectives. The Use of the Greek National Anthem in Choisy’s Exile du Patre and Kasassoglou’s Four Preludes for the Return from the Front
69
Dalibor Davidović Filmfuge 79
WORDS ON MUSICS 113 Eleonora Rocconi The Edition of Marcus Meibom’s Aristoxeni Harmonicorum Elementorum Libri Tres and its Contribution to the Knowledge of Ancient Greek Music Theory in the Seventeenth Century
115
5
heder Nico Schüler Ref lections on Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon and His Music Historiography
127
Aleksandar Vasić Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike (The importance of Srpski književni glasnik (1901–1941) in the history of Serbian music)
139
Leon Stefanija Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the Classical
149
Benjamin Knysak Immigrant Music Journals in the United States
169
Zhang Boyu 民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题 (Music Aesthetics from the Ethnomusicological Perspectives)
189
Ingrid Pustijanac Western Art Music Beyond the West
205
PERFORMANCE OF MUSICAL CULTURES 221 Allan W. Atlas Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England: Some Notes on Manufacturers’ Marketing Strategies
223
Gabriele Busch-Salmen „Ew. Hochfürstl. Durchlaucht haben […] selbst eine hohe Stufe der ausübenden Kunst erstiegen“ – Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen (“Your High Princely Highness have […] Herself Climbed to a High Level of the Performing Arts” – Essay on Composing Princesses)
247
Tina Frühauf Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia”
277
6
heder Antonio Baldassarre Identity, Ritual and Materiality of Bourgeois Power Performance: Oskar Reinhart’s Club zur Geduld in Winterthur
313
Ursula Hemetek Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats: On Research History and the Impact of Methodology
341
Melita Milin Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena: Jugoslovenski period (Music Biennale Zagreb and the Serbian Music Scene: The Yugoslav Period)
359
Antoni Pizà Joan and John: How Miró Sponsored the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Sitges in 1966
385
IMAGES ON MUSICS 407 Daniela Castaldo Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Works
409
Elena Ferrari-Barassi Antonio Canova e Le Muse: Marmo, Tempera e altri Mezzi per Reinterpretare l’Antichità (Antonio Canova and The Muses: Marble, Tempera and Other Means to Reinterpret Antiquity)
423
Nicoletta Guidobaldi Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale: Indagini sul Programma Iconografico del Tempietto del Palazzo Ducale di Urbino con un’Ipotesi di Ricostruzione Virtuale (The Concert of the Muses in the Ideal City: Investigations on the Iconographic Program of the Tempietto of the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino with a Virtual Reconstruction Hypothesis)
479
Maria Teresa Arfini Johannes Theile’s Harmonischer Baum. An Example of Figurative Canon
499
7
heder Florence Gétreau The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady: Seeking Their Identity and Paternity
517
H. Robert Cohen Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in Musical America (1915–1920)
535
Nada Bezić Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz knjižnice i arhiva Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu (Art Deco Artifacts: Samples from the Library and Archive of the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb)
571
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí
603
Emile Wennekes Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? Scratching the Surfaces of Multiple Layers of Mediatized Wagner Reception
619
Cristina Santarelli Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism
641
Michael Saffle Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945
665
ORGANOLOGY 677 Laurence Libin Literature as an Adjunct to Organology
679
Li Mei 曾侯乙编钟铭文中所体现中国人早期律学实践 (The Inscription on the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records: The Early Application Practice of Tuning)
703
8
heder Tosca Lynch The Seductive Voice of the Aulos in Plato’s Symposium: From the Dismissal of the aulteris to Alcibiades’ Praise of Socrates-auletes 715 Sylvain Perrot Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds: About the Shape of a Greco-Roman Musical Constellation
731
Dorothea Baumann Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements: Musical Instruments in Swiss Marriage Announcement and Glass Panels of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century
753
CLASSIFYING DATA ON MUSICS 769 Alan Green & Sean Ferguson The Database of Association RIdIM: Linking Data, Images and Partnerships
771
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie The “I” in RILM
783
Federica Riva World Music Documentation System: A Phantasy o una profezia? Leggendo Barry S. Brook quaranta anni dopo. (World Music Documentation System: A Phantasy or a Prophecy? Reading Barry S. Brook Forty Years Later)
793
9
heder
10
heder
INTRODUCTION
11
heder
12
Essays in Honor of Zdravko Blažeković: Introduction
Music Cultures in Sounds, Words and Images Essays in Honor of Zdravko Blažeković
Introduction This book is a gift to Zdravko Blažeković, with whom we have exchanged thoughts, had long discussions and, above all, shared our mutual passion for thinking and writing on music at different points all around the world, for many years. It came out of our long lasting, warm friendship and respect for his work, and often unexpected perspectives of considering different questions related to history of music, performance practice, archival research or indeed any aspect of musicology. This wide horizon results from his dedication to research, tireless following of contemporary literature on different topics, as well as immense experience of listening to music. According to Robert Hoffman, currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and recognized as a world leader in cognitive systems engineering and Human-Centered Computing, “researchers deserving of a festschrift share certain qualities”, including “outstanding mentoring skills, profound impact on an academic […] department’s growth or direction, technical mastery, significant contributions to research and theory, and broad interests”.1 Zdravko Blažeković exemplifies this combination of characteristics. He is a role model as mentor and advisor to many, endowed with a natural sense of humor, a sensitive f lair for trends, and visionary thinking that crosses existing boundaries. These features form the fundament of his weighty and lasting impact on research and scholarly enterprises – particularly as Executive Editor of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) at the International Center in New York, and as Member of the Council of Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM). Zdravko’s academic rigor is beyond compare, manifested in his enriching and inf luential scholarship with a remarkable research output and an almost boundless scope of interests, encompassing a spectrum of topics ranging from 1 Ricki Lewis, “Festschriften Honor Exceptional Scientific Careers, Scholarly Influences” (2 September 1996), online: https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/18041/title/Festschriften-HonorExceptional-Scientific-Careers--Scholarly-Influences (last accessed: 4 January 2018).
13
Antonio Baldassarre & Tatjana Marković global and local histories of music, to nationalism and sacred, national and traditional music, from music iconography and organology to ethnomusicology, music archaeology and ethnochoreology, and from music historiography to editing as a creative process. This wide range of issues is ref lected in the topical and methodological diversity present in this festschrift to celebrate Zdravko as an outstanding and unique figure in music scholarship, as well as to give expression to the profound gratitude which his friends and colleagues feel for the scholarly and personal enrichment that acquaintance with Zdravko has afforded us. The contributions in this volume are, therefore, taken from the research areas in which Zdravko has made major contributions, and they provide proof of the continued fecundity of his thought. Zdravko Blažeković was born on 13 May 1956 in Zagreb, 2 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the country which belonged to neither political block, and formed the third one, the Non-Aligned-Movement. 3 Being on the crossroad between east and west, connecting central/east, southeast Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean, it provided insight in both western and eastern cultures, literature, music, films, as well as a wide and specific education in the given coordinates. Such a coexistence of different worldviews can also be found as the fundamental driving force behind Zdravko’s achievements. Zdravko studied musicology at the Zagreb Music Academy, from where he received his Bachelor and Master’s Degrees in 1980 and 1983 respectively. At that time he started an extensive systematic archival research in numerous cities and towns in Croatia with his mentor Ladislav Šaban (1918–1985), which was the basis of, and departure point for his further multiplied research interests. After a period of academic activities in his native country – as researcher at the Department of Musicology of the Zagreb Music Academy (1980), and at the Croatian Academy of Science and Arts (1981, and 1983–1988), as well as Editor at the Croatian Music Information Center (1982–1983) – he moved to New York City where he was endorsed by Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), the internationally renowned American musicologist and founding father of so many significant musicological ventures. This move has, however, not meant a departure from the Old World. On the contrary, Zdravko has remained 2
3
14
The biographical part of this introduction processes information provided in Vilena Vrbanić, “Blažeković, Zdravko” (3 Sept 2014), Grove Music Online, http://www.oxford musiconline.com/grovemusic/v iew/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.0 01.0 0 01/omo 9781561592630-e-0002270684; http://www.rilm.org/aboutUs/bio.php?who=ZBlazekovic; and http://www.musiciconography.org/bio (last accessed: 15 Jan 2018) Jürgen Dinkel, Die Bewegung Bündnisfreier Staaten. Genese, Organisation und Politik (1927–1992) (Berlin–Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015).
Essays in Honor of Zdravko Blažeković: Introduction deeply rooted in the European humanist traditions embracing the curiosity to discover many new worlds. In New York City, Zdravko accomplished his PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1997, with the study Music in Medieval and Renaissance Astrological Imagery.4 In 1987 he became involved with the international center of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) – whose foundation was strongly promoted and supported by Barry S. Brook – and held various positions within it, until he was appointed Executive Editor in 1996. Simultaneously he started conducting extensive music iconography research, and was appointed Associate Director (1991–1997) of the Research Center for Music Iconography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (founded by, again, Barry S. Brook) and eventually promoted to Director in 1998. In the same year, 1998, Zdravko transformed the RIdIM Newsletter that he had edited for a couple of years into the journal Music in Art, one of the leading and most highly regarded international scholarly journals for music iconography research, of which he still serves as General Editor. Finally, Zdravko served as a member of the advisory boards of the two currently most important music encyclopediae, i.e. the 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart – concerning the latter he is still actively involved in its recently launched online version. Since 2011, he has been Chair of the Study Group on the Iconography of the Performing Arts of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) and Member of the Council of Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM). In 2002, Stjepan Mesić, the then-Croatian President, awarded Zdravko the high state Order of the Zvijezda Danica for his contribution to Croatian culture. The monograph Hrvatska glazbena historiografija u 19. stoljeću that he published in collaboration with Sanja Majer-Bobetko and Gorana Doliner received the Josp Andreis Award from the Croatian Musicological Society in 2010. 5 Finally, the volume Speaking of music: Music conferences, 1835–1966 that he edited jointly with Barry S. Brook and James R. Cowdery was awarded the Vincent H. Duckles Award of the Music Library Association in 2006.6 It is our deepest and sincere hope to bring great pleasure to our friend with this festschrift. We trust that this collection of essays honors Zdravko as both 4 5 6
Zdravko Blažeković, Music in Medieval and Renaissance Astrological Imagery (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1997; published Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2008). Sanja Majer-Bobetko, Zdravko Blažeković, Gorana Doliner, Hrvatska glazbena historiografija u 19. stoljeću (Zagreb: Hrvatsko Muzikološko Društvo, 2009). James R. Cowdery, Zdravko Blažeković, Barry S. Brook, Speaking of Music: Music Conferences, 1835–1966 (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2004).
15
Antonio Baldassarre & Tatjana Marković an “outstanding figure in a given profession”,7 and – first and foremost – as a unique individual whose incredible generosity, enormous curiosity, innovative and sometimes unorthodox thinking and remarkable achievements will always serve as a model. Antonio Baldassarre Tatjana Marković
7
16
Imogen Fellinger, “Festschriften and occasional volumes”, transl. by Tessa Wilson with permission from Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. by Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995, 2nd rev. ed.), Sachteil, vol. 3, 426–434, in Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for Music Scholars and Nonmusicians, 1840–1966, ed. by Zdravko Blažeković and James R. Cowdery (general editors) (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2009), xix–xxvii, here xix.
Sounds of nations
heder
18
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush
Beata Navratil The City University of New York
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s Anush * Abstract. The poem Anush by the Armenian poet Hovhannes Tumanian (1869–1923) is rooted in traditional Armenian music. Tumanian’s poem ref lects a number of mani festations thereof: (1) It borrows in its style from Armenian lyrical songs (such as lalik and khagh), from the parerg style (the traditional dance-song), and from the voghb style (laments such as funeral laments, bayati, and tragic odes). (2) Ashug style of storyte lling/singing as a main form of conveying the storyline. (3) Dancing and music making during Armenian traditional rituals – in particular, the Hambarsum celebration (Feast of Christ’s Ascension), the winter village wedding, and the kokh (wrestling dance) – are in the poem inseparable from the protagonists’ fate. (4) Songs incorporated into the poem serve as personifications of characters and their fate. (5) The poet uses the folk music idioms such as a presence of natural phenomena to tell the story and emotions. The three dominant interconnected components of nature – mountains, f lowers and bodies of water – create a psychological background and all songs in the poem are connected with them emulating every mood, emotion and physical attribute of the people, as there is no direct description of their feelings or appearances.
Hovhannes Tumanian (Հովհաննես Թումանյանը, 1869–1923) stands out as one of the most beloved and prominent Armenian poets. His output is large and stylistically varied, including poems, ballads, stories, fairy tales, and numerous translations of world literature. His father was a priest, an educated man who instilled a deep appreciation for the history and traditions of his country and people. He was a descendant of an Armenian princely family, the Tumanians, a branch of the royal dynasty of the Mamikonians that settled in Lori (Armenia) in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Hovhannes Tumanian was also well-educated with an excellent knowledge and love of world literature. He worked tirelessly to translate into Armenian many works of Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, Longfellow, and others. Shakespeare was and stayed the ideal of creativity for Tumanian throughout his life. In his work, Tumanian immortalized noble human aspirations – sublime dreams of happiness and justice, love and beauty, wisdom and integrity. Tu* This contribution is based on the dissertation by Beata Navratil, Music in poetry and poetry in music: Tumanian’s ‘Anush’, DMA diss., The City University of New York (2015).
19
Beata Navratil manian’s poem, Anush (Անուշ) is often called the pinnacle of his poetry. It tells about the tragic love of a young shepherd boy, Saro, for a peasant girl, Anush. Breaking away from old traditions and beliefs results in the tragic deaths of both Saro and Anush. When speaking about the musicality of Anush, an audience would almost certainly think of Armen Tigranian’s loved and widely known opera of the same name. One might say that the poem has become identified with the opera; however, the poem has its own musical language. This chapter will focus on the ethnographic musical thesaurus of folk rituals as told by Tumanian and show the musical inf luences of folk music on his work. All Tumanian scholars have agreed on the folk nature of his language but the core of his style seems to be born particularly from folk music – not simply the song sections of the poem but the entire work from beginning to end. Tumanian said with pride on many occasions that he borrowed from folklore with great freedom: “Vortegh kefs tvel e” (Whenever it pleased me to).1 He would often use words, lines, rhythms, rhymes, and any other material from national folk resources that he found carried the depth of the idea he was looking to express. 2 He was a tremendous ethnographer, collecting and transcribing folklore, 3 and his personal library contained thousands of publications on Armenian folklore and ethnography – as well as that of other nations.4 The poem Anush is deeply connected to and rooted in traditional Armenian music and ref lects a number of manifestations thereof: (1) It borrows in its style from Armenian lyrical songs (such as lalik and khagh), from the parerg style (the traditional dance-song), and from the voghb style (laments such as funeral laments, bayati, and tragic odes). (2) Ashug style of storytelling/singing as a main form of conveying the storyline. (3) Dancing and music making during Armenian traditional rituals – in particular, the Hambarsum celebration (Feast of Christ’s Ascension), the winter village wedding, and the kokh (wrestling dance). 1 From Tumanian’s article “Hayots drambianize u es” [Armenian Drambianizm and me], in Hovhannes Tumanian, Intir erker erku hatorov [Hovhannes Tumanian, Collection of works in two volumes] (Erevan: Sovetakan Grogh, 1985), 361–362. 2 Hovhannes Ghazarian, “Anushi” steghtsagortsakan patmutiune [Creative history of “Anush”] (Erevan: Hayastan, 1975), 73. 3 Artashes Nazinian, “Mets banasteghtse ev zhoghovrdakan banahyusutyune” [The great poet and folklore], Patma-Banasirakan Handes 3 (1969), 25–36. The article provides in-depth analysis of Tumanian’s work and collection of folklore. 4 Tumanian’s house-museum in Erevan contains over eight thousand books from Tumanian’s personal library. Over one thousand books comprise the collections of world folklore. http:// www.toumanian.am/tangaran/tang.php?clear=1 (last accessed: April 4, 2014).
20
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush (4) Songs incorporated into the poem serve as personifications of characters and their fate and are inseparable from the protagonists’ fate. (5) The poet uses the folk music idioms such as a presence of natural phenomena to convey the story and emotions. The three dominant interconnected components of nature – mountains, f lowers and bodies of water – create a psychological background and all songs in the poem are connected with them emulating every mood, emotion and physical attribute of the people, as there is no direct description of their feelings or appearances. Such transference and humanization of nature, combined with musical references (dancing mountains, crying-lamenting clouds, springs lamenting “as nymphs,” the river singing the hymns) are used as vehicles for telling/ singing the story. Traditional Armenian music, in all its forms and genres, has found its main expression in dancing, singing, comic musical and serious dramatic plays, as well as celebrations of rituals, both secular and sacred. Most of the traditions of common people have left their footprint in the musical heritage of the nation. Armenian musical folklore can be of great interest as it has absorbed centuries of religious traditions, popular beliefs, historical facts, and most importantly, musical excerpts from antiquity – often an oral art form most susceptible to vanishing. With its status as a masterpiece of Armenian poetry, Anush can be looked at as a musical snapshot of ethnographic musical collection as well. The poem’s musical folklore and rituals are an important part of the plot and overall structure of the poem as a synthesis of folk customs, minstrel-style storytelling and classic tragedies. The types of folk music embedded in the rituals of Tumanian’s poem reveal spiritual and earthly beliefs of an ancient civilization from early antiquity on. Each and every song, whether part of a ritual or a lyrical love song, is given in its entirety in the poem with full refrains and repetitions. This dominance of song warrants a special look. The songs bear hidden messages, genuine sentiments, and thoughts. Those elements are emphasized by slowing down the timeline, using the song to give the reader time to feel the emotions of the protagonists as ref lected and embedded in the traditional folk music and rituals. Ashugs and Poetic and Musical Forms as One Armenian national music is a monument of centuries-old culture, a natural synthesis of religious, folk and ashug music, poetry, and history. Movses Khorenatsi (Moses of Khoren, ca. 410–490 AD), an Armenian historian, hymn 21
Beata Navratil writer, and poet, and Pavstos Buzand (Faustus of Byzantium, fifth century), an Armenian historian, documented the art and rituals of ancient Armenians, including the traditions of the gusan (bard), vipasan, and goghtan (epic singer, interchangeable with the vipasan). Many poetic-musical genres, developing from late-medieval Armenia up to the turn of the nineteenth century, retained their connection to both art forms. Gusans, and later ashugs (minstrels), played a significant role in the development of literature and music, with the synthesis of both poetic and musical arts. All of these musical genres have corresponding poetic styles and meters. Tumanian was well acquainted with ashug traditions as the ashugs often traveled to and stayed in the poet’s native Lori. A common ashug style of “telling” the story was to sing some parts of the drama and narrate others while acting out different characters. In making the switch from narration/chanting to singing at the moments of high dramatic tension, some ashugs would announce the moment of transition to the song with words, “But this I cannot express in words, give me a saz5 and I will sing it for you”.6 In Tumanian’s poem, at the moments of heightened emotions, only the songs reveal the inner thoughts and true feelings of the protagonists. Thus, in line with ashug traditions, Tumanian’s protagonists express their emotions through songs when “words could not”. We know that Tumanian was well acquainted with works of many gusans and ashugs, which he would often use and rework. An example is his epic poem Sassuntsi Davit (David of Sassun),7 an ancient Armenian ballad told/sung by ashugs for many centuries that is still popular in Armenia today. It can be said with confidence that Tumanian’s work process (collection, absorption, and personal interpretation of folklore) is similar to that of the ashugs. Whether one considers the style, language, or traditions depicted, the result is the work of a singer-poet, not just of a writer who is skilled only in poetry. In Anush, the poet pays homage to minstrels and bards: (Canto the First, episode I). 8 5 Long-necked fretted lute. 6 Khristofor Kushnarev, Voprosy istorii i teorii armjanskoj monodičeskoi muzyki (Questions of history and theory of Armenian monodic music) (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1958), 241. 7 Sassuntsi Davit (David of Sassun) is an epic ballad about an Armenian herculean hero David (Sassun, historically part of Western Armenia, is currently in Turkey). It is one of four parts of a large epic poem Sassna Tsrer (Daredevils of Sassun) describing four generations of the Sassun family. Thousands of pages documenting different versions collected from oral and written sources dating from the eighth century on are preserved in the Matenadaran archives in Armenia. 8 The poetic translation of Anush by Mischa Kudian is used in this work: Mischa Kudian, trans., The bard of loree: Selected works of Hovannes Toumanian (London: Mashtots Press, 1970).
22
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush My soul now f lies towards home; There, sitting before the family hearth, They wait ever with yearning for me And through the long, wintry nights Tell about the ancient braves of Lori. Laments By framing the poem as a tragic sung lament, Tumanian touches upon the deepest corners of the human soul in ways that recall and emulate ancient Greek tragedies. The poem consists of a Prologue and Six Cantos.9 Prologue. On the night before Hambartsum (Feast of the Ascension), tearful fairies gather on the mountain top to lament the tragic love of Saro, a shepherd, and Anush, a young peasant maiden. At the first rays of light, the nymphs disappear into the rivers and springs. Canto the First (Episodes I–IX). The poet recollects memories of his beloved Lori and majestic images of the mountains and valleys bring back memories of people and events long gone. The love story of Saro and Anush is told. The young shepherd Saro, while coming down a mountain, sings a love song for his beloved Anush with the youthful ardor of passionate love. Under the watchful eyes of her traditional family, the young woman feels restless and tries to find a pretense to meet with her beloved. She joins her friends at the spring to collect water, sings Ampi Takits jur e galis (From under the clouds the water is coming) along with her friends, and eagerly waits for a meeting with Saro. Canto the Second (Episodes X–XI). The village youth are celebrating Hambartsum with dancing, singing the ritual songs of jan giulum (dear f lowers) and vitchaki erg (fortunetelling song). During the ritual of fortune-telling, Anush draws the dark lot foretelling a tragic fate. She believes in the prediction and surrenders to dark thoughts and deep sadness. Canto the Third (Episodes XII–XVI).
9
The general structure of Greek tragedies is: (a) a prologue, (b) a parodos (choral first song), followed by (c) three or more episodes interspersed with stasima (choral interludes) and (d) exodus.
23
Beata Navratil Winter has come. There is a wedding celebration in the village. During the festivities, two friends, Saro and Anush’s brother Mosi, are encouraged by the crowd to wrestle. During the wrestling, Saro breaks the age-old tradition forbidding friends to force an opponent’s shoulders to the ground. Saro, seeing Anush in the crowd, forgets the rules and the “world” and pushes Mosi to the ground, thus insulting his honor in front of all. Mosi gives an oath of revenge and forbids Anush to see Saro ever again. Canto the Forth (Episodes XVII–XXI). After some time has passed, early in the morning the news has spread of Saro’s and Anush’s elopement. Attempts to find the young couple hiding in the mountains prove to be fruitless. All have returned but Mosi, who having sworn to find them at all costs, continues his search. Sometime later Anush returns to the village with hopes of forgiveness from her family. Saro remains in the mountains. Canto the Fifth (Episodes XXII–XXVI). The news of Saro’s death reaches the village. Mosi returns home with a rif le behind his shoulders and the village folk understand that Mosi has satisfied his quest for revenge. People run to the valley to the screams of Saro’s distraught mother. Saro is buried on the river bend far from the village. Canto the Sixth (Episodes XXVII–XXIX). The spring comes again. Distraught in her grief Anush is wandering on the banks of the river crying, lamenting, and singing mad songs. She hears the voices of the river Debed calling her to reunite with her beloved. On the eve of new celebrations of Hambartsum, when time stops and nature becomes animate, two stars embrace and kiss each other in longing ardor. In many ancient cultures, laments belonged among the oldest literary forms such as epic poems and were an important medium for “telling” the tragedy. Tragic events told in laments are cries of suffering and pain and evoke strong emotions of compassion. A paper examining Greek laments by Đurđina Šijaković gives a succinct definition of the therapeutic effect of laments on the lamenters and society in general. She writes: Preserving archaic elements of ritual lament, Greek tragedy gives extremely precious and reliable testimonies about ancient funeral rites and about the way ancient Greeks used to deal with their beloved’s 24
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush death. It says a lot on the role of women in funeral ritual, on the power that traditionally belonged to them and was controlled by laws of many poleis. Lament is, even if it calls for revenge, a structured answer to death, an answer of a community, and furthermore an attitude of the same community towards life. This building of suffering into a song eases the sorrow of the woman that laments, of a bereaved family, and wider of a whole community. Lamenting has different aspects, among them creative-therapeutic as a very important and interesting one. This art offers solace, it shapes the pain.10 The musical sections of ancient tragedies were meant to stir empathy, thus lifting and redeeming an indifferent soul, something that Tumanian also saw as one of the most important purposes of literature. For Nietzsche, the musical dimension of the dramatic tragedy and most importantly music itself was of great interest. In his essay Über Musik und Wort (On music and word), he stated that music is a primary expression of the essence of everything, and lyrical poetry and drama are only secondary derivatives, thus concluding that tragedy is born from music.11 Nietzsche also argued that Greek tragedy is the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements. The Dionysian element is represented in the music of the chorus while the Apollonian element is found in the spoken dialogue. The Dionysian element is also found in the drunkenness and wild celebrations at the festivals manifested in musical representations. Likewise, in Tumanian’s Anush we have the chorus and spoken dialogues and we have Apollonian and Dionysian elements saturating all the festivities and rituals. Aristotle in his Poetics lays great emphasis on mimesis (imitation) and catharsis (cleansing) in explaining the purpose of tragedy. Especially important is his emphasis on “the language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament,” among which music plays a dominant role: Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play. In form it is action, not narrative. Through pity and terror it effects the purgation of these emotions. By ‘language embellished’ I mean lan10 Đurđina Šijaković, “Shaping the pain: Ancient Greek lament and its therapeutic aspect”, Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU 60/2 (2012), 139–154. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, On music and words, ed. by Oscar Levy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), vol. 2, 27–48 and Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy, ed. by Oscar Levy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923), vol.1.
25
Beata Navratil guage into which enter rhythm, harmony and song. By the ‘several kinds being found in separate parts’ I mean that some parts are rendered through medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song.12 Historically, Armenia, situated on the crossroads of East and West, has witnessed numerous invasions and annihilations by neighboring Muslim countries and has lost most of its ancestral lands. Lamenting, in the form of voghb or antuni, is omnipresent in Armenian culture and has inf luenced every type of Armenian folk music. It is also closely tied to the style of religious chanting, with cries directed to divine powers. The church has absorbed secular laments into its sharakan (liturgical hymns) which in turn have inf luenced folk music. Both share similar qualities of speech and singing (chanting) together, a narrow vocal range, repetitiveness, sustaining a note for extended periods in a chant-like manner, and so on. The intonation of laments is born out of native conversational speech and poetic intonations. Laments, or voghb and lalik, are specific types of ritual songs representing an interesting category in itself. The opening lament of the poem Anush is similar in style to the Greek tragedies, where the chorus sets the mood in preparation for the tragedy that will ensue. The prologue’s opening with singing fairies – the mystical animation of nature in the form of spirits and the like – is also deeply rooted in ancient tragedy. The use of a chorus, especially one sung by mystical creatures such as nymphs, pursues a specific goal to announce the ensuing tragedy, combining the beliefs in supernatural and fateful occurrences. Especially relevant to Tumanian’s work are the ideals of Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk and the unification of arts through theater drama. In his essay “Die Kunst und die Revolution,” (1849) Wagner uses the term Gesamkunstwerk in connection with Greek tragedies as works of art that are an expression of folk legends abstracted from nationalistic roots to become universal humanist fables13 – a fitting epithet for Tumanian’s Anush. Canto the Fifth is the poem’s most heartbreaking scene. The death of Saro becomes the climax of the tragedy and is painted by Tumanian in darkest colors. The scene of village people in the moment of grief envelops the reader. A sudden, shocking silence follows the screams and cries of the running crowd. Soulfully, the river Debed “sings” its muted lament alone: Like the sudden surging of a deluge, Descended from the dark clouds in the sky, Like a tempest, impetuous and swift, 12 Kenneth McLeish, Aristotle (New York: Routledge, 1999), 8. 13 Richard Wagner, The art-work of the future, and other works, transl. by William A. Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 33–59.
26
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush A group of youth from the village sped forth. Inf lamed by grief, they no longer questioned, And f lew away as if pursued by fear: And before them opened out horribly The swishing valley filled with blood. The village emptied in but a moment And, impatiently waiting on the cliff edge, They listened silently, with throbbing hearts; They looked below…there was not a sound: The roused Debed alone in the precipice Glided downwards with a muted lament. The lament of Saro’s mother loosely fits what ethnomusicologists categorize as a funeral lament. It brings forth the heartbreaking wailings of a mother over the corpse of her son. The true force of the tragedy of the grieving mother is revealed as the poem grows darker in colors laden with cries and curses. Canto the Sixth shows Anush’s madness through her songs. Anush’s madness, along with laments of lost love and consequent suicide by drowning, parallels the fate of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Both works represent a universal depiction of tragedy – a trajectory of love, family betrayal, shame, abandonment, and death expressed in their songs. Anush’s lament, in both content and mood is a combination of a funeral lament, an ode-like lament, and a lyrical love song. According to Armenian ethnomusicologists, all laments (sometimes also called mahergs, or dead-marches) share the same manner of free improvisation; they can change, shorten, elongate, and repeat the form of construction. Many lyrical love songs share the same improvisational and highly emotional forms of creation. Thus, the songs that are most emotional do not follow a specific restricted form but rather give the performer freedom of expression. Anush’s lament is her reaction of grief over the death of her beloved in the manner of a family member – something that was denied to her as Saro’s death was blamed on her. Usually, the closest female family members, such as wives, mothers, and sisters, would use laments as a way to express their sorrow.14 The lament, in its deeply touching sadness, also is a love song for her beloved. Tumanian opens the poem with the love song of Saro toward Anush and closes it with a love song of Anush to Saro.
14 Margarita Brutian, Hay zhoghovrdakan erazhshtakan steghcagorcutyun (Armenian traditional music) (Erevan: Luys, 1971), vol. 1, 149.
27
Beata Navratil Rituals and Beliefs National beliefs and values present in the rituals carry the historic memory of the nation. In turn, the rituals have the power to inf luence the behavior and beliefs of people, similar to the power of omens and signs. The poem does not present any specific time frame but celebrations such as Hambartsum and the winter village wedding give clear points of reference, becoming inseparable parts of the protagonists’ fate. The events of the poem take place through the passing seasons and different celebrations in a swirl of events. Only the songs, whether the lyrical or the ritual type, present the storyline in a timeless manner, as many rituals and songs are ageless by their inherent ability to absorb generations of traditions and customs. Many Armenian traditions and rituals come from antiquity and many are remnants of paganism. As the people of the first nation to establish Christianity as a state religion, Armenians clung to their rituals, which found their way into Christian rites and traditions.15 Beliefs in fate, curses, and omens are omnipresent in the poem and show a vital part of societal functioning. Of all of these, the curse is the most feared. Anush recalls that as a child she was cursed to spend her life in tears. Fear of a curse is very strong among the people in the poem and Anush’s fate becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A cursed person is cursed by all, a situation Anush experiences many times throughout the poem. Armenian wedding rituals are strictly observed as a means of protection from evil and bad luck. Other rituals, such as the elaborate order of lamenting for the dead and kokh (wrestling dance), were believed to inf luence future battles and even weather outcomes. Hambartsum’s order of rites and rituals is believed to bring good luck in love and marriage; thus, the interpretation of dreams, signs, and many other methods emerged (in the poem the foretelling is also done by reading barley seeds). All these beliefs are reinforced by the events that seem to be a self-professed destiny, thus supporting society’s firm faith in the importance of rituals. Most significantly, all such beliefs are strongly preserved in the musical elements of the rituals, which carry a major responsibility in bringing luck. Episodes XII and XIII of Canto the Third depict a village wedding during the wintertime. In Anush, the description of the wedding scene is not long but it contains very clear images of traditional rituals. The tension is created by terse verses and language and rhythm that are different from the rest of the poem and are rather fast paced. Once again, we are wrapped in Tumanian’s 15 Historically, the Armenian Church tried to limit pagan rituals which were seeping into Christian rites. The subject of fate prediction is frowned upon by the Church but it is firmly held in local beliefs.
28
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush timeless “time” by events that seem to happen in the blink of an eye in the long time frame of a wedding ceremony. The apogee of the tragedy is the breaking of an age-old tradition. During kokh (wrestling-dance), Saro, seeing Anush in the crowd, forgets the rules of the wrestling-dance and pushes Mosi (Anush’s brother) to the ground. Srbui Lisitsian, an expert in original Armenian dance forms, describes the ancient kokh as a hand-on-hand fight – a form of wrestling sometimes called giulash kpnel. It is an improvisational pantomime with moves dependent on choices made on the spur of the moment by both rivals. She further explains the rules: Before the start of the “fight”, the wrestlers shake hands as a sign that the match should not be perceived as personal ill-will. Each one would circle his territory with some dance moves which contributes to a deeper meaning of a path that each warrior had taken before their “meeting”. Afterwards they would move towards each other, grab each other firmly at the waist and start the wrestling according to the strict rules. Music accompanied them at all times until one of them could force the opponent’s shoulder to touch the ground. It was also customary for the “opponents” to shake hands in a sign of good will and peace.16 A few words about the style of Armenian male circle dances may explain their value in society. The most typical circle dance involves arms chained into a tight interlock; the circle can open or close but the linked arms stay strong. The male dance has primarily a military origin and all the moves are connected to the imitation of a fight or battle scene. The linked arms symbolize the strength of the battle forts as well as ancient beliefs in mystical powers of cosmic circles. One example of battling male dances popular in Armenia is berdi par (Fortress dance); it always involves a figure of a closed circle as walls of a fortress (up to three groups) of men standing on each other’s shoulders. Thus, in Anush, a ritual becomes part of the downfall. As mentioned earlier, rituals were believed to carry the power to foretell and inf luence the future. In the minds of the people, breaking with their rules was believed to carry punishment. In the poem we read: There was a custom in those dark valleys, And, ever obedient to old customs, No youth would set his fellow wrestler To the ground before an assembled crowd. 16 Srbui Lisitsian, Armjanskie starinnye pljaski [Ancient Armenian dances] (Erevan: AH SSR, 1983), 67–68.
29
Beata Navratil Such a dire warning had significant value, and even as portrayed in the dance, the rules and customs were to be respected. In many villages, in order to achieve a friendly end to those pantomimes the rules were set out and enforced strictly to prevent escalations of violence as honor was the most highly regarded quality of a man. Saro forgets the centuries-old honored tradition: He forgot friends, customs and the world. And whilst Mosi, ever in playful mood, Had momentarily released his hold, Saro mustered up his strength and kneeling, / Viciously f loored his friend and held him down! The kokh and the group dance pahladjo were often used as rituals to foretell the results of a battle, as well as for predictions of the weather and other important events in society.17 In Anush, breaking the rules of conduct ensured revenge. As in ancient times, the kokh-dance became a crucial foretelling force of honor or sin. Choosing the wrestling dance as a moment of apogee of conf lict, we are thrust into the ancient belief in the power of dance to inf luence and foretell the future. The stylized battle of kokh turns into the battle of lover against the beloved’s family. Nature in Songs An essential characteristic of the poem, Anush, is nature emulating every mood, emotion, and physical attribute of the people, as there is no direct description of either their feelings or looks. The transference and humanization of nature, deeply rooted in Armenian folklore, also connects Anush to folk music. As mentioned earlier, Tumanian marks seasonal changes throughout the poem with a consistent f low of the times of the year. For Tumanian, time is not of the essence, but such clear demarcation points to folklore sources where seasons are identified as similar to the emotional state of a person. Its cycles emulate a psychological state. Thousands of folk songs use the time of year as an important prerequisite for telling the story and Tumanian’s approach is based on these traditions. The three interconnected components of nature (we might call them “humanized participants”) depicted in Anush are mountains, f lowers, and to a lesser degree, bodies of water such as the young and pristine mountain springs and the old river Debed. The images of mountains and f lowers create a psychological background for the reader as there is no direct description of the char17 Ibid.
30
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush acters. All songs in the poem are strongly connected to these two images. We see young, strong Saro18 as a broad-shouldered mountain-like youth dancing the “shurj par” (circle dance) “like the giants of legend who kidnapped the daughters of Aragats”,19 and Anush as a gentle f lower. 20 The mountains of Lori become part of Saro’s personality and physical looks, but most importantly the mountains emulate his state of mind as a proud and strong young igit. The connection to the mountains is deep for a hoviv (shepherd) who grows to know each and every stone of his beloved mountains. For an Armenian listener, the images of the mountains run parallel with thousands of folk songs carrying specific “encoded” information of the motherland. 21 At the most critical time in his hopeless search for answers, Saro calls directly to the mountains (in a bayati 22 -song) Bardzr sarer (Tall mountains). Dialogues are omnipresent in Anush, not only as direct communications between two people but also in song rituals directed at imagined or exalted entities such as water, f lowers, and mountains. Such an abundant use of dialogue is connected to folklore traditions rooted in natural speech. Egiazarian calls some of the dialogues “dialogical monologues” – that is, a type of a speech where the answer is implied. 23 There are only two soliloquy-like moments in the poem; both are sung as monologues framed as dialogue. Those are the Bardzr sarer (Tall mountains) monologue by Saro – “Let me disappear, weary and idle, / In your stony wilderness. Wearied of this world, I want / To disappear without trace” and Ach, im bakhte (Oh, my destiny is calling me) by Anush, which bear the leitmotifs of fate. The use of f lowers as a metaphor to describe young women is found in folklore all over the world. In Armenian folk songs, the most common f lowers are wild field varieties such as daisies and daffodils. The festivities are also a 18 Saro is a short form of the Armenian name Saribek. The root of the name derives from the word sar (mountain). 19 Reference is to Canto The First: “huge, proud mountains, / That in drunken files dance around, / In a monumental dance against the sky: […] For elegant Mount Aragats’s fair daughters […]/ Abducted and borne to the impregnable Loree”. 20 One of the meanings of the word anush is “fragrant” as related to the scent of a flower. 21 Armenia is a landlocked mountainous region of the Caucasus. Mount Ararat (Masis in Armenian), currently in Turkish territories, is a symbol of the Armenian motherland and has sacred symbolism to Armenians as a “mother of the world” and is believed to be the place where Noah’s ark came to rest. 22 Armenian dictionaries define the word bayati as “sad melody of eastern origin (from PersianArabic beyt)…”. Bayati asel, atsel (to say or to “pour” bayati) means to loudly cry and lament. Stepan Malchasiants, ed., Hayeren batsatrakan bararan (Armenian Dictionary) (Erevan: Hay SSR Pet. Hrat, 1944) and Eduard Aghaian, ed., Modern dictionary of Armenian language (Erevan: Hayastan Hrat, 1968). 23 Azat Egiazarian, Poet i perevod [Poet and translation] (Erevan: Sovetakan Grogh, 1979), 10.
31
Beata Navratil celebration of the f lowers and details of rituals eulogizing the f lowers are also present. The true nature of Anush is revealed in her “dialogical monologue” directed at f lowers, which identifies her psychological state of pessimistic inclinations and her premonition of a short life similar to that of a f lower. Thus, they share the same destiny. Oh, my destiny is calling me, I know not, no, I know not where! And my heart, sorrowful and dark, Now trembles at its chill voice. Oh, pretty f lowers of the mountains, You, too, bear a silent sorrow: Your little eyes are filled with tears And your hearts are black and cheerless. Oh, all the f lowers of this world Always suffer thus in vain; And likewise all saddened hearts Become crushed and wild in their grief. The abundant use of nature metaphors is not an artificial attempt to color the words and images but rather the deep belief that nature is alive and integrally connected to the well-being of people. Tumanian’s mastery of language and its many meanings and possible interpretations gives the poem life. With the use of recognizable images of nature in a song, Tumanian can express their true essence. Often the youths, being able to tell of their love only through a song’s expressive music and language, would use figurative speech to “tell”. In turn, those expressions came from the ancient traditions of humanization and transference of feelings from and to nature. The third natural element prominent in the poem is water, either spring waters – pure and pristine, a birthplace of fairies and everything new – or the “old” river Debed “singing sharakan (church hymn)” as a prominent backdrop of the old, the powerful keeper of “customs and traditions”. A parerg (dance-song) Ampi takits (From beneath the clouds comes the water) is sung by a group of young maidens on their way to the spring to collect water. Tumanian describes their singing as “Laughing and with shoulders linked, / Their song ringing up the mountains”. Ampi takits is similar to the parerg’s style of question-and-answer antiphony and can be assumed to be sung by different groups. The song becomes a center point of Canto the First, connecting 32
Music in Poetry: Tumanian’s A nush all other events (and parts) through the prism of images of a burning heart and the need to cool it with pure spring water. In his serenade, Saro sings, “Oh, you have scorched my heart with your love […] I can bear it no more.” In Ampi takits, the women sing, “Af lame and drunk with your love; / And his burning heart.” The metaphor is emulated in Anush’s daring confessions: “I am all burning / And turning into fire; / I am melting away / And turning into water!” The water that f lows from “under the cloud” represents the cries of the lover: From beneath the clouds, f lows the water, And, breasting its way down, it froths; Whose lover is sitting up there, Sobbing away on the mountains? The lyrical song Ampi takits – even though a rather ordinary song sung by the group of young women at the spring – carries a major burden of the tragedy. Anush’s “turning into water” expression is connected to a common colloquial expression used to express great sorrow; as an idiom for the word tears, they use “achks jur darav” (my eyes turned into water). Saro in his bayati/lament sings, “oh, I would die […] Though I were freed from the torment / She would be left with a tearful eye”. The “tears” are present in the poem from the very beginning of the fairies’ lamenting “their hearts and eyes / overf lowing with tearful dew”. In Anush’s lament of the fate of the f lowers, the dew of fairies’ tears is emulated in tears of f lowers: “Oh, pretty f lowers of the mountains […] Your little eyes are filled with tears.” In folklore beliefs recorded by Abeghian, the morning dew was believed to be the tears of fairies. These examples illustrate Tumanian’s inspiration. They function as a direct reference to common musical forms known and fully absorbed by the general population. The song Ampi takits connects the image, sound, and action to the emotional background of events mirrored by nature. This study explored the musical manifestations in Hovhannes Tumanian’s poem, Anush, through folk songs, ashug style of storytelling, rituals and musical traditions. The main objective was to reveal the roots of the songs in the poem and their meaning, to analyze the inf luence of traditions on the fate of the protagonists and to show music as a powerful tool used by Tumanian in describing the characters. Ancient Armenian theater, music, architecture, astronomy, etc., have close ties to Hellenic culture which is considered to be the cradle of Western civilization. Tumanian genuinely admired and studied in depth the great writers of the world and saw the traditions of his native Armenia not in contrast to 33
Beata Navratil other cultures but in close relationship to them. Tumanian’s great desire was to see Armenian literature recognized as one of the great ancient relics of history. It is my deepest belief that the rituals and songs beautifully expressed in Tumanian’s language are a valuable addition to world literature. Furthermore, it is my sincere hope that the music deeply rooted in the poem and re-born in the opera overcomes any language barrier to reach the hearts of listeners across the world.
34
“Croatness” in Music
Tatjana Marković Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien
“Croatness” in music: Songfully Italian, solidly German, a little bit “oriental”, and above all Slavic Abstract. The nineteenth-century Croatian national activists, gathered around the Illyrian Revival movement (1835–1848), proclaimed the birth of national music in 1846, after the premiere of the first national opera Ljubav i zloba (Love and malice) by Vatroslav Lisinski (Ignatius Fuchs, 1819–1854) based on the libretto by Dimitrija Demeter (Dimitrios Dimitrou, 1811–1872). The term is by no means understood in an essentialist way, although refers to similarly invented terms in music terminology (Czechness and Russianness, for instance) speaking for characteristics of constructed music national “identity”. The “identity is understood here in its re-conceptualized meaning in accordance with Stuart Hall’s theory. The aim of the study is to disclose the strategies of construction and persistent promotion of certain resources of “Croatness”, which were accepted and approved as a sound of the nation.
Kao što je klima naše zemlje něšto posrèdnjega medju talijanskom i němačkom, isto tako je i u ovom dělu talijanska slast i vatra s němačkom silom i učenostju, nu na slavjanski način zajedno slivena.1
1
The quotation is given in the original, that is, the older orthography form, as it was published in 1846. The author, Jakob Frass, who changed his name to Slavicized Stanko Vraz, was a Slovenian poet, who joined the Croatian national movement. See Anonym. [Stanko Vraz], “Pàrva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga”, part 1, Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska 12/14 (1846), 55. As one of the Illyrian activists, Vraz supported the idea of importance of folk heritage. Moreover, he collected hundreds of Slovenian and Croatian folk songs and melodies and published 115 (Slovenian) of them in Narodne pěsni ilirske, koje se pěvaju po Štajerskoj, Kranjskoj, Koruškoj i zapadnoj strani Ugarske (Illyrian folk songs sung in Styria, Carniola, Carinthia and the western part of Hungary) in Zagreb, 1839. He was also interested in Bulgarian folk songs. Due to his work, Stanko Vraz is considered “one of the most important and most deserving folklorists of his time, not only in Croatia and Slovenia, but also in the entire Slavic territory”. Andrea Sapunar Knežević and Mirjana Togonal, “Stanko Vraz kao folklorist. Vrazov doprinos poznavanju hrvatske i slovenske usmene književnosti”, Croatica et Slavica Iadertina 7/1 (2011), 193–218, here 218.
35
Tatjana Marković (As the climate of our land is between the Italian and German, in this work the Italian delight and passion and the German vigour and scholarliness are perfectly united – but in a Slavic way.) With these words, one of the prominent members of the Croatian national movement, the poet Stanko Vraz ( Jakob Frass, 1810–1851), greeted the premiere of the first “authentic” (izvorna) Croatian opera Ljubav i zloba (Love and malice), 1846, by Vatroslav Lisinski (Ignatius Fuchs, 1819–1854) after the libretto by Dimitrija Demeter (Dimitrios Dimitrou, 1811–1872). The opera premiered on 28 March 1846, in the Gradsko kazalište (the City Theater) known as Stankovićevo kazalište (Stanković’s Theater, 1834–1860)2 in Zagreb, approximately one year after it was written, having been delayed as a result of political turmoil. Lisinski’s stage work is accepted not only as the first national opera, but as the very first work where the sound of “Croatness” appeared. 3 Moreover, the quotation on the opera shown above, is an excerpt from “the first genuine music review in Croatian”.4 The term “Croatness” I am going to apply to music here, refers to similarly invented terms in music – mainly in opera studies – terminology such as Czechness, Russianness, or Irishness and Scottishness speaking for characteristics of national music peculiarities. However, it is by no means understood in an essentialist way in this study, but as a term that symbolizes the Croatian music “identity” as it was constructed by nationalist promoters, in its redefined meaning as Stuart Hall elaborated it. The rhetoric of nationalist activists gathered around the Illyrian movement 5 strongly 2 3
4 5
36
This was the first theater house in Zagreb, named after its founder, the Serbian merchant from Zagreb, Kristofor Stanković, who invested his winnings from the lottery in Vienna in this project. The idea of “Croatness” (hrvatstvo) in music has not yet been defined. It was mentioned in relation to identity, politics and literature, not always as a positive connotation of petite bourgeois mentality or radical nationalism. See, for instance: Daphne N. Winland, We are now a nation. Croats between “home” and “homeland” (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Miroslav Krleža, “Hrvatstvo i zakon državne tromosti”, Radio Gornji Grad. Regionalni časopis za književnost, kulturu I društvena pitanja u prijelomu epohe, https:// radiogornjigrad.wordpress.com/2014/06/08/miroslav-krleza-hrvatstvo-i-zakon-dusevnetromosti/ (last accessed: 29 November 2015). Sanja Majer Bobetko, “Words on music in northern Croatia and Slavonia during the 19th century and until World War I”, IRASM 38/2 (2007), 197–216, here. 204. The Illyrian Movement is the name of the Croatian National Revival, during the period 1835–1848, which “signaled the birth of a patriotic awareness and a belief in the worth of one’s own nation and the greatness of Slavs […] It affected all areas of cultural life, including music, which was seen as a powerful medium for stimulating and strengthening political awareness, and for helping the Croats gain cultural recognition through the creation of an authentic or unique Croatian music”. Zdravko Blažeković, “Political implications of
“Croatness” in Music supported the reception of certain resources in literary and musical works in order to construct their own vision of “national” art. In other words, conside ration of the “Croatness” is aimed to define the resources invented, defined and accepted as “national” in the first half of the 1840s.6 By posting the question “Who needs ‘identity’?”, that is, by challenging the concept of identity proper, Stuart Hall redefined it in the space between the notion that it should not be completely abandoned and awareness of its limitations. First of all, it was necessary to overcome its essentialist nature by challenging the homogeneous, unchangeable, stable, unified nature traditionally related to the concept of identity: instead of essentialist, it is a strategic and positional concept. In other words, identities are “never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation”.7 Further on, identities emerge from “the narrativization of the self ” and, as such, they are “produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies” in relation to specific modalities of power. 8 This theoretical position leads to the key point of Hall’s understanding of identities: he concludes that they are based on using the resources “of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being […], how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves”.9 In the context of this study it will be
6
7 8 9
Croatian opera”, in Music-cultures in contact. Convergences and collisions, ed. By Margaret J. Kartomi and Stephen Blum (Philadephia: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1994), 48–58, here 49. The claim on “authentic and unique Croatian music” obviously assumed the existence of “Croatness” in music. In the years prior to the 1848 revolution, the Illyrian movement was in full bloom, through the activities of linguists, authors and musicians, when the Austrian Chancellor Metternich forbade its name in public by Royal Order in 1843. The Illyrians, however, did not cease their work on building a national culture until the revolution. The cult of Vatroslav Lisinski – still living today – founded after the first national opera, was built up in the Independent State of Croatia, the Nazi puppet state of Germany (1941– 1945), as the first Croatian feature film Lisinski (1944, dir. Oktavijan Miletić, music Boris Papandopulo) shows. Stuart Hall, “Who needs ‘identity’?”, in Question of cultural identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul de Gay (London et al.: Sage Publications, 1996), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Precisely this idea was a departure point of the actual theoretization of the concept of cultural identity by the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien, who suggested resources as the focus of the theory which denies cultural identity completely. More about the theoretical context of cultural resources in musical culture, based on interpretation of Jullien’s theory, I discussed in the forthcoming book dedicated to emerging of national opera
37
Tatjana Marković discussed how the strategic use of specific chosen resources in music led to emergence of the first national opera. As a form of representation, the opera was promoted and accepted as the newly born sound of nation, the “Croatness”. Accordingly, identities were constructed within the opera as a form of representation. To conclude, the concept of identity is constructed within discourse, representation and difference. Croatian self-presentation: between imperial (Habsburg) and national In 1527, after the Battle of Mohács (1526), the Croatian Diet in Cetingrad elected the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand as the Croatian king, and with this act Croatia became part of the Habsburg lands until their dissolution in 1918. In 1868, one year after the foundation of the dual Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Croatians reached an agreement with the Hungarians about a mutual state and legal relations, and the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia were united. The Kingdom of Dalmatia was denied as the third part of the Triune Kingdom, as Croatian nationalists had proposed; it remained a separate unit of the Cisleithanian half of the dual Monarchy. Croatia retained its independence in legislation, administration, legal matters, education and religious issues, while all other decisions were reached jointly. In 1918, it entered the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929–1941). As they belonged to the Habsburg Empire, the Kingdoms of Croatia and Slavonia’s national self-presentation did not necessarily exclude an imperial context. The national ideology of the well-integrated Slavic communities from the western Balkans in the empire, such as the Croatian, was signified by the shared cultures of the Germanic and Italian tradition, the long established German language, a foreign intellectual elite and the Catholic religion. Therefore they certainly did not feel under threat within the Austrian Empire. In other words, in accordance to Autroslavism,10 loyalty to the Emperor and rising nationalism were not contradictory at the outset. A national culture was built in the context of the cultural life of the empire, through the process of cultural appropriation.11 In that way, the construction of “Croatness” in traditions in southeast Europe. See François Jullien, Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle, mais nous défendons les ressources d’une culture Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2016). 10 For definition of Austro-Slavism see Joep Leerssen, “Pan-Slavism”, in Encyclopedia of Romantic nationalism in Europe, http://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159682 (last accessed: 5 September 2017). 11 Cultural appropriation, broadly defined as “the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies, by members of another culture, is inescapable when cultures
38
“Croatness” in Music music and other artistic areas, began in the Habsburg context, initiated by Illyrian Movement members, by adjusting the appropriated imperial forms to local needs. If we accept the statement of the most significant south Slavic and Croatian music historian and national ideologist, Franjo Ksaver Kuhač’s (Franz Xaver Koch, 1834–1911), that this opera was the first embodiment of Croatian musical nationalism, thanks to the nobleman Alberto Ognjen Štriga (1821–1897) and Vatroslav Lisinski, then it is necessary to define how the cultural resources as the Italian early-Romantic opera style, as well as Germanic harmony and orchestration techniques, were adjusted for Croatian ears, and how the process of transculturation developed, unified with the Slavic musical tradition, and resulting in musical “Croatness”. In 1776, when Josef II proclaimed Schauspielerfreiheit, numerous German-speaking theater troupes held guest performances in Zagreb, as in other places with south Slavic populations in the Habsburg Monarchy. Since the end of the eighteenth century, German theater had been dominant in Croatia, as well as in Slovenia, and allied with this domination were many German-speaking and Italian opera companies. From Tallinn in the North (where the popular German playwright August von Kotzebue stimulated German theatre activity) to Ljubljana, Zagreb and beyond in the South, German language theatre dominated the region around 1800. Theatres in the native language had to struggle for money and audience. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, theatres in the vernacular proliferated, and new National Theatres became important conduits of the national sentiments, though they could be built and formally named so only in nations that had a degree of political independence.12 Continuing institutionalization took place, with the aim of promoting (south) Slavic cultures. The process of nationalizing the arts, including music, lasted two or three generations13 and passed through several phases, starting with come into contact, including virtual or representational contact. Cultural appropriation is also inescapably intertwined with cultural politics. It is involved in the assimilation and exploitation of marginalized and colonized cultures and in the survival of subordinated cultures and their resistance to dominant cultures”. Richard A. Rogers, “From cultural exchange to transculturation: A review and reconceptualization of cultural appropriation”, Communication Theory 16 (2006), 474–503, here 474. 12 John Neubauer, “General introduction”, in History of the literary cultures of east-central Europe: Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, vol. 3: The making and remaking of literary institutions, ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 7. 13 It is obvious from the fact that, although the national tradition of Croatian opera was
39
Tatjana Marković self-identification with the imperial Habsburg context of the Catholic Slavs, or the denying of the imperial Ottoman context of the Orthodox Slavs, as well as Pan-Slavism. There was a specific Slavic network, including the institutions in both the Austrian, that is Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman provinces of Slavs: the literary societies called reading rooms (čitališta, čitaonice, čitalnice), the cultural centres called maticas,14 and the choral and sokol (gymnastic) societies.15 They were built on amateur involvement, which made them widespread even in towns and villages. This set of institutions, characteristic of all of the Slavic community, was signified by Pan-Slavism, which was ref lected in their repertoire too, along with works by German Romantic composers. The aforementioned first theater house in Zagreb, the Gradsko kazalište (City Theater), was opened on 4 October 1834, on the occasion of the name day of the Emperor Francis I. “Until the opening of the newly-built Hrvatsko narodno kazalište [Croatian National Theater] in 1860, the City (varoški) Theater – as the Gornjogradsko or Stanković’s Theater was called by people – was central Zagreb’s cultural institution and the only means for spreading cultural education of Croatian citizens, the majority of whom were illiterate at that time”.16 Soon after the opening of the theater, a letter presenting the institution was sent to the editorial board of the journal Agramer politische Zeitung: Das Agramer Theater ist wirklich von nationalem Interesse; und es lohnt die Mühe, das Augenmerk dahin zu richten; denn hier ist das einzige stabile und organisirte Theater in Kroatien; hier ist eine Bühne, welche das ganze Jahr hindurch offen steht […] hier ist ein neu gebautes, freundliches Haus, mit überraschend schönen Dekorationen geziert, welches wohl bei tausend Menschen sassen mag, aber leider oft leer bleibt, selten gänzlich angefüllt wird; hier ist eine Unternehmung, für welche bis jetzt gar kein Zuschuß, wie anderwärts, von Seiten der Landstände oder bürgerlichen Kommunität ausgemittelt war, ja die nicht einmal von 57 Logen, welche alle der Eigenthümer des Gebäudes vermiethet, eine established in 1846, the repertoire was dominated by Italian Romantic opera due to the regular stagioni that were held between 1843 and 1869. The national opera production and performance practice continued up until 1870. 14 The oldest one was Serbian (1826), followed by Bohemian (1831), Illyrian (1842, renamed to Croatian in 1874), Dalmatian (1861) and many others. 15 Besides choral societies, certain authors mentioned the schools, the church, the army, charities and women’s organizations. See Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen, eds., Choral societies and nationalism in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 16 Danijela Weber-Kapusta, “Društvena struktura i kulturni identitet zagrebačke publike izmedju 1834. i 1860. godine”, in Dani Hrvatskoga kazališta. Gradja i rasprave o hrvatskoj književnosti i kazalištu 42/1 (2016), 28–54, here 29.
40
“Croatness” in Music einzige zu ihrer Disposition hat; hier ist eine komplete Gesellschaft für Schauspiel, Oper und Posse, welche in einzelnen Individuen ercellirt, im Ganzen genüget; hier ist ein Publikum – (ich nenne dieß aus Bescheidenheit zuletzt, weil ich selbst dazu gehöre) in der Zahl der gewöhnlichen Theaterbesucher sehr beschränkt, aber im Urtheile streng, zur Nachsicht täglich weniger geneigt, und größtentheils nur deßhalb nicht befridiget, weil es die Forderungen fast nach dem höchsten Maßstabe stellt und darin viel weiter geht, als die Soutenirungsmittel reichen.17 Starting with Theodor Körner’s play Zrinyi (1812), this theater was, until 1860, the institution in which German travelling companies performed. However, it hosted the performance of the first theater play – and soon after that, the first national opera – in the Croatian language. It is noteworthy that Croatian ideas of national theater came from foreigners, who also formed the majority of the founders and representatives of the National Revival movement, and in many cases Croatized their names.18 Therefore, it is not surprising in the given context, that the initiative to introduce the Croatian language on the stage came from Heinrich Börnstein (1805–1892), the director of Stanković’s Theater. His appeal Über die Begründung einer illyrischen National-Bühne (On the foundation of the Illyrian national stage, 1839) was translated by Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872), and published in Croatian in his Danica ilirska on 16 December 1839. Börnstein stressed the significance of language for every national culture and praised the Slavic “tribes” for their achievements in this field. As he concluded, there is no better mediator of the highest level of a mother tongue than theater.19 Later, Börnstein even suggested which play could be performed first in the Illyrian language: “since we already have a theater, adornments, costumes, chorus and orchestra, we could try some national (domorodni) play too”, for instance, Kukuljević’s “beautiful drama” Juran i Sofia. 20 Doubtlessly, Börnstein’s suggestion did not come from his patriotic feelings for Croatian theater, but out of his awareness that drama in the national language could significantly raise audience interest and consequently garner financial 17 Benevolus, “Agramer Theater (Eingesendet)”, Luna. Beiblatt zur Agramer politischen Zeitung 37 (1835), 148–151, here 149. 18 Among them are mentioned Dimitrija Demeter (Dimitrios Dimitrou), Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (Franz Xaver Koch), Vatroslav Lisinski (Ignatius Fuchs), Adolf Veber Tkalčević (Adolfo Weber), Stanko Vraz ( Jakob Frass), Ferdo Livadić (Ferdinand Wiesner). Some of them of Croatian origin, like Count Janko Drašković, used the German language more frequently before the decision to promote the vernacular language. 19 Heinrich Börnstein, “O utemeljenju ilirskoga narodnoga kazališta”, transl. Ljudevit Gaj, Danica ilirska, 16 November 1839, 181–182, here 181. 20 Ibid., 182.
41
Tatjana Marković success. Indeed, only a few months later, the Serbian theater troupe Leteće diletantsko pozorište from Novi Sad, renamed Domorodno teatralno društvo, received a contract and played in the City Theater for the next eighteen months. During their visit, the company performed plays by Croatian, Serbian, German and other authors, resulting all together in fifty premieres. Among them, was the aforementioned Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski’s (1816–1889) drama Juran i Sofia ili Turci kod Siska ( Juran and Sofia or the Turks under Sisak), that was performed on 10 June 1840. As being one more example of cultural appropriation, this heroic play is based on Lorenz Gindl’s drama Thomas Erdödy, Ban von Kroatien (1826), 21 and is dedicated to the historical Battle of Sisak (1593), well-known for the victory of the Habsburg army over the much larger Ottoman force, which halted the march towards central Europe. Interestingly enough, it was originally written in German and, after the translation to Croatian, was performed for the first time in 1839 in Sisak, and one year later in Zagreb. Overwhelming enthusiasm characteristically connected national and imperial attitudes: “Every expression, every word, which is related to nation (rod), language, emperor and homeland, was followed by thunderous applauding and joyful acclamations, which has never been heard in that theater”. 22 The great success of Sakcinski’s play in the vernacular inspired the idea of a national theater: the poet and politician Mirko Bogović (1816–1893), who belonged to the Illyrian Movement, wrote that the foundation of a national theater “for [the] development of our spiritual life would [be] endlessly useful”; it could enable even illiterate and non-educated people to enjoy the precious national literature. Bogović concluded that the time had come to establish a national theater “because there are wishes everywhere to wake up our sleepy people from lethargy and provide the school of life – theater”. 23 The depiction of Croatia as “a heroine who, tired of the fierce fight lasting for centuries against the great enemy of the Christianity, fell asleep finally with a bloody sword in her hand”24 became a topos in different narratives. She was then awakened by the 21 See Davor Dukić, “Das Türkenbild in der kroatischen literarischen Kultur vom 15. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in Osmanen und Islam in Südosteuropa (=Abhandlugen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, vol. 24), ed. by Reinhard Lauer and Hans Georg Majer (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 157–191. 22 See Danica ilirska, 6/24 (1840), 94. 23 Mirko Bogović, “O utemeljenju narodnoga kazališta”, Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska 11/18 (1845), 70–71. This vision was implemented with the legislation by the Croatian Parliament in 1861. According to it, the Croatian National Theater is defined as a national institution, partially financed from the national budget. It even recommended the foundation of the national opera, which was opened a decade later, in 1870. 24 Anonym., “Prva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga”, part 1, Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska 12/14 (1846), 53.
42
“Croatness” in Music new, national culture, due to the authors – who did not make efforts for their own glory and material benefit as in western Europe, which had established her glory long ago, as it was stressed – and the composers of national music (embodied in singing), who did it “for the honor of their backward homeland”. In that way Croatians took a step closer to the cultured and educated nations. 25 Only some years later, the national language was heard sung from the stage, and the sound of the nation was “recognized” and strongly promoted. The sound that supported building the nation of the Slavs was vocal, 26 embodied by a united group of unison voices, accompanied by westernized harmonization – a chorus. With its communicative role to the fore, it was also the most accessible form for a mass movement of amateurs’ performance practice. The rich tradition of choral singing in promoting national movements was of key importance for the establishment of a national sound in Croatia too. Importantly, the united collective singing was often organized and led by nationalist activists. The composers of the most popular songs, who were sometimes also the authors of the first national operas, were the most highly-praised national composers. Vatroslav Lisinski is one of them. The dream of a truly national opera was fulfilled by the performance of his opera, as the most significant achievement of the Illyrian movement. National opera as an Illyrian project The first work to be recognized as a “national opera” in Croatia – Love and malice by Vatroslav Lisinski – was written in 1845 and performed one year later, around twenty-five years before the Opera House was established in Zagreb. The second opera in Croatian, also by Lisinski and Demeter, was composed between 1848–1850, but its impact failed at that time: due to the political situation after the 1848 revolution, it was performed only in 1897. For that reason, the mature national opera was not Lisinski’s Porin ili Oslobođenje Hrvata ispod franačkog jarma (Porin, or The liberation of Croats from the Frankish invasion), as music historiographers later posited, but rather Nikola 25 Vraz, “Pàrva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga” (as note 1), 54. 26 It is especially related to the Orthodox Slavs (Russians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Macedonians), former members of the Byzantine commonwealth, for the church service includes exclusively vocal music, a cappela unison singing with the ison. The Catholic practice (Czechs, Croatians, Slovenians, Slovaks) assumes vocal music, but also organ playing, with a possibility to include other instruments. Nevertheless, the vocal sound, and group singing, is present in both practices. It is interesting to mention that in the old Slavic languages now in use in Croatian, the term for music is “glazba” coming from “glas” or voice. In all other official languages of the Balkan states there are different versions of the term “music” proper.
43
Tatjana Marković Šubić Zrinjski by Ivan Zajc (Giovanni von Zaytz, 1832–1914), performed in the year of the Balkan crisis. 27 This opera, which was in certain respects inspired by Porin, brought to the vigorous sound of the nation a more stressed oriental aspect, since it was dedicated to the historical hero who lost his life in the Siege of Szigetvár (1566) against the much bigger Ottoman army led by Suleiman the Magnificent, stopping their progress to Vienna. The military topos, heroic choruses, harem dances, and Verdian music with oriental f lavor were all resources in the mentioned sense that provided a spectacle which was understood as the main national opera, based on elaborated signifiers of “Croatness” as they were defined in the opera by Lisinski. Russian, that is, Mihail Ivanovič Glinka’s (1804–1857) operas, were taken as an inspiration for Croatian national opera. The premiere of Glinka’s opera Жизнь за царя (A Life for the Tsar) in December 1836 strongly echoed among Croatian nationalists gathered around the weekly Danica ilirska, edited by the leader of the National Revival, Ljudevit Gaj. In accordance with the movement’s idea about uniting south Slavs, this journal reported regularly on music and other arts to the entire Slavic community, so it is not surprising that the news of musical life in Russia was one of the topics. In an article providing a kind of survey of contemporary composers in Russia, Glinka is mentioned as the main Russian composer, whereby precisely the qualities of his first opera which were of key importance for “Croatness” several years later, were stressed: the richness of melodic line, the “authentic”, original and unique vocal line that makes the first Russian and Slavic national operas completely different from all other European operas. 28 Thanks to the melodious richness, as it was reported, the majority of the opera melodies “live in the mouth of the [Russian] nation” and the audience could not have had enough of listening to it. 29 Glinka’s opera was based upon the intonations of Russian folk melodies in the framework of early-nineteenth-century Italian opera. It is noteworthy to mention the letter (15 February 1841) that Glinka wrote to his mother, emphasizing the Italian and German/French inf luence on his music: “Art, this joy given to me by heaven, perishes here [in Russia] from the murderous indifference to everything that is beautiful. Had I not spent several years abroad, I would not have written A life for the Tsar. Now I am completely convinced that Ruslan can only be completed in Germany or France”. 30 27 The way it embodied Croatness is discussed by Tatjana Marković, “Memorizing battle musically: The Siege of Szigetvár (1566) as an identity signifier”, LiThes 10 (2014), 5–17. 28 Anon., “Muzika u Rusii”, Danica ilirska, 1841, 194–195, here 194. 29 Ibid. 30 See Yuri Olkhovsky, Vladimir Stasov and Russian national culture (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 56.
44
“Croatness” in Music The news that the first Slavic national opera was born, moved Alberto Ognjan Štriga, one of the main ideologists of the Croatian national movement, to immediate action. He convinced Vatroslav Lisinski to compose the opera that would have the honor of being the first Croatian national stage work. As in some other cultures, the expectations for a national opera were so great that the promoters of nationalism were searching for a candidate who could compose it. Thus, the hope that Ferdinand (Wiesner) Livadić, as the only music professional at that time in Zagreb, could do for Croatians the same as “Glinka did for the Russians and Tomašek for the Czechs, because he is full of musical imagination and knowledge” and make a special gift to “all Slavic brothers and all music lovers”31 was expressed by the count Janko Drašković after the first concert of Illyrian music. This task was, however, fulfilled by Vatroslav Lisinski. Lisinski’s career – and even some life decisions such as the Croatization of his name when he was twenty-two (Ignatius Fuchs to Vatroslav Lisinski) – was directed by his friend Alberto Štriga, the lawyer, amateur baritone singer, and great organizer of musical and cultural life in Zagreb. Štriga was mentioned as the initiator of the Croatian national opera and the organizer of its performances. His main medium for establishing, supporting and directing his “new idea on nationhood (narodnost)”32 was, by no means coincidentally, the voice. He often sang folk songs in public and private spaces, and his mission to promote national ideas started by gathering academic youth in Zagreb to sing the same repertoire “in the chorus of a hundred throats”. 33 With Vatroslav Lisinski, whom he met at the beginning of the 1840s and who became his close friend, Štriga founded the first national choral society Prvo ilirsko glazbeno društvo (The First Illyrian Music Society). The members were “young intelligent Croatians” and they sang only Croatian and other Slavic songs – this was considered important to stress, because “to sing in a cosmopolitan way and in Croatian is not one and the same”. 34 Since the young composer understandably hesitated before accepting the suggestion to write the opera, considering it a too demanding task for him (as he was not yet a professional composer) 35 Štriga even ordered a libretto from 31 Anon., “Ilirska muzikalna zabava”, Danica ilirska, 1838, 63–64, here 64. 32 Franjo Kuhač, “Alberto Ognjan pl. Štriga”, part 1, Vienac zabavi i pouci, 17/43 (1885), 682– 684, here 682. As the author explained in a footnote, for writing this text, he also used the manuscript about Štriga by the late university professor Armin Šrabec. 33 Ibid., 683. 34 Ibid. 35 In order to provide professional music education for Vatroslav Lisinski, Štriga suggested studies in Prague in 1847 and financially supported his studies there. Since Lisinski’s age was
45
Tatjana Marković the amateur poet Janko Car (1822–1876) 36 and, when the composer accomplished the opera, and his Zagreb teacher Juraj Karlo (Georg Karl) Wisner von Morgenstern (1783–1855) orchestrated it, Štriga performed the main role (Alberto, or Obren in the second version of the opera). Ultimately, however, that libretto did not suffice and Štriga obtained an improved version from Dimitrija Demeter, the leading author in Croatia during the Illyrian period. As mentioned, on Demeter’s initiative the Croatian Parliament established the Hrvatsko narodno kazalište (Croatian National Theater) in Zagreb, where Demeter was a dramatist. The concert performance with fragments from the first act of the new version of the opera Love and malice took place in March 1845, and the premiere was a year later, delayed due to the dramatic political events remembered as the “July victims” event. 37 The Opera LOVE AND MALICE as a sound of “Croatness” The first Croatian national opera is based on a love story, which could seem contradictory at first glance, to the general assumption that – if not an episode from national history – then the story has at least a background topic an obstacle for him to enter the Conservatory in Prague, he studied counterpoint with Karel František Pitsch at the Organ School, and composition and instrumentation with Jan Bedřich Kittl as a private student. During this period Lisinski composed his second opera Porin. 36 Moreover, Janko Car “has never seen any opera libretto, and asked for several librettos of the popular Italian and German operas in order to educate himself and to learn the ‘craft’ at least in haste”. Vladimir Švacov, “Libreti i libretisti Ljubavi i zlobe”, in: Janko Car/Dimitrija Demeter, Libreti opera Vatroslava Lisinskog, red. by Vladan Švacov, Nikola Batušić, Martina Aničić (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1999), 133. 37 The local elections for the government of Zagreb County were marked by the struggle between two main political groups, the Hrvatsko-ugarska stranka (Croatian-Hungarian Party) or madjaroni (due to their support to Magyarization) and Narodna stranka (People’s Party or Illyrian Party). Upon the announcement of the victory of the former party (whose win was due to voter fraud), the member of the latter started protests at St. Mark’s Square in the centre of Zagreb, so that Franz Haller, the then Croatian Viceroy (banus), asked the Austrian army for help to prevent wider public protests. The clashes between the protesters and the army resulted in numerous members and supporters of the People’s Party being assassinated or severely injured. Among the injured protesters was Franjo Stazić (Franz Steger, 1824–1911), the opera singer who was engaged for the role of the Dalmatian nobleman Vukosav, which added one more reason to postpone the premiere of Love and malice until the following year, on 28 March 1846. Beside Steger, the first performers of the opera roles were young and successful: Sidonija Rubido Erdödy as Ljubica, Alberto Štriga as Obren, Kamilo Livadić as Duke Velimir, and Ljudevit Pihler as Ljudevit. The five performances of the opera in 1846, and two more in 1847, became not only the main cultural events in Zagreb, but were later considered to have been the highest point of the entire Illyrian Movement.
46
“Croatness” in Music concerning the self-identification of the nation. A love story of two young men in love with the same girl, whose father forbids her relationship with the one she loves and chooses without any clearly given reason the other one, an evil man and a political enemy, is thwarted so that love wins at the end – does not really inspire great patriotism or the celebration of nation. There are some other nineteenth-century cases of simple love – sometimes comical – stories, that are accepted as nationalistic – like, for instance, Prodaná nevěsta (The bartered bride, 1863–1866) by Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) or Gorenjski slavček (The nightingale from Upper Carniola) by Anton Foerster (1837–1926). This proves the fact that (the first) national opera became “national” through its reception, not because of its own characteristics. However, the opera – based on a simple love story with rather monochrome characterization – did obtain a patriotic and heroic sound that was not closely related to the libretto. In other words, the music only provided patriotically intoned self-identification in the “Slavic” choral numbers choral numbers and fierce part of Vukosav. At the time when he composed his first opera, Vatroslav Lisinski was still an amateur composer. His knowledge of the opera literature could have included the aforementioned information on Glinka’s opera, and the repertoire of the guest opera troupes in Zagreb which included stage works by Wolfgang A. Mozart (1756–1791), François-Adrien Boildieau (1775–1834), Conradin Kreutzer (1780–1849), Daniel F. Auber (1782–1871), Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), Louis J. Ferdinand Hérold (1791–1833), Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), Gaetano Donizetti (1797– 1848), Albert Lortzing (1801–1851), Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835), and Luigi Ricci (1805–1859). 38 The main inf luence on him was undoubtedly Italian. As previously mentioned, there are two versions of the libretto, as well as of the opera. Comparing the original libretto and its revision, it is possible to follow different kinds of changes, ranging from the content proper to the language and spelling of certain words. The differences between these two versions show, in a certain sense, the gradual refinement of the national ideology. After discussing the question of national language, more light will be shed on new aspects included in Demeter’s libretto as related to the setting and characters. As noted earlier, the sound of nation in southeast European cultures was produced through the voice. Voices of the nations were embodied in four-part choral ensembles, and also in the vernacular language, before they were uni ted in the performances of national operas. For that reason, language is tak38 Lovro Županović, Vatroslav Lisinski (Zagreb, 1819.–Zagreb, 1854.): Život i djelo. Uz 150. obljetnicu njegove smrti (Zagreb: Graphis, 2003), 316.
47
Tatjana Marković en as a sound of nation too, as the first half of the nineteenth century was the period of establishing, defining and coding national languages, and also the time when they could be heard emerging in art music. In the case of the southeast Slavic peoples, it was a complex question, since there was the shared legacy of the national recensions of Old Church Slavonic. It is therefore understandable why the vernacular language was the resource in the sense Hall defined it of a foremost importance in the building Pan-Slavic and afterwards national (musical) cultures. The members of the National Revival in Croatia had a vision of a united south Slavic culture, assuming also a mutual language. For instance, the Društvo zagrebačkih kazališnih dobrovoljaca (Society of the Zagreb Theater Volunteers, 1847) worked in accordance with the Rules (1851) defined by Demeter and Štriga. The aim of the Society was to spread a “pure” national language, to awake a love of the homeland and “everything that is national[ly] Slavic”, as well as national pride, offering a pleasant scholarly entertainment for Croatian citizens and the foundation of the permanent national theater. 39 The significance of the vernacular language’s sound echoed in opera too, as the Croatian opera proves. It was composed in a period when the question of language was prevalent and was being widely discussed. The leader of the Illyrians, Ljudevit Gaj, in his Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja (Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography, 1830), defined a unique orthography in order to overcome the inconsistencies stemming from the lack of all the specific sounds in the Latin script, and a common use of the Hungarian alphabet. His model was the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, standardized by the linguist living in Vienna, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787– 1864), some years before. Afterwards, the linguist Djuro Daničić (1825–1882) replaced digraphs from Gaj’s orthography with single letters, in his Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language, 1880). The motto was that there is one letter for every sound. In this way, Serbo-Croatian was established by the mutual effort of, first of all, Serbian and Croatian linguists. The agreement on using the Serbian language for all south Slavs,40 however, remained an unrealized idea. 39 Nikola Andrić, “Spomen knjiga Hrvatskog zemaljskog kazališta pri otvaranju nove kazališne zgrade”, Narodne novine, 1895, 27. 40 This agreement, known as Bečki književni dogovor (Vienna Literary Agreement, 1850), was signed by the Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian national ideologists, including linguists and authors Djuro Daničić, Dimitrije Demeter, Vuk Karadžić, Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Ivan Mažuranić, Franc Mikolišič, Vinko Pacel i Stefan Pejaković. The Vienna Literary Agreement was a subject of numerous studies, among them see, for instance, Robert D. Greenberg, Language and identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24–29.
48
“Croatness” in Music The slightly different spelling and orthography are obvious in the two versions of the libretti for Lisinski’s opera Love and malice. By (dis)placing the action into Dalmatia three centuries earlier, that is, to sixteenth-century Spalato (today’s Split), Demeter hinted to his reasons for entitling the opera “Illyrian”, or, of all Illyrian lands: as Franjo Kuhač clarified, the opera was called Illyrian because it unifies musical characteristics of all the Illyrian areas ( pokrajinah).41 This was certainly a reference to the vision of the Triunite Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. Demeter even included references to Dubrovnik literature.42 There are also significant differences between the two libretti in relation to the characters. Whilst in the first version the main male characters are Alberto and the nobleman Vezalić, in the second they are Obren and Count Velimir, the former Duke of Split. Subsequently, the groups of characters are also transformed from villagers, farmers and citizens to additional social groups such as gardeners, soldiers, Velimir’s servants, Vukosav’s hajduks and Ljudevit’s peasants. Further on, whilst in the first libretto Alberto and Ljubica are passive – they love each other and suffer but are not doing anything in order to overcome the obstacles and be together – Obren, from the second libretto, is more active, struggling for his love against Vukosav and Ljubica’s father’s will, so that the happy end might be seen as more logical. The only female role is of a passive and obedient young woman, who does not have any strength to resist her father’s will, even if it causes her unhappiness. She also does not make any effort to be with Obren, but instead only waits without hope. Her main – as a matter of fact, her only – sound sphere is the soloistic vocal embellishment in Bellinian bel canto style. Such vocal lyricism is also typical for Obren, a man deeply in love, who at the end is going to the uprising not because of his patriotic feelings, but as a result of disappointment (A-f lat minor!) after mistakenly thinking that he has been betrayed by Ljubica. Vukosav, his servant Branko and the hajduks are negative characters, but nevertheless the most successfully depicted. Vukosav is a passionate young man and, although evil (representing the “malice” from the opera’s title), very eager to fulfill his personal and political aims by strongly motivated action. Consequently, his musical sphere was the most delightful for a wider audience, as it dealt with rising excitement and patriotic feelings. 41 Anonym., “Prva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga”, part 2, Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska 12/15 (1846), 59. 42 Dubrovačka književnost, or Dubrovnik literature, is a term referring to the literature of the Respublica Ragusina in the period of its existence, from the Byzantine Ragusa in the fourteenth, to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was conquered by Napoleon.
49
Tatjana Marković The music-dramatic concept of the entire opera is not quite successful, first of all due to the weaknesses of the libretto, but also because of Lisinski’s lack of experience. Janko Car’s libretto suffers from a sequence of not always firmly connected events, the lack of clear phases of dramatic action, an unclear plot, and a stressed moral message that “good ones will be rewarded, and the bad ones will be punished” without the psychological development of characters and their actions. The second version by Dimitrija Demeter partially sharpened the focus of the story, included more direct action through direct communication among the characters instead of description in arias, and gave clearer motivation to the characters’ behavior. However, since Demeter did not profoundly change, but only rearranged the first version of the libretto, the main weaknesses of the story remained. It seems that the main perceived weakness is related to the “inadequate” musical setting. Only in the last part of the opera is it revealed that both Ljudevit and Vukosav are politically engaged on opposite sides, and that both plan an uprising, the former with peasants and the latter with hajduks from the urban environment. This dimension of the story sheds light on the rivals, who are also political enemies. In this light, the rather patriotic exclamations in a fiery duet between Vukosav and Obren (“let’s go to struggle”, “bloody war”, “we are struggling as lions and one of us has to be defeated”) comes to be more than only an offensive dialogue between two rivals in love with the same girl. Further on, sometimes quite elaborate, ornamented vocal lines and orchestration written by Wisner Morgenstern, especially the tutti moments, serve to overcome the rather poor content of the opera, and generally banal dialogues. Yet all of the shortcomings certainly did not deter delighted and enthusiastic audiences and critics, who were first and foremost overwhelmed with pride to be able to enjoy the first national opera. The first Croatian opera as a network of discourses Lisinski’s Love and malice is an opera in two acts, as was characteristic for Bellini’s and other early-Romantic Italian operas, with an Overture and seventeen units: these include either a single number, or a greater number of shorter musical numbers. There are ten recitatives, seven arias, two ariosos, three duets, one quintet, one sextet and eight choruses. As a matter of fact, the composer was inspired by early-Romantic Italian opera to follow the text in accordance with a given point in the dramaturgy, for instance: 50
“Croatness” in Music Scene 1 in the libretto includes: a shorter prayer as an opening male Chorus of Gardeners (No.1), a recitativo and an aria by Ljubica (No.2) and another recitativo by her (No.3); Scene 2 in the libretto: the second part of the same musical number, concluded by the first short dialogue between Ljubica and Obren (No.3); Scene 3 in the libretto: the Chorus of Harvesters, starting as a male chorus and continuing as a mixed chorus (No.4) and an aria by Obren (No.5). Lisinski obviously composed numbers departing from the scene structures defined in the libretto. These include three-part song-form and strophic song and he used thoroughly homophonic textures, either as melody and accompaniment or as a sequence of homo-rhythmic chords (in some choral numbers). In most cases, the numbers are clearly divided by cadences. As in his Lieder, Lisinski composed the opera Love and malice as an Italian-(German-)-Croatian amalgam,43 whereby the Croatian was at that time “under construction”. Additionally, another resource which was strategically used in the opera as representative – the choral budnice (rousing songs), numerous in the opus of Illyrian composers of the 1830s and early 1840s, anticipated the music of the patriotic scenes in national operas with the same characteristics: They have texts which emphasise rebellion for national emancipation, and tie existence in the unity of Slaves Oj, llirijo, oj veselo nam stoj [Oh, Illyria, oh, be joyfull]; Uviek složno treba poći [It should always go joining]). Some of the songs hold the political message that is covered in their verses, as for example, one of the most popular Prosto zrakom ptica leti [The bird f lies free in the air]. These texts […] glorify national culture, patriotism and the beauties of Croatian countryside.44 There are three discourses related to the first Croatian national opera, formulated in word, sound and picture: the Slavic, the “oriental” and the patriotic. Judging by the reactions of contemporary critics, starting from the premiere 43 Here is this expression used in the same way as Marina Frolova-Walker uses the expression “Italian-Russian amalgam” when considering Mihail Ivanovič Glinka’s opera Life for the Tsar. Moreover, in both operas we can talk about the cultural appropriation of Bellini’s operatic style as a significant resource for constructing national opera. Cf. Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian music and nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 82. 44 Zdravko Blažeković, “The nineteenth-century Croatian rousing songs: From composer’s desk to the oral tradition and back”, in Schladminger Gespräche zum Thema Musik und Tourismus, ed. by Wolfgang Suppan (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1991), 41–48, here 44.
51
Tatjana Marković in 1846, there was no strict border between the music understood as national and as Slavic, which was related mainly to – unsurprisingly – the choruses. In the opera Love and malice the amalgam was the embodiment of love, as well as the vocal embellishment of Bellinian type. The most appealing aspect of the opera is its melodic component. Vocal me lody is developed, often melismatic and – in the lyric love arias of Ljubica, sometimes of Obren too, or in their duets – includes some coloratura short passages, most often at the beginning of musical phrases, as can be found in Bellini’s arias. It is interesting to observe that Countess Sidonija Rubido Erdödy, who performed Ljubica’s role in Lisinski’s opera, was praised for her distinguished bel canto. At the aforementioned first concert of Illyrian music, when she sang an aria from Bellini’s opera La sonnambula (1831) in the vernacular, it was noticed that the Italian aria in the Illyrian language sounds “with sweetness like in Italian”.45 The elaborate vocal melody is mainly announced by an instrumental introduction, and the instrumental accompaniment contains – in the majority of cases – strings, often performing ostinato figures, and sometimes with oboe or f lute. As already noted, before he accepted Alberto Štriga’s persuasion to write the opera, the composer was dedicated to writing vocal miniatures. It is evident that he chose Ljubica’s arias, in particular, to express his gift of wri ting richly-ornamented, captivating melodies. The “Slavic sound” is “recognized” mainly in the choruses. The first Lisin ski’s biographer, Antonija Kassowitz-Cvijić (1856–1936), pointed out how precisely Stanko Vraz known as “the strictest and the most righteous critic” was happy to hear – especially in the choruses – the music from all “Illyrian south lands”, meaning “Croatian, Serbian, Styrian, Carniolan” music motifs.46 As Vraz claimed, the “Slavic sound” is evident in the Introduction of the opera, including the instrumental introduction and the Chorus of Gardeners, remarkable for its “quite new voices, although nevertheless known”, as everyone in Croatia has been listening to them for generations. This is, as the reviewer believed, the best sign that the composer had figured out the national spirit.47 “Equally superb” in this respect is the Chorus of Harvesters in Act I: in this number, “part after part [is] Slavic, peasant (seoski), but nevertheless all [is] artistic, written strictly after the rules of counterpoint”.48 This was considered “one of the most beautiful numbers of the opera” of Slavic nature that had 45 Anon., “Ilirska muzikalna zabava” (as note 24), 63. 46 Antonija Kassowitz-Cvijić, Vatroslav Lisinski u kolu Ilira (Zagreb: Hrvatski štamparski zavod, 1919), 120. 47 Vraz, “Pàrva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga” (as note 1), 55. 48 Ibid.
52
“Croatness” in Music been heard at that time. The Introduction and the Chorus of Gardeners, which encircle Ljubica’s first aria (No.2) and her dialogue with Obren as a recitative (No.3), share musical material and in this way build formal unity in a freely ABA form. The instrumental introduction (Allegro moderato, 4/4, E-f lat major) is, thus, based on the material of the Chorus of Harvesters. The orchestral beginning, as well as the chorus, starts with a unison melody of strings and male vocal ensemble. This kind of monophony of united voices obviously had a strong affect. It starts in E-f lat major, but soon – in the Chorus of Harvesters at the end of the first four-bar phrase – a minor subdominant (minor sixth) appears, either in chromatic suspensions in f lutes and clarinets (dominant – diminished sixth – dominant) or in vocal chords . The result is the scale with an augmented second between the sixth and seventh tones. According to Nikolaj Rimskij-Korsakov (1844–1908), all scales that include an augmented second are “harmonic”, and this one he called the “harmonic major”.49 It was characteristic in Romantic music, and Franz Schubert (1797–1828) used it in several of his piano sonatas (such as D. 537 A minor and D 959 C minor), as did Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) and Antonín Leopold Dvořák (1841–1904) among others. The harmonic E-f lat major is also present in the first movement of Symphony No. 3 by Ludwig van Beethoven.50 The scale was used by Glinka in his opera Ruslan i Ljudmila: moreover, it was characteristic of “Russian-Eastern (russko-vostočnyj) oriental coloeur” along with the harmonic minor or melodic major with the Phrygian second tone.51 The scale does not sound “oriental” in the same way in the Croatian opera though, but obviously contributes to the “Slavic sound” along with the approach to texture and other musical means. The “oriental” sound is nevertheless related to this number – not through the sound proper, but through iconography. The practice of changing tones, resulting in different scales with the same tonic (such as E-f lat major versus E-f lat harmonic major) is referring to the peremennyj lad (переменный лад), a term taken over from Russian music theory. Additionally, it also means an oscillation between the parallel major and minor, or some other result of changing the tonal gravity (tonic) within the same scale. It is usually achieved by avoiding dominant harmony with the leading tone. The peremennyj lad is used in some other south Slavic nineteenth-century operas and, as such, can be also understood as a signifier of the Slavic tone. 49 See Николaй Римский-Корсаков, Практический учебник гармонии (С. Петербург: Издательство Беляева , 1886). 50 See Mathew Riley, “The ‘harmonic major’ mode in nineteenth-century theory and practice”, Music Analysis 23/1 (2004), 1–26. 51 See http://www.lafamire.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=570&Item id=252 (last accessed: 6 August 2017)
53
Tatjana Marković The second part of the Introduction, the short Chorus of Gardeners called “Molitva” (Prayer) is announced by the church bells at the end of the instrumental introduction. The 15-bar Prayer for male chorus is of meditative character (Andante sostenuto, 6/8, B-f lat major), and continues in the same fashion as that of the premennyj lad – B-f lat major and B-f lat harmonic major. It also contains chromatic auxiliary tones, although only the diminished sixth is present in all vocal parts, wherein the augmented second in the melodic line is systematically avoided. It is characteristic that the melody of the first tenors mainly stays at the dominant tone (F), also in the cadence, but is harmonized mainly as the fifth of the tonic chord. The opera Love and malice by Vatroslav Lisinski explicates the main identity signifiers in Croatian nation building through music within an imperial framework: religion (Catholic Christianity) and the resulting suppressed role of women. Religious feelings are so deeply rooted in the individuals, except the rationalist Ljudevit (who instead only mentions “heaven” twice), that literally all of them use the word “God” quite frequently. In the second version of the libretto, the Chorus of Gardeners is a prayer, continued by Ljubica’s individual prayer. The Chorus of Harvesters, who follow, are thankful for their bread. The emphasized Slavism is, as a matter of fact, a revived idea taken from the “autochthon Slav” discourse derived from Renaissance times, when it was linked to the ancient construct of an indigenous Illyrian population. The early modern Slavic/Croatian writers in Dalmatia elaborated upon this idea in their works and it became especially inspiring for the Illyrian movement in the nineteenth century. This explains Demeter’s decision to displace the story of the opera to sixteenth-century Dalmatia. “This discursive construct […] tried to articulate Croat and South Slav claims on the past through the construction of continuity with antiquity. […] The idea that Croats and other South Slavs migrated into Illyricum as a single group inside an essentially single ‘nation’ or ‘race’ has been present from the renaissance and early humanistic times in Poland and Bohemia”.52 The “oriental” discourse is first of all related to the iconography of the opera, based on contemporary observation. As was the case with some other south Slavic national operas, as well as celebration concerts of the prominent choral societies, the singers wore national costumes that very often showed Ottoman inf luence in the area which was under Ottoman rule. On the occasion 52 Danijel Dzino, Becomiing Slav, becoming Croat. Identity transformations in post-Roman and early medieval Dalmatia (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 16–17.
54
“Croatness” in Music of the premiere of the opera Love and malice, the costumes, the scenery and the stage design, were presented “at the highest possible level in the given circumstances”, due to the financial support of Alberto Štriga.53 It caused great ardor amongst the audience, for the iconography of the opera fully contributed to the performance to be recognized as “national”. As a matter of fact, the costumes were partially borrowed from old noble families and partially tailored after the model from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.54 The performers wore shining, colorful “half-oriental Dalmatian” national costumes made of silk, embroidered with gems and kadifa and red long caps.55 The male costumes were also very interesting: the hajduks’ long red caps, ječermas56 of the same colour as the shiny buttons, blue trousers (with a white strip aside), red opanci,57 and a red female small cap toka. They had a weapon inserted into the belt; this was a characteristic way of wearing a yathagan or a small gun kubura or the Ottoman f lintlock. “How much more refined were these clothes than the products of Parisian and Viennese tailors which the educated world, in spite of the common sense, adores!”, were Stanko Vraz’s delighted words. 58 The clothes identical to the described costumes have been documented in the nineteenth-century international travelogues of the same time and also referred to as “almost Oriental”. One example of such an account, written by William Wingfield on his tour to Dalmatia in 1853, claims: “The men wore the national costume (with some exceptions), which looked picturesque, and almost oriental with their blue jerkins, bag breeches, scarlet caps, and bright scarlet slippers, or ‘paputze’, with their sharp-pointed toes turned upwards”.59 The “oriental” world of the Middle East was a part of the cultural space of southeast Slavs due to the presence of the Ottoman Empire. It was not understood as exotic in the way that it was considered in western Europe, where the “orient” was unknown and only imagined. On the contrary, in southeast 53 Županović, Vatroslav Lisinski (as note 30). 54 Kassowitz-Cvijić, Vatroslav Lisinski u kolu Ilira (as note 45), 121. 55 Stanko Vraz, “Prva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga”, part 2, Danica horvatska, slavonska i dalmatinska 12/15 (1846), 58. “Kadifa” is a Turkish loanword (Turk. kadife) for silk velvet. 56 The Turkish loanword “ ječerma” in Dalmatia, especially Split, and “dječerma” in central Serbia and Hercegovina means a part of national costume, a type of sleeveless coat, in these regions. 57 “Opanak” or plural “opanci” is a kind of peasant shoe with “sharp-pointed toes turned upwards”, as described by William Wingfield, A tour in Dalmatia, Albania, and Montenegro. With an historical sketch of the Republic of Ragusa, from the earliest times down to its final fall (London: Richard Bentley, 1859). 58 Vraz, “Pàrva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga” (as note 44), 58. 59 William Wingfield, A tour in Dalmatia, Albania, and Montenegro (as note 58), 101.
55
Tatjana Marković Europe it was a part of the same cosmos due to their longer coexistence. It is hence not surprising that numerous south Slavic literary works were related to the Ottomans or, as it was incorrectly assumed in Europe – the Turks. As mentioned, the first Croatian national drama by Kukuljević Sakcinski, Juran i Sofia, among others, was a reminder of the historical Austrian-Ottoman battle. Understandably, numerous operas were also inspired by various historical events or love stories related to the Ottoman world. Some of the national ideologists, gathered around the Illyrian movement, however expressed a negative attitude to that practice: Adolfo Weber Tkalčević pointed out that “if we always remain with the Turks, it could happen to us that one reprimands that we are closer to barbarism than to civilization”.60 Authors and composers did not accept this suggestion and, as mentioned, the most celebrated Croatian opera, Nikola Šubić Zrinjski (1876), like many others, depicted the dichotomy of national/Habsburg and Ottoman worlds. The patriotic music-dramatic discourse in the opera is, strangely enough, related to “malice” and opposed to “love”. The reason is that the characterization of the negative figures, especially Vukosav, is much more lively and genuine in both libretto and music. It is not surprising that the tenor Vukosav’s triumphal aria Pobeda! Pobeda! (Victory! Victory!) about revenge, his duet with Obren, and the choruses of hajduks generated the greatest enthusiasm from the audience. As the critic of the first opera performances witnessed, at the third performance of the opera, during the “combat duet”, a wreath fell from a loge to the stage in front of Stazić and Štriga, followed by exclamations from the entire audience. Later, the choruses were said to be the most successful numbers of the opera. Masculinity is presented through the patriotic-military music topoi, including rich orchestration, with frequent tutti, syncopated rhythmic figures interrupted with short breaks, and a dramatic melody of wider range. The tutti orchestra in the most dramatic moments shows that Wisner von Morgenstern’s models for the opera’s orchestration were Beethoven’s symphonic works, such as, for instance, Symphony No. 7, but he also drew inf luence from early-Romantic German composers. Vukosav’s appearances in arias and ensembles, as well as the negative side of the action he is representing with Branko and hajduks, are often accompanied by wind instruments, in some moments even tutti. In that way the two worlds from the title, love and malice, are sounded in two different – Italian and German – ways. 60 See Miroslav Šicel, “Programski spisi hrvatskog narodnog preporoda”, in Programski spisi hrvatskog narodnog preporoda, ed. by Miroslav Šicel (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1997), 9–25, here 25.
56
“Croatness” in Music The Overture includes “beloved” national melodies,61 as well as fragments, or entire themes, from No.16 Vukosav’s aria, No.6 Duet Ljudevit and Obren, No.14 Chorus of hajduks no.14, and No. 17 Finale. The composer unified the musical f low through the repetition of short sound-timber inf lections in different numbers, as well as musical references that could perhaps, in some cases, be called motifs in the traditional sense. “In Western Europe, modern nationalism was the work of statesmen and political leaders [...] In Central and Eastern Europe, it was the poet, the philologist, and the historian who created the nationalities”.62 This was precisely the case of the National Revival, whose members indeed were authors, poets, philologists, historians, and also lawyers and composers, who defined the national music in opera.63 They have – as the case study of Croatia exemplifies – used the considered resources in order to point “not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves”.64 In spite of the fact that the understanding of the musical “contexture” of “Croatness” was not once redefined, the mentioned resources – Italian vocal melodiousness, German harmony and orchestration, general Slavic character, often connected or juxtaposed with “oriental” f lavour – remained basically unchanged during Romanticism. * * * By choosing to explore the emergence of a Croatian national voice in the early 1840s (when it was still under construction in the Habsburg imperial context) as a present to Zdravko Blažeković, I would like to express my gratefulness for the endless inspirational discussions we have had during the last decades. Many years passed since they began, many things have happened around and to us, our homeland ceased to exist, and we live and work in borderless spaces respectively, unifying east, west and especially – where Zdravko’s newer interest for music archeology leads him – the Mediterranean south. 61 Vraz, “Prva izvorna ilirska opera ‘Ljubav i zloba’ od Vatroslava Lisinskoga” (as note 1), 54. 62 See John Neubauer, “Introduction to Part I: Literary nodes of political time”, in History of the literary cultures of east-central Europe: Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries, vol. 3: The making and remaking of literary institutions, ed. by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), 34. 63 See Zdravko Blažeković, “Glazba u vrijeme hrvatskog narodnog preporoda”, in Hrvatski narodni preporod 1790–1848. Hrvatska u vrijeme ilirskog pokreta (Zagreb: Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, 1985), 114–134. 64 Hall, “Who needs ‘identity’?” (as note 7), 4.
57
Tatjana Marković
58
Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti
Ira Prodanov Akademija umetnosti, Novi Sad (Academy of the Arts, Novi Sad)
Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti Abstract. Serbian composer Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (1856–1914) harmonized, stylized, and modified folk songs from his homeland and adjacent regions (Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia) to create one of the most popular collections of choral works in Serbia – the fifteen cycle choral composition, Rukoveti. His unique and highly personal selection of folk songs for Rukoveti indirectly suggests his interest in the position of woman in the patriarchal society of those times. Rukoveti creates evoked “histories” from daily life of individuals living in the aforementioned countries. In many of these narratives, the main focus is on the plight of women – their frequently tragic destiny is clearly underlined with Mokranjac’s deliberate musical effects.
Contemporary gender research in cultural studies, as well as in musicology, has significantly enriched the area of humanities and arts and has given the impetus to the formation of new attitudes towards works of art already highly familiar and considered to be fully explored. Such is the case with fifteen cycles of choral compositions, Rukoveti,1 by Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (1856–1914), 2 in which the famous Serbian composer harmonized, stylized and adjusted folk songs from, as he categorized them, My Homeland (I–VI, VIII), Old Serbia (VII, XI), Kosovo (VIII, XII), Montenegro (IX), Macedonia (X, XV), and Bosnia (XIV). In these cycles written for male or mixed choir, Mokranjac added his own seal of musical creativity to the folk music heritage of the region. At the same time, as he was the one who selected the songs for each cycle, he indirectly pointed out the position of woman in the patriarchal 1 2
Rukovet (literally meaning “garland”) is a cycle of several folk songs that contrast in tempo, theme, rhythmic pattern, mainly harmonized for choir. Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (1856–1914) was a Serbian composer, ethnomusicologist and music teacher. He, as one of the most important figures of Serbian musical Romanticism, was often called the “father of Serbian music.” See http://www.rts.rs/page/stories/sr/ story/16/Kultura/1245018/Godina+2014,+godina+Stevana+Mokranjca%3F.html (last accessed: 22 November 2016). He wrote sacred and secular choral music and was the key figure in development of music education in Serbia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Complete edition of his oeuvre was published in Sabrana dela, ed. by Vojislav Ilić (Knjaževac: Muzičko izdavačko preduzeće Nota and Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 1992).
59
Ira Prodanov society of those times. In Rukoveti are, namely, evoked “histories” from daily life of the folks living in the aforementioned countries, but it is symptomatic that in many of these narratives the main role was given to women. It is not my intention in this paper to declare Mokranjac a feminist nor to insist that his choice of songs for Rukoveti was gender sensitive. Although we could say that the selection of quoted songs has “a critical and ideological power”, 3 as a selection of a concert program that one plays, it appears that Mokranjac, in the concept of Rukoveti, was led by musical rather than gender considerations. This can be proved by the song “Osu se nebo zvezdama” (The sky is filled with stars) from the Second Rukovet, which famous Serbian composer Petar Konjović (1883–1970) compared with the “landscape of the Italian painter Segantini” (Giovani Segantini 1858–1899),4 not having in mind the fact that Mokranjac left out the reasons why “zvezdama nema Danice” (but no Morning Star is there), 5 and “ovcama nema čobana” (among the sheep no shepherd is).6 The composer actually used only a few lines from the entire poem and therefore did not reveal the poet’s references to the ancient cult of women – bacchante, in this song, among Serbians, known as witches. He left out the verses in which we learn that the shepherd was slaughtered by his sister, according to one version of the poem, and according to another version, by his mother, while an “aunt lights up the whole scene with kindling wood”.7 Knowing this, the interpretation and understanding of the beginning of the Second Rukovet receives a new, more tragic note. Nor does Mokranjac show particular gender sensitivity in the song “Dinka” from the Tenth Rukovet, where through the lively scherzo attitude we learn that the girl, Dinka, “dvori mete, drobni solzi roni i tanki prsti krši” (sweeps the halls, sad teardrops falling and slender hands wringing). The lively pace of the music is in stark emotional contrast to the girl who cries and wrings her hands. Insight into the continuation of the song reveals what was left out: Dinka, “the priest Ikonomov’s daughter”, has been forbidden to go “in the new center of learning to write and to count”. 8 However, one of the composer’s notes suggests that he was not completely indifferent to gender issues. Recognizing, in some cases, retained patriarchal 3 4 5 6 7 8
60
Mirjana Veselinović Hofman, “Koncert i njegove postmoderne naznake”, in Muzikološke i etnomuzikološke refleksije, ed. by Dragana Jeremić-Molnar, Ivana Stamatović (Belgrade: Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, 2006), 45. Petar Konjović, Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1984), 53. The star Danica is a Slavic name of Polaris (lat.). Translation of all verses in the paper by Vidosava Janković in: Mokranjac, Sabrana dela. Veselin Čajkanović, Mit i religija u Srba (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1973). Konjović, Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (as note 4), 85.
Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti relations in the social life of the people from Kosovo from the late nineteenth century, Mokranjac captures the subordinate position of the rural women of that time with a brief review of the word “grbina” (hump). His commentary, while notating the song “Jelena ovce čuvala” ( Jelena guards sheep), eloquently speaks of what at that time was the relationship between a man and his subordinate female, wife or child. One of the female singers brought to sing folk songs to Mokranjac told him she “could not sing until a male with whom she came to market in Priština returned to sit with her while singing”, i.e. until her supporter/protector, “grbina” (hump), returned, according to the “tercüman” (interpreter) of Branislav Nušić (1864–1938) Serbian consul in Priština.9 Having in mind the subordinate position of women in Serbian patriarchal society, it can be concluded that Mokranjac chose certain songs to underline the tragic fate of Serbian women who, judging by the numerous examples, were often forced to marry a man they did not want to marry, were not allowed to write or read and could even be killed if they did not meet certain social norms. In the song “Protužila pembe Ajša” (Pretty Ajsha sadly sad ) in the First Rukovet, a girl complains that she is forbidden to marry the one she loves. In the third song “Jesam li ti” (Have I not told you) from the Second Rukovet the girl, Jelena, has been scolded because she went without permission to the road where she was found by soldiers. The Fifth Rukovet contains the song “Moj se dragi na put sprema” (My sweetheart means to travel) which describes the destiny of a desperate woman who stays alone at home, while her man, as was the custom at those times, looks forward to going away. In the song “Rosa plete ruse kose” (Rosa plaits her fair hair), in the Ninth Rukovet, a mother warns her daughter that she will destroy herself by the act of marriage. One of the best-known songs from the Tenth Rukovet certainly is “Pušči me” (Let me), in which the girl humbly begs to be free to love the one she wants. And last but not least, the moving song “Da l’ nemam džanum” (Have I not, have I not) from the Twelfth Rukovet, testifies to the desperation of a young, just married girl who, being in the full strength and beauty of her youth, still does not attract her husband, who spends his days in a tavern. The fourteenth Rukovet, with the song, “Kara majka Aliju” (Mother chides Alija) is a shocking testimony about the eternal conf lict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, which, in this case, ends with murder. In this paper I will explore three case studies from Mokranjac’s Rukoveti which explicate the position of women in the patriarchal Serbian society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 9
From the legacy of Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, the Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade, Serbia.
61
Ira Prodanov Jesam li ti, Jelane Govorio, divna Jelo, Da ne rasteš, Jelane, Pokraj druma, divna jelo Gde prolaze, Jelane, Četovođe, divna Jelo. I provode, Jelane, Svoje čete, divna Jelo! (Have I not told you, Jelane, Told you, lovely Jela, Not to grow so, Jelane, Near the highroad, lovely Jela, Along which pass, Jelane, the captains, lovely Jela, and lead, Jelane, their men, lovely Jela!) If this was a theater play, the text could be spoken by a father or brother. In a brief yet threatening “scolding,” it is clear that the daughter or sister is very beloved, as the diminutive of her name ( Jelane) appears four times, as well as that she is “lovely”. This song, in itself, contains contrasts in atmosphere. The comparison of the girl’s beauty with a tree,10 which Konjović himself points out in his analysis of the Rukoveti,11 is somehow “ruined” as the song continues, as she is suddenly “surrounded” by the commanders with their troops. The appearance of wonderful Jela beside the road, on which the soldiers were passing, provokes anxiety. Mokranjac starts the music with tenors piano in threatening recitative of repetition of the same half-notes: “Je – sam li ti go – vo – ri – o” (Have I not told you). Then deeper “fatherly” voices, basses with original folk melody in mezzo forte dynamics, perform the same verse. The presence of a second verse “Da ne rasteš, Jelane, pokraj druma” (“Not to grow so, Jelane, near the highroad”) includes the altos with the same ominous monotone recitative backed by bass while now “brothers tenors” continue “scolding”. Finally, the third and fourth line inputs sopranos and Mokranjac certainly requires a crescendo and accelerando in a strongly homophonic, almost military-style of all four voices, which heats up to utter despair, almost a scream. The girl in this desperation is “scolded” by the whole family at the end, for she is their 10 In the Serbian language “Jela” is a female name, but also means pine. 11 Konjović, Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac (as note 4), 54.
62
Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti treasure and she was standing next to the road where the soldiers were passing through and because “something” has happened to her (ex. 1).
Ex. 1. Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, Second Rukovet, “Jesam li ti” (Have I not told you)
The song “Rosa plete ruse kose” (Rosa plaits her fair hair) is located in the Ninth Rukovet. Its origin, as pointed out by Mokranjac,12 is in Herzegovina, although the composer named this cycle as Songs from Montenegro. One song from this Rukovet tells us about the position of women in that region. Gradation of the four verses, as used in the previously discussed song about Jelane and the soldiers, is followed in this song too. Four such levels gradually lead into the tragedy.
12 Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, Zapisi narodnih melodija, eds. Stana Đurić Klajn and Dragoslav Dević (Beograd: Muzikološki Institut, special ed. 13, 1966), 129.
63
Ira Prodanov Rosa plete ruse kose, Dede, Role, Role, dede janje moje. Rosa majci govorila, Dede, Role, Role, dede janje moje. Udaji me, majko moja, Dede, Role, Role, dede janje moje. Udaćeš se, kajaćeš se! Dede, Role, Role, dede janje moje. (Rosa plaits her fair hair, Come, Rosie, Rosie, come, my little lamb. Rosa said to her mother Come Rosie, Rosie, come, my little lamb. Let me marry, mother mine, Come Rosie, Rosie, come, my little lamb. You will marry, then be sorry! Come Rosie, Rosie, come, my little lamb.) The refrain, “Dede, Role, Role” (Come, Rosie”) which the composer himself added, here expands and emphasizes the atmosphere of “lulling” as does the use of the diminutive of the girl’s name, so that a reversal in the last verse acts as a “bolt from the blue”. And the picture from the beginning is just as idyllic as one that appears to Konjović in the song “The sky is filled with stars”. A young girl is beautifying herself and dreaming of marriage. Then she begs her mother for permission to marry. She is impatient because marriage for a girl in this patriarchal society is the most decisive goal in her life. In contrast to the beginning of the song “Have I not told you”, the repercussion of voices here involves the sopranos. The idyllic picture is underlined by the dynamic piano pianissimo, illustrating the innocence of a young girl who is daydreaming while fixing her hair. The next verse “Rosa majci govorila” (Rosa said to her mother) involves the choir except bass and becomes louder (mezzo forte) than the first verse. After repetition of the refrain in pp, the third verse, the one in which marriage is mentioned, is even louder, and sung by the whole choral ensemble. Finally, the mother’s heartbreaking words that destroy the girl’s dreams are sung forte, like the chorus in “Have I not told you”. The cruel fact that marriage will destroy the girl’s life is emphasized by graduation of the dynamics. This simple intervention, while the folk melody stays untouched, adds the necessary drama to this short “storia” (ex. 2). Perhaps the cruelest song is “Kara majka Aliju” (Mother chides Alija) from the Fourteenth Rukovet. From a total of twenty-six verses of the original song 64
Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti
Ex. 2. Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, The Ninth Rukovet, song “Rosa plete” (Rosa weaves her fair hair)
which Mokranjac noted from a singer in Bosnia,13 only twelve are used. This shorter version of the song does not lose the dramatic essence of the underlying story which the composer further streamlines by added an “ej” (hey) at the beginning of each verse while creating a less melismatic variant of the original melody. Without redundant details in the poem, in the textual and in the musical sense, the author presents the story of Ajrija who was killed by her husband, because his mother complained that the daughter-in-law was lazy. Kara majka Aliju, Ej, i nevjestu Ajriju; Ej, ne;e Ajra da radi, Ej, ve se s’ majkom inadi. Kad to čuo Alija, 13 The song was published under number 275 in: Mokranjac, Sabrana dela, vol. 9.
65
Ira Prodanov Ej, on poćera Ajriju, Ej, pa poteže on svoj nož, Ej, da ubije Ajriju. Moli mu se Ajrija: „Ej, ne ubij me, Alija!“ „Ej, naj ti, majko, jabuku, Ej, nema više Ajrije.“ (Mother chides Alija, Aye, and his bride Ajrija; Oh, Ajrija will not work, But rather spites the mother. When Alija heard of this, Hey, he went after Ajrija, Hey, he drew his knife, Hey, to kill Ajrija with it. Ajrija begs him spare her: “Oh, don’t kill me, Alija!” “Hey, here’s an apple for you, mother, Hey, Ajrija is no more.”) The tragic content is under the tempo mark Energico ma non troppo allegro. At the beginning of the song, the mother chides both her son and her daughterin-law. Judging by the brisk tempo marking, she is doing that emphatically. As the tragedy approached, strophic repetition decreases in pace, in a way that Ajrija’s plea to her husband not to kill her is almost silenced. Likewise, we only learn that her violent death has occurred from the fact that Alija brings an apple to his mother with the words “Naj ti, majko, jabuka, ej, nema više Ajrije” (Hey, here’s an apple for you, mother, Hey, Ajrija is no more.). Thus, without any notable tense dissonant effect in the harmonic language or in the choral style, the tale ends quietly and resignedly. The interesting sound effect in this song is humming in the minor’s dominant, thus creating the startling effect of a major tonality within F minor, a Balkan minor, at the end of every second verse. The unusual ending with flat VII which Mokranjac took from the original folk tune as well as a thick choral texture that occasionally reaches six voices at a dynamic level of piano pianissimo, gives the song a desolate atmosphere (ex. 3). Although there are many folk songs in Rukoveti dedicated to women and their subordinate position in society, Mokranjac has shown that sometimes there could be difficult moments for men, too. A particular example in this regard is the fifth song from the Third Rukovet in which a young man sings: 66
Woman in Mokranjac’s Rukoveti
Ex. 3. Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, Fourteenth Rukovet, “Kara majka Aliju” (Mother chides Alija)
Aoj, Neno, lepa ti si Željo moja, pusta li si! Igram, pevam, milo mi je Niko ne zna kako mi je… (Oh, Nena, how pretty you are, My desire, how wild you are. I dance and sing and glad am I Nobody knows how I feel.) 67
Ira Prodanov The composer’s simple dynamic interventions and repercussion of choir voices which resonates with the meaning of verses, with minor changes in the music of the original folk songs of Rukoveti, contributed to dramatization of the text in which realistic daily life was described. The analyzed songs illuminate the way in which Mokranjac’s musical choices portray a woman’s life as often emotionally and physically damaged. This research is a modest reminder that numerous oeuvres that we routinely consider “cut and harvested” in research could be observed from a fresh point of view as a contribution to gender studies and general cultural studies.
68
The Use of the Greek National Anthem
Alexandros Charkiolakis Σύλλογος Οι Φίλοι της Μουσικής, Αθήνα
(The Friends of Music Society, Athens)
deological Schemes and National Perspectives. The Use of the Greek National Anthem in Choisy’s Exile du Patre and Kasassoglou’s Four Preludes for the Return from the Front Abstract. The national anthem as a concept engulfs all the elements that create national pride. The anthem exists in order to project into eternity the noble deeds of the people. Apart from the symbolic significance that it bears, a national anthem is a piece of music with its own artistic merits. In this article, we deal with the Greek national anthem and its use as thematic material in two different contexts and in two totally different periods of Greek art music. Within this scope, we unfold the historical circumstances of the composition of the Greek national anthem. Then, we focus on two orchestral pieces in an attempt to show how the same musical source material is used to represent different concepts as well as how a composer can manipulate and reuse a well-known subject within the scope of a specific compositional agenda.
The national anthem is, as a general rule, an emblematic and notorious musical piece that is adopted or composed to firmly state the deepest sentiments of love and admiration for a specific homeland. The Greek national anthem is not an exception to this, although the work from which the national anthem derives was not composed with this notion in mind, as we will see. Therefore, my aim is to trace the ideological framework of the use of the anthem and the way this is interpolated in two significant compositions, as well as its importance from a national (i.e. Greek) perspective and the role that it was meant to play. The composer of the national anthem was Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mantzaros (1795–1872),1 probably one of the most significant figures in the history of 1 For more information see Κώστας Καρδάμης, Νικόλαος Χαλικιόπουλος Μάντζαρος (Athens: Fagotto Books, 2015) and Κώστας Καρδάμης, Νικόλαος Χαλικιόπουλος Μάντζαρος “ενότητα μέσα στη πολλαπλότητα” (Corfu: Εταιρεία Κερκυραϊκών Σπουδών, 2008) and Χάρης
69
Alexandros Charkiolakis Greek art music. Significant not only because he stands as a major figure in the Heptanisian musical realm of the nineteenth century but also because he was a gifted composer and music instructor who approached music creation with the utmost devotion and professionalism in a world of dilettanti musicians. He was born in Corfu and was educated musically in his hometown by the brothers Stefano (1768–1826) and Girolamo Pojago (1779–1842) (piano and violin respectively), Stefano Moretti (years of birth and death unknown) (theory of music) and finally with “cavalliere” Barbati, whose first name and birth and death dates we do not know, with whom he read advanced theory of music and concluded his music education in Corfu. The next chapter in his engagement with music had to do with his first compositions, mainly for voice in the form of concert arias. During that period, Mantzaros composed Don Crepuscolo (1815), a one-act comic opera – the very first operatic work by a Greek composer in the history of Greek art music. 2 Nevertheless, Mantzaros, a self-proclaimed “amateur”, felt compelled to learn more. He undertook periodic trips to Italy starting in 1819, studying wtih Niccolo Zingarelli (1752–1837) in Naples. Mantzaros’ regular trips to Italy ended in 1826 although he continued composing and teaching pro bono along with his duties as a Secretary to the Senate’s Chair. One should not forget that at that time Heptanisa, and subsequently Corfu, was a British Protectorate but with a certain amount of freedom involved. In 1828 he made the acquaintance of the poet Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857) and in 1830 he set to music Solomos’s Ύμνος εις την Ελευθερίαν (Hymn to Liberty), 3 a poem written in 158 stanzas, with an obvious patriotic sentiment. The poem was written in 1823, just two years after the 1821 Greek Revolution, one of the major European revolutions of the nineteenth century. Mantzaros revised this work time and again, composing different versions of it. He dedicated the 1842–1843 contrapuntal version of the Ύμνος εις την Ελευθερίαν to King Otto (r. 1832–1862), resulting in his decoration with the Silver Cross of the Order of the Saviour. The musical setting of the first two stanzas of the first version of the work became the Greek national anthem, a composition which brought him extensive and long-lasting fame within the Greek cultural context.
2 3
70
Ξανθουδάκης , Κώστας Καρδάμης , eds, Νικόλαος Χαλικιόπουλος Μάντζαρος: ερευνητική συμβολή στα 130 χρόνια από το θάνατο του συνθέτη (Corfu: Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο – Τμήμα Μουσικών Σπουδών, 2003). Καρδάμης, Νικόλαος Χαλικιόπουλος Μάντζαρος, ibid., 92–93. Διονύσιος Σολωμός , Ύμνος εις την Ελευθερίαν (Athens: Ενάλιος, 2013), 3–12.
The Use of the Greek National Anthem Nikolaos Mantzaros was actively involved in the establishment of the Corfu Philharmonic Society already from 1840, acting as the artistic director and later being named “lifetime President of the Philharmonic”.4 He continued writing music and educating students until the end of his life. He died in 1872 after suffering a stroke while he was in class, teaching. Although his piece did not immediately become the national anthem, it nevertheless gained wide appreciation and popularity, mainly in its first version. 5 The piece was used on several occasions, both official and unofficial, and was widely accepted as a patriotic song. The annexation of the Heptanisa to mainland Greece on 21 May 1864 paved the way and from 1865 Ύμνος εις την Ελευθερίαν became the official national anthem. The use of the characteristic main tune of a national anthem or a fervent patriotic song that later becomes the national anthem as the thematic material for a composition is not completely unusual. Probably one of the most well-known musical works in this context is the Overture 1812 by Čajkovskij but this is certainly not the only instance. The Greek national anthem has been a choice for several compositions from symphonic poems to even a set of quadrilles and has been utilized as musical source material by both Greek and non-Greek composers. Two particularly interesting and characteristic case studies with contrasting significance will be examined. The first case derives from a work by Frank Choisy (1872–1966),6 a Swiss-born Belgian violinist, conductor and composer. Although educated primarily as a violinist, he later became the conductor of the Athens Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra and stayed at that post until 1907 after which he returned to Geneva. Choisy arrived in Athens in 1899 in order to teach at the Ωδείο Αθηνών (Athens Conservatoire, I will be adopting its international title henceforth), which was being established as early as 1871, making it one of the oldest institutions of this type in Europe.7 His arrival was typical for the time since there was a constant f low of foreign teachers, from the 1890s and for several years, who were hired for their teaching and performing abilities and that vague “Eu4 5 6 7
Κώστας Καρδάμης , “Φιλαρμονική Εταιρεία Κερκύρας. Ιστορική αναδρομή”, Έξι μελέτες για τη Φιλαρμονική Εταιρεία Κερκύρας (Corfu: Φιλαρμονική Εταιρεία Κερκύρας , 2010), 13–36. Κώστας Ζερβόπουλος , “Οι μελοποιήσεις του σολωμικού Ύμνου εις την Ελευθερίαν από το Νικόλαο Χαλικιόπουλο-Μάντζαρο ( μερικά ενδιαφέροντα στοιχεία της έρευνας)”, Κερκυραϊκά Χρονικά 2/5 (2010), 171–196. Αλέξανδρος Χαρκιολάκης , “ Έργα με ελληνικά θέματα από το αρχείο του Frank Choisy στη Μεγάλη Μουσική Βιβλιοθήκη της Ελλάδος ‘Λίλιαν Βουδούρη’”, Μουσικός Ελληνομνήμων 11
(2012), 50–55. Anonym., Ωδείον Αθηνών: εκατονταετηρίς 1871–1971 (Athens: Ωδείο Αθηνών, 1971), 1–12.
71
Alexandros Charkiolakis ropean element” that they could bring to the institution. It should be noted that at that time there were no Greek teachers who were trained to teach at that level. Choisy eventually became a permanent resident of Athens, having lived there for a substantial number of years. He returned to Athens in 1929 or 1930 and died there in 1966. Choisy was a gifted musician who became interested in what comprised the folk and ecclesiastic elements of Greek music. He often displayed an interest in Byzantine melos and traditional folk tunes although he is not generally considered a prototype ethnomusicologist. Also, he revealed an interest in ancient Greek music. It is known from his archival material which is now actually split in two parts: one is being maintained (and has been digitized) in the Μουσική Βιβλιοθήκη της Ελλάδος “Λίλιαν Βουδούρη” του Συλλόγου οι Φίλοι της Μουσικής (Music Library of Greece “Lilian Voudouri” of the Friends of Music Society) 8 and the other, mostly non-musical but equally interesting, remains at the MIET-ELIA Archive (Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive and National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation).9 Most of the musical artifacts are kept in the Music Library of Greece, but Choisy’s autobiography is at the MIET-ELIA Archive, awaiting its future digitization and publication. His compositional output is comprised of several works for violin, orchestral ensemble and songs. Of special interest to this article is the symphonic piece titled Exile du Patre, Suite Grecque pour petite orchestre,10 a work that was probably composed around the end of 1902 or the beginning of 1903 and performed on 7/20 March 1903.11 The piece consists of three movements and the orchestration is for an ensemble of strings, f lutes, oboes and harp, most likely ref lecting the musicians at the Athens Conservatoire who were actually available for the 1903 premiere performance of the work. The three movements of the piece were given programmatic titles: I. Le matin (Boucolique), II. Danse villageoise (Tsamikos), III. Le soir: Theme Nationale. The first two are based on the composer’s use of a folkloric musical vocabulary to depict images of Greek rural life. In the first movement, one hears the f lute, which represents the shepherd’s recorder, whereas the second movement is 8
For more information see http://digma.mmb.org.gr/Collection.aspx?cid=5 (last accessed: 13 February 2016). 9 Κωνσταντίνα Σταματογιαννάκη, “ Το αρχείο Frank Choisy στο ΕΛΙΑ/ΜΙΕΤ», Μουσικός Ελληνομνήμων 11 (2012), 45–49. 10 For more information on the work, http://digma.mmb.org.gr/Item.aspx?kkt=CHOISY 000000001 (last accessed: 13 February 2016). 11 This is inscribed on the first page of the score, on the top right-hand corner, http://digma.mmb. org.gr/MediaHandler.ashx?id=000000000263525&m=2&height=0&width=0 (last accessed: 13 February 2016).
72
The Use of the Greek National Anthem thematically based on the rhythm of the Tsamikos, a traditional dance that was widely disseminated in many areas around Greece and probably the most popular dance in the Greek rural areas. Choisy uses a Tsamikos tune to represent the “village dance” movement in the popular and most common 3/4 metre. Furthermore, he couples this with a trio part that appears amidst this movement, reminding the listener of the long European tradition of the Minuet and Trio form. It is in the last movement of the work that the composer inserts the theme of the Greek national anthem, a fact he specifically highlights with a note in the score. Putting this use of the anthem into a quasi-historical perspective of the ever-evolving Greek musical world of those times, in the beginning of the twentieth century, there are several angles from which to examine Choisy’s choice. One possible reason that he used the anthem was to express his philhellenism. He was already employed at the Athens Conservatoire and heavily involved with Athenian cultural life. This work, meant to be performed in a concert in Athens very soon after its composition, would have been a reward, a gift in return, to those who entrusted him with a faculty position at the Conservatoire and to the audience that would be there for the concert. Yet, one cannot neglect the possibility that Choisy decided to be more actively involved in the ongoing discussion about the establishment of national music. In Choisy’s contemporary musical environment there was a clear trend towards music that supported the concept of the Greek national movement. Choisy’s work was actually performed prior to the two works long considered the first works of the Greek national movement: his Exile du Patre, Suite Grecque pour petite orchestre was performed one year before the Πρώτη Ελληνική Σουίτα (First Hellenic Suite) by Dionysios Lavrangas (1860 or 1864–1941), conducted by Choisy in 1904; and four years before Η Γιορτή (The Feast) (1907) by Georgios Lambelet (1875–1945). The Greek national movement prevailed under the dominating figure of Manolis Kalomiris (1883–1962) from June 1908 onwards and after the manifesto that Kalomiris himself produced and presented during a concert with his music that was performed in Athens.12 This manifesto was included in the programme instead of the regular linear notes and aligned the composer with a new direction, with connections to both contemporary and past European movements pertaining to national music. Kalomiris’ manifesto was actually not the only text addressing these issues. There had been previous texts by Georgios Lambelet as
12 For the Kalomiris program see http://digma.mmb.org.gr/Item.aspx?kkt=PROGR000000078 (last accessed: 13 February 2016).
73
Alexandros Charkiolakis early as 190113 but also an ongoing discussion on the issue of a national music at least since the end of the nineteenth century.14 Choisy’s work falls within the long European tradition of programmatic music, with a clear and distinct Greek color, in which he inserted the most distinguished and recognizable tune associated with the modern Hellenic state, that of the national anthem. The case of Georgios Kasassoglou (1908–1984) is distinctively different. His studies initiated with distinguished personalities such as Manolis Kalomiris, Dionysios Lavrangas and Marios Varvoglis (1885-1967) among others, who were clearly expressing their national sentiments through their music. Kasassoglou started composing during the later stages of his studies, obviously inf luenced by this unique musical academic environment. Kasassoglou is not a product of some specific school, he is more of a self-made composer. His work encompasses most music genres apart from opera. His skills seem to shine through most strongly in his song compositions. He deeply feels poetry and manages to materialize the poet’s world. What one could say about Kasassoglou’s work is that it is suffused with youthful spontaneity […] His music is bold but never sloppy […] He believes in musical nationalism because, as he says, every worthy intellectual man should position himself within the boundaries of his national territory and through that, to the total universe.15 Although Theodoropoulou does not position Kasassoglou as a composer who is a member of an unofficial “group”, it is obvious that his ideas about “national” and “universal” fall generally into the doctrines expressed by others such as Kalomiris. Kasassoglou was drafted to fight during World War II. There he faced the horror of the battlefield, survived and returned to Athens after Germany entered the war, something that caused the inevitable surrender of the Greek troops. He never became involved with the resistance and the political groups that were formed immediately after the war ended. Thus he does not openly reveal his political stance, as others did, by joining any of those groups. Instead, he 13 Γεώργιος Λαμπελέτ, “Η εθνική μουσική”, Παναθήναια 2/15, 30 (1901), in: Ολυμπία ΨυχοπαίδηΦράγκου, Η εθνική σχολή μουσικής: προβλήματα ιδεολογίας (Athens: Ίδρυμα Μεσογειακών Σπουδών, 1990), 217–240. 14 Αναστασία Σιώψη, “Σημασιολογικές ερμηνείες της παράδοσης που αναδεικνύουν τον Μανώλη Καλομοίρη σε ηγετική φυσιογνωμία της ‘Νεοελληνικής Εθνικής Μουσικής Σχολής’”, Πρακτικά συνεδρίου Ζητήματα Νεοελληνικής Μουσικής Ιστορίας 2 (2000) http://users.ionio. gr/~GreekMus/anakoinoseis/siopsi2.htm (last accessed: 13 February 2016). 15 Jörg Mark Kasassoglou, Γεώργιος Καζάσογλου 1908–1984, Περιληπτικό βιογραφικό (Karlsruhe: Verlag JMK, n. d.) 5.
74
The Use of the Greek National Anthem composed his Τέσσερα Πρελούδια για την Επιστροφή από το Μέτωπο (Four preludes for the return from the front) in 1941 to describe the atmosphere surrounding him. This work belongs to a substantially significant group of pieces that includes several others by different composers, who tried to portray all aspects of the war and, some of them, the consecutive resistance movement. Composers deriving from all political spectrums tried to commemorate, in a sense memorialize, those who were lost and at the same time to enhance the vision for freedom to those who were left behind. The work, Four preludes for the return from the front, is comprised of four movements as revealed in the title and all of them describe the composer’s feelings after his return from the battlefield. A text that appears on the recto page16 just after the title page gives information for each movement. The first one is entitled “Συναισθήματα” (Feelings) and it is undersigned with the date 16 May 1941. There Kasassoglou describes his feelings during the long and tiring return home from the battlefield. The second is entitled “Αγνή παιδική ψυχή” (Innocent soul of a child), 24 May 1941, and there he describes the first days after his return and the relationship he had to create with his son, who was too young to remember his father from before his deployment to the war, a connection that had to be established from the beginning amidst the difficulties of the occupation period. The third movement is inscribed “Πένθιμο: Νεκροί και Πληγωμένοι” (Mournful: Dead and wounded), 28 May 1941. Kasassoglou describes what he sees around him, people who have become permanently disabled due to their war wounds, families who mourn their dead. The fourth and final movement is entitled “Γοργόφτερη σκέψη” (Quick and f lying thought), 14 September 1941. In this final movement, the tune of the national anthem is included as part of the thematic material. The composer writes: A song familiar to all, it takes hearts by surprise, lets loose for a moment and the heart beats for freedom, a bit here and a bit there, like something is continuing from place to place and it is this familiar song that revives and makes the heart sparkle. And inside everyone a candle of mystical and secret belief lights up waiting and hoping.17 One cannot be sure what the dates imply: if these are the dates when he sketched or composed each of the pieces or if these are the dates when he received the strong impression that he described. The official date that the 16 Γεώργιος Καζάσογλου, “Εισαγωγικό Σημείωμα”, Τέσσερα Πρελούδια της Επιστροφής από το Μέτωπο του Γεωργίου Καζάσογλου (Athens: Ένωσις Ελλήνων Μουσουργών, 1961), n. p. 17 Καζάσογλου, “Εισαγωγικό” (as note16), n. p.
75
Alexandros Charkiolakis Greek army surrendered is 20 April 1941. From that day onwards, and in several waves, all the soldiers serving at the front started to return. The use of the national anthem as the central thematic material of the last prelude has a clear connotation: a message for the fatherland, a cry for freedom as he mentions in the text preceding the score. The composer chose to use the most emblematic tune possible to express his sentiments. Rather than getting directly involved in any political outcry, he wanted to place himself above and away from political activity. Shunning the political and posing for the national was his way to remain loyal to those beliefs and ideals that he served. Furthermore, Kasassoglou did not give his impression from the battlefield but rather he explained using musical language what he discovered in the weeks and months after the surrender. The piece could even stand as a monumental glimpse of an individual’s everyday life in an occupied city, in four images describing his inner world (first prelude), his family life (second prelude), the everyday surroundings (third prelude) and, finally, with the use of the national anthem tune in the fourth prelude, the hope for a brighter future after the gloom and despair he had described. Although it might be imagined that a piece like this, with its serious connotations, would have been hidden away by the composer, this was not the case. The piece received its premiere on 3 May 1944 in a concert comprised of W.A. Mozart’s Concerto for f lute K. 285d, Cesar Franck’s Rédemption (Redemption) M. 52, Mozart’s Symphony no. 39 K.543 and Richard Wagner’s Prelude from Lohengrin. Interestingly, the work was not performed in its entirety since the fourth and most uplifting prelude that included the anthem was not performed, probably because the German occupation authorities thought it inappropriate to be heard in a city still under the rule of Axis powers. The exclusion of the last prelude shows the impact that the authorities believed it could have had on the audiences and actually enhances the argument that has been discussed above. In summary, the two pieces discussed in this text show the different roles that a significant tune could have. Apart from the obvious underlying connotation supported by the use of the characteristic motive of the Greek national anthem, the different needs that were addressed on both occasions are crucial to recognize. On one hand, in Choisy’s composition, the national anthem functions in a musical environment that seeks to portray the composer’s contemporary and vibrant national environment. On the other hand, in Kasassoglou’s piece, the anthem is used in order to stir and underline hope. The Mantzarian tune explicates two ideological worlds unraveling their universes. Choisy’s and Kasassoglou’s statements initiate from different starting points, although 76
The Use of the Greek National Anthem using the same source material. Each encapsulates a different angle of the national movement, communicating the ideas through the use of highly identifiable thematic material that clearly delivers a national message. Including the national anthem melody was not an easy choice in either case: for Choisy it might have seemed inappropriate for a foreigner to embrace first the idea of a national music and for Kasassoglou it might have been viewed as active resistance, but for each composer it was certainly an emotional and courageous decision.
77
Alexandros Charkiolakis
78
Filmfuge
Dalibor Davidović Muzička akademija Sveučilišta u Zagrebu (Music Academy, University of Zagreb)
Filmfuge Abstract. The work of the German film director Hans Jürgen Syberberg (b. 1935), which comprises both his films and his writings about film, is a response to the “radical guilt” of film in supporting National Socialism. According to Syberberg, the guilt of film should be considered radical not because of the reduction of film to propaganda in the films produced by the National Socialist regime, but rather because of the National Socialist understanding of art, and film in particular, as the essence of reality in general. In order to be “redeemed” from such radical guilt, film should return to its origin, which Syberberg considers to be something musical, and rediscover its essential elements. The following study is an attempt to understand Syberberg’s argument that fugue is the essence of music. The meaning of his argument is explored on the basis of the analysis of his film Ludwig: Requiem for the Virgin King from 1972. Falls aber von den „ernsten“, wie sie sich nennen, also von den Tragödiendichtern einmal einige zu uns kommen und uns fragen sollten: „Ihr Gastfreunde, sollen wir in eure Stadt und euer Land kommen oder nicht, und sollen wir unsere Dichtung mitbringen und einführen, oder wie habt ihr hierin zu verfahren beschlossen?“ – was könnten wir hierauf den göttlichen Männern richtig erwidern? Mir scheint folgendes: „Ihr besten Fremdlinge“, sollten wir sagen, „wir sind selber Dichter einer Tragödie, die, soweit es in unseren Kräften steht, die denkbar schönste und zugleich beste ist. Jedenfalls ist die gesamte Staatsverfassung von uns verfasst worden als eine Darstellung des schönsten und besten Lebens, und dies ist, wie wir behaupten, eigentlich die wahrste Tragödie. Dichter seid also ihr, Dichter aber auch wir selbst auf dem selben Gebiet, eure Rivalen als Künstler und Darsteller im schönsten Drama, das naturgemäß nur das wahre Gesetz vollenden kann, wie unsere Hoffnung lautet“.1
1 Platon, Leg., VII, 817A. Zit. nach: Nomoi IV–VII, übers. von Klaus Schöpsdau (= Werke, Bd. IX 2, zweiter Teilband) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003).
79
Dalibor Davidović Zur Vorrede. – Vielleicht eine Fortsetzung: der Künstler-Philosoph [...] höherer Begriff der Kunst. Ob der Mensch sich so fern stellen kann von den anderen Menschen, um an ihnen zu gestalten? (Vorübungen: (1) der Sich-selbst-Gestaltende, der Einsiedler (2) der bisherige Künstler, als der kleine Vollender, an einem Stoffe – nein! –). 2
Erste Durchführung Der Filmregisseur Hans Jürgen Syberberg (geboren 1935) bezeichnete den eigenen Film Ludwig: Requiem für einen jung fräulichen König aus dem Jahr 1972 als einen „radikalen Neubeginn“. 3 Syberberg hatte damals einige Filme schon hinter sich, aber bereits in diesen Werken war eine Distanz gegenüber seinen Zeitgenossen bemerkbar. Die Gruppe der jungen deutschen Regisseure, der er angehörte, brach zwar mit der Trivialität des damaligen „Heimatfilms“, aber führte zugleich die anderen Regeln stillschweigend ein, indem nämlich vom Künstler eine „gesellschaftlich getuschte Privatheit“ und das Schaffen der „typischen Problemstücke der ersten Stunde“4 gefordert wurde. Nicht nur, dass der Künstler das sein sollte, was die anderen von ihm erwarteten, sondern ihm wurde auch geboten, dass er sich dem Aktuellen widme und sich für die richtige Sache einsetze. Den beiden Geboten folgend, versuchte der frühe Syberberg den anderen zu gefallen, indem seine Filme beispielsweise von deutschen Touristen auf Sardinien (Scarabea: Wieviel Erde braucht der Mensch?, 1968), vom Leben der damaligen Jugendlichen (San Domingo, 1970), von den Anfängen des künstlerischen Weges der Schauspielerin Romy Schneider (Romy: Anatomie eines Gesichts, 1965) oder eben vom Drehen der volkstümlichen Pornofilme (Sex-Business made in Pasing, 1969) handelten. Aber der in diesen Filmen bemerkbare Wunsch, das Aktuelle zu erfassen, hatte stets etwas Übertriebenes. Egal, ob die Filme Syberbergs sich auf das Gesicht einer jungen Schauspielerin zur Zeit ihres internationalen Durchbruchs fokussierten, ob sie die klassischen literarischen Vorlagen (nämlich die jeweiligen Erzählungen von Tolstoi und Kleist) zu aktualisieren versuchten oder aber das Milieu der damaligen studentischen „Roten Zellen“ schilderten, indem sie, wie im Film San Domingo, ihre Musik, den „Progressiven Rock“, einbezogen – allen Filmen schien ein Unbe2 3 4
80
Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–1887 (= Kritische Studienausgabe, Bd. 12) (München: DTV; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 89. Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1976), 55. Ibid., 47.
Filmfuge hagen gemeinsam zu sein, als ob sie dadurch, dass sie sich so eifrig den neuen Geboten unterwarfen, etwas zu verdrängen versuchten. In seiner unter dem Titel Film als Musik der Zukunft veröffentlichten Schrift, einer Art Manifest, in dem er die eigene künstlerische Poetik darzustellen versuchte, lenkte Syberberg die Aufmerksamkeit unter anderem auf Folgendes: Der Film ist eine eigene Welt geworden, nach deren Muster Menschen ihr Leben programmieren, nicht nur für das Mädchen an der Schreibmaschine oder den Politiker, der sich und seine Feinde und seinem Fernsehen überprüft und dort sich seine Programme selbst bestellt, und nicht nur für den Terroristen, der seine Meldungen dort nach seinen Erpressungen verkündet und so in Form von Film seine höhere Existenz erlebt. (Hitler sah in seinem Ghetto täglich zwei Filme. Und im Krieg, seinem totalen Krieg, sah er allein in Wochenschauen seinen totalen Film, Leni Riefenstahl hatte bessere Perspektiven in Nürnberg für ihre Kameras als der Führer selbst. Das Denkmal, in dem Hitler überlebt, ist aus Zelluloid.). 5 Indem Syberberg Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) und Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) im gleichen Atem mit anderen Beispielen der Lebensgestaltung nach dem Muster des Films erwähnte, wies er nicht nur auf die Auswirkungen des Films hin, sondern auch auf seine Geschichte, eben auf die Sachverhalte, von denen die jungen Regisseure anscheinend nichts wussten – oder nichts wissen wollten. Wussten sie von diesen Sachvehalten bloß deswegen nichts, weil sie jung und ahnungslos waren? Oder spielte dabei noch etwas anderes mit? Syberberg schien noch unsicher, was der Fall wäre. Sein Gedanke über den Zusammenhang zwischen Film und Nationalsozialismus glich zu dieser Zeit eher noch einer Vermutung, als dass er völlig entwickelt gewesen wäre. In seinem Manifest wurde er jedenfalls nur beiläufig erwähnt, sogar in Klammern gesetzt, als ob es sich bloß um eine Nebenbemerkung handle. Jedoch war für Syberberg die Geschichte des Films untrennbar mit dem Nationalsozialismus verbunden. Welcher Art war dieser Zusammenhang? In seinem Manifest erwähnte Syberberg keinen konkreten Film, der beispielhaft für den „nationalsozialistischen Film“ wäre und insofern den Aufschluß über die entsprechenden Eigenschaften geben könnte. Sogar wenn Syberberg von Leni Riefenstahl sprach, war nicht von den spezifischen Eigenschaften ihrer Filme die Rede, sondern bloß davon, dass für ihre Kameras die Wirklichkeit in einer besonderen Weise arrangiert wurde. Nicht dieser oder jener Film, sondern der Film als solcher wurde zum Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit, zum 5
Ibid., 94.
81
Dalibor Davidović Muster, nach dem die Menschen ihr Leben programmierten. Nicht also seine Tendenz, den Film dem politischen Zweck zu unterwerfen, sondern eher die Tatsache, dass der Film zum Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit wurde, sollte als der wesentliche Zug des Nationalsozialismus angesehen werden. Den Film als Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit zu nehmen bedeutete nämlich, die Wirklichkeit so umzugestalten, dass sie gut aussieht, damit ihr gutes Aussehen von einer Kamera erfasst und in einem Film gezeigt werden konnte. Die Kamera musste das sogar nicht tun: Die Wochenschauen waren gar nicht nötig, damit Hitler in „seinem totalen Krieg“ das eigene Kunstwerk sehen würde, ein Werk, das wundervoller und totaler als jedes von einem bloßen Künstler hervorgebrachte Werk wäre. Insofern konnten die Filme von Leni Riefenstahl nur als ein schwaches Echo seiner „mephistophelischen Avantgarde“ (avant-garde méphistophélique) 6 angesehen werden. Syberbergs Gedanke wurde in seinen späteren Aussagen weiterentwickelt, sodass sich Hitlers „mimetische Rivalität“ (rivalité mimétique)7 gegenüber dem Künstler nicht bloß auf den Film beschränkte, sondern auch seine Vorgeschichte, nämlich Wagners Idee des Gesamtkunstwerks, einschloss: Hitler, der Bayreuth-Liebhaber und sein absurder Vollender, war nicht nur der abgewiesene Künstler der Wiener Akademie, der nun Rache nahm an allem. Er verstand sich als Vollender der Kunst der Politik, die nach ästhetischen Regeln gespenstisch zu verstehen ist, mehr als durch philosophische, religiöse, soziale Überlegungen, geistige oder machtstrategische Theorien. 8 Nicht nur, dass die Vollendung des Films – oder des Gesamtkunstwerks – im Grauen des Dritten Reiches veranschaulichte, was geschah, wenn die Kunst 6 7 8
82
Hans Jürgen Syberberg, „Hitler artiste de l’État ou l’avant-garde méphistophélique du XXe siècle“, in Les Réalismes 1919–1939, hg. von Pontus Hultén (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), 378. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique: Heidegger, l’art et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988), 99. Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (München: Matthes & Seitz, 1990), 109. Schon in seinem Manifest, über den eigenen Dokumentarfilm Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914–1975 (1975) sprechend, bemerkte Syberberg auch Folgendes: „Es geht um das Thema Kunst und Politik letzlich, die berühmte Ästhetisierung der Politik, hier klassisch vorgeführt, ganz einfach und persönlich bezeugt. Eine Frau mit Macht, eine frühzeitig Emanzipierte, die sich nur so überhaupt rechtfertigen kann, indem sie glaubhaft bezeugt, wie sie von allem nichts gewußt habe. Politik für Unpolitische, demonstriert an der wichtigsten Quelle, dem einzig von Hitler anerkannten Vorgänger seiner Ideologie: Richard Wagner und seine Musik. Und wie diese als Mittel der Macht und des Kraftzuwachses für ihn ohne Wissen der Opfer benutzt werden konnte“. Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 81.
Filmfuge zum Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit wurde, sondern sie warf den dunklen Schatten auf die Kunst selbst, da sie dadurch mitschuldig für die nationalsozialistischen Verbrechen wurde. Welche Folgen ergaben sich daraus für den Film? Nach dem Nationalsozialismus wurde er durch eine radikale Schuld gekennzeichnet. Um nicht wieder total zu werden und so das neue Grauen verursachen zu können, wurde der Film zunächst auf die eigene künstlerische Sphäre begrenzt und ständig überwacht, indem von ihm gefordert wurde, sich für die richtige Sache einzusetzen. War aber diese Buße für die begangene Schuld nicht bloß ein weiterer Sieg des Politikers über den Künstler? Obwohl die Kunst auf die eigene Sphäre begrenzt wurde, wurde sie nämlich wieder einem politischen Zweck unterworfen, indem von ihr gefordert wurde, sich in den Dienst des Guten zu stellen. Außerdem bedeutete ihre Begrenzung auf die eigene Sphäre nicht nur den Bruch mit dem Nationalsozialismus, sondern auch sein Vergessen. Die Kunst – insbesondere der Film – konnte endlich aufatmen, indem sie die eigene belastende Geschichte hinter sich brachte. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg konnte sie sich ruhig dem Alltag und dem Aktuellen widmen, um sich für die richtige Sache einzusetzen. War nicht genau das der wesentliche Zug des künstlerischen Programms, für das die jungen Regisseure standen? Gab es in ihrem Vergessen der Geschichte des Films noch etwas als bloße Naivität der Jugend? In seinem Manifest bezeichnete Syberberg zwar die künstlerische „Revolution“ seiner Kollegen als „spießig”,9 als eine konformistische Zustimmung zur gesellschaftlich getuschten Privatheit, aber gab die eigenen Erfahrungen noch nicht zu erkennen. Sie wurden erst dann bemerkbar, als der Künstler die privaten Photographien und die Zeugnisse von seinem Leben vor dem Jahr 1953, als er in die BRD f lüchtete, in einigen Veröffentlichungen preisgab. Die Fragmente seiner Kindheit tauchten auf, unter anderem die Photographien seines Vaters, eines Landgutbesitzers, der von den Nazis schikaniert wurde, weil er ihnen nicht beitreten wollte. Auf den anderen Bildern war das Gutshaus in Nossendorf zu sehen, wo die Familie Syberberg lebte, bis das Gebäude, zusammen mit dem umgebenden Landgut, durch die Rote Armee geplündert und danach von der neuen Besatzungsmacht konfisziert wurde. Schließlich stellten die Photographien den Schüler Syberberg dar, als er, damals in der DDR lebend, unter dem Großbild Stalins an dem jährlichen „Fest der Jugend“10 teilnehmen oder die Hausaufsätze über den geliebten Woschd schreiben musste. Die 9 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 47. 10 Vgl. Hans Jürgen Syberberg, „Du pays mort d’un société sans joie (Notes)“, in Syberberg (= Cahiers du Cinéma, Sondernummer), hg. von Serge Daney & Bernard Sobel (Paris: Edition de l’Etoile, 1980), 86–87.
83
Dalibor Davidović Forderung nach einer gesellschaftlich getuschten Privatheit und die Erwartung, die typischen Problemstücke der ersten Stunde zu schaffen, klangen unheimlich in seinen Ohren, wie eine Melodie, die er im Osten schon einmal gehört hatte. Zweite Durchführung Kann es den Film nach dem Nationalsozialismus, der ihn radikal schuldig machte, wieder geben? War die Forderung, dass der Film sich nun dem Aktuellen widme und sich für die richtige Sache einsetze, nicht zugleich sein Ende, da er auf etwas anderes, nämlich auf die Politik, reduziert wurde? Syberbergs radikaler Neubeginn war ein Versuch, sich sowohl zum Projekt einer Totalisierung der Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, als auch zu ihrer Ent-Totalisierung und Begrenzung nach dem Zweiten Weltkerieg zu stellen, wobei es seiner Ansicht nach keinen wesentlichen Unterschied zwischen der Forderung nach der Treue der Kunst zur offiziellen Parteilinie im Osten und der Forderung nach einem politischen Engagement im Westen gab. Radikal wieder zu beginnen bedeutete für Syberberg sowohl das Gebot, das Private gesellschaftlich zu tuschen, als auch das Gebot, die typischen Problemstücke der ersten Stunde zu schaffen, in Klammern zu setzen, vom Aktuellen einen Abstand zu nehmen und ursprünglicher nach dem Wesen des Films als Kunst zu fragen. Der Film Ludwig: Requiem für einen jung fräulichen König war der erste Versuch Syberbergs, die Frage, ob es den Film nach dem Nationalsozialismus wieder geben könnte, durch ein Kunstwerk zu beantworten. Worum handelt es sich in diesem Film? Ludwig ist eine Filmbiographie über den bayerischen König Ludwig II., die chronologisch die wichtigsten Stationen seines Lebens schildert. Der Film beginnt mit der Szene, in der drei Nornen den Niedergang der Nachkommen vom König Ludwig I. verkünden, wobei auch der zukünftige König Ludwig II. als verspielter Junge erscheint. Der längste, zweite Teil des Films zeigt was geschah, seitdem der neue König auf den Thron kam. Da der König mit den neuen, jungen Gesichtern sich umgeben hat und in dieser Weise mit der Herrschaft seines Vorgängers aufräumen möchte, werden in den ersten Szenen dieses Teils die Personen, meistens die hübschen jungen Männer, dargestellt, die vom König ausgewählt wurden, um die entsprechenden Stellen am Hof oder in der Regierung zu besetzen. Mit der Zeit wird aber klar, dass ihre Auswahl keineswegs zufällig war, da der König stets seinen staatsmännischen Verpf lichtungen auszuweichen versucht, um sich lieber der Schwärmerei, den nächtlichen Fahrten durch die Wälder, dem Bauen seiner Schlösser und der Unterstützung der Kunst Richard Wagners (1813–1883) zu widmen, wofür auch beträchtliche Summen aus der Staatskasse ausgegeben 84
Filmfuge wurden. Nicht einmal der Aufstieg Otto von Bismarcks (1815–1898), der die Souveränität Bayerns in Gefahr brachte, konnte Ludwig von seinen Lieblingsbeschäftigungen abwenden. Mit der Zeit nahmen die Ausgaben sogar zu, sodass sich Bayern im Ausland verschulden musste. Als in den Zeitungen die ersten Spekulationen über die Geisteskrankheit des Königs erschienen, begannen die Höf linge Ludwigs Pläne zu schmieden, wie man zum Wohle Bayerns den König los werden könnte. Der letzte Teil des Films ist dem Tode des Königs gewidmet, indem er dreimal dargestellt wird: Zum ersten Mal als der erhabene Liebestod, als Ludwig, nach der Nachricht vom Tode Wagners „in des Welt-Atems wehendem All“ versank; zum zweiten Mal wird sein Tod nur indirekt dargestellt, nämlich durch die bloße Nachricht, dass der unglückliche König im Starnberger See ertrunken sei; zum dritten Mal wird sein Tod als „klassischer Königstod“,11 also als Enthauptung durch eine Guillotine, dargestellt, gefolgt von einem Gebet für seine unglückliche Seele und von seiner Wiederauferstehung. Die chronologische Linie wird aber nur dann bemerkbar, wenn der Film als Ganzes betrachtet wird. Wenn man aber die Details fokussiert, erweist sich der Film als eine Folge von selbständigen Szenen, welche die Aufmerksamkeit eher auf sich ziehen, wie die Arien in einer Oper, als dass sie sich bloß in den Dienst der Handlung stellen würden. Die Szenen – der erste Teil des Films besteht aus 27, der zweite Teil aus 17 Szenen, den Vor- und den Abspann eingeschloßen – sind sogar durch Zwischentitel voneinander abgetrennt, als ob es sich um einem Stummfilm handeln würde. Die jeweiligen Szenen zeigen jedoch gewisse Gemeinsamkeiten. So schildern einige von ihnen die Momente des Glücks, in welchen Ludwig die Gesellschaft seiner Untertanen, z. B. des Hoffriseurs Hoppe (1.4)12 oder der am Lagerfeuer sitzenden Bauern (1.9), genießt, die ihn so akzeptieren, wie er ist. In einigen Szenen erscheint jeweils eine Person, wie die Bäuerin Anna Vogel (1.10) oder die Opernsängerin Madame Bulyowski (2.5), die von der wunderbaren und unvergesslichen Begegnung mit dem König Zeugnis ablegt. Eine selbstständige Gruppe bilden die Szenen, in denen die Freundinnen von Ludwig auftreten. Sie sind als starke Frauen dargestellt, welche den König unterstützen und ihn vor den Gefahren warnen: die Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich-Ungarn (1.17–1.18) und die Bildhauerin Elisabeth Ney (1.25), aber in gewisser Hinsicht auch die freisinnige und unabhängige Lola Montez (1.11), obwohl gerade sie den Fluch über die 11 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 17. 12 Die Nummerierung bezieht sich auf die DVD-Ausgabe des Films (Ludwig: Requiem für einen jung fräulichen König, 139 Min., Filmgalerie 451, 2007), wobei die erste Nummer den Teil des Films und die zweite Nummer die jeweilige Szene im entsprechenden Teil bezeichnet.
85
Dalibor Davidović Nachkommen des alten Königs brachte, und schließlich die androgyne Gestalt Richard Wagners (1.16). Das Glück wird auch in den Szenen geschildert, in denen der König meistens allein ist, um sich völlig seinen Lieblingsbeschäftigungen widmen zu können: dem Tanzen (1.21), der französischen Sprache (1.22), den Werken Wagners (1.12, 1.22, 1.24), den nächtlichen Fahrten durch die Wildnis (1.15) oder aber dem Gebet und dem Nachdenken über das eigene Schicksal (2.7). Demgegenüber gibt es Szenen, in welchen die nicht erwiderte Liebe der jungen Männer geschildert wird, mit denen sich der König umgab (1.3, 1.5, 1.21, 2.6), ebenso wie die Szenen, in denen Ludwig, den von seinen Höf lingen, Generälen und Ministern gestellten Entscheidungen über staatliche Angelegenheiten immer wieder auszuweichen versucht (1.6–1.7, 1.13– 1.14, 1.26–1.27, 2.13). Zu diesen Szenen gehören auch diejenige, in welchen die Höf linge allein sind und ein Komplott gegen den König schmieden (1.8, 1.19–1.20, 1.23, 2.8–2.9) oder sich über seinen angeblich problematischen Gesundheitszustand äußern (2.12). Schließlich gehören diejenige Szenen zusammen, die von der Existenz Ludwigs handeln: die Szene des Fluches (1.2), unter dem der König geboren wurde, die Szene des Albtraums (2.3–2.4), in der sich dem König die Zukunft offenbart, und die Szenen seiner drei Tode (2.10–2.11, 2.14, 2.16–2.17). Mit den Szenen aus der letztgenannten Gruppe beginnt und endet der Film, wobei er mit der Szene des Albtraums auch seinen Höhepunkt erreicht. Die Reihenfolge der anderen Szenen scheint nicht streng vorbestimmt zu sein – die Themen tauchen unerwartet auf, um zu vergehen, als ob sie voreinander f lüchteten. Sowie das Ganze des Films durch eine narrative Linie gekennzeichnet ist, wobei die Szenen zugleich eine Selbstständigkeit beanspruchen, zeichnen sich die Szenen selbst durch eine ähnliche Spannung aus: Während der Großteil der Szenen die isolierten Augenblicke darstellt, egal ob es sich um die Monologe (1.8, 1.10, 1.11, 1.14, 1.15, 1.16, 1.19–1.20, 1.22, 1.24, 2.5, 2.7, 2.12, 2.15) oder eher um die kurzen Situationen (1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.9, 1.12–1.13, 1.17–1.18, 1.21, 1.23, 1.25, 1.26–1.27, 2.6, 2.8, 2.9, 2.13) handelt, eröffnen gerade die Nornen-Szene, die Szene des Albtraums und die Szenen des Todes von Ludwig (also diejenigen Szenen, welche den Film auf der narrativen Ebene befestigen) einen anderen Modus der Zeitlichkeit. Da wird die Zeit nicht mehr als eine unendliche Folge der isolierten Augenblicke, sondern als eine ekstatische Art des Daseins sichtbar, die sich sowohl dem Vergangenen (in der Nornen-Szene wird der Fluch verkündet) als auch dem Zukünftigen öffnet, das sich im Albtraum offenbart. Die Ekstasen der Zeit werden schon durch die Titel der beiden Teile des Films angezeigt: Während der Titel des ersten Teils (Der Fluch) auf das Schicksal des Königs hinweist, eröffnet der 86
Filmfuge Titel des zweiten Teils (Ich war einmal) eine Möglichkeit, über das Leben des Königs so nachzudenken, als ob es schon beendet wäre. („Ich war einmal“ sind nämlich die letzten Worte Ludwigs vor seinem Liebestod.) In der Szene des Albtraums, die aus einer Folge der kurzen statischen Tableaus zusammengesetzt wird, immer wieder durch das Bild der Augen des entsetzten Königs unterbrochen, erscheinen nicht nur die beängstigenden Figuren wie Bismarck, welche eine unmittelbare Gefahr für den König und für sein Königreich darstellen, sondern auch diejenigen, die erst im Schoß der Kunst geboren werden: Karl May (1842–1912), der Erfinder der verführerischen, exotischen Welten, und Adolf Hitler, der mimetische Rivale des Künstlers und zugleich der Vollender der Kunst in der Politik, beide mit der jeweiligen Begleitung – May Hand in Hand mit Winnetou, Hitler zusammen mit dem gut gelaunten Ernst Röhm (1887–1934). (Der Film selbst weist an dieser Stelle auf das Zukünftige hin: Karl May und Hitler werden nämlich in den nachfolgenden Filmen von Syberberg porträtiert.) Im zentralen Abschnitt der Albtraum-Szene erscheint die Figur Richard Wagners, desjenigen Künstlers, der mehr als jeder andere den Totalisierungsanspruch der Kunst verkörperte. Entsprechend weist sein Monolog sowohl auf die Geburt seiner Kunst („ein musikalischer Underground im 19. Jahrhundert“) hin, als auch auf die mögliche „Erlösung” von ihrer künftigen Schuld („erst wenn Niki de Saint Phalle, Werner Schroeter mit Magdalena Montezuma und Ernst Fuchs den Ring machen, bin ich wieder erlöst“). Im letzten Abschnitt der Szene kommt die unmittelbare Gefahr zurück und der träumende König trifft die Entscheidung über die Zukunft seines künstlerischen Nachlasses: Von nun an nichts mehr über Politik! Ich will nichts mehr hören, niemanden mehr sehen, es sei denn, ich verlange danach. Und alle meine Schlösser und Seen vermache ich nach meinem selbstgewählten gewaltsamen Tod der Bayerischen Verwaltung der Schlösser und Seen, damit das armdotierte Denkmalsamt die anderen Aufgaben bewältigen kann mit meinen Einnahmen aus meinen Schlössern drei Millionen pro anno, die ich jetzt für 31 Millionen aus meinem Privatfond zu bauen gedenke für die Welt und alle meine Freunde.13 Gerade diese Erlösung des Werkes von Ludwig – seines Versuches, das Königreich Bayern, oder zumindest sich selbst, in ein Kunstwerk zu verwandeln – lässt ein weiteres Spannungsfeld des Films erkennen: jenes zwischen der Kunst selbst und den unterschiedlichen Gegebenheiten hinter den Kulissen. So schildern einige Szenen die Versuche des Königs, die Wirklichkeit und 13 Das Ende der Szene 2.4.
87
Dalibor Davidović sich selbst zur Kunst zu erheben, indem er historische Figuren (z. B. den Sonnenkönig in der Szene 1.21) nachahmt, an der Tafel mit „unsichtbaren Menschen“ spricht, die er „Marie-Antoinette“ und „meinen lieben Onkel Ludwig aus Frankreich“ nennt (wie davon einer seiner Höf linge in der Szene 1.23 berichtet), oder, manchmal auch unbewußt, die Rollen aus den Bühnenwerken Wagners nachspielt. Wenn die Stimmen von Wagner und Ludwig in der Szene 1.17 ein Zusammengefüge bilden – wobei diejenige Wagners über das erste Treffen mit dem jungen König und über den eigenen Entwurf des Tristan spricht, diejenige Ludwigs einen Brief an Wagner liest –, hört sich das wie ein Liebesduett an, in dem die Rollen allerdings nicht so eindeutig scheinen: Sowohl Ludwig als auch Wagner (durch eine androgyne Figur dargestellt) könnten sowohl Tristan als auch Isolde spielen. In der Szene des Liebestodes versinkt Ludwig in der Musik, diesmal eindeutiger der Isolde ähnlich, nachdem die Nachricht vom Tode Wagners ihn erreicht hat. In einer Reihe anderer Szenen wird dagagen eine profane Wirklichkeit zur Schau gestellt, in der sich sowohl die dem König zur Verfügung stehenden Figuren wie der Hoffriseur, der Fotograf und die Opernsängerin als auch seine Generäle und die Minister befinden, die den verträumten König zu seinen staatsmännischen Verpf lichtungen zurückzubringen versuchen. Zur zweitgenannten Gruppe gehört zweifellos die Figur des Arztes, des Professors Bernhard von Gudden: Aus seiner nüchternen Perspektive gleicht die Kunst Ludwigs nämlich einer Pathologie des Geistes. Für die Figuren aus der profanen Wirklichkeit erscheint der Enthusiasmus Ludwigs gegenüber der Kunst bestenfalls als eine exzentrische Anomalie, wenn nicht als bloßer Versuch, der einzig wahren Wirklichkeit, der Wirklichkeit der Kriege und der Verträge, auszuweichen. Während Ludwig beim Hohen zu verweilen versucht, stürzt für die anderen das Hohe unauf haltbar in etwas Niedriges um, sei es Kosmetik, Geld oder Krankheit. Nicht nur, dass der Film bloß die Spannung zwischen der Geburt der Kunst und ihrem ironischen Umkippen, zwischen dem Pathos Ludwigs und dem mehr oder weniger wohlmeinenden Spott seitens seiner Umgebung, darstellt, sondern er changiert selbst zwischen dem Pathetischen und dem Ironischen. So beispielsweise in der Nornen-Szene. Die sagenumwobenen Göttinnen, die im Besitz des Wissens von dem sind, was war, was ist und was sein wird, die Wesen, die in Wagners Ring des Nibelungen das Schicksal der Welt bestimmten, geben im Film Syberbergs den Fluch bekannt, der über die Nachkommen des Königs Ludwig I. von der Tänzerin und Schauspielerin Lola Montez, der ehemaligen Mätresse des alten Königs, ausgesprochen wurde. Lola Montez erscheint auch als Figur im Film: Auf sie wird zunächst in der Nornen-Szene durch ein Zi88
Filmfuge tat des Liedes Ich bin die fesche Lola, das im Film Der blaue Engel (1930) von der gleichnamigen Sängerin im Hafen-Variété gesungen wird, angespielt. In der Szene 1.11 erscheint schließlich Lola Montez als eine verführerische Sängerin, deren Gesichtszüge an Marlene Dietrich, die in Sternbergs Film die fesche Lola verkörperte, erinnern. Ironisch scheint die Eröffnung der Ekstasen der Zeit auch dann, wenn beispielsweise in der Szene 1.20 der Onkel Ludwigs sagt: „Die heiterste Existenz ist in der Kunst. Das ist von Brecht oder von Goethe“. Ironisch wird auch die Figur Richard Wagners, nämlich durch zwei Schauspieler, dargestellt: Der Komponist erscheint einerseits als ein zwergenhafter Hochstapler, andererseits als ein ambivalentes, androgynes Wesen, der Priesterin eines Kultes gleich. Im zentralen Abschnitt der Albtraum-Szene erscheinend, weist die Figur Wagners sowohl auf das hin, was war, als auch auf das, was seine Kunst zukünftig erlösen könnte, nämlich auf jene Kunst des Übertriebenen und Künstlichen, für die die Namen der Bildhauerin Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002), des Filmregisseurs Werner Schroeter (1945–2010) und seiner Lieblingsschauspielerin Magdalena Montezuma (1943–1984) und des Malers und Bühnenbildners Ernst Fuchs (1930–2015) stehen – das zeitgenössische Gegenstück zum Underground Wagners. Ironisch könnte aber auch jede Umwandlung in etwas anders angesehen werden, jeder Sprung in eine aus einem Kunstwerk bekannte Rolle, zu dem, neben Ludwig selbst, auch seine geistesverwandten Freundinnen neigen. Während die Kaiserin Elisabeth als Brangäne (1.17) erscheint, trägt die Bildhauerin Elisabeth Ney (1.25) drei Ausschnitte aus dem Monolog Iphigenies aus Goethes Bühnenstück Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) vor, den unglücklichen König auf „das Lied der Parzen, das sie grausend sangen“, erinnernd. Am Ende der Szene 1.24 werden die Pfauenfedern durch das Gesicht Ludwigs überblendet, als ob der König dadurch eine Strahlenkrone bekomme. Weist der Film dadurch nicht auf die Gefahr hin, in seiner Erscheinung als Kunst zu übertreiben und eben ins Triviale, Nichtige umzukippen? Die Rollen aus den Musikdramen Wagners, in denen die der Kunst zugeneigten Figuren im Film auftreten, bilden bloß eine Ebene, auf der das Musikalische im Film vorkommt. Die Musik Wagners erklingt im Film Syberbergs auch in einem buchstäblichen Sinne, vor allem in den Szenen, in denen der König sich selbst oder sein Umfeld in ein Kunstwerk umzuwandeln versucht. Als nichtdiegetische Musik, gibt sie den Grundton der jeweiligen Szene und verbindet manchmal dadurch auch mehrere Szenen. So gibt das berühmte Vorspiel aus Wagners Rheingold den mythischen Ton der Nornen-Szene, aber bildet zugleich eine Grundschicht, welche die Szene selbst (1.2.) mit dem Vorspann (1.1) musikalisch verbindet. Die Szene der nächtlichen Fahrt (1.15), in 89
Dalibor Davidović der die Kamera sich auf einem schneebedeckten Waldweg befindet und das wiedergibt, was der Blick Ludwigs erfassen könnte, der Monolog Wagners über seine ersten Eindrücke vom jungen König (1.16) und schließlich die lange Szene (1.17), die mit dem Auftritt der Kaiserin Elisabeth als Brangäne endet, sind durch die wunderbare Nachtmusik aus dem zweiten Akt des Tristan miteinander verbunden. Der Liebestod Ludwigs besteht aus zwei durch die entsprechende Musik verbundenen Szenen (2.10 und 2.11). Die Szene, in der die Nachricht vom wirklichen Tode Ludwigs mitgeteilt wird (2.14), wird durch die Musik des Todes Siegfrieds aus Götterdämmerung mit der vorigen Szene des Abschieds (2.13) verbunden. Die Musik Wagners gibt auch den unheimlichen Ton der jeweiligen Szenen, indem beispielsweise die Erinnerung Ludwigs an den Fluch (1.25) mit der Gefahr, dass er für geisteskrank erklärt wird (1.26), durch die unruhige Musik verbindet wird, die im Rheingold beim Abstieg Wotans und Loges nach Nibelheim erklingt. Die umgekehrten Beispiele, in denen in einer einzigen Szene mehrere musikalischen Ausschnitte verwendet werden, den Grundton der entsprechenden Szene modulierend, kommen seltener vor. So in der Szene des Gebets und der Meditation Ludwigs (2.7), wo nacheinander drei Ausschnitte aus Rheingold erfolgen. In zwei letzten Szenen (2.16 und 2.17), in denen der königliche Tod und die Auferstehung Ludwigs geschildert wird, erklingt nach dem Motiv Wotans die abschließende Musik aus Götterdämmerung. Die Musik Wagners ist aber nicht die einzige, die im Film vorkommt. Schon in der Nornen-Szene bildet sie nur eine Art Grundlinie, worüber dann und wann auch andere Musik erklingt. Das kurze Zitat des Liedes Ich bin die fesche Lola an ihrem Anfang, und danach das frivole Musikstück, zu dem die unerbittlichen Göttinnen tanzen, kündigen eine Reihe populärer Lieder an, die aber im Unterschied zur Musik Wagners im Film oft als diegetische Musik vorkommen. So singt Graf Holnstein in der entsprechenden Szene (1.8) sein „verräterisches“ Lied (Gern hätte ich Frau geküsst), der König hört in der nächsten Szene (1.9) dem Lied zu, das von den Bauern mit der Begleitung einer Gitarre gesungen wird, und diegetisch ist auch das von Lola Montez gesungene Kabarettlied (1.11). Im Unterschied dazu erklingen der bayerische Volkstanz und der Schlager (Komm, laß uns einen kleinen Rumba tanzen), zu dem Hitler und Röhm in der Albtraum-Szene tanzen, als auch jener Schlager (Leise geht der Tag zu Ende), der in der Szene 2.16 den königlichen Tod Ludwigs begleitet, als nichtdiegetische Musik, und zwar in den Zusammenhängen, in denen die Musik Wagners die klingende Grundlinie ausmacht. Im Unterschied zur Musik Wagners, die einen Bogen zwischen dem Anfang und dem Ende des Films aufspannt, indem am Anfang das Vorspiel aus Rheingold und am Ende der Schluß 90
Filmfuge der Götterdämmerung erklingt, scheint die populäre Musik auf den ersten Blick nicht strukturbildend für den Film zu sein. Welche Rolle kommt ihr denn zu? Setzen sich die von der Musik Wagners durchtränkten Szenen nicht der Gefahr aus, übertrieben zu wirken und in etwas anderes, in eine Nichtigkeit, umzukippen? Droht dem Film Syberbergs – in dem die Musik nicht nur buchstäblich erklingt, sondern auch sein Sujet bildet, wenn man die versteckte mimetische Rivalität zwischen Ludwig und Wagner bedenkt – nicht die Gefahr, von der Musik völlig überschwemmt zu werden? Es scheint, dass Syberberg in seinem Manifest eben dieser Entwicklung den Rückenwind geben möchte. Die Verfallenheit des Films, nicht nur dank dem Werk Leni Riefenstahls, sondern vielmehr noch dank der Katastrophe, die wegen der mimetischen Rivalität Hitlers zum Filmregisseur entstand, zeigt sich in seiner Reduktion auf das Mittel für den vogegebenen Zweck. Mit dem Begriff „narrativer Film“14 bezeichnet Syberberg in seinem Manifest den Film im Modus seines Verfallens: Es handle sich um ein „modisch variiertes Filmgenre, routiniert erfüllt und von Kennern nach ideologischen Fragekatalogen benotet und von vorprogrammierten Zuschauern nach allen bekannten Regeln so oder so konsumiert“.15 Erst in dem Modus konnte der Film sicht selbst übersteigen, und zwar dank der „Anschlußphilosophie“, der eigenen Reduktion auf die „Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik“,16 ja auf das Technische selbst. Den Abstand zu nehmen und ursprünglicher zu fragen, um eine neue Geburt dem Film zu ermöglichen, bedeutete für Syberberg, mit den beiden Forderungen, die für seine Kollegen als selbstverständlich galten, sich auseinanderzusetzen: Statt eine gesellschaftlich getuschte Privatheit anzustreben, sollte eben das Eigene problematisiert werden; und statt die Forderung nach den typischen Problemstücken der ersten Stunde zu erfüllen, sollte darüber nachgedacht werden, was nun den Film als Film ausmache. So wurde in seinem Ludwig zum ersten Mal die Frage nach dem Deutschen und seinem Verhältnis zur Kunst aufgeworfen. Genauer gesagt: Zum Thema wurde die herausragende Stelle der Kunst bei der Entstehung von Deutschland als einer modernen Nation, die Anforderung an Kunst, die „Rettung aus der deutschen Misere“17 zu geben. Auf der anderen Seite bedeutete das Problematisieren des Eigenen auch die Möglichkeit, die eigenen Erfahrungen freizulegen, ja die eigene Position 14 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 11. Für den Film im Modus des Verfallens wird in den späteren Schriften Syberbergs auch die Bezeichnung „Film als Bewegung“ verwendet. Vgl. dazu Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Die freudlose Gesellschaft: Notizen aus den letzten Jahren (Frankfurt/Main usw.: Ullstein, 1983), 70. 15 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 11. 16 Ibid. 17 Vgl. Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 7.
91
Dalibor Davidović gegenüber der genannten Anforderung einzunehmen. In einem gewissen Sinn könnte nämlich vom ganzen Werk Syberbergs nach seiner Wende als von der Darstellung des eigenen Schicksals gesprochen werden, des Schicksals eines Jungen von der Peripherie, der in der Kunst die Rettung aus der Misere sucht, in die er geworfen wurde. Die Frage nach dem, was nun den Film als Film ausmache, aufzuwerfen, bedeutete für Syberberg, nach dem Ursprung des Films zu fragen und damit hing das zusammen, was er in seinem Manifest das „Requiem“18 nannte. Nicht nur, dass sein Ludwig im Untertitel diese Gattungsbezeichnung trägt, sondern der Film endet eben als eine Totenmesse, mit dem Gebet, dass das ewige Leben den verstorbenen König erfreue. Aber mit dem Begriff Requiem meinte Syberberg nicht nur den trauernden Ton, der den tragischen Sujes seiner Filme entsprechen würde (denn sowohl Ludwig als auch die Filmbiographien von Karl May und Hitler zeigen, wie katastrophal die anscheinend wohlmeinenden Versuche, die ganze Wirklichkeit in die Kunst zu verwandeln, enden); der Begriff Requiem wurde in seinem Manifest verwendet, um jenen Modus des Films zu bezeichnen, der auf der Suche nach dem vergessenen Ursprung des Films sich befindet. Da der verkommene narrative Film auf dem dialektischen Prinzip (nämlich auf der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik) beruhe, dürfte der Ursprung des Films nichts Anschlußfähiges sein. Für Syberberg scheint dieser Ursprung eben im Musikalischen zu liegen. Wenn das Requiem als ein „geschlossenes, strenges System, ein Stil- oder ästhetisches Programm analog den universellen Gesetzen der Musik“19 gelten sollte, scheint das Musikalische nicht bloß sein Vorbild zu sein, sondern bildet eher den wahren Ursprung des Films aus, der im narrativen Modus des Films vergessen wurde. Was meinte nun Syberberg, wenn er über das Musikalische sprach? In seinem Manifest wurde die Frage unterschiedlich beantwortet. Manchmal wurde das Musikalische mit einer bestimmten Musik, nämlich der Musik Wagners, gleichgesetzt, als ob bloß sie dem Film bei seinem Versuch, von der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik los zu werden, Hilfe leisten könnte. In diesem Zusammenhang sprach Syberberg von einer „Symbiose“ 20 der Musik und den anderen Komponenten des Films, in der eine Komponente ohne die anderen nicht leben könne, denn jede sei von ihnen nur in dem Zusammenhang sinnvoll. Das andere Mal meinte Syberberg unter dem Musikalischen die von den musiktheoretischen Begriffen festgelegten Kompositionsprinzipien. Da die „Ge18 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 11. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 14.
92
Filmfuge setze“ des Films „denen der Musik näher sind als allen anderen vergleichbaren Reichen der Kulturgeschichte“, 21 sollte sich der Film auf die entsprechenden „Gesetze“ der Musik verlassen: Die mathematischen Bauprinzipien, die sich in den Musik-Termini wie Requiem, Kammermusik, Chor, Arie, Sonate, Passion, Rhapsodie, Rezitativ, Leitmotiv, Durch- und Engführung, Variation, Solo, Fuge, Kontrapunkt, vertikale Verschmelzung, dialineares Gleichgewichtssystem, Linienverspinnung, Wiederholung und Rhythmus ausdrücken, helfen verstehen, wie die Motive und Signale eines Films in ihrem notwendigen Neben- und Nacheinander verschmelzen, wie sie kreuz-und-quer-klingen und zwischen oben und unten, Anfang und Ende sich entsprechen in einer labyrinthischen Mathematik des optisch-akustischen Gefühls- und Geistesgewebes.22 Gehen wir also davon aus, dass sich das Musikalische in den musiktheoretischen Begriffen niederschlug, sollten sie den Sinnzusammenhang des Filmes beim Verlassen der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik erfassen. Statt das Musikalische bloß mit der Musik Wagners gleichzusetzen, sollte davon ausgegangen werden, dass das Musikalische unterschiedliche Erscheinungen einschließt, in einem Umfang von den Besetzungen (Kammermusik, Chor, Solo) und den Musikgattungen (Requiem, Arie, Sonate, Passion, Rhapsodie, Rezitativ) über die musikalischen Formen und Techniken (Durch- und Eng führung, Fuge, Kontrapunkt) bis zu den musikalischen Grundelementen (Variation, Wiederholung, Rhythmus, auch vertikale Verschmelzung, ein anderes Wort für die musikalische Harmonie), wobei allerdings die meisten dieser Begriffe, nimmt man ihre Geschichte in Anspruch, in der Musiktheorie auch andere Bedeutungen haben können. Die musikalische Kompositionsweise der einzelnen Szenen in Syberbergs Ludwig scheint in diesem Sinne leicht erkennbar. So besteht beispielsweise die Nornen-Szene aus drei Abschnitte, von denen der erste dem letzten entspricht (die Nornen tanzen nämlich nur im zentralen Abschnitt, während sie im ersten und im dritten Abschnitt sich körperlich nicht bewegen), nach der dreiteiligen musikalischen Liedform (ABA). Dabei sind die Abschnitte durch den gleichzeitigen Verlauf von zwei unterschiedlichen Linien gekennzeichnet: der aus der Musik Wagners bestehenden Grundlinie und der anderen Linie, welche aus trivialen Elementen (nämlich aus dem Zitat des Liedes Ich bin die fesche Lola, aus dem Tanzlied im zentralen Abschnitt und aus der niedlichen, wie auf einer kitschigen Postkarte abgebildeten Figur des Kindes Ludwig) 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.
93
Dalibor Davidović zusammengesetzt wird. Die kontrapunktische Gegenüberstellung des Hohen und des Niedrigen kommt auch in anderen Szenen vor, auch dann, wenn keine Musik erklingt. Oft geht es dabei um Szenen, in denen Ludwig einfach seinen staatsmännischen Verpf lichtungen ausweicht, um ihnen die Welt der Kunst entgegenzustellen; so bispielsweise dann, wenn er, statt politisch zu handeln, sich lieber einen Ausf lug auf die „Roseninsel“ wünscht, da es dort „kein Telefon“ (1.6) gebe. Wenn aber der König die Bildhauerin Elisabeth Mey in ihrem Atelier besucht (1.25), wirkt seine Reminiszenz an den Fluch von Lola Montez trivial in Bezug auf den Monolog der Künstlerin. Mehrere Szenen des Filmes sind durch die variierte Wiederholung eines Themas entstanden, den musikalischen Variationszyklen gleich. Die Szene mit dem Hoffriseur (1.4) besteht beispielsweise aus drei sukzessiven Expositionen des identischen Motivs in immer größerer Einstellung: zunächst in der Großaufnahme, dann halbnah und schließlich in der Halbtotale. Als eine Art Variationszyklus erweist sich auch die Szene, in der die Pfauenfedern durch das Gesicht Ludwigs überblendet werden (1.24): Variiert wird da die gemeinsame Kreisform. Auch die Szene der Audienz (1.7) besteht aus drei variierten Wiederholungen eines Themas, nämlich der drei Anreden Ludwigs an die Gäste. Danach folgt ein Monolog des Königs, eine Art Coda, in der Ludwig das Hohe, das ihn zum Leben erweckt („ich liebe die Berge, Richard Wagner und Edgar Allan Poe, die Nacht und die Pferde“), und das Niedrige, dem er auszuweichen versucht („ich hasse München, englische Industrie, ich hasse Nationalismus und Sozialismus“), gegenüberstellt. Eine Coda kann manchmal eine ganze Szene umfassen, beispielsweise dann, wenn Graf Holnstein (1.8) auf die Worte Ludwigs aus der vorigen Szene eine Antwort gibt. Auch der Monolog des Königs in der Szene 1.14 schließt, wie eine Coda, die vorige dreiteilige, nach der musikalischen Liedform komponierten Szene ab. Die Albtraum-Szene zeigt die dichteste musikalische Struktur im ganzen Film. Auch sie ist dreiteilig (nach der Form ABA) komponiert, wobei den zentralen Abschnitt der Auftritt der beiden Figuren Richard Wagners ausmacht und im dritten Abschnitt die unmittelbare Gefahr, durch die Figur Bismarcks vertreten, zurückkehrt. Der zentrale Abschnitt unterscheidet sich vom ersten auch durch die Anwesenheit der artikulierten Rede. Auf der anderen Ebene ist auch diese Szene durch die kontrapunktische Gegenüberstellung zweier Linien gekennzeichnet, die nicht nur aus zwei Arten von Musik bestehen (einerseits aus der unheimlichen Musik aus dem 2. Akt von Wagners Sieg fried, andererseits aus dem bayerischen Tanzstück und der Schlager), sondern auch aus anderen Elementen, sodass beispielsweise die triviale Linie auch durch die gesampelten Stimmen der bekannten Figuren aus alten Hollywood-Filmen fort94
Filmfuge gespinnt wird. 23 Dabei tritt jede Linie für eine Weile in den Vordergrund, um sich bald zurückzuziehen. Schließlich erscheint mehrmals die Großaufnahme der verschreckten Augen des Königs als eine Art Refrain. Die Albtraum-Szene ist nicht nur durch eine außerordentliche Dichte gekennzeichnet, sondern erscheint, als Höhepunkt des Films, auch zu einem besonderen Zeitpunkt: nämlich am Anfang des zweiten, kürzeren Teils des Films, wie in einem klassischen Musikstück, dessen Höhepunkt das Ganze in zwei Abschnitte unterteilt, die den Goldenen Schnitt approximieren. Schließlich meinte Syberberg unter dem Musikalischen noch ein Drittes, wenn er das Musikalische mit den Grundelementen des Films in Bezug setzte. So sollten im Requiem, also in jenem Modus, in dem der Film der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik los würde, „Bild und Ton [...] ständig auf ihre Parallelführung oder Kontrastierbarkeit im Sinne einer musikalischen Kontrapunktik überprüft“24 werden. Der Begriff Kontrapunkt bezieht sich in diesem Sinne nicht mehr auf die Gegenüberstellung der hohen und der niedrigen Linie, auf das Verweilen beim Hohen und auf sein Umkippen ins Nichtige, sondern auf den prinzipiellen Riss zwischen Bild und Ton. Statt im Dargestellten, zeigt sich hier das Musikalische eher in der Art und Weise der Darstellung. Während auf der Ebene des Dargestellten der narrative Film bloß ein Versuch war, bei einem Modus zu verweilen und das Umkippen ins Nichtige zu verhindern, um die berechenbaren Wirkungen zu erzielen („von vorprogrammierten Zuschauern nach allen bekannten Regeln so oder so konsumiert“), erscheint er auf der Ebene der Darstellung als ein Versuch, den prinzipiellen Riss zwischen Bild und Ton durch ihre Parallelführung zu neutralisieren. Die Rückkehr zum ursprünglich Filmischen sollte in der Darstellung eben dieses Risses hervortreten: Wie in einem kontrapunktischen Spiel sollten Bild und Ton auf die Flucht voneinander gehen, dadurch eine Art Fuge bildend. Über dem Musikalischen als dem wahren Ursprung des Films nachdenkend, schien Syberberg hier eine herausragende Stelle dem musiktheoretischen Begriff des Kontrapunkts bzw. der Fuge zu geben, wenn man die Fuge als ein mittels der Technik des Kontrapunkts komponiertes Stück, oder umgekehrt: das, was beim musikalischen Kontrapunkt geschieht, auffasst. In diesem Sinn sollte die Fuge also als Inbegriff des Musikalischen gelten. Wie sollten wir diesen Gedanken verstehen? Auch an anderen Stellen des Manifests erwähnte Syberberg die Fuge und den Kontrapunkt, als er das Requiem als Programm und 23 Entsprechend scheint die Albtraum-Szene, als die einzige im Film, die mit einem englischsprachigen Titel (Nightmare of a Dreamking) versehen wird, eine Anspielung auf die Sprache des Superman, des Tarzan und des Lone Ranger zu sein. Auf Englisch sind aber auch die schaurigen Erzählungen von Edgar Allan Poe, des beliebtesten Schriftstellers von Ludwig, verfasst. 24 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 12.
95
Dalibor Davidović einige der eigenen Filmwerke zu beschreiben versuchte, 25 aber meinte damit bloß eine Kompositionsweise unter den anderen. An der oben zitierten Stelle ging es aber nicht um das im Film Dargestellte, sondern um den prinzipiellen Riss zwischen Bild und Ton, der kontrapunktisch aufgefasst und ständig überprüft werden sollte. Von wenigen Autoren, die sich mit der Kunst Syberbergs auseinandersetzten und dabei seine Gedanken zum Musikalischen überhaupt ernst nahmen, als etwas mehr als Bloßlegung des Offensichtlichen in seinen Werken, in denen (wie in seiner Verfilmung von Wagners Parsifal aus dem Jahr 1982) die Musik sowieso einen wesenlichen Punkt ausmachte, war Solveig Olsen vielleicht die einzige, die dem Denkweg Syberbergs bis zu seiner Vermutung folgte, dass der Begriff des Kontrapunkts bzw. der Fuge nicht bloß ein Begriff unter anderen sei, sondern dass er das Musikalische in einem wesentlichen Sinne erfasse. Über den Film Ludwig sprechend, bemerkte die Autorin nämlich das Folgende: With the title implying a requiem, one expects a musical structure resembling a mass for the dead. This surfaces towards the end of the movie, but the mass is otherwise better expressed by the visual arrangements and occasional bits of dialogue. The form best suited to describe the film as a whole is the fugue. With the „Curse“ outlining the human predicament much as the subject of a fugue, several „voices“ carry the initial or basic tune through a series of transformations and interaction in overlay, as in counterpoint. Quite often, a subsequent presentation of the basic subject has changed so much in the metamorphosis so as to be unrecognizable. Concurrently with it, one hears or sees yet another version, also transformed and playing in counterpoint, so that the overall impression looks entirely new and unrelated to the original idea. The most common forms of contrapuntal changes of the basic subject are its inversion (upside-down), retrograde or crab (backwards), and inverted crab. Syberberg does not always place the division between these stages neatly between tableaux, but lets them sometimes occur in the middle of a scene. And thanks to the symbiosis of sound and image, the visual narrative can assume the characteristics of music.26 25 Im Zusammenhang mit dem eigenen Film Fritz Kortner probt Kabale und Liebe (1965) spricht Syberberg von seinem „geschlossenen fugenartigen Charakter“. Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 70. Im letzten Abschnitt seines Manifests wird vom Requiem als von einem „Zusammenspiel der Teile, wie wir es aus Fugen und Oratorien und Sonaten kennen“, gesprochen. Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 91. 26 Solveig Olsen, Hans Jürgen Syberberg and his film of Wagner’s “Parsifal” (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), 43–44.
96
Filmfuge Nachdem die Autorin auch einige Beispiele der genannten kontrapunktischen Veränderungen (Umkehrung, Krebsgang) erwähnte, fügte sie noch hinzu, dass es in Syberbergs Ludwig „at least two ‚voices‘ at play simultaneously, sound and image“ gebe. „Sometimes their counterpoints crowd the field, as when one hears two concurrent soundtracks, such as dialogue and music; or one sees two separate visual presentations at the same time“. 27 Im Unterschied zum narrativen Film, in dem der prinzipielle Riss zwischen Bild und Ton bloß neutralisiert werde, rufe der Film Syberbergs den Riss immer wieder ins Gedächtnis. Nun scheint das ständige Erinnern an den genannten Riss, das die Wiedergeburt des Films aus dem Geiste der Musik ausmache, auf ein Unbehagen hinzuweisen. Bleibt nämlich nicht der Versuch des Films, der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik los zu werden, indem er auf die kontrapunktische Gegenüberstellung von Bild und Ton zugreift, immer noch dieser Technik treu? Werden da nicht Bild und Ton zum Schuß und Gegenschuß? Wird ihr Verhältnis nicht eben dialektisch aufgefasst, werden sie nicht, eben als zwei voneinander abgetrennte Seiten, miteinander anschließbar? Sind da nicht der narrative Film und das Requiem eben als Schuß und Gegenschuß gemeint, wobei das Requiem die Dissonanz hervorhebt, auf der Dissonanz beharrt, um sie vor der Neutralisierung abzusichern? Solveig Olsen wies deswegen auf eine weitere Bedeutung des Begriffs Fuge hin: Syberberg did not select the fugue as his preferred art form simply to display his virtuosity. Several reasons come to mind, one of them being the fugue as a psychological term. The second definition of „fugue“ in Webster’s (2nd ed.) reads, „in psychiatry, a state of psychological amnesia during which a patient seems to behave in a conscious and rational way, although upon return to normal consciousness he cannot remember the period of time nor what he did during it; temporary f light from reality”. 28 Es ist nicht entscheidend, dass Olsen auch an dieser Stelle dem Gedanken Syberbergs folgte, nach dem das Musikalische den „Tunnel ins Unterbewußtsein“ 29 baue, nicht zuletzt deswegen, weil der Film „in der gleichen Wiege [...] wie die Psychologie“ 30 geboren sei; wichtiger scheint, dass in diesem Gedankengang das Musikalische anders bestimmt wurde. Das Musikalische wäre nämlich ei27 28 29 30
Ibid., 44. Ibid. Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 20. Ibid., 87.
97
Dalibor Davidović ner Kraft des Verbindens und Assoziierens gleich, die es möglich macht, auch noch dasjenige, was scheinbar auf der Flucht ist, zurückzugewinnen bzw. in einen Sinnzusammenhang zu bringen. Aus dieser Perspektive betrachtet würde der narrative Film einem Versuch gleichen, jede Möglichkeit des Verbindens auf ein eindeutiges und im Voraus gegebenes System der Verbindungen zurückzuführen. Dem Musikalischen ähnlich, sollte das Requiem dagegen einen Tunnel ins Unterbewußtsein bauen und so imstande sein, durch „Assoziationen und ihr Unterbewußtseinsgewebe ganz neue Verbindungen und Räume“ 31 zu schaffen. Könnte nun diese Bestimmung der Fuge – als einer Kraft des Verbindens, des Fügens, des Zusammenbringens – die Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik hinter sich lassen, ihre fatale Auswirkung verhindern? Dritte Durchführung Syberbergs radikaler Neubeginn war ein Versuch, sowohl auf die Totalisierung der Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, als auch auf ihre Ent-Totalisierung und Begrenzung in Hinsicht auf ihre politische Aufgabe nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, eine Antwort zu geben. Seine Radikalität zeigte sich dadurch, dass Syberberg sich in einer unmöglichen Situation befand, indem er sich den zwei sich gegenseitig ausschließenden Forderungen verpf lichtet fühlte. Einerseits folgte er nämlich der Forderung, dem Film bzw. der Kunst gegenüber möglichst misstrauisch zu bleiben, nicht nur deswegen, weil die Kunst, indem sie zum Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit wurde, die Qualen verursachte, die sich der Vorstellungskraft entziehen, sondern auch, weil sie imstande sei, das wieder zu tun. Misstrauisch dem Film gegenüber zu bleiben bedeutete deswegen nicht nur, immer wieder auf die vom Film einmal verursachte und als ständige Gefahr drohende Katastrophe hinzuweisen, sondern auch auf seine Begrenzung in die eigene Sphäre zu insistieren. Schließlich entstammte das Misstrauen Syberbergs gegenüber dem Film seiner Einsicht, dass die Totalisierung des Films im Nationalsozialismus und die Strafe, die der Film danach für seine Schuld erleidet, auf einen gemeinsamen Ursprung hinweisen. Denn die Auffassung, dass die Kunst das Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit ausmache, scheint bloß eine Folge „der auf das Äußerste getriebenen Ästhetik“32 zu sein, jener philosophischen Besinnung auf die Kunst, welche die Kunst „im voraus auf den durch das Schöne erregten Gefühlszustand absieht und alles darauf 31 Ibid. 32 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst (= Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 43) (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 90.
98
Filmfuge bezieht und von daher bestimmt“. 33 Im Anspruch der Kunst, sich zum Modell der ganzen Wirklichkeit zu erheben, wird also jene Bestimmung der Kunst vollendet, nach der sie bloß etwas Technisches sei. Aus diesem Grund musste der Künstler sich nicht buchstäblich in einer Situation der mimetischen Rivalität befinden, um dem Politiker bzw. dem Philosophen unterlegen zu sein. Andererseits wollte Syberberg nichts anderes als Film. Seine Wendung zum Musikalischen begab sich auf die Suche nach der Möglichkeit seiner Wiedergeburt. Welche Aussichten ergaben sich daraus? Als erstes Kunstwerk Syberbergs nach seiner Wende, ein Werk, das die Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik hinter sich zu lassen versuchte, indem es sich dem Musikalischen zuwandte, scheint Ludwig tatsächlich vom Musikalischen durchtränkt zu sein. Nicht nur, dass die Musik einen wesentlichen Teil seines Soundtracks ausmacht; dass sein Sujet von einem König handelt, der in der Musik den Zuf luchtsort suchte und dabei in eine merkwürdige mimetische Rivalität gegenüber dem Künstler trat (merkwürdig insofern, als der König den Komponisten Wagner zugleich uneingeschränkt unterstützte); sondern die musikalischen Züge sind auch in der Komposition des Films bemerkbar, von einzelnen Szenen bis zum Ganzen. Folgt man dem Gedankengang Syberbergs, sollte auch der prinzipielle Riss zwischen Bild und Ton, der in seinen folgenden Filmen noch mehr zum Vorschein kommen wird, musikalisch genannt werden. Schließlich wird das Musikalische zum Vorbild auch beim Versuch des Films, das scheinbar Unverbundene in einem „Assoziationsgefüge“ 34 jenseits der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik zu verbinden. Ludwig ist tatsächlich ein Kunstwerk außerordentlicher Dichte. Der gleichzeitige Verlauf seiner Linien erfordert mehrmaliges Sehen und eine besondere Hingabe seitens des Zuschauers, um alle Details und ihre Zusammenhänge zu entziffern. In der Reichhaltigkeit an Details scheint der Film keine Grenzen zu kennen, als ob er alles umfassen wollte, als ob er immer neue Anzeichen von der unausweichlichen Katastrophe anreichern müsste, als ob er aus den immer neuen „Postskripten“ bestehe, wie einmal, über die Kunst Syberbergs schreibend, Susan Sontag bemerkte. 35 Darüber spricht auch die Länge von Ludwig und die Schlussszene des Films, die die Möglichkeit eines neuen Anfangs eröffnet. Das niedliche (zugleich auch bärtige) Kind Ludwig, das in der Nornen-Szene fröhlich eine Schwan-Puppe zieht, die eigene fatale Verzauberung durch die Kunst Wagners ankündigend, erscheint nämlich auch 33 Ibid., 91–92. 34 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 81. 35 „His problem is that he cannot give anything up [...] As the film is ending, Syberberg wants to produce yet another ravishing image. Even when the film is finally over, he still wants to say more, and adds postscripts”. Susan Sontag, Under the sign of Saturn (New York: Random House, 1980), 163.
99
Dalibor Davidović am Ende des Films. Ludwig scheint alle Grenzen des Films zu übertreten. Hat nun der Film diese Tendenz nicht dank dem Musikalischen entwickelt? Hat nicht das Musikalische seinen Wunsch nach einer neuen Totalisierung wieder erweckt? Oder war für diese Tendenz eher Syberbergs Auffassung vom Musikalischen verantwortlich? Das Musikalische, als eine Kraft des Verbindens und Assoziierens, hatte nämlich für Syberberg eine merkwürdige Eigenschaft: Ihm konnte nichts entgehen. In dem Zusammenhang sprach Syberberg in seinem Manifest von einer „Beziehungs- und Gefügetechnik ohne Zufall“. 36 In der Studie von Solveig Olsen bekam seine Bestimmung auch die entsprechende Durchführung. Nicht nur, dass Olsen sich bemühte, noch die winzigsten Details von Ludwig (und des ganzen Werkes von Syberberg) zu entschlüsseln, jedes Detail mit einem anderen in einen Zusammenhang zu setzen, denn kein Detail könnte bei Syberberg zufällig sein, sondern sie wies auch auf einen bestimmten Plan der Verbindungen und Assoziationen hin. So erwies sich das filmische Assoziationsgefüge Syberbergs letztendlich als ein System der ziemlich vorhersehbaren Zusammenhänge, wobei die Schlüssel für die Entzifferung der jeweiligen Details die „Archetypen“, von denen die analytische Psychologie spricht, bzw. die „Prozesse“, bekannt aus der Kabbala, ausmachten. Bei Olsen – deren umfangreiche Studie, 37 auch darin dem Künstler treu, durch eine Tendenz gekennzeichnet ist, alle Sinnzusammenhänge des Werkes von Syberberg erschöpfen zu wollen, als ob auch sie aus immer neuen Postskripten bestehe – erschien das Unterbewußtsein als etwas Kodifiziertes, als eine Kraft des Verbindens und Assoziierens nach einem im Voraus gegebenen Plan. War das nun aber wesentlich unterschiedlich vom narrativen Film, der von den Kennern nach ideologischen Fragekatalogen benotet und von vorprogrammierten Zuschauern nach allen bekannten Regeln so oder so konsumiert wurde? Aber Syberberg blieb nicht nur misstrauisch gegenüber dem Film, er wollte zur gleichen Zeit nichts anderes als Film. Schließlich würde er den Film abwerfen, wenn er ihm gegenüber völlig misstrauisch wäre. Wenn aber die mehrmaligen Versuche Syberbergs, im Musikalischen den Ursprung des Films zu finden und dadurch den Film von seiner Schuld zu erlösen, immer wieder zur Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik zurückkehrten, musste das auch heissen, dass sein Vorschlag aussichtslos war? Oder war es eher seine Auffassung vom Musikalischen, die ihn immer wieder auf den Weg zurückbrachte, von dem er abbiegen wollte? War daran nicht seine Auffassung von der Fuge verant36 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 11. 37 In ihrer Monographie (siehe Olsen, Hans Jürgen Syberberg and his film of Wagner’s “Parsifal”, wie Anm. 26) widmet sich Olsen zwar in erster Linie dem Parsifal, bezog aber alle bisherigen Werke und Schriften des Künstlers ein, sodass eine nicht weniger als 555 Seiten umfassende Studie entstand.
100
Filmfuge wortlich? Nahm er die musiktheoretische, wissenschaftliche Auffassung von der Fuge für bare Münze, als ob die Wissenschaft alles über Fuge wisse? Die Wissenschaft selbst kam allerdings dieser Frage entgegen, indem sie, statt eine Auffassung von der Fuge für bare Münze zu nehmen, die Begriffsgeschichte der Fuge betrieb. So wies der Musikwissenschaftler Michael Beiche in dem vorbildlich dokumentierten Artikel über die Fuge darauf hin, dass „als wesensmäßig der mus. Polyphonie zugehörender Begriff “ der Fuge „allgemein die Beziehung mindestens zweier Stimmen zueinander“ impliziere, wobei die Stimmen „in gewisser Weise identisch sind und nacheinander einsetzen, in speziellen Fällen auch gleichzeitig beginnen können“. 38 Die entsprechenden musikalischen „Gebilde“ werden die Fugen genannt, weil sie als „Flucht oder Jagd verschiedener Stimmen verstanden“ wurden, wobei die „jeweiligen Begriffsbestimmungen vorwiegend durch den Verweis auf den umgangssprachlichen Wortgebrauch des lat. Substantivs geprägt“ 39 wurden. Neben dieser Etymologie, die durch die entsprechenden Stellen aus den frühesten Quellen belegt werden konnte und seitdem sich als vorherrschend erwies, wobei seit dem Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts dem Bild einer Flucht oder eines Jagens auch die Bilder eines „Wettkampfes oder Wettlaufes der einzelnen Stimmen“,40 eines musikalischen „Gesprächs“,41 eines „Volkes“,42 eines „bewegten Organismus“43 oder aber einer „Verwirklichung von Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit“44 hinzukamen, kannte die Musiktheorie in den deutschssprachigen Ländern seit dem späten 17. Jahrhundert eine weitere Bedeutung, die vom deutschen Wort fügen (im Sinne von zusammensetzen, verbinden, verknüpfen, sich beugen) abgeleitet war. Jedoch ungeachtet des Unterschiedes, ob sich in der Fuge eine Stimme an die andere nach bestimmten Regeln fügte oder von ihr f lüchtete, ob sie mit ihr in einen Wettkampf oder in ein Gespräch trat, ob sie mit anderen Stimmen eine Einheit in der Mannigfaltigkeit verwirklichte oder sich eher multiplizierte und dadurch einen bewegten Organismus bildete, war nicht jede dieser Bestimmungen im Grunde genommen bloß eine neue Variante der Schuß- und Gegenschußtechnik? Erfasste die Wissenschaft die Fuge nicht erst dann, wenn sie sich schon in einem Modus des Verfallens befand, wenn das Musikalische mit der bloßen Technik gleichgesetzt wurde? Der Musikwissenschaftler konnte 38 Michael Beiche, „Fuga/Fuge“, in: Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, hg. von Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 19. Lieferung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990), 2. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 25. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 26. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 36.
101
Dalibor Davidović sich anscheinend auf die Fuge erst dann fokussieren, konnte die entsprechenden musiktheoretischen Traktate auf listen und die Bedeutungen des Begriffs klassifizieren, als die Fuge schon durch einen musiktheoretischen Begriff festgelegt war. Als Wissenschaftler konnte er das Wesen der Fuge nur innerhalb des mit dem Begriff Gemeinten suchen und in der jeweils anderen ihrer Eigenschaften finden. Deswegen war es kein Zufall, dass Beiche im einleitenden Paragraphen seines Beitrags, alle Bedeutungen des lateinischen Verbes fugere und des entsprechenden Substantives auf listend, auch das griechische Substantiv φυγή bzw. das Verb φεύγω erwähnte,45 ohne dass er sich danach auf sie bezog. Was nun, wenn die Fuge nicht bloß eine unter anderen musikalischen Erscheinungen sei, sondern eben das Wesen des Musikalischen ausmache, wie das Syberberg – und Olsen, dem Künstler folgend – vermuten lassen, indem sie den Begriff der Fuge von allen anderen musiktheoretischen Begriffen hervorhoben? Wir sollten uns deshalb dem griechischen Wort zuwenden, als es noch kein musiktheoretischer Terminus technicus war. Wir sollten wagen, uns auf eine Reise bis ans Ende der bekannten Welt zu begeben. Das Wort φυγή und seine Varianten kommen nämlich schon in der Odysee vor. Zum ersten Mal im 10. Gesang, als Odysseus am Hofe des Königs Alkinoos, die Geschichte seiner Irrfahrten erzählend, auch von der Begegnung mit den Laistrygonen berichtet. Am Ende dieser Episode 46 kommt das Wort in unterschiedlichen Varianten sogar dreimal vor: οἱ δ᾽ ἐπεὶ εἰσῆλθον κλυτὰ δώματα, τὴν δὲ γυναῖκα εὗρον, ὅσην τ᾽ ὄρεος κορυφήν, κατὰ δ᾽ ἔστυγον αὐτήν. ἡ δ᾽ αἶψ᾽ ἐξ ἀγορῆς ἐκάλει κλυτὸν Ἀντιφατῆα, ὃν πόσιν, ὃς δὴ τοῖσιν ἐμήσατο λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον. 45 Ibid., 1. 46 In der Übersetzung von Johann Heinrich Voß (Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1990) lautet diese Stelle (Verse 112–132) wie folgt: Und sie gingen hinein in die Burg, und fanden des Königs Weib, so groß wie ein Gipfel des Bergs; und ein Grauen befiel sie. Jene rief den berühmten Antiphates aus der Versammlung, Ihren Gemahl, der ihnen ein schreckliches Ende bestimmte. Ungestüm packt’ er den einen Gefährten, und tischte den Schmaus auf. Aber die übrigen Zween enteilten, und flohn zu den Schiffen. Und er erhub ein Gebrüll durch die Stadt; und siehe; mit einmal Kamen hieher und dorther die rüstigen Lästrygonen Zahllos zuhauf, sie glichen nicht Menschen, sondern Giganten. Diese schleuderten jetzt von dem Fels unmenschliche Lasten Steine herab; da entstand in den Schiffen ein schrecklich Getümmel, Sterbender Männer Geschrei und das Krachen zerschmetterter Schiffe.
102
Filmfuge αὐτίχ᾽ ἕνα μάρψας ἑτάρων ὡπλίσσατο δεῖπνον: τὼ δὲ δύ᾽ ἀίξαντε φυγῇ ἐπὶ νῆας ἱκέσθην. αὐτὰρ ὁ τεῦχε βοὴν διὰ ἄστεος: οἱ δ᾽ ἀίοντες φοίτων ἴφθιμοι Λαιστρυγόνες ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος, μυρίοι, οὐκ ἄνδρεσσιν ἐοικότες, ἀλλὰ Γίγασιν. οἵ ῥ᾽ ἀπὸ πετράων ἀνδραχθέσι χερμαδίοισιν βάλλον: ἄφαρ δὲ κακὸς κόναβος κατὰ νῆας ὀρώρει ἀνδρῶν τ᾽ ὀλλυμένων νηῶν θ᾽ ἅμα ἀγνυμενάων: ἰχθῦς δ᾽ ὣς πείροντες ἀτερπέα δαῖτα φέροντο. ὄφρ᾽ οἱ τοὺς ὄλεκον λιμένος πολυβενθέος ἐντός, τόφρα δ᾽ ἐγὼ ξίφος ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ τῷ ἀπὸ πείσματ᾽ ἔκοψα νεὸς κυανοπρῴροιο. αἶψα δ᾽ ἐμοῖς ἑτάροισιν ἐποτρύνας ἐκέλευσα ἐμβαλέειν κώπῃς, ἵν᾽ ὑπὲκ κακότητα φύγοιμεν: οἱ δ᾽ ἅλα πάντες ἀνέρριψαν, δείσαντες ὄλεθρον. ἀσπασίως δ᾽ ἐς πόντον ἐπηρεφέας φύγε πέτρας νηῦς ἐμή: αὐτὰρ αἱ ἄλλαι ἀολλέες αὐτόθ᾽ ὄλοντο.
An anderer Stelle, im 22. Gesang,47 taucht das Wort wieder auf, diesmal die Bestrafung der Freier schildernd: δὴ τότ᾽ Ἀθηναίη φθισίμβροτον αἰγίδ᾽ ἀνέσχεν ὑψόθεν ἐξ ὀροφῆς: τῶν δὲ φρένες ἐπτοίηθεν. οἱ δ᾽ ἐφέβοντο κατὰ μέγαρον βόες ὣς ἀγελαῖαι: τὰς μέν τ᾽ αἰόλος οἶστρος ἐφορμηθεὶς ἐδόνησεν Und man durchstach sie, wie Fische, und trug sie zum scheußlichen Fraß hin. Während diese die Männer im tiefen Hafen vertilgten, Eilt‘ ich geschwind, und riß das geschliffene Schwert von der Hüfte, Und zerhaute die Seile des blaugeschnäbelten Schiffes. Dann ermahnt‘ ich und trieb aufs äußerste meine Genossen, Hurtig die Ruder zu regen, daß wir dem Verderben entrönnen; Keuchend schlugen sie alle die Flut, aus Furcht vor dem Tode. Aber glücklich enteilte mein Schiff von den hangenden Klippen Über das Meer; die andern versanken dort all‘ in den Abgrund. 47 Es handelt sich um die Verse 297–309, die in der Übersetzung von Voß so lauten: Aber Athene erhub an der Decke den leuchtenden dunkeln Menschenverderbenden Schild, und schreckte die Herzen der Freier. Zitternd liefen sie rings durch den Saal, wie die Herde der Rinder, Welche auf grasichter Weide die rasche Bremse verfolget, Im anmutigen Lenz, wenn die Tage heiter und lang sind. Aber gleich scharfklauichten krummgeschnabelten Falken, Welche von dem Gebirg’ herstürmend auf fliegende Vögel Schießen; sie flattern voll Angst aus den Wolken herab auf die Felder,
103
Dalibor Davidović ὥρῃ ἐν εἰαρινῇ, ὅτε τ᾽ ἤματα μακρὰ πέλονται. οἱ δ᾽ ὥς τ᾽ αἰγυπιοὶ γαμψώνυχες ἀγκυλοχεῖλαι, ἐξ ὀρέων ἐλθόντες ἐπ᾽ ὀρνίθεσσι θόρωσι: ταὶ μέν τ᾽ ἐν πεδίῳ νέφεα πτώσσουσαι ἵενται, οἱ δέ τε τὰς ὀλέκουσιν ἐπάλμενοι, οὐδέ τις ἀλκὴ γίγνεται οὐδὲ φυγή: χαίρουσι δέ τ᾽ ἀνέρες ἄγρῃ: ὣς ἄρα τοὶ μνηστῆρας ἐπεσσύμενοι κατὰ δῶμα τύπτον ἐπιστροφάδην: τῶν δὲ στόνος ὤρνυτ᾽ ἀεικὴς κράτων τυπτομένων, δάπεδον δ᾽ ἅπαν αἵματι θῦε.
In der ersten Szene erreichten die Schiffe von Odysseus und seiner Gefährten am siebten Tag nach dem Besuch der Insel des Aiolos eine merkwürdig stille Bucht. Odysseus verankerte sein Schiff außerhalb der Bucht und schickte die anderen zum Hafen. Seine Gefährten freuten sich, als sie an der dortigen Quelle eine junge Frau trafen und von ihr zum Hof ihres Vaters, des Königs Antiphates, eingeladen wurden. Sie wurden aber unangenehm überrascht, als seine riesige Frau ihres Gatten herbeirief, der „ungestüm den einen Gefährten“ packte und „den Schmaus auftischte”. Das Wort φυγῇ, das an dieser Stelle vorkommt, bezieht sich auf die Flucht der übrigen Gefährten von Odysseus zu den Schiffen. Jedoch die Gefahr ging noch nicht vorüber, da die riesigen Laistrygonen die abgeknickten Stücke von Felsen herab zu den Schiffen schleuderten, einige von Odysseus’ Gefährten schlugen und sie „zum scheußlichen Fraß“ hintrugen. Odysseus konnte mit einem kleinen Teil seiner Gefährten auf seinem Schiff entkommen. Er trieb sie an, „hurtig die Ruder zu regen”, damit sie „dem Verderben entrönnen“ (φύγοιμεν). Das letzte Mal bezieht sich das Wort auf das Schiff selbst, das „glücklich enteilte“ (φύγε) ins offene Meer. In der zweiten Szene stürmte Odysseus die Freier mit denen, die ihm treu geblieben waren, nachdem ihn Athene in der Gestalt des Mentors an seine vorigen heroischen Taten erinnert hatte. Als schließlich die Göttin selbst – die bis dahin als Schwalbe den ganzen Verlauf vom Dach her beobachtete – zum Kampf sich bereitete, indem sie ihr Schild erhob, erschraken die Freier und „(liefen) zitternd rings durch den Saal“. Odysseus und die seinen stürmten auf sie zu, den Falken gleich, vor welchen kein „Streiten oder Entf liehn“ (φυγή ) möglich sei.
Doch die verfolgenden Stößer ereilen sie würgend; da gilt nicht Streiten oder Entfliehn; es freun sich die Menschen des Schauspiels: Also stürzten sie wütend sich unter die Freier, und würgten Links und rechts durch den Saal; mit dem Krachen zerschlagener Schädel Tönte das Jammergeschrei, und Blut floß über den Boden.
104
Filmfuge Das Wort φυγή und seine Varianten kommen also in beiden Szenen dann vor, wenn es um eine Lebensgefahr, um eine Flucht vor dem Tod, geht, wobei in der ersten Szene Odysseus und seine Gefährten sich auf der Flucht befinden, während in der zweiten Szene die Freier dem Tode zu entkommen versuchen, den ihnen Odysseus und die seinen bereiten. Einmal befinden sich also Odysseus und seine Gefährten in Gefahr, das andere Mal sind sie eher ihre Ursache. In der ersten Szene macht Odysseus und seine Gefährten gerade ihre Unverborgenheit angreif bar, sodass sie zum offenen Meer zurückkehren, um der Gefahr zu entkommen. Dagegen sind in der zweiten Szene die Freier unverborgen und suchen deswegen einen Weg, um den todbringenden Lanzen zu entweichen. Was haben beide Szenen gemeinsam? Zunächst das, dass sich beide Seiten – sowohl Odysseus als auch diejenige, die gegen sein Haus verstießen – auf der Flucht befinden konnten. Die Flucht war in beiden Szenen die Flucht vor der Lebensgefahr und zugleich ein Ankommen an einem anderen Ort. Als Odysseus und seine Gefährten sich auf der Flucht vor den Laistrygonen und vor den von ihnen zu den Schiffen heruntergeschleuderten Felsen bafanden, gingen sie aus der Unverborgenheit in die Verborgenheit. Sie f lohen aus der Sicht der Laistrygonen und entkamen so dem Tode. Die Flucht bedeutete für sie auch ein Ankommen an einen anderen, sicheren Ort. Die zweite Szene wird nicht von Odysseus, sondern von einem Erzähler in der dritten Person erzählt, wobei die Vorkommnisse durch zwei Vergleiche geschildert werden: Der erste Vergleich bezog sich auf diejenige, die sich auf der Flucht befanden („wie die Herde der Rinder, welche auf grasichter Weide die rasche Bremse verfolget“), der zweite dagegen auf diejenige, vor welchen („gleich scharf klauichten krummgeschnabelten Falken“) man f loh. In der Odysee wird also nicht festgelegt, ob es sich bei φυγή eher um ein Ankommen oder um ein Vergehen handelt. Die φυγή lässt etwas ankommen oder vergehen und bei diesem Lassen entzieht sie sich selbst. Insofern scheint das Wesen der φυγή im Ankommen und im Vergehen selbst zu sein, wobei weder das Ankommen noch das Vergehen seiend wären, aber ihrerseits die Seienden zur Verborgenheit oder zur Unverborgenheit hinschicken. Andererseits schickt φυγή zur Verborgenheit oder zur Unverborgenheit nicht bloß einige Seienden hin. In der Odysee befanden sich nämlich nicht nur die Menschen, sondern auch die anderen Seienden (Schiffe, Rinder, Vögel) auf der Flucht. Ist es deswegen für die φυγή überhaupt entscheidend, welche Seienden sich auf der Flucht befinden? Sind die Seienden überhaupt die Vorbedingung, dass die Flucht stattfindet? In der Odysee scheint die φυγή eher das Lassen selbst zu sein, ungeachtet dessen, ob welches Seiende ankomme oder vergehe. Sicherlich entwirft die Odysee dabei keine „Theorie“ der φυγή, sie 105
Dalibor Davidović gibt keine systematische Darstellung ihrer Möglichkeiten; φυγή ist da sogar kein (proto)philosophischer Begriff. Die Odysee spricht dichterisch aus, was φυγή ursprünglich bedeutete: Das Ankommen oder das Vergehen. Deswegen wird in der Odysee auch nicht in einem musikalischen Zusammenhang über φυγή gesprochen. Aber das Wort φυγή in der Odysee lässt eben das erahnen, was der musiktheoretische Begriff der Fuge ungedacht lässt. Der Musikwissenschaftler erwähnte allerdings das griechische Wort im einleitenden Absatz seines Aufsatzes, um es sofort dem Vergessen zu überlassen. Das Vergessen der φυγή scheint nicht zufällig zu sein: Nur indem sie vergisst, dass φυγή als das Wesen der Fuge der Fuge als einem Seienden nicht gleicht, kann sich die Wissenschaft den gelehrten Abhandlungen widmen, um die Bedeutungsverschiebung des Begriffs zu erforschen. Für sie erweist sich das Wesen der Fuge bloß in immer neuen Seienden, sie sucht es in immer anderen musiktheoretischen Begriffen, als ob sich das Wesen der Fuge auf einer Flucht befinde. So konnten die frühesten Traktate das Wesen der Fuge im „Kompositionsverfahren des Kanons“48 finden, bei Gioseffo Zarlino, dem vielleicht größten Musiktheoretiker zur Zeit der Renaissance, machten das Wesen der Fuge die „bestimmte(n) kontrapunktisch-imitatorische(n) Durchführungen“49 aus, während die Fuge im „modernen“ Sinne als „Kompositionsform“50 oder schließlich als „kompositorische Technik, Textur oder Stil“51 aufgefasst wurde. Es scheint, dass auch Syberbergs Hinweis auf die Fuge durch das Vergessen der φυγή gekennzeichnet wurde, nicht nur dann, wenn die Fuge für ihn bloß als einer unter anderen musiktheoretischen Begriffen galt, von denen eine Wiedergeburt des Films zu erwarten sei, sondern auch dann, wenn Syberberg dem Begriff des Kontrapunkts bzw. der Fuge eine ausgezeichnete Stelle hinsichtlich der anderen musiktheoretischen Begriffe gab, wenn er in der Fuge das Wesen des Musikalischen vermutete. Vielleicht schlug das Ende seines Manifests aus diesem Grund einen ganz anderen Ton als der Aufang an. Zunächst wendete sich Syberberg an das Musikalische, um den Film aus seiner Verfallenheit zu erlösen, was sich in seiner Reduktion auf die Technik zeigte. Jedoch verlangte er am Ende vom Musikalischen eben die Technik, auch das Musikalische auf die Technik zurückführend. So sollten in Ludwig „unter dem mildernden und intensivierenden Gefühlsdach der Musik [...] alte, längst vergessene und verratene Kategorien wieder möglich“ werden, bei denen „berechtigterweise uns Zeitgenossen die Schamröte ins Gesicht schösse, wenn sie allein ge48 49 50 51
106
Beiche, „Fuga/Fuge“ (wie Anm. 38), 5. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 41.
Filmfuge braucht würden“. 52 Syberberg ging es also eher darum, die „längst vergessenen” und schuldbeladenen „Kategorien“ wie „Sehnsucht“, „Heimweh“ und „Wahnsinn“53 herbeizurufen, als um das Musikalische selbst, vom dem nur noch zu erwarten war, als bloßes Mittel der Steuerung – mildernd oder intensivierend – zu wirken, einem präzisen Gerät ähnlich. Am Ende seines Manifests, an den Gedanken von einer „Moralität der Musik“ 54 erinnernd, verlangte Syberberg auch vom Requiem eine „mögliche Moralität des Films, und Arbeit mit ihm am Leben“. 55 Klang seine Forderung an dieser Stelle nicht ähnlich den Forderungen, die von seinen Kollegen an den Film gestellt wurden? Ging es nicht wieder darum, dass der Film sich für die richtige Sache einsetzen sollte? Ging es nicht nochmals darum, die Bedingungen der mimetischen Rivalität zu akzeptieren? Einer Rivalität, die immer schon zugunsten des Politikers bzw. des Philosophen entschieden wird. Es scheint, dass der ganze Streit mit und um Syberberg und sein Werk von dieser inneren Bewegung seiner Aussagen herrührte. Als ob sich die Szene der mimetischen Rivalität, von der die Nomoi ein würdiges Zeugnis gaben, immer wieder in seinen Aussagen abspielen würde, um danach ihre Resonanzen in den Aussagen anderer zu finden. So versuchte der Künstler durch seine Aussagen immer wieder zu zeigen, dass er bei der Bestimmung der Kunst zumindest so philosophisch sein könnte wie der Philosoph selbst, indem er in der Kunst bloßes Mittel zur Flucht sah, ein Mittel, etwas endlich Sicheres, Festes und Stabiles zu erreichen, bei ihm anzukommen, bei ihm zu verweilen. Zum Wahren, Guten und Schönen zugleich, das aus der durch den Nationalsozialismus und der Profanierung der Kunst verwüsteten Welt verschwand. Stretto Irrte sich Syberberg, als er sich an die Musik wendete, um den Film von seiner Schuld zu lösen? Täuschte er sich, als er meinte, die Musik sei den anderen Künsten irgendwie „überlegen“?56 Vielleicht doch, wenn er im Musikalischen eine Begründung des Films suchte, die endlich sicher, fest und stabil 52 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 20. 53 Ibid.: Alle drei Worte, so ausgesprochen, dass ihre Präfixe deutlich abgetrennt werden (SehnSucht, Heim-Weh, Wahn-Sinn), geben in der letzten Szene von Ludwig dem Gebet für den verstorbenen König zugleich einen ironischen Unterton. 54 Ibid., 92. 55 Ibid. 56 Obwohl Syberberg kein System der Künste entwarf, wurde dennoch einigen von ihnen ein höherer Rang als den anderen gegeben, z. B. wenn behauptet wird, dass die „Eleganz, Schnelligkeit und Schönheit” des Films „allen anderen Künsten, außer der Musik, überlegen“ sei. Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 87.
107
Dalibor Davidović wäre. Aber in der Fuge das Wesen des Musikalischen vermutend, eröffnete er vielleicht auch einen anderen Weg auf der Suche nach einer Wiedergeburt des Films aus dem Geiste der Musik. Wir sollten deswegen zur Odysee und zur Bestimmung von φυγή als einem Ankommen und einem Vergehen noch einmal zurückkehren. Es war schon die Rede davon, dass φυγή etwas ankommen oder vergehen lasse und bei diesem Lassen sich selbst entziehe. Als Odysseus und seine Gefährten ankamen, auf der Flucht vor den Laistrygonen sich befindend, schien es, als ob sie in einer Anwesenheit weilten, wo sie endlich stehenbleiben, sich ausruhen könnten. Als ob sie in einem Zustand des ewigen Glücks ankamen, bei dem es zu verweilen galt. Aber ihr Ankommen war zur gleichen Zeit auch eine Verwerfung ins offene Meer, zu einem ständig drohenden Abgrund. In dem Sinne schickt φυγή nicht bloß zum Ankommen, sondern zur gleichen Zeit auch zum Vergehen hin. Odysseus und seine Gefährten konnten allerdings in einem Zustand des ewigen Glücks verweilen, aber dabei vergessend, dass sie von der φυγή nicht nur zum Ankommen, sondern zur gleichen Zeit auch zum Vergehen hingeschickt wurden. Insofern entspringt aus der φυγή die ständige Gefahr, dass es sich das jeweilig „Anwesende“, das Angekommene, „aus dem weilenden Verharren in das bloße Beharren verhärtet“,57 vergessend dabei, dass φυγή nicht nur zum Ankommen, sondern zugleich zum Vergehen hinschickt. Als Ursprung jener „Angemessenheit“, die im deutschen Wort Fug – auf das Heidegger in diesem Zusammenhang hinwies58 und das auch bei Beiche erwähnt wurde (wenn auch bloß am Rande, in einem „Exkurs“,59 als ob das Wort für die musiktheoretische Auffassung der Fuge unbedeutend wäre) – zum Aus57 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2003), 368. Heidegger spricht an dieser Stelle vom „Anwesenden“ als vom „Je-Weiligen“. Den Ausdruck, aus dem deutschen Wort jeweilig entstanden, versuchte Marlène Zarader mit der Phrase „ce qui sejourne chaque fois pour un temps“ zu umschreiben, darauf hinweisend, dass das Seiende durch ein Geschehen, also zeitlich, in die Anwesenheit ankommt. Vgl. Marlène Zarader, Heidegger et les paroles de l’origine (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 91. 58 Vgl. Heidegger, Holzwege (wie Anm. 57), 357. 59 „Der umgangssprachliche Ausdruck Fuge leitet sich her von ahd. fuogi, Interlinearversion bei Notker Labeo (um 1000) von lat. coniunctio, Verbindung, Zusammenhang [...] (Konträre Ausdrücke wie ungefüege und Unfuoge begegnen um 1218-28 bei Walther von der Vogelweide.) Vuoge (Fem.) erfährt im Mhd. eine Spaltung in vuog und vuoge: hier konnte vuoge dasselbe wie vuog (Mask.), Angemessenheit, bedeuten, woraus nhd. Fug hervorgeht. (Während es wenig sinnvoll erscheint, bei H. Gerle 1532 [...] oder M. Praetorius [...] 1619 [...] eben diese Bedeutung von Fug auch im mus. Zusammenhang zu vermuten, rekurriert André 1843 wie gesehen bei seiner Begründung für die Benennung Fuge eigens darauf.) Im Nhd. dagegen verengt sich die Bedeutung von Fuge auf die Verwendung für die ‚enge Verbindung zweier Gegenstände‘ und die Stelle, wo diese verbunden sind; vgl. Komposita wie Bretterfuge, Hirnschalfuge, Kelterfuge, Schiffsfuge oder Wortfuge“. Beiche, „Fuga/ Fuge“ (wie Anm. 38), 5.
108
Filmfuge druck kommt, ist φυγή also auch der Ursprung jener „Unangemessenheit“ bzw. „Alberei“ (Un-Fug), das in einem Versuch des Angekommenen, in das bloße Beharren zu verhärten bestünde. Da das Beharrte, Unangemessene, gleichursprünglich wie das Angemessene ist, wie dasjenige, das nicht vergisst, dass das Ankommen zugleich ein Vergehen ist, sind auch der narrative Film und das Requiem gleichursprünglich, nicht nur deswegen, weil jeder von ihnen angemessen und unangemessen wäre – auch der narrative Film, d.h. der Film im Zustand des Beharrens, erweist sich immer schon als etwas ins Vergehen Angekommenes, und das Requiem, d. h. ein Film, der das Andenken daran bewahrt, dass das Ankommen zugleich ein Vergehen ist, erweist sich für Syberberg eben als ein geschlossenes, strenges System und ästhetisches Programm, also als etwas Beharrendes –, sondern auch weil es für φυγή gleichgültig scheint, was für ein Film sie zur Welt bringen würde. Denn jeder Film wird durch die Unbeständigkeit gekennzeichnet, sogar dann, wenn er zu beharren versucht und das Andenken daran, dass das Ankommen zugleich ein Vergehen ist, nicht bewahrt. Deutete nicht Syberberg selbst auf diesen Denkweg hin, obwohl er vor seinem Abgrund zurückzuschrecken schien? Das Requiem als System und Programm sah nämlich wie eine Suche nach dem festen Boden aus, als ob der Film nach dem Nationalsozialismus bloß in einer heroischen Gestalt, als ein außerordentliches Seiendes, aus dem Geiste der Musik wiedergeboren werden soll. In Ludwig ließ sich eben der Wille zur Totalität, zur Unbegrenztheit, zu einer Größe im buchstäblichen Sinne erkennen, als ob das Werk durch seine gleichzeitig laufenden Linien alles umfassen und alles – noch die entferntesten Assoziationen und die ironischen Wendungen – unter seiner Kontrolle haben wollte, obwohl selbst, im Vergehen angekommen, durch die unheilbare Wunde der Unbeständigkeit gekennzeichnet wurde. Nicht nur, dass der Protagonist des Films tragisch war: Syberbergs Film als Film scheint eine grandiose Tragödie zu sein. Im Unterschied zu seinem Versuch, den Film nach dem Nationalsozialismus in einer heroischen Gestalt zur Welt zu bringen, scheint der andere Weg nirgendwo hin zu führen. Da die φυγή bloß zum Ankommen und Vergehen hinschickt und selbst nichts Seiendes ist, nichts, was ein bestimmtes Seiende vor den anderen hervorheben könnte, bleibt für sie jedes ankommende Seiende eben in seinem Sein gleichursprünglich. Deswegen wird der Film, folgen wir diesem Gedankengang, nicht unbedingt durch ein ausgezeichnetes, in einer besonderen, musikalischen Weise komponiertes Werk wiedergeboren, sondern kann in seinem Sein durch jedes Werk wiedergeboren werden. Indem die Wiedergeburt des Films ein Lassen ins Ankommen und zugleich ins Vergehen bedeutet, ereignet sie sich mit jedem Werk aufs Neue und so erscheint auch Syberbergs Ludwig letztendlich als eine unter anderen Wiedergeburten des Films. 109
Dalibor Davidović Dennoch scheint der Film Syberbergs nicht das zu vergessen, was dem Künstler und seinen treusten Deutern entkam, denjenigen wie Solveig Olsen, welche die Deutungshoheit Syberbergs hinsichtlich seiner Werke stillschweigend hinnahmen, als ob der Künstler alles über seine Werke wisse und den anderen nur noch übrigbleibe, detailreicher das zu wiederholen, was er schon sagte. Wenn wir aber den Film Syberbergs noch einmal sehen würden, würden wir vielleicht bemerken, dass sein Protagonist gar nicht so eindeutig in seiner Einstellung zur Musik war, wie das die narrative Linie des Films erscheinen ließ. Am Anfang der Szene 2.10 befand sich Ludwig im Taumel nach der schlaflosen Nacht, einen Tiefschlag durch die Nachricht vom Tode Richard Wagners erlitten. Während im Hintergrund eine rotgefärbte Frontalprojektion der zeitgenössischen Touristen, die seine Schlösser besuchten, zu sehen und die Stimme des englischsprechenden Reiseführers zu hören war, erstarrte der im Vordergrund sitzende König vor Schreck („Man soll den sozialdemokratischen Unfug in England und Amerika abstellen“), den Verrat seitens seiner Nächsten ahnend. Wenn aber die ersten Töne des Liebestodes erklangen, wurde er dadurch sofort erweckt, die Ohren zuspitzend, um erst danach – mit dem Wechsel des rotgefärbten zum blaugefärbten Hintergrund – in die Musik völlig zu versinken. Auf der anderen Seite, als er in der Szene 1.9 plötzlich aus dem Dunklen auftauchte, die Bauern begrüßend, die mitten in der Nacht am Lagerfeuer saßen und das Volkslied Auf den Bergen wohnt die Freiheit sangen (und dabei eine Ekstase der Zeit eröffneten, da der Liedtext vom Tod Ludwigs handelte), wurde der König vielleicht durch das Lied selbst zunächst angelockt, bevor das Lied zum Zeichen der freundlichen Atmosphäre wurde, von der sich der König angezogen fühlte, die Bauern sowohl beim Ankommen als auch beim Weggehen mit „Grüß Gott, Freunde!“ begrüßend. Obwohl die Musik für Ludwig letztendlich in ein bloßes Mittel verfiel – in der erstgenannten Szene wurde sie zum Mittel, sich auf die Flucht zum wahrhaft Guten, Schönen und Wahren zu begeben, in der zweitgenannten Szene wurde sie zu einem Erkennungszeichen –, spürte er nicht, dass das Musikalische nicht bloß mit einem musikalischen Gebilde gleichzusetzen wäre, mag dieses beanspruchen, in dieser oder jener Weise außerordentlich zu sein? Ließ er in solchen Momenten des aufmerksamen Hörens nicht jeden musikalisch Seienden ankommen? Brachte es ihn sogar nicht zum Weinen, als er – in der Szene 1.14 – das Todesurteil für einen Räuber unterschreiben sollte? „Mein lieber Lutz“, sagte resigniert der Prinzregent Luitpold dem Ministerpräsidenten, „wie ich Ludwig kenne, wird er diese Unterschrift nicht leisten. Er ist gegen jedes Blutvergießen“. Eröffnete der Film in solchen Momenten nicht den Riss, der vom Künstler durch seine Suche nach der Totalität, Größe und Unendlichkeit 110
Filmfuge immer wieder geschlossen werden sollte? Dennoch erinnerte er sich – dabei vielleicht Brecht folgend, einem Dichter, der vor dem Reich Hitlers f lüchtete – manchmal an das, was er „die großen Gesetze des Lebens“ nannte, die er „im Wehen der Luft und Wachsen des Getreides und gelassenen Sterben“60 fand.
60 Syberberg, Syberbergs Filmbuch (wie Anm. 3), 75.
111
Dalibor Davidović
112
heder
Words on music
113
heder
114
The Edition of M. Meibom’s A ristoxeni H armonicorum E lementorum
Eleonora Rocconi Università di Pavia
The Edition of Marcus Meibom’s Aristoxeni Harmonicorum Elementorum Libri Tres and its Contribution to the Knowledge of Ancient Greek Music Theory in the Seventeenth Century Abstract. In Antiquae musicae auctores septem graece et latine (1652), Marcus Meibom edited, translated and annotated the most important treatises on ancient Greek music theory, including the pioneer work of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the author traditionally regarded as the major musical authority of antiquity: the Elementa Harmonica. This paper aims to show the importance of Meibom’s edition and translation of this text and its contribution to the knowledge of ancient Greek music theory in the seventeenth century.
In Antiquae musicae auctores septem graece et latine, published in Amsterdam in 1652, Marcus Meibom edited, translated and annotated the most important treatises on ancient Greek music theory, including the pioneering work of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the most famous musical theorist of antiquity: the Elementa Harmonica (Harmonic elements). This opus was devoted to harmonic science, the theoretical discipline – for the first time explicitly elaborated by Aristoxenus – which identifies, classifies and describes the regular and repeated patterns underlying melodic sequences in musical compositions. Despite its importance, this work had been neglected throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance and rediscovered only in the middle of the sixteenth century thanks to the Latin translation of Antonio Gogava, published in 1562. Since then, it was gradually introduced into the controversies about tuning which animated the late part of the century. Thus, Aristoxenus was the last among ancient Greek musical authors to be read in the early Renaissance. There are many reasons for this. First of all, manuscripts containing the Harmonic elements were still rare in the fifteenth century, becoming more abundant one century later thanks to the presence of important Greek scribes in Italy. Moreover, the Aristoxenian approach to 115
Eleonora Rocconi harmonic science had been disregarded by the theoretical writer most frequently read at that time, Boethius, through whom ancient Greek knowledge on music theory was disseminated in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and by subsequent theoreticians inf luenced by him, like Franchino Gaffurio.1 Aristoxenus’ dynamic method for analyzing intervallic and melodic phenomena was one in which he carefully avoided the introduction of geometric or arithmetic values for interpreting pitch: he rather used a linear dimension into which notes appear as dimensionless points – certainly a revolutionary concept in antiquity. This approach was harshly criticized, however, by those theorists mainly Pythagoreans or “Pythagorean sympathizers” – who preferred to give a mathematical representation of intervals, conceiving them as relations between immovable and quantitative pitches. Many of his detractors, actually, did not fully understand his conception of harmonics as theōrētikē epistēmē (theoretical science) 2 concerning audible melos, i.e., “musical melody”. 3 For Aristoxenus, such a science had both the purpose of picking out musical facts, like notes, intervals and scales, grasped by “perception” (aisthēsis) and that of discovering, by means of “reason” (dianoia), the principles governing the ways in which these elements are combined to form melodic or unmelodic sequences. According to him, “memory” (mnēmē) was also a necessary tool in order to perceive the melos as a process of coming to be. The first modern defenders of Aristoxenus were scholars who shared and welcomed the intuition according to which the philosopher rejected all attempts to define intervals by means of numerical ratios. Firstly Carlo Valgulio, the literary humanist translator of Pseudo-Plutarch’s De musica (1507) who, however, had no access to Aristoxenus’ original writings; then Vincenzo Galilei who, even if unable to read Greek and consequently forced to use Gogava’s Latin translation, thought to have discovered in Aristoxenus an ancient authority in favor of his theories on temperament;4 finally Giovanni 1 2 3
4
116
See Claude Palisca, Studies in the history of Italian music and music theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 189–199. In the first sentence of his treatise, Aristoxenus explicitly says that harmonics is one of many varieties of epistēmē (“science” or “knowledge”) that are concerned with melos, like rhythmics, metrics, and so on. According to Aristotle, the three branches of theoretical science were physics, mathematics and metaphysics (or prōtē philosophia). Physics, in particular, examines mutable objects (Aristotle Metaphysics 1026a12), as if to say concrete things of the natural world which have an innate tendency to movement and change. For Aristoxenus, musical melody was an element of the natural world perceived by the ear through its audible active representation, the phōnē melōidikē, and was hence an object of a “physical” – in Aristotelian terms – enquiry. Gogava’s misleading translation (Antonius Gogavinus, Harmonicorum elementorum. Venice: V. Valgrisio, 1562), though giving Vincenzo Galilei a firsthand contact with the thought of
The Edition of M. Meibom’s A ristoxeni H armonicorum E lementorum Maria Artusi, Zarlino’s most devoted pupil, the first to set forth 5 and interpret Aristoxenus’ famous proof that the fourth consists of two and a half tones.6 Aristoxenus had also riveted the attention of Gioseffo Zarlino, the scholar who had commissioned Gogava’s translation into Latin of the Harmonic elements, as Gogava himself states in the preface to his collection. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, no edition of the original Greek text of the Harmonic elements had yet been attempted. Meibom’s edition of Aristoxenus, though realized on the basis of a limited number of manuscripts carefully listed in his preface “to the learned reader” (lectori erudito), is usually considered the first real critical edition of the Elementa Harmonica. In the most recent edition by Rosetta Da Rios, in fact, the text is still presented according to Meibom’s page numbers. Actually it was preceded by another edition that appeared shortly before, in 1616,7 and which however had been based on only one manuscript, the Lugdunensis Batavorum, gr. n. 47 Scaligerianus. The same manuscript was used nearly forty years later by Meibom himself. 8 But Meibom integrated this source with three other codices now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, made available to him by John Selden, a polymath jurist and antiquary extremely well-known at that time.9 These codices, which he calls Seldenianus and Oxonienses,10 are: (1) Oxoniensis Bodlethe author of the Harmonic elements, undoubtedly contributed to the frustration about Greek music theory that led Galilei to initiate his correspondence with Girolamo Mei, on which see Claude Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance musical thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 156–157, and Donatella Restani, L’itinerario di Girolamo Mei dalla “Poetica” alla musica (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1990). 5 With the addition of a diagram and a musical example: see Palisca, Studies in the history (as note 1), 197. 6 Artusi reviewed the ancient objections of Ptolemy to the Aristoxenian methods replying that Aristoxenus did not choose a 9:8 tone but an interval that was the difference between a fifth and a fourth, whose size he did not define. 7 Meursius, Aristoxenus. Nicomachus. Alypius. Auctores musices antiquissimi, hactĕnus non editi (Lugduni Batavorum: ex officina Ludovici Elzviri, typis Godefridi Basson, 1616). This edition is harshly criticized by Rosetta Da Rios, who on p. XIII of her introduction says: “Joannes Meursius […] ‘Αρμονικὰ Στοιχεῖα primus transcripsit atque edidit, sed in adnotationibus additis emendationibusque oblatis musicae Graecae et maxime Aristoxeni doctrinae omnino ignarum se praebuit”. Rosetta Da Rios, ed., Aristoxeni Elementa harmonica (Rome: Off. Polygraph, 1954). 8 Marcus Meibom, Antiquae Musicae, vol 1 (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1652), preface to Aristoxenus, entitled Lectori Erudito, 2: “si nostra editio cum Meursiana conferretur, quae ambae ex eodem codice sunt expressae”. 9 Ibid., 2: “tres codices Angli, cum binis Meursiane editionis exemplaribus collati, quos octo mensibus post, quam haec editio procurata esset, ad me misit vir summus Ioannes Seldenus”. 10 Ibid.: “Hunc Seldenianum, domini nomine, et beneficii auctore adpellamus […] Hos si consentient, Oxonienses”.
117
Eleonora Rocconi ianus Seldenianus 20, olim 3363 (sixteenth century); (2) Oxoniensis Bodleianus misc. 86, olim Savili et 2947 (sixteenth century); (3) Oxoniensis Bodleianus Baroccianus graecus 41 (fifteenth century). According to Meibom’s own words, however, these manuscripts gave very little help to his reading of the text: nevertheless he declares to have taken them into account in his comment for the sake of the reader.11 In his praefatio, Meibom not only realizes that the Aristoxenian text at his disposal was incomplete but he also seems to be aware of the inconsistency among the contents of the so-called three books of the Harmonica, since these do not appear to him to have all been written at the same time.12 Furthermore at the end of Book 1, where Aristoxenus seems to postpone the discussion on musical intervals to another treatise,13 the editor, though literally rendering the sentence in his translation (in Elementis […] monstrabitur), corrects the text adding the adverb hysteron (deinde) in the comment, in order to make the reference to the further part of the treatise more consistent: “it will be shown later in the Elements”, clearly referring to Book 3, which deals with the various ways of combining musical intervals. Concurrently, he remarks again the scarce possibility that the three books might be dated at the same period.14 Indeed, the conventional division of the Elementa Harmonica into three books which appears in the manuscripts and is reported in all the editions and translations of the text, from Gogava to Da Rios, has nowadays become almost unanimously rejected thanks to the correct reading, in the earliest codices,15 of the title “Pro tōn (Before) the Harmonic elements”, corrupted throughout the 11 Ibid.: “Pauca ex illis codicibus alia, quae bonae frugis esset, adnotata reperimus: de omnibus tamen, malis aeque ac bonis, lectorem in Notis monendum duxi […]”. The reasoning is clear if we look at Da Rios’ stemma codicum, according to which the codices used by Meibom basically derive from the same branch of manuscript tradition. 12 Ibid., 2: “Haec autem tria Aristoxeni Harmonica Elementa nec uno tempore scripta videntur; fine singula censeo mutila est, ut alibi dicetur”. 13 Harmonic elements 28, 30–29,1 Meibom (as note 8), 37,1–4 Da Rios (as note 7): “what we have said, then, shows clearly the way in which continuity and succession are to be sought: how they occur, and which interval is placed after which, and which is not, will be shown in our Elements (ἐν τοῖς στοιχείοις δειχθήσεται)”. 14 “Pag. 29. v. 1. His ipsis, libro III, non putem scriptum fuisse, ἐν τοῖς στοιχείοις δειχθήσεται , sede bene, ἐν τοῖς στοιχ. ὕστερον δειχθήσεται , in Elementis deinde monstrabitur. Quamvis hi tres libri vix uno tempore scripti ab Aristosseno et editi videantur”. 15 Venetus Marcianus gr. app. cl. VI/3 and Vaticanus gr. 2338, both of the twelfth century. The earlier of these two codices, corrected and annotated by several later hands, originally presented the “second and third books” as the “first and second books” of Harmonic elements (’Αριστοξένου ἁρκὸν στοιχείων πρῶτον and ’Αριστοξένου στοιχείων ἁρμονικῶν δευτέρον). On this topic see Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre. Greek Music and music theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 295–298.
118
The Edition of M. Meibom’s A ristoxeni H armonicorum E lementorum manuscript tradition into “Prōton (The First Book) of the Harmonic elements”. Interestingly, a much later testimony ascribes to Aristoxenus a preliminary treatment of the subject, entitled Peri archōn (On principles),16 which proposed his criteria for a theoretical enquiry on music: perception and reason. It has, then, been suggested that the so-called Book 1, in line with its introductory content, belongs to this separate and preliminary work, while the supposed Book 2 was the original beginning of the Elements, as also the sentence at the end of Book 1 previously quoted seems to confirm.17 So with this more recent scholarship, Meibom’s intuitive results are now confirmed. On the whole, certainly Meibom’s edition shows the first real modern understanding of the Aristoxenian approach to harmonic theory, especially in the translation, presented as a replacement of the distorted version of Antonio Gogava (versionem illorum novam […] pro barbara et inscita Gogavini substituo), and in its brief but comprehensive comment.18 In the following pages, I will give some examples of Meibom’s comprehension of Aristoxenus’ work. Firstly, the technical terms are, for the most part, properly translated. The hērmosmenon melos, i.e., the “harmonically attuned melody” (for Aristoxenus the main object of enquiry by the harmonic science, i.e., a series of notes or intervals which conforms to the proper rules of harmonic order), is appropriately translated as cantum modulatum.19 Hē peri melou epistēmē (The science concerned with melody) becomes de cantu scientia, opportunely glossed in the comment as “in one word (uno vocabulo) τῆς μουσικῆς” (sc. ἐπιστήμης). The word tasis (pitch, from teinō, “to stretch” the string of an instrument, hence to produce a sound of a certain pitch) is literally translated as tensio, 20 as in the famous definition of sound: Sonus est vocis casus in unam tensionem. 21 16 Porphyrius Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics 80,22 Düring (Ingemar Düring, ed., Porphyrios, Kommentar zur Harmonielehre des Ptolemaios. Gothenburg: Elander, 1932; Reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1978). This quotation, even if ascribed to Peri archōn, corresponds almost entirely to a passage of the Book 1 of the Harmonic elements (14,20–27 Meibom, as note 8; 19,15–20,3 Da Rios, as note 7). 17 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 28,30–29,1 Meibom (as note 8), 37,1–4 Da Rios (see n. 13). 18 As Meibom (as note 8) himself affirms (Lectori Erudito, 2): “notis, meo more, brevibus; sed quae nullum locum, qui vel difficultatis speciem haberet, intactum reliquunt”. 19 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 18,18 Meibom (as note 8), 23,17 Da Rios (as note 7). 20 The same as Gogava (as note 4). Zarlino translates it as “estensione”, maybe from the Latin extensio. 21 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 15,15–16 Meibom (as note 8), 20, 16–17 Da Rios (as note 7): “a note is the incidence of the voice on one pitch” (συντόμως μὲν οὖν εἰπεῖν φωνῆς πτῶσις ἐπὶ μίαν τάσιν ὁ φθόγγος ἐστι). All the translations of Aristoxenus’ text are from Andrew Barker, ed., Greek Musical Writings 2: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
119
Eleonora Rocconi In a few cases, however, the author modifies the translation of tasis in finitio (boundary, delimitation), well adapting it to those contexts where the image of the travelling voice, standing on one “point” or “limit” of the pitch’s linear dimension, necessarily suggests the change: nam de loco ad locum transiens, in unam finitionem se statuit, deinde rursus in aliam, continue hoc faciens (during its course it brings itself to rest at one limit and then at another: it does this continuously), 22 etenim num possibile sit, aut impossibile, vocem moveri, aut ipsam se statuere in unam finitionem, alterius est considerationis (whether it is actually possible or impossible for the voice to move or then to come to rest upon a single limit is a question belonging to a different enquiry). 23 Indeed, the idea that any phōnē (voice, human or instrumental) can move kata topon (in place) is one of the most original and fruitful Aristoxenian thoughts, later on recurrent also in the work of opponent theoreticians, including the Nicomachus and Claudius Ptolemaeus, though they inserted it in a completely different theoretical context. 24 The “movement of the voice with respect to place” is the first item that, according to Aristoxenus, people who wish to study melody should analyze: “First of all, then, the prospective student of melody must analyze the movement of the voice, its movement, that is, with respect to place”. 25 The expression tēn tēs phōnēs kinēsin tēn kata topon is literally translated by Meibom as vocis motum, eum qui in loco sit. According to Aristoxenus, the two forms of this movement are the synechē (continuous), occurring when we speak, and the diastēmatikē (intervallic), which proceeds by intervals or gaps, occurring when we sing: illa dicto motu movetur et loquentibus nobis, et modulantibus (the voice moves in the kind of movement I have mentioned both when we speak and when we sing). 26 The fundamental 22 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 8,27–28 Meibom (as note 8), 13,16–17 Da Rios (as note 7): διαβαίνουσα γὰρ ἵστησιν αὑτὴν ἐπὶ μιᾶς τάσεως εἶτα πάλιν ἐφ΄ ἑτέρας καὶ τοῦτο ποιοῦσα συνεχῶς.
23 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 9,3–6 Meibom (as note 8), 13,23–14,2 Da Rios (as note 7): πότερον μὲν γὰρ δυνατὸν, ἢ ἀδύνατον, φωνὴν κινεῖσθαι ἢ πάλιν ἵστασθαι αὐτὴν ἐπὶ μιᾶς τάσεως, ἑτέρας ἐστὶ σκέψεως.
24 On this topic see Rocconi, “La tradizione aristossenica di indagine sulla scienza armonica tra età ellenistica ed età imperiale”, in Il sapere musicale e i suoi contesti da Teofrasto a Claudio Tolemeo, ed by Daniela Castaldo, Donatella Restani and Cristina Tassi (Ravenna: Longo 2009), 5765. 25 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 3,5–7 Meibom (as note 8), 7,9–11 Da Rios (as note 7): πρῶτον μὲν οὖν ἁπάντων τὴν τῆς φωνῆς κίνησιν διοριστέον τῷ μέλλοντι πραγματεύεσθαι περὶ μέλους αὐτὴν τὴν κατὰ τόπον.
26 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 3,10–11 Meibom (as note 8), 7,12–13 Da Rios (as note 7): κινεῖται μὲν γὰρ καὶ διαλεγομένων ἡμῶν καὶ μελῳδούντων τὴν εἰρημένην κίνησιν. See also Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 8,17–20 Meibom (as note 8), 13,10–11 Da Rios (as note 7): πάσης δὲ φωνῆς […] δύο τινές εἰσιν ἰδέαι κινήσεως͵ ἥ τε συνεχὴς καὶ ἡ διαστηματική.
120
The Edition of M. Meibom’s A ristoxeni H armonicorum E lementorum importance of this concept is pointed out by Meibom in his explanatory notes: “Every movement of voice is in place: but one is that which we use in speech (sermocinando), the other that we use in song (canendo). It is then necessary to turn to this distinction”. 27 Doubts, however, on the real comprehension by the translator of such a distinction 28 arise later in the text when Aristoxenus harks back to this topic and provides a more detailed description of the two movements–the continuous and the intervallic–calling them logikē and melōidikē, with reference to the movement of logos (speech) and melos (melody). Even if, at p. 18, Meibom correctly translates the expression logōdes melos, in opposition to mousikon melos, as cantus […] qui sit sermone (in opposition to cantus musicus), at p. 10 he renders, instead, logikē and melōidikē as rationalis and cantui accomodatus. It seems clear, that, in his passage, he established his interpretation on the wide and misleading meaning of the term logos in Greek, which means “word” but also “ratio”: Quod itaque, cum duo sint vocis in loco motus; continuus, quidam sit rationalis: intervallis verò discretus, cantui accomodatus, es iis quae dicta sunt ferme constare putamus (We think it is clear from what we have said that there are two kinds of movement of the voice in space: the continuous is that of ratio, while the one marked by intervals is that which applies itself to the song). 29 These two terms are not discussed in the notes, but further evidence of Meibom’s uncertainty on this problematic issue is given when he tries to interpret the Aristoxenian attack against the theories attributed by him to Lasus of Hermione and to the followers of Epigonus of Ambracia. According to these ancient theoreticians, any note has platos (breadth), 30 sonum latitudinem aliquam habere: These words are very obscure, and nowhere has it been sufficiently explained what he (sc. the author) intends to mean with them. On the other hand, both the Pythagoreans and the Aristoxenians criticized this opinion of Lasus and the Epigonians. And with their indications they (sc. these theorists) prevented others from understanding anything 27 “Pag. 3 v. 5. Omnis vocis motus est in loco: attamen aliter is, quo sermocinando utimur; aliter, quo canendo. Distinctio itaque necessario est adhibenda”. 28 This distinction relies on the fact that ancient Greek language had a musical pitch accent, but it is less obvious in modern languages, characterized by tonic accent. 29 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 10,6–10 Meibom (as note 8), 15,3–5 Da Rios (as note 7): ὅτι μὲν οὖν δύο κινήσεων οὐσῶν κατὰ τόπον τῆς φωνῆς ἡ μὲν συνεχὴς λογική τίς ἐστιν ἡ δὲ διαστηματικὴ μελῳδική͵ σχεδὸν δῆλον ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων.
30 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 3,20–24 Meibom (as note 8), 7,19–23 Da Rios (as note 7):
ἀναγκαῖον δὲ τὸν βουλόμενον μὴ πάσχειν ὅπερ Λάσος τε καὶ τῶν Ἐπιγονείων τινὲς ἔπαθον͵ πλάτος αὐτὸν οἰηθέντες ἔχειν͵ εἰπεῖν περὶ αὐτοῦ μικρὸν ἀκριβέστερον.
121
Eleonora Rocconi concerning such a subject. Hence Nicomachus from Gerasa on p. 7 describes the sound as φωνῆς ἐμμελοῦς ἀπλατῆ τάσιν (a tension lacking in breadth of a voice which is used in melody). Even Euclides [i.e. Cleonides] in the definition of tonos on p. 2 uses the same word. 31 To a modern reader, the definition of a note as “a breadthless pitch of a melodic sound” seems to be out of place in a Pythagorean writer like Nicomachus: for this reason, modern editors expunge the sentence, and it seems peculiar that Meibom did not realize it, not even in his comment on the Nicomachean text. 32 Let us now have a brief look at other passages of the Elementa Harmonica on the same topic. In one of these, Aristoxenus mentions that the possibility of the voice to “move” or to “rest”, is a matter for enquiry of a completely different sort: etenim num possibile sit, aut impossibile, vocem moveri, aut ipsam se statuere in unam finitionem, alterius est considerationis (whether it is actually possible or impossible for the voice to move and then to come to rest upon a single limit is a question belonging to a different enquiry). 33 In another passage he refers again to illorum, qui sonos motus esse asserunt, opiniones; quique generaliter vocem esse motum contendunt (the opinions of those who reduce notes to movements, and who say quite generally that sound is movement), 34 pointing out how their conception of movement differs considerably from his own: constare enim ferè putamus, quid nos motum dicamus vocis et quietem, tum quid illi motum (for it is clear enough what we call movement and rest of the voice, and what they call movement).35 In the commentary on these passages, Meibom states explicitly that the different enquiry Aristoxenus is referring to (ἑτέρας ἐστὶ σκέψεως = alterius est considerationis) is the “physical science”: “certainly physics. As a matter of fact, physics inquires about what nature makes possible” (pag. 9. v. 5. nempe φυσικῆς. in Physicis enim, quid natura posit, expenditur). While commenting on the sentences on p. 12, then, he harks back to the obscure theories on melodic movement ascribed to Lasus and the Epigonians: 31 “Pag. 3 v. 23. Obscurissima sunt haec verba, et quid illis velit nullibi satis explicatum. Hanc autem Lasi et Epigoniorum opinionem tam Pythagorici quam Aristoxenii reprehenderunt. Et ne hujusmodi quid intelligeretur, suis definitionibus praecaverunt. Hinc Nicomachus Gerasenus sonum p. 7 definit, φωνῆς ἐμμελοῦς ἀπλατῆ τάσιν. Vocis quae in cantu ponitur tensionem latitudinis expertem. Et Euclides in Toni definitione pag. 2 idem vocabulum adhibet”. 32 See comm. ad loc. 33 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 9,3–6 Meibom (as note 8), 13,23–14, 2 Da Rios (as note 7). 34 Ibid., 12,4–7 Meibom (as note 8), 17,4–6 Da Rios (as note 7). 35 Ibid., 12,30–32 Meibom (as note 8), 17,21–23 Da Rios (as note 7).
122
The Edition of M. Meibom’s A ristoxeni H armonicorum E lementorum It is tremendously difficult to say which opinion Lasus and the followers of Epigonus had on the movement of the voice. Aristoxenus discussed a lot about that opinion in his books On music, as it is possible to infer from the penultimate line. 36 But also from this passage and from line 25, 37 as well as from pag. 3 line 23. 38 It is sufficiently clear that they believed that the voice moves continuously, but some more swiftly, others more slowly. More swiftly certainly when producing a high-pitched sound, more slowly, instead, when expressing a low-pitched one. Such an opinion, which was common to all Pythagoreans, was inferred by the movements and vibrations of the string; so, the better it corresponds to the laws of nature, the truer it is. Furthermore, they seem to have believed that no sound could be so extended by means of a stable and even voice, without its limit [that is, its pitch] distancing itself (not) too far from its origin, and going away more slowly and, so to speak, more lazily. This is visibly clear in the vibrations of a string. Hence they stated that a sound has a certain breadth. But they may have obtained this result looking at our skill as much as at a natural cause. 39 The approach of Lasus and the Epigonians to the voice’s movement is clearly brought back by Meibom to the Pythagorean environment, whose acoustic theory conceived sounds as the product of an impact on air by solid bodies: their pitch was determined by the speed of their transmission. It should be noticed, however, that in his comment to page 3, Meibom states that both Pythagoreans and Aristoxenians criticized Lasi et Epigoniorum opinionem.40 Aris36 37 38 39
Ibid.: “cum in aliis latius et accuratius sint explicate”. Ibid.: “qui ab illis dicitur, secundum celeritatem, differentiam accipiat”. Ibid.: “sonum latitudinem aliquam habere putantibus”. “Pag. 12 v. 5. Obscurissimum est, quam opinionem de vocis motu habuerint Lasus at sectatores quidam Epigoni. In libris De Musica, pluribus de illa opinione disputavit Aristoxenus, ut colligitur ex v. penult. Ex hoc tamen loco et v. 25. ut et pag. 3 v. 23. Satis adparet illos statuisse, vocem continue moveri, sed alias celerius, alias tardius. Celerius quidem in acuto sono proferendo; tardius autemin esprimendo sono gravi. Quae opinio, ut Pythagoricorum omnium fuit, qui à chordae motibus ac vibrationibus, illam desunserunt; ita naturae legibus quam optime respondet, adeoque est verissima. Praeterea autem illi statuisse videntur, nullum sonum tam stabili atque aequabili voce extendi posse, quin finis ejus à principio parum declinet, ac tardior et quasi pigrior evadat. Quod in chordae vibrationibus ad oculum patet. Unde sonum latitudinem aliquam habere statuebant. Hoc autem tam ad potentiam nostram, quam ad naturalem causam respiciendo, fecisse videri possunt”. 40 The interpretation of such a theory is still highly controversial: in his recent book on Greek harmonic science, Andrew Barker describes Lasus’ theory as an “odd conception”, although being more inclined to include it among those speculations more characteristic of the empirical theorists. See Andrew Barker, The science of harmonics in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80.
123
Eleonora Rocconi toxenus’ lack of interest in theoretical speculations on the physical properties of sound is plainly realized by Meibom, who also renders quite carefully another Aristoxenian key-expression which permits us to fully understand this ‘spatial’ image of voci motum: the sentence kata tēn tēs aisthēseōs phantasian, that is to say, secundum sensus imaginationem. This expression recurs quite often in the Aristoxenian text and, most of the time, it is literally translated by Meibom: Each of these (descriptions) is to be understood with respect to the representation of perception (secundum sensus imaginationem).41 But it is clear that none of these (suggestions) corresponds to the representation of perception (ad sensus … imaginationem).42 While, in a different example, Meibom follows Gogava by omitting the term,43 in these two passages phantasia is opportunely translated as imaginatio, the Latin equivalent of this very technical word44 which, in philosophical texts from antiquity onwards, was used to indicate that faculty acting as mediator between sense and intellect, multiplicity and unity, whose definition and function were subject to deep reviews and clarifications just at the beginning of the seventeenth century.45 In Aristoxenus, phantasia was used in its original Aristotelian sense, that is, in order to explain how, from many different single sensorial experiences, we may obtain a more comprehensive and coherent impression: “Phantasia is something different both from sense-perception and thought, but it does not exist without sense-perception and without phantasia there is no intellectual assumption”.46 41 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 9,2–3 Meibom (as note 8), 13,22–23 Da Rios (as note 7): “Horum verò utrumque capiendum, secundum sensus imaginationem” ( ληπτέον δ΄ ἑκάτερον τούτων κατὰ τὴν τῆς αἰσθήσεως φαντασίαν). In her apparatus, Da Rios (as note 7) points out that “τῆς om. U, Meib qui tamen in nota articulum accepit”. 42 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 48,22 Meibom (as note 8), 60,7–8 Da Rios (as note 7): “Perspicuum vero est, nihil horum ad sensus esse imaginationem” (δῆλον δ΄ ὅτι οὐδὲν τούτων ἐστὶ πρὸς τὴν τῆς αἰσθήσεως φαντασίαν). 43 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 8,23–25 Me ibom (as note 8), 13,12–14 Da Rios (as note 7): “[…] vox locum aliquem percurrere ipsi sensui videtur, ita ut nullibi consistat, neque in ipsis, ut sensui adparet, terminis” (φαίνεται ἡ φωνὴ τῇ αἰσθήσει οὕτως ὡς ἂν μηδαμοῦ ἱσταμένη μηδ΄ ἐπ΄ αὐτῶν τῶν περάτων κατά γε τὴν τῆς αἰσθήσεως φαντασίαν). 44 Imaginatio appears as the translation of the Greek term φαντασία in the twelfth-thirteenth century, filling in for the word phantasia. 45 On this topic see, Phantasia~Imaginatio: Vo Colloquio internazionale del Lessico intellettuale europeo (Roma 9-11 gennaio 1986), ed. by Marta Fattori and Massimo Bianchi (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1988). 46 Aristotle On the soul 427b14–16. All the translations of Aristotle’s De anima are from Walter S. Hett, Aristotle, vol. 8: On the soul. Parva Naturalia. On breath (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1957).
124
The Edition of M. Meibom’s A ristoxeni H armonicorum E lementorum In human beings phantasia allows the synthesis, transforming a detailed view of perceptions into a more general view.47 It works by giving rise to sensorial after-images ( phantasmata) 48 which, once memorized, enable us to summarize what we perceive at the present moment and what we have perceived in the past, since, according to the Aristotelian words, “the soul never thinks without a phantasma”.49 In Greek musical enquiry, for instance, it is only through this process that isolated perceptions of different musical pitches can all be reduced to one single “note”–for instance a lichanos–in all its dynamic potentialities, 50 or that we may fully understand the Aristoxenian metaphor of “the movement of voice in respect to place”, that is, in the pitch continuum. But phantasia is not concerned with “appearance” in contrast to “reality”: for Aristoxenus, the melos has an objectively real physis, as those of plants and animals. The purpose of this representation is to abstract universal categories from individual realities,51 as in the case of the inference, by the harmonic scientist, of the principles governing the ways in which notes and intervals are combined to form melodic or unmelodic sequences. Thus, any translation of the expression kata tēn tēs aisthēseōs phantasian which dismisses the term phantasia, or which simplifies it rendering the word as “appearance, impression, image”, is misleading. As a consequence, Meibom’s literal adherence to the original Greek words looks consistent with the preferential use in philosophical texts, from the twelfth century onwards, of the term imaginatio to indicate this Aristotelian faculty. It is certainly possible, and would be of course very interesting, to discuss many other translations or intuitions by this seventeenth century scholar, both philological – for instance, corrections of the text subsequently confirmed by readings on codices still unknown to him 52 – and theoretical, as when, commenting on the passage concerned with Aristoxenus’ attack against 47 Aristotle On the soul 428a1–4: “imagination […] is one of the faculties or skills through which we assess and arrive at truth or we have a mistaken idea”. 48 Aristotle On the soul 431a14–17: “in the intellectual soul mental images (τὰ φαντάσματα) exist as a sort of sense-perception, when it grants or denies the good and the bad, or avoids or pursues it; because the soul never thinks without images”. 49 Aristotle On the soul 431a16–17: οὐδέποτε νοεῖ ἄνευ φαντάσματος ἡ ψυχή. 50 The lichanos was one of the movable notes of the tetrachord, the smallest scalar system of ancient Greek music. Its pitch was not absolute, but determined by the genus (genos) of the tetrachord, i.e., by the internal division of its intervals: diatonic, chromatic or enharmonic. 51 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 7,15–17 Meibom (as note 8), 12,4–6 Da Rios (as note 7): “the practitioner of the present science must therefore discuss regions of voice both in general and in detail”. 52 See μέγιστον for μέγεθος at Harmonic elements 20,13, Meibom (as note 8), 25,16 Da Rios (as note 7). On this see Da Rios (as note 7), Aristoxeni Elementa Harmonica, apparatus ad loc.: “16 μέγιστον H, iam correxerat Meib codicis H ignarus.”
125
Eleonora Rocconi both Pythagoreans and pure empiricists, 53 Meibom points out how his media via, which joined perception and reason, will be subsequently elaborated by Claudius Ptolemaeus. 54 But what has been said in these pages, I hope, may be enough to assess the value of Meibom’s contribution to the understanding and the reevaluation, in modern times, of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the first Greek scholar who admitted that music could be studied on the basis of principles intrinsic to itself, not borrowed from physics or mathematics.
53 Aristoxenus Harmonic elements 32,20–33,1 Meibom (as note 8), 41,18–42,7 Da Rios (as note 7). 54 “Pag. 32. v. 28. Sic Aristoxeno ad utrumque extremum abiisse videntur priores Musici, cum mediam viam ingredi debuissent, sensum ac rationem in contemplando Harmonica conjungendo. In hoc deinde plurimum elaboravit Ptolemaeus”.
126
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s M usik -L exikon
Nico Schüler Texas State University
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon and His Music Historiography Abstract. This article summarizes a case study on the musical life of the Germans in Brno in the 1920s, which showed that some of the composers considered “minor” or “forgotten” today were well known in the 1920s. One of the most important sources for this study was Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon in its various editions, which contained many of those composers. To support the claim that composers included in Riemann’s dictionary were indeed important composers from the perspective of late 19th and early 20th century music and musical life, this article furthermore discusses selection criteria that Riemann used, as stated by himself, for his Musik-Lexikon as well as for his Geschichte der Musik seit Beethoven (1800–1900).
Introduction Most writings about music history are historical developments of music composition/compositional techniques, as opposed to the developments of the musical life/the reception of music. In a paper presented at the First International RILM Conference on Music’s intellectual history, which was organized by Zdravko Blažeković, I discussed a case study on the musical life of the Germans in Brno (in today’s Czech Republic) during the 1920s and how Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon [Music Dictionary] was most instrumental in finding information about some of the composers and the music being performed in the 1920s.1 In some cases, Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon and its German national focus was the only source that listed some of the “forgotten” composers that seemed to have been well known in the 1920s. In that paper, I argued that some of the “forgotten” composers were not just “minor” composers at the time, as Riemann had to be very selective regarding the inclusion of compos1
Nico Schüler, “Riemann’s Musiklexikon as a mirror of German music history”, Music’s intellectual history, ed. by Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (New York: Répertoire international de la littérature musicale, 2009), 643–651. See also Nico Schüler, “Von Heroen, Genies und anderen. Zu Musik und Musikleben im Spiegel einer Brünner-Deutschen Zeitung im Januar 1920”, Zu Problemen der ‘Heroen’- und der ‘Genie’Musikgeschichtsschreibung, ed. by Nico Schüler (Hamburg: von Bockel, 1998), 113–146.
127
Nico Schüler ers in his dictionary. I would like to continue to ref lect on Riemann’s historiography for this present paper. 2 Summary of a Case Study: On the Musical Life of the Germans in Brno Around 1920 In my previous case study mentioned above, I found that most compositions performed in Brno during the 1920s were relatively new – composed only within the preceding twenty to thirty years. Many of the composer names are little known today or totally forgotten. Some of them still have a tiny dictionary entry nowadays, and others do not. And some have never been mentioned in any dictionary. Many of the composers who are now very little known or even totally forgotten were of equal importance to some of those still considered “masters”. Karl Geidner, for instance, was mentioned in the 1920s newspapers with the same respect as Franz Schreker, Charles Weinberger with the same respect as Jacques Offenbach. Composers like Josef Gustav Mraczek, Ralph Benatzky, and Heinrich Granichstaedten were, according to my newspaper research, as well-known as Franz Schreker, Johannes Brahms, and Offenbach. On the other hand, composers such as Leoš Janáček, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hans Pfitzner, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Carl Orff, Sergej Prokof ’ev, Erik Satie, and others, were rarely mentioned in the Brno newspapers around 1920. Certainly, the musical events had a sociologically different function than our musical events today, and the scholarly approach to music historiography has changed. These are two of the reasons why – methodologically – a presentation of music history based on today’s social structures / circumstances and on today’s music historiography will likely fail with regard to the musical life of the past. Those music histories, and even, or especially, if we talk only about the composers one can find in today’s music dictionaries and the reception of their works, will always be a history of composition and not a history of musical life. Hugo Riemann and His Music Dictionary It was for the research I summarized that I began to value Riemann’s dictionary (Musik-Lexikon). In various editions of it, I found information on compos2
128
In addition to my reflections below, see also Alexander Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the birth of modern musical thought (New York: Cambridge University, 2003) and Tatjana Böhme-Mehner and Klaus Mehner, eds., Hugo Riemann (1849–1919): Musikwissenschaftler mit Universalanspruch (Köln: Böhlau, 2001).
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s M usik -L exikon ers and musicians about whom I could not find any information elsewhere. But there were still many composers that even Riemann did not mention. While the daily newspapers surely indicated that many of the composers unknown from today’s point of view were well-known and celebrated composers at the time, the question remained whether the inclusion in Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon meant that such composers were, from the musicological perspective of music historiography, indeed of importance. In other words, what exactly were the selection criteria for Riemann to include composers in his dictionary? Before we answer that question, let us consider Riemann’s background. Hugo Riemann, born in 1849, was a gifted pianist who studied philology, history, and philosophy and, later, music. He completed a dissertation Über das musikalische Hören (On musical hearing), but it was rejected at Leipzig University. With support by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze, it was eventually accepted in Göttingen in 1873. Riemann held various teaching positions in Hamburg, Wiesbaden, and Leipzig. In Leipzig, he was promoted to professor in 1901. He became a celebrated teacher and strongly inf luenced the musicological and music-theoretical thought of the first half of the twentieth century. Riemann believed that musicology should explain “the spiritual and expressive nature of the primitive elements of all musical experience […] to ascertain the physical properties of tones and the mechanical conditions governing their creation”. 3 Musicologists should not only study “the simple, most basic manifestations of this tone material, but also the complex, richly differentiated formations into which it has miraculously evolved”.4 Besides music theory, Riemann contributed greatly to music history. But music theory and music history always interacted in Riemann’s historical research, in that musical works were seen, in the words of Brian Hyer and Alexander Rehding, as “milestones on the path to the full historical realization of a timeless musical logic. Riemann thus completed his discovery history of music theory with a developmental history of musical practice, a gradual evolution of tonal consciousness that culminated in the music of Beethoven”. 5 However, I will show later with my observations from Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon that such a history that culminated in the music of Beethoven is based on a different philosophical basis than the history of music after Beethoven, as one can see in the selection of nineteenth century composers in his dictionary. While the history through Beethoven is a history of music composition, the history after Bee3 4 5
Hugo Riemann in his Grundriß der Musikwissenschaft, quoted in Brian Hyer and Alexander Rehding, “Riemann, (Karl Wilhelm Julius) Hugo”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. by Stanely Sadie (2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 21, 362. Ibid. Brian Hyer and Alexander Rehding, “Riemann, (Karl Wilhelm Julius) Hugo” (as note 3), 364.
129
Nico Schüler thoven is, at least partially, a history of music reception. This may be accidental, as there was not yet the necessary historical distance to allow the music to become a “classical work of art” that “resists the destructive power of time”, as Riemann phrased it in his article “classical” (klassisch) in his Music dictionary from its 4th edition onward.6 In my study mentioned above, I also looked at national differences (finding that Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon had a higher percentage of German composers than, for example, Grove’s dictionary),7 and in the 2001 edition of the New Grove we can find the following passage about Riemann’s historiography: “Historical or national stylistic differences, being excluded from the core of his musical logic, manifested themselves on a superficial plane which his theories did not presume to capture. Riemann was generally willing to grant different national traditions and historical periods their own developmental curves, all of which f low within a historical mainstream whose course is determined by the progressive actualization of a universal musical logic. For Riemann, the national tradition that formed the main current of that mainstream was the German – the close affiliation of German music with this musical logic had assured its hegemonic position since the 18th century”. 8 Riemann’s Music Dictionary was unique in that articles on subject matters, musical instruments, and musical terms, as well as articles on musicians and composers were written by one single author and on the basis of a systematic understanding of musicology (which largely entails music theory and music history). This concept must be seen as the reason for its success in becoming one of the most important encyclopedic music dictionaries of the first half of the 20th century, at least in German speaking countries. But translations into English, French, Russian, and Danish, for instance, show the dissemination of the dictionary outside German speaking countries.9 The following is a list of all German editions of the Musik-Lexikon: 6
7 8 9
130
Translation by the author of this article. The entire (orinigal) entry “klassisch” in the 4th edition of his Musik-Lexikon reads as follows: “Klassisch heißt ein Kunstwerk, dem die vernichtende Macht der Zeit nichts anhaben kann; da der Beweis für diese Eigenschaft er durch den Verlauf der Zeit geführt werden kann, so gibt es keine lebenden Klassiker und alle echten Klassiker galten in ihrer Zeit als Romantiker, d.h. als Geister, die aus dem Schema, der Schablone herausstrebten”. Hugo Riemann, Musik-Lexikon. 4th [completely revised and enlarged] ed. (Leipzig: Max Hesse’s Verlag, 1887), 540. Sir George Grove, ed., A dictionary of music and musicians (A.D. 1450–1889) (London: Macmillan, 1900 [reprint, with corrections, of the 1877–1889 edition]). Hyer and Rehding, “Riemann, (Karl Wilhelm Julius) Hugo” (as note 3), 364. See for example Hugo Riemann, Encyclopaedic dictionary of music, latest ed., revised to 1897, transl. by J. S. Shedlock (Philadelphia, PA: Theo. Presser, 1899) and Hugo Riemann, Dictionnaire de Musique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Payot, 1931).
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s M usik -L exikon 1. Riemann, Hugo. Musik-Lexikon: Theorie und Geschichte der Musik, die Tonkünste alter und neuer Zeit mit Angabe ihrer Werke, nebst einer vollständigen Instrumentenkunde. Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1882. [1036 pp.] 2. 2nd ed: 1884 [with corrections and additions added at the end] [1036 + XXXII pp.] 3. Riemann, Hugo. Musik-Lexikon. 3rd [revised and enlarged] ed. Leipzig: Max Hesse’s Verlag, 1887. [1124 pp.] 4. 4th ed.: 1894 [completely revised and enlarged] [1210 pp.] 5. 5th ed.: 1900 [completely revised and enlarged] [larger format from this edition on] [1284 pp.] 6. 6th ed.: 1905 [completely revised and enlarged] [1508 pp.] 7. 7th ed.: 1909 [completely revised and enlarged] [1598 pp.] 8. 8th ed.: 1916 [completely revised and enlarged] [larger format from this ed. on] [1276 pp.] 9. 9 th ed.: 1919 [completely revised and enlarged], after the death of Riemann completed by Alfred Einstein [1355 pp.] 10. 10 th ed.: 1922, edited, revised, and enlarged by Alfred Einstein [1469 pp.] 11. 11th ed.: 1929, edited, revised, and enlarged by Alfred Einstein [in two volumes] [2105 pp.] 12. [“12th ed”.: 1939, ed. by J. M. Müller-Blattau; not completed] 13. Gurlitt, Wilibald. Ed. Riemann Musiklexikon, 12th completely revised ed. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1959 [Vol. 1: Personenteil A–K; 986 pp.], 1961; [Vol. 2: Personenteil L–Z; 976 pp.], 1967; [Vol. 3: Sachteil; this volume was completed by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht; 1087 pp.]; 14. [Vol. 4] Ergänzungsband, Personenteil A–K, ed. by Carl Dahlhaus, 1972 [698 pp.]; [Vol. 5] Ergänzungsband, Personenteil L–Z, ed. by Carl Dahlhaus, 1975 [964 pp.] 15. Ruf, Wolfgang, ed., Riemann Musik Lexikon, 13th ed. [“aktualisierte Neuauf lage”] 5 Vols. Mainz: Schott, 2012. [2539 pp.] The second edition was essentially a re-print of the first, with an added appendix that contained new dictionary entries and corrections. The subtitle was dropped with the third edition. The eighth edition was the last one completely revised by Riemann himself. The ninth edition was revised by Riemann through letter “K” and completed, from letter “L” on, by Alfred Einstein. It was most important to Hugo Riemann that the dictionary was in one volume, to make it very practical in its use, to mix – alphabetically – explanations of terms and concepts with biographical notes on composers and musi131
Nico Schüler cians. Riemann’s concept is that of a “handbook”. Furthermore, it was most important to Riemann that the list of works was as complete as possible. With regard to living composers, most of the information was attained through Riemann’s personal contact with them. Riemann’s lexicographic philosophy becomes evident in his Prefaces to the various editions of his Musik-Lexikon. In the Preface to the first edition, Riemann wrote: This music dictionary should, in the first place, provide – to the musician and to the music lover – short and precise information about the lifetime, fate, and accomplishments of composers, virtuosos, and teachers of this art, about the history and the current state of the art itself as well as of its theory and of musical instruments. Whenever possible, the relative length of the articles was reconciled with the importance of their content. Regarding the selection of articles, a certain limitation was necessary because of space considerations; only in this way could the danger of an overabundance of articles ultimately becoming meaningless be counteracted. The intelligibility to all was the highest law for the presentation; however, the author did not believe in going so far that eventually even practically educated orchestra musicians could not find more in the theoretical and historical articles than what they [already] knew by themselves. As the book is, it will be of interest to the highly educated musician and the music researcher and will stimulate the ambitious music lover. The attempt to create some interest in, and understanding of, the older periods of music history for more and more people may meet with approval, considering the attempts – that are gaining a broader and broader basis – to revive the works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 10 Translation by the author of this article. The original reads: “Das vorliegende Musik-Lexikon soll in erster Linie dem Musiker und Musikfreunde kurze und bündige Aufschlüsse geben über Lebenszeit, Schicksale und Verdienste von Komponisten, Virtuosen und Lehrern seiner Kunst, über die Geschichte und den gegenwärtigen Stand der Kunst selbst sowie ihrer Theorie und der musikalischen Instrumente. Nach Möglichkeit ist die relative Ausdehnung der Artikel in Einklang gebracht worden mit der Bedeutung ihres Inhalts. In der Auswahl der Artikel war eine gewisse Beschränkung durch Raumrücksichten geboten; der Gefahr der Inhaltlosigkeit der Artikel wegen zu großer Anzahl derselben war nur auf diesem Wege zu begegnen. Die Gemeinfaßlichkeit ist bei der Darstellung als strengstes Gesetz im Auge behalten worden; doch glaubte der Verfasser darin nicht so weit gehen zu dürfen, daß schließlich selbst nur der praktisch gebildete Orchestermusiker in den theoretischen und historischen Artikeln nicht mehr fände, als er selbst weiß. So wie das Buch ist, wird es auch dem höher gebildeten Musiker und dem Manne der Musikwissenschaft Interesse abgewinnen und dem strebsamen Kunstjünger mancherlei Anregung geben. Der Versuch, auch den älteren Epochen der
132
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s M usik -L exikon Riemann made several important points. First of all, all persons with an entry in his dictionary are of major importance, because he had to be very selective. However, longer articles are dedicated to the more important figures in music (history). Second, the intelligibility to all readers was of utmost importance, although a certain depth had to be retained. Third, although older time periods are being considered, Riemann implied a special emphasis on most recent musical developments. In the Preface to the eighth edition of his Musik-Lexikon, Riemann wrote: Each new edition requires new cuts or elimination of articles from previous editions that became dispensable to preserve the practicality of the book in being in one volume. Many requests for inclusion in the new edition had to, for that reason, remain unfulfilled. The author is asking not to see this as a lack of recognition; but the danger that a biographical dictionary of musicians would degenerate into an address book of musicians is greater than one may think! The most important purpose of this book is still to provide a reliable overview of important accomplishments in the area of composition on the one hand and of musicological research on the other, and only to a limited degree can the accomplishments of musicians (singers, instrumentalists, conductors) and music teachers be recognized.11 Even more than in the first edition, Riemann emphasizes the fact that all persons listed in his dictionary are of major importance, because many others could not be included. This is especially important, considering the discusMusikgeschichte Interesse und Verständnis in weiteren Kreisen zu wecken, kann gewiß im Hinblick auf die eine immer breitere Basis gewinnenden Versuche der Wiederbelebung von Werken des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts zur Billigung finden”. Hugo Riemann, Musik-Lexikon: Theorie und Geschichte der Musik, die Tonkünste alter und neuer Zeit mit Angabe ihrer Werke, nebst einer vollständigen Instrumentenkunde (Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1882), V. 11 Translation by the author of this article. The original reads: “Jede neue Auflage zwingt zu neuen Kürzungen bzw. zur Streichung entbehrlich gewordener Artikel früherer Auflagen, um dem Buche die handliche Einbändigkeit zu bewahren. Gar manche Bitte um Berücksichtigung in der neuen Auflage mußte aus diesem Grunde unerfüllt bleiben. Der Verfasser bittet, darin keinen Mangel an Wertschätzung zu erblicken; aber die Gefahr, daß ein biographisches Tonkünstlerlexikon in ein Musiker-Adreßbuch ausartet, ist größer, als der Fernstehende ahnt! Der vornehmste Zweck des Buches ist nach wie vor eine möglichst zuverlässige Orientierung über bedeutende Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der Komposition einerseits und der musikwissenschaftlichen Forschung andererseits, und nur in sehr beschränktem Maße kann daher die verdienstliche Tätigkeit der reproduzierenden Künstler (Gesangs- und Instrumentalvirtuosen, Dirigenten) und der Musiklehrer gewürdigt werden”. Hugo Riemann, Musik-Lexikon. 8th [completely revised] ed. (Leipzig: Max Hesse’s Verlag, 1916), XI.
133
Nico Schüler sions in the first part of this paper: the many musicians and composers who are mentioned in Riemann’s dictionary were indeed of importance at the time, although many of them are totally forgotten today. Hugo Riemann and Other Aspects of Music Historiography Of course, one must consider Riemann’s music history books, which are based on specific concepts of music historiography. Riemann makes it clear that music history cannot easily be put into clear periods, but that there are ascending or descending developmental phases.12 In the Preface to his 1901 book Geschichte der Musik seit Beethoven (1800–1900) (History of music Since Beethoven, 1800–1900), he makes interesting statements regarding the relationship between music biographical presentations and music historiography: As certain as major leading figures must also be characterized in their human peculiarities, if history should not fade to an abstract theorem and to dry statistics, the accumulation of biographical material and its detailed portrayal of an excess of minor characters poses a critical danger for the actual purpose of the investigation – [which is] the practical development of artistic ideas and the evidence of its influence on the formation of the entire music practice and its position in the cultural life of the nations. To adhere to a certain middle ground and to enliven the specific art-historical [presentation] via concrete figures should be the governing aspect of this work [i.e., of this History of music since Beethoven (1800–1900)].13 Thus, Riemann believes that one has to find a balance to avoid including too many minor composers, while maintaining an accurate presentation of arthistorical developments. 12 Hugo Riemann, Geschichte der Musik seit Beethoven (1800–1900) (Berlin and Stuttgart: Verlag von W. Spemann, 1901), 1. 13 Translation by the author of this article. The original reads: “So gewiß große führende Persönlichkeiten auch in ihrer menschlichen Eigenart zur Geltung kommen müssen, wenn nicht die Geschichte zum abstrakten Theorem und zu trockener Statistik verblassen soll, so liegt doch in der Häufung des biographischen Materials und der eingehenden Porträtierung zu vieler Nebenfiguren eine entschiedene Gefahr für das Interesse an dem eigentlichen Gegenstande der Untersuchung, der praktischen Entwicklung künstlerischer Ideen und dem Nachweise ihres Einflusses auf die Gestaltung der gesamten Musikübung und ihrer Stellung im Kulturleben der Nationen. Hier eine rechte Mitte einzuhalten und das speziell Kunstgeschichtliche durch konkrete Figuren zu beleben, soll unser leitender Hauptgesichtspunkt sein”. Riemann, ibid.
134
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s M usik -L exikon Riemann also explains his view on including subjective presentations of composers by contemporaries: I do not find the concern essential that one can probably not give an unbiased historical account of a time period in which one still stands amid personal sympathies and antipathies and individual taste, for all intents and purposes, as a biased person. All historiography is based on the account and judgment of contemporaries, and to remove all individual coloration [biased presentation] would mean to kill the actual life. That a future time would measure particular phenomena of our days [time] with other dimensions than we today is certainly very likely; but just as the still subjectively colored and gradually less valid judgments by the contemporaries of the masters of the past are still most valuable for us today for the understanding of the role which they played in their own time, we can hope from our subjective time judgments [today] that they will not be worthless for a later, ref lective examination of the same period.14 Thus, even the subjective presentation of certain, recent historical developments or biographies is useful – it is useful now to ref lect on our contemporary music, and it is useful for later generations to understand the roles that music and composers play today. It also means that Riemann’s biographical dictionaries are very valuable for the understanding of the musical developments and the reception of the music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I have not yet considered is how the presentations in Riemann’s (biographical) Musik-Lexikon relate to his music history books, such as his History of music since Beethoven (1800–1900). A question one might ask is: Which composers are listed in his dictionary that are not mentioned in his music history books? Those composers could be, in Riemann’s view, minor com14 Translation by the author of this article. The original reads: “Das Bedenken, daß man nicht wohl eine vorurteilslose geschichtliche Darstellung eines Zeitraums geben könne, in dem man noch selbst mit persönlichen Symathien und Antipathien und individueller Geschmacksrichtung sozusagen als Parteimann mitten inne steht, halte ich nicht für wesentlich. Alle Geschichtsschreibung beruht auf Bericht und Urteil von Zeitgenossen, dem alle individuelle Färbung abstreifen, das eigentliche Leben töten hieße. Daß eine kommende Zeit vielleicht einzelne Erscheinungen unserer Tage mit anderem Maße messen wird als wir heutigen, ist freilich sehr wahrscheinlich; aber wie die noch so subjektiv gefärbten und mit der Zeit hinfällig gewordenen Urteile der Zeitgenossen der Meister der Vergangenheit uns heute von größtem Werte sind für das Verständnis der Rolle, welche sie in ihrer Zeit gespielt haben, so dürfen wir auch von unseren subjektiven Zeiturteilen hoffen, daß sie nicht wertlos sein werden für eine spätere rückblickende Betrachtung derselben Epoche”. Riemann, ibid.
135
Nico Schüler posers – already from his contemporary perspective. Another question one might ask is: Are there any composers mentioned in his music history books that are not listed in his Musik-Lexikon? That would certainly elevate the historical significance of those composers from Riemann’s contemporary point of view. And finally, Riemann’s view on music historiography changed over time. For one, Riemann’s understanding of music historiography changed to be more autonomous: the inherent laws [Eigengesetzlichkeit] of the musical developments had to be emphasized in the later volumes of his Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Handbook of music history). Then, the developmental history of musical forms and styles became the leading principle.15 Riemann wanted to show how one generation of composers built upon the work of the previous generation and how stringent the consecutiveness of musical styles is.16 But these are discussion for future papers. Final Remarks In this paper, I tried to show that Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon was, and is, indeed a good source for research on 19th and early 20 th century music. Many composers and musicians in various editions of Riemann’s dictionary are “forgotten” today; and because Riemann’s dictionary lists a high percentage of German composers, for many of these composers the dictionary is one of the very few sources available today. My research on the musical life of the Germans around 1920, for which Riemann’s dictionary was an excellent source of information, also revealed that musical events at the time had a sociologically different function than our musical events today. Thus, we would have to search for reasons of “forgetting” some “geniuses” or “heroes” of that time in the specific sociological circumstances. Therefore, music research based on today’s social structures and circumstances, as displayed in today’s dictionaries and history books, will fail with regard to the musical life of the past. Those music histories, and even, or especially, if we talk only about the composers one can find in today’s music dictionaries and the reception of their works, will be a history of composition and not a history of musical life. The latter would require us to re-think our methodological approach to music-historiographic research.
15 Hugo Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, vol. 2, part 1 (“Das Zeitalter der Renaissance”) (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1907), III and 484. 16 Georg Knepler, Geschichte Als Weg Zum Musikverständnis: Zur Theorie, Methode Und Geschichte Der Musikgeschichtsschreibung, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1982), 463.
136
Reflections on Hugo Riemann’s M usik -L exikon One of the most important keys for the understanding of music history was given by Riemann in his article “classical” (klassisch) in his Music Dictionary from its 4th edition on, in which he defined a “classical work of art” as one that “resists the destructive power of time”.17 Together with the information given by Riemann in the Prefaces of the various editions of his dictionary as well as in his history books, we can conclude that those composers and musicians that are included in his dictionary – many of whom are forgotten today – were indeed important composers from the perspective of late nineteenth and early twentieth century music and musical life.
17 Riemann, Musik-Lexikon. 4th ed. (as note 6) 540.
137
Nico Schüler
138
Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike
Aleksandar Vasić Muzikološki institut Srpske akademije nauka i umetnosti, Beograd (Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)
Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike * Abstract. The importance of Srpski književni glasnik (1901–1941) in the history of Serbian music: All artistic creations and creativity originate in specific historical, societal, and cultural contexts. The issues of reception of music by critique or critics and the interactions between music evaluations and composers are particularly significant for music historians. The history of music criticism, essayistic writings and periodicals, has not been emphasized as a research field in Serbian musicology. Serbian musicology has instead primarily focused on the evaluation of composers’ works, especially until the 1990s. Yet earlier in the twentieth century, Srpski književni glasnik (SKG) (Serbian Literary Magazine, 1901–1914, 1920–1941) a periodical publication, held a special importance in the field of literature as well as a major role in music criticism. Together with the daily newspaper Politika, SKG was one of the most important publications about music in the decades preceding the first World War as well as in the years between the first and second World Wars. SKG published about eight hundred titles encompassing two thousand five hundred pages about music. This paper provides a synthetic review of the musicography of SKG: the list, the typology and main characteristics of all musicographic species-genres (critiques, essays, studies, polemic texts, necrologies and notes) in addition to critics’ methods and their ideological and aesthetic views, issues of extra-musical tendencies and more. Until the 1930s SKG had a parallel path with Serbian music tendencies. Moreover, SKG’s professional views maintained an authority among composers. However, when the so-called objectivistic, or international style came into music practice, SKG turned towards a more conservative position – its role becoming restricted only to observation and record keeping about new artistic concepts.
Istorija muzičke kritike, esejistike i periodike dugo nije bila naglašenija preokupacija muzikologa u Srbiji. Jedna od najmlađih nacionalnih humanističkih disciplina, srpska nauka o muzici je veoma dugo, sve do početka devedesetih godina dvadesetog veka, bila primarno okrenuta nacionalnim kompozitorima * Ova studija je nastala u okviru projekta Identiteti srpske muzike od lokalnih do globalnih okvira: tradicije, promene, izazovi (br. 177004). Projekat izvodi Muzikološki institut SANU, a finansira ga Ministarstvo prosvete, nauke i tehnološkog razvoja Vlade Republike Srbije.
139
Aleksandar Vasić i njihovim delima.1 Pionirske radove o srpskoj muzikografiji devetnaestog i prve polovine dvadesetog stoleća napisala je Stana Đurić-Klajn. Ona je prva iznela osnovne činjenice o domaćim muzičkim piscima i njihovim tekstovima. 2 Ipak, tek će se od poslednje decenije dvadesetog veka pojaviti značajan broj knjiga, studija i članaka posvećenih ovoj problematici. Premda su se i drugi muzikolozi bavili pitanjima i problemima pisane reči o muzici u Srbiji, ipak su u ovoj oblasti najznačajnije i najbrojnije radove dali Slobodan Turlakov i Roksanda Pejović. 3 Naglasimo da je njihov naučnoistraživački rad u ovoj oblasti otpočeo nekoliko decenija pre nego što se pojavila bibliografija srpske štampe.4 S tim je u vezi i druga, jednako važna činjenica: u Srbiji do danas nije preduzet sistematski rad na analitičkoj, muzikološkoj bibliografiji raznovrsnih časopisa, kalendara, almanaha i drugih publikacija. Individualna istraživanja naučnih radnika, kao i određenih ustanova, ostaju nedovoljna pred ogromnom, izuzetno razuđenom građom. 5 U fokusu ovog teksta je Srpski književni glasnik, jedan od najznačajnijih časopisa u istoriji srpske književnosti. Ovaj časopis je izlazio punih trideset pet godina: prva serija od 1901. do 1914, nova od 1920. do 1941. godine (obnavljanje ovoga glasila na početku 1990-ih nije uspelo). Jedna od najmarkantnijih tekovina srpske građanske kulture iz međuratnog perioda, Glasnik je dugo bio zanemaren u književnoistorijskim, a naročito u muzičkoistorijskim istraživanjima. U specifičnim prilikama socijalističke epohe neretko se s ignorancijom prelazilo preko tekovina međuratne kulture. Postepeno, od sredine 1960-ih godina, o Glasniku počinje da se piše u nauci o srpskoj književnosti. Tome je veoma doprineo dugogodišnji projekat “Istorija srpske književne periodike”, u Institutu za književnost i umetnost u Beogradu. Institut je 2002. pri1
2 3
4 5
140
Podroban istorijat istraživanja i proučavanja srpske muzikografije devetnaestog i prve polovine dvadesetog veka iznet je u: Aleksandar Vasić, “Srpska muzička kritika i esejistika XIX i prve polovine XX veka kao predmet muzikoloških istraživanja”, Muzikologija 6 (2006), 317–342. Prikaz i ocenu radova Stane Đurić-Klajn o srpskoj muzičkoj kritici i esejistici videti u Vasić, ibid., 320–322, 332–334. Videti: Roksanda Pejović, Biografija i bibliografija (Beograd: Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, 2007); ista, Biografija i bibliografija (Beograd: Autorsko izdanje, 2013). Bibliografija Slobodana Turlakova nije publikovana. Prikaz i ocenu naučnih priloga ovih istraživača srpske muzikografije videti u Vasić, ibid, 322–324, 334–337. Bibliografi Narodne biblioteke Srbije priredili su do sada najpotpuniju, veoma iscrpnu i izuzetno vrednu, ali ipak selektivnu bibliografiju; videti: Milica Kisić, Branka Bulatović, Srpska štampa 1768–1995: istorijsko-bibliografski pregled (Beograd: Medija centar, 1996). Jedini iole obuhvatni bibliografski vodič kroz srpsku i jugoslovensku muzikografiju i muzičku periodiku do 1945. godine, nije potpun; videti: Bibliografija rasprava i članaka, knj. 13–14: Muzika, Struka VI, ur. Marija Kuntarić (Zagreb: Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod, 1984–1986).
Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike redio naučni skup posvećen stogodišnjici časopisa, a naredne godine izašao je obiman tematski zbornik.6 Do danas su o Književnom glasniku objavljeni mnogobrojni radovi koji osvetljavaju kako njegovu koncepciju, tako i njegovu estetičku i ideološku orijentaciju. Veliki oslonac naučnim radnicima predstavljaju objavljene bibliografije obe serije časopisa.7 Isto se može kazati za posthumno izdatu monografiju Dragiše Vitoševića o prvoj seriji SKG.8 U borbi za evropeizaciju i modernizaciju nacionalne kulture, Srpski književni glasnik je izrazito negovao prevodnu književnost i umetničku kritiku. Stoga je veliki broj naučnih radova o Književnom glasniku posvećen književnoj komparatistici – recepciji klasičnih i modernih književnosti u ovom časopisu.9 Srpski književni glasnik nije bio muzički, već književni časopis, ali je odigrao krupnu ulogu u procesu formiranja moderne srpske muzičke kritike i esejistike. Tokom gotovo četiri decenije izlaženja, u SKG-u je objavljeno blizu osam stotina tekstova o muzici, na oko dve i po hiljade stranica. Pa ipak, u srpskoj muzikologiji nije bilo dovoljno interesovanja za vrednost i značaj ovog časopisa za istoriju naše kritike i esejistike, indirektno i muzikologije. Istina je da se Srpski književni glasnik u naučnoj literaturi pominje u vezi s kritičkim i esejističkim radom Miloja Milojevića, Glasnikovog vodećeg muzičkog pisca.10 Pojedini muzikolozi izdvojili su ga među starijim književnim časopisima, uočivši njegov “izraziti sluh za muziku”.11 Ali indikativno je da se u muzičkoj leksikografiji ne može naći odrednica o ovom časopisu. Iako književni, časopis bi zbog obima i značaja objavljene muzikografije, obimnije u poređenju s pojedinim muzičkim časopisima, zasluživao izdvojenu obradu i u muzičkoj leksikografiji. Sveukupna društvena i ideološka klima, ali i tematska i metodološka orijentacija unutar same struke, uzroci su izostanka primerene pažnje 6
Sto godina Srpskog književnog glasnika. Aksiološki aspekt tradicije u srpskoj književnoj periodici, ur. Staniša Tutnjević i Marko Nedić (Novi Sad – Beograd: Matica srpska – Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2003). 7 Ljubica Đorđević, Bibliografija Srpskog književnog glasnika 1901–1914 (Beograd: Narodna biblioteka Srbije, 1982); Staniša Vojinović, Srpski književni glasnik 1920–1941. Bibliografija nove serije (Beograd – Novi Sad: Institut za književnost i umetnost – Matica srpska, 2005). 8 Dragiša Vitošević, Srpski književni glasnik 1901–1914 (Novi Sad, Beograd: Matica srpska, Institut za književnost i umetnost, “Vuk Karadžić”, 1990). 9 Na ovom mestu nije mogućno navesti obimnu bibliografiju književnonaučne i istoriografske literature o Srpskom književnom glasniku. Taj popis čitalac će naći na kraju sledeće studije: Aleksandar Vasić, Literatura o muzici u Srpskom književnom glasniku 1901–1941 (neobjavljena magistarska teza odbranjena 2004. na Filološkom fakultetu Univerziteta u Beogradu, primerak u seminarskoj biblioteci Katedre za opštu književnost i teoriju književnosti). 10 Videti Petar Konjović, Miloje Milojević, kompozitor i muzički pisac (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka, 1954), 137. i dalje. 11 Videti Roksanda Pejović, Kritike, članci i posebne publikacije u srpskoj muzičkoj prošlosti (1825– 1918) (Beograd: Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, 1994), 13–14.
141
Aleksandar Vasić prema Književnom glasniku u domaćoj naučnoj literaturi o muzici. Glasnik je tek u najnovije vreme dobio monografsku muzikološku studiju.12 Ko je u Srpskom književnom glasniku pisao o muzici? Srpski muzički devetnaesti vek bio je, velikim delom, vek ljubitelja muzike. Udeo amatera u procesu nastanka srpske kritike i publicistike bio je od odsudnog značaja. Međutim, još je Jovan Skerlić, u svojoj Istoriji nove srpske književnosti iz 1914. godine, primetio da je Glasnik “došao da povuče oštru liniju između devetnaestog i dvadesetog veka u srpskoj književnosti”.13 Isto se može primetiti i u vezi s Glasnikovom muzikografijom. U Glasniku su glavnu reč dobili profesionalni muzičari: Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac, Božidar Joksimović, Cvetko Manojlović, Petar Krstić, Stanislav Binički, Miloje Milojević, Stevan Hristić, Jovan Zorko, Kosta P. Manojlović, Danica i Ljubica S. Janković, Petar Konjović, Vojislav Vučković i drugi. Srpska građanska inteligencija prve polovine dvadesetog veka svoja vrednosna merila i svoje kulturne navike oblikovala je prema evropskim uzorima. U vreme kada muzičko školstvo nije bilo razvijeno, ovdašnji intelektualci su neretko bili muzički obrazovani. Tradicija devetnaestog veka nije sasvim napuštena u Srpskom književnom glasniku; u njemu pišu i muzički obrazovani amateri, različitog stručnog profila: diplomata, književni prevodilac s engleskog jezika Dragomir M. Janković; farmaceut i kamerni muzičar-violista Gustav Mihel;14 diplomata i književni prevodilac s francuskog jezika Stevan K. Pavlović; estetičar Branko Lazarević, Isidora Sekulić;15 istoričar i paleograf Viktor Novak; potom Stanislav Vinaver; književni istoričar – srbista, polonista i komparatista Đorđe Živanović16 i drugi. Danas, kada je muzičko školstvo razvijeno, klasična muzika više nema ono mesto u životu obrazovanog čoveka u Srbiji kakvo je imala u vreme kada nije bilo elektronskih medija. Koje su muzikografske vrste negovane u rubrikama poznatog književnog časopisa, i o kojim se temama pisalo? To su: muzička kritika, esej, odnosno ogled, studija, raznovrsne i vrlo sadržajne beleške o muzici, polemike i nekrolozi. Najviše se raspravljalo, po prirodi stvari, o srpskoj i jugoslovenskoj mu12 Videti Vasić, Literatura o muzici u Srpskom književnom glasniku 1901–1941 (fusnota 9). 13 Jovan Skerlić, Istorija nove srpske književnosti (Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva, 1997), 382. 14 Videti Aleksandar Vasić, “Muzički kritičar Gustav Mihel”, Muzikologija 4 (2004), 167–195. 15 Videti Stana Đurić-Klajn, “Muzičke teme Isidore Sekulić”, Muzički zapisi (Beograd: “Vuk Karadžić”, 1986), 77–93. 16 Videti Aleksandar Vasić, “Srpski književni glasnik i poljska umetnička muzika”, u 110 godina polonistike u Srbiji, ur. Petar Bunjak (Beograd: Slavističko društvo Srbije, 2006), 250, 256.
142
Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike zici, ali je u časopisu objavljen i velik broj radova o evropskoj muzici i njenim najvažnijim stvaraocima. Najzastupljenija vrsta u Srpskom književnom glasniku jeste muzička kritika. Nekoliko trajnih crta obeležavaju Glasnikovu muzičku kritiku. Na prvom mestu, bila je to, od početka do kraja izlaženja časopisa, stručna kritika. Ipak, Glasnikovi pisci nisu demonstrativno posezali za pojmovnikom muzičke teorije. S obzirom na nedostatak kontinuiteta muzičke periodike, u Srbiji se muzička kritika izgrađivala u dnevnim listovima, književnim i drugim časopisima. Glasnikovi kritičari su na najbolji način iskoristili priliku koja im je data i može se reći da je definitivno uobličenje standardne, stručne srpske muzičke kritike velikim delom obavljeno upravo na stranicama ovog časopisa. Za strukturu kritičkih napisa karakteristično je da se veći prostor odvajao za stručna obaveštenja o kompozitorima i njihovim delima, koja su bila izvođena u Beogradu, nego za analizu i vrednovanje samih interpretacija. To je, svakako, bilo u vezi s prosvetiteljskom misijom koju je Glasnik bio uzeo na sebe. Kulturi koja je dugo bila odvojena od tokova evropske muzike, valjalo je najpre ponuditi znanje, pa zato toliko insistiranja na informativnom sloju kritičkih sastava. Odmeren, uzdržan, sređen, Srpski književni glasnik nije cenio i negovao patetiku, emfazu i egzaltaciju. Ipak, dominantnim sklonostima SKG-a snažno kontrastiraju povišeni ton i jarka emocija u napisima Miloja Milojevića, Glasnikovog vodećeg muzikografa. Pišući, godine 1914, kritički osvrt na koncert violiniste Anrija Martoa (Henri Marteau), Milojević kaže: “Triler u Andante [Španske simfonije Edoarda Laloa (Édoard Lalo), A. V.] sul-g u pianissimo i u drugim manjim komadima u visini sul-e treperio je kao rastova šuma u letnje podne kad kroz nju vetrić ćarlija”.17 Stilski aparat Milojevića-kritičara, vidimo, na priličnom je rastojanju od racionalnosti okrenutog, možemo reći: često cerebralnog, pa i hladnog naučnog čitaoca iz druge polovine dvadesetog veka. Ipak, čitalac s predilekcijom za lektiru modernih teorija, a naročito strukturalizma, ne treba da požuri s osudom Milojevićeve egzaltacije. Isto tako, Milojevića nije neophodno “braniti” istorijskim pristupom i uvidom u genezu njegovog postupka; jer njegovo posezanje za slobodnim, literarnim izražavanjem predstavlja jedan od mogućnih odgovora na probleme s kojima se suočava muzička kritika kao takva. Odista, još od antičkih vremena, od, primerice, Pseudo-Plutarhovog traktata O muzici, do savremenog doba, nema bitne razlike u modusu saopštavanja kritičkih utisaka o nečijem muziciranju. U nedostatku stručnih ekvivalenata, u takvim 17 Videti Miloje Milojević, “Umetnički pregled. Anri Marto – Koncert u Narodnom Pozorištu 20 marta 1914 godine”, Srpski književni glasnik 32/ 8 (1914), 615.
143
Aleksandar Vasić trenucima stručnjak nužno poseže za literarnim, gotovo prozirnim izrazima koji potonjim čitaocima ne mogu u svemu da približe umetnost interpretacije. Pitanje je da li takvih reči uopšte može biti.18 Svakako, pojedini kritičari su mogli uložiti veći napor da aspekte muziciranja određenije, egzaktnije, onoliko koliko je to mogućno, izraze i prenesu Glasnikovim čitaocima koji dotičnim koncertima ili predstavama nisu prisustvovali. Ako njihova ambicija u tom pravcu nije uvek bila dovoljno visoka, sigurno je to da su svoje čitaoce snabdeli, u daleko najbrojnijim prilikama, tačnim prikazom i vrednovanjima muzike Betovena (Ludwig van Beethoven), Šuberta (Franz Schubert), Mendelsona (Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), Dargomižskog (Александр Сергеевич Даргомыжский), Musorgskog (Модест Петрович Мусоргский), Borodina (Александр Порфирьевич Бородин), Rimskog-Korsakova ( Николай Андреевич Римский-Корсаков), Sen-Sansa (Camille Saint-Saëns) i drugih kompozitora.19 Glasnikovi muzički pisci nisu bili samo informatori i prosvetitelji. Oni su imali i svoje posebne poglede na evropsku muziku, te se može govoriti o svojevrsnom Glasnikovom muzičkom kanonu. Tako se zapaža privrženost Vagneru (Richard Wagner) i njegovoj reformi opere. Dosta isključiv u tom pogledu bio je Miloje Milojević, dok su Bogdan Popović, Viktor Novak i Kosta Manojlović bili tolerantniji prema tzv. tradicionalnoj operi. U brizi da mlada srpska kultura prihvati isključivo najviše umetničke vrednosti, Milojević je isuviše strogo sudio o Čajkovskom ( Петр Ильич Чаиковский), Pučiniju (Giacomo Puccini) (mada mu je jedanput priznao da je “muzičar od rase”), Umbertu Đordanu (Umberto Giordano), Masneu ( Jules Massenet), a posebno Verdiju (Giuseppe Verdi). 20 Glasnikove procene dostignuća srpskih kompozitora prihvaćene su, najvećim delom, u kasnijoj srpskoj muzikologiji. Mokranjčeva kritika pozorišnih pesama za komad Seoska lola Davorina Jenka i Mertlovog Valcera i Marša za klavir, 18 Videti Plutarh, O muzici, sa starohelenskog preveo, uvodnu studiju i komentare sačinio Marko Višić (Niš, Beograd: Prosveta, Sfairos, 1997). Kao što je poznato, Pseudo-Plutarhov dijalog predstavlja jedan od najznačajnijih sačuvanih literarnih izvora za poznavanje istorijskih epoha starogrčke muzike. Ovde imamo na umu delove teksta u kojima pisac pominje umeće slavnih muzičara helenske prošlosti. Videti Lisijin govor (2–1132, str. 126), gde se za Tamirisa iz Trakije kaže da je bio “najvještiji pjevač”, ili Soterihov govor (31–1142, str. 141), gde o Telesiji iz Tebe stoji da je “lijepo svirao na fruli”. 19 Podroban prikaz Glasnikovog odnosa prema evropskoj muzici baroka, rokokoa, klasicizima, romantizma i verizma dat je u studiji Aleksandar Vasić, “Recepcija evropske muzike u muzičkoj kritici Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941)”, Naučni sastanak slavista u Vukove dane 34/2 (2004), 213–224. 20 O Glasnikovom kanonu, kao i o vrednovanju muzike navedenih kompozitora, videti Vasić, ibid.
144
Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike Petra Krstića tumačenja Mokranjčevog rada na rukovetima, Milojevićevi napisi o Bajićevoj operi Knez Ivo od Semberije, o Krstićevom Zulumćaru, zatim o koordinatama stila Petra Stojanovića, o operama Vilin veo, Knez od Zete i Koštana Petra Konjovića, sve su to ubedljiva, na činjenicama zasnovana zapažanja i sudovi koje prihvata i današnji muzikolog. Previda ima manje, različiti su njihovi uzroci. Ponekad je to materijalna greška, ponekad je reč o sukobu različitih estetičkih uverenja. Mihailo Vukdragović je rekao da je u srpskoj muzici tvorac klavirskog stava Miloje Milojević, ne uzevši u obzir da je Kornelije Stanković još sredinom devetnaestog veka objavio svoje virtuozne klavirske varijacije. A Milojevićeva izrazito negativna ocena oratorijuma Vaskrsenje Stevana Hristića – tema o kojoj je pisano u savremenoj muzikologiji 21 – primer je ideologizovanog stava netolerantnog kritičara koji sebi uzima slobodu da kompozitorima propisuje kakva izražajna sredstva treba da koriste u komponovanju muzike u svojoj sredini. 22 Muzički kritičari Srpskog književnog glasnika su pravovremeno obaveštavali čitaoce i o najavangardnijim kompozitorima i stilovima. Tako je Miloje Milojević još 1912. pisao o Šenbergu (Arnold Schönberg). 23 U Glasniku se pisalo i o Stravinskom (Игоръ Фëдорович Стравинский), Honegeru (Arthur Honegger) i Josipu Slavenskom, ali tako da ti kompozitori uglavnom nisu mogli zadobiti simpatije Glasnikove publike. Ni takozvani objektivistički stil iz 1930-ih godina nije našao podršku u SKG. Sve do pojave Slavenskog i Praške grupe, Književni glasnik je bio putovođa srpskim kompozitorima. 24 Od 1940-ih on tu ulogu više ne igra. Posmatrana kao celina, s dominantnim glasom Miloja Milo21 Videti: Aleksandar Vasić, “Duhovna muzika u napisima Miloja Milojevića”, Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku 15 (1994), 161–163; Hristina Medić – Katarina Tomašević, “Mesto Hristićevog Vaskrsenja u srpskoj muzici”, Muzički talas 1–2 (1997), 22–25; Katarina Tomašević, “Stilske koordinate oratorijuma Vaskrsenje Stevana Hristića (1912) i pitanje raskršća tradicija u srpskoj muzici 20. veka”, Muzikologija 4 (2004), 25–37; ista, Na raskršću Istoka i Zapada: o dijalogu tradicionalnog i modernog u srpskoj muzici između dva svetska rata (1918– 1941) (Beograd, Novi Sad: Muzikološki institut SANU, Matica srpska, 2009), 33–59; Aleksandar Vasić, “Srpski književni glasnik i nacionalna umetnička muzika”, Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku 32–33 (2005), 107–109. 22 Podrobna analiza muzikografije Književnog glasnika o srpskoj muzici data je u studiji Aleksandar Vasić, “Srpski književni glasnik i nacionalna umetnička muzika”, Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku 32–33 (2005), 101–116.. 23 Miloje Milojević, “Umetnički pregled. Vaskrsenje. Biblijska poema u dva dela za sola, mešoviti hor i veliki orkestar. Reči od Dragutina J. Ilića, muzika od Stevana K. Hristića. U Narodnom Pozorištu 2 maja 1912 godine”, Srpski književni glasnik, 28/11 (1912), 862–863. 24 Prašku grupu sačinjavaju kompozitori školovani u Pragu između dva svetska rata, u jednom periodu privrženi avangardnim prosedeima. Grupu su sačinjavali: Dragutin Čolić, Milan Ristić, Ljubica Marić, Vojislav Vučković i Stanojlo Rajičić; videti: Mirjana Veselinović, Stvaralačka prisutnost evropske avangarde u nas (Beograd: Univerzitet umetnosti, 1983), 279– 320.
145
Aleksandar Vasić jevića, Glasnikova kritika ostala je, velikim delom, privržena modernizovanom nasleđu tradicionalnih stilova od sedamnaestog do devetnaestog veka i tonalnoj muzici na osnovi proširenog dursko-molskog tonaliteta. 25 U Srpskom književnom glasniku objavljen je i veliki broj eseja, odnosno ogleda o evropskim kompozitorima. Funkcija tih tekstova bila je prosvetiteljska. Preko njih je domaća publika bila upoznata s brojnim pojavama iz muzičke istorije, ali i savremene muzike. Većina tih tekstova napisana je prema formuli pozitivističke istoriografije: život i delo. Delovi eseja u kojima je reč o samoj muzici po pravilu su znatno kraći od celina posvećenih biografijama kompozitora. To je, možda, posledica uvažavanja činjenice da čitaoce književnog časopisa ne treba obeshrabrivati suviše stručnim diskursom. 26 Srpski književni glasnik sadrži i oglede o srpskim muzičarima – Stevanu Stojanoviću Mokranjcu, Stanislavu Biničkom, Dragutinu Pokornom, kao i Josifu Marinkoviću. Pojedina od ponuđenih vrednovanja nisu ubedljiva, na primer umanjivanje Mokranjčevog kompozitorskog na račun izvođačkog, pedagoškog i organizatorskog rada; ili, pak, zanemarivanje značaja Biničkog kao autora prve izvedene srpske opere. 27 Esejistika o savremenoj muzici bila je na liniji kritike. Ipak, Stanislav Vinaver i Dragutin Čolić zalagali su se za muziku Berga (Alban Berg) i Šenberga. 28 Književni glasnik je bio časopis građanskog centra. U jednom trenutku, u vreme velikih društvenopolitičkih promena u svetu, otvorio je vrata marksizmu. Tako se tokom 1930-ih godina u SKG mogu čitati ogledi Vojislava Vučkovića i Pavla Markovca. Vučković je bio u zenitu determinističkog tumačenja muzičke istorije kao odraza ekonomske i političke istorije. 29 Markovac je, pak, bio odmereniji i pokazao je više smisla za specifičan odnos između umetnosti i društva. 30 25 Odnosu SKG-a prema savremenoj muzici posvećena je studija Aleksandra Vasića, “Položaj avangarde u srpskoj muzičkoj kritici i esejistici prve polovine XX veka – Srpski književni glasnik”, Muzikologija 5 (2005), 289–306. 26 O Glasnikovoj muzičkoj esejistici videti: Aleksandar Vasić, “Granični žanrovi srpske književne periodike: esejistika Srpskog književnog glasnika o evropskoj muzici”, u Žanrovi u srpskoj periodici, ur. Vesna Matović (Beograd, Novi Sad: Institut za književnost i umetnost, Matica srpska, 2010), 445–470. 27 Videti Aleksandar Vasić, “Srpski književni glasnik i nacionalna umetnička muzika”, Zbornik Matice srpske za scenske umetnosti i muziku 32–33 (2005), 110–116. 28 Videti: Stanislav Vinaver, “Vocek”, Srpski književni glasnik 45/7 (1935), 515–524; Dragutin Čolić, “Od Baha do Hindemita”, Srpski književni glasnik 52/ 2 (1937), 124–130. 29 Analizu Vučkovićevih ogleda u SKG-u donosti sledeća studija: Aleksandar Vasić, “Vojislav Vučković u Srpskom književnom glasniku”, u Sto godina Srpskog književnog glasnika. Aksiološki aspekt tradicije u srpskoj književnoj periodici, ur. Staniša Tutnjević i Marko Nedić (Novi Sad, Beograd: Matica srpska, Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2003), 213–224. 30 Jedini tekst Pavla Markovca u Književnom glasniku: “Rihard Vagner i pučka muzika. (Povodom pedesete obljetnice njegove smrti)”, Srpski književni glasnik 39/ 3 (1933), 198–202.
146
Značaj Srpskog književnog glasnika (1901–1941) u istoriji srpske muzike U Glasniku je objavljen izuzetno velik broj beležaka o domaćoj i inostranoj muzici. Knjige, časopisi, ustanove, kurioziteti, varia, sve je to dato u cilju informisanja, u pojedinim slučajevima i razonode čitateljstva. Deskripcija nije zadovoljavala kriterijume Glasnikovih urednika; kad god je to bilo umesno ili potrebno, jasno se stavljala na znanje ocena vrednosti neke pojave ili nečijeg rada. Srpski književni glasnik nije imao sklonosti prema polemikama. Smatrajući da treba delovati sopstvenim primerom umesto stupati u konf likte, SKG je objavio veoma mali broj muzičkih polemika. 31 Dvadeset tri nekrologa srpskim, slovenačkim, kao i evropskim muzičarima nisu samo konvencionalni, kurtoazni sastavi, lišeni kritičke dimenzije. Naprotiv, iz njih su se mogli doznati i elementi estetičkog programa samih pisaca nekrologa. Kada godine 1936. beleži smrt Otorina Respigija (Ottorino Respighi), Miloje Milojević ujedno visoko vrednuje umetnost italijanskog kompozitora i indirektno poručuje da veruje u muziku “ jedne staložene sinteze utvrđenih iniciatora modernog progresa putem evolucije”. To je, produžava Milojević, „srećna sinteza koja može da da i velike rezultate u budućnosti”. 32 U ovom nekrologu pažljivi čitalac naći će rezime estetike zrelog Milojevića, i kompozitora i muzičkog kritičara, a to je i razrešena formula Glasnikove muzičke estetike, tj. dominantni stav časopisa prema muzici dvadesetog veka. Muzikografiju Srpskog književnog glasnik obeležila je, već od 1906. godine, jugoslovenska ideologija, a do kraja izlaženja časopisa – slovenofilstvo. Pa ipak, te snažno zastupane ideološke smernice nisu uticale na vrednovanja Glasnikovih muzičkih pisaca. 33 Popis izdanja Markovčevih tekstova i najvažnije literature o njemu, čitalac će naći u našoj studiji o Vučkoviću, citiranoj u prethodnoj napomeni, str. 215, nap. br. 4. 31 Pažnju zavređuje polemika između Božidara Joksimovića i Stevana Mokranjca, u vezi s Mokranjčevim etnomuzikološkim radom; videti: Božidar Joksimović, “Umetnički pregled. Srpske narodne pesme i igre s melodijama iz Levča. Prikupio Todor M. Bušetić, muzički priredio St. St. Mokranjac. Izdanje Srp. Kralj. Akademije: Srpski Etnografski Zbornik, knjiga prva. – Državna Štamparija, Beograd, 1902. Cena 2 din”, Srpski književni glasnik 6/7 (1902), 1183– 1188; St. Mokranjac, “Umetnički pregled. Srpske narodne pesme i običaji iz Levča: Predgovor St. Mokranjca”, Srpski književni glasnik 7/3 (1902), 216–227. O ovoj polemici dvojice srpskih muzičara pisala je Dragana Stojanović-Novičić, “Božidar Joksimović kao muzički pisac i njegov odnos prema Mokranjčevom radu (polemika u vezi sa delom Srpske narodne pesme i igre s melodijama iz Levča)”, u Simpozijum Mokranjčevi dani 1994–1996. (Negotin: „Mokranjčevi dani”, 1997), 129–133. Videti i: Roksanda Pejović, “Napisi Stevana Mokranjca i njihov značaj u istoriji srpske muzike”, Razvitak 3–4/188–189 (1992), 31–35; ista, Kritike, članci i posebne publikacije u srpskoj muzičkoj prošlosti (1825–1918) (Beograd: Fakultet muzičke umetnosti, 1994), 252–254. 32 Videti: Miloje Milojević, “Muzički pregled. Smrt Otorina Respigi”, Srpski književni glasnik 48/1 (1936), 60–62. 33 Glasnikovom jugoslovenstvu posvećena je studija: Aleksandar Vasić, “Muzikografija Srpskog književnog glasnika i ideologija jugoslovenstva”, Muzikologija 4 (2004), 39–59.
147
Aleksandar Vasić Srpski književni glasnik je odigrao veoma značajnu ulogu u istoriji srpske muzičke kritike i esejistike i, uopšte, muzičke kulture. U vreme kada su stručni muzički časopisi bili malobrojni i kratkoveki, on je neprestanom muzičkoliterarnom aktivnošću, kroz dugo razdoblje, snažno nastavio misiju evropeizacije i emancipacije svoje muzičke sredine – misiju koja se može pratiti još od časopisa “Gudalo” Roberta Tolingera u devetnaestom veku. 34 Kritike, eseji i drugi članci objavljeni u Glasniku publici su približili mnogobrojne evropske pojave i vrednosti. Takođe, ovaj časopis je uzdigao na viši, moderan profesionalni nivo kritiku i esejistiku devetnaestog veka. Stručnim sudovima o evropskoj, srpskoj i jugoslovenskoj muzici, Glasnik je postavio sigurnu osnovu iz koje je posle Drugog svetskog rata bilo mogućno izrastanje srpske muzikologije.
34 Videti Tatjana Marković, “Intertextual Relations between Serbian and Viennese Concepts of 19th-century Music Periodicals”, in Music’s intellectual history, ed. by Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs-Mackenzie (New York: RILM, 2009), 719–742.
148
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical
Leon Stefanija Oddelek za muzikologijo, Univerza v Ljubljani (Department of Musicology, University of Ljubljana)
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the Classical Abstract. The contribution offers an outline of the constitutive threads out of which the texture of Slovenian musical modernism in the interwar period is founded. Divided into four parts, the discussion explores modernity theories in the historiography of music today, after which a comparison of the musical poetics by Marij Kogoj (1892–1956) and Slavko Osterc (1895–1941) is given as the two paragons of the ideal of the interwar period. They are addressed as a model of a changing ideal of modernity that grows in importance after the 1950s with the members of the group Pro musica viva. After the discussion of modernism between 1945 and 1991, a threefold definition of modernism in Slovene music is offered: technical modernism (before 1918), incommensurable or aesthetic (or even better: phenomenological) modernism (Kogoj), and pragmatic modernism (Osterc). The fourth is added as a social modernism, leading the period of the twenty-first century.
A Surmise: Theories of Modernity The end of the big stories turned out itself as a big story: in an era where only differences exist, the small stories may grow big or the big ones shrink. How big they can grow depends on what anthropologists call thick description of the discussed phenomena. The antinomies pointed out by Hermann Danuser in his entry “Neue Musik” in the Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart appear more unified as soon as one accepts modernity as a “metaphoric representation of self hood”1 in which different levers of modernity emerge, intertwine, cohabit or compete to create sets of frictions between aesthetic and cultural variables. If Paul Griffiths pointed to a really modern music discussing Debussy’s fragmentary structured theme of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 2 and there are tendencies to point 1 2
Ljubica Ilic, Music and the modern condition: Investigating the boundaries (London and New York: Routledge), 2. Paul Griffiths, Modern music: A concise history (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994).
149
Leon Stefanija to the “grundsätzlich Neue der Neuen Musik” in the “Atonalität”, 3 it also seems reasonable to emphasise the Futurists’ noise as the foundational perspective of a new music.4 Griffiths speaks of a certain detachment from tradition, Eggebrecht of creating of another, a new order and Sutherland of removing the borders between different orders – they all speak of an expansion of the aesthetical means, of bewußtes Streben nach einer Erneuerung unseres melodischen Empfindens, eines melodischen Empfindens freilich, das nicht nur nach anderen Tonkombinationsmöglichkeiten innerhalb der gegebenen Normen strebt, sondern das eine grundlegende psychische Erneuerung und Erweiterung unseres Musikempfindens überhaupt zur Voraussetzung hat. Dies mag jetzt vielleicht noch als gewagte Behauptung erscheinen.5 Yet, it would be difficult to deny another projection of modernism: as a modernism that confines the aesthetic ambitions while stylistically skipping backwards, or aside into other genres – just as Schoenberg claimed: “The only revolutionary in our time was [Richard] Strauss!”6 from his Rosenkavalier onwards. Among others, Richard Taruskin advocates this definition of what may be called social modernism: “the true break with tradition came in the 1920s with the movement, often identified as ‘neoclassicism’, which the conventional narrative represents as a return, or regression, to traditional ways”.7 It would be actually fairly interesting to proceed with a more precise differentiation of the modernist phenomena and to speak of “forerunners” and “outsiders” as well as “subversive” elements after World War II8 as well as before. Perhaps historiography added another important shift towards the “emphatic new” with Satie, who broke with the whole romantic tradition of elevated art already in the 1880s – is not Satie a crucial ideological lighthouse for what became the American avant-garde of the 1960s? Or Liszt, who, dur3
4 5 6 7 8
150
Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Musik im Abendland: Prozesse und Stationen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (München: Piper Taschenbuch, 1995), 753. See also Christoph von Blumröder, “Neue Musik”, in Terminologie der musikalischen Komposition. Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995), 299–312. Roger Sutherland, New perspectives in music (London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1994). Paul Bekker, Neue Musik, Neue Musik, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919), 85–118, here 95. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and idea, ed. by Leonard Stein (London: Faber and Faber, 1975),137. Richard Taruskin, Music in the early twentieth century (New York: University Press, 2010), xx. Rudolf Stephan, “Die sogenannten Wegbereiter. ‘Überlegungen eines Musikhistorikers zu einigen aktuellen Problemen’, Musica 25/4 (1971), 349–352.
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical ing the eighties with his Bagatelle sans tonalité and his late piano oeuvre in which atonicality and atonality may be found long before the appearance of Expressionists and Neo-classicist, may be seen as a composer of the “new age” music culture in which delicate ref lexive musical styles are being devised and taken as a hallmark of the “age of individualism”. The levers of modernity may be differentiated into different “sounding utopias”.9 The idea of modernity is an idea about “commonalities and continuities”, even “extrusion of tensions latent in the Classical”, as suggested by Julian Johnson in his “sensible history of musical modernity”.10 And the events from last century Slovenia indicate fairly strong “commonalities and continuities” within what seemed an urgent need for a certain musica viva, for certain contemporary music with its “extrusion of tensions” in different forms: oppositions, rivalries, indifferences, or proclaimed incommensurability. The Beginnings: 1900–1945 Two historiographic difficulties characterize Slovenian modernism in this period. First is the shift of two aesthetical ideals: (1) Expressionism in the 1920s and New Objectivity since the end of that decade and (2) the lack of a concept after the mid-1930s. Two Paragons of Modernity Vilko Ukmar offered a thorough account of interwar music practices in Slovenia, veiled with a charming platonic (Hegelian) view. His historical survey ends in a sober mood: Perhaps the superficial image of Slovenian musical art and its life in the last two decades is somewhat more modest than the image of the other arts. Yet we cannot conceal that it is driven by a tense and stirred-up underground beat that has an immense life power. It depends on future circumstances whether this musical power will rise from its hinterland [zaledje] into the visible world and embody itself.11 9
Julian Johnson, Out of time: Music and the making of modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 70–81. 10 Ibid., 4, 7, 10. 11 “Morda je res zunanja podoba slovenske glasbene mnetnosti in njenega življenja v zadnjih dveh desetletjih skromnejša od podobe ostalih umetniških vrst. Ven dar ne more utajiti, da jo nosi močno napet in razgiban podtalni utrip, ki ima izredno življenjsko moč. Prav gotovo zavisi od bodočih razmer, ali se bo mogla ta glasbena moč dvigniti iz svojega zaledja v vidni
151
Leon Stefanija Ukmar indicated, among other things, that two musicians had earned special positions in the interwar period, Marij Kogoj (1892–1956), who embodied the Viennese Expressionist tradition of Franz Schreker and Arnold Schoenberg, and Slavko Osterc (1895–1941) whose New Objectivity was connected by Ukmar especially to Alois Hába, who kept a cordial contact with Slavko Osterc, an eager advocate of modern music. Kogoj and Osterc lived out their musical careers within roughly two decades. Marij Kogoj was noticed in 1914 with his work for mixed choir, Trenotek and disappeared from public life in 1932, when his mental illness drove him into medical care until his death in 1956. Slavko Osterc, although nearly as old as Kogoj, entered Ljubljana musical life about a year before the performance of Kogoj’s magnum opus Črne maske on 7 May 1928. When Kogoj withdrew from public life, Osterc was one of the main figures active in Slovenian musical life, enjoying the full acknowledgement of the musical establishment – a position hardly imaginable to Kogoj, who worked as a répétiteur at the Opera of the Slovenian National Theatre (1924–1932) and as a music critic. They were both considered modernists – and this reveals the threads from which the evasive concept of musical modernism is woven. Actually, the conceptual difference between the two notions of modernism – Expressionism and New Objectivity – is smaller than their poetological provenance, much smaller than their respective aesthetical effect. The obituary to Kogoj by Marijan Lipovšek (1910–1995) – himself a prominent pianist, composer and publicist – may be read as a positive approach to Expressionism (a positive reexposition of Vurnik’s views on Expressionism that will be discussed later). Lipovšek defined Kogoj’s Expressionism with clear historical awareness of the relative belatedness of this stylistic orientation: As an artistic expression, Expressionism was exhausted before Kogoj was able to gain recognition. In Germany this [art] stream had lead to atonality and slowly liberated itself from the Wagnerian principle of melodic polyphony. Kogoj, to the contrary, stuck deeply to it. New currents, especially the mighty invasion of a new folklore, with Stravinsky, Bartók, Slavenski, Martinů, etc., and on the other side the new classicist aspirations, in their transparent sonority and classic equilibrium, were quite the opposite of Expressionism; they prevailed in the advanced ranks.12 svet ter se utelesiti”. Vilko Ukmar, “Slovensko glasbeno življenje v dvajsetletju 1918–1938”, in: Spominski zbornik Slovenije. Ob dvajsetletnici Kraljevine Jugoslavije (Ljubljana: Jubilej, 1939), 301–302. 12 “Kot umetnostni izraz se je ekspresionizem izčrpal prej, preden se je bilo Kogoju mogoče
152
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical At the same time, Lipovšek underscored Kogoj’s universal ethical stance without claiming any universality of the aesthetical trajectory of his music, emphasizing the utterly subjective character: This music leads us into a world that is in no way linked to the external effect. In this world it does not matter whether someone likes it or not, whether it is successful or not. It tells its own story, speaks of its joys and sorrows and does not care if it is taken into account. It just feels that it is real, real for itself. Not the whole of Expressionism is such. Fashionable Expressionism did not possess such a power and was less likely to possess these unsociable features. We feel Kogoj‘s strong personality traits also made him less understandable.13 On the contrary, the position of Osterc reveals a rather confused picture of the New Objectivity. Anchored in Neoclassicism and its emblematically disinterested ethical stance, focused on a kind of here-and-now efficacy of music, Osterc’s historical position has been most thoroughly addressed by Borut Loparnik: There is no doubt: it was the self-consciousness, bestowed on him by his middle-age power during the 1930s and the reception abroad, at least in Prague and SIMC, where they thought and acted alike and were able to take into account related, especially similar promotional intentions. Osterc knew, of course, of the considerable, sometimes invincible aesthetical reservations – but that the novum, as he understood it, was really a modernism is worth remembering regarding the question of what proves his avant-garde. Of course, it is defined by the Bohemian ironic posture, philistine radicalism, appertaining to a group, resistance to communal aesthetic norms, tapered ideological militancy, artistic internationalism […] a series uveljaviti. V Nemčiji je prešla ta struja v atonalnost in se počasi osvobajala wagnerjanskega principa melodične polifonije. Kogoj je v njej še globoko tičal. Nove struje, zlasti mogočen vdor nove folklore pri Stravinskem, Bartóku, pri Slavenskem, Martinuju itd., na drugi strani pa nova klasicistična stremljenja, v svoji prozorni zvočnosti in klasični odtehtanosti ekspresionizmu prav nasprotna, so prevladala v naprednih vrstah”. Marijan Lipovšek, ”Marij Kogoj”, Naša sodobnost 4/9 (1956), 772. 13 “Ta glasba nas vodi v svet, ki ni v ničemer vezan na zunanji učinek. Temu svetu je vseeno, ali je komu všeč ali ne, vseeno, ali ima uspeh ali ne. Govori nam svojo povest, pripoveduje svoje radosti in boli in nič ne mara za to, da bi bil upoštevan. Samo čuti, da je resničen, zase resničen. Ni ves ekspresionizem tak. Modni ekspresionizem ni imel te moči, pa tudi odljudnosti je imel mnogokrat manj. Čutimo, da je tu zraven še močna Kogojeva osebna poteza, ki ga je delala včasih še teže umljivega”. Ibid.
153
Leon Stefanija of signs that he emphasized and gave his a nimbus of a revolutionary. The local music community believed it […] The thought regarding his paragons did not go beyond what the composer indicated at the beginning [of his Ljubljana period since 1928] with attaching himself to Stravinsky, at least to his name; and even then the level of the author’s language and stylistic elements seemed incomprehensible even to listeners. In sum, it was, of course, Neoclassical, or in other words: Osterc’s speech no longer searched for any gradations and meanings, it did not develop itself out of negation. Flexible and customizable, he permitted many shades of interpretation and offered material for style[-definition]. […H]e was not bothered with the “formalistic” and “substantial” genesis of Neoclassicism, personified [according to Danuser] in Stravinsky and Hindemith […H]e accepted the contrasts as equal […] Stravinsky remained a referential signpost of his “direction”, regardless of his claims that he had moved away from him over the years, arguing that the new music had overtaken him.14 It can be concluded that both modernisms reveal a clear opposition that may be summarized as follows: 14 “Ni dvoma, bila je samozavest, ki sta mu jo dajala zrela moč sredi 1930-ih let in odziv na tujem, vsaj v Pragi in med ljudmi SIMC, kjer so mislili oz. ravnali enako ter mogli upoštevati sorodne, zlasti sorodne promocijske namene. Da jih ločijo znatni, kdaj tudi nepremagljivi estetski zadržki, je Osterc kajpak vedel - da pa je bilo novotarstvo, kakor ga je razumel, v resnici modernizem, se velja spomniti ob vprašanju, kaj dokazuje njegovo avantgardnost. Seveda jo opredeljujejo bohemsko ironična drža, protimeščanski radikalizem, skupinstvo, upiranje občnim estetskim normam, ideološko priostrena bojevitost, umetniški internacionalizem […] cela vrsta znamenj, ki jih je poudarjal in so mu dajala obstret revolucionarja. Temu je domača glasbena javnost verjela. Osterčeve zunanjosti niso preverjali ob kompozicijskih potezah, obarval jo je zgolj vtis disonantno ‘grdega’ in odljudnega, pri katerem je ostalo. Še misel na zglede ni segla dlje, kot ji je bil na začetku pokazal skladatelj, do Stravinskega oz. njegovega imena; in že takrat se je raven avtorjevega jezika ter slogovnih prvin zdela nerazločna, za poslušalce tudi nerazumljiva. V seštevku značilnosti je bila kajpak neoklasicistična, ali drugače: govor, ki ga je bil Osterc prevzel, ni več iskal razpona in sredstev, ni se več oblikoval iz negiranja. Gibek in prilagodljiv je dovoljeval vsakršne odtenke ter ponujal gradivo za slog […] ln vsaj toliko je važno, da ga nista begali ‘formalistična’ in ‘substancialna’ geneza neoklasicizma, poosebljeni v Stravinskem in Hindemithu. […] Zato je nasprotja sprejel za enakovredna […] Stravinski je zato ostal referenčni kažipot njegove ‘smeri’, kakorkoli se mu je čez leta odmaknil in zatrjeval, da ga je nova glasba prerasla”. Borut Loparnik, “V iskanju Osterca”, Musicological Annual 31 (1995), 83–84.
154
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical
Marij Kogoj
Slavko Osterc
Ethically upright
Ethically disinterested
Socially and temporally transcendent
Bound up with the historical moment and culture
Aesthetically subjective
Aesthetically objective
Poetics: self-referential, entailing formally and structurally unclear musical f low.
Poetics: neoclassical, enabling formally and well-structured – “constructivist” – musical forms.
Perception: a historic figure from “behind the scenes”, rarely performed later
Perception: a true icon of modernism, in the 1960s the Ensemble Slavko Osterc was established to promote contemporary national music
Within two decades, the idea(l)s of modernity changed rather swiftly: from a historically somewhat “belated style” of Expressionism that – exclusivist in itself – pretended to acquire a universal artistic expression toward a historically up-to-date New Objectivity, a stylistically integrative aesthetic pragmatism. They were both in search of aesthetic immediacy – only the means and the semantic function were different. A Changing Model of Modernity It seems as if the confidence in the present moment was closer to the Impressionists, Expressionists, Futurists and Neoclassicists than the ideas of today’s ref lective modernity allow us to believe. One may well ask if, at least on the surface did the strongly objectivist modernism of Osterc enter its post-modern phase elevating the ideal of “music for the community” long before the proclamation of Postmodernism gained relevancy. In its search for “some new classical balance” the years before World War II seem akin to contemporary “cultural tourism” and DIY culture. In both at least the “emphatic” meaning of modernity loses clear orientation. Not only the past, but also the present is seen today as perhaps not entirely, but at least partly, a “foreign country”. The Slovenian milieu came out of the Great War with two far-reaching achievements (also) regarding musical practice. The first thing was a refreshing view on the issue of centre and periphery. The nation-centred perspective of 1918 cherished the ideas of freedom and equality within the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Although the ideals faded with the personal 155
Leon Stefanija dictatorship of King Alexander I in January 1929, the period developed a national musical culture with the pertaining institutional infrastructure. Apart from the unsteady cultural circumstances of a new and politically rather heavy-handed country that was further stirred up in the 1930s by the unhappy events from both (eastern and western) political dictatorships spiced with the regional political mistrusts, cultural autonomy remained an indicator for the many faces of the national concept of the arts. The second achievement was the gradual professionalization of musical life that was accomplished between 1918 and the 1980s. In the decade before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the last impressive embodiment of the ideal of a national culture took shape through the building of the Cankarjev dom, the “Slovene Barbican”, with its facilities for what is today advertised as the national centre for “the culture of all Arts”.15 Just as the National Radio in the 1930s was seen as a “real people’s university”,16 including “(1) Education, (2) Music, (3) Entertainment, (4) For the youth and (5) Propaganda”,17 the Cankarjev dom was built with a strong political as well as cultural motivation for a “transfer of knowledge (congress, symposia, etc.), and transfer of the artistic experience” – becoming Slovenia’s main “cultural and congress centre”, as it is formally called.18 Mutual permeability between culture and art, the sameness of art and life so praised by the Dadaists, resounds through a set of issues regarding the social function of music. If today also in Slovenia “the musical life disintegrated into a teeming mass of cultures and subcultures, each with its own canon and jargon”,19 the historiographers describe the interwar period in Slovenia as a period of growth of instrumental music in the prevalently choir-oriented musical culture. 20 The growth of instrumental music heralds “modern Slovenian music”, as represented by the modernist icons: Marij Kogoj and Slavko Osterc. 21 It should be noted that especially Kogoj remained intimately bound to vocal music (he “emerged” with the choral work, Trenotek in 1914 and left the monumental Expressionist opera Črne maske (Black masks, 1927) and vocal 15 16 17 18
http://www.cd-cc.si (last accessed: 15 December 2015). Radio Ljubljana 2 (26 May–2 June 1929), 2. Radio Ljubljana 28/7 (1 December 1935), [3]. V. L., “Kulturni dom Ivana Cankarja”, Dogovori (Ljubljana) 9/2 (1981). http://www.dlib. si/?URN=URN:NBN:SI:DOC-NQ48YF5N (last accessed: 1 August 2016). See also Sklep o ustanovitvi javnega zavoda Cankarjev dom, kulturni in kongresni center, Uradni list Republike Slovenije 87/04, 104/04 – corr. 98/08 and 103/13. https://www.uradni-list.si/ (last accessed: 1 August 2016). 19 Alex Ross, The rest is noise (New York: Picador Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 20 Ukmar, “Slovensko glasbeno življenje v dvajsetletju 1918–1938”, 292. 21 Darja Koter, Slovenska glasba 1918–1991 (Ljubljana: ŠOU [koda], 2013), 5.
156
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical music remains probably the richest segment of the Slovenian musical habitus. But it holds true that some of the most palpable stylistic ideals of that time found the most succinct expression in instrumental music. Through a set of pieces, ranging from piano pieces and Lied to different chamber pieces and symphonic poems, the main novum may be summarized as a process of calibration of aesthetical modernism with social modernism. One of the most thorough reviewers of the interwar period, Vilko Ukmar (1905– 1991), described the then recent events in 1939 as a process in which “the artistic debauchery of the last two decades has again calmed down and harmonized in a healthy decrescendo”. 22 With the debauchery Ukmar meant Expressionism, whereas the healthy decrescendo leads toward two faces of the New Objectivity: Partly the reactionary stream with its renewed enforcement of the past conceptions of music is again opposing the new trends, announcing romanticism and naturalism as a proven redemptive way of artistic creation; though partly modernism is opposed by a healthy search for new paths that lead through the debauchery of artistic uprising towards new expression that will fit the contemporary human being and the difficult quandaries of today. 23 Ukmar’s conclusion in defining his divided era evokes the new equilibrium of the senses and aspirations: On this path, the artist searches for his own human image and its value in connectedness with the universal will, and the order he is meeting on this path, as inevitability of a positive life, which renders also to this art a character of some new classical balance. 24 Classical is seen obviously as “die Meisterung, die Sichtung und Ausbeutung aller Errungenschaften vergangener Experimente: ihre Hineintragung in feste und schöne Formen”. 25 22 Ukmar, “Slovensko glasbeno življenje v dvajsetletju 1918–1938”, 298. 23 “Deloma se mu je zopet zopet zoperstavila reakcionarna smer, ki ga poskuša s ponovnim uveljavljanjem preteklih glasbenih umetniških nazorov izpodmakniti, oznanjujoč romantiko in naturnlizem kot preizkušeno odrešilno pot umetnostnega snovanja; deloma pa se proti njemu uveljavlja zdravo iskanje novih poti, ki vodijo skozi ves ta prevratni umetnostni vzpon do novega izraza, ki se bo skladal z današnjim človekom in težkimi vprašanji sodobnosti”. Ibid. 24 “Na tej poti išče umetnik lastno človeško podobo in njeno vrednoto v poveznnosti z vesoljno voljo, in red, ki ga na tej poti srečuje kot nujnost pozitivnega življenja, daje tudi njegovi umetnosti zopet značaj neke nove klasične uravnovešenosti”. Ibid. 25 Ferruccio Busoni, Von der Einheit der Musik (Berlin: Max Hesses Verlag 1922), 276–277.
157
Leon Stefanija Busoni’s formulation of “classical balance”, anchored in the period of Stravinsky, the “everyday” music of Les Six, and Gebrauchsmusik, was uttered two decades before Vurnik’s observation. And it was only several years after the main proponent of Vurnik’s modernist horizon, Slavko Osterc, criticized his former paragons, Les Six and Stravinsky, as outmoded: [Stravinsky’s] Petrushka was a break with tradition and therefore it is strong and important – breaks are executed by strong people. It is a duty of the young generation to break with Petrushka, while the ideology of Schoenberg, Berg and Hába is growing old, it is a duty of the young generation to break with Schoenberg and the others mentioned. That this break has to come with a sense of progress and not reaction […] Berg’s Wozzeck testifies that music (and theatre) has stronger potentials for progress in another direction. 26 Although one of the scholars elevated Osterc’s “healthy relation toward contemporary music”, 27 it seems that a most troublesome quandary is Osterc’s claim that “it was exactly Petrushka that brought me into the camp of the hypermodernists, but that would not happen today”. 28 The quandary becomes clearer when the utterance is given even closer scrutiny. As his writings from the period since 1928 reveal, Osterc was a self-proclaimed “hypermodernist” since the late 1920s when Stravinsky was hardly the “main modernist”, even with his Neoclassicism (not to mention his “Russian” ballets). Although in the quotation above, Osterc rhetorically points to Alban Berg and his Wozzeck, the Expressionist ideals were clearly refused by Osterc in his views of the main Slovenian Expressionist figure in music, Marij Kogoj. Osterc, in probably his only public ref lection of Kogoj, offered a fairly patronizing review of Kogoj’s magnum opus, the opera Black masks, indicating an issue of pragmatic social positioning, rather than a stylistic or compositional incommensurability: I consider Kogoj’s opera Black masks a powerful work, important in our literature. It is also a true work of the mind. Kogoj’s musical language 26 “Petruška je pomenil prekinitev s tradicijo in je zato tako močan in pomemben – prelome že tako delajo samo močni ljudje. Sedaj je dolžnost mlade generacije, da prekine s Petruško, ko že ostareva ideologija Schoenberga, Berga in Habe, dolžnost najmlajših pa je, da že s Schoenbergom in imenovanimi pretrga [...] Bergov Wozzeck dokazuje, da ima glasba (in gledališče) večje možnosti razvoja in drugo smer”. Slavko Osterc, “Ljubljana”, Zvuk 6 (1935), 229. 27 Katarina Bedina, “Nazori Slavka Osterca o tradiciji v glasbi in o glasbenem nacionalizmu”, Muzikološki zbornik 3 (1967), 91. 28 Ibid.
158
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical seems to me as the most appropriate for the composition of [Leonid Nikolaievič] Andreev’s drama. I felt several “omissions” in the composition that are otherwise quite favourable for the entire work, because it would be too long without them; but here and there they interrupt the thematic organicism. In this respect I would like to advise Kogoj to search for a definitive form for the whole composition, which he will probably do also without my advice. And – would it also be possible to simplify somewhat the singers’ parts? Overabundance of effort is certainly not an advertisement for a new work and it often results in less capable ensembles not even bothering to grapple with it because the rest of the program would suffer. It would be a pity to throw such a deep and fundamental work into the archive. 29 Osterc, who praised as the “strongest side” of Kogoj’s music his ability to “thematically process individual ideas” and the “purity of style” in Kogoj’s opera as one of his “most potent features”, added in the same breath: the “rhythmic side remains in [such] polyphonic works always in the background, which is perhaps the reason why we, again, divert from polyphony”. 30 And proceeds: Kogoj’s instrumentation is massive and sounds accomplished, unproblematic. I do not agree with it, but consider it to be impudent if anyone would wish to dictate to an artist in which direction he should work and, not least, what he should do. Every work from any [stylistic] direction can be good or bad. And if a certain opera is not agreeable to some because of its [stylistic] direction, it does not mean that it is bad because of that. 31 29 “Kogojevo opero Črne maske smatram za mogočno delo, pomembno posebno v naši literaturi. Je pa to tudi resničen umotvor. Kogojev glasbeni slog smatram kot najpripravnejši za kompozicijo Andrejeva drame. Mestoma sem čutil ‚skoke‘, ki so celoti sicer zelo v prid, ker bi bilo delo brez njih predolgo, vendar prekinjajo tu pa tam tematično organičnost. V tem pogledu bi svetoval Kogoju, da jim da definitivno formo, kar bo storil najbrž itak tudi brez mojega nasveta. In – ali bi ne bilo mogoče pevskih partij nekoliko poenostaviti? Preobilo truda namreč ni reklama za novo delo in pogosto tudi povzroča, da se ga šibkejši ansambli ne morejo lotiti, ker jim radi tega zaostaja drug repertoar. Tako globokega in tako temeljitega dela pa bi bilo škoda za arhiv.” Slavko Osterc, “Marij Kogoj: ‘Črne maske’ (Opera v dveh dejanjih)”, Ljubljanski zvon 49/ 6 (1929), 382. 30 Ibid. 31 “Kogojeva instrumentacija je masivna ter zveni kot taka polno, neproblematično. Jaz osebno se z njo ne strinjam, ali smatram za predrznost, ako bi kdo hotel temu ali onemu umetniku diktirati, v kaki smeri naj dela – in nazadnje še menda, kaj naj dela. Zakaj vsako delo katere si bodi smeri je lahko dobro ali slabo. In ako kaka opera glede smeri temu ali onemu ne prija, že radi tega ni slaba”. Ibid., 380.
159
Leon Stefanija In this “objectivized” view one needs to think of the “mainstream” concept as discussed by Joseph Auner or Adorno32 in his critique of the New Music – the objectification inevitably glides toward the concept of many faces of modernity;33 the quandaries involved in the mainstream self-positioning seem trivial just as Adorno’s indication that the new loses its value as soon as it is detached from the true spirit of the historical f low. The triviality dwells in the fact that – regardless if one speaks of certain metaphysics or more Bourdieuesque power gaming – one holds true to the very concept of modernity: “Das Neue ist nicht bloß das Andere, sondern es ist das wertvolle Andere”. 34 The whats and whens of the new are palpable as soon as the hierarchy between the “absolute top” and the “absolute bottom” is defined, of course, along with the authority standing beneath the construction. In Slovenian historiography, the range of modernism was bestowed on Slavko Osterc as its last pillar. It seems not the aesthetic but the axiological side that gave rise to the “hidden history” of contemporary music after World War II (to which I will come later). Namely, the historical and artistic importance of Kogoj’s oeuvre remains actually the same even today, after four “premieres” of his opera Black masks in Slovenia. And Kogoj certainly belongs to the mainstream concept of the classical in Slovene music, just as the role of Osterc survived several revivals after his death and earned many sympathetic responses from composers as well as performers. Yet, their music is obsolete, just as the music (and remembrance) of what may be set in line as indisputable successors of that “big tradition” of Slovene music: Lucijan Marija Škerjanc (1900–1973), Primož Ramovš (1921–1999), Uroš Krek (1922–2008), Lojze Lebič (1934), and Uroš Rojko (1954), and some from the younger generations. Osterc never introduced any defined idea of “hypermodernism” in the 1930s. Although it is said he never introduced any clear concept of modernism, 35 in the 1920s he advocated different Neoclassicisms and spoke favourably of a “hypermodernism”, while, at the same time, democratically (ironically?) calling for a qualitative differentiation of the stylistic diversity. His language 32 Joseph Auner, “Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern”, in The Cambridge history of twentieth-century music, ed. By Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 228–259. Theodor W. Adorno, “Das Altern der Neuen Musik“, in Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14: Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt. (Göttingen, Vandelhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956), 143–167. 33 See Matei Calinescu, Five faces of modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 34 Boris Groys, Über das Neue. Versuch einer Kulturökonomie, ed. by Michael Krüger (= Eidition Akzente) (München-Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992), 43. 35 Andrej Rijavec, “Slavko Osterc – an Expressionist?”, Musicological Annual 31 (1984), 33–41.
160
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical somehow opposed his thoughts, leaving his critical positions contingent on a level of a pragmatic partisanship without a firm theoretical foundation. If all styles are accepted as equal and the main critical ref lection is pointing toward qualitative scrutiny, how is it that no axiological theory of music was offered after Kogoj? Osterc could easily have developed one, while distancing himself from the Expressionist persistence clinging to the inner qualities of the music as advocated by Kogoj. Actually, the only theoretical foundation of contemporary music in the 1930s, the decade when Kogoj left public musical life and Osterc called for new paragons of modernism in 1936, was lurking behind Ukmar’s reconcilement between the modernist debauchery and the new search for a universal order. The idea of the New Order was fraught with questions that were to be encountered in varying ways three more times in the later debates: the first time within the context of a search for modernity after 1945; the second time in the debates on postmodernity that grew louder while approaching the last decade of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia; and for the last time as the echo of the quandaries about the stylistic fusions and idiosyncrasies of current music production. Ukmar’s new Classicism indicated fundamentally a trans-historical ideal of contemporary music. It included a social dimension of modernity as well as vaguely indicated aesthetic variables that supposedly brought together the extremes between the so-called avant-garde on one side and, on the other, the classical heritage as well as popular music. It may be added for a more plastic comparison of the history of the ideas in the era of extremes that socially as well as aesthetically understood modernity was, almost a quarter of a century after Ukmar, addressed by the inf luential academician Lojze Lebič. He warns against the “draught” of multiculturalism in which one should be aware of consumerist hedonism (in which, of course, everything must be classy without necessarily pretending to be classical itself ). Slovenia, according to Lebič, may become a “garbage dump for auditory-musical trash”36 and we thus need a “music-cultural parliament”, “music museum”, and even a “music arbitration court”!37 Ukmar’s idealistic (Hegelian) criterion of modernity in which an artist strives toward “connectedness with the universal will” found in Lebič a mirroring twin image. Not only on the social level (as a multicultural “draught”) or as a cultural axiology (“music museum”, “music arbitration court”) but also aesthetically. Just as Hölderlin was attracted in his Hyperion by the thought that the 36 Jože Kert, ed., Lojze Lebič. Od blizu in daleč II (Prevalje: Kulturno društvo Mohorjan, 2014), 15. 37 Ibid., 21.
161
Leon Stefanija world ref lects itself in the smallest things (“Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est”), art was seen as a place for reconciliation, or better: sublimation, of the world’s extremes (and paradoxes). The praise of Lebič’s artistic power to reconcile the musical extremes of the age of extremes – to achieve a certain classical balance within a socially as well as culturally unbalanced milieu – is most convincingly surveyed by Matjaž Barbo and Gregor Pompe:38 the extremes themselves are not praised (as with the “true avant-garde”), nor the cultural openness behind them, but rather their romantic reunion in the art world. In it, the reconcilement between the modernist debauchery and the new search for a universal order may be seen as one of the most ancient missions. Modernism, Modernisms, and the Popular: 1945–1991 It seems as if the “formalism” of the New Objectivity, as advocated by Osterc, and the intimacy of Kogoj’s Expressionism are the smallest yet most powerful players in the big story of modernism after World War II. Kogoj’s aesthetic religion of “evoking the spirits” and Osterc’s artistry of constructivism, knitting the shades of Neoclassicist and Neo-Baroque into statuesque ludic structures, both result in the listener being inspired or puzzled by the comparable, more or less predictable unpredictability of the musical f low. As with Kogoj’s Expressionist logic, Osterc’s New Objectivity opposite is driven by the same scholastic logic indicating that the most hidden things are fully revealed. They both seemingly dispense with any overt ideal of stylistic innovation. Yet the dynamism of it is the subjective touch: the musical content demands to be considered with utter care as a result of an idiosyncratic creative process of a dedicated master. Both figures were considered as paragons of classical modern thinking after World War II. Osterc, more a pragmatist, and Kogoj as a more spiritual figure are the beacons of inf luence for the generation of composers born after 1900. Among those, the historiographic interpretations tend to focus on the generation of composers born around 1930 and gathered in the early 1960s until the end of the 1970s in the group Pro musica viva: 38 See Matjaž Barbo, “Moja teža je moja glasba: koroška ljudska glasba in njen umetni izraz: predavanje na strokovnem posvetu Koroški skladatelji in koroška ljudska pesem, posvečenemu skladatelju akademiku Lojzetu Lebiču v sklopu sedemnajstih Sušnikovih dnevov Prevalje: Družbeni dom, 14. november 2014”, in Koroški skladatelji in koroška ljudska pesem: zbornik predavanj s strokovnega posveta, posvečenega 80. obletnici rojstva skladatelja akademika Lojzeta Lebiča / 17. Sušnikovi dnevi 2014“, ed. by Jože Ket (Prevalje: Družbeni dom, 2015), 6–17; Gregor Pompe, Zveneča metafizika: skladateljski opus akademika Lojzeta Lebiča (Ljubjana: Znansteva založba Filozofske fakultete [Zbirka Razprave FF], 2014).
162
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical The group Pro musica viva was certainly an important inf luence on the basic aesthetic principles of Slovenian music of the late fifties and sixties, after which New Music asserted itself as aesthetically relevant. It could be expected that such changes would happen to groups such as Pro musica viva, since at that time in Slovenia there were also enough composers outside the association who employed modern methods in their own works as well as institutions which propagated New Music in a different way – music whose inf luence spread irrepressibly throughout the world. However, Pro musica viva truly introduced the avant-garde core of this movement in Slovenia. It was important not only directly in its turn towards New Music, as we can observe in the compositions of its members in the active years of the group, but also indirectly as an inf luence on the forming of public opinion, above all with their concerts at which in addition to their own compositions members also performed the most technical works of contemporaneous European modernism. Parallel to this, Pro musica viva together with the Ensemble Slavko Osterc most heavily contributed to a new appreciation and enlivening of the Slovenian historical avant-garde. 39 The unofficial Draft of the statute of P[ro]M[usica]V[iva] emphasized individuality: “stylistic – aesthetic direction of each member is free.40 Yet the individuality of the group Pro musica viva can also be seen in the way Jakob Jež (1928), Milan Stibilj (1929–2014), Alojz Srebotnjak (1931–2010), Ivo Petrić (1931), Igor Štuhec (1932), Darijan Božič (1933), Lojze Lebič (1934) contributed to the group’s disintegration: “The ‘contemporaneity’ of compositional language was accomplished by such different standards that there was no longer any unity among the members”.41 The range of the “different standards” is to be deduced mainly through the phenomena of the festival arenas in the vicinity: Warszawska Jesień (Warsaw Autumn), Muzički biennale Zagreb (Zagreb Music Biennale), Donaueschinger Musiktagen, to a certain extent also Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt. They may be confined to what today stands for the classical tradition of the then-contemporary Polish composers, especially their aleatory and textural gestures, some serialism and differently understood post-serialism, sparse electroacoustic music, and several jazz-inf luenced pieces. Yet, 39 Matjaž Barbo, “The Group Pro musica viva”, in: Jernej Weiss, Matjaž Barbo and Leon Stefanija (eds.), Pro musica viva – 2005. Znamenja ob poti (Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta, 2005), 4–10. 40 Jernej Weiss, Matjaž Barbo and Leon Stefanija, eds., ibid., 14. 41 Barbo, “The Group Pro musica viva” (as note 39), 9.
163
Leon Stefanija the “truly avant-garde core” was actually far from a core: it was a compound universe. Thus Lojze Lebič proposed two decades ago two “streams” as typical for Slovene music since the 1970s: the “hard” (Darmstadt-version), “light” (textural music), and “enriched” tradition of modernism as opposed to two “Anti-modernisms”, the first one rooted in the historical styles and the second one in the “American Post-Cagean” approaches. At first glance his comments are seemingly objective. However, rather than speaking of the branching out of the dichotomy traditional/modern – he defines the criteria of modernity through four different streams42 – creating a questionable perspective. The questionability of this differentiation is based not only on the omission of the important inf luences of spectralism, new complexity, and sound art culture to the modernist tradition but also due to omitting the more integrative musical aesthetics that expand the “pluralisation” of the traditionalist as well as modernist approaches. The third stream or the crossover ideals are just as unceremoniously omitted, although the very musical practices about which Lebič speaks as a continuation of modernism are strongly indebted to the concept of the communicativeness that has f looded what at a glance seems incommensurable at least since the middle of the 1980s. Although one may indicate the beginnings of Slovenian Postmodernity around the beginning of the 1970s in the oeuvre of Primož Ramovš, historiography stubbornly ignores what musical practices had offered for almost a century. Mladen Dolar provides a neat description of the listening inclinations: One can have the figure of the defender of the grand tradition, keeping alive the memory and the practices of the happy times when auratic music was still possible: not only through the noble endeavors of musicology, which keeps the archive in order and scrutinizes it with its strict methodology, highlighting its ever-new facets, but also through concert practice, abetted by the recording industry, which has come 42 Lojze Lebič, “Glasovi časov, IV”, Naši zbori 47/3–4 (1994), 60–61. (1) “Composers or works that also in the middle of the sharpened modernism stack with their original decisions, most often rooted in Neoclassicism or late romanticism and postimpressionist direction”. (2) “Composers or works that persist in the field of modernity in such a way that continue the more demanding ‘Darmstadt-variant’ or elaborate the simpler energetic-textural aleatoric direction”. (3) “Composers of works that from a silent opposition to the modernist mannerism find their examples in the American Post-Cagean direction”. (4) “Composers or works that widen – pluralize – the modernist presentational world in such a way that they enrich it with many different elements: of the past, the mythical, folklore […] palimpsest covering of the archetypal with the youthful and the new”.
164
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical to serve as a new agent of social distinction and indicator of social status, education, taste and “cultural capital”, with its congregation of connoisseurs and its own star system. Alternatively, one can adopt the opposite attitude: that popular music, on the contrary, is a good thing to have happened – a democratic redeployment of music to bring it, finally, within reach of everyone, chaotic and messy though it may be; a music despised only by snobs, assertions of its inferiority being indiscriminate and of dubious validity. One can, if one is willing to lend it an ear, find in popular music some aspects of dignity, originality and authenticity, commercial as it is; and many portions of it cannot be so easily dismissed. Or, thirdly, one can adopt a strict modernist stance, according to which any adherence to the great tradition, its practices and its symbolic underpinnings, its cult value, can only be false in the era of the general degradation of music, its vilification, its commodification […] I am not trying to advocate any of these attitudes, although I am not opposed to any of them and can find a certain sympathy for all of them, contradictory though they are.43 Are these three, as Dolar cautiously adds, “simplified alternatives” really alternatives or just facts? If seen from a perspective of the generation that came into the fore after the “heroic years” of modernism, that is in the 1980s, it is true that the artistic ideals spring from different modernisms. Formulated in al fresco manner, the main references may be anchored in three strains of modernism: (1) the sound-art (new complexity and spectralism) of Uroš Rojko (b.1954), Urška Pompe (b.1969) Vito Žuraj (b.1979), or Matej Bonin (b.1982), with certain theatrical f lair in the work of Bojana Šaljić Podešva (b.1978) and Petra Strahovnik (b.1986), (2) a more classical concert tradition of a stylistically fuzzy nature, in popular journalism described as an integrative concept of “moderate modernism” in the oeuvre of Tomaž Svete (b.1956), Črt Sojar Voglar (b.1974), and several works of Nina Šenk (b.1982). (3) an alternative sound art as cherished by the Institute for Sonic Arts Research or Sploh Institute for Art Production and Publishing44 and others which focuses on interconnectivity of genres and the inclusion of not only a wide range of musicians but also emphasis on improvisation and the utilization of technology. 43 Dolar, “Function beyond function?”, 17, 18. 44 http://www.irzu.org, http://www.sploh.si/indexeng.html (last accessed: 3 January 2016).
165
Leon Stefanija One of the important goals of the Sploh Institute, for example, is formulated tellingly not as a musical but as a cultural ally: “Its purpose is to connect established institutional spaces of artistic activity with premises of the dynamic action of NGOs”.45 Similarly positioned is the publisher Celovitost glasbene izkušnje that “connects individual musicians and musical genres into new totality”.46 It seems that these musicians – often more or less recognizably enriched with technological know-how – pursue the idea of a free and authentic experience rooted in improvisation. One of the critics noted that this is a new, in the transnational space oriented younger generation of improvisers. They introduce in music another kind of sensitivity, markedly slow, that introspectively builds up the f low of the play, emphasizes the aspect of creating and listening to a series of ‘micro-events’ that may occur during the session. There are many links with other musics, also electrophonic ones, that are not subordinated only to a dance and elaborate in the first place the aspects of the sound itself and alongside that force some of the sounds into art galleries.47 The sensitivity, introspection, authenticity, autonomy of the sound itself, technologically up-to-date, culturally (ethically) upright: the avant-gardism from the 1960s has obviously won historical recognition of a classical phenomenon. The very concept of music has been shifted toward artistry, toward the ancient meaning of the ars as a “more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones and focuses on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics”.48 The above-mentioned examples are granted, by critics and listeners alike, as successful, fine, respected species of the fine art of music. However, the difficulty appears when the same variables are applied to what usually falls 45 http://www.sploh.si/zvokotok.html (last accessed: 3 January 2016). 46 www.celinka.si (last accessed: 3 January 2016). 47 “Nastopala je torej nova, v transnacionalni prostor zazrta mlajša generacija improvizatorjev, ki v muziciranje vnaša drugo vrsto občutenj, izrazito počasi, introspektivno gradi tok igre, poudarja vidik ustvarjanja in poslušanja niza »mikrodogodkov«, ki se lahko pripetijo med igro. Stičišč z drugimi glasbami, tudi z elektrofonskimi, ki niso podrejene zgolj plesu in obdelujejo predvsem vidike zvoka samega, zraven pa nekatere pretirano silijo v umetnostne galerije, je precej”. Ičo Vidmar, “Improvizacija kot napotek za vsakdanje življenje”, Dnevnik (9 December 2013) https://www.dnevnik.si/1042615939/kultura/glasba/improvizacija-kotnapotek-za-vsakdanje-zivljenje# (last accessed: 3 January 2016). 48 Thomas Adajian, “The definition of art”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/artdefinition/ (last accessed: 3 January 2016).
166
Slovenian Modernisms since 1918: Evasive Idea(l)s of the C lassical into the camp of popular music culture. An imaginary (unheard-of ) line of Slovene popular music would include the following performers, composers, and institutions: Slavko Avsenik (alias Oberkrainer Musik), Kameleoni (a pop group established in 1965), Radio Študent (1969), Študentski kulturni center (ŠKUC, Student Cultural and Artistic Centre; since 1972), Pankrti (a punk group established in 1977), Laibach band (1980), Druga godba (festival of “other musics”, 1984) and DJ Umek (since 1993). The afterwards of the “alternative” popular (also music) culture in Slovenia (Metelkova City Autonomous Cultural Center, since 1993; or Kino Šiška, since 2008, among others) 49 offer platforms for reproduction of the locally appealing, once understood as new musical spaces. Whatever did not pertain to the classical or the modernist tradition remained within the field of a vast space called popular music. The Four Faces of Slovene Musical Modernism If the fin de siècle musical modernism in Slovenia, ascribed to some compositions especially by Anton Lajovic (1878–1960), Emil Adamič (1877–1936) and Janko Ravnik (1891–1982), was tied to the stylistic ideals of Impressionism and musical modernism, their aim was to create music of a fine “craftsmanship” that would fit the developments of the classical tradition. Thus their ideal may be called technical modernism. However, in the interwar period, Kogoj’s spiritual aestheticism slipped away from the stylistically or technically palpable realm of musical poetics. His Expressionist ideals introduced a realm of incommensurable aesthetic ref lections into aesthetical or phenomenological modernism specific to musical Expressionism. After Kogoj, Osterc’s work, anchored in the New Objectivity ideas, turned again toward more technically definable models. Yet Osterc pushed the whole aesthetic realm toward a rather inconsistent set of pragmatic variables; he actually devised a pragmatic modernism in which defending the new exists regardless of its technical and historical aspects (offering yet another version of the aesthetical modernist imagery). After World War II, the members of Pro musica viva were not solely focused on the technically more advanced sound world of their modernist predecessors but rather had begun exploring what remains today as the essence of different modernist stances. Even their name indicates an entity that has already become, by the time of their “heroic years”, an aesthetically integrative, heteronomous and heterogeneous ideal of social modernism. It is an imagery of the twentieth century in which all three earlier mentioned modernisms take place: technical modernism, incommensurable or aesthetic ( phenomenological) modern49 http://www.metelkovamesto.org (last accessed: 3 January 2016).
167
Leon Stefanija ism, and pragmatic modernism (that has actually nothing to do with “the music itself ”) and social modernism, as the benevolently pragmatic formulation of a music critic about the music of the last century and, within it, “anew discovered improvisational allure and electro-acoustical soundings, music of such a serious and critical relation toward the sound, the [musical] material and the creative process”. 50 Was not the same “serious and critical relation toward the sound” praised by the Expressionists and the Neoclassicists alike, reiterated by Adorno, spectralists, as well as praised by the New Age and DIY culture of the alternative musickings? In this respect, our modernist postmodernity – in which the imagery of modernism seems pulverized yet omnipresent – seems to await the debate about the classical. Namely, if as a reference the definition of classical by Rudolf Bockholdt is consulted with its three modes of existence – the ripeness (die Reife), common understandability (Allgemeinverständlichkeit), and the qualitative demand (der Anspruch; “Zuerkennung eines hohen Ranges”), 51 it is inevitable to search for the criteria also in the more socially founded context of the common understandability. It remains, of course, an open question as to how, when and to whom this common understandibility is defined.
50 Primož Trdan, “Regeneracija scene”, Odzven (21 December 2015) http://www.sigic.si/ odzven/regeneracija-scene (last accessed: 3 January 2016). 51 Rudolf Bockholdt, ed., Über das Klassische (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 231–236.
168
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States
Benjamin Knysak Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM), Baltimore
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States Abstract. An examination of the little-known immigrant music periodical literature published in the United States. Four journals – The Parlour Review / La Revue des Salons, the Deutsche Musik-Zeitung für die Vereinigten Staaten, the Bühnen-Almanach des St. Louis-Opern Hauses, and Kolo: A Monthly to Musical Artistic and Social Endeavors Among the Southern Slavs in the United States – are examined along with those involved with their foundation: Georg Carstensen, Philipp Mathias Wolsieffer, Heinrich Börnstein, and Ivan Mladineo. The significance and neglect of the immigrant musical press in American musical historiography is highlighted.
The United States is a nation of immigrants.1 From 1820, the first date in which statistics were kept by the United States government, to 1950, over 39 million immigrants arrived and were granted legal status, not counting additional numbers of undocumented immigrants. 2 During this period, the immigrant population in the U.S. rose to a peak of 14.8% in 1890 and ultimately fell to 6.9% by 1950. 3 Throughout the nineteenth century, Germans constituted the largest non-English speaking immigrant population, reaching a peak of some 1.4 million arrivals between 1880 and 1889.4 In the early twentieth century, Italians (1.9 million between 1900 and 1909) and the various nationalities jointly categorized as “Austria-Hungary” (2.0 million in this same decade) replaced Germans as the largest arriving populations. In the 1930s and 1940s, immigration declined significantly, resulting from the restrictive and xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924 and the worldwide depression of the 1930s. 1 2
Though historical memory seems to fade in current politics. For official decadal immigration statistics by nationality, see the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigration-statistics/yearbook/ 2013/LPR/table2.xls. For an excellent visualization of this data, see http://insightfulinteraction.com/immigration 200years.html (last accessed: 29 October 2015). 3 http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-overtime (last accessed: 29 October 2015) 4 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (as note 2).
169
Benjamin Knysak For as long as there has been immigration to the United States, there has been a f lourishing immigrant press. While no exact count of periodical publications issued by immigrants has been published, the number is in the thousands. According to statistics gathered by Lauren Kessler, between 1884 and 1920, the peak years of immigration, 3,444 new publications were begun “by immigrants”. 5 Karl Arndt and May Olson estimated some 5,000 Germanlanguage publications alone between 1732 and 1955.6 From the earliest studies,7 scholars have remarked upon certain common purposes of the immigrant or ethnic press:8 the need to educate readers, to aid with assimilation, to provide essential news both foreign and domestic, to foster community bonds through national identification, to promote cultural activities, and to satiate readers’ desire for nostalgia for the “old country”. Music intersected with these purposes, defining cultural identity and binding community: per Richard Crawford, “Few symbols of national identity are more potent or immediate in their impact than music, which can create collective consciousness on the spot”.9 Furthermore, given the establishment of a f lourishing musical press in most European countries by the second half of the nineteenth century, the creation of a parallel in their new country fulfilled many of the purposes outlined above. These journals constitute an important source of information for the musical culture of immigrants, demonstrate the tapestry of American musical life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and open new areas for musical research. This paper – the first of a series focusing on this littleknown literature – aims to highlight the importance of these sources through three vignettes treating four journals and those persons associated with their foundation. The only music journal published in a foreign language in the pre-1848 United States, The Parlour Review was published simultaneously in English5 6 7 8
9
170
Lauren Kessler, The dissident press (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1984), 90. Karl J. R. Arndt and May E. Olson, German-American newspapers and periodicals, 1732–1955: History and bibliography (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1961). See especially Robert E. Park, The immigrant press and its control (New York: Harper Bros., 1922), the first major study, which set the framework for subsequent publications. The terms “immigrant” and “ethnic” when describing the press have been the subject of some debate as use of the term “immigrant” identifies with first-generation immigrants, whereas “ethnic” identifies with non-English-speaking communities regardless of the generational distance from initial arrival. See Andrea Hickerson and Kristin L. Gustafson, “Revisiting the immigrant press”, Journalism (28 July 2014), 1–18. However, for the purposes of this paper, I shall use the term “immigrant” except in cases where I describe a multi-generational audience or community. Richard Crawford, America’s musical life: A history (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 784.
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States
171
Benjamin Knysak
Figs 1 and 2. The Parlour Review and Journal of Music, Literature and the Fine Arts / La revue des salons: Journal de musique, de littérature, et des beaux arts (Philadelphia, 1838), 10 nos. Weekly. From the RIPM Archive of Music Periodicals
172
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States and French-language editions. An historical curiosity owing to the time of its publication when few music journals were founded10 and the small number of French-speaking immigrants in the United States,11 the journal was a product of its editor, Georg (George) Carstensen, a Danish voyageur and mercurial entrepreneur, best known for the establishment of entertainment venues in Copenhagen, including the well-known Tivoli Gardens. Born in Algiers in 1812 to the Danish Consul General Johan Arnold Hieronymus Carstensen, Georg Carstensen served in the Danish Army from 1831 to 1835. Upon discharge he travelled widely through Spain, Morocco, Algiers and Paris in the years 1835 to 1837 before embarking from Malaga to New York, arriving on 19 October 1837. Bearing little baggage and listing his occupation simply as “Gentleman”12 Carstensen proceeded to Philadelphia and within two months of arrival began publication of The Parlour Review, the first issue appearing on 6 January 1838 and the final, no. 10, appearing on 10 March 1838. During its short run, the journal garnered praise in other publications, especially for the quality of the lithograph portraits which accompanied each issue.13 Both English-language and French-language content draws heavily on European sources, likely collected by Carstensen in Paris before journeying to the United States. English-language content features often unsigned excerpts from George Hogarth’s Musical history, biography, and criticism,14 dealing with Beethoven, Hebrew Music, music of the ancient world, Alessandro Stradella, and a history of the song “Roast beef of Old England”. Biographical sketches of Paganini, Rossini, Cherubini, and sopranos Angelica Catalani, Giudetta Pasta, and Adelaide Tosi appear alongside anecdotes drawn from writings of Thomas Busby and journals including Galignani’s Messenger, La Belle Assemblée, and Bentley’s Miscellany. A correspondent’s account of the Italian opera season in Havana and a biographical sketch of Maria Caradori-Allan, recently arrived in Philadelphia for concerts, are two rare examples of original content. 10 Between 1820 and 1848, a mere twenty music journals were founded in the United States, nearly all failing within three years. Imogen Fellinger, et al. “Periodicals”, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, ed. by Deane Root. Oxford University Press; http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/21338 (last accessed: 21 January 2016). 11 In the years 1830 to 1839, 538,381 immigrants were granted permanent residency, of which only 39,330 or roughly 7% were from France. 12 Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897. Microfilm Publication M 237,675 rolls. NAI: 6256867. Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36. National Archives at Washington, D.C. 13 “The Parlour Review”, Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) 12 (13 January 1838), 2. “Editor’s table”, Waldie’s Octavo Library 5/7 (13 February 1838), [3]. 14 George Hogarth, Musical history, biography, and criticism (London: J. W. Parker, 1835).
173
Benjamin Knysak La Revue des Salons generally treats the same subjects as The Parlour Review but reproduces different sources. For example, biographical sketches dealing with Beethoven in The Parlour Review are drawn from Hogarth’s Musical History while the same subject in the French parallel publication is treated by an article entitled “Monument de Beethoven” from La Revue et Gazette musical de Paris. Much content is drawn from this journal, including Jules Janin’s serialized sketch of Giovanni Gabrieli and his article on Stradella, a portrait of music in Spain, a history of the Théâtre-Italien, and the “Chronique” section containing musical news primarily from Paris and London. Musical supplements, largely of piano music and songs, some with guitar accompaniment, appear alongside each issue; high-quality lithographed portraits of musical figures including Niccolò Paganini, Angelica Catalani, and Luigi Cherubini precede issues. Issue number two contains a portrait and biographical sketches in English and French of Abd-el-Kader (Abdelkader ibn Muhieddine), the Algerian leader who led the resistance to French invasion during the 1830s. The sudden demise of the journal may be attributed to multiple causes. First, although the 1830s saw a significant rise in French immigration with some 39,000 new arrivals, many settling in Pennsylvania and New York, the French-speaking community in Philadelphia was largely restricted to a small, educated elite and a group of Bonapartists who arrived in 1815, many connected with the French Benevolent Society, a small but wealthy organization which reported 105 members in 1835.15 The content of La Revue des Salons, a significant portion of which was copied from Parisian journals, was clearly intended for an educated readership. Although the journal was known and distributed in New York, Carstensen may not have been able to maintain a large subscriber base, sufficiently educated and concerned with European musical and artistic life to continue publication. The complete lack of domestic content, along with the American inclination towards nativism, a tendency which would grow in the two decades following publication of the journal, may have played a part. Lastly, Carstensen’s nomadic inclination may have contributed to the journal’s demise; he departed for Le Havre on 11 April 1838 ending his brief first stay in the United States.16 Or, perhaps Carstensen simply ran out of clippings to reprint.
15 Francis James Dallett, “The French in Philadelphia: The French benevolent society”, in Invisible Philadelphia: Community through voluntary organizations, ed. by Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gilliam (Philadelphia: Atwater Kent Museum, 1995), 78–82, here 81. 16 “Shipping News. Passengers”, New-York Spectator (New York, Thursday, 12 April 1838), 2.
174
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States Upon his return to Copenhagen, Carstensen founded two journals, Portefeuillen (1839–1841) and Figaro (1841–1842) before developing the Tivoli Gardens (1843) and later the Casino Theater (1847, demolished 1960). After a dispute concerning management of the Tivoli, Carstensen traveled to the Danish West Indies and joined the Army, serving as the Governor General’s aide de camp.17 Following a second journey to New York, during which time he designed the New York Crystal Palace, he returned to Copenhagen to found a competitor to the Tivoli, the Alhambra, only to die in 1857 before its realization. The years following the failed European revolutions of 1848 saw a large wave of immigration into the United States. This infusion of liberal, educated persons, politically and morally earnest, many German and commonly referred to as the “forty-eighters”, is often credited with strengthening the abolitionist movement, forming a core element of the growing Republican party, and with the other large immigrant population of the 1850s, the Irish, contributing to the political environment which ultimately led to the United States Civil War (1861–1865). The press was a central, unifying element to German immigrant communities. From 1732, the year which Benjamin Franklin founded the first non-English language newspaper in the United States, the Philadelphische Zeitung, to 1961, approximately 5000 German-language periodicals were published.18 The arrival of the “forty-eighters” – educated, literate, and suffused in the development of German Kultur – lead to the rapid expansion of this literature; the interests of this educated community contributed to a broadening of subjects treated. The first German-language music periodical appeared in the 1850s and such publications continued to appear in the United States with only minor interruptions until 1978. Although many of these journals raise interesting and neglected musicological issues (which will be the subject of future papers) the two journals discussed here present interesting portraits of the German immigrant community in the pre-Civil War period, an era dominated by the concerns of the “fortyeighters”. The Deutsche Musik-Zeitung für die Vereinigten Staaten (hereafter, DMZ), edited by Philipp Mathias Wolsieffer (1808, Bavaria–8 October 1872, Philadelphia) and published by Philipp Rohr, is the first of many German immigrant music journals to appear in the United States. Though having 17 Virgin Islands Social History Associates. US Virgin Islands census (Danish period 1835–1911), Virgin Islands Social History Associates (VISHA), PO Box 338, Frederiksted, US Virgin Islands 00841, www.ancestry.com (last accessed: 18 December 2015). 18 Arndt and Olson, German-American newspapers and periodicals, 1732–1955 (as note 6) as cited in James Bergquist, “The German-American press”, in The ethnic press in the United States, ed. by Sally Miller (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 131–159, here 131.
175
Benjamin Knysak
Fig. 3. Deutsche Musik-Zeitung für die Vereinigten Staaten (later Staaten von Nordamerika) (Philadelphia, 1856–1861), 5 vols., Semimonthly, later varies in periodicity. From the RIPM Archive of Music Periodicals.
176
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States
Fig. 4. Frontispiece to the Bühnen-Almanach des St. Louis Opern Hauses 1 (1 January 1861). Yearly. Courtesy Missouri Historical Society.
177
Benjamin Knysak arrived in 1835 and thus before the “forty-eighters”, Wolsieffer, a music publisher, teacher and choral director active in Baltimore and Philadelphia, undoubtedly saw a significant opportunity with the arrival of a large and educated population. While in Baltimore in 1837, he organized what has been characterized as the first Sängerfest in the United States, leading a joint performance of the Baltimore Liederkranz and the Philadelphia Männerchor, both ensembles which he founded.19 Modeled on similar German festivals, the Sängerfeste centered around choral singing, vocal competitions, and beer drinking. These festivals would develop into a significant aspect of GermanAmerican culture, growing significantly in the years after 1848. Many of the subsequent German-American music journals would be connected to the Sängerbünde or feature content related to choral singing. The DMZ quickly developed into a journal of significance containing much valuable information about the German immigrant community and Englishspeaking majority. Modeled on European journals, Wolsieffer declares the purpose of the journal to be the promotion of musical progress, not merely entertainment, 20 and outlines a prospectus of (1) general musical writings (theoretical, historical, practical), (2) specialized writings with a focus on Gesangvereine, (3) reviews of musical literature, (4) correspondence, (5) amusements, (6) news, and (7) musical supplements. 21 Articles on a range of musical topics, including biography, harmony, pedagogy, and national musics predominate. Regular musical news, domestic and foreign, is a central feature of each issue. Reports of musical activities from cities with major German-American populations, including New York, St. Louis, St. Paul (Minnesota), Pittsburgh, Boston, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, and Milwaukee, are supplemented by reports from many smaller cities (i.e., Columbus, Ohio; Bellville, Illinois; Oshkosh, Wisconsin), often supplied by subscribers, which demonstrates both the geographic reach of the journal and the growing subscriber base, reaching a circulation of 5000 by 1 January 1859. 22 While many reports note activities of local Gesangvereine, others report on musical events, such as the pianist Sigismund Thalberg’s concert tour or local operatic 19 Albert Bernhardt Faust, The German element in the United States, vol. 2 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 272–273. 20 “Kann die Verbreitung eines solchen Blattes den musikalischen Fortschritt fördern? oder vermag sie höchstens eine vorübergehende Unterhaltung zu gewähren? Während wir das Letztere nebenbei auch erstreben, ist doch das Erstere Hauptzweck, uns wenn eine Zeitung nicht nützlich sein kann, so ist es besser, sie besteht nicht”. DMZ 1/1 (1 September 1856), 1. 21 Ibid. 22 “5000 Auflage” is claimed above the masthead. DMZ 3/9 (1 January 1859), 451.
178
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States and orchestral concerts. The growing importance of New York as a musical center23 can be observed through the regular and lengthy reports from Theodore Hagen, editor of the English-language New York Musical Review and Gazette and a recent immigrant himself (1854). Beginning in the second volume, Hagen is appointed Editor for New York, identified as such beneath the journal’s masthead. Reports of the predominantly German Philharmonic Society of New York and its conductor, Theodore Eisfeld, figure prominently, as do reports of pianist William Mason and the violinist and future conductor Theodore Thomas. Hagen also contributes a serialized analysis of American music (“Der National-character der Amerikaner und sein Einf luß auf die Entwickelung der Musik”, 1858). Following the demise of the DMZ and the Civil War, Hagen founded two German-language music journals, the New Yorker Musik-Zeitung (New York, 1865–1879) and the Neue New Yorker MusikZeitung (1866–1871). Foreign musical news, at first largely gathered from other musical journals (Signale für die musikalische Welt, Süddeutsche Musik-Zeitung, Rheinische MusikZeitung) is supplemented by correspondence beginning in the second volume, most regularly from the composer Louis Köhler in Königsberg. Activities of composers and performers ( Jenny Lind, Josef Staudigl, Richard Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer) are noted regularly as are accounts of Sängerfeste. Musical supplements contain predominantly secular music including four-part choral works, folk songs, drinking songs, and polkas. The journal abruptly ceases following the 15 April 1861 issue, likely a result of the political crisis following the outbreak of hostilities between the nascent Confederacy and the Union. The Bühnen-Almanach des St. Louis-Opern Hauses was the product of the revolutionary and entrepreneurial Heinrich Börnstein. Edited by Carl Börnstein, Heinrich’s son and Secretary for the Opera House, 24 and Ferdinand Kreuter, an employee of the House, the journal completed only one volume before the onslaught of the Civil War. Born in Hamburg, but raised in Lemberg (Lwów) after his family fled the French siege of Hamburg in 1813, Börnstein studied medicine at the University in Lemberg and developed an interest in
23 And large potential subscriber base: New York in the nineteenth century is often cited as having the third largest population of German speakers worldwide, behind Berlin and Vienna. Cited in William A. Everett, Review of Music in German immigrant theater: New York City, 1840–1940. Eastman Studies in Music (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009). American Music 28/3 (2010), 378–380. 24 Heinrich Börnstein, Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und Neuen Welt. Memoiren eines Unbedeutenden, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1884), 364.
179
Benjamin Knysak the theater. 25 After five years in the Austro-Hungarian Army based in Olmütz, he pursued a theatrical career in Vienna where he married Marie Steltzer, a Hungarian actress. Following successful theatrical tours through the AustroHungarian Empire, performing with his wife, and gaining experience as a theater director, he traveled to Paris in 1842 to assist a German opera company which performed at the Théâtre-Italien. Unfortunately, the company became stranded in Paris for lack of funds to return. While promoting the company’s cause, Börnstein became acquainted with Franz Liszt who performed a benefit concert in support of the troupe. 26 Upon securing the opera troupe’s return, Börnstein remained in Paris deepening a previous interest in radical politics, publishing the journal Vorwärts! Pariser Signale aus Kunst, Wissenschaft, Musik und geselligem Leben (Paris, 1844–1845) with Max Maretzek as music critic (later to become famous as an operatic impresario in New York). Sponsored by Meyerbeer, and edited by Karl Ludwig Bernays, it published polemics by, among others, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Heine, and Georg Herwegh, all with whom Börnstein became personally acquainted in the smoke- and debate-filled editorial meetings. 27 After the journal was disbanded by the French Government in 1845, Börnstein continued his political agitations, culminating in an 1848 attempted invasion across the Rhine with some 12,000 German laborers working in France. Following failure of his plot and subsequent eviction from France, Börnstein arrived in New Orleans on 5 April 1849 to begin again. After a brief stay in Highland, Illinois, Börnstein settled in St. Louis where he soon took over as editor and proprietor of the mass-circulation Anzeiger des Westerns. Following a decade of publishing and commercial success, he purchased the Variétés Theater in 1859, operating it as a German opera house, fulfilling a desire to establish a robust German theater in his new city. 28 Although only one issue of the Bühnen-Almanach was completed and published, the content ref lects Börnstein’s Viennese roots and his evident desire to develop an opera house and theater of a similar level. Modeled on the various Bühnen-Almanache or Theater-Almanache published in Germany and Austria, 25 Ibid., vol. 1, 76–79. 26 And caused a scandal in the process; see Dana Gooley, “Liszt, Heinrich Börnstein and the German exile cause”, in Liszt et la France, ed. by Malou Haine and Nicolas Dufetel (Paris: Vrin, 2012), 45–58. 27 Börnstein, Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und Neuen Welt (as note 24), vol. 1, 351. 28 “Es war von jeher mein beständiges Streben und mein heißester Wunsch gewesen, in St. Louis, das ich jetzt als meine Heimath betrachtete, ein stabiles deutsches Theater zu begründen, und ich versäumte nichts, um das Unternehmen so vollkommen, als es die amerikanischen Theaterverhältnisse erlaubten, herzustellen, und sparte dafür weder Mühen, noch Ausgaben.” Börnstein, Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und Neuen Welt (as note 24), vol. 2, 244.
180
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States the journal documents an extensive operatic and concert season in St. Louis and the German-language New-Yorker Stadttheater. Following an account of the first performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz by Otto Rupius, a German novelist famous for his depictions of the American west, there is an extensive history of German-language theaters in St. Louis from the establishment of the first theater in 1842, including both theatrical and operatic productions. Heinrich Börnstein contributes reminiscences of the Wiener Volks-Bühne in 1826 and a sketch of the Theater an der Wien, both drawn from his diaries recorded during student days in Vienna. An account of a conversation between Kaiser Franz I and the actor Ludwig Löwe follows and the volume concludes with advertising. Preceding the volume is a frontispiece portrait of Marie Börnstein, Heinrich’s wife and an accomplished actress, surrounded by a crown of laurels imprinted with the titles of the dramas and the dramatic roles she played (fig. 4). A remarkable portrait, the 47-year old Marie is depicted with a stern humility, wearing a dark blouse and a brooch attached to a white collar, her hair tied back. Her years of age visible without an overt attempt to feminize her, she appears surrounded by the document of a successful career – a professional woman. The portrait conveys a sense of solemnity and earnestness. If we view this portrait with Martha Banta’s assertion that “images of American women were created as ideas”, 29 the portrait expresses not only her personal achievements but also the aspirations which the Börnsteins had for the St. Louis Opera House and for the development of a musical and literary culture in this developing New World frontier outpost. 30 Unfortunately, such development would not come to fruition. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a militia of Confederate sympathizers, led by Missouri Governor Claiborne F. Jackson, attempted to seize the Union arsenal in St. Louis. Börnstein was elected Colonel of the Second Missouri Volunteer Regiment (at the age of 56) and led the regiment in the arrest of the militia. He subsequently witnessed rioting in St. Louis (known as the Camp Jackson Affair), sent a description of it to Abraham Lincoln, who then appointed Börnstein as United States Consul to Bremen throughout the Civil War, only to be dismissed in 1866 by Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor. Preferring to stay in Europe, he became director of the Theater in der Josephstadt in Vienna where he lived out his years, publishing an expansive two-volume memoir. 29 Martha Banta, Imaging American women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), xxxi. 30 Or perhaps, to quote Richard Kitson, expressed in a manner befitting frontier culture, “I wouldn’t want to argue with her about the potatoes”.
181
Benjamin Knysak
Fig. 5. Kolo: A Monthly to Musical Artistic and Social Endeavors among the Southern Slavs in the United States (New York, 1924–1925), seven numbers. Monthly. In English, Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian. Courtesy Immigrant Archives of the University of Minnesota.
182
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States Published by Ivan Mladineo (1889–1938), without a separate editor named, only one issue of this journal, held by the Immigrant Archives at the University of Minnesota, is known to exist in United States libraries. 31 Born in Pučišća (Pusicse), Croatia, and arriving in New Orleans in 1908 with a declared occupation as “laborer”, little is known about Mladineo. According to World War I draft registration cards we know he was living in Chicago acting as Manager of the “Croatian Daily News”. 32 Mladineo then went to work for the Yugoslav Bureau of the Foreign Language Government Information Service to distribute information on America’s purpose in World War I to foreignlanguage communities. By 1922, in an application for a passport, he described himself as a “publicity man”. 33 Between 1922 and 1935, he would travel to Europe at least five times and publish many important books, almanacs, and articles concerning the history and activities of Croatians, Serbians, and Slovenes in America. During this time, he also served as a New York correspondent to Sveta Cecilia, the foremost Croatian music journal. Mladineo, in an English-language article entitled “The Purpose”, 34 intends Kolo to be a “clearing house” for musical and artistic information, beyond that which was available in Croatian-American newspapers. He also intended for it to be an organ of cultural exchange: “the Kolo will try to explain to its readers the exalted meaning of their cultural work not only for them and for their group but for America herself, and inspire them to attain a fit place in American cultural life”. 35 The first issue opens with a photograph and an article celebrating the arrival of the Croatian violinist Zlatko Baloković in New York. Baloković, who would have a significant musical and political career in the United States, is touted as an emblem of national pride, one whose successes could ref lect positively upon Croatians in the United States, much as famous Italian singers did for Italian-Americans. 36 Much of the 31 Though a run of the journal exists in the Knjižnica Zdravka Blažekovića. 32 Possibly Hvratska zastava (1904–1917). He is not listed on the newspaper’s publication statement, but in a non-editorial role, he likely would not have been. Registration State: Illinois; Registration County: Cook; Roll: 1503993; Draft Board, 83. Original data: United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917–8. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. 33 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington D.C.; NARA Series: Passport Applications, 2 January 1906–31 March 1925; Roll # 2097 (certificates: 217726218099, 11 Sep 1922–12 Sep 1922). 34 Kolo 1/1 (February 1924), 3. 35 Ibid. 36 “Usprkos svog mnogo većeg broja, Talijani u Sjedinjenim Državama ne bi ništa značili, kad ne bi imali svoje glasovite pjevače, kad Metropolitan Opera House u New Yorku i drugdje po ostalim krajevima ove prostrane zemlje ne bi predstavljali ekspozituru njihove umjetnosti”. Ibid., 2.
183
Benjamin Knysak journal’s content concerns the activities and needs of “a hundred and more singing and musical societies in our colonies”. 37 Kolo features articles for these societies (Slovenian pronunciation, the importance of folk song, musical competitions, news) and a directory of 74 Croatian and Slovene choral societies in the United States. Reviews of compositions, for example, Božidar Širola’s ballet Sjene and Risto Savin’s opera Gosposvetski Sen; news of Croatian and Slovene musicians, active in the United States and Yugoslavia; and summaries of published writings in music journals are also found. Sveta Cecilija reports on recent publications in Kolo, republishing an excerpt from a June 1925 survey of American music. 38 Kolo represents the first significant introduction of information about Croatian music to the United States. 39 A thorough study of this journal awaits a specialist. * * * This paper is a mere sketch of four journals and the individuals involved in their creation. At first glance the four may seem disconnected; one the product of a restless traveler perhaps in search of fortune, one of a musician and publisher fulfilling a growing need for musical information, one of an earnest political refugee, and one demonstrating pride in the cultural achievements of his ethnic group. Yet each of these creators, for as interesting as their individual cases may be, reflect the broad range of reasons for emigrating and experiences once arrived. Each of these individuals, and by extension their work, attempts to inform, reflect and mold the culture of their ethnic communities. Each provides information supporting cultural pride and the broader dissemination of their musical culture. Perhaps most importantly, these creators and their works are only four examples of a larger number of immigrant music journals, not counting musical information found in general arts journals and daily newspapers.40 The musical culture of the United States has been informed, shaped, and renewed by successive waves of émigrés. This is a common “truism” in American musical history. Yet, for as central as immigration is to the broader political and social history of the United States, and the recent interest in migration studies in musicology,41 the historical contributions of immigrants 37 “The Purpose”, ibid., 3. 38 “Pregled štampe o glazbi. Kolo”, Sveta Cecilija 19/5 (September–October 1925), 159–160. 39 Little was written in the United States about Croatian music in the years before Kolo. Perhaps the most significant article was on Franjo Kuhač, Ivan Zajc, and Vatroslav Lisinski: Josef Jiří Kral, “Three Croatian composers”, Music 10/4 (September 1896), 433–441. 40 A bibliography of these titles is currently in progress. 41 RILM reports 661 records for “migrations” as a subject term, 1755 records for migration as
184
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States to American music have been less-discussed than is deserved.42 Major histories of music in the United States (so-called “American music”) 43 in the main do not discuss the contributions of immigrants and the place of “ethnic music” at length,44 a problem summarized by Richard Crawford in his grand America’s musical life: A history.45 In one notable exception, The Cambridge history of American music, Michael Broyles contributes a chapter on “Immigrant, folk, and regional musics in the nineteenth century”. Here he employs the following characterization: “much of the musical activity of immigrant groups was in the folk tradition. It was spontaneous and oral, leaving few documents”.46 Yet we know of at least twenty immigrant musical journals published in the nineteenth century alone, the time period of which he writes, not counting musical writings in the f lourishing general press. As these journals demonstrate, the range and inf luence of immigrants on musical life was broader than we perhaps yet understand. The immigrant musical press provides many areas for fruitful research involving, for example, cultural transfer, social and economic perspectives, nationalism, biases, the development of concert traditions and canon formation, and offers unique insights into minority cultures. Such topics bridge historical musicology, musical anthropology and ethnography and offer opportunities for collaboration between specialists. However, before we can examine such complex topics, we must answer several important and broad questions. Who were the most inf luential musicians, writers, and critics for these communities? Which journals were the most important? And most fundamentally and pragmatically, we must first establish a complete bibliography of these neglected publications.
42 43 44
45 46
keyword, often overlapping with the 725 examples for “immigration” as subject term (last accessed: 13 January 2016). RILM reports only 124 records for subject terms “migration” and “United States”; this can be expanded to 151 by searching “America” and “migration” instead (last accessed: 13 January 2016). A term with shades of imperialism, certainly, but more widely employed than the cumbersome construction “music of the United States of America”. For instance, Gilbert Chase, America’s music (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987, 3rd ed.); Wilfred Mellers, Music in a New Found Land (New York: Hillstone, 1987); H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A historical introduction 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988); Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: Norton, 1983); Crawford, America’s musical life (as note 9). Crawford, ibid., 782–785. Crawford describes the historiographical problem as a debate between the “melting-pot” concept and cultural pluralism. In David Nicholls, ed., The Cambridge history of American music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135.
185
Benjamin Knysak The musicological and historical significance thus seems clear. Yet as important as these journals may be, the problems of research in the musical press in general – difficulty in locating libraries with holdings, frequently incomplete runs, the large numbers of pages one must often read – are further compounded by issues of language and limited distribution. Some journals and library holdings are only known through historic bibliographies and union catalogs. All known bibliographies of music journals are incomplete. Many immigrant music journals are held by the libraries of ethnic organizations, not music or research libraries. Often, such libraries did not actively collect “ethnic” materials, deemed as ephemeral or as lower-quality literature, thus holdings are scattered and nearly always incomplete.47 The degraded physical condition of existing copies, brittle and poorly bound, prone to disintegration (a problem faced by the musical press in general) create acute problems for scholars and librarians. Furthermore, many copies of journals no longer exist, either through sins of commission – the destruction of originals following microfilming and the frequent weeding of collections based on current usage and selector bias – or sins of omission through the lack of active collecting. As a result, many journals are held in fewer than five libraries with most copies being incomplete; frequently a complete run can no longer be established from extant copies. As such, it is important that these journals are scanned and preserved lest potential understanding of this significant aspect of our musical heritage is lost. It is for reasons like this that RIPM exists, to provide access to important literature and to foster important musicological research. * * * At first glance, the choice of an American topic may seem incongruous for a festschrift celebrating the career of Zdravko Blažeković. Beyond any parallels to his own personal experience, the journals discussed here are, at their core, records of cultural exchange. It is this aspect of Zdravko – exchange – that I celebrate here: his ability to connect persons, scholars, and institutions through a shared love for musical scholarship and the art itself. The countless 47 While this prejudice was not supported by the library community officially (the collection of foreign-language materials was supported in journals like Library Journal), there likely was an unspoken prejudice, born out of anti-immigrant politics: “The native [born] American has a prejudice against furnishing books in a foreign language and often proceeds on the theory that although he does nothing to furnish facilities for learning English it is that the immigrant should read nothing while he waits”. Frances A. Kellor, “Straight America”, The Immigrants in America Review 2/2 ( July, 1916), 16.
186
Immigrant Music Journals in the United States professional and personal friendships the world over that he has fostered in the service of RILM, the IMS, RIdIM, RIPM, and many other organizations; through conferences, papers, and presentations; in ideas and advice; and through thousands of small ways, too numerous to detail here but yet so valuable – this is the contribution of Zdravko: a connected world of musical scholarship.
187
Benjamin Knysak
188
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题
Zhang Boyu 张伯瑜,中央音乐学院 (Central Conservatory of Music Beijing)
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题 Abstract. Music Aesthetics from the Ethnomusicological Perspectives: Chinese music scholars have recently been focusing on the issue of “multiple musical aesthetics”, shifting from a traditional Western music aesthetic to a broader world music aesthetic. For musical examples in their research, these scholars primarily use Chinese traditional music – including a variety of genres (folk songs, local opera music, local narrative songs, and local instrumental music) that locate at different cultural levels. For instance, Pipa (lute) music, Guqin music, Jiangnan Sizhu (bamboo and string ensemble) music, and Shandong Guchui (wind and percussion ensemble music of Shangdong Province) music are all instrumental music, but they show differences in their musical nature, social functions, and ritual processes – differences that attract the interest of Chinese ethnomusicologists. As the focus of music aesthetic studies turns from Western art music to Guqin music or Jiangnan Sizhu music, the research processes are predictable. Guided by the concept of “culture”, ethnomusicologists have increasingly attended to the close relationship between music and its functions in society. At present, many ethnomusicologists put their focus on ritual music (or “ritual soundscape”), often designating a specific subcategory of music – wedding music, funeral music, or various types of religious music – as ritual music. Intriguingly, some of the music categorized as ritual music also functions in non-ritual ways, However, once used in rites, some scholars maintain that the music is restricted by the ritual process and becomes part of the ceremony. This author thinks that ritual music is a part of “social events”, whereas art music is a part of “aesthetic events”. How can “multiple music aesthetics” be most effectively discussed in the context of “ritual”? Answering this question will help to demonstrate the value of “multiple musical aesthetics” in ethnomusicology research. This article discusses the challenges and opportunities created by utilizing this “multiple music aesthetics” approach.
摘要: 最近几年来,中国学者提出“多元音乐美学”问题,突破了音乐美学只研究西方艺术 音乐的局限,把美学视角拓展到了各国的民间音乐品种。就中国传统音乐来讲,其所含类 别多种多样,民歌、说唱、戏曲等处在完全不同的文化层面;琵琶、古琴、江南丝竹、山东 鼓吹虽然都属于器乐,但它们之间的文人性、娱乐性和仪式性使其各具特点,而又都在民 族音乐学的视阈之下。作为音乐美学的探讨,如果把焦点从西方艺术音乐转到中国的古 琴或江南丝竹等音乐品种上,其研究成果是可以预见的。然而,民族音乐学在“文化”观念 的指引下,越来越关注音乐与生活的密切关系。目前许多学者以“仪式音乐” (或“仪式音声”)
189
Zhang Boyu 来划定某些音乐品种,如婚礼中的音乐、葬礼中的音乐、各类宗教仪式中的音乐等,它们 均属于仪式音乐范畴。尽管有些仪式中的音乐与非仪式中的音乐在音声上是一样的,但是 一旦用在了仪式中,就不得不受到仪式过程的限制,成为仪式的一部分。仪式音乐是社会 事件的一部分,而艺术音乐是审美事件的一部分,怎样探讨社会事件的审美意义?“多元 音乐美学”能否在“仪式”的视阈下进行音乐的美学探讨?不回答这一问题, “多元音乐美 学”的价值便不能得以彰显。本文便在此方面提出自己的方法与认识。
一、理论与现实----多元音乐美学观念的形成基础 世界发展的一个美好倾向是人类平等观念的逐渐形成,尽管是不完善的,但人作为人的价 值至少在理论层面上是得到尊重的。这不仅体现在了人与人之间的关系上,也体现在了人 与自然的关系上。“欧洲中心主义”的破除尽管还不是一个完美的现实,但在认识层面上已 经形成了理论上的利剑,可用此来维护世界“微弱”文化的存在价值。“文化相对主义”虽然 不能解决所有“线性发展观”所提出的所有命题,但毕竟在一定逻辑关系中解释了所谓“原 始文化”并不“原始”的原因。这种多元化观念的发展,对音乐研究产生了巨大的影响。在音 乐研究领域人们越来越脱离西方音乐的单一思维,探讨着世界多元化的音乐美学原则。“ 什么音乐的美学?”这种提问式的反思经常在日常的谈话中被提及。世界各国的不同音乐 品种有着不同的美的品质,这是一个近乎共识的问题。宋瑾多年来在多元文化美学方面 进行了深入的思考,并发表了一系列的看法。《从后现代视角看音乐人类学的“音乐”观》( 宋瑾2006a)比较了音乐人类学与后现代理论之间的关系,认为音乐人类学以特定历史和 语境来审视音乐意义的观点与后现代的“非本质主义”相一致。他认为:“现代音乐人类学 的音乐观比以往传统音乐学的音乐观更为合理。音乐人类学发现各文化的‘音乐’虽然具有 共同的一面, 即在文化的感性维度上都有和人群特定观念对应的特殊声音, 但是它们之间 存在着更多的是差异, 这些差异是各文化之间的差异造成的。”(P. 75)。什么是音乐的事 件?音乐的意义又何在?这些在局内人和局外人之间的理解是不一样的,“这一点既符合了 人类音乐学的‘历史’与‘语境’的条件,同时也符合了后现代主义理论的“不确定性”。(P. 80 )宋瑾认为音乐与人的关系具有多重意义,即可作为审美对象, 也可作为认识对象,还可作 为社会功用(P. 79)。当把音乐作为审美目的时需要满足3个条件:“出于审美目的、选择适 合审美主体的审美能力与审美趣味的作品、进人直接的感性接触过程。”(P. 79) 《什么“音乐”的“美学”》(宋瑾2006b)一文沿着宋瑾教授的兴趣和思路探讨了多元音乐 美学问题。作者认为当今的中国音乐美学探讨基本上是基于欧洲艺术音乐基础之上的, 由于缺乏对世界不同音乐文化的专注而使其研究缺乏普遍性。如果把这种理论用来分析 中国传统音乐便可发现其不适应性。“欧洲文艺复兴以来强调以人的听觉作为衡量音乐之 所是和之所美的尺度, 逐渐创造出听觉感性样式很丰富的音乐, 出现了纯粹听赏的审美文 化方式。假如以西方审美文化方式中的音乐美学来看待中国的琴文化, 就会出现以方看圆 的状况。”(P. 4)。 在探讨了多元音乐美学与音乐人类学的关系之后,宋教授提出了研究多元音乐美学的基 本方法。《建构多元音乐美学的设想与呼吁》(宋瑾2008)中作者在讨论了“非物质文化 遗产”保护等问题,提出了建构多元音乐美学的设想。首先作者认识到了音乐美学的审美 体验基础:“就音乐审美而言,亲历的知是对‘理解基础上的深刻感觉’的感悟。如果说认识 活动的规律是从感性认识上升到理性认识,那么审美活动的规律则是理解基础上进行感 性体验。”(P. 7)。然而,多元音乐美学所涉及的对象往往是局内人的活动,研究者作为 局外人一是不能穷尽所有世界上的音乐现象,也不能在亲临体验中获得与局内人一样的体 验。如同宋教授所说:“审美理解无法从他人对亲历的知的美学表达中获得;从美学中获 得的学理的知,是一种间接的知。学理的知与亲历的知之间不能打等号。”(P. 7)怎么办?
190
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题 作者提出了“小型叙事”方法。作者认为,在没有构建‘普适性音乐美学体系’(宋瑾语)的情 况下,由局内人进行各自文化圈内的音乐美学研究,然后再把这些“小型叙事”进行拼贴, 这便是多元音乐美学“大杂烩”的研究方法。(P. 8) 宋教授的研究对我们思考多元音乐美学有着巨大的帮助,他在音乐人类学(民族音乐学) 和音乐美学之间架起了桥梁,其基本认识是建立在对世界文化的平等和尊重基础之上 的,并以后现代哲学为理论基础,看出两者之间的相同特性,由此而勾画出两学科在认识 论上的同质发展。 然而,在多元音乐美学研究中存在两个难题。一是音乐人类学所面临的对象大多具有社会 聚合性特征,仪式性强,音乐只是整体活动中的一部分;二是传统音乐在听众上的匮乏。 听众的减少意味着什么?是否意味着音乐品种审美价值的减弱?传统音乐“太老了”?不在 美了?理性告之我们传统音乐所具有的历史的和文化的价值,对此没有人会否认,但现实 的审美意义却很少人能够捕捉到。“非物质文化遗产保护”也只有在这一局面下才有提出 的可能与意义,如果大家都喜爱还何须谈“保护”? 对于这些社会化、仪式化的音乐品种, 对于那些不再有人爱听的音乐品种,其音乐美的探讨如何进行? 本质上说,音乐美学是以西方艺术音乐为基础的学问,当代的学者们在思考传统音乐中 的美学问题时显得很无奈,因为没有一种解释的途径,在方法论上受制于以西方艺术音 乐为基础的“音乐美学”,探讨的是“美”和“审美”的关系,也即“音乐本体”和欣赏音乐的“人” 的关系,“自律”与“他律”便在这两者之间而得以展开。然而,作为传统音乐来说,“美”的“自 律”在哪里?“审美”的“他律”又在哪里?传统音乐中所体现出的“文明规律”与“西方艺术音 乐中所体现出的“文明规律”可能完全不在一个层面上。所以,达尔文的“进化论”解释了物 种的演变关系,对文化的变迁亦有着很强的有效性。欧洲文明对世界文明的引领作用是 不容忽视的,对世界“文明秩序”的建立有这特殊的贡献,仅用“文化相对主义”是不能完全 把其抛弃的;世界多元的发展(并不仅限于音乐上的多元化)既是历史的客观,也是社会 的现实,更是人们所追求的理想。这便形成了我们基本的认识论基础,即承认共性发展的 途径,也认同个性发展的理想。在两个A和B 的矛盾体之间并非要达到某一终极目标,却 乐于徘徊于两者之间,达到一种平衡关系。多元音乐美学便在这种徘徊中找到了自己的 基本理论基础。
二、审美事件与社会事件----多元音乐美学观念的基本前提 就音乐美学的基本思维和方法而言,其所涉及的音乐是一种“审美事件”。所谓“审美事件” 即指音乐作品和音乐行为是一种艺术创作和审美行为。在这一事件中包含三种因素:创 作、表演与听众。创作过程是艺术的创造性行为,形成的是艺术作品,而把作品传递到听 众的过程是一种审美行为。音乐美学的所有问题即围绕着这三个过程而展开。就大美学 而言,其基本问题是“美”和“审美”的关系,“美是什么?”成为了美学长期以来研究的焦点。 客体性、主体性和主客观的统一性成为了人们得到答案的思维途径,而当用艺术作品为例 来寻求答案时,则不得不围绕着艺术创作、艺术作品和艺术欣赏的三个过程而展开。西方 音乐美学的“自律论”和“他律论”也即围绕作品与听众之间的关系而展开的。艺术的创作 动机和行为是多种多样的,但当形成作品并形成艺术欣赏行为时,这一行为是作为一种美 学事件而存在的。这一行为无论是发生在音乐厅,还是其他的什么地方均为如此。这样一 来,便构成了音乐美学的研究基础,即创作过程、作品本身和欣赏过程的三重关系。创作 过程中的创作者的情感与手段、作品本身的形式与内容、欣赏过程中的自律与他律,这些 便构成了音乐美学讨论的基本问题,音乐美学便围绕着这些问题而展开。 汉斯立克对自律论音乐美学的探讨即是建立在音乐作为审美事件基础之上的。他认为:“ 艺术首先是应该表现美的事物。接纳美的机能不是情感,而是幻想力,即一种纯观照的活
191
Zhang Boyu 动。”(汉斯立克1975:5)尽管以上文字所表现的内容主要是说明音乐与情感的关系,但 可以看出汉斯立克是把音乐作为艺术来对待的,而艺术是表现美的事物。他认为:“作曲 家所表现的观念,首先和主要的是纯音乐性的观念。”(P. 17)可见,汉斯立克对音乐美学 讨论的基础是基于作曲家,作品和听众三个层面上展开的。表现出了音乐作为审美事件的 特性。尽管汉斯立克强调:“音乐的内容就是乐音的运动形式”,这是他自律论美学的鲜明 的体现,但另一方面也说明了他所说的音乐是一种纯粹的“音响学”上的乐音,而非社会学 上的乐音,即在乐音运动中是不包含其它社会学因素的,如信仰、仪式等社会学因素的。 他甚至认为:“静观的听法是唯一艺术型的、真正听音乐的方式”。(P. 84)“不管听什么乐 曲,不管怎样理解,必须以乐曲本身为目的”。(P. 87)。音乐的审美事件为汉斯立克讨论 他的自律论音乐美学提供了基本的理论前提。 苏珊朗格的《艺术问题》也是围绕创作、作品和欣赏三个层面来展开的,音乐便作为了讨 论这一问题的例子。他认为艺术是“创造物”,在这点上所有艺术门类都是一样的(苏珊 朗格1983:13)。而“一件艺术品就是一件表现性的形式”(P. 13)。而这个表现性的形式 是要被知觉的,“在我看来,所谓艺术知觉,就是对艺术品的表现性的知觉”。(P. 56)。作 为哲学家和美学家,苏珊朗格意识到了社会环境因素的影响,比如,他认为艺术的变化性 因素包含:(1)艺术家们意在表达的概念;(2)艺术家把握的创造方法:(3)由物理环境 和文化环境提供的机会;(4)公众的反应。分析这四个层面可以看出,他基本上在艺术创 作、表演和欣赏三个层面上展开他的思考。虽然在第(3)项中,他意识到了物理环境和文 化环境的作用,但也是在构建着社会语境中“审美事件”的场景。 中国的《乐记》、《声无哀乐论》、《溪山琴况》等音乐美学著作无不在音声与情感之间展 开讨论,同样是把音乐和与之相关的行为作为“审美事件”而展开讨论。然而,所不同的是 民族音乐学研究中所涉及的音乐事项大多与社会行为密切相关,仪式性成为了音乐事项 的主要特征。就中国传统音乐而言,中国人在对自然的认识中积累了自身的宇宙观念,并 由此观念构成自身社会生活的主要内容。这些内容的组合便构成了中国人的社会生活, 其中主要原则是一年四季的循环规律,其中既包含了宗教信仰的内容,也包含人生礼仪的 内容。在这些活动中,尽管社会性内涵是其主要因素,但其中大部分活动涉及到音乐的应 用。在各地庙会中、葬礼或婚礼中,音乐构成其中重要的组成部分。这些场合中的音乐不 同于音乐厅中的音乐表演,这类的音乐表演尽管含有美学的成分,如音乐的形式和受众 群体对音乐的感官与能动反映,但音乐表演本身并不构成“审美事件”,而是“社会事件”的 组成部分。所以,在民族音乐学的发展中,把音乐作为文化来研究也就其道理了,许多学 者把这类的音乐研究称之为“音乐人类学”也就事出有因了。 本人曾在五台山的五爷庙采风,见到这样一个场景:五爷庙院内有一个戏台。当时上演着 山西晋剧《金水桥》,是还愿戏。舞台下面围坐着很多观众,他们与五爷一起在听戏。此次 是许愿者为五爷请的戏班,听者应该是五爷。所以,对五爷来说当然是审美事件。但这个 审美事件的审美主体是五爷,五爷的审美体验我们不得而知,然而,围坐在台下的人们,他 们同五爷一同听戏,对他们来说其审美过程是我们可以体验得到的。但是,与音乐厅中的 审美事件不同的是在此审美过程中还有许多其他因素的围绕。人们在烧香,在叩头,在穿 梭,在交谈,这些众多的行为一起构成了一个“场景”,一个社会活动的场景,戏曲表演只是 这一场景中的一部分。中国人在创造这类场景时有着独特的创造性思维。试想,如果没有 戏曲因素的引入,这个场景将失去太多的意味。所以,人们是按照人的需求来构造神的需 求的。在五爷前有供桌,上面摆有各种食品,在屋外有戏班在演戏,满足着五爷的精神需 求。所以,五爷便成为了一个具有人性化的神。西方基督教仪式中的唱诗班和管风琴的演 奏,用音乐建构了人与神之间的桥梁。中国的庙会场景则把人类社会中的因素搬到了神的 面前,神与人便构成了社会生活中的真正显示。
192
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题 2013年正月初七至初九本人在河北武安北安乐乡康宿村参加了“请城隍”的道教仪式。说 是道教仪式,其实是全村的一次盛大的社火。在一片节日般的庆典中可以勾勒出以下几个 主要因素:其一,活动由本村城隍庙组织,由玉皇庙向30公里之外的一个道教经乐班发 帖,邀请八个法师前来主持法事。法事仪式过程事先安排好,主要包括“迎神”、“安神”、“ 祝风”、“取水”、“迎贡”、“进表”、“巡香”、“送神”、“破狱”、“嵩里山”等仪式活动,所以,此次 活动是一次道教的活动;其二,该村有《玉皇庙》、《观音阁》、《药王庙》等多个寺庙。这 一天,各家寺庙均举行各自的活动,所以,此次活动又是各家寺庙的共同活动;其三,数天 的活动期间,在玉皇庙对面有一个戏台,当地平调落子剧团受邀在此演出,使其具有了庙 会的性质;其四,除了戏曲演出外,在药王庙门外还搭起了另外一个舞台,当地的流行音 乐组合在表演着各种流行元素的音乐和舞蹈;其五,正月初九晚上,村里一条主街道被封 住,以为放烟火之用。如同北京国庆节一样的烟火,足足放了一个小时,使我们体验到了 乡村过节的盛况;其六,烟火之后该村的各种花会进行演街,十几个花会排满了街道,他 们敲锣打鼓,走走停停,前面有放鞭炮者引路,每到一个路口便停下来放花炮,耍龙舞狮 队伍使尽解数,好不热闹,这是典型的乡村社火。有意思的是村里一家公房里数人在蒸馒 头,炒白菜,任何人到此可免费进餐。 在云南有洞经音乐的演唱活动。洞经会根据某寺庙或私人家庭的邀请到寺庙中或家庭中 谈经,即演唱经文。一部经文需要三到五天完成。谈经中有各种仪式,包含请神、送神、上 座、下座等。音乐类型除了演唱经文所需要的曲牌外,还有器乐曲。谈经活动数天,往往没 有任何听众,只有洞经会的成员们,但是他们仍然非常严肃认真地进行着。每次谈经都要 请多位神灵,其中有主神、陪神,天神、地神、等等。本人曾参加通海县妙善学洞经会的谈 经活动,其中请了一百多为神,用红色条纸,上写神灵名字,挂在墙上。谈经并不是为神灵 们举行的娱乐活动,实际上是对人们的一种教化活动。经文中的内容除了对神灵的赞美 外,大多是圣神们的话语,如 (引自《觉世真经》上卷第七章): 宗圣曾帝曰: 人生惟有弟兄亲,自小同胞若一人。 伯仲之间通以性,埙篪共奏合如神。 不尽祗恭空在世,常行悔慢必忘亲。 入门时念生先我,骨内欢娱万象春。 这是宗圣曾帝的话,教导人们要兄弟一家亲。所以,谈经是在表述神的话语,这些话语当 然是说给人听的。这里充分体现出了宗教信仰的本质特征,即人们通过对神灵的崇拜达 到对人自身的制约与控制。 以上三个场景,一是神的娱乐,由此而构成神与人在戏曲中的同构,这是一个完美的组 合。寺庙、人群、神灵、拜神、戏曲表演的同景现象。寺庙提供了一个场合,神和人构成了活 动的两极,拜神构成了活动的主体,而戏曲表演塑造了整个场景的气氛。即是神的气氛, 亦是人的气氛。在一种轻松的语境下述说了对神的敬仰。与此同时,由于还愿的概念强化 了神的力量,说明神在人的世界里无时不刻地在发挥着作用。二是宗教信仰与民俗生活的 结合。河北武安的活动强调了神与人、美与真的关系,即是节日的欢庆,又是心灵的洗礼, 在工业化的今天体验着农业文明中美的历史进程。期间的戏曲演出和流行音乐组合的表 演可使人们的视角暂短地离开宗教的思域,进入到一种纯粹的审美境地。但是,这一境地 持续得非常的短暂,任何时候都可能被鞭炮声、呼喊声、人群的流动、或其他任何可能发 生的事件拉回到宗教与社火的语境之中。而且,这样的表演如果脱离了这种集合性的场 域,是否能够吸引足够的听众是令人怀疑的。传统音乐听众的减少何尝不是这种音声所依 附的语境转移的结果!三是人的教化过程。与前两个场景相比较,洞经场景则是另一番景 色,体现着另外一种意义。在这里并不是神-人同娱的现象,而是人通过对神的拜祭达到 对人自身的教化过程。首先,经文中是宣传教化的,是神在教化人,是对人的教化;其次,
193
Zhang Boyu 神是通过洞经人员来代言的,来宣讲的,如同宗教的神职人员,所言均为神之言语,不同 的是洞经谈演是以代言为特征的。第三,谈演时神是在场的,能够听到和看到谈演过程 中的一切。所以,是在神的监督下的谈演,马虎不得。第四,礼请生,即在仪式过程中跪在 地上的听众,他们是真正的听众。谈演过程中他们要恭敬神灵,经常给神灵叩首,以表敬 意;他们为神灵上香,以表顺化;他们听读疏文,以表收到神的教诲。在私人家中谈经时, 主家成员便担当着礼请生的角色,在寺庙中,则由进香者担任。 但是,以上这些场景均可作为“音乐的”场景。比如在洞经的场景中,所有作为神的陈述均 是在一种音乐的气氛中进行的。所谓“谈”是一种“唱”的行为,是一种美的过程,具有一种 旋律的和谐。在念疏文之后需要把疏文焚烧,这时候,需要吹奏唢呐,称之为“大乐”;在 无词语的仪式行为时,需要奏丝竹乐,称之为“细乐”;在谈经文时需要配以曲牌,称之为“ 五支半”(即用五支半曲牌)。音乐在这里发挥着巨大的作用。没有音乐整个活动不足以成 立,所以,从艺术的角度谈经由被看成是“非物质文化遗产”。音乐的作用在哪里?音乐构成 了神与人沟通的桥梁,音乐构成了整个场景的架构因素;音乐在整个理性教化的过程中被 包容在了一种感性的外框之中,以使仪式得以进行。这便构成了中国传统和民间的社会活 动现实。
三、审美元素与社会元素的融合----多元音乐美学观念的探索途径 1, 音声----艺术美的体验 不可否认,在本文所讨论的仪式性音乐类型中也存在着美的因素,仪式中的音声作为相对 独立的形式,其本身可以作为艺术的一部分而存在,从而成为了审美的对象。对此,可从以 下几个方面来思考: 其一,音乐在仪式中具有重要的意义。我们常常问及自己,在葬礼中为什么要有音乐?在 一种悲痛的时刻,音乐在起着什么作用?这时候,我们不得不跳出单纯的自我范畴,从“我 本身”、“故去的亲人”和“周围的他人”三个方面来思考。对“我本身”来说,音乐可以制造一种 悲伤的气氛,增强了仪式感,使得仪式本身更具严肃性,所以即便是葬礼也需要音乐;从“ 故去的亲人”来思考,我们希望我们的已故亲人能够升入天堂,这是一种美好的期盼,使活 着的人与故去的亲人之间有了一种意念上的关联。这是一种精神永存,使得生死两重天的 亲人们在身体隔绝之后达到精神上的永远相依,音乐在此时便起到了对故去亲人的抚慰 作用;从“周围的他人”来考虑,对亡灵的恐惧常常使得故者成为了生者的恐惧者,尽管他们 以前是很好的友人。音乐可消除这种恐惧感,使得生者仍然能够感觉到故者的可亲。 其二,仪式中的音乐需要服务于仪式,虽然音乐本身相对简单,但并非没有结构,音阶、调 式、旋律、节奏、音色、速度等音乐要素在此均能体现出来,当人们把注意力集中在这些因 素之上时,仪式中的音乐变成为了相对独立的审美对象,形成了作为美的音乐形式与作为 审美的听者之间的关系。 其三,仪式中的音声对人的感官有刺激作用。人们常常讲音乐是国际语言,这一论点在声 音对感官的刺激上有一定的合理性,由此而使得音乐具有感性认识。 诚然,这类的传统音乐也与西方音乐美学所基于的艺术音乐类型亦有所不同。中国传统 音乐因为没有确切的创作者,本质上讲是民族集体的行为,所以,在创作、表演和欣赏三 个层面上的界限并不清晰,特别是创作层面与社会行为相交叉,亦可认为是一种“社会的 行为”;基于音乐作品形式的美学形式本身构成了意义的全部。然而,中国传统音乐在形 式上的意义相对简单,而形式背后的理性却非常深刻,道家的“大音希声”便体现出了“音 希”而“意广”的哲理。所以,游民间仪式性音乐的陈述,我们在分析着音乐与人类心灵的关 系。
194
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题 2, 行为 – 生活美的体验 民族音乐学把音乐作为文化的研究方法使得音乐的行为层面得到广泛的关注,学者们可 以从音乐行为中考查音乐的意义。音乐的美是自律的,音乐的美是他律的,这时候,民族 音乐学告诉我们:“音乐的美是文化的!”然而,音乐的美是否也可以从音乐行为中得以阐 释呢?到目前为止,我们似乎还没有从音乐行为中探讨音乐美的方法与途径,这也便构成 了“多元音乐美学”的瓶颈。仪式中的音乐尽管有其自身的结构,但脱离了仪式后它们的价 值很难得以体现,如果把它们作为纯粹的音响形式,喜爱这类音乐的人群少之又少。尽管 人们从认识上理解它们的价值,但是从听觉上很难发现其中的美。为此,许多有识之士对 传统音乐进行“改革”。2012年9月北京智化寺音乐节上邀请了河南大相国寺的僧人们前来 演奏。乐曲虽然是传统乐曲,但经过了所谓专业化的配器过程,革胡、古筝的应用,大乐队 的编制,使得大相国寺的僧人们并列到了中国音乐学院师生们的同一行列之中(当时中国 音乐学院的部分师生也参与了演出)。然而,僧人的演奏技术用“专业”的水准来衡量却是 捉襟见肘,许多快速乐句应付起来非常吃力。不知道这样的配器是发展了大相国寺的传 统,还是毁掉了这一传统,至少使僧人们在演奏上看到了自己的不足,而不是体验到了自 己的辉煌,因为他们在与专业演奏家在比,在比演奏技术,而不是在比历时的传统。那么, 大相国寺佛教音乐的“美”在哪里?2012年夏季,潮州举办潮州大锣鼓的比赛,进入决赛的 乐队演奏技艺高超,但总给人感觉在模仿民族管弦乐队,传统以潮剧音乐为基础的大锣 鼓似乎不见了踪影。 为了寻求仪式中的音乐之美使我们不得不思考下面的问题,即局内人在他们所从事的音乐 活动中想要得到的和能够得到的是什么?这可能是我们揭开作为“社会事件”的仪式性音 乐活动的美学探讨的钥匙。在人生礼仪的两端,首先是对生命来到这个世界上有着巨大的 期盼和喜悦,其次是对离开这个世界充满着恐惧,为了免除这种恐惧,人们设计了在另一 个世界有着同样或更美好的生活愿景。除了佛教、道教等官方所认可的宗教外,泛化的民 间信仰综合了各类宗教的和民俗的成分,使得信仰与百姓的生活息息相关。生时求子、祈 福、求财,死后求顺、轮回转世,所有这些希望构成了社会精神生活的重要组成部分,满足 这样的精神需求便成为了仪式音声的主要功能。云南洞经谈演大多是老年人,他们退休后 生活平淡,聚在一起从事谈经。谈一天可能有几十元的收入,但是交通费和其他费用化去 大半。演唱时很多时候需要站立,一天下来很累,晚上住在铺着草席的地上。为了什么?个 旧市大屯镇洞经会,有些成员家里很富有,甚至有矿产,他们为何要受这样的“罪”?“朝十 王”仪式给我们解开了这个谜底。人们在活着的时候需要偿还阴债,拿到还清债务的“文凭” ,死后才可升入天堂。这是一种社会生活的建构,一种对人类生死本质的理解;符合了这 一建构,满足了所理解的本质需求,人们得到是巨大的满足。与审美的满足不同,这是一 种目的的满足。审美的满足是人类的一种共性境界,而目的的满足则随不同人群而变化, 构成着一种跨文化的体验,也就是民族音乐学家们所强调的“站在局内人角度来思考问 题”的方式。有时候,社会事件的目的并不在事件本身,而在事件之外。当我看到洞经会成 员在谈经休息时拿出一些流行乐曲的乐谱,边演奏边演唱,当我看到他们围坐在一起打 麻将,我明白了,这里除了信仰的成分外,在一起的精神享受以度过晚年的寂寞时光也是 一个不能忽视的原因。这是一种生活的享受,目的的满足,同时也为我们提供了探讨多元 音乐美学的一条新的途径。
结论 综上所述,中国传统音乐美学的探讨有其特殊性,其难点在于虽然在某种程度上它体现 在审美事件的审美主体与审美客体的关系,但更多地在体现着社会事件的事件主体和事 件语境的关系。在这个语境中,即包含了音乐的表演过程,或称制造过程,也包含了音乐
195
Zhang Boyu 的社会活动,而这个活动又不仅仅是音乐的活动。所以,音乐的美并不是一种听觉的美, 而是一种社会功能的美,也可称之为文化的美。这样看来,民族音乐学为我们提供一种新 的审视角度。这一角度,是以文化的和语境的因素来审视音乐的品格。其中包含着“文化的 特殊性”和“语境的特殊性”。文化的特殊性在于音乐品种与文化关系的特殊关系,不具备 文化的转换;而“语境的特殊”则在于音乐品种所发生场景的特殊性,换了环境音乐的内涵 将发生变化。比如,现在许多所谓原生态的音乐品种被搬到了舞台上,由于其语境的特殊 性,发生在原语境的音乐本体在搬到舞蹈后必然发生某些变化(如河南大相国寺的例子) 。评判这类的演奏不能依据演奏的技术水平,而是依据对地域文化和当时语境的满足。 说到这里,不同的意见即时而生:这还是音乐美学的探讨吗? 美与审美的关系以及功能 与价值的关系本属于不同的范畴,在此是否把两者混淆了?是的,这恰恰体现出了音乐美 学对仪式性音乐的不适应。音乐美学把音乐看成是艺术,而民族音乐学把音乐看成是生 活。尽管艺术也是生活的一部分,不同的是一个处在“上层建筑”,一个在“生活基础”。问 题是离开了生活化的音乐,多元音乐美学怎样建立起来?两者的结合可能给了我们指出了 另外一条出路。把音乐行为作为一种社会行为来探讨其在社会生活中的作用是民族音乐 学的目的,而把音乐行为作为一种社会行来探讨其在社会生活中人的精神的实现便在“精 神”的层面上与美学相交融。通过这一途径来探讨仪式中的音乐与仪式中的人的精神满足 可能会成为民族音乐视域下多元音乐美学探讨的一条途径!
参考文献 宋瑾 《从后现代视角看音乐人类学的“音乐”观》。载《音乐艺术》2006(a)年第1期74-80。 宋瑾《什么“音乐”的“美学”》。载《星海音乐学院学报》2006(b)第三期1-7。 宋瑾《建构多元音乐美学的设想与呼吁》。载《交响 – 西安音乐学院学报》2008年第4期 第5-8页。 爱杜·阿德·汉斯立克《论音乐的美》。杨业治翻译。人民音乐出版社1978年。 苏珊·朗格《艺术问题》。滕守尧、朱疆源译。中国社会科学院出版社1983年。
196
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题
216 titles of Chinese instrumental solo pieces A special translation with the honor of Dr. Zdravko Blažeković to his 60th birthday Dear Zdravko It is a God’s gift to me that I can get to know you. Your intelligence and passion on all of music in the world, particularly the keen sense of Chinese music bridged the hearts between both of us, and made me so proud. Considering your long-time contribution to RILM, and working on the issue of the translation from any languages to English, I present my translations of 216 titles of Chinese instrumental pieces that I am working on recently, and hope to bring you a complete dictionary afterward. Happy Birthday! With many Thanks to our loving friend and colleague: Zdravko Blažeković! Boyu Zhang Prof. of Musicology Department Director of CCOM Press Central Conservatory of Music The Pieces for Dizi Bamboo flute 1. Chaoyuan Ge (Song of the Founding Emperor) 2. Sanliu (Three-six) 3. Baban (Eight Beats) 4. Duihua (Questions and Answers about Flowers) 5. Fang Fengzheng (Flying a Kite) 6. Gua Hongdeng (Hanging a Red Lantern) 7. Gusu Xing (Travelling to Gusu) 8. Hepingge (Peaceful Pigeons) 9. Hua Shanmian (Fan Painting) 10. Huangying Liangchi (A Warbler Flapping Its Wings) 11. Huasnle Ge (Song of happiness) 12. Jingju Liushuiban (“Flowing Water beat” Used in Peking Opera) 13. Liuqing Niang (A Slender Lady) 14. Maicai (Selling Vegetables) 15. Meihua Sannong (Plum Blossom) 16. Molihua ( Jasmine) 17. Nan Xiuhebao (Embroidering a Small Pouch from South) 18. Nao Huadeng (Celebrating the Colorful Lanterns) 19. Sanwuqi (Three-five-seven) 197
Zhang Boyu 20. Shandong Xiaokaimen (Opening the Small Gate from Shandong) 21. Dingzui (Quarrels) 22. Wu Bangzi (Five Clappers) 23. Xi Xiangfeng (Blissful Meeting) 24. Xiao Fangniu (A Small Cowherd) 25. Xingjie (Walking on the Street) 26. Xipi Huaban (Colorful beat of Xipi Melodic Type) 27. Yinzhong Niao (Birds in Forests) 28. Yunqing (Comg to Celebrate) 29. Zaochen (Morning) 30. Zhegu Fei (Flying Partridges) The Pieces for Erhu fiddle 31. Bangzi Feng (Clapper Wind, by Xiang Zuying) 32. Beige (A Song of Sadness) 33. Beijing Youge Jintaiyang (There is a Golden Sun in Beijing, by Jiang Cairu) 34. Bingzhong Yin (Reciting While Being Ill) 35. Caoyuan Xin Mumin (New Herdsmen on Grassland, by Liu Changfu) 36. Chunqiu Hui (Meeting in Spring and Autumn) 37. Duxian Cao (One String Exercise) 38. Erquan Yingyue (Ref lection of the Moon on the Second Lake) 39. Ganji (Going to Market, by Zeng Jiaqing) 40. Han Chunfeng Qu (Song of Freezing Spring Breeze) 41. Henan Xiaoqu (A Ditty from Henan, by Liu Mingyuan) 42. Honghu Renmin de Xinyuan (Wishes of Honghu People, arranged by Min Huifen) 43. Hongmei Shuixiang Qu (Hongmei Rhapsody, by Wu Houyuan) 44. Huaixiang Xing (A Home Missing Trip, by Lu Xiutang in 1930s) 45. Jianghe Shui (River Water, arranged by Huang Haihuai) 46. Jiangnan Chunse (Spring View of Southern Jiangsu, by Song Changyao and Ma Xilin) 47. Kongshan Niaoyu (Empty Mountain and Birds Singing) 48. Kumen Zhiou (Reciting with a Depressed Feeling) 49. La Luotuo (Dragging Camels by Zeng Xun) 50. Lanhuahua Xushi Qu (Lanhuahua Ballad, by Guan Ming) 51. Liangxiao (A Great Evening) 52. Liubo Qu (The Song of Water Waves, by Sun Wenming, 1928-1968, folk musician active in 1950s.) 198
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题
53. Mochounv Huanxiang Qu (Fantasia of Movhou Girl, by He Zhanhao) 54. Penchizai Qianli Caoyuan (Racing on the Vast Grass-plain, by Wang Guotong and Li Xiuqi) 55. Qinqiang Zhuti Shuixiangqu (Capriccio of Qinqiang Opera Music, by Lu Rirong) 56. Renjing Anxin (Peaceful People and Quiet Heart) 57. Saima (Horse-Racing, by Huang Haihuai, adapted by Shen Hequn) 58. Sanmenxia Changxiang Qu (Sanmen Gorge Rhapsody, by Liu Wenjin) 59. Shancun Bianleyang (Outlook of Mountain Village Has Changed, by Zeng Jiaqing) 60. Shanxiang Youdiyuan (Postmen in Villages, by Cheng Huiting) 61. Sifang Qu (Music from Four Directions) 62. Silu Shuixiang (Rhapsody of Silk Road, by Qi Weijin) 63. Songting (Offering Something to Listen to) 64. Tanyue (Plucking Music, also known as Tanliu-“Plucking six beats”) 65. Tingsong (Listening to the Pines) 66. Xiangjiang Yue (Song of Xiangjiang River, by Shi Yuemeng) 67. Xianju Yin (Reciting in a Relaxed Home) 68. Xiao Huagu (Small Colorful Drum, by Liu Beimao) 69. Xinhun Bie (Farewell of Newlyweds, by Zhang Xiaofeng and Zhu Xiaogu, with added fingering by Min Huifen) 70. Yejing Xiaosheng (Sound of Xiao Flute in a Quiet Night) 71. Yi Qinren (Remembering Relatives, by Jiang Cairu) 72. Yizhi Hua (A Flower, arranged by Zhang Shiye) 73. Yubei Xushiqu (North Henan Ballad, by Liu Wenjin) 74. Yueye (Moonlit Night) 75. Zai Caoyuan Shang (On the Grassland, by Piao Dongsheng) 76. Zhanma Penteng (Racing Warhorse, by Chen Yuexing) 77. Zidibing he Laobaixing (Soldiers and Civilians, by Chen Geng and Tang He) The Pieces for Guzheng zither 78. Chu Shuilian (Floating Lotus) 79. Chuandiao (Medium sized tunes) 80. Da Baban (Large Eight Beats) 81. Dayan (Hunting Wild Geese) 82. Feicui Dengtan ( Jade Emerges from Water) 83. Fengqiu Huang (Phoenixes Courting) 84. Fengxiang Ge (Phoenix Song) 199
Zhang Boyu 85. Gaoshan Liushui (High Mountains and Flowing Streams) 86. Guiyuan (Sorrows of Unmarried Girl) 87. Haiqing Nahe (The Eagle Catching the Swan) 88. Hangong Qiuyue (Autumn Moon Over the Han Palace) 89. Hanya Xishui (Winter Ravens Flying Over Water) 90. Henan Baban (Eight Beats of Henan) 91. Hongyan Shaoshu (Wild Goose Delivering Letter) 92. Huangli Ci (Oriole Poem) 93. Jiangjun Ling (Song of General) 94. Jiangxiang Pai (A labeled tune title) 95. Jiaochuang Yeyu (Evening Rain Beating on the Leaves of Japanese Banana Window Outside) 96. Jinshang Tianhua (Laying Flowers on the Brocade) 97. Liuqing Niang (A Slender Lady) 98. Luoyuan (Landed on Yard) 99. Meinv Sixiang, meaning Beautiful Girl Missing Her Hometown) 100. Nao Yuanxiao (Celebrating the Lantern Festival) 101. Pingsha Luoyan (Wild Geese Alighting on a Sandy Beach) 102. Pingshan Le (Happiness of Pingshan Mountain) 103. Putian Tongqing” (Nationwide Celebrations) 104. Qianli Yuan (Predestined Relations from Thousand Li) 105. Qingfeng Nongzhu” (Light Wind Blowing Tender Bamboo) 106. San Chuci (A Chuci Poem) 107. San-shi-san Ban (Thirty-three Beats) 108. Shanglou (Going Upstairs) 109. Shanming Guying (Sounding Mountains and Valleys Echo) 110. Shengui Yuan (Sadness of an Unmarried Girl) 111. Siduan Jin (Four Beautiful Sceneries) 112. Sihe Ruyi (Suite of Four Ad Lib Pieces) 113. Tianxia Datong (A Great Universal Unity) 114. Tiaolian (Opening the Curtain) 115. Xiaobanqu (small scale music) 116. Xiaodiao (short tunes) 117. Xiaotao Hong (A Small Red Peach) 118. Xiaoxi Liushui (Small Streams and Flowing Water) 119. Xin Kaiban (Starting a New Beat) 120. Yashan Ai (Sorrows of Yashan Mountain) 121. Yingzhuan Huangli (Singing of Parrots and Warblers) 122. Youyuan Qianli (Predestined Relations of a Thousand Li) 200
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题
123. Yu Lianhuan (A Jade Chain) 124. Yue’er Gao (The Moon on high) 126. Yunqing (Coming to Celebrate) 127. Zhaojun Hefan (Zhaojun Marrying a Foreign Prince to Make Peace) 128. Zhaojun Yuan (Zhaojun’s Resentment) The Pieces for Pipa lute 129. Bainiao Chaowang (A Hundred Birds Singing for the King) 130. Bang Zhuangtai (Dressing Table) 131. Banjiu Guohe (A Turtledove Crossing River) 132. Banma Suo (Striping Horse Rope) 133. Bawang Xiejia (The Warlord Disrobing His Armour) 134. Bubu Gao (Stepping High) 135. Ce Chuilian (On the Side of Lotus) 136. Chan Zhulian (Stringing up Beads), 137. Chensui Diao (Old Story Tunes, also known as An Gongzi Qu “Song of An Gongzi”) 138. Chunguang Hao (Good Spring View) 139. Cuiyun Tao (Beautiful Clouds) 140. Desheng Ling (Song of Victory) 141. Dielian Hua (Butterf ly in Love with Flowers) 142. Fanxian Cuo (Spiritual Raft) 143. Fendie Zhengchun (Flying Butterf lies Competing Their Beauty) 144. Feng Xianzhu (Phoenix Bearing Beads) 145. Fenghuang Yin (Phoenix Song) 146. Haiqing Nahe (Eagle Catching Swan) 147. Hangong Qiuyue (Autumn Moon Over the Han Palace) 148. Haoyue Longyin (Beautiful Moon and Dragon Reciting) 149. Hehuan Ling (Song of Happiness) 150. Huasheng (Beautiful Colours) 151. Huayu Binfen (Colourful Rain Flying on the Sky) 152. Ji’nao Kulong (A Big Tortoise Crying for Dragon) 153. Jiangjun Ling (Song of the General) 154. Jinchan Dao (Beautiful Road) 155. Kou Lianhuan (Connected Chain) 156. Lan Huamei (Too Lazy to Make up Eyebrows) 157. Meinv Chuansuo (A Beautiful Girl Rushing Back and Forth) 158. Mishang Yuyi (Rainbow Tune) 201
Zhang Boyu 159. Nezha Ling (Song of Nezha) 160. Pingsha Luoyan (Wild Geese Alighting on a Sandy Beach) 161. Qiansheng (One Thousand Victories) 162. Qiao Shuzhuang (Skillfully Making Up) 163. Qingping Diao (A Peaceful Tune) 164. Qiujiang (Autumn River, also known as QiujiangWandu “Crossing Autumn River at Night”) 165. Shuyuan (Complaining) 166. Qiyan Hui (Crying for Yanhui) 167. Santiao Jian ( Jumping the Mountain Stream Three Times) 168. Santong Gu (Drumming Three Times) 169. Shuangfei Yan (Geese Flying in Pair) 170. Shuilong Yin (Song of Water Dragon) 171. Sichun (Missing Love) 172. Sitan Feitan (Looking Like Plucking While not Plucking) 173. Sizi (Four Words) 174. Suishou Baban (Eight Beats for Hands to Warm Up) 175. Suozan Zhi (Old Labelled Tune) 176. Wan Buduan (Unbroken) 177. Wenban (Elegant Style) 178. Xiao Yue’er Gao (Moon on High in Shortened Form) 179. Xiaoqu (Small Tune) 180. Xiaoren Guoqiao (Deities Crossing Bridge) 181. Xiyang Xiaogu (Xiao Flute and Drum Sounding at Dusk) 182. Yanyang Tian (Sunny Day) 183. Yanzhen Jinghan (Geese Astonished by Coldness) 184. Yu Lianhuan ( Jade Chain) 185. Yuanti Heli (Ape Crying and Crane Singing) 186. Yuda Bajiao (Rain Falling Down on Banana’s Leave) 187. Yue’er Gao (The Moon on High) 188. Yuge Changwan (Singing Fishing Song At Night) 189. Yupan Zhu (Pearls on a Jade Plate) 190. Zaban (Miscellaneous) 191. Zhaojun Yuan (Zhaojun’s Resentment) 192. Zhongqu (Medium Piece) 193. Zhuchun Zhuang (Undoing Spring Make Up)
202
民族音乐学视阈中的音乐美学问题
The Pieces for Guqin zither 194. Chuge (The Song of Chu State) 195. Fancang Lang (Waves Coming Over) 196. Guangling San (Story of Guangling) 197. Huangying Yin (Reciting of Warbler) 198. Hujia Shibapai (Eighteen Beats Played by a Hujia Horn) 199. Liangxiao Yin (Song of a Calm Evening) 200. Longxiang Cao (Song of a Flying Dragon) 201. Meihua Sannong (Plum Blossom in Three Variations) 202. Oulu Wangji (Sea Gull and Empty Mind) 203. Peilan (Having Orchid) 204. Pingsha Luoyan (Wild Geese Alighting on a Sandy Beach) 205. Qiuhong (Autumn Geese) 206. Shanju Yin (Song of Living in Mountain) 207. Shuixian Cao (Song of Narcissus) 208. Wangji (Empty Mind) 209. Wujiang Yin (The Song of Wujiang River) 210. Wuye Wuqiufeng (The Leaves of a Chinese Parasol Dancing in the Wind of Autumn), 211. Xiaoxiang Shuiyun (Mist and Clouds over Dongting Lake) 212. Yuge (Fishing Song), 213. Qiaoge (The Song of Woodcutter) 214. Yuqiao Wenda (Conversation between a Fisherman and Woodcutter) 215. Zepan Yin (Reciting at Lake Side) 216. Zuiweng Yin (Reciting of a Drunken Man)
203
Zhang Boyu
204
Western Art Music Beyond the West
Ingrid Pustijanac Dipartimento di Musicologia e Beni Culturali Università degli Studi di Pavia, Cremona
Western Art Music Beyond the West * Abstract. Contemporary Western art music appears as space where the ‘art’ tradition strives to encounter other musics or other music traditions that are distant, certainly in the geographic sense, but also in the historical, cultural, aesthetic and social realms. But what happens when the ‘Other’ is the contemporary western art music itself? This paper focuses on processes of negotiation between contemporary classic canon and elements originated by non-western musical traditions that occur in works composed by non-western composers. For the purpose of this paper case studies are taken from the production of Chinese and Iranian composers of the late twentieth century such as Guo Wenjing, Hossein Alizâdeh, Reza Vali and Alireza Mashayekhi. The different categories of negotiation between contemporary classic canon and the encounter with ‘Others’ that have been developed by scholars as John Corbett, Bruno Nettl, Philip V. Bohlman and James Clifford are here applied to the works of nonwestern composers in order to stress the aesthetic-poetic complexity that stands out in contemporary masterpieces, in a world where the boundaries are more and more permeable in both directions, from West toward the ‘Others’ and vice versa, in a process of complex cross-hybridization.
Contemporary Western art music appears as a space where the “art” tradition strives to encounter other musics – a currently strong trend that has always been present in this space and that now is intensifying and accelerating. This musical encounter engages musics from the past in a process of unavoidable confrontation with contemporary art music’s own roots and undertakes with contemporary musics a deliberate process of broadening horizons typical of postmodernity. While the relationship with the musics from the past generally is examined through the tools of musicological research, the relationship with contemporary musics requires new approaches which include methods already in use and which are further enriched by skills and new research methods coming from the field of contemporary ethnomusicology, a discipline in * The text is the English translation of an article written in Italian and published as Ingrid Pustijanac. "La musica d’arte dell’Occidente oltre l’Occidente", in L'etnomusicologia e le musiche contemporanee, ed. by Francesco Giannattasio and Serena Facci (Venice: Fondazione Cini, 2009), online: old.cini.it/it/pubblication/page/100 (last accessed: 16.02.2018).
205
Ingrid Pustijanac which recurrent hybridization processes are well known. This exchange is all the more urgent when addressing music traditions that are distant, certainly in the geographic sense, but also in the historical, cultural, aesthetic and social realms. Despite how much this affirmation might sound obvious, it raises, in its simplicity, important issues regarding the relationship between the analyzed object and the researcher’s cultural and conceptual background, a relationship carefully emphasized over the long-term by ethnomusicologists: how do we approach the difference? The following text, conceived on the border between the two research fields and limited primarily to the field of contemporary musics, will illustrate some specific questions and issues related to this subject. For those who study the art music of the last decades, as does the author of this text, the term “contemporary musics”, used in ethnomusicology to refer to all current music experiences, creates a bizarre and intriguing conceptual short circuit. The term “contemporary music” (exclusively used in the singular form) is particularly tricky and refers to firmly historically situated experiences, like the ones in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as referring to a category of a specific style of recent experimental art music. However, in both instances this term seems to maintain an inescapable meaning regarding the aesthetic-composition horizons that characterize all art music, especially recent art music: the concept of innovation. The inner need that makes protagonists of art music aim towards the unknown, in an ongoing search for new technical-expressive possibilities of musical language, encourages the ever-increasing frenetic dynamism of its own basic elements. During the twentieth century the traditional dimensions of music as melody, rhythm and harmony expanded to include a wider framework of possibilities more generally defined with the term “music material”. Music material, a concept no less generic or stratified than the term contemporary music, could be the key to interpretation that concurrently allows for an understanding of the rapid transformation of compositional technique during the second half of the twentieth century and an understanding of the complex mechanisms that are gradually leading to the disintegration of the concept of musical material itself through the internalization of a multiplicity of new elements derived from different sources.1 1
206
The concept of music material is explored in many texts including the following: Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno Ästhetische Theorie, (=Gesammelte Schritften, Bd. 7) (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1996); idem, Philosophie der neuen Musik (=Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12) (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 2003). Carl Dahlhaus, in an examination of the concept’s limitations, cf. “Abkehr vom Materialdenken?”, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 19 (1984), 45–55; idem, “Adornos Begriff des musikalischen Materials”, in Carl Dahlhaus,
Western Art Music Beyond the West Currently there are many art music composers who identify as belonging to so called “Western” culture (European/North American/Australian) yet freely establish relationships on multiple levels with other music cultures in their works. The introduction of microintervals and non-equal music temperaments, the research of complex sounds typical of several “non-Western” musical instruments or scoring the music for the use of those instruments together with classical instruments, and the expansion of the traditional Western rhythmic language are only a few of the recent expressions of an enrichment of compositional styles. This broadening of compositional possibilities originating from encounters with other cultures and already widely asserted in some compositional procedures of the past, is often attributed to the common denominator of musical “exoticism”. 2 However the term exoticism, a problematically reductive reference to musics of the past, turns out to be deeply insufficient to describe the multiple nuances and complexities of the current phenomenon of “encounter” between Western contemporary music and the Others, 3 since defining and comparing each of these musical realities proves to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. It is no coincidence that the research studying this correlation first brought to light the problematic starting point, that is: the very concept of “West”. It was not a linear path that led to the problematization of the concept in the last decades. However, the problems were starkly illuminated by critical consideration of the ideas that the West had about non-Western cultures, as presented in the landmark book regarding postcolonial studies, Orientalism written by Edward Said and published in 1978.4 The Palestinian researcher, who was born in Jerusalem but lived in Egypt, Europe and United States, brings light to the intricate political-economical relations that, according to him, influence the interest of Western culture for the other ones. His harsh critique instigated many discordant and emotional responses. Within the polemic reactions elicited by Said’s writings, despite the recurrently critical tone, there emerged a particularly brilliant reading made by the American ethnographer, James Clifford.
2 3
4
Schönberg und andere. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Neuen Musik mit einer Einleitung con Hans Oesch (Mainz: Schott, 1978, 335–342) and Gianmario Borio, addressing both the valid and historically obsolete perspectives, see “Material. Zur Krise einer musikästhetischen Kategorie”, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 20 (1994), 108–118. The issue of “exoticism” in music interested many researchers and boasts a long theoretic tradition. In this context it refers only to a recent work: a collection of essays edited by Jonathan Bellman, The exotic in Western music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997). The Other is a recurring term in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Western music and its Others. Difference, representation and appropriation in music (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000). For the purpose of this text, it is used as a general term that includes all the music cultures outside the written Western one. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
207
Ingrid Pustijanac Clifford disapproves the “essentializing modes” in which Said’s work frequently relapses (indeed Said not only strongly supports the hypothesis on the tight correlation between cultural appropriation and imperialism but also underlines the conditioning of artistic production by political-economical domain factors). Nevertheless, Clifford recognizes that this Palestinian author has the privileged perspective to call into question a number of anthropological categories, perhaps the most important one is the concept of culture itself, and more generally speaking, the concept of West. In fact Clifford identifies, between the lines of Orientalism, elements to glimpse “the functioning of a more complex dialectic by means of which a modern culture continuously constitutes itself through its ideological constructs of the exotic”.5 Even if, according to Clifford, the West appears today more as a dynamic force (under the technologic, economic and political point of view) it does not radiate from a single well defined geographic and cultural center but rather from multiple places – including Japan, Australia, (the former) Soviet Union and China – that articulate into a variety of “micro sociological” contexts,6 projecting and mirroring between this Western force and the representation of the Others, that continue to serve as one of the essential catalysts of contemporary artistic production (together with other catalysts considered more typically Western such as the search for the “new” and the concept of expression). Starting from a different perspective, Philip V. Bohlman, in an article on synagogue singing, provides an equally complex and problematic image of the West.7 Recalling the phases of the geographical-historical definition, starting from the Roman Empire, the author demonstrates how the idea of West itself changes its boundaries, absorbing a significant number of Others – other cultures, other musics – many already situated in close proximity to the West. In this problematization process of the term West, it seems clear that the term is anything but well-defined and static. However the question is not altered substantially when we take into consideration the definition, equally complex and problematic, of the Others, easily identified with the general term “East”, whose cultural and geographical boundaries also prove to be unclear. Indeed, Bohlman recognizes an inner elsewhere and an external elsewhere in relation to the West. 8 Ostensibly to the external Others belong the Middle East cultures (the Arabic and Persian ones), 5
James Clifford, The predicament of culture (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 1988), particularly the chapter “On Orientalism”, 255–276, here 271. 6 Ibid., 312–313, 272. 7 Philip V. Bohlman, Composing the Cantorate: Westernizing Europe’s Other within, in Western music and its Others (as note 3), 187–212. 8 Ibid., 188.
208
Western Art Music Beyond the West the Far East (countries such as Japan, China), India, and the entire continent of Africa. In contrast, according to Bohlman, the inner Others include the religious songs repertoire (Gregorian, Protestant and other local community songs) and the popular repertoire of the different European communities that for a long time have served as sources for new musical ideas. Along similar lines, the classical period dances, Bartók’s compositional processes of cross hybridization with the Balkan folkloristic tradition, the incorporation of the popular Russian repertoire into the writing of the Five, and incorporating the f lourishing repertoire for classical guitar into Spanish contemporary musical writing are a few of the most canonized operations of appropriation of the oral tradition from the past into more contemporary written ones. In the already quoted examples regarding external or internal Others are included various categories of repertoires and traditions: the Eastern tradition, the folkloristic and the primitive one (or tribal, according to the favorite term used by Clifford). This categorization, equally general according to the American ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin,9 does not remove, despite the evident heterogeneousness of the origins, all these Others, both internal and external ones. They still appear to share a common element: they are principally defined according to their relationship to “Western Art Music” and precisely like ancient traditions become more authentic (in the double meaning of originating and original) but also less developed. Because they are assumed to mirror an antecedent stage in the development of musical expression, every internal dynamism is denied to them – they are considered static and unalterable in the course of time. This “idealized” conception of Other cultures is the outcome of a West that, as Slobin affirms, unrelentingly establishes itself through “play of projections, doublings, idealizations, and rejections of a complex, shifting otherness”, where “‘The Orient’ always plays the role of origin or alter ego”.10 Newer research in some branches of ethnomusicology widely belies these assumptions, showing how much the Western conceptual horizon can impede the comprehension of internal evolutionary phenomena on the one hand and how much this contact with the West inf luences both the transformation processes themselves and the reception of these processes by the protagonists.11 Then Clifford significantly questions himself wondering: 9
Mark Slobin, Subcultural sounds. Micromusics of the West (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993). 10 Ibid., 312. 11 Several essays have been published illustrating the sudden transformations caused by contact with the West, in particular with the free music industry and with music festivals. For this reason it is indispensible to refer to the article written by Jonathan Stock, “Peripheries and Interfaces: The Western impact on other music”, in Twentieth-century music, ed. by Nicholas
209
Ingrid Pustijanac “How are these new conditions to be conceived now that the “silence” of the Orient is broken; now that ethnography […] can be multidirectional; now that authenticity, both personal and cultural, is seen as something constructed vis-a-vis others?”12 Reflecting a strong desire to engage with new and alternative perspectives, the second part of this paper explores works written by authors belonging to two traditionally non-Western musical cultures: China and Iran. These two countries have been chosen as examples from the long list of countries that comprise the Western image of the “exotic” East.13 In addition, these are two traditions that possess their own specific art music (court Chinese music/traditional Persian music) established on monodic singing and on improvisation starting from exact pitch-class and modality systems with specific temperament systems; both have rich collections of traditional instruments used continuously from ancient to current times and advanced theoretical systems.14 Moreover, although there are some substantial differences concerning the social function of the music, the ways in which music is enjoyed and utilized, and the encounter modalities and current relationships with the West, another common element is the present systematic spread and presence of Western music not only, obviously, through the music industry and the concert activities of foreign companies but also through the local ensembles of official institutions in the style of Western higher education: the conservatories.15 In these places, beyond teaching the traditional repertoire, are inserted the foundations of Western music (instruments, musical notation, harmony, and so on). Also following the Western model, the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology emerged and directed the systematic research and the theoretic reflection on traditional music with meaningful consequences Cook, Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18–39. In wider terms see Bruno Nettl, The Western impact on world music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985). 12 Clifford, The predicament of culture (as note 5), 274. 13 The aforementioned image of the exotic East is, for historical reasons, different from nation to nation within Europe; for example, German orientalism is substantially different from the Italian or English counterparts. See Said, Orientalism (as note 4). 14 For further information about the Chinese music situation see China, the exhaustive paper written by several authors published in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 7: Eastern Asia, ed. by Robert C. Provine, J. Lawrence Witzleben, and Yosihiko Tokumaru (New York: Routledge, 2002), 127–400. See also the accessible work by Jean During, La musique iranienne: Tradition et évolution (Paris: Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1984) describing Iranian music reality as well as Jean During, Zia Mirabdolbaghi and Dariush, Safvat, The art of Persian music (Washington: Mage Publishers, 1991). 15 The first Chinese conservatory was established in Shanghai in 1927, see Isabel K. F. Wong, “The Music of China”, in Bruno Nettl, ed., Excursions in world music (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, (1992) 2004 4), 77–114. The Teheran Conservatory was founded in 1928 (cf. During, La musique iranienne).
210
Western Art Music Beyond the West to the perception of these music traditions. The current situation of academic music, where gradually the professional and artistic categories similar to Western ones have found affirmation, allows this study to concentrate exclusively on the relation between living composers (in the Western sense of the word) and contemporary art music.16 This chronological choice has two distinct motivations: to create a snapshot of the present situation of art music in these two countries and to reflect the particular historic-political conditions of these places as it impacted the previous generation of composers: specifically the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966–1976 and the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979. The music production of the previous generation of composers was strongly influenced by restrictions on their freedom of choice and limitations on their contacts with much, although not all, of the West.17 The contemporary production of Chinese and Iranian composers covers a wide spectrum of attitudes toward their respective traditions as well as toward the Western art tradition. Assuming that the “easiest” operation consists of acceptance and derivative imitation of Western art music, there are multiple other interactional levels that move towards assimilation of Western ideas: introduction of Western musical instruments as well as the transformation of traditional lutherie, implementation of Western harmonic language but also developing their own harmonic systems (for example, the Han Chinese system), the adoption of the Western temperament but alternatively tuning these instruments (piano, strings) according to traditional temperament, and so on. Embracing the definitions by Bruno Nettl, it is possible to talk of a process of “musical Westernization” in the first case (copying or imposing specific techniques that allow non-Western people to integrate Western culture), while the second case corresponds to the complex method of “musical modernization” which involves the implementation of techniques that lend “modernity” while preserving the national character.18 16 Leaving aside the relationship with Western pop music, which includes interaction on multiple levels, since the social and analytical-aesthetic prerequisites of this connection fall outside the purposes of this paper. 17 During the entire twentieth century, China and Iran, evidently for political reasons, maintained a good relationship with some countries of the West. Of particular importance was the strong Russian influence imposed on Chinese composers in the first half of the 1900s. This episode explains the Chinese grasp of a specific harmonic-modal language, based on the model of Russian composers, but also the heavy presence of ordinary popular songs of the labor forces. As a result of the restricted access to the remainder of the West, scholars in those Western countries continue to have limited knowledge regarding music production of the previous generation of composers in China and Iran. 18 After the pioneering studies conducted by Bruno Nettl, The Western impact on world music (as note 11) concepts like westernization, modernization and globalization have been recently
211
Ingrid Pustijanac Although at first glance these distinctions may appear effective and clear, there are some situations not encompassed by these categories. Further ref lection suggests a shift to a schematic awareness of a reality that expresses this application of ethnomusicological categories based on the analysis and aesthetics of Western music. The contemporary art music production of both traditions shows a similar trajectory: while distancing itself from the purely traditional repertoire, it strives to fully integrate the traditional repertoire through a synthesis process. Examples of immediate comprehension and aesthetic fruition include the areas of music production that incorporate elements attributable to a specific tradition, for example the presence of ethnic instruments inside a characteristically Western musical setting together with the use of characteristically traditional harmonic-melodic elements (pitches, rhythmicmelodic formula). This is a frequent approach among contemporary composers, both Western and non-Western, that has been defined by John Corbett (initially in reference to musical production by non-Western composers and later extended to musical production by Western composers which share these features) as decorative orientalism. In the article entitled “Experimental Oriental: New music and other Others”,19 the American writer explains how these “contemporary chinoiserie”20 concern activities that privilege the imitation and the introduction in new music contexts of scales, timbres, instruments, textures, voices and non-Western music genres, operations that can be interpreted as an effort to renew the music but also as the continuation of a tradition of musical orientalism of the nineteenth century style. In contrast, in terms of such music production on the part of non-Western composers, these results (sometimes very similar to the works of the Western composers) are perceived as the result of a process of Westernization (partial or total abandonment of the traditional instruments, introduction of harmonic-polyphonic writing that is unknown to the traditional monodic style and so on) that demonstrates a curiosity towards Western culture from the perspective of the traditional. In this overthrowing of perspective, the West is the object of interest from the Others who appropriate and integrate it, in a faster and faster summing up process, focusing not only on Western economic production systems but also on many aspects of artistic production. re-examined in Martin Stokes, “Music and the Global Order”, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), 47–72. 19 Published in Western music and its Others (as note 3), 163–186. 20 John Corbett, Experimental Oriental: New music and other Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 170. The term chinoiserie is present in Steve Reich, Writings about music, in Gregory Battock, ed., Breaking the sound barrier (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 163 (quoted after Corbett).
212
Western Art Music Beyond the West The first examples are in the already mentioned category of decorative orientalism. Ney Navâ, a piece for ney and string orchestra (1982) written by the Iranian composer Hossein Alizâdeh is very famous in Iran and abroad. 21 Widely known as a performer of traditional Persian music and director of the national orchestra of the Iranian radio-television, Alizâdeh (born in Teheran in 1951) was educated at the highest music institutions of his country, he studied with many masters of traditional music and also started studies during the early 1980s at the University of Berlin, focused on composition and musicology. As many Iranian composers, Alizâdeh makes use of a harmonic language characterized by a strong modal trait. This modal approach in Western music experienced an artistic f lowering during the period of national schools (for example, the Russian school – Mussorgskij and the successive Hungarian one – Bartók). It is a period when the use of popular melodies implicated a significant transformation, not only regarding the harmonic realm but also in the formal perspective of the classical language. The presence of the melody, often well known, seems to impede the possibility of its own elaboration in a traditional Beethovenian approach; it rather orientates the compositional language toward the variation technique and to the sequence of formal sections, creating contrast through rhythmic-melodic work and character. This formal principle is maintained in Ney Navâ where nostalgia and respect for the melodic formula of the Iranian tradition is not distorted by the use of the Western string orchestra, constantly active as musical accompaniment to the melody of the solo instruments (ney and violin) (fig.1). Aspects of modern compositional technique can be observed in some works of Reza Vali. He was born in 1952 in Ghazvin, though he finished his conservatory studies in Teheran. He continued his career at the Music Academy in Vienna and at the University of Pittsburgh, a city where he still lives and works today, after obtaining his Ph.D. in music theory and composition there. Western criticism considers Reza Vali as the “Persian Bartók”, 22 given that he 21 The piece was published in 2004 by the Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art Teheran (http:// www.mahoor.com/default.aspx, last accessed: 18 January 2018), Today the Institute is engaged in the promotion and spread of Persian culture. I would like to express my gratitude to the young Iranian composer and musicologist Amir Molookpour for several illuminating conversations and for making the works available to me for this research. 22 “Had Bela Bartók gathered folk material from Persia, his string quartets might have turned out something like Reza Vali’s Folk songs for string quartet”, affirms Karl Stark, The Syracuse Herald American, 7 January 1996; while Phillip George writes “Leave all conception of belly dancing and new-age syncretism at the door in Reza Vali’s ‘Persian Folklore’ a thoughtful collection of compositions by an artist who has been cited as an Iranian Bartók in bringing a deep understanding of his native folk music in consort with Western classical techniques”, 20th-Century Music, March 1999, online: http://www.rezavali.com/reviews.htm (last accessed: 16 February 2018).
213
Ingrid Pustijanac
Ex. 1. Hossein Alizâdeh, Ney Navâ for ney and string orchestra, b. 1–6, 29–34. © Mahoor Institut of Culture and Art, Teheran
combines traditional work with modern compositional techniques, follows formal procedures and uses effective and enchanting rhythms. His works consist of orchestra pieces, chamber ensembles, string quartets, vocal, piano and electronic music. He shows emancipation from the simple modal and melodic language, without fully embracing the language of Western modernity. The introduction of specific instrumental techniques for the realization of a richer timbral range of Western musical instruments is accompanied, in many works, by the use of traditional instruments such as the ney and oud. This reveals his interest in compositional dimensions that consider timber as a crucial parameter in the musical composition. Even his most modern harmonic choices follow the principles of writing with a timbral focus while not overpowering the substantially melodic expressivity. So, for example in the numerous Folk Songs composed for a variety of instrumental combinations (f lute and cello, string quartet, and so on) the traditional melodic material is elaborated through procedures that expand its intrinsic features, utilizing the microtonal profile, rhythmic irregularity, and repeti214
Western Art Music Beyond the West tive structure to create innovative sounds and new timbric universes. The results are not dissimilar to those obtained by some Western composers who are particularly attentive to the timbral dimension–for instance, Giacinto Scelsi and György Ligeti. 23 Similarly, in contemporary Chinese production, the music scene seems to be governed by the same phenomena. On one side is a renewed interest in traditional music and instruments24 following the Cultural Revolution and from the other side there is a wide range of hybrid genres as a result of modernization. Indeed, many composers, albeit with full respect to tradition, embrace elements of Western art music. Thanks to the continuous relationships with musical institutions and international festivals (particularly French ones) 25 and thanks to the presence of the composer Chou Wen Chung at Columbia University, many Chinese composers have frequent relationships with the West and their music is more familiar to the Western public when compared to Iranian composers and music. Names like Shuya Xu (Changchun 1961), Qigang Chen (Shangai 1951), Guo Wenjing (Chonhqing 1956) and particularly Tan Dun (Hunan 1957), just to mention a few, are not unknown to Western audiences. Their works, often the outcome of periods of studying abroad, as with the Iranian musicians, share two possible approaches. On one side, there are works that mainly present features of the Chinese tradition (for example, Tan Dun’s compositions or those of Liu Wenjin, a composer of the previous generation) although with modern elements more and more prominent. On the other hand, there is a total acceptance of the contemporary language, intended as part of a search for new compositional techniques, an outgrowth of the European avant-garde approach in the second half of the 1900s. For explanatory purposes, we will delve deeply into some pieces of Guo Wenjing. Born in China, in Chongqing (the province of Sichuan), Wenjing was one of the one hundred students (out of 17,000 aspirants) allowed to attend the Beijing Conservatory in 1978. Different from the brilliant graduates of this class (Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou Long), Wenjing chose to live in China, ex23 In addition to the already listed composers, there are many contemporary Iranian authors embracing a melodic-modal style. To name just a few: Morteza Hannaneh, Loris Tjeknavorian, Hossein Dehlavi, Aminoullah Hossein, Shaheen Fahrat, Heshmat Sanjari, and so on. The production by some Iranian composers is available on CD (in particular see two anthologies Works by Persian composers 1&2, 2003) edited by the above mentioned Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art Teheran (see note n. 21). 24 To obtain more detailed information on the development of the Chinese national orchestras in the twentieth century, see Tsui Ying-fai, “Ensembles: The Modern Chinese Orchestra”, in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (as note 14), 227–232. 25 Observing the program of the renowned French music festival Présences, it is possible to notice how much attention is paid to the Chinese production.
215
Ingrid Pustijanac cept for a short stay in New York (thanks to a scholarship sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council). His works are edited in the Casa Ricordi Milan 26 and include not only chamber and symphonic works (poems and concertos for solo instrument and orchestra), but also pieces for usual ensembles (Late spring, 1995) and mixed ensembles (Sound from Tibet, 2001). Beginning in 1983, when the symphonic poem Suspended Ancient Coffins on the cliffs of Sichuan was performed for the first time in Berkeley (California), Wenjing took part in the most important music festivals in Europe and America, composing for numerous international ensembles. Taking the wide production of Guo Wenjing into account, I intend to focus attention on two works: String quartet no. 2 with a percussionist (op. 28, 1997–1999), encompassing not only strings but also percussion, including three Chinese instruments (xiao bo, nao bo and chuan bo), and Concertino for violoncello and ensemble (op. 26). It was composed in 1997 without the inclusion of the usual traditional Chinese instruments. These two compositions, despite the essential differences, clearly position themselves in the field of contemporary art music. The presence of aesthetic-expressive premises typical of experimental music is especially evident in String quartet no. 2, where the use of Chinese percussion does not simply create folkloristic coloristic “effects”. On the contrary, it defines the unique writing for the strings, which in turn become percussive and, thanks to different executive modalities, very rich in a timbral sense (in particular, in the first of the three movements), fully integrating into the overall sonority of the usual ensemble (see music example 2). Concerning melodic content, the Concertino appears less abstract. A continuous succession and the overlapping of repetitive, discontinuous sounds and rhythms of the ensemble builds in the single sections a unique formal arc, where gestures of a more melodic nature emerge on the sound surface and are supported by the violoncello. The melodic shapes, even if very short, are clearly audible due to a well-defined rhythmic and melodic profile. There are no wide and articulated melodic lines but rather short cells that abandon the general timbral background (composed of repetitive interval and rhythmic patterns) and emerge in the foreground as a melodic entity. Despite the pres26 On the website of Casa Ricordi dedicated to Guo Wenjing (http://catsearch.umpgclassical. com/it/composers/wenjing-guo; last accessed: 17 January 2018) it is possible to find extensive information about the composer, including information from an interview published by Enzo Restagno, ed., La musica cinese. Le tradizioni e il linguaggio contemporaneo (Turin: EDT, 1998), 170–173. The promotional office of Casa Ricordi, to whom I am sincerely grateful, supplied all the necessary works for this essay. I also express my heartfelt thanks to Yoichi Sugiyama, composer and orchestra leader, who was the first to draw my attention to the music by Guo Wenjing.
216
Western Art Music Beyond the West
Ex. 2. Guo Wenjing, String quartet no. 2 with a percussionist, I movement, bb. 196–200 © Ricordi, Milan
ence of these apparently figurative elements, it is not possible to establish, both in the String quartet no. 2 and also in Concertino, a temporal orientation or directionality. On the contrary, the aspect of suspense emerges, full of sounds and gestures – elements typical of a formal conception and not based on the analogy with language typical of Western classical music. It is instead based on rules of the formal and on a timbral balance and is more abstract. These short examples open a new survey field since they show that classical art music represents a reason for interest from those of other cultures. It also clarifies that within the field of contemporary art music, whose technical and poetic requirements the Western public often does not appear to understand, there is active interest in and interpretation by other cultures, offering a valid new area of research to pursue. For explicatory purposes, before I formulate a final conclusion, it is illuminating to discuss some other Iranian authors that attempted to take on the challenge of contemporary art music. Among names like Kiawasch SahebNassagh (Teheran, 1968), M. T. Masudieyeh and Alireza Mashayekhi, the last one represents the main figure of this trend. Born in Tehran in 1940, Mashayekhi is one of the first Iranian composers to introduce contemporary music to his country. After finishing his studies in his homeland, he spent some time abroad, studying composition in Vienna with Hanns Jelinek and Karl Schiske. Getting to know Jelinek inspired him to explore the wide palette of twentieth century sound. Together with his Iranian cultural background, it provided 217
Ingrid Pustijanac the basis of his musical development. After studying at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, he moved to Utrecht, Netherlands, to continue his research on electronic and computer music. In Utrecht, he worked with Gottfried Michael Koenig, among others. His impressively large number of works move in two main directions: pieces directly inspired by the Iranian culture (Symphony No. 5, Persian Suite and Sharzad) and some based on more freely conceived ideas (Symposium, String quartet no. 3, Symphony no. 8 and Celebration for piano and percussion). He assumes as a model not only the avant-garde music but also the theoretical ref lections of the avant-garde composers regarding the composition itself. In addition, Mashayekhi develops a sophisticated system of thought to illustrate his own poetics. 27 To talk about composers such as Guo Wenjing, Alireza Mashayekhi and others mentioned above, the general category of “decorative orientalism” proves to be insufficient. The musical writing employed by these composers shows a process of deep internalization of elements of Western contemporary language. If we wish to discuss categories, it would be more correct to introduce the term “Western contemporaneism”. Yet to understand the ongoing reciprocal inf luences, it is necessary not to lose sight that the composers themselves belonged to the European avant-garde of the 1950s that appropriated not only the music elements (timbral research, introduction of “ethnic” instruments) but also some mental attitudes characteristic of non-Western cultures. In other words, the abstract dimension that the Western arts (in particular painting and sculpture, and only successively music) assimilated as a result of contact with other cultures at the beginning of the 1900s. Authors like Pierre Boulez (the multi-colored Le marteau sans maître, for instance), Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman and of course John Cage (to mention only a few proponents of the most heterogeneous trends) perform a deep summary, whose musical results often do not fit into the concrete musical works of the Western tradition. They are composed for traditional Western ensembles and performance venues and yet the writing makes use of avant-garde compositional procedures. However the works are radically different compared to the Western tradition since they have the poetic-aesthetic background of the composer deeply inf lu27 Starting from philosophical considerations about the music, the composer asserts that the truth can be discovered only through the multiple-logic structures of the artistic way of thinking. He considers this the only way to keep the contradictions, held in the truth itself. He affirms that by abandoning the consecutive solutions of problems, unquestionably ruled by logic, especially from Newton on, we are simultaneously able to follow a given quantity of X. For this reason, he defined his way of arranging the music “the quest for meta-X”. For further information, consult the composer’s internet website at: http://www. alirezamashayekhi.com/fa/h/ (last accessed: 17 January 2018)
218
Western Art Music Beyond the West enced by the Eastern way of thinking. This perspective is rooted in the Western musical thinking which emerged during the avant-garde periods both in the U.S. (the New York School) and in Europe (Darmstadt, Cologne), new methods developed to conceive new parameters in musical language, musical form and tempo. The directionality of the temporal progress, normally tied to the presence of harmony, melody or of the music gesture in the broader meaning of the term, in these pieces becomes obsolete. Now the stasis, the time circularity and the contemplation of the sound micro-events establish themselves as front rank elements. But these are dimensions that the Western tradition largely did not possess for a long time. On the contrary, they represent the Eastern philosophical essence. In this case, Corbett talks about “conceptual orientalism”. 28 What then, is the ongoing process, when non-Western composers embrace the innovations of the Western compositional language of the last few decades? Is it recognized as a foundation that is common in the abstract dimensions and far from the past categories of melody – harmony – narrative form? Or is it about those with other points of view regarding Western culture that raises curiosity and the desire of comparison? The majority of the previously mentioned composers have a traditional education in their countries (dimensions that are much more emotionally connected to the traditional culture in Iran compared to China, due to different cultural politics) that is in parallel, or successively wedded, to studies of Western classical music. Moreover, a remarkable detail is that many Iranian and Chinese composers realize part of their production in a so-called “new-modal” style. The reasons why must be sought in the scholarly system of Western classical music of these countries (that focus above all on the past masterpieces, also in the composition classes) but also in the substantial and important production of soundtracks, an activity that concerns many of the mentioned authors. In the end, there are very few authors who venture to deal with contemporary musical research, without completely abandoning other fields of study or their continuing as traditional musicians. This appears evident in authors who leave their homelands (like Mashayekhi) as well as those who decide to stay (as Wenjing). Also under what point of view and with which instruments is it necessary to examine the relationships between production and the theoretic-poetic thinking of these authors and their Western colleagues? Highlighting a different conception of musical writing by the Chinese authors, they appear much more oriented toward timbral-temporal research. This is known in Europe as the “French school”, where in France, maybe not by chance, the majority of the 28 Corbett, Experimental Oriental: New music and other Others (as note 20), 170.
219
Ingrid Pustijanac above mentioned Chinese composers studied. Iranian composers rather followed a trend of a more logic-constructive type (that is the “German school” – Germany being the most visited country by the Iranian composers). Is this contributing a better understanding of these authors or simply informing us about the cultural relationships between the two countries? How many of our own fundamental cultural convictions exist in these assumptions, almost trivializing a musical reality that is highly complex and rich, still awaiting analysis? Certainly in musical practice, always more global, the summing up and fusion are already a prominent reality. The theoretical issues about relationships and the survey of musicologic types in the wider sense appear to become more and more difficult and complicated. These complexities, however, are necessary to address as we examine new systems: not only social and economic, but also those aesthetic-poetic ones that stand out in contemporary masterpieces.
220
heder
PERFORMANCE OF MUSICAL CULTURES
221
Allan W. Atlas
222
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England
Allan W. Atlas The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England: Some Notes on Manufacturers’ Marketing Strategies * Abstract. The paper argues that Victorian manufacturers of the English concertina developed marketing strategies in order to pitch the instrument towards women. Five such sales pitches stand out: (1) the concertina was portable; (2) it was relatively easy to learn (since it was a fixed-pitch instrument); (3) it was a viable substitute for both f lute and violin, both of which were off-limits to women until relatively late in the century; it thus afforded women access to repertories that were otherwise closed to them (and since the concertina was produced in treble, tenor, and bass sizes, this included access to string quartets); (4) playing the concertina could count among a young lady’s “accomplishments”; and (5) at least one manufacturer, Louis Lachenal (c. 1821–1861), promoted concertina recitals by his daughters, obviously in the hope that they would serve as role models.
As is well known, Victorian England held firm convictions about which musical instruments were appropriate for women, whether professionals or wellbred amateurs of the middle and upper classes. Thus conventional wisdom holds that until the 1870s, when the unfavorable view of women playing the violin began to soften, only three instruments (besides the voice) were deemed suitable for ladies: piano, harp, and guitar, with the popularity of the latter two having peaked by mid-century.1 *
1
What follows draws upon a section of an earlier study, “Ladies in the Wheatstone ledgers: The gendered concertina in Victorian England, 1835–1870”, Royal musical association research chronicle 39 (2006), 1–234 (it fills the entire issue), here slightly expanded (the section in question, that is) and with the documents quoted at greater length. On women and the violin, see the excellent study by Paula Gillett, Musical women in England, 1870–1914: “Encroaching on all man’s privileges” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 77–140. Note that the Royal Academy of Music, founded in 1822, did not admit its first female violin student until 1872, prior to which female students could study only voice, piano, or harp; see Frederick Corder, A history of the royal academy of music from 1822 to 1922 (London: F. Corder, 1922), 10. The literature on the domestic role of the piano in Victorian England
223
Allan W. Atlas There was, however, a fourth instrument of which women could avail themselves: the English concertina, which, after being patented by the well-known physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875, knighted in 1868) in 1829, 2 gained immediate popularity with England’s uppermost socio-economic crust (women included) and played a significant role in mid-Victorian, “highbrow” musical life; in addition, it acquired a large repertory of works by both concertina virtuosos and mainstream composers of the day (all either native to England or having settled there). 3 And just how quickly the concertina’s popularity spread among women is already evident in June 1834, when the Dublin evening post described it as follows: “[it is] esteemed by fashionable circles of London, the most elegant novelty in the list of musical instruments played upon by ladies” (App. 1, Doc. 1). This description would ring true until the final quarter of the century, when the instrument began its journey from London’s fashionable salons and concert halls and joined a pair of more “vernacular” concertina types in such working-class venues as the music hall, the concertina bands of both northern factory workers and the Salvation Army, and, eventually, in various folk traditions throughout the English-speaking world.4
2
3 4
224
and its gendered association with women in particular is large; among the most useful items: Arthur Loesser, Men, women and pianos: A social history (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 267–283; Mary Burgan, “Heroines at the piano: Women and music in nineteenth-century fiction”, The lost chord: Essays on Victorian music, ed. by Nicholas Temperley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 42–67; Laura Voracheck, “’The instrument of the century’: The piano as an icon of female sexuality in the nineteenth century”, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, 38/39 (2000), 26–43; Elizabeth Morgan, “The virtuous virtuosa: Women at the pianoforte in England, 1780–1820”, Ph.D. diss., University of California/ Los Angeles (2009). On the guitar and the harp: Stewart Button, The guitar in England. Outstanding dissertations in music from British universities (New York: Garland, 1989), and John Oxenford, “Music in the drawing room”, Gavarni in London: Sketches of life and character, ed. by Albert Smith (London: David Bogue, 1849), 18, respectively. The “standard” biography of Wheatstone is Brian Bowers, Sir Charles Wheatstone, FRS, 1802–1875, 2nd ed. (London: Science Museum, 2001). Wheatstone & Company was the most prestigious manufacturer of the English concertina. I discuss the patent in Allan W. Atlas, The Wheatstone English concertina in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 29–34; there is a facsimile of the patent at Robert Gaskins, “A Portfolio of historic concertina patents”, Concertina library: Digital reference collection for concertinas”, online at http:// www.concertina.com/patents/index.htm, last accessed: 14 May 2017 (hereafter, Concertina library with URL for specific item); this website is rich in both original concertina-related documents and secondary literature about the instrument. The most comprehensive survey of the instrument in nineteenth-century English art-music circles remains my The Wheatstone English concertina. The two other concertina types: the “Duet” (also native to England) and the German-born “Anglo” (also called “Anglo-Continental” or “Anglo-German” – this confusing terminology came about in the nineteenth century as a result of the modifications that the Brit-
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England What follows considers the marketing strategies with which Victorian concertina makers pitched the instrument towards women. Brief ly, they dangled five enticements before them: (1) the concertina was portable, (2) it was relatively easy to learn, (3) it was a viable substitute for both violin and f lute, and thus gave women access to string and wind repertories at a time when these were otherwise off limits to them, (4) to play the concertina could be counted among a young lady’s “accomplishments”, and (5) at least one manufacturer seems to have promoted concerts by his teenage daughters, no doubt with the hope that they would serve as role models and thus attract other young women to his instruments. To consider portability first: this was usually mentioned merely in passing, as in the introduction to Alfred B. Sedgwick’s Complete system of instructions for the concertina (1854):5 “To Ladies [the concertina] is particularly recommendable from [sic] its extreme elegance and portability” (Appendix 1, Doc. 2a). For some, however, the instrument’s portability was a major asset regardless of gender (or health!). As William Cawdell puts it in his A short account of the English concertina (1865): one can play the concertina in any position, standing, sitting, walking, kneeling or even lying down. If confined to the house by a sprained ankle, you may play whilst reclining on the sofa […] and when you are convalescent, you may take your instrument into the fields where the Piano can never be (App. 1, Doc. 2b).
5
ish brought to bear on the original German product). On these instruments, see Atlas, The Wheatstone English concertina (as note 2), 12–16; Oliver Heatwole, “Types of concertinas”, Concertina 1/1 (Winter 1981), 5–15; on the German Konzertina tradition in particular, see Maria Dunkel, Bandonion und Konzertina: Beitrag zur Darstellung der Instrumententyps. Berliner musikwissenschaftlicher Arbeiten 30 (München; Salzburg: Katzbichler, 1987), as well as her Akkordeon–Bandonion–Concertina im Kontext der Harmonikainstrumente (Bochum: Augemus, 1999). There is a fine study of the many folk traditions in which the “Anglo” has found a home in Dan M. Worrall, The Anglo-German concertina: A social history, 2 vols. (Fulshear, TX: Concertina Press, 2009); on the Irish tradition in particular, see Dan M. Worrall, “Notes on the beginnings of concertina playing in Ireland, 1834–1930”, Concertina library, online at http://www.concertina.com/worrall/beginnings-concertina-in-ireland/index.htm (last accessed: 14 May 2017), and Gearóid Ó Hallmhuráin, “Clare: The heartland of the Irish concertina”, Papers of the international concertina association 3 (2006), 1–19; on the tradition in the United States: Dan M. Worrall, “A brief history of the Anglo concertina in the United States”, Concertina library, online at http://www.concertina.com/worrall/anglo-in-unitedstates (last accessed: 14 May 2017). Victorian music publications generally do not carry dates of publication; I follow those given in the “British Library Integrated Catalogue”, online at www.theeuropeanlibrary.org (last accessed: 14 May 2017) though these are dates of accession, which can sometimes (if only occasionally) differ from those of publication.
225
Allan W. Atlas In fact, it is in the open field that Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) has Count Fosco play Rossini’s “Largo al factotum” on his concertina in his (Collins’s) masterful mystery The woman in white (1859).6 As for the instrument being relatively easy to learn – another a feature no doubt equally prized by women and men – a Wheatstone & Company publicity pamphlet of 1848 puts it as follows: From the remarkable simplicity of its fingering, and the great facility with which its tones are produced and sustained, it is very easily learnt; and as it cannot be sounded out of tune, the most perfect crescendos and diminuendos may be obtained, without the practice requisite on other instruments” (App. 1, Doc. 3a). Now, while portability and not having to worry about one’s intonation or tone production must have had their allure, they were gender-neutral in their attraction. There were, however, strategic plays that were aimed specifically at women, the most loudly trumpeted of these being that with the concertina women could play music originally written for both violin and f lute, repertories that, as noted above, were largely inaccessible to them until the 1870s. To cite the concertinist George Case’s (1823–1892) advert for instruments of his manufacture in The musical world for 29 September 1855: The Concertina […] [has the] capacity to play any music written for the Violin, Flute, etc. […] [and] may be used as a substitute for the Violin or Flute […] Tenor and Bass Concertinas are likewise manufactured, upon which any music for the Viola or Violoncello may be performed. […] They are frequently combined, and in Quartets, Septets […] or even larger numbers, they produce a beautiful effect (App. 1, Doc 4a). And what Case only implies, the virtuoso concertinist (and well-known violist) Richard Blagrove (1826/27–1895) states explicitly in his 1864 Instruction book for the study of the concertina: Tenor and Bass Concertinas are also manufactured […] affording Ladies the peculiar advantage of enabling them to perform quartetts written for two violins, viola and violoncello (App. 1, Doc. 4b). 6
226
First published serially in Charles Dickens’s All the year round (26 November 1859 – 30 August 1860), The woman in white was published in its first integral, three-volume edition in 1860 by the London publisher Sampson Low; my reference is to the Penguin edition, edited by John Sutherland (Harmondsworth, 1974), 250.
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England
Fig. 1. Two Wheatstone concertinas: a 48-button treble with rosewood ends, serial no. 6760, 1853–1854 (on the left); a 48-button baritone with amboyna ends, serial no. 18216, c. 1870 (on the right).
Thus the concertina gave women access to the string quartet repertory from which, at the time Blagrove was writing, they were still being excluded. In fact, Blagrove continued to recommend the concertina to women for the purpose of playing chamber music even after that barrier had been effectively lifted. As he wrote in the magazine called The girl’s own paper in 1880–1881: “A very fair rendering of classical chamber music can be given [on concertinas], in which ladies can take part” (App. 1, Doc. 4c). Women could even reach beyond the chamber music repertory and try their “fingers” at, for example, one or another of Giulio Regondi’s (1822–1872) arrangements for concertina ensembles of Mozart symphonies.7 Yet the idea of luring women to the concertina with the prospect that they could play string quartets had a problem, since the bass concertina, which 7
Regondi (see App. 1, Doc. 1) produced three such arrangements: No. 39 in E flat, K.543, for two trebles and baritone; No. 38 in D, K.540 (“Prague”), for treble, baritone, and bass; and No. 38 again, now for two trebles, baritone, and bass; yet given that none of these was published, they were likely intended for his own concertina quartet (see the “Note” that follows Doc. 2a in Appendix 1). The arrangement of the finale of K.540 for four concertinas appears in Allan W. Atlas, ed., Victorian music for the English concertina (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2009), 145–161. Far more accessible for most concertinists were the many published arrangements (most often based on opera excerpts) for two concertinas, usually treble and baritone; thus the edition just cited also includes (pp. 134–144) Richard Blagrove’s Duo concertante, from “Les huguenots” of Meyerbeer (1862).
227
Allan W. Atlas reaches down to the cello’s low C and which would have appropriated that instrument’s part, is a cumbersome instrument, as witness the following data: the 1850s Wheatstone treble that I sometimes use when performing with the New York Victorian Consort8 has a circumference (around its six sides – see fig. 1) of 21 inches, measures about 4½ inches across with its bellows tightly closed, and weighs approximately one pound, these figures being more or less typical for a mid-nineteenth-century treble. On the other hand, the same measurements for my circa 1870 baritone concertina – and baritones could vary a bit in size – are 25 inches, 5¾ inches, and just under three pounds. But the bass concertina, which could also vary in size, was a monster; and two mid-century basses for which I have precise data come in as follows: 35½ inches in circumference, 7½ inches across, and 7¾ pounds for an instrument made by Edward Chidley (1853–1932), and 34 inches, 8 inches, and 8 pounds for one manufactured by Joseph Scates (1818–1899).9 Wheatstone’s solution was clever: they simply made a smaller version of the bass concertina specifically for ladies. Thus among the instruments that they displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was a “concert bass concertina […] for violoncello or bassoon music, singly or in concert; the same, of a smaller size, for the use of ladies” (App. 1, Doc 5). Yet the venture seems to have been a commercial failure. Of the more than 1400 transactions in the Wheatstone sales ledgers (about which presently) that refer specifically to women and that also date from after the Exhibition opened on 1 May 1851, only six involve the purchase or rental of a bass concertina, and only one of these refers explicitly to a “small bass”. Thus while women may well have f locked to the concertina in order to take part in the string quartet repertory, I suspect that concertina quartets were generally mixed ensembles in terms of gender, with the cello part usually being assigned to a gentleman in the group. Still another angle from which to pitch the concertina towards women was handed to the manufacturers on a silver platter: that is, like playing the piano and speaking French, playing the concertina could be counted among a young lady’s “accomplishments”. Surely, this is what the “lady of talent” who ran a Kensington Park finishing school implies when she placed the following advertisement in The times on 26 July 1860: EDUCATION […] for YOUNG LADIES […] In an old-established finishing school, of high standing, conducted by a lady of talent, assisted by English and foreign governesses and eminent masters daily 8 9
228
With Julia Grella O’Connell, mezzo-soprano, and Jin-Ok Lee, piano. My thanks to Wim Wakker and Robert Harvey for the information about the Chidley and Scates instruments, respectively.
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England for all accomplishments. The instruction comprehends all the higher branches of English, modern languages, piano, singing, concertina, guitar, drawing, dancing, and calisthenics (App. 1, Doc. 6a). Finally, we may consider one of the strategies adopted by the Swiss-émigré Louis Lachenal (c. 1821–1861), a one-time Wheatstone employee who set up his own company in 1858 and quickly became Wheatstone’s chief competitor. His scheme was tried-and-true: he “exploited” his own talented children. Thus on 14 June 1865, the teenage sisters Marie (1848-1937), Eugenie (1849– 1883), and Josephine (1851–?) Lachenal made their debut at Myddelton Hall in Islington. And though neither the favorable review that appeared in the Islington times on 17 June nor the accolades that accompanied the girls’ successful concerts in Edinburgh later that year emphasized issues of gender (App. 1, Doc. 7), I suspect that Lachenal was, at least in part, promoting his daughters as role models who might attract other young women to buy his concertinas. As a footnote to both Lachenal’s strategy and the concert, I would suggest that perhaps it was the Lachenal sisters’ Islington performance that inspired William Cawdell, who was in the audience, to the following rapturous confession in his Short account of the English concertina: I must not omit to speak of lady concertinists; I have heard of the dangers of Croquet [Cawdell’s italics] to young men of a susceptible turn of mind, but I think that those perils cannot be compared to the fascination of a group of young ladies in a magic semicircle practicing selections on several concertinas. I remember once being present at such a scene, and I went home suffering from heart affection and Concertina on the brain. […] I recovered entirely from the first, but the effects of the latter have not quite disappeared.10 In all, there can be no doubt that Victorian concertina makers sought to attract women to the instrument. And with prices in 1862 that could run as high as eighteen guineas for Lachenal’s top-of-the-line treble and twenty-two guineas for his best baritone and bass concertinas,11 it would seem that they 10 William Cawdell, A short account of the English concertina (London: William Cawdell, 1865), 17. One possible problem with respect to cause (the sisters’ concert) and effect (Cawdell’s “Concertina on the brain”): though we know that the concert took place on 14 June 1865, we do not know precisely when during that year A short account was published. 11 Lachenal’s 1862 price list appeared in The international exhibition of 1862. Illustrated catalogue of the industrial department, British division, vol. 7 (Class XVI – musical instruments) (London: Her Majesty’s Commissioners,1862), 112; it is reproduced in Stephen Chambers, “Some notes on Lachenal concertina production and serial numbers”, Concertina library, online at http://www.concertina.com/chambers/lachenal-production/index.htm (last accessed: 14
229
Allan W. Atlas
Fig. 2. Edward Chidley, Chidley’s instructions for the concertina, 3rd ed. (London: Chidley, 1854), frontispiece.
were taking aim at women of solid socio-economic means, the kind that we see in the frontispiece of Edward Chidley’s 1854 method book Instructions for the concertina (shown in fig. 2). All of this raises an obvious question: how effective were these strategies? Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer; for like the question about whether a bagel is a piece of bread with a hole in the middle or an air-filled hole with a ring of dough around it (I use this very New York-centric means of measuring instead of the more customary glass half full/half empty in honor of Zdravko Blažeković, who by now may be considered an “honorary” native New Yorker), the answer will depend upon one’s perspective. And rather than offering my own somewhat biased opinion on the matter, I will let some names and numbers do the talking. May 2017). A guinea was equal to 21 shillings (that is, 1£ + 1 shilling). To put these prices into perspective: the average, mid-century working-class salary was about 15 shillings a week, so that with such a salary it would have taken about 25 weeks of labor to purchase the 18-guinea instrument, and that, of course, assumes that the wage-earner spent not a pence on anything else. On the estimated salary, see John F. C. Harrison, The early Victorians: 1832–1851 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 66.
230
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England Fortunately for those interested in both the English concertina and the sociology of music in Victorian England, the Horniman Museum in South London’s Forest Hill preserves a fascinating set of documents: nine Wheatstone & Company sales ledgers that, with only an occasional gap, record the firm’s daily transactions from 4 April 1835 to 23 May 1870. All told, the ledgers account for more than 15,000 transactions – sales, rentals, exchanges, and loans – and include the names of the customers, the serial number of most of the instruments, and, beginning on 1 January 1851, most of the prices. And of these 15,000-plus transactions, no fewer than 1,769 (or just under 12%) refer to and account for as many as 978 women (many of them, obviously, cited more than once). To be sure, these numbers come with an important caveat: (1) we cannot know how many instruments listed as having been purchased by women nevertheless ended up in the hands of men or vice-versa; (2) nor can we know how many women either bought Wheatstone concertinas from one of the many instrument dealers to whom Wheatstone sold in bulk or simply purchased instruments made by other manufacturers, none of whom seems to have left us any records.12 Yet despite the many unknowns, the list of Wheatstone’s 978 female customers reads like a “who’s who” of Victorian England’s rich-and-famous. Among the 129 female members of the titled aristocracy (more than double the number of their male counterparts), we find, to name just three: Elizabeth Wellesley (née Hay, 1820–1904), the Duchess of Wellington (923);13 Lady Emily Bulteel (1839–1892) (127), the granddaughter of the Earl Grey of tea fame and great-great-grandmother of Lady Diana Spencer, the late Princess of Wales (1961–1997); and Hamilton Campbell, Lady Belhaven of Wishaw House (c. 1790–1873), Lanark (60), who provided bed and board for Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) when he toured Scotland in October 1848. The world of commerce and philanthropy is represented by the likes of the fabulously wealthy Angela Burdett Coutts (1814–1906) (129), who often hobnobbed with Charles Wheatstone at her Friday get-togethers after the lectures at the Royal Institution, while other women with high-level name recognition include, to cite but two, Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth (1817–1872) (478) and Miss Isabella Maria Herries (1789–1870) (422), whose impressive – and still extant – library of concertina music is full of fascinating annotations in the hand of her teacher, Richard Blagrove. 12 The fullest description of the ledgers, together with an inventory of the 978 women listed in them, appears in Atlas, “Ladies in the Wheatstone ledgers” (as note *), 58–66, 72–234. 13 The numbers in parentheses refer to each woman’s entry in the “Inventory” of “Ladies in the Wheatstone ledgers” (as note *).
231
Allan W. Atlas In addition there were professional musicians who adopted the concertina as a second instrument. Among them were two who became quite proficient on it: Madame R. Sidney Pratten (Catharina Josepha Pratten, née Pelzer, 1821– 1895) (672), who, though better known as a guitarist (see below), nevertheless played, taught, and wrote for the concertina (one of her students on the instrument was John Bird Sumner (1780–1862), the Archbishop of Canterbury), and Isabella Dulcken (1836–1899) (265), who, with her pianist-sister Sophie (1835–after 1857), took the concertina as far east as Moscow and St. Petersburg (their mother, Louise Dulcken (1811–1850), taught piano to members of the royal family). Finally, there were such mainstays of the London music scene as the contralto Charlotte Dolby (1821–1885) (248), the pianist and composer Clara Angela Macirone (1821–1895) (553), and the organist Elizabeth Mounsey (1819–1905) (624), all of whom must at least have dabbled on the instrument. Yet if, in the end, I continue to withhold my own opinion about the success or lack thereof of the manufacturers’ strategies for placing concertinas in the hands of Victorian women, I hope that I’ve provided at least a brief look at the data upon which readers can form their own impression. * * * I would like to conclude with some music. Appendix 2 presents the Romance No. 1 from Madame R. Sidney Pratten’s Repertoire for the concertina (for the use of her pupils): No. 1, Two romances (London: R. Sidney Pratten, 1861). Born Catharina Josepha Pelzer in Mühlheim am Rhein in either 1821 or 1824, she and her family settled in London in 1829, where she quickly established a reputation as a child prodigy guitarist. Just when she began playing the English concertina is not known. (As I have noted elsewhere, there was no shortage of “professors” who played both guitar and English concertina, Giulio Regondi being the most famous of them).14 In 1854, she married the f lutist R. Sidney Pratten, from which time she was best known as Madame R. Sidney Pratten. Said to have taught more than 1500 students, she died in London in 1895.15 14 On the concertina-guitar connection, see Atlas, Ladies in the Wheatstone Ledgers (as note *), 29–33. 15 On Pelzer/Madame Pratten, see Button, The guitar in England (as note 1), 78–86, 113–116, 133–137, 144–148; Paula Gillett, “Entrepreneurial women musicians in Britain: From the 1790s to the early 1900s”, The musician as entrepreneur, 1700–1914: managers, charlatans, and idealists, ed. by William Weber (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 211–214.
232
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England Appendix 1 (N.B.: unless otherwise noted, all instances of italicized emphasis are mine.) Document 1: The two earliest known references concerning the suitability of the concertina for women. (a) The announcement for Giulio Regondi’s first concertina recital in Ireland, in The Dublin evening post, 12 June 1834: “In addition to the beauty of tone and power of expression, this newly invented instrument possesses the capability of sustaining and performing full and varied harmonies. The concertina is at present esteemed by fashionable circles of London, the most elegant novelty in the list of musical instruments played upon by ladies”. Note: Cited after Tom Lawrence, “Giulio Regondi and the Concertina in Ireland”, Concertina world: International concertina association newsletter 411 ( July 1998) 22–23; also online at both http://www.ucd.ie/ pages/99/ articles/Lawrence/pdf and concertina library, http://www.concertina.com/ Lawrence. Regondi (1822–1872) arrived in England in 1831, having already established a reputation as a child prodigy on the guitar; he must have taken up the concertina almost immediately, and quickly became the period’s greatest virtuoso on the instrument; his compositions for both concertina and guitar are seminal. The Regondi literature cited in Atlas, “Ladies in the Wheatstone ledgers”, 7, note 21, is still up to date. (b) An “introduction” to the concertina, unsigned notice in The musical world 5/61 (12 September 1837) 135–136: “This instrument is a vast improvement on the accordion, and is the invention of the ingenious Professor Wheatstone […] [His] mellif luous synphonion [symphonion] is constructed on the same principles; but the tone is produced by breathing into the latter; whereas on the concertina it is brought out by the bellows, which renders it far more agreeable for ladies to play upon”. Note: The 1829 patent (see note 2) describes both the English concertina (though it was not yet so named) and the symphonion, a mouth-blown, harmonica-like instrument in the shape of a little rectangular box, with buttons on both sides, these arranged in somewhat similar fashion to those on the English concertina.
233
Allan W. Atlas Document 2: On the portability of the concertina as recommending it to women (and men). (a) Alfred B. Sedgwick, Complete system of instructions for the concertina (London: Levesque, Edmeades, 1854), 1: “To Ladies it [the concertina] is particularly recommendable from [sic] its extreme elegance and portability”. Note: Sedgwick (1821?–1878) left England and settled in Brooklyn in October 1851 (Brooklyn was then an independent city, and remained so until it was incorporated as part of New York City in 1898); though he enjoyed a successful career as a composer of theater music, he continued to play the concertina, often appearing as part of a concertina duo with Master Charles Sedgwick (his son, Alfred Charles); there are reviews of his performances in both The New York times and the Brooklyn daily eagle; his career as a concertinist in England was marked by two notable events: (1) he was one of the concertinists – together with Giulio Regondi, Richard Blagrove, and George Case – in the Concertina Quartett, which made its debut in the Hanover Square Rooms in 1844, and (2) he was among the first concertinists to introduce the instrument to the music hall, when, by May 1851 at the latest, he appeared at the Royal Music Hall together with a concertinist named Barton; his works for the New York theater are edited in The collected works of Alfred B. Sedgwick, ed. Michael Meckna (New York: Garland, 1994). (b) William Cawdell, A short account of the English concertina, its uses and capabilities, facility of acquirement, and other advantages (London: W. Cawdell, 1865), 13:“Its portability is another advantage strongly recommending it to persons going on a long voyage, or young men not settled down in life, perhaps using only a small room, their movables contained in a single box […] the concertina may be played in any position, standing, sitting, walking, kneeling, or even lying down. If confined to the house by a sprained ankle, you may play whilst reclining on the sofa, it will soothe you to forgetfulness of the pain; and when you are convalescent, you may take your instrument into the fields where the Piano can never be”. Note: Cawdell’s Short account stands as the earliest history (given its unbridled enthusiasm, perhaps it is better called an “appreciation”) of the English concertina; the entire twenty-four-page pamphlet (dated 1865 and 1866 on the title pages of the copies at the New York Public Library and the British Library, respectively) is available online at Concertina Library, http://www.concertina.com/cawdell. That Cawdell himself played the 234
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England concertina is evident from a notice in The orchestra, 2 December 1865 (and reprinted in A short account, 23): “Mr. Wm. Cawdell delivered last week a lecture at Dalston on ‘Domestic Music’, illustrating it on the Concertina”. Reviews of A short account appear in The musical times 12/275 (1 January 1866) 211, and The musical standard 4/90 (10 February 1866) 260. Cawdell resided at 24 Dorchester Street, New North Road, N London. Document 3: On the ease of learning the instrument as recommending it to women (and men). (a) A Wheatstone & Co. publicity pamphlet and pricelist, 1848 (italic emphasis in the original): “From the remarkable simplicity of its fingering, and the great facility with which its tones are produced and sustained, it is very easily learnt; and as it cannot be sounded out of tune, the most perfect crescendos and diminuendos may be obtained, without the practice requisite on other instruments”. Note: Cited after Stephen Chambers, “Louis Lachenal: ‘Engineer and concertina manufacturer’”, The free-reed journal 1 (1999) 16; Chambers’s article is available online at Concertina Library, http://www.concertina. com/chambers; the brochure alone appears online as part of an extensive series of manufacturers’ brochures and price lists at Concertina Library, http://www.concertina.com/pricelists; this two-page brochure of 1848 seems to be the earliest extant piece of Wheatstone-issued publicity material for the instrument. (b) An 1855 advertisement for George Case’s instruments (distributed by Boosey & Sons), The musical world 33/39 (29 September 1855) 636 (italic emphasis in the original): “From its intonation being always correct, the tone is easy to produce, and the keys lying entirely under the command of the fingers, it can be learned with much greater facility than other instruments. On this account it is particularly valuable to the amateur”. Note: George Tinckler Case (1823–1892), who played violin in the Royal Opera House orchestra, performed on, wrote for, and manufactured concertinas; in addition to a few original pieces for the instrument, he turned out a large body of transcriptions and arrangements, along with five method books, one of which, The baritone concertina (London: Boosey & Sons, 1857), sheds light on the use of the baritone concertina in small parish churches that did not have an organ. Case lifted the passage in the 235
Allan W. Atlas 1855 advertisement virtually verbatim from his Instructions for performing on the concertina (London: Wheatstone, 1849), 3. (c) George Bernard Shaw, “Some instruments and how to play them”, The star, 8 March 1889: “But I must not leave my inquiring amateurs without a word for those who most deserve my sympathy. They are people who desire to enjoy music socially: to play together, to explore the riches of concerted chamber music for mere love of it, and without any desire to expand their lungs and display their virtuosity. Yet they are too old to learn to fiddle, or, having learnt, cannot do it well enough to produce a tolerable concord. Their difficulty is, fortunately, quite easy to solve. The instrument for them is the concertina […] the English concertina of Wheatstone […] The intonation does not depend on you any more than that of a pianoforte”. Note: Cited after Shaw’s music, ed. by Dan H. Laurence (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981) I, 575–576; Shaw (1856–1950) praises the English concertina on a number of occasions, and was always careful –and knowledgeable enough – to distinguish it from the German imports (the so-called “Anglo” – see note 4), which, as he disparagingly notes, found their way into the hands of the street musicians; thus he had no qualms about a performance of the Mozart String Quintet in G minor, K.516, played on five concertinas: “The idea of a quintet by Mozart played on concertinas […] may seem alarming; but the result is thoroughly agreeable. […] the English concertina closely resembles the clarinet in tone – and, indeed, at a pinch, a worse substitute for Mr Lazarus than Mr [Richard] Blagrove might easily be found. The substitution of reeds for strings produces a marked change in the effect of such works as Mozart’s quintet in G minor, but does not detract from their charm” (Shaw’s music I, 118–119); on Blagrove, see Doc. 4b, below; on the clarinetist Henry Lazarus, see James D. Brown and Stephen S. Stratton, British musical biography (London: William Reeves, 1897; reprint New York, Da Capo Press, 1971) 241; all of Shaw’s references to the concertina are collected in Atlas, “Historical Document: George Bernard Shaw on the Concertina”, Papers of the international concertina association 4 (2007), 51–57.
236
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England Document 4: On the concertina as an instrument upon which women can gain entry to repertories otherwise off limits to them. (a) An 1855 advertisement for George Case’s instruments (see Doc. 3b): “The Concertina possesses considerable compass, having a greater register than the Flute, and (excepting the very highest notes only used in very difficult and elaborate compositions), the same as the Violin. […] [It has the] capacity to play any music written for the Violin, Flute, etc. […] [and] may be used as a substitute for the Violin or Flute […] Tenor and Bass Concertinas are likewise manufactured, upon which any music for the Viola or Violoncello may be performed. […] They are frequently combined, and in Quartets, Septets, or even larger numbers, they produce a beautiful effect. (b) Richard Blagrove, Instruction book for the study of the concertina (London: Cramer, Wood, 1864), 1: “Tenor and Bass Concertinas are also manufactured[,] qualified for performing music originally intended for the Viola and Violoncello[,] affording Ladies the peculiar advantage of enabling them to perform quartetts written for two violins, viola and violoncello”. (c) Richard Blagrove, “How to play the concertina,” The girl’s own paper 2 (1880–1881), 488: “There are many charming effects produced with different kinds of concertinas: tenor, bass, and double-bass, to take the string parts of the viola, violoncello, and double-bass. These are very useful to those amateurs who have not the courage or the time to study stringed instruments. A very fair rendering of classical chamber music can thus be given, in which ladies can take part”. Note: Blagrove (1826/27–1895), the period’s second great concertinist (after Regondi), was the brother of the violinist Henry Gamble Blagrove and himself a prominent viola player (he taught the instrument at the Royal Academy of Music). He played a particularly important role in building a repertory of chamber music for the concertina, commissioning works from such composers as George Alexander Macfarren, Bernhard Molique, and John Barnett; it was Blagrove who gave the first performance of Molique’s Sonata in B f lat, Op. 57, on 11 May 1857, about which The musical gazette for 16 May (p. 229) wrote: “Amateurs of the concertina may consider themselves considerably indebted to Herr Molique […] for this addition to the limited library of concertina music […] Ladies in particular, have now an opportunity of conciliating admirers of classical music by in-
237
Allan W. Atlas troducing into the salon a portion at least of this charming work”. Among Blagrove’s many female concertina students were Lady Belhaven and Lady Emily Bulteel (see above). His own output for the instrument, which consists mainly of “fantasias/variations on” opera excerpts and popular melodies of the day, is both large and technically challenging. Document 5: William Wheatstone and Company’s advertisement for a small bass concertina specifically intended for women. Great exhibition of the works of industry of all nations,1851. Official descriptive and illustrated catalogue (London: Commissioners for the Exhibition, 1851), 469–470: “A concert bass concertina, with 56 keys, for violoncello or bassoon music, singly or in concert; the same, of a smaller size, for the use of ladies”. Note: William Dolman Wheatstone (1804–1862) was Charles’s younger brother and ran the family business until his death. This is one of the earliest references to a 56-button concertina, instruments with 48 buttons having been the mid-century standard. All the musical instruments exhibited at the Great Exhibition are listed in Peter and Ann Mactaggart, Musical instruments in the 1851 exhibition (Welwyn: Herts: Mac & Me, 1986). It was at the 1851 Exhibition that Berlioz became familiar with the concertina, about which he wrote in the second edition of his Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1855), where he praised its tone as “mordant et doux,” but criticized its meantone tuning and division of the octave into 14 notes as “la doctrine des acousticians”, which, in effect, is exactly what Charles Wheatstone was. Not until some point later in the 1850s did concertina manufacturers begin to abandon that tuning for equal temperament, which was generally late to arrive in England. Document 6: On playing the concertina as one of a young woman’s “accomplishments”. (a) A notice in The times, 26 July 1860, 4: “EDUCATION (superior) for YOUNG LADIES: inclusive terms 40 guineas a year. – In an old-established finishing school, of high standing, conducted by a lady of talent, assisted by English and foreign governesses and eminent masters daily for all accomplishments. The instruction comprehends all the higher branches of English, modern languages, piano, singing, concertina, guitar, drawing, dancing, and calisthenics. The domestic arrangements are on a most 238
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England liberal scale. The residence is a spacious mansion, delightfully situate[d], with extensive garden, and the locality not to be surpassed for salubrity. Address A.B., 9, Stanley-gardens, Kensington-park”. (b) A notice in The times, 14 November 1860, 3: “MORNING or DAILY GOVERNESS. – A married lady, accustomed to tuition, wishes an ENGAGEMENT. She teaches piano, harp, concertina, singing, French, and Italian f luently, drawing, rudiments of German, and all other requisites to a Lady’s education. – A.B., 5, Lyndon-street, Sussex-gardens, Hyde-park”. (c) A notice in The times, 16 February 1855, 2: “PARIS. – A private family can receive two or three YOUNG LADIES who are desirous of perfecting themselves in the French language. The study of the piano, concertina, and singing can be followed under the most able professors. Address to M.P., Marshall’s British and Foreign Library, 21 Edgeware-road”. (d) A notice in The times, 28 September 1855, 11: “PARIS. – A married lady, residing in Paris, professor of the piano and concertina, will shortly be in London for the purpose of taking back with her one or two YOUNG LADIES wishing to complete their EDUCATION, or study the French language, music, &c. Apply to A.M., 68, Boulevart [sic] Beaumarchais; or A.M., Marshall’s library. 21 Edgeware road”. Note: The notices originating in Paris on 16 February and 28 September 1855 coincide nicely with the sale on 8 November 1855 – recorded in one of the Wheatstone & Co. sales ledgers – of seventeen instruments for which the prices are given in terms of French francs; this would have been about the time that the “married lady” who advertised on 28 September might have had need of a number of instruments. Document 7: The review of the Lachenal sisters’ debut concert, Myddelton Hall, Islington, 14 June 1865. Islington times, 17 June 1865: “the Mdlles. Lachenal’s Concert is we believe the first entertainment available for the million in which the Concertina has been in a position fairly to challenge a verdict on its merits as an orchestral instrument of surpassing beauty and extensive capabilities. The Concert commenced with an operatic selection for five Concertinas (two trebles, tenor, baritone and bass), of which the united effect was magnificent, now resem239
Allan W. Atlas bling the tones of the organ, now more like a string band, preserving the spirit of the airs, yet gracing them with novel charm. […] Mdlle Marie Lachenal was deservedly encored after performing a splendid fantasia on the airs from [Gounod’s] “Faust” on the Concertina with great taste and artistic effect; this one piece was sufficient to entitle the Concert to a success, but the enthusiasm of the audience rose higher still on hearing a trio of Scotch airs for treble, baritone and bass Concertinas by the Mdlles. Lachenal […] the performance gave evidence of much talent and finished style and the Concert successfully demonstrated to the general public that which was known only to few enthusiastic amateurs – viz., the adaptability of the Concertina to first-class orchestra Music, where this elegant instrument shines with peculiar effect both in melody and harmony, and sustains the full score unaided by instruments of any other description” Note: Cited after Faye Debenham and Randall C. Merris, “Marie Lachenal: Concertinist”, Papers of the international concertina association 2 (2005) 1–2, who give the Islington times review as it appears in Cawdell, A short account of the English concertina, 15 (see Doc. 2b; the article is online at Concertina Library, http://www.concertina.org/pica/index.htm); for the piece for five concertinas, the sisters were joined by their teacher, Richard Blagrove, and his niece, Ellen Attwater.
240
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England Appendix 2 Romance No. 1 from Madame R. Sidney Pratten’s Repertoire for the concertina (for the use of her pupils): No. 1, Two romances (London: R. Sidney Pratten, 1861).
241
Allan W. Atlas
242
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England
243
Allan W. Atlas
244
Ladies and the Concertina in Victorian England
There is an error in the concertina part: downbeat, four measures from end, lower note of dyad = a.
245
Allan W. Atlas
246
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen
Gabriele Busch-Salmen Kirchzarten / Freiburg im Breisgau
„Ew. Hochfürstl. Durchlaucht haben […] selbst eine hohe Stufe der ausübenden Kunst erstiegen“ – Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen * Abstract. “Your High Princely Highness have […] Herself Climbed to a High Level of the Performing Arts” – Essay on Composing Princesses. In recent years, sociologists have increasingly turned their attention to court elites, resulting in an increased interest in smaller courts led or dominated by educated noble women rulers. These courts are generally referred to as “Musenhöfe” (Courts of the Muses), a term previously associated with the realm of pseudo-scientific apologetics based on legends. Since Volker Bauer developed an “ideal type” of German seventeenth- and eighteenth-century courts in 1993, the thinking about the role of smaller courts has become less biased. “Courts of the Muses” are now described as residences within the dynastic rivalries where rulers whose scope of political action was eclipsed by other, more inf luential residences had the chance to compensate for this limitation by offering extensive opportunities in the areas of Fine Arts and Sciences, sometimes at considerable financial expense. Today, most studies focus on rulers as patrons, while opinions tend to differ regarding the competency of the rulers as productive artists. The assessment of the musical legacy left by two princesses who are at the center of this study seeks to cast new light on the creative contributions (e.g. to the operatic discourse) of women rulers within their biographical context, using as examples Margravine Wilhelmine of Bayreuth (1709–1758) and Duchess Anna Amalia of SaxeWeimar-Eisenach (1739–1807). It is owing to these women that the Bayreuth and Weimar residences had the respective cultural profiles for which they became known. While no one questions their role as patronesses of architecture, dramatic arts or literature, their musical output has generally been assessed, using strict analytical principles, as at most, amateur in nature. However, both women saw and presented themselves as trained musicians and composers, also in their portraits. At a time of important paradigm shifts in society, they acted in an unconventional way, using the freedom available to them as members of the elite. While Margravine Wilhelmine contributed to loosening up “opera seria” standards, Duchess Anna Amalia, together * Überarbeitete und Zdravko Blažeković gewidmete Druckfassung eines 2001 an der Hoch-
schule für Musik Köln im Rahmen einer Ringvorlesung zum Thema „Frauen in der Musikgeschichte“ gehaltenen Vortrags.
247
Gabriele Busch-Salmen with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, was already very receptive to the ideas of the Germanlanguage Singspiel with its bourgeois subjects. This study therefore discusses the need for extending the criteria for an adequate assessment of their musical achievements. (Translated by Judith Blank)
Wie schon am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, so pilgern auch heute noch die Weimarenthusiasten in die „Musenresidenz“ an der Ilm, „um auf Göthes Flügeln auch mit zur Sonne aufzuf liegen“, wie der Direktor des Weimarer Gymnasiums Karl August Böttiger 1791 ironisch bemerkte.1 Schon damals wurde in den Reiseberichten der Journale dafür gesorgt, dass sich ein besonderer Nimbus um diese Residenz bildete, man schwärmte vom „schönen Heiligtum der Musen“, dem „Gipfel des deutschen Parnasses“, auf dem sich die „obersten Götter [...] zu einem glänzenden Kreis versammelt“ haben, von einer „Geisterstadt“, die „seit mehreren Jahren unter die merkwürdigsten und anziehendsten [...] Deutschlands“ zähle. 2 Dass dieses „Heiligtum“ das Ergebnis eines Hof konzeptes war, das seine Durchsetzung der kunstsinnigen Herzogin Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach verdankte, wurde und wird freilich stets mitgedacht. Sie hatte es verstanden, die heruntergewirtschaftete Residenz während und nach ihrer Regentschaft zu dem so erstaunlichen wie bestaunten Magneten für Künstler zu machen, zum „Musenhof “ par excellence. Tief und unübersehbar sind die Spuren, die sie hinterließ und eng waren die „Geister“ mit ihr verbunden, die an den Hof verpf lichtet wurden. Als sie 1807 starb, wurde um eine Partnerin in allen Fragen der Kunst, Literatur und Musik, Mäzenin und Musikerin getrauert, die bereits zu Lebzeiten zur Legende geworden war. Literaten machten sie zur Heldin ihrer Romane und Erzählungen und umfangreich ist die einschlägige Forschungsliteratur. 3
1 2 3
248
Karl August Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen, hg. von Klaus Gerlach und René Sternke (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1998), 35. Anonym [Joseph Rückert], „Bemerkungen über Weimar 1799“, in Der Genius der Zeit (1800), zit. nach der Neuausgabe hg. von Eberhard Haufe (Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, o.J., 1969). Rückert lebte von 1771–1813. Hermann Klencke, Der Parnass zu Braunschweig. Historischer Roman in 3 Büchern (Cöthen: Paul Schettler Verlag, 1854); Wilhelm Raabe, Hastenbeck. Erzählung (Berlin: Otto Janke Verlag, 1899). Neuere biographische Darstellungen: Joachim Berger, Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1739–1807): Denk- und Bitte Zeilenumbruch korrigieren. Handlungsräume einer „aufgeklärten“ Herzogin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006); Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Walter Salmen, Christoph Michel, Der Weimarer Musenhof. Dichtung – Musik und Tanz – Gartenkunst – Geselligkeit – Malerei (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1998).
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen Uneinig ist man sich indessen über ihre Kompetenzen als Komponistin. Da diese Unsicherheit, ja Skepsis der Zurückhaltung gleicht, mit der im allgemeinen den schöpferischen Fähigkeiten von weiblichen Mitgliedern des hohen wie niederen Adels begegnet wird, sei im Folgenden der Versuch unternommen, in zwei Fallstudien über einen geeigneten Beurteilungskanon nachzudenken, in dem es gilt, komplexe kulturgeschichtliche und biographische Zusammenhänge in den Blick zu nehmen. Denn die stilkritische Werkanalyse ihrer überlieferten Musikalien und Kompositionen reicht nicht aus, um zu einem angemessenen Urteil zu gelangen. Es soll ein Blick geworfen werden auf die elitären Freiräume, die von Fürstinnen im Rahmen ihrer Möglichkeiten eigenwillig und progressiv als „Chance“ genutzt werden konnten.4 Traditionell gehörte das aktive geistig-kulturelle Engagement zum selbstverständlichen herrscherlichen Habitus, zum „Hochfürstlichen Divertissement“, das von frühester Jugend an eingeübt wurde und zwischen exklusiver Privatheit und einer ebenso exklusiven, reglementierten Öffentlichkeit changierte. Zere Zeremonialbücher wachten über dem komplizierten Verhaltenskanon. Den Erziehungsinstruktionen und Diarien für junge Adelige ist zu entnehmen, dass täglich bis zu drei Stunden dem Instrumentalunterricht, dem Gesang und der Unterweisung in die höfische Civilité durch die Tanzmeister eingeräumt werden konnten.5 Derart sozialisiert, wurde erwartet, dass Fürstinnen und Fürsten gleichermaßen ihre Fähigkeiten sowohl in der formvollendeten Teilnahme am repräsentativen höfischen Tanz und an den „Balletti“ erwiesen, wie im Musizieren und Komponieren. Was sie von ihren Hofmusikern trennte, war die professionelle Veräußerung, die sich als Rollenverfehlung mehr oder weniger verbat und als Griff in die Kompetenzen niederer Bedienstetenränge verstanden wurde. Die aus der Antinomie von privilegierter sozialer Stellung und dem Schicklichkeitskanon entstandenen Spannungen und Konflikte sind spätestens seit Giovanni Boccaccio willkommene literarische Sujets, geeignet, soziale Utopien zu entwerfen. In Wilhelm Heinses 1795/96 in zwei Teilen erschienenem Musikroman Hildegard von Hohenthal etwa ist dieser Rollenkonflikt ein Teil der Rahmenhandlung. Die Titelheldin bricht aus ihren geschützten Räumen aus und schlüpft in die Rolle eines Kastraten, in der sie in Italien Triumphe feiert.6 4 5
6
Grundlegend zu dieser Frage: Linda Maria Koldau, Frauen – Musik – Kultur. Ein Handbuch zum deutschen Sprachgebiet der Frühen Neuzeit (Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2005). Vgl. Walter Salmen, Der Tanzmeister. Geschichte und Profile eines Berufes vom 14. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (=Tanzhistorische Studien 1), (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1997); Rita Multer, Pädagogische Perspektiven in deutschen Fürstenspiegeln und Erziehungsinstruktionen von Fürstinnen und für Fürstinnen in der Frühen Neuzeit, Diss. phil., Eichstätt, Kath. Universität (1998). Wilhelm Heinse, Hildegard von Hohenthal. Musikalische Dialogen, Neuausgabe hg. und kommentiert von Werner Keil (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2002).
249
Gabriele Busch-Salmen
Abb. 1: Albert Freyse (zugeschrieben), Gambenconsort der Familie des Braunschweig-Lüneburger Herzogs, des Fürsten von Braunschweig Wolfenbüttel, August des Jüngeren im Schloß zu Hitzacker (?) mit Herzogin Sophie Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel am Spinett, Ausschnitt, um 1645, Öl auf Leinwand, 134,4 cm x 182,7 cm. Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum (VMB 3278).
Die Ausprägung von Unabhängigkeit oder künstlerischen Eigeninitiativen erforderte in einer von zeremonieller Etikette, Erwartungszwängen, Rangstreitigkeiten und Rivalitäten geprägten patriarchalischen Welt stets mit Kompromissen verbundene Strategien. Neuzeitliche Fürstinnen und Aristokratinnen konnten jedoch je nach Begabung und Interesse, besonders als „Herrscherinnen eigenen Rechts, als Regentinnen für einen unmündigen Sohn oder als Ehefrau eines schwachen, zum Herrschen wenig geeigneten Mannes“ neben ihren Repräsentationspf lichten einen nicht zu unterschätzenden Wirkungsspielraum entwickeln.7 In allen drei Funktionen verfügten sie über einen eigenen Hofstaat und Etat, und wenn es gelang, diese wirtschaftlichen Ressourcen zur Etablierung eines eigengeprägten Hof lebens einzusetzen, konnte es zu 7
250
Peter Fuchs, „Der Musenhof “, in Residenzen – Aspekte hauptstädtischer Zentralität von der frühen Neuzeit bis zum Ende der Monarchie (= Oberrheinische Studien 10), hg. von Kurt Andermann (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1992), 138.
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen einem Aufsehen erregenden Signum werden, das nicht selten den Wettbewerb namentlich der Kleinfürstentümer untereinander anfachte. Ein besonders kühnes Beispiel dafür ist die dritte Gemahlin des Braunschweig-Lüneburger Herzogs, des Fürsten von Braunschweig Wolfenbüttel, August des Jüngeren, Herzogin Sophie Elisabeth zu Mecklenburg (1613–1676). Unmittelbar nach dem Ende des Dreißigjährigen Krieges prägte sie an der Seite ihres kunstsinnigen Mannes die Gestaltung der Wolfenbütteler Residenz, den Bau der Fürstlichen Bibliothek und des Hoftheaters entscheidend mit, für das sie auch als Komponistin tätig war. Ihr gelang es, in den Jahren von 1655 bis 1667 Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) in der Funktion als Braunschweig-Lüneburgischer Hof kapellmeister von Haus aus an den Hof zu binden. 8 Später wurde das von ihrem Stiefsohn, Herzog Anton Ulrich gebaute Lustschloss Salzdahlum, unweit von Wolfenbüttel, das umgeben war von einer prächtigen Gartenanlage, der Sommersitz der herzoglichen Familie. Es war eine großzügige Stätte der Sammlungen und diente als Theater- und Festort, an dem die Tochter des Braunschweig-Wolfenbütteler Herzogspaares Karl I. und Philippine Charlotte, Anna Amalia ihre prägenden Eindrücke erhielt.9 Nachhaltig ernteten die Braunschweiger Welfen, wenn ihr Engagement im achtzehnten Jahrhundert auch bis an den Rand des wirtschaftlichen Ruins führte, den Ruf: „daß die Musen überhaupt und die Theatralische Poesie insonderheit, an keinem deutschen Fürstenhofe einen sichereren Aufenthalt und eine erwünschtere Zuf lucht“ fänden, als hier.10 Sophie Elisabeth war sich ihrer Qualitäten als Mitinitiatorin bewusst und ließ sich wiederholt als passionierte Musikerin abkonterfeien. So entstand um 1645 das großformatige, Albert Freyse (gestorben 1652) zugeschriebene Gemälde, das die herzogliche Familie in Anwesenheit einiger Bediensteten beim Musizieren und exklusiven Divertissement mit Brett- und Kartenspielen im Conzertzimmer wohl im Wolfenbütteler Schloss festhält. Im linken Bildteil sind die sieben Söhne und Töchter des Herzogs zu einem Gambenconsort vereinigt, optisch dominiert von dessen am Spinett sitzender Gemahlin. Die Unabhängigkeit, die sich zwei Generationen später auch Sophie Charlotte von Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1662–1705) an der Seite ihres 1701 als Friedrich I. 8
Dazu ausführlich Ralf Eisinger, Das Hagenmarkt-Theater in Braunschweig (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1990), (= Braunschweiger Werkstücke / Reihe A.29), 6–10. 9 Dazu ausführlich Friedrich Thöne, Wolfenbüttel, Geist und Glanz einer alten Residenz (München: Bruckmann Verlag, 1963). 10 Widmung Johann Christoph Gottscheds der Racine-Übersetzung Iphigénie, 1731, an den Sohn Anton Ulrichs, Herzog Ludwig Rudolf. Aufgenommen als Iphigenia in die Sammlung: Die Deutsche Schaubühne nach den Regeln der alten Griechen und Römer eingerichtet (Leipzig: 1741– 1742, Faksimiledruck Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 1972).
251
Gabriele Busch-Salmen zum König in Preußen gekrönten Gatten, in allen Entscheidungen, insbesondere in der Durchführung ihres Schlossbaues Charlottenburg bewahrte, den sie zu einem bedeutenden „Musenhof “ machte, wurde durchaus mit Neid registriert. So heißt es in einem Brief von Madame Orléans vom November 1694 aus Versailles: Wenn ich betrachte, dass I.L. die Churfürstin von Brandenburg hinreißt, wo es ihnen beliebt, heußer bawet, musicanten hatt, mitt einem wort: thut waß ihr gefelt, finde ich, dass sie woll tausendt undt tausendtmahl glücklicher ist, Churfürstin in Brandenburg zu sein, alß wenn sie hir dauphine gewesen were, denn da hette sie allzeit thun müssen waß andere wollen, nie ohne den König reißen, wenig gelt haben.11 Dieser Satz, namentlich der Passus, dass „sie allzeit thun“ müsse, was „andere wollen“, trifft die Anpassungszwänge, denen man sich bei Hofe stets zu beugen hatte. Er passt auch zu den Erziehungsgrundsätzen, wie sie noch Kaiserin Maria Theresia (1717–1780) für ihre Töchter entwarf, denn entgegen ihrem eigenen Lebensentwurf fügte sie sich in die Tatsache, dass Prinzessinnen grundsätzlich von einer verantwortlichen Tätigkeit ausgeschlossen seien. Ihre Tochter Amalie, Herzogin von Parma (1746–1804), trage ihren Titel nur, so Maria Theresia, „weil er regierender Herzog ist [...] also ihm allein die Regierung und Verwaltung der Geschäfte obliegt“.12 Ihre Töchter, vor allem Königin Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793), beweisen indessen, dass sie sich als ausgebildete Musikerinnen in ihren Salons wie Primadonnen bewegen konnten. Marie-Antoinette ließ sich in ihren pompösen Boudoirs wiederholt als Musikerin malen.13 Das produktive Zusammenwirken ausgebildeter weiblicher Mitglieder der Hofgesellschaft mit ihren bestallten Hofmusikern blieb vornehmlich, in vielen Fällen sogar ausschließlich auf die elitäre Privatsphäre konzentriert, die „Concertzimmer“, „Musiccammern“ oder „Concert-Stuben“, die ein sorgfältig geplanter Teil der Schloss- und Palaisarchitektur waren. So fanden die „Singe-Spiele“, Maskeraden und allegorischen Aufzüge Herzogin Sophie Elisabeths nicht im „öffentlichen“ Komödien- oder Lusthaus des Stadtschlosses in Wolfenbüttel statt, sondern im Esssaal. Sie waren Bestandteile ausgedehnter Hoffeste und somit der höfischen Selbstvergewisserung, zu der es gehör11 Zit. nach: Briefe der Herzogin Elisabeth Charlotte von Orléans, hg. von Wilhelm Ludwig Holland, 2 Bde. (Leipzig: Literarischer Verein, 1867), 149. 12 Zit. nach: Multer, Pädagogische Perspektiven in deutschen Fürstenspiegeln und Erziehungsinstruktionen von Fürstinnen und für Fürstinnen in der Frühen Neuzeit (wie Anm. 6), 190. 13 Abbildungen in Walter Salmen, Haus- und Kammermusik (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1969), Abb. 51–56.
252
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen te, dass die Mitglieder der herzoglichen Familie als Akteure wirkten. Das „Theatro“ im Esssaal war eine Bühne mit Vorhang, die jeweils bei Bedarf den Mittelpunkt großer Bankette bildete. Auch der Burgsaal der Dankwarderode in Braunschweig konnte zum Theatersaal umgebaut werden und wurde zur Spielstätte von Aufführungen, bei denen sich „in Gegenwart vieler Chur“ Realität und ästhetischer Schein verwischten.14 In diese Exklusivität gewähren uns, wie bereits erwähnt, die Hofmaler Einblick, die angehalten waren, die familiären Abendkonzerte und Divertissements zu dokumentieren.15 Während diese Bildwerke zu einem Teil der herrscherlichen Repräsentation werden konnten und als Dokumente herumgereicht wurden,16 verblieben die musikalischen Opera als privater, gehüteter Besitz meist in den eigenen Hausarchiven und Bibliotheken und damit einer größeren Öffentlichkeit weitgehend verborgen. Folgerichtig blieben die Leistungen namentlich der Frauen unbekannt, abzulesen etwa an der Lexikographie des achtzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, in die ihre Namen selten Eingang fanden. So wurde in Ernst Ludwig Gerbers Historisch-Biographischem Lexikon der Tonkünstler zwar „Friedrich, Markgraf zu Brandenburg-Culmbach“ als einer „der leidenschaftlichsten Liebhaber der Musik“17 gewürdigt, nicht jedoch seine Ehefrau, Markgräfin Wilhelmine. Ihr hatte der Leipziger Gelehrte Lorenz Christoph Mizler bereits 1739 enthusiastisch mit seinen Widmungszeilen gehuldigt, die er 1739 dem ersten Band seiner „Neu eröffneten Musikalischen Bibliothek“ voranstellte, „weil höchst Dieselben selbsten die grösten Kennerinnen der Musik sind“.18 Die Situation, dass wir von der Existenz gedruckter oder handschriftlicher Musikalien, wenn überhaupt, dann nur durch die Berichte Dritter oder durch Briefe wissen, es nach wie vor aufwendiger Recherchen bedarf, um die Materialien zu sichten und wieder zugänglich zu machen, trug gewiss mit dazu 14 Details bei Eisinger, Das Hagenmarkt-Theater in Braunschweig (wie Anm. 9), 6–10. 15 Vom Szenario der „Singe-Spiele“ Herzogin Sophie Elisabeths wissen wir durch eine 1642 angefertigte Kupferstichserie, mitgeteilt in Eisinger, Das Hagenmarkt-Theater in Braunschweig (wie Anm. 9), Abb. 1–6. Weitere Bilddokumente bei Salmen, Haus- und Kammermusik (wie Anm. 14), 94–109, auch das Kapitel „Konzerte bei Hofe“, in Walter Salmen, Das Konzert – eine Kulturgeschichte (München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1988), 88–96. 16 Markgräfin Wilhelmine von Bayreuth ließ 1739 für ihren Bruder eine Tischplatte für „seinen Musiksaal“ in Rheinsberg anfertigen, auf den sie „den kleinen hiesigen Parnaß [...] anbringen“ ließ, ihre Hofkapelle, in deren Mitte sie sich am Cembalo befindet. Friedrich beantwortete die Sendung mit einem Lobgedicht auf den Bayreuther Parnaß. Vgl. Gustav Berthold Volz, Friedrich der Große und Wilhelmine von Baireuth, Bd. 1: Jugendbriefe (Leipzig: Verlag Koehler, 1924), 424–425. Dort Abbildung. 17 Ernst Ludwig Gerber, Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler, Bd. 1 (Leipzig: Verlag Breitkopf, 1790), Sp. 445. 18 Neu eröffnete Musikalische Bibliothek (Leipzig: Braun, 1739), 5.
253
Gabriele Busch-Salmen bei, den Spekulationen Tür und Tor zu öffnen. Die Urteile schwanken zwischen der Über- und Unterbewertung und selten gelingt die Darstellung des gesamten Kontextes. Im Falle Herzogin Anna Amalias zieht sich der Tenor marginalisierender Epitheta bis in die Abqualifizierung des gesamten musikalischen Geschehens an ihrem Hof.19 Das geht so weit, dass Zweifel formuliert wurden, dass es in Weimar nach dem verheerenden Schlossbrand im Jahr 1774, durch den das Hoftheater vernichtet wurde, bis zur Errichtung des Herzoglichen Comoedienund Redoutenhauses (1780) kein Theater gegeben habe. Die Aufführungen seien stets im Stadium des Provisoriums stehengeblieben. Nur zu folgerichtig wurde daraus der Schluss gezogen, dass das Repertoire und die Beiträge, die die Herzogin für das Gesellschaftstheater, aber auch für die Hof konzerte lieferte, ihre Singspielvertonungen und Instrumentalmusik, nicht so sehr „als Kunstwerke“ interessant seien, „sondern eher als Dokument“. 20 Diese Beurteilung steht in denkbar scharfem Kontrast zu den Urteilen der Zeitgenossen. So wenig wir davon ausgehen können, dass Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) und Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) in ihren ausführlichen Würdigungen lediglich zu artigen Verbeugungen ausgeholt haben, so wenig kann man von Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804) annehmen, dass er 1779 den Widmungstext seiner Anweisung zum musikalisch-zierlichen Gesange als hohle Dedikationsgeste verstand: Die Aufmerksamkeit und Achtung, deren Ew. Hochfürstl. Durchlaucht die Musik jederzeit gewürdiget haben, und noch zu würdigen geruhen, ist eine von den großen Vorzügen, auf welche diese schätzbare Kunst stolz zu seyn, hohe Ursache hat; da Ew. Hochfürstl. Durchlaucht es nicht an einem bloßen unthätigen Wohlgefallen an derselben bewenden lassen, sondern selbst eine hohe Stufe der ausübenden Kunst erstiegen haben, und in ihre theoretischen Geheimnisse tief eingedrungen sind. 21 Angesichts dieses Auseinanderklaffens von Maßstäben war es an der Zeit, dass neben der schier unüberschaubar gewordenen Fülle von Arbeiten über höfi19 Charakteristisch dafür ist der Aufsatz von Wolfram Huschke, „Anna Amalia und die Musik ihrer Zeit“, in Wolfenbütteler Beiträge 9 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 123–151. 20 „Nehmen wir dazu [der Vertonung von Goethes Libretto Erwin und Elmire] noch das Divertimento B-Dur für Klavier, Klarinette, Viola und Violoncello, ist die Materialbasis für wertende Aussagen gewiß ausreichend. Um es vorwegzunehmen: die Stücke machen fast alle den Eindruck des Unvollkommenen“, ibid., 133. 21 Leipzig: bey Johann Friedrich Junius, 1780; hier zit. nach dem Exemplar im GoetheMuseum, Düsseldorf: Sign. GD 2.
254
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen sche Eliten Untersuchungen vorgelegt wurden, die nicht nur der Bezeichnung „Musenhof “ ein Comeback bescherten, sondern den Blick unbefangener auf kleinere, von gebildeten Fürstinnen geführten oder dominierten Hof haltungen lenken. 22 Die Skepsis, mit der Hofcharakterisierungen wie die des „Musenhofes“ gern in die Sphäre mehr von Legenden als von Fakten geprägter Apologese gedrängt wurden, weicht in diesen Arbeiten dem Versuch, zu einer Einschätzung jener Freiräume zu gelangen, die im formalisierten Hofalltag der Kunstübung nicht nur als dem nötigen Grundbestand fürstlicher Magnifizenz zukamen. Spätestens seit der 1993 von Volker Bauer entwickelten Idealtypologie der deutschen Höfe des siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, wird über ihre Rolle im Wettbewerb der Dynastien vorurteilsfreier nachgedacht. Er beschrieb den Musenhof als eine Residenz, in der es der Herrscherpersönlichkeit oft mit hohem Eigenanteil gelang, ihren eingeschränkten Handlungsspielraum im Schatten der politisch tonangebenden Residenzen dadurch zu kompensieren, dass sie unter bisweilen erheblichem finanziellen Aufwand den schönen Künsten und Wissenschaften jedwede Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten gab. Es scheint, als könne man wieder leichter mit dem antikisierenden Bild vom Herrscher umgehen, der sich der Emphase früherer Herrschergloriolen folgend als Apollo und „Musaget“ feiern ließ, oder der Fürstin, die als „Olympia“ oder eine über den Parnaß Gebietende23 verehrt wurde, die an ihrem Hof wie auf dem Helikon, dem Sitz der Musen, residierte. Mit dem Blick auf die Landkarte der Territorien des Deutschen Reiches, auf der vom siebzehnten Jahrhundert bis in die 1790er Jahre 300 bis 350 unterschiedlich strukturierte Hof haltungen verzeichnet sind, die über 150 Jahre mit beispiellosem Einf luss in „barocken“ oder „absolutistischen Herrschaftsstrukturen“ verharrten, bietet Bauer in seiner Arbeit Kriterien für fünf Hof22 Dazu ausführlich Fuchs, „Der Musenhof “ (wie Anm. 8), 127–158. Peter O. Krückmann (Hg.), Paradies des Rokoko, Galli Bibiena und der Musenhof der Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, 2 Bde (München: Prestel, 1998); Busch-Salmen, Salmen, Michel, Der Weimarer Musenhof (wie Anm. 4); Detlef Jena, Maria Pawlowna – Großherzogin an Weimars Musenhof (Regensburg: Pustet, 1999); Burkhardt Göres (Gesamtleitung), Sophie Charlotte und ihr Schloß, Ein Musenhof des Barock in Brandenburg-Preußen, Ausstellungskatalog (München: Prestel, 1999). In die Richtung einer prinzipiellen Erörterung angemessener Zugänge zielt auch Christine Fischers Aufsatz: „Selbststilisierungs- und Herrschaftskonzepte in Maria Antonia Walpurgis’ ‚Talestri, regina delle amazzoni’“, in Frauenstimmen, Frauenrollen in der Oper und Frauen- Selbstzeugnisse, hg. von Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Eva Rieger (Herbolzheim: Centaurus Verlag, 2000), 198–225, in dem der Rezeptionsgeschichte der einst gefeierten Oper der sächsischen Kurprinzessin nachgegangen wird. Die Arbeit von Linda Maria Koldau, Frauen – Musik – Kultur, in der ein großes Quellenmaterial ausgebreitet wird, ist bereits in Anm. 5 genannt worden. 23 Friedrich II. an seine Schwester Wilhelmine. Epigramm auf ein Bildnis: „Stellt Dich und Deiner Nymphen Schar/ Und den Parnaß, wo Du gebietest, dar“, zit. nach: Volz, Friedrich der Große und Wilhelmine von Baireuth (wie Anm. 17), Bd. 1, 425.
255
Gabriele Busch-Salmen modelle an, die in Repräsentationshabitus und Zielsetzungen unterschiedlich arbeiteten. Er unterscheidet den „zeremoniellen Hof “ vom „Kaiserhof “, den „hausväterlichen Hof “ vom „geselligen“ und dem, meist von Fürstinnen und dem weiblichen Adel dominierten „Gelehrten-“ oder „Musenhof “. 24 Durch diese Typisierung entsteht ein zwar plakatives, jedoch für die im Folgenden zu diskutierenden Fragen durchaus hilfreiches Orientierungsraster. Zwei Beispiele aus zwei Generationen komponierender Fürstinnen mögen das Gesagte verdeutlichen: Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Markgräfin von Bayreuth (1709–1758) und Anna Amalia Herzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1739–1807). Die exponierten Vertreterinnen zweier einf lussreicher Dynastien spiegeln nicht nur den Wandel vom uneingeschränkt absolutistischen zum aufgeklärten Hof, sondern zeigen auch eindrucksvoll, dass sie als ausgebildete Musikerinnen auf die gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen mit unterschiedlichen Hof konzepten reagierten. Beide hinterließen überdies schonungslose Selbstref lexionen: aus der Feder der Markgräfin stammen die „Mémoires“, 25 aus der der Herzogin die autobiographische Skizze „Meine Gedanken“, 26 sodass wir uns eine Vorstellung machen können, unter welchen Umständen sie ihr Weltbild entwickelten. Beide Texte sind bewegende Zeugnisse ihrer Selbstfindungsprozesse, deren „harte Unterdrückung“ von Amalia mit dem Satz zusammengefasst werden: „Nicht geliebt von meinen Eltern, immer zurückgesetzt, meinen Geschwistern in allen Stücken nachgesetzt, nannte man mich nur den Ausschuß der Natur“. 27
24 Volker Bauer, Die höfische Gesellschaft in Deutschland von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). 25 Mémoires de Frédérique Sophie Wilhelmine, Margrave de Bayreuthe, soeur de Frédéric le Grand, depuis L’année 1709 jusqu’a 1742, écrit de sa main. Mercure de France, Paris 1967. Manuskript in der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, deutsche und französische Ausgaben, Neuedition: Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Eine preußische Königstochter, Glanz und Elend am Hofe des Soldatenkönigs in den Memoiren der Markgräfin Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, hg. von Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann (Frankfurt/Main: Insel Verlag, 1981 und 1990). 26 Vier beidseitig beschriebene Blätter, datiert um 1772, möglicherweise als „briefartige Mitteilung an einen vertrauten Freund, vielleicht an Wieland“ gerichtet (Volker Wahl). Aufbewahrt im Goethe-Schiller-Archiv Weimar, Nachlaß Goethes, Signatur: GSA 36/ VII, 18, erstmals kritisch ediert von Volker Wahl, „‚Meine Gedanken’. Autobiographische Aufzeichnung der Herzogin Anna Amalia von Sachsen Weimar“, in Wolfenbütteler Beiträge, 9, wie Anm. 20, 102–117. 27 Wahl, „Meine Gedanken“ (wie Anm. 27), 106.
256
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Markgräfin von Bayreuth (1709–1758) Mit der Vermählung der um drei Jahre älteren und in Fragen der Kunstübung ihm uneingeschränkt verbündeten Lieblingsschwester des Kronprinzen, späteren Königs Friedrich II. von Preußen, Prinzessin Wilhelmine mit dem Markgrafen Friedrich III. von Bayreuth (1711–1763) im Jahr 1731 wurde nicht nur der quälende Streit ihrer Eltern um ihre hintertriebene Verheiratung mit dem Prinzen von Wales beendet. Es wurde wohl auch die Begnadigung des Bruders nach dessen Flucht erkauft. Die 22jährige Wilhelmine verließ Berlin, das ihr „ebenso verhasst geworden, als es ihr (mir) einst teuer war“ und sie hoffte „trotz mangelnden Reichtums“ auf ein „ruhiges und friedliches Leben“ am Bayreuther Hof. 28 Verletzt, gedemütigt und mit ihrer Mutter überworfen zog sie nach Bayreuth, das sie in ihren Memoiren ähnlich grotesk verwahrlost schildert, wie Anna Amalia später das kleine Weimar. Erst mit dem Regierungsantritt ihres Gatten im Jahr 1735 begannen sich neue Perspektiven abzuzeichnen, denn sie war in der Lage, ihre eigenen Vorstellungen umzusetzen, zu denen gehörte, dass sie die Parks und Lustschlösser zu paradiesischen Refugien werden ließ. Das ihr zum Geschenk gemachte, etwa 8 km vor den Toren der Stadt gelegene barocke Garten- und Schlossensemble „Monplaisir“ verwandelte sie in eine „Eremitage“, in der sich nahezu ausschließlich ihre musikalisch-literarischen Interessen als eine ideale Festwelt widerspiegelten. Ihre private „Musiccammer“, die sie mit einer Porträtgalerie ausstatten ließ, gilt heute als ein Kleinod höfischer Raumkunst. 29 In dieser Phantasiewelt konnte sie alle bislang erlebten Enttäuschungen kompensieren. Glanzvoller Höhepunkt dieser ehrgeizigen Bautätigkeiten war die Einweihung des Opernhauses im Jahr 1748, mit dem es der Markgräfin gelang, in Bayreuth nicht nur das architektonische Gegenstück zu Potsdam zu schaffen, ja, es mit dem Opernhaus sogar zu übertreffen, sondern auch ein überaus prachtvolles, an Italien orientiertes Musikleben zu entfalten. Die Hof kapelle wurde aufgestockt, im Jahr 1758 zählte sie 54 Instrumentalisten und 21 Vokalisten, für Opernaufführungen wurden vorwiegend italienische Sänger verpf lichtet, die französischen Comödien, Tänze und Ballettkompositionen lagen in der Verantwortung eines „Compositeur de la musique des divertissements“ und das Ballettensemble bestand bis 1744 aus 25 Tänzerinnen und Tänzern. 30 Sie bestritten die allabendlichen Konzerte, die Karne28 Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Eine preußische Königstochter (wie Anm. 26), 294. 29 Vgl. dazu die Dokumentation Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko (wie Anm. 23), Bd. 1, 25–35. 30 Adelheid Krause-Pichler, Jakob Friedrich Kleinknecht (Weißenhorn: Anton H. Konrad Verlag, 1991), 32.
257
Gabriele Busch-Salmen
Abb. 2: Antoine Pesne, Markgräfin Wilhelmine in Pilgertracht, um 1750, Öl auf Leinwand, 145.0 x 111.0 cm. Potsdam: Schloss Sanssouci, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten BerlinBrandenburg (reproduziert nach Peter O. Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko, Das Bayreuth der Markgräfin Wilhelmine. Bd. 1, München: Prestel Verlag, 1998, Abb. 44).
258
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen valfestlichkeiten mit großen italienischen Opernproduktionen und Bällen, die Empfänge, Staatsbesuche, Geburtstage im Stadtschloss, die Illuminationen und Feuerwerke in den Lustschlössern und in der Eremitage. Als eine bemerkenswerte Illustration der Gemütslage Wilhelmines ist das wahrscheinlich 1750 während ihres Aufenthaltes bei ihrem Bruder in Potsdam und Berlin entstandene Porträt des Berliner Hofmalers Antoine Pesne (1683–1757) zu verstehen, das sie in einer Felsgrotte in Pilgertracht festhält. So sehr das Gemälde auf die Eremitenspiele anspielen mag, so sehr liegt es nahe, die Wahl der Kleidung und des Ambientes vor allem als Psychogramm zu interpretieren. Denn fern ihrer geistigen Heimat lebte sie im Exil in einer ihr gleichsam zur zweiten Natur gewordenen Resignation. Das Bild verdeutlicht aber auch, dass sie alles daransetzte, eine Gegenwelt zu schaffen und ihre Interessen zu leben: die Musik, die Literatur und die Malerei, angedeutet durch die aufgeschlagen vor ihr stehende Komposition eines „Concerto“ für Cembalo sowie durch Bücher und einen Malkasten. Dass sie sich als Komponistin definierte, legt ein weiteres, ebenfalls um 1750 entstandenes Porträt des Miniaturmalers Anton Friedrich König (1722–1787) nahe. Sich der fürstlichen Repräsentation enthaltend, auf die auf allen anderen Porträts akribisch geachtet wurde, zeigt sie sich dem Betrachter mit den Attributen ihrer Profession. Das zweimanualige Cembalo mit aufgeschlagenen Noten und einzelnen Notenblättern wird neben ihr sichtbar. Zum Zeitpunkt dieser Bildzeugnisse war das prachtvolle Opernhaus fertiggestellt, in dessen Spielbetrieb Wilhelmine aktiv eingriff. Sie bediente sich mithin bewusst eines Instrumentes höfischer Repräsentation. Folgerichtig galt der Gattung Oper auch in ihren eigenen kompositorischen Bemühungen ihr vornehmliches Interesse. Nachdem sie unter der Anleitung ihrer Hof komponisten (zeitweilig Johann Pfeiffer, 1697–1761, und der Flötist Christian Friedrich Döbbert, um 1700–1770) und in dichter Korrespondenz mit ihrem Bruder die Kompositionstechnik so weit perfektioniert hatte, dass sie sich über Solo- und Kammermusikwerke hinaus an die Komposition von Opern wagen konnte, entstand ihre erste Oper, die „Tragedia“ in drei Akten Argenore. Zum Geburtstag ihres Gatten fand im Mai 1740 die Premiere im Opernsaal des „Opern- und Redouten-Hauses“ im alten Bayreuther Schloss statt. 31 Das Pasticcio-Libretto setzt sich aus Versatzstücken italienischer Operndichtungen zusammen und ergibt ein Handlungsraster, in dem es nach politischen und 31 Libretto italienisch und deutsch, Bayreuth 1740. Argenore, Oper in drei Akten, Neuedition hg. von Wolfgang Hirschmann, in Das Erbe deutscher Musik 121 (Mainz: Schott, 1996); Ruth Müller-Lindenberg, Wilhelmine von Bayreuth. Die Hofoper als Bühne des Lebens (Köln u. a.: Böhlau Verlag, 2005).
259
Gabriele Busch-Salmen
Abb. 3: Anton Friedrich König, Markgräfin Wilhelmine von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, um 1750, Aquarell auf Elfenbein, Miniatur. Potsdam: Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg. Schloss Charlottenburg (reproduziert nach Peter O. Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko, Das Bayreuth der Markgräfin Wilhelmine. Bd. 1, München: Prestel Verlag, 1998, Abb. 49).
260
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen amourösen Verwicklungen darauf hinausläuft, dass ein als Kind entführter Thronfolger unerkannt an seinen Heimatort zurückkehrt und dort auf den tyrannischen Vater Argenore trifft, der außer sich gerät. Fast alle Personen enden durch Mord oder Selbstmord und die Zeichnung der Figur König Argenores, der sich aus Verzweif lung über sein Schicksal, seinen eigenen Sohn verfolgt zu haben, das Leben nimmt, hat immer wieder zu Spekulationen Anlass gegeben, darin die Charakterisierung des jähzornigen Vaters der Markgräfin zu erkennen, in der Tragödie mithin ein autobiographisch gefärbtes Emanzipationsdrama. In jedem Falle gelang es der Komponistin, zu einer eigenwilligen Opera seria Adaption zu gelangen, deren katastrophisches Finale ganz und gar nicht den Konventionen dieser Gattung entsprach. Das Werk erweist sich als ein „negativer Fürstenspiegel“, aus dem der Zuschauer die Lehre ziehen konnte, dass „die Fähigkeit zu überlegtem Handeln und damit die Kontrolle von Affekten [...] einen wirklichen Herrscher auszeichnet und dass die Missachtung dieses Prinzips ein Staatswesen in die Katastrophe führt“. 32 Mit ihrem Bruder tauschte sich Wilhelmine über dieses Bühnendebut aus, das sie ihm mit folgenden Worten schildert: der Komponist verdient den Zutritt zum Parnaß nicht. Ich hoffe nur, man wird ihm wegen der Merkwürdigkeit des Falls aus Achtung vor dem schönen Geschlecht Achtung erweisen; denn mit derartigen Dingen haben die Frauen sich bisher noch nicht befasst. 33 Mit dem Hinweis auf die „Merkwürdigkeit des Falls“ mochte sie auf das in der Oper thematisierte Schicksal, Kind eines tyrannischen Vaters gewesen zu sein, angespielt haben. Sie mochte sich wohl aber auch ihres Freiraumes im Umgang mit Gattungskonventionen vergewissert haben, der sie in die Lage versetzte, auch in ihren folgenden Arbeiten für die Bühne zu gewagten Lösungen zu gelangen. In die Adaption von Voltaires Tragödie Sémiramis zu einem „Musikalischen Spiel/ Mit Tänzen vermischt“ integrierte sie lange vor Christoph Willibald Glucks Ballettpantomime das Handlungsballett als Bestandteil, und in ihrer gemeinsam mit Andrea Bernasconi verfassten Festa teatrale: L’Huomo wagt sie einen philosophisch freimaurerischen Diskurs unter Einbeziehung von Versatzstücken aus dem antiken Theaterspektakel. 34 32 Hirschmann, Vorwort zu Argenore, Oper in drei Akten (wie Anm. 32). Siehe auch ausführlich Thomas Betzwieser (Hg.), Opernkonzeptionen zwischen Berlin und Bayreuth. Das musikalische Theater der Markgräfin Wilhelmine (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2016) (=Thurnauer Schriften zum Musiktheater 31). 33 Zit. nach Volz, Friedrich der Große und Wilhelmine von Baireuth (wie Anm. 17), Bd. 2, Brief Nr. 482. Siehe auch Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko (wie Anm. 23), Bd. 2, 249. 34 Zu Wilhelmines Opernkonzepten siehe Reinhard Wiesend, „Markgräfin Wilhelmine und
261
Gabriele Busch-Salmen Die Beschreibungen von Festivitäten unter freiem Himmel unter der Beteiligung ihres gesamten kostümierten Hofpersonals, etwa dem Fest auf dem Brandenburger Weiher 1745 lesen sich wie überdimensionierte Versuche, die sie umgebende Welt vollständig zu theatralisieren. 35 Das Ausmaß dieser solipsistischen Inszenierungen ist durch die Restaurierungsmaßnahmen der Bayreuther Schlossanlagen erst in jüngster Vergangenheit wieder ins Bewusstsein gelangt. Dass wir über die abendlichen Kammerkonzerte, in denen Wilhelmine als Cembalistin wirkte, im Detail wenig wissen, entspricht dem bereits erwähnten Umstand, dass sie elitär und von der Außenwelt abgeschirmt in der „Musiccammer“ verblieben. Die oben skizzierte 1739 bemalte Tischplatte, die heute verschollen ist, vermittelt uns eine Vorstellung von diesem Szenario. Das dürfte bei ihrem Flöte spielenden Bruder, für dessen Rheinsberger Musikzimmer das Möbelstück angefertigt wurde, ähnlich ausgesehen haben. Die am Cembalo sitzende Markgräfin hat ihre 20köpfige Hof kapelle um sich versammelt und musiziert unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit. 36 Schon zur Zeit ihres Wechsels nach Bayreuth hatte man Kunde von ihrer künstlerischen Kompetenz, das belegen die musiktheoretischen Abhandlungen und Kompositionen, die ihr dediziert wurden. Kein geringerer als der Leipziger Gelehrte Lorenz Christoph Mizler (1711–1778) widmete ihr 1738 sein Periodicum Musikalische Bibliothek oder Gründliche Nachricht nebst Unpartheyischem Urtheil von Musikalischen Schrifften und Büchern. Er versah es mit den Huldigungszeilen, aus denen bereits zitiert wurde: Diese Hofnung wird auch dadurch noch mehr gestärket, weil höchst Dieselben selbsten die größten Kennerinnen der Musik sind, einer Wissenschaft, welche die Regenten, die Helden und die Weltweisen des ehemahls blühenden Griechenlandes so sehr getrieben und hochgeschätzet, und welche gewissermassen einen unendlichen Spiegel der ewigen Weisheit des selbständigen Schöpfers aller Dinge abgeben kann. 37 die Musik“, in Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko (wie Anm. 23), Bd. 2, 94–97. 35 Vgl. Krause-Pichler, Jakob Friedrich Kleinknecht (wie Anm. 31), 33. 36 Abbildung dieses Gemäldes, das sich unter dem Titel Baireuther Parnass (1924) aus dem Besitz Friedrichs des Großen im Hohenzollern-Museum befand ( jetzt verschollen), bei Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko (wie Anm. 23), Bd. 2, 44; auch bei Volz, Friedrich der Große und Wilhelmine von Baireuth (wie Anm. 17), Briefe Nr. 456, 457, 324. 37 Christoph Mizler, Musikalische Bibliothek oder Gründliche Nachricht nebst Unpartheyischem Urtheil von Musikalischen Schrifften (Leipzig: Braun, 1738), zit. nach: Krückmann, Paradies des Rokoko (wie Anm. 23), Bd. 2, 45.
262
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen Die Utopie der in Wilhelmines Bühnenwerken vorgeführten kritischen Humanitas und ihre Idee, Bayreuth in dem kurzen Zeitraum von nur etwa zwanzig Jahren zu einem weit über die Grenzen ausstrahlenden Musenhof, einem arkadischen Idealreich werden zu lassen, aus dem die Bevölkerung nahezu vollkommen ausgeschlossen blieb, führte die Markgrafschaft in eine tiefe wirtschaftliche Krise. Die verschwenderische Pracht stand in krassem Gegensatz zur Armut des Volkes, nach Wilhelmines Tod im Jahr 1758, der mit dem Ausbruch des Siebenjährigen Krieges zusammenfiel, führte der Nachfolger die Liquidation des Hofes durch. Binnen weniger Jahre verschwand alles, was zu ihrem anspruchsvollen Hofstaat gehört hatte, die Musiker wurden zum Teil vom Ansbacher Markgrafen übernommen. Wilhelmine hatte noch eine ungebrochen standeshierarchische Sonderwelt verwaltet, in der die Inte gration der bürgerlichen Gelehrten und Künstler nur als Staffage zugelassen wurde. Eine Generation später zog am aufgeklärten Weimarer Musenhof die nicht minder ambitionierte Herzogin Anna Amalia aus ihrer Herkunft und Verantwortung ganz andere Konsequenzen. Anna Amalia Herzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1739–1807) Den Umgestaltungen, die in Weimar während Anna Amalias Regentschaft zwischen 1758 und 1775 geschahen, kam entgegen, dass sie den Hof zu einem Zeitpunkt übernahm und reorganisierte, als sich vielerorts unter der kritischen Anteilnahme einer neuen bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit ein emanzipatorischer Strukturwandel vollzog. Dass an die Stelle der exklusiven, personalintensiven höfischen Unterhaltungen, wie sie Markgräfin Wilhelmine favorisierte, das selbsttätige, gelehrt diskursive Miteinander ihres Hofstaates unter Leitung und Teilnahme bürgerlicher Künstlerinnen und Künstler treten konnte, war fast ein Vorgriff auf bürgerliche Verhältnisse. 38 Eine aktive Kunstübung, an der alle Hofchargen aufgefordert waren, sich zu beteiligen, sollte (auch aus Sparsamkeitsgründen) an die Stelle aufwendiger Divertissements treten. Es wurde jener „Geist der Geselligkeit“ kultiviert, wie er seit der Frühauf klärung gedacht worden war und in vielen bürgerlichen Lesezirkeln und Freundschaftsclubs bereits gepf legt wurde. In Sozietäten also, denen das gemeinsame 38 Vgl. den Zeitzeugenbericht von Carl Wilhelm Heinrich Freiherr von Lyncker, der am Hof Anna Amalias seine Pagenausbildung bekam: Carl Wilhelm Heinrich Freiherr von Lyncker, Ich diente am Weimarer Hof, Aufzeichnungen aus der Goethezeit, zum ersten Mal vollständig hg. mit Anmerkungen und einem biographischen Nachwort von Jürgen Lauchner (Weimar, Köln/ Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1997).
263
Gabriele Busch-Salmen Musizieren, das „gesellige Lied“ ebenso wie das Lesen von Prosatexten oder das Theaterspiel in besonderer Weise entsprachen. In Weimar fiel das überaus dichte Netz geselliger Runden und die allmähliche Vermischung der Stände so sehr auf, dass es Reisende hierher trieb, um die Clubs und Zirkel, das Leben in den Schlössern Ettersburg und Tiefurt zu erleben, in denen die Herzogin, Wieland, Goethe und Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827), Luise von Göchhausen (1752–1807) oder Corona Schröter (1751–1802) den Ton angaben. Mit den regelmäßigen Hof konzerten, den Theater-, Opern- oder Festspielvorstellungen, in der Ballsaison den aufwendigen Redouten bildete das gesellige Leben in Weimar eine einzigartige Plattform, auf der sich teilnehmend nicht nur alle bewegten, sondern experimentierend Neues entstehen konnte. 39 Wie sehr der Herzogin daran lag, ihre literarisch-künstlerischen Neigungen auch dort nicht zu verbergen, wo man fürstliche Repräsentation erwartete, zeigen die meisten ihrer Porträts, die in ihrer Bildanlage den oben erwähnten Porträts von Wilhelmine durchaus vergleichbar sind. Sie folgen selten dem Klischee repräsentativer Herrscherporträts, auf denen die Amtsinsignien, Wappen, herrschaftliche Architektur und Pose nicht fehlen durften. Vielmehr zeigen sie eine selbstbewusste Dame, die ihre Neigungen zu dominierenden Bildattributen erhob. Tasteninstrumente, Notenblätter, von ihr begonnene Kompositionsskizzen, aufgeschlagene Bücher oder die von ihr gespielte Traversf löte werden zu Insignien ihres Verständnisses von einer aufgeklärten Herrscherin. Das geschieht besonders eindrucksvoll auf dem Konterfei, das um 1769 von dem hannoverschen Hofmaler Johann Georg Ziesenis (1716–1776) für das Dichter-Zimmer im Weimarer Wittumspalais angefertigt worden ist und in mehreren Kopien kursierte. Die Noten und Bücher waren Zeichen ihres gelehrten Hof konzepts, das sie gerade begonnen hatte, in die Tat umzusetzen. Die verwitwete Regentin ließ sich mit Witwenschleier und kostbarer rosengeschmückter Kleidung darstellen, die Musik als ein dominantes Signum, ließ sie durch ein kostbares zweimanualiges Cembalo mit aufgeschlagenen Noten ins Bild setzen. Als sie am 24. Oktober 1739 als fünftes von dreizehn Kindern im Wolfenbütteler Schloss geboren wurde, erlebte sie im dortigen und im bereits erwähnten Lustschloss Salzdahlum die letzte Blüte dieser Residenzkultur, denn zwischen 1753 und 1754 verlegte ihr Vater, Herzog Carl I., den Familiensitz und die Verwaltung nach Braunschweig. Bis dahin wurden die Herzogskinder 39 Vgl. die Kapitel „Private gesellige Zirkel“ und „Tanzen gehöret zum festlichen Tag“, in Busch-Salmen, Salmen, Michel, Der Weimarer Musenhof (wie Anm. 4), 85–108, 113–142.
264
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen
Abb. 4: Johann Georg Ziesenis, Herzogin Anna Amalia, 1769, Öl auf Leinwand, 144.5 x 102.5 cm. Weimar: Klassik Stiftung (Inv. Nr. KGe/00301).
vom späteren protestantischen Abt Johann Friedrich Jerusalem (1709–1789) unterwiesen und von einem kulturbef lissenen Hof leben geprägt, das auf dem 1762 fertiggestellten repräsentativen Gemälde des Kasseler Hofmalers Johann Heinrich Tischbein d. Ä. noch einmal idealisiert dargestellt wurde. Das 265
Gabriele Busch-Salmen großdimensionierte Bild, das heute im Kasseler Schloss Wilhelmshöhe hängt, fasst nach Art der niederländischen Konversationsstücke alle Besonderheiten dieser Hof haltung zusammen. Die fürstliche Familie präsentiert der Maler auf einer verschwenderisch drapierten Terrasse des Salzdahlumer Schlosses und gewährt einen fast programmatisch anmutenden Blick auf das Parterre des Parks, das von einer weitläufigen Fontänen- und Grottenanlage, dem „Parnaß“, abgeschlossen wurde. Vor dieser Kulisse erscheinen der Herzog und seine Gattin als Förderer der Künste und Wissenschaften, die das Fürstentum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel zu einem Zentrum der norddeutschen Auf klärung gemacht haben. Die Musikübung war in diesem Zusammenhang ein wesentlicher Teil des kultivierten und humanisierenden Miteinanders. Sie wird durch eine Bildszene vergegenwärtigt, in der Anna Amalia und ihre Geschwister um ein Cembalo versammelt dargestellt sind.40 Ausführlich geschildert wird diese Umgebung, in die die Prinzessin hineinwuchs, vom englischen Musikgelehrten Charles Burney (1726–1814) im dritten Band seines 1773 in deutscher Übersetzung edierten Tagebuch seiner Musikalischen Reisen. Dort heißt es: Die Musik wird an wenig Orten mit glücklicherm Erfolge kultivirt als in Braunschweig [...] und dazu haben der Gefallen des regierenden Herrn Herzogs Durchlaucht an den Opern, und der feine Geschmack des Herrn Erbprinzen ein Grosses beygetragen [...] das ganze Hochfürstliche Braunschweigische Haus ist musikalisch.41 Auf ihre Kindheit und Ausbildung, die im Schatten ihrer Schwester als disziplinierender Unterricht bei mehreren Lehrern des Collegium Carolinum, den Gouvernanten, der Oberhofmeisterin und der Hofmeisterin erlebt wurde, konnte Amalia in ihrer später niedergelegten autobiographischen Skizze leider nur verletzt und lakonisch zurückblicken: Von Kindheit an – die schönste Frühlingszeit meiner Jahre – was ist das alles gewesen? Nichts als Aufopferung für andere [...] Meine Erziehung zielte auf nichts weniger, als mich zu eine(r) Regentin zu bilden. Sie war, wie alle Fürstenkinder erzogen werden.42 Es ist ein offenes, passagenweise sogar verzweifeltes Dokument, das die kaum 33jährige wohl als eine Bilanz über vierzehn Witwen- und überaus heraus40 Abb. und Kommentar in ibid., 1–5. 41 Carl Burney’s der Musik Doctors Tagebuch seiner Musikalischen Reisen, Dritter Band (Hamburg: Bey Bode, 1773), Faksimile-Neudruck (Kassel: Bärenreiter 1959), 259. 42 Hier und im Folgenden zit. nach Wahl, „Meine Gedanken“ (wie Anm. 27), 102.
266
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen fordernde Regierungsjahre niedergelegt hatte. Weder erfahren wir, dass ihr Unterricht auf dem Clavichord, der Gitarre und der Harfe, wohl auch auf der Traversf löte erteilt wurde, noch dass sie vom braunschweigischen Hoforganisten Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer im Kontrapunkt unterwiesen wurde. Selbst die Beschäftigungen mithin, die ihrem „feinen Gefühl“ entsprochen haben mussten, „welches ich von Natur bekommen habe“, und durch die sie die Grundlegung ihres späteren sicheren künstlerischen Urteils erfuhr, scheinen gänzlich von „Schmerz“, „Kummer“ und „harter Unterdrückung“ verdeckt gewesen zu sein. Auch ihre Vermählung mit dem um zwei Jahre älteren Herzog Ernst August II. Constantin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1737–1758) im Jahr 1756 kommentierte sie nur kurz: „In meinem 16tn Jahre wurde ich aus denen harten Banden erlöset. Man verheirathete mich so wie gewöhniglich man Fürstinen vermählt“.43 Nach einem dreiwöchigen Verlöbnis war diese Eheschließung gewiss das Ergebnis politisch-dynastischer Überlegungen.44 Eine glückliche Fügung war es jedoch, dass sie mit ihrem Ehemann die musikalisch-kulturellen Interessen teilte, sodass der frühe Tod ihres Gatten nach nur zwei Ehejahren bedeutete, dass sie den verständnisvollen Partner verlor, an dessen Seite sie begonnen hatte, ein besonderes Hof konzept zu entwickeln. Das, was als „Wittib, Obervormünderin und Regentin“ auf sie zukam, war also erneut eine große Herausforderung. Bis zu ihrer Mündigkeitserklärung, die mühevoll erstrittene, durch „Ihro kayserliche Majestät“ erteilte venia aetatis über ihr kleines Herzogtum verging ein Jahr. Amalia resümiert diese Situation nicht nur mit dem Satz, dass „die größte Epoche ihres Lebens“ angefangen habe, sondern gesteht auch, dass nach dem „ersten Sturm“ ihre „Eitelkeit und Eigenliebe erwachte“, sie: „auf einmal das Große [...] sah“, das auf sie wartete und sie „schon Stolz genug hatte, um sich „in der Welt hervorzuthun“. Jedoch: „Meine Unvermögenheit krämte mich sehr“,45 sodass sie diese Zeit nutzte, um die Aufgaben der Verwaltung, wie auch der kultur- und bildungspolitischen Führung nicht nur ihren Beratern, Verwaltern und Beamten zu überlassen: „Tag und Nacht studirte ich, mich selbst zu bilden und mich zu den Geschäften tüchtig zu machen“.46 Unterwiesen und begleitet von ihrem Vizekanzler, verfolgte sie eine selbstbewusste Personalpolitik. Im Gegensatz zu den unwirtschaftlichen 43 Ibid., 106. 44 Dazu ausführlich Günter Scheel, „Braunschweig – Wolfenbüttel und Sachsen – Weimar in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Dynastische, politische und geistige Beziehungen“, in Wolfenbütteler Beiträge 9 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 1–30. 45 Wahl, „Meine Gedanken“ (wie Anm. 27), 108. 46 Ibid., 112.
267
Gabriele Busch-Salmen Prinzipien der meisten damaligen Hof haltungen, die ihre Souveränität – wie am Beispiel Markgräfin Wilhelmine abzulesen war – auf Kosten der Untertanen zur Schau stellten, erkannte sie in geordneten Haushaltsverhältnissen die wesentlichen materiellen Voraussetzungen dafür, dass die damals etwa 6’000 Einwohner zählende ländliche Residenzstadt zu einer ‘Polis’ besonderer Prägung werden konnte. Bis zum Zeitpunkt der Regierungsübernahme ihres Sohnes im Jahre 1775 war es gelungen, den Etat weitgehend zu konsolidieren und wesentliche Schritte unternommen zu haben, zu denen die Verbesserung des Bildungs- und Sozialsystems gehörten. Dass Weimar dennoch eine bescheidene Residenz blieb, erfahren wir aus den Reiseberichten zur Genüge, in denen großes Erstaunen darüber ausgedrückt wird, dass es der Stadt an jeder Form von äußerem Glanz gefehlt habe.47 Die Musik spielte in allen Phasen der Reorganisation des Hofes eine zen trale Rolle, die Institutionen des Theaters wie der Hof konzerte wurden zu den gesellschaftlichen Drehpunkten. 1761 machte Anna Amalia den 26jährigen angehenden Gelehrten Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1735–1792) aus Jena zu ihrem Klaviermeister, den sie wenig später zum Konzertmeister, Hof komponisten und zum Kapellmeister aufsteigen ließ. In seinen Händen lag das viel Diplomatie erfordernde Amt der Organisation und Durchführung der regelmäßig stattfindenden Hof konzerte. Wolf gehörte zum inneren Zirkel der Hof haltung und hatte eine anspruchsvolle, stets auf Novitäten bedachte Hofgesellschaft zu bedienen, von der er am 28. März 1776 an den Leipziger Verleger Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf schreibt: „Es lassen sich hier so viel Cometen sehen, dass man befürchten muss, es gehe einmal über kurz oder lang ein ganzes Sonnensystem zu Grunde.“48 Diesem Briefwechsel, den er amtlich und zugleich freundschaftlich mit Breitkopf unterhielt, verdanken wir Detailinformationen über seine Tätigkeit. Es war ein heikles Amt, denn: „die Concerte gab man stets in dem großen Saale und auf die Capelle wurde ein fortwährendes Augenmerk gerichtet, weil die Herzogin Mutter selbst musikalisch war und componirte“, wie Carl Wilhelm Heinrich Freiherr von Lyncker (1767–1843) in Erinnerung an seine Pagenjahre resümiert.49 Wolf begründet wiederholt seine Bitte an Breitkopf, ihn mit den neuesten Musikalien zu versorgen, mit dem Satz: „Ich muss am hiesigen Hofe immer etwas Neues 47 Dazu ausführlich Busch-Salmen, Salmen, Michel, Der Weimarer Musenhof (wie Anm. 4), 8–10. 48 Zit. nach Wilhelm Hitzig, „Beiträge zum Weimarer Konzert 1773–1786“, in Der Bär, Jahrbuch von Breitkopf & Härtel auf das Jahr 1925 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1925), 88. 49 Lauchner, Ich diente am Weimarer Hof (wie Anm. 39), 65.
268
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen bringen u. spielen“. 50 Wie sehr Anna Amalia in die aktuelle Programmgestaltung involviert war, geht aus ihren Notenwünschen hervor, die sie durch ihren Kapellmeister weiterleiten ließ. Wolf gibt etwa am 23. Februar 1774 an Breitkopf die Weisung: Die Durchl. Herzogin geben mir Ordre bei Ew. Hochedelgeboren mich zu erkundigen, ob nicht Duetten auf die Flûte Traversière von Reinhardt bey Ihnen zu haben wären? Und wenn Ew. Hochedelgeb. davon besitzen sollten, um 6 od. 12 geschrieben od. gedruckt zu bitten. 51 Am 29. Dezember 1774 heißt es dann: Die Frau Herzogin spielen die Flöte und wünschte gerne ein halb Dutzend Concerte von Hoffmann vor dieses Instrument zu besitzen [...] Etwas vom Londoner Bach[52] würde gut tun; die neuesten, in Kupfer gestochenen Clavierkonzerte von ihm hab ich auch; Synfonieen von Eichner[53] wünschte zu besitzen. [...] Ich überlasse es aber Ew. Hochedelgeb. was Sie uns schicken wollen, und bitte soviel als möglich neue Sachen zu senden. 54 Aus diesen Sätzen spricht die geradezu hektische Neugier auf die damaligen musikalischen Entwicklungen. Dabei lag zwischen dem Brief vom Februar 1774 und dem zuletzt zitierten der Brand des Schlosses, der eine neuerliche empfindliche Zäsur für die Hof haltung und alles bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt Etablierte bedeutete. Das gesamte höfische Leben hatte sich aus den repräsentativen Räumen der Wilhelmsburg, in denen nicht nur die Hof kapelle, sondern auch die Seylersche Theatergesellschaft wirkten, in andere Räumlichkeiten in und um Weimar verlagert, Anna Amalia kaufte das an der Esplanade gelegene Barockpalais ihres Ministers Friedrich Freiherr von Fritsch (1731–1814) und machte es zu ihrer Stadtresidenz, ihrem Wittumspalais. 55 Und obwohl sie sich gezwungen sah, sich von der Theatertruppe zu trennen, auch die Kapelle reduziert werden musste, wurde alles unternommen, das Musikleben aufrecht50 Brief vom 27. März 1782, zit. nach Hitzig, „Beiträge zum Weimarer Konzert“ (wie Anm. 49), 92. 51 Hitzig, „Beiträge zum Weimarer Konzert“ (wie Anm. 49), 83. Gemeint waren wohl die Londoner oder Amsterdamer Drucke der Duette von William Reinards, die später im Katalog von Breitkopf verzeichnet wurden. 52 Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782). 53 Ernst Eichner (1740–1777). 54 Hitzig, „Beiträge zum Weimarer Konzert“ (wie Anm. 49), 85. 55 Vgl. dazu ausführlich Busch-Salmen, Salmen, Michel, Der Weimarer Musenhof (wie Anm. 4), 18–20.
269
Gabriele Busch-Salmen zuerhalten. Amalias eigene Kammermusikwerke, z.B. ihr „Concerto“ für zwölf Instrumente und obligates Cembalo in G oder das „Divertimento/ per il/ Piano-forte/ Clarinetto/ Viola e Violoncello“56 machen deutlich, wie sehr sie am aktuellen Klangbild und Kompositionsstil zwischen Empfindsamkeit und Klassik orientiert war. 57 Zweifellos waren diese Werke Ref lexe auf die Disposition ihrer Hof konzerte, in denen Kompositionen aus Neapel, Wien oder London zu Gehör gebracht wurden und man bereits ein offenes Ohr für das Werk Christoph Willibald Glucks (1714–1787) hatte, der an vielen Höfen zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch unbeachtet geblieben war. In dieses Bild einer produktiven Atmosphäre fügt sich, dass Neuzugänge von Musikalien mit den Musikern in einem von der Herzogin einberufenen „Consilium“ begutachtet wurden. Wolf konnte etwa nach der positiven Aufnahme neuer Vokalkompositionen am 9. März 1775 an Bernhard Breitkopf (1695–1777) nach Leipzig berichten: „bravissimo dem Herrn Magister Breitkopf [...] brillante Melodien vors Clavier und wohlausgesuchte, mit feinem Ausdruck zu Gesang begleitete Lieder, die ich bei unserer Unterhaltung bewunderte“. 58 Auch ist bemerkenswert, dass die Herzogin offenkundig nicht bereit war, jede „Dedication“ von Werken entgegenzunehmen, sondern derartige Ansinnen durchaus ablehnen konnte. Warnend schreibt Wolf an Breitkopf im gleichen Brief: „Herr Uber – wie! – er lässt wirklich was drucken! - Doch nicht eine Dedication an die Herzogin? Da bekäm ich meine liebe Noth.“59 Amalia hatte sich in der Beletage ihres Wittumspalais ein kleines privates Musikzimmer eingerichtet, das sie von „Freund Oeser“60 ebenso ausmalen ließ, wie den Festsaal im 2. Stock, in dem konzertiert wurde, Bälle und Redouten stattfanden und dann und wann auch das Liebhabertheater seine Spielstätte hatte. Bis 1784, also dem neuerlichen Spielbeginn einer engagierten professionellen Theatertruppe im 1780 fertiggestellten Redouten- und Comoedienhaus, war das Palais ein Haupttreffpunkt. Immer auch für eine größere Öffentlichkeit geöffnet, waren die Theaterabende für Anna Amalia ein noch wichtigerer Garant für ihre aufgeklärt erziehe56 Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar, Divertimento für Klavier, Klarinette, Viola und Violoncello, hg. von Siegfried Beyer (Neudruck, Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag, 1992). 57 Concertino als ‚Sonatina per il Cembalo obligato‘, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Musiksammlung, Mus. IV f:1. Beide Werke wurden 1981 von Rosario Marciano mit dem Wiener Kammerorchester bei FSM (53042) eingespielt. 58 Hitzig, „Beiträge zum Weimarer Konzert“ (wie Anm. 49), 86. 59 Ibid., 87. 60 Der am Weimarer Hof sehr vertraute Maler und Bildhauer Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717– 1799), der 1764 zum ersten Direktor der Leipziger Zeichenakademie und im selben Jahr zum kurfürstlich-sächsischen Hofmaler ernannt wurde.
270
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen rischen Absichten, als es die Konzerte waren, die ebenfalls von Hörern von außen besucht werden konnten. Als im Jahr 1774 der Schloßbrand das Hoftheater vernichtete, wurde auch dieses Unternehmen auf eine harte Probe gestellt. Aus der Not verstand man es jedoch, eine Tugend zu machen, denn aus den Reihen der „Tafelrunde“, des geselligen, von Frauen dominierten Gesprächsforums, zu dem die Herzogin regelmäßig lud, entstanden mehrere „gesellschaftliche- oder Liebhabertheater“. Goethe übernahm nach seiner Berufung an den Hof (1775) die Leitung, und bald wuchs aus den verschiedenen Gruppierungen eine feste Institution, an der mit großem Engagement sowohl die Hofangehörigen aller Ränge, von der Herzogin angefangen über ihre Söhne, Kammerfrauen, die Mitglieder der Hof kapelle, als auch interessierte Bürger und Adelige aus der Stadt teilnahmen. Es wurde nicht nur das Unterhaltungsbedürfnis der Hofgesellschaft befriedigt, sondern es entwickelte sich ein Forum für Goethes experimentelltheatrale Gesamtkunstwerke. Als er im November 1775 in Weimar ankam, lagen für die 36jährige Herzogin die Amtsgeschäfte bereits hinter ihr. Sie konnte sich in ihrem kleinen Witwenhofstaat nun ganz ihren Neigungen hingeben und begann, sein Libretto Erwin und Elmire zu vertonen. In Abänderung der Goetheschen Gattungsbezeichnung „Schauspiel mit Gesang“ entstand eine „Oper“ in zwei Aufzügen, eine stattliche 255seitige Partitur.61 Die Oper war konzipiert für bestimmte, leider heute nurmehr fragmentarisch rekonstruierbare Voraussetzungen und lässt erkennen, dass die Herzogin ein Werk schaffen wollte, das mit den Mitteln ihres Liebhabertheaters das Muster der „Comédie“ verließ, um an Christoph Willibald Glucks Reformopern anzuknüpfen. Die Besetzung bestand aus vier Gesangssolisten, deren Parts im Sopranschlüssel notiert sind, begleitet werden sie von einem Streichquintett, das von bisweilen obligat eingesetzten Flöten, Oboen, Hörnern und Fagott verstärkt wird. Ouverture, ein Entreacte und zwanzig Gesangsnummern, Da-Capo-Arien, Rondos, Ariosi, eingängige Lieder, Szenen, Duette, Terzette, die den gesprochenen Dialogen folgen und das später eingefügte Schlußquartett verraten den Ehrgeiz, sich auf bemerkenswerte Weise an einem damals als bürgerliche Alternative zur höfischen Oper viel diskutierten Genre zu beteiligen. An der Textvorlage mochte sie besonders gereizt haben, dass Goethe versucht hatte, den Rollenklischees der 61 Partitur Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek: Mus.II a: 98. Leicht gekürzter Klavierauszug mit ausführlichem Kommentar hg. von Max Friedlaender (Leipzig: C.F.W. Siegel’s Musikalienhandlung, 1921). Klavierauszug, hg. von Peter Tregear (Kassel: Furore, 2011). Ausführliche Werkmonographie in Gabriele Busch-Salmen (Hg.), Goethe Handbuch, Supplemente 1: Musik und Tanz in den Bühnenwerken (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2008), 150–164.
271
Gabriele Busch-Salmen Hillerschen Singspiele die zeitkritisch ref lektierende Profilierung der handelnden Personen entgegenzustellen, sie etwa zu Fragen und Problemen der Mädchenerziehung Stellung beziehen zu lassen, bevor die eigentliche Handlung als Parabel aufgerollt wird. Erwin und Elmire wurde am 24. Mai 1776 im Redoutenhaus an der Esplanade, einem stattlichen dreigeschossigen Gesellschaftsgebäude aufgeführt, das über viele Jahre der Ort bedeutender Veranstaltungen blieb. Bis 1778 wurde das Werk mindestens 8 mal wiederholt: „2 Tage das Theater zurechte gemacht einen Tag zur hauptbrobe und einen Tag zur Comoedi als den 23ten und 24ten May“, so kann man in der Rechnungslegung des Hofebenisten und Theatermeisters Johann Martin Mieding (1725–1782) lesen.62 Als Mitwirkende sind Heinrich Seidler als Erwin, die Hofsängerinnen Friederike Steinhardt als Elmire und Caroline Wolf als Olympia ermittelbar.63 Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–1792), damals als enthusiastischer Stürmer und Dränger am Amalischen Hof, ließ im Wielandschen Teutschen Merkur 1776 sogar eine Lobeshymne „Auf die Musik zu Erwin und Elmire, von Ihrer Durchlaucht, der verwittibten Herzogin zu Weimar und Eisenach gesetzt“ drucken in der er schwärmte: Ja, ja, Durchlauchtigste, Du zauberst uns Elmiren In jede wilde Wüstenei; Und kann der Dichter uns in sel’ger Raserei Bis an des Todes Schwelle führen: So führst Du uns von da noch seliger und lieber Bis nach Elysium hinüber.64 Aus der Korrespondenz Wolfs mit Breitkopf erfahren wir, dass an der Disposition der Oper immer wieder gearbeitet wurde. So schreibt er am 27. Februar 1777: Erwin und Elmire hat Herr Goethe sehr verschönert. Er lässt die Mutter mit dem Bernardo zu erst auftreten, u. sie miteinander wegen des Zustands der Elmire besprechen, und am Ende lässt er selbige, wie gerufen, wieder herzu kommen. Daher sind noch 3 Arietten, und am Ende ein Quartett entstanden. Mademoiselle Schröter als Elmire, thut Wunder, meine Frau (Caroline geb. Benda) als Olympia ist auch nicht 62 Gisela Sichardt, Das Weimarer Liebhabertheater unter Goethes Leitung (Weimar: Arion Verlag, 1957), 136. 63 Aufführungs- und Besetzungsübersicht in Busch-Salmen, Goethe Handbuch (wie Anm. 62), 144. 64 Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz, hier zit. nach dem Nachwort von Max Friedlaender zu seiner Ausgabe, Erwin und Elmire (wie Anm. 62), 163.
272
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen auf den Kopf gefallen. Bernardo macht Herr ( Johann Adam) Aulhorn, Erwin Herr (Heinrich) Seidler; beide leidlich.65 Die Oper muß bis in die 1790er Jahre im Repertoire geblieben sein, denn in einem Billet vom Juni 1796, das die erste Hofdame der Herzogin, Luise von Göchhausen an Goethe richtete, heißt es: Wir gedenken Morgen Abend vor einer kleinen Gesellschaft bey verschlossenen Thüren Ihre Operette, Erwin und Elmire, zu spielen. Die Herzogin weiß nichts davon, und wir hoffen, ihr eine kleine Freude damit zu machen.66 Ab dem Frühjahr 1776 hatte die Herzogin das nordwestlich von Weimar gelegene Schloss am Ettersberg zu ihrer Sommerwohnung gemacht, um im Kreise ihres Hofstaates, einiger Gäste und ihrer Vertrauten „in Freiheit und Natur“ ein vielseitig aktives Leben, gegen den stumpfen Ernst der Hofgesellschaft, zu beginnen. Um die Voraussetzungen für das Theaterspielen, Tanzen, Malen oder Musizieren zu schaffen, ließ sie die steifen Gartenanlagen ummodeln, aufforsten, Waldnischen und ein Naturtheater anlegen sowie ein stattliches Theater im Schloss bauen. An lauen Sommernächten wurden Feuerwerke gezündet und die Umgebung illuminiert. Selbst die Proben für die Darbietungen schlossen häufig mit einem Ball oder einem ausgedehnten Souper. Im Theater des Schlosses ging am 20. (24.) Oktober 1778 das von Goethe zu einer Operette umgearbeitete Knittelversdrama Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern in Szene, die zweite musikdramatische Arbeit Anna Amalias. Über die Vorbereitungen zur Aufführung berichtete Wieland seinem Darmstädter Freund Heinrich Merck (1741–1791) Mitte Oktober 1778: Ich hab dir lezthin schon gemeldt, daß sich unsre Herzogin izt eine große fête mit Göthens Puppenspiel macht. Kranz, als Orchestermeister und Kraus als Decorateur haben seit 14 tagen alle hände voll zu thun und sind fast immer zu Ettersburg. Göthe kommt dann und wann, darnach zu sehen, und das Werk in Gang zu bringen, und die Herzogin lebt und webt und ist in dem allen von ganzer Seele, von ganzem Gemüth und von allen Kräften. Ich darf nichts davon sehen, bis alles fertig ist; das ist bey dergleichen Anläßen immer ein eigner Spaß, den sie sich macht, und wozu ich mich, wie du denken kannst, de la meilleure grace 65 Hitzig, „Beiträge zum Weimarer Konzert“ (wie Anm. 49), 90–91. 66 Werner Deetjen, Die Göchhausen. Briefe einer Hofdame aus dem klassischen Weimar (Berlin: Mittler, 1923), 125.
273
Gabriele Busch-Salmen du monde prêtire. der halbe hof und ein guter theil der Stadt spielt mit. […] Ich gäbe Geld darum, wenn du den Spaß mit uns theilen könntest.67 Die Posse, in der Figuren und Themen des Jahrmarktstreibens, des Estherund des Schattenspiels nach Art des barocken Bilderbogens burlesk erzählt werden, gehörte zu den Höhepunkten der Sommervergnügungen in diesem Jahr. Das Stück, so lesen wir bei Luise von Göchhausen in einem Brief vom 25. Oktober 1778 an Goethes Mutter, war als „Nachspiel“: „auf den hiesigen neuerbauten Ettersburgschen Theater [...] zu grosen gaudium aller vornehmen und geringen Zuschauer, hier aufgeführt“ worden. Das Bänckelsänger Gemählde, weil es von Kennern und Nichtkennern für ein rares und treff liches Stück Arbeit gehalten wird und Sie als eine Kunstkennerin und Liebhaberin dergleichen Dinge berühmt sind, wird Ihnen in einer Copie, ins Kleine gebracht, nebst der Romantze auch zu geschickt. D. Wolf (Goethe) spielte alle seine Rollen über allemasen treff lich und gut, hatte sich Sorge getragen sich mächtiglich, besonders als Marcktschreyer herraus zu putzen.68 Es bot sich ein figurenreiches Spiel im Spiel, das glänzend geeignet war für eine derb-komische Pasticciovertonung mit kleiner Instrumentalbesetzung. Sie entstand in der Zusammenarbeit der Herzogin mit ihrem Kammerherrn Siegmund Freiherrn von Seckendorff mit Couplets und anspielungsreichen Liedern aller Stände und Klassen, sodass wir die Herzogin einmal mehr als eine unkonventionelle Komponistin kennenlernen, die sich ohne Scheu oder Berührungsängste auf Sujets einließ, durch die das höfische Divertissement neu definiert und neues Terrain erschlossen wurde. Diese wenigen Streif lichter auf die kompositorischen Arbeiten Anna Amalias mögen deutlich gemacht haben, dass ihre musikalischen Fähigkeiten und ihr aktiver Anteil am Musikleben ihres Hofes unkonventionell und facettenreich war. Das, was wir derzeit namentlich über die Jahre vor ihrer 1788 angetretenen Italienreise wissen, zeigt, dass sie alles unternahm, um ihren Hof zu einem kritisch ref lektierenden Forum zu machen. Die literarische Dominanz wurde durch dichte, theatral-musikalische Verf lechtungen aufgebrochen, die Theaterexperimente und die Neuformulierung der Liedästhetik sind beredte Zeugnisse dafür. Eindrucksvolle Einblicke in ihre musikästhetischen Rückversicherungen gewähren etwa ihre „musikalischen Aufzeichnungen“, die als undatierte Schriften im Thüringischen Hauptstaatsarchiv auf bewahrt wer67 Johann Heinrich Merck, Briefwechsel, hg. von Ulrike Leuschner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), Bd. 2, 171. 68 Deetjen, Die Göchhausen (wie Anm. 67), 17.
274
Versuch über komponierende Fürstinnen den.69 Es sind Traktatfragmente zur theoretischen Grundlegung der Musik und ein 17seitiger Essay „Gedanken über die Musick“, der die zu diesem Zeitpunkt in ihrer Tafelrunde diskutierten Phänomene der anthropologisch begründeten Wirkungsästhetik thematisiert, die zum gleichen Zeitpunkt auch Herder, Wieland und Goethe zu philosophischen Exkursen veranlasst hatte. Die Tonkunst, so schreibt sie, habe „Gesetze“, die so „Einfach“ seien, Daß sie unmittelbar und ohne ihren zweck zu verfehlen auf die Seele wirken kan. [...] jeder Mensch liebt sie weil Harmonie u Rhythmus in seiner natur liegt allein dieses schränkt sich auf ein dumpfes Gefühl ein oder vielmehr auf den blossen instinct ohne zu wissen worinne die wahre schönheit dieser Erhabnen kunst bestehe.70 Sie führt diese Unmittelbarkeit der Wirkung der Musik auf die menschliche Psyche darauf zurück, dass die „TonKunst [...] ihren Ursprung und ihre Gesetze von der Natur“ erhalte, denn: „Das ganze Welt Gebäude ist auf Ordnung und Harmonie gegründet gleich wie die natur.“ 71 Und da diesen Gesetzen auch eine „Moralität“ eignet, fordert sie, dass man die „Sinnen, welche den Genuß des lebens veredeln“ schult und ausbildet. „Es were aber noch weit rühmlicher daß man zur ausbildung solcher (musikalischen) Talente zu erst gute Schulen anlegte“.72 Wenn es ihr auch nicht gelang, ein solches Institut in Weimar zu etablieren, sie sich darauf beschränken musste, begabte Anwärter in den Unterricht bei ihren Hofvocalisten zu schicken, so zeigt dieser Traktat jedoch einmal mehr, wie sehr sie darauf bedacht war, gerade die Musik zu einem zentralen Movens im menschlichen Zusammenleben zu machen. Das mochte auch Herder gemeint haben, wenn er nach der Lektüre des Traktattextes der Herzogin mit den Worten dankt: „Warum wurden Ew. Durchlaucht nicht Kaiserin in Wien? Da wäre etwas geworden. Wohlan denn! In un‘ altra stella. Die Harmonie umfaßt Alles; Die Melodie tönt fort; in ihrer unendlichen Kette läßt sie nichts sinken.“ 73
69 Gedanken über die Musick, Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Weimar, Hausarchiv A XVIII, Nr. 129. Erstveröffentlichung hg. von Wolfram Huschke, in Wolfenbütteler Beiträge 9 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1994), 145–151. 70 Ibid., 145. 71 Ibid. Dazu auch Gabriele Busch-Salmen, „Das ganze Welt Gebäude ist auf Ordnung und Harmonie gegründet“. Bemerkungen zum Musikverständnis Herzogin Anna Amalias, in Viva Voce 50/51 (1999/2000), 4–7, 11–18. 72 Gedanken über die Musick (wie Anm. 70), 148. 73 Busch-Salmen, “Das ganze Welt Gebäude ist auf Ordnung und Harmonie gegründet” (wie Anm. 72), 18.
275
Gabriele Busch-Salmen
276
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia”
Tina Frühauf Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” Abstract. The Pannonian Basin, a historical region of east-central Europe, constitutes a unique borderland, not merely in a political sense, but concerning traditions, ethnicities and religious denominations, and their musics. In this borderland, divergent Jewish cultures and traditions met, clashed, and melded: Eastern and Western, Sephardic and Ashkenazic and Romaniote, and later on liberal and traditional. This essay is conceived as a historical journey that follows the path of the Jewish communities along the Lower Danube to map their musical practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It departs from the Jewish remnants in Bratislava, which once was the home of the acclaimed cantor Yossele Rosenblatt. The musical practices observed in Budapest and Belgrade attest to the soundscape of the synagogues in Pannonia being highly diverse, absorbing the century of Reform with its primary icon, the organ, while preserving Orthodoxy in its most strict of forms; and displaying many variants in-between these denominations. Pannonia was also the home of hazzanim and cantors during the golden ˙ age who moved from synagogue to synagogue, from place to place in the region. The spectrum of musical practices broadens when moving south, from central to southeastern Europe and beyond Pannonia’s borders to Bucharest. A junction of diverse Jewish musical practices, Pannonia appears as an intersection, a borderless space nestled between continents and empires. In this way, Jewish music in the Pannonian Basin can serve as a paradigm for music in the region at large.
In December 2000 my colleague and friend Zdravko Blažeković asked me to contribute to his collection of essays sponsored by the International Music Council of UNESCO. The volume was tentatively titled Musical Culture in the Lower Danubian Region during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Given that there had been no all-encompassing study in the English language that considered the region’s musical history and culture in its entirety – from religious contexts to historiography and journalism, theater, printing, instruments, and more – Blažeković’s endeavor promised to be a major contribution to the field of musicology, one that I was proud to participate in as a young scholar. “Pannonia”, as it was dubbed, proved to be a difficult feat for its editor who was missing high quality studies for certain sections in order to close the volume. The endeavor stalled. This essay picks up the threads of my contribution on 277
Tina Frühauf synagogue music, but it does so in revised format and altered content. In tribute to the honoree, having in mind his passion for travelling, the original unpublished essay appears here, updated and reconceived as a journey along the Danube, through time and space of the Jewish musical life of “Pannonia”. In historical parlance, Pannonia refers to the ancient province of the Roman Empire established in 20 C.E. Roughly bounded north and east by the Danube and southward with Dalmatia, Pannonia was located over the territory of present-day western Hungary, eastern Austria, northern Croatia, Vojvodina, northern Slovenia, western Slovakia, and Bosnia. Specific cities and towns located in these parts – from Ad Novas (Zmajevac, Croatia) to Valcum (Fenékpuszta, Hungary) – made up the Pannonian province until it ceased to exist in 107 C.E. From Roman times onward, a Jewish settlement (some of the Jews came from as far as Syria) is known to have existed in Pannonia and in its surrounding regions, specifically along the banks of the Danube, in what today are Serbia, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.1 But this is not the Pannonia that concerned our honoree’s collection. Blažeković’s “Pannonia” refers to the historical region of east-central Europe, the so-called Pannonian Basin. Situated on the border between central, eastern, and southeastern Europe, it forms a topographically discrete unit, surrounded by imposing geographic formations: the Carpathian Mountains, the Alps, the Dinarides, and the Balkan mountains. The Rivers Danube and Tisza divide the basin roughly in half. In terms of modern state borders, the basin is centered in the territory of Hungary, and also extends to Vojvodina or northern Serbia, central Croatia and Slavonia, western Slovakia, the eastern Slovak Lowland (including the southwestern tip of Ukraine), the border regions of Bosnia, Transylvania, and the eastern tips of Slovenia and Austria. Still, these borders should not be seen purely as geographic markers of territory, nation, or culture. I understand the concept of border in accordance with Nikos Papastergiadis, who defines it as a socially constructed line that helps to identify different political and cultural constituents. 2 In many ways Pannonia is reminiscent of the Jewish Diaspora, representing an imagined community without defined borders. Here, it is situated in a unique borderland, not merely in a political sense, but concerning traditions, ethnicities and religious denominations, and their musics. In this borderland, divergent Jewish cultures and traditions met, clashed, and melded: Eastern and Western, 1 2
278
See András Mócsy, Pannonia and Upper Moesia: A history of the middle Danube provinces of the Roman Empire (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1974), 228. See Nikos Papastergiadis, The turbulence of migration: Globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 59.
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” Sephardic and Ashkenazic and Romaniote, and later on liberal and traditional. This essay follows the path of the Jewish communities along the Lower Danube, and relevant adjacent regions of Romania, to trace the remnants of their musical culture with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Traversing such large geographic territory dictates selectiveness of content. Further, existing research on synagogue music in the different countries comprising Pannonia differs greatly both in quantity and quality, and sources are not always accessible. 3 As such, the essay can only offer a preliminary survey of the history and culture of synagogue music in Pannonia, one that ultimately serves as a lens for broader observations on cultural shifts in this region. Travelling through time There have been Jews along the Danube for as long as anybody has been singing about it. Traces of Jewish presence are buried in Roman ruins. As we travel through time, the Jews who settled along the banks of Lower Danube beginning in the tenth century formed small communities. The founding stratum consisted of the Romaniote from Greece; then came the Ashkenazim who migrated during the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and with them the Italians some of whom had previously migrated from the Germanspeaking lands themselves. Later on, the Iberian Jews came in the wake of the edict of their expulsion from Castile and Aragon in 1492, and finally the Spanish and Portuguese New Christians or conversos, of known or presumed Jewish descent, who were f leeing the Inquisitions in their respective lands and declared themselves Jews. The Iberian Jews moved into the Balkan Peninsula initially from Salonika, and later on, Constantinople. Not surprisingly therefore, the Jews in this region displayed inf luences of Greek, Spanish, and Turkish cultures, which they had assimilated before settling in the Balkans. The Sephardim (who eventually absorbed the Romaniote) were more numerous in the southern districts of the Danube, the Ashkenazim in the northern, while the other provinces hosted a mix of both. What united these contrasting groups was a sense of common Jewish heritage, despite the diversity of 3
For an evaluation of the situation in Hungary, see Judit Frigyesi, “Bence Szabolcsi’s unfinished work: Jewish identity and cultural ideology in Communist Hungary”, The musical quarterly 88/4 (2005), 496-522. Between 1881 and 1903 (therafter it was an appendix to the periodical Die Wahrheit), the Oesterreich-ungarische Cantoren-Zeitung: Organ für die GesammtInteressen jüdischer Cantoren (henceforth OUCZ) chronicles community issues in the column “Kleine Chronik”. Coverage is naturally uneven, given the differences of the communities. Budapest is covered extensively, Bucharest only twice (in November 1885 and 1886). Arad is covered only in “Gemeinde-Berichte”.
279
Tina Frühauf their origins. In their Danubian propinquity they continually came in contact with each other, while at the same time they encountered the music of the non-Jewish cultures – Romanian, Transylvanian, Serbian, Vojvodinian, Hungarian, Slovak – the peoples in whose midst they lived and from whom new adherents to their groups derived. Such diversity of heritage and culture was accompanied by varied musical traditions that correlated with the musics of their surroundings. The overlapping life-worlds of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewry intersected in the spheres of political administration and cultural inf luence of the three multi-ethnic empires (Ottoman Empire until 1878, Russian Empire, and Austrian/Austro-Hungarian Empire), which during the nineteenth century became increasingly exposed to the upheavals of nation-state building.4 By the beginning of the eighteenth century only a few remnants of the ancient Jewish settlement that existed there were to be found. At this time a movement of Jewish migration began, marking the formation of the eastern European Jewry of the modern era. During the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–1780) their situation deteriorated. The reign of Joseph II alleviated the harsh conditions upon issuing Patents of Tolerance in 1781 and 1782, whereby allowing Jews to settle in the royal cities. This gave Jews a high degree of legal parity with nonJews, but soon proved to be more theoretical than real, since Jews continued to experience serious discrimination. 5 In the eighteenth century, the Jews of the Danube region began to experience the impact of two major movements, one emerging in eastern Europe, the other in the West, both of which were to exert a profound impact on their musical culture. In the East, Israel ben Eliezer, most commonly known as Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760) started a religious mystical movement in Podolia (now Ukraine), later known as Hasidism. Hasidism was a response to the needs of large masses of Jews who had suffered grievously during the declines, wars, and depredations of the previous century and a half and who, not unjustifiably, had come to feel neglected by their rabbinic leadership. Led by anti4
5
280
The Austrian-Hungarian Empire, also known as the Hapsburg Empire after its reorganization into a Dual Monarchy in 1867, included the Austrian crown lands of predominantly German population, the Kingdom of Bohemia, Galicia, Italian provinces, and the Kingdom of Hungary and Croats, with its ruling class of Magyars and its own minorities: Slovak, Vojvodinian Serbs, and Romanians. The manifestation of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in Jewish musical life is the Austria Hungarian cantors’ journal OUCZ, founded by Obercantor Jacob Bauer. For a list of fifty Jewish musicians drawn from those who registered under the taxa tolerantialis during the period 1767–1795, see Sándor Scheiber, “Jüdische Musiker in Ungarn Im XVIII. Jahrhundert”, Studia musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 18/1–4 (1976), 335–337.
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” establishment members of this leadership, Hasidism succored these bereft and benighted people through personal concern, compassion, healing, preaching and teaching, and the creation of a way of life that generated joy out of their despair. The expression of this joy rested heavily on musical articulations, of which none was more characteristic and none of greater spiritual expression than the Hasidic niggun, a melody without lyrics, which, as popular philosophy often asserted, was a like a soul of divine origin. The followers of Hasidism created many such melodies or niggunim, connecting them to just about any text and singing them with certain syllables or combinations of syllables such as doy-doy-doy or ya-ba-bam. Musical presentations utilizing such niggunim, intensified with dance rhythms, could well catapult its participants into a state of ecstasy.6 In western Europe, a dramatically different movement arose around the same time as a consequence of the Jews’ emancipation and integration into the new societal structures in the course of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment). Its roots can be traced to the circle of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729– 1786). The Haskalah fostered increased secularization of Jewish life through secular learning, a concern for aesthetics, and acculturation. Reforms opened the synagogue to the inf luences of the modern environment. Throughout the nineteenth century, the internal life of the Jews was marked by polemics between the traditionalists and those advocating modernity, integration, and acculturation. These developments gave birth to Reform Judaism on the one hand and led to the orthodoxization of traditional Judaism on the other. In the course of the reforms, synagogue music underwent radical changes to make it more palatable to a public increasingly educated in Western art music, though not without the resistance of traditionalists. The hazzan, with his ˙ excellent knowledge of liturgy, was succeeded by the cantor, who had a more profound knowledge of music and was able to write music and conduct as well, but whose role throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would continuously change. Congregational singing in unison became a central part of Jewish worship, emphasizing commonality and processes of exchange that were key elements of the reforms. Larger communities employed a (semi) professional chorus (depending on the congregation, either mixed or, to avoid kol isha, male voices only) and sometimes instrumentalists. Torah cantillation was only practiced in a very few Reform congregations, because the reformers be6
For in-depth information on the niggun, see Ellen Koskoff, Music in Lubavitcher life (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000). See also the anthology edited by Yaakov Mazor, The Hasidic niggun as sung by the Hasidim ( Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Jewish Music Research Center, 2004).
281
Tina Frühauf lieved that cantillation and biblical chant no longer had validity as both were a “post-biblical invention”.7 Besides, the Reform movement found cantillation to be antiquated and unattractive, and not in line with the current fashion of synagogue song. The elimination of selected elements from worship was common, indeed, as also evident in the prayer of Kol Nidre, which was substituted by Psalm 130 or replaced with new texts redigesting its basic themes through key words and some original phrases, albeit using the traditional melody. If until the nineteenth century vocal music was mostly orally transmitted, it was now written down, thereby pressed into the “novel” scheme of Western notation and regular meter. Hence the improvisation inherent to hazzanut slowly ˙ vanished, replaced by a rhythmically and structurally firm melody. Classical and Romantic styles began to infiltrate the structure and expression of synagogue music. One of the most strident markers of a new musical identity, however, was the organ as accompaniment and solo instrument. The admission of organs into the synagogue service, which traditionalists regarded as a “Christianization”, was the subject of vehement quarrels and debate regarding the halakhic (legal, according to Jewish law) question of whether one may play an instrument on Sabbath and holidays, and whether a Jewish musician may perform. The debate extended to communities and to rabbinical conferences, and was the subject of various polemics. 8 Halakhic support for innovations, especially for the use of the organ, came in the form of four rabbinic responses published in Dessau in 1818 under the title Noga Hazedek (The Radiance of Light).9 The leading respondent was the rabbi from Arad in Transylvania, Aaron Chorin (1766–1844), who took a rather open-minded stance. Arad was the first community in Pannonia to introduce the organ into the synagogue in 1842 (four years later, an organ was installed in the new synagogue of Nagykanizsa).10 Moritz Klein, who had a music publishing business, played it, accompanying Obercantor Salomon Schwarz (1825–1889).11 7
See Protokolle und Aktenstücke der zweiten Rabbinerversammlung (Frankfurt/Main: E. Ullmann, 1845), 133. 8 For further details, see Tina Frühauf, The organ and its music in German-Jewish culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 9 Elieser Liebermann, Or Noga (Dessau, 1818) and Aaron Chorin, Noga Hazedek (Arad, 1818). Both rabbinical responses were quickly out of print; see Abraham Berliner, Zur Lehr’ und Wehr über und gegen die kirchliche Orgel im jüdischen Gottesdienste (Berlin: Nathansen und Lamm, 1904), 44–51. 10 For further details, see Michael A. Meyer, Antwort auf die Moderne: Geschichte der Reformbewegung im Judentum (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), 85–86. 11 See Franz Metz, “Orgelbau im Banat”, Ars organi 45/3 (1997), 150–172, here 159–160, 169. In 1864, the Arad synagogue organ was replaced by a second instrument by the local builder Anton Dangl (for further synagogue organs in that region, see appendix A).
282
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” When David Kohn (1834–after 1906) became the Obercantor at Arad’s synagogue in 1857, he and the choir director and music professor Adolf Grünzweig (1829–1905) created a new music program.12 Grünzweig, who served Arad from 1855 to 1895, later published his contributions in the anthologies Zemirot shel Shabat: Sabbathliche Synagogalgesänge (1863); Mateh Ahron: 40 Chor- und lythurgische Gesänge für die hohen Feiertage; Neujahrs- und Versöhnungstag (1893), with organ accompaniment, transliterated Hebrew, and the numbers 1, 8, and 27 in German and Hungarian; and Kol-Rinnah: Jubel-Klänge; 40 Sabbath-, Festund Gelegenheits-Gesänge (1899).13 Progressiveness evolved over time, reaching a peak in March 1884 when the just founded girls choir under the baton of Grünzweig gave its debut on a Sunday morning; Obercantor Kohn sang the solos and Kapellmeister J. Hößli accompanied on the organ.14 Later in the century, nearby Temesvár (today Timișoara) showed similar developments, when the Sulzer disciple Leon Kartschmaroff (1842–1915) became cantor there.15 Clearly, the eastern European communities on the Western periphery did not remain immune to the developments that originated in central Europe. Not all communities were reform oriented. Certainly not the Sephardic Jews who had settled in Dej, Cluj-Napoca, and even further north in Carei, and those who had migrated from Turkey and settled in Temesvár in the sixteenth century. In later centuries, the Sephardim lost their majority to the Ashkenazim. Rural areas differed from those in urban centers. The Ashkenazic Jews who lived in the Carpathian Mountains of northern Transylvania, of Maramureș, for instance, were steadfast Hasidism. The sounds of service consisted of the recitation of prayer. Funerals were without music. Paraliturgical events, such as weddings, however, had distinct repertoires.16 Often Romani people played on those occasions. Christians were part of klezmer bands and some seemed to know Yiddish.17 The fact that Jews had relations 12 For an extensive biography, see Aron Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren, 3 vols. (Berlin: C. Boas, 1918–1927), vol. 2, 90–92; See also Josef Singer, “Adolf Grünzweig”, OUCZ 15 (13 February 1895), 2. Kartschmaroff had been cantor in Třešť, and after his time in Timișoara, moved on to become Obercantor in Szeged and Nagykanizsa for which he composed a new service, Schire bes Jausef: Nagykanizsaer gottesdienstliche Gesänge für das ganze Jahr für Cantor-Solo, Soli, Chor mit und ohne Orgelbegleitung (Vienna: Josef Eberle, 1911). 13 A new edition of Mateh Ahron has been recently published by the Merseburger Verlag in Germany. 14 The choir was founded in January 1884, see OUCZ 4/10 (18 March 1884), 6. 15 See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 1, 180 –184. 16 See Ioan R. Nicola, “Jewish wedding in Maramures”, East European meetings in ethnomusicology 4 (1997), 49–66. 17 See Ghisela Suliţeanu, “On the ‘Hascala’ movement and the traditional music of Jews in Romania”, East European meetings in ethnomusicology 7 (2000), 48–66.
283
Tina Frühauf with non-Jews is ref lected in the music as well, particularly in the inclusion of Romanian repertoire, such as cântecul miresii (bride’s song) on a doina tune.18 Another example is the dance chusenl (the groom), which was transformed from the Romanian into chussedl (Hasid). Folksongs had an impact on the niggunim.19 That Transylvania shows such diversity and interaction is unsurprising. Astride the trade routes between East and West, as well as the North and South of Europe, it was home to a diverse population of Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Roma, and Slavs. The Jewish experience was understandably unique, since it was open to inf luences from all directions. From the 1830s, the Haskalah was firmly established further south, and religious reforms spread to several communities along the Danube, though not to its most extreme. The wish to introduce reforms in education and religion in parallel to other changes still aroused opposition from traditionalists. The Jewish Congress in 1868/1869, held in Pest, led to a schism between traditional and progressive Jews, and the opponents separated into three groups that continued to coexist: Orthodoxy, a liberal stream of Judaism called Neolog, 20 and Status-quo-ante (communities associated with neither of those two movements). From provinces dominated by Austro-Hungarian culture and more prone to West European influence, the spiritual and religious trends spread further east (advancing as far as to parts of Galicia and Russia) impacting the traditional structure of synagogues. In the nineteenth century, the Chorshul (literally, choir synagogue) emerged (among the trailblazers was Odessa’s Brodsky Synagogue, where Nissan Blumenthal founded a choir school in 1841). The h azzanut of the Chorshul ˙ remained eastern European to a great extent, which implies modality with frequent modulations, often rising to tonal levels similar to the maqamāt of Arabic and Turkish music, highly improvisational and melismatic with great ornamentation of the vocal line, and a free rhythm unrestricted by regular meters. In contrast, cantorial art of western and central Europe had regular rhythm and limited embellishment, and the Sephardic customs relied on various differing styles. However, the eastern European style in the Chorshul was fused with Western music through the amalgamation of choral elements. 18 Often performed for guests at the banquet table during a wedding or other celebration, doinas allow a musician to display virtuosity and expressiveness through highly embellished elaborations within a variety of related modes; see ibid. 19 See Max Eiskovits, Songs of the martyrs: Hassidic melodies of maramures (New York: SepherHermon Press, 1980). Eiskovits, former director of the Academy of Music in Cluj, presents 20 Hasidic prayers and niggunim in this collection. Those melodies reflected the variegated influences that shaped the particular type of Hasidism of Maramureș. 20 The appellation was used for Hungarian progressive communities since the late nineteenth century. Neologs are roughly the equivalent of followers of present-day Conservative Judaism.
284
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” The modernization and, consequently, westernization in Sephardic communities started in the 1860s, about the same time as in the Ashkenazic parts, when the Alliance Israélite Universelle network founded the first modern schools there. The gradual but steady dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the growing exposure to Western European culture in some parts of the Danubian region led to changes that affected the liturgy’s music. In some synagogues, European languages replaced Hebrew or Ladino; and sometimes even an organ was installed. Heading southeast, Sephardic and Ashkenazic, Eastern and Western, Jewish and non-Jewish musical elements in the Jewish communities along the Danube came in close contact, a process that can be observed after our starting point in Bratislava. Departing from the Jewish remnants in Bratislava Situated on the Danube River, in medieval times Bratislava was home to an important Jewish community in what was then the city of Pressburg (there were also settlements in other towns on the Danube, such as Gabčíkovo and Komárno). In August 1526, these Jews were expelled after the disastrous defeat of the Croatian-Hungarian Kingdom by the Ottoman Empire at Mohács. A new settlement only formed again toward the end of the seventeenth century. By 1736, the community had grown substantially to 770 people, consisting of locally born Jews, migrants from Vienna, and later joined by Jews from Bohemia and Moravia, and a few from Poland. 21 By the end of the eighteenth century nearly 1,700 Jews are documented (by 1869 this number rose to 4,500 Jews, constituting about nine percent of the city’s population). By that time the city was a gateway into the Kingdom of Hungary, serving as the seat of the kingdom’s administration until 1784 and the site of the Diet until the Revolution of 1848. Slovakia was part of Hungary for almost one century and the history of the Jews in this region was submerged in the history of the Jews of greater Hungary, and until 1918 an integral part of Magyar Jewry. 22 21 Statistics and historical facts for all eastern European communities are, if not indicated otherwise, based on Gershon David Hundert, ed., The YIVO encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); it is also available online, see http:// www.yivoencyclopedia.org/ (last accessed: 6 August 2015); and the Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007). 22 In origin, spoken language, and culture and customs, this Jewry was divided into three sections: the Jews of the northeastern districts (Unterland) mostly of Galician origin, who spoke an eastern dialect of Yiddish; the Jews of central Hungary, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke Hungarian; and the Jews of the northeastern districts (Oberland) of Austrian and Moravian origin, who spoke German or a western dialect of Yiddish. Culturally, Jews in Bratislava during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adhered to the latter.
285
Tina Frühauf Two distinct groups of Jewry lived in the region: Galician Jews who were inf luenced by Hasidic trends from Poland and eastward settled in eastern Slovakia. Western Slovakia was populated by western Orthodoxy. Its major urban center Bratislava was especially receptive to cultural and religious trends from Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, and Vienna, and it largely remained a center of Orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth century. After 1869 the Orthodox, Neolog, and Status-quo-ante factions began to split into separate congregations. In March 1872, a minority formally seceded to found a separate Neolog community, though it only moved into a new synagogue on Rybné Square in 1893 (today the former site of the synagogue has a Holocaust memorial). The installment of an organ is not documented. 23 Otherwise few details are transmitted on the musical life of the communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We do know of cantors who either stemmed from Bratislava or passed through. One of the earliest known hazzanim active in Bratislava was Salomon Ketten ˙ (1814–1889), who began as a meshorer in Budapest (traditionally an assistant to the hazzan, accompanying him and providing vocal interludes). Before set˙ tling in Bratislava, he served Nagyvárad (today Oradea) and Baja in southern Hungary as cantor. From there he went on to Posen (today Poznań), and then moved west in 1855 to become cantor at the Temple Notre-Dame de Nazareth in Paris. Similarly, on the move was Armin Freisinger (1846–1920), who served as cantor in Timișoara, Esztergom, and Nagyvárad, before coming to Bratislava, where he was promoted chief cantor in December 1871. Eventually he became Obercantor in Plzeň.24 Nagyvárad with its diverse and prosperous Jewish population served somewhat as a crossing point for cantors from the East en route to the West. 25
23 Neolog communities further afield installed instruments. The Neologists in Košice built a double tower synagogue in the Moyzesova street and furnished it with an organ, built by Josef Angster of Pécs in 1911 (disposition unknown; 2 manuals, 20 ranks), to the despair of the Orthodox Jews. Until they had their own trained organist, Oldrich Hemerica, the choirleader of the local cathedral, played the instrument. 24 See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 2, 146–148. 25 The cantor Mayer Schorr (1856–1913) is another example of a musician from Romania for whom Nagyvárad was a stepping stone. After working as chief cantor in Nowy Sącz (Galicia) for four years, from 1881 to 1893 he served the Orthodox synagogue in Nagyvárad, and then got a post at the Polish synagogue Beth Israel in Vienna; see Rainer E. Lotz and Axel Weggen, Deutsche National-Discographie. VI: Judaica I (Bonn: Birgit Lotz, 2006), 491. See also Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 3, 50–51. Short biographies about cantors and h azzanim in Austria, Hungary, and Russia can be ˙ found on 129–137.
286
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” One of the household names of cantorial art to hold a position in Bratislava was Josef Rosenblatt (1882–1933). 26 Born in Bila Tserkva (near Kiev), he would exert a strong inf luence on hazzanut throughout Europe, and the ˙ United States where he immigrated in 1912. At the age of seven, he toured Hungary, Bukovina, and Galicia with his baal tefillah (preceptor) father, and after his death with his brother Levi. During that time he absorbed Hasidic music and different styles of hazzanut, and studied Talmud. By the age of nine ˙ he was somewhat of a celebrity, able to sing whole passages from the liturgy by heart. At the age of eighteen after much travelling, he became cantor in Mukacheve (then in Carpathian-Ruthenia, now Ukraine), winning the position in that city’s synagogue by surpassing over 40 other candidates in what amounted to a sing-off. After eleven months, in the spring of 1901 the Bratislava community “kidnapped” him. 27 In truth, Mukacheve was dominated by two Hasidic dynasties, which held and spread an extreme aversion to any form of modernity or westernization – even if kept within faithfully traditional frameworks. In 1865, rabbis had gathered in nearby Michalovce to render a psaq din (formal ruling). Signed by 72 rabbis, it strictly prohibited any modification of synagogue service to avoid semblance with Christian worship. A choir was unacceptable. 28 Rosenblatt identified as Orthodox and continued to do so throughout his life, but he must have found the narrow environment of Mukacheve stif ling. He seized upon a dispute with his congregation over monetary support for the choir as an occasion to resign and assumed the position of Obercantor in Bratislava at the Orthodox synagogue at Zámocká Street (built in 1862, it was demolished after World War II). Samuel Vigoda (1895–1990), another hazzan ˙ of the star generation recalls an encounter with Rosenblatt when he was only seven years old: My father left for Hungary, and he became a cantor in what’s now Slovakia […] near Pressburg […] One day Yosele came to town. Yosele sang at the sude [wedding banquet] and my father sang something and we assisted […] So Yosele says to my father, git mir di tsvey yingelah [give me the two boys – T. F.] to sing in my choir, I’ll take them to Pressburg […] My father says “you should promise me you’ll keep 26 Biographical details are taken from an interview by Morris Clark of Yossele Rosenblatt in which he tells his life story, and his son’s biography, in Musical America 28 (22 June 1918). There are discrepancies between the accounts. 27 Ibid., 33. 28 See Maroš Borský, Synagogue architecture in Slovakia: A memorial landscape of a lost community (Bratislava: Jewish Heritage Foundation-Menorah, 2007), 35.
287
Tina Frühauf them in your home, they’ll eat at your table, they’ll sleep at your bed, and you enroll them in the talmud torah, they wouldn’t be just loafing around and you’ll take good care of them. I’ll give them to you”. So we lived in the home of Yosele Rosenblatt. 29 The five years in Bratislava were Rosenblatt’s first productive period in terms of composition. During that time he produced his first major collection of cantorial recitatives and liturgical choral music for four voices. His choir, consisting of students from the local Yeshiva, might have served as a testing ground for some of these settings. The untitled manuscripts of nine pieces on 60 pages, known as Shirei Yosef, bears approbations from Adolf Lazarus and Jakob Bachmann of Budapest, Béla Guttmann and Philipp Kläger of Vienna, signed between December 1904 to March 1905. 30 The latter defines the work as Old-Polish in style. It is noteworthy that Rosenblatt sought endorsements from cantors who resided in two Jewish centers of Reform on the Danube, but worked for congregations that followed traditional customs. Approbations were necessary since Rosenblatt was largely self-taught as a composer and arranger. During his time in Bratislava he acquired the affectionate sobriquet “Yossele Pressburger” and thereafter was known as Yossele rather than Josef. Word of his high vocal abilities spread to western Europe. He made his first recordings between March and September 1905. Manufactured by the Edison Record Company in Vienna, the Herrengesang featured four cantorial pieces on phonograph and is one of the earliest recorded examples of cantorial art. 31 In 1906 Rosenblatt accepted an appointment in the Kohlhöfen Synagogue in Hamburg, thus making a cultural leap into western European Orthodoxy. The individuals who served Bratislava as cantors are testimony to the cultural f luidity and diversity that must have pervaded the music of the prayer service. 32 Although documentation on synagogue music in Bratislava is absent, 29 Quoted after Mark Slobin, Chosen voices: The story of the American cantorate (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 79. 30 The title is derived from Samuel Rosenblatt, Yossele Rosenblatt: The story of his life as told by his son (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), 67. He erroneously states that the collection contains 150 pieces. Only one copy of the score could be located, at the Klau Library, Hebrew Union College, New York. Adolf Lazarus (1855–1925) was at the time Obercantor and Professor in Budapest. For a detailed biography, see Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 3, 50; and Adolf Lazarus, “Einigkeit ist Macht”, in Festschrift zum 25-Jährigen Jubiläum des Österreichisch-Ungarischen Cantoren-Vereines in Wien, 1883–1908, ed. by Moritz Löwy (Vienna: Cantoren-Verein, 1908), 19-21. 31 See Lotz and Weggen, Deutsche National-Discographie. VI: Judaica I (as note 25), 431. On the recording Rosenblatt is erroneously identified as Roenblatt. 32 Bence Szabolcsi discusses local variants, among them archaic chants with tritonic and pentatonic pattern, and sometimes a signal- or fanfare-like intonation; see Bence Szabolcsi,
288
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” considering the heritage of the cantors, we can safely assume that the sounds of the synagogue were changing. While in the eighteenth century, the hazza˙ nim had made little or no effort to reform synagogue music, particularly the cantorial recitative (with the exception of measured melodies), in the nineteenth century, the sounds of Bratislava’s synagogues and elsewhere in Pannonia were diverse, with Eastern and Western Ashkenazic styles developing in parallel and overlapping. First stop: Budapest Historically and geographically, Budapest is an eminently logical place as a first stop on a sojourn of Jewish musical culture and heritage following the Lower Danube. Draped on both sides of the river, the city is still home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, shrunken as it is. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most Magyar Jews lived along the Danube River in Buda, Óbuda, and Pest. Around 1800 (16 years after the Jews were officially allowed to have a minyan, 1784), the name of the first hazzan of Pest, a certain ˙ Jacob, appears in the records of that time. 33 In 1827, Pest got a new hazzan, ˙ Károly Eduard (Azriel) Denhof (1798–1840) from Óbuda (Old Buda). Having little formal education, his formative inf luences were Izsák Komárni of Buda, the below mentioned David Strelisker, and Solomon Weintraub (1781–1829) from the Volhynia region, who traveled from town to town giving performances in his unique coloratura style. 34 A tall, corpulent young man, Denhof became known for his powerful high baritone voice and clear diction. He was well-versed in the eastern European style of hazzanut. 35 ˙ Just before Denhof was hired, a new rite was established in nearby Vienna (a moderate revision of the liturgy and of synagogue music), 36 and in Pest a group of young Jews founded the private prayer group Hesed Neurim or ˙ Jungen-Schul in 1825. To fulfill the requirement of this group, Denhof took
33 34
35 36
“Hebrew recitative-types in Hungary”, Journal of the International Folk Music Council 16 (1964), 65. See Kinga Frojimovics and Géza Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest: Monuments, rites, history (New York: Central European University Press, 1999), 75. See Ignaz Reich, “Denhof Karl Eduard”, Beth-El: Ehrentempel verdienter ungarischer Israeliten II (2nd ed., Budapest: Alois Buesánszky, 1867), vol. 3, 257. The biography includes a survey of Jewish Kultus in Pest before and during the time of Denhof. For liturgical changes (but with nearly no information on the musical program), see anon., “Programm der ‘reformirten’ Synagoge in Budapest”, OUCZ 4/31 (10 September 1884), 3–6. For a detailed description of his style, see Reich, “Denhof Karl Eduard” (as note 34), 266–267. For details on the Viennese rite, its musical component, and the role of Sulzer therein, see Tina Frühauf, Salomon Sulzer: Reformer, cantor, icon (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2012), 15–19.
289
Tina Frühauf music lessons with the local organist, Mr. Feil. He also went to study for a few months with Salomon Sulzer (1804–1890), the cantor who musically shaped the rite (he transformed the recitative into a set of musical pieces and brought the choir into the foreground). 37 When the Jewish community officially acknowledged the new Cultus-Tempel on 30 April 1830, further changes entered worship. 38 Denhof replaced congregational prayer with musical arrangements, introduced Sephardic pronunciation, and employed two or three choir boys who functioned as meshorerim. Under the direction of Salomon Sachsel, they evolved into a small choir, which, as in Vienna, served as an extension of the cantor's function. 39 Perhaps inf luenced by Sulzer’s occasional leaps into secular performances Denhof was the first cantor in Pest to perform opera. On occasion he would accept an invitation to entertain at social events, in aristocratic salons, and charity concerts. He once recited Eleazar’s prayer from Fromental Halévy’s opera La Juive (1835), rejecting the fee offered to him.40 Around 1830, the traditionalists of Pest also hired a new hazzan, David Stre˙ lisker (1783–1848), also known as Dovidl Brod, originally from Brody (today western Ukraine). A number of synagogues in Hungary in favor of Eastern styles of cantorial art employed hazzanim from farther east. Strelisker had ˙ previously been cantor in nearby Old Buda. A grand singer and original talent, he could not read or write music. Still, his inf luence over cantorial practices in Galicia and Hungary was enormous. He trained Bratislava’s Salomon Schwarz and Israel Singer also known as Srole Hliník (1806–1897), father of acclaimed cantor Josef Singer as meshorer.41 Sulzer held Strelisker in high esteem; he was not alone. Strelisker’s gravestone reads: “He was able to express all the sufferings of the Jewish people in one sound”. By the mid-nineteenth century Pest counted around 40,000 Jews.42 The growth of the community both in number and in wealth necessitated the 37 For an excellent comparison of traditional practices and those shaped by Salomon Sulzer, see Judit Frigyesi, “A rift never to be healed: The music of the traditional and Reform service”, in Jüdische Musik als Dialog der Kulturen/Jewish music as a dialogue of cultures, ed. by Jascha Nemtsov (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2013), 71–102. 38 Altering the ceremonial hymn and introducing a choir were only the first steps; see Frojimovics and Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest (as note 33), 123. 39 See Reich, “Denhof Karl Eduard” (as note 34), 265. 40 See Frojimovics and Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest (as note 33), 78. 41 See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 2, 49–52. Israel Singer became active in Hlínik (today Bytča) and founded one of the early synagogue choirs there. Josef Singer (1841–1911), who had studied in Trnova (Slovakia), was among the first to approach synagogue prayer chant on a pseudo-musicological basis. He composed numerous choral settings and is known for outstanding achievements, among them his trailblazing book, Die Tonarten des traditionellen Synagogengesangs (Wien: Wetzler, 1886). 42 See Frojimovics and Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest (as note 33), 106.
290
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” construction of a new temple, one that matched the community in size and appearance. In September 1845, a construction committee decided to build a new synagogue that would follow the Viennese rite. But more radically, the new house of worship would have an organ to enhance the festive mood. In other respects the traditional customs would be observed. Traditionalists would have a separate synagogue to alleviate the rising tensions that had begun when the first changes were introduced in the 1830s. In 1859, after a long period of gestation, Pest became the home to the substantial Dohány Street Synagogue. Built in the Moorish Revival style, with the decoration based chiefly on Islamic models from North Africa and medieval Spain, it became the center of modernizations more than ten years before the Congress.43 Its organ built by J.F. Schulze & Söhne of Paulinzella was originally placed behind the Ark.44 When the organ was repaired and remodeled in 1902, the new pipes were put above the wings of the Ark, flanking a tenth of it. The German music critic and teacher Gotthard Wöhler (1818–1888) who had settled in Pest in 1856, played the organ and also contributed arrangements. The instrument was one of the best in the region and thus was also used for recitals: On March 6, 1879, Camille Saint-Saëns gave a private one-hour matinée with improvisations and a prelude and fugue by Bach, attended by Franz Liszt.45 The congregation hired cantor Mór (Moritz) Friedmann (1827–1891), also a former student of Sulzer.46 An aspiring hazzan from Hrabócz, Friedmann had ˙ lived in Sopronkeresztúr (Németkeresztúr, then Deutschkreutz) for around four years in the mid-1840s, working as a synagogue singer, assistant cantor to Rubin Goldmark, and school teacher. A series of career moves began in 1848, when he served as cantor in nearby Ödenburg. Two years later he became cantor, teacher, and secretary of the congregation at Fünf haus, a suburb of Vienna, until January 1858 when he assumed the position of Obercantor in Pest.47 There he composed a significant number of works for different occa43 For other features of modernization, see ibid., 123. 44 See ibid., 109. Aside from Dohány Street Synagogue, the Neolog synagogue at 8 Beniczky utca / Berzeviczy Gergely utca built in 1896 has an organ today. After the synagogue in Kecskemét was converted into an office building in 1966, its expansive two-manual organ was brought here and placed above the entrance, a unique location given that the Neolog synagogues of Hungary preferred it above the Ark; see Frojimovics and Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest (as note 33), 357. 45 See Margit Prahàcs, Franz Liszt, Briefe in ungarischen Sammlungen, 1835–1886 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1966), 395–396. In his book Begegnung mit dem Genius (Vienna: Fiba-Verlag, 1934), Ludwig Karpath alludes to Liszt having also played on the same organ, see 387–389. 46 See Frojimovics and Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest (as note 33), 110. 47 See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 1, 131–140. For further biographical details, see Friedmann-Album: Zur bleibenden Erinnerung an die Feier des 25-jährigen
291
Tina Frühauf
Fig. 1. In 1930, the instrument was replaced with a large four-manual organ having 70 stops, built by Gebrüder Rieger (Opus 2485). Jehmlich Orgelbau rebuilt the organ in 1996 (Opus 1121). It still consists of four manuals and sports 64 stops. (Photograph courtesy of Achim Seip).
sions. Liszt apparently praised his works for their “musical finesse and refined taste”.48 For a short time, the young Karl Goldmark, whose sister Johanna he had married, joined him in these efforts. Friedman was especially involved in the musical aspects of the reforms as formulated during the Hungarian Congress in 1868 and the Augsburg Synod in 1871.49 In 1875 he published the first edition of religious songs Izraelita Vallásos Énekek (1875), which comprises 23 numbers and was used in many congregations throughout Hungary. The same year Emperor Franz Joseph I conferred upon him the decoration of the Golden Cross. In 1879 Pest’s rabbinical seminary appointed him professor for vocal instruction. In 1882 he founded a union of Jewish congregation officials, which he also headed until his death. It is safe to say that during the nineteenth century there had not been a more inf luential cantor in Budapest. Amtsjubiläum des Herrn Moritz Friedmann, Obercantors der israelitischen Religionsgemeinde Pest (Budapest: Chorin & Co., 1877), 99–110. The Festschrift also contains a list of cantors active in Pest at the time, see ibid., 14. For contemporaneous tributes, see Josef Singer, “Professor Moritz Friedmann”, OUCZ 3/2 (13 January 1883), 1. 48 See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 1, 135. 49 See Moritz Friedmann, “Denkschrift”, OUCZ 17/24 (15 October 1897), 2–3.
292
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” Before 1900 Benjamin (Béla) Guttmann (1872–1911) served as Untercantor at the Dohány Street Synagogue. 50 There was also both a male and a boys’ choir, which used to sing on the first f loor, but on some ceremonial occasions they came forward to the stand in front of the Ark. On certain occasions, such as the Jewish-Hungarian brotherhood celebration or memorial services for Hungarian leaders, the choir sang “Szózat”, the second most important national poem after the national anthem, to the music composed by Ferenc Erkel. 51 The Dohány Street Synagogue was one of many new synagogues to emerge in Budapest. With the spread of Neology among the Oberland Jews of Pest, Hungarian Orthodoxy became the source of new radical Orthodox movements among the Unterland Jews who did not take part in the process of modernization. Ironically, the Orthodox synagogue Bész Hakneszesz at 48 Garay Street was built on premises that formerly functioned as the organ warehouse and showroom of the Rieger Brothers in 1873. 52 In counterpoint to the Dohány Street Synagogue, the adversaries to Neology built another synagogue at Rumbach Sebestyén Street. Inaugurated in 1872, the Rombach Schul was a small concession to Neology, and an example for Status-quo-ante. It had a choir of eight and later six men and almost thirty boys. 53 Women were not allowed to sing in the choir and there was no organ. Members of the choir wore uniform gowns and stood in front of the Ark. The Rombach Schul could pride itself on having as its cantor a man with the most phenomenal heroic tenor voice at the time, Jacob Bachmann (1846–1905). Born in Russia and educated at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, he had previously served in Constantinople, Rostov-on-Don, Berditchev, Lvov, and Odessa. 54 From 1885 to his death he served the Rombach Schul as cantor and choir director. 55 He was a highly skilled musician, active also as composer of liturgical music.56 In honor of the silver anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph I 50 51 52 53 54 55
See Lotz and Weggen, Deutsche National-Discographie. VI: Judaica I (as note 25), 181. See Frojimovics and Komoróczy, Jewish Budapest (as note 33), 111. Ibid., 267. Ibid., 136–137. See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 1, 189–196. In the latter function he educated the next generation of cantors such as Josef Basser (1871– 1938), who sang in the choir and later served as cantor in Althofen, Óbuda, Novi Sad, Vienna, and Subotica; see Lotz and Weggen, Deutsche National-Discographie. VI: Judaica I (as note 25), 22–24. 56 Bachmann published one substantial collection comprising 233 pages, Schirath Jacob: Gesänge für den Israelitischen Gottesdienst (Moscow: Edition Jurgenson, 1884). Other published compositions include Uwaschôfor-godôl für Cantor solo, Chor und Orgelbegleitung (Leipzig: C. G. Röder, 1889) and Jom kipur katan: Gesänge für den israelitischen Gottesdienst für Solo und Chor mit und ohne Orgelbegleitung (Leipzig: C. G. Röder, 1892).
293
Tina Frühauf
Fig. 2. An autograph portrait of Moritz Friedmann. The Hebrew subtitle borrows from the beginning of Psalm 149:6 “romemot el begronai, teheltu al leshonai” (Let high praises of God be in my mouth, his glory be on my tongue.). Reprinted from Friedmann-Album: Zur bleibenden Erinnerung an die Feier des 25-jährigen Amtsjubiläum des Herrn Moritz Friedmann (Budapest: Chorin & Co., 1877).
and Empress Elizabeth, he composed a cantata based on Psalm 45. He generally remained rooted in eastern European tradition, though some melodies ref lected the somewhat newer style introduced by the extremely popular Louis Lewandowski of Berlin (1821–1894) in his collection of cantorial recitatives, Kol rinnah u-tefillah (The sound of supplication and prayer, 1871), and Toda W’simrah (Thanksgiving and song, 1876–1882), a collection of the entire liturgical cycle for four-part choir, solo cantor, and organ ad libitum. A good number of organs were built for synagogues in the Pannonian Basin – symbols of Jewish modernity. In the territory that is present-day Hungary, 294
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” over two dozen instruments existed, most built by József Angster (1834– 1918). Trained by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in Paris between 1863 and 1866, his first domestic commission was for the new Pécs synagogue (the instrument has been restored and still exists today). 57 The same year, in 1869, he founded a workshop in that city. Angster’s first organ deviated only slightly from the Cavaillé-Coll organ ideal with regards to sound and technology. Angster, however, discontinued building in the French style. 58 His subsequent organs reveal an idiosyncratic mixture of French and German features, with the latter clearly dominant. In the following decades he received numerous commissions from houses of prayer throughout Hungary and surrounding countries, establishing the dynasty of Angster József és Fia Orgona- és Harmóniumgyár, which by 1973 had built over 1,200 instruments. His organs, mostly two-manual instruments, were deemed most important in southeastern Europe. Although Angster monopolized the market there were a number of other builders who installed organs in synagogues, most notably the workshops of the Rieger Brothers and Carl Leopold Wegenstein (the two most significant builders after Angster), J. F. Schulze & Söhne, and Peppert Nándor és Fia (see appendix B). Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, organ construction in the synagogues along the Danube would grow rapidly. This is also the case when travelling further south toward Belgrade. Passing through Croatia (which before 1918 was in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary), there were ten organs in synagogues, the earliest built in Varaždin by József Angster; only three of the instruments stemmed from another organ building workshop, that of the Rieger Brothers (see appendix C). Second stop: Belgrade The community of Belgrade Jews was almost totally destroyed in the Holocaust. Nearly all synagogues were demolished in the German bombing of Belgrade in April 1941. No traces remain today of the Jews from Italy and Hun57 See anon., “Ismét működik Angster op. 1-es mesterműve a pécsi zsinagógában”, Magyar Egyházzene 10/1 (1 January 2002), 117. For Angster’s own account on this first commission, see Das Tagebuch eines Orgelbauers, ed. by Franz Metz (Munich: Donauschwäbische Kulturstift, 2004), 67, and vii, xi. 58 See Pál Enyedi, “‘Der Ton gewinnt einen magischen Zauber’: Rezeption und Vermittlung der französischen Orgelromantik in der Tätigkeit der Angster-Orgelfabrik zu Fünfkirchen”, Studia musicologica: An international journal of musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 48/3–4 (2007), 335–351.
295
Tina Frühauf gary who settled there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. No traces remain of the Sephardi Jews who arrived after the Ottoman conquest in 1521. When the Ottoman Empire began to decline, a long series of catastrophes befell the Jews of Belgrade, leaving the community ravaged after the Habsburg’s conquest in 1688. Throughout the eighteenth century, Belgrade’s Jewish population remained volatile as the city became the key bulwark against the Turks under Austrian rule. Belgrade changed hands many times – the Jews suffered each time. In 1807 the Serbs expelled the Jews from Belgrade. In the course of the nineteenth century the situation of the Jews improved, although not without intermittent restrictions. Who would think of music under those conditions? The stay in Belgrade has thus to account for the presence or absence of knowledge about synagogue music. Until World War II, Sephardic prayer leaders relied primarily on oral transmission as a primary method of teaching and learning. Hence details of the music dialects of the Belgrade Sephardic community are difficult to discern. 59 For sure, prayer song was a dynamic, evolving practice, usually integrating sacred poetry with local folksong styles. It was a cappella, sung in Hebrew and other languages and in different styles, and was often based on maqamāt. Throughout the nineteenth-century musical customs must have been quite consistent given that the Shmuel M. Melamed (d. 1892) served the community as h azzan for almost 35 years.60 The re˙ ligious soundscape of the Ashkenazic minority of Belgrade is equally difficult to reconstruct, and most likely followed the common Eastern and Western Ashkenazi customs. Communities farther afield clearly showed the inf luence of Western reforms, as indicated by organs built by Angster, Wegenstein, and Rieger (see appendix D). In a unique way the Sephardic and Askenazic soundscapes of Belgrade began to overlap in 1879, when conductor Petar Dimić (1837–1898) founded the Prvo jevrejsko pevačko društvo (The First Jewish Choral Society).61 It was not affiliated with any synagogue, but it fed on the repertoires of these separate communities. Its foundation rested on the increasing popularity of choral singing in broader society and the opening of barriers towards secular 59 Two studies of the post-1945 Belgrade developments are of note: Kathleen R. Wiens, “A Serbian Jewish perspective on media and musical transmission”, Ethnomusicology forum 23/1 (April 2014), 49–66; and Jasmina Huber, “Competing musical traditions in the Holy Land in the twentieth century and how they found their way into the synagogue of Belgrade”, PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien 20 (2014), 87–98. 60 For his death notice, see OUCZ 12/8 (11 March 1892), 5 61 For a detailed history of the choir, see the Festschrift by Ivan Hofman, Srpsko-jevrejsko pevačko društvo (Hor “Braća Baruh”): 125 godina trajanja (Belgrade: Hor Braća Baruh, 2004).
296
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” Jewish life styles. In this way the society arranged concerts for the Jewish population and for the general public as well. A year after its foundation, the choir changed names to Srpsko-jevrejsko pevačko društvo (The Serbian-Jewish Choral Society); it performed under this name until it dissolved in 1941. Among its conductors were the famed composers Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac and Josif Marinković.62 Members of the choir were always Sephardic Jews, but the membership was also opened to non-Jewish Serbs. Though initially a men’s choir, by 1899 female voices were admitted.63 The repertoire consisted of a broad mix of synagogue music in Hebrew, choral music in Yiddish and Ladino, Serbian folk, and Western classics.64 In 1934 the Ashkenazic community established a parallel ensemble, the Jevrejski akademski hor. Directed by Mario Menashe Bronca, this choir numbered between 20 and 30 singers who focused on a repertoire dominated by the works of Salomon Sulzer and Louis Lewandowski. After the departure of Bronca from Belgrade in 1939, Jevrejski akademski hor ( Jewish Academic Choir) merged into Srpsko-jevrejsko pevačko društvo.65 The shifts of Ashkenazic culture and Sephardic culture in the very south of the Pannonian Basin are ever more discernable when we follow the Danube further with a last stop farther afield, in Bucharest. In this way the Romanian capital constitutes the logical closure of a journey that began in the northern regions dominated by Ashkenazi communities and ends in the southern regions where Sephardic communities had a greater presence. Bucharest: Beyond Pannonia’s Borders Jews arrived in Bucharest from two directions: Sephardic Jews came from the south, mainly through the Ottoman Empire. From the mid-seventeenth century Ashkenazic Jews from Galicia or the Ukraine who had passed through Moldavia settled as well, gradually outnumbering the Sephardim. State authorities organized Jews into a single community for tax purposes, and only by the early eighteenth century were the two communities recognized as being separate. With that they continued to develop in parallel, culturally and 62 See Jelena Milojković-Djurić, “Jevrejski pisci u srpskoj književnosti”, Balkanistica 16 (2003), 179–188, here 180. 63 See Joshua Jacobson, “The oldest Jewish choir”, Journal of synagogue music 20/2 (1990), 24–27, here 25. 64 In 1952 the choir was revived, renaming itself in 1962 to Hor Braća Baruh, and in 2010 back to Srpsko-jevrejsko pevačko društvo (Hor Braća Baruh continues to exist in parallel). For a website of the choir, see also http://sjpd.rs/o-nama/ (last accessed: 14 August 2015). 65 See Hofman, Srpsko-jevrejsko pevačko društvo (as note 61), 26–29.
297
Tina Frühauf musically. By the early nineteenth century, over a dozen Ashkenazic and Sephardic prayer rooms existed. A few decades later the number rose to over three dozen synagogues. The Jewish population of Bucharest began to explode (by 1890 it counted about 24,000) and with it a striving musical life inside and outside the religious service came to evolve. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Sephardim established two congregations: The Kahal Grande also known as Kahal Kadosh Gadol, erected in the second decade of the nineteenth century and frequented by the most emancipated Spanish Jews; and the Kahal Cicu, a smaller synagogue built ca. 1846, reconstructed several times, and used by the traditionalists. Hazzanim, ˙ some stemming from Adrianople and Izmir, such as Isaac David Bahar (Behar), conservatory-trained Isaac Alteras, Itzhac Sevilia, Danon, and Iaacov Eschenazy shaped the prayer melodies of the Cahal Cicu and imbued them with “Oriental” f lavor.66 In 1853, Kahal Grande was rebuilt in Moorish style, borrowing details from the Synagogue del Transito in Toledo, Spain.67 For another reconstruction of the synagogue in 1890, the Rieger Brothers donated a small organ (the synagogue’s harmonium was moved to the Kahal Cicu). During the inauguration, Carlo Bianchi conducted a choir and an orchestra, and played the organ; and Giuseppe (Iosef Curiel) from Trieste served as cantor. In due course the synagogue would introduce a new musical program with a choir singing in Hebrew and Romanian, including organ accompaniment. Apparently, as with some of the musicians, the music program had strong ties to Trieste, whose unique integration of Ashkenazic and Sephardic customs may have been used as a model.68 Instigated by the synagogue’s music director Mauriciu Cohen-Lînaru, the music program would further evolve in the twentieth century, with the hiring of Alberto Della Pergola (1884–1942). An accomplished opera singer, he arrived from Florence in the winter of 1909 to audition for the post of Obercantor. Endowed with a 66 See Raoul Siniol, “Sephardic synagogal music”, Romanian Jewish studies 1/2 (1987), 31–33; and Ghisela Suliţeanu, “Situation de la musique populaire et de la liturgie synagogale chez les juifs sepharades de Bucarest”, in The Sephardi and Oriental Jewish heritage, ed. by Issachar Ben-Ami ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1982), 421–488, here 433. Dates and spellings for these hazzanim could not always be ascertained. ˙ Aristide and Lucian Schwarz, Synagogues of Romania (Tel Aviv: Hasefer Publishing 67 See Streja House, 1997), 64–65. 68 This information stems from the diary of Ivela, which is held at the Archyion Hahistori in Jerusalem. Extracts can be found in an essay by Ivela’s student, Raoul Siniol, “א.ל. ”)יולה(הלוויא, [A.L. Ivela (Halevi)] in [ לארשי תמוקתב הינמור תודהיYahadut Romania Bit’kumat Israel, Shorashim: Romanian Jewry and the revival of Israel – Roots], ed. by Filip Paltiel Segal (Tel Aviv: Shevet Yehudei Romania [Center for Research of Romanian Jewry], 1992), 1, 301–304.
298
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” stupendous tenor voice, he served at the synagogue until 1935, and also worked as an opera singer and producer. He was one of the founders of the Bucharest Opera. The Jewish community evidently did not have an issue with his activities outside worship. Instead, religious services at the Kahal Grande were musically in grand style, accompanied by Umberto Pessione on the organ, Marica Pessione on the harp, Josef Thaler on the cello, and with singers Constanţa Dobrescu (alto), Jean Athanasiu (baritone), and George Folescu (bass). The Kahal Grande became the crossroad for influential composers and musicians known outside the Jewish community. The Friday evening services were not merely attended by congregants, but by members of neighboring synagogues, other musicians, even Christian Orthodox visitors, who might have recognized some similarity in the melodies with their own chants.69 Details of the repertoire performed in the Kahal Grande can be discerned from the creative output of the synagogue’s music directors: Mauriciu CohenLînaru (1849/52–1928), a composer, teacher, and choir conductor, and Abraham Zwi Levi (1878–1927), a composer, musicologist, teacher, organist, and choir conductor also known as Ivela (a backronym of his last name and first name initial). Little is known about Cohen-Lînaru, although he is considered “one of the leading Romanian composers during the second half of the 19th century”.70 He was born in Adrianople (today Edirne, Turkey). A student of Georges Bizet and César Franck among others, he had a solid background in Western classical composition. It is not clear when exactly he became in charge of modernizing the service at Kahal Grande. Among his compositional output are two compilations of music for the Sabbath and High Holidays published in 1910 by Durlacher in Paris as Tehilot Yisrael.71 The virtuoso “Ma tovu” written for a coloratura soprano bears the caption: “Chanté par Mlle. Marie Zissou au Temple israélite de Bucarest”, giving way to the fact that women’s voices were allowed at the synagogue, both as choristers and soloists. Lînaru exerted great inf luence on cantors and composers, particularly his student and successor Ivela, who himself became an important composer of liturgical music and wrote especially for Pergola. Born into a rabbinical family in Bucharest, Ivela had pursued a career in medicine, but at the age of 22 became 69 Siniol, “Sephardic synagogal music” (as note 66). 70 See Jim Samson, “Nations and nationalism”, in The Cambridge history of nineteenth-century music, ed. by Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 568–600, here 596. 71 Another noteworthy anthology is Culegere de melodii religioase traditionale (Bucharest: Comitelur Templelor Comunitati Israelită de rit spaniol din Bucureşti, 1936). Collected and recorded on phonograph cylinders in 1934 by Josef Almuly (brother of Rabbi Jacob Almuly) and Isaac Cauly, the melodies were transcribed by ethnomusicologist Paula Carp, who worked closely with Constantin Brăiloiu; see Suliţeanu, “Situation de la musique populaire” (as note 66), 422.
299
Tina Frühauf blind.72 Already deeply immersed in music, he established himself in two parallel careers, as a teacher, and as choir conductor and organist at the Kahal Grande, a position he held from 1896 until 1927. Because of Ivela’s blindness, Wilhelm Cilibiu, a cantor from Timișoara, assisted Ivela and wrote down the music for him.73 Ivela’s compositions fill the three volumes of Iuval, which contain over 200 liturgical pieces, original or adapted from Sephardic melodies for soloists (specially written for Pergola’s vocal range), chorus, organ, and orchestra. Ivela wrote two Zionistic songs, “Hava Achim” and “Sham”, that are known to have been sung at meetings of various organizations.74 Besides Cohen-Lînaru and Ivela’s composition, a broad variety of different repertoires were heard at the Kahal Grande, those left behind by cantor Iosef Curiel, works by French composer and hazzan Samuel Naumbourg (1815– ˙ 1880), the Mantuan composer Benedetto Franchetti (1824–1894), and Lewandowski.75 Aside from Ashkenazic and Sephardic works, melodies by Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868) were also performed. Léon Algazi asserts that the adoption of melodies from operas into the religious service was quite common at the time.76 Such diverse repertoires ushered in stylistic breadth, ranging from polyphonic pieces to Italian bel canto.77 Romanian musicologist Mauriciu Rottenberg also asserts cultural breadth in the Sephardic melodies themselves, which in their rich ornamentation are close to Oriental music while assimilating Bulgarian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, and “Arab-Persian elements”.78 Ivela confirms the inf luence of Spanish and Arabian-Persian songs of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.79 72 For a detailed study on Ivela, see Carmen Stoianov and Ioana Sarah Stoianov, “Ivela: Musician and teacher”, Studia hebraica 2 (2002), 182–191. See also Ivela’s entry on himself in his Dictionar muzical ilustrat (Bucharest: Alcalay, 1927). 73 See Suliţeanu, “On the ‘Hascala’ movement” (as note 17). 74 The musicologist Emil Săculeț claims that the origins of Ivela’s music are to be found in Sarajevo and that the original melodies were heard in other communities (specifically Severin and Oltenia) as well. 75 Siniol, “Sephardic synagogal music” (as note 66). In the twentieth century, the congregation also used arrangements by Ivela’s successor, Josef Rosenstock (1895–1985). 76 See Leon Algazi, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade: Histoire de la musique Juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 370. Secular repertoire, too, absorbed non-Jewish influences. 77 Traces of this repertoire can be found in the recordings made by Cohen- Lînaru and Ivela, which are preserved in the synagogue archive. The recordings of Ivela’s festive cantatas for tenor and bass, mixed chorus, and strings (Perfection Concert Record nos. 10392 and 10393) are noteworthy. The solo parts are sung by Pergola and Folescu; Ivela conducts. 78 See Mauriciu Rothenberg, “Melodii religioase ale evreilor sefarzi din România” [The religious melodies of Sephardic Jews of Romania], Revista cultului mozaic 17/269 (1 February 1972), 2. 79 See Siniol, “Sephardic synagogal music” (as note 66), 32.
300
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” The musical diversity of the Ashkenazi community was equally broad, shaped by native and foreign-born members. The increasing inf luence of the Haskalah led to the emergence of a group seeking modernization, and by the mid-nineteenth century the community split. Still, the traditionalists attempted to impede the reformers, and a quarrel erupted that led to imprisonment and expulsion of the Orthodox figurehead. Interestingly, there was no similar conf lict within the Sephardic community. By 1857, the reformers planned to build a new synagogue and nine years later the Neolog Templul Coral opened its doors. Sulzer’s student Gerson Weiß (1836–1904) served the congregation as its first cantor, a position he held for nearly 38 years. He had served as cantor before, beginning in his hometown Miskolcz and followed by positions in Oradea and Timișoara. His accomplishments as Obercantor were honored by the Österreichisch-Ungarischer Kantorenverband (Austro-Hungarian Cantor’s Alliance) and renowned cantors such as Aron Friedmann.80 After his death Leo Low (1878–1960) from Belarus became music director at the Temple, a position he held from 1905 to 1908. He introduced a new repertoire and also studied synagogue music with CohenLînaru, a testimony to the overlap of Ashkenazi and Sephardi aesthetic interests. Part of the repertoire of the Templul Coral can be reconstructed from Low’s successor Arnold Wecker. 81 Between ca. 1891 and 1908 he had served as a cantor and choir conductor in the town of Botoșani, a Moldavian enclave whose Jewish population at the time was estimated to be 50 percent. In 1908, Wecker assumed the post of choir conductor at the Templul Coral, a position he held at least until 1934. He was also active as composer and arranger.82 Some of the repertoires Wecker used in Bucharest stemmed from his time in Botoșani, among them copies of works by Nissan Blumenthal and Pinchas Minkowsky (both cantors at Odessa’s Brodsky Schul); Aron (Abraham) Dunajewsky (also from Odessa), and from even further east, Maksimilian Shteinberg and Eliezer Gerowitsch. There were also the Western household names of Lewandowski, Naumburg, Sulzer, and Josef Goldstein. 83 Wecker also contributed composi80 See Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 2, 97–99. 81 The Arnold Wecker Music Collection, housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, comprises about three linear feet and consists of Wecker’s original works, his arrangements of traditional synagogue melodies for cantor, choir (SATB) and organ, handwritten copies of nineteenth and early twentieth century, and published synagogue music. 82 The title “Obercantor A. Wecker” is engraved on the covers of several of the books that contain his liturgical compositions. He refers to himself in at least one other manuscript (“Rosa de Shabos” from [Synagogue music collection, miscellaneous cantorials D]) as “Choir director of the Bucharest Choral Temple”. 83 Josef Goldstein (1837–1899) was a cantor in Novi Sad and Vienna. He also composed a Schire Jeschurun: Gottesdienstliche Gesänge der Israeliten (Vienna: H. Engel & Sohn, 1862).
301
Tina Frühauf tions and arrangements. 84 At the Templul Coral, he closely collaborated with the synagogue’s organist Iosef Paschill (1877–1966), who composed most notably a “Mogen uvos” in 1919. These and other pieces offer a glimpse into the religious and social customs of the Templul Coral. Mostly rooted in the style of the nineteenth century, the repertoire is derived from different Jewish cultures, uniting Eastern and Western tastes prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some pieces were with organ accompaniment, others a cappella. Some pieces were sung in Romanian (especially for memorial services and weddings); for weddings the synagogue used an orchestra and diversified its repertoire to include “Pentru rege” (For the king) and the Zionist hymn “Hatikvah”; “In pace in trati”, a Romanian translation of Wagner’s wedding march from Lohengrin; as well as arrangements of “Mi adir” and “Mehero”. While all places we have visited in the Lower Danube region have indicated that synagogue music is far from monolithic, the Bucharest community shows a truly eclectic mix of repertoires and styles that transcend constructed divisions between Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Orthodox and Reform and nonJewish, East and West. It represents what Jacques Derrida has characterized as the indeterminate space between the binary, a pluralistic space that is beyond the binaries. 85 In Bucharest, it seems, almost anything goes. Mirroring Vienna, the community exhibits Jewish modernity par excellence and serves as a microcosm for Pannonia at large. Remapping Jewish music in a borderland The soundscape of the synagogues in Pannonia could not be more diverse. It is anything but homogenous or mono-dimensional. It absorbed the century of Reform with its primary icon, the organ, and preserved Orthodoxy in its most strict of forms; and it showed many variants in-between these two poles of worship. It relied on the h azzanim and cantors during the golden age, with ˙ their moving from synagogue to synagogue, from place to place in the region, representing the mobility of Jewish culture that has defined it through the age.86 84 The earliest work dates from 1891; though anonymous, it is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the reign of King Carol I of Romania (“Am Geburtstage des Landesfuersten”). The manuscript is part of a collection entitled Contul Toletti: Botoshani, 1908 (SMC, miscellaneous, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York). 85 See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, transl. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 86 For a list of these cantors, see Friedmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Kantoren (as note 12), vol. 3, 35, 129–133.
302
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia”
Fig. 3: The organ for the synagogue in Vukovar (Croatia) serves as an example of the integration of the Star of David. Built in 1890 by Josef Angster of Pécs, Hungary, it represents a smaller instrument with only eight stops on one manual. Reprinted from Orgona-Katalogus Angster József és Fia, Orgona- és Harmonium-Gyárából Pécsett/Orgel-Catalog aus der Orgel- und Harmonium-Fabrik Josef Angster & Sohn in Fünfkirchen (Pécs, 1896).
303
Tina Frühauf Synagogue music in Pannonia transcends the historical and modern boundaries of the region. It is music by minorities in a multi-ethnic context that has experienced major shifts throughout the nineteenth century. These shifts are internal, triggered by reforms and the increasing Sephardic presence further south. They are external by way of distributing musical formulas from one culture to another, depending on regional contexts. These shifts ref lect social and cultural issues, which manifest themselves differently in urban and rural communities. Rural communities in Hungary, for instance, were largely unaffected by social and religious changes. Nonetheless, Orthodox synagogues utilized the dance and vocal models of the minuet, the Austrian folkdance dance Ländler, the intricate Hungarian dance csárdás which is characterized by variations in tempo, marches, and operatic arias. 87 In contrast, the synagogue organs in Pannonia neither show stylistic diversity nor a unique Jewish imprint, with the obvious exception of Jewish symbolism found on some façades (e.g. the Star of David on the organs of Szekszárd, Tapolca, and Vukovar). Many of the shifts are gradual and nuanced. Heading south along the Danube, there are no real borders – the river’s transnational f low translates to the Jewish communities’ seamless or overlapping musicscapes that drift across cultural and regional boundaries. With its arrival in Bucharest, synagogue music is no longer typically Ashkenazic or Sephardic or Romaniote, or bound to what we understand as Hungarian or Romanian. Synagogue music begins to transcend such divisions, thereby occupying a new space with new meaning. In this way, the journey down the Danube helps to take a fresh look at borders and borderlands. Borders certainly imply crossings or trans-bordering, and thus are permeable. In Pannonia’s reality they are invisible lines within the boundaries of constructed nation-states, which artificially divide cultures previously often interconnected. The lines that separate one Jewish community from another are often imagined rather than real. Taking into account the overlapping musical styles, forms, and practices within Jewish and with non-Jewish musics in the region, borders suggest transfer and not separation. Synagogue music in Pannonia exemplifies the cultural identity of the region at large, which has always inhabited diversity and exchange. The junction of western and “oriental” cultures, peoples, religions, and musics, has made Pannonia appear in every sense an intersection, a borderless land in-between continents and empires. In this way, synagogue music in the Pannonian Basin can serve as a paradigm for the region at large. 87 Leopold Löw, “Der Gesang in den orthodoxen ungarischen Synagogen”, Ben Chananja 6 (1863), 455–460, 470–474, here 460.
304
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” Appendix A: Synagogue organs in Romania Note: Tables shaded in grey refer to instruments that are outside the Pannonian Basin. Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1842
Arad
unknown
unknown
1864 Arad, Anton Dangl, Arad Manual I
Manual II
Pedal
Principal
8'
Viola di Gamba
8'
Subbass
16'
Princ. Octav
4'
Salicional
8'
Contra Violon
16'
Quint
3'
Flauto traverso
8'
Octavbass
8'
Violoncello
8'
Octav
2'
Flaut major
8'
Mixtur
1 1/3' 2fach
Flaut minor
4'
Flute Bourdon
8'
Violin
2'
Flauto dulcis
4'
Tremulant
Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1890
Bucharest, Kahal Grande
Gebrüder Rieger
I/10; disposition unknown; opus 318
1895
Timişoara, Gyárváros Carl Leopold Wegenstein zsinagóga
II; disposition unknown
1900
Lugoj
Carl Leopold Wegenstein
II; disposition unknown
1900
Timişoara, Belváros zsinagóga
Carl Leopold Wegenstein
II; disposition unknown
305
Tina Frühauf Appendix B: Synagogue Organs in Hungary Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1846
Nagykanizsa
unknown
unknown
1859 Budapest, VII. Dohány Street, J.F. Schulze & Söhne, Paulinzella Manual I
Manual II
Pedal
Principal
16'
Geigen-Prinzipal
8'
Principalbaß
16'
Bordun
16'
Lieblich Gedackt
16'
Violon
16'
Octave
8'
Salicional
8'
Subbaß
16'
Gambe
8'
Rohrf löte
8'
Quintbaß
10 2/3'
Gemshorn
8'
Flauto traverso
8'
Violon
8'
Gedackt
8'
Principal
4'
Violon
8'
Hohlf löte
8'
Dulciana
4'
Cellobaß
8'
Quinte
5 1/3'
Flauto traverso
4'
Gedacktbaß
8'
Octave
4'
Flageolet
2'
Octave
4'
Gemshorn
4'
Mixtur
4fach
Posaune
aufschl. 16'
Oboë
8' aufschl.
Trompete
aufschl. 8'
Clarine
aufschl. 4'
Gedackt
4'
Quinte und Octave
2 2/3' ; 2'
Cornett
4fach
Mixtur
5fach
Trompete
aufschl. 8'
Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1869
Pécs
József Angster, Pécs
II/24; disposition unknown; Opus 1
1870
Győr
Carl Hesse, Vienna
I; disposition unknown; Opus 79
1875
Nagykanizsa
József Angster, Pécs
II/15; disposition unknown
1880
Balassagyarmat
Országh Sándor és Fia, Budapest
I; disposition unknown
306
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” 1887 Csurgó, József Angster, Pécs, Opus 103 Manual I Bourdon
8'
Fugara
8'
Flöte
4'
Superoctave
2'
Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1888
Budapest, Frankel Leó Street
József Angster, Pécs
I/6; disposition unknown; no pedal work
1889 Kaposvár, József Angster, Pécs, Opus 129 Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Subbaß
16'
Bourdon
8'
Principalbass
8'
Silvestrina
8'
Pr. Octava
4'
Viberation zu Silvestrina Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1890
Szigetvár
Peppert Nándor és Fia, disposition unknown Szombathely
1890
Szombathely
Peppert Nándor és Fia, I; disposition unknown Szombathely
1892
Budapest, VII. Dohány Street
J.F. Schulze & Söhne, Paulinzella
II/38; disposition unknown; expansion
307
Tina Frühauf 1894 Székesfehérvár, Carl Szalay, Stuhlweissenburg Manual I
Manual II
Pedal
Principal
8'
Salicional
8'
Violonbass
16'
Viola di Gamba
8'
Dulcia fugara
8'
Subbass
16'
Burdon
8'
Lieblich gedackt
8'
Oktavbass
8'
Flauto harmonico
8'
Doppel-Flöte
4'
Cello
8'
Flauto traverso
4'
Oktave
4'
Flauto
4'
Mixtur
2 2/3' 3fach
Date
City
Organ Builder
Specifications
1898
Keszthely
Országh Sándor és Fia, Budapest
II/7; disposition unknown
1899
Szolnok
József Angster, Pécs
I/11; disposition unknown
1899
Bares
József Angster, Pécs
I/6; disposition unknown
1900
Veszprém
Peppert Nándor és Fia, Szombathely
I; disposition unknown
1900
Nagyataol
József Angster, Pécs
I/6; disposition unknown
1902
Budapest, VII. Dohány u. József Angster, Pécs
III/44; disposition unknown; opus 382
1903
Zalaegerszeg
József Angster, Pécs
II/16; disposition unknown
1903
Szeged
Carl Leopold Wegenstein, Timișoara
II/21; disposition unknown
1906
Cegléd
Carl Leopold Wegenstein, Timișoara
I/8; disposition unknown
308
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” 1906 Tapolca, József Angster, Pécs, opus 531 Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Bourdon
8'
Subbaß
Salicional
8'
Flauta
4'
Pr. Octava
4'
Mixtur
3' sor 2 2/3'
16'
Date
City
Organ builder
Specifications
1910
Budapest
Gebrüder Rieger, Budapest
I/14; disposition unknown; opus 1658
1911
Szekszárd
József Angster, Pécs
II/10; disposition unknown
1912
Körmenol
József Angster, Pécs
I/7; disposition unknown
1913
Budapest, Újpest
József Angster, Pécs
II/28; disposition unknown; opus 880
1913
Kecskemét
József Angster, Pécs
II/43; disposition unknown
1914
Makó
Carl Leopold Wegenstein, Timișoara
I/8; disposition unknown
1930
Budapest, VII. Dohány Street
Gebrüder Rieger, Budapest
IV/70; disposition unknown; opus 2485
1942
Budapest, Budai izr. Fötemplom
Gebrüder Rieger, Budapest
II/15; disposition unknown; opus 3015
309
Tina Frühauf Appendix C: Synagogue Organs in Croatia Date
City
Organ builder
Specifications
1873
Varaždin
József Angster, Pécs
II/20; disposition unknown; opus 12
1888
Virovitica
József Angster, Pécs
I/8; disposition unknown; opus 118
1890
Vukovar
József Angster, Pécs
I/8; disposition unknown
1899 Karlovac, Gebrüder Rieger, Budapest, opus 747 Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Bourdon
8'
Salicional
8'
Vox celeste
8'
Octave
4'
Dolce
4'
Subbaß
16'
Date
City
Organ builder
Specifications
1904
Slavonski Brod József Angster, Pécs
I/6; disposition unknown; opus 439
1907
Rijeka
József Angster, Pécs
II/10; disposition unknown; opus 578
1910
Đakovo
József Angster, Pécs
I/6; disposition unknown; opus 709
1914
Bjelovar
Gebrüder Rieger, Krnov II/16; disposition unknown; opus 2008
1896 Koprivnica, Gebrüder Rieger, Budapest, opus 74 Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Bourdon
8'
Salicional
8'
Octave
4'
Mixtur
2'
Subbaß
16'
1906 Podravska Slatina, József Angster, Pécs, opus 528 Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Bourdon
8'
Salicional
8'
Zerkürt
4'
310
Subbaß
16'
Jewish Vestiges on the Banks of the Danube: Synagogue Music in “Pannonia” Appendix D: Synagogue Organs in Serbia 1894 Zrenjanin, József Angster, Pécs Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Subbaß
16'
Bourdon
8'
1.
8'
Salicional
8'
2. Vibration pro silvestrina
Silvestrina
8'
Flautaconcava
8'
Cello
Flauttravers
4'
Pr. Octav
4'
Superoctav
2'
Mixtur 3fach
2 2/3'
Date
City
Organ builder
Specifications
1900
Subotica
Carl Leopold Wegenstein, Timișoara
II; disposition unknown
1904 Pančevo, József Angster, Pécs, opus 685*** Manual I
Pedal
Principal
8'
Subbaß
16'
Fluato solo
8'
3.
Apertabass
8'
Gamba
8'
4.
Vibration pro silvestrina
Aeoline
8'
Vox celeste
8'
Pr. Octav
4'
***moved to Reformed Church in Vojvodina
1908 Novi Sad, Gebrüder Rieger, Budapest, opus 1457 Manual I
Manual II – Swell Organ
Pedal
Bourdon
16'
Geigenprincipal
8'
Violon
16'
Prinzipal
8'
Salizional
8'
Subbaß
16'
Hohlf löte
8'
Vox celestis
8'
Octavbaß
8'
Gamba
8'
Rohrf löte
8'
Cello
8'
Gedeckt
8'
Fugara
4'
Octave
4'
Rohrf löte
4'
Octave
2'
Mixtur
2 2/3' 4fach
311
Tina Frühauf
312
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Antonio Baldassarre Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Music
Identity, Ritual and Materiality of Bourgeois Power Performance: Oskar Reinhart’s Club zur Geduld in Winterthur* Abstract. In 1922 Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965), the wealthy Swiss magnate and patron of the arts, established a club in the English style in Winterthur at the Haus zur Geduld, a building whose history dates back to the fifteenth. Reinhart became accustomed to the comforts and advantages of such an establishment while being involved in the London and India branches of his father’s trading company, Gebrüder Volkart, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The company was established in 1851 with its headquarters in Winterthur and was one of the most important Swiss businesses in trading colonial goods – until 1989 it was the fourth largest cotton dealer in the world. Fairly quickly the Winterthur based Club zur Geduld developed into the private center of the city’s moneyed aristocracy in which business-professional interests amalgamated with political, social, and artistic concerns. This profile was not only visible in a specific concept of habitus as performed within the boundaries of the club, including the active promotion of music and the fine arts, but also strongly supported by a highly sophisticated and cleverly arranged interior design. The representations of topics of music, the performing arts and decorative arts play a significant role in a twofold way: they, firstly, are an important part of the narrative related to the performance of bourgeois power and secondly, they simultaneously participate in creating such a narrative, particularly due to their inherent symbolic power. *
I would like to express my gratitude to Gaby Weber (Research Assistant, Amt für Raumentwicklung, Abteilung Archäologie & Denkmalpflege, Dokumentation, Baudirektion Kanton Zürich), as well as Kerstin Richter (Director and Curator of the Oscar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”), and Harry Joelson-Strohbach (volunteer researcher of the Oscar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”). They generously provided all necessary support with regard to the inspection of the source material preserved at both the Cantonal Office for the Preservation of Monuments and the Archive of the Oscar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur. A special thank you goes to both Giovanni Gaggini and Zdravko Blažeković. Giovanni Gaggini, a member of the Club zur Geduld, invited the author of this essay to dinner in this club, for the first time in late 2015, and thereby laid the foundation for an intense intellectual engagement with the fascinating history of this site in the historic old town of Winterthur. Zdravko Blažeković as Chair of the ICTM Study Group on Iconography of the Performing Arts generously invited the author to present the first results of this research at the study group’s Thirteenth Symposium “Decoration of the Performance Space: Meaning and Ideology” that was held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, from 17 to 20 May 2016.
313
Antonio Baldassarre On 2 June 1908, 22-year-old Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965) (fig. 1) wrote a remarkably revealing letter to his father, Theodor Reinhart (1849–1919). He admitted that “a purely business activity is not conceivable” to him due to his particular interests. If I now work hard in the company at all times, I do so primarily to get closer to the point at which my position, I hope, will allow me to casually devote myself to art. This is, and I say this in all sincerity, my second purpose in life.1 It is quite telling that the word “casually” was added to the letter later – whether as a mere correction or whether as an explicit withdrawal of an overly revealing confession towards the father cannot be answered unequivocally. In general, this self-assessment mirrors the judgment of the Austrian-American composer Ernst Krenek (1900–1991) – who enjoyed the sponsorship of Oskar’s brother Werner Reinhart (1884–1951) in the 1920s – characterizing Oskar as being completely devoted to collecting art while the business did not particularly interest him. 2 Against such a background, it is scarcely surprising that the correspondence which Reinhart wrote during his formative years in the trading branches of his father’s company in London, India, and Sri Lanka from 1907 to 1912, are rarely dealing with business matters but rather with his deep devotion to the fine arts and with issues of erudite culture – the latter often approached with bitingly dry humor. 3 The primordial importance 1
2
3
314
“[…] mit den Interessen, die ich nun einmal habe, ist mir eine rein geschäftliche Tätigkeit nicht denkbar. Wenn ich jetzt zu jeder Zeit tüchtig in der Firma arbeite, so tue ich dies nicht zuletzt, um dem Zeitpunkt näher zu kommen, wo mir meine Stellung, wie ich hoffe, erlauben wird, mich nebenbei [nachträglich ergänzt, A. d. Autors] in den Dienst der Kunst zu stellen. Dies ist, das sage ich offen, mein zweiter Lebenszweck”. Letter of Oskar Reinhart to Theodor Reinhart (London, 2 June 1908), Archiv Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz” (hereafter “ASOR”). See Ernst Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit. Erinnerungen an die Moderne (Munich: Diana Verlag, 1999), 485. See also the letter of Oskar Reinhart to his brother Georg Reinhart (Winterthur, 16 January 1920), ASOR: “Immerhin habe ich gelernt mich mit meinem Schicksale abzufinden weil ich den Ausblick in eine schöne Zukunft halten kann. […] Es ist mir eine Erlösung u. zugleich auch ein Gebot der Pflicht es einmal auszusprechen, dass ich vom 45. Altersjahr an über eine noch viel weitergehender persönliche Freiheit verfügen möchte wie jetzt. Ich möchte dannzumal soweit sein, dass ich mich leicht 2-3 Monate vom Geschäft absentieren kann”. (“After all, I have learned to accept my fate because I can maintain the outlook into a beautiful future. […] It is both a salvation to me and at the same time a duty to utter that I would like to have much broader personal freedom from the age of 45 than I have now. Then I would like to be ready to withdraw from the business for 2–3 months”.) On 1 March 1907, for instance, Oskar Reinhart reported to his mother, Lilly ReinhartVolkart from London: “Yesterday, I spent a pleasant evening with S. and M. from Frankfurt. Both of them are studying here, art and architecture, but neither of them knows much in
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Fig. 1. Oskar Reinhart in India, ca. 1910, photograph. By courtesy of Archiv Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur.
that Reinhart attributed to art is already evident in the exceptionally detailed letter that he wrote to his father on 1 February 1908 and in which he spelled out – over ten pages and rich in details – his ideas of a pictorial concept for the family home on Rychenberg, Winterthur.4 Supporting the arts played a significant role in the Reinhart family. Already Theodor Reinhart, Oskar’s father, acted as a patron of the arts, vigorously sup-
4
their field. In Germany, it is simply the done thing that one of the family members paints.” (“Gestern verlebte ich mit S. und M. aus Frankfurt […] einen sehr netten Abend. Beide studieren hier Kunst und Architektur, aber keiner von beiden kann oder weiss viel auf seinem Gebiet. Es gehört halt in Deutschland zum Ton, dass einer der Familienangehörigen malt.”) Letter of Oskar Reinhart to Lilly Reinhart-Volkart (London, 1 March 1907), ASOR. Quite similarly, Reinhart commented on potential marriage plans. “This afternoon a visit,” he accounted from Colombo in 1910, “particularly because extremely pretty daughters are present. Engagement is not excluded! Mother-in-law, however, a bit daunting!” (“Heute nachmittag auf Besuch, namentlich da so hübsche Töchter anwesend sind. Verlobung nicht ausgeschlossen! Schwiegermutter zwar etwas abschreckend!”) Letter of Oskar Reinhart to Lilly Reinhart-Volkart (Colombo, 7 September 1910), ASOR. See letter of Oskar Reinhart to Theodor Reinhart (London, 1 February 1908), ASOR.
315
Antonio Baldassarre porting Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) as well as younger, promising artists who were not yet widely known, such as the German expressionist Karl Hofer (1878– 1955), the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller (1880–1950) (generally acknowledged as one of the leading fathers of modern sculpture in Switzerland), and the German artist Edmund von Freyhold (1878–1944) who became particularly famous as a book illustrator. In 1876 Theodor married Lilly Volkart (1855–1916), the daughter of Salomon Volkart (1816–1893) and thus became partner of the very successful company Gebrüder Volkart (Volkart Brothers) whose sole leadership he took over in 1912. The company was established by Salomon and his brother Johann Georg Volkart (1825–1862) in Winterthur in 1851 shortly after the British Navigations Acts were repealed in 1849. 5 Clearly, the Volkart brothers were not the only ones who benefited from the dissolution of the high trade barriers. Numerous other developing Swiss companies experienced substantial gains as a result including – to name at least a very few of many – André & Cie. in Lausanne, one of the largest commodity trading houses in the world that originated from a family of grain traders,6 the Basel Trading Company (Basler Handelsgesellschaft) that was financed by a few families of Basel and primarily dealt wholesale with palm-oil, cacao and cotton,7 and finally the company established by the Swiss pharmacist Henri Nestlé (1814–1890) in 1867 out of which eventually grew the world’s biggest food producer to date. 8 In essence the company of the Volkart brothers was part of the late nineteenth-century emerging Swiss 5
6 7
8
316
These acts constrained the use of foreign ships for trade between every country except Britain. Cancellation of these acts eventually broke the 200-year-old British hegemonic policy of mercantilism and allowed the free movement of goods between Europe and India. See Larry Sawers, “The Navigation Acts revisited”, Economic History Review 45/2 (1992), 262–284; Gary M. Walton, “The new economic history and the burdens of the Navigation Acts”, Economic History Review 24/4 (1971), 533–542. Gilbert Marion, article “André”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, online: http://www.hlsdhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D41701.php (last accessed: 28 April 2017). See Niklaus Stettler, article “Basler Handelsgesellschaft”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, online: http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D43012.php (last accessed: 28 April 2017); Gustaf Adolf Wanner, Die Basler Handels-Gesellschaft AG, 1859-1959 (Basel: Basler Handelsgesellschaft AG, 1959); Rudolf Fischer, Die Basler Missionsindustrie in Indien 1850– 1913: Rekrutierung und Disziplinierung der Arbeiterschaft (Zurich: Verlag Reihe W, 1978). Albert Pfiffner, article “Nestlé, André”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, online: http://www. hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D28895.php (last accessed: 28 April 2017); Albert Pfiffner, article “Nestlé”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, online: http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/ D41776.php (last accessed: 28 April 2017). For further information about the economic rise of Switzerland see: Friedhelm Schwarz, Macht durch Nahrung (Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe, 2003); Christof Dejung, “Unbekannte Intermediäre: schweizerische Handelsfirmen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”, Traverse 17 (2010), 139–155; Andreas Zangger, The Swiss in Singapore (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2013).
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur economic elite that was primarily characterized by social cohesion, oligarchy and family-centered power structures as was the case in almost all highly industrialized countries at that time.9 Their interest was, however, not exclusively focused on profit seeking but also embraced social responsibility and the promotion of cultural affairs. The accumulation of economic power was involved in a continuous process of exchange with social and cultural assets which Pierre Bourdieu described as a process of mutual convertibility of the various types of capitals, i.e. the economic, social and cultural capitals. Such a convertibility is – according to Bourdieu – essential not only to the preservation of power but also to the disguise of it.10 The Volkart company was one of the leading Swiss businesses trading colonial goods including tea, coffee, spices, and caoutchouc and European products such as soap, matches, paper, and later also textiles and machinery. As recently as 1989, the company was the world’s fourth largest cotton trader. The key position of the company is illustratively mirrored in the numerous subsidiaries and branches it established around the globe including: New York City, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Karachi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Singapore, Shanghai, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, and Tokyo, among others. These branches were managed from the head office built in neo-Gothic style at the beginning of the twentieth century at Turnerstrasse 1 in the heart of the city of Winterthur. At this time Winterthur was quite small, embracing a population of a little more than 40,000 inhabitants,11 yet one of the leading world centers of international trade as well as a major cradle of modern industrialization in Switzerland. Theodor’s sponsorship of the arts and culture, often linked with charitable commitment, was a generally performed agenda of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century well-educated, wealthy and especially economically successful haute bourgeoisie. As much as this agenda was charged with a philanthropic responsibility to society, it was simultaneously a very refined selffabrication of a distinctive image that served to veil the powerful accumulation of economic, social and cultural capital as much as it was intended to cement 9
See in this respect C. Wright Mills, The power elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Dieter Ziegler, ed., Großbürger und Unternehmer: Die deutsche Wirtschaftselite im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000). 10 See Pierre Bourdieu, “Ökonomisches Kapital – Kulturelles Kapital – Soziales Kapital”, in Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht, ed. by Margareta Steinrücke (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2005), 49–79, particularly 70–79. 11 See http://stadtentwicklung.winterthur.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Stadtentwicklung/Dateien /winterthur_in_zahlen/Zahlen_und_Grafiken/1985-2014_Bevoelkerung_Winterthur.pdf (last accessed: 28 April 2016).
317
Antonio Baldassarre the essentially precarious status of singularity, exceptionality, and superiority. Two of Theodor’s four sons complied with their peer-specific obligations as did the only daughter, the youngest child, Emma Berta Reinhart (1890–1966). She embraced a life dictated by contemporary society-driven expectations that defined women predominantly by their role as daughter, wife and mother.12 The already mentioned Werner Reinhart, the third-born child, became a partner of Volkart Brothers in 1912 after his voluntary service in a Parisian bank house and commercial training in the offices of Volkart Brothers in London, India, China and Japan. In addition to his widespread activities for the company, he was deeply devoted to music, literature, and the fine arts, being acquainted and/or supporting – among others – Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Richard Strauss (1864– 1949), Anton Webern (1883–1945), Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), Hermann Scherchen (1891–1966), Paul Sacher (1906–1999), and Alma Moodie (1898– 1943) in addition to the already mentioned Ernst Krenek. Werner’s mansion in Winterthur was a vibrant meeting place of the national and international music and art scene, absolutely comparable with the New York salon of Walter and Louise Arensberg13 or the Vienna Palais of Karl Wittgenstein.14 Georg Reinhart (1877–1955), the eldest child of the Reinhart siblings had quite a similar career to that of his brother, Werner. He started his professional life with commercial training in his father’s firm with stays in England and longer journeys to the United States, India and the Far East. In 1904 he married Olga Schwarzenbach (1881–1970), the daughter of Robert Schwarzenbach (1839– 1904), who owned the largest Swiss weaving company and performed an influential role as politician and cultural sponsor. In the same year, 1904, Georg became a partner and later managing director of Volkart Brothers until 1952. He too had a particular affinity for the arts, and due to his outstanding drawing and painting skills that were highly praised by Rainer Maria Rilke,15 he seriously 12 In 1915 Emma Berta Reinhart married the eminent researcher and university professor, Felix Robert Nager (1857–1959) and gave birth to five children. The Nager syndrome, a congenital anomaly syndrome, is named after her husband. 13 See Robert M. Crunden, American salons: Encountering with European modernism, 1885–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 409–444; Stephen Voyce, “‘Make the world your salon’. Poetry and community at the Arensberg apartment”, Modernism/modernity 15/4 (2008), 627–646; Diane Glazer, “Among friends: Italian futurism comes to America”, New Sound 34/2 (2009), 62–75. 14 See Jorn K. Bramann, Karl Wittgenstein, business tycoon and art patron. Online publication: http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/KarlWittgenstein.htm (last accessed: 28 April 2016). 15 Catalogue of the exhibition at the graphics cabinet of the Museum Winterthur, 12 June– mid-August 1927, including an essay on Georg Reinhart’s charcoal drawings by Rainer Maria Rilke.
318
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur considered pursuing an active career as an artist. He ultimately chose the “safer path” but remained faithful to the arts as art collector and patron, promoting – among others – the Expressionist painter Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), the author of such influential novels as Siddharta, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. In contrast to Georg and Werner Reinhart, the brothers Hans and Oskar dedicated their lives directly to the arts. Hans (1880–1963), the second-oldest child of Theodor and Lilly Reinhart, was deeply fascinated by literature and became an inf luential Swiss author, translator and patron after his studies in Switzerland, Germany and France. Upon making acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) in 1905, the founder of anthroposophy and the person who Hans regarded as his spiritual teacher, Hans devoted himself to anthroposophy and was eventually one of the major sponsors of the first Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel, the headquarters of the anthroposophical movement. In 1957 he established a foundation that, since then, awards the Hans-Reinhart–Ring, one of the most prestigious Swiss awards for outstanding achievements in the field of theater. As explored, Oskar Reinhart, the fourth-born child and youngest son of Theodor and Lilly Reinhart, showed a very limited interest in business life. When his father died in 1919, he was able to free himself from many expectations of society and his parents (his mother had already passed away in 1916). The inheritance of an enormous fortune allowed him to dedicate his life entirely to the support of the arts and the establishment of a vast collection of fine arts (fig. 2) with a special emphasis on nineteenth-century French painting.16 He took advantage of his business trips to visit the local museums and galleries and to regularly update his knowledge about the current art market.17 16 See, for instance, Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice, Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz” Winterthur. Gesamtkatalog, ed. by SIK-ISEA and Bundesamt für Kultur (Basel: Schwabe, 2003). 17 A revealing document in this context is, for example, Oskar Reinhart’s letter to his brother Georg of 26 April 1923. In this letter he reports, on the one hand, that he secured a large number of artworks for purchase from the collection of Wilhelm Hansen (1868–1936) and his wife, Henny (1870–1951), in Copenhagen (including objects by Courbet, Degas, and Renoir) and that, on the other hand, a stay in Paris gave him the opportunity to visit several private collections. Letter of Oskar Reinhart to Georg Reinhart (Winterthur, 23 April 1923), ASOR. Hansen, a successful Danish insurance magnate, established a remarkable collection of Danish and French nineteenth- and twentieth-century art that is preserved at Ordrupgaard Museum today, the former home of the Hansens. Because of financial constraints in 1922, Hansen was forced to sell parts of his collection. See Christofer Conrad et al., Renoir, Gauguin, Degas. Schätze der Sammlung Ordrupgaard, Kopenhagen (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2003).
319
Antonio Baldassarre
Fig. 2. Oskar Reinhart in the art gallery of his mansion “Am Römerholz”, ca. 1960, photograph. By courtesy of Archiv Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur.
Later his collecting activity was guided by Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935), a German art-critic and writer,18 and in addition, Reinhart assigned various art dealers to make purchases for him at auctions.19 According to Grete Ring, 18 See Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as art critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973). 19 See Adrian Mebold, “Oskar Reinhart: eine Spurensuche”, Jahrbuch Winterthur 2011, 112–119, here 117.
320
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur the name of Oskar Reinhart has stood for everything that was not only most accomplished and select, but also most original and progressive in the “art of art collecting.” At the time when an iron curtain separated the “old” from the “modern” collector, Dr Reinhart, was one of the first to illustrate the doctrine of his great countryman Hugo von Tschudi, [20] who, as early as 1912 put forward the revolutionary view that every collection, public or private, should depart from contemporary art. 21 * * * “Is it really necessary to earn always more and more money?” Oskar asked his brother Georg in a letter that he composed one year after his father’s death but which he never dispatched. The highly rhetorical subtext of the posed query is evident in the context of the reasoning that follows the question: If I ever get married, which is not likely, my sons have to choose professions other than commercial ones unless it is their explicit wish to become merchants. This is also the underlying reason of my bachelorhood; I do not want to bring descendants into the world who would wade through the same struggle between occupation and affection, between duty and natural gift and interests as I still have to do. 22 Consequently he retired step-by-step from his father’s business and purchased the visually very impressive mansion “Am Römerholz” in 1924 that was designed by the Swiss architect Maurice Turrettini (1878–1932) for the Winterthur industrialist Jakob Heinrich Ziegler-Sulzer (1859–1930). Soon after 20 [Footnote by the author of this essay]: Ring is referring to Hugo von Tschudi (1851–1911) who became particularly famous as an art collector with a noteworthy interest in modern art and as director of the National Gallery in Berlin and of the State Galleries in Munich. Further information is available in Hugo von Tschudi, “Ein Rundgang durch das moderne Paris“, Beiblatt zur Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 11/49 (1876), 776–785; Hugo von Tschudi, Édouard Manet (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1909, 2nd ed.); Hugo von Tschudi, Gesammelte Schriften zur neueren Kunst, ed. by Ernst Schwedel-Mayer (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1912); Barbara Paul, Hugo von Tschudi und die moderne französische Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Mainz: Zabern, 2001). 21 Grete Ring, “Reflections on the opening (Summer 1951) of the Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur”, The Burlington Magazine 94/589 (1953), 116–118, here 116. 22 “Ist es denn nötig, immer noch mehr Geld zu verdienen? […] Sollte ich je heiraten, was nicht wahrscheinlich ist, so müssten meine Söhne andere Berufe ergreifen als den Kaufmännischen [sic!], es sei denn, dass es ihr ausdrücklicher Wille wäre, Kaufleute zu werden. Das ist auch der tiefere Grund meines Junggesellentums; ich will keine Nachkommen auf die Welt setzen, die den gleichen Kampf zwischen Beruf und Neigung, zwischen Pflicht und natürlicher Begabung und Interessen durchzukämpfen hätten[,] wie ich dies noch immer tun muss”. Draft letter of Oskar Reinhart to Georg Reinhart (Winterthur, 16 January 1920), ASOR.
321
Antonio Baldassarre the purchase, Reinhart commissioned Turrettini for the construction of an annex planned to serve as a gallery for Reinhart’s impressively large collection (fig. 3). Already in 1923 Reinhart lamented about the lack of space for his ever-growing collection: “Unfortunately, I can no longer hang paintings at my home. The question of how I can accommodate my collection, bothers me everyday.”23 Unlike the small and sumptuously decorated rooms of the residential villa, the gallery consists of a large and compact construction, abstaining from all potential historicizing reminiscences and with a highly modern and sophisticated channeling of light (fig. 4). Both buildings imposingly satisfy the demand for visible representation with which individuals who had acquired great wealth as entrepreneurs and bankers in the course of industrialization asserted their own identity. “I don’t know,” recalled Krenek in his memoirs, how many millions hung on the walls of this bourgeois home. Resting on the mantel of the fireplace of his bedroom, Oksar Reinhart had one of the very few drawings by Matthias Grünewald, an object of inestimable value. In the main hall of his museum was a beautiful organ. 24 In full alignment with the demand for representation was Reinhart’s systematic and cautious planning of his collection that he had pursued for a considerable length of time. In his datebook of 1909, for instance, on the page for 13 April, is a list of names of illustrious artists including Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Anthonis van Dyck (1599–1641), Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669), Francisco José de Goya (1746–1828), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), James Whistler (1834–1903), Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and so forth. 25 It is very likely that these artists were already, even at this early stage, in Reinhart’s collection or under consideration for prompt acquisition, taking into account that works by all of them and many more artists are today represented in Reinhart’s wide-ranging collection. 23 “Leider kann ich die Bilder zu Hause nicht mehr hängen. Die Frage, wie bringe ich meine Sammlung unter, beschäftigt mich täglich”. Letter of Oskar Reinhart to Georg Reinhart (Winterthur, 26 April 1923), ASOR. 24 “Ich weiß nicht, wie viele Millionen an den Wänden dieses bürgerlichen Wohnsitzes hingen. Auf dem Kaminsims seines Schlafzimmers hatte Oskar Reinhart eine der ganz wenigen Zeichnungen von Matthias Grünewald stehen, ein Objekt von unschätzbarem Wert. Im Hauptsaal seines Museums stand eine wunderschöne Orgel”. Krenek, Im Atem der Zeit (as note 2), 485. 25 The page of the datebook is reproduced in Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice, “Oskar Reinhart – kultivierter Eigensinn mit internationalem Horizont”, in Kunst ohne Geschichte, ed. by Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice et al. (Munich: Hirmer, 2014), 133–154, here 135 (fig. 3).
322
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Fig. 3. Mansion “Am Römerhof ” (right) and Art Gallery (left), architect: Maurice Turrettini, ca. 1925, photograph. By courtesy of Archiv Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur.
Fig. 4. Gallery “Am Römerhof ”, architect: Maurice Turrettini, commissioned by Oskar Reinhart in 1924, photograph. By courtesy of Archiv Sammlung Oskar Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur.
323
Antonio Baldassarre This collection is currently preserved in two institutions, the Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten, a public institution that opened in 1951 after Winterthur’s voting population adopted the city council’s proposal to support the project with 1.3 million Swiss francs on 3 December 193926 – the exceptional significance of this positive vote in support of Reinhart’s project must be assessed in the context of the outbreak of World War II only three months before the popular vote. On the occasion of the Museum’s inauguration, the Swiss author Ernst Kappeler (1911–1987) pointed at the transformation of economic power into cultural and social capital: “And all those who travel through Winterthur by train and see nothing but train rails and large, gray factories may remember that at the heart of our city is another country, a secret beautiful garden of art”. 27 Indeed, Reinhart’s art collection turned Winterthur into a museum city with international vibrancy. 28 The Museum am Stadtgarten houses around 500 paintings and sculptures from the end of the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century from Germany, Austria and Switzerland in addition to approximately 7,000 prints and drawings from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The other institution, the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz,” contains European masterpieces from Classical Antiquity to the early twentieth century with a major focus on French nineteenth-century paintings. In 1958 Reinhart bequeathed this collection to the Swiss Confederation which made it accessible to the public but kept the private legal status as a foundation to date. In essence, the collection as assembled by Reinhart not only presents his enormous wealth and its transformation into cultural and social capitals but also his personal version of the history of Western art from the Gothic period to his own time. Equally important is the collection’s function as a symbol of honor, prestige, and privileges linked with societal recognition. 29 Reinhart completed this profile with the creation of a platform for his social needs and commitments. In the early 1920s he founded a tennis club (still in existence) which included gardens where he set up bronze sculptures by Hermann Hubacher (1885–1976), Hermann Haller (1880–1950) and Pierre26 See Mebold, “Oskar Reinhart” (as note 19), 118. 27 “Und all jene, welche mit dem Zug durch Winterthur hindurchfahren und nichts als Schienenstränge und grosse, graue Fabriken sehen, mögen sich erinnern, dass im Herzen unserer Stadt (ein) anderes Land liegt, ein heimlicher, schöner Garten der Kunst”. Quoted in Mebold, “Oskar Reinhart” (as note 19), 118. 28 Ibid., 114. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1979; English as Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Bourdieu, “Ökonomisches Kapital - Kulturelles Kapital - Soziales Kapital” (as note 10).
324
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) among others. 30 With this sponsorship, Reinhart promoted a sports activity to which he was exposed during his training years in London and the British colonies and that – very much more important to the arguments of this paper – encapsulates values important to status-conscious upper and upper-middle class people as Robert Lake has explored in his remarkable study A social history of tennis in Britain. 31 Equally important was the foundation of the Club zur Geduld in 1922 that Reinh art explicitly based on English models with which he became acquainted particularly during his stay in London. This project also demonstrates Reinhart’s strong peer-specific habitus and his keen instinct to successfully combine personal interests with concerns of political, social and artistic matters. Fairly quickly, the Winterthur club developed into a private center of moneyed aristocracy, visibly manifest in a specific concept of habitus as performed within the boundaries of the club, including the active promotion of music and the fine arts by its members, and strongly supported by a highly sophisticated and cleverly arranged interior design. The site for the Club zur Geduld was chosen strategically (fig. 5). The Haus zur Geduld belongs to the most prestigious architectural monuments of Winterthur, located in the immediate vicinity of the city’s political center, the city hall (fig. 6). In addition, the building is one of the few townhouses with a representative natural stone front facing Winterthur’s main street, the Markt gasse, that stretches on a perfectly straight trajectory through the entire Old Town. The building’s main entrance in the style of a triumphal arch and its Tuscan pilasters as well as the central bay window and the clear horizontal structuring of the windows in three axial levels communicate power and dignity. 32 The house was first mentioned in records of 1448 and was owned by the Biedermann family into whose ownership the house had passed in the early eighteenth century, when Oskar Reinhart bought it along with the adjacent rear building in 1919. 33 The Winterthur architectural team of Robert Rittmeyer (1868–1960) and Walter Furrer (1870–1949) was entrusted with the remodeling of the house 30 See Joseph Gantner, “Die neue Anlage des Tennisklub Winterthur”, Das Werk 12 (1924), 341–348. Today the sculptures are, to a large extent, preserved at the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart in Winterthur. 31 Robert J. Lake, A social history of tennis in Britain (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2014). 32 Matthias Frehner, “Ein Leben mit Stil: Oskar Reinhart und sein ‘Club zur Geduld’”, in Oskar Reinhart. Mensch, Sammler, Stifter, ed. by Peter Wegmann (Zurich-Chur: Rüegger Verlag, 2012), 139–156, here 141. 33 Concerning the history of the “Haus zur Geduld” see Emanuel Dejung and Richard Zürcher, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons Zürich, vol. 4: Die Stadt Winterthur, ed. by Gesellschaft für Schweizerische Kunstgeschichte (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1952), 129–132.
325
Antonio Baldassarre
Fig. 5. Haus zur Geduld, principle front, Marktgasse, photo: Ateliers Hermann Linck, Winterthur, 1922. By courtesy of the Denkmalpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
326
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Fig. 6. Original elevation plan, Marktgasse north side (dated: 13 Nov 1926). By courtesy of the Denkmalpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
and its transformation into a private club. The extent to which Reinhart involved himself in the reconstruction can be interpreted as an indication of the significance the club had for him to function as a venue of private sociability. In line with the English models, the house was divided into different areas and consisted of a variety of rooms including a library, a reading room, a meeting room, a bridge room, a bar, and a lecture hall that also served as a ballroom as well as a place for concerts and theater performances. Each of these rooms received its own stylistic character. While the design of the dining room and the ballroom, for instance, was completely entrusted to artists, other rooms like the smoking room and the ladies’ salon (introduced at a later date) were individually decorated by Reinhart himself with historic furniture and artworks from his private collection. 34 The anteroom to the bar, with the prominent fireplace and the stucco ceiling from the eighteenth century, may serve as an example in this respect (fig. 7). Its original decoration included two well-arranged paintings by Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918). Above the fireplace hung 34 See Heinrich Schlosser, “Das Clubhaus zur Geduld in Winterthur”, Das Werk 9/12 (1922), 223–238.
327
Antonio Baldassarre
Fig. 7. Club zur Geduld, anteroom to the bar with two canvases by Ferdinand Hodler, photo: Ateliers Hermann Linck, Winterthur, 1922. By courtesy of the Denkmalpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
the famous painting Der Mäher (The Reaper) of 1910 (right side on fig. 7) 35 that Reinhart inherited from his father and that he sold in the 1950s. 36 The second painting is Hodler’s impressive canvas entitled Landschaft bei Champéry (Landscape near Champéry), one of his late works that is preserved today at the Oskar Reinhart Museum am Stadtgarten in Winterthur (left side on fig. 7). 37 Matthias Frehner convincingly argued that “the balanced composed interior design, in which artworks played a central role,” embraced an “educational 35 Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Der Mäher, 1910, oil on canvas, 83.0 x 105.0 cm. Private Collection. 36 Frehner, “Ein Leben mit Stil” (as note 32), 144. In 2008 the painting was for sale again at Sotheby’s Zurich. See http://www.sothebys.com/ru/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/swiss-artzh0806/lot.52.html (last accessed: 14 May 2017). 37 Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Landschaft bei Champéry, between 1912 and 1916, oil on canvas, 60.0 x 79.0 cm. Winterthur: Oskar Reinhart Museum am Stadtgarten. Online available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hodler_-_Landschaft_bei_Champ%C3%A9ry_-_ ca1913.jpg#/media/File:Hodler_-_Landschaft_bei_Champ%C3%A9ry_-_ca1913.jpg (last accessed: 14 May 2017).
328
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur task” as much as it functioned as a manifestation of Reinhart’s own views and convictions about the fine arts and their history. 38 “Again and again he [Reinhart] replaced the artworks and presented […], of course, also the art of his painter friends.”39 This educational mission was not only a peer-typical involvement but also encapsulated the intention to inspire the club’s members to purchase the art of Reinhart’s protégés – an instance that fully supports Bourdieu’s concept of mutual convertibility of the different types of capitals. In general the original design for all rooms demonstrates a refined sense for “representation and comfort”40 to which the various and changing arrangements of artworks contributed insofar as they were always positioned in an optically commensurate manner and often assembled in balanced groups of two or three. As mentioned, the artistic fittings of two rooms with primarily social functions, i.e. the dining room and the multifunctional ballroom, were entrusted to two artist friends of Reinhart. Henry Bischoff (1882–1951) 41 was assigned to design the large areas of the Baroque panel in the dining room, while Karl Walser (1877–1943), the brother of Robert Walser (1878–1956) who later became an internationally renowned Swiss author, was in charge of the decoration of the ballroom.42 The panel paintings of the dining room by Bischoff present two different series of subject matter.43 The first series refers to depictions with topics from contemporary commercial and industrial life, while the second series provides timeless and sometimes almost Arcadian illustrations of bathing, hunting and carnival scenes (fig. 8) and – in the restaurant’s booths – pictorial allusions to the muses’ functions and attributions in a highly modernized manner with subject matter related to music, dance and the fine arts (fig. 9). The decorative concept is more than a mere embellishment satisfying needs of aesthetes 38 39 40 41
Frehner, “Ein Leben mit Stil” (as note 32), 143. Ibid. Ibid., 145. The following references to Bischoff’s life and works apply information and data provided in Edmond Gilliard, André Kuenzi, Henry Bischoff, 1882–1951 (Lausanne: Éditions du Verseau, 1962); Florian Rodari, article “Bischoff, Henry”, SIKART Lexicon on Art in Switzerland, http://www.sikart.ch/KuenstlerInnen.aspx?id=4000033 (last accessed: 14 May 2017). 42 See Bernhard Echte and Andreas Meier, eds, Die Brüder Karl und Robert Walser (Stäfa: Rothenhäusler, 1990), and the letter of Oskar Reinhart to Henry Bischoff (Winterthur, 29 July 1920), ASOR, as well as Henry Bischoff’s correspondence to Oskar Reinhart: Lausanne, 7 March 1921; Lausanne, 23 March 1921; Lausanne, 12 November 1921; Lausanne, 30 November 1921; Lausanne, 18 December 1921; Lausanne, 22 March 1922; Lausanne, 27 March 1922; Lausanne, 19 April 1922; Lausanne, 6 December 1922, Lausanne, 28 December 1922; all in ASOR. 43 See the detailed correspondence between Bischoff and Reinhart in ASOR.
329
Antonio Baldassarre
Fig. 8. Henry Bischoff (1882–1951), panel paintings, detail, 1922, oil on panel, dining room, Club zur Geduld, photo: Ateliers Hermann Linck, Winterthur, 1922. By courtesy of the Denk malpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
or beaux esprits. It presents and stabilizes a peer-specific habitus, functioning as visual manifestation of specific patterns of social values and behavior. Although the decoration is highly representational, it is alienated insofar as it does not raise unexpected issues but rather creates a generally positive ambience that meets with the room’s real and symbolic function as a locus of selfassurance in which the different expressions of social, cultural and economic power could easily circulate. The decoration of the multifunctional ballroom was – as mentioned – entrusted to the artist Karl Walser44 who was also active as a stage designer and 44 The following information about Walser’s life and works refer to Walter Hugelshofer, “Karl Walser”, Das Werk 31/4 (1944), 121–127; Walter Hugelshofer, “Briefe an Karl Walser”, Schweizer Monatshefte: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur 61/3 (1981), 213–230; Werner Wüthrich, article “Karl Walser”, in Theaterlexikon der Schweiz, ed. by Andreas Kotte (Zurich:
330
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Fig. 9. Henry Bischoff (1882–1951), panel paintings, detail, 1922, oil on panel, dining room, Club zur Geduld, photo: Ateliers Hermann Linck, Winterthur, 1922. By courtesy of the Denk malpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
book illustrator.45 In his early creative period he was strongly inf luenced by symbolism and eventually turned to a monumental classicism with which he enjoyed great success in Berlin and Switzerland.46 It seems that it was the Winterthur textile industrialist, Richard Bühler-Steiner (1879–1967), then president of the city’s art association, who introduced Walser to Winterthur’s society and its artistically interested circles around 1918 due to a planned exhibition which eventually took place in the fall of 1919.47 It may also be possible that Reinhart was acquainted with Walser through Meier-Graefe, whom – as Chronos, 2005), vol. 3, 2043–2044; Bernhard Echte, article “Walser, Kurt”, SIKART Lexicon on art in Switzerland, http://www.sikart.ch/KuenstlerInnen.aspx?id=4023433 (last accessed: 14 May 2016). 45 Edmund Stadler, “Der Maler und Illustrator Karl Walser als Bühnen- und Kostümbildner”, Theater, Bühne, Bild. Kunstwoche 1983. 46 Neues Museum Biel, ed., Grosses Format: Wandbilder von Karl Walser – Œuvres murales de Philippe Robert (Biel: NMB Nouveau Musée Bienne, 2013). 47 Verena Senti-Schmidlin, “Das Wirken des Malers Karl Walser in Winterthur”, Jahrbuch Winterthur 2013, 94–101, here 94–95.
331
Antonio Baldassarre mentioned – Reinhart consulted in questions related to art dealing. MeierGraefe highly appreciated the work of Walser as evidenced by some letters.48 Finally, it is also very likely that Walser and Reinhart met at Hotel Schwert in Zurich – a posh hotel that was frequented by Walser and Reinhart around this period49 and which is praised as being one of the best accommodations in Zurich with “excellent cooking” in the 1913 edition of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide. 50 In any event Reinhart seemed to be very determined to create strong and maybe even exclusive bonds with “the most outstanding Swiss painter” according to the judgment of Hans Eduard Bühler-Volkart (1893–1967), 51 a third cousin of Richard Bühler. After all, already on 3 March 1919, almost six months prior to Walser’s Winterthur exhibition, Walser accepted Reinhart’s commission of “decorating the lecture- or ballroom” of the Club zur Geduld. 52 In 1920 the patron eventually provided the artist with an atelier in Zurich. In order to give Reinhart an impression of his artistic ideas, Walser dispatched pictures of the frescos with which he decorated the entrance hall and the staircase of the Palais of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1875–1935) and his wife Charlotte Reichenheim (1877–1961) at Alsenstraße 3/3a in Berlin. That structure was torn down in the 1950s. In addition he provided images of the dining room of the country house (no longer in existence) in Semmering (Austria) that belonged to Josef Kranz (1862–1934), the Austrian banker and industrial magnate, whose business interests dealt mainly with alcoholic beverages. The decoration of Kranz’s country house included opulent pictorial scenes of Don Juan’s life. Reinhart was very interested in the artistic realization of his project and therefore accompanied every single step as strikingly evidenced by preserved letters to the artist. 53 Walser himself produced numerous sketches that he dis48 Hugelshofer, “Briefe an Karl Walser” (as note 44), 216–217. 49 Ibid., 217. See also Jürg E. Schneider et al., “Das Haus ‘Zum Schwert’ in Zürich vom Wohnturm zur Standes- und Nobelherberge am Limmatbrückenkopf ”, Mittelalter. Zeitschrift des Schweizerischen Burgenvereins 1/1 (1996), 3-28. 50 Bradshaw’s continental railway guide (special ed., 1913). 51 Letter of Hans Bühler-Volkart to Karl Walser (August 1918); quoted in Senti-Schmidlin, “Das Wirken des Malers Karl Walser in Winterthur” (as note 47), 95. 52 Letter of Karl Walser to Oskar Reinhart (Zurich, Hotel Pension Tiefenau, 3 March 1919), ASOR; letter of Oskar Reinhart to Karl Walser (Winterthur, 14 August 1919), ASOR. 53 Hugelshofer, “Briefe an Karl Walser” (as note 44), 218–219. See also the following letters of Karl Walser to Oskar Reinhhart: Twann, 11 June 1919; Twann, 7 July 1919; Twann, [?] July 1919; Twann, 1 October 1919; Zurich, Hotel Pension Tiefenau, 9 February 1920; Zurich, Steinwiesstrasse 8 [= Hotel Pension Tiefenau], 10 April 1920; Zurich, Steinwiesstrasse 8 [= Hotel Pension Tiefenau], 17 December 1920; Zurich, Stampfenbachstrasse 67, 30 April 1921; all in ASOR.
332
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur cussed with Reinhart who eventually opted for the version that included wall paintings, as his letter of 26 June 1919 verifies. 54 Reinhart was, however, not only highly engaged in the realization of the architectural design but also took meticulous care of details that are usually considered as being of minor concern, such as the purchase of furniture and curtains and even the purchase of playing cards and newspaper and journal subscriptions. This stance ref lects the high significance the Club zur Geduld had for Reinhart. Paradigmatic in this regard are the words he added in handwriting to the typescript of his opening speech on the occasion of the first ordinary “General Assembly of the Club zur Geduld” that was attended by 170 members: “I feel so intertwined with the club and the house that it will be my earnest endeavor to exert for [their] prosperity with my modest strength.” 55 As with Bischoff ’s panels, the wall paintings by Walser avoid any definite reference to time and place. However, Walser’s subjects are not placed into a highly stylized or Arcadian imaginary as in Bischoff ’s case but rather are situated on a stage, yet the result is not any less fictive than Bischoff ’s images while alluding to the world of music, art, and theater (figs 10-12). 56 In addition to the paintings, Walser was also responsible for the interior design of the ballroom, including a ceiling mirror as well as wall lights and chairs with red-covered seating surfaces. 57 For the ballroom’s vestibule, the artist and patron eventually decided on paintings with a quasi-monochrome effect in brown and grey tones and for light beige walls (fig. 13). Reinhart’s promotion and sponsorship of Walser continued after the successful and satisfying accomplishment of the work on the ballroom of the Club zur Geduld as vividly evinced by, for instance, the commission of Walser’s large-size wall painting Hirtenvolk. 58 54 Quoted in Hugelshofer, “Briefe an Karl Walser” (as note 44), 219. 55 “Ich fühle mich so mit dem Club und Haus verwachsen, dass es mein ernstes Bestreben sein wird nach meinen bescheidenen Kräften für das Gedeihen einzutreten.” Oskar Reinhart, handwritten addition to his speech on the occasion of the first “General Assembly of the Club zur Geduld” (typescript), 3, ASOR. 56 Since 1903 Walser was well aware of the specific requirements of stage and theater rooms, taking into account his highly praised accomplishments as a set designer in collaboration with many directors, including, most notably his collaboration with Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) the innovative and highly prominent early twentieth-century Austrian theater director, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, today the home of the internationally renowned Berlin Ensemble. 57 Senti-Schmidlin, “Das Wirken des Malers Karl Walser in Winterthur” (as note 47), 96. 58 Karl Walser, Hirtenvolk I/II, 1939, both 246 x 476 cm. Winterthur: Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten (entrance foyer). See also Hugelshofer, “Karl Walser” (as note 44), 122–123; Guido Magnaguagno et al., Dreissiger Jahre Schweiz, ein Jahrzehnt im Widerspruch (exhibition catalogue Kunsthaus Zürich, 30 Oct 1981–10 Jan 1982) (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1981), 247.
333
Antonio Baldassarre
Figs 10-12. Karl Walser (1877–1943), ballroom, Club zur Geduld, 1922, oil on wood; photo: Kuno Gygax, 2009. By courtesy of the Denkmalpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
334
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Fig. 13. Karl Walser (1877–1943), vestibule to the ballroom, Club zur Geduld, 1922, oil on wood; photo: Kuno Gygax, 2009. By courtesy of the Denkmalpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
335
Antonio Baldassarre In general the visual narrative of the dining room and the lecture hall/ballroom create obvious links to the social and cultural life at the Club zur Geduld. According to Reinhart’s own intention the club was planned to be a site of “ungezwungener Geselligkeit”, i.e. “informal sociability”. 59 Only individuals of the business elite performing power and inf luence have had access to the club and since 1923 – when the club was inaugurated – there has been a committee to evaluate all membership proposals based on rigorous rules still valid to date. Not surprisingly, this assessment process has often caused discord among the elected members.60 The club’s exclusivity is also evidenced by the fact that still today the names of members are not publicly accessible and it is part of the code of conduct not to talk about such issues in public. The Club zur Geduld presented a deliberately created space – an exclusive stage for the local elite where they were completely among themselves and where they could not only enjoy peer-specific entertainments but also carry out important business in an ambience appropriate to their peer-specific needs and requirements. Accordingly, Reinhart’s words of his already mentioned speech on the occasion of the first “General Assembly of the Club zur Geduld” have to be contextualized: May the Club zur Geduld increasingly become a harmonious whole and at the same time an important factor of our social life through the active participation of all its members. May our Club be the palladium in which old friendships are fostered and newly strengthened. However, may there also be built in this house that receives its special consecration today, new, precious and lasting friendships between members of our Club whose paths have not yet or only rarely crossed. These are my deepest wishes on the occasion of our first general assembly.61 59 Oskar Reinhart, speech on the occasion of the first “General Assembly of the Club zur Geduld” (typescript), 2, ASOR. 60 See the correspondence and minutes of the Council of the Club zur Geduld that was chaired by Oskar Reinhart, in the yet not indexed boxes of source material linked to the Club zur Geduld, ASOR. 61 “Möge der Club zur Geduld durch die rege Anteilnahme aller seiner Mitglieder mehr und mehr zu einem harmonischen Ganzen und zugleich zu einem wichtigen Faktor in unserem gesellschaftlichen Leben werden. Möge unser Club der Hort sein, darin alte Freundschaften weitergepflegt und neu gekräftigt werden. Mögen aber auch in diesem Haus, das heute seine besondere Weihe erhält, neue, wertvolle und dauernde Freundschaften entstehen, zwischen Mitgliedern unseres Clubs, deren Wege sich bis anhin noch nicht oder nur selten kreuzten. Dieses sind meine innigsten Wünsche anlässlich unserer ersten Generalversammlung”. Oskar Reinhart, speech on the occasion of the first “General Assembly of the Club zur Geduld” (typescript), 3, ASOR (emphasis original).
336
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur Beyond such obvious issues, the Club zur Geduld also served the business elite as a locus of self-reassurance and of ostentatious spatial and social demarcation that may well have been nurtured by a certain tendency towards escapism manifest by Reinhart. For example, in the early 1920s he was envisioning a retreat in a small house near London.62 On the other hand, the business elite perceived the need to stand aloof as increasingly essential for maintaining their status and recognition as a social group because simultaneously their status was being obviously questioned as mirrored by a statement of Oskar Reinhart in a letter to his brother Georg in 1919: In the past our outward position as the owner of a large, prestigious factory was perhaps the equivalent of the responsibility, the work, the many inconveniences typical of our profession. But now as the owner of a large company, as a capitalist, one is simply the target of enviousness and hate.63 As a matter of course, women were not accepted as members to this exclusive circle until 1998,64 and for a long time they were not even allowed to access the club as companions. Only with time and probably as a result of the rather successful annual “ladies’ nights”65 this strict regulation was loosened somewhat and women were allowed as companions, treated, however, as pleasant and attractive accessories. Later they were assigned their own room, the socalled “Damensalon” (“Ladies’ Room”), but a visit to the bar remained strictly forbidden.66 The “Ladies’ Room” held a secret for a long time that was discovered only in 2003 when a decision was made to refurbish it. Having long been hidden under eight coats of paint and thus unknown to Reinhart, were several 62 See Mebold, “Oskar Reinhart” (as note 19), 116. 63 “Früher war unsere Stellung nach aussen als Inhaber einer grossen angesehenen Fabrik vielleicht ein Äquivalent für die Verantwortung, die Arbeit, die vielen Unannehmlichkeiten, die unserem Beruf eigen sind. Jetzt aber ist man als Inhaber eine grossen Firma als Kapitalist nur noch die Zielscheibe von Neid und Hass”. Letter of Oskar Reinhart to his brother Georg Reinhart (Winterthur, 25 February 1919), ASOR. 64 Marius Beerli, “Die Krawatte darf fehlen, der Veston nicht”, Der Landbote (14 July 2010), 12. 65 See in this respect the letter of Oskar Reinhart to his brother Georg Reinhart (Winterthur, 26 April 1923), ASOR: “Der Damenabend war ein voller Erfolg. Beteiligung 165 Personen. Im Theatersaal wurde getanzt. In der Bar war das grosse Buffet aufgestellt, das nach allgemeiner Ansicht an Ausstattung und Aufmachung alles übertraf, was man je in der zusammenschrumpfenden Stadt gesehen hat”. (“The ladies’ night was a complete success. Participation 165 people. There was dancing in the theater hall. In the bar the huge buffet was set up which, according to the general view, surpassed everything in features and appearance that one has ever seen in the shrinking city”.) 66 René Donzé, “Die Winterthurer Elite öffnet ihren Geheimclub”, Tages-Anzeiger (14 July 2010), 13.
337
Antonio Baldassarre eighteenth-century grisaille paintings, presenting river and lake landscapes (figs 14–15) and supposedly inf luenced by contemporary Dutch landscapes.67 Women were not the only group that experienced resistance regarding access to club membership. A very similar resistance was performed with regard to the artistic and intellectual elite.68 Until the 1990s, the club’s exclusive group was primarily composed of businessmen and industrialists who controlled, with nearly unlimited power, economics and politics far beyond the geographical boundaries of Winterthur and who had the financial resources to pay an annual membership fee (currently almost 1,500 Swiss francs.) 69 In this regard one can hardly miss the symbolism of the surely intentional placing of the large canvas by Carl Justus Fedeler (1837–1897) depicting the model of the windjammer “Ida Ziegler” that was once exhibited at the spacious entrance hall of the Club zur Geduld (and is preserved today at the Naturmuseum Winterthur). The members were immediately exposed to an almost emblematic sign of the extraordinary accumulation of economic power within this exclusive club when they entered the clubhouse (fig. 16). This windjammer was from a series of new and highly innovative ship designs that the London based company T.H.A. Wattenbach & F. W. Heiligers commissioned from the shipbuilding company R.C. Rickmers in Bremerhaven between 1853 and 1855 and of which the first was – interestingly enough – named “Winterthur.” 70 The building of both ships, the “Ida Ziegler” as well as the “Winterthur,” was made possible mainly through the high investment of Winterthur-based wealthy companies. The eponym Ida Egg-Ziegler (1854– 1915) was the then twenty-year old daughter of Johann Ulrich Greuter-Egg (1801–1878), a citizen of the city of Winterthur who owned an extraordinarily successful calico printing company that produced the most important products of the weaving and printing industry in England, Germany, France and Switzerland from the late eighteenth century. It is no exaggeration to conclude that Oskar Reinhart’s achievements as a patron of the arts and a benefactor of social and cultural affairs, including 67 See Direktion der Öffentlichen Bauten des Kantons Zürich, Bauamt II der Stadt Zürich, ed., Zürcher Denkmalpflege. 20. Bericht 2009–2010 (Zurich: Baudirektion Kanton Zürich, 2015), 196–197; Martin Gmür, “Der Club zur Geduld: Mit Tradition in die Zukunft”, in Altstadt Winterthur: Von Fresken, Kachelöfen und Stuckdecken, ed. by Stadt Winterthur, Departement Bau, Denkmalpflege (Winterthur: Ziegler Druck- und Verlags AG, 2010), 18–19; Thomas Ribi, “Zarte Landschaften unter acht Farbschichten”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (21 July 2010), 15; Alex Hoster, “Schicht um Schicht zur Grisaille-Malerei”, Der Landbote (27 August 2012). 68 Donzé, “Die Winterthurer Elite öffnet ihren Geheimclub” (as note 66), 13. 69 Ibid. 70 Herbert Karting, “Die Ida Ziegler: Die erste von R. C. Rickmers gebaute Klipper” (part 1), Das Logbuch 45/2 (2009), 80–88.
338
Oskar Reinhart’s C lub zur G eduld in Winterthur
Figs 14–15: Unknown artist, Ladies’ Room, Club zur Geduld, grisailles, eighteenth century, after restoration. By courtesy of the Denkmalpf lege des Kantons Zürich.
339
Antonio Baldassarre
Fig. 16. William Foster, Ida Ziegler, 1863, lithograph, hand colored, sheet: 30.0 x 45.6 cm (mount: 48.0 x 63.1 cm). Greenwich, London: National Maritime Museum (inv.-no.: PAH0634).
the foundation of the still active Club zur Geduld, provide striking evidence of what Bourdieu described as the disguising processes of transforming economic capital into cultural and social capital forms. Such disguise of capital transmission into transformed and travestied forms of economic capital presents, in essence, a rather successful strategy of legitimization for a social group whose status of prestige and recognition was potentially always a subject of jealousy and resentment. It would, however, be too simple to reduce Reinhart’s achievements and merits to his economic power only. Rather one has to recognize that his accomplishments and credits can generate specific effects only to the degree they are able to hide the fact that, firstly, they were based on economic capital and that, secondly, these effects are strongly determined by economic power.71
71 See Bourdieu, “Ökonomisches Kapital – Kulturelles Kapital – Soziales Kapital” (as note 10), 79.
340
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats
Ursula Hemetek Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats: On Research History and the Impact of Methodology Abstract. The article deals with the ethnomusicological research history of the Burgenland Croats, a minority in Austria. The political status of minority is important because it evokes certain theories and methods. In the nineteenth century, the method of research on the Burgenland Croats suggested that they were part of the Croatian nation. Folk song collections by Fran Kurelac (1811–1874) and Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834–1911) went into that direction, being very selective. In the twentieth century, we still find the nationally inspired “collecting” approach, a method quite usual in the European tradition of Folk Music Research. All these collections were based on notation by ear. As soon as there were recordings (the earliest in 1936) there seems to be a shift in approaches. Researchers like Jerko Bezić and Ivan Ivančan in the 1970s began to document the whole range of musical expressions of Burgenland Croats, not only what the researchers considered to be “Croatian.” My narrative on the development of research into the vocal music of Burgenland Croats shows the impact of methodology on results up to modern ethnomusicological minority studies.
I remember very well the SEM anniversary in 2005 in Atlanta, especially one session (19 November) about the “founding fathers of ethnomusicology” when Zdravko Blažeković presented a paper about the Croatian musicologist Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834–1911). In the same session there were also papers by Johnathan Stock about John Alexander Ellis (1814–1890) and by Lars Koch about Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877–1935). Although this was a very interesting combination of three very different personalities in the history of ethnomusicology, it turned out that the comparison offered valuable insights. If we take into account that comparative musicology was only one of the roots of ethnomusicology in Europe and the other was folk music research, we find that Kuhač was the only one of the trio who was a representative of the latter. And this inevitably meant a certain nationalist element in his attitude. Zdravko and I were talking after the session and shared the feeling about the burden but also the challenge of research history and the importance of a source critical approach. 341
Ursula Hemetek I was quite familiar with Kuhač because he collected and published songs of the Burgenland Croats, a crucial and long-term focus in my own research.1 Inspired by the talk with Zdravko and by his work on Kuhač, in this article I would like to deal with some aspects of research history concerning the Burgenland Croats with a focus on socio-political aspects and source criticism. The Burgenland Croats: Some facts The Burgenland Croats are a minority group who have been living in the easternmost province of Austria – Burgenland – since the sixteenth century. They were refugees and working immigrants at that time; today about 30,000 people belong to this ethnic group. Until 1921 the region was part of Western Hungary with Hungarian being the dominant spoken language. However, after 1921 when Burgenland was unified with Austria, German became the dominant language. Burgenland had already been ethnically diverse for several hundred years with Jews, Roma, Hungarians, German-speaking Austrians, Slovaks and Croats living there together. However, during the Nazi regime, huge shifts occurred with the Jews being forcibly expelled in 1938 and 90 % of the Roma being killed in Nazi concentration camps. The traditional music of the Burgenland Croats is characterized by its vocal practice. But in 1923 the first tamburica ensemble was founded and the instrument became very popular among the Croats. 2 Although there had been no tamburica tradition before that, the tamburica became the ethnic marker of Burgenland Croats and still functions in that way. The organic integration 1
2
342
Ursula Hemetek, Hochzeitslieder aus Stinatz. Zum Liedgut einer kroatischen Gemeindes des Burgenlandes, Ph.D. diss., Universität Wien (1987); Ursula Hemetek, “Veränderungen im Musikleben der burgenländisch-kroatischen Gemeinde Stinatz in den letzten 11 Jahren (1979–1990) beeinflußt von der Persönlichkeit des örtlichen Pfarrers“, Narodna umjetnost, special ed. 3 (1991), 319–331; Ursula Hemetek, “Kroatisch Singen, deutsch reden. Musik als Überlebensstrategie ethnischer Minderheiten“, in Trendwende? Ethnische und sprachliche Vielfalt im Burgenland, ed. by Werner Holzer and Rainer Münz (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1993),177–191; Ursula Hemetek, “Der Tanz als Ausdruck von Identität bei Minderheiten in Österreich”, Musicologica Austriaca 21 (2002), 189–217; Ursula Hemetek, “Re-entering the field after 30 years: Changing traditions?”, in Musical Traditions: Discovery, Inquiry, Interpretation, and Application, ed. by Pál Richter (Budapest: HAS Research Centre for the Humanities, 2012), 179–197. Extensive literature is available regarding the use of the tamburica among the Burgenland Croats. Tow examples among many, include: Christine Gregorich, Die Burgenlandkroaten und ihre Tamburica. Die Genese eines ethnischen Identitätssymbols im Spiegel der bugenländischkroatischen Wochenzeitungen “Hrvatske Novine” und “Naš tjednik”, M.A. thesis, Universität Wien (2001); Wolfgang Kuzmits, Die Tamburica im Burgenland. Tradierung “authentischer” Kultur?, M.A. thesis, Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (1996).
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats
Fig. 1. Tamburica ensemble in Stinatz/Stinjaki 2010. Photo: Iris Gruber.
of that instrument worked so well because it was and still is mainly used to accompany songs. In every Croatian village in Burgenland there is at least one local tamburica ensemble and there is one in Vienna as well. The tamburica has continued to be an important part of the folklore scene and is also very often used to maintain the Burgenland-Croatian language, which has been in decline for a long time. Usually children start playing and singing in the ensembles at an early age. Participants are often unable to speak the language, but they can sing in Croatian. This is a typical phenomenon for minorities in general, that the songs in the minority language are preserved much longer than the spoken language. To what extent the songs of the Burgenland Croats can be traced back to their Croatian roots seems to be an important question. On the basis of my own research, ongoing since the late 1970s, I draw the following conclusions: The integration and transculturation process has been going on for over 450 years, resulting in the development of very interesting forms of musical expression. The songs of the Burgenland Croats have a “multinational quality” so to speak, a phenomenon that we often find with autochthonous minorities because of the different regional inf luences and the cultural exchanges that have been going on for a long time. 343
Ursula Hemetek This is one way of seeing the phenomenon and it is of course the result of theories and methodologies. My research model has never approached the music-making of the Burgenland Croats as a “Croatian-only” phenomenon. Rather, I have been interested in the manifold forms of musical expression and in the discovery of a variety of ethnic influences. These interests resulted in continuing to record my interlocutors even when they were singing either in another language or something “non-traditional”. I do not claim that this is the only way of approaching the topic. By exploring other approaches in the following section from the research history of the Burgenland Croats I demonstrate that methodologies and research goals powerfully influence research outcomes. Minorities seen as an extension of the nation In the early days of folk music research, a tradition commonly understood as starting with Herder in the eighteenth century in Europe (at least in the German-speaking areas), folk song texts were the primary object of research. These folk songs were seen as records of the ethnic group’s wisdom, a way of life, and a treasure of cultural heritage. In these early studies a good deal of attention was given to language. This is why, for example, Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864), the creator of the standardized Serbo-Croatian language, also published several collections of folk songs in 1814, 1815 and later (under the Germanized name, Wolf Stefansohn). 3 This is also why linguists like Franjo Kurelac (1811–1874), who also collected Croatian folk songs in Burgenland4 were often ethnographers too, especially in Slavic countries. The folk song collections of that time were all published without the transcription of melodies; the text was the important component. Later on, more attention was paid to the melodies, as in the work of Croatian musicologist Franjo Kuhač, for example, who did extensive collecting in many different communities. Kuhač’s theory on minorities, in this case Croats living outside their mother country, can be seen in the following quote: I think that it is irrelevant in which country an Italian, for example, is born; whether in Italy itself, in America, or in some other icy part of the world. If he is born to Italian parents, his nature will remain Italian, and he will have all the abilities or inabilities which yield an Italian temperament 3 4
344
See Vera Tiefenthaler, Südslawische Ethnographie und Sprache in Wiener Sammlungen bis 1914, M.A. thesis, Universität Wien (2004), 39–40. Fran Kurelac, Jačke ili Narodne pesme prostoga i neprostoga puka hrvatskoga: po župah Šoprunskoj, Mošonjskoj i Železnoj na Ugrih (Zagreb: Dragutin Albrecht, 1871).
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats […] The nature of a Croat will remain what it is, regardless of where he was born, even if he has neglected his mother tongue, changed and distorted his national surname, adopted a different faith. Guided by such ethnic principles, each nation has every right to adopt all those men whose blood belongs to that particular nation, because without their blood they would not have the abilities through which they achieved their recognition. 5 So Kuhač was obviously convinced that the Burgenland Croats were Croatian by nature, no matter where they lived, because “the characteristic achievements of a nation are not the result of education, but rather of its nature, blood, and ethnicity.” This quote actually continues in a pejorative way as to Jews and Roma, and attributes outstanding musical abilities to Croats and Slovenes.6 In his collections of five volumes (1878–1881, 1941) of southern Slavic folk songs, Kuhač also included 104 songs of the Burgenland Croats, seeing them as part of the Croatian nation, although they were living in Western Hungary at that time. Although there is a clear theoretical framework for Kuhač’s research, the method remains vague. We do not know when, where and from whom he collected the songs. Blažeković comments on Kuhač’s method of documentation: It is interesting to see how Kuhač, who dedicated his life to the study of historical documents and was obsessed with documenting his own research for those tunes included in his collection, never mentioned the date when he transcribed the tune or the name of his informant. Although he made a substantial effort to find out the history of the songs he included in his collection, he himself neglected to document the context in which he transcribed them. In his well-documented research process, the aspect that is missing and that he rarely mentioned in his autobiographical writings is the chronology and geography of his fieldwork.7 5
6 7
Zdravko Blažeković makes the following comment on the origin of this quote: Kuhač, “Historijski uvod” [Historical introduction] to Ilirski glazbenici: Prilozi za poviest hrvatskoga preporoda. Matica Hrvatska, publisher of the original 1893 edition of Ilirski glazbenici [Illyrian musicians], rejected the chapter “Historijski uvod”, qualifying it as “chauvinist”. It was published for the first time in a reprint of the book, ed. by Lovro Županović (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 1994), vii–lxv, quote on page X. Zdravko Blažeković, “Franjo Ksaver Kuhač and the beginnings of music scholarship in Croatia”, in Music’s intellectual history, ed. by Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2009), 203–240, quote from 214. Blažeković, “Franjo Ksaver Kuhač and the beginnings of music scholarship in Croatia” (as note 5). Ibid., 221–222.
345
Ursula Hemetek Kuhač uses a notation system of the melodies which is rather typical for that time: an arrangement for piano in order to make them popular in the soirees of the “high society” of that time. 8 He points to similarities of melodies used by Haydn and Beethoven, and states that both composers used Croatian melodies in their work. Thus he helps to refine the image of folk songs and to transform them so that they might appeal to higher social strata. He does not include contemporaneous songs in other languages despite the broad cultural and ethnic diversity in the region. Clearly, examining diversity was not Kuhač’s research goal. The next published collection that also still bears the markers of the “nationalist” approach appears much later, in 1964, by Vinko Žganec from Zagreb and Mate Meršić, priest and important intellectual of the Burgenland Croats. Like Kuhač’s collection, it is not based on recordings. During their fieldwork the researchers asked the informants to sing the melody; they then repeated it on an instrument and wrote it down. The beginning of the collecting work already started in the 1930s, but due to World War II and other obstacles publication was delayed. There are 254 melodies and 217 song texts. Traditional customs are included to a certain extent and there are detailed descriptions of three weddings, thus providing more musical context than Kuhač’s work. The systematic order of the melodies and the transcriptions make this collection much more reliable – in terms of modern ethnomusicology – than that of Kuhač. However, this collection also offers only a partial representation of the regional diversity. The authors acknowledge this intention: “It was my aim to collect our Croatian songs. Therefore I left out many songs that had Hungarian or German melodies”.9 We find again an approach to a minority culture that neglects the inf luences of surrounding cultures and sees the minority somehow as an extension of the nation. This narrow focus may be accounted for by the fact that the researchers – Kuhač and Žganec – were musicologists from Croatia who ascribed to a more nationalistic research approach as their writings specifically state. In contrast, two other researchers from Croatia, both active in Burgenland in the 1970s, the ethnomusicologist Jerko Bezić and the ethnochoreologist Ivan Ivančan, demonstrated a much more broad-based approach. 8 9
346
As I was told by Zdravko Blažeković during the 2005 SEM conference, the reason for publishing the songs in that way might also have been financially motivated, trying to attract a broader public. He was badly in need of money at that time. “Glavni moj cilj je bio, da saberem naše hrvatske napjeve. Zato sam izostavio mnoge takove jačke, ke imaju madjarski ili nimški napjev.” See Martin Meršić and Vinko Žganec, Jačkar. Hrvatske narodne jačke iz Gradišća (Čakovec: Novinsko-izdvačko i štamparko poduzeće, 1964), V.
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats There are other research documents and collections that were made before the 1970s and merit investigation. The authors are teachers and musicians among the Burgenland Croats pursing the goal of preserving “their” songs. While “preservation” is a unusual goal in the general folklore scene, it obtains another additional dimension in the context of a minority culture, because the reasons for the disappearance of the cultural expressions of the minority very often have to do with assimilation processes ref lecting political circumstances. Educational activities frequently function as a means for keeping the minority culture alive. The wish to preserve one’s “own” culture Jakob Dobrovich (1911–1984) was a teacher in Steinbrunn/Štikapron, the founder of the local tamburica ensemble and very active in the musical scene of the Burgenland Croats. His collecting work was driven by his wish to keep the singing tradition of the Burgenland Croats alive. He published two volumes of songs (1950 and 1964). Rather than using a highly restricted approach, he attempted to encompass the entire repertoire, broadening his methodology to also include melodies of Hungarian or German origin and popular songs, the so-called Schlager. Thus he gives a realistic picture of the mixed repertory of the Burgenland Croats. Dobrovich did fieldwork in many villages in Croatian Burgenland: the first volume is dedicated to the northern part and the second to central and southern locations. His engagement as an active musician and as the leader of a tamburica ensemble accounts for his harmonization of all the songs in his collections and his deliberate simplification of the rhythms. These harmonizations and simplifications sometimes seem to be very practical and make it clear that his approach was not driven by academic interest but mainly by an educational one. Dobrovich was also interested in spričanje, which is a song genre connected to the death ritual, though not to be confused with the lament. Spričanje is a formalized vocal expression that is sung by an appointed person as a farewell to the deceased individual. His collection, containing a few melodies and many texts, was published by his daughter Ingeborg Enislidis in 1999 after his death.10 Stefan Kocsis is a composer and cantor from Unterpullendorf born in 1930. He was musically active not only in a religious context but also in folklore. Kocsis started to collect songs in Croatian villages as early as 1955–1956, and 10 Jakob Doborvich and Ingeborg Ensilidis, Spričanje. Das Toten-Abschiedslied der Kroaten im Burgenland (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1999).
347
Ursula Hemetek he was the first to use a tape recorder in this region for his documentation of numerous songs (although these are not the earliest recordings of Burgenland Croatian songs; see below). His intention was actually to find the songs that Franjo Kurelac had collected as texts in 1871 and especially asked for these songs. Because in the early days of tape recording technology the tapes were very expensive, Kocsis turned off the recorder whenever people were not singing and he only recorded those songs that matched his theoretical concept, the “old folk songs” that he was documenting. Kocsis recorded and categorized 252 songs as “old Croatian folk melodies.” Although the singers suggested additional melodies that were popular among them, Kocsis would only record those that he wanted to “preserve” and revive. Fortunately, his recordings were saved, although they never were stored in an archive. Kocsis’ private collection was used for several seminars and Master’s theses at the Institut für Volksmusikforschung und Ethnomusikologie (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology).11 When his son Martin Kocsis wrote his master’s thesis, part of his intention was to save all the recordings and digitize them. A volume containing the complete source material will be published in 2018–2019. This collection seems to be a milestone in the research history of the Burgenland Croats. It makes a great difference that these sound documents will now be readily accessible to be consulted and interpreted by researchers. Although Stefan Kocsis was not a professional researcher when he made his recordings and contextual information was not noted, it was possible to reconstruct much of the information based on his recollections.12 Stefan Kocsis used his collected materials mainly for his compositions and also edited a song book for schools called Hrvatska pjesmarica,13 Stefan Kocsis’ recordings inevitably ref lect a selective approach yet these auditory documents still greatly enhance the research potential of other available material. The first master’s thesis based on his recordings was by Christina Csenar as early as 1973. Many years later the master’s thesis of Stefan Kocsis’ daughter, Helene ( Jelka) Zeichmann-Kocsis (1990) concentrated on 11 These are: Christina Csenar, “Liedgut und Brauchtum in Unterpullendorf ” (paper at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, 1973); Helene Zeichmann-Kocsis, Studie zur Überlieferung und Form des erzählenden Liedgutes bei den Kroaten im Burgenland, M.A. thesis, Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (1990); Martin Kocsis, Wandel und Kontinuität burgenländisch-kroatischer Volkslieder, M.A. thesis, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (2001). 12 See more details about the collecting work in Kocsis, Wandel und Kontinuität burgenländischkroatischer Volkslieder (as note 11). 13 Stefan Kocsis, Hrvatska pjesmarica, (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1973).
348
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats ballads among the repertory and investigated the reasons for their decline, whereas Martin Kocsis (2001) wrote about the musical transformation of the material in the use of contemporary folklore ensembles. Both used the collection of their father as a point of departure and added their own research material to it. So the intentional approach of “preservation” connected to the collection was broadened and the enlarged body of recorded melodies could be used to answer diverse research questions. The first sound documents from the Burgenland Croats (see below) appear to have had a similar function. The earliest sound documents The first sound documents of the Burgenland Croats, created in 1936 but not published until 2009, are preserved in the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna.14 There are twelve songs in multipart singing featuring a male singing group from Parndorf. Naila Ceribašić provides some fascinating insights on this music which she characterizes as love songs and one wedding song. When comparing the printed versions, she finds variants of the songs in “more humble” editions like that of Dobrovich and not in the more professional but “purist” Meršić-Žganec collection. Ceribašić concludes: All in all, it seems that the recording session in the Phonogrammarchiv was not restricted by disciplinary canons of the time, providing us with valuable material that, in all likelihood, represents a layer of the most popular songs among Burgenland Croats in the 1930s.15 In contrast to the printed collections, here we find multipart singing which might have been common practice but was neglected by research. On the intention of the Phonogrammarchiv when making these recordings, Gerda Lechleitner comments: Quite often, the Phonogrammarchiv took the opportunity to invite visitors to make a recording. On the one hand in order to enlarge the collections and on the other to create recordings for comparison––in another recording situation and thus under better technical conditions than in the field.16
14 Gerda Lechleitner and Grozdana Marošević, eds., Croatian Recordings 1901–1936 (=OEAW PHA CD 27) (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009). 15 Naila Ceribašić, “Burgenland Croats: A male singing group from Parndorf ”, in ibid., 157. 16 Gerda Lechleitner, “The Phonogrammarchiv’s role concerning the Croatian recordings 1901–1936”, in ibid., 21–27, here 26.
349
Ursula Hemetek So we find an approach as early as 1936 that seems to be not selective but more neutral concerning the repertory. It was the sound document itself that counted and the singers were free to choose what to sing. So these few songs serve as a different “representation” of the vocal practice of the Burgenland Croats. Some of these songs have recently been used for new vocal arrangements in a very creative modern style by the vocal group Basbaritenori. This process has been called “old wine in new bottles” in the title of an article by Gerda Lechleitner.17 “Inclusive” research projects from Croatia and Austria During the 1960s and the 1970s, the attitude of “collecting” was replaced by “research” in approaches to the music of Burgenland Croats. Inf luential individuals in this regard include Jerko Bezić (1929–2010), Ivan Invančan (1927–2006) and Karoly Gáal (1922–2007). All of these researchers were connected to research institutions: Jerko Bezić (ethnomusicology) and Ivan Invančan (ethnochoreology) came from the Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku in Zagreb, while Karoly Gáal (ethnology) came from the Institut für Volkskunde (Institute for Ethnology) at Vienna University. This means that the formerly “private” collections had now been institutionalized and that the recordings made were stored in archives. The researchers were professionally trained in doing fieldwork. The research of Ivančan in Burgenland had an applicational intention: he was looking for dances of the Burgenland Croats in order to create stage performances for the Burgenland Croatian folklore ensemble “Kolo Slavuj”. Whereas Gáal mainly did his research in one village in the southern part of Burgenland (Stinatz) and was much more interested in the social structure and local dialect than in the music,18 the other two researchers tried to cover most of the Croatian villages in Burgenland. 17 Gerda Lechleitner, “’Old wine in new bottles’-maintaining tradition through modern interpretation”, in Music and minorities in ethnomusicology: Challenges and discourses from three continents (Vienna: Institut für Volksmusikforschung und Ethnomusikologie, 2012), 105– 112; online: www.mdw.ac.at/ive/publications (last accessed: 24 May 2016). 18 It should be mentioned that Gáal’s work, especially his recordings of Jafkat, a lament practice in Stinatz, were used by following generations of researchers as well. The ethnomusicologist Marko Kölbl was inspired by these to write his MA thesis on the topic and also draws from it in his PhD project; Karoly Gaal and Gerhard Neweklowsky, Erzählgut der Kroaten aus Stinatz im südlichen Burgenland (Vienna: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, 1983); Marko Kölbl, Javkat. Totenklage und andere Aspekte musikalischen Totenbrauchs in Stinatz, M.A. thesis, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Wien (1996); Idem, Burgenländische und kroatische Totenklagen, PhD thesis, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (2017).
350
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats Bezić clearly states that it was not his intention to find the “Croatian” elements in the singing of the interlocutors but to draw a picture of the manifold musical expressions to be found within Burgenland Croatian music-making.19 He recorded music in everyday life, so-called Gebrauchsmusik, and he did not select, or turn off the recorder when something in German or Hungarian was sung. The approach of Ivančan was similar. 20 The list of the dances he collected from the Burgenland Croats clearly points to multiculturality:21 Besntonc; bezentanc Boloton Čardaš friški Čardaš lagani Englišvojcer Furman bi se vozio Gusinje Hodji čirke hodj; hodi čube hoš Hohštajriš Hop, skočit ne morem Jegermarš Kočinto; kočingotovo Krancltonc; vienac tancat Kolo Kupte mi, mamenka Landler; landlja; lendler; landlar Mazurka Po hrvatsku; hrvatski tanac Polka; pulka; polkar; puljker Polstertanc; poljstrtonc; pojstertanc; pujstertanc Račko kolo; radsko kolo Radaš Ritka buza; ritka buda Sesltonc Smetljije tancat
19 Jerko Bezić, “Folklorna glazba”, in Povijest i kultura gradišćanskih Hrvata, ed. by Ivan Kampuš (Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Globus, 1995), 361–403. 20 Ivan Ivančan, “Plesovi i plesni običaj”, in ibid., 4. 21 Gabrijela Novak-Karall, “Tanztraditionen der Burgenländischen Kroaten“, in Musik der Kroaten im Burgenland/Muzika gradišćanskih Hrvatov, ed. by Ursula Hemetek and Gerhard Winkler (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches Landesmuseum, 2004), 65–78, here 68–70.
351
Ursula Hemetek S rupcom Sibšsrijet; simšred; simšret; sedam korak; simšered Sova sidi na panji Spala je rosa Šotis; šoderić Špigeltanc Štancltanc Štrošnajder; Šupladler Tanac kuharic Tanac s f lošom Tanac za zaručnjake Tanac za mladu neviestu Tange Valjcer; vojcar; voljcer Vorgošit; varga varga šic Vuonsep Žub tancat This collection is especially interesting for German speakers. Very often the Hungarian or German name is used but the writing is phonetic transcription using Croatian letters, even mirroring the German dialect, for example Englišvojcer (Englischwalzer), which translates as English waltz. Ivančan’s recordings have recently been the primary source for an MA thesis at the Institute of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology in Vienna. 22 Philipp/Filip Tyran used them as a historical source for the musical practices in Novo Selo, a village in the northern part of Burgenland, comparing previous practices to current practices. He also compares the old recordings to the staged programs of “Kolo Slavuj”, a very similar approach to that of Martin Kocsis in his MA thesis concerning the Kocsis collection. 23 With the Ivančan recordings it is possible to draw conclusions about the context of singing practice in the 1970s, because the interviews are included. Following are two examples of Philipp Tyran’s transcriptions:
22 Philipp-Paul Tyran, Das traditionelle Liedgut der Kroaten am Heideboden, M.A. thesis, Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (2015). 23 Kocsis, Wandel und Kontinuität burgenländisch-kroatischer Volkslieder (as note 11).
352
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats
Ex. 1. Doletil je orlić mlad, recorded by Ivan Ivančan in 1972 in Parndorf/Pandrof, transcription by Filip Tyran 24
This is the first stanza of a ballad sung by an elderly lady in which a young eagle f lies to the white town and makes a great deal of noise with its wings. The young king wants to kill it, but the eagle asks for permission to sing a song for the king. This recording served as what we may call the “original” for a Csardas in Ivančan’s choreography Hati (1981) (ex. 2). It seems to be quite a radical transformation.
24 Tyran, Das traditionelle Liedgut der Kroaten am Heideboden (as note 22), 126.
353
Ursula Hemetek
Ex. 2. Hati, choreography by Ivan Ivančan for the folklore ensemble “Kolo Slavuj”, 1981 transcription by Filip Tyran 25
It is a transformation from a vocal ballad in a slow tempo to a very fast instrumental Csardas. The melody was transmitted among the Burgenland Croats in the latter version, because “Kolo Slavuj” is a very popular ensemble and serves as a kind of role model in the folklore scene. The choreography created by Ivančan is still in use by the ensemble as this photograph of an ensemble performance in 2013 documents. For Tyran, who grew up in the folklore scene of the Burgenland Croats and who is currently one of the leading creative musicians of the younger generation, it was quite an epiphany to hear Ivančan’s recordings and to find the models for or let us say “originals” of the arrangements and song versions that he had known from his childhood in the “Kolo Salvuj” ensemble. It was also the reason he dedicated his master’s thesis to this topic. 26 The existence of these recordings show how certain current “standards” came into being. The aspect of “representation” in this example seems to be even more important, as folklore ensembles like “Kolo Slavuj” do represent the Burgenland Croatian traditional culture through their stage performances in Austria and abroad. And I think it is important to note that this kind of “collective” representation came into being through creative individual decisions like that of Ivančan, who chose to create a representative stage choreography from a song he recorded from an elderly informant. The inf luence of the Bezić collection, however, lies elsewhere. With his approach one can notice a kind of “ideological change” that was inf luential 25 Ibid., 131. 26 Ibid.
354
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats
Fig. 2. “Kolo Slavuj” perfoming Csardas in Vienna, photo by Filip Tyran, 2013
for subsequent research. Bezić’s way of doing field work by looking neither for what is “Croatian” nor for “folk music” and not making selections solely for ideological reasons, seems to me extremely important. It is not only his way of documentation but also his conclusions which represent a new dimension in research on Burgenland Croats. Bezić was the one who challenged the claim once stated by Kuhač that Joseph Haydn had borrowed melodies from the Burgenland Croats. There is one very famous example: A traditional love song of the Burgenland Croats (see example below) which is similar to the first part of the melody found in the anthem “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” composed by Haydn in 1797 for the birthday of Emperor Franz II. There have been ongoing debates about who borrowed from whom and Bezić deconstructs the myth that Haydn must have heard the melody from the Croats, arguing that it could easily have been the other way around. Bezić argued that the first time the melody in its Burgenland-Croatian version was ever published was actually a hundred years after the Haydn composition in the above mentioned Kuhač collection. The Croats could have integrated the melody – which was at that time very popular – into their singing. Unfortunately, most of Bezić’s works are only published in Croatian and therefore relatively unknown to many ethnomusicologists. What will be remembered within the international academic community is that Bezić was 355
Ursula Hemetek
Ex. 3. Jutro rano sung by Viktoria and Regina Palatin, recorded and transcribed by Ursula Hemetek in 1991
the first scholar to organize an international conference on music of minorities/ ethnic groups in 1985 in Zagreb. This conference was the inspiration for my own engagement in the field of minorities, following the completion of my dissertation on wedding songs in Stinatz. 27 Closing words The international perspective of research on minorities and music was already envisioned in the above-mentioned conference in 1985 and has seen a tremendous development in ethnomusicology since then. 28 Research on the Burgenland Croats should be seen against the background of this international development. The theories as well as the methodologies used markedly differ from those of the past. There is quite a large body of literature exploring these developments. 29 It was my intention to look into the past and to comment on research documents on Burgenland Croats which were created under different political circumstances. In their day, these documents suggested certain results that can now be interpreted differently due to the knowledge that has been accumulated since then. One conclusion which can be drawn from this would be that ethnomusicological documentation always bears the markers of the time and the political circumstances in which it was created. It is a source critical approach that will be useful for subsequent generations of researchers. 27 Hemetek, Hochzeitslieder aus Stinatz (as note 1). 28 This development is very much linked to and influenced by the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities which was founded in 1999; see https://ictmusic.org/group/musicand-minorities (last accessed 22 November 2016). 29 See for example Svanibor Pettan, “Music and minorities. An athnomusicological vignette”, in New unknown music: Essays in honour of Nikša Gligo, ed. by Dalibor Davidovć and Nada Bezić (Zagreb: DAF, 2014), 447–456; Ursula Hemetek, “‘Kulturkontakt-Kulturkonflikt?’ Erfahrungen und Reflexionen aus 25 Jahren ethnomusikologischer Minderheitenforschung in Österreich”, Jahrbuch des Österreichischen Volksliedwerks 63 (2014), 97–112.
356
Vocal Music of the Burgenland Croats These older documents can always be used by innovative musicians to create something new. This is especially true for the lively musical scene of the Burgenland Croats, which would probably be quite different and certainly less vibrant if there had not been researchers and collectors in the past.
357
Ursula Hemetek
358
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena
Melita Milin Muzikološki institut, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, Beograd (Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena: Jugoslovenski period * Abstract. Music Biennale Zagreb and the Serbian Music Scene: The Yugoslav Period. The aim of this article is to investigate the effects of the Music Biennale Zagreb (MBZ) on the Serbian music scene from the festival’s first staging (1961) until the sixteenth event (1991) that took place only two months before war broke out in the country. Imagined as a Yugoslav version of the Warsaw Autumn festival, the MBZ proved to be of huge importance for the modernization of Yugoslav composers’ achievements, especially of those belonging to the youngest generations. The focus of the article is on the ways the international new music heard at MBZ inf luenced the work of Serbian composers. Also discussed are issues such as the organizers’ criteria for the selection of works by Serbian composers and the number of them performed at the Biennale during those first three decades, the reception of the works heard at the festival among Serbian avant-garde-oriented and other composers, and Serbian critics’ appraisals of the international and domestic new music performed at the MBZ.
O izuzetnom značaju Muzičkog bijenala Zagreb (MBZ) za razvoj kompozitorskog stvaralaštva u Jugoslaviji tokom prve tri decenije njegovog postojanja (odnosno tri poslednje decenije ove države, 1961–1991) nikada nije bilo dilema. Dok su dela izvedena na ovom festivalu često bila predmet kritika i osporavanja, sâmo njegovo postojanje bilo je uglavnom pozitivno vrednovano, doživljavano kao širenje prostora slobode umetničkog izražavanja i kao sredstvo uspostavljanja i jačanja veza s kulturnim činiocima u inostranstvu, pre svega na kapitalističkom Zapadu. Osnivanje MBZ 1961. godine, u vreme dominacije avangardne muzike – ako ne u sveukupnoj muzičkoj produkciji na internacionalnom nivou, onda svakako na festivalima savremene, odnosno nove muzike – obavezivalo je organizatore da preuzmu upravo model festivala usmerenih ka promociji avangardnih dela iz celog sveta, na primer * Ova studija nastala je kao rezultat rada na projektu Identiteti srpske muzike od lokalnih do
globalnih okvira: tradicije, promene, izazovi (ON 177004), 2011–2016, koji finansira Ministarstvo obrazovanja i nauke Republike Srbije.
359
Melita Milin onih u Donauešingenu (Donaueschinger Musiktage), Darmštatu (Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt) i drugde, ali verovatno je odlučujući podsticaj za inicijatore MBZ bio uspeh Varšavske jeseni (Warszawska Jesień), festivala osnovanog 1956, otkada se redovno održavao svake godine, osim 1957. i 1982. godine. Osnivači zagrebačkog festivala preuzeli su uspešnu poljsku formulu retorike zbližavanja Istoka i Zapada putem jačanja kulturnih komunikacija između zemalja dva suprotstavljena bloka u jeku Hladnog rata. Za razliku od Poljske, koja je pripadala Varšavskom paktu i bila izložena tipičnoj državno-socijalističkoj diktaturi, Jugoslavija je sticajem različitih okolnosti (pre svega zbog krize oko Informbira, 1948) pošla putem „mekšeg“ socijalizma i balansiranja između dvaju blokova, što je podrazumevalo postepeno jačanje veza sa Zapadom. Iako je u tim procesima bilo oklevanja i kontradiktornosti, ipak se opšta situacija postepeno menjala nabolje tokom 1950-ih. Pored intenzivnijih razmena gostovanja reprezentativnih solista i ansambala umetničke muzike, moglo se zapaziti da su domaći kompozitori počeli dobijati šansu da posete muzičke festivale u inostranstvu, ostanu tamo duže u okviru studijskog boravka ili prate specijalističke kurseve na nekom uglednom univerzitetu. Jedan od njih bio je Milko Kelemen (r. 1924), hrvatski kompozitor koji je posle studija na Muzičkoj akademiji u Zagrebu u klasi Stjepana Šuleka, godine 1954. posredstvom poznatog violiniste Zlatka Balokovića dobio stipendiju koja mu je omogućila da nastavi studije u Parizu kod Olivjea Mesijana (Olivier Messiaen) i Volfganga Fortnera (Wolfgang Fortner) u Frajburgu. U tekstu napisanom povodom tridesete godišnjice MBZ, Kelemen je izneo više interesantnih podataka relevantnih kako za uvid u pripremu i organizaciju prvog Bijenala, tako i za razumevanje osnovnih motiva za njegovo pokretanje i teškoća koje su ga pratile. Kelemen je pisao vrlo otvoreno 1991. godine, kada je raspad Jugoslavije bio sasvim blizu i nije više bilo nikakve cenzure. Odlomci iz ovog teksta rečito dočaravaju vladajuću kulturno-političku atmosferu oko 1960. godine i ukazuju na veštine koje su bile potrebne u tadašnjoj Jugoslaviji, odnosno Hrvatskoj, za ostvarenje ambicioznog cilja kakav je bio osnivanje jednog međunarodnog festivala savremene muzike: Opće je poznata činjenica da se Jugoslavija nakon II. svjetskog rata razvijala u potpunoj izolaciji, primitivizmu i provincijalizmu. Takvo je stanje posebno loše utjecalo na skladatelje, budući da je „socijalistički realizam“ bio proglašen službenom doktrinom koju su svi morali podržavati [...] Uvijek mi je bilo jasno da je „moj grad“ Zagreb u svojim korijenima duboko vezan uz zapadnu kulturu, te da bi trebalo uraditi
360
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena nešto, što bi Zagreb učinilo centrom nove muzike u Jugoslaviji, odakle bi se i druge republike revolucionirale.1 U nastavku istog teksta Kelemen navodi da je bio vrlo razočaran kada se posle studija u inostranstvu vratio u Zagreb i uverio se da je „muzika u Jugoslaviji najmanje 80 godina u zaostatku za Europom“, 2 pri tom ne isključujući savremenu muziku u Hrvatskoj. Ipak, smatra za potrebnim da u navedenom pasusu objasni zašto je upravo Zagreb izabran za mesto održavanja novog festivala, kao grad sa dubokim korenima „uz zapadnu kulturu“, što svakako nije bila specifičnost hrvatske prestonice u okviru Jugoslavije. Čini se ipak logičnim što je izabrao da Zagreb bude grad-domaćin više s obzirom na to da je on sam bio Hrvat i da je ranije živeo i studirao u tom gradu, kao i da je poznavao tamošnje ljude od uticaja, kao i kolege. Interesantan je i Kelemenov opis sopstvenih akcija animiranja budućih učesnika festivala. Otputovavši „samostalno“ (kako naglašava) najpre u Sovjetski Savez, s tamošnjom ministarkom kulture Jekaterinom Furcevom ( Екатерина Алексеeвна Фурцева) 3 ugovorio je gostovanje Boljšog teatra,4 od kojeg svakako nije mogao očekivati avangardni doprinos budućem festivalu, ali je to svakako bio dobro smišljen potez koji je trebalo da eventualnim kritičarima njegove inicijative ukaže na bitnost ideje zbližavanja Istoka i Zapada – ne zaboravimo da se sve ovo dešavalo u isto vreme kada su tekle i pripreme za prvu konferenciju nesvrstanih zemalja u Beogradu, koja će se održati tri meseca posle I Bijenala – početkom septembra 1961. Sledila su, kako Kelemen tvrdi, “samoinicijativna” putovanja u Vašington (bio je u State Departmentu!), zatim u Bon i Pariz. Iz ovih iskaza je uočljivo da se radilo o kulturnoj diplomatiji, pri čemu ne raspolažem podacima o tome koliko je ova inicijativa bila podržana od zvanične diplomatije tadašnje jugoslovenske države. Čini se da je mladi kompozitor morao imati ozbiljnu podršku da realizuje svoje zamisli. Osvrt na Kelemenov članak može se završiti navođenjem još nekih interesantnih svedočenja, koja ukazuju na činjenicu koliko je sfera kulture u Jugoslaviji bila smatrana značajnom i stoga bila izložena stalnom političkom nadzoru:
1 2 3 4
Milko Kelemen, “Muzički biennale Zagreb, zašto?”, u Muzički biennale Zagreb / The Zagreb Music Biennale 1961–1991, prir. Erika Krpan (Zagreb: Muzički informativni centar Koncertne direkcije Zagreb, 1991), 10. Ibid., 10. Furceva je bila supruga Nikolaja Pavloviča Firjubina, sovjetskog ambasadora u Jugoslaviji 1953–1957. Kelemen, „Muzički biennale Zagreb“ (fusnota 1), 10.
361
Melita Milin Nekoliko tjedana prije početka prvog Muzičkog biennala došlo je do dramatičnih momenata, jer se pročulo da se u centralnim komitetima nekih republika diskutira o tome kako bi Muzički biennale u Zagrebu trebalo zabraniti, jer se koncepcijom istok-zapad u Jugoslaviju unosi „marazam“ i dekadencija „buržoaskog“ zapadnog društva, što bi negativno moglo utjecati na razvoj socijalističke kulture. Zasluga je pokojnog Ive Vuljevića, šefa propagande Muzičkog biennala, što je svojom akcijom razuvjerio protivnike Biennala: da je riječ o demokratizaciji naše muzičke kulture i da će publika sama imati priliku odlučiti što joj se sviđa, a što ne.5 Od samog početka, organizacija MBZ bila je isključivo u nadležnosti hrvatskih institucija, konkretno Koncertne poslovnice Hrvatske (kasnije Koncertne direkcije Zagreb), dok je Društvo skladatelja Hrvatske bilo odgovorno za program, a glavnu ulogu imao je umetnički savet čiji je predsednik tokom prvih deset festivala bio Milko Kelemen (kasnije je bio počasni predsednik), a od 1981. tu dužnost je obavljao Stanko Horvat. S obzirom na ove okolnosti bilo je prirodno (i očekivano) da će najveći udeo u festivalskim programima imati dela hrvatskih kompozitora, dok će oni iz drugih jugoslovenskih republika biti uglavnom samo simbolično zastupljeni. Neosporno je da su organizatori težili da ponuđenim programima kreiraju reprezentativnu selekciju novijeg jugoslovenskog repertoara, da bi u što boljem svetlu predstavili muzičku produkciju zemlje domaćina, kao i da su u ranom periodu održavanja MBZ u jugoslovenskom stvaralaštvu još dominirala stilska usmerenja aktuelna u prvoj polovini veka, što je takva dela diskvalifikovalo od izvođenja na ovom festivalu. Kompozitori kojima su oko 1960. bile bliske težnje tadašnje svetske avangarde nisu bili brojni i pripadali su isključivo najmlađoj generaciji, rođenoj 1920-ih i 1930-ih godina. Njihovi profesori bili su ili okrenuti poznom romantizmu ili zainteresovani za međuratno muzičko nasleđe, i nisu pokazivali sklonost za uključenje u posleratnu avangardu o kojoj nisu imali dovoljno informacija. Ako ne računamo kompozitore koji su od sredine 1950-ih pretežno živeli na Zapadu – samog Milka Kelemena, ili Ivu Maleca i Vinka Globokara, koji su od 1955. živeli u Francuskoj – u Jugoslaviji je bilo svega nekoliko kompozitora koji su ranije proveli izvesno vreme u inostranstvu i bili u kontaktu s najnovijim avangardnim tendencijama; u Srbiji su to bili, između ostalih, Enriko Josif i Dušan Radić, u Hrvatskoj Natko Devčić i Stanko Horvat, u Sloveniji Janez Matičič i Alojz Srebotnjak, dok ih u ostalim republikama nije bilo. Iako nisu imali prilike da borave u nekom od evropskih 5
362
Ibid., 12.
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena muzičkih centara, pojedini kompozitori su tih godina ipak uspevali da napišu dela avangardnog usmerenja, što je bila dobra osnova za njihovo uključenje u međunarodne tokove nove muzike od početka 1960-ih godina, kada je počeo da se održava MBZ. Istaknuti predstavnik te grupe bio je srpski kompozitor Vladan Radovanović (r.1932) koji je tokom studentske ekskurzije u Beču 1953. godine imao priliku da čuje dela posleratne nove muzike – kompozicije Karla Amadeusa Hartmana (Karl Amadeus Hartmann), Rolfa Libermana (Rolf Liebermann), Borisa Blahera (Boris Blacher) 6 i drugih. U godinama pre I Bijenala među srpskim kompozitorima se gotovo opsesivno iščekivalo da neko među njima ili šire u Jugoslaviji napiše nešto posebno i novo u internacionalnim razmerama, ali drugačije u odnosu na posleratnu avangardu o kojoj su postepeno saznavali sve više, što međutim nije bitnije uticalo na njeno prihvatanje. U jednom dužem članku iz 1960. godine kompozitor i muzikolog Dragutin Gostuški (1923–1998) zapitao se: „Zašto se ne bismo jednom našli na čelu razvoja svetske muzike?“ 7 Karakterističan je i sledeći stav ovog autora: Odmah mogu da konstatujem da je titula moderniste odlikovanje koje se može steći sa najmanje napora. Najprostijim tehničkim postupcima, svima nama dobro poznatim, recimo neprekidnim gomilanjem najoštrijih disonanci, odmah ulazimo u krilo modernizma iz prostog razloga što do nedavno takve muzike u istoriji nije bilo. Sa nešto više napora možemo se uvrstiti u avangardu. Sviraćemo laktom ili poklopcem klavira ili još bolje, ostavićemo izvođaču da improvizuje – što je najneverovatnija i za našu profesiju najviše ponižavajuća tekovina naših dana.8 Među onima retkima koji su bili na sasvim suprotnoj poziciji bio je Vladan Radovanović koji danas uživa status jednog od najsamosvojnijih srpskih kompozitora u periodu posle Drugog svetskog rata, na osnovu opusa koji je avangardan i po težnjama i po rezultatima. Još tokom studija kompozicije u klasi Milenka Živkovića na beogradskoj Muzičkoj akademiji pokazivao je izrazitu sklonost za inovativne tehnike i paralelno stvaranje u različitim umetničkim medijima. Svoj diplomski rad, Sinfoniju concertante (1956), komponovao je u neoklasicističkom stilu koji je u to vreme u Jugoslaviji još uvek smatran vrlo modernim, da bi ubrzo potom počeo da istražuje oblast serijalizma,9 osmi6 7 8 9
Informacija dobijena od Vladana Radovanovića 5. decembra 2015. godine. Dragutin Gostuški, „Mesto jugoslovenske muzike u razvoju svetske muzičke kulture“, Zvuk 39–40 (1960), 477–486, ovde 484. Ibid., 479. Prema svedočenju Vladana Radovanovića, Kelemen ga je, uveriviši se za vreme I Bijenala u njegovu temeljnu teorijsku upućenost u serijalnu tehniku, zamolio da podučava jednu
363
Melita Milin slivši princip „frekvencije neponavljanja tonova“ koji je primenio u Polifoniji 9 za nespecifikovane izvođače (1959) i, na tom delu zasnovanom, Prazvuku za kamerni ansambl (1959–61). Pojedina njegova dela iz druge polovine 1950-ih godina, kao što su redukcionističko-minimalistički Korali (1956) i hiperpolifone Polifonije (1957–59) mogu se, prema predlogu samog autora, ubrojati u „idejnu“ ili „ne-javnu“ avangardu, s obzirom na to da nisu javno izvođene i samim tim nisu mogle uticati na druge kompozitore.10 Kao i nekolicina drugih kompozitora iz Beograda, prisustvovao je prvom Muzičkom bijenalu Zagreb (1961), ali, s obzirom na to da je bio gotovo nepoznat i da je tek 1962. godine doživeo prvo javno izvođenje jednog svog dela posle diplomiranja,11 trebalo je da sačeka sledeće Bijenale da bi se njegovo ime našlo na programu ovog festivala. Jedan Radovanovićev iskaz o svojim interesovanjima iz tog vremena može da pomogne u razumevanju položaja kompozitora u Srbiji, pa i u Jugoslaviji tih godina: Negde 1957. čuo sam sa ploče Štokhauzenovu elektronsku Studiju II [...] Tada [pre I Bijenala] bio sam upućen u neke tokove avangarde, ali ne u sve. Poznavao sam dodekafonu i serijelnu muziku i, nešto manje, konkretnu i elektronsku. Nisam poznavao muziku zvučnih masa niti minimalističku muziku.12 O vrenju koje je nastupilo među jugoslovenskim kompozitorima u drugoj polovini 1950-ih godina – periodu koji je prethodio prvom MBZ, rečito svedoči dokumentacija sa II diskusionog sastanka Saveza kompozitora Jugoslavije, održanog u Beogradu krajem marta 1960.13 Posebno je interesantan deo koji se odnosi na dodekafoniju i muziku avangarde. Citira se Kelemenenovo izlaganje, koje je bilo propraćeno zvučnim primerima, potom i delovi diskusije, u kojoj su učestvovali Enriko Josif, Ivo Lhotka-Kalinski, Aleksandar Obrado-
10 11
12 13
364
njegovu studentkinju (ako je dobro zapamtio, njeno ime je bilo Nada Pongrac), što je on i prihvatio. Navedeno prema razgovoru vođenom s Vladanom Radovanovićem 27. decembra 2015. Melita Milin, Tradicionalno i novo u srpskoj muzici posle Drugog svetskog rata (1945–1965), (Beograd: Muzikološki institut SANU, 1998), 62. Najpre je na kamernom koncertu dela srpskih kompozitora različitih generacija u Domu kulture „Đuro Salaj“ 14. marta 1962. premijerno izveden Prazvuk, te je snimak tog dela emitovan na autorskom koncertu 15. aprila u istoj sali i oktobra iste godine u okviru simpozijuma „Nova muzika i muzička interpretacija“ u Opatiji. Navedeni simpozijum je verovatno imao smisao pripreme osnivanja Tribine jugoslovenske muzike koja je ustanovljena 1963. godine. Tekst dobijen od Vladana Radovanovića 5. decembra 2015. godine. Izveštaj, „Sa II diskusionog sastanka Saveza kompozitora Jugoslavije. Kompozitori o stvaralačkim problemima“, Zvuk 39–40 (1960), 466–477.
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena vić, Danilo Švara, Slavko Zlatić i drugi. Kelemen je u svom govoru konstatovao da u Jugoslaviji postoji odbojnost prema serijalnoj tehnici i da kompozitori iz zemlje imaju čitav niz predrasuda prema njoj koje je pokušao da ospori.14 Već su se na I Muzičkom bijenalu (17–24. maj 1961) okupili neki od najpoznatijih predstavnika svetske muzičke avangarde – Vitold Lutoslavski (Witold Lutosławski), Karlhajnc Štokhauzen (Karlheinz Stockhausen) i Pjer Šefer (Pierre Schaeffer), a izvedene su, po prvi put u Jugoslaviji, i izvesne kompozicije iz Bartokovog (Béla Bartók), Ravelovog (Maurice Ravel) i Šenbergovog (Arnold Schönberg) opusa, bitne za razvoj muzičkih ideja u prvoj polovini dvadesetog veka. Izvođači su takođe bili prvorazredni: Radiotelevisione italiana orchestra sinfonica di Milano (Milanski RTV orkestar), kojim je dirigovao Mario Rosi (Mario Rossi), Kölner Ensemble für neue Musik (Ansambl za novu muziku iz Kelna) sa Mauricijom Kagelom (Maurizio Kagel) kao dirigentom, pijanistkinja Ivon Lorio (Yvonne Loriod) i drugi. Dela hrvatskih kompozitora obuhvatila su jednu operu Stjepana Šuleka (Koriolan, 1957), Simfoniju o mrtvom vojniku (1958), kao i balet Tri sintetske poeme (1959) Branimira Sakača, Assonance za klavir Krešimira Fribeca, Scherzo za gudače (1961) Frana Lhotke, orkestarska dela Milka Kelemena (IV koncert za gudače (?) i Koncertantne improvizacije za gudače, 1954), Stjepana Šuleka (I klasični koncert, 1944), Borisa Papandopula (III koncert za klavir i orkestar, 1959), Mila Cipre (Tri susreta za orkestar, 1961) i Ive Maleca (Pokreti u boji za orkestar, 1961). Slovenački kompozitori bili su zastupljeni jednim orkestarskim delom Alojza Srebotnjaka (Sinfonietta in due tempi, 1961), jednim solističkim delom Primoža Ramovša (Sonatina za klarinet, ?) i jednim kamernim delom Slavka Osterca (Simfonijski stav, 1936). Moglo se i očekivati da će iz Srbije na Bijenale biti pozvani dvoje među najcenjenijim srpskim kompozitorima prethodne decenije, Ljubica Marić (1909–2003) i Dušan Radić (1929–2010), mladi kompozitor neoklasicista čiji je radikalni otklon od još prisutne ideologije socijalističkog realizma šokirao mnoge i izazvao burne polemike. Njihova dela su zaista uključena u festivalski program: kantata Pesme prostora (1956) Ljubice Marić, vrlo uspelo ostvarenje na liniji Svadbe i Simfonije psalama Stravinskog i Radićev balet Balada o mesecu lutalici (1957). Oba dela su bila odlučno distancirana od romantičarskog stila, te su se izdvojila od najvećeg dela srpske muzičke produkcije tog vremena, u kome je osavremenjivanje muzičkog izraza kroz ekspresionističko zaoštravanje izraza. Kantata je karakteristična i po poetski arhaizovanoj atmosferi koja je bila sasvim nova u srpskoj muzici, a mogla se donekle dovesti u vezu sa Simfonijom orijenta Josipa Slavenskog, kompozitorkinog prvog profesora kompozicije, dok je drugo delo bilo na tragu muzike francuske Šestorice, 14 Ibid., 470–471.
365
Melita Milin sa životnim pulsom moderne svakodnevice u koju je prodrla i džez muzika. I u tematskom smislu ova dela su bila inovativna, jer su bila nadahnuta filozofskim meditacijama o životu i smrti (Kantata je bazirana na tekstovima natpisa na srednjovekovnim stećcima), odnosno savremenom ljubavnom pričom s elementima nadrealnog (libreto Bore Ćosića). Muzike iz Srbije na I Bijenalu je bila zastupljena i delima dvojice Slovenaca, naturalizovanih Beograđana: opera Četrdeset prva Mihovila Logara (1902–98) prema romanu Pesma Oskara Daviča i kantata Dani u tami (1959) Josipa Kalčića (1912–95) na stihove Gvida Tartalje. Logareva opera je premijerno izvedena samo četiri meseca ranije, 10. februara 1961. u sarajevskom Narodnom pozorištu, dok je Kalčićeva kantata najpre emitovana preko Radio Beograda 8. aprila 1960. Dok je Logar tada bio uveliko etabliran kao kompozitor, kome je pomenuta opera bila već četvrta po redu, Kalčić je bio poznat uglavnom kao rukovodilac muzičkog sektora na Radio-Beogradu, a obavljao je i veći broj kulturno-prosvetnih funkcija na jugoslovenskom nivou. Za razliku od Četrdeset prve, stilski neujednačenog dela s akcentom na psihološkom realizmu podvučenom harmonskim rešenjima koja samo povremeno donose reskiji zvuk, u kantati su izražajna sredstva ekspresionistički zaoštrena u težnji ka što plastičnijem prikazivanju mučnih scena u nacističkim logorima. Moguće je da je izbor ova dva dela za izvođenje na I Bijenalu bio prvenstveno rezultat želje organizatora da se njima obeleži dvadesetogodišnjica izbijanja ustanaka jugoslovenskih naroda protiv okupatora u II svetskom ratu. Kompozicije Ljubice Marić i Josipa Kalčića izvedene su na istom koncertu Simfonijskog orkestra i hora RTV Beograda s dirigentom Borivojem Simićem. Logarevo delo je izveo operski ansambl sarajevskog Narodnog pozorišta (kao i na premijeri), dok je Radićev balet, koji je bio prvi put izveden u beogradskom Narodnom pozorištu 1960. godine, prikazao baletski ansambl Hrvatskog narodnog kazališta, zajedno sa druga dva baleta, baletom na muziku Simfonije o mrtvom vojniku Branimira Sakača i baletom A csodálatos mandarin (Čudesni mandarin) Béle Bartóka. Opšti utisak posle završetka I Bijenala može se svesti na neskriveno zaprepašćenje pred nekim radikalnim avangardnim ostvarenjima, pre svega Džona Kejdža ( Johna Cage) i Karlheinca Štokhauzena, dok je bilo uočljivo manje ili više pozitivno reagovanje na dela autora „poljske škole“. Među retkima koji nisu bili šokirani onim što su čuli bio je Vladan Radovanović koji se ovako seća prvog i nekih sledećih bijenala: Najjači utisak na prvom MBZ ostavila je na mene kompozicija Scontri Henrika Goreckog.15 Sećam se da sam tada pomislio kako je ta kom15 Ovo delo, komponovano 1960, nije bilo izvedeno na I bijenalu, već je verovatno emitovano
366
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena pozicija donekle bliska Sferoonu na kojem sam uveliko radio. Još se sećam da sam izdvojio Gruppen za 3 orkestra Karlhajnca Štokhauzena,16 Atmosphères Đerđa Ligetija (na četvrtom bijenalu), od jugoslovenskih dela sećam se Interferencija 19 i 10 Rubena Radice (na trećem bijenalu). S druge strane, izvesna dela od kojih sam više očekivao, veoma su me razočerala. Među njima su Atlas Eclipticalis Džona Kejdža (na II bijenalu) i elektronska kompozicija Artikulacije Đerđa Ligetija (na I bijenalu), koju sam jedva zapazio. Na nju sam više obratio pažnju nekoliko godina kasnije, kada sam nabavio partituru iste kompoziicije, koja izgleda zanimljivije nego sama muzika. Drugačiji slučaj je s Kejdžovim radom Lecture 17, koji me nije iznenadilo zato što je predložen kao muzika jer ja to nisam ni smatrao muzikom, nego tekstualnim predloškom sličnom mojim projektističkim radovima i uopšte radovima protokonceptualnog karaktera.18 Lako je uvideti da su organizatori I Bijenala bili tolerantni prema ostvarenjima koja se nisu uklapala u koncept aktuelne avangarde, jer da nisu, gotovo da ne bi imali šta da ponude od muzike jugoslovenskih autora. Navedena četiri dela kompozitora iz Srbije bila su u stilskom pogledu međusobno vrlo različita, a pri tome daleko od uticaja posleratnih avangardnih stremljenja. Tih godina su jedino Vladan Radovanović, donekle i Erne Kiralj (Ernő Király) (1919–2007) i u manjoj meri Rudolf Bruči (Rudolf Brucci) (1917–2002) istraživali na polju koje je vodilo ka avangardi, ali njihova dela nisu bila poznata ni većini beogradskih kolega pre 1962. godine. Izvesni kompozitori, kao na primer Marjan Lipovšek, Petar Bergamo, Aleksandar Obradović, kao i student Ivan Klemenčič iz Ljubljane, kritikovali su izbor jugoslovenskih dela, jer su to bila ostvarenja koja niti čine presek domaćeg stvaralaštva, niti sva pripadaju „najnaprednijima“, čine „lošu uslugu jugoslovenskoj umetnosti“, zaključivši i da je MBZ „pokazao potpunu dezorijentaciju“.19 Nasuprot tome, Petar Bergamo je smatrao da je Bijenale bacilo pravo svetlo na jugoslovensko muzičko stvaralaštvo:
16 17 18 19
sa magnetofonske trake u okviru predavanja Vitolda Lutoslavskog o savremenoj poljskoj muzici, 19. maja 1961 (prim. M. Milin). Delo je izvedeno na III Bijenalu. Delo je verovatno pušteno sa magnetofonske trake na predstavljanju savremene poljske i američke muzike, uz učešće samog Kejdža, u okviru II Bijenala, 10. maja 1963. Tekst dobijen od Vladana Radovanovića 5. decembra 2015. godine Marjan Lipovšek, „Loša usluga jugoslovenskoj umetnosti“, u „Prvi muzički biennale u Zagrebu – pogledi i utisci“, Zvuk 49–50 (1961), 491.
367
Melita Milin Bijenale je nedvosmisleno pokazao da su one razlike između „jugoslovenske muzičke avangarde“ i onih drugih „umerenih“ ili čak konzervativnih elemenata dosada bile isforsirane. I jedni i drugi su crpli elemente svoje invencije i tehničkih sredstava iz fundusa već konačnih stilova ili iz muzičkih profila savremenih klasika. Muzički naprednim kompozitorima kod nas su se smatrali oni čije dosadašnje delo nije ništa drugo do repetitorij izvesnih etapa razvojnog puta Stravinskog, Bartoka, Veberna i drugih. 20 Ovom izjavom Bergamo je verovatno želeo da opovrgne vladajuće mišljenje među srpskim kompozitorima da je klasa Stanojla Rajičića, iz koje je i on izašao, mogla da iznedri samo „umereno moderne “, manje smele i manje interesantne stvaraoce, dok je klasa Milenka Živkovića, u kojoj su završili studije Dušan Radić i Vladan Radovanović između ostalih, bila širih umetničkih vidika, čak avangardna. Sigurno se Bergamovo mišljenje odnosilo i na pojedine kolege kompozitore iz drugih republika. I zaista, direktno suočeni sa najnovijim svetskim avangardnim tokovima prezentovanim na prvom Bijenalu, jugoslovenski kompozitori su se mogli uveriti da se od Drugog svetskog rata – tokom decenije i po dok je Jugoslavija bila u znatnoj meri kulturno izolovana od zapadnog sveta – muzičko mišljenje razvijalo u smislu radikalnog raskida s ranijim stvaralaštvom, tako da je načinjena distanca koju nije bilo lako prevazići. O selekciji jugoslovenskih kompozicija na I Bijenalu dao je svoje mišljenje i Aleksandar Obradović (1927–2001), kompozitor koji je završio studije u klasi Mihovila Logara i bio jedan od onih koje će iskustvo upoznavanja nove muzike na bijenalima podstaći da osavremene svoj muzički izraz. Pošto je izneo vrlo pozitivne utiske sa I bijenala, on piše: Ima nekoliko problema koje bismo morali da razjasnimo kod organizovanja sledećeg Biennala. Mnoge moje kolege iz raznih republika sa izvesnim negodovanjem su zapazili da su hrvatski kompozitori na Biennalu bili znatno više zastupljeni sa izvođenim delima nego kompozitori svih ostalih republika zajedno. Dakle, da li je Biennale stvar samo hrvatskih tj. zagrebačkih kompozitora ili je to realna slika stanja u našoj muzici, gledana kroz savezni kriterijum? Ne zastupam tezu „republičkih ključeva“ kod izvođenja umetničkih dela, već pre svega kriterijum umetničke vrednosti, ali se tu pitam da li se imao uvid u ono što se komponovalo u drugim republikama? Drugo: kada se daje uvid u stvaranje domaćih kompozitora, da li treba izvoditi ono što svi naši kompozitori pišu, dakle i stariji i mlađi, sa primenom folklor20 Petar Bergamo, „Nijedan sistem ne obezbeđuje delu vrednost“, u ibid., 485.
368
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena nih elemenata (tzv. „nacionalni pravac“) i bez njega, – ili se opredeliti samo za kompozicije koje podražavaju najnovija strujanja iz avangardističkih svetskih muzičkih centara? 21 Fizionomija MBZ je ipak bila prilično definisana već u njegovom prvom izdanju. U prvom planu je radikalno nova muzika, nastala najviše nekoliko godina ranije, kao i afirmacija već potvrđeno značajnih ostvarenja u celom posleratnom periodu, dok je prisustvo manje značajnih dela sa međunarodne ili domaće scene bilo samo rezultat nužnih kompromisa. Pored toga, prilikom razmatranja većeg učešća hrvatskih kompozitora na bijenalskim programima u odnosu na kompozitore iz drugih republika, mora se imati u vidu činjenica da je, kao što je ranije navedeno, MBZ organizovano (i finansirano) od strane Koncertne poslovnice Hrvatske (kasnije Koncertne direkcije Zagreb) i da je program sastavljao Programski odbor sastavljen od članova Društva skladatelja Hrvatske. S obzirom na međunarodni karakter festivala, postojala je obaveza (odnosno očekivanje) uključivanja kompozitora iz cele Jugoslavije, mada su – kao što je već uočavano – hrvatski autori bili zastupljeniji. Na II Bijenalu (8–16. V 1963) bilo je više dela kompozitora iz Srbije – ukupno sedam, od kojih su dva emitovana sa magnetofonske trake: Poema o zori (1960) Erne Kiralja, kratka kompozicija u kojoj se kombinuju konkretni i elektronski zvuci, i II stav Koncerta za klavir i orkestar in Cis (1961) Rajka Maksimovića (r.1935). 22 Ova dela su predstavljena na posebnom emitovanju magnetofonskih snimaka kompozicija jugoslovenskih autora. Ostala dela srpskih autora na ovom bijenalu bila su: Introdukcija i Finale iz Opsednute vedrine, kamerne kantate za ženski hor i dva klavira (1956) Dušana Radića (na koncertu Hora i članova Simfonijskog orkestra Radio-televizije Zagreb, dirigent Slavko Zlatić), Prazvuk (1959) za sopran i kamerni ansambl Vladana Radovanovića (na kamernom koncertu dela jugoslovenskih kompozitora) 23, Muzika za kamerni orkestar Milana Ristića (1908–1982) (Simfonijski orkestar RTZ, dirigent Pavle Dešpalj – premijera), balet Remi (1955) Dragutina Gostuškog (1923–1998) (Balet zagrebačkog Hrvatskog narodnog kazališta) i Musica oktoiha (odnosno Oktoiha 1, kako glasi kasnije promenjen naslov) Ljubice Marić (Zagrebačka filharmonija s dirigentom Milanom Horvatom). 21 Aleksandar Obradović, „Nerešen problem domaćeg stvaralaštva“, u ibid., 498. 22 Podatak dobijen od kompozitora tokom razgovora vođenog novembra 2015. Delo je bilo premijerno izvedeno 28. januara 1964. u Beogradu, vidi Vlastimir Peričić, Muzički stvaraoci u Srbiji (Beograd: Prosveta, 1969), 239. Snimak je očigledno napravljen ranije. 23 Ime Josipa Kalčića je navedeno na programu koncerta od 13. maja, na kojem je izveden i Radovanovićev Prazvuk. Vidi Krpan, Muzički biennale Zagreb, 22. Medjutim, u indeksu na kraju publikacije nema nijednog Kalčićevog dela izvedenog 1963. Zbog toga pretpostavljam da je planirano izvođenje Kalčićeve kompozicije bilo otkazano.
369
Melita Milin Radovanovićev Prazvuk je bio premijerno izveden marta 1962. u Beogradu, potom oktobra iste godine u Opatiji u okviru simpozijuma „Nova muzika i muzička interpretacija“, kada su ga izveli članovi ansambla „Slavko Osterc“, a dirigent je možda, po sećanju Vladana Radovanovića, bio Milko Kelemen. Tako se desilo da je Radovanović početkom 1963. dobio poziv, odnosno obaveštenje od Josipa Stojanovića da će se Prazvuk naći na programu II Bijenala 13. maja 1963, kako je i bilo. Ovaj poziv svedoči o tome da su organizatori MBZ direktno komunicirali s kompozitorima, a ne preko republičkih udruženja. Ipak, sačuvano je i pismo koje je Josip Stojanović poslao na adresu Udruženja kompozitora Srbije 10. aprila 1962. godine, a ono ga prosledilo Ljubici Marić. 24 Pismo je sadržavalo porudžbinu orkestarskog dela koje bi se izvelo na II Bijenalu. Kako ona nije prihvatila ponudu ili nije stigla da komponuje delo (što još nije utvrđeno), sledeće godine je na Bijenalu izvedena njena Muzika oktoiha 1, čija je premijera održana u Beogradu 28. februara 1959. godine. Kompononovan još 1955, Gostuškov balet je izveden na II Bijenalu zahvaljujući nagradi koju je dobio 1961. na konkursu povodom stogodišnjice Hrvatskog narodnog kazališta u Zagrebu. Izveden je na kraju baletske večeri na kojoj su prikazani i kratki baleti Ive Kirigina, Krešimira Fribeca i Milka Kelemena. Iz Srbije su došli i učesnici „Polemičkog razgovora o kretanjima savremene muzike u svetu“ – Dušan Plavša i Pavle Stefanović, dok su među ostalim učesnicima bili Alois Haba (Alois Hába), Luiđi Nono (Luigi Nono), Vitold Lutoslavski, Bohuslav Šefer (Bohuslav Schäffer). Zvučni zapisi sa ove diskusije, kao i mnogih drugih vođenih na bijenalima, nisu mi bili dostupni. Od izvođača iz Srbije na II Bijenalu učestvovao je samo ansambl Opere Narodnog pozorišta u Beogradu s dirigentom Oskarom Danonom. Oni su izveli operu Igrok (Kockar) Sergeja Prokofjeva (Сергей Сергеевич Прокофьев) (16. maja 1963). Centralni događaji II Bijenala bili su, pored izvođenja dela Igora Stravinskog i posebno autorovog nastupa kao dirigenta na koncertu svojih kompozicija 12. maja 1963, koncerti s delima poljskih autora na kojima su mnogi domaći kompozitori prvi put čuli dela u kojima je primenjena aleatorika. Ova tehnika je imala vrlo dobru recepciju među srpskim kompozitorima zainteresovanim za avangardne tendencije u muzici. Vladan Radovanović je analitički i kritički pisao o delima koja je čuo na II Bijenalu, a svoj tekst je završio sledećom rečenicom: „Udaljavajući se vremenski od drugog Biennala u svesti i dalje 24 Ovo su prva dva od ukupno sedam pisama koja su Ljubici Marić stigla iz uprave MBZ-a (poslednje je iz decembra 1964). Pisma se čuvaju u Arhivu SANU i Arhivu Muzikološkog instituta SANU.
370
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena ostaje jedno konstantno osećanje zadovoljstva zbog punoće doživljaja i osećanje zahvalnosti organizatorima Biennala za pružanje preseka razvoja muzike u svetu i proširenje iskustva“. 25 Na programu sledećeg, III Muzičkog bijenala (12–23. V 1965), izvedeno je samo jedno delo iz Srbije, Vizantijski koncert Ljubice Marić (Zagrebačka filharmonija s dirigentom iz Beograda Živojinom Zdravkovićem i solistkinjom na klaviru Olgom Jovanović). Razlog za izbor samo jednog ostvarenja nipošto ne može biti nedostatak avangardnih kompozicija. Iz pisama koja je Marićeva u periodu maj–decembar 1964. godine dobila od Josipa Stojanovića, direktora Bijenala, 26 može se saznati da joj je bilo ponuđeno da na III Bijenalu bude premijerno izvedeno neko njeno delo, što je ona prihvatila, ali nije uspela da ga komponuje, pre svega zbog majčine smrti novembra 1964. Termin rezervisan za srpsku kompozitorku organizatori su potom iskoristili za izvođenje njenog Vizantijskog koncerta, čija je premijera bila u Beogradu 4. juna 1963. Tako se desilo da na MBZ-u nije premijerno izvedeno nijedno delo Ljubice Marić, iako su joj bile stigle porudžbine. Među srpskim kompozitorima svih generacija, a prvenstveno među pripadnicima srednje i mlađe, postepeno je dolazilo do prestrojavanja u odnosu na nove muzičke tendencije. Među pripadnicima starijim od pedeset godina, moderan, mada ne i avangardan senzibilitet, pored Ljubice Marić, imao je Milan Ristić koji je tokom 1960-ih godina sve više zaoštravao svoj u osnovi neoklasicistički muzički izraz, unoseći u izvesna dela elemente dodekafonije, ne upuštajući se ipak u upotrebu avangardnih tehnika. Od mlađih srpskih stvaralaca mesto na programima bijenala u prvoj polovini 1960-ih godina zasluživali su, s obzirom na svoja interesovanja za primenu novih tehnika, sopstvenih i tuđih, pored Vladana Radovanovića, još i Aleksandar Obradović (1927–2001), Petar Bergamo (r.1930), Petar Ozgijan (1932–1979) i Zoran Hristić (r.1938). Vladan Radovanović je bio najdosledniji avangardista još od svojih ranih dela (iz 1950-ih godina) do danas i on će kasnije, od početka 1970-ih, posebno posle osnivanja Elektronskog studija Radio Beograda, čiji je bio rukovodilac, biti najzapaženiji srpski učesnik na bijenalima. Bilo je onih koji su bili vrlo nezadovoljni ekskluzivnim statusom avangarde na MBZ, o čemu je u intervjuu iz 1990. govorio Petar Bergamo:
25 Vladan Radovanović, „Drugi zagrebački Muzički biennale. Pogledi i utisci mladih“, Zvuk 59 (1963), 510–518, ovde 513. 26 Pisma se, kao što je već napomenuto, nalaze u Arhivu SANU i Arhivu Muzikološkog instituta SANU.
371
Melita Milin U poslednjih tridesetak godina nije se moglo pisati normalno. Prirodan razvoj muzike na Zapadu je AGRESIJOM AVANGARDE bio prekinut. Ne mislim da sam avangardan. Samo sam se prirodno nadovezivao na prethodno [...] Ne znam da li vam je poznato da ja ni u snu nisam, a možda to nisam ni želeo, mogao pomisliti da prodrem na programe Zagrebačkih bijenala. Svi su na njima bili. I Vasa Mokranjac i Šulek, rečju svi, gotovo da nikoga ne znam koji sve tamo nije mogao – osim mene. Podignut je preda mnom jedan zid. Čak se govorilo: „Ako pustimo njega, on će muziku vratiti natrag!“ Bio bi to prirodan put, a oni su hteli, po jednom određenom diktatu vremena, – Adorno i kompanija – da ga preskoče. A do toga se ipak došlo. Ono što je danas aktuelni trend, čemu se vraća i jedan Penderecki, ja sam radio još u Drugoj simfoniji. To zvuči malo prepotentno, ali tako je [...] Mnogi ljudi, kao Papandopulo, Logar, Bjelinski, Šulek, i dalje su pisali kako su pisali, iako su znali da su na indeksu, proglašavani su brbljivcima i šta sve ne. 27 I Dragutin Gostuški je spadao u kompozitore i muzikologe koji su dosledno kritikovali rezultate muzičke avangarde. U jednom članku napisanom posle III Bijenala on je, na svoj uobičajeno britak i duhovit način, iskazao svoje razočaranje što se posle decenije čekanja da „sirova materija“ i „početno mucanje“ evoluira u „stabilnu vrednost“, muzika nalazi „u krilu epigonstva i novog akademizma, šireći neizdrživu dosadu i apatiju“, pretvorivši se u „institucionalno legalizovan teror koji [...] predstavlja proizvod ili rđavih namera ili inferiornog duhovnog potencijala“. 28 Posle održana tri bijenala, jugoslovenski muzički krugovi zainteresovani za savremenu umetničku muziku mogli su da formiraju, utvrde ili promene stavove o onome što su čuli i može biti korisno i poučno zastati ovde na čas. Ulrih Dibelius (Ulrich Dibelius), nemački muzički publicista i zagovornik avangardnih ideja u muzici, osvrnuo se u svojoj knjizi o modernoj muzici posle Drugog svetskog rata na Muzički bijenale Zagreb, sagledavajući njegov značaj prvenstveno kroz vizuru prevazilaženja hladnoratovskog političkog 27 Milena Pešić, „‚Ploviti se mora, živeti ne!‘ Povodom izvođenja kompozicije „Navigare necesse est“ na koncertu Beogradske filharmonije, 23. februara“ (intervju s Petrom Bergamom), Pro musica 143 (1990), 10–18, ovde 10–11, 18. U vezi sa Bergamovim navodima o neizvođenju svojih dela na Bijenalima, treba spomenuti da je njegov Concerto abbreviato za solo klarinet izveden na V bijenalu 1969, dok je kasnije, na XVI bijenalu 1991, izveden njegov Gudački kvartet (1958). Treba još dodati da Vasilije Mokranjac ipak nije nikada imao nijednu kompoziciju na MBZ. 28 Dragutin Gostuški,„Kriza lažnog progresa“, u Umetnost u nedostatku dokaza (Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1977), Beograd, 123.
372
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena zaziranja između istočnog i zapadnog bloka, u sposobnosti okupljanja muzičkih stvaralaca s obe strane, u čemu je njegova sličnost sa festivalom Varšavska jesen. 29 Autor, međutim, uočava i važnu razliku između ova dva festivala. On, naime, smatra da savremeno muzičko stvaralaštvo zemlje domaćina nije izraslo kao treća markantna veličina pored zapadne i istočne. Dibelius čak pomišlja da je potencijal istinskih talenata manji u Jugoslaviji nego u Poljskoj, ali dopušta i mogućnost da su mnogi domaći kompozitori osetili opasnost od odricanja od prirodnih, energetskih izvora folklora, pa su usvajali samo poneke elemente novih tehnika, oslanjajući se pritom uglavnom na sopstveni ukus i sklonosti. Bilo je ipak i posmatrača sa strane koji su imali drugačije mišljenje. Tako je Everet Helm (Everett Helm), američki kompozitor i muzikolog koji je dobro poznavao muziku u Jugoslaviji, imao razumevanje za položaj domaćih kompozitora, podržavao je sporiji put, prirodnu evoluciju naše muzike, dok je stilsku revoluciju smatrao pogrešnim rešenjem. 30 Ako dela savremene srpske muzike nisu imala dovoljnu prohodnost prema Bijenalu, ipak su mogla da se čuju na Tribini jugoslovenskog muzičkog stvaralaštva koja je osnovana 1963. godine i koja je, za razliku od Bijenala, bila finansirana i iz drugih republika. Prethodnik Tribine bio je simpozijum „Musica nova“ održan u istom gradu 1962, čiji je cilj bio da se razmotre aktuelna dešavanja i tendencije u međunarodnim okvirima i sagleda mesto jugoslovenske muzike u njima. Sasvim je jasno da je nastanak ove manifestacije, koja se tokom decenija svog postojanja (do 1990, nastavljajući kasnije da se održava pod drugim nazivima i sa novim koncepcijama) dokazala kao bitna za razvoj nove muzike u celoj zemlji, bio podstaknut suočavanjem sa avangardnim delima predstavljenim na prvom Bijenalu. Tribina je predstavljala i platformu za diskusije koje su pomogle da se razjasne neki pojmovi i zauzmu stavovi prema inovativnim trendovima. Godine 1964. mogle su se čuti i oštre kritike nedovoljno brze modernizacije jugoslovenske muzike u celini, iako su već bila prošla dva bijenalska festivala. Ivo Malec je bio zabrinut zbog toga što Jugoslavija nije bila prepoznavana kao učesnica u avanturi muzičke avangarde: on je smatrao da organizatori inostranih festivala čak nemaju ni ref leks da se pitaju šta se dešava u Jugoslaviji, što znači da „ne postojimo kao činjenica“. 31 Objašnjenje za sporost ovog procesa on vidi u tome što prethodne generacije kompozitora nisu u dovoljnoj meri prenele „štafetu“ predratne moderne muzike mlađima, već su ih prepustile vladajućoj posleratnoj konzervativnoj este29 Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik 1945–1965 (München : R. Piper & Co Verlag, 1966), 292– 295. 30 Everett Helm, „Music in Yugoslavia“, The Musical Quaterly, 60/1 (1965), 215–224. 31 Ivo Malec, „Stanje naše glazbe“, u Petar Selem, ur., Novi zvuk. Izbor tekstova o suvremenoj glazbi (Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske, 1972), 137–144, ovde 142.
373
Melita Milin tici. 32 Dok Malec nigde ne apostrofira srpsku muziku, Petar Selem, hrvatski istoričar umetnosti, operski reditelj i muzički publicista, pišući posle opatijske Tribine održane 1965, pominje i kompozicije nekolicine srpskih kompozitora. Kritikuje „demona naracije“ kojeg uočava u Simfoniji italiani Mihovila Logara i Koncertu za klarinet i orkestar Milana Ristića, pa i u Siluetama Petra Ozgijana detektujući „bučni narativni tok“, kao i „sasvim klasično strukturiranje po navici izmjenjivanja napetosti i opuštanja“, mada je osetljiv na „neku svježinu senzibiliteta“ ovog dela. 33 U vezi s Epitafom H Aleksandra Obradovića pominje muzičku deskripciju i „modernistički konformizam“34, a „deskripciju“ pogotovo zapaža u muzici koja dolazi iz „istočnih južnoslavenskih centara“, primećuje da se ona može svrstati u neku vrstu primenjene muzike, te u tom kontekstu navodi Magnovenja Stanojla Rajičića, Svodove senke Vojislava Kostića, Krik treba ponoviti Josipa Kalčića, Tri grane vremena Dušana Radića i Prag sna Ljubice Marić. 35 Ostvarenja vrlo različita po stilu i kvalitetu, ali neoprostivo ne-avangardna, prema Selemu! Kao što se može zapaziti na osnovu ovih sažetih fragmenata iz onovremenih publikacija, MBZ je prilično uzburkao celu jugoslovensku savremenu muzičku scenu, bilo je dosta netrpeljivosti i osporavanja, naglih zaokreta, što je u krajnjoj liniji bilo produktivno za osmišljavanje sopstvenih kompozicionih pozicija među tadašnjim aktivnim kompozitorima. Na IV Bijenalu (1967) broj dela srpskih kompozitora je bio veći, mada i dalje skroman: samo dva. To je činjenica koja navodi na razmišljanje, pogotovo što je uoči održavanja ovog festivala Kelemen u jednom intervjuu tvrdio da su „jugoslavenski autori [...] zastupljeni bolje i potpunije nego na bilo kojem od dosadašnjih Bijenala“. 36 Iz Beograda su bili prisutni Petar Ozgijan (Petar Osghian, 1932–79) sa Sigogisom za kamerni orkestar (1967) i Rajko Maksimović (r.1935) sa Tri haiku za ženski hor i 24 instrumenta (1966). Oba dela su bila porudžbine MBZ, upućene dvojici mladih, perspektivnih kompozitora, čija su se ranija dela već izvodila u Beogradu i Opatiji. Kompozicije predstavljaju istaknuta ostvarenja srpske muzike 1960-ih i u obema su upotrebljeni elementi aleatorike, u Ozgijanovoj i serijalna organizacija. Sigogis je izveo Kamerni orkestar Radio-televizije Zagreb (RTZ) s dirigentom Pavlom Dešpaljem. Prema usmenom svedočenju Rajka Maksimovića (od novembra 2015), Branimir Sakač mu je u 32 Malec, ibid., 138. 33 Petar Selem, „Igra istine“, u Selem, ur., Novi zvuk, Izbor tekstova o suvremenoj glazbi, 164–170, ovde 166–167. 34 Ibid., 167. 35 Ibid., 167–168. 36 Milko Kelemen, „Bijenale – afirmacija jugoslavenske muzike u svjetskim razmerima“, Zvuk 73–74 (1967), 9–19, ovde 19.
374
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena ime organizatora IV Bijenala poručio delo za premijerno izvođenje, pišući mu u SAD, gde je boravio kao Fulbrajtov stipendista 1965/66. godine. Delo su izveli Hor i članovi Simfonijskog orkestra RTZ s dirigentom Slavkom Zlatićem. Pro musica, beogradski časopis namenjen široj čitateljskoj publici, posvetio je proteklom IV Bijenalu veći deo broja 24 za 1967. godinu. Pored portreta Milka Kelemena, koji je napisala Eva Sedak, objavljeni su i intervju urednika Đure Jakšića s Kelemenom kao predsednikom Odbora MBZ, zatim osvrt na četiri dotadašnja bijenala iz pera Josipa Stojanovića, direktora MBZ, prikazi tri dela domaćih kompozitora izvedenih na IV Bijenalu i vrlo afirmativni i analitični članak Berislava Popovića „Osvrt na četvrti muzički bijenale u Zagrebu“. Pored toga, u Zvuku su objavljena različita mišljenja posetilaca u kojima dominiraju nedoumice i otpori nekim radikalističkim tendencijama. U nepotpisanom uvodnom tekstu stoji da je podnaslov celog priloga – „Heroji avangarde su umorni“ – inspirisan dominantnim stavom intervjuisanih da moderna muzika nije više toliko revolucionarna i da nema mnogo novoga. 37 Izrazito negativan stav o delima koja je čuo izneo je srpski kompozitor srednje generacije Konstantin Babić (1927–2009). On piše o „totalnoj emocionalnoj sterilnosti“ i dodaje: Za šest proteklih godina, od kada je u našu sredinu importovana ova muzika, ona je doživela svoj puni rascvat i svoju maksimalnu infiltraciju u duh i sluh naših kompozitora, koje, ovoga puta na žalost, goni neka čudna ambicija da ne izostanu za vremenom, pa nekritički – izneveravajući sebe i svoj odnos prema umetnosti – pišu kompozicije koje kao duhovni produkti imaju kvalitete dostojne pitomaca azila u Šarantonu, duševne bolnice na „Guberevcu“ i drugih sličnih ustanova. 38 Nešto mlađi kolega, Dejan Despić, piše o stagnaciji, jer ono što nas je na prvom, i donekle na drugom Bijenalu moglo da zainteresuje, ili makar da šokira, danas nema više tu moć, a nije, međutim, osveženo nikakvom značajnijom novinom... Bilo bi doista zanimljvo ispitati šta od mnogih kompozicija – sa inače vrlo zvučnim, pretencioznim i svakako dugo traženim naslovima – ostaje ako se iz njih odstrane gudačka glisanda, tremola i f lažoleti, duvačka frulata i sforcata, pa sladunjava treperenja vibrafona, ili šum metlica po udaraljkama i razni slični efekti. 39 37 Anon., „Odjeci zagrebačkog Muzičkog bijenala. Heroji avangarde su umorni“, Zvuk 75–76 (1967), 20–37, ovde 20. 38 Ibid., 22–23. 39 Ibid., 25–26.
375
Melita Milin Dragutin Gostuški nije promenio mišljenje: [Ustanova Bijenala] ovaj put je definitivno podlegla pritisku stupidnih estetskih principa i diverzantske neodgovornosti [...] Ovogodišnji Bijenale predstavlja, pre svega, izrazitu manifestaciju osećanja niže vrednosti kome se poslušno pokoravaju i stvaraoci i interpretaori i slušaoci [...] drsku agresiju na sluh i dobru volju svih ljudi odanih umetnosti. U krajnjoj liniji neartikulisano, primitivno zvučno buncanje kome prisustvujemo predstavlja pokušaj poniženja elementarne ljudske inteligencije te ga ja u suštini i s prezrenjem odbacujem.40 U osnovi pozitivan stav i ovog puta je imao Vladan Radovanović: [Bijenale je]naša najneophodnija muzička manifestacija [...] Ako Bijenale 1967. ne izgleda značajan kao raniji, razlog ovome nije toliko u smanjenju prosečne vrednosti izvedenih dela već pre u smanjenju inovacije koju su ona donela [...] da bi neki naši istaknuti kompozitori, pored dostignuća nesumnjivih kvaliteta (Surprise, Fibula, Prostori), ostvarili dominaciju i u kvantitetu dopuštali su da im se izvede gotovo sve što su napisali između dva bijenala (Mikrosuita za klavir, Strukture) pa čak i relikti koji jedino mogu imati značaj za njihov lični razvoj (Kelemen, Dijalog za dva klavira – Radica, Sonata za klavir).41 Na V bijenalu (7–18. V 1969) kompozitori iz Srbije bili su predstavljeni Partitom concertante (1965) Rajka Maksimovića, koju su izveli Zagrebački solisti bez dirigenta, zatim Concertom abbreviatom za solo klarinet (1966) Petra Bergama (svirao Milenko Stefanović), Kadencama za 5+1 za duvački kvintet i traku Josipa Kalčića (Beogradski duvački kvintet), Studijom br. 1 za tamburaški orkestar Erne Kiralja (Tamburaški orkestar Radija Novi Sad) i Asteroidima za elektroniku Ludmile Frajt (1919–99). Može se primetiti da je, iako umereno moderna (s jasnim osloncem na barokne modele i sa slobodno primenjenom dodekafonskom tehnikom), nastala pre Tri haiku, Maksimovićeva Partita concertante (1965) našla put do bijenalskog programa, jer je verovatno bio odlučujući kriterijum kvaliteta dela, a ne njegova avangardnost. Pretpostavljamo da je Concerto abbreviato bio izbor izvođača, a odobren od strane organizatora. Interesantno je da su autori ostala tri dela pripadali starijoj generaciji, bili su rođeni 1912. (Kalčić) odnosno 1919. (Kiralj i Frajtova), bili su zaposleni na radiju (Beograd i Novi Sad) kao muzički urednici i funkcioneri i posle ranih dela uglavnom tradicionalnih osnova, vrlo brzo su oko 1960. godine počeli 40 Ibid., 27. 41 Ibid., 33.
376
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena da usvajaju pojedine avangardne tehnike. Iako su njihove kompozicije imale zasluženo mesto na ovom i drugim bijenalima, očekivalo bi se da se više pažnje posvećivalo mlađima koji su već bili pokazali svoje vrednosti, kao što su bili Petar Bergamo, Petar Ozgijan i Zoran Hristić (r.1938). Upravo njih je, zajedno sa Rajkom Maksimovićem, Vojislavom Kostićem (1931–2010), Dejanom Despićem (r.1930), Vartkesom Baronijanom (1933–93) i Srđanom Barićem (1927–2005), kao najperspektivnije srpske kompozitore izdvojio Darijan Božič (r.1933), slovenački kompozitor i dirigent, u svom referatu na Međunarodnom sastanku mladih kompozitora i muzikologa u Ohridu 1966. godine.42 Božič se posebno osvrće na stvaralaštvo Dušana Radića, koje visoko ceni, ali se pita „Da li će to opet biti za nas jedan neiskorišćeni talenat?“43 On sigurno nije bio jedini koji se pitao u kom će se pravcu razvijati ovaj tada već pripadnik srednje generacije, koji je bio modernista (neoklasicista) tokom 1950-ih godina, da bi od početka 1960-ih godina, verovatno pod uticajem poezije Vaska Pope, započeo „pijetistički hod imaginarnim prostorima davnih, zaboravljenih vremena“,44 udaljujući se od avangardnih tokova. U vezi sa svojom kantatom Uspravna zemlja (1962–63) Radić zapisuje da ovo delo odražava reakciju na besomučnu trku današnjih kompozitora za plasiranje svog pronalaska, svog „štosa“, svog „signe“-a [...] odražava reakciju na nesiguran lov novih starih dosetki, viceva i sličnih varki, reakciju na bezmerno robovanje avangardizmu, „modernizmu“, -izmu, mazohizmu i ostalim obeležjima pseudo-originalnosti; odražava reakciju na proglašavanje neizvesnog zvučnog eksperimenta za neprikosnoveni stvaralački čin, reakciju na brutalnu hajku koju današnji pretenciozni pobornici „aleatoričke organizacije“ kompjuterima vode protiv tradicije.45 Radić je tako pokazao smelost da se suprotstavi vladajućim trendovima i kao kompozitor-početnik i kasnije kao zreo umetnik, jer je bilo potrebno hrabrosti da bi se bio iskren i da bi se javno istupilo protiv avangarde, i to u vreme njenog međunarodnog uspona. Cena za to je bila, između ostalog, da se posle 1961. godine nijedno njegovo delo nije izvelo na MBZ. Na sledećem, VI Bijenalu (8–20. maj 1971), ponovo su u program uključena dela Rajka Maksimovića (Diptih Not to Be or to Be i Eppur si Muove za orkestar, 42 Darijan Božič, „Mlada kompozitorska generacija Jugoslavije“, u Međunarodni sastanak mladih kompozitora i muzikologa, Ohrid, 5–7. VIII 1966., šapirografisani materijal. 43 Ibid., 6. 44 Dušan Radić, Spisak kompozicija i komentari (Beograd: Sopstveno šapirografisano izdanje, 1987), 27. 45 Ibid., 27.
377
Melita Milin 1970), Erna Kiralja (Ref leksije I, II, III, za glas, gitaru i citru) i Josipa Kalčića (Preludijum za 15 instrumenata), a izvedene su i kompozicije Vladana Radovanovića (Evolucija za 18 gudača, 1970) i Aleksandra Obradovića (Mikrosonata 1 za solo klarinet, 1970). Radovanovićeva Evolucija, klastersko delo lučne forme, uspelo je ostvarenje koje će otvoriti vrata za češće prisustvo njegovih dela na narednim bijenalima. Zapravo, on je bio najizvođeniji srpski kompozitor na ovom festivalu u toku njegove prve tri decenije: 1963, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1985. i 1989; Rajko Maksimović je takođe imao uspeha učestvujući na sedam bijenala, Josip Kalčić, a Ludmila Frajt i Vuk Kulenović na četiri. Dok bijenalske svečanosti 1971. nisu izazvale niti naročito oduševljenje, ali ni posebne polemike, a podstakle su zaključak izvesnih stručnjaka da su jugoslovenska dela ponekad bila i značajnija od inostranih,46 sledeće, VII izdanje MBZ (14–20. maj 1973), bilo je uzbudljivije, jer je prikazalo raznolik program u kojem se našlo mesta kako za avangardne tendencije, tako i za one umerenije. To je bilo doba kada je počelo preispitivanje estetičkog imperativa stalnog inoviranja, u duhu tadašnjeg šireg, prvenstveno evropskog stišavanja avangardne groznice i potrage za različitim sintezama, kako unutar muzike, tako i u polju multimedija. Za srpsku muziku je od posebnog značaja bilo prvo predstavljanje javnosti elektroakustičkog stvaralaštva nastalog u novoosnovanom studiju Radio Beograda (1971). Pored dela stranih autora, prikazana su i jugoslovenska: Elektronska studija br. 1 i Elektra Vladana Radovanovića, dela Vojina Komadine (1933–97), Ive Maleca, kao i Britanca Pola Pinjona (Paul Pignon) (r.1939), kompetentnog elektronskog tehničara koji je pomogao da studio počne da radi, a istovremeno i autora prvog dela realizovanog u ovom studiju.47 Mikrosimfoniju za orkestar i traku Aleksandra Obradovića (1967) izveo je Simfonijski orkestar RTZ s dirigentom Igorom Kuljerićem, Strofe za kamerni ansambl Josipa Kalčića izveo je premijerno Budapest Chamber Ensemble (Budimpeštanski kamerni ansambl), dok su Srebrni zvuci (1972) za gudački kvatet i srebrne kašike Ludmile Frajt izvedeni na MBZ radionici. Nekoliko dela srpskih autora predstavljeno je preko magnetofonskih snimaka (kompozicije Rudolfa Bručija, Milorada Kuzmanovića, Vitomira Trifunovića, Zorana Hristića, Vlastimira Trajkovića i drugih), ali je danas teško naći konkretne podatke o njima. Elektronski studio Radio Beograda, kao jedini u tadašnjoj Jugoslaviji, bio je skoro redovno prisutan na sledećim bijenalima. Na predstavljanju njegovih novih ostvarenja na VIII Bijenalu (12–18. V 1975) izvedeno je, između ostalih, delo Josipa Kalčića Duboki Do, rađeno uz tehničku pomoć Vladana 46 Anon., „Retrospektiva kao memento. U susret Biennalu“, Zvuk 1 (1973), 93–107. 47 Zijo Kučukalić, „Elektronska muzika iz beogradskog studija“, Zvuk 4 (1973), 457–460.
378
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena Radovanovića, koji je imao priliku da na posebnom programu govori o idejno-estetskom usmerenju studija. Hor RTB pod upravom dirigenta Borivoja Simića izveo je program s delima Rajka Maksimovića (Tri madrigala), Minte Aleksinačkog (Bajalice), kao i horovima Slavenskog i Kelemena. Potrebno je napomenuti da je Maksimovićevo ostvarenje zapravo deo njegovog ciklusa madrigala Iz tmine pojanje (1973–75). Na Bijenalu su izvedeni stavovi „Togda beše glad“, „Lotov greh“ i „Zemlja bo i nebo“. Pored navedenih kompozicija srpskih autora, pojavilo se i ime Vitomira Trifunovića (1916–2007), urednika na Radio Beogradu i kompozitora koji je studije započeo kod Josipa Slavenskog i završio kod Milenka Živkovića: na programu koncerta Zagrebačkog kvarteta bio je njegov II Gudački kvartet. Trifunović pripada malobrojnoj grupi srpskih kompozitora koji su se, posle tradicionalno obojenih ranih ostvarenja, u zrelim godinama upustili u istraživanje prostora modernizma. Na sledećem, IX bijenalu (8–14. V 1977) ponovo je izvedeno jedno delo Vitomira Trifunovića: Impulsi za kontrabas i orkestar (1975) koje je interpretirao Simfonijski orkestar RTV Ljubljane s dirigentom Ričardom Difalom (Richard Dufallo) i solistom na kontrabasu Andrijom Potroškom. Dela trojice srpskih i trojice stranih kompozitora, našla su se na programu Beogradskog kamernog orkestra kojim je dirigovao Uroš Lajovic. Premijerno je izvedeno delo Zorana Hristića U roku od osam koje je kasnije bilo na repertoaru jednog austrijskog i jednog švedskog ansambla. Izabrana je i kompozicija Dva dodira praznine za mecosopran i gudače Milorada Kuzmanovića (1932–96). Treće delo jugoslovenskog kompozitora na ovom koncertu bila je Imaginacija III za kamerni orkestar Rudolfa Bručija i to je bilo jedino uživo izvedeno delo ovog kompozitora na svim bijenalima do 1991. Na koncertu dela nastalih u Elektronskom studiju RB predstavljen je i Nokturno Ludmile Frajt. Na X bijenalu (12–18. V 1979) broj učesnika iz Srbije bio je na sličnom nivou. Rajko Maksimović je porudžbinom koju je dobio za pisanje kompozicije za ansambl iz Lisabona koji se specijalizovao za savremenu muziku, potvrdio svoj renome uspešnog kompozitora, iako je u to vreme on već više godina stvarao na distanci prema radikalnoj avangardi. Za portugalske muzičare Maksimović je komponovao delo pod nazivom Tenderly?. Vladan Radovanović je doživeo vrlo pozitivnu recepciju svog Audiospacijala za osam ženskih glasova i elektronske zvukove (1978),48 a imao je i priliku da na izložbi u Galeriji suvremene umjetnosti prikaže retrospektivu svojih sintezijskih, odnosno audio-video-verbo-voko istraživanja od 1953. do 1979. Na predstavljanju dela nastalih u beogradskom Elektronskom studiju mogla se čuti i kompozicija 48 Eva Sedak, „Muzički biennale Zagreb 1979. Lice jednog jubileja“, Zvuk 4 (1979), 83–89, ovde 87.
379
Melita Milin Figure u pokretu Ludmile Frajt, dok se Erne Kiralj ostvarenjem Folk rustle za citrafon predstavio kao kompozitor i kao izvođač na tematskom koncertu „Jugoslovenska avangarda i folklor“. Osim što su uvek isticali da žele da poštuju pluralizam savremenih muzičkih izraza, organizatori MBZ su bili u toku sa novim muzičkim tendencijama u svetu, a one su ukazivale na izvestan zamor avangarde, na novi prodor minimalizma i raznovrsna stvaralačka preispitivanja. Tako je Ansambl za drugu novu muziku Studentskog kulturnog centra u Beogradu dobio priliku da izvede minimalističke Permutacije III i Permutacije V mladog srpskog kompozitora Miloša Raičkovića (r.1956), a prvi put se na bijenalu pojavio i Vuk Kulenović (1946–2017), koji je rođen u Sarajevu a, posle studija u Ljubljani, preselio se u Beograd gde je od početka 1970-ih godina gradio uspešnu karijeru ne oslanjajući se na nove avangardne tendencije, već istražujući u područjima minimalizma i modalnosti. U okviru MBZ radionice premijerno je izvedena njegova kompozicija Voces nocturnae za sopran, čembalo i elektroniku, a izvođači su bili Festivalski instrumentalni ansambl i dirigent Vjekoslav Šutej. Raičković i Kulenović bili su prvi srpski kompozitori na bijenalu rođeni posle II svetskog rata. Kulenović je bio prisutan i na sledećem, XI Bijenalu (9–17. V 1981), kada je Hor Slovačke filharmonije s dirigentom Lubomirom Matlom izveo njegovu kompoziciju ...in mezzo, al brivido astrale. Elektronski studio Radio Beograda bio je ponovo pozvan. Srpski kompozitori na programu bili su Miloš Petrović (1952–2010), mladi pijanista, džez muzičar, odnosno autor kompozicije Anton sa Webernom i bez Weberna (1980) i Vladan Radovanović s metamuzičkim projektima Transmodalizmi I i II (1979). Na programu Beogradskog gudačkog orkestra kojim je dirigovao Aleksandar Pavlović, a solistkinja na gitari bila Vera Ogrizović, izvedeno je delo koje je utisnulo jak pečat na srpsku muziku prethodne decenije: Arion, le nuove musiche za gitaru i gudače (1979) Vlastimira Trajkovića (1947–2017). Ovo ostvarenje, koje u podtekstu sadrži programsku ideju poziva na oslobađanje od „nove sholastike ’avangardnog’ jednoumlja“,49 donelo je svežinu jednostavnosti i novu osećajnost koja je je bila u oštroj opoziciji s tada još dominantnim avangardističkim težnjama kompozitora. Studio za tolkala [udaraljke] iz Ljubljane izveo je delo Ivane Stefanović (r.1948) Kuda sa pticom na dlanu za udaraljke i traku (1979). Na programu beogradskog Akademskog hora Collegium musicum kojim je dirigovala Darinka Matić-Marović bila su dela dvoje kompozitora iz Srbije: Ritual Srđana Hofmana (r.1944) i Prah Ksenije Zečević (1956–2006). Na koncertu koji je priredila Pavica Gvozdić izvedene su Reminiscencije Miroslava Štatkića (r.1951). 49 Vlastimir Trajković, „Oslobađanje od zabrana avangarde“, Politika (1. XI 1997), 24.
380
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena U odnosu na osam kompozitora iz Srbije predstavljenih te godine, njihov broj – samo troje – na sledećem, XII Bijenalu (22–28. IV 1983), bio je skoro simboličan. Izvedena su dela Zorana Hristića, Katarine Miljković (r.1959) i Vladimira Tošića (r.1949). Hristićev Decembar X, antikoncert za violinu, sintisajzer i simfonijski orkestar imao je čast da bude premijerno izveden na otvaranju festivala, a svirali su Zagrebački simfoničari s dirigentom Urošem Lajovicom i solistom na violini Jovanom Kolundžijom. Plavi prostor za devet instrumenata (delo su interpretirali članovi Festivalskog ansambla) Katarine Miljković iskorišćen je kao muzička podloga za kratak balet u izvođenju Zagrebačkog plesnog ansambla. Tošićevu minimalističku kompoziciju D-fuzija za dva klavira izveli su Fred Došek i Ksenija Kos. Na XIII Muzičkom bijenalu (19–25. IV 1985) dostojna pažnja je bila posvećena novom radiofonskom delu Vladana Radovanovića Malo večno jezero koje je najpre emitovano s trake na MBZ radionici, a kasnije istog dana prikazano u tekstu Mirjane Veselinović-Hofman u okviru simpozijuma „Skladateljske sinteze osamdesetih godina“. Iste večeri je sam Radovanović pročitao svoj prilog pod naslovom „Kompozitorske sinteze osamdesetih nisu samo muzičke“. Na ovom Bijenalu premijerno su izvedeni Kulenovićevi Prstenovi vremena za vokalni ansambl i elektroniku (britanski ansambl Electric Phoenix) i takođe premijerno dela Vladimira Tošića – Hromoserije za klavir, električni klavir, čembalo i čelestu (izvođači: Nada Kolundžija, Anđelka Marjanović, Ognjen Bogdanović i autor), kao i Jazz sonata za trombon i klavir Miroslava Štatkića koju su izveli Kiril Ribarski i Milica Šperović-Ribarski. Srpski kompozitori su bili minimalno zastupljeni i na programu XIV Bijenala (9–17. IV 1987). Na koncertu koji su priredili ansambli Muzičke akademije u Zagrebu, mešoviti hor s dirigentom Vladimirom Kranjčevićem izveo je premijerno Arios Vladimira Tošića. Divertimento Ensemble iz Milana je takođe premijerno izveo Dream quartet za violinu, violu, violončelo i klavir Miloša Raičkovića. Nešto je povoljnija bila situacija na XV bijenalu (8–14. IV 1989) kada je Elektronski studio Radio Beograda dobio priliku da se predstavi u okviru obeležavanja 40 godina elektrofonske muzike. Na programu tog koncerta su bile prikazane Figure u pokretu Ludmile Frajt, Lei parla italiano Miloša Petrovića, Déja vu Srđana Hofmana i Timbral Vladana Radovanovića, uzimajući u obzir stvaraoce iz Srbije. Na ovom Bijenalu izvedena je premijerno i Sekvenca 6 za alt saksofon i preparirani klavir Katarine Miljković. XVI Muzički bijenale (6–12. IV 1991), poslednji pred raspad Jugoslavije, obeležio je 30. godišnjicu tako što je, između ostalog, poverio muzikologu Evi Sedak da sastavi antologiju najznačajnijih dela koja su na njemu izvedena. Ideja je bila da to bude „MBZ fonoantologija. Prijedlog za zvučni presjek u 381
Melita Milin 300 minuta“. U izboru, u kojem dominiraju dela hrvatskih autora, našla su se i tri dela srpskih kompozitora: Tri haiku Rajka Maksimovića, Audiospacijal Vladana Radovanovića i ...in mezzo al brivido astrale... Vuka Kulenovića. Uz Maksimovićevu kompoziciju autorka antologija napisala je: „Maksimović je među prvima koji je u srpskoj muzici protoaavangardnost Ljubice Marić izoštrio u susretu s novim tehnikama. Tri haiku svojedobno mnogo obećavahu“. 50 Sedak smatra da je Radovanovićev Audiospacijal „skladba dugog daha i monolitne konstrukcije, ’opus perfectum’ gotovo suprotan autorovu konceptualističkom imageu što ga je do tada izgrađivao“, 51 dok u vezi s Kulenovićevom kompozicijom piše da „vremena postaju sve blaža, titraji, t.j. zvuk, t.j. glazba premošćuju svjetove od čaše do zvijezda nadajući se da će usput njihove ’harmonijski čiste plohe’, kako kaže Kulenović, dodirnuti i čovjeka“. 52 Na ovaj poslednji bijenale kad je Zagreb još bio jugoslovenski grad, iz Srbije su došli kao učesnici Zoran Erić (r.1950) s delom Slike haosa II. Abnormalni udarci Dogona za basklarinet, preparirani klavir, kompjuter i udaraljke (1991), Stevan Kovač-Tickmayer (r.1963) s kompozicijama za preparirani i obični klavir Gardon music (1987), Wild motions (1989), zatim izborom iz ciklusa Comedia Tempio (1990) za nekoliko instrumenata i kompozicijom Intelectual cabaret: Neeuklidovski plesovi (1991) za klavir i harmonijum, i Vuk Kulenović s kompozijom Om za jednog izvođača na raznim instrumentima (premijera). Kao što se može uočiti u ovom pregledu prvih šesnaest muzičkih bijenala s tačke gledišta učešća kompozitora iz Srbije, znatno veći prostor je posvećen prvim festivalima nego onima od kraja 1960-ih godina nadalje, jer je cilj bio da se pruži obuhvatni uvid u značaj ove uspešne inicijative i njene prve efekte, dok kasnija festivalska izdanja više nisu izazivala takve senzacije i šokove, ali su uspevala da održe visok nivo u pogledu prezentacije relevantnih aktuelnih muzičkih tokova u svetu i u zemlji. Za srpske kompozitore, kao uostalom i za hrvatske i ostale jugoslovenske, Muzički bijenale Zagreb je bio „prozor u svet“, kao i prilika da se predstave kolegama kompozitorima, ali i izvođačima, muzičkim kritičarima i producentima. Trebalo bi preduzeti posebno, vrlo obimno istraživanje koje bi uključilo muzikološku literaturu i repertoare izvođačih ansambala, da bismo dobili precizne pokazatelje o recepciji dela jugoslovenskih autora i saznali da li smo tokom vremena postali prepoznatljivi deo evropske ili svetske savremene muzičke scene. Pre nego što se eventualno takvo istraživanje ne obavi, može se samo izneti utisak da je internacional50 Eva Sedak, Eva, „30 godina MBZ (1961–1991): MBZ fonoantologija“, u Srećko Lipovčan, ur., XVI. muzički biennale Zagreb (Zagreb: Koncertna direkcija Zagreb, 1991), 64–90, ovde 82. 51 Ibid., 120–121. 52 Ibid., 121.
382
Muzički bijenale Zagreb i srpska muzička scena no priznanje pošlo za rukom samo nekolicini domaćih muzičkih stvaralaca, pri čemu ni ta činjenica ne mora uvek i neophodno da govori o umetničkom kvalitetu njihovih kompozicija, odnosno izostanak prodora na strana muzička tržišta ne mora da bude znak prosečnosti ili niže vrednosti. Kada se govori o srpskim kompozitorima čija su dela izvedena na bijenalima do 1991. godine, mora se konstatovati da su ona uglavnom bila reprezentativna i da su se uklapala u aktuelne tokove avangarde odnosno drugih stilskih orijentacija. S druge strane, bilo je dela srpskih autora koja su zasluživala da se pojave na programu MBZ, ali su različite okolnosti o kojima većinom ne možemo reći ništa sa sigurnošću, uticale da budu zanemarena (na primer, ograničeno koncertno vreme na raspolaganju, nemogućnost da se angažuju adekvatni ansambli i slično). U svakom slučaju, pitanje kriterijuma selekcije, odnosno porudžbina, ostalo je nedovoljno rasvetljeno. Razumljivo je da su organizatori pravili različite kompromise, što svakako nije bila specifičnost ovog festivala. Međutim, i kada se sve to uzme u obzir, ostaje izvesna nedoumica u vezi sa objektivno nedovoljnom zastupljenošću autora iz Srbije u odnosu na hrvatske pre svega, što je bilo zapaženo već na I Bijenalu. Na prvih šesnaest bijenala izvedena su dela 30 stvaralaca iz Srbije; veliki broj je imao samo jedno izvedeno delo ili dva u navedenom periodu, a među onima koji su bili najviše prisutni bili su Vladan Radovanović (osam), 53 Rajko Maksimović (sedam), 54 Josip Kalčić, Ludmila Frajt i Vuk Kulenović (po pet). U ovim razmatranjima bi svakako bilo neophodno uzeti u obzir i vrstu i trajanje dela, kao i podatak da li su izvođena uživo ili emitovana sa trake. Što se tiče srpskih izvođača, solista i ansambala, i njih je bilo u minimalnom broju. Bez obzira na navedene kvantitativne pokazatelje, u celini gledano, kompozitori i izvođači iz Srbije su imali znatne koristi od Muzičkog bijenala Zagreb, ne samo kad su bili učesnici, već i kad su prisustvovali kao slušaoci, jer je ovaj festival uspeo da postane relevantna međunarodna manifestacija. Razvoj srpske (i jugoslovenske, muzike) tokom poslednje tri decenije postojanja Jugoslavije povezan je sa dešavanjima na MBZ i bez sumnje bi bio drugačiji da veliki broj kompozitora nije dobijao stvaralačke podsticaje od upoznavanja s aktuelnim usmerenjima predstavljenim na ovom festivalu. Kako su godine prolazile, imali su sve više prilika da upoznaju i dela na inostranim festivalima specijalizovanim za novu muziku, ali dok je trajala Jugoslavija, ovaj festival je za njih uspevao da zadrži svoju važnost i privlačnost.
53 Uključujući emitovanje Audiospacijala u okviru predstavljanja Fonoantologije na XVI Bijenalu. 54 Ibid.
383
Melita Milin
384
Joan and John
Antoni Pizà Foundation for Iberian Music, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Joan and John: How Miró Sponsored the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Sitges in 1966* Abstract. A reconstruction of the 1966 event in Sitges (Spain) by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company with special attention to Joan Miró’s sponsorship and his friendship with John Cage. The role of the Club 49, an arts association concerned with the promotion of avant-garde practices, and especially the inf luence of Ricardo Gomis, a wealthy arts patron, and his ultramodern property La Ricarda, designed by architect Antoni Bonet, are also examined. The role of Spanish critics, intellectuals, and musicians is also analyzed.
In the spring of 1966, the renowned dance critic Clive Barnes, with his usual wit, claimed in a column in the New York Times that the State Department was “being subsidized by European painters”.1 He was sounding the alarm about a specific fact: while the Office of Cultural Presentations at the State Department was defunding many US projects abroad, prosperous visual artists were stepping in to foot part of the bill. A case in point – and the main motivation behind Barnes’s column – was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC). Throughout the sixties, and even earlier, it had built a solid reputation in Europe and Asia thanks to its international tours. Many of these had been bankrolled through a combination of sources: booking fees paid by the venues where the Company performed; many private donations collected through semi-public fundraisers in the US, and above all, many donations that had materialized through personal contacts, including in-kind gifts offered by the MCDC’s friends in the visual arts. Both Merce Cunningham and John Cage had had many * I am extremely grateful to Marita Gomis for encouraging this research; I am deeply indebted
1
to her for providing many sources of information and being an avid e-mail writer. Pilar Subirà Adelantado, a musician, music journalist, and radio personality, introduced me to her and has also been instrumental in shaping this essay. Clive Barnes, “Dance: Trouble with going abroad”, New York Times (21 May 1966), 24.
385
Antoni Pizà artistic partnerships with artists who eventually had become well-known and financially successful, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg being two clear examples. 2 Thus, to tap into the art world for subsidies was for the MCDC an almost natural modus operandi. 3 Barnes was a staunch defender of cultural diplomacy and apparently thought it was scandalous that the MCDC had been “evaluated” but not “nominated” for any grant in 1966. He supported his opinions with the argument that, in addition to the previous successes of the MCDC’s tours in Europe, “this year [1966] the company also received a number of foreign invitations, among them were a festival at Sitges, Spain, another in the south of France, a film-date in Hamburg and the very prestigious Berlin Festival”. Ultimately, though, he acknowledged: “However, the story has a happy, or fairly happy ending. The great Spanish painter Joan Miró, who had seen the Cunningham group in Paris, was so interested in getting the company to Spain that he donated one of his paintings to pay the company’s fares to Europe and back”.4 David Vaughan and Melissa Harris, archivists of the MCDC and authors of the Company’s official history, summarize that same difficult juncture as follows: The company returned to Europe twice in 1966. Once again, funding was a problem. The State Department refused to help. The summer tour was to begin in Sitges, Spain; to continue to the Fondation Maeght, Saint Paul-de-Vence, France; and conclude with the filming of Variations V in Hamburg. The airfares were covered by the gift of a painting by Joan Miró, who had seen the company in Paris in 1964. 5 2
3
4 5
386
Cage created several financial structures to support his artistic projects, including the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, aimed at establishing partnerships with visual artists, which functioned to receive art works to subsidize the MCDC’s tours. See Naima Prevots, Dance for export: Cultural diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press; Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998). See also Jennifer Harris, “Merce Cunningham: The Accidental Icon”, Honors Thesis / Wellesley College, 2012), 108–109. Both argue that since the MCDC was systematically excluded from government funds, Cage and his collaborators had to tap into the art world for funds. The MCDC not only innovated in dance, but also in fundraising for dance. A very readable account of all kinds of minutiae, including performance fees, of the MCDC can be found in David Vaughan and Melissa Harris, Merce Cunningham: Fifty years (New York: Aperture, 1997). Many primary sources are available also through the Merce Cunningham Trust, whose archives are open to the public at The New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Barnes, “Dance: Trouble with going abroad” (as note 2). Vaughan and Harris, Merce Cunningham: Fifty years (as note 4), 152. See also Calvin Tomkins, The bride and the bachelors: Five masters of the avant-garde (New York: Vinking Press, 1965), 269–270. Originally published in The New Yorker magazine, Tomkins, like Barnes, covers the lack of financial support from American officials for Cunningham’s tours. In addition
Joan and John And so, it was true: the MCDC was able to accept some of these invitations thanks to the generosity of Miró and others.6 The first stop of the tour was Sitges, a beautiful seaside resort about an hour away from Barcelona, where on July 29 1966, the MCDC would perform at the Teatro Prado. Early in the twentieth century, Sitges had been known as a retreat for artists, including Diaghilev and Massine, and bohemians and continuously since then as a liberalminded tourist destination, especially for the LGBTQ community. Barcelona, a cosmopolitan and large city, would have appeared to be the optimal place to host the first stop in the MCDC’s European tour but no venue was available and the Teatro Prado in Sitges was chosen as an alternative.7 Fortunately, Sitges had many advantages: in addition to its long-established artistic and liberal atmosphere open to innovation, it was near La Ricarda (also known as Casa Gomis), a villa built by Ricardo Gomis (1910–1993) and his wife Inés Bertrand (1915–1992). The Gomises were a highly cultivated family with a serious interest in the arts. The couple were supporters and friends of many artists and, from the very beginning, La Ricarda was thought of as a place to entertain artists and, above all, to foster creativity and artistic experimentation. A day after the performance in Sitges, on July 30 1966, the Gomis family hosted the whole MCDC troupe at La Ricarda; in addition they helped with the expenses of the Sitges performance. 8 La Ricarda had been built on farmland and marshes owned by Inés Bertrand’s family, wealthy textile entrepreneurs since the nineteenth century. Her husband, Ricardo was an engineer by training and took a keen interest in planning all
6
7
8
to the financial sacrifices the members of the MCDC had to endure in order to make the tours possible, the Company itself experienced many indignities: in 1964 they received an important award in Paris; the American Embassy it picked up, mailed it to the MCDC’s offices in NY and make them pay for forty cents for the some postage. In addition to Miró, Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002) also donated a work. Moreover, there were other private donations in Spain, which will be discussed later. Both Miró and Riopelle were working under contract by Galerie Maeght. The MCDC was to perform at the newly opened Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Composer Carles Santos has stated that it was only at the last moment that the performance was moved from Barcelona to Sitges, although there is no other documentation to corroborate his statement. Santos states: “Llegaron a Barcelona y en el último momento el teatro que los tenía que acoger no lo hizo, y al final todo se trasladó a Sitges”. See Josep Ruvira’s interview with Carles Santos, “El piano ya me lo traigo yo”, in Situaciones: Un Proyecto multidisciplinary en Cuenca, ed. by José A. Sánchez (Cuenca: Diputación de Cuenca/ Universidad de CastillaLa Mancha, 2003), 93. One of the daughters of Ricardo, Marita Gomis, keeps the family archive, which includes check stubs of some payments towards the MCDC’s transportation within Spain as well as other expenses. I visited the archive on 13 December 2015 and I have maintained a busy e-mail correspondence with Marita Gomis.
387
Antoni Pizà
Fig. 1. Teatro Prado, Sitges. From left to right: Gordon Mumma, John Cage, Raimon Tort, and David Tudor setting up the performance of the MCDC. Photographer unknown. Marita Gomis’ family archive.
construction and the design details of the house. (Incidentally, La Ricarda’s name has no connection to Ricardo Gomis’s first name). The home was to have the latest technology in design, appliances and – more importantly for the avant-garde-friendly couple – a state-of-the-art sound system for their own use and for their music soirées. A few years earlier, Gomis had recruited Raimon Tort Alemany to help him in the installation of their home’s sound system; and so, for the Sitges performance in 1966 Tort also provided the “James B. Lansing, Marantz y Revox” equipment, as the program spells out. Tort owned a hi-fi business, AUDIO, S.A., dedicated to designing as well as selling audio systems. However, he loved projects involving experimental music and the arts in general. Designing the proper sound system for La Ricarda and eventually helping the musicians ( John Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma) with the Sitges performance were a matter of passion, not only business.9 The construction of La Ricarda was finished in 1963. Originally, the Gomises had asked renowned architect Josep Lluís Sert to design the house but he declined the offer and recommended instead Antoni Bonet (1913-1989) who 9
388
I am grateful to Raimon Tort’s son, Antoni, who continues the A/V family business, for several emails describing his father’s artistic interests.
Joan and John
Fig. 2. La Ricarda or Casa Gomis; Antoni Bonet, architect; used by permission of the Town Hall of El Prat de Llobregat, photo by Sergi Ramos.
had trained with Sert and Le Corbusier. Accordingly, La Ricarda follows the strict principles of the modern style in its Spanish version sometimes referred to as racionalismo. Sert, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1953– 1969) and a good friend of Joan Miró, also designed the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Palma de Mallorca. He was also the architect of the second venue of the MCDC tour, the Fondation Maeght. It was a full circle: Miró, Sert, the Gomis family at La Ricarda, and the Fondation Maeght. In the early twentieth century, Sert had been one of the founding members of several associations aimed at promoting modernism and arts experimentation in Barcelona. First, there was the GATCPAC (Grup d’Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l’Arquitectura Contemporània or Group of Catalan Architects for the Advancement of Contemporary Architecture). From this group emerged another association, the ADALAN (Amics de l’Art Nou or Friends of New Art). Finally, this motivated the foundation of the Club 49,10 10 The activities of Club 49 were surveyed in a publication and an exhibition. Pilar Bonet and Marti Peran, eds, Club 49: Reobrir el joc, 1949–1971 (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2000). This publication accompanied an exhibition at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona 15 June–31 August 2000.
389
Antoni Pizà again to promote new developments in the arts. Some of its members were Joan Prats, a milliner and art advocate; the brothers Joaquim and Ricardo Gomis; composer Josep Maria Mestres-Quadreny; artist and art activist Joan Brossa; art critic Sebastià Gasch; and Joan Miró, among many others. Club 49 was the official sponsor of the MCDC’s performance in Teatro Prado, Sitges, as the program shows. Another member, Maria Lluïsa Borràs remembers how the Club got involved in bringing the MCDC to Barcelona: During that time, deep into the Franco regime, I was afraid to go to work outside my home because I thought they would accuse me of not taking care of my daughter […] Both Prats and Miró asked me to become the manager [secretaria] of Club 49 […] They offered it to me to get me out of the house, not because I was qualified. It was under Miró’s indication, and through the Club 49, that we invited Merce Cunningham to come to Barcelona to dance. He was touring Europe with John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg; we sent him a letter, which I wrote, and we explained to him that Club 49 wanted him to present the same show in Barcelona. And he agreed. Nonetheless, his budget was very high and the Club 49, formed by volunteers, had no funds. Miró made a lithograph, which he gave to the members of the Club – we all have one – and the rest were sold; with that money we were able to bring Merce Cunningham.11 Some events organized by Club 49 were hosted at La Ricarda. Indeed, throughout the sixties and beyond, La Ricarda presented a few avant-garde events, concerts, theater and performance “actions,” as they were termed.12 11 “En aquell temps, en ple franquisme, em feia por sortir a treballar a fora de casa perquè pensava que m’acusarien de no ocupar-me de la meva filla […] Prats i Miro, tots dos […] em van demanar que em fes càrrec de la secretaria del Club 49. Estic segur que no me la van oferir perquè creguessin que jo era la persona mes adequada o perquè els anava be, sinó per treure’m d’aquell aïllament i donar-me una feina que m’obligues a sortir […] I va ser per indicació seva que, a traves del Club 49, vam convidar Merce Cunningham perque vingués a ballar a Barcelona. Estava fent una gira per Europa amb John Cage i Robert Rauschenberg, i li vam enviar una carta que vaig escriure jo, explicant que el Club 49 volia presentar el seu espectacle, i ell va constar que si. Tanmateix el pressupost que va fixar era molt elevat, i el Club 49, format per un grup de persones voluntàries, no tenia fons. Miró va fer una litografia que va regalar als membres del Club 49 -tots en tenim una- i la resta es va posar a la venda; amb aquells diners vam poder portar Merce Cunningham”. See interview with Borràs in Joan Punyent Miró, Al voltant de Miró (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 2014), 74. All translations are mine, unless otherwise stated. 12 For a detailed survey of these performances see Helena Martin Nieva, “Les accions musicals de Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny i Joan Brossa a Casa Gomis-Bertrand de La Ricarda (1963–
390
Joan and John
Fig. 3. Interior of La Ricarda with the Butterf ly chair designed by Antoni Bonet. Photo by Asier Rúa.
The exquisite interiors and furniture were designed mostly by the same architect, Antoni Bonet, and included one of his signature designs, the airy and summery Butterf ly chair. This was the perfect setting to host the MCDC, beacons of modernity around the world. The beauty of the setting, the streamlined architecture and ornamental details, the exquisite décor, and above all the generosity of the Gomis family left a deep imprint on all the guests. John Cage later recollected: We spent the afternoon on the lawns of Ricardo Gomis’ estate outside Barcelona. The tortillas were delicious (omelets with potatoes and onions). The weather was perfect. Even though we were all there (and his five daughters and many other guests) the space was such it didn’t seem like a large party.13
66)”, Masters Thesis (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. 2009). Nieva is now completing a dissertation on the Club 49. 13 John Cage, Empty words (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 86.
391
Antoni Pizà
Figs. 4, 5, 6 John Cage and Merce Cunningham (David Tudor in the background), David Tudor at La Ricarda, 1966. Photos by Joaquim Gomis.
There seems to be a little divergence of memories about who exactly had the original idea of bringing the MCDC to Sitges or at least to Spain. Was it the Club 49’s idea or was it the MCDC’s initiative? It seems the idea was actually Cage’s, who in addition to composing was the MCDC’s main public relations person responsible for garnering the needed financial support for their European tour in 1966. Although many years after, Cunninham was quoted in the daily El País as saying: “I performed in Sitges, invited by Joan Miró, who drew the poster of our tour”,14 he and Cage had in fact pitched the idea before getting the invitation. As seen in the letters quoted below and Cage’s introduction to his own “Miró in the third person: 8 statements”, he came up with the idea of asking Miró to help subsidize the tour. When the Catalan artist accepted, he asked Cage to include Spain in the tour and also for some texts to accompany an edition of his upcoming gravures published by Maeght Éditeur. Most of the deal was done through the Galerie Maeght and one of its directors, Jacques Dupin, an art writer, Miró’s confidante, and the author of several critical volumes on Miró. At the same time, many seeds had been planted in Spain that had created a buzz among art lovers. For one, Spanish composer and artist-provocateur Juan Hidalgo had attended in 1958 the celebrated Darmstadt course and had met Cage. In 1959 both Hidalgo and Cage were in Italy working with Bruno Maderna. When Hidalgo, who was financially independent, returned to Barcelona that same year, he began advocating for new music and especially Cage’s music among the local composers, including Josep M. MestresQuadreny and the main members of the Club 49, especially Joan Prats and Joan Brossa. His enthusiasm for new music was such that some critics even referred to him as “the Spanish Cage”.15 One result of that activism was a 14 No author, El País July 25, 1985. 15 Llorenç Barber, “40 años de creación musical en España”, Tiempo de historia 62/6 ( January 1980), 207.
392
Joan and John series of concerts, Música oberta (Open music), whose main event that year was David Tudor’s concert on Nov 8, 1960. This Tudor concert was the main kernel that generated most of the local interest in the Cage and Cunningham artistic partnership. Cage definitely knew about Miró as the music editor of the arts journal Possibilities from 1947 to 1952, when Francis Lee interviewed the artist for the magazine.16 Nevertheless, it is quite plausible to think that Cage was acquainted with Miró’s art several decades before. During the 1930-31 period, Cage had traveled throughout Europe with his boyfriend, Don Sample (also known as Donald St Paul). A bright Harvard graduate and a sort of a precocious modern art connoisseur, Sample introduced him to European modernist currents, specifically James Joyce. Cage, therefore, was very well-informed about what went on in Paris in the early part of the twentieth century, and being au courant, of course, meant to be aware of Miró’s art. Incidentally, during his time in Paris, Cage casually met Josep (or José) Pijoan (1881–1963) on the street. Pijoan was a Catalan art historian who had taught at Pomona College, Cage’s alma mater. Cage credits him and this Paris encounter with having inspired his interest in “modern music and modern painting”.17 Furthermore, Cage wrote his first musical composition in Mallorca, Miró’s home island for most of his life. It could be argued, then, that there is a kind of “Catalan connection” (Pijoan-Miró-Cage-Mallorca) which later would be crowned by Cage’s friendship with the Duchamps, longtime residents of Cadaqués on the Catalan coast. It was at the Duchamps’ home in Cadaqués where Cage, in September 1966, two months after the Sitges performance, wrote the text, “Miró in the third person: 8 statements”.18 The story of how these “statements” originated and how the Sitges performance was arranged and sponsored by Miró can be partially surmised from Cage’s unpublished correspondence.19 The “statements” were also published independently by Cage and they were preceded by an introduction detailing how both artists met: 16 Francis Lee, “Interview with Miro”, Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947–1948), 66–67. The text is reproduced in Joan Miró: Selected writings and interviews, ed. by Margit Rowell (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), 204. 17 See http://johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html (last accessed: 30 Septembre 2016). 18 John Cage, A year from monday: New lectures and writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969). 19 See The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University Library, especially the following items: Box 5, Folder 10, Sleeve 1; Box 5, Folder 11, Sleeve 11; Box 6, Folder 4, Sleeve 12; Box 6, Folder 6, Sleeve 4; Box 6, Folder 6, Sleeve 4; Box 112, Folder 6, Sleeve 16. My gratitude to Greg MacAyeal, Curator of the Music Library, for expediting these documents.
393
Antoni Pizà One day I telephoned Miró. He was in a New York hotel about to leave for Europe. Our conversation was in French and I had never met him. I asked him to make a gift of a painting to the Cunningham Dance Foundation, explaining that this gift would make possible a European tour on the part of the dancers. (I knew Miró had seen the 1964 performances of Cunningham and his Company at Theâtre de l’Est Parisien and that he had been enthusiastic.) Miró asked me to write him a letter. I did. He replied generously, not only promising a gift but proposing performances in Spain for which he would made a poster. 20 Corroborating the story, on November 25 1965, Dupin wrote to Cage: He [Miró] is delighted that the Merce Cunningham Company had the idea of including Spain in its tour. He is also very happy that you are planning shows at the Maeght Foundation, he will personally be there. To help you with your plans in Barcelona and in Saint Paul de Vence, he agrees to execute a work that he will put at your disposal. 21 Another letter dated March 12, 1966 from Cage to Dupin seems almost desperate and frantic in tone and reads: Dear Mr. Dupin: The financial state of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is such that we will not be able to perform in Europe unless our travel expenses are covered. We are depending on the generosity of Miró. I am referring to your letter of November 25 in which you state that Miró agrees to execute a work that he will put at our disposal. Our total expenses are very high but we shall be finding some subsidy here. We are counting on the Miró work for us, that it will cover the travel expenses which are in the neighborhood of $20,000.00. You will understand that we need confirmation of this as soon as possible. Please let me know very soon what we may expect from the sale of the work of Miró. The Tour depends upon it. 22 Miró and Cage often communicated through Dupin or other intermediaries with typed letters on official letterhead. A few times, both added handwritten 20 Cage, A year from monday (as note 19), 85. 21 John Cage Collection, Box 5, Folder 10, Sleeve 1 (as note 20). 22 Letter at the library of the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca. The call number is FPJMFD 0472 – 5229, carpeta 11. Also FD0462 includes a note from Dupin to Miró stating that Cage accepts writing a text for the etchings.
394
Joan and John notes directly to each other. On one occasion, on a typed letter by Dupin, Miró had written: “J’ai beacoup regretté de ne pas vous rencontré [sic] avant mon depart, et espère vous voir bientôt. Tres amicablement, MIRÓ”. 23 Thus Cage, upping the ante, so to speak, and desperate to get the funds, adds to this letter in beautiful handwriting: “Dear Miró, We hope you will make this tour possible. It will be a miracle!”24 And a miracle it was. In late July 1966, John Cage, arriving separately from the rest of the troupe, landed at the Barcelona airport. Composer Josep Maria Mestres-Quadreny, Juan Hidalgo’s partner in new music activism and a member of the Club 49, picked him up and has left a vivid portrait of Cage’s early hours in Catalonia: That year [1966] the great event of the Club 49 was the presentation of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. This company came to Europe with a spectacle with music by John Cage for two pianos, performed by himself and David Tudor, to perform at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence and also at Teatro Prado in Sitges. Joan Miró created a lithograph to defray the expenses of the tour, which was also used to illustrate the poster and hand program. I took care of picking up Cage at the airport and taking him to Hotel Terramar in Sitges. His French was sufficient to carry on a conversation and, being a very extroverted person, we soon started a lively conversation, starting with the joy he felt to ride around the Garraf slopes, so similar, as he said, to the coastal slopes of California, where he hailed from, and then following through several aspects about music, which we continued for a good while as soon as we arrived at the hotel. “Music has been so much of the same for three centuries, that now it’s surprising that it could be different”, he said. Among other things he explained his project to mount an exhibition about new graphic musical notation, to which I would be invited to participate. The performance of the spectacle was a great success. An expectant public had filled the Teatro Prado, I even saw some young composers from Madrid, and all fervently applauded the artists. The next day, Ricard Gomis offered a reception at La Ricarda where he invited the whole company and we could all share a few hours and a few drinks with all of them. 25 23 Box 5, Folder 10, Sleeve 1 (as note 20). 24 FPJM-FD 0472–5229, carpeta 11 (as note 23). 25 Josep Maria Mestres-Quadreny, unpublished memoirs. The composer has explained most of these anecdotes in some of his published books, most importantly in Josep Maria MestresQuadreny, Tot recordant amics (Tarragona: Arola, 2007), 166. The unpublished version reads:
395
Antoni Pizà Mestres-Quadreny has also commented that one morning he and Cage strolled around Barcelona (it was probably Sunday July 31 1966) and Cage, seeing a public performance of the sardana, the national dance of Catalonia, and having a very jovial personality, joined the dancers with great enjoyment. When the whole company arrived, it was quite a sensation. A local journalist, comically, insisted on referring to Merce Cunningham as “Ms. Merce Cunningham” since in Catalonia “Mercè” is one of the most popular women’s names26 but most of the writing was very well informed and serious. Thus, the press offered several lengthy previews full of excitement and later there were a quite a few favorable reviews of the event. Xavier Montsalvatge, a well-known composer and writer, published an extensive article in La Vanguardia about a week before the Sitges performance. Despite Montsalvatge’s bent for tonal music and conventional forms and genres in his own compositions (his nostalgic Cinco canciones negras are an alltime favorite among many singers), as a critic he was open to experimental artists. He was also respectful of the members of the Club 49: wealthy art patrons like the Gomises and international artists such as Miró who could not be antagonized. His preview of the event highlighted the fact that Cage’s music gained by being associated with Cunningham’s choreography. The visual element, he claimed, made it easier for the audience to assimilate Cage’s complex musical language. Cunningham’s movements on the stage, he argued, created “an absolutely new kind of beauty”. 27 “Però aquell any el gran esdeveniment del Club 49 fou la presentació de Merce Cunningham and dance company. Aquesta companyia vingué a Europa amb un espectacle amb música de John Cage per a dos pianos, interpretats per ell mateix i per David Tudor, per fer una representació a la Fundació Maeght de Sant Pau de Vença i l’altra per al Club 49 al teatre del Prado a Sitges. Joan Miró va fer una litografia per a sufragar les despeses d’aquesta gira, que també serví pel cartell i el programa de mà. Jo em vaig ocupar de recollir Cage a l’aeroport per traslladar-lo al hotel Terramar de Sitges. Ell parlava un francès suficient per mantenir una conversa i, en tractar-se d’una persona molt extravertida vam engegar una animada conversa, començant pel goig que li feia circular per les costes de Garraf, tant semblants, segons deia, a les costes californianes d’on ell era originari i seguint per diversos aspectes de la música, que van prosseguir una bona estona un cop arribats a l’hotel. “La música ha estat tres segles tant igual que ara sorprèn que pugui ser diferent”, deia. Entre altres coses em va parlar del seu projecte de fer una exposició de noves grafies musicals a la qual jo seria invitat a participar. La representació de l’espectacle fou tot un èxit. Un públic expectant omplia de gom a gom el teatre del Prado, hi vaig veure fins i tot alguns compositors joves madrilenys, i va aplaudir amb fervor els artistes. El dia següent Ricard Gomis va fer una recepció a la Ricarda on va invitar a tota la companyia i vam poder compartir unes hores i unes copes amb tots ells.” 26 Delfí Colomé, “Dansa transitive”, Assaig de teatre: revista de l’Associació d’Investigació i Experimentació Teatral (Monogràfic: Dansa a Catalunya), 66–67 (2008), 85–94. 27 Xavier Montsalvatge, “El ballet de Merce Cunningham en Sitges”, La Vanguardia, 16 July 1966, 48.
396
Joan and John Arturo Llopis (Arturo Llorens Opisso’s nom de plume), a prestigious cultural reporter, profiled Joan Prats and Joaquim Gomis, founding members of the Club 49. The sponsorship of the MCDC’s Sitges performance, he asserted, was very much in line with the spirit that had always driven the Club. Prats and Gomis recalled their successful efforts, many years ago, when they organized exhibitions of Picasso and Miró, as well as many other lesser-known artists. In 1956, they recalled, they mounted a presentation by György Ligeti who spoke on electronic music and performed some of his scores. On a different occasion, Pierre Barbaud introduced his musical compositions on Bull computers. Llopis also acknowledged the sponsorship of Joan Obiols, a psychiatrist, professor, and eventually the Rector of the Universitat de Barcelona and one of main founding members of the Club 49. Other sponsors were the City of Sitges (Ajuntament de Sitges), whose mayor is quoted as saying that he applauded initiatives such as this because they brought back to Sitges “yesteryear’s artistic ambience”, especially when the ambiance is brought up to the present moment, as with the MCDC. According to the article, other sponsors were the Tourist Board (Fomento del Turismo), the Tourist Workers Union (Sindicato Local) and the Casino Prado Suburense, the club (or parent company) that hosted the actual theater. 28 The first review of the event came a few hours after the performance. An enthusiastic Llopis, a reporter and critic from the time when reviews were “dictated” over the phone, offered his readers his immediate reaction to the performance: “I am dictating these notes while at the Teatro Prado: the audience’s roaring applause continues, an audience that is enthusiastic and knowing and that has totally filled the old theater”. He mentioned that not only Cunningham but each individual dancer got a standing ovation; as did the shy musicians. He described the choreography as having an “obsessive plasticity” and finishes by saying “this is all one can say in a journalistic note written in the early hours of the morning”. 29 One of the most prominent founding members of the Club 49, Sebastià Gasch, was a very active modern arts promoter as well as a columnist for the conservative Madrid newspaper ABC. He used his column to highlight Barcelona as a center for modern creativity, as opposed to Madrid, seen as a bit less dynamic than Barcelona and a bit more bureaucratic and governmentoriented. His column stressed the role of the Club 49 in bringing the avant28 Arturo Llopis, “El Club 49 presenta a Cunningham y a los suyos”, La Vanguardia, 29 July 1966, 29. 29 Arturo Llopis, “Sitges: Éxito de ‘Merce Cunningham and Dance Company’”, La Vanguardia, 30 July 1966, 44.
397
Antoni Pizà garde to Barcelona and the excitement of the “free spirit” brought by the MCDC in which the artistic paradigms of authorship and creative responsibility, he elaborated, are substituted by a collaborative enterprise. Cunningham, Cage, and Tudor, he asserted, contributed their art without anyone knowing their exact role in the staging of these dances. 30 The cultural monthly Serra d’Or also published an essay by musicologist Montserrat Albet, “John Cage a Sitges”. 31 The fact that she focused on Cage and not on the MCDC is important. She claimed that the Sitges performance became an opportunity to experience Cage’s music up-close after having heard so much about it and she thought that the fact that that music and dance evolve on the stage independently and without any narrative or story was a plus. Albet asserted that the later performance at the Fondation Maeght the first week of August was not liked by the critics but that it was nevertheless attended by luminaries of the art world such as Chagall and Miró, and they all pronounced it a success. Zen, she argued, is seen in Europe as suspicious and that could be a problem for Cage, despite the outstanding success of his prepared piano. She suggested that Cage was best understood by contextualizing it with Umberto Eco’s ideas, especially his concept of “open artworks”, as well as the literary experimentations of Samuel Beckett and Ionesco. As a safe conclusion she said that although it might seem too early to really evaluate Cage’s music, so far it was worth paying attention, at least. There are a few written accounts of those days in Sitges by some members of the MCDC. Composer Gordon Mumma had just been hired as a sound producer for the troupe. His music was not performed on July 29 1966 in Sitges but in the Fondation Maeght, a few days later, Cunningham included Place, choreography based on Mumma’s electronic work Mesa. Michelle Fillion, editor of Mumma’s recent memoir, explains: In July 1966 Mumma and his wife Jackie [ Jacqueline Leuzinger] left Ann Arbor to tour with the company; his first professional appearance with them was in Sitges, Spain, on July 29. The connection was f lexible from the start – no contracts needed – and as work progressed Mumma soon proved himself an indispensable member of the musical trio with Cage and Tudor. 32 30 Sebastián Gasch, “Cunningham y su compañía de danza, en Sitges”, ABC 7, August 1966, 67. 31 Montserrat Albet, “John Cage a Sitges”, Serra d’Or 8/8 (August 1966), 72-73. 32 Gordon Mumma and Michelle Fillion, eds, Cybersonic arts: Adventures in American New Music (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 99.
398
Joan and John Mumma himself has written about their days in Sitges and a hilarious drinking episode: Following a rehearsal of the Cunningham Dance Company in the Spanish town of Sitges in July, we discovered that it was siesta time and the tractor-tram to our hotel was not running. A few dancers conceded to the long, hot walk; the rest of us decided to wait. A nearby store was ignoring siesta and Cage purchased a rare heavy sherry, Sandeman’s Bang Brown. Boarding the idle tram, Peter Saul and John resumed a previously suspended game of travel-board chess, sharing with the kibitzers the Brown Bang. A half-hour passed, the air grew hotter, the Brown Bang was finished, and the chess moved more slowly. David Tudor opened a secret bottle of coconut liqueur. The chess game stopped and unnoticeably the tram began its now quite surreal journey down the long beach to the Terramar Palace Hotel. 33 In a recent email communication Mumma added: One other amusing situation: only a short time before the performance I had stepped outside to buy some bottled water for us musicians. When I returned and tried to enter from the front entrance (rather than the stage-entrance) I was denied entry because I wasn’t on their list of the dancers. I showed them my name on the performance program, but that wasn’t sufficient for the front-door bureaucracy. So I had to get entry by going around the outside of the building to the stageentrance, where they recognized me, and arrived just a few minutes before the curtain went up. All of Sitges was a wonderful time, in hot weather. 34 One of the most important dancers of the MCDC, Carolyn Brown, has also left her impressions from that sojourn in Sitges: In late July, the Cunningham Company left for Spain and an idyllic four days on the coast of the Mediterranean at the Terra Palace Hotel, which rose like a gigantic wedding cake at the end of a long white crescent beach, a short jitney ride away from the outdoor Prado Theatre in the ancient town of Sitges, where our single performance did not begin until one hour before midnight. Usual for Spain, unusual for us. 35 33 Ibid., 181–182. 34 Mumma’s e-mail to the author on 25 January 2016. 35 Carolyn Brown, Chance and circumstance: Twenty years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007), 472.
399
Antoni Pizà
Figs 7a-b. Carolyn Brown
She details the names of the whole troupe, which included her mother, and of her dance students, the MCDC’s dancers, lighting designers, the musicians, and the company’s manager, among others. Her recollection that the Teatro Prado was an “outdoor” venue is incorrect, though. The subsequent Maeght performance was outdoors but not the one in Sitges. The Gomis archive holds many photos of the rehearsal and performance of the show. It was indeed inside. The following photos give a little insight on the rehearsal and performance at Teatro Prado in Sitges in 1966. They all come from Marita Gomis’ family archive. The photographer is unknown, perhaps a member of the Gomis family. 36 One more record helps us understand that summer in Sitges in 1966. The documents archived as part of the “Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation Collection” at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center contain a recording about ten minutes long. It is a voice-over in English for the 1966 film John Cage by Klaus Wildenhahn. 37 In his documentary, Wildenhahn follows the ensemble during their 1966 tour. In the English voice-over, he himself describes Cage’s composition, How to pass, kick, fall and run, which was performed in the 1966 European tour both in Sitges and the Fondation
36 The following individuals helped me identify the dancers: K. Meira Goldberg, Ailleen Pasloff, Wendy Perron, Carolyn Browan, Barbara Dilley, Sandra Neels. My deepest gratitude for their help. 37 This is not part of the “film-date in Hamburg” that Barnes mentions in the article quoted at the beginning of this essay (see Barnes, “Dance: Trouble with going abroad”, as note 2). That film is VARIATIONS V directed by Arne Arnbom and it was recently issued on DVD from Mode Records DVD 258.
400
Joan and John
Fig. 8. Merce Cunningham
Fig. 9. Sandra Neels (and Merce Cunningham in the background)
Fig. 10. Barbara Dilley-Lloyd Fig. 11. Sandra Neels and Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham
Maeght. 38 The dance is paired not with music but short texts by Cage read aloud by the composer, while sipping Champage in some performances, 39 and sometimes other people. In France Cage read the texts in “his own French” but we don’t know in what language they were read in Sitges. It could have been English, Spanish, Catalan or more likely in French, in preparation for the Fondation Maeght performance. Parts of texts, incidentally, were sometimes read simultaneously by two people, often making them incomprehensible; 38 For a detailed description to the MCDC’s choreographies see http://www.mercecunningham. org/trust (last accessed: 16 February 2018) 39 See Tomkins, The bride and the bachelors (as note 6), 269.
401
Antoni Pizà all the more because the voices were manipulated by electronic devices with sound modifiers changing color and intensity. Wildenhahn also focuses on the fact that Miró donated an artwork worth $20,000. Half of that amount was wired to the MCDC in advance, he says, but at the Fondation Maeght, Cage had to request from Daniel Lelong, Aimé Maeght’s general manager, the rest of the money. Wildenhahn mentions the “French system” of valuing art: for an established artist like Miró, the price is calculated according to the size of the artwork. So, Lelong and Maeght, he says, know exactly that this Miró is worth at least $20,000. Cage, tellingly, is quoted as saying that the role of the modern composer is that of a public relations agent in charge of fundraising. Wildenhahn actually mentions that venues are asked to provide the electronic equipment for these types of performances the same way “they provide a Steinway” for conventional concerts. Musicians in the MCDC, he continues, do not travel with heavy amplifiers, tape recorders, and loudspeakers. They do have sound modifiers, cables, sockets, and prepared tapes, however. Then, the musicians set up a switching system between sound source, sound modifiers and loud speakers. Their role is the “skilled, intuitive, and inventive manipulation of this system during performance”.40After Sitges, the MCDC left on a train to France for their performance at the Fondation Maeght. That performance created a lot of stress. The equipment was retained at the SpanishFrench border; the electricity at the Fondation did not work until later in the day of the first performance; the dancers were aff licted with splinters from the pine f loor of the stage. In the end all went well. This is the subject of another essay “Discipline and Cicadas” written by Gordon Mumma, always a great raconteur. He remembers it as follows: I have always been impressed with Cage’s discipline as a performer, particularly under unusual or difficult circumstances. On my first tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the summer of 1966 we performed in Saint-Paul de Vence on the French Riviera. We had traveled by train from our previous engagement, crossing the border from Spain that day. It turned out to be a national holiday and the customs offices were closed. All our equipment, costumes, and musical instruments would have to be held at the border until customs opened the next day. The performance was that night in an outdoor space at the Fondation Maeght to a sold-out house. I considered the situation a disaster. Cage, on the other hand, undertook a careful exploration 40 All the preceding quotes are from the film John Cage by Klaus Wildenhahn (1966).
402
Joan and John of the gallery and outdoor stage, experimenting with its inherent sounds. He dragged pieces of wood across the soggy, splintered stage. He considered the results in the context of the natural sounds of the space: screaming cicadas in the noonday sun and a croaking chorus of tree frogs that emerged later in the day. In the end we did get some of our equipment by a small private plane, chartered from Corsica, and the performance. Despite all the problems, many sources identify the 1966 event as a crucial point in Spanish music. Composer and conceptual artist Carles Santos has expressed exactly this idea: Santos considers the event very “important” and even “traumatic” for Spanish music.41 Its inf luence on contemporary dance has also been remarkable for the paths it opened.42 Recent surveys of avant-garde, experimental, and conceptual art highlight the inf luence of the event in all media and art forms, punk rock included.43 It all seemed to have happened thanks to the fundraising tactics of John Cage and the support of Joan Miró. Merce Cunningham ended that year speaking at a Dance Management Seminar (Dec 14 1966). Despite all the financial problems of his company he stated optimistically, almost triumphally: Dancers have a strength of community that they are not aware of, and that consists of the human interest of the people who have been involved [in], or whose lives have in some way touched, the dance. I was furious at the Rockefeller Brothers report that said that dance is in a state of chaos. That is not true. Despite being ignored, we have made a forceful and handsome art come alive. The American dance has brought glory to this country around the world. Chaos indeed!44 Clive Barnes would have agreed.
41 Sánchez, Situaciones (as note 8), 93. 42 Llorenç Barber and Pep Llopis, “Nuevas músicas y danza en la España de hoy”, Variaciones: Cuadernos de música contemporánea 3 (February 1995), 33. 43 Pilar Parcerisas, Conceptualismo(s) poéticos, políticos y periféricos: en torno al arte conceptal en España 1964–1980 (Madrid: Akal contemporaneo, 2007); Jorge Luis Marzo and Patricia Mayayo, Arte en España (1939–2015): Ideas, practicas, politicas (Madrid: Catedra, 2015); Pompeyo Perez Diaz, “Musica y Situacionismo: de John Cage al Punk Rock”, Revista de Musicologia 32/2 ( July 2009), 579–590. See also Helga de la Motte-Haber, “Die Gruppe Zaj: Cage-Rezeption in romanischen Ländern”, Positionen: Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 21 (November 1994), 32. 44 Vaughan and Harris, Merce Cunningham: Fifty years (as note 4), 156. They quote Lydia Joel, “Dance Management Seminar Held”, Dance Magazine 1967.
403
Antoni Pizà
404
Joan and John
Figs. 12 a-d. Hand program for the performance at Teatro Prado, Sitges 1966.
405
Antoni Pizà
406
heder
Images on music
407
heder
408
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works
Daniela Castaldo Università del Salento, Lecce
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissard’s Works ἁλωτὰ γίνετ’ ἐπιμελείᾳ καὶ πόνῳ ἅπαντα Φιλόπονος ἴσθι, καὶ βίον κτήσῃ καλόν 1 Abstract. During his several travels to Italy, especially to Rome, the French poet and antiquarian J. J. Boissard (1528–1602) joined the entourage of some of the most important collectors and connoisseurs of antiquities of that time. Like many others artists, he studied and copied the archaeological objects included in their collections and reproduced them in his works (Emblematum liber, 1593; Romanae vrbis topographiae & antiquitatum, 1597–1602; Parnassus cum imaginibus Musarum, 1601). Among them there are several representations of ancient musical themes and instruments: the goal of this contribution will be to identify the archaeological objects copied by Boissard and analyze how these iconographical models were reproduced in the work of some of the most important antiquarians of the eighteenth century, such as Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), Francesco Bianchini (1662–1729) and Jean Benjamin de La Borde (1734–1794).
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many scholars dealt with the history of ancient musical instruments. These early studies on ancient organology were not based on realia, i.e. the remains of ancient musical instruments, but on their depictions in Roman coins, gems, statues and bas-reliefs. As Zdravko Blažeković demonstrated in recent studies, “each of these works introduced new pictures into the canon, which together created a corpus of organological iconography repeatedly used in general surveys of music history, copied from one author to the other”. 2 1
“All things are accomplished by diligence and labor. Work hard and live happily”. Menander, Fragmenta: 19, 3; Sententiae: I 527. These two quotations of Menander appeared below the portrait of Boissard in the 1584 edition of Icones; see Augustin Calmet, s.v. “Jean Jacques Boissard”, Bibliothèque Lorraine ou Histoire des Hommes Illustres, vol.4 (Nancy: A. Leseure, 1751), 130–131; Auguste Castan, Jean-Jacques Boissard. Poète latin, dessinateur et antiquaire, Enfant de Besançon et citoyen de Metz, Extrait de Mémoires de la Société d’Emulation du Doubs – Séance publique di 17 décembre 1874 (Besançon: Imprimerie Dodivers et Compagnie, 1875), 65–91, here 77. 2 Zdravko Blažeković, “Francesco Bianchini’s triplex lyra in eighteenth-century music historiography”, in Musik, Raum, Akkord, Bild. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Dorothea
409
Daniela Castaldo Among the sources they cite with some regularity are works by the French engraver and humanist Jean Jacques Boissard (1528–1602). After his initial education at several universities in Germany, Boissard, like many other intellectuals of the time, traveled to Italy to study its collections of antiquities. 3 From 1555, he visited several cities, including Venice, Padua and Bologna, and then stopped in Rome where interest in archaeology was very strong at the time. He was admitted to the entourages of some of the most famous antiquity collectors, i.e. Cardinals Francesco Cesi (1500–1565), Rodolfo Pio da Carpi (1500–1564), and Carlo Carafa (1517–1561), and thus had the opportunity to study and reproduce pieces of their collections and some of the city’s monuments. In 1559, he visited Greece, Syria and Jerusalem before finally leaving Rome, when he returned to France and settled in Metz. He then began to publish his many works dealing with the most diverse subjects: portraits and biographies, customs and traditions of foreign peoples, emblems and antiquities. His Romanae Urbis Topographia & Antiquitates was certainly one of the antiquarian works with the widest diffusion in Europe. Published in Frankfurt between 1597 and 1602, it was a sort of topographical-monumental itinerary through Rome, consisting of four-day visits including the most important palaces and gardens with their prestigious collections of antique marbles and was ideally intended for scholars visiting the city to study its antiquities. The work, divided into six parts, contained ca. 800 plates with images of plants and city views, statues, bas-reliefs, funerary monuments and ancient (and modern) inscriptions, all created by the famous Frankfurt engraver Théodore de Bry (1528–1598).4 Some of the engravings included musical details which would be
3
4
410
Baumann / Music, space, chord, image: Festschrift for Dorothea Baumann’s 65th Birthday, ed. by Antonio Baldassarre (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 581–595; Idem, “Vesuvian organology in Charles Burney’s ‘General history of music’”, in Klänge der Vergangenheit: Die Interpretation von musikarchäologischen Artefakten im Kontext / Sound from the past. The interpretation of musical artifacts in an archaeological context, ed. by Ricardo Eichmann, Fang Jianjun, Lars-Christian Koch (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2012), 39–57; Idem, “Illustrations of Musical Instruments in Jean-Benjamin de La Borde’s ‘Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne’”, Musique-Images-Instruments 15 (2015), 143–170. On Boissard’s life and works, see Castan, Boissard (as note 1); M. H. Tribout de Merembert, Les années messines de Jean-Jacques Boissard archéologue et humaniste, 1559–1602 (Metz: Éditions Le Lorrain, 1967); Marianne Grivel, “Boissard”, in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon (AKL), vol. 12, ed. by Andreas Beyer, Bénédicte Savoy, Wolf Tegethoff (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), 320–321. Jean Jacques Boissard and Théodore de Bry, Vol. 1: Pars Romanae Urbis Topographia & Antiquitates (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1597); Vol. 2: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1597); Vol. 3: Pars antiquitatum seu Inscriptionum (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1597); Vol. 4: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum, sive II tomus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1598); Vol. 5: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum, sive III
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works
Fig. 1. “Priapus”. Jean-Jaques Boissard and Théodore de Bry, Vol. 2: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1597), 16.
dealt with several times in the subsequent literature. For example, in the scene “Priapus” illustrated in the second book, a female character is playing a wind instrument consisting of two tubes that unite in a single mouthpiece5 (fig. 1). This instrument, which is not historically documented but rather is the fruit of the imagination, is reproduced several times in surveys of aerophones, such as those shown in the plates of Bartholin’s De tibiis veterum,6 Bianchini’s De tribus generibus instrumentorum,7 Diderot and D’Alambert’s Dictionnaire 8 and Blainville’s Histoire générale, critique et philologique de la musique 9 (fig. 2). Appearing twice among the engravings with musical subjects is Hercules as musician, a rather rare iconographic theme documented only in coins and
5 6 7 8
9
tomus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1600); Vol. 6: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum, sive IIII tomus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum (Frankfurt/Main: Theodori de Bry, 1602). Boissard and de Bry, Vol. 2: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (as note 4), pl. 16. Caspar Bartholinus, De tibiis veterum (Rome: Ex Typographia Pauli Monetae, 1677), pl. 1. Francesco Bianchini, De tribus generibus instrumentorum (Rome: Fausto Amideo, 1742), pl. 1. Denise Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alambert, Recueil de planches sur les sciences. Les arts liberaux et les arts mechaniques, Vol. 21 part 2, pl. 1 (Paris: Briasson […], David […], Le Breton […], Durand […], 1767), suite 2, plate 1: “Instruments des anciens”. See Naomi J. Barker, “Undiscarded images: Illustrations of antique musical instruments in 17th- and 18th-century books, their sources and transmission”, Early Music 35/2 (2007), 193, 196, 202. Charles Henri de Blainville, Histoire générale, critique et philologique de la musique (Paris: Pissot, 1767), pl. 7.
411
Daniela Castaldo Fig. 2. Charles Henri de Blainville, Histoire générale, critique et philologique de la musique (Paris: Pissot, 1767), 7.
gems. The first image is the reproduction of a monument labeled “Apud Titum Celsum”, perhaps referring to the Roman aristocrat Titus Celsus. The hero appears to be standing in a frontal position near a club and a lion skin, holding a short sword and an old-fashioned lyre with an indeterminate number of strings. At his feet is a detail that appears in various engravings, a head wearing a Phrygian cap, perhaps belonging to a monument nearby. The inscription placed below can be interpreted as “dedicated to Herakles Musagetes”, leader of the Muses, [made] by Mnesiphilos.10 In a second bas-relief located (according to the inscription) “In via Appia”, Hercules is leaning on his club, facing an altar near a tree from which two crowns are hanging. A sixstring lyre with a form similar to the previous one is on the ground near the tree. The scene is completed by the inscription “Herculi Musarum Pythus”, “dedicated to Hercules as the leader of the Muses”.11 Pythus is an epithet of Apollo and alludes to the serpent Python that he killed: a chapter in Boissard’s De Divinatione 12 is devoted to “Apollo Pythius”, as oracular god, represented with lyre and arrow (fig. 3) and this same god is represented in Parnassus biceps where the author distinguishes him from “Apollon praeses Musis”, “leader of the Muses”, to whom is attributed only the lyre.13 10 Boissard and de Bry, Vol. 4: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (as note 4), 63. 11 Boissard and de Bry, Vol. 6: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (as note 4), 130. The hero is probably associated with the musical instrument also in a third scene, in which he appears with Apollo, perhaps in reference to the sign of Gemini which was under the influence of Mercury, a planet always considered particularly important and influential for musicians: Vol. 4: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (as note 4), 136. See Francesca Cannella, “‘The heroes of the fabulous history and the inventions ennobled by them’: The myth of the Argonauts between visual sources and literary ‘inventio’”, Music in Art 60/1–2 (2015), 191–202: here 198–199. 12 Jean Jacques Boissard, De Divinatione et magicis praestigiis (Oppenheim: Typis Hieronymi Galleri, 1615), 106–123. 13 Jean Jacques Boissard, Parnassus biceps (Frankfurt/Main: Wilhelm Fitzer, 1627), 27.
412
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works
Fig. 3. “Apollo Pythius”, Jean-Jaques Boissard, Parnassus biceps (Frankfurt/Main: Wilhelm Fitzer, 1627), 27.
413
Daniela Castaldo The strong analogy in the iconography between Apollo as musician and Hercules as musician here seems to be reiterated by the attribution to the hero of an epithet usually attributed to the god.14 The iconographical tradition of Hercules as musician is first documented in Roman times when the hero is mostly linked to Apollo and the Muses. Pausania, describing the Hellenistic temple of Asklepios at Messene, narrates that inside the temple were statues of Apollo, the Muses and Hercules.15 This tradition must have been followed by the consul Fulvius Nobilior when in 189 BC, after returning from a victorious campaign in Aetolia where he was accompanied by the poet Ennius (c. 239–c. 169 BC), he ordered the construction of a temple dedicated to Hercules Musagetes (leader of the Muses) in Rome. According to Eumenius (298 AD): Fulvius Nobilior dedicated to Hercules and the Muses a temple at Circus Flaminius, not simply out of his love for literature and his friendship with the eminent poet Ennius, but because when commanding the Roman troops in Greece he heard of Hercules Musagetes, companion and leader of the Muses. He was also the one who had the entire group of the Camenae transported from the city of Ambracia to Rome. He placed them under the protection of the strongest god because Hercules and the Camenae were to help and honor each other, as was correct, with reciprocal support and mutual advantage: the Muses’ tranquility in return for Hercules’ protection, and Hercules’ bravery in return for the voice of the Muses.16 According to some scholars, the image on a series of coins issued by the Roman moneyer Quintus Pomponius Musa (66 BC) may represent the statue of “Hercules Musarum” placed inside this temple. On the reverse of these coins, Pomponius Musa used the theme of the nine Muses, in reference to his cognomen.17 The iconography of the sardonyx cameo by the engraver Skylax (first century BC) refers to the theme on Quintus Pomponius Musa’s denarius, showing Hercules moving to the right while playing a twisted-arm lyre and wearing a large leonte (lion skin) hanging from his shoulders.18 14 “Pythus” is declined as the nominative case but to be in agreement with “Herculi” should be in the dative. 15 Pausania, Graeciae Descriptio, vol. 4, 31, 10, 2. 16 Eumenius, Panegirici, vol. 9, 7, 3. 17 For other examples of this iconography in the Roman age, see Daniela Castaldo, “Ercole musico: un esempio di ripresa rinascimentale”, Ocnus 18 (2010), 170–183, here 170. 18 Denarius of Quintus Pomponius Musa, Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, NUM 29475: see Monete sonanti. la cultura musicale nelle monete e nelle medaglie del Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna, exhibition catalogue, ed. by Paola Giovetti (Ferrara: Edisai, 2008), 58.
414
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works From the beginning of the sixteenth century, after a long period of silence, engravers began again to propose the iconographical theme of Hercules musician.19 Taken from Boissard’s plates were both the musical details (e.g. the lyres are reproduced in musical surveys such as Doni’s Lyra Barberina) 20 and the images of the hero to accompany texts about gods and ancient mythology (e.g. Beger’s Hercules Ethnicorum 21 (fig. 4a-4b) or the chapter dedicated to Hercules in Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures). 22 Boissard apparently liked this theme since there is further evidence of it in his works, such as Emblematum Liber published in 1593 in Frankfurt by Théodore de Bry. 23 The emblems, clearly demonstrating the author’s Protestant beliefs, were allegorical illustrations of virtues (Virtus, Libertas, Pudicitia, Sapientia, Amicitia) and vices (Invidia, Ingratitudo, Voluptas). 24 The frontispiece includes some of the numerous quotations from ancient authors presented in the work: above a Baroque arch is the inscription “Envy is the shadow of Virtue”, 25 Boissard’s motto, followed by two quotations from Menander “Fortune is the ally of all virtuous men”26 and below “Try more to well understand than to become rich”. 27 On the left side of the arch we see Hercules standing, wearing his leonte, with his club lying nearby; he is holding a lyre and his left arm is resting on his head. On the right side, Athena is portrayed, with her helmet and spear, standing on a shield. A very similar frontispiece precedes the French version of Emblemata, 28 but Apollo with the lyre and Hermes appear at the sides of the Baroque arch: hence it seems that Boissard used these two figures inter19 Alexandra Goulaki Voutyra, “Heracles and music”, RIdIM Newsletter 17 (1992), 2–14; Toby Youen, “Glyptic sources of Renaissance art”, in Engraved gems: Survivals and revivals, ed. by Clifford M. Brown (Hannover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 137–157. 20 Giovanni Battista Doni, Lyra Barberina, ed. by Antonio Francesco Gori and Giovanni Battista Passeri (Firenze: Stamperia Imperiale, 1763): pl. 9, 8, 10. See Claude V. Palisca, ed., G.B. Doni’s Lyra Barberina (Bologna: A.M.I.S., 1981). 21 Lorenz Beger, Hercules Ethnicorum Ex Variis Antiquitatum Reliquiis Delineatus Additis in fine Modernis Qibusdam Eiusdem argumenti Picturis (Berlin : s.n., 1705). pls. 30–31. 22 Bernard de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Paris: Chez Florentin Delaulne […], 1719), vol. 1, part 2, ch. 10, 133, pl. 137. Both Beger (as note 21) and de Montfaucon (along with Boissard, as note 4) cite the Skylax gem, taking it from Domenico de Rossi, Le gemme antiche figurate (Rome: Stamperia alla Pace […], 1707), pl. 92. 23 Jean Jacques Boissard, Emblematum liber (Frankfurt/Main: Theodor de Bry, 1593). 24 Alison Adams, “Jean-Jacques Boissard: Humanist and Christian”, in Webs of allusions: French protestant emblem books of the sixteenth century (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 230–291. 25 “ΑΡΕΤΗϹ ΣKIA ΦΘONOC ”. 26 “ΠΑϹΙΝ ΕΝΦΡΟΝΟΥϹΙ ϹΥΜ ΜΑΧΕΙ ΤΥΧΗ”: Menander (as note 1), fr. 714. 27 “ΚΑΛΩ AKOΥEIN MAΛΛON H ΠLOΥTEIN ΘELE”: Menander, Sent. 406 Jäkel. 28 Jean Jacques Boissard, Emblesmes latins de J.-J. Boissard, avec l’interprétation françoise du I. Pierre Joly (Metz: Jean Aubry and Abraham Faber, 1588).
415
Daniela Castaldo
Figs. 4 a-b. Reproductions of Jean Jacques Boissard and Théodore de Bry, vol. 6: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum, sive IIII tomus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum (Frankfurt/Main: Theodori de Bry, 1602), 130; and Jean Jacques Boissard and Théodore de Bry, vol. 4: Pars Antiquitatum Romanarum (Frankfurt/Main: apud Iohannem Feyrabend, impensis Theodori de Bry, 1598), 63. Lorenz Beger, Hercules Ethnicorum Ex Variis Antiquitatum Reliquiis Delineatus Additis in fine Modernis Qibusdam Eiusdem argumenti Picturis (Berlin: s.n., 1705), 30–31.
changeably on the frontispieces, attributing them purely decorative value. 29 Another image of the hero, very similar to this one, appears on Emblem 17, dedicated to the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1528–1598) (fig. 5). Above is the inscription “Virtue is made more vigorous by envy”. 30 In the middle of the pictura, two women are facing each other: one, Virtue, gives a book to the other, Envy, who is holding a scale. On the left is a base with the inscription “Actions weighed by Envy’s scale lead to more perfect glory”. 31 On the base is a statue holding a lyre, which probably can be interpreted as Her29 On the frontispiece of Jean Jacques Boissard, Emblemata cum tetrastichis latinis (Metz: Jean Aubry, 1584), Zeus and Hercules with club and apple appear at the sides of the arch. 30 “VIRTVS INVIDIA FIT EXCITATIOR”. 31 “QUAE BILANCE LIBRANTVR INVIDIAE, GLORIAM ADQVIRVNT PERFECTIOREM”.
416
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works
Fig. 5. Emblem 17. Jean Jacques Boissard, Emblematum liber (Frankfurt/Main : Theodor de Bry, 1593).
cules because the figure is wearing a leonte. Once again the subscriptio stresses that Virtue is incited by Envy:32 “Virtue inspires envy: envy censures, and 32 Adams, Jean-Jacques Boissard (as note 24), 257–258.
417
Daniela Castaldo
Fig. 6. Emblem 46. Jean-Jacques Boissard, Dionysii Lebei Batillii, Emblemata. Emblemata a Jano Jac. Boissardo delineata sunt et a Theodoro de Bry sculpta (Frankfurt/Main: s.n., 1596).
corrects whenever virtue is acting more sluggishly. By envy’s censure, virtue f lourishes, and she inspires any task requiring effort and application”. 33 The presence of a youth kneeling and embracing his knees reminds us of the scene engraved on Dioskourides’ famous cornelian portraying the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, where the young Olympus is kneeling while pleading for mercy for the satyr. 34 The iconographic theme of Hercules playing a lyre seems once again to overlap the god Apollo, the other, more famous, lyre player: the club and the lion skin are the only elements that allow us to identify this figure as Hercules. According to Boissard’s poetics, this Hercules as musician as an emblem of Virtue should become the symbol of the virtuous man, endowed with constantia, perseverance. The French artist again proposes this musical theme in a pictura for Denis Lebey de Batilly’s Emblemata (1596): Emblem 46, dedicated to Josephum Scaligerum ( Joseph Justus Scaliger, 1540– 1609), a French writer and humanist from Italy and inventor of the Julian day, shows the inscription “Hercules Musagetes” (fig. 6). In the pictura we can see a statue of the hero inside an architectural structure whose subscriptio suggests it is the temple of Hercules Musarum built in Rome 33 “Excitat invidiam virtus: perstringit at illa, / Corrigit & quicquid segniùs ista facit. / Huius censura virtus viget, excita ad omne / Quod cura & studiis aggrediatur opus”. 34 Cornelian by Dioskourides, Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, n. 213, inv. 26051.
418
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works by Fulvius Nobilior. 35 The last occurrence of the hero as musician in Boissard’s works is in Parnassus cum imaginibus Musarum deorumque (1601): Apollo and the Muses are on the top of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses (“Parnassus mons Musis sacer”), 36 whereas Hercules as musician, Pan (?), Jupiter and Athena are represented at its base. Apollo is playing a lyre with a form very similar to that of Hercules, which in the upper part of the yoke presents a curious face-shaped ornament (fig. 7a). After this overview, a plate is dedicated to each character: “Apollo Musarum praeses”, who leads the Muses with the sound of his lyre, is leaning against a tree trunk around which the serpent Python is wrapped. At his feet are the palm and the trumpets that symbolize victory. After Pallas Athena, the series of Muses begins. The musical instruments attributed to them are: aerophones to Melpomene, Calliope, Polyhymnia, and a curious string instrument to Erato37 (fig. 7b). The compass, which in the iconographic tradition is attributed to Urania, together with the sphere, is transformed into a double wind instrument in Boissard’s version. The series of the Muses concludes with Hercules as lyre player, “Musarum protector”, standing and leaning on his club with an old-fashioned lyre in his right hand and wearing a leonte. At his feet, near Pan holding a mask, are several pipes of some wind instruments, among them a syrinx, a clear reference to a pastoral context 38 (fig. 7c). After Bacchus, which concludes the review of the gods, the most famous poets of antiquity are illustrated: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sappho, Virgil. The curious string instrument attributed to Erato (an oval sound box with C-shaped holes, with the strings attached to a decoration in the shape of palms at the top) is also seen beside the poet Pindar. Thus, all the instruments illustrated by Boissard have fantastic features, recalling ancient times in some cases; even when they are not completely the fruit of the imagination they are quite remote from real models. In the Epistola of Parnassus, Boissard provides the key to interpretation of the work: the presence of the Muses is connected to the harmony of the spheres, to which they impart movement by singing and playing. 39 Here Boissard is allied with the neo-Platonic theories of Macrobius (early fifth century AD) and Martianus Capella (active c. 410–420) according to whom each Muse imparts movement to the planet with which she is associated. This tradition was also 35 Jean-Jacques Boissard, Dionysii Lebei Batillii, Emblemata. Emblemata a Jano Jac. Boissardo delineata sunt et a Theodoro de Bry sculpta (Frankfurt/Main: s.n., 1596). 36 Jean-Jacques Boissard, Parnassus cum imaginibus Musarum deorumque praesidum Hippocrenes (Frankfurt/Main: Theodori de Bry, 1601), 4. 37 Ibid., 11 (“Erato lyram excogitavit. Nuptialia et saltationes tractat”). 38 Ibid., 16. 39 Ibid., Epistola.
419
Daniela Castaldo
Fig. 7a-c. Jean Jacques Boissard Parnassus cum imaginibus Musarum deorumque (Frankfurt/Main: Theodori de Bry, 1601), 4 (Parnassus Mons), 11 (Erato), 16 (Hercules lyre player).
adopted in iconography starting from the fifteenth century, as can be seen in the Mantegna Tarocchi, in Ludovico Lazzarelli’s De Gentilium deorum imaginibus (1471, 1474) and on the frontispiece of Franchino Gaffurio’s De practica musicae (1496). This concept probably also inspired one of Boissard’s first works, the illustrations to Ovid’s Metamorphosis: here, departing from the previous iconographical tradition, he associates each book with a Muse to express the concept that the motion of the spheres is caused by the Muses 40 (fig. 8). Hercules as musician is present not because he is “litteris cultus”, a “man of letters”, but because he was considered a friend of the Muses, both because he offered them “amplam scribendi materiam”, “so much material for their art” and because they enjoyed his protection and thus could devote themselves serenely to their artistic activities.41 This concept was repeated in the commentary found in the illustration of “Hercules Musagetes, Musarum Protector”. The caption reiterates the concept already expressed in the Epistola dedicatoria: “I am offering material for writing to the sacred Muses who are endowed with tranquility due to my protection”.42 The relationship between Hercules as musician and the Muses is very similar to that between the poet and the 40 See Michael Thimann, Jean Jacques Boissard. Ovids ‘Metamorphosen’ 1556: Die Bildhandschrift 79 C 7 aus dem Berliner Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin: Mann, 2005), 36–38. 41 Boissard, Parnassus: Epistola (as note 36): “Musis gratus et amicus fuisse creditus est: tum quod illis amplam scribendi materiam praebuerit: tum quod protectione dei fortissimi tranquilla degant quiete”. 42 Boissard, Parnassus (as note 36): 16: “Materiam sacris scribendi praebeo Musis / Sub nostro quibus est numine parta quies”.
420
Images of Ancient Music in Jean-Jacques Boissards's Works
Fig. 8. Jean Jacques Boissard: Ovids ‘Metamorphosen’, fol. 2v, in Michael Thimann, Jean Jacques Boissard: Ovids ‘Metamorphosen’ 1556: Die Bildhandschrift 79 C 7 aus dem Berliner Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin: Mann, 2005), 90.
421
Daniela Castaldo patron: the patron protects the poet who in turn will render him greater service, making him immortal through his verses.43 Boissard takes up this theme which, brought to the attention of his contemporaries thanks to works such as Giglio Gregorio Giraldi’s Herculis vita,44 became a favorite subject of French poets from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Hercule Défenseur des Muses was the particularly eloquent title of the poem which Amadis Jamyn (1538–1592) dedicated to François d’Alençon (1555–1584), whose baptismal name was Ercole and who would become the Duke of Anjou in 1574.45 Ronsard expressed it even more openly in Elégie à J. De la Perouse “they host Hercules in the temple of the nine sisters to demonstrate that their power is exhausted if a hero does not take their hand firmly, and that their verses are disregarded if not favored by a great king”.46 From this brief overview, it is clear that the reproduction of classical models in Boissard’s work was inspired by an archaeological and antiquarian interest, with the desire both to catalogue the monuments and the works of the most important collections and to reinterpret the figurative themes of the classical world in order to adapt them to the contemporary historical and cultural reality and thus express new more modern meanings.
43 Marc-René Jung, Hercule dans la littérature française du XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 131. 44 Giglio Gregorio Giraldi’s Herculis vita (Basel: apud Mich. Ising, 1539), 71; see also Coluccio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis (unfinished, 1383, 1391), edition: Berthold L. Ullman, Coluccii Salutati De laboribus Herculis (Zurich: Artemis, 1951). 45 Amadis Jamyn, Oeuvres poétiques (Paris: M. Patisson, 1575), 16v–18r. 46 Pierre de Ronsard, Elégie à J. De la Péruse = Cinquième livre des Odes (Paris: Chez la veuve Maurice de la Porte, 1553), 264: “Logeoient Hercule au temple des neufs soeurs, / Pour demontrer que leur puissance est morte, /Si quelque Héros ne leur tient la main forte, / Et quel es vers demeurent déprisés / Si d’un grand Roi ne sont favorisés”.
422
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Elena Ferrari-Barassi Università degli Studi di Pavia, Dipartimento di Musicologia e Beni Culturali
Antonio Canova e Le Muse: scultura, Tempera e altri Mezzi per Reinterpretare l’Antichità Abstract. Antonio Canova and The Muses: Marble, Tempera and Other Means to Reinterpret Antiquity. Antonio Canova, the great neoclassic Italian sculptor (1757–1822), represented the Muses on various occasions using different artistic means including tempera on paper and marble sculpture – sometimes using ideas from the temperas for later statues. He allowed his best works to be reproduced in burin-and-etching prints issued from his calcographic laboratory. Imagery of the Muses has existed since Antiquity, their attitudes and attributes becoming fixed in a cycle originated in Pompeii (first century CE) and later reproduced in a printed volume in Naples (1757). Muses related to music are Erato (lyrical poetry), Euterpe (music) Terpsichore (dance and choral poetry) and Polyhymnia (sacred singing and/ or pantomime). Canova gives Erato, who usually holds a kithára, a new animated interpretation in his marble Dancer with hands on hips (ca. 1802). Later he shaped a majestic marble Terpsichore, holding a non-realistic lyra (1811); this work was subsequently reproduced in different engravings. The statue, first conceived as a portrait of Alexandrine, second wife of Napoleon’s brother, Luciano Bonaparte, soon had its head changed for an anonymous one and was sold to a different client. Canova portrayed further members of the Bonaparte family, later reproduced in engravings: Napoleon as Mars, his mother Laetitia as Madame Mère, his second wife Empress Marie-Louise as Concordia, his sisters Paolina as Venus and Carolina in a bust like her husband Gioachino Murat, King of Naples 1808–1815. Another sister, Elisa, Princess of Lucca and Piombino, commissioned a portrait as a seated Muse Polyhymnia, but in 1814 she was dethroned. The statue, now in the Hof burg in Vienna, was acquired by the state of Venice and presented, with a changed face, to Emperor Francis I of Austria for his fourth wedding (1818). In this Polyhymnia attitude, expression and attributes (a half-concealed mask and a neglected f lower wreath) reject the arts of mime and dance for a quiet introspection and meditation.
Ho già avuto occasione di studiare da un punto di vista iconografico-musicale opere dello scultore italiano Antonio Canova (1757–1822), interprete d’alto rango di quel neoclassicismo figurativo, che dimorò in Europa a cavallo delle sconvolgenti vicende militari e politiche aventi a protagonista Napoleone 423
Elena Ferrari-Barassi Bonaparte (1769–1821). Presentai quello studio a un simposio del quale fu anima Zdravko Blažeković:1 mi sembra ora che un’espansione dello stesso tema possa costituire un omaggio gradito a quel collega e amico, tanto autorevole in campo scientifico quanto amabile nei rapporti umani. In quell’occasione mi occupai di figure di danzatrici, per le quali identificai quali fonti d’ispirazione alcuni degli affreschi rinvenuti a Pompei durante le campagne di scavi promosse da due re di Napoli della famiglia Borbone, Carlo III (1734–1759) e Ferdinando IV (1759–1806, poi nel 1815–1816 detto Ferdinando I delle Due Sicilie): quegli affreschi distaccati, accanto ad altre opere d’arte provenienti da Ercolano e da ulteriori terre vesuviane, si trovavano collocati nel cosiddetto Museo Ercolanese situato a Portici; si trattava di una collezione privata dei sovrani, della quale era consentita la visita solo a persone privilegiate. 2 Di fatto quel Museo e gli scavi vesuviani facevano parte, quale “meta obbligata”, del cosiddetto Grand Tour, viaggio d’istruzione, il quale era spesso compiuto a partire dal XVII secolo da artisti, persone colte e giovani aristocratici provenienti da tutta Europa e che comprendeva varie città di Francia e d’Italia. 3 Per quanto riguarda Napoli, nel 1562 tale viaggio ebbe quale rappresentante particolarmente prestigioso e qualificato lo storico e critico d’arte tedesco Johann Joachim Winckelmann.4 Anche Antonio Canova nel 1780, durante un suo soggiorno a Napoli in età giovanile, visitò con alcuni amici il Museo di Portici, del quale lasciò alcune impressioni scritte;5 ma naturalmente, volendo abbeverarsi alle fonti dell’arte antica, che allora offriva agli artisti modelli considerati indispensabili, egli aveva solo l’imbarazzo della scelta anche quando si tratteneva a Roma: infatti in quella città egli ebbe lo studio e risiedette 1
2 3
4 5
424
Elena Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography of conography: Dance in ancient Roman representaions, Canova’s works and their reproductions in engravings”, Music in Art (Neoclassical reverberations of discovering antiquity. Selected Papers presented at the Twelfth Shymposium of the ICTM Study Group on the Iconography of the Performing Arts. Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte, Turin, 6–9 October 2014) 40/1–2 (2015), 45–78. Notizie e bibliografia in Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 57–59. Cfr. Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London: Thames Methuen, 1987); Geoffrey Trease, The Grand Tour (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Edward Chaney, The evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance (London & Portland: Frank Cass Publisher, 1998; rev. ed. 2000); Paola D’Alconzo, “Facing antiquity, back and forth, in eighteenth-century Naples”, Music in Art 40/1–2 (2015), 9–43; FerrariBarassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 59–60. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen: an den Hochgebohrnen Herrn, Herrn Heinrich Reichsgrafen von Brühl (Dresden: George Conrad Walther, 1762). Antonio Canova, “I Quaderni di viaggio (1779–1780)”, in Scritti (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2007), a cura di Hugh Honour & Paolo Mariuz, 117–118. Cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 59–60.
Antonio Canova e le Muse per la maggior parte della sua vita dal 1779 in poi; lì nel 1802 egli fu addirittura nominato da papa Pio VII (1742–1823) “Ispettore Generale delle Antichità e delle Arti dello Stato della Chiesa”. Nel modellare, fra le molte figure singole e i molti gruppi mitologici, Ebe coppiera degli dei e tre danzatrici, Canova seguì una vena di grazia e movimento protesa verso l’arte ellenistica, piuttosto che verso la staticità “classica” di Fidia. Il primo risultato dei suoi lavori si poteva già ammirare nei modelli in gesso, testimonianze vive e originali poi fedelmente rif lesse nelle opere in marmo. Due di queste statue, la Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi (fig. 1) e la Danzatrice col dito al mento (fig. 2), arieggiavano ideali figure di ninfe, mentre la terza, Danzatrice con i cembali, riprendeva piuttosto, in forma gentile e f lessuosa, gli atti e i contorni di una baccante munita di un paio di cembali destinati a sottolineare ritmicamente la danza. Escludendo questa terza danzatrice, le altre due si possono assimilare alla lontana, oltre che a ninfe, anche a figure di Muse, in particolare Tersicore e Polimnia. Se consideriamo la carriera artistica del Canova, vediamo un filo rosso unire quelle due ninfe danzanti a questi personaggi mitologici; il filo è sottile e si svolge in modo differente nei due casi, ma è reale, benché non riconoscibile senza qualche difficoltà. Curiosamente un’autorevole anticipazione del legame di quelle due Muse con la danza si ravvisa in un dipinto che sicuramente il nostro artista conosceva: l’affresco del Parnaso di Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779) (fig. 3), annuncio significativo o addirittura manifesto del neoclassicismo: esso fu compiuto nel 1761 nel palazzo del cardinale Alessandro Albani, oggi di proprietà Torlonia. Sulla scia del Parnaso di Raffaello, ma con debite innovazioni, vi si vede al centro Apollo in piedi, ignudo e munito di lyra, e ai lati le Muse accompagnate dai rispettivi attributi, in vari atteggiamenti in piedi o sedute, con la loro genitrice Mnemosine; ma nel connotarle il Mengs, pur aderendo a modelli dell’antichità, non lo fa con lo stesso scrupolo poi osservato dal Canova e ricorre in buona parte alla fantasia. Ad esempio Mnemosine, diversamente da quanto suggeriscono modelli antichi, gesticola con fare eloquente ed estroverso; e Tersicore e Polimnia, le due Muse all’estrema sinistra, danzano animatamente fra loro coronate di fiori, benché Tersicore senza interrompere il ballo si stringa al petto l’immancabile lyra. Per continuare a discutere del rapporto fra Canova e le Muse, è essenziale ora chiamare in causa una serie di suoi dipinti su carta, estranei dunque alla produzione maggiore e più nota di lui, quella scultorea. Si tratta di alcune immagini, fra le molte de lui eseguite a tempera fra il 1796 e il 1800, che un anonimo catalogo dei suoi lavori stampato nel 1817 e ripubblicato varie volte ai suoi giorni, definisce come “varj pensieri di danze, e scherzi di Ninfe con amori, di Muse, e Filosofi ecc. disegnati per solo studio, e diletto dell’Arti425
Elena Ferrari-Barassi sta”;6 queste opere sono conservate nel Museo e Gipsoteca Antonio Canova situato a Possagno (Treviso) nell’ex casa natale dell’artista.7 A loro proposito il biografo del Canova Leopoldo Cicognara, che anch’egli offre un inventario delle opere del maestro, riferisce: “Soleva egli chiamar ozii suoi que’ disegni gentili […], nei quali si trovano i leggiadri motivi di molte sue statue”. 8 Entro le trentaquattro tempere di Possagno sono riconoscibili tre raggruppamenti: Danzatrici; Ninfe con amorini; Muse con filosofi e poeti.9 Nel mio precedente saggio ne avevo preso in considerazione particolarmente un paio dal ciclo delle Danzatrici e una da quello delle Muse con filosofi e poeti. Nell’aspetto e nelle movenze quelle figure anticipano senz’altro alla lontana le nominate statue marmoree di danzatrici, anzi le si può vedere quasi come studi preparatori.10 Ora, ricorrendo di nuovo a quella stessa raccolta di tempere, fisso l’attenzione in particolare sul ciclo Muse con filosofi e poeti. Si tratta di otto immagini (nove, se vi si aggiunge quella, tematicamente collegata, di Minerva e Apollo): vi compaiono tutte e nove le Muse, ciascuna di solito abbinata a un poeta o a un filosofo a lei affine per attitudine culturale; fanno eccezione tre Muse: Erato danzante accanto ad Euterpe e Polimnia che si accompagna alla madre di tutte le Muse, Mnemosine (“Memoria”). Quando verso il 1811, per meglio divulgare la conoscenza delle sue opere, Canova ebbe l’idea di istituire a sue spese un laboratorio 6
Catalogo cronologico delle sculture di Antonio Canova pubblicato dietro richiesta di S.A.R. il Principe di Baviera (Roma: Francesco Bourlié, 1817); edizione moderna in Canova, Scritti (cit. a nota 5), 461–493; accenno ai “varj pensieri” “Anno 1816”, 485. Il Principe ordinante era Ludwig von Wittelsbach (1786–1868), che poi divenne re nel 1825. Le edizioni successive del Catalogo, uscite in contesti diversi, risalgono agli anni 1818, 1819, 1864. 7 Cfr. Elena Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno. Catalogo delle opere. Guida alla visita della Gipsoteca, Casa e Tempio (Treviso: Edizioni Canova & Arti Grafiche Longo e Zoppelli, 1972), nn. 110–118, 56–57; Giuseppe Pavanello, L’opera completa del Canova (Milano: Rizzoli, 1976), 153–155. L’istituzione nacque a Possagno dopo la morte di Antonio Canova (1822), fra il 1833 e il 1836, quando il fratellastro per parte di madre ed erede Giovanni Battista Sartori vi trasportò, per donarlo alla città, l’intero contenuto dello studio romano di Antonio. Cfr. Giancarlo Cunial, “I ask you to write me the latest news on our House, I will be delighted to receive them”, in Antonio Canova: Art and memory in Possagno (Ponzano:, Edizioni Grafiche Vianello – Fondazione Canova Possagno, 2007), 22–42, particolarmente 38–41. 8 Leopoldo Cicognara, Biografia di Antonio Canova (Venezia, Giambattista Missiaglia, 1823), 29. 9 Giancarlo Cunial, “Le tempere di Possagno. Il genere grazioso in Canova” in Canova e la danza, a cura di Mario Guderzo (Possagno: Fondazione Canova – Crocetta del Montello, Terra Ferma Edizioni, 2012), 41–49, particolarmente p. 41. Cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), nn. 97–131. In quest’ultimo catalogo le tre categorie figurative non ricevono specifiche intitolazioni in quanto tali; comunque esse corrispondono rispettivamente ai nn. 97–109, 110–118, 119–131. 10 Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 52–53, 57, 61 e figg. 11, 12, 13. Cfr. “Catalogo delle opere” a cura di Mario Guderzo in Canova e la danza (cit. a nota 9), 162–165 e figg. pp. 78–135. In questo catalogo le numerose schede e illustrazioni relative alle “Danzatrici” delle tempere hanno numerazione discontinua.
426
Antonio Canova e le Muse calcografico dove fare eseguire ad acquaforte e bulino, da ottimi artigiani e artisti, disegni poi trasformati in incisioni che riproducessero i suoi lavori, non solo egli fece ritrarre in tal modo numerose sue opere scultoree, ma sottopose allo stesso trattamento anche parecchie delle sue tempere, evidentemente ritenute degne di diffusione.11 Fra di esse trovarono favore anche quelle Muse, che dunque possediamo in due versioni bidimensionali cartacee, una a tempera e l’altra a stampa. Gli accostamenti fra le Muse protettrici delle scienze e delle arti e i corrispondenti scrittori e pensatori offrono i seguenti abbinamenti: Clio (storia) con Erodoto, Melpomene (tragedia) con Sofocle, Talia (commedia) con Aristofane, Tersicore (danza e lirica corale) con Pindaro (fig. 5), Calliope (epica) con Omero, Urania (astronomia) con Talete. L’unica di queste prime sei Muse dichiaratamente legata alla musica è Tersicore; tuttavia richiamano la musica anche le rimanenti tre diversamente abbinate: Erato (poesia lirica) che come già detto danza accanto ad Euterpe (musica) (fig. 4), inoltre Polimnia (canto sacro, pantomima) accostata alla madre Mnemosine strettamente velata e paludata (fig. 6).12 Come si vede, l’unica Musa raffigurata in atto di danzare è Erato, quindi il Canova non fa propria l’immagine del duo danzante Tersicore-Polimnia del Parnaso di Mengs (fig. 3); nella sua concezione artistica il legame di queste Muse con il ballo è più remoto e sotterraneo. Indubbiamente gli accostamenti programmatici adottati dal Canova circa le competenze specifiche di ogni Musa si adeguano alla dottrina, peraltro non fissa né immutabile, prevalente ai suoi giorni. In realtà quel criterio di assegnazione continuava ad ammettere variazioni, benché a partire dall’età ellenistico-romana, ma solo da quel periodo avesse acquistato una certa stabilità. Prima di allora, ossia nella Grecia antica, le attitudini specifiche delle Muse apparivano alquanto sfumate e incerte; il più delle volte erano ricostruite su basi etimologiche suggerite dai rispettivi nomi, così com’erano stati esposti fra l’VIII e il VII secolo a. C. da 11 Fabio Fiorani, “La calcografia del Canova a Roma. Storia delle raccolte dei rami desunta dall’inventario del 1823”, in Canova e l’incisione, a cura di Grazia Pezzini Bernini e Fabio Fiorani (Bassano del Grappa: Ghedina & Tassotti, 1993), 37–43. Per «inventario del 1823» si intende quello inserito da Cicognara nell’opera qui menzionata alla nota 8. A proposito delle incisioni che ritraggono danzatrici raffigurate dal Canova sia su tempera sia in marmo, cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography”, (cit. a nota 1), 71–75 e figg. 25–30. 12 Le sfere di competenza delle varie Muse in relazione a questi dipinti e alle relative stampe sono riportati nei predetti termini da Grazia Pezzini Bernini e da Fabio Fiorani, “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe”, schede a cura di Grazia Pezzini Bernini e Fabio Fiorani, in Canova e l’incisione (cit. a nota 11), schede 96/2–11, 264–275. Nel catalogo di Possagno i titoli delle tempere davano gli abbinamenti dei personaggi, ma non le rispettive specialità (cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 53–57, nn. 110–118 pp), inoltre i titoli dei nn. 113 e 118 recavano i nomi delle Muse invertiti rispetto a quelli conferiti da Grazia Pezzini Bernini e Fabio Fiorani: non dunque Tersicore e Pindaro ma Erato e Pindaro, non Erato ed Euterpe ma Tersicore ed Euterpe. Anche Pavanello, L’opera completa (cit. a nota 7), D 53, aveva identificato la Musa accompagnata ad Euterpe con Tersicore.
427
Elena Ferrari-Barassi Esiodo in un passo della Teogonia (Proemio, v. 76–80). Esiodo descrive le Muse come compagne di Apollo sul Parnaso e sull’Elicona e maestre, al pari di lui, dei cantori e dei suonatori di kithára (Proemio, v. 94–95). Non venivano diversificate le loro competenze, formulate in seguito attraverso un’interpretazione dei loro nomi, con assegnazione di funzioni e attributi peraltro oscillanti sia nelle fonti letterarie sia in quelle figurative. Solo tardivamente si cercò di mettere ordine nella materia, ed anche allora con successo relativo. I nomi e i caratteri delle Muse si trovano fissati per la prima volta in modo inequivocabile in una serie di pannelli recanti Apollo e otto delle sue compagne, affrescati fra il 62 e il 79 d. C. a Pompei nella domus di Julia Felix. Quei riquadri furono distaccati nel 1755 dalle pareti della domus durante gli scavi promossi localmente, fra i tanti, da Carlo III di Borbone. Evidentemente nel corso dell’operazione andò persa la figura della nona Musa, Euterpe, che manca tuttora all’appello. Nel 1802 quei pannelli furono donati dal successivo re di Napoli, Ferdinando IV (1751–1825), a Napoleone Bonaparte e ora si trovano a Parigi nel Museo del Louvre. Nel frattempo quelle immagini erano state artisticamente riprodotte in incisioni su rame e corredate di accurati studi e commenti storici in una vasta pubblicazione affidata all’Accademia Ercolanese: era questo un organismo, appositamente costituito dai sovrani borbonici per lo studio dei reperti archeologici rinvenuti negli scavi della regione vesuviana a Ercolano, Pompei e Stabia. La pubblicazione dedicata agli affreschi s’intitolava Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano e copriva cinque volumi della più ampia raccolta in otto volumi Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (1757–1792).13 Poiché la circolazione di quei volumi era riservata a un ambito privilegiato, presto ne furono ricavate privatamente copie, sia riprodotte nel testo originale italiano, sia tradotte in altre lingue.14 Questo consentiva a chi non avesse la ventura di visitare il Museo di Portici o di acquisire i volumi originali della Stamperia Reale, di ammirare ugualmente le molte illustrazioni e di leggerne le spiegazioni; il ricorso a quelle edizioni era essenziale per conoscere i dipinti antichi di estrazione vesuviana ed eventualmente ispirarvisi per nuove creazioni artistiche. Naturalmente ne Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano è accolto anche il ciclo di Apollo e delle Muse proveniente dalla domus di Julia Felix:15 non l’unico di quel genere in ambito pompeiano, ma l’unico riprodotto nei sopraddetti volumi, il meglio conservato e di più facile identificazione.16 Quelle 13 Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, 8 tomi (Napoli: Regia Stamperia, 1757–1792); tomi 1–5: Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, Ottavio Antonio Bayardi, Antonio Piaggio, Camillo Paderni (Napoli, Regia Stamperia, 1757). 14 Esse si trovano enumerate in Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 77, note 65 e 66. 15 Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano (cit. a nota 13), tomo II (1757), tav. 1–9. 16 Cfr. Vincent Tran Tam Tinh, Catalogue des peintures romaines (Latium et Campanie) du musée du Louvre (Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1975), 25–35.
428
Antonio Canova e le Muse copie incise in rame riproducono fedelmente gli originali pittorici della domus, quindi mostrano ogni Musa in piedi sopra una mensola o seduta su un sedile a sua volta posato su una pedana, munita del proprio attributo consistente in uno o più oggetti caratteristici. Come ulteriore chiarificazione identitaria, ogni immagine reca, scritti in caratteri greci, il nome e l’attività della propria Musa. Nell’età neoclassica quelle scritte, che immortalavano senza ombra di dubbio le attribuzioni delle varie Muse, vennero sentite come certe e definitive e fecero testo fra studiosi e artisti; eppure occasionalmente quelle qualifiche subirono ancora rivisitazioni e contaminazioni di fantasia. Passando all’ambito scultoreo, serie di Muse d’età romana consistono in statue a tutto tondo radunate insieme, oppure in bassorilievi di sarcofago recanti le loro figure allineate. Riguardo alla prima sistemazione, l’esempio più noto è quello della cosiddetta “Sala delle Muse” facente parte del Museo Pio Clementino nei Musei Vaticani: la sala accoglie le statue delle nove Muse di grandezza naturale disposte in due ali, con al centro il cosiddetto Torso del Belvedere ossia un Apollo mutilo. Sette di esse e l’Apollo, risalenti all’età adrianea (II secolo d. C.), furono rinvenute nel 1774 nel corso di scavi nei pressi di Tivoli; in seguito esse furono in parte rimaneggiate, sottoposte a qualche forzatura di identificazione e arbitrariamente aumentate a nove. Un’altra serie di Muse scolpite fra il I e il III secolo d. C. si trova a Roma presso il Museo Torlonia; altre Muse di età romana si trovano isolate in varie sedi in Italia e fuori. Quanto ai bassorilievi di sarcofago con Muse affiancate l’una all’altra, due di essi sono stati studiati da Emanuel Winternitz in due diversi saggi: nel primo egli indaga alcuni particolari organologici ravvisati nel cosiddetto Sarcofago delle Muse, risalente a un’età fra il 180 e il 200 d. C., già appartenuto alla collezione Giustiniani a Roma e ora conservato a Vienna presso il Kunsthistorisches Museum (fig. 11); egli avvicina quei particolari ad altri simili, ricorrenti negli affreschi di Filippino Lippi situati a Firenze nella Cappella Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella;17 nel secondo saggio il confronto tocca invece al cosiddetto Sarcofago Mattei, risalente al II–III secolo d. C. e conservato a Roma al Museo delle Terme: l’autore vi trova analogie con certi aspetti del Parnaso di Raffaello (1483–1520), peraltro ricco di contaminazioni e fusioni inaspettate fra questo e quel personaggio mitologico e fra gli strumenti effigiati.18 17 Emanuel Winternitz, “Le Muse e la Musica in una cappella funebre”, in Emanuel Winternitz, Gli strumenti musicali e il loro simbolismo nell’arte occidentale (Torino, Boringhieri, 1982), 142– 166, particolarmente 157–159 e figg. 75, 76. 18 Emanuel Winternitz, “Archeologia musicale del Rinascimento nel ‘Parnaso’ di Raffaello”, in Emanuel Winternitz, Gli strumenti musicali (cit. a nota 17), 167–236, particolarmente 176– 226.
429
Elena Ferrari-Barassi Benché le nominate opere d’arte dell’antichità e molte altre simili rappresentino le Muse in forma relativamente stabile e convenzionale, in sede letteraria le cose stanno diversamente: infatti le loro attribuzioni specifiche non sono sempre esposte in modo univoco. Ad esempio non sono date definizioni del tutto concordi delle qualifiche di due Muse che solitamente nelle fonti iconografiche appaiono munite di strumenti musicali cordofoni: Erato e Tersicore. A Erato, normalmente raffigurata con una kithára, poteva essere attribuita ora la poesia lirica ora il canto cerimoniale; e Tersicore, provvista di lyra, poteva essere considerata protettrice ora della danza e della lirica corale, ora del canto conviviale. A parte simili discrepanze interpretative, è interessante richiamare il motivo per il quale spesso le Muse adornavano un monumento funebre. Ciò accadeva agli albori dell’era volgare (II–IV secolo d. C.), quando si stava diffondendo il cristianesimo; per un diffuso bisogno di risposte escatologiche ai problemi esistenziali avanzava anche il neoplatonismo e con esso uno speciale culto della bellezza e della sapienza, che si vedevano incarnate in forma ottimale nelle arti e nelle scienze personificate.19 Max Wegner ha individuato un corpus di ben 237 sarcofagi recanti le nove Muse, spesso ritratte in compagnia di Apollo e di Atena, 20 ossia le stesse divinità aggiunte dal Canova alla sua serie a tempera di Muse con filosofi e poeti. Prendendo ad esempio il Sarcofago delle Muse (fig. 11), i personaggi raffigurati si riconoscono nell’ordine come segue: Polimnia, Clio, Tersicore, Calliope, Talia, Atena, Euterpe, Melpomene, Erato, Urania, Apollo. Tornando alle tempere del Canova, ai nostri giorni sono affiorate discordanze interpretative circa una Musa ritratta in coppia con Euterpe (fig. 4): Erato o Tersicore? Come già detto, nella serie delle Muse con filosofi e poeti Tersicore appare già in compagnia del poeta Pindaro, con tanto di nome in didascalia (fig. 5); i due sono scortati da un Erote (amorino) che, in piedi su uno sgabello, regge uno scrigno recante una scritta di disagevole lettura. Tersicore, munita di lyra e di un gigantesco plettro a punta di freccia, con la mano sinistra pizzica le corde a dita nude; così facendo sembra suggerire al poeta le note da comporre sulla kithára, che egli suona con entrambe le mani. Ora Pindaro (518 circa – 438 a.C.) fu il massimo esponente della lirica corale greca, alla cui esecuzione si univano un accompagnamento strumentale e la danza: tuttavia il canto corale e il ballo non erano eseguiti dal compositore, bensì da un gruppo a ciò preposto; ecco perché nell’immagine né il poeta né la sua Musa ispiratri19 Cfr. Clementina Panella, John Bryan Ward-Perkins, “Sarcofago” (paragrafo “Sarcofagi di età romana”), in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Antica (Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani), vol. 7, 1973. 20 Max Wegner, Die Musensarkophage (Berlin: Mann, 1966).
430
Antonio Canova e le Muse ce stanno danzando. Forse per questo c’è chi vuole vedere di nuovo Tersicore, questa volta intenta al ballo, nel duo di Muse meglio riconosciuto come composto da Erato ed Euterpe (fig. 4). In passato anch’io incorsi in questo errore, come tornerò a ricordare fra breve. La seconda figura femminile, che non balla, è senza dubbio Euterpe, concordemente dichiarata protettrice della musica: solitamente ella si trova effigiata con uno strumento musicale aerofono come il f lauto o l’aulós; qui la si vede munita addirittura di due corti aulói impugnati con le due mani: fra l’altro quello tenuto dalla destra in direzione della bocca ha due chiavi, che lo fanno assomigliare vagamente a una tibia Berecynthia, strumento in uso a Roma nell’età imperiale. Non mi risulta che alcuno abbia finora cercato di appurare a quale tipo di musica servissero in genere, in mano a una Musa, un aulós greco oppure una tibia romana, strumenti ad ancia doppia normalmente assegnatile; personalmente posso supporre che essi fornissero un accompagnamento alla poesia elegiaca, che a quei tempi veniva effettivamente declamata su un sottofondo auletico; altrimenti bisognerebbe considerare tutte le occasioni che nell’antica Grecia prevedevano l’impiego dell’aulós: la tragedia, i simposi, i kómoi (cortei rituali alquanto scomposti) e i riti dionisiaci; tali situazioni in buona parte furono ereditate da Roma, unite al suono della tibia, versione romana del aulós. Eppure mi sentirei di escludere recisamente questi ultimi generi, per lo più collegati con la figura di Dioniso, antagonista di Apollo, guida delle Muse. A un’altra Musa talvolta fu assegnato uno strumento a fiato: la tromba, simbolo di onore e fama; tuttavia l’assegnataria non fu univoca, poiché l’attributo vagò fra Clio (storia) e Calliope (poesia epica). Una Clio con la tromba si vede nel gruppo delle Tre Muse Clio, Euterpe e Talia, olio su tela di Eustache Le Sueur (1616–1655) conservato al Louvre; ma mentre nel quadro Talia, accovacciata a terra, sorregge e contempla una maschera ed Euterpe, seduta, suona legittimamente un f lauto traverso, Clio, pure seduta, si limita a impugnare una tromba diritta con il padiglione in su e l’imboccatura appoggiata contro di sé, più simbolo da mostrare che strumento per far musica. È singolare che le due Muse musiciste di questo terzetto si dedichino entrambe a uno strumento a fiato. C’è chi assegna una tromba anche a Calliope: a questo proposito rimando al saggio di Winternitz sul Parnaso di Raffaello, dove egli riconosce un’Euterpe fusa con Calliope, in quanto munita di un ibrido fra aulós e tromba. 21 Veramente il prestito di una tromba a Clio e/o a Calliope è un fenomeno relativamente tardo e sporadico; esso non si riscontra affatto nell’arte greco-romana, nella fattispecie negli affreschi della domus di Julia Felix e fra le statue della “Sala delle Muse” e del Museo Torlonia: in quelle sedi Clio regge un rotolo di 21 Emanuel Winternitz, “Archeologia musicale” (cit. a nota 18), 225–226.
431
Elena Ferrari-Barassi pergamena e Calliope è munita di stilo e tavoletta per scrivere, attributi puntualmente ripetuti anche da Mengs nel suo Parnaso (fig. 3). Tornando alla tempera del Canova che vede abbinate due Muse (fig. 4), una volta identificata Euterpe nella seconda, rimane da appurare l’identità della prima, rimasta incerta fra Erato e Tersicore. Oggi mi discosto dalla soluzione adottata nel precedente articolo, dove accettai l’identificazione del personaggio con Tersicore proposta da Elena Bassi, da Giuseppe Pavanello e da Mario Guderzo. 22 Ora invece, al pari di Grazia Pezzini Bernini e Fabio Fiorani, 23 mi attengo alla definizione della prima Musa come Erato. Infatti, essendo certamente Tersicore quella rappresentata in coppia con Pindaro, con i due nomi stampati bene in evidenza sotto la scena (fig. 5), non ha senso che, nella serie, costei debba ricomparire in altra compagnia. Certo l’Erato danzante del Canova costituisce un’eccezione se rapportata al panorama figurativo classico: di solito nelle fonti archeologiche Erato è ferma e munita di kithára, non la si vede danzare priva dello strumento come accade nella tempera canoviana; ma questa immagine obbedisce senza dubbio a un estroso sfogo creativo dimentico delle antiche convenzioni. Eppure fra poco tale indisciplina apparirà più sfumata, quando porremo mente all’arpa tenuta da uno dei due Eroti accompagnatori della dea (fig. 4). L’immagine di danza offerta da questa Musa non ci autorizza a darle senz’altro, come è stato fatto, il nome di Tersicore, scompaginando l’ordinata serie delle Muse. D’altra parte il nostro stupore nel vederla danzare cresce, se addirittura riconosciamo in tale “abusiva” danzatrice una palese anticipazione della futura Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi, statua dapprima, come d’uso, modellata in gesso (fig. 1), poi scolpita in marmo. Se nella tempera Erato non ha la kithára di prammatica (come non l’avrà nemmeno la Danzatrice), può darsi che sulla sua figura abbia inf luito la rappresentazione anomala che ne dà Mengs nel suo Parnaso: là, terza fanciulla da destra, ella è del tutto sprovvista di strumento musicale; invece, stando in piedi, regge una tavoletta o libro scuro aperto, mentre solleva il braccio sinistro in un gesto magniloquente (fig. 3). Dunque a entrambe le Erato del Mengs e del Canova manca l’attributo della kithára. Però nella tempera canoviana la kithára mancante si può considerare supplita da un’arpa del tipo trígonon, che viene sorretta da uno dei due Eroti che accompagnano la Musa, mentre l’arco e la faretra di uno dei due amorini giac22 Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 57, n. 118; Pavanello, L’opera completa (cit. a nota 7), D 53 (si veda sopra). D’altra parte un’ambigua definizione “Euterpe ed Erato (ma Tersicore)” si legge in “Catalogo delle opere” (cit. a nota 10), 163, n. 26 e 27, e 122, 123, n. 26 e 27; Cfr. anche Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 52, 55, 71 e figg. 11, 25. 23 “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe” (cit. a nota 12), 269, LXXXX–6. Viceversa, come si è visto, il catalogo di Possagno dava a questo abbinamento il titolo Erato e Pindaro. Cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno, (cit. a nota 7), 57, n. 113.
432
Antonio Canova e le Muse ciono inerti a terra (fig. 4). In questa scena sono proprio gli Eroti a rafforzare l’identificazione della Musa con Erato; infatti, alcuni scrittori dell’antichità mettevano in relazione il nome di lei proprio con Eros, aggiungendo una connotazione amorosa alla poesia lirica da lei impersonata. Venendo a Tersicore, anch’ella nei secoli fu soggetta a interpretazioni variabili e la più comune fu senza dubbio quella che la voleva protettrice della danza tout court, senza riguardo per l’unione col canto corale. Fra l’altro, al di fuori dell’iconografia, se ne constata una prova in campo strettamente musicale, con il titolo di Terpsichore conferito nel 1612 da Michael Praetorius alla famosa imponente raccolta di danze, da lui armonizzate a più voci su motivi attinti dal repertorio della corte di Francia. 24 Perché poi Tersicore nella sua veste più accreditata sia munita solitamente di lyra mentre Erato lo è di kithára, l’enigma è difficile da sciogliere. Come è noto, si tratta di due strumenti affini, trattandosi in entrambi i casi di cordofoni a giogo: ma nell’antica Grecia e a Roma il primo aveva un’impronta naturalistica e familiare, mentre il secondo godeva di una architettura più massiccia e robusta. In origine la lyra s’intendeva assemblata con elementi di origine animale: un guscio di testuggine coperto da membrana per la cassa armonica e due corna di capra o d’ariete per i bracci laterali; viceversa il secondo strumento, suonato abitualmente da professionisti, era più grande e di solida costruzione lignea. Se davvero nel consesso delle Muse Tersicore doveva rappresentare la lirica corale unita alla danza ed Erato la poesia lirica a solo, oggi non sembrerebbe del tutto giustificata l’attribuzione di una lyra alla prima e di una kithára alla seconda, a meno di una nostra sicura ignoranza circa la reale prestazione dei due strumenti nei loro rispettivi ruoli. In ogni modo come abbiamo visto, il Canova ha differenziato i due strumenti anche nel dipingere in mano a Tersicore la lyra, contro la kithára affidata a Pindaro (fig. 5). Certo nelle connotazioni delle Muse ha giocato, nel tempo, una difficile elaborazione di caratteri e di schemi figurativi connessi con quelle divinità e con i rispettivi attributi, a volte scambiati con quelli di altri personaggi. Di fatto quelle divinità, inizialmente evanescenti, nell’acquistare col tempo qualifiche differenziate subirono contaminazioni fra loro ed anche con prototipi esterni. A proposito dell’antica iconografia di Erato munita di kithára, è stato addirittura visto in quella Musa uno sdoppiamento della versione di Apollo citaredo vestito di chitone e manto, tipologia adottata in molte repliche. 25 Certo un simile im24 Michael Praetorius, Terpsichore, Musarum Aoniarum quinta (Wolfenbüttel: Fürstliche Druckerei, 1612). La definizione aggiuntiva allude alla Aeonia o antica Beozia, sede delle Muse, inoltre al quinto posto che dà Esiodo al suo nome nella loro numerazione complessiva. 25 Panella, Ward-Perkins, “Sarcofago” (cit. a nota 19).
433
Elena Ferrari-Barassi prestito iconografico, se reale, denuncerebbe un processo non del tutto chiaro di “nobilitazione” di Erato dedita all’aristocratica kithára, rispetto a Tersicore usa alla semplice lyra, strumento più comune e dal suono più sommesso. Effettivamente alle varie Erato d’età romana che conosciamo in immagine sono attribuite kithárai di tutto rispetto, pure se di foggia variabile. Un esempio è la kithára assai longilinea (quindi di suono grave) posta in mano ad Erato nell’affresco della domus di Julia Felix e nella relativa riproduzione a stampa (fig. 9), mentre una molto simile in versione marmorea è suonata dall’Erato della “Sala della Muse”; un altro esempio ancora è la kithára di Erato nel Museo Torlonia: questa è più piccola ma ben costrutta, con i bracci sporgenti indietro a C e le cime protese in avanti e graziosamente ondulate, quasi da lyra; si veda ancora l’Erato del Sarcofago delle Muse (fig. 11), terzo personaggio da destra, rimasto fuori campo nella riproduzione del Winternitz: anche questa kithára sporge lateralmente le cime a mo’ di lyra, pur distinguendosi nettamente dalla vera lyra, di sagoma più snella, imbracciata da Tersicore, terzo personaggio da sinistra; rispetto a quest’ultima la kithára di Erato ha una linea più solida e tondeggiante, esibendo, in più, vistose ed eleganti protuberanze sui fianchi esterni. Erato fu confinata dal Canova nel citato disegno a tempera con Euterpe, né le due Muse ricevettero da lui ulteriore attenzione. In compenso il caratteristico atteggiamento della prima, danzante sulla punta dei piedi con i gomiti in fuori e le mani ai fianchi, ritornerà meticolosamente nella statua della Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi (fig. 1), lontana da qualunque riferimento a una Musa. Anche quella scultura dovette però subire ai suoi giorni un’erronea identificazione con Tersicore, come si vedrà meglio più avanti. Altre Muse non verranno poi riprese dal Canova salvo Calliope, che avrà un’elaborazione scultorea piuttosto modesta ovvero la semplice Testa di Calliope (1812), oggi conservata a Firenze nella Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti. Sorte ben più lusinghiera avranno le rimanenti due colleghe di Erato e di Euterpe convolte nella musica, Tersicore e Polimnia; come si è visto, nella serie a tempera esse si trovavano abbinate la prima al poeta Pindaro (fig. 5), la seconda a Mnemosine madre di tutte le Muse (fig. 6); ma più tardi esse ispirarono all’artista, in circostanze diverse, opere statuarie di grande portata. La Musa Tersicore ebbe, grazie a Canova un destino singolare. Una statua a lei intitolata, maestosa e aggraziata insieme, la ritrae in piedi mentre, tenendo un plettro nella mano destra, sostiene con la mano sinistra la lyra poggiata su un alto podio (figg. 12 e 13). Sul retro di quel podio o cippo l’opera è firmata e datata al 1811 con una scritta latina (“Canova f.(ecit) an.(no) MDCCCXI”) e sul fronte, in un riquadro ovoidale ricavato nella zona alta del cippo, sono dichiarati in lettere greche nome e competenza della protagonista: “ TEPΨIXOPH 434
Antonio Canova e le Muse ΛYPAN” (lettura: “Terpsichóre lyran”). Oggi la statua si conserva nella colle-
zione permanente della Fondazione Magnani Rocca a Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma), dove è pervenuta nel 1984 per acquisto da parte dal fondatore Luigi Magnani; prima era appartenuta via via a eredi del primo proprietario, il conte lombardo Giovanbattista Sommariva (1760 circa – 1826), 26 che l’aveva fatta arrivare nel 1812 a Parigi, dove egli dimorava stabilmente, mantenendo come seconda casa la prestigiosa Villa Carlotta di Cadenabbia sulla riva ovest del lago di Como. All’inizio del 1813 il conte fece esporre pubblicamente la statua al Salon del Louvre e questo le fruttò grandi lodi, oltre qualche critica per certi aspetti anatomici ritenuti incongrui: collo troppo grosso e lungo, spalle troppo basse, seni poco evidenti. 27 Contemporaneamente un’altra statua del Canova stava esposta al Salon, riscuotendo grande successo: la Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi, scolpita per l’imperatrice Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763–1814) e oggi situata a San Pietroburgo; a Possagno se ne conserva invece il bellissimo modello in gesso (fig. 1). A Parigi vi fu allora chi, vedendo addirittura in quella Danzatrice una personificazione della danza, la denominò abusivamente Tersicore come la vera titolare del nome, pure essa esposta al Salon. L’errato appellativo, apparso sulle pagine del Journal de l’Empire, non mancò di suscitare vivaci proteste da parte del Canova in persona, che il 23 febbraio 1813 in una lettera a Ennio Quirino Visconti (1751–1818) rivendicò per quella scultura l’identità di lieta danzatrice e non di Musa: nei suoi intendimenti la vera Musa Tersicore, in confronto alla ballerina, mostrava “uno stile più severo e meno giocondo”. 28 Sorge il dubbio che l’articolista del Journal conoscesse almeno la riproduzione ad acquaforte e bulino della Musa danzante accanto ad Euterpe, dapprima dipinta a tempera (fig. 4); la riproduzione a stampa era già uscita nel 1811–1812, eseguita da Pietro Fontana (1762–1837). Può darsi che quella Musa del tutto simile nell’atteggiamento alla Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi, Musa che oggi riconosciamo come Erato, già allora (come è accaduto anche oggi) venisse equivocata come Tersicore dal critico del Journal. In effetti, la vera Tersicore con la lyra scolpita dal Canova (figg. 12 e 13) non ha sicuramente la movenza vivace della nominata Danzatrice (fig. 1): la posa della Musa 26 Cfr. Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), sub 1808: “Statua della Musa Terpsicore pel sullodato Sig. Gio. Battista Sommariva di Milano”, 477, e nota 78. 27 Cfr. Fondazione Magnani Rocca, La Tersicore di Antonio Canova. Scheda critica dedicata al capolavoro di Antonio Canova conservato nella collezione permanente della Fondazione Magnani Rocca, http://www.magnanirocca.it/antonio-canova-tersicore (ultimo accesso: 31.07.2017). 28 Cfr. Lucia Capitani, “Arti dello spazio e arti del tempo”, in Canova e la danza (cit. a nota 9), 29–39, particolarmente 35–36; Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 50–52 e figg. 2, 3.
435
Elena Ferrari-Barassi è statica, benché si ammorbidisca nell’incrociare con naturalezza la gamba sinistra sulla destra e nel posare il piede a terra in punta; ella calza dignitosi sandali, mentre la ninfa danzatrice rivale dal piglio popolaresco, ha i piedi nudi entrambi posati sulla punta delle dita, nervosamente scostati fra loro in atto di danza. Maggiore compostezza e senso d’importanza, pure mitigati da garbo gentile, sprigiona anche il resto dell’abbigliamento tersicoreo: una tunica lunga e una sopravveste morbidamente panneggiata, parzialmente raccolta in vita da una cinta di stoffa ritorta. Di contro la Danzatrice indossa semplicemente una tunica leggera stretta lievemente sotto il seno. Anche l’acconciatura della Musa è dignitosa e insieme leggiadra: una fascia ornata da rosetta le circonda il capo orizzontalmente trattenendo cascate di riccioli cannellati. Indubbiamente tale acconciatura, alquanto elaborata, contrasta con la semplice corona di fiori portata dalla lieta Danzatrice sopra i capelli raccolti. La lyra sostenuta dalla Musa risponde, in linea di massima, alle fattezze “classiche” dello strumento, con i due bracci sporti in alto oltre il giogo che li unisce e lievemente curvati in fuori a S. Forse per incutere maggiore reverenza, questa lyra non ha l’aspetto naturalistico “assemblato” visibile in antiche pitture vascolari e altre figurazioni antiche, dove permane il ricordo del guscio di testuggine e dei lunghi corni d’animale. Qui i diversi elementi formano una struttura unica tutta di un pezzo, percorsa senza soluzione di continuità da una decorazione di arabeschi f loreali graffiti. Di per sé la foggia “continua” non costituirebbe un inconveniente, se alla struttura non mancasse una vera e propria cassa armonica: l’incavatura quadra posta alla base inferiore dello strumento in luogo di una sporgenza dona alla struttura un bell’aspetto, ma non fa riconoscere una possibile funzionalità. Diversa era la situazione nelle figure antiche. Se si getta lo sguardo sulla Tersicore effigiata in terza sede da sinistra nel Sarcofago delle Muse (fig. 11), si nota che la lyra, anch’essa posata su un cippo e qui pizzicata dalla Musa con un lungo plettro, ha sì contorni esterni molto simili a quelli conferiti dal Canova, ma inferiormente ha una zona solida piuttosto estesa, appunto la cassa armonica. Le corde sono raffigurate in larga fascia, mentre nella Tersicore del Canova sono assenti per comprensibili motivi strutturali dovuti alla lavorazione a tutto tondo; semplicemente vi s’indovina un numero virtuale di cinque, grazie alle cinque caviglie superiori e ai cinque bottoni inferiori che nelle intenzioni dovrebbero tenderle; ma essi sono più simili ai dispositivi di una moderna arpa che a quelli dell’antica lyra. Anche la Tersicore seduta e coronata d’alloro situata nella “Sala delle Muse” del Museo Pio Clementino, ha una lyra con spaziosa cassa armonica e cordiera molto sporgente: in questo caso i diversi elementi distinti (cassa, bracci) sembrano denunciare la proverbiale origine animale; il giogo e le corde si sono 436
Antonio Canova e le Muse persi, né si può dire se queste ultime fossero state veramente aggiunte alla scultura, comunque la Musa fa atto di suonare a mano aperta e a dita nude. 29 Invece un’altra Tersicore seduta del II secolo d. C., copia romana di una statua greca conservata all’Ermitage di San Pietroburgo, appoggia la lyra su un tronco nodoso situato al suo fianco; lo strumento ha una linea continua fra base e bracci e contorni ad S molto pronunciati; le manca la citazione naturalistica e le mancano le corde, volutamente non effigiate: ma non le manca la cassa armonica sotto forma di un’adorna protuberanza quadrata, sporgente in basso a mo’ di piedistallo. Quanto alla Tersicore dipinta già appartenuta alla domus pompeiana e ora al Louvre, che si trova puntualmente riprodotta in Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano (fig. 8), essa è in piedi come quella del Canova, porta in testa un serto d’alloro e stringe al petto una lyra a sei corde di piccolo formato, simile (salvo che nelle dimensioni) a quella della Tersicore dell’Ermitage, con cassa armonica fatta di un’ampia protuberanza inferiore terminante a piedistallo, in parte nascosta dalla mano sinistra. Certo, in confronto agli strumenti ora osservati nelle opere antico-romane, la lyra della Tersicore canoviana non mostra né fedeltà storica né realismo organologico; d’altra parte in mano a questa Musa lo strumento della classicità, vagheggiato con appassionata determinazione anche se riprodotto con scarsa fedeltà, si pone come attributo della dea in forma chiara ed elegante. Il plettro, tenuto inattivo fra il pollice e l’indice della mano destra abbandonata lungo il fianco, benché non chiaramente visibile contribuisce anch’esso all’impressione di una reminiscenza classica priva di particolare realismo, ma voluta con sobria determinazione. Di questa Tersicore sopravvivono i cimeli di precedenti stadi realizzativi: a Cadenabbia si trova il bozzetto e a Possagno il grande, bellissimo modello in gesso. 30 L’elaborazione iniziale dell’opera fu piuttosto travagliata, poiché sulle prime era stata concepita come ritratto della principessa Alexandrine de Bleschamps (1778–1855), seconda moglie del Principe di Canino ossia Luciano Bonaparte (1775–1840, fratello minore di Napoleone) committente dell’opera; a riprova, nella Gipsoteca di Possagno esistono due ritratti preliminari della signora sotto forma di busti originali in gesso;31 ma la mira era quella di attribuirle precisamente le sembianze della Musa Tersicore a figura intera. L’idea di assimilare a una Musa la persona ritratta non era nuova: infatti, Mengs nel Parnaso aveva dato a Clio le fattezze di sua moglie Margarita e a Mnemosine quelle della 29 Una forma di lyra analoga a quelle del Sarcofago delle Muse e della “Sala delle Muse” si vede attribuito a un’altra Tersicore seduta, della prima metà del II secolo d. C., proveniente da Villa Adriana a Tivoli ed ora conservata a Madrid nel Museo del Prado. 30 Per il modellino in terracotta cfr. Fondazione Magnani Rocca, La Tersicore (cit. a nota 27), 7; per il calco in gesso Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 79, n 191. 31 cfr. Bassi, ibid., 79, n. 192, 193; foto p. 80.
437
Elena Ferrari-Barassi contessina Vittorucchia Ceroffini. 32 Del resto è risaputo che anche Raffaello nella Scuola d’Atene aveva ritratto personaggi noti, dando ai filosofi che la compongono le fisionomie di grandi artisti del suo tempo; più indietro nella storia, Benozzo Gozzoli (1420 circa – 1497) aveva profuso ritratti di signori, principi e dignitari del suo tempo nel Corteo dei Magi affrescato a Firenze in Palazzo Medici Riccardi; anche Paolo Veronese nelle Nozze di Cana raffigurò artisti e dotti di sua conoscenza; e chissà ancora quanti altri artisti di varie epoche e luoghi elevarono i loro soggetti in posa al rango di personaggi storici, biblici o mitologici. Tuttavia nel caso dell’opera pensata dal Canova per la principessa Bleschamps il progetto, avviato nel 1806 e poi concretato nel 1808 col compimento dell’intero modello in gesso, non andò a buon fine: infatti, la statua, segnata da venature del marmo, fu rifiutata dal committente e scambiata con una Venere. 33 La commissione della Tersicore, una volta esclusa la finalità ritrattistica, passò allora al conte Sommariva; cosicché lo stadio finale dell’opera, visibile sia nel modello in gesso di Possagno sia nella statua poi rifinita in marmo nel 1811, mostra una testa diversa da quella originaria dotata della fisionomia di Alexandrine de Bleschamps. Nel periodo di esposizione della statua al Salon il cambio di destinazione, una volta risaputo, indusse qualcuno a giustificare i difetti anatomici prima lamentati: infatti, le imperfezioni non furono più imputate a imperizia dello scultore, ma all’aver egli ritratto fedelmente una dama in carne ed ossa. In ogni modo Canova fece anche una replica più tarda di quella statua svincolandola da ogni velleità ritrattistica; essa, proposta nel 1814 al nobile collezionista inglese Sir Simon Houghton Clarke (1764–1832), fu completata per lui nel 1816. Per la realizzazione della replica non fu innovata solo l’esecuzione in marmo, ma fu rifatto anche il modello in gesso, lievemente diverso rispetto a quello primitivo esistente a Possagno. 34 Una volta giunta a Londra, similmente a quanto era avvenuto nel Salon parigino per la precedente Tersicore, nel 1817 la nuova Tersicore fu esposta alla Royal Academy congiuntamente a una Ebe inviata nel 1816 a John Campbell, Lord Cawdor (1753–1821): anche quest’ultima era una replica, ora rifatta in base al precedente originale creato nel 1802 per Joséphine de Beauharnais. 35 Attualmente il secondo gesso di Tersicore sta a 32 Cfr. P. F. Schmidt, “Mengs, Anton Raphael” in Ulrich Thieme – Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1907–1950), vol. 24 (1930). 33 Cfr. Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), 477–478, nota 78. 34 Cfr. Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), 478, nota 79; Cicognara, Biografia (cit. a nota 8), sub 1808, p. 63: “Statua della Musa Terspsicore, scolpita due volte: la prima vedesi in Parigi nel palazzo del conte Sommariva, la seconda fu spedita a Londra al Cav. Simone Clarke”. 35 La vicenda dell’esposizione è ricordata in “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe” (cit. a nota 12), 199, LV. Per la Ebe di Lord Cawdor: Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), 481, e nota 94. Ora
438
Antonio Canova e le Muse Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) presso il Carnegie Museum of Art, mentre la definitiva statua in marmo è esposta a nel Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio). 36 Nella nuova realizzazione la Musa perse un po’ del suo rigore, acquistando invece sensualità: tiene il capo inclinato con naturalezza alla sua destra e incurva voluttuosamente il tronco nella stessa direzione. Pure la lyra sembra leggermente diversa rispetto al modello precedente, avendo forse il contorno inferiore più schiacciato verso la base. Rimane invece invariata la scritta greca alludente a Tersicore e alla sua attitudine artistica. Tale scritta è presa nuovamente di peso dalla Tersicore ad affresco di origine pompeiana oggi conservata al Louvre con Apollo e le altre Muse. In quei pannelli dipinti ognuna delle Muse è accompagnata da parole greche di riferimento, apposte di solito sui finti piedistalli o pedane che le sorreggono, salvo per Clio, che invece esibisce quelle parole su un rotolo di pergamena semi-svolto tenuto con la mano sinistra. Ovviamente le scritte si ritrovano nelle riproduzioni a stampa de Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano. Di tali scritte è interessante osservare una curiosa particolarità che si ripete per ogni Musa. Stando a Tersicore, sia l’antica figura dipinta, sia la sua riproduzione incisa (fig. 8), 37 sia la nuova statua del Canova danno l’intitolazione “ TEPΨIXOPH ΛYPAN” (lettura: “Terpsichóre lyran” = Tersicore lyra). Qui la lyra non solo, dunque, viene additata come attributo di questa Musa, ma insieme ne espone sbrigativamente la competenza artistica. Altre definizioni greche di quelle Muse, presentandosi più loquaci, ne lasciano intravvedere meglio le rispettive funzioni allegoriche; ad esempio, traslitterate in caratteri latini esse recitano: “Cléio historían”, “Eráto psáltrian”, “Melpoméne tragodían”, “Tháleia komodían”, “Polymnía Mythous” (= Clio storia, Erato citarista, Melpomene tragedia, Talia commedia, Polimnia, miti, ovvero “antiche favole”). Se fosse osservata l’analogia con queste definizioni, Tersicore non dovrebbe essere identificata, come invece lì appare, con la lyra stessa, ma essere considerata una suonatrice di quello strumento; tuttavia non resta che accettare la definizione
essa si trova alla Chatsworth House nel Derbyshire nella residenza dei Duchi di Devonshire. Sulle varie Ebe cfr. anche Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 49–50, e 76, nota 16. 36 Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), 477–478; notizie dettagliate alle note 78, 79, 80; è pure interessante un passo dovuto al Canova da “Appunti sul viaggio in Inghilterra (1815)”, in Canova, Scritti (cit. a nota 5), 451–460, e 460, nota 41. Queste varie note, che segnalano fra l’altro l’ubicazione della statua a Cleveland, non parlano però del modello in gesso situato a Pittsburgh. In effetti tale presenza si è verificata a partire da una data successiva all’edizione degli Scritti (2007); infatti tale acquisizione si trova annunciata dal Carnegie Museum il 31 dicembre 2010. Cfr. Ėloge de l’Art par Alain Truong – European Art (19th Century) – Carnegie Museum, http://elogedelart.canalblog.com/archives/2010/12/31 (ultimo accesso: 31.07.2017). 37 Per la Musa Tersicore di provenienza pompeiana conservata al Louvre: Tran, Catalogue (cit. a nota 16), 30–31, P.7, e fig. 5. Per la riproduzione incisa: Le antichità di Ercolano esposte da Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano (cit. a nota 13), II, tav. 5.
439
Elena Ferrari-Barassi anomala e scarna dell’immagine; essa è vieppiù insoddisfacente se si pensa questa Musa come patrona della lirica corale danzata: qui tale qualifica è taciuta. Tutte queste scritte osservano una curiosa costruzione sintattica, in base alla quale il nome proprio della Musa è in caso nominativo e la rispettiva qualifica all’accusativo. I dotti autori de Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano ne discutono, poi giustificano tale procedura inconsueta appoggiandola a citazioni da Cicerone e da Petronio e supponendo quindi fra soggetto e oggetto un verbo sottinteso del tipo “scelse” o “trovò”. 38 È significativo comunque che il Canova per la sua Tersicore abbia adottato alla lettera, senza discutere, la dicitura dell’affresco pompeiano come dato normativo e inviolabile; certamente la riproduzione e il commento riportati ne Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano erano percepiti come capisaldi di assoluta garanzia. Ciò conferma, se ce ne fosse ancora bisogno, l’autorità rivestita in ambito neoclassico dai modelli greco-romani dissepolti durante scavi remoti e recenti, e quanto contasse l’importante pubblicazione promossa dai sovrani borbonici. Gli artisti se ne facevano condizionare, anche se a volte consapevolmente o inconsapevolmente si abbandonavano a varianti e reinterpretazioni individuali. Evidentemente il Canova considerò la sua Tersicore statuaria un’opera degna di ampia conoscenza, se la fece riprodurre in una delle stampe prodotte dal suo laboratorio di incisione calcografica dall’incisore Pietro Fontana su disegno di Giovanni Tognoli (fig. 14). Inizialmente la stampa fu concepita in onore di un’illustre dama, che, infatti, risulta dedicataria di una prima versione con la scritta “Aloisiae e Principibus Stolbergis Albaniae Comitissae” (= a Luisa dei Principi Stolberg Contessa di Albany). 39 Era costei la colta nobildonna di origine belga Louise de Stolberg-Gedern (1752–1824), nota come Contessa d’Albany: ella fu amante del grande drammaturgo Vittorio Alfieri dal 1777 al 1803 quando egli morì; nel 1788 rimase vedova del marito, il pretendente al trono d’Inghilterra Carlo Edoardo Stuart, vissuto in esilio prima a Roma poi a Firenze con il titolo di Conte d’Albany. Fu lei a commissionare al Canova il monumento funebre a Vittorio Alfieri, che l’artista completò nel 1810 nella chiesa di Santa Croce a Firenze. Pare che l’immagine a stampa della Tersicore non ritragga la statua originale, ma la replica compiuta nel 1816 per Sir Simon Houghton Clarke. Successivamente fu eseguita anche una ristampa “corrente” priva di dedica.40 Un’altra incisione della Tersicore ebbe una clamorosa divulgazione, apparendo questa volta stampata a piena pagina in un libro, al posto d’onore accan38 Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (cit. a nota 13), II, 9, tav. 2, nota 8. 39 “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe” (cit. a nota 12), 199, LV. 40 “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe” (cit. a nota 12), 199, LV. L’opinione circa l’originale servito alla riproduzione è di Pavanello, L’opera completa (cit. a nota 7), scheda 210.
440
Antonio Canova e le Muse to al frontespizio: ciò avvenne nell’importante trattato di danza The Code of Terpsichore di Carlo Blasis (1797–1878), pubblicato a Londra nel 1828 (fig. 15).41 Evidentemente anche in questo caso Tersicore era considerata esclusivamente come protettrice della danza; eppure nella figura del libro, così come nella statua del Canova, ella se ne sta ferma in piedi tenendo accanto a sé la lyra senza accennare alcun passo di danza.42 La figura è disegnata a puro contorno con linee nette e ben distinguibili, senza le ombreggiature e i chiaroscuri di quella uscita tempo prima dalla stamperia canoviana. Non ostante le premesse, pare che l’immagine, alquanto rigida, non riproduca la Tersicore “inglese” di proprietà di Simon Houghton Clarke, ma si rifaccia ancora alla versione primitiva. L’autore del trattato era il coreografo e maestro di danza Carlo Blasis, napoletano di nascita ma francese d’adozione, persona coltissima e artista di grande successo. Avendo frequentato a Parigi le più prestigiose istituzioni coreutiche d’Europa, ossia la gloriosa scuola dell’Académie Royale de Danse (fondata da Luigi XIV nel 1713) e il Ballet de l’Opéra, e avendo avuto maestri di grido fra i quali Jean Dauberval (1742–1806) e Salvatore Viganò (1769– 1821), egli si fece autorevole interprete della danza accademica francese, potenziandola e diffondendola in molti teatri europei, dove spesso fra il 1817 e il 1826) fu primo ballerino (a Milano dal 1817 al 1823). Talvolta in quell’epoca la danza da palcoscenico spesso esigeva, oltre che abilità tecnica, anche capacità narrativa e drammatica, traducendosi nel cosiddetto ballet d’action o ballo pantomimo, coltivato da artisti quali Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), Gasparo Angiolini (1731–1803) e Salvatore Viganò, il creatore del coreo-dramma; ma in realtà Blasis ambiva soprattutto alla bellezza e alla perfezione formale.43 Per la verità The Code of Terpsichore non era un’opera nuova ma una traduzione condotta da R. Bourbon, con supervisione dell’autore, di un testo già uscito nel 1820 a Milano in lingua francese col titolo Traité élémentaire, théorique et pratique de l’art de la danse.44 In quella prima versione non appariva ancora la figura della Tersicore canoviana, la quale invece nel 1830 ritornò in un rifacimento francese e nel 1831 in una riedizione inglese con nuovo titolo.45 Nel 41 Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore: a Practical and Historical Treatise on the Ballet, Dancing and Pantomime, with a Complete Theory of the Art of Dancing […] (London, James Bulcock, 1828). L’incisione della figura di Tersicore è dovuta a John Kennerley. 42 Nel mio precedente articolo avevo creduto che l’immagine di Tersicore fosse apparsa nell’originale francese del 1820 e si conformasse alla statua della Danzatrice con le mani suo fianchi anziché a quella vera di Tersicore. Cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 51–52. 43 Cfr. ibid., 45–47. 44 Carlo Blasis, Traité élémentaire, théorique et pratique de l’art de la danse (Milan: Chez Joseph Beati et Antoine Tenenti, 1820). 45 Carlo Blasis, Manuel complet de la danse, a cura di Paul Vergnaud (Paris: Librairie Encyclopédique
441
Elena Ferrari-Barassi 1847 Blasis pubblicò a Londra un nuovo trattato, quando nel frattempo erano uscite anche diverse traduzioni italiane del Traité élémentaire. L’attività teorica e pratica fruttò a quel maestro la direzione della Scuola di perfezionamento della Imperiale Regia Scuola di Ballo del Teatro alla Scala di Milano, che egli tenne dal 1837 al 1849 coadiuvato da sua moglie Annunciata Ramaccini (1807–1892) come insegnante di mimica.46 Dunque nell’Europa di allora l’aspirazione classicheggiante non investiva solo i prodotti “statici” degli artisti figurativi, ma si estendeva pure all’arte viva del ballo e della coreografia. Uno spirito simile aveva animato anche le famose esibizioni mimiche tenute a casa propria in forma privata negli anni 1790 da Emma Hart Lyon (1765–1815), alias Lady Hamilton, moglie di Sir William Hamilton, ambasciatore inglese presso la corte di Napoli;47 ma certo i balli narrativi rappresentati nei teatri furono manifestazioni di proporzioni ben più ampie. Fra le quattordici tavole con figurine schizzate, appartenenti al Traité élémentaire di Carlo Blasis e alle successive edizioni (The Code of Terpsichore, The Art of Dancing), ve n’è una che illustra vivaci passi di danza compiuti da personaggi maschili e femminili dotati di sembianze, vesti e accessori presi dagli affreschi pompeiani o più probabilmente dalle loro riproduzioni ne Le Antichità di Ercolano. In mano ai ballerini appaiono anche strumenti musicali quali una lyra, diverse paia di cymbala, un f lauto di Pan, un sistro e una sonagliera a cornice.48 Un’immagine più composta, conservata a Parigi nella Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, si riferisce invece a una scena dal ballo Achille à Scyros rappresentato a Parigi nel 1804 con coreografia di Pierre Gardel (1758–1840): vi si vedono una ballerina in tunica corta, inghirlandata di fiori e munita di un tamburello a manico, e due strumentiste in abito lungo con acconciatura di foggia classica, una in piedi, in atto di suonare a dita nude una lyra simile a quella della Tersicore della domus di Julia Felix e l’altra seduta, con un’arpa dal dorso curvo da lei tenuta appoggiata a terra.49 Dunque sia Gardel sia Blasis nel ricostruire coreografie d’ispirazione classica guardano, come d’obbligo, ai modelli figurativi dell’antichità. Come si è visto, Blasis fa del Canova un intermediario, ponendo a guardiana di un trattato la sua Tersicore maestosa e gentile. Ella, pure non in atteggiamento di danza, si erge seria e autorevole a proteggere i seguaci che de Roret, 1830); Carlo Blasis, The art of dancing (London: Edward Bull, 1831). 46 Carlo Blasis, Notes upon dancing (London: M. Delaporte, 1847). Cfr. inoltre Flavia Papacena, Il Trattato di Danza di Carlo Blasis (1820–1830) / Carlo Blasis’ Treatise on dance 1820–1830 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2005), 12–13 e passim, 110–111. 47 Cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 45–46. 48 “Planche XIV”/”Plate XI” riprodotte in Papacena, Il Trattato di Danza (cit. a nota 46), 172. Per i modelli pompeiani cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 58–63 e figg. 16, 22. 49 Cfr. Flavia Papacena, Il Trattato di Danza (cit. a nota 46), tav. 11c.
442
Antonio Canova e le Muse praticano quell’arte: premessa sicura e rigorosa per un discorso teorico sul ballo e sulla coreografia di stampo neoclassico. Come si è visto, nel 1812–1813 la Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi esposta al Salon di Parigi fu confusa con la Musa Tersicore proprio mentre nella stessa sede figurava la vera Tersicore. Anche la Danzatrice col dito al mento (fig. 2), godette dell’accostamento a una Musa, questa volta senza usurparne indebitamente il nome, ma anticipandone le fattezze: questa Musa fu Polimnia, la cui rappresentazione statuaria ereditò diversi elementi figurativi della precedente fanciulla danzante. Nel citato articolo ho già avuto occasione di rimarcare le somiglianze e di cercarne gli ascendenti pompeiani,50 ora torno sopra il tema in forma più circostanziata, offrendo immagini della statua di Polimnia e di possibili modelli dell’antichità a lei collegati. Al pari della versione originaria di Tersicore, anche Polimnia fu pensata inizialmente come ritratto di un personaggio della cerchia napoleonica: questa volta si trattò di una sorella di Napoleone, Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi (1777–1820): era fatale che il potere politico allora dominante coinvolgesse un artista come il Canova nella glorificazione della dinastia Bonaparte, la famiglia del dominatore. Lo stesso Napoleone ebbe diverse effigi di mano del Canova, a partire dal busto come Primo Console in uniforme, compiuto in gesso nel 1802; studio preparatorio di un progettato e mai concluso monumento equestre. Seguì un nuovo busto-ritratto a collo ignudo poi replicato in varie copie, inteso per anticipare l’imponente Napoleone Bonaparte come Marte pacificatore in piedi, ignudo con le sembianze del dio, monumento realizzato fra il 1803 e il 1806.51 Diversi furono i membri di casa Bonaparte titolari di ritratti di mano del Canova: notissimo è il marmo, concepito nel 1807 e compiuto nel 1808, di sua sorella Paolina Borghese Bonaparte Venere vincitrice, seminuda e allungata su un sofà, opera conservata a Roma nella Galleria Borghese; di lei vi è anche il ritratto preparatorio sotto forma di busto.52 Analoghi busti-ritratto, tratti dai modelli e calchi in gesso conservati nella Gipsoteca di Possagno, sono dedicati a personaggi della famiglia: vi sono i due già citati di Alexandrine de Bleschamps sposa di Luciano Bonaparte, 50 Cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1). 66–70 e figg. 4, 12, 24, 26. 51 Cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 64, n. 144: Napoleone Bonaparte Primo Console, busto, modello originale in gesso (foto p. 65); 64–65, n. 145: Napoleone Bonaparte, busto, gesso originale; foto in Ottorino Stefani, “The origins of Canova’s sculpture” in Antonio Canova: Art and Memory in Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 74–139, foto e commento p. 125. Napoleone come Marte pacificatore giunse a Parigi nel 1811; caduto Napoleone, attraverso varie vicende approdò presso il Duca di Wellington Arthur Wellesley vincitore di Waterloo, nella cui residenza londinese, Apsley House, si conserva tuttora. La replica in bronzo di Francesco e Luigi Righetti, voluta nel 1807 da Eugenio Beauharnais viceré d’Italia per il cortile del Senato a Milano, passò poi all’Accademia di Brera e nel 1859 vi venne collocata in cortile. 52 Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), n. 188 Paolina Bonaparte (originale in gesso) e n. 189 (calco in gesso del marmo) e foto p. 77.
443
Elena Ferrari-Barassi studi per la già considerata Tersicore poi destinata (sostituita la testa) ad altro committente, inoltre i busti compiuti nel 1813 per un’altra sorella dell’Imperatore, Carolina Bonaparte Murat (1782–1839), regina di Napoli, e per suo marito, il re di Napoli Gioachino Murat.53 Ma prima di tutti costoro il Canova aveva onorato “Madame mère” ossia la madre dell’imperatore, Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte (1750–1836), ritraendola comodamente seduta a figura intera; iniziata quella scultura nel 1804, l’aveva terminata nel 1807, e l’anno dopo, nel 1808, essa fu esposta al Salon.54 Ne seguirono immancabili riproduzioni in incisione: una reca la scritta latina “Napoleonis Mater” e una successiva è intitolata, in lingua francese, “Madame Mère de l’Empereur et Roi d’Italie” (fig. 16). La statua di Letizia fu decretata somigliante alla statua romana di una matrona seduta, alla quale effettivamente il Canova si era ispirato: allora la si credeva Agrippina, oggi invece viene riconosciuta per Flavia Giulia Elena Augusta, madre di Costantino il Grande, in seguito canonizzata come Sant’Elena; la sua statua sta a Roma nei Musei Capitolini, nella Sala degli Imperatori in Palazzo Nuovo (fig. 17). Se Letizia Ramolino ebbe un’effigie ragguardevole, più solenne ancora ne volle una sua figlia Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, moglie di Felice Baciocchi e, come tale, Principessa di Lucca e Piombino, Duchessa di Massa e Principessa di Carrara. La statua fu commissionata nel 1809 quando la signora aveva aggiunto agli altri titoli anche quello altisonante (benché solo onorifico) di Granduchessa di Toscana. Inizialmente ella chiese al Canova di ritrarla nelle vesti della Concordia; ma nelle more della lavorazione quel soggetto fu prescelto dall’imperatrice Maria Luisa d’Austria, seconda moglie di Napoleone; il modellino e il modello grande in gesso della suddetta nuova Concordia somigliante a Maria Luisa furono compiuti nel 1811 e l’opera finita in marmo nel 1813–1814;55 la stessa Maria Luisa volle poi con sé la statua nella reggia di Colorno, quando, caduto Napoleone, nel 1816 ella prese possesso del Ducato di Parma, Piacenza e Guastalla. Ora la statua si trova a Parma nella Galleria Nazionale.56 La maestosa figura di Maria Luisa (o Maria Luigia, come la chiamano i parmigiani) si erge seduta a schiena ritta con un diadema in fronte, un lungo scettro in pugno e una patera da libagioni sor53 Cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 90, n. 229 (foto p. 91), n. 230, n. 231: Busto di Carolina Bonaparte Murat, rispettivamente modello originale in gesso e due calchi in gesso del marmo; p. 91, n. 232, Busto di Gioacahino Murat, calco in gesso dal marmo, foto p. 92. 54 Cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 67–69, n. 155–158: bozzetto in terracotta, modellino in gesso, calchi del marmo. Notizie su quest’opera in “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe” (cit. a nota 12), 156–158, XL. 55 Cfr. i risultati delle varie fasi della lavorazione in Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 12), 84–85, n. 200–205. 56 Cfr. Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), sub 1811, p. 479: “Statua sedente che rappresenta Maria Luigia Imperatrice di Francia, e figurata sotto il simbolo della Concordia in un vero grande”; notizie storiche alla p. 479, nota 85.
444
Antonio Canova e le Muse retta con la mano sinistra. Anche quest’opera ebbe la sua riproduzione a stampa, ombreggiata ad acquaforte e bulino e introdotta dal titolo latino “Maria Aloysia Austriaca Napoleonis Uxor” (fig. 18). Come si è detto, fin dal 1812 Elisa per non dare ombra all’illustre cognata aveva modificato la propria commissione, rinunciando alla Concordia e ripiegando su un diverso personaggio, meno prestigioso se si vuole, ma più suggestivo: la Musa Polimnia. In effetti, mentre un primo bozzetto originale in terracotta raffigurava ancora la Concordia, un busto-ritratto di Elisa del 1812 è concepito in preparazione della figura completa di lei come Musa Polimnia. L’anonimo Catalogo cronologico delle sculture di Antonio Canova (1817) così nomina l’opera, rubricandola sotto l’anno 1812: “Statua sedente, grande al vero, destinata a rappresentare Maria Elisa Principessa di Lucca, ed ora la Musa Polinnia”. 57 Dunque quel “grande” ritratto mostrava la destinataria seduta, analogamente alle statue di Letizia e di Maria Luisa; a testimoniare il processo creativo di quell’opera si conservano a Possagno gli studi per il ritratto, un modellino completo della statua e il suo calco in gesso integrale. 58 Viceversa la statua in marmo vera e propria, che nel 1814 era ancora incompiuta, risentì del destino malinconico della sua committente. Infatti Elisa, una volta detronizzato in quell’anno il fratello imperatore, fuggì davanti alle truppe inglesi sbarcate a Livorno al comando di William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1774–1839, Lord Bentinck), subì una temporanea prigionia nella fortezza dello Spielberg, poi riparò a Bologna e morì infine a Trieste nel 1820; venne sepolta con il marito a Bologna in San Petronio. Naturalmente l’impegno di Elisa per l’acquisto della sua statua-ritratto era sfumato e l’opera ebbe una sorte diversa: all’inizio del 1817 essa, “esistente ancora presso l’Autore” a Roma,59 fu richiesta dai responsabili delle Province Venete per adibirla a presente di nozze per il quarto matrimonio dell’imperatore d’Austria Francesco I con Carolina Augusta di Baviera; cancellata la somiglianza con Elisa e idealizzati i tratti fisiognomici, nel luglio di quello stesso anno la statua di Polimnia ormai finita fu spedita dal Canova a Venezia, e da lì nel 1818 raggiunse Vienna;60 fece dunque parte del cospicuo dono di nozze in opere d’arte che le Province Venete, soggette 57 Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), sub 1812, p. 480. 58 Cfr. Bassi, Antonio Canova a Possagno (cit. a nota 7), 88, n. 216: “Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi gran duchessa di Toscana [busto], Gesso originale”; 88, n. 217: “Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi (nei depositi), Calco in gesso del busto di cui sopra”; 88, n. 218: “La Concordia o la Musa Polimnia, bozzetto in terracotta”. 88, n. 219: “Modellino per una statua ad Elisa Baciocchi sotto l’aspetto di Musa Polimnia” (con foto a p. 89); 88, n. 220: “La Musa Polimnia, Calco in gesso dal marmo”. Per notizie esaurienti su questa commissione cfr. “Catalogo delle matrici e delle stampe” (cit. a nota 12), 213–214, LXIV; Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), 480, note 88 e 89. 59 Catalogo cronologico (cit. a nota 6), sub 1812, 480. 60 Ibid., 480, nota 88.
445
Elena Ferrari-Barassi all’Austria, riservarono alla neo-imperatrice. Le furono offerti anche cento esemplari di una pregevole raccolta di stampe con vedute veneziane e riproduzioni di reperti antichi intitolata Omaggio delle Province Venete alla Maestà di Carolina Augusta Imperatrice d’Austria.61 Chi s’incaricò della consegna dei doni fu Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834), amico e biografo del Canova; a proposito della statua di Polimnia egli riferisce che essa fu collocata “nel gabinetto dell’Imperatrice”.62 Alla Hof burg di Vienna la statua ebbe un posto d’onore nel Grosser Salon (alla francese Grand Salon) degli appartamenti imperiali. Dopo la dissoluzione dell’impero austro-ungarico, occorsa nel 1918, essa passò attraverso varie vicissitudini, fra le quali l’acquisto nel 1943 da parte di Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), che la trattenne presso di sé in Germania. Terminata la seconda guerra mondiale, la statua fu restituita a Vienna divenendo proprietà della Repubblica Austriaca; tornò a occupare il Grosser Salon a Hof burg, dove la si ammira tuttora (fig. 19).63 Come si è visto, sulle prime l’immagine scultorea di Polimnia era stata concepita dal Canova come ritratto di Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi dopo che la stessa aveva rinunciato a farsi ritrarre come Concordia; in seguito, per cause di forza maggiore, l’idea del ritratto fu abbandonata e la fisionomia del viso ritoccata per non lasciare trasparire le originarie fattezze della committente. Ma il resto della figura rimase, inalterato, mantenendo i caratteri che dovevano connotare la statua come Musa: postura, gesto, abbigliamento, dettagli accessori. Un analogo destino di ritocco del viso era occorso, seppure per diversi motivi, anche alla Tersicore canoviana, concepita in origine per la cognata di Elisa, Alexandrine de Bleschamps Bonaparte. Viceversa la Concordia destinata all’altolocata e più fortunata cognata Maria Luisa d’Asburgo non dovette subire cambiamenti: essa mostra tuttora la fisionomia dell’Imperatrice, poi divenuta Duchessa di Parma, Piacenza e Guastalla (fig. 18). La Polymnia di marmo ora situata alla Hof burg (fig. 19) siede su una sedia a braccioli munita di cuscino, sobria nel disegno ma elegantemente decorata; la persona, grazie alla posizione eretta della schiena e del capo, rammenta l’alto grado politico dell’originaria committente, tuttavia la linea morbida delle brac61 Omaggio delle Province Venete alla Maestà di Carolina Augusta Imperatrice d’Austria (Venezia: Alvisopoli 1818), 18 stampe calcografiche, in tutto 600 esemplari fuori commercio. Autori delle incisioni: Canova, Pietro Fontana, Francesco Hayez, Felice Zuliani, Giuseppe Borsato, Bartolomeo Ferrari. 62 Cicognara, Biografia (cit. a nota 8), sub 1812, 64. 63 Per le notizie riguardanti le circostanze e la consistenza dei donativi all’imperatrice Carolina Augusta nonché le successive sorti di Polimnia fra Austria e Germania, ringrazio la dott.ssa Ilsebill Barta, Capo Dipartimento e Direttrice Scientifica del Patrimonio degli Arredi del Museo di Vienna nella Hofburg (Hofmobiliendepot – Möbel Museum Wien, Silberkammer Hofburg Wien).
446
Antonio Canova e le Muse cia smentisce velleità altezzose. Mentre il primo dei due aspetti accosta la figura sedente a quella della maestosa Maria Luisa d’Asburgo/Concordia armata di scettro, il secondo la avvicina piuttosto all’immagine pacifica di Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte “Madame mère” (fig. 16): quest’ultima, similmente a Flavia Giulia Elena di età romana (fig. 17), sta mollemente appoggiata allo schienale della poltrona con le braccia a riposo: il braccio destro ricade disteso davanti al corpo con la mano in grembo mentre il braccio sinistro, ripiegato all’indietro con il gomito sporto al di là dello schienale, rientrando posa il polso sul bordo ligneo e lascia ricadere la mano. Se ora osserviamo Polimnia, le sue braccia obbediscono a un analogo principio di quiete, pur atteggiandosi diversamente: il braccio destro se ne sta abbandonato in grembo, nascosto sotto un lembo di mantello che copre anche la mano, mentre il braccio sinistro, vestito di una mezza manica, poggia il gomito sul bracciolo e alza l’avambraccio verso il viso, tenendo il dito indice enigmaticamente puntato in direzione del mento senza però raggiungerlo. Questa Musa, al pari delle molte raffigurazioni antiche e meno antiche che la precedono, non porta vistosi attributi ossia oggetti che la connotino in modo palese; però, in questo caso specifico ne ammette uno seminascosto e un altro dismesso: il primo si scorge al suolo sotto la sedia, dal lato destro della donna seduta, a sinistra se chi guarda la osserva da quel fronte: l’identica visuale è ben favorita anche dal modello in gesso conservato a Possagno (fig. 20). Il secondo dei due oggetti è appeso in modo noncurante, dallo stesso lato, al bracciolo della sedia. Il primo, quello a terra, è una maschera tragica teatrale maschile, simile a quella solitamente caratterizzante la Musa Melpomene, mai prima d’ora prestata a Polimnia; il volto barbuto è incorniciato da riccioli a cascata sagomati a cannelli, che coprono anche parte della fronte; l’espressione è di sorpresa o addirittura di spavento. Invece l’oggetto appeso al bracciolo è una vezzosa corona di fiori. Il sobrio abbigliamento della dama è formato da un chitone sopra il quale un manto adagia i suoi drappeggi, nascondendole (come detto) il braccio e la mano destra; i piedi calzano sandali e l’acconciatura è singolare: i capelli riccioluti sono trattenuti indietro da un’alta fascia a diadema formata da tessuto attorcigliato; alla base di essa corrono due file di dischetti infilati uno di seguito all’altro e trattenuti al centro da un fermaglio oblungo, decorato con una rosetta. A quanto pare tutti gli elementi nel loro insieme vogliono assemblare e riassumere diverse caratteristiche della Musa Polimnia così come tramandate, talvolta in forma contraddittoria, lungo i secoli dall’iconografia e dalla letteratura. Come si è visto le arti più spesso attribuite a Polimnia erano quelle del canto sacro e della pantomima. Tuttavia, come discettano autorevolmente le annotazioni de Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano richiamandosi a una quantità di autori della classicità, il nome di quella Musa evocava ambiti diversi a secon447
Elena Ferrari-Barassi da del variare della grafia greco-romana, che esisteva in linea di massima in tre diverse forme: Πολυύμνια (Polyhymnia), Πολύμνια (Polymnia) e Πολυμνεία (Polymneia). Le prime due rimandavano etimologicamente alla “moltitudine degl’Inni” o alle “molte lodi” profuse con l’inneggiare, la terza invece nascondeva una derivazione da μνήμη (mneme) = “memoria”. Sebbene il richiamo agli inni comportasse un riferimento musicale, normalmente nessuno strumento per far musica è mai stato attribuito a Polimnia: è da eccettuare solo un fuggevole accenno di Orazio all’attitudine di quella Musa a “tendere barbiton” (Orazio, Odi, I, v. 33),64 ossia a tendere, pizzicandole, le corde del barbiton, varietà grave di lyra. Di fatto nessuna immagine a me nota prodotta dalla romanità in poi pone questo o altro strumento musicale in mano alla nostra Musa. Quanto alla menzione della “memoria”, essa ovviamente convalida l’origine non solo di Polimnia, ma di tutte quante le Muse, che erano considerate figlie di Zeus e della Memoria, componente primordiale di ogni scienza e arte. Non per nulla, come si è visto, il Parnaso di Mengs rappresenta questa dea accanto alle sue figlie in compagnia di Apollo (fig. 3); per non parlare dell’accostamento canoviano di Polimnia a Mnemosine (fig. 6) entro la serie a tempera e a stampa delle Muse con filosofi e poeti: in quella rassegna il predetto abbinamento ha il sapore di una vera e propria citazione, attraverso l’immagine, di una delle etimologie dottamente ricordate ne Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano: risulta che quella pubblicazione fosse ben nota al Canova.65 Memoria a parte, in base ad altre etimologie e a leggende aggiuntive le propensioni artistiche di Polimnia, a volte espanse in modo sorprendente fino a comprendere persino l’esercizio dell’agricoltura, di solito si aggirano nel campo squisitamente musicale, principiando dagli inni e allargandosi al ballo pantomimo, come suggeriscono le annotazioni riportate ne Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano: simili notizie vi vengono ricavate da passi di Plutarco, di Quintiliano, di Nonno di Panopoli, di Sidonio Apollinare e di Cassiodoro. Fra l’altro in ambito romano Polimnia è vista pure come la Musa di Numa Pompilio soprannominata “Tacita” (= “Silenziosa”) e successivamente come colei che, tacita di per sé, induce anche gli altri al silenzio esprimendosi con i gesti muti del ballo d’azione.66 Certo Mengs, rappresentando nel suo Parnaso Polimnia come una semplice danzatrice in duo con Tersicore (fig. 3), le fa torto, trascurando gli altri significati che le aleggiano intorno. Le lunghe e dotte disquisizioni offerte ne Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano si estendono ad ampio raggio, ma convergono sull’immagine di Polimnia come 64 Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (cit. a nota 13), II, 44, tav. 7, nota 3. 65 A proposito di questi ed altri volumi appartenenti alla biblioteca del Canova cfr. FerrariBarassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 71 e relativi riferimenti bibliografici. 66 Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (cit. a nota 13), II, 44–45, tav. 7, note 2 e 4.
448
Antonio Canova e le Muse è raffigurata nel volume (fig. 10) nella serie che la annovera in compagnia di Apollo e delle sue otto sorelle: si tratta delle riproduzioni dei già ricordati affreschi pompeiani appartenuti alla domus di Julia Felix poi al Museo Borbonico, ed ora conservati al Louvre. La nostra diva, connotata dalla didascalia apposta sul piedistallo che la sostiene come “Polymnía Mythous”, sta in piedi coronata d’alloro e severamente paludata; con la mano sinistra trattiene il panneggio del mantello e, sollevando la destra, dirige il dito indice verso la bocca. Il gesto, come si legge nel volume citato, suggerisce silenzio: ecco dunque giustificati il soprannome di “Silenziosa”, e pure l’intento di far tacere gli astanti. In effetti lo stesso identico gesto si vede accennato da altre figure femminili, questa volta non impersonanti Muse bensì compunte officianti di riti in onore di Dioniso; esse appaiono in tre scene di thíasos (45–79 d.C.) affrescate a fregio, provenienti da una non identificata domus di Ercolano; tali scene, distaccate dalle pareti d’origine all’epoca dei Borboni, oggi si trovano disperse in vari musei del mondo, primo fra tutti il Museo Nazionale Archeologico di Napoli; si vedono però riprodotte una dopo l’altra in ordinata successione, accanto ad altre della stessa serie, in apposite tavole de Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano.67 Le donne in questione, due in piedi e una seduta, tengono davanti alla bocca il dito indice della mano sinistra (non della destra come Polimnia), con gesto chiaramente invitante al silenzio: quest’atto, inquadrato in un rito sacro, vuole obbligare i fedeli al segreto allontanando i profani.68 Indubbiamente lo stesso atteggiamento, riferito alla figura di Polimnia, le dona un innegabile senso di mistero. Sembra più difficile interpretarlo come posa mimica di teatro; ancora più problematico sarebbe l’attribuire a questa Polimnia così statica un’intenzione di danza, anche se intesa come ballo pantomimo ovvero azione drammatica muta: una simile propensione, asserita nelle annotazioni de Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, sulle prime non sembrerebbe attagliarsi a questa specifica immagine. Soccorre però la scritta “Polymnía Mythous” (Polimnia, miti ossia “antiche favole”) apposta sul piedistallo; tale didascalia, ignorando qualunque riferimento agli inni il più delle volte suggerito dal nome della Musa, porta verso un’altra sfera ideale. Siccome i miti o “antiche favole” formano l’oggetto di rappresentazioni teatrali ( fabulae), ecco giustificata l’estensione del concetto di silenzio, combinato con quello di memoria, alla nozione di pantomima o danza, arte silenziosa ma carica di espressività; anche a questo proposito sono invocati, a volte un po’ forzatamente, autorevoli scrittori dell’antichità greci 67 Cfr. Tran, Catalogue (cit. a nota 16), 51–53; Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (cit. a nota 13), II, 127–167, tav. 20–27. Le tre immagini considerate corrispondono alle tav. 21, 23, 25. 68 Per maggiori notizie e precisazioni cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 63–68.
449
Elena Ferrari-Barassi e latini, pagani e cristiani: Tito Livio, Plutarco, Luciano, Arnobio, Cipriano, Tertulliano, Girolamo, Agostino, ecc.69 I significati finora ricordati sono attribuiti alla figura di Polimnia in base alla citata fonte pittorica pompeiana e alla scritta che la connota; ma esistono altre Polimnie d’età romana orientate in modo diverso. Una è la statua a tutto tondo, databile al 160–150 a. C. e derivata da un originale tardo-ellenistico di origine micro-asiatica, che emerse con altri reperti da scavi effettuati a Roma nel 1928, quando furono portati alla luce gli Horti Liciniani e quelli di Mecenate; essa, affidata ai Musei Capitolini e dapprima esposta nel Palazzo dei Conservatori, è stata poi dislocata nello spazio museale della Centrale Montemartini (fig. 21), ex centrale termoelettrica che esibisce sia la propria archeologia industriale sia i reperti di archeologia classica ivi raccolti. Anche in questo caso la Musa è in piedi, ma sta leggermente chinata in atto meditabondo, appoggiandosi a un cippo con i gomiti a braccia incrociate e sorreggendosi il mento con la mano destra. La sua capigliatura pettinata all’indietro è priva del serto d’alloro e il manto che le avvolge il busto copre in un unico fascio anche le braccia; nel suo insieme questa figura, destinata a una visione ottimale di profilo, produce un vago effetto di stupore e di mistero. Indubbiamente, qualunque fosse l’intenzione creativa di partenza, in questa immagine tutto esprime il silenzio assai meglio di quanto faccia il gesto esplicito della Polimnia di Pompei: sarebbe bello immaginare questa divinità come la Polimnia soprannominata “Tacita” che ispirava Numa Pompilio. Il suo aspetto compunto e riservato si ritrova del tutto o in parte in altre Polimnie scultoree che spesso ne offrono varianti anche sui sarcofagi, fra le altre Muse a schiera.70 In questo senso è esemplare quella che appare, prima da sinistra, nel Sarcofago delle Muse (180–200 d. C.) (fig. 11). La sua postura ripete quasi alla lettera quella della Polimnia della Centrale Montemartini, ma in forma più carnale; la veste e il mantello leggero che le coprono il corpo ne lasciano intravedere liberamente le linee e mostrano entrambe le mani scoperte, esentando la diva da quel senso mistico che la imprigionava nel modello antico. È interessante notare come, nella stessa immagine, anche Clio e la supposta Urania si avvolgano nelle pieghe del mantello quasi a nascondere il corpo con ritrosia: sono, nell’ordine, la seconda persona da sinistra e la seconda da destra. Quale superiore ideale incuteva in queste Muse tanta riservatezza? Forse un senso della morte o dell’immortalità, suggerito dalla natura luttuosa del sarcofago?
69 Cfr. Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (cit. a nota 13), II, 45, tav. 7, nota 5. 70 Cfr. Panella, Ward-Perkins, “Sarcofago” (cit. a nota 19).
450
Antonio Canova e le Muse Un’altra Polimnia a tutto tondo (II secolo d. C.) (fig. 22), mostra di derivare dall’antico modello della Centrale Montemartini, tipologia evidentemente molto affermata; essa fa parte del gruppo ospitato nella ricordata “Sala delle Muse” ai Musei Vaticani. Anch’ella è in piedi; il braccio destro, piegato contro il busto e interamente fasciato dal drappeggio del manto, lascia libera solo la mano che ne trattiene le pieghe all’altezza della spalla sinistra; invece il braccio e la mano sinistra scompaiono completamente dietro il panneggio che ricade di lato. Il capo della diva è sormontato da una coroncina di dischetti visti frontalmente, decorati al centro della loro superficie forse nell’imitare fiori stilizzati. Il nascondersi sotto il mantello accomuna questa Polimnia alle altre due, ma il suo fare maestoso la differenzia da entrambe. Soprattutto a questa immagine, non certo alla figura assorta emersa alla luce nel 1928 né a quella formosa del sarcofago, sembra ispirarsi la Polimnia a tempera dal Canova, ritratta accanto a Mnemosine nella serie delle Muse con filosofi e poeti riprodotta anche a stampa (fig. 6). In piedi di profilo, d’aspetto nobile e compassato, coronata di fiori, ella accoglie in sé molte caratteristiche abituali del personaggio, prima fra tutte il paludamento avvolgente che le nasconde il corpo; il manto indossato sopra il chitone non le lascia vedere le braccia, ma solo la mano sinistra sporgente verso l’alto; in questo ella differisce dalle altre tre Polimnie, che mostrano invece la mano destra. A ben vedere, nell’immagine a tempera la posizione di quella mano anticipa a modo suo l’atteggiamento della Polimnia marmorea di Hof burg, se non fosse per il dito indice, che non si scosta dalle altre dita, ma sta loro unito. Questa Polimnia, così come gli antichi modelli marmorei, si astiene dal gesto del “silenzio” con il dito davanti alla bocca, compiuto invece dalla Polimnia dell’affresco di Pompei (fig. 10): però nella stessa scena c’è chi sembra fare quel gesto al suo posto: è la madre Mnemosine, che sembra liberare a questo scopo un dito dal drappo che le avvolge la mano destra. Non basta: il putto che la accompagna compie chiaramente l’atto, muovendo il piccolo indice dal pugno chiuso della mano destra per alzarlo verso la bocca. È difficile assegnare un significato preciso a una simile figurazione, che rimodula le fonti antiche in forma nuova e impensata. Certo qui, come nella scena di Erato ed Euterpe (fig. 4), un’azione spettante alla Musa viene compiuta da un Erote: in questo caso è il gesto del silenzio, là si trattava di sorreggere l’arpa al posto di Erato. Si noti poi che, fra Polimnia e Mnemosine, in quest’immagine la più coinvolta nel silenzio è proprio Mnemosine, dea della memoria, coperta da capo a piedi dal velo, dal manto e dal chitone mentre accenna quel tale gesto con la mano fasciata. Non bisogna dimenticare l’osservazione, già fatta, che la scena sembra interpretare con i mezzi figurativi una delle etimologie attribuite al nome 451
Elena Ferrari-Barassi di Polimnia, ossia quella che vi vede la radice mneme = “memoria” e induce a pensare a una connessione molto stretta fra la figlia e la madre. Un particolare che ora distingue la Polimnia dipinta dal Canova da quella Vaticana è il serto di fiori che incorona la Musa; essa le conferisce leggiadria, come fa del resto anche con altre Muse della stessa serie; l’artista ha dunque preferito trasformare in fiori la fila dei dischetti stilizzati che circondano il capo del modello antico. Invece non lascerà più indossare una simile corona f loreale alla Polimnia di marmo, probabilmente perché nel frattempo egli avrà immaginato per quest’attributo un significato di danza festosa, che Polimnia dovrà rinnegare. Dopo aver evocato la Polimnia della classicità nell’immagine a tempera, nella statua il Canova ne dà un’interpretazione ancora nuova. Egli mantiene l’idea di un panneggio invadente, tale da celare interamente un braccio, ed ora pure la mano destra della Musa; anche il particolare delle file di dischetti intorno al capo richiama la coroncina della Musa Vaticana (fig. 22), benché questa volta i dischetti mostrino non il lato frontale, ma lo spessore laterale (fig. 19). Un altro elemento sembra invece venire alla nuova Polimnia canoviana, come già a Mnemosine e all’Erote dipinti a tempera in compagnia di Polimnia: il gesto della mano che sporge l’indice verso il viso, preso dalla Musa omonima dipinta a Pompei (fig. 10). Questa volta però il dito non arriva fino alla bocca come nell’affresco antico e nella tempera, bensì si ferma più in basso, a una certa distanza dal collo. In tal modo esso non indica più nulla, anzi dona alla mano un aspetto noncurante, interlocutorio e quasi di riposo, come se il personaggio interrompesse un movimento appena accennato. Tale “freno” sembra offrire riscontro alla scomparsa dell’altra mano sotto il mantello, quasi entrambi gli elementi volessero adombrare un’intenzione espressiva repressa. Nella statua si nota pure che quell’indice lungo e affusolato, discosto dalle altre dita della mano, è puntellato con un’asticciola, probabilmente per esigenze di buona conservazione della scultura; sembra più difficile leggere in quel corpo estraneo una funzione ideale, quasi si trattasse di un plettro o di un mezzo per scrivere, senza alcun riscontro complementare nel resto dell’immagine. Dunque, stando al suo atteggiamento, questa Polimnia sembra mettere da parte gli inni, le antiche favole e il danzare drammatico che gli autori antichi le attribuivano: persino la maschera tragica, oggetto simbolico prestato abusivamente a questa Musa come allusione all’arte teatrale, se ne sta quasi nascosta, relegata sotto il sedile. Quanto alla corona di fiori (primule) che pende trascurata dal bracciolo, anch’essa sembra nascondere una rinuncia. Di questo avevo già discusso nell’articolo precedente, indovinando un legame tenue, ma molto significativo, con la seconda delle tre affascinanti ninfe danzanti scolpite dal Ca452
Antonio Canova e le Muse nova, precisamente la Danzatrice col dito al mento (fig. 2). Essa era stata compiuta nel 1814 per Domenico Manzoni, ricco funzionario dell’amministrazione di Forlì e poi del Dipartimento del Rubicone per conto di Napoleone, prima che questi cadesse, poi fu acquisita dall’ambasciatore russo a Roma Nicolaj Dimitrievič Gur’ev. Oggi la versione in marmo è perduta, ma a Possagno si conserva il bellissimo modello in gesso. Tale immagine, concepita dal Canova nel 1809 in un periodo di malinconia e di smarrimento conseguente all’entrata in Roma delle truppe napoleoniche, non ha l’aria spensierata della precedente Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi (fig. 1): sembra fermarsi a meditare, con un fare tra il vezzoso e lo sbarazzino, incrociando le gambe e con il piede destro sospeso, come fosse intenta a studiare da ferma un passo prima di riprendere slancio; intanto la corona di fiori, che la ninfa precedente portava lietamente e baldanzosamente in testa, ora è tenuta appesa al braccio sinistro ripiegato con il dorso del polso poggiato in vita. Ecco dunque lo stesso motivo della ghirlanda appesa, ripreso nella Polimnia di Hof burg (fig. 19).71 Ma forse quell’emblema messo da parte ha, nei due casi, sfumature semantiche diverse: la Danzatrice esprime una momentanea (solo momentanea) sospensione del ballo e dell’umore gioioso, invece Polimnia sembra accantonare un ricordo di danze del passato, ricordo pure adombrato dal gesto della mano sinistra appena accennato e interrotto. La corona di fiori deposta sembra richiamare anche la figura di Polimnia dipinta a tempera dal Canova con la madre Mnemosime (fig. 6): ma là la Musa indossava quei fiori sui capelli di fonte alla madre severamente velata, quasi a differenziare i rispettivi umori: Polimnia avrebbe in sé una componente gioiosa preclusa a Mnemosine. Invece ora sembra quasi che l’artista, dovendo creare una nuova più “importante” e dignitosa Polimnia, riconosca un errore figurativo prima compiuto e lo corregga ripetendo un’idea già usata per la Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi. Ora Polimnia non danza e non gioisce. La combinazione di tre elementi di rinuncia, la maschera, la corona di fiori e il movimento sospeso della mano, da un lato allude ancora alla tradizionale funzione di Polimnia come maestra nella pantomima, ma dall’altro rimuove dalla memoria proprio quegli attributi e quell’atteggiamento per donare ora alla Musa un’identità intellettuale più pura, di marca atenaica o apollinea. Anche qui dunque il Canova esplica quella tendenza alla polisemia, che spesso nel descrivere personaggi e situazioni gli fa conciliare significati diversi armoniosamente combinati fra loro. Fra le tempere e stampe anche la Danzatrice col dito al mento ha un precedente, questa volta nella serie dedicata alle Danzatrici (fig. 7). In quell’immagine si vede una fanciulla, menade danzante aggraziata e f lessuosa, alla sinistra di una 71 Cfr. Ferrari-Barassi, “Iconography” (cit. a nota 1), 52–53, 68–71 e figg. 7, 12, 26.
453
Elena Ferrari-Barassi collega (a destra per chi guarda) pari a lei nell’aspetto e nell’atteggiamento; l’appartenenza delle due alla sfera dionisiaca è denunciata da oggetti tipici, inerti al suolo o appesi nelle vicinanze: due tirsi, un tamburello a cornice e un paio di cembali. Le due menadi non sono coronate di fiori né ne reggono in altro modo: sarebbe fuori posto per la loro categoria. Quella di sinistra allarga le braccia sorreggendo i lembi della veste leggera, mentre quella di destra accenna una posa quasi identica a quella poi rivissuta dalla statua della Danzatrice col dito al mento (fig. 2). Però il dito che la danzatrice marmorea punterà contro la base del mento, quest’altra danzatrice lo fa indugiare contro la guancia, non si sa se con intenzione allusiva o per semplice vezzo.72 Complessivamente la figurina a tempera sembra più frivola e decorativa rispetto a quella successiva in marmo, ma entrambe le fanciulle danzanti (quella dipinta e quella scolpita), hanno in comune un gesto: sollevano il dito indice di una mano come poi farà Polimnia, e lo fanno con la destra, mentre la Musa scultorea lo farà con la sinistra. In realtà tutte e tre alzano quel dito verso il viso, però lo fermano a diversi livelli: contro la guancia, contro il mento e a mezz’aria. Curiosamente, lo stesso gesto ha così tre varianti a seconda delle identità raffigurate: la menade, la ninfa e la Musa. Certo si è persa qualunque ideale connessione con le sacerdotesse di Dioniso apparse nei thíasoi di Ercolano con l’indice davanti alla bocca per invitare al silenzio; né si mantiene l’analogo accenno al silenzio introdotto dalla Polimnia di Pompei (fig. 10). (“Polymnía Mythous”) nell’evocare le rappresentazioni mute, né al gesto di Mnemosine e dell’Erote nella ricordata tempera canoviana Polimnia e Mnemosine (fig. 6). Secoli dopo il nostro artista riprende sì quell’atto, ma appena accennato e in forma deviata: infatti nell’attribuirlo alla menade dipinta, alla Danzatrice col dito al mento e a Polimnia, annebbia gli antichi ruoli e ne conferisce loro di nuovi a fantasia. A quanto pare in questo caso gli preme sottolineare soprattutto l’aspetto della danza. Alla giovane menade basta, per esprimerlo, l’atteggiamento del corpo inarcato e pronto allo scatto, mentre invece la ninfa e la Musa evocano la stessa attività tramite la ghirlanda dismessa; il serto rivelatore, che adornava il capo della spensierata Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi (fig. 1), richiama tuttora l’idea del ballo ma la pone fra parentesi; l’atto del ballare, interrotto solo momentaneamente dalla ninfa, dalla Musa sembra interrotto per sempre. Mentre Tersicore era stata effigiata dal Canova in piedi (figg. 12 e 13), ora Polimnia è seduta (figg. 19 e 20), distinguendosi in questo dalle Polimnie del passato. Probabilmente la postura prescelta fin dall’inizio intendeva offrire un’impressione di maestà trattandosi di un ritratto di Elisa granduchessa, chiamato a competere con quelli di Letizia “Madame mère” (fig. 16) e di Maria 72 Ibid., 57, 70–71 e figg. 12, 26.
454
Antonio Canova e le Muse Luisa imperatrice (fig. 18). Tuttavia il tema della Musa seduta non era nuovo nell’antichità, benché non si trattasse di Polimnia. Ad esempio Clio e Urania si trovano raffigurate sedenti nella serie ad affresco di Ercolano73 e di nuovo in marmo nella “Sala delle Muse” in Vaticano, qui imitate da Calliope e persino da Tersicore; Clio lo è pure fra le Muse del Museo Torlonia, al pari di Euterpe. Muse sedute se ne vedono anche nel Parnaso di Mengs, al di là della madre Mnemosine: mentre altre Muse, come Apollo, si ergono in piedi, Euterpe se ne sta accomodata su un sedile e Calliope e Urania siedono a terra. Dunque se il Canova conferisce a Polimnia questa postura, la licenza figurativa non è assoluta ed ha più di una giustificazione. Egli dunque contravviene alla rappresentazione che vuole Polimnia in piedi, tuttavia dalle Polimnie antico-romane egli prende altri tratti fondamentali che donano fascino al personaggio: li vedremmo alquanto enigmatici, se non riconoscessimo i loro precedenti. Il più intrigante è la velatura del corpo, che riveste persino una mano; anche la posizione dell’altra mano suscita interrogativi di difficile risposta, se non vi riconosciamo alla lontana il gesto di invito al silenzio con l’indice davanti alla bocca compiuto dalla Polimnia di Pompei (fig. 10): quel gesto si stempera nei gesti simili, ma mitigati e non più imperativi, che lo stesso Canova, prima di foggiare la Polimnia marmorea, imprime alla menade danzante dipinta (fig. 7) e alla ninfa danzante scolpita (fig. 2). Un’analoga sfumata rimozione appare dalla maschera nascosta sotto la sedia, che ricorda la pantomima teatrale con la sua silenziosa drammatizzazione dei miti: anche questo suggerimento ideale viene della Musa pompeiana, cioè dalla sua scritta “Polymnía Mythous”. Invece la corona di fiori ora appesa alla poltrona di Polimnia non viene dal mondo romano, ma da una sensazione quasi onirica introdotta dal Canova: evoca un passato mondo di danza e di letizia, una temperies che aveva arbitrariamente sfiorato anche Polimnia, là dove ella si accompagnava a Mnemosine nella sfilata delle Muse con filosofi e poeti (fig. 6); ma ora anche questo è relegato alla sfera del ricordo. Per rimanere alle due Muse più rappresentate nella produzione artistica del Canova, Tersicore e Polimnia, le loro storie hanno messo in luce ispirazioni molteplici, rielaborazioni, inf lussi e trasmigrazioni concettuali ora palesi ora sfuggenti: idee “rubate” sì in principio all’antica cultura greco-romana, ma poi consegnate alla fantasia e alla sensibilità individuali e rivissute come cosa propria. Il poeta, librettista e studioso di cose antiche Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714–1795), ben noto alla storia della musica come responsabile con Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) di una stagione di riforma del melo73 Cfr. Tran, Catalogue (cit. a nota 16), 29, 34; Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (cit. a nota 13), II, tav. 2 e 8.
455
Elena Ferrari-Barassi dramma, negli ultimi anni della sua vita fu amico del Canova e colse in lui quel particolare estro volto a un garbo geniale, che superava la sua capacità di innalzare grandiosi monumenti. Così dunque lo esortò epistolarmente: Ella non imprenda più a scolpir monti di sassi, ma faccia belle dee e grazie, ninfe e bacchetti e satiretti e amorini e genietti […]. Mi lusingo che darà tutto il suo tempo a’ lavori di Prassitele, abbandonando quelli grandiosi di Fidia.74 Le Muse create dal Canova possono annoverarsi fra le “belle dee” consigliate come soggetto ideale dal Calzabigi all’amico scultore; egli talvolta le apparentò a “ninfe” danzanti, ma non si limitò a scolpire in marmo queste e altre creature come aveva fatto in età classica Prassitele, anticipatore dell’ellenismo per dolcezza e languore: a volte il Canova, ancor prima di foggiare i loro modelli in creta e in gesso, dietro un impulso spontaneo si sbizzarrì nel dipingerle a tempera, dando loro come compagni altri personaggi e magari anche gli “amorini” auspicati da Calzabigi; poi, al fine di ricavarne introiti commerciali, mandò alle stampe con mezzi moderni sia le scenette pittoriche (figg. 4, 5, 6, 7), sia immagini delle sue statue più belle (figg. 14, 16, 18) Il fondamentale contributo del Canova al neoclassicismo fu sì una aderenza ossequiosa ai modelli dell’antichità appoggiata ai dotti strumenti culturali disponibili al suo tempo, ma anche libera escursione in un mondo tutto suo di immaginazione e quasi di gioco. In questo quadro si dispongono pure gli elementi musicali connessi con le sue figurazioni: gli strumenti attribuiti alle Muse musiciste (Erato, Euterpe, Tersicore) e la danza, che spesso aleggia intorno a queste dee anche quando non specificamente rappresentata.
74 Ranieri de’ Calzabigi a Canova, Napoli, 22 giugno 1790; Napoli, 2 ottobre 1790. Bassano del Grappa, Museo Biblioteca Archivio, Carteggio Canoviano, III, 213, 2483 e 2484. Cfr. Anna Laura Bellina, “Ultime lettere di Ranieri Calzabigi: corrispondenze amichevoli e ‘versetti’ encomiastici per Antonio Canova”, in Studi in onore di Vittorio Zaccaria in onore del settantesimo compleanno, a cura di Marco Pecoraro (Padova: Unicopli, 1987), 339–355, soprattutto 344, 345; Paola Fardella, “Tra antico e moderno: Antonio Canova e il collezionismo napoletano”, in Antonio Canova: la cultura figurativa e letteraria dei grandi centri italiani: Milano, Firenze, Napoli (4a settimana di Studi Canoviani, Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico, 4–8 novembre 2002), a cura di Fernando Mazzocca e Giovanni Venturi, (Bassano del Grappa: Istituto di Ricerca per gli Studi su Canova e il Neoclassicismo, 2006), 313–325, soprattutto 316.
456
Antonio Canova e le Muse Post-scriptum Poco più indietro, a proposito di Tersicore, era balenato il nome del musicista tedesco tardo-rinascimentale o meglio proto-barocco Michael Praetorius. Vale la pena di ricordare il suo nome anche a proposito di Polimnia: egli la chiama in causa nel pubblicare due raccolte di musica sacra concertante: Polyhymnia caduceatrix et panegyrica. Darinnen solennische Friedt- und Frewden-Concert (Wolfenbüttel, 1619) e Polyhymnia exercitatrix, seu Tyrocinium musicum harmonicum (Francoforte sul Meno, 1619–1620). Il primo dei due titoli latini conferisce a Polimnia le qualifiche di “caduceatrix” e di “panegyrica”, ossia “ambasciatrice divina” 75 e “foriera di lode gioiosa”, come spiega il sottotitolo in lingua tedesca, dove fra l’altro “Polimnia” é presentata sbrigativamente come “concerto”; nel secondo caso invece egli chiama la Musa “exercitatrix”, chiarendo con la definizione aggiuntiva Tyrocinium musicum harmonicum che le musiche sacre raccolte nel libro rivestono uno scopo didattico. Evidentemente il musicista, pure mostrandosi imbevuto di fervore umanistico, non si addentra nei reconditi significati della personalità di Polimnia, ma si ferma a quelli generici e alquanto soggettivi di “fautrice di inni in concerto” e di “maestra di musica e armonia”. La deferenza del Praetorius verso le Muse si potrebbe già vedere in una raccolta precedente, pure essa sacra, intitolata Urania oder Uranochordia (Wolfenbüttel, 1613): ma qui il supposto richiamo alla Musa Urania inganna, poiché in realtà l’intitolazione nasconde due aggettivi sostantivati al neutro plurale, designanti “canti celestiali o canti fatti su corde celestiali”. Indubbiamente però la più importante manifestazione, da parte di Michael Praetorius, di devozione alle Muse come protettrici ideali della musica sacra cristiana, si ha nei suoi quindici libri intitolati Musae Sioniae apparsi a nove riprese fra il 1605 e il 1610; essi recano elaborazioni di corali luterani e salmi, nonché altre composizioni religiose. Il richiamo alle Muse ripetutamente espresso nei titoli si riqualifica in senso cristiano con l’evocazione del monte Sion, emblema della città santa di Gerusalemme.
75 Secondo i canoni della classicità il caduceo era la verga die Hermes/Mercurió, mesaggero degli dei.
457
Elena Ferrari-Barassi Fig. 1. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Danzatrice con le mani sui fianchi, modello in gesso (1802 circa). Possagno: Museo e Gipsoteca Canova (inv.: 168).
458
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 2. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Danzatrice col dito al mento, modello in gesso (1809). Possagno: Museo e Gipsoteca Canova (inv.: 196).
459
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 3. Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), Il Parnaso, affresco (1760-1761). Roma: Villa Albani, volta della Galleria. Proprietà Principe Torlonia.
460
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 4. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Le Muse Erato ed Euterpe con due Eroti, tempera su carta (1799). Possagno: Museo e Gipsoteca Canova (inv.: 118).
461
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 5. Luigi Cunego (1757–1823) (incisore), La Musa Tersicore e Pindaro, con un Erote, da tempera di Antonio Canova; acquaforte e bulino. Roma: Calcografia Camerale (1812).
462
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 6. Pietro Fontana (1762–1837) e Michele Torres (incisori), La Musa Polimnia e Mnemosine, con un Erote, da tempera di Antonio Canova; acquaforte e bulino. Roma: Calcografia Camerale (1811).
463
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 7. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Due menadi danzanti, tempera su carta (1797). Possagno: Museo e Gipsoteca Canova (inv.: 119).
464
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 8. Pietro Campana (1727–1765) (incisore), La Musa Tersicore; disegno di Giovanni Elia Morghen da affresco di Pompei, domus di Julia Felix; incisione su rame da Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, tomo II (1757), tav. 5, appartenente all’opera Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, 8 volumi (Napoli, Regia Stamperia, 1757–1792).
465
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 9. Pietro Campana (1727–1765) (incisore), La Musa Erato; disegno di Giovanni Elia Morghen da affresco proveniente da Pompei, Domus di Julia Felix; incisione su rame da Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, tomo II (1757), tav. 6, appartenente all’opera Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, 8 volumi (Napoli, Regia Stamperia, 1757–1792).
466
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 10. Pietro Campana (1727–1765) (incisore), La Musa Polimnia; disegno di Giovanni Elia Morghen da affresco proveniente da Pompei, Domus di Julia Felix; incisione su rame da Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, tomo II (1757), tav. 7, da Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, 8 volumi (Napoli, Regia Stamperia, 1757–1792).
467
Fig. 11. Sarcofago delle Muse, marmo (età romana, 180-200). Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum (inv.: ANSA I 171).
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
468
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 12. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), La Musa Tersicore, marmo (1811), visione di ¾ da sinistra. Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma): Fondazione Magnani Rocca.
469
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 13. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), La Musa Tersicore, marmo (1811), visione di ¾ da destra. Mamiano di Traversetolo (Parma): Fondazione Magnani Rocca.
470
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 14. Pietro Fontana (1762–1837) (incisore), La Musa Tersicore; disegno di Giovanni Tognoli dalla statua in marmo di Antonio Canova; acquaforte e bulino. Roma: Calcografia Camerale (1816 circa).
471
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 15. John Kennerley (attivo 1829) (incisore), La Musa Tersicore dalla statua in marmo di Antonio Canova; incisione su rame, da Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore […] (London, James Bulcock, 1828), piena pagina a fronte del titolo.
472
Antonio Canova e le Muse Fig. 16. Pietro Fontana (1762–1837) (incisore), Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte (Madame Mère de l’Empereur et Roi d’Italie), disegno di Vincenzo Camuccini dalla statua in marmo di Antonio Canova; incisione su rame (1810 circa).
Fig. 17. Flavia Giulia Elena Augusta, marmo (età tardo-romana, IV secolo d. C.). Roma: Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo, Sala degli Imperatori.
473
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 18. Domenico Marchetti (1780 circa–1844 circa) (incisore), Maria Luisa d’Austria come Concordia, disegno di Giovanni Tognoli dalla statua in marmo di Antonio Canova; acquaforte e bulino. Roma: Calcografia Camerale (1817).
474
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 19. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), La Musa Polimnia, marmo (1812-1817), visione di ¾ da sinistra. Vienna: Hof burg, Appartamenti Imperiali, Grande Salone dell’Imperatrice Elisabeth (Grosser Salon Kaiserin Elisabeth), © fotografia: Bundesmobilienverwaltung, Hof burg Wien, Kaiserappartaments, fotografa: Tina King.
475
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 20. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), La Musa Polimnia, modello in gesso (1812–1813), visione frontale da sinistra. Possagno: Museo e Gipsoteca Canova (inv.: 220).
476
Antonio Canova e le Muse
Fig. 21. La Musa Polimnia, marmo (età romana, 160-150 a. C.). Roma: Museo alla Centrale Montemartini (sede distaccata dei Musei Capitolini), fotografia: Musei Capitolini.
477
Elena Ferrari-Barassi
Fig. 22. La Musa Polimnia, marmo (età romana, II secolo d. C.). Città del Vaticano: Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino, Sala delle Muse, fotografia: Musei Vaticani.
478
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
Nicoletta Guidobaldi Università di Bologna
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale: Indagini sul Programma Iconografico del Tempietto del Palazzo Ducale di Urbino con un’Ipotesi di Ricostruzione Virtuale Abstract. The Concert of the Muses in the Ideal City: Investigations on the Iconographic Program of the Tempietto of the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino with a Virtual Reconstruction Hypothesis. The pictorial cycle originally housed in the so-called Tempietto delle Muse in Federico da Montefeltro’s Ducal Palace in Urbino, the oldest attestation of the iconographic representation of the Muses as musicians within a courtly context, visualizes the celebratory theme of music as a mirror of the harmony realized by the Duke during his reign, representing, at the same time, the praise of the ducal “musicality” and that of the favorite ducal instruments and repertories. There is no doubt that this sophisticated iconographic project was elaborated within a humanistic, neoplatonic celebratory program but its reconstruction is complicated by the lack of documents concerning its sources and the original number and disposition of the paintings (partly lost) inside the Tempietto. On the basis of the recontruction of the pictorial cycle’s ‘iconographic genealogy’ and a global interpretation of the iconographic programme, this paper proposes a hypothesis to identify the iconographic sources of the lost paintings and their possible disposition. To support these hypotheses, the paper also proposes a virtual reconstruction, “relocating” in the Tempietto both the surviving and the missing musical images.
Il ciclo pittorico originariamente collocato nel cosiddetto Tempietto delle Muse del Palazzo ducale di Urbino, la più antica attestazione in ambito cortese del tema delle Muse musiciste, costituisce anche una preziosa variazione sul tema della musica come specchio dell’armonia realizzata da Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482) durante il suo regno.1 L’identificazione di Urbino con la Città Ideale e di Federico con il Perfetto Governante platonico, esposta da Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) in particolare nel De Regno e ripresa, a diversi livelli di 1
Nicoletta Guidobaldi, “Il ritorno delle Muse nell’Italia del Quattrocento”, RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter 17/1 (1992), 15–24, e Nicoletta Guidobaldi, La musica di Federico. Immagini e suoni alla corte di Urbino (Firenze: Olschki, 1995).
479
Nicoletta Guidobaldi elaborazione sia nella copiosa produzione letteraria e poetica in onore del duca che nella decorazione del Palazzo, trova una suggestiva visualizzazione nelle immagini delle Muse, nelle quali l’elogio della “musicalità” ducale s’intreccia con quello delle performances predilette dall’ambiente. Il diretto collegamento fra il programma del Tempietto e il recupero del significato sapienziale delle Muse nell’ambito del neoplatonismo che caratterizza gli orientamenti culturali della corte di Urbino è stato ampiamente evidenziato dagli studiosi, che ne hanno sottolineato i chiari riferimenti a tematiche riconducibili all’opera di Ficino. 2 Se non c’è dubbio che le immagini destinate al Tempietto siano state elaborate dagli umanisti di corte nell’ambito di un dotto programma celebrativo, la ricostruzione del progetto iconografico si scontra con l’assenza di testimonianze coeve sulla composizione e sulla disposizione originaria dei dipinti, rimossi durante la devoluzione del ducato e oggi parzialmente dispersi. Dopo la morte senza eredi dell’ultimo duca di Urbino, i dipinti, concessi nel 1632 da Urbano VIII (1558–1644) ad Antonio Barberini (1607–1671), Cardinale Legato del Ducato di Urbino, furono trasferiti a Roma e di lì passarono, per via ereditaria, al Principe Corsini a Firenze, dove sono attualmente conservati gli esemplari superstiti: otto tavole a olio, raffiguranti Apollo suonatore di lira da braccio e sette Muse musicanti (risultano perdute Urania ed Euterpe). 3 Dopo il restauro effettuato durante gli anni Novanta, che ha restituito la piena leggibilità ai dipinti, a lungo trascurati dalla critica a causa delle condizioni di conservazione e delle numerose ridipinture, è stata confermata l’attribuzione di Polimnia, Clio, Calliope, Tersicore, Erato e Melpomene a Giovanni Santi (1439–1494) che li avrebbe realizzati nella ultima fase della sua attività, fra il 1480 e i primi anni Novanta del Quattrocento. Dopo la morte dell’artista, probabilmente coinvolto anche nell’ideazione del programma, il ciclo sarebbe stato completato durante il regno di Guidubaldo (1506–1508) da Timoteo Viti (1470–1523), al quale si devono le figure di Talia e di Apollo, apprezzate dallo stesso Vasari, che nelle sue Vite ricorda di aver visto a Urbino “un Apollo e due Muse mezze nude, in uno studiolo secreto, belle a mera2
3
480
André Chastel, Art et Humanisme à Florence à l’age de Laurent le Magnifique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 359–372, qui 371; Claudia Cieri Via, “Ipotesi di un percorso funzionale e simbolico nel Palazzo Ducale di Urbino attraverso le immagini”, in Federico di Montefeltro. Le Arti, a cura di Giorgio Cerboni Baiardi, Giorgio Chittolini, Piero Floriani (Roma: Bulzoni, 1986), 47–64, qui 57–62; Maria Grazia Pernis, “Neoplatonismo in alcuni programmi iconografici del Palazzo Ducale di Urbino”, in Studi per Pietro Zampetti, a cura di R. Varese (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 1993), 153–162, qui 155–158. Sono molto grata agli Eredi Anna Lucrezia Sanminiatelli Corsini, Eredi Nerini Incisa della Rocchetta Corsini, Cristina Minutoli Tegrimi Corsini e Lucrezia Miari Fulcis Corsini per avermi gentilmente concesso le riproduzioni di Apollo e delle Muse conservate nella Galleria Corsini e per avermi permesso di pubblicarle a corredo di questo saggio.
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
Fig. 1. Veduta assonometrica del Tempietto delle Muse e della Cappella del Perdono (Urbino, Palazzo Ducale), da P. Rotondi, Il Palazzo Ducale di Urbino (1950)
viglia”.4 Nonostante gli importanti chiarimenti sulle vicende del ciclo emersi dagli studi recenti, numerose incertezze permangono sulla stessa concezione del progetto e sull’identificazione delle tavole perdute. In questo breve contributo, a partire da una ricognizione sulla “genealogia iconografica” delle tavole 4
Per una dettagliata ricostruzione delle vicende storico-critiche delle tavole prima del restauro, con bibliografia precedente, cfr. le schede di Daniela Ferriani, “Le Muse del Tempietto del Palazzo Ducale di Urbino”, in Urbino e le Marche prima e dopo Raffaello, a cura di Paolo Dal Poggetto e Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto (Firenze: Salani 1983), 150–158. Per una rivalutazione complessiva del ciclo nell’ambito dell’attività di Giovanni Santi, studiato in maniera approfondita in occasione del restauro delle tavole, cfr. gli atti del convegno internazionale Giovanni Santi, a cura di Ranieri Varese (Milano: Electa, 1999); e le schede di Agnese Vastano e Daniela Ferriani, Raffaello e Urbino. La formazione giovanile e i rapporti con la città natale, a cura di Lorenza Mochi Onori (Milano: Electa, 2009), 102–109.
481
Nicoletta Guidobaldi superstiti, verrà proposta una interpretazione del programma iconografico e dei suoi contenuti musicali, avanzando alcune ipotesi sull’i identificazione dei dipinti scomparsi e sulla loro possibile disposizione all’interno del Tempietto. La chiara ispirazione al platonismo ficiniano che costituisce lo sfondo concettuale su cui si basa l’elaborazione del progetto del Tempietto emerge fin dalla scelta di collocare le immagini in un piccolo ambiente dedicato che, insieme alla cosiddetta “cappella del Perdono”, occupa uno spazio perfettamente coincidente, a distanza di un piano, con quello del celebre Studiolo (fig. 1). Nell’ambito di un programma organico, che legava idealmente e strutturalmente gli ambienti riservati al Duca nell’area occidentale del palazzo incorniciata dai torricini e affacciata sulla valle del Metauro, 5 la cappella e il Tempietto costituiscono, idealmente, il punto d’ arrivo del “percorso reale e simbolico” che dallo studiolo, attraverso la scala elicoidale, conduce nella zona sacra del Palazzo.6 Sui bordi delle candide pareti del vestibolo comune ai due ambienti, un’iscrizione in lettere d’oro in campo azzurro introduceva il visitatore all’eterno splendore della Città Ideale: HAEC QUICUMQUE PETIT MUNDO / PIA LIMINA CORDE / HIC PETIT AETERNI FULGIDA REGNA POLY. Una seconda iscrizione, all’interno del portico, ribadiva l’unità ideale e architettonica dei due sacelli rispettivamente dedicati a Dio e alle Muse, in accordo con la concezione ficiniana nella quale filosofia platonica e religione cristiana non sono opposte, ma perfettamente integrate: BINA VIDES PARVO DISCRIMINE / IUNCTA SACELLA /ALTERA PARS MUSIS/ ALTERA / SACRA DEO EST. La terza iscrizione, visibile sul bordo superiore delle pareti all’interno del Tempietto, infine, ne ribadiva la sacralità, in termini densi d’inequivocabili risonanze ficiniane: QUISQUIS ADES LAETUS MUSIS ET CANDIDUS ADSIS FACUNDUS CITHARAE NIL NISI CANDOR INEST.7 5 6 7
482
Paolo Rotondi, Il Palazzo ducale di Urbino (Urbino: presso l’Istituto statale d’arte per il libro, 1950), vol. 2, 332–337; cfr. anche Il Palazzo di Federico da Montefeltro. Restauri e ricerche, a cura di Maria Luisa Polichetti (Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1985). Cieri Via, “Ipotesi di un percorso” (cit. a nota 2), 57–59. Sulle iscrizioni, trascritte alla fine del Cinquecento e pubblicate da Lorenz Schrader, Monumentorum Italiae quae hoc nostro saeculo et a Christianis posita sunt, libri quatuor (Helmstedt: J. Lucinus, 1592), fol. 284, cfr. Rotondi, Il Palazzo ducale di Urbino (cit. a nota 5), vol. 1, 368, e Paolo Rotondi, “Manifestazioni di paganesimo umanistico nel Palazzo ducale di Urbino”, Emporium 108 (1948), 233–242; cfr. anche Cecil H. Clough, “Decorative Elements
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
Fig. 2. Giovanni Santi (1439–1494), Clio. Firenze: Galleria Corsini
483
Nicoletta Guidobaldi
Fig. 3. Giovanni Santi (1439–1494), Calliope. Fig. 4. Giovanni Santi (1439–1494), Tersicore. Firenze: Galleria Corsini Firenze: Galleria Corsini
Nei dipinti originariamente collocati sulle pareti del Tempietto le Muse sono visualizzate da fanciulle a grandezza naturale, ognuna con un diverso strumento musicale, tranne Clio, che sembra accennare un passo di danza (fig. 2). Calliope, Tersicore, Erato e Polimnia (figg. 3, 4, 5, 6) vestono sontuosi abiti dalle lunghe maniche, dai colori prevalentemente scuri ma impreziositi da fasce e cinture, e calzari simili a quelli di Apollo, che indossa una tunica rossa e un mantello, mentre Melpomene e Talia, a piedi nudi, indossano semplici tuniche “all’antica” che lasciano scoperte le braccia (figg. 7 e 8). Le eleganti figure femminili sono raffigurate accanto a pareti e grotte rocciose che visualizzano l’“operosum antrum” che l’immaginario umanistico associa al Parnaso – sullo Associated with the Cult of Antiquity in the Ducal Suite of the Urbino Palace”, in Studi per Pietro Zampetti, a cura di Ranieri Varese (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 1993), 175–176.
484
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
Fig. 5. Giovanni Santi (1439–1494), Erato. Fig. 6. Giovanni Santi (1439–1494), Polimnia. Firenze: Galleria Corsini Firenze: Galleria Corsini
sfondo di un paesaggio naturalistico i cui elementi salienti (rilievi montuosi, colline, corsi d’acqua, lo stesso cielo con nuvolette bianche) definiscono un fondale comune, che idealmente prosegue, da un dipinto all’altro, stabilendo un legame fra Apollo Musagete (fig. 9), le Muse e le altre figure oggi scomparse. Un ulteriore elemento di collegamento fra le immagini è costituito dalle iscrizioni latine dipinte sul margine inferiore delle tavole raffiguranti le Muse: ad ogni figura corrisponde un verso tratto da un epigramma, all’epoca considerata di Virgilio, ma in realtà dello Pseudo Ausonio: Clio gesta canens transactis temporis reddit. Melpomene tragico proclamat moesta boatre Comica lascivo gaudet sermone Thalia Dulci loquis calamos Euterpe f latibus urget 485
Nicoletta Guidobaldi
Fig. 7. Giovanni Santi (1439–1494), Melpomene. Firenze: Galleria Corsini
Fig. 8. Timoteo Viti (1470–1523), Talia. Firenze: Galleria Corsini
Terpsichore affectus citharis movet: imart auget Plectra gerens Eratho saltat pede; carmine vultu Carmina Calliope libris heroica mandat. Urania poli motus servitatur et astra. Signat cincta manu: loquiturque Polymnia gestu Mentis Apollineae vis has movet undique musas. In medio residens complectitur omnia Phoebus Clio istoria invenit; Melpomene tragoedias Thalia comoedia Eutherpe tibias Terpsichore Psalterium Eratho geometriam Calliope litteras Urania astrologiam Polymnia rhetoricam. 8
8
486
André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’Art (Genève-Lille: Droz -Giard, 1954),139, nota 5; e Chastel, Art et Humanisme à Florence (cit. a nota 2), 371–372.
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
Fig. 9. Timoteo Viti (1470–1523), Apollo. Firenze: Galleria Corsini
487
Nicoletta Guidobaldi I versi, che indicano il nome, l’azione o il gesto che individua i rispettivi ambiti della creazione poetica e artistica cui sovrintende ogni musa, fungono da didascalia e svolgono essenzialmente un ruolo d’identificazione (più che di puntuale descrizione) delle immagini dipinte. I versi presentano le Muse in una sequenza – aperta da Clio e conclusa da Urania e Polimnia, con Apollo al centro – che secondo Cecil Clough, avrebbe determinato la disposizione delle tavole all’interno del Tempietto.9 Se queste immagini poetiche che rispecchiano l’interpretazione ficiniana di Apollo/Sole da cui deriva il movimento delle Muse sfere – costituiscono una componente di rilievo per l’elaborazione delle immagini delle Muse urbinati, non c’è dubbio che la principale fonte d’ispirazione per la realizzazione del programma iconografico sia stata costituita dal De gentilium deorum imaginibus di Ludovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500), poeta e filosofo neoplatonico, strettamente legato all’ambiente urbinate. I suoi contatti con la corte di Urbino, attestati non solo dalla presenza di due diverse versioni della sua opera nella Biblioteca ducale, ma anche da suoi carmi in lode del Palazzo e del giovane Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (1472–1508), sembrano essersi intensificati proprio in relazione all’a allestimento di una nuova versione del testo, che, arricchito da numerose integrazioni e correzioni rispetto alla precedente versione (dedicata a Borso d’Este, 1413–1471), Lazzarelli avrebbe dedicato a Federico da Montefeltro dopo il 1474.10 Nella sua opera, un poemetto latino illustrato da miniature, dedicato alle immagini degli antichi dei, Lazzarelli presenta le divinità planetarie nel primo libro e Apollo e le Muse nel secondo. È stato osservato come le due serie d’immagini, che rispecchiano il macrocosmo e il microcosmo, siano legate da un nesso musicale, esplicitato dall’immagine della Musica, che si manifesta in tutte le dimensioni della realtà, dalla rotazione delle sfere celesti, fino al canto delle Muse e a quello dei poeti, con cui si conclude il primo libro.11 Di ogni immagine Lazzarelli presenta sia il “ritratto” figurativo sia quello “morale”, affiancando, a ogni miniatura, la corrispondente descrizione in versi che ne illustra le qualità e i caratteri salienti. Vale la pena notare come elementi distintivi dell’una e dell’altra componente delle 9
Cecil H. Clough, “Il Tempietto delle Muse e Giovanni Santi”, in Giovanni Santi. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Urbino, 17–19 marzo 1995), (Milano: Electa, 1999), 63–70, qui 68. 10 La relazione dell’ statt fra l’opera di Lazzarelli con il ciclo delle Muse era già stata evidenziata da Cieri Via, “Ipotesi di un percorso” (cit. a nota 2), 56–59. Per un’approfondita disamina dei contatti di Lazzarelli con la corte di Urbino si veda l’edizione critica con traduzione e commento dell’esemplare dedicato a Federico da Montefeltro (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urbinate Latino 717): Ludovico Lazzarelli, De gentilium deorum imaginibus, a cura di Claudia Corfiati (Messina: Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Umanistici, 2006). 11 Lazzarelli, De gentilium deorum imaginibus (cit. a nota 10), 48–49 e 160–163.
488
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale immagini contenute nel De gentilium deorum imaginibus, rielaborate e adattate alla luce della celebrazione federiciana, siano riconoscibili nel programma iconografico del Tempietto. In primo luogo la peculiare caratterizzazione delle Muse urbinati, collocate in un sacello e raffigurate come figure serie, le cui vesti ne enfatizzano, in alcuni casi l’aspetto quasi sacrale, sembra rispecchiare l’intento dichiarato da Lazzarelli all’inizio della sua opera, di presentarne, per la prima volta, la natura di divinità caste, che presiedono e sovrintendono ai diversi generi poetici. Nella finzione poetica, infatti, Lazzarelli compone la sua opera in risposta all’accorato appello della stessa Calliope, che gli era apparsa, all’inizio del poema, chiedendogli di redimere le Muse dalle denigrazioni di poeti e filosofi e di ristabilire la verità sul loro conto. In questa prospettiva, nelle immagini delle Muse del Tempietto si rispecchierebbe quello stesso riconoscimento della loro natura divina che è alla base dell’opera di Lazzarelli.12 Altrettanto evidente è la diretta relazione delle Muse di Urbino con quelle raffigurate nelle miniature del De gentilium deorum imaginibus, a loro volta letteralmente modellate sulle incisioni dei cosiddetti Tarocchi del Mantegna, in cui sono ritratte come musiciste, ognuna con un diverso strumento musicale e una sfera che visualizza la loro associazione con le sfere celesti, dal cui perenne moto risulta l’Armonia del mondo.13 Il riferimento iconografico alle Muse-sfere dei Tarocchi-Lazzarelli, nelle Muse del Tempietto, nonostante siano abbigliate diversamente e prive di sfere, è evidente. Alcune piccole varianti riguardano l’assegnazione degli strumenti: la chitarrina di Tersicore, nel dipinto di Santi si trasforma in una ribeca, mentre a Talia, che nei Tarocchi-Lazzarelli suona la ribeca, nel dipinto di Urbino è assegnato un corno gigante. Ma il carattere saliente della reinterpretazione urbinate dello schema delle Muse musiciste riguarda l’estrema cura dei dettagli nella raffigurazione degli strumenti musicali, tutti molto curati, ispirati a esemplari realmente esistenti e in alcuni casi identificabili con quelli “dolci e sottili” prediletti dal Duca, annoverati fra le meraviglie della corte e orgogliosamente immortalati nel Palazzo ducale di Urbino e di Gubbio.14 Così, per esempio, il generi12 Sulle immagini delle Muse “restaurate” da Lazzarelli, interpretate anche in contrapposizione con quelle delle Muse dipinte come “Veneri in trono” nello studiolo estense di Belfiore, cfr. Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros. Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 127. 13 Arthur M. Hind, Engraving: A critical catalogue with complete reproductions of all the prints described (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1970) vol. 1, 221–240; Claudia Cieri Via, “Origine, significato e fortuna di un ciclo di immagini”, in I Tarocchi: Gioco e magia alla corte degli Estensi, a cura di Giordano Berti e Andrea Vitali (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale,1987), 49–77. 14 Per una puntuale disamina degli strumenti dipinti da Santi nel ciclo delle Muse cfr. Francesco Luisi, “Iconografia musicale in Giovanni Santi”, in Giovanni Santi. Atti del Convegno internazionale (cit. a nota 4), 152–156.
489
Nicoletta Guidobaldi
Fig. 10 A/B. Confronto fra la ribeca di Tersicore e quella intarsiata nello Studiolo di Gubbio, 1478–1482 circa. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art (inv.-no.: 39.153).
co organetto portativo dei Tarocchi-Lazzarelli nella Polimnia del Tempietto viene trasformato in un piccolo organo a cuspide, del tipo più volte ritratto nelle tarsie di Urbino e nella stessa allegoria della Musica attribuita a Giusto di Gand (1430 circa–1480 circa),15 mentre la ribeca affidata a Tersicore trova riscontro con l’esemplare intarsiato nello Studiolo di Gubbio (fig. 10 A/B).16 Lo stesso Apollo, inoltre, che nei Tarocchi-Lazzarelli è raffigurato come “Re”, nel dipinto del Tempietto assume le sembianze di un cantore improvvisatore che trae i suoi accordi dalla lira da braccio: lo strumento quasi divino, che lo stesso Federico aveva imparato a suonare alla scuola del venerato Maestro Vittorino da Feltre, vero e proprio emblema degli ideali umanistici coltivati dall’ambiente urbinate, e non a caso attribuito ad Apollo anche nella tarsia della porta della Sala del trono (fig. 11). Grazie alla raffigurazione di strumenti riconoscibili che evocano il “paesaggio sonoro” ben noto agli osservatori, le 15 Nicoletta Guidobaldi, “Mythes musicaux et musique de cour au début de la Renaissance italienne”, Musique. Images. Instruments, 5 (2003), 32–47, qui 38. 16 Emanuel Winternitz, “Quattrocento Science in the Gubbio’s Study”, in Musical instruments and their symbolism in western art (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 116–119 e 120–128; Olga Raggio, The Gubbio studiolo and its conservation (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999).
490
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale Fig. 11. Apollo musico, tarsia dalla porta della Sala del trono. Urbino: Palazzo Ducale.
figure mitiche dipinte nel Tempietto vengono inequivocabilmente ambientate nella cornice culturale della corte ducale. In virtù di quest’attualizzazione, l’armonia delle sfere viene visualizzata dalle immagini “piene di suono” del concerto di Apollo Musagete e delle Muse, che danno forma al mito della Città Ideale e del fondamento musicale del regno di Federico. Apollo e le Muse che secondo la mitologia urbinate accompagnavano Federico fin dalla nascita con il proprio canto,17 intervengono con canti e versi nelle feste di corte e compaiono ripetutamente nelle rappresentazioni poetiche: dai versi di Alessandro da Firenze dedicati a Federico ancora Conte,18 fino al Preambolo della Cronaca rimata, opera incompiuta (direttamente ispirata all’Apologo del De Regno di Ficino), composta da Giovanni Santi (1433–1494) dopo la morte di Federico e dedicata a Guidobaldo.19 Nella narrazione poetica 17 Fra gli altri, Gian Mario Filelfo nelle sue Martiados ricorda come le Muse fossero state inviate da Giove a Federico per insegnargli l’amore per le arti e guidarlo nel suo percorso di perfezionamento interiore. 18 Alessandro da Firenze, Triumphus de inclitis Laudibus magnanimi ac divi principis Federici Urbini Montis Feretrique comitis (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urbinate latino 740). 19 Giovanni Santi, La vita e le gesta di Federico da Montefeltro duca d’Urbino. Poema in terza rima, edizione moderna a cura di Luigi Michelini Tocci (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Vaticana, 1985).
491
Nicoletta Guidobaldi l’autore, artista e letterato, egli stesso ideatore e allestitore di trionfi spettacolari, rappresenta l’Apoteosi di Federico che, incoronato dalla Fama, avanza fra Apollo e Minerva, preceduto dal corteo delle Muse: Nove vergin succinte iscalze e isnelle Coi capei sparsi d’or cum legiadria, Le qual, sopra natura excelse e belle, Coi segni in man venian cantando versi (V, 92–95). L’evocazione poetica delle fanciulle divine che danzano e cantano rinvia a quelle che nelle feste di corte e nei trionfi urbinati cantavano e suonavano e a quelle dipinte, in quegli stessi anni, dallo stesso Santi. 20 Come nelle rappresentazioni poetiche e spettacolari in onore del Duca, anche nei dipinti destinati al Tempietto, Apollo e le Muse erano accompagnati da altre immagini, perdute nelle travagliate vicende del Ducato, ma delle quali restano due preziose tracce verbali. La prima si deve a Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617) che, nella sua descrizione del Palazzo ducale pubblicata nel 1587, molto rilevante anche per il riferimento alle cornici lignee e agli altri ornamenti che decoravano il Tempietto (definito “studio”) inserisce un riferimento esplicito a “una Pallade con l’egida”: Degli studi, un altro ve n’è sotto questo [lo studiolo] nell’appartamento inferiore, la metà più picciolo: perciocchè dove lo spazio dello studio di sopra, tutto è libero, quello di sotto che gli risponde, è diviso nello studio, di che parliamo, ed in una cappelletta di cui parleremo dopo. Questo, oltra gli scorniciamenti di legno dorati, tarsia ed altri ornamenti, è diviso in alcuni spazi, ne’ quali, per mano di Timoteo Viti, famoso pittore di quei tempi, sono dipinti una Pallade con l’egida, un Apollo con la lira e le nove Muse, ciascuna col suo proprio instrumento. 21 La seconda testimonianza, nell’inventario Barberini del 1644, non solo conferma l’esistenza della Pallade oggi dispersa, ma fornisce una lista dettagliata dei dipinti che erano stati trasportati a Roma dal Cardinal Barberini: 20 Sull’intreccio fra cultura letteraria, figurativa e della rappresentazione nella multiforme attività di Santi cfr. Ranieri Varese, “La cronaca rimata”, e “Teatralità”, in Giovanni Santi (Fiesole: Nardini, 1994), 27–53 e 187–192; Guido Arbizzoni, “Le arti sorelle. Giovanni Santi e la corte di Urbino”, in Raffaello e Urbino (cit. a nota 4), 45–51; Daniele Seragnoli, “Immaginazione e significati. Giovanni Santi e le culture della rappresentazione”, in Giovanni Santi. Atti del convegno internazionale (cit. a nota 4), 119–140. 21 Bernardino Baldi, Descrizione del palazzo di Urbino, in Versi e prose (Venezia: De Franceschi, 1590), 532.
492
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale (1) Nove quadri longhi in tavole con le Muse, cioè: Euterpe, Melpomene, Polimnia, Tersicore, Calliope, Clio, Urania, Erato e Thalia; (2) un quadro con Apollo che suona la cetera con cornice tinta di noce filettata d’oro; (3) un quadro con Minerva con lo scudo e asta e con cornice simile; (4) uno simile, con una donna nuda à sedere che tiene la coscia manca sopra una dritta. 22 Sulla base di questa lista è possibile affermare che il ciclo pittorico del Tempietto comprendesse originariamente, oltre ad Apollo e alle nove Muse, anche Pallade (registrata come “Minerva con lo scudo e asta” nell’inventario) e un’altra figura, non meglio identificata. Clough, al quale va il merito di aver attirato l’attenzione sull’inventario Barberini riconducendo a dodici il numero delle tavole urbinati, ha suggerito di identificare la figura ignota con Venere, che secondo lo studioso doveva essere collocata, insieme ad Apollo e a Pallade, sulla parete di fondo del Tempietto. 23 Il fatto che nel ciclo fosse raffigurata Pallade, protettrice dell’Accademia Platonica e nume tutelare del Duca musicista, 24 non solo conferma la forte caratterizzazione “ficiniana” del programma iconografico, ma ci fornisce un indizio per individuare la fonte verosimilmente utilizzata per definire la serie delle immagini da collocare nel Tempietto, e per avanzare un’ipotesi alternativa rispetto a quella di Clough sull’identificazione della figura femminile scomparsa. Dal momento che le immagini che caratterizzano la mitologia federiciana compaiono tutte nel De imaginibus di Lazzarelli, dove le Muse, scortate da Apollo e da Pallade, sono introdotte dalla Poesia, si può ipotizzare che le dodici immagini destinate al Tempietto corrispondessero appunto a quelle presentate da Lazzarelli nel secondo volume della sua opera. Nella miniatura che raffigura Poesis, come negli altri casi derivata dai cosiddetti Tarocchi del Mantegna (fig. 12), la Poesia è ritratta come una fanciulla coronata d’alloro, seduta in un locus amoenus, che tiene un flauto diritto con la sinistra mentre con la destra versa da una
22 Mary Aronberg Lavin, Seventeenth-century Barberini documents and inventories of art (New York: New York University Press, 1975). 23 Secondo Clough all’interno del Tempietto le tre divinità erano collocate sulla parete di fondo, mentre le Muse si distribuivano lungo le pareti principali: Clough, “Il Tempietto delle Muse e Giovanni Santi” (cit. a nota 9), 68. 24 Sul ruolo di Minerva come protettrice del duca di Montefeltro nelle opere di Ficino dedicate a Federico, cfr. Pernis, “Neoplatonismo in alcuni programmi iconografici” (cit. a nota 3), 157–158.
493
Nicoletta Guidobaldi
Fig. 12. Poesia, incisione dai Tarocchi del Mantegna, serie E, 1465 circa. Parigi: Bibliothèque national de France.
494
Fig. 13: Ricostruzione virtuale della sequenza di Apollo e le Muse (sulla base dello sfondo).
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
495
Fig. 14. Ricostruzione virtuale della sequenza di Apollo e le Muse, secondo l’ordine del De gentilium deorum imaginibus (BAV, MS Urbinate latino 717).
Nicoletta Guidobaldi
496
Il Concerto delle Muse nella Città Ideale
Fig. 15. Vista prospettica della ricostruzione virtuale del Tempietto.
brocca l’acqua della fonte Castalia che nutre l’ispirazione dei poeti. 25 A sostegno dell’ipotesi che questa immagine possa aver costituito il modello iconografico per la realizzazione del dipinto destinato al Tempietto, va notato che la posizione della Poesia, seduta con la gamba sinistra accavallata sulla destra, trova risconto con quella della figura femminile dipinta nella dodicesima tavola proveniente da Urbino, descritta nell’inventario Barberini: seduta, con “la coscia manca sopra una dritta”. A complemento di questa lettura del programma iconografico del Tempietto di Urbino, ne proponiamo una ricostruzione virtuale, “ricollocando” sia le immagini superstiti che quelle scomparse (segnalate dalle corrispondenti miniature di Lazzarelli) all’interno dell’ambiente. Fra le possibili sequenze dei dipinti, che potrebbero essere disposti secondo l’ordine dei versi o della coerenza figurativa degli sfondi e del paesaggio (fig. 13), qui proponiamo quella basata sulla successione delle immagini nell’opera di Lazzarelli, in modo da esplicitare e verificare, al tempo stesso, l’ipotesi esposta nel testo (fig. 14). Tenendo conto delle dimensioni, degli elementi architettonici e dei dati emersi nel corso degli ultimi restauri dell’ambiente, a partire dalla Poesia (la prima immagine del secondo libro di Lazzarelli) che viene collocata al centro della parete di fondo, le tavole vengono disposte, procedendo in senso orario con 25 Ludovico Lazzarelli, De gentilium deorum imaginibus (cit. a nota 10), 52–53 (miniatura e descrizione poetica) e 165–166 (traduzione e commento).
497
Nicoletta Guidobaldi Apollo, e poi con Clio e con le altre Muse, e infine Pallade, che conclude la serie di Lazzarelli, in modo da occupare gli spazi possibili, prima sulla parete destra, poi sulla sinistra, e poi sul fondo. Seguendo quest’ordine, sulla parete di fondo si trovano Pallade, la Poesia e Apollo, mentre le Muse si dispongono lungo le due pareti (fig. 15). 26 Se questa ipotesi andrà evidentemente approfondita e verificata nella prosecuzione della ricerca, la stessa ricollocazione virtuale delle immagini nel loro contesto originario ci permette fin d’ora di accostarci al senso di quello straordinario progetto in cui l’armonia della Città Ideale realizzata da Federico si manifestava nell’integrazione perfetta d’immagini pittoriche e ideali, di spazi e proporzioni architettoniche e musicali che solo “entrando” nel Tempietto si poteva cogliere.
26 In questa ricostruzione virtuale vengono presentati i primi esiti di un ampio progetto di ricerca in corso nel Dipartimento di Beni culturali dell’Università di Bologna, sviluppato in collaborazione con il gruppo di ricerca del Laboratorio Multimediale diretto da Alessandro Iannucci. Sono molto grata a Marco Orlandi, Chiara Caputo, Simone Zambruno, Federico Taverni, e desidero ringraziare in particolare l’ architetto Chiara Caputo, che ha coordinato lo studio dei rilievi e ha realizzato espressamente per questa pubblicazione, le viste prospettiche della ricostruzione virtuale del Tempietto con le ipotesi di suddivisione degli spazi e di ricollocazione delle tavole.
498
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
Maria Teresa Arfini Università della Valle d’Aosta
Johannes Theile’s Harmonischer Baum. An Example of Figurative Canon Abstract. Two manuscript copies of the Musikalisches Kunst-Buch (1691) composed by Johann Theile, contain some miscellaneous compositions dating from the last decades of seventeenth century, including an interesting puzzle canon in figurative form: the Harmonischer Baum. The canon is presented in the form of a tree with eight upper branches (“Harmonischer Baum in Canone à 10”), four on each side of the trunk. The base of the tree is a bass line in which the last four measures are the retrograde of the first four (“Radix”). The Harmonischer Baum is provided with a rhyme, which is written just below the ten-part canon: “Liebet so ihr liebstern Beyde / daß ihr einst mit tausent Freude / Kinder sehet um euch gehen / so Viel Zweig um Baume stehen” (“Love you most beloved pair / so that one day with a thousand joys / as many children encircle you / as there are branches on the tree”). The canon could be a commemorative piece, possibly a gift, for a wedding, or it could be related to alchemy because of its marriage symbology. In this article I will explain the possible resolutions of the canon and the canon’s unique place within the figurative canon tradition.
An interesting manuscript music book with pedagogical and demonstrative aims is conserved in Staatsbibliothek of Berlin: the Musikalisches Kunstbuch by Johann Theile,1 a German composer and theorist of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 1
Probably this specific title (as far as I know, only the Theile compilation bears the title Kunstbuch) suggested the definition used by Erich Schenk describing Die Musikalische Opfer by Johann Sebastian Bach; he used the expression “musikalisches Kunstbuch” (musical art-book or, musical book of patterns) to indicate “a pedagogical text, in which the author presents the quintessence of his compositional knowledge, without words and inserted musical examples […] but with musical pieces of different lengths” (Unter einem musikalischen “Kunstbuch” versteht man eine Lehrschrift, in der der Verfasser die Quintessenz seines kompositorischen Könnens niederlegt, und zwar nicht mit Worten und eingestreuten Notenbeispielen, wie dies heute bei Kompositionslehrbüchern der Fall ist, sondern an Hand von Tonstücken verschiedenen Umfangs, die bei zunehmender Schwierigkeit aus dem Bereich des schulmäßig Erlernbaren zu Werken fortschreiten, die der praktischen Kunstübung dienen), ordered by progressive musical difficulty. Die Musikalische Opfer could belong to this category of books and is, as well known, a thematically unified set of pieces. Erich Schenk, Das “Musicalische Opfer” von Johann Sebastian Bach, 1953, reprinted in Erich Schenk, Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Reden und Vorträge (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, 1967), 61–72, here 63–64.
499
Maria Teresa Arfini Theile was born in 1646 in Naumburg, a small town in Saxony, southwest of Leipzig. He took his basic education in Magdeburg, where he also received his first musical training. He was a law student at the University of Leipzig from 1666 until 1672: in this period, he was a pupil of Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) in Weissenfels; in 1673 he moved to Lübeck and was acquainted with Johann Adam Reincken (1623–1722) and Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707). He worked as Kapellmeister at Gottorf from 1673 to 1675; then he held the position of Kapellmeister in Wolfenbüttel from 1685 to 1689 and afterwards he entered the service of Duke Christian I (1615–1691) at Merseburg. In addition to his activity as a Kapellmeister and an opera composer (his most famous opera was Adam und Eva: Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch, first performed in Hamburg on 2 January 1678), he was a prominent counterpoint teacher: probably he was also active as a music teacher in the Berlin royal court of Frederick I of Prussia (1657–1715), from 1701 to 1713. In 1694 he returned to his hometown of Naumburg, where he died in 1724. 2 Theile’s Musikalisches Kunstbuch consists of some miscellaneous compositions dating from the last decades of the seventeenth century. It is made up of fifteen works of varying lengths and styles, a collection of musical examples employing various contrapuntal techniques and unified by the use of double counterpoint. As mentioned, it survives in five manuscript copies conserved in Berlin. The most complete of these (Mus. Ms. Theor. 913/1) was copied, probably in 1691, by Johann Gottfried Walther (1684–1748), a cousin of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who was his intimate friend during Bach’s Weimar period. The fifteen items include: (1) Canon in augmentation, by similar and contrary motion (2) Aria (3) Aria (4) Suite 2
500
For general information about Theile’s life, see Elizabeth Jocelyn Mackey, The sacred music of Johann Theile (Ph.D. diss., University Ann Arbor/Mich., 1968), vol. 1, 1–56. Mackey writes that “the basis of biographical information about Theile is provided by Johann Mattheson […] The prime source for Theile’s biography, however, is the obituary which Mattheson printed in Critica musica, Vol. 2, in 1725, the year after Theile’s death”, ibid., 2. Other more detailed information is available in Johann Mattheson, Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (Hamburg: In Verlegung des Verfassers, 1740), including an article on Theile’s biography. In 1927 Willi Maxton integrated the biographical note with a few new documents in his doctoral dissertation, now reprinted: Willy Maxton, Johann Theile (Wolfenbüttel: Floßdorf, 2004). Additional information is available in Werner Braun, “Theile-Studien”, in Festschrift Arno Forchert zum 60. Geburtstag am 29. Dezember 1985, ed. by Gerhard Allroggen (Kassel etc.: Bärenreiter, 1986), 77–85, and in Paul Walker, Theories of fugue from the age of Josquin to the age of Bach (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 204–234.
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum (5) Canon in augmentation, by contrary motion (6) Canon (duplex) in augmentation, by contrary motion (7) Examples of double counterpoint and inversion (8) Mass (Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus) (9) Fugue (10) Suite (11) Sonata (à 5) (12) Mass (Kyrie) (13) Sonata (duplex) (à 3) (14) Sonata (à 3) (15) Sonata (à 5) The other four copies belonged to Princess Amalia of Prussia (1723–1787), sister of Friedrich the Great (Friedrich II, 1712–1786). They perhaps belonged originally to Sophie Charlotte of Hanover (1668–1705), the wife of Theile’s patron, Friedrich I, and the grandmother of Friedrich the Great and Amalia. All four copies include items 4 (only the Aria), 5, 6, 8, and 14, and a fugue which is not found in Walther’s copy. All the copies present some further different items. Two copies (Mus. Ms. Theor. 452 and Am. B. 511/1), very similar in content, include also items 1 and 3 and present an interesting puzzle canon in figurative form: the Harmonischer Baum that perhaps does not even belong to the Kunstbuch. I wish to focus on the second page of these two last copies, representing the puzzle canon in the form of a tree. Carl Dahlhaus did not include it in his critical edition of the Musikalisches Kunstbuch, 3 and except for a little contribution by Erich Schenk4 and some references by David Yearsley, 5 the canon was not analyzed. * * * The enigmatic canon in figurative form is not a novelty. According to Luis Robledo,6 this kind of graphic musical representation derives from two traditions: the first one is the puzzle canon present in western music since Ars Nova 3 4 5 6
Johann Theile, Musikalisches Kunstbuch, ed. by Carl Dahlhaus (Kassel etc.: Bärenreiter, 1965). Erik Schenk, “Johann Theiles ‘Harmonischer Baum’”, in Musik und Bild, ed. by Heinrich Besseler (Kassel etc.: Bärenreiter, 1938), 95–100. David Gaynor Yearsley, “Alchemy and counterpoint in an Age of Reason”, Journal of the American musicological society 60/2 (1998), 201–243. Luis Robledo Estaire, Los emblemas musicales de Juan Del Vado (Madrid, Fundación Caja Madrid, 2009), 9–10.
501
Maria Teresa Arfini and developed to the very highest degree in the Franco-Flemish school in the fifteenth and sixteenth century; the second one is the graphic representation of music, originated in the so-called ars subtilior. A very famous example is the chanson about love, Belle, bonne, sage, by Baude Cordier (c. 1380 – before 1440) in the shape of a heart (Codex Chantilly, F-CH MS 564); another one is the virelai La harpe de la melodie (c. 1395, Chicago Manuscript, US-Cn 54.1) by Jacob de Senleches (active 1382/1383–1395), with vocal part notated on what appears to be the strings of a harp.7 Cordier also composed the circular canon Tout par compas suy composes (c. 1380, Codex Chantilly, F-CH MS 564), in the form of a wheel; the circular graphic form suggests the canon’s structure: it is a canon perpetuus, or “circular canon” or “round.”8 Another important example is the canon in wheel form Mundus et musica et totus concentus by Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja (c. 1440–1522): composed at the end of the fifteenth century. It is an allegorical introduction to a Florentine Chansonnier as well as a circular canon in four voices for which the copyist drew a circle with the musical staff and pictured the four winds blowing at the successive entering-notes of the canon. The miniature presents two inscriptions: the one inside the circle contains some technical instructions; another under the circle reveals a literary program.9 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the tradition of canon in figurative form, or musical emblem, was notably developed. The most representative were the canons in the form of a wheel, symbolically connected to infinity and eternity: for example, the circular canon Sphera Mundi by John Bull (1562/63–1628) composed in the early seventeenth century, and numerous canons by Juan Del Vado y Gomez (c. 1625–1691) from the second half of the seventeenth century.10 There are also canons notated in the form of a cross, with explicit symbolical allusion, such as the canon contained in the Plaine and easy introduction to practi-
7
Reinhard Strohm, “‘La Harpe de Melodie’ oder das Kunstwerk als Akt der Zueignung”, in Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte-Ästhetik-Theorie. Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Hermann Danuser (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1988), 305–316. 8 John Bergsagel, “Cordier’s circular canon”, The Musical Times 113/1558 (1972), 1175–1177. 9 “Omnibus hoc vitium est cantoribus inter amicos ut numquam inducant animum cantare rogati iniussi numquam desistant” (Singers all share the vice among friends of never acceding to the request when they are asked to sing and stopping when they are not being asked). See Robert Stevenson, Spanish music in the age of Columbus (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 61; Howard Mayer Brown, A Florentine chansonnier from the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). 10 See Laurence Wuidar, Canons énigmes et hiéroglyphes musicaux dans l’Italie du 17e siècle (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008).
502
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
Fig. 1. Puzzle canon in form of cross, from Thomas Morely, Plaine and Easy Introduction to Practical Musicke (London, Peter Short, 1597), 174.
cal musicke by Thomas Morley (1557/58–1602).11 In the third part of the treatise, dedicated to counterpoint, Morley explains the artifice of canon and also presents an enigmatic figurative canon: “I my selfe […] for exercises did make this crosse without any cliffes, with these wordes set by it: Within this crosse here may you find, / Foure parts in two be sure of this: / But first seeke out to know my mind, / Or else this Cannon you may misse”.12 Then, he explains how the canon is devised: the arms of the cross contain a mensural canon in the twelfth and likewise the staff contains other two parts in one; besides, it is a polymorphous canon which can be read backwards (fig. 1). 11 Thomas Morley, Plaine and easy introduction to practical musicke (London: Peter Short, 1597), 174. 12 Ibid., 173–174.
503
Maria Teresa Arfini
Fig. 2. Puzzle canon in form of Hercules pillars with tree, Juan De Vado, El Hércules peregrino, E-Mn M.1323, emblem V (from: Luis Robledo Estaire, Los emblemas musicales de Juan Del Vado, Madrid, Fundación Caja Madrid, 2009, 35).
504
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum Besides the aforementioned canons, some canons by Del Vado are especially interesting from an iconographical point of view. Composed as dedications, they substituted for the customary sonnets in a mass choir book manuscript for King Charles II of Spain (1661–1700, dated from 1677 to 1679.13 All the canons present a title, one or more inscriptions (also required to resolve the puzzle) and musical notation graphically presented as a wheel, with only two exceptions: the second canon is written on the imperial crown and on the crossed clubs, symbols of the Habsburgs, and is to be read from left to right and backwards on the clubs and clockwise and counterclockwise on the crown; the fifth canon is supported by the Pillars of Hercules and generates sixty-three different versions non plus ultra. Its iconographical presentation is interesting because of the figure of a tree (with no music notated) representing the growing possibilities of the canon (fig. 2).14 If these canons are comparable to the Harmonischer Baum for dedicatory aim and figurative conception, a further figurative canon must be remembered for its position at the opening of another music book with pedagogical and demonstrative aims, contemporary to Das musikalische Kunstbuch: the circular canon placed as the second item of the Artifici musicali op. 13 by Giovan Battista Vitali (1632–1692),15 a Cantilena a quattro in ruota (circular cantilena in four parts), graphically presented as a wheel. Its inscription presents indications to resolve the puzzle: “Fortunae solum virtus fuit semper verax dux. Variat illa vices, manet illa fixa lux” (Only virtue was always a truthful leader of fortune. One turn alternates, the other stays as a fixed light). This very simple tune, with its palindromic structure, is able to generate many solutions in four parts by means of inversion and retrograde imitation and could be considered a polymorphous canon (fig. 3).16 13 See Luis Robledo Estaire, “The enigmatic canons of Juan Del Vado (c. 1625–1691)”, Early Music 15/4 (1987), 514–519; Ibid., Los emblemas musicales de Juan Del Vado (Madrid: Fundación Caja Madrid, 2009). 14 See Robledo Estaire, The enigmatic canons (as note 13), 517–518. 15 Giovan Battista Vitali, Artificii musicali ne quali si contengono canoni in diverse maniere, contrapunti dopii, inventioni curiose, capritii, e sonate, op. XIII (Modena: Cassiani, 1689), 6. This music book is a pedagogical compilation of sixty compositions. Through the book Vitali presents his compositional art by means of canons, examples of double counterpoint and nine works in the principal contemporary instrumental forms. The works vary in size and scope and are arranged in order of increasing difficulty. The collection also includes a number of unusual pieces: for example, a balletto in three different meters simultaneously and a passacaglia, which modulates through the circle of fifths. 16 See John G. Suess, “Giovanni Battista Vitali e i suoi Artifici musicali op. XIII (1689)”, Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana 27/4 (1993), 628–629; Giovanni Battista Vitali, Artifici musicali opus XIII, ed. by Louise Rood and Gertrude P. Smith (Northampton: Smith College, 1959), 1–2.
505
Maria Teresa Arfini
Fig. 3. Cantilena a quattro in ruota, from Giovanni Battista Vitali, Artificii musicali ne quali si contengono canoni in diverse maniere, contrapunti dopii, inventioni curiose, capritii, e sonate, op. XIII (Modena: Cassiani, 1689), 6.
* * * The puzzle canon, which is the object of this article, is presented in the form of a tree with eight upper branches, four on each side of the trunk, with the inscription: Harmonischer Baum in Canone à 10 (Harmonic tree in canon in ten parts). The base of the tree is a bass line in which the last four measures are the retrograde of the first four: this palindromic structure is also very similar to the structure of Vitali’s Cantilena a quattro in ruota; its inscription is: “Radix”. The music on the lower two branches probably make up a separate canon; in effect the inscription is: “Canon à 6 qui undecies revolvi potest” (canon in six parts with eleven solution possibilities). 506
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
Fig. 4. Harmonischer Baum, in Johannes Theile, Musikalisches Kunstbuch, manuscript copy, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Am. B. 511/1, f. 2r.
The Harmonischer Baum is also provided with a rhyme, which is written just below the ten-part canon: “Liebet so ihr liebstern Beyde / daß ihr einst mit tausent Freude / Kinder sehet um euch gehen / so Viel Zweig um Baume stehen” (Love you most beloved pair / so that one day with a thousand joys / as many children en-circle you / as there are branches on the tree). Probably because of this rhyme, Erich Schenk suggested that the canon was a commemorative piece for a wedding; maybe it was a gift for a bridal couple.17 Particularly, Schenk compares Theile’s canon and verses to the dedicatory Perpetuum Mobile by Alessandro Poglietti (died 1683)18 for the Habsburg 17 Schenk, “Johann Theiles ‘Harmonischer Baum’” (as note 4), 95. 18 Poglietti received musical training in Rome or Bologna. In 1661 he became an organist and
507
Maria Teresa Arfini imperial couple, Leopold I (1640–1705) and his third wife Eleonor Magdalene of Neuburg (1655–1720): this circular canon in wheel form opens the harpsichord collection Rossignolo, dated 1677. On the other hand, David Yearsley argues that the canon was related to alchemy because of its tree form and marriage symbolism: Theile’s tree is similar to representations of the arbor philosophica, the symbol of Hermetic philosophy. Uses of this arboreal metaphor abound in the alchemical literature, as in the passage from an English edition of Paracelsus’s Of the nature of things: “It is possible also that Gold, through industry and skill of an expert Alchymist may bee so far exalted, that it may grow in a glass like a tree, with many wonderful boughs, and leaves, which is indeed pleasant to behold, and most wonderfull” […] Marriage provides another central metaphor in the discourse of alchemy. The union of husband and wife is commonly used to represent the joining of elements in alchemical reactions; the product of this fruitful union is a child, and the married couple remain “in the marriage bed of warmth until the perfect birth” (im Ehebett der Wärme bis zu der vollkommenen Geburt) of the philosophers’ stone.19 It is not my aim to discuss these affirmations, both well argued. Besides, most figurative canon shapes could refer to a very complex symbolism, particularly cross and wheel. Moreover, the form of a tree could suggest the growing possibilities of a canon, i.e. the polymorphous canon, like the tree in Del Vado’s canon El Hercules Peregrino (1677). The Harmonischer Baum could belong to the category of polymorphous canon, i.e. a canon with many possibilities of resolution. As Johann Mattheson (1681– 1764), for example, wrote in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), the devices necessary to solve such a canon are: double counterpoint, when the upper voice becomes the lower and so on; contrary motion, with inverted intervals; retrograde motion, beginning from the end; augmentation; doubling of parts, most commonly at the third. 20 All these devices could also be employed together in various combinations. In order to present the resolution of the first canon in ten parts, I copied all the branches in their original notation. First we can see the four upper branches, Kapellmeister at the Jesuit church Zu den neun Chören der Engel in Vienna and on 1 July 1661 he was appointed organist of the court Kapelle under Leopold I. Poglietti might have known Johann Pachelbel, who visited Vienna in the mid-1670s. 19 Yearsley, “Alchemy and counterpoint in Age of Reason” (as note 3), 234–237. 20 Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Christian Herold, 1739), 417.
508
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
Ex. 1. Canon in 10 parts: Soprano, similar and retrograde motion
Ex. 2. Canon in 10 parts: Contralto, similar and retrograde motion
Ex. 3. Canon in 10 parts: Tenor, similar and retrograde motion
Ex. 4. Canon in 10 parts: Violin, similar and retrograde motion
which present the final clef notation suggesting the retrograde motion and then are to be used both in similar and in retrograde motion (ex. 1–4). The trunk also presents the double clef notation, suggesting a backward movement for the bass line as well. Moreover, the bass line clearly derives from the “Radix”, written at the base of the tree (ex. 5, ex. 6). Put together in score, they could constitute a double chorus in eight parts, with two violin parts added for a total of ten parts, as indicated in the manuscript. Each chorus is independent and rooted on the bass line. Chorus 1 is by similar motion, Chorus 2 by retrograde motion: they easily could be superimposed in an eight-part composition by similar and retrograde 509
Maria Teresa Arfini
Ex. 5. Canon in 10 parts: Bass, similar and retrograde motion
Ex. 6. Radix: The last four measures are the retrograde of the first four
motion. The two versions of the violin line (“recto” and “cancrizans”) also could be superimposed (ex. 7). The short example of monumental musical writing, like many compositions of the seventeenth century, as described, among others, by Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Similar to these monumental canons, principally diffused in Italy, its counterpoint construction is quite simple: the melodic lines are the elaboration of a few triadic structures in the tonality of C major. Such a device permits the composition of canons with a very high number of voices but produces a composition that is not so musically interesting. The well-known Canon angelicus in thirty-six parts of Romano Micheli (c. 1575 – c. 1660), 21 written before 1650 and printed in the front page of the Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650), 22 represents an example of this canonical conception (ex. 8, ex. 9). 23 The other two branches (Canon a 6 qui undecies revolvi potest) are more problematical. They are in a different tonality, F major, and consist only of six measures; the bar lines are not notated in the manuscript. The first two meas21 Romano Micheli, born in Rome about 1575, studied music there with Francesco Soriano, and acquired fame as a learned contrapuntist. Micheli visited the more important towns in Italy: Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, Venice, Florence, and Naples. He returned to Rome in 1625 as maestro di cappella at S. Luigi de’ Francesi. In 1659, he was still alive at the age of eightyfour. 22 Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni in X. libros digesta (Rome: Ex typographia Haeredum Francisci Corbelletti, 1650). The Micheli’s canon had a philosophical value rather than a musical one: in the frontispiece Kircher presented a cosmic scheme embodying Catholic doctrine. The triangle at the top represents the Trinity. It is surrounded by nine choirs of angels; each choir singing in four parts. Together they are singing a canon in 36 parts. In that way, cosmic harmony was presented. 23 See Giuseppe Gerbino, “Gli arcani più profondi dell’arte. Presupposti teorici e culturali dell’artificio canonico nei secoli XVI e XVII”, Il Saggiatore musicale 2/2 (1995), 205–236, here 219–222.
510
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
511
Maria Teresa Arfini
Ex. 7. Canon in 10 parts: Complete realization in score
ures of each line are similar and contrary motion of the same melody but this relationship does not continue. By means of doubling at the upper and lower third the canon can be expanded into four parts but presents some problems (mistakes) in interval relation. Some different combinations in reversible counterpoint are also possible, but it is impossible to obtain a counterpoint in six parts with eleven combinations, as it is indicated in the manuscript (ex. 10–13). 512
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
Ex. 8. Scheme of the triadic structure of the Canone à 10
Ex. 9. Scheme of the triadic structure of the Canon Angelicus in 36 voices by Romano Micheli
Ex. 10. Canon in 6 parts: Soprano line, without indication of measure, incomplete
Ex. 11. Canon in 6 parts: Violin line, without indication of measure
Ex. 12. The two parts in score: The first two measures of D are the contrary motion of the first two measures of A
The Harmonischer Baum displays the same approach towards the reversible counterpoint (or double counterpoint) which unifies the entire Kunstbuch. Nevertheless, some questions about its contextualization remain open: Does it actually belong to Theile’s Kunstbuch? What is its scope? As mentioned, Carl Dahlhaus did not include it in his critical Ms. Theor. 913/1, but the Harmonischer Baum could be a dedicatory item of a particular copy, maybe dedicated to a bridal couple, as Schenk argued.
513
Maria Teresa Arfini
Ex. 13. Canon in four parts with two doublings to the upper and lower third
514
Johannes Theile’s H armonischer B aum
Ex. 14. Canon in four different combinations of double counterpoint
515
Maria Teresa Arfini
516
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady
Florence Gétreau CNRS, Paris, Institut de recherche en musicologie
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady: Seeking Their Identity and Paternity Abstract. No portrait of Antoine Forqueray (1672–1745) has yet been identified with certainty although a painting of a violist and a very young woman recently offered at auction in Paris has been the occasion to reopen the discussion. By taking into account the skill with which the painter depicts the Parisian instrument, the manner in which the bow is held, and the Order of St. Michael, this study explores the possibility that the painting depicts the professional musician Antoine Forquray and his daughter or Michel Ferrand (1681–1738) – captain of the French Guards as well as a pupil of Caix d’Herveloix (1680–1759) – and his young wife. A dating around 1725 and an attribution to the painter Jacques-François Delyen (1684–1761) are proposed. The enigma remains, making this “case study” a methodological ref lection on the challenges of identifying individuals with certainty within paintings despite many interesting clues.
In November 2015, a painting appeared at the Hôtel Drouot that was attributed to Jacques François Delyen (1684–1761) and very surprisingly described as Presumed Portrait of François Francoeur (1698–1787).1 According to the auction catalogue, this double portrait was considered by a family tradition to be a representation of the composer François Francoeur (1698–1787). A violinist, one of the 24 Violons du roi, and surintendant de la Musique, Francoeur received the royal orders of Notre-Dame du Mont Carmel and Saint-Lazare de Jérusalem, whose cross is green and ribbon red, in 1729. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that such a famous violinist would wish to be portrayed for posterity, not with a violin as the emblem of his skill, but with a viola da gamba, particularly when one takes into account codes of representation from the time. If we consider the possibility that the portrait is indeed of Francoeur, we must also investigate the identity of the young person near him. Could she be Marie Pelissier (born in 1707), who started singing at the Académie royale de musique 1
Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Vente collégiale de maîtres anciens et du XIXe siècle, 12 November 2015, 60– 61, lot 40, oil on canvas, 163 x 130 cm, presented by the auction house Thierry de Maigret, expertise Cabinet Turquin.
517
Florence Gétreau
Fig. 1: Attributed to Jacques-François Delyen (1684–1761), possibly presenting Antoine Forqueray and his daughter or Michel Ferrand (1681–1738) and his young wife, probably around 1725, oil on canvas, 163 x 130 cm. For sale by Hôtel Drouot, auction house, Paris.
in 1726, became his mistress in 1731 and filled the columns of gazettes? Her physiognomy as depicted in her portrait by Hubert Drouais at the Musée du Louvre does not support such a hypothesis. 2 2
518
Hubert Drouais (1727–1775), Mademoiselle Marie Plessier, second quarter of the eighteenth century, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 81.5 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre (inv.–no.: RF 2147).
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady In the months before the portrait’s public auction, the Cabinet Turquin, specialists in Old Master paintings, asked my opinion about it: my provisional conclusion was very different from what had been published in the catalogue. This is why I would like to share the results of the investigation I conducted and transmitted to the experts. An Unusual Composition In front of a wooded landscape framed by a column, this double portrait (fig. 1) represents a man and a young girl. He sits on a caned settee wearing a light blue jacket and a ruff led shirt with lace cuffs and a jabot. He wears a pair of elegant mules. In his right hand, he keeps a bass viol close to him, holding the bow as though he has just been interrupted. A book of music lies on its spine and sheets of music are spread carelessly on the f loor. Curiously, the girl seems to stand on the settee, leaning on the man’s shoulder and supporting herself with a cane attached to her wrist by a ribbon. She wears a “robe à la française”, a style that appeared around 1720, with a stomacher (a “pièce d’estomac”) covered with diminishing scales of knots finishing with two embroidered motifs on a puffed facing. The pink overcoat opens to show the lace sleeve. On the right, a basket full of balls of wool lies on a chair constructed partly of wicker. Two puppies play. This unusual double portrait intrigues the viewer immediately because of the somewhat artificial and theatrical placing of the girl in the middle of the composition, in a dominant position. Is she kneeling or standing? My first instinct was to consider the violist and his status: could he be a professional or was he simply an amateur? Portraits and “Figures” of French Viol Players (1680–1740) To understand the peculiarities of this portrait, it is necessary to consider the main portraits and “figures” of male viol players already well known today, created in France between 1686 and 1737, since this period probably includes the painting in consideration. 1.
3
Jean Dieu de Saint-Jean (1654–1695), Portrait of Marin Marais, after 1686, oil on canvas, 69.0 x 52.7 cm. Blois: Musée du château (inv.-no.: 869.5.1). 3 Florence Gétreau, “Portraits peints et gravés de Marin Marais”, in Marin Marais violiste à l’opéra (1656–1728), ed. by Benoît Dratwicki (Versailles: Centre de musique baroque, 2006), 11–21, here 14–16; Jonathan Dunford and Pierre-Gilles Girault, “Un portrait du musicien
519
Florence Gétreau 2. André Bouys (1656–1740), Portrait of Marin Maris, 1704, oil on canvas, 53.0 x 40.0 cm. Paris: Musée de la Musique (inv.-no.: 20 145). Autograph replica of a larger original exhibited at the Salon in 1704; location not known. The same portrait was engraved by Bouys and exhibited with the painting at the same Salon. A painted sketch on paper of the former Suzanne and Henri Baderou collection is preserved in Rouen: Musée des Beaux-Arts (inv.-no. 975-4-107). 3. François de Troy (1645-1730), Portrait de M. Theobaldo [Théobaldo Gatti (ca. 1650–1727] joüant de la viole, oil on canvas, Salon de peinture, 1699; location not known.4 4. Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648–1711), M. Morel de la musique du Roy [ Jacques Morel (active first half of the eighteenth century.)], 1699, violist and composer]; location not known. 5 5. André Bouys (1656–1740), La Barre and other musicians, ca. 1710-1715, oil on canvas, 160.0 x 127.0 cm. London: The National Gallery (inv.-no.: NG2081).6 6. André Bouys (1656–1740), Réunion de musiciens, oil on canvas, 117.5 x 89.0 cm. Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts (inv.-no.: CA 577). 7. After André Bouys (1656–1740), Réunion de musiciens, oil on canvas, 112.0 x 86.0 cm; former collection of André Meyer, Paris.7 Offered for sale by the gallery Alexis Bordes, Paris, in 2017. 8 8. Louis Tocqué (1696–1772), Monsieur Rindvel, Hollandais, en pied, jouant de la basse de viole, oil on canvas, Salon de peinture, 1737; location not known.9 9. Circle of or after Marianne Loir (1715–1769), Portrait of a viol player, oil on canvas, 130.0 x 97.0 cm. London: Private collection.10 Marin Marais par Jean Dieu de Saint-Jean au musée du château de Blois”, Cahiers du château et des musées de Blois 37 (2007), 15–21. 4 Liste des tableaux et des ouvrages de sculpture exposez dans la grande gallerie du Louvre par Messieurs les peintres et sculpteurs de l’Académie Royale, en la présente année 1699, Paris, Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1699, 16. 5 Liste des tableaux et des ouvrages de sculpture (as note 4), 20. 6 Gétreau, “Portraits peints et gravés de Marin Marais” (as note 3), 16–17. 7 François Lesure, Collection André Meyer (Abbeville: F. Paillart, 1960), 100, reproduction plate150; Gétreau, “Portraits peints et gravés de Marin Marais” (as note 3), 17. 8 http://www.alexis-bordes.com/fr/galerie/nouvelles-acquisitions/peinture/article/lecompositeur-michel-de-la-barre-dirigeant-marin-marais-et (last accessed: 14 July 2017). 9 Explication des Peintures […] de Messieurs de l’Académie Royale, Salon du Louvre, 1737 (Paris, Jacques Collombat), 14; Florence Gétreau, “À la recherche du portrait de ‘Monsieur Rindvel jouant de la viole’”, in Strumenti, Musica e Ricerca: Atti del Convegno internazionale, ed. by Elena Ferrari Barrassi, Marco Fracassi, and Gianpaolo Gregori (Cremona: Ente triennale internazionale degli strumenti ad arco, 2000), 203–224, here 203–212. 10 Gétreau, “À la recherche du portrait de ‘Monsieur Rindvel jouant de la viole’” (as note 9), 207–208.
520
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady 10. Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), Le Duo, also called La leçon de musique, 1710, oil on canvas, 131.0 x 99.2 cm. Paris: Musée de la Musique (inv.-no. 997.13.1).11 11. Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743), Le joueur de basse (Portrait of a viol player), ca. 1725, oil on canvas, 50.0 x 34.0 cm. New York: Private collection.12 12. Jean-Martial Frédou (1710–1795), Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699– 1782), 1737, oil on canvas, 130.0 x 163.0 cm, Private collection.13 Considering this series of portrayed violists showing professional musicians (numbers 1 to 6) and amateurs (with posture and instrumental gestures “less controlled”), we first tried to discover the identity of the musician in the double portrait proposed by the auction house Thierry de Maigret, with the help of contemporary lists of famous violists. Abraham Du Pradel, in the two editions of his Livre commode contenant les addresses de la ville de Paris (1690, 1692) gives the following list of “Maîtres pour la Violle”: Messieurs de Sainte Colombe [ Jean de Sainte Colombe, f l 1670– 1700], Marais [Marin Marais, 1656–1728] rue Bertin Poirée, Theobal [Theobaldo di Gatti, ca. 1650–1727] rue de Richelieu, des Fontaines [ Jean Desfontaines, 1658?–1752., composer of psalms and airs], rue de Grenelle Saint Honoré, de Machy [First name unknown, passed on to posterity with two publications: Pièces de violes, 1685 and Traité, 1687], rue des Fossez Saint Germain, Garnier [?], près le Palais Royal, Bellier [?], rue de Mommorency, Fourcroy le fils [Antoine Forqueray, 1672–1745].14 As we already saw the location of both Theobaldo di Gatti’s portrait by François de Troy and Jacques Morel’s portrait by Mademoiselle Chéron are not known today. But we have two different painted portraits representing Marin Marais (numbers 1 and 2), engraved and also exhibited in 1704 by 11 Florence Gétreau in the exhibition catalogue Un musée aux rayons X. Dix ans de recherche au service de la musique, ed. by Joël Dugot, Laurent Espié (Paris: Musée de la Musique, 2001), 148–149. 12 Mary Tavener Holmes, Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743) (New York: The Frick Collection, Forth Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 1991), 41, fig.18; Gétreau, “À la recherche du portrait de ‘Monsieur Rindvel jouant de la viole’” (as note 9), 216, 219, 222. Also see: Georges Wildenstein, Lancret (Paris: les Beaux-arts, édition d’études et de documents, 1924), fig. 152. 13 Pierre Jaquier, “Redécouverte d’un portrait de Jean-Baptiste Forqueray. Découverte de certains éléments de la basse de viole représentée”, Imago Musicae, 4 (1987), 315–324, here 324. 14 Nicolas de Blegny [dit Abraham Du Pradel], Le Livre commode contenant les Adresses de la Ville de Paris, et le Tresor des almanachs (Paris: Chez la Veuve de Denis Nion, 1691 and 1692), 62.
521
Florence Gétreau Bouys,15 and we have no doubt that he is also represented in André Bouys collective portrait (numbers 4, 5, and 6) an attribution developed first by Dominique Brême16 and later by Humphrey Wine in 2001 when he attributed the group portrait of the National Gallery in London to this painter, having discovered his signature.17 Humphrey also suggested identifying the violist as Marin Marais. We should insist – even if we can find fancy identifications on the Web – that no portrait of Antoine Forqueray has yet been identified with certainty. In 1987 Pierre Jaquier18 taking over the identification proposed without any argument by Norbert Dufourcq19 and Marc Honegger, 20 and later repeated by Albert Pomme de Mirimonde, 21 concluded his article on Jean-Baptiste Forqueray’s portrait painted by Jean-Martial Fredou in 1737, suggesting the identity of Antoine Forqueray and his son in La Barre and Other Musicians preserved in The National Gallery in London, a proposal difficult to argue: if we compare the face of the violist with the physiognomy of Marin Marais’ medal by Simon Curé (c. 1681–1734) later engraved by Jean-Baptiste Coignard fils, in 1732, and reproduced in Titon du Tillet Le Parnasse François dédié au Roi 22 it is quite obvious that they are very similar, something Johan Huskinson had already notice in 1977. 23 15 André Bouys, Marin Marais, 1704, estampe, 42.7 x 31.2 cm. Versailles: Musée du château et de Trianon (inv.–no.: GRAV 624). 16 Dominique Brème, “François de Troy”, Dossier de l’Art – L’Art du portrait sous Louis XIV, 37 (1997), 36–43, here. 41, reproduction on page 40; Dominique Brème, “Les élèves de François de Troy”, L’Objet d’art L’Estampille, 314 (1997), 69. 17 Humphrey Wine, “A Group of Musicians by André Bouys (1656–1740) in the National Gallery”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 138/1592 (2001), 72–80. 18 Pierre Jaquier, “Redécouverte d’un portrait de Jean-Baptiste Forqueray. Découverte de certains éléments de la basse de viole représentée” (as note 13), 324. 19 Norbert Dufourcq, “Partie V. Chapitre premier. La musique française de 1661 à 1764”, in La Musique. Les hommes, les instruments, les œuvres, ed. by Norbert Dufourcq (Paris: Larousse, 1965), vol. 1, 293. Suggested identification: “Michel de La Barre, Antoine Forqueray et les frères Hotteterre”. 20 Dictionnaire de la musique. Les hommes et leurs œuvres, ed. by Marc Honegger (Paris: Bordas, 1970), vol. 2, plate 65, placed between pages 710–711. Suggested identification: “Michel de La Barre, with Antoine Forqueray”. 21 Albert Pomme de Mirimonde, L’iconographie musicale sous les Rois Bourbons (Paris, Éditions A. & J. Picard, 1977) vol. 2, 95. Attribution: “François de Troy”; identification: “Michel de La Barre, the brothers Jean et Jacques Hotteterre”, “The violist was identified for a long time as Marin Marais and it is still the identity supported by M. Cailleux, but the Encyclopedies published by Larousse (1965) and Marc Honegger (1970) indicate that it should be Antoine Forqueray”. 22 Gétreau, “Portraits peints et gravés de Marin Marais” (as note 3), 18–20 (17, 21 note 19). 23 John Huskinson, “‘Les ordinaires de la musique du roi’ Michel de La Barre, Marin Marais et les Hotteterre d’après un tableau du début du XVIIIe siècle”, Recherches sur la musique française, XVII (1977), 22–23.
522
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady No portrait of the four masters mentioned by Du Pradel seems to exist. Among these masters, Sainte-Colombe, who passed away in 1700, and de Machy, cannot be candidates for our painting because of its presumed dating (around 1725–1730). Desfontaines and Garnier have fallen into oblivion. Between Theobaldo Gatti, Jacques Morel and Antoine Forqueray, famous even today, we gave preference, probably too spontaneously, to the third, as we shall later explain. If we check the “États de la France” between 1692 and 1736, apart from Marin Marais at the Musique de la Chambre, we find among the “Pensionnaires de la Musique de la Chambre, païés sur les Menus”, the following male and female bass violists: “M. Antoine Forcroy [throughout this period], M. N […] le Moine [his name disappears after 1694], Mademoiselle Hilaire [until 1708], Mademoiselle Sercamanan [until 1718], Alarius Verlage [from 1722]”. 24 Once again only Forqueray le père seems to be a possibility. After Du Pradel, Titon du Tillet in Le Parnasse François, published for the first time in 1732, suggested that on his monument in bronze an orchestra should be placed with a series of the most famous musicians represented along with the instrument that made each one famous: Qu’on forme sur notre Parnasse un Orchestre de tant de fameux Joueurs de toutes sortes d’instrumens, qui ont paru pendant le regne de Louis le Grand […] les Marais, les Forquerays, pour la Viole. 25 Titon du Tillet devotes chapter 242 to Marin Marais (who died in 1728, during his 73th year). He also mentioned the fact that among Marais’ nine children, three sons and a daughter were also famous in 1732 for playing the viol: Les trois fils de Marais, dont on vient de parler, font encore aujourd’hui l’admiration des personnes qui les entendent jouer de la Viole, & ont un grand talent pour montrer l’art d’en jouer. M lle Marais, personne d’un esprit aimable & d’un merite distingué, peut bien tenir son rang parmi ses trois freres pour la maniere brillante & delicate dont elle execute sur la Viole. 26 24 Érik Kocevar et Yolande de Brossard (eds), États de la France (1644–1789), numéro special de Recherches sur la Musique française classique, 30 (1999–2003). 25 Titon du Tillet, Le Parnasse François, Dédié au Roi (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard Fils, 1732), 43–44 [“Let us build on our Parnassus an orchestra of so many famous players of all kinds of instruments, which appeared during the reign of Louis the Great... The Marais, the Forquerays, for the Viol”]. 26 Titon du Tillet, Le Parnasse François (as note 25), 627 [“The three sons of Marais, of whom we have just spoken, are still today admired by those who hear them play the Viol, & [they] have a great talent for showing the art of playing it. Mademoiselle Marais, a person of an
523
Florence Gétreau Titon du Tillet also provides a short chapter on “Salomon, Provençal, Musicien de la Chappelle du Roi, mort à Versailles à la fin de l’année 1731, âgé d’environ 70 ans” who was employed as “basse de Viole”. 27 Coming to the violist in the painting that we are trying to identify, we have to exclude that it could have been Marin Marais and Salomon, because they would have been too old to be the person represented. Additionally, none of them, nor Marais’ sons, were decorated with an order, excluding them also. There is one more useful source regarding the most famous violists under the Bourbon kings. It is the pamphlet published by Hubert Le Blanc in Amsterdam in 1740 under the title Defense de la basse de viole contre les entréprises du violon et les Prétentions du Violoncel. 28 Complaining that young violists are mainly trained too superficially, he defends the renowned skill of ladies playing the viol who recognize only a few male players as their equals, including les Virtuozes, tels que Mr. le Chevalier de Guigne sur la Flute, Mr. de Bellemont sur la Viole, Mrs. Les Ingénieurs en chef Demoulceau, Chevalier, & Mr. Le Blanc, qui en possède le manche à fonds. 29 In his pamphlet Hubert Le Blanc quotes Forcroi [Forqueray] (le Père) six times and Marin Marais thirteen times. If we now consider the collections of music for viol printed during the first half of the eighteenth century (see appendix to this paper), the names of Louis de Caix d’Hervelois (ca. 1715, 1719, 1731), Marin Marais (1717, 1725), Thomas Marc (1724), François Couperin (1728), Joseph de Boismortier (1730), Johannes Schenck (1730, 1742), Giuseppe Valentini (1730, 1740), Roland Marais (1735, 1736, 1738), Louis-Gabriel Guillemain (1743) and Antoine Forqueray (1747) are predominant. Two known portraits, one of Joseph de Boismortier by Jean Ranc (location not known) 30 and one of Johannes Schenck, a mezzotint by Peter Schenk (London, Royal College of Music), have nothing in common with the picture we are dealing with. Moreover, we know no portraits of the other composers.
27 28 29 30
524
amiable disposition and of distinguished merit, may well rank among her three brothers for the brilliant and delicate manner with which she performs on the Viol”]. Ibid., 658. Hubert Le Blanc, Defense de la basse de viole (Amsterdam: Chez Pierre Mortier, 1740). Ibid., , 6 (emphasis original) [“the virtuosi, such as the Chevalier de Guigne on the Flute, Mr. de Bellemont on the Viol, the Chief Engineers Demoulceau, Chevalier, & Mr. Le Blanc”]. http://www.artsunlight.com/artist-photo/Jean-Ranc/joseph-bodin-de-boismortierprisant-du-tabac-0010.jpg (last accessed: 14 July 2017).
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady The Ribbon and Royal Order Worn by the Violist In the enquiry to identify the main figure of the painting, one detail called our attention: above his ruff led shirt, an order is ostensibly hanging on a red ribbon (fig. 2). Looking more precisely, the cross, sketched by the painter, has four branches, terminated by eight points distinctly highlighted with green over motifs. These green highlights can be related to the cross of Saint-Michel or the Order of the Holy Spirit and the red ribbon to the Order of Saint-Louis. Among the “Chevaliers de l’ordre militaire et royal de Saint-Louis”, was a certain Michel Ferrand (1681–1738), 31 “seigneur de Vernay et autres lieux, capitaine aux Gardes françaises” [“Lord of Vernay and other places, captain of the French Guards”], who married Anne Marguerite Julie de Violaine (born on 7 January 1706) on 24 April 172632 when he was 45 years old and while he was living at rue de Beautreillis near Saint-Paul in Paris. He was probably a pupil of the famous violist Louis d’Hervelois de Cais. 33 D’Hozier listed two individuals with the name Ferrand, both members of the “Ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis” [“Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis”], who received it. Ferrand (the father) in 1694 and on 3 March 1700 (the son). 34 Michel Ferrand (the son) was indebted of 300 livres in 1709 and died on 8 May 1738. The inventory of his estate, mentions neither music nor the painting in discussion. Are these facts sufficient to recognize his portrait here? Could the young lady in the painting be his wife at 20 years of age? Taking into account the fact that the “roturiers” who received this distinction, mostly belonged to the high royal administration it is likely they would prefer to emphasize their official function when they were portrayed rather than to be represented as an amateur violist, despite the fact that during the eighteenth century, the most likely period for our painting, playing viola was still a popular aristocratic leisure pursuit. If we assume it was not an amateur violist, which professional violist could have been decorated with this “Order of merit”? In her book on Versailles et les musiciens du roi, Marcelle Benoit noted:
31 His father, Michel Ferrand, seigneur of Saulx, Vernay and Bernardière, Capitaine des Gardes Françaises, Inspecteur Général de l’Infanterie in 1713, married Geneviève du Drac in 1681. http://gw.geneanet.org/pierfit?lang=fr&p=michel&n=ferrand (last accessed: 14 July 2017). 32 http://gw.geneanet.org/pierfit?lang=fr&p=anne+marguerite+julie&n=de+violaine (last accessed: 14 July 2017). 33 Michel Quagliozzi and Laurent Guillo, “Nouveaux éléments sur la vie de Louis d’Hervelois de Caix (1677–1759)”, Revue de musicologie 101 (2015), 27. 34 Jean-François-Louis d’Hozier, Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint-Louis. Recueil de tous les membres, 2 vols (Paris: Bon Français & J. Smith, 1817), vol. I, 150; vol. II, 188. http://users.skynet.be/ fdde/genealogie/SaintLouisF.html (last accessed: 14 July 2017).
525
Florence Gétreau
Fig. 2: Attributed to Jacques-François Delyen (1684–1761), possibly presenting Antoine Forquray and his daughter or Michel Ferrand (1681–1738) and his young wife, detail, probably around 1725, oil on canvas, 163 x 130 cm. For sale by Hôtel Drouot, auction house, Paris.
Certaines dignités récompensent des musiciens à titre personnel: Campra reçoit celle de chevalier de Saint-Lazare. Couperin, celle de chevalier de l’ordre de Latran: décoration qui figure, sur la gravure de Flipart, posée sur la table. La distinction de chevalier de Saint-Michel revient en principe au surintendant. Michel Richard Delalande en bénéficiera en 1722. Le Régent offrira le cordon de l’ordre à Antoine Forqueray. 35 To support this last remark, Benoit referred only to the small monograph published by Louis Forqueray in 1911, a descendant of the dynasty, who mentioned an eighteenth-century manuscript in his possession in the form 35 Marcelle Benoit, Versailles et les musiciens du roi. Étude institution et sociale. 1661–1733 (Paris: Picard, 1971), 385 [“Certain dignitaries reward musicians on a personal basis: Campra receives that of a knight of Saint-Lazare. Couperin that of a knight of the Order of Lateran: a decoration that is presented in the engraving of Flipart as placed on the table. The Order of Saint Michael is in principle for the Superintendent. Michel Richard Delalande will benefit from it in 1722. The Regent will offer the cordon of the order to Antoine Forqueray”].
526
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady of a necrology of the musician. He transcribed an excerpt of the manuscript evoking the order received by Antoine Forqueray: M. le Régent se plaisoit beaucoup à l’entendre et le faisoit souvent joüer devant luy [l’] honoroit de sa bienveillance [au point] qu’il l’anoblit en le décorant du cordon de Saint-Michel. 36 However, Lionel de La Laurencie had – in his article on Forqueray published in 1908 – transcribed quite differently this very same excerpt from the necrology in question that is hardly readable: Il eut l’honneur d’avoir pour Ecoliers Mr le Duc de Bourgogne, Mr Le Régent, Mr le Duc d’Orléans, Mr L’électeur de Bavière. Et tout ce que La cour et la ville avoient de plus distingué. Mr Le Régent se plaisoit beaucoup à l’entendre et le faisoit souvent jouër devant luy. Ce grand Prince digne apprétiateur des talents honoroit de sa bienveillance Mr Forqueray; il [luy avoir promis de] l’ennoblir en le décorant du cordon de St-Michel et de luy assurer une pension; [La mort de ce prince priva Mr Forqueray de cette récompense f latteuse], mais M. Le Régent Luy avoit précédemment donné des marques essentielles de ses bontés par un présent de cent mille francs qu’il a offert à Mr Forqueray pour réparer La perte qu’il avoit sur les billets de Banque. 37 To the first uncertainty regarding the reception of the order, is a second one concerning its identification in the painting: the large ribbon is red instead of the usual blue moire that one can discover on many portraits representing the Knights of the Order of St. Michael or of the Order of the Holy Spirit (those always belonging to the Catholic hereditary nobility) painted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The red ribbon, on the other hand, 36 Louis Forqueray, Musiciens d’autrefois: Les Forqueray et leurs descendants (Paris: L. Fournier, 1911), 5 [“M. le Regent very much liked to listen to him and often made him perform before him, honored with his kindness he ennobled him by awarding him the Cordon of Saint Michael”]. 37 Lionel de La Laurencie, “Deux violistes célèbres”, Bulletin français de la SIM [Société Internationale de Musique] 4 (1908), 1251–1274, here 1252 [“He had the honor of having as his pupils the Duke of Burgundy, the Regent, the Duke of Orleans, and the Elector of Bavaria. And all that the court and the city had, moreover, that was distinguished. The Regent was much pleased to hear him, and often made him play before him. This great Prince, worthy of talents, honored Mr. Forqueray with his kindness; he promised to honor him by awarding him with the Cordon of St. Michael, and to secure him a pension; [The death of this prince deprived Mr Forqueray of this flattering reward], but Le Regent had previously given him essential marks of his kindness with a present of one hundred thousand francs which he offered to Mr Forqueray to redress the loss which he experienced on banknotes”].
527
Florence Gétreau is associated with the military Order of Saint Louis and could not be received by a musician. Could it have been painted later on the already existing figure, just after the death of the Regent Philippe d’Orléans? Could we image that the painter chose consciously the red color to create a contrast with the preexisting blue gown? Could Antoine Forqueray, whose reputation was of having a fiery and unpleasant personality throughout his life, have ambitiously overstepped reality after his protector passed away without having confirmed this nomination? The Young Lady, Her Cane and Her Possible Identity The second noticeable detail in the painting is the cane held by the young female figure (fig. 3). It suggests some infirmity and seems to be an attempt to make her incongruous position more “natural”. It is difficult to understand why the young female figure is not depicted standing on the f loor or seated, like the musician, on the caned settee. Did the painter try to offset her very small size by placing her standing on the settee? On the other hand, in the biographical article on Antoine Forqueray written by Barbara Coeyman and Marie-Thérèse Lalaguë-Guilhemsans in 1992, one can read: “En 1731, il [Antoine] s’était retiré avec sa dernière fille, infirme depuis l’âge de seize ans, à Mantes”. 38 This entry is based on LalaguëGuilhemsans’ PhD thesis focused on the Forqueray family including as many organists as violists. 39 The ribbon with an order and the cane are the two clues that led us to try to support the hypothesis that the figures could be Antoine Forqueray and his disabled daughter. Lalaguë-Guilhamsans’ academic work, the most complete ever done on this subject and based on extensive research in archives, was unfortunately never published. But it provided us with many arguments and information on sources in order to attempt to clarify whether Antoine Forqueray really obtained a royal order, to render the life of his second daughter more precisely, and to understand why this double portrait is so ostentatious in representing a “musicien ordinaire” of the royal music. 38 Barbara Coeyman and Marie-Thérèse Lalaguë-Guilhemsans, “Forqueray”, in Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, Fayard, 1992), 298–301, here 299: “In 1731, he retired in Mantes with his younger daughter, disabled since the age of sixteen”. 39 Marie-Thérèse Lalaguë-Guilhemsans, Une famille de musiciens français: les Forqueray aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Étude sociale (Paris: Thèse de l’École des chartes, 1979). A copy is available in the Archives nationales (AB XXVIII 698). I express my gratitude to the author, Curator in the Archives nationales, who generously gave me access to this work and discussed several points. Apart from specific mentions, all biographical references quoted later in this essay originate from this PhD thesis even if some of them were already mentioned by JacquesGabriel Prod’homme, “Les Forqueray”, Rivista musicale italiana 10 (1903), 670–706.
528
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady
Fig. 3. Attributed to Jacques-François Delyen (1684–1761), possibly presenting Antoine Forquray and his daughter or Michel Ferrand (1681–1738) and his young wife, detail, probably around 1725, oil on canvas, 163 x 130 cm. For sale by Hôtel Drouot, auction house, Paris.
Some Biographical Arguments Antoine Forqueray married Henriette-Angélique Houssu and signed a contract on 4 February 1697. They had three children: Charlotte-Elisabeth, born 3 November 1697, Jean-Baptiste, born 3 April 1699 and Elisabeth, born “around 1702”. Very soon, difficulties appeared in the marriage. Antoine, living a depraved life, deceived his wife and subjected her to mistreatments, as was also the case with the children: beating at birth was even mentioned in some accounts of the justice procedure that eventually lead to the separation of the couple in 1710. Between 1715 and 1725 Forqueray the Elder had his son Jean-Baptiste imprisoned at Bicêtre on the pretext that he had a dissolute life, then he organized his exile in December 1725 (a decision signed by Louis, duc d’Orléans, the son of the Regent, who was also a pupil of Antoine Forqueray). Forqueray became more conciliatory only after July 1732 when Jean-Baptiste married for the first time. Antoine Forqueray wrote three testaments. In the second, dated 16 January 1736, Elisabeth, who is designated as crippled since 18 years (it means since 1718), inherits considerable money and would receive a pension throughout her life: 529
Florence Gétreau [Antoine Forqueray] donne et lègue à damoiselle Elisabeth Forqueray, sa fille cadette infirme depuis dix huit ans et en considération de son état valétudinaire, […] la somme de mille livres […] en argent comptant [et] en meubles […], la somme de six mille livres en principaux de rente […], et en outre deux mille livres de rente et pension viagère sa vie durant.40 Elisabeth Forqueray died on 11 December 1736, less than one year after this testament was issued. For all these reasons, could we not consider that this double portrait is intended to express the father’s desire to redeem himself brilliantly in the eyes of his prestigious colleagues and surroundings? To show himself as a protector of his disabled child that he educated, after the judgment of 1710, with his faithful servant who was also disabled and mentioned in all the three testaments? This collection of indicators has led us to review the hypothesis that this double portrait could be that of Antoine Forqueray and his daughter, the violist seeking to produce an image of himself as an honored musician, living with a certain prosperity while simultaneously being a protective father. However, the color of the ribbon and the design of the cross, if they were those of the Ordre de Saint-Louis, falsify this hypothesis. It is almost impossible to determine whether the figures are the amateur Michel Ferrand, posing with his very young, new, twenty-year-old wife, or the professional viol player Antoine Forqueray and his disabled daughter, due to a lack of sufficient sources and portraits that would enable a comparison. The Viol Represented in the Painting In contrast to the music lying on the f loor that is not readable, the viol is represented with precision. On the neck of the instrument, the seven gut frets are placed realistically. The seven wooden pegs stained black and the sculpted woman’s head at the top of the pegbox correspond well to the models from the first decades of the eighteenth century that have been preserved. There are even some similarities between the sculpted head of the depicted viol and those on the viols of Nicolas Bertrand (?–1725), of whom three instruments are
40 Paris, Archives nationales, Minutier central des notaires, Etude XLCII, 50, 16 January 1736. Antoine Forqueray’s second testament [“[Antoine Forqueray] gives and bequeaths damsel Elisabeth Forqueray, his younger daughter disabled for eighteen years and in consideration of her ailing status, [...] the sum of one thousand pounds ... in cash [and] in furniture [...], The sum of six thousand pounds in principle as annuity [...], and in addition two thousand pounds as a lifelong annuity and pension”.]
530
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady preserved at the Musée de la Musique in Paris.41 Antoine Forqueray possessed several viols. In July 1710, an estimate of his assets42 issued when he separated from his wife, mentions “quatre basses de viole angloises”, each estimated at 200 livres – a considerable sum indicating that the instruments themselves were extraordinary. These instruments were undoubtedly made in the “English style”, because “English viols are the ones which we use regularly” as stated by Forqueray’s son Jean-Baptiste in a letter dispatched to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia at the end of 1767 or beginning of 1768. The letter continues: A l’égard de celles qui sont faites par Colichon, je n’en connois aucune de cet auteur. Les excellentes violes angloises sont en très petit nombre, la raison en est, Monseigneur, qu’elles ont perdu de leur bonté par leur caducité […]. Nous avons eu en France, depuis vingt-cinq ans, un homme qui se nommoit Barbet qui a fait un grand nombre de Violes avec du bois d’Angleterre, c’était le plus grand ouvrier que nous ayons eu pour la coupe, pour l’épaisseur, pour la propreté et les dimensions. Ses instruments gagnent tous les ans à vieillir par le moëlleux et le brilliant du son. J’en ay deux de lui que mon père a joué pendant vingtcinq ans jusqu’à la fin de ses jours. L’une pour les pieces, l’autre pour l’accompagnement.43 Perhaps the viol shown in the painting under discussion is one of these two instruments. Unfortunately, the surviving instruments of Guillaume Barbet do not feature a woman’s head at the top of the pegbox but rather a scroll. In any case, we noted the rather restrained format of the seven-stringed viol in the painting. Was this the instrument “for pieces” whose reduced proportions 41 Florence Gétreau, Instrumentistes et luthiers parisiens (Paris: Délégation artistique à l’Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1988), 77–78 and 150; Sylvette Milliot, Histoire de la lutherie parisienne du XVIIIe à 1960, vol. 2: Les luthiers du XVIIIe siècle (Brussels: Les Amis de la Musique, 1997), 31–33 and 185. 42 Archives nationales, Minutier central 299 (21 July 1710). 43 Yves Gérard, “Notes sur la fabrication de la viole de gambe et la manière d’en jouer, d’après une correspondance inédite de Jean-Baptiste Forqueray au prince Frédéric-Guillaume de Prusse”, Recherche sur la musique française classique, II (1961–62), 165–171, here 166–167. [“With regard to those which are made by Colichon, I do not know any by him. There are very few excellent English viols. The reason for this, Monseigneur, is that they have lost their quality by their obsolescence […] For twenty-five years in France, we have had a man named Barbet who made a large number of viols with English wood. He was the greatest craftsman we had in terms of cut, thickness, propriety, and dimensions. His instruments gain every year in richness [moëleux] and brilliance of sound by aging. I had two by him which my father played for twenty-five years until the end of his days. One for pieces, the other for accompaniment”].
531
Florence Gétreau permitted greater virtuosity? Or is it the instrument of Antoine Forqueray’s daughter? Over the course of his career, Forqueray had received two other viols as presents: one from the Elector of Bavaria as compensation, since he had returned to Germany in 1718 owing the violist three years of earnings; the other from the Regent himself, as we learn from his obituary. The bow as held by the male figure in the painting is of great precision and attests to the person being an experienced musician with a steady and natural gesture. As Forqueray’s son explains forty years later in a letter to the Prince of Prussia: It is the role of the third finger on the bow which is the great vehicle of expression and which gives character to the whole music. To achieve that, the bow hair should form a cross with the first joint of the third finger and it should never leave this position […] Above all, one must observe, Monseigneur, that the bow thumb should be gently placed on the wood.44 The Strange Furniture Finally, the morphology of the decorative furniture in the painting raises questions. No Parisian furniture from these decades corresponds to that which the painter represents. We find a few points of comparison with the engravings of the maître ébéniste Gilles-Marie Oppenordt (1672–1742), who was noticed by the Regent, worked at the orangerie of Pierre Crozat’s château in Enghien, and prepared drawings for two collections of engravings well appreciated by amateurs, the Grand Oppenord and the Moyen Oppenord (1737). He also prepared an architectural plan for the palace of Buen Retiro de Bonne for the Elector of Bavaria in 1717. The Attribution to Jacques François Delyen At the sale at Hôtel Drouot on 12 November 2015 the painting was attributed to Jacques-François Delyen (1684–1761) as a “Presumed Portrait of François Francoeur (1698–1787)”.45 As we said earlier, this identification seems completely unconvincing. However, the attribution to Delyen is well 44 Gérard, “Notes sur la fabrication de la viole de gambe et la manière d’en jouer, d’après une correspondance inédite de Jean-Baptiste Forqueray au prince Frédéric-Guillaume de Prusse” (as note 43), 168. 45 Paris, Hôtel Drouot, Vente collégiale de maîtres anciens et du XIXe siècle, 12 November 2015, 60–61, no. 40, huile sur toile, 163 x 130 cm, presented by Thierry de Maigret, expertise Cabinet Turquin.
532
The Portrait of a Violist and a Young Lady justified. Born in Ghent and a student of Largillière, the artist was accepted into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in August 1724. In 1727 his address was recorded as “rue des Poulies chez Monsieur de Voigny, Secrétaire du Roy, joignant M. Roulier”.46 One year later he moved to “Quai de l’École chez Monsieur le Chevalier Hervé” where he lived until 1732, not far from both Michel Ferrand, who was based on rue Beautreillis in the parish of SaintPaul, and Antoine Forqueray, who – at this period – resided at rue CourteauVillain (which later became the rue de Montmorency), not far from SaintNicolas-des-Champs. Delyen’s art is characterized by a beautiful treatment of fabrics, landscapes showing a close study of nature, the interiority of figures “which imparts a very realistic feeling of life in his models, where, even if the individual takes priority, their function or social status is nonetheless underlined with discretion”.47 To judge these qualities, we can refer to the magnificent portrait of Guillaume Coustou from 1725 which he presented to the Académie.48 The ease of the pose, the beautiful silk, the elegance of the hands, are all very close to what we observe in the portrait of the violist that was examined in this paper. However, nothing in Delyen’s biography gives us any clues to bring to the debate between the identification of the figure as Michel Ferrand, Antoine Forqueray, or anyone else. This story reveals both the excitement and frustration inherent in a music iconographic investigation. And the reality that even after intense research, the definitive answers regarding a particular work may not emerge although various scenarios tantalize and crystalize into a potentially reasonable hypothesis to possibly reconsider in the future.
46 Gérard de Wallens, Les peintres belges actifs à Paris au XVIIIe siècle à l’exemple de Jacques François Delyen, peinture ordinaire du roi (Gand, 1684–Paris, 1761) (Brussels: Rome, Institut historique belge de Rome, 2010), 77 and 106. 47 Wallens, Le peintres belges actifs à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (as note 44), 101. [« qui insuffle un sentiment de vie très réalite à ses modèles, où, si l’individu prime, la fonction ou le statut social sont cependant soulignés avec discrétion »]. 48 Jacques François Delyen (1684–1761), Guillaume Ier Coustou (1677–1746), sculpteur, 1724, oil on canvas, 130.0 x 97.0 cm. (Versailles: Musée national des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon) (Inv.–no.: MV 5864).
533
Florence Gétreau Appendix: Pieces de viole [pour la basse] published in Paris between 1715 and 1747 Louis de Caix d’Hervelois (1680–1759), Premier livre de pieces de viole avec la basse-continue… . Paris: l’auteur, Foucault, [ca. 1715]. Marin Marais (1665–1728), Pièces a une et a trois violes composes par M. Marais. Paris: chez l’auteur, chez le sieur Hurel et chez le sieur Foucault, 1717. Louis de Caix d’Hervelois, (1680–1759), Second livre de pieces de viole avec la basse-continue… . Paris: l’auteur, Foucault, [ca. 1719]. Thomas Marc (n.d.), Suitte de Pièces de dessus et de pardessus et trois sonates, avec les basses continüe qui se peuvent joüer sur la viole, la f lute traversière et autres instruments […] Composé par Mr Marc. Livre 1er. Paris: chez l’auteur, 1724. Marin Marais (1665–1728), Pièces de viole. Composées par M. Marais. Paris: chez l’auteur, le Sr Boivin, Roland Marais, Jean Loüis Marais, 1725. François Couperin (1668–1733), Pièces de viole avec la basse chiffrée. Paris: Boivin, 1728. Jean-Baptiste Cappus, (16??–1751), Premier livre de pieces de viole et la bassecontinue […] Gravé par du Plessy. Paris: Boivin, Le Clerc, 1730. Joseph de Boismortier (1689–1755), Trente et une oeuvre contenant diverses pieces de viole avec la basse chiffrée. Paris: l’auteur, Boivin, Le Clerc, 1730. Jean Schenk [ Johannes Schenck, Johannes] (1660–after 1712), L’Echo du Danube. Paris: Le Clerc, 1730. Louis de Caix d’Hervelois (1680–1759), Troisième oeuvre […] contenant quatre suites de pieces pour la viole avec la basse-chiffrée en partition. Paris: l’auteur, Boivin, Leclerc, 1731. Roland Marais (1680?–1750?), Premier livre de pieces de viole avec la basse chiffrée en partition. Paris: l’auteur, Vve Boivin, Le Clerc, 1735. Roland Marais (1680?–1750?), Premier livre de pieces de viole avec la basse chiffrée en partition. Paris: l’auteur, Vve Boivin, Le Clerc, [1736]. Roland Marais (1680?–1750?), Deuxième Livre de pieces de viole avec la basse chiffrée en partition. Paris: s.n.: 1738. Jean Schenk [ Johannes Schenck, Johannes] (1660–after 1712), L’Echo du Danube. Paris: Le Cler, 1742. Louis-Gabriel Guillemain (1705–1777), Six sonates en quatuors ou Conversation galantes et amusantes entre une f lutte traversière, un violon, une basse de viole et la basse continue […] Oeuvre XIIe. Gravez par Mlle Bertin. Paris: Mme Boivin, Le Clerc, 1743. Antoine Forqueray (1672–1745), Pièces de viole avec la basse continue. Gravées par Mme Leclair, Livre 1er […] Ces pieces peuvent se jouer sur le pardessus de viole. Paris: l’auteur, veuve Boivin, Le Clerc, [1747]. 534
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920)
H. Robert Cohen Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM), Baltimore
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in Musical America (1915–1920)* Abstract. In the four and a half years between 18 December 1915 and 22 May 1920, Musical America published 222 numbered caricatures in a series entitled “Musical America’s Gallery of Celebrities”, depicting well-known contemporaries active in the musical life of the period. 220 of these were drawn by Gianni Viafora, a charming Italian artist living in New York. While all but forgotten today, he was arguably the twentieth-century’s preeminent caricaturist of musicians. This article offers an overview of Viafora’s activities, a catalog of his works in the “Gallery of Celebrities” and concludes with numerous examples of his drawings.
In the four and a half years between 18 December 1915 and 22 May 1920, Musical America published 222 numbered caricatures in a series entitled “Musical America’s Gallery of Celebrities”,1 depicting well-known contemporaries active in the musical life of the period. With three exceptions, 2 all were drawn by Gianni Viafora who is all but forgotten today, despite the fact that he was arguably the twentieth-century’s preeminent caricaturist of musicians. How can such a gifted artist, depicting important and popular musicians during such a dynamic period of musical activity, fail to be recognized? Two answers are reasonable: (1) caricatures fall out of fashion when the public’s visual and aural memory of the depicted musician fades; and (2) the magazine to which Viafora contributed this significant body of work is in large part inaccessible. I believe the latter more likely, for many of Viafora’s subjects are not forgotten. Rather their physiognomy maintains its place in the public memory because their faces have appeared so frequently in publications, on the jackets of recordings, in advertisements, and on television. Among these are Toscanini, Puccini, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein. However, a lack * This “Viafora” is for my friend Zdravko, with whom I have been discussing “important 1 2
issues” for years and years, always with much pleasure and very often with much laughter. May this text provide him with another reason to smile. There are 223 illustrations in the series; no. 219 appears twice with two different drawings. Fig. 1 appeared in Musical America 30/9 (28 June 1919), 7. The exceptions are: Bodanzky, no. 191; Rachmaninoff, no. 192; and Caruso, no. 200.
535
H. Robert Cohen Fig. 1. “Salvatore de Stefano, who is depicted as having a Good Head for Music”.
of interest in the field in general has also done little to promote work in this area. Fortunately, with the full-text publication of a significant portion (1898– 1923) of Musical America in the RIPM Preservation Series: European and North American Music Periodicals, 3 it becomes possible to identify and to recognize the remarkable talents of an artist overlooked for some one hundred years. Viafora was born in 1870 in Cosenza, a city in Calabria, Italy; in 1899 he married the well-known soprano Gina Ciaparelli, a teacher of Caruso; and, three years later the Viaforas settled in New York. By 1907, the artist had produced a series of caricatures of singers performing at the Manhattan Opera House 4 and had drawn opera-related caricatures for The Chicago Tribune.5 On 21 Feb3 4 5
536
See www.ripm.org (last accessed: 23 April 2016). See http://www.vendio.com/stores/ajkish/item/postcards-artist-signed/rare-1907-a-s-viaforaopera-st/lid=41818959 (last accessed: 23 February 2016). See The Chicago Tribune (10 April 1907), 3; (11 April 1907), 8; (12 April 1907), 8. http:// archives.chicagotribune.com/1907/04/10/page/3/article/caricatures-of-grand-opera-stars-by-
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) ruary of the same year, Viafora, as Director of Columbia Records, recorded Puccini’s voice during the composer’s tour of the United States.6 After contributing caricatures for a number of years to New York publications (including The New York Evening Mail, New York World, The Morning Telegraph, The New York Mail and Musical America) and to magazines in Italy, after gaining a certain renommé, and after becoming intimately involved with the Italian-American community, Viafora became a regular contributor to MA in 1911, with this introduction of the artist to the magazine’s readers on 18 November 1911: Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce one of the clearest caricaturists in this city, Mr. Viafora, who is to draw pictures exclusively for Musical America. They will be published in this column [“Behind the Curtain”]. The fine satire and subtle humor of Mr.Viafora’s sketches have long since made him a favorite with operagoers and opera artists alike and the readers of two continents, especially those of Italian and American nationality, are familiar with the name of the great artist, whom I have now the honor of introducing to my readers in a caricature by himself (fig. 2) […] It’s the face of a man who is fond of cracking a joke about others and who can enjoy a joke at his own expense. Evviva Viafora!7
Curiously, another notice regarding Viafora’s position at MA appeared on 12 July 1913. G. Viafora, the distinguished cartoonist and journalist, for many years prominent in the Italian colony of New York has joined the staff of Musical America. Mr. Viafora has enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with practically all of the Italian musicians who have visited New York and has won renown as a correspondent for a number of leading newspapers and magazines in Italy. 8
6 7 8
sig-viafora (last accessed: 28 April 2016). In the same year his wife Gina Ciaparelli made her debut in Chicago in La Bohème. Recording available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi6PZou5eb8 (last accessed: 23 February 2016). Musical America 15/2 (18 November 1911), 21. Ibid., 18/10 (12 July 1913), 16.
537
H. Robert Cohen Fig. 2. Mr. Viafora Sees Himself as Others See Him
The pages of MA record in some detail the manner in which the Viaforas participated in the musical and social life of the period. We learn of their close friendship with Caruso and many other singers, the high-society receptions they sponsored and attended, their holidays, and when they left and returned to New York, communicated at times with photographs of them. We also learn how Gianni’s activities were not limited to that of an artist. For example, he served as interpreter for numerous Italian singers, related anecdotes to the magazine about the travails of Italian artists in America, offered advice to musicians about their compositions and published in the magazine noteworthy news items that were communicated to him in telegrams from friends abroad.9 In addition he served on the “Mayor’s Committee that welcomed the Italian Commission during its visit to New York”. Despite the limited scope of this brief introduction, three subjects must be addressed: where in MA did Viafora’s drawings appear, other than in the columns “Gallery”, and on occasion in Ludwig Wielich’s column “Behind the
9
538
For example, see the announcements of the birth of a child of conductor Tulio Serafin [Musical America 24/23 (7 October 1916), 5], and of the success the baritone Riccardo Stracciari achieved at the National Opera in Mexico City [Musical America 24/ 22 (29 September 1917), 20.] See also, “Did ‘Spaghetti’ Keep Verdi from Writing Opera for Sixteen Years,” [Musical America 18/15 (16 August 1913), 32], a charming if silly theory based upon a Verdi letter owned by Viafora.
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920)
Fig. 3. “The Modern Composer Rescues an Idea From Its Source of Turmoil and City Noises”.
Scenes”;10 how were his drawings received by his subjects and by the public; and, finally, the reception and content of Viafora’s only book.11 In addition to Viafora’s 220 drawings for the “Gallery”, and his occasional caricature for “Behind the scenes”, he also produced drawings for two other rubrics. One entitled “As seen by Viafora”, contains drawings of, among others, the pianists Ignace Jan Paderewski and Guiomar Novaes, conductors Alfred Herz, Leopold Stokowski and Fritz Reiner and composer Ernest Bloch. The other, “Viafora’s Pen Studies”, depicts figures that are less well-known today. However, both “As seen by Viafora,” and “Viafora’s Pen Studies”, continue, in the main, the tradition established with the long-running “Gallery” of depicting single individuals. The artist also provided illustrations for isolated articles, including a few not dealing directly with music. And, at times, the subjects of the drawings are not necessarily limited to an individual. One case in point is his illustration for an 10 Viafora at times, contributed a caricature for this rather extensive weekly column written by Ludwig Wielich. 11 Gianni Viafora, Caricature: 125 Caricatures of personalities noted in finance, politics, art, music, etc. And some practical suggestions on the execution of “Pen-and-ink satire” (New York: For Sale at Brentano’s, 1919).
539
H. Robert Cohen Fig. 4. “‘Dolce Far Niente’ Summer Fishing Dream”.
article by Ivan Narodny – a Russian émigré, revolutionary, friend of Maksim Gorkij, and arms merchant – dealing with the failure of modern music and entitled “Bedlam: Cradle of Modern Music”. To accompany this article Viafora offered a larger than usual drawing (fig. 3).12 Another example is his drawing entitled “Viafora visualizes the approach to the New York Philharmonic Society’s offices the morning after its conductor [Stranzky] resigned”.13 It depicts a “Conductor wanted” sign, three members of the selection committee – one is the conductor Mengelberg – and a long line of potential candidates for the position that includes Georges Enesco, Alfredo Casella, and Henry Hadley. There is also an occasional reproduction of a painting by Viafora; for example the handsome portrait of the baritone Riccardo Stracciari reproduced in a MA advertisement,14 and the well-known, wonderful bust of Caruso that Viafora created after his friend’s death.15 Finally Viafora designed the Headpiece for the column “Point counterpoint”, that apparently attracted a great deal of attention.16 There are also a number of self-caricatures which at times offer insights into the artist’s personality. For example, Viafora who was smitten by fishing drew a caricature of himself dreaming about this subject. However, he is not pulling in a fish; rather the fish is biting him on the nose (fig. 4).17 The following relates to the artist’s abilities as a fisherman. Gianni, you know, is the intimate friend of all the great artists, including Caruso, Scotti, Rosa Rais, Titta Russo, Rimini, Stracciari, and many others that I could name. Like a good many other Italians, he has 12 13 14 15 16 17
540
Musical America 37/25 (14 April 1923), 3. Ibid., 37/17 (17 February 1923), 2. Ibid., 31/3 (15 December 1919), 72. Ibid., 34/23 (1 October 1921), 5. Ibid., 26/17 (25 August 1917), 19. Ibid., 38/9 (23 July 1923), 7.
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920)
Fig. 5. Charles Wakefield Cadman
a craze for fishing, of which he knows about as much as the average cat knows of astronomy. Not long ago, it seems, he was persuaded by a bassoon player of his acquaintance to join him in a fishing expedition…
Now on this particular occasion, when Gianni was asked what he had caught he said: I catcha-a nothing, but a boiled fish! There was such a crowd that I could find no place, but I see one spot where was no one, so I go and 541
H. Robert Cohen
Fig. 6. John C. Freund
throw in my line, and presently there was a pull on it and I bring in a boiled fish, because you see I was fishing in the place where the steam and hot water come out from the boiler of the ship.18 This is one of many instances in which he pokes fun at himself. For despite the fact that he took his fishing seriously, joking about his lesser than stellar abilities reveals the nature of a good-hearted fellow, ready to laugh at his foibles, as well as those of others. In fact, his charm, kindness and humanity are a theme often repeated in the magazine. Moreover, the manner in which he draws his subjects clearly ref lects his kind nature. For, his drawings do not ridicule his subjects by grotesquely exaggerating a physical feature, which is the manner in which we today often rec18 Ibid., 32/7 (12 July 1920), 8.
542
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) ognize a caricature. Rather, his drawings often attempt to depict an aspect of the inner character of his subjects. Of course, there is the occasional big belly, a large nose here and there, and the American composer Charles W. Cadman sports a special headdress because he employed Native American themes in his compositions (fig. 5).19 But more often than not it is a wrinkle, a frown, the position of a hand, the stance of an artist while performing, a slightly troubled countenance, a characteristic facial expression or a glimmer or a smile or sparkling eyes that reveals something special and unique about the nature of the subject. However, albeit within this context, the emotional range and musical expression is quite remarkable. For example, with respect to the conductors and composers, whose caricatures appear at the end of this article, we see a rigidly-posed yet powerful Arturo Toscanini, an overly-energetic Alfred Herz, Josef Stransky idolized by the ladies, Pierre Monteux striving for a well-shaped musical phrase and Leopold Stokowski fixing his soft, charming gaze directly on us, the audience. Saint-Saëns is depicted as a cave-man-like Samson, Richard Strauss’s head, without expression, is served up on a platter à la Salomé, Pietro Mascagni’s eyes and nose depict a conductor, Ruggiero Leoncavallo is the Pagliacci clown, Puccini a dapper gentleman with a smoking cigarette in one hand, a rif le in the other and a score in his pocket, Debussy fiercely scowls and Rachmaninoff ’s long, dour face is supported by a very large hand. The evocations are equally telling in Viafora’s depictions of instrumentalists and singers but I leave to the reader the challenge of discovering the message in each. Interestingly, his subjects, rather than fearing or being offended by the appearance of a Viafora caricature, appear to have been flattered by them; some even thanked him in print for the privilege of being depicted. On this subject the aforementioned “Indian-dressed” Cadman wrote to the Editor of Musical America: I wish heartily to thank you for including me in your “Gallery of Celebrities” with the very clever cartoon by Mr. Viafora in your issue of June 16 [1917]. I appreciate the compliment very much and it goes without saying it has afforded my friends and myself a great deal of amusement […] At least, it must have been characteristic of my work and “personality” to judge from the favorable comments about it! Let me say that it is a most diverting feature in the make-up of your paper and I never fail to hunt for each “victim” when the paper reaches me. Thank you again. 20 19 Ibid., 26/7 (16 June 1917), 7. 20 “Mr. Cadman to Mr. Viafora”, Musical America 26/11 (14 July 1917), 36.
543
H. Robert Cohen Not surprisingly, Viafora maintained many friends over a long period of time despite his depictions of them; and I have not come across a single disparaging remark about the artist or his drawings. His art apparently offended no one. For, the charming, good hearted, kind, funny, and remarkably talented man that he is described to be in MA are qualities that are clearly ref lected in his art. In 1919, Viarfora published an oblong soft-cover volume (his only) entitled Caricature: 125 Caricatures of personalities noted in finance, politics, art, music, etc. And some practical suggestions on the execution of “Pen-and-ink satire”.21 Its first page contains a drawing titled “From a satirist in art to an artist in satire”. It depicts MA’s editor John C. Freund, identified as “Mephisto: in Musical Amerca”, referring to a column written by Freund (fig. 6). One reviewer of the book described Viafora’s caricatures as being brilliant, “delicious sketches” “well known to the public,” and his book as “brightening up the atmosphere of a work-a-day world already also often tinged à la rose by the author’s cheerful and charming personality”. The same reviewer also referred to the volume’s four-page introduction as being exteremely valuable for the “would-be caricaturist” for therein Viafora outlines the function and his conception of the caricature with characteristic “modesty”. 22 Information regarding Viafora’s life and art between 1924 and his death in 1930 is, no doubt, available in MA. But to fill in this missing chapter one must either wait for RIPM to offer these years of the magazine online, or, turn carefully the more than 20,000 pages printed during this period in search of the hopefully now better-known name, Viafora. At the age of fifty-five, his life came to an end by his own hand after a long illness. 23 Ludwig Wielich, Viafora’s old friend who wrote the “Behind the Curtain” column for which Viafora supplied illustrations, remembered him this way: “He was a delightful, witty, hospitable companion, always ready for some prank or some innocent mischief, beloved by all the artists”. 24 His wit, kindness and remarkable talent are themes that are regularly used to describe Gianni Viafora. “The world needs more of such kindly humor, which, while it scintillates, burns not”. 25
21 Viafora, Caricature (as note 12). See https://archive.org/details/caricature125car00viaf (last accessed: 29 February 2016). 22 Musical America 29/23 (5 April 1919), 37. 23 See Washington Post, 18 June 1930, 2; New York Times, 18 June 1930, 2. 24 Ludwig Wielich “Some Recollections of the Sparkling Gianni Viafora”, The Musician (August 1930), 12. 25 Musical America 29/23 (5 April 1919), 37.
544
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920)
Fig. 7. Viafora (top left) with the bass Pompilio Malatesta, the baritone Riccardo Straccari, and Theodore Bauer, Representative of the Boston Opera House. (Photo taken between 1915 and1920) 26 26 Bains Collection, Library of Congress, LC-B2-4472-1, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ resource/ggbain.26104 (last accessed: 23 February 1912).
545
H. Robert Cohen
Fig. 8. On 20 January 1912, a banquet honoring Gianni Viafora was given by the Italian Club of New York. It was attended by Enrico Caruso and other well-known distinguished personalities. This is a facsimile of the menu. 27 27 Musical America 15/12 (27 January 1912), 37.
546
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) * * * Following is a catalog of the caricatures published in “Musical America’s Gallery of Celebrities”. The drawings are numbered as they are in the magazine; their size varies, including captions, from approximately 2.25 x 4.25 inches (57 x 108 mm) to, on rare occasion, 4.5 x 9.5 inches (114 x 241 mm). Unless otherwise noted the drawings appear on page 7 of the issue and are cited by year, volume and number. Column four duplicates the captions that accompany each drawing in MA. I have placed the name of the person caricatured in bold font.
No.
Date month, day, year
Vol., No., Page=7 Caption
1
12/18/15
23, 7
The Great Carus’ Walks Down Fifth Avenue
2
12/25/15
23, 8
David Bispham, Who Needs No Make-up to Pose as Beethoven
3
1/1/16
23, 9
Ignace Paderewski, who is selling dolls and playing the piano – as only he can – to raise money for his starving fellow countrymen in Poland.
4
1/8/16
23, 10
Josef Stransky, Conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Who Unites to Musical Efficiency Elegance and Good Taste, Turns to Thank the Ladies Who Are His Most Enthusiastic Supporters
5
1/15/15
23, 11
Arthur Bodanzky, the New Conductor of German Opera at the Metropolitan. He Has Made as Great a Hit as a Poker Player as He Has as a Conductor of Wagner’s Music
6
1/22/16
23, 12
Victor Herbert, distinguished as Conductor and Composer. Enjoys a National Popularity. Never Loses an Opportunity to Berate the Critics, Which Doesn’t Hurt Them but Makes Him Feel Better.
7
1/29/16
23, 13
Alfred Hertz – formerly of the Metropolitan Opera Co. – hears that he has made a great success as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
8
2/5/16
23, 14
Antonio Scotti (as “Scarpia”), who enjoys a world-wide reputation as an artist. He celebrates his recurring birthdays in strict seclusion with a few devoted friends, who are first solemnly pledged to secrecy as to his age.
9
2/12/16
23, 15
Maria Barrientos in the “Mad Scene” of Lucia. The celebrated prima donna made her début in New York in this rôle on Jan. 31. Her press agent has already created the Barrientos Spanish Omelet.
547
H. Robert Cohen 10
2/19/16
23, 16
Giorgio Polacco, the eminent and popular conductor of the Metropolitan Opera house, sketched by the cartoonist at the very moment of his greatest triumph, that is, when he said to himself, “I am satisfied with you Giorgio – you have done nobly!”
11
2/26/16
23, 17
Luca Botta, the Gifted and popular young Italian Tenor, Who Grieves Over the Indisposition of Lucrezia Bori Because It Has Knocked Him Out of Some of His Best Rôles.
12
3/4/16
23, 18
Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Director of the Metropolitan Opera Company, Acknowledges the Receipt of a New Contract, Which Extends His Period of “Service” to 1920.
13
3/11/16
23, 19
George Hamlin, distinguished and popular American tenor, whose voice, art and temper have, like good wine, improved with age.
14
3/18/16
23, 20
Mischa Elman, the Russian violinist. His ambition, sustained by a superb self-confidence, is to be able some day to compose as well as he can fiddle.
15
3/25/16
23, 21
Gaetano Bavagnoli, one of the new conductors at the Metropolitan. He has shown distinguished ability. Has made so many friends and has so won the appreciation of the press that he is beginning to hold his head up.
16
4/1/16
23, 22
Giovanni Martinelli of the Metropolitan Opera Co. as “Cavaradossi” in Tosca has won great favor. He looks fierce, but has a most amiable disposition and is very much in love – with his young and pretty wife.
17
4/8/16
23, 23
Pasquale Amato, popular baritone of the Metropolitan Opera Company, as Napoleon in Giordano’s “Mme. Sans Gêne,” a rôle in which he has distinguished himself as much as an actor as he had always distinguished himself as a singer.
18
4/15/16
23, 24
Giuseppe De Luca, the versatile baritone, one of Signor Gatti’s unquestioned successes during the past season. His personality is as charming as his art is of the highest.
19
4/22/16
23, 25
Cleofonte Campanini, director of the Chicago Opera Co., a veteran in the musical and operatic world, considered by many to be a perfect Machiavelli of diplomacy.
20
4/29/16
23, 26
Lucien Muratore, the French tenor, who has scored a great success with the Chicago Opera Co. and ranks with the leading opera singers in this country. He has also shown great originality and dramatic power in his interpretations. Socially he is known as Lina Cavalieri’s husband.
548
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 21
5/6/16
24, 1
William Guard, known as M. Billiguard, the versatile and universally popular press representative of the Metropolitan Opera Co., who has also won a reputation as a special correspondent for leading dailies, and has written several interesting books. As his appearance indicates, he is a cubist.
22
5/13/16
24, 2
Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink, whose whole-hearted and intensely human personality and superb vocal art have endeared her to all American music-lovers. May her shadow never grow less!
23
5/20/16
24, 3
Lina Cavalieri, distinguished for her beauty, her wit and her artistic ability as a prima donna.
24
5/27/16
24, 4
Dr. William C. Carl, the distinguished organist, who will always be found in the forefront of any movement looking to the advancement of musical conditions in the country.
25
6/3/16
24, 5
Fritz Kreisler (Ne Plus Ultra)
26
6/10/16
24, 6
John Philip Sousa, Whose Melodious and Stirring Band Music Has Carried His Name as an American Composer All Over the World
27
6/17/16
24, 7
Leopold Godowsky, Virtuoso and Educator. His technique is “Kolossal”, while his interpretations have won admiration. When he wants to compose he disappears.
28
6/24/16
24, 8
Horatio Parker, a Winner of Operatic Prizes
29
7/1/16
24, 9
Engelbert Humperdinck, Composer of Haensel und Gretel and Köningskinder – a Gentle Soul
30
7/8/16
24, 10
Richard Strauss, Distinguished German Composer of Salomé, Who Presents His Own Head as a Peace Offering to Public Opinion
31
7/15/16
24, 11
Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Who Dreams, and Dreams, and Dreams of Producing Another Masterpiece Like Pagliacci
32
7/22/16
24, 12
Giacomo Puccini, one of the most successful and popular of modern composers. His particular ambition, however, is to win fame as a hunter of game, which the cartoonist has endeavored to illustrate.
33
7/29/16
24, 13
Walter Damrosch, Who Might Have Been a Lawyer, or a Doctor, or a Scientist, but Preferred to Be “An American Musician”
549
H. Robert Cohen Pietro Mascagni, Eminent Composer of Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Well-Known Operas. Mascagni is One of the Very Few Composers Who Can Conduct as Well as He Can Compose. The Cartoonist, Viafora, Has Been Particularly Happy in Making This Cartoon, as, if You Will Look at the Picture Closely, You Will Find That the Eyebrows and Nose and the Lines Around the Mouth Show Mascagni Conducting, While in the Hair He Has Shown on the White Horse the Figure of Isabeau, the Leading Rôle in the Composer’s Opera Dr. Karl Muck, Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and musical idol of the intellectual hub of the universe Harold Bauer, Pianist Virtuoso, One of the Few Who Can Draw a Large Audience Whenever and Wherever He Plays
34
8/5/16
24, 14
35
8/12/16
24, 15
36
8/19/16
24, 16
37
8/26/16
24, 17
Emmy Destinn, world renowned operatic and concert artist. The cartoonist shows her as the heroine in Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West
38
9/2/16
24, 18
39
9/9/16
24, 19
Mary Garden, one of the greatest artists on the operatic stage, has won international prominence by her realistic performances as well as by the frankness of her utterances on every possible subject from matrimony to the measles. The cartoonist shows her as Salomé Arturo Toscanini – Il Maestro
40
9/16/16
24, 20
Oscar Hammerstein – The Unsolved Riddle of the Musical World
41
9/23/16
24, 21
Max Rabinoff – Impresario – the Phoenix of the Operatic World
42
9/30/16
24, 22
Mark Hambourg, Piano Virtuoso, Noted for the Strenuous Virility of His Performances, Which, It Is Said, Is Due to His Extraordinary Muscular Development
43
10/7/16
24, 23
Montemezzi, the Distinguished Italian Composer of L’Amore dei Tre Re, which Made Such a Success at the Metropolitan Two Years Ago, and Other Operas. Viafora, the Cartoonist, Says of Him: “Effery time he hav’ three King he draw a fulla house – you know – just lika poker!”
[44]
10/14/16
24, 24 page, 11
Evan Williams, Welsh Tenor, Who Worked Up from the Ranks and Still Astonishes the People by His Extraordinary Interpretative Power
45
10/21/16
24, 25
Rudolph Ganz, Swiss Pianist, who has become very popular in this country and has wielded great inf luence upon our musical life through the large number of his American pupils.
46
10/28/16
24, 26
Claude Debussy, the most completely original pathbreaker in music between Richard Wagner and Arnold Schoenberg.
550
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 47
11/4/16
25, 1
Efrem Zimbalist, Russian violinist, who played the Last Rose of Summer (mit variations) at his New York Recital.
48
11/11/16
25, 2
Camille Saint-Saëns, World-Renowned French Composer – The Cartoonist Has Portrayed Him as “Samson”
49
11/18/16
25, 3
Riccardo Zandonai, Composer of Francesca da Rimini, Which Will Be One of the Metropolitan Opera House Novelties of This Season
50
11/25/16
25, 4
Leopold Stokowski, the Brilliant and Enterprising Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra
51
12/2/16
25, 5
Ernest Schelling, Distinguished American Pianist – He It Was Who Acquainted This Country with Granados, composer of Goyescas, Who Met a Tragic End Through the Torpedoing of the Sussex
52
12/9/16
25, 6
Maud Powell, the American Violinist, Who Has Carried the Best Music to All Quarters of the World
53
12/16/16
25, 7
54
12/23/16
25, 8
55
12/30/16
25, 9
Gennaro Papi, formerly assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera Company, who has lately been promoted to conductorship by Mr. Gatti, and who has won golden opinions regarding his work, especially from the members of the company Albert Spalding, the distinguished American violin virtuoso, is shown by the cartoonist as saying: - “Well, I got there, after all, didn’t I? My time is all filled for the season”. Amelita Galli-Curci, the Remarkable Italian Soprano Who Early This Season Came to America Unheralded – Now, Whenever Her Name Is Announced for a Performance with the Chicago Opera Company, the “Standing Room Only” sign Is Hung Up
551
H. Robert Cohen 56
1/6/17
25, 10
57
1/13/17
25, 11
58
1/20/17
25, 12
59
1/27/17
25, 13
60
2/3/17
25, 14
Leo Ornstein, regarded by some as a musical freak, but esteemed by those who know as a genius!
61
2/10/17
25, 15
Frances Alda, the Australian prima donna, who has won her way to the highest regard of the opera-going public in New York by her extraordinary versatility. She has appeared in and created a number of wholly different rôles.
62
2/17/17
25, 16
Eddy Brown, the young Western violin virtuoso, who enjoys the distinction of making the name “Brown” famous in the musical world and of helping to break down the oldtime prejudice favoring foreign names for musicians.
552
Artists, singers, actors and actresses develop on certain well-defined lines, but all are impressed with the idea that in whatever line the public accepts them they possess the ability to shine in diametrically opposite characters. Thus, the comedian is obsessed with the idea that after all it is in tragedy that he could shine, just as the tragedian is obsessed with the idea that if the public would only forget him in his tragic rôles he would create the furore as a comedian. This is particularly true of the operatic artists. The great baritone hopes by the grace of God and the aid of a skilled physician to become a tenor. The mezzo-soprano of national fame is determined to shine in other rôles as a soprano. Even our good friend Enrico Caruso dreams of other fields to conquer. Now Caruso’s most intimate friend is Enrico Scognamillo. Signor Scognamillo is a big man with a fierce black moustache. His particular duty is to protect his friend Caruso and keep everybody at ten paces distance. When people come nearer he transfixes them with his basilisk eyes. Personally he is not only a most charming man, when you know him, but a really fine cello player. His great ambition is to be able to sing like Caruso, while Caruso’s dream, depicted by the cartoonist, is to be able to play the cello like Scognamillo. Louis Graveure, whose identity is still a mystery to many. However, there is no mystery about his success as a singer of serious songs, for he has captured the public wherever he has appeared. He is one of the sensational “hits” of the season. Claudia Muzio, the young Italian prima donna, who made such a successful début at the Metropolitan as Tosca, and who reinforced that success by her later appearances as “Nedda” in Pagliacci, “Manon” in Manon Lescaut and “Leonora” in Il Trovatore. Kurt Schindler, conductor of the Schola Cantorum, as he appeared before his marriage. The cartoonist promises a picture of him, later, as he appears since his marriage.
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 63
2/24/17
25, 17
Percy Hemus, the American baritone, to whom the composers of this country owe a debt of gratitude for his vigorous and untiring exploitation of their works.
64
3/3/17
25, 18
Geraldine Farrar as Carmen, as the cartoonist sees her. You will notice that she has one eye on the audience
65
3/10/17
25, 19
Percy Grainger, Australian composer, pianist, virtuoso, whose bright, effervescent and genial personality have [sic] made him as many friends as his talent.
66
3/17/17
25, 20
As there is a man behind the gun, so there is a man behind the chorus of the Metropolitan, and a very wonderful man he is, too. His name is Giulio Setti, who is considered the greatest “maestro” of operatic choral work in the world.
67
3/24/17
25, 21
De Koven – composer of The Canterbury Pilgrims, recently performed at the Metropolitan. The cartoonist depicts him in the costume of the time of Richard II of England.
68
3/31/17
25, 22
Franz Kneisel, head of the famous Kneisel Quartet, which, after twenty-five years of distinguished work to promote an appreciation of chamber music in this country, disbands at the very height of its success and popularity.
69
4/7/17
25, 23
Charles Gilbert Spross, talented American composer, whose songs have won him a national reputation. Has also gained distinction by his notable ability as an accompanist to some of the world’s greatest artists.
70
4/14/17
25, 24
Frederick Stock, who succeeded Theodore Thomas as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and has maintained the high standard which that great conductor established once for all in this country.
71
4/21/17
25, 25
72
4/28/17
25, 26
This Represents the Illustrious Belgian Violinist, Eugen Ysaye, Who Has Worked Nobly in the Cause of the Belgian Relief Fund. The Cartoonist Shows Him Without an Instrument to Depict the Foolishness of Those Who Go into Ecstasies Over What They Call Ysaye’s Finest, Most Delicate Effects, When in Reality His Bow, at the Time, Is Not Even on the Strings Ethel Leginska, whose strikingly individual piano playing and unique ideas regarding concert costumes have brought her fame and favor
73
5/5/17
26, 1
Arthur Hartmann, Prominent American Violinist and Composer
74
5/12/17
26, 2
Riccardo Stracciari, Eminent Italian Operatic Baritone, Remembered as a Metropolitan Artist of Some Ten Years Ago. He Has Returned to America After Triumphs in Havana
553
H. Robert Cohen 75
5/19/17
26, 3
Arthur Shattuck, American Pianist. A Virtuoso with Marked Gifts. Prides Himself Upon Being an “Experienced Yachtsman”. Has Offered His Power Cruiser “Mignon” to the Government
76
5/26/17
26, 4
David Mannes, violinist and musician of great distinction, for years director of the Music School Settlement. Now directs one of New York’s leading music schools.
77
6/2/17
26, 5
Charles W. Clark, American baritone with an international reputation. Has located in Chicago for the time being on account of the climate.
78
6/9/17
26, 6
George W. Chadwick of Boston, distinguished and representative American musician and composer. Never pays any attention to anything that is written about him, whether in praise or blame
79
6/16/17
26, 7
Charles Wakef ield Cadman, American Composer, one of the pioneers in the utilization of the Indian theme as a basis of serious musical works
80
6/23/17
26, 8
John McCormack, started as a singer of Irish folk songs, won fame and fortune. Later developed into an artist of the highest distinction
81
6/30/17
26, 9
Jacques Thibaud, famous French violinist. Has served his country both in the trenches and on the concert platform
82
7/7/17
26, 10
Giovanni Zenatello, discovered by Oscar Hammerstein as one of Italy’s leading tenors. Star last season with Rabinoff ’s Boston National Opera Company.
83
7/14/17
26, 11
Frank La Forge, whose songs are sung by concert artists everywhere – One of the first Americans to win international recognition in the fine art of accompanying.
84
7/21/17
26, 12
Modest Altschuler, Conductor of the Russian Symphony Orchestra. A public-spirited musician and a sturdy propagandist for the modern Russian school of composition.
85
8/4/17
26, 14
Alice Nielsen - Popular Idol on the American Concert Stage, Who Next Season Returns to Her First Love, Comic Opera. She Will Appear in Kitty Darlin.
86
8/11/17
26, 15
Pierre Monteux, Distinguished French Conductor. Came from the Trenches to Direct for the Russian Ballet in America; Conducted New York’s Civic Orchestra Concerts This Summer. Will Conduct French Opera at the Metropolitan.
87
8/18/17
26, 16
Henry Hadley, Illustrious American Composer and Conductor. His new grand operas will be produced by Campanini in Chicago
554
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 88
8/25/17
26, 17
Hipolito Lázaro, Spanish Tenor, whose Admirers say he will Out-Caruso Caruso. He is said to Sing the High E Flat Made Famous by Rubini. Metropolitan Opera-goers will test these claims during the Forthcoming Season.
89
9/1/17
26, 18
George Barrère, who has been called the Casals of the Flute. Might Not Casals be called the Barrère of the Cello?
90
9/8/17
26, 19
Alexander Lambert, noted pianist and pedagogue. His presence is indispensable to the success of all musical and theatrical premières in New York City
91
9/15/17
26, 20
Oscar Seagle, baritone and authority on vocal matters. For many years associated with Jean de Reszke in Paris
92
9/22/17
26, 21
Carlos Salzedo, French harp virtuoso - has seen active service in the trenches – A popular favorite here.
93
9/29/17
26, 22
The Zoellner Quartet – reading from the top – Joesph, Jr., Amandus, Antoinette and Joseph, Sr. Probably the only professional family string quartet which has toured in two continents.
94
10/6/17
26, 23
Ossip Gabrilowitsch, distinguished piano virtuoso, conductor, also known as the son-in-law of the late Mark Twain.
95
10/13/17
26, 24
Giulio Crimi, noted Italian Tenor. He will sing the leading rôles with Mr. Campanini’s Chicago Opera Co. this season.
96
10/20/17
Special Fall Issue
Anna Case, soprano of the Metropolitan Opera Co. – Gave her annual New York recital in Carnegie Hall on Sunday
97
10/27/17
26, 26
Giuseppe Creatore, who won international renown as the most acrobatic of band masters. Now an operatic impresario.
98
11/3/17
27, 1
Henry Theophilus Finck, Erudite Critic of New York Evening Post, Authority of Dietetics, and Author of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty – American Biographer of Richard Strauss
99
11/10/17
27, 2
Reinald Werrenrath, a fine type of American manhood and a singer of distinguished ability. Qualifies also as a highly successful salesman of liberty bonds
100
11/17/17
27, 3
Lambert Murphy, popular American tenor, for many years prominent in our concert and operatic life
101
11/24/17
27, 4
Olive Kline, American soprano, familiar to concert-goers everywhere. Viafora sketched her “from live”, knitting paraphernalia and all.
102
12/1/17
27, 5
This is Viafora’s version of young Jascha Heifetz, the Russian violinist, whose playing has been one of the sensational features of the present season.
103
12/8/17
27, 6
Henri Scott, American basso of the Metropolitan Opera Co. A prominent figure on our concert stage.
555
H. Robert Cohen 104
12/15/17
27, 7
Mabel Garrison, Pretty and Vivacious Soprano of Operatic and Concert Fame – Unlike Many Women Artists, Willing to Brave the Perils of Being Cartooned
105
12/22/17
27, 8
Reed Miller, American Tenor, Famed as a Teller of Southern Stories and a Singer of Southern Songs
106
12/29/17
27, 9
Arthur Farwell, First to Apply Walt Whitman’s Famous Phrase, “I Hear America Singing,” to a Musical Movement, in 1901
107
1/5/18
27, 10
Paul Althouse As “Turridu” – This American Tenor Is Making His Way to the Front with Mighty Strides
108
1/12/18
27, 11
Léon Rothier, a Soldier of France – Basso of the Metropolitan Opera Company
109
1/19/18
27, 12
Max Rosen, the New York Roumanian Boy, Who Made a Successful and, Indeed, Sensational Début in Carnegie Hall, Saturday Night
110
1/26/18
27, 13
Rosa Raisa, Dramatic Soprano of the Chicago Opera Association, and one of the Bright Particular Stars of Mr. Campanini’s New York Season
111
2/2/18
27, 14
Clarence Whitehill, American Basso of the Metropolitan. When the Golf Links Are Frozen Over He Amuses Himself at Pool and Billiards
112
2/9/18
27, 15
Adamo Didur, Polish Baritone of the Metropolitan Opera House, Sprang Into Prominence as Creator of “Boris” in Boris Godounoff. Noted Also for Sartorial Effulgence
113
2/16/18
27, 16
Marcel Charlier, Conductor of French Operas with the Chicago Opera Association – Campanini’s Lieutenant Since the Days of Hammerstein Opera
114
2/23/18
27, 17
Nellie Melba, as Viafora Saw her, Singing the King of Thule Ballad in Faust
115
3/2/18
27, 18
Roberto Moranzoni, Metropolitan’s new Italian conductor, Fast Winning Popularity Among New York Operagoers
116
3/9/18
27, 19
Giuseppe Sturani, Leading Conductor of Italian Opera with Cleofonte Campanini’s Opera Organization. Formerly at the Metropolitan
117
3/16/18
27, 20 Page 17
Florence Hinkle – that was; now Mrs. Herbert Witherspoon, and a greater singer than ever
118
3/23/18
27, 21
Richard Hageman, Conductor, Who Has Become a Popular Favorite at the Metropolitan Opera House Sunday Night Concerts
119
3/30/18
27, 22
A. Buzzi-Peccia, Distinguished Italian Maestro Whose Songs Are Sung by Concert Artists Everywhere
120
4/6/18
27, 23
Oscar Saenger, Vocal Teacher and Operatic Coach – Favorite Pastime Horseback Riding
556
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 121
4/13/18
27, 24
Vittorio Arimondi, the Giant Basso of the Chicago Opera Association
122
4/20/18
27, 25
Morgan Kingston, the Welsh Tenor, Had His Chance at the Metropolitan This Season and Made Good
123
4/27/18
27, 26
Gianni Viafora Undertakes the Hazardous Task of Cartooning His Wife, Mrs. Gianni Viafora. Professionally Known as Gina Ciaparelli-Viafora. Strong Men Have Been Shot for Less!
124
5/4/18
28, 1
Leopold Auer, The Progenitor of a Large Progeny of Violin Virtuosi
125
5/11/18
28, 2
Percy Rector Stephens, Conductor of the Schumann Club of New York – He Would Sooner Fight Than Teach
126
5/18/18
28, 3
H.T. Burleigh, Noted Colored Composer. His Songs Are Being Sung by the Most Distinguished Artists.
127
5/25/18
28, 4
Richard Ordynski, Stage Director – One of the Big Men Behind the Guns at the Metropolitan
128
6/1/18
28, 5
Tamaki Miura, Dainty Prima Donna, in Her Appealing Portrayal of the Rôle of Her Native Japan – “Madame Butterf ly”
129
6/8/18
28, 6
Paul Dufault, French-American Tenor. His Popularity Extends from Hong Kong to Medicine Hat
130
6/15/18
28, 7
Nahan Franko, Whose Magic Bâton Has Held Tens of Thousands in Its Spell
131
6/22/18
28, 8
Toscha Seidel, Latest of Auer’s Geniuses and Destined to Rank Among the Really Great
132
6/29/18
28, 9
Arnold Volpe, conductor of New York’s Latest Open-Air Symphony Concerts at the City College Stadium
133
7/13/18
28, 11
Pablo Casals, Generally Conceded to be the King of All Living ‘Cellists
134
7/20/18
28, 12
Cantor Josef Rosenblatt, a New Star in Our Musical Firmament
135
7/27/18
28, 13
Riccardo Martin, as “Canio” – a winner of new triumphs in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia
136
8/3/18
28, 14
Emil Oberhoffer, Conductor of the Symphony Orchestra That Has Made Minneapolis Famous
137
8/17/18
28, 16
Andres De Segurola, Famous Spanish Basso of the Metropolitan. Noted Equally for His Art and His Monocle
138
9/14/18
28, 20
Amelita Galli-Curci, the Woman with the Wonder Voice. She Smiles Despite Litigation.
139
9/21/18
28, 21
Mischa Levitzki, Young but Formidable Among Contemporary Concert Pianists
557
H. Robert Cohen 140
9/28/18
28, 22
John Alden Carpenter, One of America’s Serious Composers Who Has heard the Voice of the People, as Demonstrated by His Interest in Community Music
141
10/5/18
28, 23
Orville Harrold, Once Famous in Light Opera, Now Celebrated in Grand Opera
142
10/12/18
28, 24
Giuseppe Bamboschek, Assistant Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera Company – His Accompaniments Have Helped Many an Artist to Success
143
10/19/18
Special Fall Issue page 13
With the Aid of a Verbal Description Supplied by an Eye Witness, and a Photograph Supplied by the Art Editor, Viafora Gives Herewith His Conception of Henri Rabaud, new Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
144
10/26/18
28, 26
Lucy Gates, Shining Example of What a Plucky, Talented American Singer Can Accomplish
145
11/2&9/18
29, 1-2
The Flonzaley Quartet, Picturesque, Buoyant, Progressively Modern, Virile, and Always Artistically Satisfying
146
11/16/18
29, 3
Alberto Bimboni, Versatile Conductor, Composer and Accompanist. An Italian with an All-Indian Opera Up His Sleeve.
147
11/23/18
29, 4
Victor Maurel, Creator of “Falstaff,” “Iago,” “Tonio,” and Other Rôles – It Is Viafora’s Impression That Present Day Singers Are Pigmies in Comparison with This Giant
148
11/30/18
29, 5
John Barnes Wells, Concert Tenor, Who Spends His Spare Hours Composing Encore Songs
149
12/7/18
29, 6
Jacque Coini, Stage Director of the Society of American Singers. A “Man Behind the Guns” Whose Genius and Taste Have Scored Many an Artistic Hit
150
12/14/18
29, 7
Luigi Montesanto, the Handsome New Baritone of the Metropolitan. His Artistic Stride Will Be Measured When he Sings the Leading Rôle in Puccini’s Il Tabarro
151
12/21/18
29, 8
Joseph Charles Breil, American Composer of The Legend, Which Mr. Gatti Has Selected for Production at the Metropolitan Opera House This Season
152
12/28/18
29, 9
Giulio Crimi, Tenor of the Metropolitan Opera Company – Rapidly Gaining in the Favor of New York Opera Goers
153
1/4/19
29, 10
Fernando Carpi, Young Lyric Italian Tenor – Enjoys Unique Distinction of Having Sung with Both the Metropolitan and Chicago Opera Companies Within One Year
558
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 154
1/11/19
29, 11
Andre Messager, Conductor of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra – An Emissary from Our Sister Republic Who Brings Us, Through His Refined Art, a Message of Artistic Fellowship and Sympathy
155
1/18/19
29, 12
Maximilian Pilzer, American Violinist Who Has Come Into His Own as Soloist of Notable Talent and Virtuosity
156
1/25/19
29, 13
Raoul Vidas, Roumanian Violinist – Another Youngster Who Plays Like a Veteran
157
2/1/19
29, 14
Mme. Margaret Matzenauer Caught by Viafora’s Photographic Eye as She Sang “Dalila”
158
2/8/19
29, 15
Josef Hofmann, One of the Really Great Pianists of This Generation. His “All American” Program Last Week Caused Critical Fur to Fly
159
2/15/19
29, 16
M. Henri Février, Composer of Monna Vanna and Gismonda – The Emancipation of Woman Is the Theme of His Next Opera – He Came Here Direct from the French Trenches of Verdun
160
2/22/19
29, 17
Alessandro Dolci, Campanini’s New Tenor, His Name Acts as a Constant Advertisement of His Art
161
3/1/19
29, 18
Louis Hasselmans, French Conductor of the Chicago Opera Association – A Son of the Great Harpist Alphonse Hasselmans
162
3/8/19
29, 19
Arthur Rubinstein, Polish Pianist Who Returns After a Long Absence, to Exhibit His Rosenthal-like Technical Perfection
163
3/15/19
29, 20
Giacomo Rimini, Noted Baritone of the Chicago Opera Association – Once Famous as an Automobile Racer
164
3/22/19
29, 21
Mary Ellis, the Youngest Soprano of the Metropolitan Opera Company
165
3/29/19
29, 22
Hugo Riesenfeld, the Campanini of the Movies – a symphonic conductor par excellence and an astute impresario of motion pictures at the Rialto and Rivoli Theaters in New York
166
4/5/19
29, 23
What the Years Did to Caruso! 1894 At the Age of 21[;] 1919 At the Age of 46
167
4/12/19
29, 24
Hipolito Lazaro of the Ringing Top Notes – as He Appears in La Reine Fiammette
168
4/19/19
29, 25
Sasha Votichenko, virtuoso of the tympanon, collector of musical antiques and an altogether picturesque figure in the artistic life of New York
169
4/26/19
29, 26
Charles Hackett, Waiting for the Lemonade to Be Served at Geraldine Farrar’s Reception Last Week
559
H. Robert Cohen 170
5/3/19
30, 1
Titta Ruffo, the Aristocrat of Baritones, as Viafora Saw Him Passing Through New York on His Way to South America the Other Day
171
5/10/19
30, 2
William R. Chapman, Conductor of the Rubinstein Club of New York and Leading Spirit in the Great Maine Festivals
172
5/17/19
30, 3
John Lund, Prominent for Many Years as One of Buffalo’s Leading Musicians and Conductors
173
5/24/19
30, 4
Frieda Hempel as “Annetta” in Crispino e la Comare
174
6/7/19
30, 6
Max Jacobs, Conductor of the Orchestral Society of New York
175
6/14/19
30, 7
Amparito Farrar, No Relation to Geraldine – but a Soprano Just the Same. She Sang for Our Soldiers Abroad, Lost Her Heart and Is Now a Happy Bride.
176
6/28/19
30, 9
Salvatore de Stefano, Who Is Depicted by the Cartoonist as Having a Good Head for Music
177
7/5/19
30, 10
Arnold Volpe, Under Whose Able Leadership the Stadium Symphony Orchestra Is Again Delighting Hosts of New York Music-Lovers
[178] 7/12/19
30, 11
Milton Aborn, Creator of Dollar-Opera-in-English, and Owner of the Best Known Head of Hair in Managerial Circles
179
7/19/19
30, 12
Emil Oberhoffer, Conductor of the Minneapolis Orchestra, Which Enjoys the Distinction of Being the Leading Touring Symphonic Ensemble of America
180
7/26/19
30, 13
Mana-Zucca, at Once Pianist, Singer and Prolific Composer of Songs and Piano Pieces
181
8/2/19
30, 14
Arturo Toscanini, probably the most famous and popular operatic conductor living. He is a comprehensive genius, however, and has shown himself scarcely less gifted as an interpreter of Beethoven and Brahms than of Wagner and Gluck.
182
8/9/19
30, 15
Rosa Ponselle, Soprano, Who Won Instant Success in her Début at the Metropolitan Opera House Last Season
183
8/16/19
30, 16
J. W. F. Leman, the gifted conductor of the Steel Pier Symphony Orchestra, Atlantic City, whose concerts are attracting many thousands of music-lovers to the famous structure by the sea
184
8/23/19
30, 17
Pierre V. R. Key, music critic of the New York World, long since noted for his straight-from-the-shoulder comment on New York’s musical conditions
560
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 185
8/30/19
30, 18
Edwin Franko Goldman, whose inspiring bâton has brought throngs to the campus of Columbia University this summer to hear concerts of extraordinary interest and merit
186
9/6/19
30, 19
Arthur Middleton, Distinguished Baritone, Known Throughout the American Musical World
187
9/13/19
30, 20
Hans Kronold with His Cello, His Inspiration and His Cigar – A Combination Certain to Produce Fine Music
188
9/20/19
30, 21
Philip Berolzheimer, the Father of Municipal Music in New York City
189
9/27/19
30, 22
Aurelio Giorni, Gifted as a Composer, Better Known, however, as a Pianist of Exceptional Talent
190
10/4/19
30, 23
P. A. Tirindelli, versatile composer, conductor and all’round musician, formerly of Cincinnati, now of New York.
191
10/11/19
30, 24
Artur Bodanzky, Conductor of the New Symphony Orchestra and one of the really big figures in our musical life (Not drawn by Viafora)
192
10/18/19
30, 25
Sergei Rachmaninoff, celebrated Russian Composer, Pianist and Conductor, Now a Conspicuous Figure in America’s Musical Life (Not drawn by Viafora)
193
10/25/19
30, 26
Alessandro Bonci, here with bag and baggage to delight the ears of the lovers of “bel canto”
194
11/1/19
31, 1
Carlo Peroni, highly gifted Italian Conductor, introduced to American Audiences by Fortune Gallo
195
11/8/19
31, 2
Rosario Scalero, Distinguished Italian Violinist, Composer and Teacher, Who Has Joined New York’s Music Colony
196
11/15/19
31, 3
Riccardo Stracciari, the debonnaire and distinguished Italian baritone of the Chicago Opera Association
197
11/22/19
31, 4
Italo Montemezzi, famous Italian Composer, Who is Adding Lustre to Our Operatic Season
198
11/29/19
31, 5
Anna Fitziu, the Chicago Opera Soprano As She Appears in One of Her Greatly Admired Roles, “Lady Godiva”
199
12/6/19
31, 6
Gino Marinuzzi, Gifted as Composer and Conductor. One of Campanini’s Acquisitions of this Season
200
12/13/19
31, 7
Mr. Caruso Sees Himself as Others See Him (Not drawn by Viafora)
201
12/20/19
31, 8
Carlo Galeff i, Mr. Campanini’s New Baritone, Considered Among Italy’s Greatest Operatic Artists
202
12/27/19
31, 9
William Thorner Taking His Vocal Exercises, Whereby He Accumulates the Strength and Fortitude to Introduce Budding Singers to an Appreciative Public
203
1/3/20
31, 10
This is What Viafora Saw From His Stage Box When He Attended Luisa Tetrazzini’s Concert in New York
561
H. Robert Cohen 204
1/10/20
31, 11
He started his musical career as Eddie Johnson, church singer; then he became Eduardo di Giovanni, tenor in leading Italian opera houses. Now he is Edward Johnson, leading tenor of the Chicago Opera Association.
205
1/17/20
31, 12
Teof ilo de Angelis, Conductor of the Chicago Opera Association
206
1/24/20
31, 13
No, Not a Bad Likeness of Godowsky, but an Excellent Delineation of the Features of Giacomo Rimini, Baritone of the Chicago Opera Association
207
1/31/20
31, 14
Tito Schipa, the Chicago Opera Association’s New Tenor. He Defied the Claque in Milan; Was Hissed for Refusing to Sing an Encore in Madrid and Carries a Live Snake in His Pocket as a Mascot.
208
2/7/20
31, 15
In the Mad Rush of Modern Day Life This Gentle Soul, Sam Franko, Finds Time to Delve Into the Compositions of Centuries Past and to Revive Them in All Their Classic Beauty and Simplicity.
209
2/14/20
31, 16
Gabriella Besanzoni, the Italian Contralto of the Metropolitan, Sketched by Viafora as She Came Into Rosa Raisa’s Dressing Room at the Lexington to Congratulate Her Sister Artist.
210
2/21/20
31, 17
Georges Baklanoff, Matinée Idol of the Opera Stage and a Distinguished Member of the Chicago Opera Association
211
2/28/20
31, 18
Rosa Raisa, Whose Unique Art Made Possible the Revival of So Neglected a Masterpiece as Norma
212
3/6/20
31, 19
Jules Falk, the Gifted Violinist, Who Has Travelled the Length and Breadth of America, Season After Season
213
3/13/20
31, 20
Christiaan Kriens, Noted Composer, Teacher and Orchestral Conductor, Who Has Done Notable Work with the Kriens Symphony Orchestra, Which Was Formed to Give Students Experience in Orchestral Playing, and Also to Allow American Composers an Opportunity to Hear Their Works Performed
214
3/20/20
31, 21
Robert Couzinou, Debonair and Impressive Baritone of the Metropolitan Opera Company
215
3/27/20
31, 22
Jules Speck, the Man Behind the Scenes – Once of the Metropolitan and Now with the Chicago Opera Association
216
4/3/20
31, 23
As the Toastmaster Might Say: “We Have with Us This Evening a French Musician of High Distinction, a Soldier Whose Record Added Lustre to the Military Glory of France and a Composer Whose Opera, The Blue Bird, Was Produced in the World’s Greatest Opera House – Albert Wolff, of the Metropolitan”.
562
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) 217
4/10/20
31, 24
Victor Harris, Conductor of the St. Cecilia Club, Composer of More Than 100 Songs and a Conspicuous Figure in New York’s Musical Life
218
4/17/20
31, 25
Salvatore Fucito to say that he is Caruso’s accompanist is to classify him, automatically, as one of the very best in the world.
219 [a]
4/24/20
31, 26
William Simmons, Who Gave Up a Successful Commercial Career to Become a Concert Baritone, in Which Capacity He Has Fully Justified the Transition
219 [b]
5/1/20
32, 1
Cesare Sodero, Italian Conductor and Composer – A musical prophet who wrote an opera based on the Russian Revolution years before it occurred.
220
5/8/20
32, 2
Michel Gusikoff, Brilliant Concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, a Visitor to New York Last Week
221
5/15/20
32, 3
Emerson Whithorne, One-time Clevelander, an Outstanding Figure Among America’s Contemporary Composers Whose Music Is Admired Quite as Much Abroad as It Is in His Own Country
222
5/22/20
32, 4
Umberto Sorrentino, Gifted Young Italian Tenor, Whose Personal Charm and Graciousness Have Won him a Host of Friends in America.
563
H. Robert Cohen Selected Caricatures in Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” Composers
Mascagni (No. 34) Leoncavallo (No. 31) Humperdinck (No. 29) Puccini (No. 32) Saint-Saëns (No. 48) Debussy (No. 46) Strauss (No. 30) Montemezzi (No. 43)
564
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920)
Conductors
Damrosch (No. 33) Bodansky (No. 5) Stransky (No. 4) Herz (No. 7) Stokowski (No. 50) Stock (No. 70) Monteux (No. 86) Toscanini (No. 181)
565
H. Robert Cohen Pianists
Bauer (No. 36) Hofmann (No. 158) Rubinstein (No. 162) Paderewski (No. 3) Gabrilowitsch (No. 94) Godowsky (No. 27) Levitzki (No. 139) Leginska (No. 72)
566
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920) String Players
Ysaÿe (No. 71) Thibaud (No. 81) Kreisler (No. 25) Auer (No. 124) Elman (No. 14) Heifetz (No. 102) Casals (No. 133) Salzedo (No. 92)
567
H. Robert Cohen Singers
Maria Barrientos (No. 9) Mary Garden (No. 38) Amelita Galli-Curci (No. 138) Geraldine Farrar (No. 64) Nellie Melba (No. 114) Tamaki Miura (No. 128) Rosa Ponselle (No. 182) Luisa Tetrazzini (No. 203)
568
Viafora’s “Gallery of Celebrities” in M usical A merica (1915–1920)
Caruso (No. 1) Ruffo (No. 170) Schipa (No. 207) Rosenblatt (No. 134) Martinelli (No. 16) Stracciari (No. 196) Maurel (No. 147) De Luca (No. 18)
569
H. Robert Cohen
570
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Nada Bezić Hrvatski glazbeni zavod Zagreb (Croatian Music Institute, Zagreb)
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz knjižnice i arhiva Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu Abstract. Art Deco Artifacts: Samples from the Library and Archive of the Croatian Music Institute in Zagreb: The first part of this study of noteworthy visual-art items from the Art Deco period in the library and archives of the Croatian Music Institute (CMI) in Zagreb, published in 2015, presented works by six artists. This part deals with works by sixteen artists, among them Austrian graphic designer Hans Neumann (1888–1960), famous Russian painters Natalja Gončarova (1881–1962) and Mihail Larionov (1881–1964) and Russian stage designer and caricaturist Vladimir Žedrinskij (1899–1974) who worked in Belgrade and Zagreb. Until now it was not known that Croatian painters Ljubo Babić (1890–1974), Oto Antonini (1892–1959) and Vladimir Kirin (1894–1963) created covers for printed music and that in the Zvuk music magazine (Belgrade, 1932–1936) there are drawings and caricatures by Croatian painters Pjer Križanić (1890–1962), Omer Mujadžić (1903–1991), Branimir Petrović (1888–1957) and Marijan Šimunić (1913–1942). Results of the research also allow accurate dating of a concert poster designed by Jozo Kljaković (1889–1969) and a painting by Jerolim Miše (1890–1970). This research demonstrates that because the library catalogues do not include information on interesting designs of covers, art historians need assistance from the music librarians to find works by painters on music material.
Kada sam 1987. godine postala knjižničarka Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda (HGZ) u Zagrebu nisam ni izdaleka slutila koja se tamo sva blaga čuvaju. Moja prethodnica, kolegica Vedrana Juričić, dala mi je kratke upute i predala ključeve od ormara, a ja sam polako, isprva kao honorarno, a od 1989. kao stalno zaposlena, otkrivala što je sve u njima. Savjetima mi je redovito pomagao i Zdravko Blažeković koji je honorarno radio u knjižnici HGZ-a od 1979. do 1986. godine. Kao dugogodišnji suradnik Ladislava Šabana, jedne od ključnih osoba u povijesti knjižnice i arhiva (službeni je naziv zbirka arhivske građe) HGZ-a, stasao je od studenta-pomoćnika preko ravnopravnog kolege konačno do Šabanovog nasljednika, a poznavanje knjižnice i arhiva HGZ-a 571
Nada Bezić rezultiralo je s nekoliko Blažekovićevih značajnih radova.1 Svih ovih proteklih godina kada god bih u knjižnici pronašla nešto zanimljivo, Zdravko bi u pravilu uvijek rekao da je za to već znao. Tako je bilo i s notnim izdanjima nakladničke kuće Edition Slave, velikom hrpom nota koja je nekatalogizirana na vrhu jedne police čekala da bude pokazana svijetu. Prvi je put to bilo na izložbi Najljepša izdanja Edition Slave što sam ju 1992. priredila u vitrinama u predvorju koncertne dvorane HGZ-a. Atraktivan dizajn korica tih muzikalija, djelo višestruko talentiranog Ive Tijardovića, oživio je nakon toga na drugim izložbama, bio je predstavljen javnosti u publikacijama i u znanstvenim radovima. 2 Ispostavilo se međutim, da je šezdeset tiskanih muzikalija bečke tvrtke Edition Slave sačuvanih u HGZ-u samo dio zanimljivog materijala iz razdoblja art décoa što se čuvaju u toj ustanovi. U istraživanje sam krenula zahvaljujući poticaju koji je stigao izvan područja muzikologije. Zagrebački Muzej za umjetnost i obrt priredio je početkom 2011. godine veliku izložbu Art déco3 i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj između dva rata. Zahvaljujući dugogodišnjoj suradnji HGZ-a i Muzeja, u širokom spektru izložaka bila su zastupljena i notna izdanja, točnije 11 muzikalija iz knjižnice HGZ-a koja su predstavila Tijardovićeve radove za Edition Slave.4 U pripremama za tu izložbu pronašla sam još mnogo likovno zanimljive građe, te priredila izložbu Art déco u HGZ-u, koja je trajala od veljače do lipnja 2011. i privukla veliku pozornost posjetitelja HGZ-a. Bile su izložene dvadeset četiri muzikalije, dvije knjige, dva časopisa, četiri koncertna programa, četiri razglednice, jedan dopis i jedan račun, sve građa iz 1920-ih i 1930-ih godina.5 Likovno oblikovanje te građe djelo je petnaest umjetnika iz Hrvatske, Srbije, Slovenije, Austrije i Rusije, rođenih između 1873. i 1903. godine. Trinaest autora je djelovalo na području Kralje1
2
3 4 5
572
Npr.: „Djelatnost Ivana Zajca u okvirima Hrvatskog zemaljskog glazbenog zavoda“, u Zbornik radova sa znanstvenog skupa održanog u povodu 150. obljetnice rođenja Ivana Zajca, ur. Lovro Županović (Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1982), 55–78; „Music autographs in the Nikola Udina Algarotti collection in Zagreb (ca. 1740–1838)“, Current musicology 58 (1995), 127–165. Duško Kečkemet, Nepoznati Tijardović: Likovno stvaralaštvo najpoznatijeg splitskog skladatelja (Split: Naklada Bošković; Zaklada Karlo Grenc, 2012); Nada Bezić, „Notna izdanja Edition Slave (Slavenski izdavački zavod), Beč“, u Glazba, riječi i slike: Svečani zbornik za Koraljku Kos, ur. Vjera Katalinić i Zdravko Blažeković (Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikološko društvo, 1999), 127–144. Pojam dolazi od francuskog izraza art décoratif što znači ukrasna umjetnost, a nastao je nakon Međunarodne izložbe dekorativnih umjetnosti u Parizu 1925. godine. Notna su izdanja iz knjižnice HGZ-a u popisu izložaka uvrštena u najveću skupinu Dizajn; usp. Miroslav Gašparović, ur., Art déco i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj između dva rata [katalog izložbe] (Zagreb: Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, 2011), 234. O izložbi vidi Anonim., „Art déco u HGZ-u“, HaGeZe 15/5 (2011), 1; Nada Bezić, „Art déco u HGZ-u: Izložba u natuknicama“, HaGeZe 15/6 (2011), 3 (oba članka dostupna su i na http://www.hgz.hr/glasilo). Katalog izložbe nalazi se u dokumentaciji knjižnice HGZ-a.
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu vine SHS/Jugoslavije, a među njima je devetero sudjelovalo na Međunarodnoj izložbi dekorativnih umjetnosti u Parizu 1925, što je podatak koji ukazuje kako su se dizajnom glazbenih izdanja (nota i koncertnih programa) bavili uistinu ponajbolji likovni umjetnici.6 Za vrijeme trajanja izložbe u HGZ-u pisala sam o njoj u časopisu Cantus,7 a to me je istraživanje uvjerilo da količina građe i njena posebnost zaslužuju mnogo više pozornosti. Prilika se pružila 2015. godine kada je objavljen moj članak Art déco u Hrvatskom glazbenom zavodu u Zagrebu – tragom jedne izložbe.8 U tom sam tekstu međutim obuhvatila samo dio građe, djela hrvatskih umjetnika Tomislava Krizmana,9 Ive Tijardovića,10 Radovana Tommasea11 i Marka Rašice12 te slovenskog slikara Tone Kralja13 i srpskog likovnog umjetnika Dušana Jankovića.14 Rezultati tog istraživanja pokazali su da su grafički dizajni Rašice, Kralja i Jankovića do sada bili nepoznati povjesničarima umjetnosti koji su proučavali njihovo stvaralaštvo. Ovaj će prilog zaokružiti ovu temu prikazom preostale građe s izložbe u HGZ-u (djelomično proširene s djelima drugih autora); bit će riječi o umjetnicima iz Austrije (Hans Neumann), Rusije (Natalja Sergejevna Gončarova, Mihail Fjodorovič Larionov i Vladimir Ivanovič Žedrinskij koji je živio u Hrvatskoj), Hrvatske (Oto Antonini, Ljubo Babić, Joso Bužan, Sergije Glumac, Vladimir Kirin, Jozo Kljaković, Pjer Križanić, Jerolim Miše, Omer Mujadžić, 6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14
U Parizu su izlagali: Ljubo Babić, Dušan Janković, Vladimir Kirin, Jozo Kljaković, Tone Kralj, Tomislav Krizman, Marko Rašica (unutar predstavnika zagrebačke Obrtne škole), Radovan Tommaseo i Vladimir Žedrinskij. Usp. katalog Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes: Section du Royaume des Serbes, Croates et Slovénes, http://dizbi.hazu.hr. Nada Bezić, „Slike s izložbe: Uz izložbu Art déco u HGZ-u, (veljača–lipanj 2011.) postavljenu usporedo s izložbom Art déco i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj između dva rata u Muzeju za umjetnost i obrt u Zagrebu“, Cantus, 168 (2011), 6, http://www.hds.hr/ea/wp-content/ uploads/2013/09/cantus-168.pdf (posljednji put posjećena: 16. veljače 2018). Nada Bezić, „Art déco u Hrvatskom glazbenom zavodu u Zagrebu – tragom jedne izložbe“, u Musica et artes: Ob osemdesetletnici Primoža Kureta, ur. Jonatan Vinkler i Jernej Weiss (Koper: Založba Univerze na Primorskem; Ljubljana: Akademija za glasbo Univerze v Ljubljani, Festival Ljubljana, Slovenska filharmonija, 2015), 307–336. Tri table u boji sa slikama scenografije u klavirskom izvatku opere Vilin veo Petra Konjovića (Zagreb: Vl. nakl., 1917). Notna izdanja Edition Slave i četiri razglednice iz serije Internacionalni plesovi (Zagreb: Čaklović, s.a.). Korice izdanja Tijardovićevih popijevaka Bijela serenata (Beč: Edition Slave, cop. 1922) i Milovô sam (Beč: Edition Slave, cop. 1922). Rudolf Taclik, Hrvatske božićne pjesme (Zagreb: Albini, 1937); Zlatko Grgošević, Južnoslovenske narodne pjesme (Zagreb: Rirop, s.a.); Josip Canić, Melodije: Izabrane skladbe 1905–1918. (Zagreb: Čaklović, 1919). Breda Šček, Kadar jaz dekle umrla bom: 33 harmonizanih ljudskih pesmi za mešani zbor (Trst: Vl. nakl., 1933). Vrlo originalan dizajn korica popijevke Molba Koste Manojlovića (Beč: Edition Slave, cop. 1922).
573
Nada Bezić Branimir Petrović, Marijan Šimunić) i Crne Gore ( Jovan Zonjić). Prikupljenu građu grupirala sam prema zemlji podrijetla ili umjetničkom žarištu: riječ je o bečkom, zagrebačkom i ruskom krugu te krugu oko časopisa Zvuk. Bečki krug (Tijardović, Neumann) Hrvatski skladatelj i dirigent, libretist i slikar, scenograf i kostimograf Ivo Tijardović (1895–1976) radio je u Beču kao dizajner u izdavačkoj kući Edition Slave od 1919. do 1921. godine. Tvrtka je isprva imala naziv Slavenski izdavački zavod, a osnovao ju je Dubrovčanin Milan Obuljen početkom 1918. godine s osnovnim ciljem objavljivanja skladbi ( južno)slavenskih skladatelja. Tvrtka je poslovala do Obuljenove smrti 1923. godine, a u njoj su uz Tijardovića svoj honorar zaradili i drugi hrvatski glazbeni umjetnici, Jakov Gotovac i Blagoje Bersa, komu je tvrtka Edition Slave objavila desetak skladbi. Bersa je u Beču živio od 1903. godine, a 1911. se zaposlio kao aranžer u znamenitoj glazbenoj tvrtki Doblinger. U nakladi te izdavačke kuće objavljen je klavirski izvadak Bersine opere Postolar od Delfta/Der Schuster von Delft (fig. 1) početkom 1918. godine (opera je praizvedena u Zagrebu četiri godine ranije). Bersa je 26. siječnja 1918. zapisao u svoj dnevnik: „Jutros je došla iz štamparije 2. korektura od Postolara. Jutros je poslao slikar Hans Neumann sliku (klišee) za kopertinu (izvana) od Klavierauszuga od Postolara, upravo je divna! izvanredno i originalno izmišljena – postolar Piét (crna boja) sjedi i radi, a povrh njega kao fantomi = Sreća i Smola“.15 Rijedak je to primjer svjedočanstva reakcije nekog skladatelja na prvi susret s dizajnom korica svojeg djela. Libreto Postolara od Delfta nastao je prema poznatoj priči Čarobne kaljače Hansa Christiana Andersena. Lik koji Bersa u dnevniku naziva Smolom u originalu se zove Pech, u Hrvatskoj preveden kao Nesreća, a na Neumannovom je crtežu najviše nalik vragu, koji se uostalom i pojavljuje u trećem činu opere. Uz njega stoji golišava Sreća, koketno ga pogledavajući. Slikar Hans Neumann (1888–1960), kojeg Bersa spominje u Dnevniku, bio je između dvaju svjetskih ratova jedan od vodećih austrijskih grafičkih dizajnera. Godinu dana nakon što je dizajnirao naslovnicu Postolara od Delfta, dakle 1919. osnovao je u centru Beča vlastitu tvrtku Atelier Hans Neumann i u širokom spektru dizajnerskih poslova radio (zajedno sa suradnicima) i korice izdanja šlagera.16 Koliko mi je poznato, Neumann je jedini stranac koji je izradio korice notnog izdanja neke skladbe hrvatskog autora. 15 Blagoje Bersa, Dnevnik i Uspomene, prir. Eva Sedak i Nada Bezić (Zagreb: Hrvatski glazbeni zavod, 2010), 213. 16 Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel, „Biographie“, u Hans Neumann: Pionier der Werbeagenturen, ur. Peter Noever, (Wien: MAK, 2009), 94. Vidi u toj publikaciji (str. 95) dvije reprodukcije korica
574
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 1. Blagoje Bersa: Der Schuster von Delft, klavirski izvadak (Wien: Ludwig Doblinger, 1918); HGZ izvadak sign. 6488 (oblikovanje H. Neumann).17
šlagera (oko 1922), te ilustraciju korica šlagera Sulamith W. Engel-Bergera na http://www. imagesmusicales.be/browse/item/13262/8/ (u potpisu je Atelier Hans Neumann). 17 Nažalost, primjerak izdanja u HGZ-u je oštećen, no to ne smeta cjelokupnom dojmu ilustracije.
575
Nada Bezić
Fig. 2. Vatroslav Lisinski: Porin, klavirski izvadak udesio Fran Lhotka (Zagreb: Hrvatska filharmonija, 1919); HGZ sign. 6771 (oblikovanje Lj. Babić /?/).
576
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu Zagrebački krug (Babić, Kirin, Bužan, Antonini, Glumac, Kljaković) U lipnju 1919, pola godine nakon izvedbe opere Postolar od Delfta u Beču, Bersa se trajno nastanio u Zagrebu. Te se godine obilježavala 100. godišnjica rođenja Vatroslava Lisinskog, pa je između ostalog objavljen i klavirski izvadak opere Porin (fig. 2). Pri dnu korica tog izdanja mala je ilustracija potpisana inicijalima Lj. B. što gotovo sigurno upućuje na slikara i scenografa, jednog „od najplodnijih hrvatskih stvaralaca na području opreme knjiga“18 Ljubu Babića (1890–1974). Ilustracija nema nikakve veze sa sadržajem opere, a k tome se crtež ubavog pejzaža i stogova sijena stilski ne uklapa u art déco, pa ni u Babićeve radove iz tog vremena, primjerice poznatu ekspresionističku ilustraciju za korice časopisa Plamen. Pa ipak, čini se da je riječ o jednom od rijetkih, ako ne i jedinom primjeru Babićeve opreme notnih izdanja. U literaturi se, naime, spominje da je autor čak 300 oprema „knjiga, časopisa, brošura i kataloga“, no ne navode se i notna izdanja.19 Sljedeća dva hrvatska autora nisu tipični predstavnici art décoa, ali ih svakako valja navesti, budući da pridonose raznolikosti grafičkog dizajna notnih izdanja tog doba, a k tome su njihovi dizajni sačuvani u HGZ-u vjerni primjerci stila svakog umjetnika. Notno izdanje Hrvatskih plesova za klavir Žige Hirschlera (fig. 3) ukrasio je njegov vršnjak, slikar, grafičar i ilustrator Vladimir Kirin (1894–1963), „uz Ljubu Babića i Tomislava Krizmana jedan od najznačajnijih i najboljih autora opreme knjige prije 1945. godine“. 20 Skladbu je objavila tvrtka Kugli, tada vodeća glazbena nakladnička kuća s dugom tradicijom. Premda na izdanju nema godine izdavanja, na samom je crtežu uz Kirinov potpis godina 1920, pa se može pretpostaviti da i izdanje potječe iz te godine. 21 Tada je Kirin radio kao ilustrator u Londonu, ali je za uskrsne blagdane 1920. boravio u Zagrebu, 22 te je možda tom prilikom napravio ilustraciju, 18 Libuše Jirsak, „Duboki trag promišljena poteza“, u Ljubo Babić: Antologija: Moderna galerija, Zagreb, 14. prosinca 2010.–27. ožujka 2011. [katalog izložbe], autorice izložbe i kataloga Ivanka Reberski, Libuše Jirsak, Lada Bošnjak Velagić (Zagreb: Moderna galerija, 2010), 192. 19 Ibid., 193. 20 Josip Bratulić, Mrvice sa zagrebačkog stola (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1994), 89. 21 Leksikonska natuknica o Hirschleru navodi 1920. kao godinu izdanja, usp. Marijana Pintar, „Hirschler, Žiga (Hiršler)“ u Hrvatski biografski leksikon, sv. 5, ur. Trpimir Macan (Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 2002), 581; dostupno i na http://hbl.lzmk.hr/clanak. aspx?id=7657 (posljednji put posjećena: 16. veljače 2018). 22 Biserka Rauter-Plančić, „Vladimir Kirin / Ljetopis“, u Vladimir Kirin (1894–1963): Retrospektiva: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 19. prosinca 2006. –11. veljače 2007. [katalog izložbe], ur. Biserka Rauter Plančić (Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2006), 7.
577
Nada Bezić
Fig. 3. Žiga Jelenić [Hirschler]: Hrvatski plesovi (Zagreb: Kugli, s.a.); HGZ sign. 907 (oblikovanje V. Kirin).
ili ju je prije ili kasnije te godine poslao iz Londona. U svakom slučaju, riječ je o jednom od najranijih Kirinovih radova objavljenih u domovini, koji se, koliko mi je poznato, ne spominje u dosadašnjoj literaturi o Kirinu. Svojom motivi578
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 4. Program Hrvatskog pjevačkog društva „Kolo“ Zagreb; HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, III-PG, 1923/50 (oblikovanje J. Bužan).
kom kao da najavljuje treće izdanje Priča iz davnine Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić koje će Kirin oslikati 1926. godine. Dizajnu publikacija povezanih s glazbenom umjetnošću vratit će se i kasnije, primjerice 1938. godine kada je oblikovao program i plakat za koncerte Hrvatskog pjevačkog društva „Kolo“. 23 23 Usp. program koncerta 25. 6. 1938; HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, III-PG, 1938/52. Atribucija Kirinu preuzeta je iz kataloga Nacionalne i sveučilišne knjižnice gdje se čuva plakat, vidi
579
Nada Bezić Ilustracija za prigodnu brošuru i program jubilarnog koncerta Hrvatskog pjevačkog društva „Kolo“ 1923. godine (fig. 4) 24 odražava prepoznatljiv stil slikara Jose Bužana (1873–1936). On je bio „pristupačan publici dopadljivom tematikom pučkih prizora i likova, koje je slikao bez većih težnji, ali s izrazom sugestivna životnog optimizma“. 25 Bužan je na programu prikazao veselu pjesmu i ples u narodnim nošnjama, uz univerzalni muzički simbol liru. Danas nam se folklorni ton ove ilustracije u kontekstu proslave jubileja izrazito građanskog društva možda čini neprimjeren, ali se zapravo uklapa u kontekst domoljubne tradicije „Kola“, k čemu treba uzeti u obzir i onodobnu izuzetnu popularnost Bužanovog stila. No taj je stil, prema mišljenju Vladislava Kušana, bio „u zakašnjenju spram naprednog evropskog slikarstva“, 26 s čime se moramo složiti. Kada je riječ o stilu u Hrvatskoj u doba art décoa, treba posegnuti za riječima Jasne Galjer, jedne od autora koncepcije izložbe Art déco i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj između dva rata: 1920-te godine se u povijesti primijenjene umjetnosti i dizajna u Hrvatskoj najčešće identificiraju kao prijelazno razdoblje između secesije i afirmacije modernizma [...] Podrazumijevamo li pojmom art décoa najčišće supstrate europskih suvremenih pojava, tada u Hrvatskoj nalazimo malobrojne primjere. Prihvatimo li polazišta prema kojima je art déco manifestacija modernizma, a ne konzistentna stilska formacija, tada se slika mijenja. Osobito u primijenjenoj umjetnosti i oblikovanju predmeta za svakodnevnu upotrebu, kao i reklamnim oglasima, časopisima i plakatima, gdje brojna ostvarenja i pojave tvore reprezentativan uzorak za kontekstualiziranje u okviru suvremenih europskih zbivanja. 27
24
25 26 27
580
Lada Kavurić, Hrvatski plakat do 1940. (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb, Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica, Horetzky, 1999), 74, 167. Jubilej „Kola“, osnovanog 1862. godine, bio je zapravo 1922., no proslave su održavane naredne godine. Pedantni Antun Goglia u svojoj kronici društva „Kolo“ (Spomenica povodom 80-godišnjice društva: Hrvatsko pjevačko društvo „Kolo“ u Zagrebu 1862 – 1942 [Zagreb: „Kolo“], 1942, 123) zabilježio je da je Bužan izradio „naslovni list“ spomenice objavljene 1923. godine; zapravo se radi o publikaciji bez imena autora i izdavača, s naslovom Hrvatsko pjevačko društvo „Kolo“ 1862–1922 Zagreb: U povodu šezdesetogodišnjice 1862–1922 (Zagreb: tiskara Zv. Pečnjak, s.a.). Mirjana Petričević, „Bužan, Jozo“, u: Hrvatski biografski leksikon, sv. 2, ur. Aleksandar Stipčević (Zagreb: Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod „Miroslav Krleža“, 1989), 552; dostupno i na http://hbl.lzmk.hr (posljednji put posjećena: 16. veljače 2018). Vladislav Kušan, Ars et artifex: Studije i eseji (Zagreb: Gradjanska tiskara, 1941), 107. Galjer, „Art déco u primijenjenoj umjetnosti i dizajnu“, u Art déco i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj između dva rata (bilješka 4), 39.
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 5. Lujo Šafranek-Kavić: Medvedgradska kraljica, klavirski izvadak (Zagreb: [Albini], 1928); HGZ sign. 7246 (oblikovanje O. Antonini).
Takva ostvarenja su svakako radovi Ota Antoninija i Sergija Glumca, čija djela su 2011. bila upečatljiv dio izložbe u Muzeju za umjetnost i obrt, ali su našla svoje mjesto i na izložbi u HGZ-u. 581
Nada Bezić Oto Antonini (1892–1959) 28 bio je dugogodišnji ilustrator i likovni urednik časopisa Svijet (1926–1932). Literatura o njemu ne spominje da je dizajnirao i notna izdanja, a u dosadašnjoj fazi istraživanja pronašla sam samo jedan primjer: klavirski izvadak opere Luje Šafraneka-Kavića Medvedgradska kraljica iz 1928. godine (fig. 5). Riječ je o djelu danas gotovo zaboravljenog hrvatskog skladatelja koji je međutim nadobudno objavio svoju operu dvojezično, s njemačkim prijevodom. Inicijali O. A. na dnu korica nedvojbeno upućuju na autorstvo Ota Antoninija. Njegova ilustracija efektno koristi samo jednu boju: narančasto-crvenu za kosu opake kraljice, njezine usne i šare na zmijama. Sergije Glumac (1903–1964), jedan od najboljih grafičara svog vremena, bio je na izložbi u Muzeju za umjetnost i obrt prisutan u četverostrukoj ulozi: kao slikar, scenograf, kostimograf i dizajner. Jasna Galjer ističe ga u katalogu kao najzanimljivijeg među suradnicima Zavoda za znanstveno proučavanje reklame i umjetničku reklamnu produkciju Imago, kojeg 1928. godine osnovao Miroslav Feller. 29 Međutim, možda je Glumcu ipak nanesena nepravda. Naime, jedan od najpoznatijih uradaka tvrtke Imago i općenito jedan od najkvalitetnijih hrvatskih plakata dvadesetih 30 plakat je iz 1929. godine s oglasom za Studio Gussich-Feller (fig. 6). Riječ je o privatnoj glazbenoj školi u Basaričekovoj ulici br. 3 na zagrebačkom Gornjem gradu, koju su vodili Fellerov brat Marijan i njegova tadašnja supruga Dora Gušić. U katalogu izložbe Art déco u Muzeju za umjetnost i obrt kao autor tog plakata naveden je Vladimir Mirosavljević, jedan od suradnika Imaga koji je tada imao tek 21 godinu. 31 I u ranijoj relevantnoj literaturi ovaj je plakat opisivan kao djelo Mirosavljevića, 32 počevši od 1975. kada je Renata Gotthardi-Škiljan pripisala plakat Mirosavljeviću na temelju njegove izjave o autorstvu. 33 Tada Glumac više nije bio živ. Plakat prikazuje „plošno riješenu, stiliziranu i apstrahiranu scenu koncertne izvedbe. Odabir scene koncerta za reklamiranje škole ne začuđuje s obzirom da je studio bio prepoznatljiv po javnom koncertnom djelovanju, a o njego28 Premda dio literature, među kojom je i katalog izložbe posvećene Antoniniju (Željka Kolveshi, Otto Antonini: Zagreb i „Svijet“ / „Svijet“ i Zagreb dvadesetih [Zagreb: Muzej grada Zagreba, 2006]), navodi njegovo ime u varijanti Otto, ovdje je preuzet službeni oblik Oto pod kojim se vodi u publikacijama i popisima Leksikografskog zavoda Miroslav Krleža. 29 Galjer, „Art déco u primijenjenoj umjetnosti i dizajnu“, 53. 30 Lovorka Magaš, „Reklamni zavod Imago i komercijalni grafički dizajn u Hrvatskoj 1920ih“, Peristil 51 (2008), 102. 31 Art déco i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj između dva rata (bilješka 4), 227, izložak br. 184. 32 Kavurić, Hrvatski plakat do 1940., 77. 33 Renata Gotthardi-Škiljan, Plakat u Hrvatskoj do 1941.(Zagreb: Kabinet grafike JAZU, 1975), 12, 72–73. Citirano prema Magaš, „Reklamni zavod Imago“, 117.
582
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu voj popularnosti svjedoči i podatak da su dio koncerata izvodili u eteru radija“. 34 Vlasnici Studia Gussich-Feller, kasnije Muzičkog studija Feller-Gussich-Grgošević zadržali su dizajn plakata kao svoj logotip, što se vidi i na dopisu Marijana Fellera HGZ-u iz travnja 1933. godine (fig. 7). Lovorka Magaš dokazala je u svojoj studiji o Reklamnom zavodu Imago da je autor plakata zapravo Sergije Glumac. Kao argumente između ostalog navodi: (1) plakat nije signiran, potpisana je samo tvrtka Imago, a monogram SK upućuje na gravera Slavka Kovačića; (2) oblikovanje plakata je po nizu karakteristika srodno tadašnjim djelima Glumca, dok su Mirosavljevićeva djela formalno i stilski drugačija; (3) tipografija je identična oblikovanju slova na istodobnim Glumčevim reklamama, k čemu je „karakteristično oblikovanje slova ‘g’ u riječi Gussich (osmica s crticom) zaštitni znak Sergija Glumca“. 35 Iz teksta Lovorke Magaš doznajemo i zanimljive podatke o životu Sergija Glumca, pa tako i to da je u Parizu „tijekom zime 1925./1926. posjećivao predstave Ballets Russe Sergeja Djagiljeva i oduševio se avangardnim scenografijama i kostimima Baksta, Larionova i Gončarove koje je upoznao na izložbi ruske scenografije u salonu Charpentier“. 36 Ova nas rečenica uvodi u krug likovnih umjetnika kojeg čine upravo Rusi: Mihail Larionov, Natalja Gončarova i Vladimir Žedrinskij, no započet ćemo ga s još jednim hrvatskim umjetnikom koji je, poput Glumca, u inozemstvu susretao slavne Ruse. Slikar i karikaturist Jozo Kljaković (1889–1969) živio je od 1916. do 1918. godine u Ženevi. S druge strane ženevskog jezera, u mjestu Morges blizu Lausanne, često je bio gost sopranistice Maje Strozzi-Pečić i njezinog supruga, pijanista Bele Pečića, koji su tamo boravili 1918. i 1919. između ostalog i zato da bi pripremali koncert slavenskih autora. Kljaković u svojoj autobiografiji piše da su u to povijesno prijelomno doba koncertima „vršili propagandu za ujedinjenje Hrvata i Srba“;37 činjenica je da je na programu koncerta s naslovom Concert Slave (Slavischer Liederabend) istaknuto da se radi prije svega o djelima „jugoslavenskih“, a uz to i „čehoslovačkih“ te ruskih autora, jer su uz Vitĕzslava Nováka, Jaroslava Křičku, Anatolija Ljadova i Igora Stravinskog na programu bile popijevke Antuna Dobronića i Petra Konjovića. 38 O tome koliko je paru Strozzi – Pečić 34 35 36 37 38
Magaš, ibid., , 109. Ibid., 109, 112. Ibid., 103. Jozo Kljaković, U suvremenom kaosu (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 2011), 95. Na sačuvanom programu s tekstom na njemačkom jeziku (HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, Fond Strozzi-Pečić, programi) zapisana je tintom napomena: „Taj je program u cjelini bio izveden!“ i uz nekoliko oznaka prekrižena je točka s ciklusom Uspomene iz djetinstva Igora Stravinskog.
583
Nada Bezić
Fig. 6. Plakat za Studio Gussich-Feller; Kabinet grafike HAZU (oblikovanje S. Glumac /?/).39
značio taj koncert svjedoče posvete što su ih zapisali na sačuvanim programima, npr.: „kao uspomena kad je naša pjesma prvi put odjeknula van granice mile naše domovine“.40 39 Zahvaljujem Kabinetu grafike HAZU, posebno ravnateljici mr. sc. Slavici Marković, na dozvoli za objavljivanje reprodukcije plakata. 40 U Fondu Strozzi-Pečić sačuvane su programske knjižice na francuskom i njemačkom jeziku, od toga dvije s posvetama, ova je posvećena „Mojoj mamici“, dakle Mariji Ružički-Strozzi, i datirana „Zürich, 19/I 19“.
584
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 7. Dopis Marijana Fellera HGZ-u; HGZ, Spisi ravnateljstva, 1932/33, br. 222.
U privremenom švicarskom domu hrvatskih muzičara Kljaković je upoznao i Igora Stravinskog, prijatelja bračnog para Strozzi-Pečić, i o tome ostavio živopisno svjedočanstvo u autobiografiji. Ona se, međutim, pokazala kao ne posve vjerodostojan izvor. Kljaković u detalje opisuje kako je jednom razgovarao sa Stravinskim o tadašnjoj umjetnosti, ne samo glazbenoj, nego i likovnoj, nakon čega se Stravinski povukao da bi s Belom Pečićem vježbao svoje djelo za klavir četveroručno za skorašnji koncert u Lausanni.41 Uistinu, prema 41 Vidi Kljaković, U suvremenom kaosu (bilješka 37), 95–97.
585
Nada Bezić
Fig. 8. Program koncerta M. Strozzi-Pečić i B. Pečića 13. I. 1919.; HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, Fond Strozzi-Pečić, programi (oblikovanje J. Kljaković).
586
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 9. Jozo Kljaković: Boris Papandopulo; HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, Fond Papandopulo.
587
Nada Bezić podacima sa sačuvanog programa u HGZ-u, na koncertu u Lausanni 5. ožujka 1919. Stravinski i Pečić su svirali Tri laka komada i Pet lakih komada za klavir četveroručno,42 međutim Maja Strozzi-Pečić nije izvodila pjesme Stravinskog, kako tvrdi Kljaković, niti je istu večer bila izvedba Priče o vojniku (Kljaković piše da je bila: „premijera glazbene pantomime ‘Đavao i soldat’“; praizvedba te skladbe bila je u Lausanni 28. rujna 1919). U nastavku Kljaković navodi da su on i glazbenički par te večeri pozvali Stravinskog da dođe u Zagreb, što se i dogodilo 1920. kada je bila Stravinskijeva večer u kazalištu. Tu je, međutim, najveća Kljakovićeva zabuna: Stravinski je došao u Zagreb i nastupao na svojoj skladateljskoj večeri tek 1926. godine, i to ne u kazalištu, nego u Hrvatskom glazbenom zavodu. Na plakatu za koncert Maje Strozzi-Pečić i Bele Pečića u Švicarskoj nalazi se Kljakovićev crtež s dva ljudska lika unutar okvira što ga čine breze i lastavice, i to je jedan od najpoznatijih plakata/programa iz razdoblja art décoa (fig. 8).43 Na dnu crteža slikar se potpisao inicijalom J. K. Kako piše Frano Dulibić, poznata su samo dva Kljakovićeva plakata, a ovaj plakat Dulibić detaljno opisuje u sljedećem odlomku: Na plakatu za koncert Maje Strozzi iz 1918./19. središnji likovni dio omeđen je u gornjem i donjem dijelu tekstom izvedenim primjerenim tipom slova. Dekorativni karakter likovnog dijela plakata određen je strogom omeđenošću kompozicije vertikalama breza na lijevoj i desnoj strani te horizontalnim isticanjem tla u donjem dijelu kao i horizontalnim pravilnim rasporedom lastavica koje poput crnog friza omeđuju gornji dio. Dva ljudska lika okrenuta udesno u profilu svojim usklađenim pokretima ispunjavaju središnji dio kompozicije. Taj plakat koji je uvršten u povijesni pregled hrvatskog plakata do 1940. pokazuje Kljakovićeve iznimne mogućnosti izražavanja u formi plakata i možemo samo ustanoviti kako je šteta što Kljaković nije izveo seriju od barem desetak plakata koji bi zasigurno stajali uz bok plakatima Radovana Tommasea, Tomislava Krizmana ili Mirka Račkog.44 U literaturi se ne spominje da je osim plakata Kljakovićev crtež objavljen i na programu/programskoj knjižici koncerta; oblikovanje cjeline i tekst su identični, no dok je program jednobojan, za plakat su korištene zlatna i plava boja. 42 HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, Fond Strozzi-Pečić, programi. U knjižnicu HGZ-a su iz ostavštine Maje Strozzi-Pečić dospjele i note ciklusa Trois pièces faciles (Genève: Edition Ad. Henn, cop. 1917), HGZ 614/2010, s vlastoručnom posvetom Igora Stravinskog Beli Pečiću. 43 Vidi reprodukciju plakata u Kavurić, Hrvatski plakat do 1940., 102. 44 Frano Dulibić, „Crteži, ilustracije, plakati i karikature Joze Kljakovića“, u Jozo Kljaković – retrospektiva: katalog izložbe, ur. Petra Senjanović (Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2009), 46.
588
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu U ostavštini Maje Strozzi-Pečić u HGZ-u sačuvane su četiri programske knjižice koncerta, a na jednoj je otisnuto vrijeme i mjesto, pa tako sada konačno znamo da je koncert održan u maloj dvorani Tonhalle u Zürichu 13. siječnja 1919. godine. K tome nam program (na kojem su samo osnovni podaci bez tekstova pjesama) otkriva i to da je koncert organizirao koncertni ured M. Kantorowitz iz Züricha, te da je program tiskan u uglednoj ciriškoj tiskarskoj i knjižarskoj tvrtki Art. Institut Orel Füssli. Poznanstvo Kljakovića i glazbeničkog para Strozzi-Pečić zabilježeno je i u njihovim portretima koje je slikar učinio,45 a u HGZ-u se čuva i originalni Kljakovićev portret Borisa Papandopula, crtež olovkom, vjerojatno iz 1925. godine (fig. 9).46 Kljaković je autor portreta i drugih osoba iz glazbenog života svojeg doba; među najpoznatijima je portret Blagoja Berse, primjer kubističkog izražaja unutar slikarovog opusa.47 U beogradskom časopisu Zvuk 1933. i 1934. godine objavljeno mu je pet crteža muzičara, o čemu će biti više riječi u posebnom poglavlju. Ruski krug (Gončarova, Larionov) U doba dok je Igor Stravinski vodio diskusije s Kljakovićem, nastupao s Belom Pečićem i pisao popijevke koje je posvetio Maji Strozzi-Pečić, uvelike se družio i s ruskim slikarskim, kasnije i bračnim parom Natalijom Sergejevnom Gončarovom (1881–1962) i Mihailom Fjodorovičem Larionovim (1881–1964). Oni su u godinama pred Prvi svjetski rat utemeljili likovni smjer rejonizam (ruski: lučizm), koji je usmjeren na ispitivanje novih prostornih mogućnosti i učinka svjetlosnih zraka čime je započela orijentacija ruskog slikarstva prema apstrakciji. Od 1914. živjeli su u Parizu, gdje su kao scenografi bili suradnici Djagiljevljeve baletne trupe Ballets Russes. Knjižnica HGZ-a pruža primjere za opus oboje tih likovnih umjetnika, tj. po dva notna izdanja objavljena kod ugledne londonske nakladničke kuće Chester. Gončarova je 1921. godine dizajnirala klavirski izvadak baleta Ljubav čarobnjak Manuela De Falle (fig. 10).48 Na posljednjoj, nepaginiranoj stranici nalazi se reklama za Chesterova izdanja naslovljena „Les grands succes des Ballets Russes“ (djela skladatelja Rossinija-Respighija, 45 Zahvaljujem Željki Zdelar, kustosici Memorijalne zbirke Jozo Kljaković, na ovom podatku. 46 Datacija „1925 (?)“ je preuzeta iz publikacije u kojoj je crtež objavljen: Papandopulijana, ur. Erika Krpan (Zagreb: Hrvatski glazbeni zavod, 2006), 34. 47 Taj Kljakovićev crtež Blagoja Berse objavljen je u raznim publikacijama npr. Jozo Kljaković – retrospektiva, 170, a dostupan je i na: Zbirka Joze Kljakovića, Crteži, http://kljakovic.mdc. hr/hr/zbirka/predmeti/crtezi/blagoje-bersa-studija-glave,43.html (posljednji put posjećena: 16. veljače 2018). 48 Nažalost na primjerku u HGZ-u nije sačuvan list s vinjetom.
589
Nada Bezić
Fig. 10. M. De Falla: Ljubav čarobnjak; klavirski izvadak (London: Chester, cop. 1921); HGZ 6664 (oblikovanje N. Gončarova).
Scarlattija-Tommasinija, De Falle, Stravinskog). Crtež korica ove muzikalije Chester je upotrijebio i kasnije, npr. za izdanje Plesa vatre iz De Fallinog baleta (Danse rituelle du feu, cop. 1930). Međutim, jednobojni crtež Gončarove djeluje 590
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 11. L. Berners: L’poisson d’or (London: Chester, cop. 1919); HGZ sign. 540 (oblikovanje N. Gončarova).
prilično konvencionalno kada se usporedi s njezinim sasvim posebnim dizajnom jednog drugog Chesterovog izdanja (fig. 11). Prijatelj para Gončarova – Larionov, engleski skladatelj, pisac i slikar Lord Berners komponirao je upravo tih godina klavirsku skladbu Le poisson d’or (Zlatna ribica) i posvetio je svojem prijatelju Stravinskom, a bio je i oduševljeni poklonik Ballets Russes. Na naslovnoj je 591
Nada Bezić
Fig. 12. Lord Berners: Trois morceaux (London: Chester, 1919); HGZ sign. 1302 (oblikovanje M. Larionov).
stranici neuobičajeno velikim slovima ( jednake veličine kao i ime skaladatelja!) naglašeno da je Natalja Gončarova izradila „korice, sliku uz naslovnu stranicu i vinjetu“.49 Jarke boje – žuta, narandžasta i crvena – sjajno korespondiraju s 49 „couverture, frontispice et vignette“.
592
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 13. Alfredo Casella: Pupazzetti (London: Chester, 1920); HGZ sign. 1304 (oblikovanje M. Larionov).
naslovom skladbe. Zanimljivo je da čak i jedan enciklopedijski članak o Lordu Bernersu spominje da je izdanje te njegove skladbe dizajnirala Gončarova.50 50 „Berners’ earliest mature works were for the piano – Le poisson d’or, dedicated to Stravinsky and published with designs by Natal'ya Goncharova of the Ballets Russes“, usp. Peter
593
Nada Bezić Nakladnička kuća Chester iste je godine izdala i Bernersovu skladbu za klavir četveroručno Trois morceaux (fig. 12). Ovaj put je likovno oblikovanje potpisao Mihail Larionov. Prva skladba u ciklusu njemu je i posvećena, a posljednju je, s naslovom Kazačok, Berners posvetio Nataliji Gončarovoj. U krugu prijatelja Lorda Bernensa bio je i talijanski skladatelj Alfredo Casella. Chesterovo izdanje Casellinog ciklusa klavirskih minijatura Pupazzetti iz 1920. slijedi isti obrazac: likovno oblikovanje korica, crtež prije notnog teksta i stražnja strana korica. U ovom slučaju osobito je zanimljiv Larionov crtež na nepaginiranoj stranici u izdanju (fig. 13). A kako su te uistinu posebne note dospjele u knjižnicu HGZ-a, koja čuva jedine njihove primjerke u Zagrebu? Zahvaljujući Arturu Schneideru, agilnom i zaslužnom tajniku HGZ-a od 1919. do 1948. godine. Među najznačajnijim njegovim aktivnostima bilo je pokretanje ciklusa Intimne muzičke večeri koji je u razdoblju od 1923. do 1926. zagrebačku publiku upoznao s tada suvremenom glazbenom produkcijom, kako hrvatskom, tako i stranom. Za taj ciklus su mu bile potrebne muzikalije, a njih je nabavljao od stranih izdavača, u pravilu uz pomoć inozemnih kulturnih centara u Zagrebu. Na skladateljskoj večeri Lorda Bernersa u HGZ u 2. studenoga 1923. godine izvedene su njegove popijevke i klavirske skladbe, među kojima, dakako, i skladba L’poisson d’or. 51 Ruski krug ćemo završiti s osobom koja u ovom konktekstu povezuje Rusiju i međuratnu Jugoslaviju. Riječ je o ruskom emigrantu, kostimografu i scenografu Vladimiru Ivanoviču Žedrinskom (1899–1974), koji je kao mladić 1920. došao prvo u Srbiju, a poslije u Hrvatsku, gdje je od 1940. do odlaska u inozemstvo 1950. bio scenograf i kostimograf u zagrebačkom Hrvatskom narodnom kazalištu. 52 Zanimljivost je da je Žedrinskij kao kostimograf te scenograf (uz Marijana Kopajtića) sudjelovao i na filmu Lisinski Oktavijana Miletića 1944. godine. No, to je razdoblje nakon art décoa, pa nam se valja vratiti u početak 1930-ih, kada je Žedrinskij živio u Beogradu i bio scenograf i kostimograf u Narodnom pozorištu. Bio je i nadaren karikaturist, 53 a jedno od mjesta gdje je mogao iskazati svoj talent bio je časopis Zvuk. Dickinson, „Berners, Lord [Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Sir Gerald Hugh, Baronet]“, u Grove Music Online, ur. Deane Root http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (posljednji put posjećena: 16. veljače 2018). 51 HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, III-PG, DK sv. 3. 52 U Zagrebu se bavio i likovnom opremom knjiga, npr. Bajke i basne Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić (Zagreb: Hrvatski izdavalački bibliografski zavod, 1943). 53 Premda je bio cijenjen karikaturist (usp. Pozorišne karikature Vladimira Žedrinskog [Beograd: Muzej pozorišne umetnosti SR Srbije, 1974]), sam Žedrinskij u svojim uspomenama ne spominje taj dio stvaralaštva, usp. Vladimir Ivanovič Žedrinskij, „Autobiografske bilješke“ u: Ruski emigranti u Hrvatskoj između dva rata: rubovi, memorija, prir. Irena Lukšić (Zagreb: Hrvatsko filološko društvo, 2006), 173–186.
594
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu Krug oko Zvuka (Žedrinskij, Križanić, Kljaković, Mujadžić, Šimunić, Miše) Časopis Zvuk izlazio je u Beogradu od jeseni 1932. do početka 1936. godine. 54 Uređivala ga je Stana Đurić-Klajn (tada pod imenom Stana Ribnikar, navedena u impresumu i kao vlasnik časopisa) i uspjela je okupiti brojne ugledne suradnike iz cijele Jugoslavije. O likovnom aspektu Zvuka Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman je napisala: „Takođe, umetnički veoma kvalitetna vizuelna oprema časopisa, uvek pažljivo usklađena sa njegovim sadržajem, koja pored slika kompozitora, izvođača, fragmenata iz operskih i baletskih inscenacija, sadrži crteže i karikature muzičara i baletskih umetnika jeste, naravno, presudna odrednica samog izgleda časopisa ali istovremeno i njegova specifična informativno-edukativna dimenzija“. 55 Prema navodu Mirjane Veselinović-Hofman likovni je urednik bio Vladimir Žedrinskij; ona ga jedinog ističe među „poznatim jugoslavenskim autorima“, likovnim umjetnicima koji su surađivali sa Zvukom. 56 Dokaz kako je Stana Đurić-Klajn bila svjesna važnosti te komponente časopisa je deplijan s pozivom na pretplatu ususret trećem godištu časopisa, dakle u jesen 1934. godine. Đurić-Klajn je zasigurno bila autorica nepotpisanog teksta deplijana u kojem između ostalog piše: „‘Zvuk’ je [...] obratio punu pažnju i na svoju tehničku opremu. Prema priznanju najmerodavnijih faktora ‘Zvuk’ je po svojoj tehničkoj opremi jedna od najlepših muzičkih revija na svetu“. 57 Navedene su i glavne teme o kojima se pisalo, ulomci iz kritika o Zvuku, popis dotadašnjih suradnika, i, za ovu temu, znakovita napomena: „‘Zvuk’ donosi crteže i karikature čuvenih muzičara, od poznatih slikara: Branka Petrovića, Vladimira Žedrinskog, Pjera Križanića, J. Kljakovića, O. Mujadžića, Šimunića i Zonića [sic!], slike u prilogu i na omotu, notne primere u tekstu i pretstavlja jedini bogato ilustrovani muzički časopis u Evropi“. 58 Međutim, u posljednjem, trećem godištu upravo su likovni prilozi (osim na koricama) izostali, jedino u br. 4 Žedrinskij objavljuje dva crteža, 54 Prva dva godišta časopisa pratila su koncertnu sezonu, pa je tako br. 1 izlazio u studenom. Nakon zadnjeg broja drugog godišta nastala je stanka u kojoj je časopis promjenio vlasnika (Grafički umetnički zavod „Planeta“) i prvi je broj trećeg godišta izašao u siječnju 1935, a u 1936. godini je objavljen samo jedan broj. 55 Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman, „Stana Đurić-Klajn i časopis ‚Zvuk‘: programska koncepcija časopisa i nivoi njegove artikulacije u prvom periodu njegovog izlaženja“ u: Stana ĐurićKlajn i srpska muzikologija: povodom stogodišnjice rođenja Stane Đurić-Klajn: 1908-1986, ur. Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman i Melita Milin (Beograd: Muzikološko društvo Srbije, 2010), 109. 56 Ibid., bilj. 6. U impresumu časopisa Zvuk kao ni u opisima u internetskim katalozima Muzičke akademije u Zagrebu i Virtuelne biblioteke Srbije nema tog podatka. 57 Deplijan bez paginacije, prilog uz drugo godište uvezanog časopisa Zvuk, HGZ B119. 58 Ibid.
595
Nada Bezić
Fig. 14. Vladimir Žendrinskij: Josip Š. Slavenski, Zvuk 1/5 (1933), HGZ B119.
a nakon toga se i cjelokupni dizajn korica izmijenio. Za ovu su temu, dakle, relevantna prva dva godišta. Na ukupno impresivnih 876 stranica objavljen je, uz mali broj fotografija te djela europskih umjetnika, osamdeset jedan likovni prilog osmorice onodobnih autora iz Jugoslavije. 59 Neočekivana je činjenica 59 Treba spomenuti i reprodukciju mnogo starije slike, portreta Kornelija Stankovića, djelo Stevana Todorovića.
596
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu
Fig. 15. Branimir Petrović: Igor Stravinski, Zvuk 1/1 (1932), HGZ B119.
da su, uz iznimku crnogorskog slikara Jovana Zonjića, svi bili iz Hrvatske ili su kasnije u njoj djelovali (Žedrinskij). Urednica je možda s njima došla u kontakt zahvaljujući zagrebačkim glazbenim piscima koji su surađivali sa Zvukom ili preko Pjera Križanića, koji je tada živio u Beogradu. Likovni suradnici su bili: (1) Vladimir Žedrinskij: četrdeset osam crteža i karikatura te tri fotografije scenografija/maketa; (2) Branimir Petrović (1888–1957): sedamnaest crteža i karikatura; (3) Jozo Kljaković: pet karikatura (P. Konjović, B. Bersa, B. Papandopulo, L. Šafranek-Kavić, R. Matz); (4) Omer Mujadžić (1903–91): portreti P. Markovca, Z. Grgoševića i M. Tajčevića; (5) Pjer Križanić (1890–1962): karikature Beogradskog kvarteta i Zagrebačkog kvarteta; 597
Nada Bezić (6) Jerolim Miše (1890–1970): portret P. Konjovića; (7) [Marijan] Šimunić (1913–1942):60 karikatura M. Pozajića; (8) Jovan Zonjić (1907–1961): portret D. Milhauda. Riječ je ponajviše o novinskim, skicoznim crtežima, u manjem broju karikaturama. Prikazuju muzičare koji sviraju i dirigiraju; pijanisti su uvijek za klavirom, baletani plešu. U pravilu je to paleta njihovih suvremenika, skladatelja i reproduktivnih umjetnika, ukupno 77 muzičara te baletni duo Pia i Pino Mlakar, jedan klavirski duo te dva komorna ansambla. Zanimljivo je da se likovni prilozi ne nadovezuju uvijek na sadržaj u časopisu, npr. karikatura Stravinskog (fig. 15) objavljena je između Markovčevog članka Uz problem nacionalne muzike i tekst Stane Đurić-Klajn Intimni lik Kornelija Stankovića. Žedrinskij je dominirao brojem priloga, osobito u prvom godištu kada je izrađivao i dizajn korica Zvuka. Prema dosadašnjim rezultatima istraživanja, može se reći da su ovi likovni prilozi hrvatskih autora u Zvuku do sada većinom bili nepoznati hrvatskim povjesničarima umjetnosti. Činjenica koja potkrepljuje ovu tezu jest i to da u knjizi Frane Dulibića Povijest karikature u Hrvatskoj do 1940. godine nema spomena Zvuka u prikazima rada pojedinih karikaturista (Petrović, Kljaković, Križanić, Šimunić), a ni u zaključnom poglavlju u kojem samo općenito govori „o suradnji naših karikaturista u europskom tisku“, što se ipak ne odnosi na područje Kraljevine SHS/Jugoslavije.61 Shodno naslovu svoje knjige, Dulibić ne piše o djelima nastalima ili objavljenima izvan Hrvatske; ali kod Petrovića spominje da je nakon odlaska iz Hrvatske 1911. godine u Švicarskoj „objavljivao karikature istaknutih osoba iz svijeta glazbe i politike“.62 Čini se da je sedamnaest crteža Branimira Petrovića objavljenih u Zvuku važno otkriće, jer prema Dulibiću „u Hrvatskoj poznajemo samo Petrovićeve početke, malobrojne sačuvane radove iz prvih pet godina njegova stvaralaštva, tek naznake cjelokupnog opusa [...] Iz golemog dijela opusa koji je nastajao čak četrdeset godina izvan Hrvatske, nije poznato baš ništa“.63 U svojoj nedavno objavljenoj knjizi o Omeru Mujadžiću Frano Dulibić ne spominje njegove crteže u Zvuku, štoviše, piše da nisu poznate Mujadžićeve ilustracije novinskih članaka, što ukazuje da su objavljeni crteži muzičara vrijedan novi podatak o opusu Mujadžića.64 Stručnjacima su također 60 Portret je potpisan s „Šimunić 1933“, a u legendi stoji: „Crtež Šimunića“; radi se zasigurno o glazbeniku i slikaru Marijanu Šimuniću koji je kao vrlo mlad već bio etabliran karikaturist (usp. Frano Dulibić, Povijest karikature u Hrvatskoj do 1940. godine (Zagreb: Leykam International, 2009), 228–230. 61 Dulibić, Povijest karikature u Hrvatskoj do 1940. godine, ibid., 314. 62 Ibid., 158. 63 Ibid., 159. 64 Frano Dulibić, Omer Mujadžić (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2015), 77.
598
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu bili nepoznati crteži Joze Kljakovića,65 od kojih je portret Papandopula varijanta originala (vidi fig. 9), a crtež Berse je neusporedivo jednostavniji od ranije spomenutog poznatog Bersinog portreta. Zanimljiv je slučaj i portret Petra Konjovića (ulje na platnu) što ga je učinio Jerolim Miše. Portret je nedatiran i danas se nalazi u Muzeju savremene umetnosti u Beogradu.66 Budući da je reprodukcija u Zvuku objavljena u prosincu 1933, taj je podatak vrijedan doprinos približnoj dataciji Mišine slike. Neidentificirani autori U pravilu su se autori likovnog dizajna glazbene građe potpisivali; ponegdje je doduše teško bilo odgonetnuti potpis na koricama izdanja (Dušan Janković i Tone Kralj), a drugdje je trebalo zaključivati prema inicijalima (Ljubo Babić, Oto Antonini). Nažalost, jedan je inicijal ipak ostao nedešifriran. Riječ je o vrlo zanimljivom crtežu na programu koncerta Maje Strozzi-Pečić i Bele Pečića održanom 1922. u Hrvatskom glazbenom zavodu (fig. 16). Inicijali na programu vjerojatno su na latinici slova „A. C.“, a ako je riječ o ćirilici „D. S.“. U potonjem slučaju, prema mišljenju Bojane Popović iz Muzeja primenjene umetnosti u Beogradu,67 autor bi mogao biti srpski slikar Dragoslav Stojanović (1890–1945) koji je živio u Parizu od 1914. do 1922. godine i tamo radio mnogo plakata, ilustracija i karikatura. Možda je poveznica među Stojanovićem i parom Strozzi-Pečić bio Jozo Kljaković; on je, naime, nekoliko godina prije Prvog svjetskog rata živio u Srbiji, a nakon toga kratko i u Parizu, gdje je crtao za srpskog princa Đorđa Karađorđevića, pa je mogao upoznati i ostale Srbe u Parizu, između ostalih i Stojanovića. No, Bojana Popović je uz svoju pretpostavku o autorstvu dodala kako su Stojanovićevi inicijali u pravilu dekorativniji nego na programu zagrebačkog koncerta, pa tako u nedostatku literature koja sagledava cjelokupni Stojanovićev opus, ostaje upitno je li on bio autor ove ilustracije. Od ostale građe s neidentificiranim autorima likovnog oblikovanja ističu se četiri notna izdanja. Na koricama ciklusa pjesama s naslovom 1914, op. 11, češkog skladatelja Boleslava Vomáčke 68 jasna je asocijacija na Prvi svjetski rat, jer je na leptiru smještenom uz naslovnu godinu početka rata crtež mrtvačke glave. Autor crteža koji zaprema cijele korice foxtrota Adieu, New York!
65 66 67 68
Zahvaljujem Željki Zdelar na ovom podatku. Zahvaljujem Ani Šeparović, autorici doktorske disertacije o Jerolimu Miši, na ovom podatku. Pismo autorici ovoga rada od 31. svibnja 2011. Boleslav Vomáčka, 1914 ([S.l.]: Hudební Matice U.B., 1923); HGZ inv. br. 668/2010.
599
Nada Bezić
Fig. 16. Program konceta M. Strozzi-Pečić i B. Pečića 1922. g. (nepoznati autor); HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, III-PG, kut. 4, 1922/23.
Georgesa Aurica 69 mogao bi biti Jean Cocteau, budući da je skladba njemu posvećena, a k tome je Cocteau bio angažiran u organizaciji praizvedbe skladbe. U Zagrebu su objavljena dva zanimljiva izdanja hrvatskih skladatelja. Na
69 Georges Auric, Adieu, New York! (Paris: Editions de la sirène, cop.1920); HGZ sign. 505.
600
Artefakti Art Décoa: Primjeri iz Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda u Zagrebu ukusno dizajniranim koricama ciklusa Maštanja za klavir Dore Pejačević 70 inicijali su „R: T:“, što se vjerojatno ne odnosi na Radovana Tommasea, jer se on u pravilu potpisivao punim imenom. Shimmy-foxtrot Tutankhamen nastao je zasigurno nakon 1922, kada je tek otkrivena Tutankamonova grobnica. Skladatelj je potpisan kao To. Kado, a riječ je o pseudonimu Krste Odaka.71 Vesele korice s crtežima rasplesanih Egipćana potpisala je „Asir radiona“ iz Zagreba, no nije bilo moguće ustanoviti tko je bio autor dizajna. Zaključak Dizajn korica tiskanih muzikalija i koncertnih programa u Hrvatskoj još je uvijek nedovoljno istraženo područje. Istini za volju, do podataka o likovno atraktivnim koricama notnih izdanja nije lako doći. Naime, ako na naslovnoj stranici piše tko je autor likovnog oblikovanja, katalogizator će to ime staviti u kataloški opis i moći će se pronaći pretraživanjem. Međutim, ako je ime u sklopu ilustracije na koricama, ono se može, ali i ne mora staviti u napomene, pa tako informacija o tome najčešće nije dostupna. Ovaj je tekst zaokružio cjelinu naših spoznaja o do sada pronađenim tragovima art décoa u knjižnici i arhivu Hrvatskoga glazbenog zavoda, no za cjelokupnu sliku o tom razdoblju trebat će se napraviti sveobuhvatno istraživanje. K tome, nova se građa stalno otkriva: nedavno sam pronašla još jedno nepoznato notno izdanje koje je u svojem raskošnom stilu ilustrirao Marko Rašica (ciklus Tri pjesme Krešimira Baranovića).72 Interdisciplinarnost koja je nužna pri ovakvim temama donosi plodove kako muzikologiji, tako i povijesti likovne umjetnosti. Što se važnosti samih djela tiče, ponekad nadjača likovna nad glazbenom umjetnošću: Natalja Gončarova je značajnija i poznatija umjetnica od skladatelja Lorda Bernersa, a Oto Antonini od Luje Šafraneka-Kavića. Za neke skladatelje danas gotovo da ne bismo ni znali kad ne bi bilo atraktivnih nota; najbolji primjer za to je hrvatska pijanistica i skladateljica Gisela Beck čija je notna izdanja ilustrirao Ivo Tijardović, a objavio ih je Edition Slave. Od 70 Dora Pejačević, Maštanja, za klavir (Zagreb: Čaklović, 1920); HGZ, Zbirka arhivske građe, Fond Pejačević, V A5. 71 To. Kado. [= Krsto Odak], Tutankhamen: shimmy-foxtrot, za klavir (Zagreb: Heliografija, s.a.); HGZ sign.1252. 72 HGZ, knjižnica, inv. br. 21/2010. Rašica je uz potpis na ilustraciji napisao godinu 1921, dok sama publikacija nema godinu objavljivanja. Ovo je izdanje objavila zagrebačka nakladnička kuća Rirop, u čijoj je nakladi izašla i zbirka Južnoslavenske narodne pjesme Zlatka Grgoševića s atraktivnom Rašičinom ilustracijom (vidi Bezić „Art déco u Hrvatskom glazbenom zavodu u Zagrebu – tragom jedne izložbe“, 331). Nijedno od ta dva notna izdanja nije uvršteno u monografiju Sanje Žaja Vrbica, Marko Rašica (Zagreb: Društvo povjesničara umjetnosti Hrvatske, 2014).
601
Nada Bezić šesnaestero likovnih umjetnika čija sam djela opisala, najmanje sam pozornosti posvetila strancima, zato jer o njima postoji inozemna literatura (pogotovo o paru Gončareva – Larionov). Nisam se upuštala u prosudbe kvalitete likovnih ostvarenja, kao što ni povjesničar umjetnosti ne bi prosuđivao skladbe. Kao i u mojem ranije objavljenom tekstu o art décou, otkrivene su nove činjenice o vrlo poznatim likovnim umjetnicima: (1) podatak da su se dizajnom notnih izdanja bavili Ljubo Babić, Oto Antonini i Vladimir Kirin; (2) nadopuna poznatih činjenica o plakatu Joze Kljakovića i njegov likovnoj javnosti do sada nepoznati crtež; (3) suradnja Joze Kljakovića, Pjera Križanića, Omera Mujadžića, Branimira Petrovića i Marijana Šimunića u časopisu Zvuk; (4) približna datacija jedne slike Jerolima Miše. Ponovno se je pokazalo da muzikolozi moraju ukazivati povjesničarima umjetnosti na važnost fondova glazbenih knjižnica bilo zbog toga što su ta izdanja nepoznata specijalistima za nečije stvaralaštvo (S. Žaja Vrbica, Marko Rašica), bilo da se notna izdanja uopće ne spominju u tekstovima o razdoblju art décoa (katalog izložbe Art déco) ili da povjesničari umjetnosti propuste priliku da ih temeljito analiziraju jezikom svoje struke (izdanja Edition Slave u D. Kečkemet, Nepoznati Tijardović ). Čini se kako i unutar povijesti umjetnosti nije sve razriješeno, jer premda je članak Lovorke Magaš u kojem je dokazano kako je Sergije Glumac autor dizajna za plakat Studio Gussich-Feller objavljen još 2008. godine, tri godine kasnije na izložbi Art déco ponovno je naveden Vladimir Mirosavljević kao autor plakata. Razdoblje art décoa sa stanovišta dizajna glazbene knjižnične i arhivske građe uistinu je bogato, a ukazuje i na veliku dinamičnost. Karakteristična su ispreplitanja životnih i stvaralačkih puteva i obzora umjetnika, kako unutar Kraljevine SHS/Jugoslavije, tako i Europe. Posvete, prijateljevanja, zajednički nastupi samo su dio toga. Kada se sagleda povijest likovnog dizajna glazbene građe u Hrvatskoj od prvih, jednostavnih notnih izdanja, preko secesijskog razdoblja u kojem je dominirala zagrebačka izdavačka kuća Kugli, pa kasnijih izdanja Muzičke naklade bez ijednog likovnog dodatka do današnje eksplozije kreativnosti koja si dopušta da na koricama notnog izdanja Ivanu Zajcu čak zalijepi zečje uši,73 moramo zaključiti da je art déco u ovom području dao najviše najboljih uradaka istaknutih likovnih umjetnika.
73 Ivan Zajc, 24 vokalize, prir. Lada Bujas Majić, likovno oblikovanje Tanja Tintor Keller (Zagreb: Hilarion 2015).
602
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey Conservatorium of Music, University of Tasmania
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí Abstract. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, virtuosity in piano composition rivaled, and was therefore well suited to evoking, the exuberance and theatrical display of Italian fountains. This paper explores the ways in which Franz Liszt (1811−1886), Maurice Ravel (1875−1937) and Charles Griffes (1885−1920) convey the visual, kinetic, temporal and sonic qualities of fountains in their respective compositions “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” (1877), Jeux D’eau (1901) and “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” (1916). Compositional devices first presented by Liszt are common to all three works, and become characteristics of this distinctive genre of piano fountain music. Situating the works within the broader cultural and aesthetic context, the paper explores the trajectory of the piano/fountain association from the golden era of Romantic pianism through to the mid-twentieth century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach it considers the above piano pieces and their relationship to the visual, along with artworks by Titian (c.1488−1576) and Salvador Dalí (1904−1989) that depict the piano/fountain association. A significant shift in the twentieth century in the symbolism of the piano/fountain association is noted.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, virtuosity in piano composition had reached a height that rivaled the exuberance and theatrical display of Italian fountains. This so-called golden-age of pianism thrived within a cultural context that fostered program music, synaesthesia, and inter-art dialogue, encouraging pianist-composers such as Franz Liszt (1811–1886), Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), and Charles Griffes (1885–1920) to use the piano as a vehicle for the lyrical description of sights and sounds gleaned from direct observation or from poetic stimulus. The continued attraction of Italy and especially Rome as a place of artistic pilgrimage (as captured in the second and third books of Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage) along with the Impressionist and Symbolist interest in natural and mythical subjects that provoked an outpouring of piano music describing water (such as Debussy’s “Ref lets dans l’eau” and “Jardins sous la pluie”, and both his and Ravel’s musical descriptions of “Ondine”) combined in a distinctive genre of piano fountain music. Liszt’s “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” (1877), Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau (1901), and 603
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey Griffes’ “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” (1916) convey the visual, kinetic, temporal, and sonic qualities of fountains, through compositional devices first presented by Liszt in the opening of “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” but common to all three works: the use of a soft dynamic to begin, a lively tempo, rapid passagework, repetition of patterns, and a preference for the middle and high registers of the piano (indeed, all pieces begin with both hands in the middle register). As Busoni remarked: “Les jeux d’eau[x à la Villa d’Este] still remains today the model for all musical fountains which have f lowed since then”.1 In this paper we will explore the trajectory of the piano/fountain association from the golden era of Romantic pianism through to the mid-twentieth century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will consider the piano pieces noted above and their relationship to the visual, along with artworks by Titian (c.1488–1576) and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). It is a great honor to have been invited to contribute to a festschrift for Dr. Zdravko Blažeković given his immense contribution to furthering and expanding the discipline of music iconography – his own research and publications are considerable, and this combined with his generous encouragement of younger and non-Western scholars starting out in the field, his friendly support of colleagues, and his openness to a myriad of approaches to the study of the relationship between music and visual art has made him a highly respected and appreciated figure within the international scholarly community. In Dreams of love: Playing the Romantic pianist Ivan Raykoff writes that when “it comes to artworks, literature, and films, the piano is typically embodied in symbolic ways: as a beautiful woman or as a wild animal. These two familiar modes of representation are not as paradoxical as they might seem, since both imply masculine agency, a power dynamic that considers the piano as an object to be “tamed” and played by the domineering – usually male – virtuoso”. 2 To Raykoff ’s two modes of representation we might add the piano as fountain, to describe the interest in the association of pianos and fountains shown by both composers and artists. This additional mode embraces some of the sexual innuendo of Raykoff ’s modes, as well as the more traditional symbolism of fountains as a source of life, but depending on context its meaning differs: the fountain as a source of life and salvation for Liszt, and keyboard instruments and fountains as motifs in amorous scenes by Titian, are concepts 1 2
604
Ferrucio Busoni, The essence of music and other papers, first published 1922, trans. Rosamond Ley (London: Rockliff, 1957), 139. Ivan Raykoff, Dreams of love: Playing the Romantic pianist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 113–114.
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí far removed from the twentieth-century artist Salvador Dalí’s use of the association to convey the decline and irrelevance of high culture. Dalí’s imagery is a visual signifier of the decline of the piano’s relevance in the inter-war period. In Liszt’s time, however, the piano was at the peak of its popularity, both as a solo concert instrument and a vehicle for disseminating reductions, transcriptions, and paraphrases of orchestral and theatrical music; and as a domestic instrument at the heart of home entertainment. Liszt’s “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” from Années de Pèlerinage (book three) ref lects the emotional and spiritual nourishment the composer gained from the sumptuous gardens and fountains at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. Liszt first visited the Villa d’Este in 1868, staying for a month at the invitation of Cardinal Hohenlohe, and “knew that he had found an artistic paradise which was likely to satisfy all his creative needs”. 3 Returning many times over the years, it was – according to eminent Liszt scholar Alan Walker – “a wonderful source of inspiration” that was to stimulate some of the finest piano music of his later years.4 In 1851, Hohenlohe had rescued the villa and gardens, created by the sixteenth century architect, artist, designer, and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio, from over a century of neglect. 5 In the seventeenth century the Villa d’Este was regarded as one of the treasures of Italy, renowned for its spectacular harnessing of water – Ligorio had diverted a river and created “a series of aqueducts and graded waterfalls” to power the hundreds of fountains – but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the whole complex fell into decay.6 As Walker notes, By the time Liszt arrived, the spectacular water-displays were once more functioning as they had in Ligorio’s time. Liszt would certainly have sat inside Ligorio’s masterpiece, the Fontana dell’ Ovato (the socalled Queen of Fountains), and contemplated from inside the marble chamber the wall of water rushing over him.7 “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este” is the result of the happy coincidence between Liszt’s direct experience of the recently renovated fountains, his interest in program music, and the experimental style of his mature years. Suffering depression in 1877, Liszt would 3 4 5 6 7
Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 3: The final years, 1861–1886 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 165. Ibid. Villa d’Este, Tivoli (Italy)-official site, “History”, http://www.villadestetivoli.info/storiae. htm (last accessed: 29 September 2016). Walker, Franz Liszt (as note 3), 164, 165. Ibid., 165.
605
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey sit for hours gazing at the fountains, spellbound by the play of their cascading waters. The result was a piece of musical impressionism so advanced for its time that for thirty years it had no successor until Ravel composed his own Jeux d’eau […] But whereas Ravel, the master impressionist, merely composed a piece of water music, Liszt transcended simple visual imagery and turned his streaming fountains into mystical symbols, associating them with the well-known verse from the Gospel according to St. John (4:14), which he quotes in Latin on the score: Sed aqua quam ego dabo ei, fiet in eo fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam (“But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst [but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life]”). As if to confirm that this is really a religious piece, Liszt enshrines it in his “divine” key of F-sharp major. 8 In this way, Liszt continued the artistic tradition of associating fountains with religion: as the entry in James Hall’s Dictionary of subjects & symbols in art explains, a fountain is a “source of water hence, symbolically, of spiritual life and salvation”.9 It is interesting that Liszt places the quotation not at the opening of the composition, but about half-way in (bar 144), when a modulation to D major and a change of texture (the chordal melody marked pp dolcissimo now in the right hand, supported by a f lowing, arpeggiated sextuplet accompaniment in the left hand) create a serene mood in contrast to the shimmering lushness of the developmental, demisemiquaver passage that precedes it (bars 108–143). It is as if Liszt is conveying through sound the calming (and uplifting) effect of his prolonged “looking at” and “listening to” the fountains. In the introduction he establishes the regular rhythm and linear gestures of the rising and falling of the water through repeated ascending (bars 1–9) and then descending (bars 10–13) arpeggio motives, beginning on the dominant seventh. From bar 14 the ascent begins again, this time using a scalar motion with alternating fifths, beginning in the middle of the keyboard. By bars 19 to 21, both hands are in an extremely high, and somewhat awkward, position on the keyboard. While the introductory traversing of the keyboard has its origins in the improvisatory nature of Baroque preludes, in this context it is useful as a visual device for reinforcing the fountain program of the music. As Ivan Raykoff notes, the sight of performance – “the dynamic interplay of musicality, physicality, 8 9
606
Ibid., 372. James Hall, Dictionary of subjects and symbols in art (Rev. ed.; London: John Murray, 1996), 128.
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí and visuality” – is powerful.10 Raykoff quotes Stravinsky: “The sight of the gestures and movements of the various parts of the body producing the music is fundamentally necessary if it is to be grasped in all its fullness”.11 Liszt uses the choreography of the pianist to symbolise the movement of the water. After describing the visual qualities of the fountain in the introduction (bars 1–39), Liszt establishes the tonic key in a new section marked Un poco più moderato (bar 40). Here the music suggests the experience of “listening to” rather than “looking at” the fountains: in the first eight bars the melody is restricted to the notes of the tonic triad and tremolando is used for ambience and to sustain the sound. The static nature of this material (which recurs with slight variation at bar 64, and then later in new keys at bar 132 and in the closing section of the piece from bar 252) invites close listening, requiring the performer and listener alike to focus on the color created at that particular moment. This effect is similar to the hypnotic power of f lowing water to fascinate and to promote relaxation. A staccato figure accompanying the subsequent phrase furthers the sonic allusions by suggesting the sounds of water droplets – the use of semiquavers distinguishing this motive (and the related staccato ascending scale in thirds, introduced in bar 110) from the more f lowing, demisemiquaver arpeggio motive first heard in the opening. In this way Liszt describes the kinetic and temporal qualities of water moving at different speeds and in different quantities. In Jeux d’Eau Ravel emphasizes the sonic aspects of water, explaining that the piece was “inspired by the bubbling of water and the musical sounds of fountains, waterfalls, and brooks” and heading the score with words by Henri de Régnier (1864–1936) that indicate the playful, mercurial nature of the music that follows: “The river god laughing at the water that tickles him”.12 The implied humor and lightheartedness –qualities that should characterize the pianist’s approach–distinguish Jeux d’Eau from the seriousness of Liszt’s extramusical content. Although Jeux d’Eau was composed in France, Ravel was corresponding at that time with fellow composer Florent Schmitt, who was living in Rome as the winner of the Prix de Rome. A letter from Ravel to Schmitt dated 8 April 1901 expresses Ravel’s admiration for the music of Debussy and Liszt, and his own desire to be in Rome, asking his friend: “Does Rome inspire you 10 Raykoff, Dreams of love (as note 2), 131. 11 Igor Stravinsky, An autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 72, quoted in Raykoff, Dreams of love (as note 2), 132. 12 Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Maurice Ravel: Variations on his life and work, trans. Samuel R. Rosenbaum (Philadelphia; New York; London: Chilton Book Company, 1968), 50, 51.
607
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey with delightful ideas?”13 Yet despite five attempts between 1900 and 1905, Ravel would never win the Prix de Rome.14 While Ravel does not specify a particular fountain or watercourse as the inspiration for Jeux d’Eau, it seems likely that (as a student of piano and a composer determined to win the Prix de Rome) he was occupied with thoughts of Italy and with the piano music it had inspired in Liszt. The impact of Liszt’s music on Jeux d’Eau has long been acknowledged. Hanz Heinz Stuckenschmidt, for instance, wrote in 1966 “not only in the amount of technical difficulties but in the searching out of instrumental sonorities is the model of Franz Liszt clearly recognizable”.15 He declared that with Jeux d’Eau “Ravel reached the front rank of innovators and inventors of pianistic sound effects and instrumental tone colors […] Consistently and with even sharper definition he followed the path Franz Liszt had begun to outline in the 1870’s”.16 Ravel himself acknowledged the importance of Jeux d’Eau as a seminal work, identifying it as “the point of departure for all new pianistic expressions one may find in my works”.17 Like Liszt, Ravel establishes at the outset the linear gesture of the rising and falling motion of the water through arpeggio figuration in both hands. Repetition of the initial two-beat motif, first at the same pitch and then transposed (for instance, bars 3 and 5) and varied with partial inversion (bar 9) suggests the calming effect of listening to and watching a fountain, while Ravel’s insertion of an occasional bar of 2/4 or 1/4 to destabilize the regular meter of common time, hints at the humor inherent in the quoted poetry. While Liszt allows his music to dwell on the middle and upper registers and uses soft dynamics for quite some time, Ravel quickly introduces an occasional bass note (bar 7) and allows dramatic dynamic and rhythmic changes to describe the sounds, speeds, and volumes of water produced by his varied inf luences, which, as noted above, included waterfalls and brooks. Similar to Ravel, the American composer Charles Griffes was deeply inf luenced by poetry. In the Roman Sketches, op. 7 for piano solo (a set of four pieces: “The White Peacock”, “Nightfall”, “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” and “Clouds”) his ideas of Rome were gleaned from the poetry of Scotsman William Sharp (1855–1905, also known as Fiona Macleod), rather than from direct experience. Sharp had visited Italy in 1891 and excerpts from his Sospiri 13 Quoted in Stuckenschmidt, Maurice Ravel (as note 12), 52–53. 14 Barbara L. Kelly, “Ravel, Maurice”, Grove music online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ subscriber/article/grove/music/52145 (last accessed: 26 October 2015). 15 Stuckenschmidt, Maurice Ravel (as note 12), 51. 16 Ibid., 52. 17 See ibid., 50.
608
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí di Roma (Sighs of Rome) appear at the beginning of each of Griffes’ four pieces.18 “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” (1916) is prefaced with the following few lines that highlight the play of light and color on the bubbling and foaming water: Shimmering lights, As though the Aurora’s Wild polar fires Flashed in thy happy bubbles, Died in thy foam. Taken from the end of the second of four stanzas, these lines must have been deliberately and carefully chosen by Griffes to indicate the particular aspect of the poem that had inspired him, for Sharp’s poem is lengthy and depicts the fountain from various angles: the first stanza evokes the powerful sounds the water creates (“A music wild, barbaric”), the third stanza celebrates the movement of the water (“Ever in joyous laughter
thy wavelets are dancing”) and the final stanza describes the beauty of the fountain at night.19 As Andrew Managravite notes, Sospiri di Roma is “a surprisingly sensuous collection” and Sharp is “clearly concerned with painting word-pictures”. 20 Unlike Ravel who was inspired by the sonic aspects of moving water, Griffes draws our attention to a particular visual image: that of the quickly changing illumination. The coincidence of Respighi composing Fontane di Roma (1915–1916) at the same time is intriguing. In an article for the Journal of the American Liszt Society Reginald Haché notes that there “are striking similarities in imagery” between Griffes’ “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola”, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, and Liszt’s “Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este”. He writes that while “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” “is the most conventional” of the four Roman Sketches it is also “the most idiomatically written […] and displays technical brilliance well above the level of the other three compositions”. 21 Some of the similarities between the three pieces have been identified above, demonstrating that certain musical devices have come to be associated with fountain piano music. However, it is interesting to 18 Taylor A. Greer, “The unfolding tale of Griffes’ ‘White Peacock’”, Gamut 3/1 (2010), 175. 19 Selected writings of Wm Sharp, vol. 1: Poems http://www.sundown.pair.com/Sharp/WSVol_1/ sospiri%20di%20roma01.htm (last accessed: 16 November 2015). 20 Andrew Managravite, “William Sharp’s Sospiri di Roma (1891)”, The Victorian web: Literature, history, and culture in the age of Victoria, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/sharp/sospiri. html (last accessed: 29 October 2015). 21 Reginald Haché, “Charles Tomlinson Griffes revisited: An essay on the music of Charles Griffes”, Journal of the American Liszt Society 34 (1993), 40–41.
609
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey also note Griffes’ departures from the archetypes set up by Liszt and Ravel. For instance, although he was also a pianist, he does not indicate pedaling on the score, and the overall approach to articulation and phrasing favors long, legato lines. Devoid of staccato markings, the piece’s few accents highlight rhythmic processes, unlike Liszt and Ravel’s use of various shorter articulations often within specified pedaling. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of “The Fountain of the Acqua Paola” – and the one with which Griffes departs most dramatically from his predecessors – is the frequently changing meter. Opening in 4/4, the piece (which is 70 bars long) undergoes sixteen changes before returning to 4/4 for the final four bars: the intermediary meters including 3/4, 4/8, 9/8, 7/4, and one bar of 5/4 for the climax point. This rhythmic f lexibility gives liquidity to the music and allows Griffes to brief ly establish short sections of distinctive material (often created by the repetition of short musical ideas) that then f low into the next passage. In this way the music captures the capricious, shifting qualities of the poetic images. The use of the single bar of 5/4, and simultaneously the only use of fortissimo, at the climax point (bar 49) that precedes the return of the opening material is, I would argue, structurally significant when we consider the architectural design of the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola (fig. 1). As Nicola Moorby has explained in reference to Joseph Mallord William Turner’s 1819 sketch of the fountain and its commanding view over Rome, the fountain was “built in the form of a triumphal arch during the seventeenth century”. 22 Two smaller arches f lank its three central arches, making five arches in total – is this then the reason for Griffes’ use of 5/4? In a similar vein, it is interesting to note the correspondence between Griffes’ polyrhythmic passage from bars 29 to 37 (with its simultaneous triplet quavers and crotchets in the right hand that descend and ascend, and more static semiquavers in the left hand) and the different quantities and movement of water that f low from the spouts within each of the arches: water gushes from the single outlet in each of the three central arches (fig. 2), while it trickles more gently from the gargoyles in the outer arches (fig.3), creating rhythmic counterpoint. 22 Nicola Moorby, “’The Fontana dell’Acqua Paola and a view of Rome from the Janiculum’ 1819 by Joseph Mallord William Turner”, catalogue entry, May 2008, in J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours, ed. by David Blayney Brown, Tate Research Publication, December 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/jmwturner/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-fontana-dellacqua-paola-and-a-view-of-romefrom-the-r1132745 (last accessed: 29 October 2015).
610
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí
Figs 1–3. Fontana dell’ Acqua Paola, 17th century, Janiculum Hill, Rome, photographs by author, 2015.
611
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey Having explored some of the ways in which Liszt, Ravel and Griffes depicted the sonic, visual, temporal, and kinetic qualities of fountains through piano music, we will turn now to consider how the piano/fountain association has been treated in visual art. Scholars have noted that for Salvador Dalí the piano had strong personal associations. Dalí’s sister believed that the night concerts of the Pixtots (a family the Dalís often stayed with during Salvador’s youth) were the origins of the grand piano motif that recurs in many of Dalí’s artworks of the 1930s; while Carlos Rojas notes that many scholars have associated the piano with Federico Garcia Lorca, the homosexual poet with whom Dalí had a complicated friendship from 1922. Aside from his literary talents, Lorca was a keen and entertaining musician who – during his and Dalí’s student years in Madrid – played piano pieces by Chopin, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Ravel, and Falla. 23 Writing of Dalí’s oil painting Atmospheric skull sodomizing a grand piano (1934) Rojas states: With regard to the piano, the rape victim […] It represents Dalí’s memories of the Pixtot brothers’ night concerts in the air, but it also evokes Lorca’s spontaneous recitals at the student dorm, and even his performance of classical music for Salvador and Ana María [his sister] on the piano of the Pixtots when they took him there to visit the family […] So Dalí not only assumed the role of rape victim by identifying himself with the piano, but he also symbolically deprived Lorca of part of his identity by associating him with the instrument abused by the grinning skull. 24 But there is also a further, less personal meaning associated with Dalí’s piano imagery, and that is the decay and obsolescence of bourgeois society and high culture which occurs in the inter-war period, at the same time as a major stylistic shift away from lyricism in piano music. Referring to Arthur Loesser’s assertion in Men, women and pianos that the piano reached its lowest social significance in the 1930s, Raykoff notes that numerous “cultural, economic, and technological developments…brought to an end the Romantic pianist’s privileged place in society”. 25 Yet, Raykoff argues, “Romantic pianism lived 23 Carlos Rojas, Salvador Dalí, or the art of spitting on your mother’s portrait, trans. Alma Amell (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 160–161, 172. 24 Ibid., 175. Salvador Dalí, Atmospheric skull sodomizing a grand piano, 1934. Oil on wood panel, 14 x 17.8 cm. St. Petersburg, FL: The Salvador Dalí Museum. 25 Raykoff, Dreams of love (as note 2), 224. Raykoff refers to Arthur Loesser, Men, women and pianos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954).
612
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí on in modernist contemporary concert music, even if the sensuality and sentimentality of late nineteenth-century tonality already gave way to the intensive atonality of Expressionism, the noises of Futurism, the earnest irony of Neoclassicism, and the intellectual rigors of Serialism”. 26 Against this backdrop, Dalí’s own comments about Atmospheric skull sodomizing a grand piano: “The lyricism of the piano is brutally possessed by the jaws of a fossil skull”, should not be dismissed: lyricism in piano music would seem to be a thing of the distant past, replaced to a large degree in the first few decades of the twentieth century by the rhythmic interest, percussive approach and dissonance of composer-pianists such as Prokofiev, Bartók, Leo Ornstein, and George Antheil. 27 In Dalí and Buñel’s ground-breaking film Un chien andalou (1929), “a man drags along two priests and two grand pianos laden with putrefying donkey corpses representing the obsolescence of bourgeois culture and its traditional values”. 28 How then does Dalí portray the piano/fountain association? The oil painting William Tell (1930) depicts Tell in a tortured and dishevelled state, having just castrated his son with the scissors he holds in his left hand near the fountain. In the upper part of the image, a second Tell plays a grand piano weighed down by Dalí’s motif of the rotting donkey, over which a white stallion jumps. 29 This is a disturbing and chaotic image filled with symbols of sexual tension, violence and decay, against which the fountain–and its connotations of life, beauty, and refreshment – seems no match. Like the piano, it too shows signs of decay – the rendering of a chipped surface exposes the bricks below. Tell’s act of castration means there is no future for his genes – Dalí would seem to be suggesting that the golden era of the piano has also come to an end. In the oil painting Necrophilic fountain flowing from a grand piano (c.1932) Dalí portrays a coffin-shaped grand piano on a barren beach at sunset. 30 Its shut lid renders it soundless. The scene is almost devoid of life aside from the one small bird at the left. A tree grows through the top of the piano causing the side of the instrument to crack, in much the same way as dry ground cracks, and an antique sculpture beside the tree adds to the sense of desolation. From the cen26 Raykoff, Dreams of love (as note 2), 226. 27 Dalí quoted in Peter Tush, “Atmospheric skull sodomizing a grand piano 1934”, in Ted Gott et al., Salvador Dali: Liquid desire, exhibition catalogue (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2009), 119. Originally quoted in Robert Descharnes, The world of Dalí (London: Macmillan, 1968), 175. 28 Raykoff, Dreams of love (as note 2), 123–124. 29 Rojas, Salvador Dalí (as note 23), 93. Salvador Dalí, William Tell, 1930. Oil and collage on canvas, 113 x 87 cm. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou. 30 Salvador Dalí, Necrophilic fountain flowing from a grand piano, c.1932. Oil on canvas, 22 x 27 cm. Private Collection.
613
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey tre of the keyboard a small fountain of water f lows into a piano-shaped pool, as if the instrument is urinating into its own grave: the absurdity of this recalls Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made Fountain (1917). Yet, with the setting of the sun and its implication of closure there is a sense of serenity in this image – it is as if when we accept obsolescence and decay, we can find beauty in the past. Dalí takes the idea of the piano as an embodied instrument much further when he includes a female rubber mannequin whose body is painted with a piano keyboard, lying horizontally and submerged in an aquarium, as part of his “Dream of Venus” pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Ref lecting the contemporary popularity of water attractions and dive shows, the aquarium was animated by female swimmers. The souvenir gramophone record produced by RCA “plays a rambling dream monologue” in which Venus says: “I see an instrument of music which is gradually turning into a woman – the black and white notes of the piano keys change into the f lesh of a woman’s body”. 31 A painted backdrop of “an imaginary garden-scape in classical Italy”32 includes a fountain near the piano woman. While Raykoff uses the Dream of Venus painted mannequin to illustrate his idea of the piano-as-woman, that is, “as a beautiful body to be viewed, touched, and played for pleasure”;33 it is interesting that Dalí’s piano woman is inanimate and anchored down with chains, in stark contrast to the live swimmers whose half-naked bodies tantalize the viewer. Yet again, Dalí would seem to be suggesting links between the instrument, the weight of the past and lifelessness. However, in linking Venus with a keyboard instrument and a garden backdrop with a fountain, Dalí recalls two paintings by Titian that explore the themes of love and music in the pre-piano era: Venus and music (fig. 4) and Venus with an organist and with Cupid (c.1555), both in the Prado. Subtle variations on the same subject matter and design, each portrays a man distracted from his organ playing to turn and admire a reclining nude against a backdrop of a garden scene at dusk. Prominently positioned between the figures is a garden fountain. Renowned Titian scholar Charles Hope writes that the Reclining Venus pictures (a collective term embracing the two paintings noted above and a third Venus with an organist; as well as two paintings of Venus and Cupid with a lutenist, and one of Venus and Cupid alone) 34 31 Ingrid Schaffner, Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus: The Surrealist funhouse from the 1939 world’s fair, photographs by Eric Schaal (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 48–50, 70, 92, 98. 32 Ibid., 122. 33 Raykoff, Dreams of love (as note 2), 117. 34 Venus with an organist and with Cupid, c.1555, Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado; Venus with an organist, 1550–1552, Berlin: Gemäldegalerie; Venus and Cupid with a lute-player, c. 1560–
614
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí
Fig. 4. Titian [Vecellio di Gregorio Tiziano], Venus and music, c.1550, oil on canvas, 138.0 x 222.4 cm. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado (inv.-no.: P00420). Photo © Museo Nacional del Prado, 2017.
have been the subject of the same kind of prudish and abstruse interpretations as have so many of Titian’s other secular compositions. Thus it has been suggested that those incorporating a musician were concerned with the contemporary philosophical controversy about the relative merits of the senses of sight and of hearing. In the versions with an organist, for example, the man, in turning from his instrument, is supposedly revealing that he values visual beauty above the beauty of music. 35 As an advocate for Titian’s “simplicity and clarity”, arguing that “he did not feel the need to fill his work with learned allusions to literary and philosophical texts”, 36 Hope disagrees with this interpretation, believing instead that the pictures “simply show a man attempting to win the favors of a woman through the power of music”. 37 Or to put it even more simply, are the upright, phallic organ pipes linked to the direction of the man’s gaze? 1565, Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum; Venus and the lute llayer, c. 1560–1570, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Venus and Cupid, c.1546-47, Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi. 35 Charles Hope, Titian (London: Chaucer Press, 2003), 175. 36 Ibid., 23. 37 Ibid., 176.
615
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey The strolling couple and animals in the background support a romantic reading, yet it is interesting to contrast the backdrop of the Prado Organ paintings with its prominent fountain and formal grove of cypresses continuing the strong vertical rhythm of the organ pipes and leading the eye towards the golden sunset – with that of Venus and the lute player (c.1565–1570, Metropolitan Museum of Art) which is instead a more naturalistic landscape with a river f lowing through it. In the distance between the two figures we can just see a group of naked dancers and a musician under the trees. Both backgrounds then further the musical allusions and characteristics of their foregrounds – the more gentle timbre of the lute is echoed in the gracefulness of the dancers, the movement of the river, and the softness of the clouds; while the organ’s regulated tuning is referenced in the ordered spacing of the trees. The fountain in the Prado organ paintings provides both the sonic and kinetic elements provided by the dancers and musician in Venus and the lute player, and its positioning in the composition, placed as it is above the woman’s thigh, perhaps makes it symbolic of the sexual pleasures the couple will enjoy. Titian’s use of luxurious red fabrics in the curtain and bed covering to frame Venus and emphasize the sensual qualities of her creamy white skin reappears 400 years later in Dalí’s painting Red orchestra (1957), part of the series entitled “The seven lively arts” which was commissioned by Billy Rose for the Ziegfeld Theater, a Broadway theater in New York. 38 Set against the backdrop of a sumptuous theatrical red curtain, a faceless white man plays a cello rendered as a person, the two figures joined in dance. A keyless grand piano has been transformed into a fountain – water f lows through its lid, which is cracked, decayed and home to bats. An athletic woman tries to break through the curtain, her hands reaching for the keyboard that has no keys. To the right of the lid stands an exotic figure carrying something on her head, recalling the subject matter of Frederic, Lord Leighton’s oil painting Lieder ohne Worte (1861), in which Leighton suggested sound through the depiction of two fountains and a blackbird. 39 Leighton’s title refers to Mendelssohn’s piano pieces of the same name, but the painting does not depict music-making – instead, a young woman dressed in classical drapery sits by a water spout, absorbed in her own 38 Salvador Dalí, Music. The seven lively arts: Red orchestra, 1957. Oil on canvas, 84 x 111.5cm. Nahmad Collection, Switzerland. Gala and Salvador Dalí Foundation, “Music. The seven lively arts: Red Orchestra”, in Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí et al., eds., Salvador Dalí: Catalogue raisonné of paintings [1910–1964], 2014, http://www.salvador-dali.org/cataleg_raonat/fitxa_ obra.php?text=Red%20Orchestra&obra=728&lang=en (last accessed: 3 December 2015). 39 Frances Fowle, “Frederic, Lord Leighton: Lieder ohne Worte, exhibited 1861”, Tate, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/leighton-lieder-ohne-worte-t03053/text-summary (last accessed: 1 December 2015).
616
The Piano/Fountain Association: From Franz Liszt to Salvador Dalí thoughts. Leighton explained that his aim was to transmit – through color and f lowing line – the pleasure the woman is receiving aurally.40 In contrast, Dalí’s figure has her back to the piano, a gesture of disinterest. The Red orchestra indicates that in 1950s popular culture, the piano has become only one part of the spectacle of show biz: it is the central motif in Dalí’s painting, and – as a fountain – the giver of life, but is devoid of its true purpose. Dalí has depicted a senseless instrument – back-to-front with the highest notes on the left and the lid on the right – it tilts precariously, hovering ungrounded in an imaginary space. Its only remaining purpose is to be purely ornamental, and thus today we find numerous images online of abandoned pianos turned into water features for the garden. How strange all of this would have seemed to Franz Liszt, who famously declared that the piano “is the repository of all that stirred my nature in the passionate days of my youth. I confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys, and my sorrows. Its strings vibrated to my emotions, and its keys obeyed my every caprice. Would you have me abandon it and strive for the more brilliant and resounding triumphs of the theatre of orchestra? Oh, no!”41 While this paper has revealed a distinct change in the piano/fountain association from the vitality of Liszt, Ravel and Griffes’ piano music to the unsettling imagery of Dalí and the truths it reveals about the piano’s position in twentieth-century society, Liszt’s words remind us of the importance the instrument once assumed and of the passion with which these composers approached it.
40 Leonée and Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975) 60. 41 Quoted in Alan Walker, Franz Liszt. Vol. 1: The virtuoso years, 1811-1847 (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1983), 296–297. Walker cites two sources: Franz Liszts Gesammelte Schriften. ed. by Lina Ramann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880-83) vol. 2, 151; and Jean Chantavoine, Pages romantiques (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1912), 135.
617
Arabella Teniswood-Harvey
618
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango?
Emile Wennekes Universiteit Utrecht
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? Scratching the Surfaces of Multiple Layers of Mediatized Wagner Reception * Abstract. Richard Wagner posthumously finds himself within a dense network of mediatized formats that represent essential stages of the history of mediatization. Wagner has not only splendidly survived a century of technically mediatized innovations, he has remained a rich source for productive reception. Wagner was already a prominent figure in the era of the silent film. His character, his biography as well as his protagonists inspired film narratives from the very dawn of the medium. His music served to accompany silent films and to score movies following cinema’s conversion to sound. Serious attempts were made to capture his work on film, however, his characters were used for parody as well, eventually becoming signifiers for the operatic genre. Not only in cinema but in television advertisements, animated cartoons and computer games, Wagner has retained his prominence through all subsequent media developments. Nowadays, opera companies offer Wagner productions on-line, and directors incorporate Wagner-related avatars into their productions, reducing the ontological distinction between live and mediatized components. Through their frequent use in widely diverse media, Wagner’s tunes have become trope codifiers, yet this has eroded their precise meaning and has resulted in an ambiguous network of musical associations.
He was born only seven years after Richard Wagner died, but in the subsequent decades this Danish tenor became the quintessential twentieth-century Heldentenor: Lauritz Melchior. “Not the world’s greatest Wagner tenor […] he was the only one!” a critic once remarked.1 Melchior made his Bayreuth debut as Parsifal in the summer of 1924 and subsequently returned to Bayreuth to * This contribution is based on a keynote talk, given at the University of Bayreuth on 11
1
January 2012, as part of the lecture series Wagner world wide 2013. It represents a more complete implementation of a theory previously introduced in my chapter “‘What’s the motive?’ She asked: Tales from a musical pawnshop”. in Liber plurium vocum voor Rokus de Groot, ed. by Sander van Maas et al (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2012), 205–227. See Ib Melchior, Lauritz Melchior: The golden years of Bayreuth (Fort Worth, TX: Baskerville Publishers, 2003), 261.
619
Emile Wennekes sing the leading roles of Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan, and Tannhäuser. Beyond Bayreuth, he became equally famous for his unparalleled performances on many of the most important opera stages of the Western world. Between 1926 and 1950, he sang an unprecedented 519 Wagnerian roles with the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Comparably late in his career, during the post-war years, the Danish ex-patriot was discovered by Hollywood. From 1945 to 1953, he starred in five MGM musical movies: Thrill of a romance (dir.: Richard Thorpe, 1945), Two sisters from Boston (dir.: Henry Koster, 1946), This time for keeps (dir.: Richard Thorpe, 1947), Luxury liner (dir.: Richard Whorf, 1948), and The stars are singing (dir.: Norman Taurog, 1953). In all of these movies, Melchior played the role he did best and the role he was so well known for – a tenor from Denmark. From a mediated perspective, it could be argued that the feature film Two sisters from Boston is the most intriguing of these Hollywood productions. In it we encounter Melchior in multiple “mediatized” contexts. The movie is a period piece wherein the snooty opera world is humorously contrasted with vaudeville culture in a disreputable saloon somewhere in New York City. The film also includes a parody on the dawn of the audio age. In the given scene, Melchior – in the role of Richard Olstrom – makes his first acoustic studio recording. “Artistically” both pushed back from and pulled towards the recording horn, Olstrom awkwardly performs Walther von Stolzing’s Preislied “Morgenlich leuchtend im rosigen Schein” from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. 2 In this remarkable scene, varying aspects and topoi of cinematographic Wagner reception blend beautifully together. The music of Wagner is considered here as pars pro toto for the operatic genre. This stereotype is usually paired with more or less obese singers – this time not in shining armor however, as is often the case. 3 Wagner opera and its singers have always been easy victims for grotesque irony, especially from a “non-elitist” point of view. The parody of the early recording industry in the Melchior sequence presents all of the industry’s fascinating possibilities but at the same time, all the practical challenges yet to be overcome. Here one mediatized form comments on the other: sound film pictures an ironic image of the dawn of audio recording. Many interpretative layers regarding Wagner can be identified in the scene: the stereotypically “opera-Wagner” in the filmed musical itself; the suggested “live” performance – with bad lip sync – in the studio, by a real-life heroic 2 3
620
See http://www.wagneropera.net/Themes/Wagner-In-Movies-Two-Sisters-From-Boston.htm (last accessed: 24 May 2016). A well-known example is Kirsten Flagstad’s appearance in The big broadcast of 1938 (dir.: Mitchell Leisen, 1938).
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango?
Fig. 1. Souvenir album from Two sisters from Boston, 1946. © www.vintagecollectionsonline.com.
tenor; the recorded/replayed/mediatized Wagner; depicting one of these performances as pleasing to the little dog Nipper, future icon of His Master’s Voice (HMV) – the pleasure in response to a recording signifying the exponential growth of satisfied listeners to recorded music. 621
Emile Wennekes By including a fragment of Meistersinger, an opera with a New York reception history dating back to 1886, the narrative content of the opera can be interpretatively “read”. Undoubtably, the “outsider” Olstrom/Melchior is the only male “master singer” present in this musical, at least in terms of the classical rules of art. The striking Preislied sequence with Melchior appears to be missing from the film credits. It is also missing from a recent Wagner filmography, published in 2010 in the book Wagner and cinema. The entry on Two sisters has only a general reference to Lohengrin. (Indeed, in this movie Olstrom also performs an English translation of the bridal chamber scene which culminates with Olstrom sneering at Elsa because she is too fat and comparing her cruelly to a hippopotamus). Yet this small omission does not decrease the overall worth of the cinematographic overview offered in Wagner and cinema. The book lists 175 Wagner music quotes from mainly English-language feature films. Filmed opera (recordings of stage productions), opera-films (cinematic productions of Wagner’s operas), and the entire range of silent film types are explicitly excluded. Nevertheless, if we put in all our supplements, add new films, and take the filmography beyond its limited English-language domain, the list of Wagner-inspired films would probably be double or even triple the amount suggested in the book.4 In his foreword to Wagner and cinema, the award-winning film director Tony Palmer recalls a conversation he had with Wolfgang Wagner. In their dialogue, Richard Wagner’s grandson makes two striking remarks: “First, never forget that the world is full of Wagner experts […] who know for certain how many eggs my grandfather had for breakfast on the third Thursday of the fourth month of 1875, and what’s more, many of them know how long he boiled the eggs”. Secondly: “If my grandfather were alive today, he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood. He would not have been able to resist the technical wizardry at his disposal, nor the hordes of workers, nor the money”.5 This view of Wagner’s operas as having a strong affinity to film music is held by many. Film composer Max Steiner stated, “If Wagner had lived in [the twentieth] century, he would have been the number one film composer”.6 Or as the American director and screenwriter Harmony Korine put it: “If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He al4 5 6
622
Other introductory texts on the topic of this contribution can be found in the themed issue of Wagnerspectrum 4/2 (2008): “Schwerpunkt Wagner und Fantasy/Hollywood”. Tony Palmer, “Foreword”, in Wagner and cinema, ed. by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), x–xi. See Jon Burlingame, “Underscoring Richard Wagner’s influence on film music”, Los Angeles Times, 17 June 2010.
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? ready knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about”.7 There might be some truth to these statements. On the one hand, Wagner was very interested in the theatrical wizardry of his day, like the film invention avant la lettre, the Moving Panorama or “Wandeldekoration”. 8 By switching off the lights in Das Festspielhaus, the Bayreuth theater, the orchestra is hidden, anticipating to a certain extent the movie soundtrack, where the orchestra is heard but not seen. Nevertheless, in recent decades, the wizardry in Hollywood has changed fundamentally; the most impressive cinematographic effects are computer generated and animated. In casu these special effects could be developed and applied everywhere, inside as well as outside of Hollywood. The music production of today’s Hollywood movies has, on the other hand, undergone a decisive change, since the music itself is now created by hordes of workers. Hans Zimmer – well known for his Wagner-inf luenced scores to feature films as diverse as Gladiator (dir.: Ridley Scott, 2000), Lion King (dir.: Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994), Inception (dir.: Christopher Nolan, 2010), Pirates of the Caribbean: The curse of the black pearl (dir.: Gore Verbinski, 2003) and many others, functions as a general supervisor of an atelier consisting of approximately one hundred cue writers; computing composers; sound and sample designers; programmers; synthesizing, recording, and mixing engineers; arrangers; orchestrators; conductors; and musicians – all joining forces to realize “Zimmer’s” scores. One could seriously question whether Wagner would have dared to leave delicate musical matters like scoring or inventing tunes or expostulating themes to anyone other than his “royal” self, yet he most likely would have been tempted to command similar hordes. If we extrapolate from “Hollywood” to include the entire film industry, Wagner’s music remains strikingly inf luential today. For example, in 2011, at least four remarkable films premiered that could in themselves inspire an addendum to the book Wagner and cinema. Among these films is the first computeranimated film by Pirates’ director, Gore Verbinski. In this Western comedy called Rango, Hans Zimmer inserted a hilarious hillbilly-style arrangement of “Walkürenritt” (“Ride of the Valkyries”) which he mixed with “An der schönen blauen Donau” by Johann Strauss Jr. For the French dramatic comedy Celles qui aimaient Richard Wagner (Those who love Richard Wagner), director Jean-Louis Guillermo used Martin Gregor-Dellin’s well-known edition of Mein Leben as a veritable guide. Jean-François Balmer plays the title role, 7 8
See Ronald Bergen, “Continuous melody”, The Guardian, 6 October 2007. Julia Franzreb and Anno Mungen, “Musiktheater”, in Handbuch Musik und Medien, ed. by Holger Schramm (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2009), 452.
623
Emile Wennekes whereas Roberto Alagna can be seen and heard in the role of one of Melchior’s historic predecessors, the first Tannhäuser, Joseph Tichatschek. Wagner also pervades the scores, the plots and the psychology of the protagonists in director Lars von Trier’s much disputed film Melancholia (2011) and director David Cronenberg’s film A dangerous method (2011). In A dangerous method, it is the music drama Sieg fried that structures both the thematic material and the form of the score compiled by award-winning composer Howard Shore. In his words, “It follows the opera in terms of its overall structure – I used the bones, if you will, of the opera to create the structure and the arc of the music”.9 In Melancholia, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is predominant, but Danish sound arranger Kristian Eidnes Anderson did not merely record the famous orchestral prelude anew; von Trier commissioned him to highlight certain registers. Ultimately, a solo cellist dubbed the orchestral cello section in order to achieve the aural result von Trier had in mind. Previously, I referred to the terms “mediatized”, “mediatization”, or “mediatizing of music”. Within this approach to musical reception, the phenomenon of Wagner, his music and ideas, was a prominent focus for directors and producers as soon as it became possible to reproduce musical performances and moving images. Despite the trendsetting, extensive book, Wagner and cinema, mediatized Wagner is of course not limited to this specific screen format. In other mediatized formats, Wagner is (omni)present as well.10 The possibilities that newly invented media formats offer have also proven stimulating to new formats of “creative Wagner reception”, often resulting in a complicated web of perceptive associations. I use the term “mediatizing” for the process of representing (sounding) music in other media formats, regardless if these other formats are considered “old” or “new” media (from scores to television), hypermedia (like the world-wideweb), transparent media, with highly immersive qualities, and so on. In this Festschrift contribution, I will concentrate on the role Wagner and his music plays within visual and virtual media, without any consideration of the abundance of audio recordings. 9
See David Ng, “‘A Dangerous Method’, ‘Melancholia’ take cues from Richard Wagner”, Los Angeles Times, 25 November 2011. 10 The mediatized Wagner reception offers an intriguing but relatively new way of interpreting the importance of Wagner. In Barry Millington’s generally informative Wagner Compendium (1992), there is not even a hint of this type of reception, and in the Richard-Wagner Handbuch, edited by Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, there is only a modest overview of cinematic Wagner reception. See Barry Millington, ed., The Wagner Compendium (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992); Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, eds, Richard-Wagner Handbuch, transl. and ed. by John Deathridge (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992).
624
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? The term “mediatizing” implies a process, an ongoing, creative and/or commercial development involving numerous actors and factors. This has dramatic implications for performance practice, for a listener’s perception, for our appreciation and knowledge of classical music, for the music industry – and for the way we think about music in general. In short, it has resulted in extensive implications about music’s place, role and function in society. Stately simply, most people who are familiar with “Ride of the Valkyries” probably have never seen an opera house from the inside, not to mention the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Instead, they might know the tune via the brutal helicopter scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse now (1979), or a ring tone, or an animated cartoon like Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny’s What’s opera, Doc? (1957); or a paraphrase by the “Muppetopolitan Opera Company” starring Beverly Sills (1997: “I can sing higher, I can sing higher”), or a game like Saints row: The third (2011) – Wagner is definitively omnipresent in terms of media. In the recent Routledge companion to music and visual culture, Robert Kendrick contributed a chapter on iconography. In this he acknowledged that, augmenting traditional issues studied in the field, others should be recognized, for example “the modes of narration and referentiality in film music”. Since Zdravko Blažeković has always encouraged alternative ways of interpreting iconography, I salute the broader approach Kendrick defines; this contribution can be considered in that light. Moving images represent mediatized iconographies: both artifacts are mere shadows in Plato’s cave. To return to (film) music: all music in today’s society reveals itself, in one way or another, as mediatized. The present omnipresence of intervening media in society does not leave the performing arts unscathed. According to the Danish media researcher Stig Hjarvard, media are not simply technologies that organizations, parties or individuals can choose to use – or not use – as they see fit.11 A significant share of the inf luence that media exert arises out of the fact that they have become an integral part of performing practice. Moreover, media question and re-question the relationship(s) between the mediatized artefact and the “live” performance, between mobile, mediatized appearances and more “fixed” iconography. Some of the mediatized relationships are in f lux and may even have morphed into an antithesis of the original meaning. An example of this is the confrontation between the “live” rendition by Melchior and the mediatized artefact of the performance. On the other hand, the role of the dog in the same sequence can only be understood in relation to the iconographic HMV image of Nipper. 11 Stig Hjarvard, “The mediatization of society: A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change”, Nordicom Review 29/2 (2008), 105–134, here 106.
625
Emile Wennekes Fig. 2. Nipper and the recording horn, image from Two sisters from Boston, 1946
Ever since the inception of recorded music and moving images, the notion of “liveness” has been challenged, as Philip Auslander, among others, has made clear.12 Whereas recordings and radio transmissions initially imitated or emulated live concert performances, these mediatized products gradually became cultural artefacts in their own right. The Melchior sequence of Two sisters from Boston caught this split spot on. Developments have been amazingly rapid ever since the historic moment pictured in this film. Mediatized artefacts nowadays openly compete with live performances. Increasingly, there are no “clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones”.13 In a 2008 Götterdämmerung production by the Flanders Opera, director Ivo Van Hove not only staged the singers in the opera production itself, he also made them perform simultaneously within the virtual world of Second Life, letting the singers navigate their avatars live on screen from behind their Apple notebooks. Second Life was incorporated into the dramatic visualization of Wagner’s interplay between the world of the gods and the world of man. According to Peggie Phelan, an event can be described as a live performance when “a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame” have an experience “of value which [leaves] no visible traces behind”,14 ergo: “Per12 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a mediatized culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). 13 Ibid., 7. See Steve Dixon, Digital performance: A history of new media in theatre, dance, performance art and installation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 115–134. 14 Peggy Phelan, as quoted in Philip Auslander, “LIVENESS. Performance and the anxiety of simulation”, in Performance and cultural politics, ed. by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 196.
626
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? formance’s only life is in the present”, although modern technology is even capable of taking this notion of liveness beyond the grave.15 Elvis still sings nowadays, albeit remediated in a live show with his former band members and the original backing vocals of The Sweet Inspirations and The Imperials. “The concept of Elvis Presley in Concert is a reproduction as authentic as possible of a real Elvis concert”, the agency promises us. Alas, Wagner himself died just a bit too early to benefit from this variant of immortality. Nevertheless, “Wagner” (by which I refer to his biography, his music, as well as his conceptual ideas) posthumously finds himself within a dense network of mediatized formats that actually cover a substantial part of the history of mediatization itself. “Wagner” in this sense has splendidly survived a century of technically mediatized innovations – from nineteenth-century caricatures to silent film appearances and subsequently to sound film, his compositions were captured in mono and stereo formats: from analogue to digital; from bakelite to vinyl; from CD and DVD to MP’s 3, 4 and beyond; from radio to high definition television-on-demand. The mediatized content of Wagner and his works can now be distributed via at least a dozen formats, varying from video-on-demand to simulcast and vodcast. If we subsequently list the multi-hued manifestations of the visually mediatized Wagner, this could result in a taxonomy that would more or less contain the following categories. (1) “Mediatizing” (parts of ) Wagner’s Work(s) using: (a) filmed opera (b) opera-film (c) virtual staging (content distribution via diverse media) (2) “Mediatizing” Wagner’s music as (partial) soundtracks: (a) (parts) of separate “numbers” (b) complete acts (content distribution via diverse media) (3) “Mediatizing” (parts of ) Richard Wagner’s vita as: (a) principal part (b) supporting character (content distribution via diverse media) 15 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The politics of performance (London: Routledge, 1996), 146.
627
Emile Wennekes (4) “Mediatizing” Wagner-inspired narratives and/or characters in: (a) derived (feature) film, or TV (series) (b) cartoons (c) video games (content distribution directly related to the specific medium) The moment the possibilities of a narrative visualization of some length could be realized, directors immediately grabbed Wagnerian opportunities. In the silent movie era, Wagner had already become a prominent feature; his character, his biography, as well as his opera protagonists inspired film narratives from the dawn of the medium. At the same time, his compositions could regularly be found in the recommendations for musical accompaniment on “cue sheets” compiled to suggest tunes for the sensitive “underscoring” of a silent scene. At that point, Wagner’s music was widely known and excerpts of it can be found on cue sheets throughout Europe as well as in the United States, where Edison started publishing cue sheets as of 1909. Hardly surprising, the “Wedding march” from Lohengrin was the most popular Wagner tune recommended in both Europe and the US.16 “Ride of the Valkyries” would probably make a good second. Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk strongly inf luenced silent film accompanists. Wagner had “argued that music in opera should not be privileged over other elements and should be composed in accordance with the dramatic needs of the story. Accompanists envisioned film music as performing the same function […] Silent film accompanists often used the leitmotif to unify musical accompaniment, and during the period of film’s transformation into a narrative form, leitmotifs became an important device for clarifying the story and assisting audiences to keep track of characters”.17 When the first orchestral scores were produced to accompany silent films, these were more rigidly in accordance with the wishes of the director, nevertheless the formula remained much the same. Joseph Carl Breil unmistakenly echoes Wagner’s principles when stating that: “The composer must remember that a character whom he has labeled with a theme at his first entrance does not appear in the same condition – in the same surroundings – nor in the same psychological mood at each re-appearance. Therefore the motif must in its further presentations be varied to suit the new situation”.18 16 Scott D. Paulin, “Postscript. Wagner in the silent era: Cue sheets and cinema music collections”, in Wagner and cinema (as note 5), 452–456, here 452. 17 See http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Music-MUSIC -IN-SILENT-FILM.html (last accessed: 24 May 2016). 18 Martin Miller Marks, Music and the silent film: Contexts and case studies 1895–1924 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 156.
628
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? Breil is the composer of the first “original” film score in the United States which accompanied D. W. Griffith’s epic 1915 movie The birth of a nation. In his score, Breil blends together a potpourri of borrowed tunes augmented with transitional passages of his own composition. Amidst the many borrowed themes, Wagner is prominent with crucial fragments from the Rienzi overture and “Ride of the Valkyries”. In his study on Music and the silent film, Martin Miller Marks notes that “Wagner’s Ride functions as the score’s ultimate “hurry”, and as such is well suited for a sequence which brings together shots of galloping riders, those in peril, and those who besiege them, through cross-cutting at a dizzying speed”.19 In this silently shot film, we already witness the genesis of a trend to come: “Walkürenritt” underscoring scrimmages, speedy scenes, races sequences and the like – from the Luftwaffe bombings in the German wartime newsreel Die Deutsche Wochenschau to The Blues brothers (dir.: John Landis, 1983), from Rebel without a cause (dir.: Nicholas Ray, 1955) to Repo man (dir.: Miguel Sapochnik, 2010), Excalibur (dir.: John Boorman, 1981) or Police academy 5 (dir.: Alan Myerson, 1988), and certainly the scene that became an icon in itself, the infamous f ly-bys from Apocalypse now, with its blurred interchange between diegetic and non-diegetic use of the music within a “panic inducing violence of infrasound”. 20 “Yeah, I use Wagner – scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it!” explains the character of Lt. Col Kilgore. “The meaning-baring music”, concluded Lawrence Kramer, “seems both to blend with the imagetext and envelop it, both to saturate and exceed it”. 21 Due to this memorable sequence, no subsequent cameratized helicopter scene is complete without at least a segment of “Ride of the Valkyries” resonating. This holds true for films like Jarhead (dir.: Sam Mendes, 2005), Watchmen (dir.: Zack Snyder, 2009), Super Troopers (dir.: Jay Chandrasekhar, 2001), uploaded YouTube films of f light shows or remote-controlled helicopters on scale, live-action TV (like episodes of the Myth Busters), or video games like Grand theft auto (1997), Saints Row (2006), Nintendogs (2005), Just cause (2006). Without altering a note, mediatizing has added extra meaningful layers to “Ride of the Valkyries”, making it a mediatized leitmotif in its own right. The use of Wagnerian tunes as mediatized trope codifiers has also had political impact. Nazi propaganda made use of it via the works of, among others, Leni Riefensthal and Karl Ritter. The allied forces exploited the exact same 19 Ibid., 146. 20 Steve Goodman, Sonic warfare: Sound, affect, and the ecology of fear (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2010). 21 Lawrence Kramer, Musical meaning: Toward a critical history (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 153.
629
Emile Wennekes strategy, making it grotesque, however – to either ridicule the Japanese enemy, as in “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” (dir.: Friz Freleng, 1944) or in the no less than brilliantly conceived Walt Disney cartoon “Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi” (dir.: Clyde Geronimi [uncredited], 1943). In this last cartoon, Siegfried, galloping to “Ride of the Valkyries”, turns out to be the Führer himself, whereas Brünnhilde represents Germany, not singing the Johotoho-onomatopoeia to her beloved, but “Heil Hitlu-hur, Heil Hitlu-hur!”22 In her book Unheard Melodies, Claudia Gorbman underlines that “(a) fast horse chase needs fast ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ music”, in order to be “appropriate to the scene”. 23 However, the more we hear this tune as a soundtrack, the more audible and significant it becomes. As a result, we experience some tension with one of the major classical film music principles: inaudibility. Film music is “not meant to be heard consciously. As such it should subordinate itself […] to visuals, i.e. to the primary vehicles of the narrative”, according to Gorbman. 24 Yet instead of remaining unheard, the moment this specific Wagner tune commences, we might effortlessly witness ourselves s(w)inging along. “(E)very viewer comes to the cinema carrying his or her own jukebox ready loaded”, argue Romney and Wootton in their book Celluloid jukebox, waiting “only for the filmmaker to hit the right button”. 25 Anahid Kassabian would in this case more likely refer to the “affiliating identifications” of the Walkürenritt since “perceivers bring external associations” with them. 26 After having been used for soundtracks intensively for over a century, “Ride of the Valkyries” is by now doomed to fail as “traditional” film music that subtly underscores a scene; one can no longer psychologically neglect the accumulated layers of associations as previously discussed. As a result of its mediatization, it has become a trope in popular culture, however ambiguous. For 22 See the talks by the author given at the conferences Sounds of wars and victories: Military musicians on battlefields and promenades (New York, organized by Zdravko Blažeković, CUNY, Research Center for Music Iconography, 11 November, 2014), entitled (1) “Parody and propaganda: Sounding the war through animations” and (2) “Mobilizing the celluloid soldier: Parody and propaganda in cartoons’, presented at the conference War of media – Media of war: The importance of music and media for propaganda in times of change (Vienna, organized by the University of Music and Performing Arts & the IMS Study Group Music and Media [MaM], 27 November 2015). 23 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard melodies: Narrative film music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; London: British Film Institute, 1987), 78. 24 Ibid., 73. 25 Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton, eds, Celluloid jukebox: Popular music and the movies since the 50s (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 2. 26 Anahid Kassabian, Hearing film: Tracking identifications in contemporary Hollywood film music (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 3.
630
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? Fig. 3. Image from What’s Opera, Doc? © Warner Bros, 1957.
serious purposes and due to its extensive use, “Ride of the Valkyries” may perhaps nowadays only be effectively used as a parody. In addition to these feature films, there is an astonishing amount of YouTube films that use “Ride of the Valkyries” as a soundtrack. The English language version of the piece alone resulted in hundreds of thousands of uploaded videos. Striking among the comments is the fact that even when the tune is used in serious, canonic film sequences, in many cases there is at least one viewer who posts the simple comment: “KILL DA WABBIT, KILL DA WABBIT!” This is a reference to the 1957 Warner Brothers’ cartoon What’s opera, Doc? of the Merrie Melodies series, directed by Chuck Jones. Here, the entire Ring des Nibelungen is hilariously condensed into a minimal narrative of less than seven minutes. Elmer Fudd – with spear and magic helmet, representing Siegfried – awaits Bugs Bunny in front of his rabbit hole, singing “KILL DA WABBIT” to the melody of “Ride of the Valkyries”. The music of the cartoon is a compilation of Wagnerian bits and pieces including: Der f liegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) (storm scene), Siegfried’s horn call from the music drama of the same name; “Ride” from Die Walküre; excerpts of Tannhäuser (Vorspiel, Chorus, Bacchanal) – all embodied in shrewd arrangements by Milt Franklin. The animation has been deemed the “greatest cartoon of all time” by a jury of one thousand animation professionals. 27 It was the first cartoon to be preserved in America’s National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. The result of the creative recycling process – here even in mediatized parody – is clearly culturally significant. The discipline of linguistics has unveiled the mechanisms behind such recycling processes; this might help us to better understand these receptional occurrences. Julia Kristeva concluded early on that 27 Jerry Black, ed., The 50 greatest cartoons: As selected by 1,000 animation professionals (Atlanta; GA: Turner Publishing, 1994).
631
Emile Wennekes every text is “the absorption and transformation of another” and “constructed as a mosaic of quotes”. 28 We could adopt this qualification by transferring it to musical texts: ergo, every musical text is the absorption and transformation of another and is constructed as a mosaic of quotes. This is applicable to all individual components of Wagner’s “Ride” including its 9/8 meter, the B minor key, its dotted eighth/sixteenth note rhythm, the underlying trills, as well as the switching back and forth from major to minor modes. Out of these separate building blocks, used repeatedly, Wagner erected his original orchestral construction, a catchy composition that has been subsequently copied many, many times. To put it into a simple chart:
Here, composer B quotes A, as for instance Hans Zimmer does with “Ride” in his film Rango. Zimmer quotes Wagner literally, yet he also gradually adds a Jew’s harp, a banjo, and a harmonica. Ideally, the listener here “communicates” with composer A (Wagner) as well as with composer B (Zimmer), well aware of the irony involved. Ideally, the listener is capable of interpreting Zimmer’s adaptation as a musical quotation, having some background notion about what is original and what is superficial, and of course, some knowledge of the connotation of the unexpected instrumentation. 28 Julia Kristeva, “Word, dialogue, and novel”, in Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 66.
632
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? If we now change the “listener” into “recipient” (with thanks to Hans-Robert Jauss), we might be able to broaden the appropriateness of this simple blue print. To yet again scrounge in the backyard of linguistics, one could refer to Gérard Genette who studied trans-textuality and hyper-textuality, a relational concept that is also applicable to musical analysis. 29 In his theoretical approach, he defines an original hypo text as well as a hyper text: one that is grafted onto the older one. We could adapt this terminology by only slightly altering the types into a “Hypo tune” and a “Hyper tune”. So if we now also substitute composers A and B for a Hypo and a Hyper Tune respectively, it results in the next diagram:
With popular borrowed tunes, the recipient’s notion of what the real Hypo tune is and what the Hyper one is might get blurred. In the case of “Ride of the Valkyries” we have a Hypo composition and an enormous number of Hyper Contexts in which the original composition is presented. The more Hyper contexts a Hypo composition accumulates, the more confusing it becomes and the more complex to distinguish whether a fragment first and foremost refers to the Hypo tune or to some Hyper context (tune) or to both. There is also the recipient’s capability to refer (either consciously or subconsciously) to 29 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the second degree (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
633
Emile Wennekes yet other Hyper contexts, intentional or otherwise by the one who presents any specific Hyper context. The relational web gets denser and denser and all references lose their clean-cut focus to become receptively ambiguous.
634
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? Here, the Hypo composition remains Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, and the Hyper context A is Zimmer’s arrangement. But what if the recipient associates the tune more with Kill da wabbit – Hyper context B – than with Wagner’s Die Walküre? The communicational lines then take on a different pattern:
635
Emile Wennekes The more familiar Hyper context B is, the stronger it steers the recipient’s association. Neutral use of alternative Hyper contexts then becomes even more complex as the previously mentioned posted comments on “KILL DA WABBIT” clearly illustrate. In order to effectively present a new Hyper context, a presenter has to deal with at least some previous contexts. He might even be able to make explicit use of this multiple associative network, by assuming and consequently playing upon the recipient’s association of Hyper context B.
636
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? A hilarious example of this is the 12 April 2007 “Cleveland” episode of the American television series 30 rock. When the phone of Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey) goes off during her lunch break, we hear “Ride of the Valkyries” as her ring tone. Her posh friend Phoebe asks whether she likes Wagner, to which Liz replies that she likes Elmer Fudd. Blond colleague Jenna immediately reacts by bursting into “Kill da Wabbit, Kill da Wabbit!” Ten years prior to this episode, the television animation series Hey Arnold! also made use of a double entendre Wagnérien. In a 1998 episode entitled “What’s opera, Arnold?”, Mr. Packenham takes his class on an opera field trip. The episode is mainly about Carmen but the references to the previously mentioned Bugs Bunny cartoon are difficult to miss. By analyzing the mediated reception of “Ride of the Valkyries”, one can hardly ignore the notion of traveling through the “four phases of the image” as signaled by the French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard in his famous essay Simulacra and Simulations. 30 We could argue that the musical motive began as a basic narrative reference but by being repeatedly quoted, it went on to “mask” and “pervert” this basic reference. Subsequently, the absence of this basic reference has become increasingly “masked”. Finally, it has reached a detached stage in which quotes of “Ride of the Valkyries” in fact bear no relation to a Wagnerian reference whatsoever: it has become its own pure simulacrum. Every mediated “Ride of the Valkyries” tells its own story, mostly detached from its basic narrative reference. It has developed into a simulacrum or a trope in its own right, with no remaining relation to the plot of Die Walküre or the story of Der Ring des Nibelungen. That Wagner created the Hypo composition (with both score and story) is hardly relevant nowadays within a myriad of Hypo contexts. In another series of associational uses of “Ride of the Valkyries” as soundtrack, this again becomes clear. In 1983, Maxell Electric Industrial Company launched a long-running commercial for its audio-cassettes. In the ad, created by art director Lars Anderson, a cassette tape is put into a stereo by a butler. “Ride of the Valkyries” then blows away the seated listener. This scene with the “blown away guy” has often been parodied: in the “Model misbehaviour” episode of the animation series Family guy (dir.: Sarah Frost, 2005), in the feature film Stay tuned (dir.: Peter Hyams, 1992) or in Jackass 3D (dir.: Jeff Tremaine, 2010), where Ryan Dunn gets blown away by a jet plane engine. The soundtrack in all these scenes is “Ride of the Valkyries”.
30 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, transl. by Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss and Paul Patton (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983).
637
Emile Wennekes
Fig. 4 Image from Maxell commercial. © Youtube.com
All music in today’s society reveals itself as mediatized. This (r)evolutionary process has clearly made its mark on both performing practice and listener’s practice on countless levels. This “mediatizing” is not a strictly straightforward analytical or scholarly concept, more “an ambiguous term which refers to the technically mediated communication”, as media expert Esa Väliverronen once put it, albeit it in a different context. 31 This ambiguous term is not limited to mediated communication alone: it also deeply inf luences the subject being communicated, the way the artefact is distributed, the way it is received (or perceived), the way it achieves new significance and/or accumulates augmentative layers of meaning. “With the ability to manipulate sound through […] technology, musicians have been able to transcend space, time and physical limitations, and in the process have created wholly new sounds, works, and performance traditions”, to quote Mark Katz. 32 This may bring to mind Lauritz Melchior’s own record debut of 1913 as he made his first commercial recording for the Danish HMV notably as a baritone, not as a tenor! In his presence within the various media types, Wagner may not be unique, 31 Esa Väliverronen, “From mediation to mediatization: The new politics of communicating science and biotechnology”, in The politics of public issues, ed. by Ulamaija Kivikuru and Tarja Savolainen (Helsinki: Department of Communication, University of Helsinki, 2001), 159. 32 Mark Katz, Capturing sound: How technology has changed music (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 200), 41.
638
Walküre or Wabbit; Richard and/or Rango? yet in the dazzling amount of his representations he is pre-eminent. These numerical facts, when combined with the multi-faced forms by which he is represented, elevate “Wagner” to a category sui generis. What commenced with Griffith and Breil when they chose an adequate sound track for their silently shot Birth of a nation (1915), has gradually mushroomed into a complicated citational labyrinth, a “looney tuney” jungle with a preponderant amount of musical parasites and pathogens. In the mediatized Wagner reception, you might never know for sure whether it is Die Walküre or the Wabbit that is at stake; whether it is Richard and/or Rango.
639
Emile Wennekes
640
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism
Cristina Santarelli Istituto per i Beni Musicali in Piemonte, Torino
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism Can anyone imagine anything in the arts that would surpass the visible rendering of sound, which would enable the eyes to partake of all the pleasures which music gives to the ears? (Louis-Bertrand Castel, S.J.)1 Abstract. In June 1913, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright presented themselves in Munich as “Synchromist” painters. These artists, who had settled in Paris in 1909 and 1911 respectively, defended a painting of “pure vision”, characterized by musical analogy and whose model was Delaunay’s prismatic concept of space. They began studying with painter and color theorist Ernest Percyval TudorHart, who disclosed to them the correlation between light and sound. MacdonaldWright and Russell advanced Tudor-Hart’s theories and created a style of painting based on chromatic contrasts and the use of color scales similar to musical scales. In their paintings 1913–1917, the organizational basis of composition is the concept of “principal rhythm”, also called the “hollow and bump”, consisting of two opposing lines interlocked to achieve an overall synthesis of essential harmonic components; schematized by two contraposed curves, it expresses the relationship between tension and relaxation, acting as a visual metaphor for perfect balance of fundamental opposites. The form is defined by color alone, according to the well-known psychophysical phenomenon that warm colors seem to advance and cool colors to retreat in the visual field; so, “color melodies” are generated by spacing colors out, separated by neutral ground. During the ensuing years, this concept of harmony residing in the polarity between opposites was increasingly expanded by artists’ exposure to Eastern thinking, especially the idea of Tao hinged on yin/yang dualism: although Oriental scales are completely different from Western scales, voids in Chinese painting had a function similar to the use of espacement in the synchromist aesthetic.
In modern art, the term “Synchromism” refers to an abstract style of painting founded in 1913 in Paris by the Americans Morgan Russell (1886–1953) 1
Quotation drawn from Faber Birren, Color: A survey in words and pictures, from ancient mysticism to modern science (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963), 124.
641
Cristina Santarelli and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973). 2 After their move to the French capital, the two artists, initially oriented figuratively, were inf luenced by late nineteenth-century movements such as Cloisonnism of Emile Bernard and Synthetism of Paul Gauguin, as well as by some leading figures of the international avant-garde (Vasilij Kandinskij, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka), and they began to explore the properties and effects of color. Closely related to Orphism 3 in the prismatic conception of a space governed by the decomposition of light, Synchromism was interested both in the volumetric experiments of Cubism and in the studies on optics developed by Pointillism. It is based on the assumption that sound and color are similar phenomena and that the latter can be orchestrated on the canvas or on paper in the same way a composer harmonizes frequencies, timbres and modulations in a musical score.4 In the programmatic manifesto included in the catalogue of the movement’s first exhibition, held at Munich’s Neues Kunstsalon in June 1913, we read: Mankind has until now always tried to satisfy its need for the highest spiritual exaltation only in music. Only tones have been able to grip us 2
3
4
642
On the movement and its exponents, see the following contributions: Willam C. Agee, Synchromism and color principles in American painting: 1910–1930, exhibition catalogue (New York: M. Knedler & Co., 1965); Andrew Hudson, The art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, National Collection of Fine Arts, 1967); Gail Levin, ed., Synchromism and American color abstraction, 1910–1925, exhibition catalogue (New York: George Braziller, 1978); Donelson Farquhar Hoopes, Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Paintings, 1903–1973 (Los Angeles: Arco Center for Visual Art, 1979); Marilyn Kushner, Morgan Russell (New York: Hudson Hills, 1990); Synchromism: Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, exhibition catalogue (New York: Hollis-Taggart Galleries, 1999); Will South, ed., Color, myth, and music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism, exhibition catalogue (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001, 39–65). In addition: Abraham A. Davidson, Early American modernist painting, 1910–1935 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); John Gage, Colour and culture. Practice and meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993); Robert Hughes, American visions: The epic history of art in America (New York: Knopf, 1994); Nancy Mowll Mathews, ed., American dreams: American art to 1950 in the Williams College Museum of Art (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2001). Despite their affinity with the thinking of Delaunay, Russell and Macdonald-Wright affirmed from the beginning their complete lack of involvement in the French avant-garde: a statement not easy to maintain since the text Sur la Lumière was published in Germany six months before their Munich debut. In fact, translated into German by Paul Klee, it was published in January 1913 in the journal Der Sturm, which Herwarth Walden published in Berlin since 1910; see Robert Delaunay, Du Cubisme à l’Art Abstrait, ed. by Pierre Francastel (Paris: Sevpen, 1957). See also Virginia Spate, Orphism: The evolution of non-figurative painting in Paris, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Similar investigations of rhythm, color and movement were conducted at the beginning of the century by the Italian Divisionists and later by the Futurists, by the Russian CuboFuturists, by Francis Picabia and by Fernand Léger.
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism and transport us to the highest realms. Whenever man had a desire for heavenly intoxication, he turned to music. Yet color is just as capable as music of providing us with the highest ecstasies and delights […] In freeing ourselves from certain previous restraints and stepping boldly into the unknown, we have been able to wrest from nature its secrets in order to bring painting to its highest point of intensity. Although painting is intellectually a step ahead of music, it leans closer to reality, for vision brings us stronger ties to nature than does our hearing. It is impossible in our art to arrive at greater heights when we have finally reached that point. 5 Russell and Macdonald-Wright were among a number of avant-garde artists operating immediately before World War I who believed that realism in the visual arts had long since reached a point of exhaustion; their “Synchromies”, based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, are considered the first abstract works in American art. In 1913, they exhibited in Paris at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, attracting the attention of the critics Guillaume Apollinaire 6 and Louis Vauxcelles, and at the Armory Show in New York, causing scandal among the public;7 Russell then attended regularly the most important Parisian events, including the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. Although Synchromism is unanimously considered an artistic movement with only two voices – just to remain with the musical metaphor – other American painters would at least partially follow the example of Russell and Macdonald-Wright: among them Arthur B. Davies, Patrick Henry Bruce, Andrew Dasburg, and especially Thomas Hart Benton. On 20 March 1915 Aleksandr Skrjabin performed Prometej: Poema ognja [Prometheus: The Poem of Fire] op. 60 at Carnegie Hall in New York; a color organ called the Chromola was built especially for this event by the Edison Testing Laboratories. Critical reactions was generally negative: The concert received a tremendous amount of notice worldwide and stimulated a great deal of serious thinking on how to go about creating an art of mobile color. If Scriabin’s arbitrary sound-color relations 5
6 7
See Ausstellung der Synchromisten. S. Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, exhibition catalogue (Munich: Der neue Kunstalon, 1913). The movement’s manifestos and other programmatic statements were republished and expanded by Willard Huntington Wright, Stanton’s brother, in the book Modern painting: Its tendency and meaning (New York: John Lane, 1915). Leroy C. Breuning, ed., Apollinaire on Art: Essays and reviews 1902–1918 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987). Milton Wolf Brown, The story of the Armory Show (Washington: Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1963; reprint New York: Abbeville Press, 1988).
643
Cristina Santarelli failed to persuade, the performance nevertheless convinced many that color music is feasible, if only it were based on the scientific study of color and its psychological effects as well as the development of a sophisticated technology for projecting colors and forms. Prometheus stood as a model of how to shape an artwork around a spiritual concept, and its premise that the art of light could be based on the laws of music would certainly have made an impact on artists striving for nonobjective painting. 8 This convergence of music and painting was widespread in Europe during the teens.9 In Concerning the spiritual in art (1911), Vasilij Kandinskij wrote about the analogies between sound and color: The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes, or dark lake in the treble […] color is a power which directly inf luences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.10 Synchromist painting expressed a potential dynamic destined to be transformed into movement thanks to the kinetic machines its authors invented for the projection of abstract animations. Begun in the mid-1910s, the project was brought to fruition much later, when Macdonald-Wright constructed, along with Frank P. Herrnfeld, a device that he called Synchrome Kineidoscope.11 In turn, Morgan Russell devised a box which projected colored rays 8
See James M. Baker, “Prometheus in America: The Significance of the World Premier of Scriabin’s Poem of fire as Color-Music, New York, 20 March 1915”, in Over here! Modernism, the first exile, 1914–1919, ed. by Kermit S. Champa (Providence, R. I.: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 1989, 106). 9 See Glenn Watchins, Soundings: Music in the twentieth century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988). 10 Vasilij Kandinskij, Concerning the spiritual in art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977, 25). 11 An historical antecedent of the Synchrome Kineidoscope and all the color organs constructed between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century is the clavecin oculaire invented by the mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel in 1735 to put into practice Newton’s theories on the correspondences between sound and color. The colors chosen by Castel (blue, red, yellow) symbolized the C-E-G triad, while other intermediate hues completed the C major scale; the keys were connected to ampoules filled with colored substances and when struck produced certain tonalities. Castel’s experiments were followed by other inventions, such as the color organs (1876) of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, George Field and Bainbridge Bishop, the clavecin à lumière (1895) built by Alexander Wallace Rimington and used by Skrjabin in his Prometheus, the Sarabet (1916) of Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, the Chromopiano (1921) of Arthur C. Vinageras, the Clavilux (1921) of Thomas Wilfred, the cromofono (1921) of Guido Carlo
644
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism controlled by a commutator, transforming the painting into a sort of imaginary vision of light in motion; throughout his writings, he suggested that the music that would accompany this machine run slow because the changing of the lights would have to be slow as well.12 Although it proceeded through ups and downs related to financial and technological difficulties, the Synchrome Kineidoscope project was revived after World War II and the first version saw the light in the late 1950s. In 1967, the Smithsonian American Art Museum held a retrospective exhibition of the works of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, at which time the artist was invited to Washington to present his machine to the public.13 Here, however, we are not so much interested in discussing this invention – today virtually forgotten – but rather in analyzing, by means of the protagonists’ writings, the aesthetic basis of an avant-garde movement which, despite its short duration, exerted a lasting inf luence on American artists until the birth of Action Painting and Color Field Painting. In a series of notes dated August 1912, Morgan Russell maintained that painting should be able to arouse emotions comparable to those induced by music: to this end he suggested sacrificing completely the object and focusing attenVisconti di Modrone, the color organs (1925) of Alexander László, and Ludwig HirschfeldMark, the musichrome (1930) of George L. Hall. Finally, we should mention the Optophonic Piano (1916) of Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, whose production was an incessant research of the synesthetic associations, the stroboscopic effects of light and the play of color in movement. The device, which projected light through colored translucent discs with abstract shapes creating moving compositions able to translate musical passages by Beethoven, Grieg and other composers, was presented for the first time in Moscow at the Meyerholds Theater in 1923. 12 Notebook 8, September 1912, Russell Archives, Montclair. For further information on the history of so-called “color instruments”, see the following contributions: Adrian Bernard Klein, Colour Music, the Art of Light (London: Lockwood, 1930); Alexandre László, Die Farblichtmusik und ihre Forschungsgebiete (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1925; reprinted in: Farbe-Licht-Musik, Synästesie und Farblichtmusik, ed. by Jörg Jewanski and Natalia Sidler, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, 276–337); Kenneth Peacock, “Instruments to perform colormusic: Two centuries of technological experimentation”, Leonardo 21/4 (1988), 397–406; Paula F. Glick,“The First Appearance of Chevreul’s Color Theory in America”, American Art Journal 27/1–2 (1995–1996), 101–105; Barbara Kienscherf, Das Auge hört mit. Die Idee der Farblichtmusik und ihre Problematik (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996); Judith K. Zilczer, “Music for the Eyes: Abstract Painting and Light Art”, in Visual music: Synaesthesia in art and music since 1900, ed. by Kerry Brougher et al. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005); Jörg Jewanski, “Von der Farbe-Ton-Beziehung zur Farblichtmusik”, in Farbe-Licht-Musik, Synästesie und Farblichtmusik, ed. by Jörg Jewanski and Natalia Sidler (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 132–209. 13 A Washington Post journalist described the complex device and its effects in this way: “Four projectors, three 35 millimeter black and white films (two of which cross each other behind a projector) and a color ‘control’ are involved in a process of 17 different operations which send overlapping color shapes marching across the screen in different directions, make them disappear in a fade-out, or transformation or ‘mutation’ of color ‘key’”.
645
Cristina Santarelli tion on parameters such as the plane, the line, the rhythm, the color, in other words the purely abstract components of pictorial composition: Search for a rhythmic basis to color – the struggle of warms and colds […] Forget the linear outlines of objects […] never will you arrive at expression in painting until this habit is lost – ignore borders/profiles except where light renders them prominent – make little spectrums that is all – an order of little spectrums.14 In October, after visiting the pivotal Salon de la Section d’Or held at the Galérie La Boétie in Paris, Russell invented the term “synchromy” as a label to identify the new manner of painting: initially he had thought of the term “symphony”, which however lent itself poorly to use in the semantics of light: This is Cubisme, Futurism, Synchromisme and any “isms” possible for many years and perhaps centuries. The concrete vision of the various tendencies of modern art after they have been melted into a unit – a vision having a complete and satisfying character of totality is the power of composing curves, angles, colors, light gradations in such a manner that they evoke in a satisfactory manner the emotion of reality […] The vision of composition will be of course quite complexe [sic] and the fragments of reality that are “expressed”, not represented, will be superposed [sic] and cut each other. Instead of directly working from objects and trying to pull out a more or less “musical” whole the modern artist will have a complete mastery over scales and harmonic relations of colors, of curves, of angles, and of these in relation one to the other and their appropriate connection with the material subtleties of reality.15 Additionally, he was intrigued with the emotional sensations inherent in colors: Colors are all in reality subjective – but they have relatively objective degrees. Thus violet blue emotions us weakly and appears to our senses as weak subjective. Yellow Orange affects us on surface – superficially – and is most objective […] shadow equals mystery, coldness and estrangement – and lacks positiveness and heat of life. Light – a sunlight equals positiveness, warmth and elatement and is […] cheerful and life-giving.16 14 Notebook, August 1912, Russell Archives, Montclair. 15 Notebook 9, October 1912, Russell Archives, Montclair. 16 Ibid.
646
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism
Fig. 1. Morgan Russell (1886–1953), Synchromy in blue-violet, 1913, oil on canvas, 55.25 x 38.1 cm (21¾ x 15 in). Minneapolis: Curtis Galleries
An attentive observer of the Parisian scene of those years, Russell was informed that Paul Sérusier had used the word “synchromie” as the title of a painting exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910 and in 1911;17 this did not prevent Russell from presenting the first declared Synchromist work, 17 On this topic, see William C. Agee, “Morgan Russell, then and now: Notes on an American modernist”, in Kushner, Morgan Russell (as note 2), 18; as well as Donald Edward Gordon, Modern art wxhibitions 1900–1916 (Munich: Prestel, 1974), vol. 2, 387, 481.
647
Cristina Santarelli Synchromy in Green (1913), in the same venue. To fully explain his pictorial message, the artist considered it important to indicate the musical grounds on which he constructed his paintings. This emerges from a short booklet sent to his patroness Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney18 regarding the canvas Synchromy in Blue-Violet, exhibited in Paris in autumn 1913 (fig. 1): a large part of the pamphlet, entitled “Harmonic analysis of the Big synchromie en bleu-violacé” (in French in the text), consists of a list of the structural components of the painting, referred to as “first theme”, “second theme”, and so on. He also describes its palette in musical terms, calling the main colors (blue, violet) “tonic” and the secondary ones (orange, red) “subdominant”, concluding that the central tonality of the painting derives from the opposition of blue-violet and yellow, the latter being the “dominant” of the tonality indicated as blue-violet: I have found the solution in my manner of treating light – i.e. translating the half-tones by colors naturally midway in value from yellow to blue – that is by reds, orange and greens. Never in painting has color been composed in the same sense. The firm belief that a painting can be conceived in a certain musical tonality, favoring some colors over others, may seem difficult to accept; we know, however, that these ideas were circulating in the manuals of the time.19 Indeed, Russell derived his thinking from the teachings of Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart, a Canadian painter deeply involved with experimenting in the domain of color-sound equivalents, whose lectures he attended along with Macdonald-Wright in Paris. 20 Tudor-Hart was convinced that sounds and colors are similar in terms of both their psychological effects and the way in which they are perceived:21 18 Morgan Russell to Mrs Harry Paine Whitney (Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney), 2 December 1913, The Morgan Russell Archives and Collection, The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry M. Reed. 19 Jean D’Udine, L’Orchestration des Couleurs. Analyse, Classification et Synthèse Mathématiques des Sensations Colorées (Paris: A. Joanin, 1903). 20 See the monograph by Alasdair Alpin McGregor, Percyval Tudor-Hart 1873–1954: Portrait of an artist (London: P. R. Macmillan, 1961). 21 Among the key figures whose ideas exerted a strong influence on the synchromist notion of color and sound, Isaac Newton established seven primary colors that made up white light: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet; he limited the spectrum to seven hues because there are seven notes in the Western musical scale, excluding sharps and flats. His discoveries found a fierce opponent in Louis-Bertrand Castel who believed that color and music were derived from a common mysterious physical source other than light and hence they behaved according to the same aesthetic principles.
648
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism In both cases [that of color and sound] our knowledge of their mode of perception, and the exact relation between subjective reaction and objective stimulus, is as yet largely a matter of conjecture […] Before investigating the analogy of sound and colour intervals it is necessary to emphasize the fact that the psychological equivalent of the simultaneous perception of two or more sounds is the simultaneous perception of two or more juxtaposed colours. Melody in colour will therefore result from the espacement of colours, their isolation by intervening neutral tint, and also from the order in which colours lie on the field of vision. 22 In substance, the colors of a given scale should not be mixed, because they would lose their individuality; they should merely be placed near each other to be able to perform the function of chords. Persuaded of the possibility of demonstrating exact physical and mathematical correspondences between visual and acoustic phenomena, he postulates that, just as the octaves in music are based on the progressive increase of frequencies, the same occurs with the color scale: This is of prime importance in the general analogy between sound and colour. In sound the octaves rise in pitch from bass to treble, in a geometrical progression by a power of two, i.e., each octave has double the number of vibrations of the preceding one. We may express the analogy thus. As sound rises in pitch, a note and its successive octaves appear to the senses as equal intervals. The vibrations of these intervals increase in a geometrical progression. Similarly as light increases from darkness the “notes” and their luminosity octaves appear to the senses as equal intervals; and these intervals are constructed by increments of luminosity in a geometrical progression. 23 With regard to the other parameters of sound, if the pitch in acoustics corresponds to brightness in optics, the intensity (“designating strength or weakness of sounds”) is equivalent to color saturation and the timbre to tonality. After these considerations, the author reiterates the hackneyed belief that the lowest notes of the scale (A-f lat, A, B-f lat and B) would induce “melancholy and sadness” in the listener, just like blue and violet, while D-sharp, E and F carry “an emotion of brightness and cheerfulness”, just like yellow-orange, yellow and yellow-green. Although in a conventional diagram – such as those 22 Ernest Percyval Tudor-Hart, “The analogy of sound and colour”, Cambridge Magazine 7/21 (2 March 1918), 480–486, here 480, 485. 23 See Levin, Synchromism and American color abstraction, 1910–1925 (as note 2), 31.
649
Cristina Santarelli proposed in the nineteenth century by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Otto Runge or Charles Blanc – the colors of the spectrum are distributed evenly around the circumference, in the scheme identified by Tudor-Hart the three primary colors (red, yellow and blue) are equidistant, as are the three secondary colors (orange, gray and violet or purple). By inserting another six intermediate or tertiary colors24 (red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet and red-violet or purple) in the spaces between the primary and secondary colors, one obtains a chromatic circle consisting of twelve colors; by matching each sector of this circle to a semitone in music, one can in theory construct major and minor scales of light frequencies by choosing from time to time a different color as “tonic”: It will be found that the intervals between the colours are pleasant to the eye in exactly the same degree as the sounds are to the ear [and] that each harmonic is in consonance with its fundamental colour, just as in sound each harmonic is in consonance with its tone (or generating sound). 25 Returning to Synchromy in Blue-Violet, the color scale identified by Russell is as follows: blue-violet, red-violet, orange-red, orange, yellow, green and blue. According to Tudor-Hart, of the twelve colors that make up the spectrum, yellow is the one closest to white light while blue-violet is absolutely the least bright; this allows the painter to produce the greatest possible contrast by placing advancing yellow areas next to receding blue-violet areas. 26 The organizational basis of the painting’s composition, illustrated by means of a diagram in the booklet for Mrs. Whitney, is the concept of “principal rhythm”, desumed from antiquity and described as “only a composition of color & light, the form generated being but a simple order of projections and hollows”; schematized by two contraposed curves, it expresses the relationship between tension and relaxation, acting as a visual metaphor for perfect balance of fundamental opposites. The novelty of the synchromist method 24 The tertiary colors are made by mixing a primary and one of its adjacent secondaries, for example, red-orange (tertiary), a mixture of red (primary) and orange (secondary). 25 See Tudor-Hart, “The analogy of sound and colour” (as note 22), 486. 26 In an unpublished document written in August 1973 (The roots of Synchromism) MacdonaldWright retrospectively analyzed the influences on the evolution of his language by painters who used color in an unconventional manner, such as Eugène Delacroix, William Turner, Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. Also important in its development were the theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul set out in his De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1839), according to which the warm colors (red, yellow, orange) advance toward the eye while cold ones (blue, violet, green) recede; moreover, each color influences the adjacent one in the direction of its complement, changing its perception by the observer.
650
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism
Fig. 2. Morgan Russell (1886–1953), Synchromy in orange: To form, 1913–1914, oil on canvas, 347.98 x 314.96 cm (135 x 121½ in). Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1958 (inv.-no.: K1958:16).
consists of the attempt to merge the common essences of sound and color, since this contrapposto rhythm – “a very primitive and elementary thing” – is the principle informing both musical harmony and color harmony. 27 Another painting crucial to Russell’s poetics is Synchromy in Orange: To Form, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1914 (fig. 2).
27 About his work in the same period, Macdonald-Wright commented: “I strive to divest my art of all anecdote and illustration and to purify it to the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic, as when listening to good music [...] I cast aside as nugatory all natural representation in my art. However, I still adhered to the fundamental laws of composition (placements and displacements of mass, as in the human body in movement) and created my pictures by means of color-form, which, by its organization in three dimensions, resulted in rhythm”; see Anne Harrell, The Forum Exhibition: Selections and additions, Whitney Museum of American Art (18 May–22 June 1983), 23.
651
Cristina Santarelli Fig. 3. Morgan Russell (1886–1953), Cosmic Synchromy, 1913–1914, oil on canvas, 41.28 x 33.34 cm (16½ x 13¼ in). Utica (N.Y.): Munson William Proctor Arts Institute (inv.-no.: 57.26).
In a notebook used in February and March of that year, the artist remarked that the composition of chords and tonalities must always be subordinate to the form: The composition of chords or tonalities must be a result of the form under-structure – Thus a picture conceived as a projection at top and at bottom with a hollow in the middle must be a combination of three tonalities giving these form results […] The composition must be conceived as an order of volume and space – of projection and hollow – this without any doubt whatsoever is the foundation of all painting, the skeleton in which the rest grows and develops for light means volume and space [and] color also means volume and space but once this part [is] thoroughly conceived it should generate its light and dark and consequently color organization. 28 By virtue of its name, the painting is concerned with the color orange: the yellow, green and blue triad of adjacent colors on the right side of the canvas blend into the triad of green, blue and yellow-orange underneath; movement throughout the composition can be read as a progression of the color chords 28 Russell Archives and Collection, notebook no. 17, The Montclair Art Museum.
652
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism from one area to the next. The sculptural quality of the central mass is generated by the color peculiarities: warm hues indicate a bulging or convex surface and cool hues a receding or concave one. Traces of representational elements can be found also in Cosmic Synchromy (1914), one of Russell’s favorite works (fig. 3). Although the painting apparently consists of the simple juxtaposition of pure colors of the spectrum, calculated with the aim to create color scales, melodies and harmonies, an underlying spiral structure makes reference to the examples of Renaissance sculpture that the two painters studied at the Louvre: I have always felt the need of imposing on color the same violent twists and spirals that Rubens, Michelangelo etc. imposed on form […] It is only by a sense of continuity or curve in color that one can produce an effect as emotional as that of music on us – This sense of color-curves sort of carries one around and not only up and down or from side to side as line does but is a powerful manner of drawing us into space back and forth in waves. 29 The same happens in some later canvases by Macdonald-Wright, for instance Synchromy in blue (1916, fig. 4) and Synchromy in green and orange (ca. 1916–1917, fig. 5): in both cases we are faced by an overt figuration, based on classical themes rendered in a more atmospheric setting able to suggest a timeless ambience. During the ensuing years, this concept of harmony residing in the tension between opposites was increasingly expanded by the artist’s exposure to Eastern thinking, especially the idea of Tao hinged on yin/yang dualism: voids in Chinese painting had a function similar to the use of espacement in the synchromist aesthetic: This relationship of thing or action to the observer is the starting point of a work of art. The event itself is of no possible importance further than being the spark that ignites. Here again a demonstration of Lao Tzu’s empty spaces. Nothing exists between the thing and the result which follows and yet every particle of its importance to the artist lies in this vortex of nothingness. 30 Reverting to Russell’s Synchromy in orange, it is also evident to a lay eye that the work is based on careful juxtapositions of two, three and even four colors contained mainly in trapezoidal or fan shapes. In line with the title, the orange 29 Morgan Russell to Mrs Harry Paine Whitney. 30 Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Lectures to the Art Students’ League of Los Angeles, recorded and transcribed by Mabel Alvarez, Museum of Modern Art Library.
653
Cristina Santarelli
Fig. 4. Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), Synchromy in blue, ca. 1917–1918, oil on canvas, 66.4 x 51.1 cm (26¼ x 20⅛ in). New York: The Museum of Modern Art, The Sydney and Harriet Janis Collection (inv.-no. 629.1967).
chords prevail in the painting; the red-orange and yellow-blue-green combinations are also recurrent, as if to suggest a dominant seventh chord. In truth, the painter, while faithfully following the orange scale identified by TudorHart (orange, yellow, green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange), seems to seek different relations among different tonal centers, emphasizing the way in which the color suggests support and dispersal, full and empty 654
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism
Fig. 5. Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), Synchromy in green and orange, 1916, oil on canvas, 86.68 x 76.52 cm (34⅛ x 30⅛ in). Minneapolis: Collection Walker Art Center, Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, Hudson D. Walker Collection (inv.-no.: 1953.49).
655
Cristina Santarelli
Fig. 6. Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Bubbles, ca. 1914–1917, oil on canvas, 55.9 x 41.9 cm (21¾ x 16½ in). Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Gift of H. L. Mencken (inv.-no.: 1947.317).
656
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism (“the hollow and the bump”), giving “the illusion that the canvas develops, like music, in time”. 31 Thomas Hart Benton 32 does the same in Bubbles (1916, fig. 6), where the circular forms act in contrast to the angular forms in a riot of swirling rhythms closely resembling the two Conception synchromy works by Macdonald-Wright respectively (in the) Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and in the New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (figs. 7 and 8). These noteworthy pictures are built on color scales, creating rhythmic zones with advancing and receding hues; they typically originate from a central vortex and explode in complex chromatic harmonies. The painter avoided using atmospheric perspective, relying solely on pigment and shape to delineate form: “Painting being the art of color, any quality of a picture not expressed by color is not painting”. 33 The method devised by Tudor-Hart is basically the one Macdonald-Wright would later put forward in his Treatise on color.34 Although it appeared only in 1924, the book contained ideas from at least a decade earlier, arising from the conversations with Russell during his time in Paris. Fascinated by the art of Whistler and the masters of synesthesia such as Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter claimed already in 1919 to have identified, together with his Canadian master, Tudor-Hart, and Russell, a pictorial analogon of musical techniques: 31 “In Synchromy in orange, the viewer moves in and out of space, following the rhythms established, while everywhere this movement and space are determined by color […] Synchromy in orange attempts that very sensation. To realize the full desired and intended sensations, a viewer could not experience the work simultaneously, but rather had to move along with the espacement of color and along with the pushing and pulling contrast of curves. This virtual engagement necessarily had to occur over a period of time, much the same as listening to a sequence of musical notes”. The frequent mention of a fourth dimension indicates that the Synchromists could have become aware of the topic from attending lectures by the philosopher Henri Bergson in Paris. See South, Color, myth, and music (as note 2), 51, 53. 32 In his autobiography, Benton recalled his encounter with Synchromism in this way: “As I had not lost my curiosity, aroused the year before, about the Synchromist color system, I asked to have it revealed so that I might explore its possibilities for my own work. This system, invented by Tudor-Hart, a Canadian scientist-painter residing in Paris, took the form of a spectral wheel so divided that triads of harmoniously related colors could be automatically determined. I was immediately taken by its complete rationality and with my usual enthusiasm for a new painting theory set about experimenting with it”. See Thomas Hart Benton, An American in art: A professional and technical autobiography (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1969), 36. 33 Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, introduction to Exhibition of Synchromist paintings by Morgan Russell and S. Macdonald-Wright (New York: Carroll Galeries, 1914). 34 A facsimile edition of the work, published at his own expense in 1924 for the benefit of the students of the Art Students’ League of Los Angeles, appears in an appendix to Hudson, Stanton Macdonald-Wright.
657
Cristina Santarelli
Fig. 7. Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), Conception Synchromy, 1914, oil on canvas, 91.3 x 76.5 cm (36 x 30⅛ in). Washington D. C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn (inv.-no.: 66.3189).
658
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism
Fig. 8. Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973), “Conception”. Synchromy, 1915, oil on canvas, 76.4 × 61.6 cm (30 x 24 in). New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of George F. Of (inv.-no.: 52.40).
659
Cristina Santarelli These color harmonies, limited in number with Cézanne, but of singular justness of vibration, we three made precise in studying the solar spectrum, and it is now as easy for a painter to strike a perfect chord in any color scheme on his palette as for a pianist to do the same thing on the piano. Such a discovery I believe to be of inestimable value to artists, not because it permits them to put down pretty color combinations, but because the organization of the color scheme serves to bring to a greater homogeneity every element in his work. Besides this it gives him a color center about which the development of his color scheme must be a definite equilibration. The use of these scales also gives him a more precise method of expression which I think will do away with the stupid idea of “inspiration” that artists have been talking for years. 35 Albeit extremely precise, the method, inf luenced by the treatise Modern chromatics written in 1879 by Ogden Rood, is not free from difficulties and inconsistencies. 36 Without going into a comprehensive explanation, we will merely mention that the author discusses in detail how to create color tonalities, chords and scales, also providing examples of how inversions of chords and transpositions or modulations from one tonality to another can be obtained. To this end, he asks the reader to visualize the twelve colors along a keyboard so that each primary, secondary or tertiary color corresponds to a particular note of the chromatic scale. Using the color wheel, the artist chooses a “tonic”; then, assuming that he wants to create a painting in “major”, the succession of the intervals between the degrees of the major scale in Western music (tonetone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone) will form the basis for selecting the other colors that will constitute the color scale. If the starting color is red, the colors identified proceeding counterclockwise will be: red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet and red-violet; therefore the major chord will be formed by the first, the third and the fifth color of the scale. Since the tonic color can be considered the foundation of the painting, the tonic chord and its emotional meaning constitute its harmonic basis. Other chord triads besides the root (or tonic) chord can also be generated. To form a triad, you take any note from the scale, skip over a note, take the next note, 35 Antony Anderson, “Art and artists”, Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1919. 36 Ogden Rood, Modern chromatics, with applications to art and industry (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1879). Unlike Macdonald-Wright, however, Rood does not attempt to connect his color triads to as many musical triads, resolutely stating that there is an unbridgeable gap between auditory sensation and visual sensation and that any endeavor to establish a precise relationship between the two spheres inevitably turns out to be flawed.
660
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism skip a note, then take the next note: generating chords in this manner is called “harmonizing the major scale”. The insistence on certain groupings of colors corresponding to major and minor triads and to their inversions, and the fact that some of them cannot be employed in the same picture, substantiates that the painter understood the concept of color harmony in an absolutely literal sense; some passages of the Treatise demonstrate a rather conservative personal taste, for instance when he calls discordant intervals such as a tritone “noise instead of sound […] ceasing to have any harmonic significance” or when he characterizes the musical key of A-f lat as “too sentimental”. 37 An aesthete leaning towards oriental mythologies and Zen philosophy (as many other American artists, including Sam Francis, Ad Reinhardt, Marc Tobey and John Cage), Macdonald-Wright believed that each hue was imbued with its own emotional and psychological impact. He actually builds these meanings up from one simple axiom: Yellow = Light, Red = Strong, Blue = Shadow. Proceeding from there, Orange = Red +Yellow, or Strong-Light, Violet = Red+Blue, or Strong-Shadow, Green = Yellow+Blue, or Light+Shadow. He then associates these attributes of the colors themselves to various states of mind, deeming some color keys suitable for some subjects and unsuitable for others. His at times naive descriptions of the qualities of individual colors recall those given by Kandinskij in the aforesaid essay, 38 for example when comparing green – considered “weak, lackadaisical [...] it seems to have arrived at 37 Other American theorists, including Henry Fitch Taylor and Hardesty Gilmore Maratta, proposed an exact correspondence between the colors and the twelve semitones of the chromatic scale. In 1914, Maratta patented his diagram (“A chart for finding triads and chords in sounds and colours”), which influenced painters such as Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Bellows. Another devotee of the color-music analogy was Frederick Schwankovsky, who in the 1920s made his students a booklet in which he assigned each color a specific musical tone and an emotional content; he could have derived all or most of his ideas from Kandinskij and from the Theosophical text Thought forms. See Milton Wolf Brown, American painting from the Armory Show to the depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955). 38 Kandinskij’s language frees the light frequencies from the limits of physics to give them an aura of mystery. Hence bright yellow, which can achieve an “intensity unbearable to the eye and the soul”, is like the acute sound of a trumpet or the deafening sound of a fanfare. Blue resembles a flute and dark blue the timbre of the double bass or of the organ. Green recalls the “calm, broad, middle tones of a violin”. Red is a color that is “rampant and typically warm, which acts on the psyche in a vital manner, radiating an immense energy”; light red brings to mind “the sound of fanfares with the tuba: strong, steadfast, loud”, vermilion “a strong drum roll”, dark cold red “the passionate, middle and low tones of the cello”, light cold red “the clearest, high, singing tones of the violin”. The sound of orange “seems that of a bell calling to the Angelus, or of a robust contralto, or of a viola playing a largo”. That of violet (a red “physically and psychically cooled which bears something sickly”) “resembles the sound of the English horn, of the bagpipes, and when it is deep, the low register of woodwinds, for example, the bassoon”.
661
Cristina Santarelli a point where it halts contentedly, a disciple of non-action, of calm, of quiet” – with blue, “the colour of ethereality [...] of anti-materialism [...] highly spiritual”. Moreover, he defines red-orange as “martial, blatant, self-satisfied and harsh”, adding “It is like a trombone in quality, while red is more like a tuba”. As for orange, “it gives us the sensation of febrile gaiety, and quickness, or of soft, solid dignity. It is either mercurial or magistral”, while red-violet (purple) is “portentous, it is the calm before the storm, whereas violet is the storm itself ”. Not only every single color but also every scale stimulates the mind, provoking different emotions (“The scale of violet is dramatic, dignified, solid; has a pliability that permits of quick movement and gracefulness”; “Yellow-Orange, while being rich, is at bottom weak and sickly […] It is gracious and suave and has an evanescent quality peculiar to itself ”; “Blue-Violet is the introspective, the inspirational color”; “The most brilliant combination possible to use is orange and green”). However, Macdonald-Wright seems aware of the fact that these observations are rather reductive: the tonalities of color, like the musical ones with their consonant or dissonant combinations, produce more nuanced emotions, inexpressible in words, linked to the psychic individuality of the user. 39 To resume, the cornerstones of synchromist ideology are the following: (1) use of color alone to define form and space, based on the well-known psycho-physical phenomenon that warm colors seem to advance and cool colors to retreat in the visual field; (2) form based on the “principal rhythm”, also called the “hollow and bump”, consisting of two opposing lines (“the two eternally antagonistic forces”) interlocked to achieve an overall synthesis of essential harmonic components; (3) application of “color-scales”, directly related to musical scales and created by choosing a predominant “key” color with its own psychological meaning; (4) utilization of “color melodies” generated by spacing colors out, separated by neutral ground; furthermore, “color triads” can be composed by the juxtaposition of particular colors from the scale, in order to emphasize the emotional content of an important area of the painting. After temporarily abandoning Synchromism in 1916 in favor of more representational pictures, by fall of 1922 Russell went back to painting abstract Synchromies, calling them Eidos, after the Greek word for “form”. The color in these new Synchromies was freer than in those of the first period, where embracing a given color scale confined the artist to using pre-determined hues. Moreover, whereas the old Synchromies had one center to which all 39 “In both cases [that of color and sound] our knowledge of their mode of perception, and the exact relation between subjective reaction and objective stimulus, is as yet largely a matter of conjecture”. See Tudor-Hart, “The analogy of sound and colour” (as note 22), 480.
662
Color Harmonies, Music Harmonies: Notes on American Synchromism parts of the composition related, the Eidos Synchromies – testimony of Russell’s increasing feeling about Oriental cultures – could have shifting anchoring points and symmetries (“Life is that way, the mid is that way, there is no center, there are centers everywhere […] The points are everywhere & nowhere at once”).40 In order to espouse his new ideas concerning color, Russell thought to disown Tudor-Hart’s color theories that had played such an important role in the earlier works: It is absolutely impossible to compare a color group of any colors and certain musical chords. Ainsi [sic]: red and red-orange alongside of each other or smeared together are very harmonious – in fact too sweet perhaps, but certainly nothing at all like the harshness and “gruice” [sic] of Do and Do♯ when played together. Also red and orange are perfect and so are all the near colors. They become less harmonious as they get farther away, just the contrary of what takes place in music. The least harmonious in music is a diminished second and a second Do and Do♯-Do and Re, but glance at your palette. Is there the slightest suggestion of harshness in the corner where you have the reds and red-oranges smeared – in the green corner or any other? Of course not. The next least harmonious color to red and green is red and blue green – and so on backwards through red and yellow green – red and yellow – red and orange – and red and red-orange. The latter being the sweetest of all either mixed or juxtaposed.41 The repudiation of Tudor-Hart’s ideas does not ascertain that the Eidos series had nothing to do with music. Years earlier Russell had established a bond between his paintings and Beethoven’s music; in a letter dated October 1922, he confirmed the affinity of new Synchromies with the emotional power of Beethoven’s symphonies: Talking of Beethoven, I took up last winter one of my old Synchromy themes […] and did it over several times. One of them makes me think irresistibly of the 5th Symphony. Naturally one could not do this consciously, but when it happens that I have 8 or 9 that feel in the same way it would be great to give them with the orchestra – simultaneously or preferably alternately.42 40 Russell to Macdonald-Wright, June 11, 1924, Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art. 41 Ibid. 42 Russell to Macdonald-Wright, October 19, 1922, Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art.
663
Cristina Santarelli Conceived to be accompanied by a kinetic light machine, the Eidos Synchromies were also religious expressions for Russell, who spoke of them in terms of “hymns in color and shape, to the infinite”. As for the agnostic MacdonaldWright, he painted many of his most compelling canvases in the late 1910s and in the 1920s, but with an increasingly figurative bent; however, he remained a color-painter throughout his life and returned to the use of color-scales in his later years, even if in the advanced Synchromies created in the 1950s the tendency towards centrifugal fragmentation of the early works gives way to immobility, while the tones of the palette appear muted and the outlines geometrically well-defined. Although the inf luence of Synchromism on subsequent generations of artists has generally been undervalued and underestimated, we believe that the philosophical and symbolic components of its visual language have played a fundamental role in the formation of artists such as Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, in particular regarding the spiritualistic-esoteric reinterpretation of the sound-color concept. Nevertheless, it should be noticed that once the polemical and destabilizing energy of the first avant-garde had abated, the painters of the second avant-garde marked the passage from a type of dynamic temporality to a type of increasingly static and immanent temporality, the same temporality observed in so much modern and contemporary music.
664
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945
Michael Saffle Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945 Abstract. Between its emergence during the very early twentieth century, and its radical transformations after World War II, jazz was represented visually by both European and American artists in a variety of ways. Among the attitudes embodied in those representations are jazz as a source of “primitive” painterly inspiration; an exciting new mode of expression; a form of entertainment associated initially with sophisticated rebellion and later with popular songs and dances of many kinds; a symbol of cultural and national identity, especially urban identity (for both French and American artists); and an emerging synonym for creativity and spontaneity of many kinds, visual as well as musical. Race has always been always an important aspect of “visual jazz”, but white as well as black musicians have excelled as jazz composers and performers.
The origins of jazz are difficult to pin down. The Oxford English Dictionary (or OED) identifies the earliest printed uses of the word “ jazz” as dating from 1912–1913, when it referred to energy, excitement, and “pep” as well as to “excessive talk” and “nonsense”. As “ jass” as well as “ jazz” it also referred to sexual intercourse – and this almost certainly in conjunction with such additional connotations as “lively”, “sophisticated”, and “unconventional”. Only between 1915–1917 was “ jazz” first used to identify a form of musical expression as well as a number of related phenomena: jazz “bands”, “clubs”, “dances” and “dancers”, “orchestras”, “singers” and “songs”, “tunes”, and even poetry.1 Furthermore, “ jazz”, “ragtime”, “swing”, and “the blues” were and occasionally still are treated as synonyms for, or at least aspects of, one another. No one really knows when jazz or something quite like it was first performed, either in New Orleans or elsewhere. The historical importance of Storyville, the New Orleans red-light district that opened in 1897, cannot be denied. Yet jazz may also have begun elsewhere. In 1853, Frederick Law Olmstead reported that “in all of the southern cities [of the United States], there are music bands, composed of Negroes, often of great excellence”, and that “the mili1
The Oxford English Dictionary is accessible at http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/view/ Entry/100938?rskey=xQbWta&result=1#eid (last accessed: 1 January 2016). No posting dates are available for this and many other online jazz image sites.
665
Michael Saffle tary parades [in those cities] are usually accompanied by a Negro brass band”. 2 If members of those bands improvised during their performances, they might well have anticipated the “ragtime” music-making described by New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson (1879–1949), who participated in post-burial funeral festivities as early as 1905 and almost certainly earlier. 3 African inf luences of several kinds were essential to the creation of jazz, and the secret societies involved with black funerals in New Orleans helped preserve those practices. Also essential, however, were European (which is to say, white) and Caribbean inf luences, including such disparate elements as British ballads, field-hollers, rondo and march forms (perhaps inspired by military music), “Afro-Spanish rhythms such as the tango and rhumba”, and of course ragtime and the blues.4 Always eclectic, jazz has been produced over the decades by hundreds and even thousands of “hot soloist[s]” who have reveled in their freedom “to quote anything” musical. 5 Nevertheless, even the earliest jazz devolved upon a certain performance style as well as an amalgam of inf luences. Legendary trumpeter Buddy Bolden’s (1877–1931) “powerful” and distinctive sounds, described but never recorded (Bolden’s career ended in 1907), was characterized by a “hoarseness, a notable lack of harmony [in the sense of familiar chord progressions], and a high level of heterophony (voices close to but not quite in unison) – in other words, a […] new manner of playing”.6 The importance of race to the history of jazz can scarcely be exaggerated, and characteristic forms of musical expression have always been markers of 2 3 4
5
6
666
Marshall W. Stearns, The story of jazz (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 55. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 73. Prior to World War I, many people and even some musicians understood “ jazz” as equivalent or related to “the blues” and “ragtime.” Rags continue to be composed today; William Bolcom, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, has written a number of them and has not had recorded ragtime songs with his wife, Joan Morris. But ragtime isn’t jazz, at least any more; although early white jazzer Milton (“Mezz”) Mezzrow described early jazz performances in what seem to be ragtime terms. See Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the blues (New York: Random House, 1946), passim. Nor are jazz and blues the same thing, although they are often discussed together as closely related African American musical forms of expression. Alfred Appel, The art of celebration: Twentieth-century painting, literature, sculpture, photography, and jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 164; italics in the original. For some critics, including Hughes Panassié, “hot” jazz – le jazz hot – was the only true jazz. See Matthew F. Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French cultural identity (Urbana, IL, etc.: Illinois University Press, 2010), 142. For additional information about Panessié, perhaps France’s most influential preWorld War II jazz critic, see Tom Perchard, “Tradition, modernity, and the supernatural swing: Re-reading ‘primitivism’ in Hughes Panassié’s writing on jazz”, Popular Music 30/1 ( January 2011), 25–45. Stearns, The story of jazz (as note 2), 70.
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945 African American identity.7 Bolden and Johnson were both groundbreaking black artists. Yet jazz has also served as a marker of racial “duality”. 8 The earliest surviving jazz recordings, or among the earliest, were made by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, an all-white (rather than -black) ensemble, and date from 1917. Considered coarse and vulgar by many critics, early jazz was attacked as “‘noise’, and compared […] to a plague or disease threatening to destroy the civilized world”.9 Today, of course, jazz is recognized as an art form in its own right, a significant contribution to global culture by musicians, primarily black (which is to say, African American) musicians, of the United States.10 Jazz began to be more “respectable” (if less exciting) only when white musicians also took it up. The pages that follow identify a few of the ways in which jazz was represented visually during the first three decades of its history. They also examine, albeit brief ly, five of the attitudes embodied in those representations, including – in overlapping but roughly chronological order – jazz as: (1) a source of “primitive” painterly inspiration; (2) an exciting new mode of expression adopted by a few composers of so-called “serious” music and their visual collaborators; (3) a form of entertainment associated initially with sophisticated rebellion and later with popular songs and dances of many kinds, depicted in thousands of advertisements, posters, sheet-music covers, and other ephemera; (4) a symbol of cultural and national identity, especially urban identity, for both French and American artists; and (5) an emerging synonym for creativity and spontaneity of many kinds, visual as well as musical. One of the earliest surviving jazz paintings, Albert Gleizes’s (1881–1953) Composition pour “ jazz” (1915), depicts a banjo player in Analytical Cubist style.11 7
Jazz itself has been identified as a marker of French identity as well. See Jordan, Le Jazz (as note 5); and Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making jazz French: Music and modern life in interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8 See Donna M. Cassidy, Painting the musical city: Jazz and cultural identity in American art, 1910– 1940 (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), especially 125– 146. Cassidy’s discussion is especially illuminating; although she identifies the saxophonist as an African American icon and a symbol of political freedom [134-136], she is well aware the instrument was invented by Adolphe Sax (1814–1894), a Belgian musical inventor and performer. 9 Kathy J. Ogren, The jazz revolution: Twenties America & the meaning of jazz (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153. 10 For a discussion of jazz as art, rather than as depicted in visual art, see Paul Lopes, The rise of a jazz art world (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11 Because of copyright restrictions, illustrations referred to in the text are identified by reproductions in printed and virtual sources. Thus, for a digital reproduction of Gleizes’s painting, go to https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1464 (last accessed: 1 December 2017).
667
Michael Saffle Composition pour “ jazz” acknowledges a musical mode of expression that Gleizes cannot have known too much about when he encountered it for the first time in New York City. Before America entered World War I, jazz was scarcely familiar to most of its own citizens, even less so to those of other nations. The originality and simplifications of Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, as well as later avantgarde visual styles, continue to influence such contemporary pop artists as Jason Oliva and Paul Rogers. In 2010, Rogers designed a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service that recalls, in its stylized representations of jazz performers, the work of Gleizes and other illustrators, including those of the 1930s and 1940s.12 Throughout its history, jazz has mostly been produced collaboratively, by groups of musicians who sang and/or performed together on different kinds of instruments (often wind instruments). Almost all of the innumerable late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century “ jazz paintings” represented today on internet sites depict either famous individual performers associated with ensembles, or entire ensembles singing or playing trumpets, trombones, saxophones, drums, and pianos.13 Today, solo jazz pianists represent an exception to this rule, as do piano-vocal jazz duos. Gleizes’s Composition, however, references jazz entirely in terms of a lone banjo player. Prior to the 1930s the banjo was considered a “black” instrument, whereas today it is more often associated with the “old-time” music of the Appalachian Mountains south of Pennsylvania (an area also referred to as the “southern highlands”). Perhaps Gleizes chose to depict a banjo player because of the instrument’s distinctive New World character (and, prior to the 1930s, its racial associations), as well as its distinctive shape, suitable for quasi-geometrical representation. In Gleizes’s geometrically structured, yet rhythmically suggestive style – structure and rhythm representing two “fundamental and constituent notions of Cubism” – Composition pour “ jazz” calls to mind the fascination felt by a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European artists for “primitive societies”, “Far Eastern arts”, and African masks – the last of which “opened new horizons” for even such comparatively lyrical painters as Georges Braque (1882–1963).14 A few of the carved and painted wooden sculptures 12 For Rogers’s philatelic image, go to https://www.google.com/search?q=Demuth+jazz+singe r&client=firefox-b-1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP2Py7qoLYAhXLCs AKHSRbDI0Q_AUICigB&biw=1082&bih=657#imgrc=lfwqfTdaRfbMLM (last accessed: 1 December 2017). Nor was Rogers the first to design a jazz stamp; in 1964 artist Stewart Davis designed a stamp illustrated and discussed on the same website. 13 For a detailed discussion of post-1945 jazz and blues imagery, see Graham Lock and David Murray, eds., The hearing eye: Jazz and blues influences in African American visual art (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 14 Jean Laymarie, Braque, trans. James Emmons (Geneva: Skira, 1961), 31. Charles Harrison reminds us that, although today “the term ‘primitive’ reveal[s little more than] a Western-
668
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945 produced during Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) “Negro period” (c. 1906–1908) testify to his knowledge of tribal images, just as paintings like Woman in yellow (1907) testify to his familiarity with African masks.15 Among Picasso’s more colorful Synthetic Cubist images of collaborative music-making are two paintings of 1921, both of them entitled Nous autres musiciens (also known as The three musicians). In these paintings, Picasso presents his performers as commedia dell’arte characters, with Harlequin depicted in both paintings wearing motley and playing a violin.16 There is nothing specifically jazzy about these paintings, however, and the presence of musical notation contradicts improvisation. Furthermore, when he depicted musicians and their instruments, Picasso mostly stuck with violins and guitars. Later artists borrowed some of Picasso’s African “touches”, including striations as illustrative details and a seemingly stark approach to the depiction of individual figures, even those depicted in vigorous motion. Winold Reiss (1886–1953), a German-born American painter celebrated for his portraits of Harlem Renaissance poets and musicians, employed these devices in Drawing in two colors or Interpretation of Harlem jazz I (1915–1920), a poster inf luenced by Cubism, “the Art Deco style[,] and the vibrant cultural scene among Harlem’s elite”.17 Examples by other artists include Aaron Douglas’s (1899–1979) Music (1925), Play da Blues (1926), and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1925) – the last referencing a well-known African American spiritual rather than a popular song.18
15 16 17 18
centred [sic] view of an alien culture (hence [the] use of inverted commas) […] concepts of the ‘primitive have [also] been used […] as a measure of positive value” – among other things, of purity and originality. Charles Harrison, Primitivism, cubism, abstraction: The early twentieth century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 5. In other words, so-called “primitive” art was understood by some later nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury artists as existing “in a kind of temporal vacuum”, without known origins, which “allowed for a fair amount of romantic speculation and rumination about it” and its cultural significance. Jack Flam, “Introduction” to Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, eds., Primitivism and twentieth-century art: A documentary history (Berkeley, CA, etc.: University of California Press, 2003), 3. Additional studies of jazz and primitivism, especially in France – and, in this case, of labor and industrial progress – include Jeremy F. Lane, “‘Rythme de travail, rythme de jazz’: Jazz, Primitivism, and Machinisme in Inter-war France”, Atlantic Studies 4/1 (April 2007), 103–116. For reproductions of the carvings and painting in question, see Carsten-Peter Warncke, Pablo Picasso, 1881–1973, ed. by Ingo F. Walther, vol. 1: The works 1890–1936 (Cologne: Taschen, 1995), 161–163. Both versions of The three musicians are reproduced in Warncke, Picasso (as note 15), 282–283. Graham C. Boettcher “‘Jazzed’ by the discovery of a rare print”, http://www.artsbma.org/ jazzed-by-discovery-of-a-rare-print (last accessed: 1 January 2016). For reproductions of all three images, see Cassidy, Painting the musical city (as note 8), 134– 135.
669
Michael Saffle By the early 1920s ragtime and jazz sounds had already been embraced or at least toyed with by several French or French-inf luenced composers, including Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).19 Suggestions of jazz or at least ragtime in the form of irregular, angular, and innovative rhythms, for example, appear throughout Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat (1918), and one of its movements is entitled “Ragtime”. Other Europeans of the 1920s and 1930s – Paul Hindemith (1895– 1963), Kurt Weill (1900–1950), and Erik Satie (1966–1925) – also employed jazzy gestures in their compositions. 20 The inf luence of African images on Cubism as a movement may well have been “overblown” by some historians, 21 but notions of an imagined Africa as primal and the inf luence of African idols as well as Cubism on the Parisian art world reappeared visually in 1922, in the form of Fernand Léger’s (1881–1955) stage designs for the original production of Milhaud’s La création du monde. Milhaud’s music for La création is full of “blue” notes (especially the f latted third, fifth, and seventh degrees of the major scale) and other recognizable, albeit “symphonicized” melodic and rhythmic jazz gestures, and similar gestures appear in many of his later works. 22 Léger’s designs for Milhaud’s ballet are “African” in their inspiration; in his costumes we encounter images modeled on tribal gods that suggest earth’s origins in a seemingly “primitive” aesthetic context. 23 Unfortunately, compared to later visual depictions of jazz – and this, in spite of their vivid and contrasting colors – Léger’s Création designs seem stiff and even awkward today. 24 Nor does anything explicitly American have a place on Léger’s stage, although music historians have long been aware that Milhaud’s score “was notable”, among other things, “as one of the first concert works significantly inf luenced by American jazz”. 25 19 For a discussion of France’s involvement with jazz, see Jody Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist art and popular entertainment in jazz-age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), esp. 109 –163. See also Jordan, Le Jazz (as note 5). 20 See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-century music: A history of musical style in modern Europe and America (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991), 416–419. 21 Timothy Hilton, Picasso (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 83. 22 Milhaud himself once went so far as to proclaim jazz “a school of rhythm” for French musicians. Quoted in Blake, Le Tumulte noir (as note 18), 140. Blake’s volume contains reproductions of dozens of images, many of them jazz-related and of French origin. 23 See Dennis Siminiatis, “Siminiatis says: LA CREATION DU MONDE” [sic] (2013). https:// simanaitissays.com/2013/06/29/la-creation-du-monde (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 24 Léger’s other works, including his own Three musicians (1944), are nothing like his Création sets. See Blake, Le Tumulte noir (as note 18), plate 6. See too https://www.moma.org/ collection/works/79472 (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 25 Morgan, Twentieth-century music (as note 20), 164; italics added.
670
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945 Strikingly different is Charles Demuth’s (1883–1935) Jazz singer (1916). 26 Known today principally as an American Precisionist who inspired other artists to depict industrial sites, Demuth produced an early jazz painting that has nothing to do with primitivism or Cubism. Instead, Jazz singer is an impressionistic and visually f lexible representation of a contemporary blues performance, with what appears to be a white singer backed by a black band that includes a guitarist and a drummer. Although Demuth’s colors are muted, the contrast between his vocalist’s blue gown and the tuxedos of the African American musicians supporting her is quite effective. A reddish aura surrounds the instrumentalists, perhaps intended to suggest a “hot” accompan iment. Stylistically related paintings by Demuth that do not reference jazz specifically but hint at its presence include In vaudeville (Dancer with chorus, 1918), owned today by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 27 After World War I and especially after the beginning of Prohibition in the United States on 17 January 1920, jazz took on new luster as a form of defiant and exciting American entertainment, one often performed by black musicians for primarily or exclusively white audiences. Chicago and New York City became epicenters of jazz, especially the Manhattan neighborhood known as Harlem. It is at this point in time that improvisation, perhaps the most important aspect of jazz as a musical genre, began to inf luence its visual representations. Instead of Gleizes’s and Léger’s Cubist constructions or Demuth’s painterly impressions, we encounter images of sinuous performers and audience members having a lot of fun. These images suggest the pleasures associated with jazz in 1920s Paris. 28 At the same time, and in spite of its essentially improvisatory character, a few simplified songs and dance numbers were published with jazzy cover images, many of them depicting celebrated artists or ensembles, or introducing famous melodies that amateur pianists wanted to play. 29 26 See https://www.google.com/search?q=Demuth+jazz+singer&client=firefox-b-1&source=lnms& tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP2Py7qoLYAhXLCsAKHSRbDI0Q_AUICigB&biw= 1082&bih=657#imgrc=lfwqfTdaRfbMLM (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 27 For additional information, go to https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/ 53889.html (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 28 See, for instance, both the cover and contents of Jackson, Making jazz French (as note 7). 29 Music published comparatively early in jazz history that incorporated the words “ jazz” or “ jazzy” in their titles – one example is Maceo Pickard’s Jazz babies’ ball (1919), later used as the theme song for Bud Abbott’s and Lou Costello’s 1950s TV program – were in fact popular songs. For additional information about similar works composed by African Americans, see David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ rhythm around: Black popular songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Schirmer, 1998). See too Paul Oliver, “‘Selling that Stuff’: Advertising Art and Early Blues on 78s”, in The hearing eye (as note 13), 24–25. Oliver reproduces sheet-music
671
Michael Saffle Cover designs for these and a great many other pieces of sheet music, as well as images produced for newspaper and magazine advertisements, phonorecord labels, and so on, tell us much about the musical history of America. Thousands of song sheets depicted African Americans, often in extremely offensive ways; the “coon” compositions of the ragtime era (c. 1896-1906) are cases in point. 30 But ragtime piano pieces and songs, whether offensive or innocuous, were printed and could be performed by amateurs at home; so could a few early blues numbers. This simply was not true of improvisatory jazz, which eschewed musical notation. Lillian Hardin (1898–1971), later the first wife of trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong (1901–1971) and a member of Armstrong’s early, ground-breaking ensembles, surprised the first jazz performers she encountered when, during an audition, she asked “for the music” and was told politely that “they didn’t have any music and furthermore never used any”. Nor did they even tell Hardin which key they intended to use. Nevertheless, she got the job. 31 Like her husband-to-be, Hardin proved herself “a natural swing player [who] didn’t need any scoring at all”. 32 During the 1920s, jazz began to interest “cultivated” American composers and performers. 33 Milhaud’s Création was followed in 1924 by George Gershwin’s (1898–1937) Rhapsody in blue, and by the successes of European American jazzers Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931), Benny Goodman (1909–1986), Paul Whiteman (1890–1967), and other artists associated with large ensembles as well as smaller “combos” of various kinds. Whiteman, whose 1920 recordings of Whispering and Japanese sandman enjoyed “a phenomenally large sale”, led an orchestra that sounded “fuller and smoother and richer” than the smaller and livelier “vernacular” jazz ensembles of Harlem, and that featured arrangements containing “as many semi-classical devices as possible”. 34 It was Whiteman and his orchestra that introduced Gershwin’s Rhapsody to respectable audiences at Carnegie Hall. We should not forget, however, that Gershwin’s music was originally scored by Ferde (or Ferdie) Grofé (1892–1972)
30 31 32 33 34
672
covers for Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer, W. C. Handy’s The Saint Louis blues, and Jim Burris’s and Chris Smith’s Ballin’ the Jack – the last as published in both London and New York. The cover of May Irwin’s bully song, a well-known “coon shouter” song, also appears in Oliver, “‘Selling that Stuff’” (as note 29), 24. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, eds, Hear me talkin’ to ya (New York: Rinehart, 1955), 93. Louis Armstrong, on an appearance by himself and two other “of New Orleans’ most distinguished performances” during 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri. Quoted in Stearns, The story of jazz (as note 2), 163. For a discussion of “cultivated” and “vernacular” aspects of American musical history, see H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: An historical introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969 and subsequent editions). Stearns, The story of jazz (as note 2), 165.
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945 for a comparatively small ensemble that included a banjo. The more familiar “theater” orchestra and symphonic Rhapsody arrangements date from 1928 and 1942 respectively. It was almost certainly Whiteman’s ensemble and Milhaud’s score that F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) parodied in The great Gatsby. 35 Fitzgerald understood jazz primarily in sexual rather than musical terms, and his Tales of the jazz age depict young American men and women enjoying newfound erotic freedom. Fitzgerald did not invent the famous phrase often attributed to him; the OED identifies “ jazz age” as having appeared in print for the first time in a 1920 issue of the Dunkirk, New York, Evening Observer. In Chapter Three of Gatsby, however, Fitzgerald inserted a description of an imaginary composition: a “Jazz History of the World”, attributed to one Vladimir Tostoff and performed during one of Jay Gatsby’s exciting parties. Elsewhere in the same work Fitzgerald also quotes the lyrics of several popular, quasi-jazz or -blues songs, including Richard Whiting’s Ain’t we got fun? (1921). Jazz produced or at least popularized its own characteristic dances. For many Americans, the Charleston came to epitomize the musical 1920s. (Other jazz dances, including the Black Bottom, are all but forgotten today.) As a dance, the Charleston and its African American origins dates from the later nineteenth century, although James P. Johnson’s (1894–1955) famous song appeared only in 1923. Josephine Baker’s (1906–1975) remarkable Charleston performances and her outlandish outfits (or lack of same) took Paris by storm, embodying as they did an innovative form of “primitive” expression, “positioning her as the bearer of both the new and the ancient”. 36 In addition to other “ jungle” stereotypes – she often appeared clad exclusively in a skirt composed of bananas – Baker embodied those desires that “cultivated” audiences often simultaneously derided and embraced as “vernacular” amusements. Her uninhibited movements and remarkable sense of fun made jazz clubs rather than concert halls and art galleries the go-to destinations for post-1918 Europe’s and America’s restless young men and women. For Michel Leiris, jazz as an experience and Baker’s performances in particular embodied “a more or less conscious demoralization born of the [First World] war”. 37 35 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1925). For additional information about Fitzgerald’s novel and jazz, see Michael Saffle, “Jazz, prestige, and five Great Gatsby film adaptations”, in Adaptation, awards culture, and the value of prestige, ed. by Colleen KennedyKarpat and Eric Sandberg (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 151–169. 36 Carole Sweeney, From fetish to subject: Race, modernism, and primitivism, 1919–1935 (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2004), 52. 37 Ibid. For silent 1925 footage of Baker dancing, accompanied by dubbed portions of an ensemble arrangement of Johnson’s The charleston, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= jEH6eDpjgRw (last accessed: 1 December 2017).
673
Michael Saffle The somewhat less raucous and more soothing sounds of Whiteman and other white artists profoundly inf luenced and at times comprised much of America’s popular music, especially dance music, throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Waltzes, foxtrots, and other established and less vigorous dances were “ jazzed”, just as popular melodies of the 1890s had often been “ragged”. Even China heard of jazz. At Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, at least until 2012, members of that hostelry’s original pre-World War I jazz orchestra still performed on occasion. Simplified and commercialized images of these kinds blurred cultural and ethnic boundaries. They contributed to the globalization of jazz, despite its African American racial origins. 38 During the later 1920s and 1930s several inf luential artists produced cityscapes of various kinds that equated jazz with cities and their cultures, French as well as American. At this point we leave behind depictions of music – whether of performers (Gleizes, Demuth), venues (Harlem’s Cotton Club, Chicago’s Green Mill), illustrators (among them the gyrating f lappers of John Held, Jr.’s book and magazine covers), dancing (the Charleston, Josephine Baker), etc. – and encounter depictions of jazz as a part of everyday American life, especially urban life. Consider abstractionist Arthur Dove’s George Gershwin – I’ll build a stairway to paradise (1927). 39 Ostensibly painted while the artist listened to a phonograph record of the music that inspired him, Dove employed “short, layered brushstrokes” to “suggest the stairway in the lyrics”, while his “[f ]luctuating lines and shapes, dabs of color […] and metallic paint all communicate the energy of [Gershwin’s] song”.40 Another of Dove’s musical tributes to Gershwin and popular culture is entitled Rhapsody in blue, Part I (1927).41 Among more representational and self-consciously nationalistic jazz images is James Daugherty’s (1889–1974) drawing Music, a study for a mural entitled American rhythm.42 Displayed as part of “For the people: American mural drawings of the 1930s and 1940s” – an exhibition held during 2007 at the Frances 38 For cover illustrations and discussions of numbers such as Taki Ta Tao, a “Chinese two step” composed by Henri Bereny, and The jazz one step by Hans Von Holstein and Alma M. Sanders – the latter depicting a 1920s Hong Kong jazz ensemble similar to that of Shanghai’s Peace Hotel – see Michael Saffle, “Images of China and Japan in turn-of-the-last-century American sheet music”, Music in Art 42/1–2 (2017), 329–340. 39 For additional information as well as a digital reproduction, see http://www.mfa.org/ collections/object/george-gershwin-ill-build-a-stairway-to-paradise-35077 (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 40 Cassidy, Painting the musical city (as note 8), 87. 41 Reproduced in ibid., 85. 42 Daugherty’s sketch is reproduced at http://collegerelations.vassar.edu/2006/2319 (last accessed: 1 January 2016).
674
Visual Representations of Jazz, 1915–1945 Lehman Loeb Art Center on the Vassar College campus – Daugherty’s sketch depicts his native land in terms of a lusty female vocalist, a tuba player, and a jazz pianist. More often associated with abstract expressionism, Daugherty and other American artists, including “ jazzy” Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), supported themselves by contributing to Works Progress Administration murals during the Great Depression of the 1930s.43 Hence the patriotically motivated title of Daugherty’s mural. More familiar today is Stuart Davis’s (1892–1964) Swing landscape of 1938: a quintessential combination of color, movement, and a Manhattanesque skyline to equate jazz with America’s emerging urban culture.44 Davis produced what might be considered a prequel to Swing landscape in his Abstraction of 1937.45 Both paintings suggest the daring, progressive, and experimental character of the American urban experience – confusing perhaps, but also colorful, the “rhythmic beat of our everyday lives”.46 For composer Irving Berlin, the power and speed, the jazz of America, was “interpretive of our verve and speed and ceaseless activity. When commuters no longer rush for trains, when taxicabs pause at corners, when businessmen take afternoon siestas, then, perhaps jazz will pass”.47 Davis, it should be noted, was a white artist painting the American city – one in which blacks were still confined to ghettoized neighborhoods – as not merely “American”, but also African American. Perhaps no one captured in visual terms the emerging abstract-improvisational quality of modern jazz – the new music that began with bebop in Kansas City as well as New York during the later 1930s and earlier 1940s, and that was invented by Duke Ellington (1899–1974), Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), Charlie “Bird” Parker (1920–1955), and other black geniuses – more imaginatively than Henri Matisse (1869–1954). The colorful paper cut outs and handwritten comments preserved in Jazz: a collection of images created by Matisse during the 1940s that suggest not only the experimental aspects of progressive jazz, but its improvisatory, circus43 Although his action paintings have often been discussed in conjunction with bebop and other forms of 1940s and 1950s progressive jazz, especially in terms of their vigor and rhythmic gestures, Pollock was actually “a [ jazz] conservative” who “listened to the more traditional musicians he had first heard when he was young, people like Louis Armstrong and Count Basie and Duke Ellington.” Evelyn Toynton, Jackson Pollock (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 58. 44 For a digital reproduction and discussion of Davis’s work, go to http://www.philamuseum. org/exhibitions/2005/82.html (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 45 See https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/abstraction-6348 (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 46 Irving Berlin, “Jazz Comes to Stay”, Current Opinion 77 (September 1924), 77. 47 Ibid.
675
Michael Saffle like, and sometimes cryptic character.48 Thus one of Matisse’s pages, associated with the legend of Icarus, suggests caution: that of preventing young people from traveling before they finish their studies.49 With Matisse’s colorful volume in mind, we might well conclude that, by 1945, jazz had become twentieth-century Europe and America’s visual as well as audible alternative to the classicism of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), the erotic tension of Richard Wagner (1813–1883), and the severe sophistication of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). 50
48 Originally published in 1947. Reprinted in 2001 by Prestel of New York City. Hundreds of hard copy and virtual reproductions of Matisse’s book exist. For a visual survey of the entire volume, go to https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/abstraction-6348 (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 49 The original text reads: “Ne devrait-on pas faire accomplir un grand voyage en avion aux jeunes gens ayent terminé leurs études.” The page is reproduced at https://gerryco23. wordpress.com/2014/09/07/painting-with-scissors-matisses-cut-outs-at-tate-modern (last accessed: 1 December 2017). 50 I would like to thank Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), especially the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, for support toward the completion of this article and for its presentation in preliminary form at the 15th International Conference of RIdIM: the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale, held at Ohio State University from 8–10 November 2015. Special thanks go to reference librarian Leslie P. Mathews of Tech’s Art and Architecture Library, who helped locate a few of the sources quoted in the pages above.
676
heder
organology
677
heder
678
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology
Laurence Libin Emeritus Curator of Musical Instruments, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Editor-in-Chief Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology Abstract. Literature in the form of fiction, in genres ranging from children’s stories to sacred scriptures and including novels, poetry, theatre and film scripts, and other imaginative writings, can provide information helpful to the scientific study of musical instruments. The principles for adducing and evaluating evidence from literature parallel established guidelines for interpreting music iconography. Literature in a descriptive vein by well-informed authors may offer useful detail about how real musical instruments are made and used, but more valuable are writers’ insights to social attitudes toward instruments. Indeed, throughout history literature has powerfully shaped readers’ attitudes and continues to affect how instruments of different types are popularly perceived. This article presents numerous examples from English-language writings illustrating literature’s function as an adjunct to organology.
For present purposes, “literature” means creative writing of an imaginative nature in prose or poetry; it excludes purely factual and philosophical texts, essays, memoirs, and other nonfiction. Even so narrowly defined, literature embraces varied genres: novels and short stories, poems, many theater scripts, screenplays and libretti, humor, children’s story books, and, arguably, sacred scriptures, among others. Some record older orally transmitted utterances such as folk tales and epics. Taken together, these writings contain innumerable references to musical instruments both real, discussed below, and fanciful, as in the illustrated storybooks of Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991). Dr. Seuss’s three-nozzled bloozer, boom-pah, and other fantastic inventions stretch children’s concepts of music-making. Literary works provide valuable clues to how actual instruments are perceived and function in society, and can amplify technical examination by vividly describing subjective sensations, as of tone and touch, insufficiently addressed by quantitative measures. Thus literature complements iconography in offering potentially useful evidence for organology. Reciprocally, organology can advance literary criticism, not so much by distinguishing good writing from bad as by illuminating content. Our task, then, resembling the iconographer’s, 679
Laurence Libin is systematically to compile, evaluate, analyze, and cautiously interpret literary material, taking care not to read unintended meaning into it.1 Responsibly discharging this complex task presupposes our understanding the writer’s language and syntax, and comprehending the writing’s social and cultural context, not least its intended readership. The more remote the author and target readers are in time and culture from our own, the more difficult our job becomes; so, for example, making sense of biblical references to sound-producing implements, and even establishing what kinds of instruments might have been denoted by elusive terms in ancient languages, remain fraught with controversy even after generations of serious inquiry. Here as elsewhere, organologists can benefit from collaboration with historians, literary critics, linguists, sociologists, and other specialists. The principles of literary investigation parallel those articulated by Emanuel Winternitz for music iconography. 2 Chief ly, these include: (1) Ascertaining the author’s intent and ability. Is the work didactic, moralistic, provocative, amusing? Does the writer mean to describe an instrument or explain its functions accurately and possess an adequate vocabulary for doing so, or is the reference vague, confused, exaggerated, symbolic, poetic, comical, sardonic, or otherwise blurred? (2) Weighing the evidentiary or heuristic value of the reference. Is it drawn from first-hand knowledge or a reliable source or merely a cliché? Does it evoke a mood, sketch a scene, or provide real-world information? How might it inf luence readers’ perception of the instrument? (3) Determining whether the reference is to a specific real instrument or maker. Where verisimilitude is desired in fiction, the author may allude to a known instrument or maker or to a recognizable category that carries culturally determined resonance. Famous names such as Stradivari and Steinway are loaded terms that must be unpacked of meaning as understood by the writer and intended readers. (4) Compiling comparative material to help ascertain whether an observation is original and perhaps uniquely perceptive. Is a strikingly detailed or discerning reference supported by independent evidence? A single isolated remark may be dubious, but a collection of related data might support a hypothesis. 1 2
680
Computerized text aggregation platforms facilitate searches for instrument references over a wide range of sources. Emanuel Winternitz, Musical instruments and their symbolism in western art (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1967), chapter 1: “The visual arts as a source for the historian of music”, especially 31–42.
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology Translations pose additional problems, as encountered in numerous versions of the Original Testament, where Hebrew words, such as kinnor (lyre), have often been wrongly rendered, giving rise to mistaken expressions such as “King David’s harp”, a trope ubiquitous also in iconography. 3 Martin Luther (1483– 1546) translated shofar (ritual horn) anachronistically as Posaune (trombone) 4 whereas the King James Version supplies “trumpet”. 5 Similarly, the Greek word aulos, usually denoting a reed instrument, has often been translated as “f lute”, an error infecting scholarly writings as well as literary – but compounding the confusion, aulos (literally “pipe” or “tube”) apparently sometimes denotes a f lute or even a trumpet; hence context is crucial to proper understanding. Modern languages are not immune; consider the misleading translation of German Clavier as “clavichord,” as in Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685–1750) misnamed Well-tempered clavichord, reprised in the satirical title of Sidney Joseph Perelman’s The ill-tempered clavichord (1952),6 which summons a picture of something quaintly old-fashioned and paints the author as a curmudgeon. We will avoid translations here. Because the scope of relevant literature in all languages since antiquity is unfathomably vast, we will consider only a few English-language writings to exemplify the foregoing principles. As might be expected, literary works seldom aim to provide reliable technical information; indeed, they are a major source of misinformation. Rather, their chief utility for organology lies in exploring attitudes. Some authors approach musical instruments from an emotional or aesthetic standpoint, or present them as potent avatars, or upset or reinforce expectations aroused by the normally benign character most people attribute to instruments.7 Many writers regard instruments merely as tools used to perform music; others investigate their extra-musical functions as status symbols, gender markers, vehicles for exerting social control, links to supernatural realms, products of refined craft, and so on. Church bells in particular have been widely revered, consecrated, and endowed with supernatural properties, while even ordinary cattle and sleigh 3
4 5 6 7
The novelist Geraldine Brooks, in The secret chord (New York: Viking, 2015), 12, incredibly assigns to King David “a fine tall harp from Mitzrayim [Egypt], the slender curve of its soundboard a smooth and perfect arc such as that land’s craftsmen know how to fashion. But, like all his harps, this one had been adapted to his use, the number of its strings doubled to allow for strange tunings, with half and quarter tones”. See for instance Psalm 150:3 of Luther’s German translation of the Bible. See also Psalm 150:3 in the King James Version. Sidney Joseph Perelman, The ill-tempered clavichord (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952). Exceptions include, for some listeners, revulsion toward the sexually-charged electric guitar and drum kit of rock musicians (hence the rejoinder, “If it’s too loud you’re too old”), and among some religious fundamentalists, toward all instruments.
681
Laurence Libin bells have been deemed apotropaic. Ref lecting Victorian reality, the novels of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), mention bells in many mundane circumstances, more often than any other sound–producing implement. Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1840), unsettling poem “The Bells” (published 1849) 8 evokes feelings associated with sounds of bells made of various metals, from cheerful jingling (silver) to mournful clanging (iron). The emotional resonance of Poe’s poem may be attenuated among present-day readers who seldom encounter real bells, but to his contemporaries the sounds of bells of all types were inescapable and meaningful, the knell, for example, a memento mori. Ominous or parlous bells occur throughout English literature, encompassing John Donne’s (1572–1631) memorable line, “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee”9 from his Devotions upon emergent occasions, 1624 (source of Ernest Hemingway’s title For whom the bell tolls, 1940)10 and Dorothy L. Sayers’s gripping account of change ringing and its dangers in her mystery novel The nine tailors (1934).11 The manifold implications of bells, or of any instrument, cannot be grasped solely from examining them as physical objects and analyzing their sounds. Also nearly unavoidable in many nineteenth-century cities were handcranked barrel organs and pianos, commonly transported through the streets by low-class, itinerant Italian “organ grinders”, heirs to the dismal status earlier accorded blind hurdy-gurdy players.12 The very term “grinder” connotes the monotonous drudgery of cranking out a limited, pre-programmed repertoire. John Ernest McCann’s one-act play The organ grinder (1906) indicates how people perceived these mechanical instruments and their much-abused, panhandling operators, and illuminates their portrayal in silent films such as A good time with the organ grinder (1903), in which the operator is subjected to acrobatic ridicule, and The organ grinder (1909), whose virtuous Italian hero helps recover a kidnapped girl.13 Thus literature intersects with iconography, including cinema, to inform us about these little-studied instruments’ reception history.
8 9 10 11 12 13
682
Edgar Allan Poe, “The bells”, Sartain’s Union Magazine (November 1849). John Donne, Devotions upon emergent occasions, and several steps in my sicknes, Meditation XVII (London: Thomas Iones, 1624). Ernest Hemingway, For whom the bell tolls (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1940). Dorothy L. Sayers, The nine tailors (London: Gollancz, 1934). Exceptionally, a Jewish organ grinder appears in James Oppenheim’s short story “Everyday”, The American Magazine 67/5 (1909), 498–513. See Ilaria Serra, The imagined immigrant: Images of Italian emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (Madison and Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 108.
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel Player piano (1952),14 a parable of disruptive technological innovation, ref lects upon the fate of workers dispossessed and deprived of initiative by automation, as player pianos once threatened to displace pianists.15 Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson’s play The Gibson upright (1919)16 dramatizes a socialist labor uprising in a New York piano factory during the so-called First Red Scare; the play echoes a real contemporary event, a bitter strike by employees against New York piano manufacturers. August Wilson’s play The piano lesson (1987),17 inspired by Romare Bearden’s eponymous collage (1983; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), hinges on conf lict within a black family over whether the sell their inherited, ornately carved upright piano in order to purchase land, or keep it as an heirloom embodying family identity and continuity. Jane Campion’s film The piano (1993) eroticizes the plight of a mute woman trapped in a loveless marriage, whose destiny is literally entwined with that of her precious piano; she tangles her foot in a rope attached to the piano as it is thrown overboard from a boat. These authors subvert the piano’s comforting image as an icon of social harmony. The player piano of Vonnegut’s title, normally viewed as a purveyor of effortless entertainment, stands instead for working-class anxiety, while Campion makes her heroine’s piano superf luous for intimate, wordless communication. In The Gibson upright,18 anarchists explode a piano to protest exploitative capitalism. The emotional shock of any piano’s destruction arises from feelings and memories surrounding pianos in general – mental images largely formed and shared through literature. Perceptions of instruments’ societal roles are not static. The piano’s image changed radically during the nineteenth century, from sweet, compliant, and feminine in Jane Austen’s era, when writers and artists began depicting pianos as agents for housebound women’s self-realization, to virtually adversarial in Franz Liszt’s (1811–1886) day, requiring strength and dexterity to overcome in the male-dominated concert arena.19 Obviously, this paradigm shift had as 14 Kurt Vonnegut, Player piano (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952). 15 See Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, The player piano and the Edwardian novel (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015). 16 Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, The Gibson upright (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1919). 17 August Wilson, The piano lesson (New York: Dutton, 1990). 18 Tarkington and Wilson, The Gibson upright (as note 16). 19 The apt sobriquet “black dragon” for a modern concert grand piano, as in Edwin M. Good’s Giraffes, black dragons, and other pianos (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), recalls James Joyce’s “Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses, helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwinds like Goodwin’s name”, in Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), 280. Thomas McGuane
683
Laurence Libin much to do with expansion of virtuosic repertoire and the rise of charismatic concert pianists as it did with the instrument’s own rapid industrial development, premised in The Gibson upright. 20 The accordion’s image also shifted. A prized novelty after its invention in the 1820s, the accordion became commonplace in the twentieth century to the point of disdain in America, as seen in Gary Larson’s two-frame Far side cartoon captioned, “Welcome to heaven […] here’s your harp. / Welcome to hell […] here’s your accordion”, as though these instruments were polar opposites. E. Annie Proulx’s novel Accordion crimes (1996) 21 portrays the accordion as a low-class plaything, albeit vital for preserving and transmitting vernacular musics. Proulx relates the peregrinations of a diatonic button accordion made in 1890 by a Sicilian village craftsman using parts stolen from a factory in Castelfidardo, the capital of Italian accordion manufacture. Brought to America by its impoverished maker, this simple instrument changes hands among players of various ethnicities, passing through episodes of neglect, damage, repair, and heavy use until its destruction a century later. In passing, we encounter other types of accordions and folk instruments played with them. Unusually rich in facts, Accordion crimes rests on solid research including the author’s interviews with expert makers. Proulx relates telling details about construction, tuning, and performance practices and sensations: Stiff leather bellows “fight back […] like squeezing a corpse” (207); a bicycle bell attached to a diminutive “Français” accordion signals changes of dance figures; “musette” tuning involves three reeds per note, one tuned slightly higher and one lower than the correct pitch; a bend in the tip of a reed gives a deeper, fuller tone. A character describes the accordion as “the instrument of unsuccessful men, of poor immigrants and failures” (141). The button accordion is “a nasty toy for amateurs and drunks” (142), but in a Cajun community, “people danced hotter to the button than to the piano [accordion]” (228). Playing a piano accordion, a Chicana’s “bellows control technique was extraordinary, with dramatic swells and choking, sforzati explosive effects. She scratched and rubbed and struck the keys, ran the back of her nails across the folds” (142–143). An likens a hooked tarpon to a Steinway grand piano sliding downhill or falling from a great height, in An outside chance: Essays on sport (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 19. 20 Tarkington and Wilson, The Gibson upright (as note 16). On the place of the piano in English fiction, see Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, eds., The idea of music in Victorian fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), especially chapter 4: Jodi Lustig, “The piano’s progress: The piano in play in the Victorian novel”, 83–104. 21 E. Annie Proulx, Accordion crimes (New York: Scribner, 1996); pages numbers below refer to this edition. Proulx’s acknowledgements credit her son Morgan Lang, a student of ethnomusicology, and makers and accordionists including Raynald Ouellette and Marcel Messervier.
684
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology Irish girl calls her accordion “a come-to-me-go-from-me” (338). Such nuggets of information and opinion embedded in a dramatic narrative shed light on the accordion’s position in North America, where, unlike in Russia and much of Europe, it is commonly associated with immigrants or cultural minorities. Unlike the accordion and the once-ubiquitous piano, the latter in most of its forms a middle-class democratizing instrument, the violin in literature exudes an aura of elitism and mystery fed by high prices and myths (e.g., the “secrets” of Stradivari) promoted by dealers and collectors and by popular fiction that dwells upon themes of violin theft, fakery, magical formulas, and multigenerational curses. Sometimes requiring demonic mastery, violins may impose their own will on players and, if stolen or misused, bring down retribution. The question for organology is, where do these romantic notions come from and how are they communicated? Violin stories proliferated in the later nineteenth century, when Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) in particular was mythologized as Ludwig van Beet hoven (1770–1827) and Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) had been. 22 Sherlock Holmes played a Strad he had bought at a pawnshop for 55 shillings, and in Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The field bazaar” Holmes reads “a very interesting article upon the trees of Cremona and the exact reasons for their pre-eminence in the manufacture of violins”. 23 While mistaking the source of wood used by Cremonese luthiers, Doyle brings violin lore into the domain of detective fiction, leading for example to Richard K. Radek’s The problem of the singular Stradivarius (The sequestered adventures of Sherlock Holmes, part 1, e-book, 2014), in which Joseph Joachim’s favorite 1713 Strad is purloined and issues of fakery and authentication are addressed by a writer who is also a musician and lawyer. In John Meade Falkner’s ghostly novelette The lost Stradivarius (1895), 24 a long-hidden 1704 violin, “a unique and intact example of Stradivarius’s best period”, preserved in original condition, embodies evil. 25 Its identification involves an expert, George Smart, who examines its label, outline, fine varnish, soundpost and bass-bar, neck and scroll (the scroll carved in a profile 22 David Schoenbaum, The violin: A social history of the world’s most versatile instrument (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) is among many recent books cashing in on the violin’s cachet. For a more penetrating study, see Christina Linsenmeyer, The Stradivarius myth: A story of science, revolution and art (forthcoming). Skepticism is apparent already in Ambrose Bierce, The devil’s dictionary (New York: World, 1911, and many other editions), which defines “Cremona” as “A high-priced violin made in Connecticut”. 23 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The field bazaar”, The Student (Edinburgh University magazine) 11/197 (20 November 1896), 35–36. 24 John Meade Falkner, The lost Stradivarius (New York: Appleton, 1895), 25 Project Gutenberg eBook (unpaginated), www.gutenberg.net (last accessed: 7 August 2015).
685
Laurence Libin likeness of the pagan philosopher Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305), named on a strange second label), finding all virtually untouched though the strings are broken. 26 Its structure is deemed sufficiently sturdy to sustain modern stringing; then, when bowed, its music, specifically a wicked gagliarda of Carlo Graziani (ca.1710–1787), dooms its player, who dies when the violin ultimately is destroyed. Leaving aside his fanciful plot, Falkner (an English arms merchant, book collector, and paleographer, among other occupations) engages readers with quirky tidbits of music history, going so far as to state inaccurately that “Michael Praetorius in the ‘Syntagma musicum’ should speak of the Galliard generally as an ‘invention of the devil, full of shameful and licentious gestures and immodest movements’”. 27 Falkner may have been motivated by publicity surrounding the “Messiah” Stradivari, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which had been exhibited by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume (1798–1875) in London in 1872 (that South Kensington Museum exhibition also included the so-called Violon du Diable by Guarneri del Gesù, 1698–1744) and purchased in 1890 by the dealers W. E. Hill & Sons. During this period the author Charles Reade’s (1814–1884) controversial opinions on Vuillaume and Stradivari roused interest among violin aficionados. 28 Whatever Falkner’s motivation, by blending recognizable realistic (if inaccurate) elements with supernatural, he exploits readers’ credulity and enhances the violin’s mystique as an agent of social disruption. 29 In a similar vein, Gerald Elias’s Devil’s trill (2009; the title refers to solo violin sonata in g minor by Antonio Tartini, 1692–1770), an amateur detective story written by a professional violinist, features the fictitious 1708 “Piccolino 26 A real George Smart (d. 1818) was a notable violinist, music merchant, and possibly a violin maker; his son George Thomas Smart (d. 1867) became a prominent conductor. Whether Falkner had either man in mind is unknown. Another fictive Strad, with an interior inscription in blood, appears in Marie Corelli’s novel Wormwood: A drama of Paris (New York: National Book Co., 1890), 176–178. 27 Falkner lifted this made-up quotation of Praetorius from Ebenezer Prout’s entry “Galliard” in A dictionary of music and musicians, ed. by George Grove (London: Macmillan, 1880). On the violin’s diabolical reputation, see J.E.B., “Violins and villany” [sic] Musical News 10 (8 Feb. 1896), 130–131; Prof. William E. Hettrick kindly provided this reference. 28 Charles Reade’s letters of 1872 were reprinted as “A lost art revived”, section II of The violin gallery (Des Moines, Iowa: George A. Dissmore, 1890), 23–48; see also his chapter “Cremona fiddles” in The complete writings of Charles Reade 14 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896), 23– 52. Like many others, Reade, a novelist, dramatist, and violin connoisseur, believed in an esoteric “lost secret” of Cremonese violin varnish, a falsehood cultivated to elevate the instruments’ prestige. 29 See further, Paula Gillett, Musical women in England, 1870–1914: “Encroaching on all man’s privileges” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), especially chapter 4, “Woman and the devil’s instrument”, 77–108, and chapter 5, “The new woman and her violin”, 109–140.
686
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology Stradivarius”, a three-quarter-size masterpiece with gold purf ling and a ruby-eyed dragon figurehead, said falsely to be the only small violin Stradivari would ever make and “considered by many to be the most perfect”. 30 Replete with misinformation (e.g., gambas are held between the legs while viols are held on the shoulder; old Cremonese violins have a unique sound and Stradivari’s an unmistakable tone; Mozart was penniless), the story involves theft and corruption, fakery and deception, sexual innuendo, and bloody tragedies surrounding the instrument, all common themes in violin fiction. With more originality, Elias ventures to discuss criteria for comparing and evaluating violins and bows, and offers some cogent thoughts about violin pedagogy. These remarks contrast with the nonsensical qualities he attributes to the Piccolino Strad itself, undermining his story’s plausibility. The success of François Gerard’s award-winning film The red violin (1998) might have stimulated Elias’s imagination during his book’s long gestation. The film’s red-varnished 1681 violin (reportedly inspired by the 1721 “Red Mendelssohn” Stradivari), last product of a fictitious Cremonese maker, is colored with blood of the maker’s wife, who dies in childbirth as the violin is being finished. A secondary, topical theme of the film concerns a modern appraiser’s surreptitious substitution of a copy for the authentic violin when it is offered at auction. Over three centuries, possession of the Red Violin portends tragedy. Recent, well-publicized thefts and recoveries of rare violins (such as the reemergence in August 2015 of the 1734 Stradivari of Roman Totenberg (1911–2012), stolen 35 years earlier) and convictions of violin dealers for fraud (including in recent years Peter Biddulph, Dietmar Machold, and Charles Magby Jr.) continue to call unsavory attention to these instruments, while sensational pseudo-scientific revelations about “secret” varnish formulas and wood treatments reinforce myths of violin makers’ esoteric knowledge. Paul Adam’s murder mystery Sleeper (2004), about violin-related crime, includes characters identifiable as real persons thinly disguised, and thus perpetuates impressions, not wholly unwarranted, of unscrupulous violin dealings. 31 The renowned band director John Philip Sousa (1854–1932) added to this literature in his slight novel The fifth string (1902), 32 in which Satan offers a lovesick virtuoso a sinister five-string violin to replace his smashed Stradivarius and with which to win his inamorata’s affection. The strings are characterized thus: G, the string of pity; D, hope; A, love; E, joy; the fifth, middle (!) 30 Gerald Elias, Devil’s trill (New York: Minotaur Books, 2009), 20. 31 Paul Adam, Sleeper (London: Little Brown Book Group, 2004), reissued in 2006 as The Rainaldi Quartet (New York: Minotaur Books, 2006). 32 John Philip Sousa, The fifth string (Indianapolis: The Bowen-Merrill Co, 1902).
687
Laurence Libin string, made of extra lengths of the others and wrapped with strands of black hair from the biblical Eve, is the string of death, which kills whomever plays upon it. 33 Unlike Falkner, Sousa vests power in the strings, not in the body of the violin. He invokes a composition by Paganini for E- and G-strings, the E impersonating Paganini’s beloved, the G Paganini himself, engaging in a dialogue in which love triumphs. 34 Premised on the existence of real five-string instruments (e.g., the quinton and various nineteenth-century developments intended to extend the normal violin’s range) but bizarre in its presumed tuning – would the middle string sound F? – the satanic violin tempts its player as Eve did Adam. Knowingly or not, Sousa varies an ancient, widespread theme: An instrument incorporates material from a once-living being, embodies that being’s essential qualities, and arouses a corresponding response when made to sound. The animated instrument is thus potentially dangerous, particularly if improperly played or mistuned or handled by the wrong person. 35 In fiction as in iconography, a broken string may connote death. Anne Rice’s Violin (1997), one of many novels Rice has contributed to the “vampy chick-lit” subgenre, takes the spooky, multigenerational violin tale a step further, involving an insane widow’s conf lict with a ghostly violinist, Stefan Stefanovsky, once a pupil of Beethoven’s and son of a Russian nobleman who had owned twenty Strads. The plot hinges on the contested possession of Stefanovsky’s spectral 1690 Stradivari, called, wrongly, “‘the long Strad’ that the elder Stradivari made near the end of his life”, implying this long-pattern example is unique and Stradivari was old when he made it. 36 Rice is also misinformed about Stefanovsky’s “long, broad” baroque bow, possibly also made 33 But hair strings can be beneficent: In William Butler Yates’s Irish sonnet “The harp of Aengus” (1899), Edain, lover of Midhir, “wove seven strings, / Sweet with all music, out of his long hair, / Because her hands had been made wild with love. When Midhir’s wife had changed her to a fly, / He made a harp with Druid apple-wood/That she among her winds might know he wept”. 34 Paganini reportedly sometimes pitched his gut G string a half-step sharp for greater brilliance, and occasionally played pieces on that string alone, employing harmonics to extend its range. His sensational effects led to rumors that “his G string was made from the intestine of a murdered mistress”; see Phyllis Weliver, Women musicians in Victorian fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of music, science and gender in the leisured home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 96. For more on human gut violin strings see David Huckvale, The occult arts of music: An esoteric survey from Pythagoras to pop culture ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2013), 62– 66, quoting Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s “The ensouled violin”, in Nightmare tales (1892). 35 An Italian spinet of 1540 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is inscribed, Riccho son doro et riccho son di svono. Non mi sonar si tv non ha del bvono (“I’m rich in gold and rich in tone; if you lack virtue, leave me alone”), a warning from the (living) instrument to its prospective player. 36 Anne Rice, Violin (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 128.
688
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology by Stradivari: “It’s wide, very wide, wider than our modern bows […] [s]o that the horsehair and wood don’t touch so easily, so that you can play more stridently”. 37 “A slightly concave bow is necessary for that, isn’t it?”38 Rice describes the “sinister and sacred instrument” in highly sensual tactile and visual (but not aural) terms: “I saw the wood more distinctly, how richly lacquered it was […] he just held it, letting the light catch it and race up and down its curves as if the thing were real”. 39 “I fondled the violin […] it was lustrous and material and gorgeous in its own right, without a note of music coming forth from it”.40 “‘Perfect F holes,’ I said softly, reverently, running my fingers over them on the belly of the violin”.41 “I didn’t kiss the thing, that seemed a wanton vulgar thing even to think of. I just wanted to hold it”.42 Such hackneyed, sexualized personification of the violin as a passive but seductive feminine body helps explain why, even early in the twentieth century, women violinists were often viewed with disapproval.43 In contrast, Jessie Fothergill’s romance The First violin (1877) pays only glancing attention to instruments; rather, her title refers to a charismatic first violinist (concertmaster) whose personal magnetism kindles a teen-aged girl’s passion. Fothergill characterizes the violinist’s anonymous instrument not as passive but as a seemingly independent, disembodied partner: “It was not a violin that he played – it was a spirit that he evoked – and a strange answer it sometimes gave forth to his summons”.44 Apparently, the eerie violin and Paganini-like virtuoso have usurped the place of the “magic f lute” and morally ambiguous Pied Piper of earlier folklore. Indeed, modern writers seem less drawn to wind instruments than to strings and keyboards, possibly because of the prestige and better-known repertoire of the latter types and the greater opportunity they afford authors to explore tactile sensations; breath seems less meaningful to story-tellers today than formerly. Fashions in literary awareness of instruments do not necessarily follow musical trends. Authors have paid scant attention to some common, ordinary instruments such as reed organs and clarinets, while certain unfamiliar types have attracted considerable interest owing to strange qualities imputed to 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
Ibid., 130. Ibid. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 129. For a typical post-Victorian example see Ethelbert Ames’s poem “My fiddle”, The Violin Times 12 (February 1905), quoted in Gillett, Musical women in England, 1870–1914 (as note 29), 77. 44 Jessie Fothergill, The first violin (New York: F. M. Lupton, n.d.), 121.
689
Laurence Libin them. The age-old, persistent idea that some instruments can be dangerous or malevolent gained currency in nineteenth-century literary circles partly in response to growing interest in acoustics and aural perception, psychology, and spiritualism. The glass armonica of Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was widely blamed for causing mental disturbance, especially melancholia, in susceptible (mainly female) players due, some believed, to disquieting vibrations communicated through the fingers. The malign laughter of the Brides of Dracula was likened by their victim, Jonathan Harker, to “the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played by a cunning hand”, a literary conceit already at least a century old when exploited by Bram Stoker.45 Mitch Cullin’s novel A slight trick of the mind (2005) 46 involves the aged Sherlock Holmes with a grief-stricken, suicidal woman who becomes obsessed by the glass armonica’s ethereal sound. In Cullin’s book, Holmes describes a treadle-operated instrument claimed to have belonged to the Belgian “inventor” Etienne-Gaspard Robertson (1763–1837) – an actual physicist and entertainer who employed a glass armonica in his phantasmagoria performances – but dismisses the specter of madness caused by lead poisoning from the rotating glasses. In Louise Marley’s science-fiction fantasy The glass harmonica (2000),47 the haunting reverberations of Franklin’s invention penetrate neural pathways to connect two young women players in eighteenth-century London and 2018 Seattle. At both ends of the time frame Marley associates the instrument with experimental medical treatments and healing. Taking a different approach, Rebecca Dunham’s metaphorically titled poetry collection Glass armonica (2013) 48 centers on the disturbing emotional effects of unwanted touch on the bodies of real women thought to have been melancholic or hysterical. The association of musical glasses with pathology received fresh impetus from the unsolved disappearance on 6 May 1999 of Gerhard Finkenbeiner, the most prominent American maker of glass armonicas, who vanished while piloting 45 Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1897), 37–38. Stoker borrowed the name Harker (i.e., listener) from his friend Joseph Cunningham Harker. On precedents for Stoker’s take on musical glasses in writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Théophile Gautier, see David J. Jones, Sexuality and the gothic magic lantern: Desire, eroticism and literary visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 176–178. See also James G. Kennaway, Bad vibrations: The history of the idea of music as cause of disease (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). Donizetti’s scoring for the “mad scene” in Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) originally included a glass armonica, later replaced by a flute. 46 Mitch Cullin, A slight trick of the mind (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2005). The novel was the source of director Bill Condon’s 2015 film Mr. Holmes. 47 Louise Marley, The glass harmonica (New York: Ace Books, 2000), 48 Rebecca Dunham, Glass armonica (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
690
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology his small airplane on an apparently spur-of-the-moment f light.49 Thus fiction and reality intertwine to maintain the occult, usually baleful aura of stroked musical glasses. Let us consider several better-known references to instruments in English and American literature. The sonnet CXXVIII by Shakespeare (1564–1616) alludes to the lively touch of the virginals (or another wire-strung keyboard instrument), caressed into sounding by gentle fingers: How oft when thou, my music, music play’st, Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap, To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, Whilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap, At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand! To be so tickled, they would change their state And situation with those dancing chips, O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait, Making dead wood more bless’d than living lips. Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss. 50 The sense Shakespeare conveys of delicate touch (by “saucy jacks” and “dancing chips” he means keys, not plucking mechanisms) accords with reality. The virginals appears to the envious lover as an actively engaged respondent (not a passive device merely acted upon) whose keys leap up to tickle, or pleasantly excite, the player’s tender fingertips. The more usual, reverse idea of a player tickling the instrument occurs in Thomas Nashe’s (1567–1601) Anatomie of absurditie (1589) as an ability desirous in a courtier: “to tickle a Cittern, or have a sweete stroke on the Lute”. 51 The image persists in the early-twentieth-century American slang expression “tickle the ivories,” which implies f leet, light piano playing more in the style of Jelly Roll Morton or Art Tatum, say, than of Rachmaninoff.
49 See Tatsha Robertson, “Glass armonica maker vanishes”, Boston Globe (9 May 1999), B01. 50 Internet Shakespeare editions: The sonnets, ed. by Michael Best and Ian Lancashire, http:// internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Son_M/complete (last accessed: 4 August 2017). 51 Thomas Nashe, The anatomie of absurditie, http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/ Anatomy (last accessed: 1 September 2015), 3.
691
Laurence Libin Shakespeare’s “dancing chips” reappear in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803– 1882) poem “Maiden song of the aeolian harp” (Selected poems, 1876), 52 one of innumerable Romantic paeans to that mysterious instrument sounded only by the changeable wind, that is, by Nature, hence free of the constraints and pressures of human performance: Keep your lips or finger-tips For f lute or spinet’s dancing chips; I await a tenderer touch I ask more or not so much: Give me to the atmosphere. 53 Emerson’s poem “Merlin I”, a product of the 1840s, further expresses his predilection for the aeolian harp’s unregulated, transcendent harmony over the tame sounds of the conventional parlor harp and piano: Thy trivial harp will never please Or fill my craving ear; Its chords should ring as blows the breeze, Free, peremptory, clear. No jingling serenader’s art, Nor tinkle of piano strings, Can make the wild blood start In its mystic springs. 54 Romantic poems about regret, loneliness, and death often refer wistfully to obsolete instruments such as the lute and harpsichord, symbolizing bygone days and irretrievable loss. In Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) poem “Merlin & Vivien” from Idylls of the King (1859), Vivien likens loss of faith between lovers to a “little rift within the lute”, 55 which mutes the music as the crack expands. Anachronistically, the Pre-Raphaelite painting The rift within the lute by Arthur Hughes (1832–1915) 56 depicts not a normal lute but a Brit52 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected poems (Boston, Mass.: James R. Osgood, 1876). 53 Ibid., 176. 54 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The complete works, ed. by Edward W. Emerson, 12 vols (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), vol. 9, 120. See further, Cynthia A. Cavanaugh, “The aeolian harp: Beauty and unity in the poetry and prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 56/1 (2002), 5–35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The eolian harp” (1795) likens the aeolian harp to a coy maiden caressed by a lover. 55 Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. by Janet Baine Kopito (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2012), 122–123. 56 Arthur Hughes, The rift within the lute, 1861–1862, oil on canvas, 52.0 x 92.0 cm. Carlisle: Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery (inv.-no.: 1949.125.23).
692
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology ish harp-lute of about 1815, already outmoded by the 1860s. Presumably the poem or the painting elicited the line “Ritchie rift in the lute alone sat” from Ulysses of James Joyce (1882–1941). 57 Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), son of a fiddler, gives such nostalgia a morose twist in his poem “Penance” (published 1922), as a questioner asks, “Why do you sit, O pale thin man, At the end of the room By that harpsichord, built on the quaint old plan? – It is cold as a tomb, And there’s not a spark within the grate; And the jingling wires Are as vain desires That have lagged too late.” […] “I do to-day What I would not then; and the chill old keys, Like a skull’s brown teeth Loose in their sheath, Freeze my touch; yes, freeze.”58 Hardy refers plaintively to an old, silk-fronted cabinet piano in “A Duettist to Her Pianoforte: Song of Silence”, beginning Since every sound moves memories, How can I play you Just as I might if you raised no scene, By your ivory rows, of a form between My vision and your time-worn sheen, As when each day you Answered our fingers with ecstasy? So it’s hushed, hushed, hushed, you are for me! And as I am doomed to counterchord Her notes no more In those old things I used to know, In a fashion, when we practised so, “Good-night! Good-bye!” to your pleated show 57 James Joyce, Ulysses (as note 19), 283. 58 Thomas Hardy, The collected poems, with an introduction, bibliography and glossary by Michael Erwin (Ware: Wordsworths Edition, 2002), 596–597.
693
Laurence Libin Of silk, now hoar, Each nodding hammer, and pedal and key, For dead, dead, dead, you are to me!59 An instrument collection, too, might recall a tomb. A character of Fothergill’s recalls glancing into the far recess of a deep, ghostly room, where the fire-light kept catching the sheen of metal, the yellow whiteness of ivory keys or pipes, or the polished case of some stringed instrument. Strange, grotesque shapes loomed out of the uncertain, f lickering light: but was it not a strange and haunted chamber? Ever it seemed to me as if breaths of air blew through it, which came from all imaginable kinds of graves, and were the breaths of those departed ones who had handled the strange collection, and who wished to finger, or blow into, or beat the dumb, unvibrating things once more. Did I say unvibrating? I was wrong then. The strings sometimes quivered to sounds that set them trembling; something like a whispered tone I have heard from the deep, upturned throats of great brazen trumpets – something like a distant moan floating around the gilded organ-pipes.60 Hardy’s poem “Haunting fingers; A phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments” endows the instruments themselves with consciousness. Their desolate conversation bemoans “This dumb dark stowage after our loud melodious years!” And they felt past handlers clutch them, Though none was in the room, Old players’ dead fingers touch them, Shrunk in the tomb.61 Jane Austen’s (1775–1817) use of musical performance and instruments as plot devices has been thoroughly studied, as have her own musical talents.62 Her references in Emma to the leading London piano manufacturer Broadwood 59 Ibid., 555–556. 60 Fothergill, The first violin (as note 44), 344. Surprisingly in a work of popular fiction, the passage goes on to mention the obscure Hebrew magrepha, once believed to have been a type of pipe organ. 61 Hardy, The collected poems (as note 58), 560. 62 See for example, Kathryn L. Libin, “Music, character, and social standing in Jane Austen’s Emma”, Persuasions 22 (2001), 14–30; “Daily practice, musical accomplishment, and the example of Jane Austen”, Elegance, propriety, harmony: Jane Austen and the Arts, ed. by Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press, 2013), 3–20.
694
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology depend for effect on readers’ recognition of that illustrious firm’s name and of the status conveyed by ownership of a Broadwood piano, whether it was played or not. Frank Churchill’s extravagant, tactless giving of “a very elegant looking […] large sized square pianoforté” by Broadwood to Jane Fairfax, an accomplished pianist whose family was unable to afford a piano, underscores the company’s importance in nineteenth-century Britain and the central role pianos played in middle- and upper-class domesticity, particularly in young women’s education and cultivation, courtship, and identity construction. By Austen’s day the spinet was outmoded but still familiar, as shown by Mrs. Cole’s disparaging remark, I really was ashamed to look at our new grand pianoforté in the drawing-room, while I do not know one note from another […] and there is poor Jane Fairfax, who is mistress of music, has not any thing in the nature of an instrument, not even the pitifullest old spinnet in the world.63 In John Irving’s novel Until I find you (2005), the dissolute character William Burns was captivated as a child by the organ. He’d started piano lessons at six and had not touched an organ before he was nine, but at seven or eight he began to stick bits of paper above the piano keys – Imagining they were organ stops. He’d already begun to dream about playing the organ, and the organ he dreamed about was the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s.64 When an opportunity to play it finally arose, William Burns was disappointed by the organ. Built in 1888, the Father Willis would have been more highly valued if it were still in its original condition. Alas, in William’s estimation, the organ had been “much fiddled with”; by the time he got to try it, it had been restored and electrified, a process typical of the anti-Victorianism of the 1960s.65 Irving refers here to a real instrument built by Henry Willis (known as “Father Willis”) for Old St. Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and installed in 1888.66 According to the church’s history, it 63 Jane Austen, Emma, collated by R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933, 3rd ed.), 214–216. 64 John Irving, Until I find you (New York: Random House, 2005), 9. 65 Ibid., 10. 66 Listed in the National Pipe Organ Registry of the British Institute of Organ Studies, www. npor.org.uk, index no. D00483 (last accessed: 2 August 2015).
695
Laurence Libin was then presumably typical of Willis’s small instruments of this period: strong and forthright in tone with a robust mechanical action. Slight modifications were made to this instrument in 1936; it was electrified and enlarged in 1960 when a new console with tab stops was provided. Further tonal modifications and additions were made in 1968.67 The organ, subsequently further altered, remains in use. Irving’s description is reasonably accurate (though the organ had not been “restored” so much as rebuilt and modernized, not necessarily from anti-Victorian motives) but not based on first-hand knowledge; Irving relied on an acquaintance for information that, from the beginning, embeds his novel in reality. Burns’ disappointment encapsulates a truly-held attitude among persons with informed sensibilities regarding misguided “improvement” of historical organs. A further point here is Irving’s use of the expression “fiddled with” (meddled, tampered with), which, like the expressions “fiddling” (trifling, petty), “fiddle around” (waste time) and “fiddlesticks” (nonsense), has negative connotations. Other slang expressions derived from instruments include “drum up” (arouse), “harp on” (tiresomely reiterate), “trumpet” (loudly proclaim), “chime in” (break into a conversation), and “high-strung” (excessively tense or sensitive). Deeply embedded in colloquial language, these expressions borrow names of old kinds of instruments; more recent types seldom lend their names to idioms. Unlike easy identification of the 1888 Willis organ, it may be difficult or impossible to ascertain whether an author refers to a particular real instrument. Jane Orcutt’s novel The pipe organ (2005) 68 tells of a plausible situation in which a decrepit church organ by Hook & Hastings, once a leading American builder, is threatened with replacement by an electronic substitute, prompting a small-town community to mobilize to repair the old instrument. Whether Orcutt based her morality tale on an actual incident is unknown, and her description of the Hook & Hastings organ is inept but beside the point: The organ (and in a parallel subplot, some old printing equipment) represents cherished values endangered by “progress” and pecuniary considerations. Orcutt’s faith-affirming story, one in a series appealing to conservative Christian female readers, ref lects tension between advocates of historic preservation vs. modernization, authenticity vs. expediency, tradition vs. disruption, and shows that a venerable organ’s embodiment of group identity, civic pride, and communal memory transcends its liturgical use. 67 http://www.osp.org.uk/index.php/liturgy/stations (last accessed: 2 August 2015). 68 Jane Orcutt, The pipe organ (Carmel, N.Y.: Guideposts, 2005).
696
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology Of course specificity does not guarantee authenticity, and details are not necessarily facts, as we gather from Rose Tremaine’s award-winning historical romance Music & silence (1999), focused on the life of an English lutenist in service to Denmark’s King Christian IV (1577–1648). At one point, the king’s musicians play “in the church [in Frederiksborg] […] assembled round the fine organ made for the King in 1616 by his brother-in-law, Esaias Compenius of Brunswick”.69 In fact, the well-known, extant organ by Compenius (1566–1617) in the Frederiksborg castle chapel was built about 1605-1610 for the Hessen castle at the behest of Duke Heinrich Julius of BraunschweigWolfenbüttel (1564–1613), and came to Frederiksborg only after his death, in 1617. The duke, not the organ builder, was the brother-in-law of Christian IV. Tremaine has said, I have very strong opinions on how the novelist must work with history […] I believe research should be done in a scholarly way […] However, once the months of research are complete, they should be followed by a time of quiet thought, in which […] the researched data will be fading away into the unconscious. Only in this way can historical fact be alchemized into something new and living.70 Perhaps Tremaine’s unconscious betrayed her or she conjured a second Compenius organ for Frederiksborg; in either case the utterly implausible notion that Compenius was the king’s brother-in-law undercuts her alchemy. The fictitious New York harpsichordist Myra Drysdale in Francis Steegmuller’s novel Blue harpsichord (1949; originally published under the pseudonym “David Keith”)71 is modeled after Sylvia Marlowe, who in the early 1940s played jazz at the Blue Angel nightclub and the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center. The historian Edward Kottick claims that on those occasions Marlowe used her blue William Dowd harpsichord, but Dowd was not yet building instruments in the 1940s, and Hal Haney, who attended Marlowe’s Rainbow Room performances, recalled her playing her white Pleyel harpsichord.72 Anyway, Steegmuller’s title refers not to an instrument but to a recording Drysdale is to make, presumably including her nightclub repertoire, which embraces blues. Trained in France (as was Marlowe, who also recorded jazz selections), Drysdale comes across as versatile and approachable, like her instrument. 69 Rose Tremaine, Music & silence (paperback edition; New York: Washington Square Press, 2001), 262. 70 Ibid., [491] (unnumbered). 71 Francis Steegmuller [David Keith], Blue harpsichord (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949). 72 Marlowe’s white Pleyel is referenced in Harold L. Haney, “Interview with Sylvia Marlowe”, The Harpsichord 4/3 (1971), 5–11 and 17–19.
697
Laurence Libin In contrast to Hardy’s plaintive backward glance at the harpsichord, Steegmuller’s story shows that at the onset of the early music revival, the harpsichord had already entered public perception in America both as a rejuvenated vehicle for baroque music and as an incisive modern medium for jazz, blues, swing, and related genres. In the Paramount Pictures film Second chorus (1940), featuring music by Artie Shaw, a college student (Fred Astaire) mentions a scholarly article on the “decline of the harpsichord and her sister instruments” – ironically, since Shaw’s Gramercy Five band at that time occasionally featured a harpsichord, played by Johnny Guarnieri. Where an allusion is vague or a detail cannot be confirmed, the question whether the writer had personal experience with that type of instrument should be considered. Joyce’s well-attested musicianship gives credence to this scene from Ulysses, a radical work replete with references to music, here regarding a piano in a saloon: “Upholding the lid he (who?) gazes in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling a triple of keys to see the thickness of felt advancing, to hear the muff led hammerfall in action”.73 The diagonal triple stringing disclosed beneath the piano’s raised lid, the softpedaled triad sounded by thick-felted hammers, seeing, pressing, hearing, all attest to Joyce’s close observation of a piano’s workings.74 He further evokes the prolonged diminuendo of a tuning fork: From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the tuner had forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now poised that he now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.75 Here we discern the gesture of striking one of the fork’s prongs and pressing the end of its handle onto a resonant surface to amplify its pure, gradually decaying “call” – a surprising locution suggestive of heightened awareness, since tuning forks are usually regarded as musically inert, inexpressive. And returning to the piano, “A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all
73 Joyce, Ulysses (as note 19), 259. Joyce might have taken the obscure term “duodene” from Alexander Ellis’s translation of Hermann von Helmholtz, On the sensations of tone as a physiological basis for the theory of music (1875). Further, see Zack Bowen, Musical allusions in the works of James Joyce – Early poetry through Ulysses (Albany: State University of New York Press, and Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975). 74 Joyce’s Anton Petrof upright piano is on long-term loan to the Dublin Writers Museum. 75 Joyce, Ulysses (as note 19), 260.
698
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology harpsichording”.76 Joyce’s association of “chirruped bright treble” notes with “harpsichording” hints at his sensitivity to timbre and touch and his response to the recently reintroduced harpsichord. Significantly, Joyce had written on 16 June 1904 to Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), asking Dolmetsch to make a lute for him; Dolmetsch instead offered Joyce a harpsichord.77 Joyce alludes to this exchange in Ulysses in the midst of an extended conversation on music and composers, as Stephen Dedalus remarks on the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter Lane near Gerard the herbalist, who anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus, an instrument he was contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom [Leopold] Bloom did not quite recall, though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas.78 Joyce imagines a contretemps involving a grand piano by a leading London manufacturer: “Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the Collard grand”.79 In effect, Collard’s instrument participates in an argument, presumably winning it; either that, or something was wrong with it that Goodwin could not overcome, a situation painfully familiar to pianists faced with an obstreperous piano. We shall soon see, however, that Goodwin was an ineffective player. Joyce refers also to a hand-cranked pianola, whose pinned drum, turned by a “drumhandle”, is supplemented by a keyboard: “Professor Goodwin […] totters across the room, his hands f luttering. He sits tinily on the piano stool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel’s grace” as “[t]he pianola, with changing lights plays in waltz time the prelude of My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.”80 Interestingly, Joyce’s pianola does not conform to the word’s use as a brand name trademarked by the Aeolian Company in the United States for a type of roll-operated player piano. Aeolian’s Pianola was manufactured for the British market from 1909 at the Orchestrelle Company factory in Hayes, Middlesex. The Oxford English dictionary cites the earliest known use of the word (in Scots76 Ibid. 77 Lillian M. Ruff, “James Joyce and Arnold Dolmetsch”, James Joyce Quarterly 6/3 (1969), 224– 230. Dolmetsch built his first harpsichord in 1896. 78 Joyce, Ulysses (as note 19), 661–662. 79 Ibid., 264. 80 Ibid., 559–560. This song recurs numerous times in Joyce’s Ulysses.
699
Laurence Libin man, 5 March 1901) as referring to a roll-operated, push-up piano attachment powered by wind and depressing as it were “with handless sticks” a regular piano’s keys, that is, a Vorsetzer, not the self-contained instrument Joyce had in mind, which requires coins to unlock the mechanism and has a changing light display, probably electrical. This animated pianola was a state-of-the-art device at the time Joyce was writing, and even more novel in 1904 Dublin, the setting for Ulysses. Coexisting with barrel pianos played in the streets, Joyce’s technologically-advanced pianola represents modernity but ref lects age-old fascination with musical automata. Coincidentally, in 1904 Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835–1910), himself a casual pianist, purchased an Aeolian Orchestrelle (a large automatic reed organ) and dozens of rolls, by means of which he became acquainted with a substantial repertory of classical music, which previously he purported to regard as dreary. 81 In one of his early humorous writings, Clemens professes to prefer cheerful American folk music and its most characteristic instrument: I like Gottschalk well enough. He probably gets as much out of the piano as there is in it. But the frozen fact is, that all that he does get out of it is “tum, tum”. […] The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo. Gottschalk compared to Sam Pride or Charley Rhoades, is as a Dashaway cocktail to a hot whisky punch. When you want genuine music – music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, – when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!82 Clemens, targeting this newspaper’s mostly male readership, paints the piano as insipid and effeminate (therefore deserving to be smashed) in contrast to the aggressively masculine banjo. His hyperbolic expression of personal taste underscores real class and gender distinctions: Pianos in 1860s California were luxuries brought from the East mainly for ladies’ recreation, while banjos were strongly associated with minstrelsy and black rural entertainment (Sam Pride was a noted African-American banjoist). As Mark Twain, Clemens was later credited with the opprobrious remark, “A gentleman is someone 81 James Howard Richards, “Music and the reed organ in the life of Mark Twain”, American Music 1/3 (1983), 38–47. 82 Mark Twain, “Enthusiastic eloquence”, San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle (23 June 1865).
700
Literature as an Adjunct to Organology who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t”, suggesting either a change in his outlook or a bow to a more refined audience. 83 The relatively unexplored literature of instrument humor and satire, at the same time funny and serious, parallels ludicrous instrument iconography, from marginal depictions in medieval manuscripts through the illustrations of Dr. Seuss and Gary Larson. Jokes about instruments range from inane wordplay (You can tune a piano but you can’t piano a tuna) to ref lections of realworld attitudes, especially toward instruments stereotypically perceived as inferior (viola), irritating (accordion, banjo), hard to keep in tune (lute), prone to mishap (Why is the French horn divine? Because Man blows into it but God only knows what comes out of it), or otherwise distinguished by some characteristic that invites mockery.84 Musicians’ in-jokes often poke fun at the idiosyncrasies of certain instruments; regarding the trombone, for example, it is said that you can’t trust a player whose instrument changes shape while being played. Relatively few jokes have yet emerged involving electronic instruments, which are still widely viewed with incomprehension and have yet to figure much in fiction. Many jokes and stories address economic hardship suffered by instrumentalists. Players also aim comic barbs at singers in a spirit of affectionate rivalry and denigrate conductors as a way of defusing tension. Robert Barclay, an instrument conservator and trumpet maker, exposes such little-discussed social aspects of organology in his tongue-in-cheek science-fiction story Death at the podium (2012), 85 which incidentally provides truthful observations about instrument maintenance (e.g., oboe reed making), and about orchestral performance practice. Barclay mentions the Amati instruments at the University of Saskatchewan, identifying them only as “a quartet of classic Cremonas”. He takes notice of archaeological discoveries and of musical qualities, for example citing a ca. 1860 Triébert (sic; the accent was used only from 1878) oboe at old French orchestral pitch. Such factual references, based on personal experience, research, and discussions with musicians and makers, are important in communicating instrument lore. But it must be emphasized that even wholly imaginative writing 83 Fintan O’Toole, characterizing W. H. Auden in The New York Review of Books 62/16 (2015), 48, substitutes “accordion” for “banjo.” 84 For examples see Nancy Groce, The musician’s joke book: Knowing the score (New York: Schirmer, 1996) and “Knowing the score: The transmission of musician jokes among professional and semi-professional musicians”, New York Folklore 22/1–4 (1996), 37–48, and Carl Rahkonen, “No laughing matter: The viola joke cycle as musicians’ folklore”, Western Folklore 59/1 (Winter 2000), 49–63. 85 Robert Barclay, Death at the podium (Huntington Beach, Calif.: Loose Cannon Press, 2012).
701
Laurence Libin contributes to shaping perception of musical instruments. In literature as in iconography, our duty is to distinguish organological fact from fiction and to appreciate the usefulness of both.
702
The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records
Li Mei 中国,北京 (Music Research Institute, Chinese National Academy of Arts, Beijing)
曾侯乙编钟铭文中所体现中国人早期律学实践 Abstract. The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records: The Early Application Practice of Tuning: Although there was no theory of just intonation in ancient China, the music of the traditional instrument Qin and a large number of ancient books show the practice of the just tuning system. But as the tuning system for the Qin was written down much later, it had only minimal inf luence on Chinese musical theory, which also failed to form a system of just intonation theory. The Chime Bells from the tomb of Zeng-hou-Yi which were excavated in Suizhou, Hubei Province in 1978, show that just tuning practice is a historical fact. The inscriptions on the chimes of this tomb ref lect the basic rules of the ancient tuning system of bells. The discovery of the Chime Bells of Zeng-hou-yi (buried in 433 BC) provides conclusive evidence. It can end the long dispute over the possibility that chimes of the pre-Qin dynasty era had a two-tone structure. The excavated bells have confirmed that one bell can have two tones and they have also proved that the Chinese musical system used the harmonic third-interval (the major third 5/4, minor third 6/5). After research of the inscriptions on the Chime Bells, we can understand the principle of the tuning system used with the Chime Bells. Chinese scholars call this tuning the “Fu-Zeng system” (曾体系). This structure is based upon a basic four-tone group that is constructed using fifth intervals, each basic tone upward and downward produces a major third-interval. The upward tone is called Fu and the downward tone is called Zeng (曾). The four basic tones, four Fu tones and four Zeng tones, are organized together and form just intonation of tone relationships. In practical terms, when a third is shown as a melodic interval, the third interval is very large. It follows the three-sectional tuning of the Chinese up-and-down principle of tone generation (which is the method of subtraction and addition of a string’s one-third length). When the third interval is played as a chord, it follows the principle of 5-limit. The pre-Qin bells provide two tones in one body; this indicates that the pre-Qin Chime Bells’ tuning practice conforms to the law of 3-limit and 5-limit. The “Fu-Zeng system” (曾体系) is based on the principle of subsection vibration of a string. It means this tuning system should be multifarious. Beyond the above mentioned 3-limit and 5-limit, it also can provide deeper mathematical exploration. Until the 1980s, modern scholarship was unaware of some of these aspects of earlier Chinese theories. It appears that the ancient Chinese had reached a high level of cognition and application of these theories as early as the fifth century BC.
703
Li Mei This paper intends to introduce the “Fu-Zeng system” based on the inscriptions on the Chime Bells of Zeng-hou-yi.
人类文明史中一项专门的学问是有关对乐音之间运动规律的认识,这就是 律学。中国是个有律学传统的国度,从春秋战国时代(公元前8-3世纪), 就已经形成了对乐音的体系化认识,这些系统化的知识都记载在古籍文献 中。在两千多年的历史书写中,关于乐律学的书籍难以胜数。中国人在先 秦就形成的大国意识,充分体现在统一度量衡方面,这其中也包括了音乐 方面的统一原则,在公元前5世纪就形成了十二个律名:黄钟、大吕、太簇、 夹钟、姑洗、仲吕、蕤宾、林钟、夷则、南吕、无射、应钟; 1 五声音阶的阶名:宫(Do)、商(Re)、角(Mi)、徵(Sol)、羽(La)。2 规定标准音 高“取竹於嶰溪之谷,以生空窍厚钧者,断两节间--其长三寸九分--而吹 之,以为黄钟之宫”,3记录了十二音依次五度相生的理论,中国古代称这个 理论为“三分损益法”。4在两千五百多年的学术史中,产生了丰富的有关“ 三分损益法”的研究著述。这些研究传统和成果的形成,一直于音乐实践 紧密相联。所以,中国古人习惯于用所讨论的乐器来命名调律系统,讨论 编钟上的调音问题,则称“钟律”,讨论古琴的调音问题,则称“琴律”,讨论 吹管乐器的调音,则称“管律”。但究其实质,无外乎五度相生律和纯律两 类律制。 由于中国音乐单声旋律性发展的特色,在音律关系中不涉及纯律,所以, 虽然研究著述汗牛充栋,却鲜见有关纯律理论的研究。不过,在传统乐器 古琴的演奏及其大量琴谱中却包含着纯律的实践,南宋朱熹的一篇论文《 琴律说》(约1187年后)中首次出现了系统讨论古琴上的调音问题,其中涉 及到古琴上运用谐和三、六度的方法和美学意义,称为“琴律”。5不过,朱 熹仍然是试图用三分损益法来解释这些符合纯律规范的音程,并没有真 正进入到纯律原理的探讨。所以说,《琴律说》产生年代较晚,对中国传统 律学理论没有太大的影响,更没有真正展开对纯律的研究。从文献记载来 看,中国古代音乐实践和理论似乎没有与纯律相关的内容。然而, 1978年 在湖北省随县出土的曾侯乙编钟(公元前433年入葬)则让我们看到公元前 五世纪已经存在的纯律实践,镌刻在曾侯乙编钟上的铭文所记载的内容 则反映出古代钟律的基本规定具有纯律思维。 图1.曾侯乙编钟 1 2 3 4 5
704
[吴]韦昭注,《国语·周语下》,《四部丛刊·初编》251册。约成书于公元前五世纪,战国初。 [唐]房玄龄注,《管子·地员》,《四部丛刊·初编》346册。管仲本人大约生活在公元前730-前 645年间,《管子》约成书于公元前四世纪。 [秦]吕不韦等,《吕氏春秋·古乐》,《四部丛刊·初编》420册。 最早见于《管子·地员》,记录生五音的方法和顺序,后《吕氏春秋·季夏纪·音律篇》规定了生十二 音的顺序。 [南宋]朱熹,《晦庵集·第卷六十六·琴律说》,《四部丛刊·初编》。
The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records 曾侯乙编钟的出土在研究古代青铜冶金术和铸造技术方面有重要的意义, 在音乐学方面的意义也是非凡的。 曾侯乙编钟问世之前,已有一百多枚中国北方存世的商周编钟得到学界的 深入研究,学者们注意到先秦合瓦形编钟的正鼓部和侧鼓部的内壁都有 不同程度的挫痕,这表明这两个部位可获得的音高是经过调整的,有的钟 侧鼓部还有鸟图形,似乎是提示某种功能。根据现代声学的研究与解释, 合瓦形构造使每枚钟可以获得两个基频,这个铸有鸟图形的部位或许可以 敲击得音。因此,早就有学者提出“先秦编钟双音结构”的推测。6但这种钟 形的制造方法在汉代(公元前)即已失传,文献记载也不清晰,所以这个推 测还不能获得共识。而曾侯乙编钟的出土,使这一论断得到实物确证。并 由测音数据和铭文记载得到一个结论,即先秦合瓦形编钟是双音结构,中 国音乐也早有三度生律的实践。同墓出土的另一件五弦器,是专为调钟的 音高而备的调音器 – – 均钟,其原理也是通过听辨迅速找到弦的分段振动 节点而获得正确的音,如同古希腊的monochord。 图2.均钟,调钟律器 7
6 7
黄翔鹏,《新石器和青铜时代的已知音响资料与我国音阶发展史问题》,此文完成于1977年9月, 发表于《音乐论丛》1978年第1辑,1980年第1辑。 邹衡、谭维四主编,《曾侯乙编钟》,金城出版社、西苑出版社2015年7月出版,上册,198頁
705
Li Mei 一、“甫頁曾体系” 根据编钟铭文研究得知钟律生律法以“甫頁曾体系”为原则。8 “甫頁曾体 系”由四基、四甫頁、四曾构成: 四基 – – 初始四音:宫(Do)、徵(Sol)、商(Re)、羽(La) 四甫頁 (亦称“角”,四基音各音上方谐和大三度音) – – 宫甫頁 (Mi)、徵甫 頁 (Bi)、商甫頁 (#FA)、羽甫頁 (#Do) 四曾(四基音各音下方谐和大三度音) – – 宫曾( bLa)、徵曾( bMi)、商曾( bSi)、 羽曾(Fa) 用矩阵结构图表示如下,以C=宫(Do),甫頁、基、曾三行,各为五度链结 合,每音含阶名、音名和相对波长:
四
(角):
四基:
四曾:
测音数据也证实了这一点。具体而言,即乐音以旋律音程先后相继而生 2 3 — )、三倍(纯四度,相对波长 — )的五度、 时,呈现出三分(纯五度,相对波长 3 4 四度相生关系;而当乐音以和声音程同时而生时,如同先秦编钟同体双音 4 — )、五倍(谐和小三度,相 的协和关系,是来自五分(谐和大三度,相对波长 5 5 — )的三度生律关系,这就构成了包含着“三分三倍”和“五分五倍”两 对波长 6 种生律法的音体系。 “甫頁曾体系”是以弦的谐和划分为根本,其律制的性质具有多重性,已经 超出了“三分损益法”的生律范畴,提供了更丰富的生律因素。虽然我们直 到20世纪70年代末、80年代初才真正了解到这一律学理论与应用方面的 学术遗产,但作为一门学科知识的认识水平和应用水平,中国人则是早在 公元前5世纪就已经达到了极高的程度,不仅能够获得丰富多样的音程类 型,还能将这种听觉经验通过青铜冶炼术物化显现,如同录音机般把远古 的音响实践存留至今。 8
706
黄翔鹏,《曾侯乙钟磬铭文乐学体系初探》,原载《音乐研究》1981年第1期。
The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records 二、曾侯乙编钟铭文本文的乐律学意义 曾侯乙编钟全套64枚钟,钟上的铭文表述出其中的乐音组织关系。铭文不 仅展示出当时各个诸侯国不同律名之间的对应关系,还通过一些缀词显示 出音程关系。在诸国并立的时代,还没有统一标准,这些或同或异的律名 中,有黄钟、太簇、姑洗、蕤宾、夷则、无射、应钟七律名称亦见于古籍《国 语》(公元前六世纪),借用现代音名,相当于C、D、E、#F、#G、#A、B七 个音。 图1,曾侯乙编钟钟架结构及挂钟示意图 9
整个编钟呈曲尺状排列,下层分三组,图左下一层一组共3枚,中间为下一 层二组共6枚,右侧为下一层三组共4枚;中层一组共11枚,中层二组共12 枚,中层三组共10枚;最上一层也分三组,上层一组共6枚,二组共6枚,三 组共7枚。 上层钟称为钮钟,中、下层称为甬钟。从测音来看,钟架正面二层右侧10枚 钟的音准条件最好。 中国的古文字学家和音乐学家们对这套编钟上的铭文进行研究,整理释 义所有的铭文术语,如图1中第二层右起第六枚钟,编号为中·三·5,其正鼓 部和侧鼓部铭文如下图左右。
9
同前,《曾侯乙编钟》,上册,157頁,本文已修图。
707
Li Mei 图3:中·三·5浊穆钟10 钲部:姑洗之羽,蕤宾之终,黄钟之羽角, 右鼓部:姑洗之宫 。姑洗之在楚号为吕 无射之徵曾。1
钟,其反为宣钟。2
1112
这两段铭文的核心内容是说此枚钟正、侧鼓部所发之音有如下乐律关系: 正鼓部:所发之音为姑洗(C4)为宫(Do)之羽音(La);蕤宾(D4)宫之徵音;黄 钟(bA4)宫之羽角(即F4音上方谐和大三度)。用矩阵图示为:
10 从下文的分析来看,此钟律名应为“浊穆钟”。 11 同前,《曾侯乙编钟》,上册,309頁。 12 同上。
708
The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records 侧鼓部:姑洗(C4)为宫(Do)。“姑洗”一名在楚国称“吕钟”,高八度钟称“宣 钟”(C5)。 每枚钟上的铭文都是这样的叙述体例,即本钟正、侧鼓部音在两种以上不 同调性中所当之声,并提供不同诸侯国对同一音律的不同称谓。编钟铭文 所描述的每钟双音多为小三度关系,侧鼓音为正鼓音上方小三度。测音结 果与铭文所描述的音程关系相差不多,其中不准的音可以理解为在入葬 前调音不精或钟体经历锈蚀而导致音准出现误差。 整套钟的编组及每钟正鼓部的理论音高 13列表如下(侧鼓部音多为正鼓部 上方小三度): 表1.
曲尺状钟架左架上、中、下层: 11
编号
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
(浊姑洗) (文王) bC5 E5
上层一组 坪皇 文王 浊兽钟 (浊穆钟) 姑洗 D4 E4 G4 A4 C5
中层一组
坪皇 D5
3
2
(新钟) (浊穆钟) (坪皇) (兽钟) bG5 A5 D6 bA6
(文王) (浊穆钟) (坪皇) (文王) (浊穆钟) E5 A5 D6 E6 A6 蕤宾 姑洗C2 D2
下层一组
表2. 编号
钟架正架左上、中层,正面下层: 12
11
10
9
8
7
6
上层 二组
5
4
3
黄钟 姑洗 韦音E5 bA4 C5
2
应音 bA5
中层 坪皇 文王 赢孠#F4 浊兽钟 (浊穆钟) 姑洗 (坪皇) (文王) (浊穆钟) (坪皇) 楚.新钟 二组 D4 E4 齐.吕音 G4 A4 C5 D5 E5 A5 D6 下层 二组
表3. 编号
1
坪皇D2
1
(姑洗) (文王) C6 E6 (文王) (浊穆 E6 钟)A6
文王 (浊兽钟) (浊穆 (浊姑 姑洗 蕤宾D3 韦音E3 赢孠#F3 (浊兽 E2 G2 钟)A2 洗)B2 C3 楚.坪皇 楚.文王 楚.新钟 钟)G3
钟架正架右上、中层: 10
9
8
上层 三组 中层 (浊兽钟) (浊穆钟) 三组 G3 A3
7
6
5
无射#F4 太簇bB4 蕤宾D5 姑洗 C4
蕤宾D4 楚.坪皇
4
3
2
1
赢孠#F5 穆钟 (坪皇) (应 楚.新钟 bB5 D6 音)#G6
韦音E4 (浊穆钟) 楚.文王 A4
13 参见崔宪《曾侯乙编钟铭文校释及其律学研究》,北京:人民音乐出版社1997年出版,第19-134 頁,另见附录一“曾侯乙编钟理论数据、测音数据对照表”,199-222頁。本文依据铭文和数据进行 分析推导并制如下三表。
709
Li Mei 以上三表中凡用括号标注的律名是从铭文的叙述中逻辑推导得出。 从铭文的内容可以提炼出姑洗为宫,并与其他各音形成的乐音组织关系。 以下的五度链关系是根据铭文所述建立起来,如表4中浊兽钟铭文曰:姑 洗之徵。穆钟之羽……浊兽钟之宫。”14这段说得很清楚,“浊兽钟”是姑洗 的上方纯五度;穆钟上方五度相生大六度……。由于篇幅原因,铭文原文 略去。 表4.
以姑洗为中心的基链各音,借用五线谱示意 穆音(曾)
古代律名
(楚)
夷则(申)
(楚)
(楚)
+2
+4
+6
+8
+10
+12
+14
1 8
1 12
1 9
2 27
8 81
16 243
64 729
256 2187
3 16
1 4
1 6
2 9
4 27
16 81
32 243
128 729
512 2187
9 32
3 8
1 2
1 3
4 9
8 27
32 81
64 243
256 729
1024 2187
9 16
3 4
1
2 3
8 9
16 27
64 81
128 243
512 729
2048 2187
-4
-2
小字二组
9 128
3 32
小字一组
9 64
小字组
大字组
相对波长
(楚、曾) (曾)
(曾、楚) 穆钟(楚) 浊新钟 吕钟(楚) 浊兽钟 坪皇(楚) 浊穆钟 文王 槃钟(晋) (楚)
校正值(cent)
浊姑洗 无射 (浊坪皇)
蕤宾(曾)
姑洗
14 引自崔宪,《曾侯乙编钟铭文校释及其律学研究》,第71-72,241页。
710
The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records 根据乐音在调式组织结构方面所体现出的色彩性,运用中国传统哲学中 的阴阳观念,对下列这类色彩性音列表述为阳链。 表5.
以韦音为中心的阳链各音,借用五线谱示意
-18
-16
韦音 (曾、周) 文王(楚) -14
小字二组
9 80
3 40
1 10
1 15
4 45
16 135
32 405
128 1215
256 3645
小字一组
9 40
3 20
1 5
2 15
8 45
32 135
64 405
256 1215
512 3645
小字组
9 20
3 10
2 5
4 15
16 45
64 135
128 405
512 1215
1024 3645
大字组
9 10
3 5
4 5
8 15
32 45
128 135
256 405
1024 1215
2048 3645
古代律名 校正值(cent)
相对波长
-12
赢孠 (浊坪皇) 应音(周) (浊文王) (槃钟) (曾、周) 应钟(曾) (太簇) 新钟(楚) 兽钟(楚) (剌音) -10 -8 -6 -4 -2
阳链左端两音并没有铭文提及,只是根据甫頁曾体系的逻辑推衍。 根据乐音在调式组织结构方面所体现出的色彩性,运用中国传统哲学中 的阴阳观念,对下列这类色彩性音列表述为阴链。
711
Li Mei 表6.
以黄钟为中心的阴链各音,借用五线谱示意 (浊姑洗)
对 波 长
太簇(曾)
兽钟(楚)
浊文王 穆钟(楚)
(浊新钟)
宣钟 (曾、周)
+8
+10
(楚) +12
应音(周) +14
(楚) +16
剌音(周) +18
+20
六墉(晋) +22
小字二组
135 2048
45 512
15 128
5 64
5 48
5 72
5 54
10 81
小字一组
135 1024
45 256
15 64
5 32
5 24
5 36
5 27
20 81
小字组
135 512
45 128
15 32
5 16
5 12
5 18
10 27
40 81
大字组
135 256
45 64
15 16
5 8
5 6
5 9
20 27
80 81
校正值(cent)
相
黄钟(曾) 浊坪皇
(新钟)
古代律名
根据上三表中姑洗-韦音(姑洗之宫甫頁15)-兽钟(姑洗之宫曾16)这 三音所统领的三个五度链之间的关系,可以将这三个音列整合为一个音系 网: 图4.曾侯乙编钟铭文音系网:
15 中三6钟铭文“姑洗之宫角,韦音之宫”。 16 下二9、下二3钟铭文“兽钟之宫……姑洗之宫曾”。
712
The Inscription of the Bell Chimes of Zeng-Hou-Yi records 这是一个符合纯律(Just intonation)逻辑关系的结构网。矩阵中有些音位 缺律名,这是根据铭文所述关系推导出来。编钟铭文所叙述的内容反映出 强调三度关系的认识,上层钮钟铭文甚至不记律名,更加突出了甫頁 – 曾 三度关系,表明这种关系已经成为一种重要的音程观念,并凝练为术语“ 甫頁、角”和“曾”,“宫角(甫頁)”“徵角”“商角”“羽角”和“宫曾”“徵曾”“商 曾”“羽曾”的广泛使用,具体可感地反映出古人对弦长五等分振动所产生 的乐音,不仅有了经验性的认识,还总结出了术语表达系统,并将这种音 律思维固化到青铜编钟上。这种对音律命题的全面观察和表述,在人类认 知音律规律性的探索历程中无疑是居于首位的。 测音数据反映出基链中从穆钟到浊姑洗,各律当调式主音时,其调式音阶 音准条件最好。总体音准呈现出中音区为佳,尤其中层三组最好。甬钟低 音和高音误差较大,属于调音的技术性问题,钮钟甚至有各别音偏高近一 个全音,似乎是未完工所造成的。这些并不影响我们对古人音律思维的判 断。虽然在过去两千年来中国音乐文献记载中几乎没有关于纯律的消息, 但这套镌刻在青铜编钟上的铭文却告诉了我们一些不一样的实践,与编钟 同墓出土并同样古老的五弦琴,今日七弦古琴的前身,则完全具备纯律实 践的条件,在流传至今的众多乐谱中也能看到运用谐和三、六度的音位。 这表明,纯律的运用并非必然地与复调音乐和功能和声体系共生,在旋律 性的单音音乐发展中也同样有所实践。
713
Li Mei
714
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium
Tosca Lynch Jesus College, Oxford
The Seductive Voice of the Aulos in Plato’s Symposium: From the Dismissal of the auletris to Alcibiades’ Praise of Socrates-auletes Abstract. In the Symposium, Plato presents his readers with many different characterisations of the aulos and the performers of this instrument. At the very beginning of the drinking-party (Symp. 176e7) the aulos-girl is sent away: given that this instrument played a very significant role in the sympotic practices of Classical Athens, this exceptional choice calls for an explanation. In the light of the following developments of the dialogue, the dismissal of the αὐλητρίς becomes even more significant. In fact, on the one hand, this character reappears at a key moment of the dialogue, as Alcibiades’ dramatic appearance on scene is announced and accompanied precisely by the sound of her “voice” (αὐλητρίδος φωνὴν ἀκούειν, 212c8; cf. 212d6). On the other hand, in his following discourse of praise, Alcibiades characterises Socrates as ‘the most wonderful αὐλητής’ and claims that this image not only epitomises the effect of Socrates’ words on the souls of his listeners (cf. 215b-216d) but reveals no less than “the truth” about Socrates (τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἕνεκα , 215a9). But what do Socrates’ words have in common with the seductive voice of the aulos? In this paper, I will show how these apparently conf licting images can help us understand Plato’s complex and nuanced attitude towards the alluring voice of the aulos and its psychological effects. More specifically, I will contend that Alcibiades’ characterisation of Socrates as the ‘most wonderful aulete’ reveals how the power of Socrates’ seductive words can be truly likened to a ‘good use’ of auletic music. Just as Marsyas’ and Olympus’ divine music is capable of revealing who needs to participate in mystic rites, so also Socrates’ aulemata are capable of achieving an effect that goes much deeper than mere rational persuasion and exposes the true ethical needs of his interlocutors. Differently from what is often maintained, then, I will argue that Plato is not at all concerned with the capacity of the aulos to provoke deep and powerful emotions; on the contrary, far from rejecting entirely the intense and even ecstatic effects of music, Plato’s aim is to highlight the importance of using these powerful forces correctly. If oriented correctly, both musical and rhetorical aulemata become crucial educational “tools” to give shape to the soul and its inner hierarchy of desires. If oriented in the wrong ethical direction, both the power of persuasive speech and that of music lead to the exact opposite result: psychological (and therefore political) strife.
715
Tosca Lynch As attested by rich iconographic and textual evidence, the aulos played a central role in Athenian symposia.1 Acoustically marking the entrance to a cultural space devoted to the shared enjoyment of many kinds of pleasures, 2 the seductive notes of this instrument, together with the inebriating effects of wine and perfumes, fostered emotional and physical intimacy between the guests, reinforcing individual affective bonds as well as the collective identity of the group. 3 This ideal vision of a symposium, however, must not be mistaken for a comprehensive or historically accurate depiction of this cultural institution: it seems more like “a dream, even hallucination of perfection”.4 In actual fact, much more disquieting and conf lictual elements lurked behind this inebriating atmosphere of intimacy: as Theognis’ penetrating observations reveal, symposia offered unique opportunities to secretly uncover the ethical “fibre” of the other guests, 5 observing their response to physical and intellectual pleasures in an ostensibly open and relaxed context. This aspect of the psychology of sympotic gatherings is highlighted by Plato himself at the end of Book 1 of the Laws, where we are told that the apparently playful “test of 1
2
3 4 5
716
See Peter Wilson, The aulos in Athens, in Simon Goldhill, and Robin Osborne, eds, Performance culture and Athenian democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ewen L. Bowie, “Early Greek elegy, symposium and public festival”, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986), 13–35, esp. p. 27 and 35; Ezio Pellizer, “Outlines of a morphology of sympotic entertainment”, in Sympotica – A symposium on the symposion, ed. by Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 177–184. Aulos music accompanied Classical symposia from start to finish. A special type of aulos music, the so-called “Libations” (spondeia), marked the transition from the meal that took place in the first part of the evening to the symposion proper: see Plut. Quaest. Conv. 712f–713a. In addition, the aulos accompanied many of the musical performances that took place in the course of the evening: see e.g. Theogn. 531–534, 791 and 943–944 in Martin L. West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, vols. 1–2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) (hereafter IEG). Classical sources often comment explicitly on the ethical importance of this institution; see for instance Xenophanes 1.19–20 IEG: “praising the man who presents noble ideas while drinking, so that there may be recollection and striving after excellence”. On the relationship between song, aulos music and self-representation in Classical symposia, see e.g. Theogn. 237–525 IEG. Stephen Halliwell, Greek laughter – A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 117, with the illuminating discussion at pages 109–127. Theogn. 309–312 IEG, where the poet exhorts a young man (probably Cyrnus) not to reveal his real thoughts while attending a symposium; he should rather take advantage of this occasion to observe the nature of his companions, acquiring knowledge that could become useful in everyday life. See also Theogn. 477–496 IEG, a wonderfully effective, if idealised, depiction of this tension between the enjoyment of pleasure and self-control. For a stimulating discussion of sympotic ideology, see Fiona Hobden, The symposium in ancient Greek society and thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 22–65.
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium wine” (ἡ ἐν οἴνῳ βάσανος) may turn into a very useful “tool” in the hands of an experienced and careful symposiarch: according to the main character of the dialogue, this harmless test allows one to observe directly nothing less that “the character of the soul” of the guests (ἦθος ψυχῆς θεάσασθαι).6 The interplay of these sharply different points of view presents us with a complex image of the symposium as a space of conf lict between different psychological needs: on the one hand, the determination to perform well in the lighthearted – but nonetheless partly serious – contests held between the fellow drinkers, on the other the desire to lose control and indulge in the pleasures of music, wine and love.7 This tension, together with many other aspects of the multifaceted tradition we have glimpsed at, is embodied in the sophisticated literary representation of a drinking party offered in Plato’s Symposium, which reframes and reinterprets the features of this fundamental cultural institution within the framework of his own agenda for the dialogue: celebrating the vital, but not unambiguous role of Eros in human life. The Expulsion of the Aulos-girl and its Cultural Implications So what part does the aulos play in Plato’s complex literary and philosophical programme? Not a very relevant one, it would seem at first sight, given that the aulos-girl is swiftly dismissed at the very beginning of the party. Nevertheless, this revealing detail foreshadows some important features of the atmosphere that will characterise the first part of this work, especially if we keep in mind the central role that not only the aulos itself but also this specific kind of performer played in Classical Greek symposia. In fact, as Eleonora Rocconi has pointed out from the mid-sixth century BC iconographical evidence shows that a very important part of sympotic entertainments was provided by aulos-girls (auletrides), female harpers ( psaltriai) and dancers (orchestrides), women of humble origins who were hired not only for their musical performances but also for their erotic skills. 8 This picture is 6
Plato, Leg. 1.649e–650a, with Lucia Prauscello, Performing citizenship in Plato’s Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 109–118. The idea of needing a “test” to verify the true character of a person, going beyond superficial appearances, occurs in many other Platonic passages: see e.g. Resp. 3.413c–d and 3.414a–b, where Socrates argues that the future Guardians of the ideal city will have to be exposed to fears and pleasures, in order to show whether they are able to keep their ethical dispositions and beliefs unaltered in the face of intense emotional experiences. 7 For a poetic depiction of this tension, see Adesp. El. 27 IEG. 8 Eleonora Rocconi, “Women players in ancient Greece: The context of symposia and the socio-cultural position of psaltriai and aulētrides in the classical world”, in Musikarchäologie
717
Tosca Lynch widely confirmed by textual evidence: Aristophanes, for example, touches on this problem in the closing scene of the Wasps,9 where Bdelucleon rightly accuses his father Philocleon of having stolen an aulos-girl from the symposium they had just attended in order to keep her sexual favours only for himself – a lively discussion which culminates in a physical fight between the characters. But if the sexual character of the entertainment provided by female aulosplayers was a natural target for humorous remarks, the question of their social inf luence, and especially their remuneration, was no laughing matter. For instance, in a passage of his Constitution of the Athenians (50.2), Aristotle tells us that the Athenians appointed special city officers (ἀστυνόμοι) to make sure that aulos-girls, as well as other female musicians like harpers and kithara-players, were not paid more than the maximum legal fee of two drachmas, solving any unsettled rivalries by casting lots10 – a telling provision which suggests that violent disputes over aulos-girls could pose a significant threat to public safety. While this is not the place to discuss the details of these and other fascinating testimonies on the social role of these female musicians, one point is immediately evident and has very important implications for our current purposes: either as targets of salacious jokes or as objects of serious legislation, aulos-girls evoked very strong reactions in the cultural environment of Classical Athens, representing the long-awaited “democratization” of a traditional aristocratic institution or, on the contrary, becoming the clearest symbol of its cultural “degeneration” in the eyes of conservative critics. With these notions in mind, let us now turn to Plato’s Symposium and look more closely at the way in which Eryximachus introduces the unusual idea to expel the aulos-girl from the drinking party: Well then, said Eryximachus, since it has been established that each man will be allowed to drink as much as he wants and nobody will be forced to have more than that, next I propose this idea: the aulos-girl who has just come in should be dismissed and either go out and play to im Kontext = Music archaeology in contexts: archaeological semantics, historical implications, sociocultural connotations, ed. by Ellen Hickmann, Adje Both and Ricardo Eichmann (Rahden: Marie Leidorf, 2006), 335–344, here at page 336. 9 Ar. Vesp. 1364–1386. 10 Isocrates too repeatedly denounced the “corrupt” habits of the young men of his time, who enjoyed drinking large amounts of wine, gambling and spending time in the company of female aulos-players in their “training schools”: Isocr. Areopag. 48.5 and Antid. 287.3, with James Davidson, Courtesans and fishcakes: The consuming passions of classical Athens (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 82ff.; cf. Dem. 21.36. This problem is addressed also in a passage of Plato’s Protagoras, 347c–348a, quoted and discussed below.
718
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium herself or to the other women inside the house, if she wants, whereas today we shall entertain each other only with words and speeches.11 This choice is presented as an explicitly symbolic gesture, a cultural rejection that is all the stronger in comparison with the traditional background we have outlined at the beginning. After Phaedrus’ already unusual request that the guests should not be forced to get intoxicated (dia methes) but should drink purely for pleasure ( pros hedonen),12 Eryximachus’ unorthodox proposal to send the aulos-girl away suggests a consistent strategy: this gathering must be “purified” from external and mundane elements as much as possible, leaving them to lesser subjects such as slaves and women, while Agathon’s distinguished guests will engage in nobler activities. But this is not the first or only Platonic passage that depicts this “dream” of selfsufficiency. Indeed, the unusual rules endorsed by Phaedrus and Eryximachus at the beginning of the Symposium seem to reflect accurately the model of a virtuous drinking-party depicted by Socrates in the following passage of the Protagoras: Whenever the fellow-drinkers are refined and well-educated, you wouldn’t see any aulos-girls, dancers or harpers, but the guests would be properly trained to entertain each other through their own voices, without resorting to these silly and childish means but talking and listening in turn and in orderly fashion, even though they may drink quite some wine. Therefore these kinds of gatherings, which bring together people such as most of us claim to be, do not need any alien voice, not even that of the poets, who can’t be questioned about what they really meant to say […].13 11 Symp. 176e4–9: Ἐπειδὴ τοίνυν, φάναι τὸν Ἐρυξίμαχον, τοῦτο μὲν δέδοκται , πίνειν ὅσον ἂν ἕκαστος βούληται , ἐπάναγκες δὲ μηδὲν εἶναι , τὸ μετὰ τοῦτο εἰσηγοῦμαι τὴν μὲν ἄρτι εἰσελθοῦσαν αὐλητρίδα χαίρειν ἐᾶν, αὐλοῦσαν ἑαυτῇ ἢ ἂν βούληται ταῖς γυναιξὶ ταῖς ἔνδον, ἡμᾶς δὲ διὰ λόγων ἀλλήλοις συνεῖναι τὸ τήμερον. 12 Symp. 176e1–3: ταῦτα δὴ ἀκούσαντας συγχωρεῖν πάντας μὴ διὰ μέθης ποιήσασθαι τὴν ἐν τῷ παρόντι συνουσίαν, ἀλλ᾽ οὕτω πίνοντας πρὸς ἡδονήν. As noted by Kenneth Dover, ed., Plato – Symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) ad loc., this passage “carries the revealing implication that excessive drinking at a party could be more a social obligation than a pleasure”. Moreover, Phaedrus’ request draws attention to the unconventional fact that Agathon and his companions did not formally elect a symposiarch and, therefore, nobody would have the authority to force additional drinks on the guests: however, as we will see below, Alcibiades will hubristically appoint himself to this role as soon as he makes his appearance on scene. See also Symp. 223b–c: in this passage we are told that the party is taken over by a crowd of drunken revellers, who create a great uproar and upset the orderly atmosphere of the evening, forcing the guests to drink a vast amount of wine. 13 Prot. 347c–348a: ὅπου δὲ καλοὶ κἀγαθοὶ συμπόται καὶ πεπαιδευμένοι εἰσίν, οὐκ ἂν ἴδοις οὔτ᾽ αὐλητρίδας οὔτε ὀρχηστρίδας οὔτε ψαλτρίας , ἀλλὰ αὐτοὺς αὑτοῖς ἱκανοὺς ὄντας συνεῖναι
719
Tosca Lynch In a subsequent passage of the Protagoras this select kind of symposium, ideally separate from the human world and its cares, is starkly contrasted with the “degenerate” practices proper to “vulgar” drinking-parties. Differently from the elegant guests described above, the boorish members of this corrupt symposium14 are forced to rely on the “the alien voice of the auloi” (ἀλλοτρίαν φωνὴν τὴν τῶν αὐλῶν) in order to fill the vacuum of their thoughts, specifically resorting to the expensive, if trivial, performances offered by aulosgirls:15 For these men, being base and vulgar, are not able to entertain each other over drinks through their own means, with their own voices and discourses, because of their lack of education; so they place great value on aulos-girls, paying large sums to hire the alien voice of the auloi, and they get together and bond through the voice of those instruments.16 By contrast, the setting of Plato’s Symposium matches perfectly the “ideal” model described in the Protagoras: after getting rid of the aulos-girl, the distinguished guests of Agathon’s party spend the night delivering speeches and listening to each other in turn. And it is significant to notice that in the Symposium this activity is given precisely the same ethical significance that Socrates attributes to it in the culminating section of his speech in the Protagoras: Cultured men, by contrast, will do away with these kinds of parties and will bond through their own means, using their speeches to put each other to the test in turn. It is this kind of people that I think you and I should rather imitate […] we should produce our speeches for ἄνευ τῶν λήρων τε καὶ παιδιῶν τούτων διὰ τῆς αὑτῶν φωνῆς , λέγοντάς τε καὶ ἀκούοντας ἐν μέρει ἑαυτῶν κοσμίως , κἂν πάνυ πολὺν οἶνον πίωσιν. οὕτω δὲ καὶ αἱ τοιαίδε συνουσίαι , ἐὰν μὲν λάβωνται ἀνδρῶν οἷοίπερ ἡμῶν οἱ πολλοί φασιν εἶναι , οὐδὲν δέονται ἀλλοτρίας φωνῆς οὐδὲ ποιητῶν, οὓς οὔτε ἀνερέσθαι οἷόν τ᾽ ἐστὶν περὶ ὧν λέγουσιν […]. 14 Prot. 347c4–5: τοῖς συμποσίοις τοῖς τῶν φαύλων καὶ ἀγοραίων ἀνθρώπων […].
15 Prot. 347c–d. Cf. Alexandra Pappas, “More than meets the eye: The aesthetics of (non)sense in the ancient Greek Symposium”, in Ineke Sluiter and Ralph Rose, eds, Aesthetic value in classical antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 71–111, esp. 95, who analyses a red figure kylix decorated by the Brygos painter (British museum E71). The sympotic scene featured on this wine cup includes an aulos-girl, whose head is surrounded by nonsensical inscriptions, while an inscription reading kalos is set at the opposite edge of the scene. See also Leslie Kurke, “Inventing the hetaira: sex, politics, and discursive conflict in archaic Greece”, Classical Antiquity 16/1 (1997), 106–150, and François Lissarrague, The aesthetics of the Greek banquet: Images of wine and ritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 16 Plato Prot. 347c–d: καὶ γὰρ οὗτοι [scil. οἱ φαῦλοι καὶ ἀγοραῖοι ἄνθρωποι], διὰ τὸ μὴ δύνασθαι ἀλλήλοις δι᾽ ἑαυτῶν συνεῖναι ἐν τῷ πότῳ μηδὲ διὰ τῆς ἑαυτῶν φωνῆς καὶ τῶν λόγων τῶν ἑαυτῶν ὑπὸ ἀπαιδευσίας , τιμίας ποιοῦσι τὰς αὐλητρίδας , πολλοῦ μισθούμενοι ἀλλοτρίαν φωνὴν τὴν τῶν αὐλῶν, καὶ διὰ τῆς ἐκείνων φωνῆς ἀλλήλοις σύνεισιν.
720
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium each other out of what is really our own, making trial of the truth and of ourselves.17 The Symposium, therefore, provides a direct fulfilment of Socrates’ exhortation to “emulate” ( μιμεῖσθαι) the model of a “good” drinking party he had just outlined: through their own speeches and the emotional inf luence of wine, Agathon’s guests will test each other, revealing the “truth” about their intellectual and ethical nature.18 However another detail concerning the audience of Socrates’ exhortation in the Protagoras poignantly shows that these two texts do not simply belong to the same problematic domain but should almost be regarded as two “acts” of the same dramatic play. In addition to high-calibre intellectuals such as Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippocrates and Hippias and politically inf luential personalities like Callias and Critias, there is one character among Socrates’ distinguished addressees that casts a completely different light on his words: Alcibiades, the tragicomic figure who dominates the concluding section of the Symposium, to which we will now turn.19 The Reappearance of the auletris and Alcibiades’ Arrival on Scene From the very moment of his appearance on scene, Alcibiades is depicted as an outsider to the measured environment of the party. His arrival is explicitly signalled as an abrupt and unexpected “invasion” of reality into the ideal and, 17 Plato Prot. 347e–348a: ἀλλὰ τὰς μὲν τοιαύτας συνουσίας ἐῶσιν χαίρειν, αὐτοὶ δ᾽ ἑαυτοῖς σύνεισιν δι᾽ ἑαυτῶν, ἐν τοῖς ἑαυτῶν λόγοις πεῖραν ἀλλήλων λαμβάνοντες καὶ διδόντες. Τοὺς τοιούτους μοι δοκεῖ χρῆναι μᾶλλον μιμεῖσθαι ἐμέ τε καὶ σέ […] αὐτοὺς δι᾽ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν πρὸς ἀλλήλους τοὺς λόγους ποιεῖσθαι , τῆς ἀληθείας καὶ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν πεῖραν λαμβάνοντας. 18 See esp. Symp. 214e6–215a, where Alcibiades repeatedly claims to reveal “the truth” about Socrates in his discourse of praise, especially by means of his musical eikon: see pp. 717–23 below. 19 The crucial role played by Alcibiades in this dialogue is underlined since the very beginning of the dialogue: in fact, at 172a7–b1, Apollodorus is asked specifically to talk about “the party of Agathon’s with Socrates and Alcibiades’ (τὴν Ἀγάθωνος συνουσίαν καὶ Σωκράτους καὶ Ἀλκιβιάδου) and relate “what they said in their speeches about love” (περὶ τῶν ἐρωτικῶν λόγων τίνες ἦσαν). Moreover, Plato seems to establish an additional intertextual link between these two dialogues by means of an inversion in the dramatic roles of Socrates and Alcibiades: in the Protagoras, Alcibiades is the first character to speak immediately after Socrates’ exhortation and forces Protagoras to engage in a dialogue with Socrates, making him “feel ashamed” of his previous conduct (αἰσχυνθείς, Prot. 348c1); in the Symposium, by contrast, it is Alcibiades who claims to have undergone precisely the same emotional experience after talking with Socrates: Socrates is said to be the only man who could force him to see the pointlessness of his political ambition and his ethical shortcomings, making him feel ashamed of himself (see Symp. 216b1–2, quoted in note 42 below).
721
Tosca Lynch to some extent, artificial intellectual world created in Agathon’s house: Socrates has just finished his complex and passionate discourse on Eros when, all of a sudden (ἐξαίφνης, 212c6), 20 the guests hear a group of drunken revellers approaching, emphatically announced by door-banging and by the sound of “the voice of an aulos-girl” (τὴν αὐλητρίδος φωνὴν ἀκούειν, 212c8). 21 The “alien voice” of the aulos-girl and her instrument, 22 against which Socrates argued so strongly in the Protagoras, is employed here as a powerful symbol of the wildest aspects of contemporary symposia and significantly preludes to Alcibiades’ own entry on scene. In fact, Plato describes his arrival through the very same expression and dramatic sequence he had previously employed in connection with the aulos-girl: long before seeing him, Agathon’s guests hear the sound of Alcibiades’ voice (Ἀλκιβιάδου τὴν φωνὴν ἀκούειν) as he starts shouting loudly from the forecourt of the house, completely drunk. This oblique connection is confirmed as soon as Alcibiades stumbles into the banqueting-hall: completely intoxicated and unable to walk on his own, Alcibiades is literally “brought in” and “supported” by the aulos-girl (212d6) – an effective image that momentarily merges the two characters into one item and, interestingly, presents Alcibiades as a passive follower of the aulos-girl and her lead. In the following pages of the dialogue, Plato provides many sustained and vivid representations of Alcibiades’ psychological imbalance, which reveal how deeply he embraced the model of intemperance epitomised by the aulosgirl. For instance, being already drunk and therefore more inclined to reveal the dominant traits of his nature, 23 Alcibiades hubristically appoints himself as the new symposiarch, a gesture whose symbolic and ethical value hardly needs f lagging. But it is another, apparently minor, detail that reveals the full extent of Plato’s cultural condemnation of Alcibiades’ psychological and ethical attitude. With a subtle touch of literary artistry, Plato makes Alcibiades 20 This adverb occurs again at Symp. 223b2, when a group of drunken revellers takes over the party (cf. note 12 above). Interestingly, the same adverb is employed also at Symp. 210e4, where it depicts the sudden appearance of the nature of beauty and again at 213c1, where it qualifies Socrates’ unexpected appearance in front of Alcibiades. 21 See also Theaet. 173d5: σὺν αὐλητρίσι κῶμοι, with Angus M. Bowie, “Thinking with drinking: Wine and the Symposium in Aristophanes”, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1986), 1–21, esp. 9. 22 The term φωνή indicated both human voices and the “voices” of instruments: see e.g. Eur. Tr. 127, Plato Prot. 347c, Arist. De anima 420b7, [Arist.] De Audib. 802a, Mnesim. 4.56; see also Plato Resp. 3.397a: σαλπίγγων καὶ αὐλῶν καὶ συρίγγων καὶ πάντων ὀργάνων φωναί . 23 Alcibiades admits this explicitly in a following passage of his speech: “you wouldn’t hear me say what I am about to tell you, unless wine was there first and, as the saying goes, there is truth in wine when the slaves have left – but also when they haven’t!” (τὸ δ᾽ ἐντεῦθεν οὐκ ἄν μου ἠκούσατε λέγοντος , εἰ μὴ πρῶτον μέν, τὸ λεγόμενον, οἶνος ἄνευ τε παίδων καὶ μετὰ παίδων ἦν ἀληθής , Symp. 217e).
722
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium order a slave to fill up a ψυκτήρ, a large vase which, as the name says, was normally used as a wine cooler: turning this vase into his own personal cup, Alcibiades dramatically drains it dry, almost in one shot. While this gesture could be simply regarded as a particularly memorable sign of Alcibiades’ intemperance, his request for that specific container – a hapax in the Platonic corpus – subtly adds a supplementary charge, since the ψυκτήρ was used to store pure wine. 24 What action could be more emblematic of a disharmonic nature in a Greek symposium than disobeying the very basic nomos of mixing wine and water, embracing the “barbaric” custom of drinking large quantities of undiluted wine? 25 And here it is the self-proclaimed symposiarch who overthrows this rule, that is to say the person who normally would have reinforced it. 26 Through this revealing gesture, then, Alcibiades exposes fully the deranged emotional and ethical hierarchy established in his soul: in other words, he turns into a living, tragic paradigm of lawlessness (παρανομία). The Most Wonderful auletes, or the “Truth” about Socrates If our understanding of Plato’s use of aulos imagery in the Symposium were to be based only on what we have seen so far, the verdict would have to be unanimously and unquestionably negative: the aulos-girl, a widely recognised icon of sympotic excesses, is consistently associated with ethically dubious attitudes and especially with the character of Alcibiades, Plato’s supreme example of intemperance. However, the following pages of the dialogue pose a radical challenge to the network of symbols we have traced up to now: in fact, while repeatedly claiming to speak the truth, 27 Alcibiades centres his discourse of praise28 on describing Socrates as the most excellent and wonderful 24 Robert J. Forbes, Studies in ancient technology (Leiden: Brill, 1966). vol. 6, 116–117; James Davidson, Courtesans and fishcakes (as note 10), 158–159. 25 Scythians, Persians and Thracians were often associated with this practice, which was regarded as a symbol of their alleged licentiousness: see e.g. Plato Leg. 1.637d5–e7, as well as the specific reference to the Persians at Ach. 73–78 and the parody of sympotic customs at Aristoph. Eq. 85–108, where pure wine and a large jug (chous) appear again as symbols of intemperance. Cf. Hobden, The Symposium in ancient Greek society and thought (as note 5), 66–116. 26 This is particularly relevant for our present purposes, since Plato often presents the regulating activity of the symposiarch as the distinguishing feature of well-ordered symposia: cf. e.g. Leg. 1.639–640. 27 See Symp. 214e6–10, especially 215a6: ἔσται δ᾽ ἡ εἰκὼν τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἕνεκα . 28 Even though Alcibiades’ speech does not address the prescribed topic, since it focuses on Socrates and not on Eros, the content of his discourse of praise shows that Socrates’ words have a similar effect to the inspired mania caused by Eros: see Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Socrates’
723
Tosca Lynch aulos-player (αὐλητής , 215b). So, how should we interpret this seemingly incongruous choice? If Plato simply regarded the aulos and its players as a symbol of the negative consequences of excessively indulgent ethical attitudes, why would he make one of his most powerful characters use this kind of imagery to describe nothing less than “the truth” about Socrates? After commenting on the contrast between physical unattractiveness and the “inner treasures” that both Socrates and the statues of musical Silens hold in store for the people who are truly able to understand their value, Alcibiades moves on to the most important and explicitly musical resemblance between Socrates and these mythical auletai. More specifically, Alcibiades likens Socrates to the mythical archetype of all aulos players, the Phrygian satyr Marsyas:29 Why, aren’t you an aulos-player? And indeed you are much more wonderful than Marsyas. In fact he bewitches people by means of his instruments, thanks to the power of his mouth, and so does anyone who plays his compositions on the auloi even today – for I say that the pieces that Olympus played are actually by Marsyas, who taught him. Whether it is a good aulete who plays his tunes or a third-rate aulosgirl, they are the only pieces which can cast a spell over the listeners and overwhelm them, revealing who is in need of the gods and mystic rites, because they are themselves divine. 30 The very first and most relevant aspect emphasised by Alcibiades is the intense emotional effect of Marsyas’ music: with his seductive tunes, he bewitches (κηλεῖν) 31 the listeners and brings them to an entranced state (κατέχεσθαι), daimonic art: Love for wisdom in four Platonic dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 110–196. 29 On Marsyas as the “first” aulos player, see esp. Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1132f, 1333d, 1333e (τὸν δὲ Μαρσύαν […] εἶναι δ᾽ αὐτὸν Ὑάγνιδος υἱόν, τοῦ πρώτου εὑρόντος τὴν αὐλητικὴν τέχνην). As noted by Andrew Barker, Greek musical writings 1 – The musician and his art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) ad loc., the correlation between Marsyas and Phrygia concerns both the origin of this instrument and that of the Phrygian harmonia. For more “technical” characterisations of Marsyas as a skilled aulete, see e.g. Plut. De cohib. ira 456b, Quaest. Conv. 713d. On Marsyas and Olympus’ paradigmatic role in Plato, see Leg. 3.677d, Resp. 3.399e and [Plato] Min. 318b–c, where Marsyas’ and Olympus’ αὐλήματα are described in very similar terms to those used in the Symposium: once again, they are said to be capable of revealing who is “in need of the gods” because they are themselves divine. 30 Symp. 215c: ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ αὐλητής; πολύ γε θαυμασιώτερος ἐκείνου. ὁ μέν γε δι᾽ ὀργάνων ἐκήλει τοὺς ἀνθρώπους τῇ ἀπὸ τοῦ στόματος δυνάμει , καὶ ἔτι νυνὶ ὃς ἂν τὰ ἐκείνου αὐλῇ – ἃ γὰρ Ὄλυμπος ηὔλει, Μαρσύου λέγω, τούτου διδάξαντος – τὰ οὖν ἐκείνου ἐάντε ἀγαθὸς αὐλητὴς αὐλῇ ἐάντε φαύλη αὐλητρίς , μόνα κατέχεσθαι ποιεῖ καὶ δηλοῖ τοὺς τῶν θεῶν τε καὶ τελετῶν δεομένους διὰ τὸ θεῖα εἶναι . 31 This verb seems to be specifically related to the power of fascination exerted by music, both
724
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium revealing which souls are troubled and need to partake in mystic initiation rites (τελεταί ). 32 According to Alcibiades this extraordinary effect, which is often associated with the aulos-music employed in Corybantic rites, 33 is so intimately related to the nature of these compositions that it can be achieved independently from the ability of the performers, a point that is significantly illustrated by juxtaposing the performance of a mediocre aulos-girl to that of a skilled male aulete. 34 So what kind of music was Alcibiades thinking of here? In specifying that these tunes could be still heard at his own time, Alcibiades brings the figure of Olympus into the picture, characterising him as Marsyas’ pupil; but if Marsyas and his music belong entirely to the mythical realm, the connection established with Olympus gives us some hints as to the contexts in which the type of aulos music described by Alcibiades could be heard in Classical Athens. In fact if technical texts associate Olympus to the solemn spondaic mode, 35 which accompanied for instance the libations that marked the transition from the end of the dinner to the beginning of a proper symposion, all the extant Classical sources – including Aristophanes, Aristotle and Euripides 36
32 33
34
35 36
in Plato and in other classical writers. For Plato, cf. e.g. Resp. 3.411b, Leg. 8.840c, Lys. 206b, Prot. 315b (and 328d, perhaps metaphorically). See Ivan M. Linforth, “Telestic madness in Plato, Phaedrus 244de”, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13/6 (1946), 163–172. See Ivan M. Linforth, I. “The Corybantic rites in Plato”, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13/5 (1946), 121–162; Eric R. Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 77–80; Yulia Ustinova, “Corybantism: The nature and role of an. Ecstatic Cult in the Greek Polis”, Horos 10–12 (1992–1998), 503–520. These rites are also associated with the pyrrhic dances in armour of the Corybantes and Curetes (e.g. Strabo 10.3.7–18) which were characterised by short notes, very fast steps and passionate motions: see Arist. Quint. De Mus. 82.10–22, Dion. Halic. De Comp. 17.15–18. At Leg. 7.816a–b, the Athenian stranger includes pyrrhiche in the category of “beautiful dances” that should be practised in Magnesia; see Paola Ceccarelli, “Naming the weapon-dance: Contexts and Aetiologies of the Pyrrhiche”, in Praktika IA’ diethnous Sunedriou klassikon spoudon (Athens: Parnassos Literary Society, 2002), vol. 2, 197–215. As we have seen above, aulos-girls did not enjoy a very high social standing, as opposed to their male counterparts, on which see Martin L. West, Ancient Greek music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 35 and 366; see also the interesting interpretative approach proposed by Andrew Barker, “The music of Olympus”, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 99/3 (2011), 43–57, esp. p. 56, who associates the Platonic idea of a phaule auletris in the context of ecstatic ceremonies with female-only initiation rites that took place at the Thesmophoria. E.g. Ps.-Plut. De Mus. 1134e-1135f and 1137a-e. See e.g. Aristoph. Eq. 9, Eur. Iph. Aul. 576ff., Arist. Pol. 8.1339b–1140a, Telestes fr. 806 Page (Denys Page, ed., Poetae Melici Graeci, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), as well as the aforementioned Platonic passages. For a detailed discussion of the various types of music associated with Olympus, see Barker, “The music of Olympus” (as note 34).
725
Tosca Lynch – focus instead on Olympus’ Phrygian compositions such as the Metroia. 37 Performed in honour of the Mother Goddess in the context of ecstatic rites, these performances involved intense dancing accompanied by the sharp sound of the auloi and energetic rhythms, musical features which led the initiates to experience “divine possession” (enthousiasmos), as Aristotle tells us explicitly in the Politics.38 Keeping these musical features in mind, let us examine the rest of Alcibiades discourse, where he completes his musical eikon by explaining how Socrates’ words resemble the aulos music played by the Phrygian Satyr. Once again, Alcibiades starts by describing in great detail the nature of the emotional reactions triggered by the “wonderful aulete” Socrates: similarly to the ecstatic music of Dionysiac rites, Socrates’ words are able to generate passionate feelings and desires in his audience, casting a sort of spell which brings them to an entranced state (ἐκπεπληγμένοι ἐσμὲν καὶ κατεχόμεθα , 215d). Narrowing momentarily the focus on his own personal response, Alcibiades continues by portraying his own physical and emotional reactions to the discourses of this “philosophical Marsyas”: And if it weren’t for the fact that I would seem to be completely wasted, gentlemen, I would swear to you that this is exactly what I felt and still feel myself when I am under the inf luence of his words. Whenever I listen to him, my heart races much more than that of the people who are filled with Corybantic frenzy: his discourses make tears f low down my cheeks, and I see that many other people undergo the same feelings. When listening to Pericles or other good orators, I used to think that they spoke well but I didn’t experience anything remotely 37 Cf. Ps.-Plut. De Mus. 1141b. An interesting depiction of the strict correlation between Olympus, the Phrygian cult of the Great Mother and the Corybantes is symbolically expressed at Diod. Sic. 5.49.3, where Olympus is said to be Cybele’s lover and Cybele’s son Corybas, fathered by Iasion, is described as the original founder of Corybantic rites. 38 Arist. Pol. 8.1340a8–11: “but it is clear that we are affected by many types of music and not least by the tunes of Olympus: for these admittedly make our souls enthusiastic” (ἀλλὰ μὴν ὅτι γιγνόμεθα ποιοί τινες , φανερὸν διὰ πολλῶν μὲν καὶ ἑτέρων, οὐχ ἥκιστα δὲ καὶ διὰ τῶν Ὀλύμπου μελῶν· ταῦτα γὰρ ὁμολογουμένως ποιεῖ τὰς ψυχὰς ἐνθουσιαστικάς). See also Dion. Halic. De Demosth. 22.1–18, where the author mentions precisely the two musical genres associated with Olympus in order to exemplify the two most different types of music: on the one hand, there are serious spondaic tunes that bring about a calm and solemn ethos (ἐν ἤθει σπουδαῖος γίνομαι καὶ πολὺ τὸ εὐσταθὲς ἔχω τῆς γνώμης , ὥσπερ οἱ τῶν σπονδείων αὐλημάτων ἢ τῶν Δωρίων τε κἀναρμονίων μελῶν ἀκροώμενοι), on the other the ecstatic music of the Metroia and the Corybantes (ἐνθουσιῶ τε καὶ δεῦρο κἀκεῖσε ἄγομαι , πάθος ἕτερον ἐξ ἑτέρου μεταλαμβάνων [...] διαφέρειν τε οὐδὲν ἐμαυτῷ δοκῶ τῶν τὰ μητρῷα καὶ τὰ κορυβαντικὰ καὶ ὅσα τούτοις παραπλήσιά ἐστι , τελουμένων).
726
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium like this: my soul was not thrown into turmoil nor was it irritated because of my servile attitude. But often this Marsyas here has made me feel this way, to the point that I thought my life was not worth living in my present state. And you, Socrates, can’t say that these things are not true. 39 Alcibiades’ behaviour resembles and even exceeds that of people who partake in mystic rites: both his body and his soul are completely overwhelmed by the experience of listening to Socrates’ enchanting voice. However, the “philosophical mania”40 caused by Socrates’ aulemata unveils a kind of psychological disharmony that differs from that revealed by Olympus’ music: Socrates brings his Corybantes to feel dissatisfied with their own actions and ethical attitude, instilling a cognitive dissonance within their minds that leads them to reject their own choices and lifestyle, ultimately urging them to change their ways. Just as the Corybantes respond exclusively to one specific type of music,41 this deep psychological reaction can be triggered only by Socrates’ words and not by the words uttered by any random, if skilled, rhetorician: as Alcibiades confesses, Socrates is the only person who could force him to admit that his ethical conduct is neither correct nor serves his real psychological needs, compelling him to see for a moment the pointlessness of his ambition and making him feel ashamed of himself.42 39 Symp. 215d6–216a2: ἐγὼ γοῦν, ὦ ἄνδρες , εἰ μὴ ἔμελλον κομιδῇ δόξειν μεθύειν, εἶπον ὀμόσας ἂν ὑμῖν οἷα δὴ πέπονθα αὐτὸς ὑπὸ τῶν τούτου λόγων καὶ πάσχω ἔτι καὶ νυνί . ὅταν γὰρ ἀκούω, πολύ μοι μᾶλλον ἢ τῶν κορυβαντιώντων ἥ τε καρδία πηδᾷ καὶ δάκρυα ἐκχεῖται ὑπὸ τῶν λόγων τῶν τούτου, ὁρῶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλους παμπόλλους τὰ αὐτὰ πάσχοντας· Περικλέους δὲ ἀκούων καὶ ἄλλων ἀγαθῶν ῥητόρων εὖ μὲν ἡγούμην λέγειν, τοιοῦτον δ᾽ οὐδὲν ἔπασχον, οὐδ᾽ ἐτεθορύβητό μου ἡ ψυχὴ οὐδ᾽ ἠγανάκτει ὡς ἀνδραποδωδῶς διακειμένου, ἀλλ᾽ ὑπὸ τουτουῒ τοῦ Μαρσύου πολλάκις δὴ οὕτω διετέθην ὥστε μοι δόξαι μὴ βιωτὸν εἶναι ἔχοντι ὡς ἔχω. καὶ ταῦτα, ὦ Σώκρατες, οὐκ ἐρεῖς ὡς οὐκ ἀληθῆ.
40 Symp. 218b3–4: “for you all took part in the philosophical mania and Bacchic frenzy [scil. caused by Socrates]” (πάντες γὰρ κεκοινωνήκατε τῆς φιλοσόφου μανίας τε καὶ βακχείας). 41 Plato Ion 536c: “ just as the Corybantes perceive acutely only the particular tune that belongs to the god that they are possessed by, and have plenty of dance motions and words that go well with that specific melody […]” (ὥσπερ οἱ κορυβαντιῶντες ἐκείνου μόνου αἰσθάνονται τοῦ μέλους ὀξέως ὃ ἂν ᾖ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐξ ὅτου ἂν κατέχωνται, καὶ εἰς ἐκεῖνο τὸ μέλος καὶ σχημάτων καὶ ῥημάτων εὐποροῦσι […]). A similar background is assumed by the events related in Menander
Theophor. fr. 25. The image of the Corybantes, present in both of these passages, plays a central role also in other Platonic texts: see e.g. Crito 54d (on effect that the voice of the personified Laws has on Socrates), Ion 534a, Euth. 277d–e and Laws 7.790d, with Linforth, “The Corybantic rites in Plato” (as note 33), and Roslyn Weiss, “The Corybantic Cure”, in Socrates dissatisfied: An analysis of Plato’s Crito (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 134–145. 42 Symp. 216a4–7: “he forced me to admit that, even though I am severely flawed, I don’t take care of myself but I get involved in Athenian politics. So I force myself to block my
727
Tosca Lynch In this sense Alcibiades, by portraying Socrates as a wonderful aulete, actually tells the truth about him: Socrates’ aulemata are as divine as Marsyas’ because they are able to reveal the unhealthy and troubled state of other people’s souls and, at the same time, provide a cure for them. However, there is one reason why Socrates is an even more wonderful aulos-player than Marsyas: he is able to achieve these life-altering effects even without the aid of the seductive notes of the aulos, just with his bare words.43 Conclusions So how are we to interpret Plato’s apparently contradictory attitude towards the aulos? Similarly to how the intense emotions related to sympotic practices are presented in a different light depending on the ethical approach that informs them, so also the evaluation of the effects of aulos music is not fixed and immutable because it is not the musical nature of the instrument per se or its ability to provoke powerful emotions that triggers Plato’s worries: in fact, all these elements are presented in a positive light in connection with the figure of Socrates αὐλητής as well as in relation to Olympus’ divine aulemata. The reason why the aulos-girl, the symbolical representative of “bad” eroticism, was sent away at the beginning of the refined symposium hosted at Agathon’s house is that she is not aware (or interested in taking care) of the wide-ranging psychological impact of the powerful emotions stirred by her music. In the absence of careful handling, these intense forces often end up having a negative effect on the souls of her listeners, making their soul more conf lictual and disharmonic without providing an adequate and constructive release to this tension, as testified by the tragic figure of Alcibiades. But the very same psychological experiences have a completely different meaning in the case of the “Bacchic frenzy” caused by Socrates’ aulemata: his music gives a precise direction to the emotional energy it liberates, turning it into a cenears and go away, as if I was escaping from the Sirens […]” (ἀναγκάζει γάρ με ὁμολογεῖν ὅτι πολλοῦ ἐνδεὴς ὢν αὐτὸς ἔτι ἐμαυτοῦ μὲν ἀμελῶ, τὰ δ᾽ Ἀθηναίων πράττω. βίᾳ οὖν ὥσπερ ἀπὸ τῶν Σειρήνων ἐπισχόμενος τὰ ὦτα οἴχομαι φεύγων […]). This confession stands in sharp contrast with the centrality of the concept of ἐπιμέλεια σαυτοῦ in the First Alcibiades, e.g.
Alc. 1 120d–124c. On the unique effect of Socrates’ words, see Symp. 216b1–2: “And there is something I experienced only in the presence of this man, something nobody would believe I have in me: feeling shame before anyone whatsoever. Yet before him and him alone I feel ashamed” (πέπονθα δὲ πρὸς τοῦτον μόνον ἀνθρώπων, ὃ οὐκ ἄν τις οἴοιτο ἐν ἐμοὶ ἐνεῖναι, τὸ αἰσχύνεσθαι ὁντινοῦν· ἐγὼ δὲ τοῦτον μόνον αἰσχύνομαι). 43 Symp. 215c6–8: “you differ from him (i.e. Marsyas) in one point only – that you produce the same effect without any instruments, only with your bare words” (σὺ δ᾽ ἐκείνου τοσοῦτον μόνον διαφέρεις, ὅτι ἄνευ ὀργάνων ψιλοῖς λόγοις ταὐτὸν τοῦτο ποιεῖς).
728
The Seductive Voice of the A ulos in Plato’s S ymposium tral tool to give the “right shape” to disharmonic souls. Significantly, this outcome is exactly the one that is envisaged in Laws 1 in relation to correctly organised symposia. In these metaphorical “gyms” for the soul, the guests can train themselves by means of intense emotions and pleasures, in order to learn how their psychological reactions work and how to handle them at best. This crucial psychological exercise (προσγυμνάζειν, 1.647c8) leads them to develop real mastery over pleasures: in other words, the guests of these select symposia, and the ideal citizens of Plato’s constitutions, learn how to enjoy pleasures without being enslaved by them.44 In conclusion, this seems to be the substantial difference that informs all the Platonic evaluations of “good” and “bad” use of emotions, whether triggered by music, love or wine: given the deep effects that these forces have on the soul, it is crucial to orient them in a constructive direction that improves the human nature of each individual and his ethical quality, instead of damaging it. If oriented towards the wrong objects, the emotions elicited by these powerful experiences, while originally generating an “ecstatic” effect similar to well-oriented practices, end up achieving the opposite result: 45 the inner order of the soul is destroyed by the conf lict created between its different parts, a psychological outcome which does not affect only the life of each individual, as Plato is well aware, but inevitably leads also to political strife (στάσις). These potentially opposite outcomes are represented effectively by the conf lictual feelings experienced by the character of Alcibiades. His gifted nature allows him to understand intellectually and feel emotionally “the truth” of Socrates’ music; however, not having trained his soul to strive towards “correct” ethical goals, as soon as Socrates’ seductive music is over, to use his own words, he falls again “a victim to the honour of the crowds” (216b6–7).
44 See Leg. 1.647c: “And how about the opposite case, when we attempt with the aid of justice to make a man fearful? Is it not by pitting him against shamelessness and exercising him against it that we must make him victorious in the fight against his own pleasures?” ( Τί δ᾽ ὅταν ἐπιχειρῶμέν τινα φοβερὸν ποιεῖν μετὰ δίκης; ἆρ᾽ οὐκ ἀναισχυντίᾳ συμβάλλοντας αὐτὸν καὶ προσγυμνάζοντας νικᾶν δεῖ ποιεῖν διαμαχόμενον αὑτοῦ ταῖς ἡδοναῖς;). See also Leg.
1.647d–1.649d and 2.673e–674c, where “good” symposia are characterised as “serious” institutions that teach the citizens how to use emotions correctly. 45 The same goes also for good vs. bad rhetoric: “bad” rhetoric triggers intense emotional reactions only to win the approval of the listeners and does not help them to improve themselves (cf. Gorg. 501a–504e, where this skill is significantly likened to the technical excesses of contemporary aulos players); good rhetoricians are equally capable to create such an intense emotional involvement but employ their skills with a precise ethical aim: improving the ethical nature of the citizens (see Phaedr. 268a–272c).
729
Tosca Lynch
730
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds
Sylvain Perrot Académie de Strasbourg, France Collaborateur scientifique du laboratoire Archéologie & Philologie d’Orient et d’Occident, Paris
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds: About the Shape of a Greco-Roman Musical Constellation Abstract. From Pythagoras to Claudios Ptolemaios, Greek scientists understood the sky through arithmetic and geometry, whereas poets wrote narratives based on the shapes of constellations. Since the science of harmonics was closely related to other sciences, it seems relevant to give specific attention to the Lyre. The purpose of this paper is to understand why Greeks decided to identify this specific instrument in that location, by studying the connections between the Lyre and its neighbors. The starting point of the enquiry is an exploration of the very few ancient depictions of constellations found on Roman celestial globes. After having investigated the iconographical sources, a comparison is made of Greek written sources and their reception in Latin literature. Greek scientists seem to have recognized a tortoise and then a lyre in this small grouping of stars. The identification of a stringed instrument was motivated by other constellations related to Apollo, including the Swan. Thus the Lyre became a balance point of the universe, a function close to the Libra. This illustrates the Greek idea that harmony should rule the world.
Greek scientists considerably improved their knowledge of the world during Hellenistic times, after Alexander’s conquests.1 Greeks, who were already in touch with Babylonian and Egyptian science, were more and more involved in collecting new thoughts and new methods. They developed their own practices and ways of thinking in many fields like harmonics and astronomy. Pythagoras, who was born in Samos, an island bridging West and East, played a strong role by combining both sciences. Yet afterwards Hellenistic Greek scientists invented new tools to measure distances between stars and music notes. The constitution of high schools, especially in Alexandria, Egypt led them to exchange ideas and questions. One of the main figures interested in harmonics, mathematics and astronomy as well was Claudios Ptolemaios, who lived in the second century AD, in Roman Egypt. He made the first extant compre1
Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, Une histoire de la science grecque (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 175–306.
731
Sylvain Perrot hensive description of the sky although we know that the first complete list of constellations had been written by Hipparchus of Nicaea, who lived in the second century BC. Some scholars have tried to compare Hipparchus’ description with the five existing depictions of the constellations in Greek and Roman art. 2 This paper aims at studying one particular constellation that allies music and astronomy and therefore suits well Pythagorean science and Zdravko Blažeković’s interests. In accordance with their habit of explaining associations of stars based on mythology, Greeks placed a lyre in the sky and we can recognize it on three fully conserved celestial globes and on a fragment of a fourth one. The most famous one is the World held by the Titan Atlas in the archaeological museum of Naples, the so-called “Farnese Atlas”. There are two other lesser known celestial globes: one is owned by the archaeological museum of Mayence and one by a Parisian gallery. I would like to compare these three depictions with the Greek and Latin texts on the lyres to create a small history of the representations of this constellation and to answer two simple questions: how and why did Greeks get the idea to put a lyre in the sky? Building a bridge between pictures and texts may give some new ideas. I do not want to prove that pictures are based on texts but to show how pictures and texts give a coherent conception of the sky, in an anthropological approach. Urbi et orbi: The Roman Celestial Globes Let us start with pictures. Before I comment upon the depiction of the lyre on the fully preserved celestial globes, I should like to underline that perhaps the most ancient picture of the lyre as a constellation is to be found on a fragment of a Greek globe in the Berlin Antikensammlung, dating back to the first century BC. 3 By chance this blue marble item shows in relief the part of the sky with Lyra, Cygnus and Cassiopea. The lyre is upside down, seen from the back. We just have a kind of negative of the lyre without any details and no strings are attached. It is not a realistic depiction: the crossbar is particularly thick whereas the arms are very thin. Although it obviously is a lyre, the sound box does not look like a tortoise shell but instead as if the sound box and the arms were made of the same piece of material, which usually is the case for the kithara. In fact, this instrument looks rather like the archaic 2
3
732
Elly Dekker, Illustrating the phaenomena: Celestial cartography in antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 2. We should now add a sixth one, the most ancient one, on an Archaic clay vase, but there is no lyre: John T. Barnes, “Asteras eipein: An archaic view of the constellations from Halai”, Hesperia 83/2 (2014), 257–276. Inv. Nr. Sk 1050. Georg Thiele, Antike Himmelsbilder (Berlin: Weidmann, 1898), 42–43, http://www.jenseits-des-horizonts.de/downloads/pressebilder (last accessed: 8 June 2017).
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds phorminx.4 Like many artists of this period, the sculptor does not seem to have accurate organological skills. The most ancient complete globe was exhibited in the Kugel Gallery in Paris in 2002. 5 This remarkable piece of art, made of silver, was fully described and the document published two years later by H. Cuvigny.6 Because she identified several mistakes, her assessment was that the globe was made by a handworker who did not have any skill in astronomy but rather built a copy of an existing globe. Dating it seems to be quite difficult: the whole representation is close to known texts but not completely. If we trust the antiquarian who sold this globe with two other items, it should have been produced in the second century BC, that is in the Hellenistic times, although some details seem instead to belong to Roman times – but these discrepancies can be explained by ancient mistakes. So it is impossible to decide whether this silver globe was made before or after the Berlin fragment. Finally Cuvigny suggests that this globe was placed on the top of a small column. With regard to the shapes of constellations, she notes that the chiseler liked depicting objects and was sensible to details: the altar and the lyre indeed are the most accurate.7 Each part of the lyre is well distinguished. The design of the sound box looks like a tortoise shell seen from above. The concentric rings of the tortoise shell are well executed; the shell is suggested with bold lines, whereas the differences of color are indicated through light lines. 8 We may add that the central part of the shell is hexagonal, six being the number of strings. The arms and the crossbar are of realistic length and thickness. Only the junction between them is inaccurate because the crossbar is not inside the arms as it should be and the arms are not symmetrical. Even if the chiseler is not an expert in astronomy, he has good knowledge of music iconography and even of organology. The second known globe, made of brass, is preserved at the archaeological museum of Mayence. It is a work from the Roman Empire of the time between 150 and 220 AD. According to Künzl,9 it supposedly originated in Asia 4 5 6 7 8 9
Martha Maas and Jane MacIntosh Snyder, Stringed instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), 42, fig. 2; Sylvain Perrot, “L’iconographie des instruments à cordes à Erétrie”, Bulletin de l’ASAC/SAKA 2013, 40–41. Hélène Cuvigny, “Le troisième globe céleste en argent connu de l’Antiquité” in the online catalogue of the Kugel gallery (2002): http://www.galeriekugel.com/expo_spheres/c/ c1.htm (last accessed: 8 June 2017). Hélène Cuvigny, “Une sphère céleste en argent ciselé”, in Gedenkschrift Ulrike Horak (P. Horak), ed. by Herrmann Harrauer and Rosario Pintaudi (Florence: Gonnelli 2004), 345–381. Ibid., 362. Ibid., 372. Ernst Künzl, “Ein römischer Himmelsglobus der mittleren Kaiserzeit. Studien zur römischen Astralikonographie”, Jahrbuch des römisch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 47 (2000), 495–594.
733
Sylvain Perrot Minor, but the globe, or its model, presumably came from Roman Egypt. The Mayence Globe has all forty-eight constellations, even if they do not fully agree with the catalogue of Claudius Ptolemaeus. This object is not a scientific piece of work but rather served as the crown of a gnomon on a sundial. The string instrument depicted on this globe is not a lyre at all: it is rather a six-stringed kithara but the sound box is very small, reduced to a singular rectangle. Furthermore, it seems that the drawing was made without any tool: it is not regular. The arms are not symmetrical at all. It is clear that the chiseler of this globe has no skills in music instruments, as if he had done his job very quickly. Thus, while comparing both sliver and brass globes, we may wonder whether it is an incompetence of the artist or an intention to show how it is difficult to see a perfect object in the sky, since the spherical quality of the celestial orb changes the perceived shape. Whatever the reason might be, the brass globe is of lesser quality than the silver one. The last globe is the most famous one, the celestial sphere carried by Atlas on his back: The Farnese Atlas, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original (fig. 1).10 It was found in Rome and it is supposed to have belonged to the furniture of the library in Trajan’s forum. The globe features the celestial equator, the ecliptic with the band of the zodiac, the Arctic and Antarctic circles, the colure and the constellations (nineteen northern, fourteen southern) with the twelve signs of the zodiac. There has been a very difficult debate on the possibility that the sculptor wanted to represent the sky according to Hipparchus’ views. But there is strong evidence against this hypothesis, so it is probably a synthesis made from several sources.11 The lyre is well preserved. The sound box is of a very circular shape, which is not very realistic, but the marble worker has drawn many lines on the back to feature the tortoise shell. The shape of the arms is accurate but they are very thick as is the crossbar. This depiction is very precise and we even may recognize the species of the tortoise thanks to the general display: this is the Testudo Hermanni Hermanni, which was very commonly used to make lyres.12 The sculptor represented five strings: we can only imagine that this could be related to the number of the brightest stars of the constellation.
10 Thiele, Antike Himmelsbilder (as note 3), 19–26. 11 See http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~dduke/farnese (last accessed: 8 June 2017). 12 Stelios Psaroudakes, “A lyre from the cemetery of the Acharnian Gate, Athens”, in Music archaeology in context. Archaeological semantics, historical implications, socio-cultural connotations, ed. by Ellen Hickmann, Arnd Adje Both and Ricardo Eichmann (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2006), 59–79.
734
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds
Fig. 1. Sculpture of Atlas with Farnese Globe on his shoulders, Roman Copy of Hellenistic original, 2nd century AD. Naples: Archaeological Museum.
735
Sylvain Perrot Ut pictura poesis: The Written Sky Descriptions and the Stars of the Lyre Most of Ptolemaios’ views come from Hellenistic science but also from poetry. While science was being improved, Alexandrine authors were also very interested in describing the sky, making the link between stars and mythology. Those texts were not directly used by the sculptors who made the globes but it is important to see which representation of the Lyra they give, so as to highlight common points and differences. What I want mainly to address here is the iconography through the texts, that is, how writers through words could draw a constellation, especially in the fields of size and position of the stars. The first poet who composed a poem on constellations is Aratus, who was considered by other poets as the model to follow. Aratus of Soli (ca. 315 BC/310 BC–240 BC) was a Greek didactic poet like Hesiod. His major extant work is his hexameter poem Phaenomena (Appearances), the first half of which might be a verse setting of a lost work of the same name by Eudoxos of Cnidus. It describes the constellations and other celestial phenomena, and among them the lyre:13 And here is the tiny Tortoise, which, while still beside his cradle, Hermes pierced and bade it be called the Lyre. And he brought it into heaven and set it in front of the unknown figure. Crouching on his knees, he comes near the Lyre with his left knee, but the top of the Bird’s head wheels on the other side. Between the Bird’s head and the knee has been fixed the Lyre.14 First of all, we may wonder about the original name of the constellation at that time. Was it called Tortoise or Lyre? It is a fact that the Greek term χέλυς , which means “tortoise”, is also used to refer to the lyre, since the sound box was made of tortoise shell. According to Aratus, this sound box ought to be recognized in the sky. In fact, even if Arabs later preferred seeing a vulture to a lyre, they kept the allusion to the tortoise by calling one star “the tortoise”. In few cases, they even depicted a tortoise.15 Thus it is sure that for 13 Aratus, Phaenomena, 268–274. 14 Καὶ ἥδ’ ὀλίγη. Τὴν ἆρ’ ἔτι καὶ παρὰ λίκνῳ Ἑρμείης ἐτόρησε , δέ μιν εἶπε λέγεσθαι , κὰδ δ › ἔθετο προπάροιθεν ἀπευθέος εἰδώλοιο οὐρανὸν εἰσαγαγών. Τὸ δ › ἐπὶ σκελέεσσι πέτηλον γούνατί οἱ σκαιῷ πελάει· κεφαλή γε μὲν ἄκρη ἀντιπέρην Ὄρνιθος ἑλίσσεται· ἡ δὲ μεσηγὺ ὀρνιθέης κεφαλῆς καὶ γούνατος ἐστήρικται .
15 Willy Hatner, “Wega”, in First encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. by Martijn Theodoor Houtsma et al., (Leyden: Brill 1913–1936), 1137. See e.g. the manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
736
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds Aratus, a tortoise is to be recognized in the sky. In his text, tortoise and lyre are firmly linked but it is not certain at all whether the constellation itself is the tortoise before it was transformed into the lyre or the lyre made from the tortoise. Aratus’ style is quite ambiguous and this is one of the very rare cases where Aratus gives two different names for one constellation. There are not many tortoises in Greek myths and the most famous one is the one which Hermes transformed into a lyre. What later scholars comment upon is namely the creation of the lyre and not really the shape of the constellation. Indeed, this very first description of the constellation is brief but rich, that is why it has been explained by later authors in scholia. Most of them recall the myth according to which Hermes, as a very young baby (according to the scholion, he was three days old), went out from his cradle and met a tortoise. After having killed it and stolen Apollo’s oxen, he built a lyre with the tortoise shell, ox guts, horns and skin. This myth is developed in the Homeric hymn to Hermes, dating back to the seventh century BC.16 The verb Aratus uses refers to a specific gesture in making the instrument: Hermes bored and drilled several holes through the carapace to firmly attach the skin. He is not only the inventor of the lyre but also of the name of the lyre itself according to Aratus: while giving the name, he creates a new item. Scholiasts add the end of the myth: as a ransom to the robbery, Hermes gave the lyre to his brother Apollo. In one scholion, it is the opportunity for the author to play with words, linking the Greek word “lyra” (lyre) to another one, “lutron” (ransom).17 Ancient scholars give other significant clues to understand how the constellation of the Lyre was to be seen in the sky. Since, according to Greek mythology, real items were put in the stars (what they called catasterism), there are some questions to be asked, especially the number of strings in the case of the lyre. Indeed, ancient scholars wondered how many strings this lyre had. The traditional number of strings on a Greek lyre is seven. Seven is of course very symbolic in the Greek mind (the Seven Wonders e.g.), but it suits what ancient Greek theorists of harmonics called the conjunct heptachord, with three fix notes (from low pitch to high pitch: hypate, mese and nete) building two tetrachords (the mese France Arabe 5036, f° 53v, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b60006156/f112.item (last accessed: 8 June 2017). 16 Homeric hymn to Hermes, 39–53 (see also Lucian, Dialogus Deorum, 223–224, and Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, I, 10). On the myth, see Paul Courbin, “Lyres d’Argos”, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique Suppl. 6 (1980), 93–114; Annie Bélis, “À propos de la construction de la lyre”, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 109/1 (1985), 201–220; Jesper Svenbro, “Ton luth, à quoi bon? La lyre et la pierre tombale dans la pensée grecque”, Mètis 7 (1992), 135-160; John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, La tortue et la lyre. Dans l’atelier du mythe antique (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2014), chapter 4. 17 ταύτην ἐδωρήσατο ἀντίλυτρον αὐτῶν.
737
Sylvain Perrot is common to both) and two mobile notes to fulfill each tetrachord. So it is not surprising that according to scholiasts the sky lyre has seven strings. But they add that this is the number of the Atlantides, who are daughters of Atlas and Pleione.18 They are better known as the Pleiades, who escape in the sky from the hunter Orion. As shown by Orion and the Pleiades, ancient Greeks linked some constellations between them to recreate a mythological story but there are other conceptual links, like this one between the Lyre and the Pleiades. By doing this, the ancient Greeks create a kind of network of constellations. After Apollo got the lyre from Hermes, he gave it to his son Orpheus, who is said by scholia to have added two more strings, having then a lyre with nine strings, which is this time the number of Muses: Orpheus was the son of one muse, Calliope. We see here the permeability of myths: if the lyre in the sky belongs to Hermes, it is seven stringed; if it is Orpheus’, it is nine stringed. The number nine is also associated with another constellation, the Dolphin, which is made of nine stars and is famous for being φιλόμουσος, i.e. for liking music and Muses. W. Hübner wrote a comprehensive article on the links between both constellations, noticing that they disappear at the same time. He also explored all the connections between the nine stars, the nine strings, the nine Muses and the ninth place of the Lyre in the catalogue of Eratosthenes, as we will see.19 A last point on Aratus’ text remains: the Lyre is tiny, which is an obstacle to its good perception. Indeed, the Lyre is one of the smallest constellations in the sky. According to scholia, 20 it is “obscure and difficult to recognize for most of people”. It seems to have been placed between two constellations to fill a gap, as if Greek astronomers needed a small item for a few leftover stars. The Lyre is one of the seven objects usually seen in the sky. This is the only detail scholiasts notice on their own: all the other observations come primarily from a text written by another writer who lived in Alexandria, Eratosthenes of Cyrena. Aratus was a poet; Eratosthenes was a scientist who dedicated his work to the fields of geography and astronomy. Just a generation after Aratus, Eratosthenes wrote his Catasterims, which is a description of the constellations. 21 Here is his text on the Lyre: 18 αὕτη δὲ κατεσκευάσθη μὲν ὑφ’ Ἑρμοῦ πρῶτον ἐκ τῆς χελώνης ἑπτάχορδος , ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀριθμοῦ τῶν Ἀτλαντίδων. μετέλαβε δὲ αὐτὴν ὁ Ἀπόλλων καὶ Ὀρφεῖ παρέδωκεν, ὃς ἐννεάχορδον ἐποίησεν ἀπὸ τοῦ τῶν Μουσῶν ἀριθμοῦ. καὶ μετὰ θάνατον αὐτοῦ τὴν λύραν αἱ Μοῦσαι ἔδωκαν Μουσαίῳ ἀξιώσαντι τὸν Δία ὅπως αὐτοῦ μνημόσυνον εἴη ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις. (manuscripts MDΔKVUAS) 19 Wolfgang Hübner, “Die Lyra cosmica des Eratosthenes. Das neunte Sternbild der Musen mit neun Sternen und neun Saiten”, Museum Helveticum 55/2 (1998), 84–111. 20 ἐπειδὴ ἀμυδρά ἐστιν ἡ Χέλυς , ὡς ἔφαμεν, διὰ πολλῶν εὐκατάληπτον αὐτὴν πειρᾶται δεικνύναι (manuscripts MKS) 21 Eratosthenes of Cyrena, Catasterismi, n° 24.
738
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds This constellation is ninth among the constellations and belongs to the Muses. It was invented once by Hermes from the tortoise shell and the cattle of Apollo. The lyre had seven strings from the number of the daughters of Atlas. Later Apollo received the lyre. He adapted one song to it and gave it to Orpheus, who was the son of the Muse Kalliope. Orpheus increased the number of strings to nine, the number of Muses. He was held in ever greater esteem among men, so that the story circulated about him that he charmed rocks and wild animals with his song. He did not honor Dionysus, but considered Helios as the greatest of the gods and called him Apollo. Arising at night, toward dawn, he would climb Mount Pangaion and await the sunrise so that he might first see the sun. Dionysus was angered and sent the Bassarides against him, as Aischylos the poet recounts. These tore him limb from limb and scattered the members in different places. The Muses gathered the limbs and buried them at the place called Leibethroi. Having no one to whom they would give the lyre, the Muses asked Zeus to catasterize it, so that a memorial to Orpheus and to themselves might be placed among the stars. Zeus granted their wish and so the lyre was placed this way. It bears the sign of Orpheus’ misfortune by setting in each season. The lyre has one star on either rib ([or] comb), one on either arm, one on the extremity, one on either shoulder, one on the crossbar and one bright white star at the base. The total is nine. 22 Eratosthenes is the first to make the link between the constellation and Orpheus’ lyre. This point will be developed by other poets and it is not the purpose of this paper to see the myths but the shape of the constellation. More interestingly for 22 Αὕτη ἐνάτη κεῖται ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις , ἔστι δὲ Μουσῶν· κατεσκευάσθη δὲ τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ὑπὸ Ἑρμοῦ ἐκ τῆς χελώνης καὶ τῶν Ἀπόλλωνος βοῶν, ἔσχε δὲ χορδὰς ἑπτὰ ἀπὸ τῶν Ἀτλαντίδων. μετέλαβε δὲ αὐτὴν Ἀπόλλων καὶ συναρμοσάμενος ᾠδὴν Ὀρφεῖ ἔδωκεν, ὃς Καλλιόπης υἱὸς ὤν, μιᾶς τῶν Μουσῶν, ἐποίησε τὰς χορδὰς ἐννέα ἀπὸ τοῦ τῶν Μουσῶν ἀριθμοῦ καὶ προήγαγεν ἐπὶ πλέον ἐν τοῖς ἀνθρώποις δοξαζόμενος οὕτως ὥστε καὶ ὑπόληψιν ἔχειν περὶ αὐτοῦ τοιαύτην ὅτι καὶ τὰς πέτρας καὶ τὰ θηρία ἐκήλει διὰ τῆς ᾠδῆς· ὃς τὸν μὲν Διόνυσον οὐκ ἐτίμα, τὸν δὲ Ἥλιον μέγιστον τῶν θεῶν ἐνόμιζεν εἶναι , ὃν καὶ Ἀπόλλωνα προσηγόρευσεν· ἐπεγειρόμενός τε τῆς νυκτὸς κατὰ τὴν ἑωθινὴν ἐπὶ τὸ ὄρος τὸ καλούμενον Πάγγαιον < ἀνιὼν> προσέμενε τὰς ἀνατολάς, ἵνα ἴδῃ τὸν Ἥλιον πρῶτον· ὅθεν ὁ Διόνυσος ὀργισθεὶς αὐτῷ ἔπεμψε τὰς Βασσαρίδας , ὥς φησιν Αἰσχύλος ὁ τῶν τραγῳδιῶν ποιητής· αἵτινες αὐτὸν διέσπασαν καὶ τὰ μέλη διέρριψαν χωρὶς ἕκαστον· αἱ δὲ Μοῦσαι συναγαγοῦσαι ἔθαψαν ἐπὶ τοῖς λεγομένοις Λειβήθροις. τὴν δὲ λύραν οὐκ ἔχουσαι ὅτῳ δώσειν τὸν Δία ἠξίωσαν καταστερίσαι , ὅπως ἐκείνου τε καὶ αὐτῶν μνημόσυνον τεθῇ ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις· τοῦ δὲ ἐπινεύσαντος οὕτως ἐτέθη· ἐπισημασίαν δὲ ἔχει ἐπὶ τῷ ἐκείνου συμπτώματι δυομένη καθ’ ὥραν. Ἔχει δὲ ἀστέρας ἐπὶ τῶν κτενῶν ἑκατέρων αʹ, ἐφ’ ἑκάστου πήχεως αʹ, ἐπ’ ἀκρωτῆρι ὁμοίως αʹ, ἐφ’ ἑκατέρων ὤμων αʹ, ἐπὶ ζυγοῦ αʹ, ἐπὶ τοῦ πυθμένος αʹ, λευκὸν καὶ λαμπρόν· τοὺς πάντας θʹ.
739
Sylvain Perrot my topic, Eratosthenes is the first author who gives the number of strings and of stars and their position within the constellation as well. J. Pamias i Massana and A. Zucker made a comprehensive commentary of this text, by putting together all the sources, especially Latin texts that give the position of the stars inside the lyre. 23 They conclude that sources do not agree with one another and that they give different combinations. They make some suggestions but they also admit they are not totally convincing. It is possible that another close reading of these various texts would reveal new insights. Eratosthenes’ text is quite puzzling because the terms he uses to describe the shape of the lyre are rare. The easiest point is probably to identify the most luminous with the star Vega (α Lyr), the best known in the constellation. The other stars cause many problems because it is difficult to understand which stars Greeks really saw and which ones they imagined to build a plausible shape of a lyre. As Aratus says, the constellation is small and in fact it is likely that for a long time only the single star, Vega, was considered as the Lyre, as it appears in Greek calendars. 24 So it seems that the whole constellation was built afterwards, probably in Hellenistic times. That is why Eratosthenes’ text, like its followers, may be characterized by a strong symmetry between stars, with some pairs. Furthermore, he uses terms which can be understood only with the help of Hesychius, a later scholar who wrote a whole lexicon to explain complicated terms. Thanks to him, we understand that what we translate as “ribs” or “combs” is in fact the upper part of the lyre, that is the arms, the yoke and the strings. Namely it has the shape of a comb or of a thoracic cage. After two stars on the arms, Eratosthenes places one star “on the extremity”. The Greek term is a hapax and refers to the idea of the end of something, the summit, something prominent. I would suggest that Eratosthenes is locating this star on the shell itself, specifically the caudal part of the shell, which is the top of the shell in the lyre. Indeed the arms are fixed in the posterior part of the tortoise shell. In the case of Testudo Hermanni Hermanni, the caudal part is a little prominent. It would suit the idea of ἀκρωτῆρι . 25 It means that this star should be placed on the border of the shell in the middle of both arms. By consequence I suggest that this star is the one we know as ζ Lyr. Then I think the shoulders are correctly identified with the bottom of the arms, that is the holes of the shells 23 Jordi Pamias i Massana and Arnaud Zucker, Eratosthène de Cyrène. Catastérismes (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2013), no. 24. 24 Thiele, Antike Himmelsbilder (as note 3), 6. 25 The later manuscript of the British Library Harley MS 647 (9th–11th century AD), illustrating the text of Cicero and Hyginus, places a star at that exact point (fol. 5r): http://www.bl.uk/ catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=29556 (last accessed: 08 June 2017).
740
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds through which the rear feet of the tortoise are moving. The two last stars are not difficult to place. This was the state of art in the early Hellenistic times. Pamias i Massana and Zucker compared Eratosthenes’ data with the only other Greek author dealing with this topic, Ptolemaeus. They admit the big discrepancies between their interpretation of Eratosthenes’ text and Ptolemaeus’ views. In fact, my interpretation of Eratosthenes” text is closer to Ptolemaeus’ description 26 although the texts are not completely matching: Ptolemaeus actually sees ten stars whereas Eratosthenes sees nine. He gives some descriptions with distances. I reproduce here only the description, without the coordinate system: The bright star which is called Lyre on the shell […]; among the two stars which are located in the continuity close to the previous one, the Northern one... the Southern one […]; the star which follows them and is in the middle of the birth of the horns […]; among the two stars in the continuity at the East of the shell, the Northern one […] the Southern one […]; among the two which precede on the yoke, the Northern one […] the Southern one […]; among the two which follow on the yoke, the Northern one […] the Southern one […] Ten stars, among which one with size 1, two with size 3 and seven with size 4. 27 The star Ptolemaeus located in the Eastern part of the shell, between both arms, should be the one of the ἀκρωτῆρι by Eratosthenes. Then I think the stars Eratosthenes place on the “combs” may have been one of the pairs placed by Ptolemaeus on either side of the yoke, if I understand correctly the previous and following stars on the yoke. With this reconstruction we get two close shapes of the lyre. In order to confirm my views, I would like now to examine how the constellation is designed in Latin sources. Aratus and Eratosthenes were so famous in Antiquity that Roman authors also composed imitations of the Greek texts by translating and adapting them to their own views. We find two main branches: the poetic one, rewriting Aratus, and the scientific one, rewriting Eratosthenes, but there is no firm borderline between both. Indeed, we cannot speak about formal imitations, it is rather a kind of inspiration and authors may combine different kinds of 26 Ptolemaeus, Syntaxis mathematica, ed. by Johan Ludvig Heiberg (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898). 27 ὁ λαμπρὸς ὁ ἐπὶ τοῦ ὀστράκου καλούμενος Λύρα. τῶν παρακειμένων αὐτῷ συνεχῶν ὁ βόρειος… ὁ νοτιώτερος αὐτῶν… ὁ τούτοις ἑπόμενος καὶ μέσος τῆς ἐκφύσεως τῶν κεράτων τῶν ἐν τῷ πρὸς ἀνατολὴν τοῦ ὀστράκου συνεχῶν ὁ βόρειος ... ὁ νοτιώτερος αὐτῶν… τῶν ἐν τῷ ζυγώματι προηγουμένων ὁ βορειότερος… ὁ νοτιώτερος αὐτῶν… τῶν ἐν τῷ ζυγώματι ἑπομένων ὁ βορειότερος αὐτῶν... ὁ νοτιώτερος αὐτῶν… ἀστέρες , ὧν αʹ μεγέθους , γʹ , δʹ .
741
Sylvain Perrot sources. 28 It was a fashion that happened particularly in the Late Roman Republic and the Early Empire. Four authors wrote a description of the sky in Latin verse or prose: Cicero, Germanicus, Hyginus and Manilius. Cicero and Germanicus are the closest to Aratus’ original. Cicero was fond of astronomy, especially the signs that may have been sent by the gods. He wrote a famous treatise on Divination, in which he quotes his own epics (On his Consulate), where he describes all the celestial signs that announced Catilina’s conjuration. He also translated Aratus’ text. Here is the extract on the Lyre:29 From there the string instrument seems lightly placed and curved; Mercury is said to have made it once with his small hands while being in his cradle and to have put it in a high seat; it has fallen and seats on the left knee of the crouching figure and it was fixed between the bent knee and the head of the Bird. 30 When compared to Aratus, there really is nothing new. We just get a small description of the constellation but it is not very clear. It seems to hang in the sky, as if it was a wall. Cicero also makes an allusion to the shape of the arms of the lyre but it is possible that it is just a way to say that the lyre is not as perfectly shaped as a real one, because of the sphericity of the celestial orb. It is probably hopeless to look for a perfect drawing in the night. Germanicus is briefer about the lyre itself:31 Furthermore the lyre, which is a delight for Mercury and was often admitted to the feasts of the gods, is shining in the sky in front of the suffering figure, whose left foot leans on the temples of the sinuous Draco and whose right hand is raised. This figure holds the upper part of his knee leaning towards the place where the Lyre wheels. 32 28 See Jean Martin, Histoire du texte des Phénomènes d’Aratos (Paris: Klincksieck 1956); PierreJacques Dehon, “Aratos et ses traducteurs latins : de la simple transposition à l’adaptation inventive”, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 81/1 (2003), 93–115. 29 Cicero, Aratea, 42–46. 30 Inde Fides leviter posita et convexa videtur ; Mercurius parvis manibus quam dicitur olim in cunis fabricatus in alta sede locasse ; quae genus ad laevum Nixi delapsa resedit, atque inter flexum genus, et caput Alitis haesit. 31 Germanicus Caesar, Arati Phaenomena, ed. by André Le Boeuffle (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1975), 270–274. 32 Quin etiam lyra Mercurio dilecta, deorum multum accepta epulis caelo nitet ante labore devictam effigiem, *torti subiecta draconis* tempora laeva premit *quoi planta erectaque dextra* summa genus subvorsa tenet, qua se lyra volvit.
742
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds We have more information about the position of the constellation in relationship to the others. The interesting element is the description of the figure suffering, the constellation our sources first call the Engonasin, the “Croucher”, who may be Hercules, but the text is widely corrupted. Concerning Germanicus, the most important feature is rather the commentary that was made later, 33 where we find a kind of translation of the technical terms used by Eratosthenes. It shows how unintelligible those terms were: we find literal translations ( pectines for combs, umeris for shoulders) and astonishing things (cacumine chordarum, “submit of the strings”, for the arms, unless it is an attempt to translate ἀκρωτῆρι; fundo, “fundament”, for the yoke – likely a confusion with the base). We may compare it with other Latin texts that translate Eratosthenes. The latest one, the so-called Aratus Latinus (ca. 8th century AD) gives literal translations:34 pectines (combs), humera (shoulder), iugo (yoke) and one misunderstanding: pedales, “for one foot”, for arms, but the confusion is easy to explain. The Greek term also means “a distance of one arm” and it was translated into “a distance of one foot”. There is a last strange translation: it seems that the difficult word ἀκρωτῆρι is translated into “modulo”, maybe “the place where we modulate”. Before explaining this curious interpretation, let us see the last translations, of Hyginus, 35 which are precise: we find again humeros for shoulders; cacuminibus bracchiorum, the extremity of the arms, is much better than camumine chordarum; imo for basis. For the combs, Hyginus uses the term lateribus, which means “f lanks”. In fact, we have to understand that the Greek term, meaning “combs” or “ribs” was translated into a Latin word meaning the place where the ribs are, the f lanks. Finally, the ἀκρωτῆρι is translated into scapulis, the top of the back between shoulders. It suits well my own interpretation of the Eratosthenian ἀκρωτῆρι . Aratus Latinus’ translation is more problematic, because ἀκρωτῆρι becomes modulo. I see two possible interpretations. There may be confusion in architectural terms, because both terms are used in architecture (ἀκρωτήρ is the summit of a building; modulus is the module used in the measures of the monument). Yet this possibility would imply a total incompetence of the Roman translator. It is also possible that he read an omicron in the word instead of an omega. Ἀκρότης means high pitch and the Roman scholar may have used the word modulo thinking of the modu33 Scholia to Germanicus Caesar, 270–274. 34 Ernestus Maass, ed., Aratus Latinus (Berlin: Weidmann, 1893), 233. See on this text Hubert le Bourdelles, L’Aratus latinus, étude sur la culture et la langue latines dans le Nord de la France au VIIIe siècle (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille 1985). 35 Hyginus, Astronomia, vol.3, 6. On the relationships between Hyginus et Eratosthenes, Arnaud Zucker, “Hygin et Ératosthène. Variation mythographique ou restitution d’un original perdu”, Polymnia 1 (2015), 83–125.
743
Sylvain Perrot lation of the voice in high pitches. This hypothesis seems to me more valuable. In another place Hyginus again describes the constellation but this time he deals with mythology. 36 The text is very long but is shows how the author is more interested here in tales than in astronomical considerations. After a small introduction mentioning his main source, Hyginus focuses on Orpheus: The Lyre was put among the constellations for the following reason, as Eratosthenes says. Made at first by Mercury from a tortoise shell, it was given to Orpheus, son of Calliope and Oeagrus, who was passionately devoted to this matter. That is why it is thought that by his skill he could charm even wild beasts to listen. When, grieving for his dead wife Eurydice, he descended to the Lower World, there he praised the children of the gods in his song, all except Father Liber; indeed, he overlooked and forgot him, as Oeneus did Diana in sacrifice. Afterwards, then, when Orpheus was taking delight in song, seated, as many say, on Mount Olympus, which separates Macedonia from Thrace, or on Pangaeum, as Eratosthenes says, Liber is said to have roused the Bacchae against him. They slew him and dismembered his body. But others say that this happened because he had looked on the rites of Liber. The Muses gathered the scattered limbs and gave them burial, and as the greatest favour they could confer, they put as a memorial his lyre, pictured with stars, among the constellations. Apollo and Jupiter consented, for Orpheus had praised Apollo highly, and Jupiter granted this favour to his daughter.37 We may notice that this first part is strongly delimited with the reference to the catasterism, with exactly the same syntagm (inter sidera constituere: to put among the stars). In the second part, Hyginus makes an excursus on Mercury, which is not really useful for my topic, but he says that Mercury created a seven-stringed lyre because of the number of Atlantides-Pleiades, since Maia, 36 Hyginus, Astronomia, vol. 2, 7. 37 Lyra inter sidera constituta est hac, ut Eratosthenes ait, de causa, quod initio a Mercurio facta de testudine, Orpheo est tradita, qui, Calliopes et Oeagri filius, eius rei maxime studiosus fuit. Itaque existimatur suo artificio feras etiam ad se audiendum adlicuisse. Qui querens uxoris Eurydices mortem, ad inferos descendisse existimatur, et ibi deorum progeniem suo carmine laudasse, praeter Liberum patrem; hunc enim obliuione ductus praetermisit, ut Oeneus in sacrificio Dianam. Postea igitur Orpheus, ut complures dixerunt, in Olympo monte, qui Macedoniam diuidit a Thracia, sed ut Eratosthenes ait, in Pangaeo sedens, cum cantu delectaretur, dicitur ei Liber obiecisse Bacchas, quae corpus eius discerperent interfecti. Sed alii dicunt, quod initia Liberi sit speculatus, id ei accidisse. Musas autem collecta membra sepulturae mandasse, et lyram, quo maxime potuerant beneficio, illius memoriae causa figuratam stellis inter sidera constituisse Apollinis et Iouis uoluntate, quod Orpheus Apollinem maxime laudaret; Iuppiter autem filiae beneficium concessit.
744
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds his mother, belongs to them. Finally, Hyginus draws the link between Apollo and Orpheus, so that all the legends about the lyre are mentioned in the text: But to return to the subject at hand, Apollo took the lyre and is said to have taught Orpheus on it, and after he himself had invented the cithara, he gave the lyre to Orpheus. Some also have said that Venus and Proserpina came to Jupiter for his decision, asking him to which of them he would grant Adonis. Calliope, who was the judge appointed by Jupiter and the Muse mother of Orpheus, decided that each should possess him half of the year. But Venus, angry because she had not been granted what she thought belonged to her, stirred all the women in Thrace by love, each to seek Orpheus for herself, so that they tore him limb from limb. His head, carried down from the mountain into the sea, was cast by the waves upon the island of Lesbos. It was taken up and buried by the people of Lesbos, and in return for this kindness, they have the reputation of being exceedingly skilled in the art of music. The lyre, as we have said before, was put by the Muses among the stars. Some say that because Orpheus first preferred love for young men, he seemed to insult women, and for this reason they killed him. 38 Hyginus’ point is to explain how the lyre was transferred from Apollo to Orpheus. Then he explains why it is now in the stars: there is a small variation in the expression (inter astra constituere). Therefore Hyginus sums up many myths related to Apollo, Orpheus and the lyre, while combining all the tales together. He obviously found much material in the works of Eratosthenes. It is not my point to comment on Orpheus’ myth in Hyginus’ description but it is obvious that Hyginus wanted to tell the whole story. Finally, Manilius wrote a very different description, inserting a totally new idea:39
38 Sed ut ad propositum reuertamur, Apollo lyra accepta dicitur Orphea docuisse, et postquam ipse citharam inuenerit, illi lyram concessisse. Nonnulli etiam dixerunt Venerem cum Proserpina ad iudicium Iouis uenisse, cui earum Adonin concederet. Quibus Calliopen ab Ioue datam iudicem, quae Musa Orphei est mater; itaque iudicasse uti dimidiam partem anni earum unaquaeque possideret. Venerem autem indignatam, quod non sibi proprium concessisset, obiecisse omnibus quae in Thracia essent mulieribus, ut Orphea amore inductae ita sibi quaeque adpeterent ut membra eius discerperent. Cuius caput, in mare de monte perlatum, f luctibus in insulam Lesbum est reiectum; quod ab his sublatum et sepulturae est mandatum. Pro quo beneficio ad musicam artem ingeniosissimi existimantur esse. Lyra autem a Musis, ut ante diximus, inter astra constituta est. Nonnulli aiunt, quod Orpheus primus puerilem amorem induxerit, mulieribus uisum contumeliam fecisse; hac re ab his interfectum. 39 Manilius, Astronomica, vol. 1, 322–328.
745
Sylvain Perrot And the lyre is seen among the stars in the sky with its extended arms. With it, Orpheus had once taken anything he had touched by singing, he made his way through the dead themselves and he overcame infernal laws with his charming song. Therefore it has a celestial honor and a similar power on the cause of things. At that time it attracted woods and rocks and now it drives stars and carries the huge globe of the turning world.40 Manilius refers to Orpheus and does not say anything unusual until his conclusion. According to him, there is a strong difference between past and present (tunc […] nunc […]), the time of myth and the time of astronomy. This ending is of great interest since it is the first time that a writer is suggesting that stars and planets are moving to the sound of the lyre. Those four authors (Cicero, Germanicus, Hyginus and Manilius) composed their works at the same time, when Augustus grew up and became the Emperor of Rome.41 It is relevant to notice here that Augustus especially worshipped Apollo. At that time Rome became the center of the ancient world and the association of Augustus to Apollo makes clear that Apollo’s lyre ruled Augustus’ Rome: the Lyre and Rome are both at the center of the universe.42 The continuity with Greek authors is obvious but Manilius introduced a new idea we need to consider so that we may understand its origins. Acta est fabula: The Tortoise and the Bird, the Lyre and the Swan If we sum up the elements in common between texts and pictures, we get a more precise idea of the role this constellation played in the Greek sky and we may understand the reasons why Greeks put it there.
40 At lyra diductis per cœlum cornibus inter Sidera conspicitur, qua quondam ceperat Orpheus Omne quod attigerat cantu manesque per ipsos Fecit iter domuitque infernas carmine leges. Hinc cœlestis honos similisque potentia causæ: Tunc silvas et saxa trahens, nunc sidera ducit Et rapit immensum mundi revolubilis orbem. 41 We have other Latin adaptations of Aratus and Eratosthenes in Late Antiquity: Rufus Festus Avienus, Arati Phaenomena, “Lyra” and Martianus Capella, De nuptiis, vol. 8, 838. Those texts do not bring much material to my topic. 42 Just think of the famous verse P. Corneille gave to Augustus in his theatre piece Cinna (1641): “Je suis maître de moi comme de l’univers” (V, 3).
746
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds First of all, the constellation is very small in comparison to other ones. The Greeks apparently needed a small item to use these remaining stars, if we assume that the Lyre was invented after the others. It does not mean that the Lyre is not an ancient feature. We do know that at that place Babylonians saw a goat, Uza,43 and it is well know that the lyre is a typical Greek invention. Furthermore, we are sure that Greeks in archaic times (Democritus, Meton and Euktemon) 44 called something Lyre in the sky but very probably it was only the star Vega. Adding other stars to Vega to build a whole instrument came later. It may not have been seen before and there was a gap to fill; we cannot be sure whether the Lyre or the stars came first. Definitely, it is not easy to see except by specialists. In consequence, this constellation has a special quality-- a kind of invisibility for uninitiated people. Secondly, it is clear through textual evidence that the string instrument is a lyre and not a kithara. The globes of Paris and Naples are right, the globe of Mayence shows how very erroneous some globes may have been. Nevertheless in the written sources there may be some mistakes between both terms. It was important to imagine the tortoise shell and at the beginning it may have been more important than the idea of the string instrument. As we know, the five most visible stars of the Lyre form a tetragon and an additional segment from one star (ζ Lyr) to Vega (α Lyr). It is quite difficult to see a string instrument with this design but Greeks wanted to because we do know that for Archaic and Classical writers, the Lyre was present in the sky, although they could have been referring only to the single star of Vega. The first step to building the constellation may have been to find the shape of the tortoise shell. Indeed, it seems much easier to identify the tetragon with a carapace and the segment with the neck and the head of the tortoise. That is probably why Arabs preferred to see a tortoise rather than a lyre, when they do not see a vulture: furthermore, for them, the lyre does not hold the same significance as for Greeks, for whom the lyre was one of the main musical instruments. However, we have to admit that for Greeks the tetragon is not the tortoise shell but the upper part of the lyre, Vega being on the shell. The question whether Greeks first imagined a tortoise shell or the whole lyre is then a difficult puzzle to solve. 43 Andrée Florisoone, “Astres et constellations des Babyloniens”, Ciel et Terre 67 (1951), 59; John H. Rogers, “Origins of the ancient constellations”, Journal of the British Astronomical Association 108/1 (1998), 16; Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, Science Awakening, vol.2: The Birth of Astronomy (Leiden: Noordhoff International Pub.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 73. 44 Thiele, Antike Himmelsbilder (as note 3), 6. Even the poet Anacreon may have evoked it in his fragment 99.
747
Sylvain Perrot By doing this, Greeks should have realized it was a good opportunity to have a lyre in this place in the sky. The idea was ancient because Vega was probably called Lyre but the whole shape only came afterwards when the sky was full of other features. In fact, the Lyre is close to the constellation they used to call the Bird, before it was renamed the Swan. Changing the name is the same as telling a new story. The swan is the favourite bird of Apollo and a famous singer.45 Its link with the Lyre is obvious. But there is more: the Lyre is also close to the constellation of Hercules, considering the Engonasin is Hercules. On Naples’ globe, we get the impression that Hercules tries to touch the Lyre. If we keep the identification as the Lyre, it does make sense with Hercules: he was told as a young boy to kill his master, Linus, with his lyre.46 Furthermore, the Lyre has relationships with other constellations. The number of strings is related to the constellations of the Dolphin (if 9) or of the Pleiades (if 7), who also are the daughters of Atlas, who is holding the celestial globe in Naples. One of the Pleiades was Maia, the mother of Hermes who invented the lyre. Here is another element of a particular network. Much more, the group of Pleiades and Orion is close to the Zodiac, between Taurus and the Gemini. According to the main tradition, the Gemini are Castor and Pollux.47 But some people thought it could have been Apollo and Hercules, that is the association we have between Hercules and the Lyre. In modern times some scholars published one of the Gemini holding a string instrument.48 If we follow the forty-eight constellations listed by Ptolemaeus, the sky is full of Hercules’ works because this mythology gives many occasions to put objects or animals in the stars: Hercules himself, with Taurus, Sagitta, Draco, Hydra, Serpens, Cancer, Leo. And we have seen that even the Lyre plays a role in Hercules’ story, in his music lessons with Linus. Hercules is a hero praised for having banished monsters and civilizing the world. It is obvious that Greeks put symbols of civilization into the sky: there are two other cycles of famous heroes, Jason (Argo Navis, Aries, Serpens, Draco) and Perseus (Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopea, Cepheus, Cetus). Hercules grew up with the centaur Chiron, who also has his place in the sky, being the preceptor of all of those heroes (Centaurus, Ara and in some cases Sagittarius). Then the sky is a projection of the civilized country of the Greeks. However there also are bad sides of heroes. Although Hercules is famous, he is also strong-willed and violent: he killed e.g. Linus. Greeks may not have admitted that all the sky 45 46 47 48
748
W. Geoffrey Arnott, “Swan Songs”, Greece & Rome 24/2 (1977), 149–153. [Apollodorus], Bibliotheca, 2, 4, 9; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 3, 67, 2. Eratosthenes, Catasterismi, no. 10. Hyginus, Astronomia, vol. 2, 22. See e.g. Urania’s mirror, 1825, plate 18.
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds was ruled by Hercules’ power. It is likely the reason why they also put Apollo in with his own symbols (Lyra, Cygnus, Delphinus) and mythology (Corvus, Crater; Ophiucus; Orion, Scorpio, Lepus, Canis major et Canis minor, Eridanus). The aim was to find some equilibrium in the relationships between stars. This is the role of Zeus--to maintain stability--and he also has his symbols, close to our constellations: Libra and Aquila. Furthermore, Libra is related to Virgo and in that case it is Themis, goddess of divine justice which is the symbol of the golden age and a principle of unity and harmony. There is another clue, which is the constellation of Gemini. Indeed, who would have thought that the Gemini were Apollo and Hercules? It is improbable to be sure, but we may suggest that it has to do with the Pythagorean milieu. One of the biggest theories of Pythagoras was the harmony of the spheres. It is impossible to know whether Pythagoreans played a role in identifying constellations but it is certain that Claudius Ptolemaeus, who was a Pythagorean, did not discard constellations and their meanings. He wrote a whole treatise on harmonics and to him, the lyre meant something original. There is more: some authors say that according to Pythagoras, Pleiades are the lyres of the Muses.49 This is what our sources call akousmata, that is aphorisms. Some concern the sky: e.g. to the question “what are the Isles of the Blessed?”, Pythagoras used to answer “the sun and the moon”. In Manilius’ text, the constellation of Lyra is the leader of the chorus of the stars. Moreover his contemporaneous Philo, who was a Jew but also a Platonician scholar, describes this dance of the universe around the seven stringed lyre. 50 Philo knows very well the treatises of Plato, who himself was deeply inspired by Pythagorean philosophy, especially in the musical field. 51 Finally the main question is which lyre is in the sky. There are several myths attached to this constellation. Authors speak about the transfer from Hermes to Apollo and from Apollo to Orpheus. But Isidorus much later is the only one who lets Apollo disappear in this chain:52 The lyre (lyra) is so called from the word lerein (i.e. “speak frivolously”), that is, from “variety of voices”, because it renders diverse sounds. They say that the lyre was first invented by Mercury in the following way. When the Nile was receding into its channels, it left behind various animals on the plains and a tortoise was one that was stranded. 49 Aristotle fr. 196; Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae, 41. 50 Philo of Alexandria, De opificio mundi, 126. 51 According to Saint Jerome, Catalogus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum, 11: “Philo platonizes, Plato philonizes”. 52 Isidorus of Sevilla, Etymologiae, vol. 3, 22, 8–9.
749
Sylvain Perrot When it decomposed, and its tendons remained stretched out in the shell, it made a sound when Mercury plucked it. Mercury made a lyre of this shape and handed it over to Orpheus, who was by far its most zealous student. Whence it is thought that by his art he controlled not only wild beasts but also the rocks and the woods by the modulation of his song. On account of his love of musical pursuits and praise of song, musicians have imagined, in the fictions of their tales, his lyre as being located among the stars. 53 Hermes/Mercury is closely associated with the birth of this constellation and I wish to emphasize that Eratosthenes also wrote a poem on Hermes where he defines the role of the god in arranging the whole sky. In one fragment, 54 Hermes is astonished to find that the music of the spheres exactly harmonizes with that of the lyre which he has just invented. The lyre is the only musical instrument present in the sky but Eratosthenes evokes one legend where a musical instrument, the conch, plays a role in the war between Gods and Titans. This narrative takes place in the myth of the Capricornus, a figure who is said to have invented the conch and to have played on it to frighten Titans:55 the music helps to maintain the order in the universe. And according to other sources, Hermes should have invented this instrument. 56 If we sum up, we realize that Hermes is very present in the sky because he makes the link between music and astronomy. Through the number of stars and the shape of constellations, astronomy is also related to arithmetic and geometry. As a result, Hermes is one of the very few who is able to understand the hermetic laws of the universe. Therefore it is not surprising that in the Arabic world Hermes will be considered as the teacher of Pythagoras. 57 To conclude, it is always difficult to correctly interpret the iconography of constellations in Greco-Roman antiquity, especially as it appears through 53 Lyra dicta ἀπὸ τοῦ ληρεῖν, id est a varietate vocum, quod diversos sonos efficiat. Lyram primum a Mercurio inventam fuisse dicunt, hoc modo. Cum regrediens Nilus in suos meatus varia in campis reliquisset animalia, relicta etiam testudo est. Quae cum putrefacta esset, et nervi eius remansissent extenti intra corium, percussa a Mercurio sonitum dedit; ad cuius speciem Mercurius lyram fecit et Orpheo tradidit, qui eius rei maxime erat studiosus. Unde existimatur eadem arte non feras tantum, sed et saxa atque silvas cantus modulatione adplicuisse. Hanc musici propter studii amorem et carminis laudem etiam inter sidera suarum fabularum conmentis conlocatam esse finxerunt. 54 Eratosthenes, Hermes, fr. 13, ed. by John U. Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). 55 Eratosthenes, Catasterismi, n° 27. 56 Scholion to Homerus, Iliad, 5, 785. 57 Martin Plessner, “Hermes Trismegistus and Arab Science”, Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 50–57.
750
Lyre in the Sky with Diamonds texts. Whatever the methods or the tools to observe the sky might have been, there is continuously some fantasy. From a cognitive point of view, the picture that is drawn by the human brain is a unique function of that person, inf luenced by that individual’s cultural heritage. For sure the Lyre is a very ancient presence in the Greek sky but it received its shape much later, probably in Hellenistic times. But which shape? Where was each star located? It seems that the answer is different from one source to another. Moreover a constellation is not only an item in itself, it is also part of a narrative recounted by several constellations. A whole story is to be read in the sky and the Lyre has a very complicated and original one. Some authors only tried to describe the object, placing stars on different parts of the lyre. But others want to show how the Lyre is in fact at the center of the universe, being also in the center of the Pythagorean theory of spheres. It harmonizes and rules the world. Although it is an ancient idea, I tried to prove that it was reenacted at the time when Augustus, devote of Apollo, became the Emperor. However, there was also another tradition assigning a prominent role to Hermes/Mercury in the knowledge of cosmic laws. Hermes invented the real and celestial lyre, Apollo played on it. In the following centuries, the Lyre was not as important as in the Greco-Roman world, although it remained in the sky maps, at least in the Western world. But Orpheus’ lyre continued to inspire poets, who see in this constellation their own star, like Gérard de Nerval in this famous poem:58 Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé, Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie: Ma seule Étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie. Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé, Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie, La f leur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé, Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie. Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? … Lusignan ou Biron? Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine; J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la sirène... Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron: Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée. 58 Gérard de Nerval, “El Desdichado”, in Les Chimères (1854).
751
Sylvain Perrot El Desdichado (The disinherited) I am the man of gloom – widowed – unconsoled The prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruin: My sole star is dead – and my constellated lute Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia. In the night of the tomb, you, my consolation, Give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea, The f lower that so eased my heart’s desolation, And the trellis that twines the rose into the vine. Am I Eros or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron? My brow is still red with the kiss of the queen; I have dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims. . . And, twice victorious, I have crossed Acheron: My Orphic lyre in turn modulating the strains Of the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay. R. Sieburth (Penguin Classics, 1999)
752
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements
Dorothea Baumann Universität Zürich
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements: Musical Instruments in a Swiss Marriage Announcement and Glass Panels of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Abstract. Until the seventeenth century, glass painters using imagery of musical instruments and music scenes in their output, mostly copied from sample books and models (for example, Carl von Egeri, Zug (c. 1510–1562). In contrast, the musical instruments of the Zurich painter and engraver Conrad Meyer (1618–1689) were based on direct practical knowledge of actual musical instruments and music scenes. A convincing example of this is the copper plate engraving for the announcement of the marriage between Johann Bernhard Holtzhalb and Elisabeth Hirtzel in Zurich on 26 February 1644 which shows enough detail to identify the plucked instrument as a cittern (despite several unusual features including a turned-back lute neck). Details such as the hand posture of a lute player and the partbooks in a copper plate engraving by the same artist used as title page for Johann Wilhelm Simler’s Teutschen Gedichten (Zurich: Johann Jacob Bodmer 1648) are also especially well designed. From Meyer’s educational background and a similar instrument on the case of a German positive organ from around 1600 at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin (inv.-no.: 4981, around 1600) in a scene modeled after Apollo and King Tmolos (around 1590) by the Dutch copper engraver Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1616 or 1617) we may ask whether the cittern with turned-back pegbox in the Zurich wedding announcement ref lects local use of an instrument typical for German und Flemish speaking countries since the end of the sixteenth century.
In Protestant Zurich of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, luxury was forbidden and splendor remained behind private doors. Special forms of celebrations were developed in order to express admiration and respect for the wealthy and the powerful. Printed marriage announcements distributed to the public and painted glass panels as marriage gifts, which were preserved in considerable quantity, give evidence of this aspect of social life of the city. These gifts are encomia, glowing and enthusiastic praises of the bridegroom 753
Dorothea Baumann
Fig. 1: Announcement of the marriage between Johann Bernhard Holtzhalb and Elisabeth Hirtzel in Zurich on 26 February 1644, copper plate engraving by Conrad Meyer. Reproduction with kind permission of Winterthurer Bibliotheken, Sondersammlung en, XVII_4687/23; 20 cm, signed “C.M.fe.” [i.e. Conrad Meyer fecit].
and his father and family and of the bride and her family. Pictures with music scenes in printed wedding announcements are rare. One of the few examples is the following copper plate engraving for the announcement of the marriage between Johann Bernhard Holtzhalb and Elisabeth Hirtzel in Zurich on 26 February 1644 by Conrad Meyer (1618–1689), the Zurich painter and engraver well known for his portraits and realistic landscape paintings.1 The three poems in Greek, Latin and German below the picture explain that we see a hunter who catches a hind (female deer) not with bow and arrow but with the melody of his musical instrument. A viola, partly hidden behind a
1
754
Taedae emblematico-aenigmaticae in nuptias auspicatissimas nobilitate, pietate omniq virtutum decoro eximij viri Dn. Joh. Bernhardi Holtzhalbii, inclytae Reipubl. Tig. Ducentum-Viri, viri nobilitate, pietate, omniq virtutum splendore praestantissimi Dn. Joh. Bernhardi Holtzhalbii p.m. filij sponsi: ut et genere, omniq virtutum nitore florentissimae nymphae Elisabetae Hirtzeliae, magnifici, amplissimiq viri Dn. Solomonis Hirtzelii ejusdem Reipubl. Tribuniplebis & Laborophori, filiae, sponsae: XXVI. Febr. feliciter celebratas / accensae a JohanneLavatero, b.l.st. Tiguri, 1644. Zurich: Zentrablibliothek, 18.1508.6. Online: http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-12008 (last accessed: 28 April 2017).
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements cittern with a lute neck (turned-back peg-box), 2 a bent and a straight cornet and a trumpet (or trombone) lie on the f loor. These representatives of different categories of musical instruments are the emblems of musica. The hunter resembles Orpheus because the hunted animal, a small hind, an allusion to the bride’s name Hirtzel, is attracted by his music. But instead of bow and lyre he holds a f lute, the instrument of a shepherd who calms the animal with love tunes. By combining these allusions of the picture, according to local tradition, hides several enigmata. 3 Close iconographic models of the animal can be traced back to Zurich book engravings from the sixteenth century. The hind resembles the deer in Christoffel Froschauer’s (c. 1490–1564) folio bible from 1531 in the illustration of chapter two of Genesis (God creates Eve from Adam’s rib) engraved by a Zurich artist, probably Hans Asper (1499–1571),4 after a composition by Hans Springinklee (c. 1490/c. 1495–c. 1540) was. 5 A deer is also among the animals from the Alps in the Chronik der alten Eidgenossenschaft by Johannes Stumpf (1500–c. 1578) with illustrations by Hans Asper (1499–1571), printed in Zurich by Froschauer in 1547–1548:6 A few years later similar pictures of deer and other animals were published in Conrad Gessner’s (1516–1565) Historiae animalium, printed by Froschauer in 1557–1558, and in Icones animalium quadrupedibus oviparis from 1560:7 2 3
4 5
6
7
See David Munrow, Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 80–82. My thanks go to Harry Joelson, former librarian of the special collections at the Winterthurer Bibliotheken, for showing me the marriage announcement with the illustration by Conrad Meyer. I also thank Antonio Baldassarre, Head of Research and Development at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Music, as well as Daniel Fueter, Director of the former Hochschule Musik und Theater Zürich, and Dominik Sackmann, Head of the Research Department of the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Department of Music, and my research colleague Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser for their support and collaboration in the music-iconographic research projects “Music Scenes in Swiss Glass Panels” (2006–2009) and “Music-related Visual Objects in Switzerland up to 1650” (2012–2013). Tapan Bhattacharya, “Hans Asper”, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, online: http://www. hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18317.php (last accessed: 28 April 2017). Paul Leemann-van Elck, Die zürcherische Buchillustration von den Anfängen bis um 1850 (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1952), 33, fig. 26; see also http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-7469 (copy owned by the Grossmünster Zürich): http://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/content/pageview/1929224 (both last accessed: 28 April 2017). Johannes Stumpf, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft Stetten, Landen und Völckeren Chronick wirdiger Thaaten Beschreybung […] (Zurich: Froschauer, 1548), chapter 16, book 9, 288. Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, AW 40:1–2, http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-5076 (last accessed: 28 April 2017), 1290. Leemann-van Elck, Die zürcherische Buchillustration (as note 5), 33, fig. 26, from: Konrad Gessner, Icones animalium quadrupedum viviparorum et oviparorum, quae in historiae animalium
755
Dorothea Baumann
Fig. 2: [Die] gantze Bibel / der ursprünglichen ebraischen und griechischen Waarheyt nach auffs aller treüwlichest verteütschet (Zurich: Forschauer, 1531), illustration of Genesis, chapter 2. Reproduction with kind permission of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
756
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements
Fig 3: Johannes Stumpf, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft Stetten, Landen und Völckeren Chronick wirdiger Thaaten Beschreybung (Zurich: Forschauer, 1548), book 9, chapter 16, 287 verso. Reproduction with kind permission of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
757
Dorothea Baumann
Fig. 4: Conrad Gessner’s Icones animalium quadrupedibus oviparis, Tiguri, anno 1560, 44. Reproduction with kind permission of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
758
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements Fig 5: Sebastian Virdung’s “Groß Geigen” from Musica getutscht (Basel: Michael Furter, 1511), B II. Public domain.
Tracking down models for the musical instruments is more difficult. If we compare these instruments with Sebastian Virdung’s (c. 1465–after 1511) Musica getutscht, printed 1511 in Basel and with Michael Praetorius’ (1571–1621) De organographia (Syntagma musicum 2), Wolfenbüttel, 1619, Meyer’s instruments appear more modern than Virdung’s, mainly the viola in comparison to Virdung’s Gross Geigen (a viola da gamba with turned-back peg-box),8 but more old-fashioned than Praetorius’ instruments, mainly the instruments of the violin family. The partially visible resonance body of the viola in the marriage picture features corner blocks and s-holes (reversed left to right), known in Italy since about 1530,9 while Praetorius’ instruments of the violin family and the Italian Lyra de bracio [sic!] show modern f-holes mainly in use since about 1600, while the viola da gamba family shows c-holes.10 Wind instruments which closely resemble Meyer’s depictions appear in a consort with cornets and a trombone in the royal wedding scene used several times in Stumpf ’s Chronik (1547–1548),11 probably based on a design of Hans Holbein the younger: Conradi Gesneri libro I. et II. describuntur, cum nomenclaturis singulorum latinis, graecis, italicis, gallicis, et [...],Tiguri, anno 1560, 44. Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, NNN 44 | F, http://dx.doi. org/10.3931/e-rara-1668 (last accessed: 28 April 2017). 8 Sebastian Virdung, Musica getutscht und ausgezogen […] (Basel: Michael Furter, 1511), B II. Facsimile ed. by Robert Eitner (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, 1882); later ed. by Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1970); see also the very similar Alte Fiddel with 5 strings given by Praetorius among the instrumenta Hieronimi, in Michael Praetorius, De Organographia, Syntagma musicum, vol. 2 (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein, 1619), plate XXXIV, no. 14; and the Grossen welschen Geigen given by Martin Agricola, Musica instrumentalis deudsch (Wittemberg: Georg Rhaw, 1528 and 1545, 1st and 4th eds.), new ed., partly in facsimile, ed. by Robert Eitner (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1896), 92. 9 Dominic Gill, The book of the violin (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1984), 14. 10 Praetorius, De Organographia (as note 8), plate XX and XXI. 11 Stumpf, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft Stetten, Landen und Völckeren Chronick wirdiger Thaaten Beschreybung (as note 6), book 2, chapter 28, 66, http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-5076 (last accessed: 28 April 2017), 61.
759
Dorothea Baumann
Fig. 6: Johannes Stumpf, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft Stetten, Landen und Völckeren Chronick wirdiger Thaaten Beschreybung […] (Zürich: Froschauer, 1548), book 2, chapter 28, 66. Reproduction with kind permission of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
760
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements The recorder and the way it is played are reminiscent of the recorder players and open partbooks on the title page of Fontegara (1535) by Silvestro Ganassi (1492–mid-sixteenth century),12 with a bent and straight cornet in the foreground and string instruments with c-holes and a lute shown from the back side hung on the wall:
Fig. 7: Silvestro Ganassi’s Fontegara (Venice, 1535), title page. Public domain.
More frequent are music scenes in the upper or lower corner fields of Swiss glass panels which were not only presented as marriage gifts but also on other occasions. The abrupt prohibition of church decoration after the Reformation not only caused the destruction of many cultural treasures but forced a whole generation of painters and artisans involved in glass panel production for churches to find new clients. In Protestant places such as Zurich secular panels were the only alternative. Imitating aristocratic behavior, these panels were not bought but rather were donated by governments to be represented in the many new town halls built in cities joining the Protestant faith, by families to be represented on marriage panels, or by professionals incorporating heraldic signs to show their membership in a guild. They presented a combination of 12 Silvestro Ganassi, Opera Intitulata Fontegara (Venice, 1535): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Silvestro_Ganassi#/media/File:Ganassi_fontegara.jpg (last accessed: 28 April 2017).
761
Dorothea Baumann emblems of political power, religious devotion and scenes from everyday life. The production of this cabinet glass, often on a lower artistic level, was mostly based on models or worked from sample books.13 Carl von Egeri (around 1510–1562),14 the painter of Orpheus in the woods at the bottom of the heraldic panel from Glarus with Saint Fridolin, dated 1557,15 was familiar with the animals of Genesis in Froschauer’s 1531 Bible (see figure 2). Orpheus’ viola da gamba or lyra looks rather archaic, all the more as the picture is reversed left to right (Orpheus holds the bow with his left hand). It seems Carl von Egeri worked from a model for the engraving.16
Fig. 8a: Glarus, Saint Fridolin, heraldic panel, Carl von Egeri, 1557, the monastery of Muri. Photo Dorothea Baumann. Reproduction with kind permission of the Hochschule Luzern – Musik.
The second of the pair of panels from Glarus with Saint Hilarius in the respective field shows a hunter with horn and dogs chasing the deer to the left-hand side towards a net (Glarus with Saint Hilarius, heraldic panel by Carl von Egeri, Zug; monastery of Muri, cloister, east VI c):17
Fig. 8b: Glarus, Saint Hilarius, heraldic panel, Carl von Egeri, 1557, the monastery of Muri. Photo Dorothea Baumann. Reproduction with kind permission of the Hochschule Luzern – Musik. 13 See Walter Salmen, “Kabinettscheiben (vitrail civil): Musikikonographisch betrachtet”, Music in Art 26/1–2, (2001), 107–112. 14 Tapan Bhattacharya, “Aegeri [Egeri], Carl von”, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, online: http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18287.php (last accessed: 28 April 2017). 15 Monastery of Muri, Canton of Aargau, Switzerland, cloister, east VIa, see Bernhard Anderes, Glasmalerei Kreuzgang von Muri: Kabinettscheiben der Renaissance (Bern: Hallwag, 1974), 146; Corpus Vitrearum Schweiz, Reihe Neuzeit 2, Kt. Aargau (Aarau: Lehrmittelverlag des Kantons Aargau, 2003) 146, plate 44. Date 1557 at the bottom between the coat of arms. 16 Anderes, Glasmalerei (as note 15), sees here a direct influence of the painter Hans Asper who was a friend of Carl von Egeri. 17 Monastery of Muri, canton of Aargau, Switzerland, cloister, east VIc, see Anderes, Glasmalerei (as note 15), 148, plate 45.
762
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements Even more archaic is the harp played by Orpheus in a pen design for a glass painting, copied in 1610 by Lorenz Lingg (1582–after 1639) in Murer’s atelier in Zurich from an earlier pen design of 1600–1606:18
Fig. 9a: Orpheus with harp, pen design by Lorenz Lingg, Zurich 1606. Reproduction with kind permission of the Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern. Foto Yvonne Hurni. Fig. 9b: Michael Praetorius, De Organographia, Syntagma musicum, vol. 2 (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein, 1619), plate XVIII, 1. Reproduction with kind permission of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden.
Also earlier harps always have a bent upper part to attach the strings. Here this part is straight while the usually straight or slightly outwards curved vertical column is bent in reversed s-shape (for comparison see the woodcut of Virdung’s Harpffen, 1511,19 and the common harp from Praetorius’ Syntagma musicum, 1619). 20 These archaic details seem surprising because the animals are quite close to nature and fit well between Froschauer and Gessner. 18 Rolf Hasler, Die Scheibenriss-Sammlung Wyss: Depositum der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft im Berner Historischen Museum, 2 vols (Bern: Stämpfli, 1996–1997), vol. 2, 204–206, fig. 591: Sammlung Wyss, Historisches Museum Bern (inv.-no.: 20036.404), compare to figure 591.1: Sammlung Lavater, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, LAV 96/2040, and 591.2: Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe. 19 Virdung, Musica getutscht (as note 8), B II verso. 20 Praetorius, De Organographia (as note 8), plate XVIII, fig. 1: http://digital.slub-dresden.de/ werkansicht/dlf/15636/292/0 (last accessed: 28 April 2017).
763
Dorothea Baumann From his professional training and his family relations we may assume that Meyer knew the Zurich book illustrations and maybe even this model for a glass painting or woodcut from Murer’s atelier. In 1649 Meyer married Susanna Murer (1614–1679), grandd aughter of Jos Murer and niece of the glass painter, painter, and engraver Christoph Murer (1558–1614). Not only Meyer’s landscapes but also his designs of musical instruments are more realistic and modern than these models and glass paintings. The question remains whether the special elements in the design of the viola (reversed s-holes) and the four-coursed cittern (three double stringed and one triple stringed course and the surprising lute neck) are a hint that he did not design real instruments but worked from models. We note that Adrian Le Roy’s (c. 1520–1598) fourcoursed cittern has two triple stringed and two double stringed courses as well as a straight, slightly curved pegbox, as does Praetorius’ cittern:21
Fig. 10a: Adrien Le Roy, Brievfe et facile instruction (Paris, 1565). Reproduction from David Munrow, Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 81. Fig. 10b: Michael Praetorius, De Organographia, Syntagma musicum, vol. 2 (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein, 1619), plate VII, 2. Reproduction with kind permission of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden. 21 See Munrow, Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (as note 2), 81: Adrian Le Roy, Brievfe et facile instruction, Paris 1565. Praetorius’ cittern is six coursed, see Praetorius, De Organographia (as note 8), plate VII: http://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/ dlf/15636/281/0 (last accessed: 28 April 2017).
764
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements Direct borrowing from Italian and Flemish paintings with music scenes seems possible (during his stay in Frankfurt am Main in 1639, Meyer evidently became acquainted with Flemish paintings) and needs further research that goes beyond the scope of this paper. 22 A next step toward a safer basis for interpretation is to search for more designs with musical scenes by the same artist. 23 Looking for further book illustrations by Meyer, the author came across the following copper plate used as title page for Teutschen Gedichten by Johann Wilhelm Simler (1605–1672), first printed 1648 by Johann Jacob Bodmer in Zurich. 24 This “memento mori” is presented with the following comment: “Ein künsches Hertz mag mit Gesang, mit Instrument- und Seiten, / Ergetzen sich, und Gottes Lob bis in den tod außbreiten”. (A chaste heart may be pleased by singing with instruments and strings and praising God until death.) A man sitting at a table is singing from a partbook, his raised right hand conducting. He is accompanied by a woman playing a lute from a second partbook. A third partbook is supported by two books in such a way that Death, standing behind the table, can read or sing from it. Holding the scythe in his right hand he raises a tapestry held by a swan and showing the book title, unveiling five or six organ pipes. The lute player, representing Musica, is surrounded by string, wind, and percussion instruments: harp (about 20 strings visible, top bar and column slightly bent), kettledrum, trumpet (whose bell is less conical and without the more widened end of the brass instrument in the marriage picture), viola with turned-back pegbox (viola da braccio or lyra da braccio?), bass viol (6 strings, bow, the bridge far below the s-holes, the left hole at first sight similar to the viola’s s-hole on the wedding picture, but, in 22 See http://www.cittern.theaterofmusic.com provides a collection of cittern pictures. The hypothesis of a Flemish model is supported by a picture of a cittern with such a turned-back pegbox on the case of a German positive organ from around 1600 at the MusikinstrumentenMuseum Berlin (inv.-no.: 4981) painted after a copper engraving of around 1590 by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1616 or 1617) in Apollo and King Tmolos. My thanks go to Conny Restle, Director of the Museum, for the information on the model of this painting. 23 According to SIKART (Lexikon und Datenbank zur Kunst in der Schweiz und im Fürstentum Lichtenstein) Conrad Meyer’s oeuvre still needs scholarly exploration http://www.sikart.ch/ KuenstlerInnen.aspx?id=4023147 (last accessed: 28 April 2017). 24 Leemann-van Elck, Die zürcherische Buchillustration (as note 5), 114, fig. 118: Johann Wilhelm Simler, Teutsche Gedichte: darinnen I. Haubtbegriffliche Inhälte der Psalmen Davids: II. Underschiedliche/ auf zeiten und anlässe gerichtete Gesänge: III. Allerhand erbauliche Überschrifften/ (German poems, containing: I. The main parts of David’s psalms; II. Songs for various times and occasions; III. Various entertaining comments), first printed 1648 by Johann Jacob Bodmer in Zürich. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, rara, 3.211, http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/erara-13165 (last accessed: 28 April 2017), 7: title page [6] 6: copper plate engraving by Conrad Meyer.
765
Dorothea Baumann
Fig. 11: Johann Wilhelm Simlers’s Teutsche Gedichte (Zurich: Johann Jacob Bodmer, 1648), title page, copper plate engraving by Conrad Meyer. Reproduction with kind permission of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
766
Organology as Methodology to Find Realistic Elements fact, as the right hole, an additional decoration of a rosette). Musica holds her instrument in a demonstrative rather than natural way, the top table of the resonance body turned toward the viewer. From the outside, in front of a dark landscape with clouds, a man with cape and hat is contemplating the strange scene shining in bright light and clearly situated inside a room. Though emblematic and realistic aspects are mixed in both engravings, the additional material supports the following conclusions: Unlike earlier and contemporary glass painters mostly copying from sample books and more or less stereotypical models, the painter and engraver Conrad Meyer not only was one of the first representatives of naturalistic landscape painting of the seventeenth century in Switzerland but his musical instruments too were based on direct practical knowledge of actual musical instruments and music scenes. 25 An excellent example of this knowledge is seen in the surprising shape of the plucked instrument of the wedding picture (see fig. 1) which, thanks to the engraving technique, shows enough details to identify it clearly as a cittern – in spite of its unusual lute neck (turned-back pegbox): the three and two course strings cross a slightly bent bridge and are fixed at the lower side of the f lat resonance body with a slightly inclined bottom plate. A lute would feature a f lat bridge with strings attached. Not only the instruments but also details such as the hand posture of the lute player and the partbooks are especially well designed. From this background, we may ask whether the cittern with turned-back pegbox and its double and triple strings in the first picture ref lect local use of an instrument typical for German and Flemish speaking countries since the end of the sixteenth century.
25 Together with the poet Johann Wilhelm Simler, Conrad Meyer founded the series of Neujahrsblätter der Zürcher Bibliothek, a broadsheet with an etching and verses printed at the beginning of the New Year since 1645.
767
Dorothea Baumann
768
heder
CLASSIFYING DATA ON MUSICS
769
heder
770
The Database of Association RIdIM
Alan Green and Sean Ferguson Music & Dance Library, Ohio State University
The Database of Association RIdIM: Linking Data, Images and Partnerships Abstract. Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale, hereafter referred to by its acronym RIdIM, is an organization concerned with the cataloguing and interpretation of images of music, dance and dramatic arts in works of visual art. Founded in 1971, it is approaching 50 years of worldwide activities and the participation and contributions of countless scholars, librarians, archivists, curators and information technology professionals around the globe.
One of four international documentation projects initiated in the second half of the twentieth century through the cooperation of the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, RIdIM’s founding goal, which continues to this day, is to assist scholars, performers, instrument makers, and publishers to make the fullest use of performing arts iconography for scholarly and practical purposes. Since its inception, it has produced publications and research tools supporting the study of visual materials relating to music and other arts, and organized conferences and workshops to facilitate scholarship and cataloguing activities in this field. In 2011, the project was incorporated as the not-for-profit Association RIdIM, based in Zurich, Switzerland. Historical background In the first several decades of the project, various RIdIM national committees around the world coordinated the cataloging of music-related visual materials in their countries’ museums, libraries and archives. Standards for cataloging and photographing music iconography were developed, and a catalogue card template was designed and disseminated along with guidelines for its use, including terminology for art media, musical instruments and subjects.1 The card 1
Howard Mayer Brown, musicologist and author of writings on music iconography, called the RIdIM catalogue card “the most important first step in realizing the organization’s goals” in “What is RIdIM”, Early Music 2/1 ( Jan. 1974), 51, 53.
771
Alan Green and Sean Ferguso provided space to affix a small photograph of the catalogued work. Thousands of these cards and other documents were collected and organized at RIdIM’s original headquarters, The Research Center for Musical Iconography (RCMI) at the City University of New York, which began in 1972 as the U.S. national RIdIM center and also served as the project’s international center during its early years. 2 Even at this early stage, the data was collected with eventual computerization in mind, as envisioned by RIdIM co-founder Barry S. Brook: Ideally, computerized and stored RIdIM data should have two facets: a) the catalogued information should be available for retrieval on a dial-up basis, and b) the picture itself should be stored, perhaps through a method similar to that of television, producing an imperfect reproduction on the screen for identification […] the cataloguing aspect of computerization has already been tested; the real problem is in joining it to the display of stored visual materials. 3 Among its many activities, the RCMI published several inventories of music iconography in American museums in the 1980s, with funding from a U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Art works from the inventories for the Frick Collection in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC have now been incorporated into the RIdIM database whenever the museums have provided images of the works on their web sites. Inventories of works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art were also compiled but not published, and works from these institutions will be entered into the database using the manuscripts of these inventories. In 1975, the RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter began publication and supported cataloguing activities, among other areas of focus. In 1998, it was transformed into the scholarly journal Music in Art, which continues to this day. In the twenty-first century, Association RIdIM has planned, developed and hosted a free web database of visual sources depicting performing arts, finally realizing the visionary concept of the project’s early leaders in the 1970s.4 The 2 3 4
772
See Barry S. Brook and Richard D. Leppert, “RCMI/CUNY: The Research Center for Musical Iconography of the City University of New York”, College Music Symposium 13 (Fall 1973), 106–113. Barry S. Brook, “RIdIM Chairman’s Report”, Fontes Artis Musicae 26/1 (1979), 127. See Antonio Baldassarre, “Music Iconography: What is ist all about? Some remarks and considerations with a selected bibliography”, Ictus: Periódico do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Música da UFBA 9/2008, 55–95, and Antonio Baldassarre, “Quo vadis music iconography? The Répertoire International d‘Iconographie Musicale as a case study”, Fontes artis musicae 54/2 (2007), 440–452.
The Database of Association RIdIM previously published inventories and catalogue card records from the various national committees became the first generation of data entered into the RIdIM database during its development and testing, leading up to its public release at http://db.ridim.org in the summer of 2012. Database content The database is now open to contributions from scholars worldwide and is growing steadily. Today the RIdIM database contains records for works by over 2,000 artists, held by more than 500 museums, libraries and other institutions in 30 countries. There are currently 214 different types of musical instruments depicted in the database and it contains artworks created over a span of over 2,500 years, from ancient Greek pottery to a portrait of the late Amy Winehouse. There are 22 different types of objects currently represented in the database, including traditional paintings and drawings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, tapestries, Chinese silk paintings, collages, and three-dimensional mixed media works. Also covered are prints such as engravings and posters, for which we developed a method of handling variable information for multiple copies, such as different owning institutions, inventory numbers, exact dimensions, state of each print, and other details. Database design In addition to incorporating data elements from the earlier RIdIM card-cataloguing system and more recent resources, the RIdIM database has been designed to take advantage of current technology and support widely used concepts and standards for metadata, including those specially designed for art, music and iconography. Primary examples are: (1) Unicode text encoding for consistent representation and handling of text, (2) Repeatable fields for entering unlimited numbers of artists, titles, musical instruments and other data, (3) Controlled, centrally edited authority lists of artist and musician names, musical instruments, owning institution names, art media terms and geographic places, (4) Free-text fields for entering descriptions, information on related art works, bibliographic references and various types of notes. These four data fields are the minimum requirements for creating a record for an item in the RIdIM database: title, creator, item type, and location. 773
Alan Green and Sean Ferguso When the creator or current location of a work is unknown, this can be indicated. There are many optional fields that catalogers are encouraged to complete whenever they are applicable. Those that are especially valuable include depicted persons, musical works and instruments, prose descriptions of the art, and links to images. Bibliographic citations for sources of information on the art work are also useful, especially those that focus on musical aspects. Whenever possible, RIdIM database records include one or more links to high-quality images of the work on the owning institution’s web site, often with zooming capability. We sometimes add links to additional image sources such as Google Arts & Culture or Europeana, in case the museum changes or removes its image web page. We also sometimes link to images on sites such as the Artstor Digital Library (for subscribers) and Wikimedia Commons, as well as certain large commercial web sites such as Bridgeman Art. We regularly check for broken links, and do our best to promptly enter valid URLs for the highest quality images available. In cases where permission is given by rights owners, there is also an option to upload images of works directly to the RIdIM server for display in search results, individual item records, and other image applications, subject to legal and technical requirements. Controlled vocabularies and authorities The interdisciplinary nature of the RIdIM database results in a variety of information sources, reference works and vocabulary lists being used to create and maintain authority files for the controlled fields. Our preferred resources for authority work are determined by considering their comprehensiveness, international perspective, editorial standards, ease of access, and compatibility with RIdIM’s partner projects such as the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM). For musical instruments, RIdIM uses the controlled vocabulary established by the Musical Instruments Museums Online, or MIMO (http://www.mimo-international.com/MIMO/), the world’s largest freely accessible database for information on musical instruments. Currently, the MIMO vocabulary contains entries for over 2,300 instruments from cultures around the world, plus extensive cross-references and parallel lists in English, French and German, with more languages in progress. At present, only the primary English terms are implemented in the RIdIM database, but eventual incorporation of the full thesaurus will allow powerful multilingual access to instruments. 774
The Database of Association RIdIM For art work types, objects, media and techniques, a variety of terminology resources are utilized when refining the vocabulary, beginning with the extensive Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (http://www.getty.edu/research/ tools/vocabularies/aat/). For names of musicians, RIdIM uses Grove Music Online as the primary authority resource. For names of musicians not included in Grove, creators of art works, and the wide variety of persons depicted in art, the Virtual International Authority File (http://viaf.org/) is the primary resource. This service, hosted by OCLC, virtually combines multiple library, archive and museum name authority files into a single name authority service. The service currently includes more than 40 authority files from national libraries and other institutions, and it continues to grow. One of the participating authority files is the Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/ulan/), which is the largest controlled list of artists freely available on the web and RIdIM’s primary resource for creators of art. Searching VIAF allows a cataloguer to instantly see name entries from the Getty ULAN alongside those from the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and many other authority files around the globe. VIAF is especially useful for establishing names of non-musical persons depicted in art works (such as rulers, authors, actors, dancers, etc.). It also includes permalinks and VIAF record ID numbers that could eventually be utilized for linked data. There were three primary RIdIM Database developments in 2015: (1) New data fields for entering and displaying subject classifications and linked data from the Iconclass system. (2) Basic help text for cataloguers that can be quickly displayed directly below each field in the record screen. (3) A new field for institutions, projects and other groups to publicly identify their contributed data records. Iconclass Iconclass (http://www.iconclass.org/) is a freely accessible, multilingual classification system designed for art and iconography, and is administered by the Netherlands Institute for Art History. It is the most extensive tool for the description and retrieval of subjects represented in images (works of art, book illustrations, reproductions, photographs, etc.) and is used by museums, digital image collections and art institutions. Iconclass applications around the world have made it the most widely accepted classification system 775
Alan Green and Sean Ferguso for visual culture. Similar in structure to the Dewey Decimal Classification used by libraries for books and media, Iconclass is a subject-specific classification system divided into ten broad categories. It is a hierarchically ordered collection of more than 28,000 definitions of objects, people, events and abstract ideas that serve as the subject of an image. Art historians, researchers and curators use it to describe, classify and examine the subject of images represented in various media such as paintings, drawings and photographs. Numerous institutions across the world use Iconclass to describe and classify their collections in a standardized manner. In turn, users ranging from art historians to museum visitors use Iconclass to search and retrieve images from these collections. As a research tool, Iconclass is used to identify the significance of entire scenes, or individual elements represented within an image. The entire Iconclass descriptor and keyword system is available via the easy-to-use browser interface, with parallel content in English, German, French, Italian and Finnish, and with more translations in Chinese, Dutch and Norwegian underway. Linked data The inclusion of Iconclass data fields in the RIdIM Database is not only a new enhancement, it is also the first implementation of linked data functionality for RIdIM. The Iconclass system is designed to accommodate easy linking to each individual classification, utilizing the notation codes in URLs. Any notation code can be appended to a short URL to create a direct link to that Iconclass entry in the browser. The RIdIM database has been programmed to create these links automatically when a code is saved in the Iconclass field. For example, http://iconclass.org/42D253 is a linked data URL for the Iconclass notation 42D253 (“dancing at wedding feast”). Clicking an Iconclass link in a RIdIM record will take you directly to the entry for the subject in the Iconclass browser, where you can see it in the context of the larger classification, search for related topics, and see translations of the descriptor in additional languages. Iconclass notations are just the first implemented example of several data types that could be linked between the RIdIM database and external data sources. We have begun preparing for potential linking to data in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) for personal names of creators, performing artists and composers, and any documented persons who are depicted in art, such as historical and political figures. In VIAF you can see variations in preferred forms of a person’s name in different spellings and scripts, and open 776
The Database of Association RIdIM full authority records in dozens of different contributing authority files from around the world. In addition to VIAF links, we are also recording available International Standard Name Identifiers (ISNI, http://isni.org/) for potential linking to the ISNI database. These are ISO certified global standard numbers for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution. Another very useful application of linked data for RIdIM would be musical instrument IDs in the Musical Instrument Museums Online system. RIdIM uses the MIMO terminology as the basis of its controlled vocabulary for instruments, and the four-digit MIMO instrument IDs are included in the RIdIM instrument authority records. Like Iconclass codes and VIAF/ISNI IDs, these MIMO IDs can be used to connect directly to MIMO linked data pages containing the instrument name in all seven available languages, along with broader and related terms and a link to views of actual instruments of this type held in MIMO’s member museums. For example, the ID for Guitar is 3237, with this URL: http://mimo-db.eu/LinkedData/default. aspx?lex=3237. Lastly, RIdIM Database records are themselves available in the same way for linking and direct retrieval on the web, with the record ID number in a consistent URL, for example record no. 1: http://db.ridim.org/display.php?ridim_id=1. 5 Help for cataloguers Another new feature in the RIdIM cataloguing interface is help text for most data fields, visible directly within the record screen and displayed or hidden by clicking the “i” information button next to each field. The text is displayed below the corresponding field, and is a concise summary of the most important points and examples excerpted from the complete RIdIM Cataloguing Style Guide. 6 Links to the Style Guide and other useful resources are included in many of the texts. 5
6
Zdravko Blažeković entered the first record into the international RIdIM database (db. ridim.org) on 25 March 2003, the first cataloguer of the original prototype database for RIdIM developed by Stephen R. Westman and Alan Green. This prototype was first presented publicly at the 2003 conference of the International Association of Music Libraries conference: Alan Green and Stephen Westman, “The New RIdIM Database: How It Will Work. Some Practical Examples”. Presented at the 43rd meeting of the International Association of Music Libraries, Tallinn, Estonia, 10 July 2003. https://library.osu.edu/documents/music-and-dance/RIdIMStyleGuide.pdf (last accessed: 16 February 2018).
777
Alan Green and Sean Ferguso Crediting and collaborating with data providers There is functionality in the RIdIM Database for identifying contributors of cataloguing data. The Data Provider fields allow entry of the name, web address and/or logo of participating institutions, projects and other groups who partner with RIdIM to contribute individual records, or larger batches of imported data. Providers’ logos can be uploaded using the same process as uploading images of catalogued works. In the public view of a database record, the logo incorporates both the provider’s name and a clickable link to the provider’s website. This identifying link to a data provider helps to facilitate the recently implemented framework for collaboration between the RIdIM database and partner organizations that wish to share data describing music, dance, and dramatic arts in visual sources. In 2014, Association RIdIM launched the open access initiative entitled Linking and uniting knowledge of music, dance and theatre/Opera in visual culture. This program for exchange of knowledge and data with the database of Association RIdIM provides three collaborative options: (1) Solution A applies to all partners that have not yet developed a database solution and whose data are stored either in paper copy or not recorded at all. Thus Solution A requires the inputting of the raw data material to the RIdIM database. (2) Solution B covers all partners that have already developed their own database but decided to transfer their data source material to the RIdIM database or partners that wish to export data periodically to the RIdIM database. In these cases, new data migration software needs to be written for each partner project in order to export data to the Association RIdIM database. (3) Solution C applies to all project partners that have already developed their own database that allows the development of an interface solution i.e. the development of a portal that brings information together from different sources in a uniform way and provides access to the data sets of the partner project. As of 2018, discussions are underway with numerous potential partner projects and organizations who are excited about the possibilities for sharing of data and leveraging the valuable work of cataloguers past, present and future. The first such collaborations have been established with two data providers: The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Performing Arts Index (PAI); and the RIdIM Working Group in Germany. Data from these significant sources will enrich the RIdIM Database with entries for thousands of additional items. 778
The Database of Association RIdIM Growing database content An excellent example of the ongoing additions to the database are the works entered recently by the Research Project Hochschule Luzern-Musik in Switzerland. Their cataloguers have provided detailed descriptions and high-quality uploaded images of dozens of Swiss paintings, carvings, mosaics and other works from the second through seventeenth centuries. Two representative items from this rich collection are reproduced here:
Fig 1. Cristoforo da Seregno and Nicolao da Seregno, “Angel with fiddle”, detail from Coronation of Maria, ca. 1450, fresco. Kapelle St. Agatha (Disentis, Graubünden, Schweiz), RIdIM Database record ID 4311. Photograph © courtesy of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Music.
These items highlight the value of the image upload functionality in the RIdIM Database. Once legal terms for permissions and use are agreed to, the uploading process is very easy and results in images displayed within individual database item records, from which they can be enlarged with one click7. Uploaded images also display in browsing lists of search results, where they can also be clicked for an enlarged view. 7
For example, see the item at http://db.ridim.org/display.php?ridim_id=3793 (last accessed: 16 February 2018).
779
Alan Green and Sean Ferguso
Figure 2. Workshop of Niklaus Glaser, Angel with lute (Wurzel-Jesse-Fenster), ca. 1450, stained glass. Berner Münster. RIdIM Database record ID 3793. Photograph © courtesy of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Music.
780
The Database of Association RIdIM Participation and possibilities The RIdIM database searching interface (http://db.ridim.org) is available free of charge to anyone and allows retrieval of works using both free-text keywords and controlled vocabulary names and terms. Examples of search access points include names of artistic creators and musicians, musical instruments, titles (often in multiple languages), visual art media, date of creation and owning institutions, such as museums, archives, and libraries. Further enhancement of the search functionality is a high priority for RIdIM. Anyone interested in contributing data as a cataloguer is welcome to contact Association RIdIM for a cataloguing login, supporting documentation, and guidance from editorial staff. We seek new content on visual depictions of the performing arts from any time period, culture, geographic area, or artistic media. Looking forward, as RIdIM’s 50th anniversary approaches in 2021, there are many exciting possibilities and opportunities for individuals and partner projects to collaborate with the database. In 2014, at an international conference focused on current and emerging issues in bibliographic control, Zdravko Blažeković presented his creative ideas on new directions in music documentation and data from the RILM perspective.8 Among the many potential data connections he discusses with the goal of enhancing the web search experience for performing arts researchers around the world, he mentions the example of establishing a link between the RIdIM and RILM databases that could “bring together a reproduction of the artwork, information about its owner and physical characteristics, and a bibliography of writings about it”.9 He later summarizes the broad possibilities, echoing Barry Brook’s original vision for both RILM and RIdIM, and updating it for the twenty-first century: “If the data is rich, consistent, granular, multilingual, and produced according to international standards, the possibilities for linking and visualization of content – both as stand-alone and linked with other related databases – are endless”.10
8
Zdravko Blažeković, “RILM Abstracts of Music Literature in its global environment: Its past and vision for the future”, paper presented in Rome at the conference Faster, smarter and richer: Reshaping the library catalogue, organized by the Associazione Italiana Biblioteche and the Biblioteca Vaticana, 27–28 February 2014. https://www.academia.edu/5802640/ RILM _ Abstracts_of_ Music_Literature_in_its_global_environment_Its_past_and_ vision_for_the_future (last accessed: 16 February 2018). 9 Ibid., 4. 10 Ibid., 7.
781
Alan Green and Sean Ferguso
782
The “I” in RILM
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
The “I” in RILM Abstract. Zdravko Blažeković has been involved in RILM since his student days in Zagreb, culminating in his position as Executive Editor of RILM. Through these years Blažeković has worked on every aspect of the database, but if there has been one common thread running through his engagement with RILM, it has been his conviction that RILM’s international scope is the core of its mission. This conviction has helped to promote the continual expansion of the database’s geographic coverage and the accurate representation of the world’s music research across all languages and cultures. Blažeković has encouraged the active participation of existing national committees and the establishment of new ones; his signal accomplishment in this vein was RILM’s expansion into China, resulting in the coverage of tens of thousands of Chinese publications in RILM abstracts. Further, he has organized meetings with local scholars and students in places under-represented in RILM, including – in recent years – Mexico, Colombia, South Korea, and Taiwan. Perhaps most importantly, Blažeković has developed and implemented a model for roundtables that have taken place in regions where contact with and coverage by international documentation efforts has been lacking. These roundtables enable the mutual exchange of information and cooperation between regional scholarly communities and the four international music documentation projects – the so-called R Projects (RIdIM, RILM, RIPM, and RISM). To date, such roundtables have taken place in China, Chile, Cuba, and Kazakhstan (RILM only).
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) aims to represent and disseminate the music scholarship of all countries and languages, across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. The breadth of this mission drives the day-to-day activities of the RILM International Center as well as its longterm goals and pursuits. RILM’s f lagship publication, RILM abstracts of music literature,1 is a continually expanding international bibliography of writings on music covering research from the early nineteenth century to the present. 1
Recently RILM’s activities have broadened to include other publications. RILM music encyclopedias, an online, full-text compilation of 45 titles published from 1775 to the present, was launched in December 2015. RILM abstracts of music literature with full text will be launched later in 2016. And, in partnership with the publishers Bärenreiter and J. B. Metzler, RILM released MGG online in November 2016; MGG online comprises the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) with new and substantially updated content.
783
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie The scope of the bibliography increases over time both chronologically and, especially, geographically. While many organizations include the word “international” in their names, few actively strive to engage with all parts of the globe; RILM does, thanks largely to the efforts of Zdravko Blažeković, RILM’s Executive Editor. The impact of his efforts on RILM and on other repertoires and societies has been profound. Blažeković’s work with the bibliography dates back to his student days in Zagreb, where he was reared in a musicological environment that placed great value on RILM. He and his fellow students contributed records to the database (in fact, he was a member of the former national RILM committee of Yugoslavia), and the day he met RILM’s founder, Barry S. Brook, proved to be pivotal. Due at least in part to RILM and to Blažeković’s interest in the work of RILM’s founder, he decided to leave his native Croatia and come to New York to study with Brook at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center (where RILM was and still is housed). Almost immediately upon arrival in 1987, he joined the RILM staff. In the early years of Blažeković’s tenure at the RILM International Center, he worked with paper abstract forms mailed in by RILM’s national committees and by authors around the world, creating bibliographic records on paper file cards, physically cutting and pasting entries together, stenciling in diacritical marks for non-English characters (before RILM was able to use anything like Unicode), carting reams of extra-wide green-and-white-striped computer printouts from the CUNY mainframe site on 57th Street to the RILM office on 42nd Street, proofing them, and laboriously line-editing errors in order to produce printed volumes, among other tasks. Later on, when the digital age began to impact the world of academic publication, Blažeković worked closely with the National Information Services Corporation (NISC) to develop a CD-ROM of RILM abstracts. He traveled frequently to NISC’s headquarters in Baltimore to work with the staff there on complex data and formatting issues. As a result, RILM was one of the first humanities indexes to appear in digital format on CD-ROM. In 1991, Blažeković was officially promoted to Associate Editor. Here is the New York Times advertisement for this position. Since then, he has assumed a number of roles at RILM, culminating in 1996 in his promotion to Executive Editor. 784
The “I” in RILM
Through these years Blažeković has worked on every aspect of the database, but if there has been one common thread running through his engagement with RILM, it has been his conviction that RILM’s international scope is vitally important. This conviction has helped to promote the continual expansion of the database’s geographic coverage and the accurate representation of the world’s music research across all languages and cultures. Since RILM’s founding in 1966, its national committees have been the cornerstone of the bibliography’s international reach. RILM committee members submit citations and abstracts of works published in their countries that meet RILM’s scope guidelines, thereby ensuring that the music scholarship of their countries enters the international discourse on music. Blažeković has encouraged the active participation of existing committees and the establishment of new ones. Perhaps his signal accomplishment in this vein was RILM’s expansion into China. Prior to these efforts, RILM abstracts lacked coverage of Chinese publications, and few scholars in the West were familiar with the musicological research of Chinese scholars. Blažeković set about to change this, deciding that the way to begin to build contacts between RILM and China was to spend time in the country, getting to know something of its culture and its musicological contexts, practices, and personalities. And this he did, navigating his way around China, making connections within its musicological community, and eventually organizing and training a team there to submit citations and abstracts of Chinese publications to the bibliography. Now, almost ten years later, RILM’s team in China adds some 600 records of Chinese publications every month to the database, totaling over 58,000 bibliographic citations of Chinese publication in RILM abstracts. These records, which include citations and abstracts in English as well as in Chinese characters, have helped Western scholars discover the work of Chinese scholars and vice versa: The increasing familiarity with and use of RILM abstracts in China suggests the increasing discoverability of Western music scholarship there. And the impact of Blažeković’s efforts in China extends far beyond RILM (see below). 785
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie Another initiative aimed at furthering connections and participation in countries whose publications have been under-represented in the bibliography has involved the organization of meetings with local scholars and students at which the database is demonstrated and discussed. In recent years such meetings have been held in Mexico, Colombia, South Korea, and Taiwan. 2 But perhaps Blažeković’s most inf luential endeavor has been the development of a model for roundtables that enables the mutual exchange of information and cooperation between national scholarly communities and all four international music documentation projects – the so-called R Projects (RIdIM, RILM, RIPM, and RISM). These roundtables provide a forum for scholars and librarians in countries whose publications are not well represented in the Rs to meet with the projects’ directors. The music scholars and librarians talk about their country’s academic and research activities, publication endeavors and trends, and their libraries and collections; the R Projects learn how their bibliographies may better serve and represent these communities and publications. Begun just in the last few years, the Blažeković roundtables have been highly effective in increasing mutual understanding and exploring possibilities for greater collaboration. Examples to date include the following: China: New Musicology: Theories, Methods and Resources. Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, 6-8 July 2013. Blažeković’s years-long effort to establish contacts with music scholars and librarians in China laid the groundwork that enabled him to organize this first roundtable. The occasion was a conference entitled New Musicology: Theories, Methods and Resources, held at the Central Conservatory in Beijing in 2013. Blažeković invited the directors of all four R Projects as well as Elizabeth Davis of the Index to Printed Music (IPM) and the presidents of the International Musicological Society (IMS) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML) to participate in the conference, and each one jumped at what was clearly a rare opportunity. And the results were rewarding indeed. In one session, each R Project and IPM director introduced and demonstrated the database(s), and solicited the participation of Chinese scholars. More importantly, Blažeković’s organized a roundtable of historic importance at which each of the following participated:
2
786
Blažeković represented RILM in Mexico and Colombia, and the author did so in South Korea and Taiwan.
The “I” in RILM •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• ••
RIdIM (Antonio Baldassarre) RILM (Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, Zdravko Blažeković) RIPM (Benjamin Knysak) RISM (Klaus Keil) Index to Printed Music (Elizabeth Davis) IMS (Dinko Fabris) IAML (Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie) 贾国平,中央音乐学院,北京 ( Jia Guoping, Central Conservatory, Beijing) 吴旭,中央音乐学院,北京 (Wu Xu, Central Conservatory, Beijing) 钱仁平,上海音乐学院 (Qian Renping, Shanghai Conservatory) 王建欣,天津音乐学院 (Wang Jianxin, Tianjing Conservatory) 孙晓辉,武汉音乐学院 (Sun Xiaohui, Wuhan Conservatory) 刘荣弟,西安音乐学院 (Liu Rongdi, Xi’an Conservatory) 王学仲,沈阳音乐学院 (Wang Xuezhong, Shenyang Conservatory).
An energetic and thoroughly enlightening discussion ensued. Each Western participant shared information about their projects and societies, welcoming and encouraging the participation of Chinese scholars and librarians. Each Chinese participant described his institution, the academic degrees it bestows, its scholarly focuses, journals, libraries and collections, and more. Everyone learned about the practices and contexts of all the others, cross-continental doors were opened, and mutual understanding increased substantially. The roundtable was such a success that it set a precedent Blažeković would follow in other parts of the world, to the benefit of all of these projects, societies, and national scholarly communities.
Fig. 1. Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, 7 July 2013. Seated from left to right are Antonio Baldassarre (RIdIM), Zdravko Blažeković (RILM), Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (RILM), Klaus Keil (RISM), Benjamin Knysak (RIPM).
787
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie Cuba: Latinoamérica y el canon. Asociación Regional de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología para América Latina y el Caribe (ARLAC/IMS). Casa de las Américas, Havana, 17–21 March 2014. This conference was the first meeting of the Asociación Regional de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología para América Latina y el Caribe (ARLAC), a regional association of the IMS. Many hundreds of music scholars from the region gathered for five days, and Blažeković saw his next opportunity for a roundtable similar to the one held the year before in Beijing. The following email is quoted almost in full, because it demonstrates so clearly Blažeković’s methods and goals for these roundtables: I thought it would be appropriate and timely to re-examine with all of you the Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American content included in the RISM, RILM, RIdIM and RIPM databases. This is also an excellent opportunity for all of us who lead these projects of bibliographic control to better familiarize ourselves with the music resources available in Cuba, our host country. Therefore I proposed to María Elena Vinueza, Director of Music at Casa de las Américas in charge of the entire event, as well as to Egberto Bermúdez (Chair, Program Committee) and Malena Kuss (liaison with IMS and Coordinator, ARLAC/IMS), to include a conversation about the R-projects and how they can better serve music scholarship in the region by improving the coverage of bibliographic control. This proposal was enthusiastically received by the organizers of the event, who also provided me with very helpful input. I am deeply grateful to María Elena Vinueza and Casa de las Américas for hosting an event that will make possible the establishment of lasting contacts with experts in the region. There will be three sessions in the conference dedicated to the Rs and to resources in Cuba as well as other countries in Latin America. The first of these sessions (C/5, chaired by Arien González) will consist of demonstrations of the R databases for participants who might not be familiar with their content and most recent search practices, as well as presentations on music holdings at the Biblioteca Nacional “José Martí” (by Zoila Lapique Becali) and Casa de las Américas (by Layda Ferrando). The second session (C/6a, chaired by me) will focus on Cuban and Latin American contents in the 4 Rs as well as presentations on research resources at CIDMUC (by Laura Vilar Álvarez) and on holdings related to the educational mission of the Colegio Universitario de San Gerónimo (by Miriam Escudero). 788
The “I” in RILM On the basis of those two previous sessions (C/5 and C/6a), I would like to devote the third session (C/6b) to an exchange of ideas about the more pragmatic ways in which the Rs can improve coverage of Cuba and the region as a whole. For this roundtable discussion, I would like to invite conference participants who have been involved in some way with the R projects. Colleagues who are on the international boards/committees of the Répertoires or are associated with them: •• •• •• ••
Leonardo Waisman, associated member with RISM Verein Melanie Plesch, RILM Commission Mixte Pablo Sotuyu Blanco, RIdIM board member Cristina Urchueguía, author of a volume in RISM B series on polyphonic Mass in Spain, Portugal and Latin America
Colleagues who are involved with the Rs at the national level: •• Juan Pablo González, past RILM national committee member, Chile •• Maria Alice Volpe, RIPM coordinator, Brazil •• Beatriz Magalhães Castro, coordinator of [several] R projects, Brazil From the host country, I would like to invite the participation of •• Zoila Lapique Becali, Biblioteca Nacional “José Martí” •• Layda Ferrando, Casa de las Américas •• Miriam Escudero, Colegio Universitario de San Gerónimo •• Laura Vilar Álvarez, CIDMU •• Jesús Gómez Cairo, Museo Nacional de la Música •• Arien González, Casa de las Américas And, of course, we will have there the directors of the four R projects: •• RISM: Klaus Keil (Frankfurt am Main) • • RILM: Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (New York) •• RIPM: H. Robert Cohen (Baltimore, Maryland) •• RIdIM: Antonio Baldassarre (Zurich/Luzern) I am also inviting the participation of Benjamin Knysak (Associate Director, RIPM, Baltimore, Maryland) and Debra Pring (Executive Director, RIdIM). For session C/6b, scheduled on Thursday from 2–4 p.m., I would like to divide the conversation in two parts. The first hour will be 789
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie dedicated to assess[ing] materials from Cuba [that] are missing from the R projects and how [we] can […] accomplish future collaboration with Cuban institutions and scholars in order to integrate their materials into the R databases. In the second part, we should broaden our discussion to include other countries in Latin America and assess the situation. Of course, we will not have representatives from all countries, but we can at least initiate a discussion and see where it leads us. I wish we could use this panel to establish future collaborations and eventually improve our coverage of materials from the region as a whole in these international databases. I would like to invite everybody included in the panel to bring to Havana ideas and proposals about •• what significant material we might be missing from the R databases; • • how to cover it most efficiently and close the current gaps; • • how to establish collaboration from countries where cataloguing and indexing of resources is not yet disseminated or can reach users beyond local means of communication; • • identify institutions that can help to improve representation of the region as a whole; and • • identify individuals willing to collaborate with the projects. If you already have any proposals, suggestions, and ideas on how we could make this opportunity for exchange more effective and beneficial, please let me know before we meet in Havana. 3 As was the case in China, this event proved to be extremely informative on all sides and helped to establish lasting connections between the R Projects and scholars and librarians in Cuba and throughout Latin America. Kazakhstan: 43rd ICTM World Conference. Қазақ ұлттық өнер университеті / Kazakh National University of Arts, Astana, 16–22 July 2015. The roundtable at this conference involved only RILM, as the other R Projects were unable to participate. Entitled “Bibliographic control of ethnomusicology in Kazakhstan”, it was organized jointly by Blažeković and Valerija Nedlina, and like its predecessors, it aimed to explore the potential for exchange between the Kazakh scholarly community and RILM as a global center for the bibliographic control of music scholarship. Participants included the following: 3
790
Zdravko Blažeković, email to the potential participants (listed above), 12 February 2014.
The “I” in RILM • • Valerija Nedlina (Kurmangazy Kazakh National Conservatory, Almaty, who teaches there, runs the musinews.kz online newspaper, publishes the Conservatory’s bulletin, and is involved in the publishing of monographs, festschriften, and collections of articles in Kazakhstan) • • Nargiz Hinkov-Aitbajeva (Academy of Sciences, Almaty) • • Nurgijan Ketegenova • • Galija Begembetova (Kurmangazy Kazakh National Conservatory, Almaty). At the start of the panel, Blažeković provided a general overview of RILM’s coverage of Kazakh publications and topics related to Kazakh and Central Asian music in general. In the second part, participants from Kazakhstan presented position statements about issues facing music scholars and publishers in Kazakhstan. This was followed by a discussion exploring the possibilities for future collaboration between the Kazakh scholarly and publishing communities and international musicological resources such as RILM. Chile: 2nd Congress of the Asociación Regional de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología para América Latina y el Caribe (ARLAC/IMS). Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, 12-16 January 2016. Following a joint session in which RILM, RIPM and RISM each presented an overview of its database and activities, each of these Rs had its own roundtable. Blažeković organized the RILM session around Chilean music research and collections, inviting the following participants: •• Luis Merino (Universidad de Chile and editor of Revista musical chilena) •• Alejandro Vera (Universidad Catolica and editor of Resonancias) •• Cecilia Astudillo (Biblioteca Nacional, Santiago) •• Claudio Mercado Munoz (Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino) •• José Miguel Ramos (Universidad de Talca and editor of Neuma) All of the above described their institutions, collections, and activities, including the musicological and publishing endeavors of each, and a discussion ensued regarding the possibilities for greater representation and participation in RILM. * * * In addition to Blažeković’s determined focus on encouraging more and more countries to participate in the RILM project, and on understanding each 791
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie country’s musicological contexts, publications, trends, and collections, his own direct contributions to the content of RILM abstracts over the years is worthy of note. Blažeković adds citations and abstracts to the database on a daily basis. On the occasion of his 25th anniversary of working at RILM, and in recognition of this aspect of his contribution to the database, the staff of the RILM International Center produced a kind of internal Festschrift in his honor,4 a compendium of the then 3504 abstracts that were written by Blažeković. Since then that number has risen to well over 4000 abstracts. In addition to these, he has indexed almost 40,000 RILM records all together. In short, RILM would not be the comprehensive, international bibliographic database it is today without Blažeković’s deep engagement over the past 30 years. All four R Projects, as well as the worldwide community of music scholars enjoy far richer bibliographic resources thanks to his efforts.
4
792
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, ed. and pref. The Z files, 1987–2010: Liber amicorum Valentino filio Blasii (New York: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, 2010).
World Music Documentation System
Federica Riva Conservatorio di musica “Arrigo Boito”, Parma
World Music Documentation System: A Phantasy o una profezia? Leggendo Barry S. Brook quaranta anni dopo Abstract. World Music Documentation System: A Phantasy or a Prophecy? Reading Barry S. Brook Forty Years Later. How does music documentation, now based on the rapid development of e-technologies, graft onto traditional studies at the international level? This dialogue compares the views of Barry S. Brook (USA) and Claudio Sartori (Italy) in the field of music bibliography and cataloguing in the 1970s and 1980s through their own words. Both bibliographers had an extraordinarily clear view of their future times, a time that has now arrived. Both underlined the value of human networking as a crucial factor to meet the discipline’s aim of the worldwide dissemination of accurate information. Their powerful ideas can continue to support our current efforts to meet the challenges of our discipline including: dissemination of scholarly information both to scholarly communities having broad access to technology and those scholarly communities with more limited access due to financial or other factors, improving accessibility worldwide to information contained in e-documents; improving the accuracy of the information itself; shifting research methods and accepted standards of practice within our discipline from paper to the electronic environment.
MNBMNBNBVNBVNBV òòkòkòkòkòkòkòkòkòkòkòkpoipoipoipoiuytuytuytuytuytuytrewrewrewrewrewrewknknknkknkknhhekhhhhhhhhhhhykhkhkhkkhkhkh khkhkhkhkhkhhehehhehehehhehevdsdvsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdshheh ccidenti non soo è scomprso i ie m desso si è nche rott tstier de computer! Così rischio di non rispettre scdenz di cnsen de’rticoo; è proprio un medizione. M che test ! D quche prte in cs ho tstier estern wireless; se riesco coer riprendo scrivere d titoo.
793
Federica Riva World Music Documentation System: A Phantasy o una profezia? Leggendo Barry S. Brook quarant’anni dopo. Un dialogo in due scene trascritto da Federica Riva Personaggi la Studiosa, musicologa S il Bibliotecario B la Cassiera del negozio C Avventori e cameriere del caffè La Scena è ambientata nella città di Mainz, al caffè del Gutenberg Museum, una domenica autunnale dell’anno 2016. Sala illuminata dalle vetrate che nel fondo mettono al cortile, oltre il quale, sulla destra, si apre il negozio del museo; sulla sinistra si apre l’arco che collega il museo alla piazza; avventori seduti ai tavolini. A un tavolino in prima fila è seduta la Studiosa: sta leggendo alcune fotocopie sciolte; due cameriere che vanno e vengono. E’ una domenica dal clima mite. Il campanile del duomo sta suonando le cinque e mezzo; il cielo è ancora chiaro. Le fotocopie contengono un articolo di Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), World documentation system: A phantasy, in Challenges in music education. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the International Society for Music Education held in Perth, Western Australia, 5 to 12 August 1974, published by the Department of Music, the University of Western Australia with assistance from the Music Board of the Australia Council, 1976, pp. 302–312. Tutte le citazioni sono tratte delle pagine 302–305. Scena I B (sulla porta mentre esce dal negozio del Museo, con più di un sacchetto ingombrante in mano, rivolto all’interno): Grazie, e scusatemi se sono rimasto oltre l’orario di apertura; non mi ero proprio accorto di che ore fossero. C (voce dall’interno): Si immagini! È colpa nostra che ci siamo dimenticati di chiudere la porta del negozio verso il Museo. Ha poi trovato quello che le interessava? B: Sì, grazie, l’ho trovato. Come al solito rientrerò a casa pieno di pacchi e pacchettini, sempre che riesca a farli stare tutti in valigia. 794
World Music Documentation System C: Comunque ha fatto bene a venire oggi perché domani il Museo sarà chiuso. B: Eh sì, l’avevo immaginato, vi auguro buona serata e un buon riposo per lunedì. C: Buon domenica a lei e buon soggiorno a Mainz! B (uscendo in giardino va a sedersi sulla statua a forma di libro aperto che si trova subito a sinistra della porta, mentre con una mano compone un numero al telefono cellulare): Sono esattamente le cinque e mezzo, ma devo proprio telefonare. Ho promesso. Sarò breve, altrimenti qui mi aspettano, e non andrebbe bene lo stesso… Pronto, ciao, come stai? (La telefonata dura comunque al punto che la Studiosa, non vedendo arrivare il Bibliotecario, si alza dalla sedia per farsi vedere, lasciando sul tavolino un gruppo di fotocopie sciolte su cui si legge: Challenges in Music Education; scorgendola, il Bibliotecario le fa cenno che la telefonata sta per finire, e intanto le si avvicina): B: Sì, sì, ho capito, bene mi fa piacere. Ci sentiamo da casa. Ciao ciao ciao ciao [detto a velocità crescente come usa, abbassando contemporaneamente il tono della voce]. Scena II S: Eccoti, non ero sicura che mi avessi visto; mi sono seduta all’interno per ordinare da bere; vuoi qualcosa anche tu? Come ti è sembrato il Museo? B: Emozionante. Peccato che abbia avuto appena il tempo di vedere le Bibbie e le macchine per la stampa. Ho intravisto anche qualche testo di musica, ma davvero poca cosa, giustamente. E tu cosa hai fatto nel frattempo? (si siedono al tavolino) S: Ho finito di leggere l’articolo di Barry S. Brook del 1976, di cui mi hai portato le fotocopie. Interessante. Molto. Ho imparato diverse cose che non sapevo, inclusi alcuni dettagli sulla nascita dei progetti di ricerca bibliografico-musicali internazionali, i cosiddetti Four R-projects, cioè RISM, RILM, RIPM, RIdIM. B: Sono molto contento che ti sia piaciuto; sono affezionato a questo scritto. Sono oramai due anni che l’ho letto per la prima volta, da quando il nostro comune amico me lo ha fatto conoscere, consegnandomi proprio queste copie da cui l’hai letto tu adesso. Da allora l’ho riletto più di una volta per riassaporare il suo stile visionario e rif lettere sulle intuizioni di cui è ricco. Mi spiace, però, avertelo dato in questa forma; i fogli sono oramai assai stropicciati, pieni di sottolineature e note manoscritte. Quando usciamo da qui, te ne faccio una copia migliore. S: Assolutamente non ti preoccupare! Non ce n’è alcun bisogno. Ho già fatto le foto con il mio cellulare. 795
Federica Riva B (resta un po’ di stucco ma cerca di non farlo notare): Ah, benissimo, cosa fatta capo ha ... ma davvero riesci a leggere un articolo su uno schermo piccolo come quello del telefono cellulare? S: Infatti, non lo leggo al cellulare. Quando vado a casa riverso le foto nel computer e lo leggo a video. B: Già certo, basta essere pratici di come si scaricano i file dal cellulare al computer, al tablet o come li si aggiorna automaticamente. Devo proprio lasciare le mie vecchie abitudini e impratichirmi anch’io quanto prima. Tutta questa tecnologia… ma a te non fa impressione? Intendo dire la velocità del cambiamento e l’impegno che ci richiede per discernere i nuovi modi con cui fare oggi le stesse cose che facevamo prima, da ciò che le tecnologie precedenti non ci consentivano di fare. Ci è chiesto di adattarci a pensare e ad agire in modi sempre diversi, di tenere la mente sempre sve glia e vigile, e sembra anche che questo assorba tutta la nostra attenzione. Siamo talmente presi dal nostro presente che non si vede più chi desideri fantasticare sul futuro. Eppure Barry S. Brook, esattamente quarant’anni fa, quando ne aveva cinquantotto, cioè circa la nostra età, questo desiderio lo aveva. Eccome! S: Puoi ben dirlo. Da questo articolo ho imparato non solo cosa fosse la documentazione musicale negli anni Settanta del Novecento - quali intuizioni e quali fatti abbiano concorso a sviluppare la ricerca bibliografica musicale internazionale - ma anche quale fosse a quel tempo la loro visione del futuro, che poi saremmo noi! Barry S. Brook ha descritto gli effetti che la tecnologia avrebbe prodotto sulla documentazione quando ancora non esistevano nemmeno le strutture, né le macchine che li avrebbero prodotti. B: E quindi non potevano esistere nemmeno le parole per indicarle. Parole di cui oggi noi facciamo uso tutti i giorni come computer, tastiera, video e poi Internet, digitale, cellulare, cloud, tablet. Anche se l’interesse principale di Brook non era la tecnologia in sé, ma il modo con cui le persone utilizzavano la tecnologia per le loro attività di ricerca: la collaborazione, il networking. S: Sì, certo, questo è ben chiaro sin dall’inizio dell’articolo [gira e rigira le fotocopie fino a quando non riesce a trovare la pagina giusta, la prima]: I would like to hope, optimist that I am, that one day someone will propose a similar, retrospective change in the subtitle of the present paper [‘A Prophecy’ rather than a ‘A Phantasy’] because something resembling the World Music Documentation System [WMDS] will have come into being […] For our present phantasy, the machines and the 796
World Music Documentation System programmes to drive them already exist. What is required to realize WMDS is not the creation of new hardware but the marshalling of human resources, national and international, in an unprecedented scale, in addition to the effective utilization of existing machines. B: Diciotto anni dopo, precisamente nel 1984, un ultrasettantenne Claudio Sartori che, se ricordo bene, era di soli cinque anni maggiore di Barry S. Brook, avrebbe espresso un concetto simile spostando però l’accento del discorso. Brook aveva, infatti, ben presente quanto fosse indispensabile cos truire una rete mondiale di collaboratori per documentare la ricerca a livello globale; solo questa avrebbe consentito di abbreviare i tempi della raccolta delle informazioni per pubblicare una bibliografia della letteratura musicologica, che fosse veramente corrente e senza ritardi, perché avrebbe fatto anche un uso efficace delle tecnologie immediatamente disponibili. Claudio Sartori pensava piuttosto alla necessità di fondare la ricerca musicologica su di un catalogo completo della musica prodotta e conservata in un ambito determinato, ben delimitando la zona geografica della sua ricerca. Per corrispondere a principi di scientificità, il catalogo avrebbe dovuto essere caratterizzato da chiarezza, indiscutibilità, facilità di lettura; al risultato si sarebbe giunti solo se fossero entrate a far parte del gioco alcune doti umane, e in particolare la perseveranza e la buona volontà. Guarda ho qui anche la citazione esatta che ho rintracciato di recente per un articolo che devo finire di scrivere a breve: Claudio Sartori, Verso una bibliografia musicale più giovane e snella, “Bollettino di Informazioni AIB”, n .s. XXIV, n.2, 1984, pp. 155–156. “Oggi, e soprattutto domani, bisogna accettare e inserirsi nella collaborazione generale, senza la quale non è possibile sperare in un lavoro esauriente e in una realizzazione sicura. In Italia, per giungere a una catalogazione completa dei fondi musicali, compresi quelli del secolo passato ingiustamente trascurati dal RISM, bisogna organizzare il lavoro comune delle singole Regioni, che investa tutte le biblioteche e tutti gli archivi pubblici e privati. E i risultati delle ricerche locali dovranno essere riversati in una centrale che li organizzi in un Catalogo nazionale dei fondi musicali. In questa attività comune di singoli e di enti bisognerà adattarsi all’interpretazione delle norme, sempre inevitabile, che sia più rispondente al fine ultimo di riuscire a un lavoro chiaro, indiscutibile, e facilmente leggibile. … Si tratta di spronare e organizzare il lavoro e soprattutto di non avere fretta, ma di ottenere i risultati sperati con perseveranza e buona volontà, i due poli che debbono guidare il lavoro di tutti per un utile risultato comune.” S: Già allora gli Stati Uniti e l’Italia viaggiavano a velocità completamente diverse rispetto all’evoluzione tecnologica. Mi par di capire che Claudio Sartori non la citi nemmeno. Anche lui però intende la collaborazione come globale, rispetto all’ambito di ricerca che si è dato. 797
Federica Riva B: Barry S. Brook da decenni andava invece osservando l’evolversi dei me todi di ricerca in campo scientifico e cercava di convincere l’ambiente musicologico che sarebbe stato possibile condurre uno sforzo di cooperazione imponente, mai tentato prima, anche in campo umanistico. L’esempio che preferisco, e che mi pare ancora oggi convincente, è quello che fa riferimento all’International Biological Program (IBP). Il progetto, finalizzato allo studio dell’adattamento dell’uomo all’ambiente, tra il 1965 e il 1975 aveva mirato a inventariare esaustivamente ogni essere vivente sulla terra e nel mare, occupandosi non solo del loro vivere presente, ma anche dei loro potenziali sviluppi o decrescite. Un tale impegno fu sostenuto da una molteplicità di soggetti patrocinatori - come l’International Council of Biological Unions, l’UNESCO, la World Health Organization – e fu finanziato da un gran numero di nazioni. S: Però la conclusione che ne trae Barry S. Brook oggi forse non mi convince del tutto: Problems in music and music education are not so crucial to human life as those in ecology, biology, or medicine – even we are prepared to admit that, but this simply means that WMDS funding will be more difficult and international co-operation – much of it voluntary – more vital. B: Nemmeno io ne sono del tutto convinto, soprattutto alla luce di come poi effettivamente è cresciuta e si è organizzata la ricerca bibliografica musicale internazionale e come ha affrontato il passaggio tecnologico dal supporto cartaceo al supporto digitale. Se osserviamo la questione da vicino, possiamo distinguere una linea che demarca il limite che pone da una parte i princìpi e dall’altra le modalità organizzative. Un principio ribadito a livello nazionale e internazionale - sia da Barry S. Brook sia da Claudio Sartori - rispecchia un modo di pensare che possiamo riassumere pressappoco così: La co-operazione di tutti gli attori coinvolti è essenziale per compiere esaurientemente l’enorme lavoro necessario a raggiungere con certezza lo scopo della ricerca bibliografica musicale. Ritenere che la co-operazione in ambito umanistico sia “much of it voluntary”, mi pare invece un’affermazione che rispecchia le modalità organizzative di quegli anni. Siamo certi che questa forma organizzativa, che è tuttora la principale, sia valida ancora oggi e lo sia per tutti i paesi del mondo? O forse, grazie all’esperienza maturata sin qui, possiamo chiederci se - laddove sia necessario e al fine di ottenere un migliore risultato scientifico - il modello non vada oggi precisato e adattato alle condizioni economiche e sociali attuali di ciascun paese? In altre parole, quale forma organizzativa sostiene oggi nel modo migliore 798
World Music Documentation System cioè quello in cui il vantaggio è maggiormente reciproco - lo sviluppo della co-operazione internazionale in campo bibliografico musicale e garantisce “un lavoro esauriente e una realizzazione sicura”? S: Fossi in te, porrei questa domanda di ricerca agli studenti nei Licei e nelle Università. Avresti in risposta delle indicazioni che - valutate e soppesate alla luce dall’esperienza di chi ha inventato, come H. Robert Cohen, o di chi nella generazione successiva ha gestito uno dei Four R-projects – potrebbero darci delle soluzioni ‘senza ritardi’ rispetto al nostro tempo. Dico questo pensando alla raccolta dei dati sul campo, alla loro elaborazione editoriale, alla successiva distribuzione come pubblicazione elettronica online che oggi raggiunge sia un pubblico assi vasto, sia gli stessi studiosi che hanno raccolto le informazioni. Ciascun soggetto ci appare – oggi più che mai – fondamentale nel proprio ruolo e la cooperazione un lavoro basato sulla pariteticità dei ruoli. Ma possiamo osare anche di più e pensare al ruolo svolto dai paesi dove la luce elettrica e la struttura tecnologica non sono assicurate ovunque e in ogni momento della giornata, diversamente da quanto accade invece in ampie zone dell’Europa, dell’America settentrionale, dell’Australia e dell’Estremo Oriente. Se osservi bene, in molte nazioni della terra le singole persone, condizionate dalle possibilità economiche individuali e dalla propria posizione nella società – cittadino o campagnolo, universitario o analfabeta, artista o impiegato, migrante o respingente… – spendono una qualche parte del proprio tempo a contatto con la tecnologia telematica, andandoci chi più, chi meno d’accordo, a seconda del proprio talento naturale, del grado d’istruzione, delle competenze specifiche acquisite, dei casi e dei momenti. L’aggiornamento tecnologico tanto più costa ai singoli in termini di tempo e denaro, quanto più scarse sono le infrastrutture tecnologiche del paese in cui vivono. Chissà quanta energia si sta sprecando di persone che potrebbero contribuire in maniera assai maggiore alla ricerca di quanto non possano fare oggi. Quarant’anni dopo la fantasia (o la profezia?) di Barry S. Brook sappiamo bene che il mondo non ha proceduto unitariamente, come forse l’immaginazione degli anni Sessanta-Settanta tendeva a sottendere, ma che si è invece suddiviso tra paesi che accelerano di anno in anno la propria corsa tecnologica e paesi che di anno in anno la ritardano. Esponenzialmente. Te ne risparmio la lista perché tanto è sotto gli occhi di tutti. Mi par di capire che né Claudio Sartori né Barry S. Brook hanno scritto molto sugli aspetti economici e sociali della ricerca bibliografica musicale. Ma su questo punto potremo tornare in seguito. Ripartiamo invece adesso dall’inizio, cioè dalla definizione del termine ‘documentazione’ usata da Barry S. Brook: 799
Federica Riva Documentation as a general term has been defined as “the group of techniques necessary for the ordered presentation, organization and communication of recorded specialized knowledge, in order to give maximum accessibility and utility to the information contained”. B: Tra le tante definizioni esistenti, Barry S. Brook ha scelto di offrire nel suo articolo del 1976 una definizione che aveva utilizzato in alcune conferenze dieci anni prima. L’articolo che stiamo leggendo è in stile molto colloquiale, ha pochissime note, e quindi non sempre Brook cita le sue fonti; specie per quelle citazioni che avrà ritenuto ovvie per il pubblico cui si stava rivolgendo. Ma che per la nostra cultura europea ovvie non sono. Ho così ricostruito che la definizione è del bibliotecario statunitense Jesse H. Shera (1903–1982), di cui faresti bene a interessarti, magari partendo dalla lettura della voce che gli ha dedicato Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Jesse_Shera), in cui trovi anche il motto: “Embrace the technology but do not become its servant.” S: Addirittura […] e per quali strade lo hai scoperto? Chissà quanto tempo e quanta fatica ti sarà costato, o sei così colto, buon per te, da aver ricono sciuto la citazione a memoria? B: Magari! È andata invece esattamente al contrario: è bastato inserire nel box di ricerca di Google l’intera citazione per ottenere, in risposta dal sistema, diversi link; il migliore di quelli mi ha portato direttamente alla pagina 257 di un volume digitalizzato in Google Books, dove la citazione è preceduta nel testo da “Jesse H. Shera says that documentation is:” ed è seguita dalla nota 111. Il testo digitalizzato riproduce una pubblicazione indiana di R. K. Bhatt, Growth and development of libraries in India, Mittal publication, Nuova Dehli, 1995 – che, ovviamente, non può essere stata la fonte di Barry S. Brook, il quale avrà ripreso la definizione da una pubblicazione dello stesso Jesse H. Shera, ma non saprei dirti quale, né a quando essa risalga perché il testo della nota 111 (“ibid. p.9”) rinvia alla nota 100 (“Jesse H. Shera, op. cit. p. 7”); la nota 100 a sua volta rinvia ad altra nota precedente pubblicata a p. 291; ma arrivati qui Google Books ci avverte che “La pagina 291 non fa parte dell’anteprima del libro” e quindi la mia ricerca è rimasta a metà. Tutto questo ha il sapore del controsenso, ma immagino che con gli anni la situazione cambierà. Il link in chiaro della ricerca che ho fatto in Google è lungo sette righe, ma la citazione del volume digitalizzato in sé è brevissima, perché l’indirizzo web fa uso del codice ISBN del volume cartaceo: https://books.google.it/books?isbn=8170995825. S: Così il link si abbrevia di molto e puoi citarlo agevolmente. Divertente: non solo mi hai dimostrato come la citazione bibliografica può passare dal 800
World Music Documentation System cartaceo al digitale – cosa guadagni e cosa perda in questo passaggio – ma anche quanto cammino ci resti ancora da fare affinché la documentazione in ambito digitale giunga allo scopo della definizione di Jesse H. Shera, e cioè dare la massima accessibilità e utilità all’informazione inerente la conoscenza specializzata in essa contenuta. Quanto al titolo del contributo e alla sua data di pubblicazione ti consiglierei di non voler fare tutto subito ma di avere la creanza di lasciare anche agli altri qualcosa da cercare! Così almeno usavano e usano dire dalle parti di casa mia… B: “Caminantes / no hay caminos / hay que caminar”. E tu non dimenticare però che – al di là dei limiti oggettivi delle singole tecnologie e dell’uso che si è concordato di farne all’interno della comunità scientifica – buona parte della ricerca dipende dalla tua personale capacità di rendere efficace qualsiasi sistema ponendo, in maniera adeguata, domande precise per ottenere risposte precise. S: Mi chiedo con quali strumenti, da quale punto di vista e con quali intuizioni potremo risolvere noi oggi quel tipo di problemi che Barry S. Brook affrontò e risolse nel 1966: I propose that we investigate the possibility of establishing an abstract journal of significant musicological literature published throughout the world, a sort of RISM [Répertoire International des Sources Musicales]. [This became RILM, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale]. The journal could be worked on co-operatively in many countries and by various universities that do graduate work in musicology. Abstracts would be stored in a computer, indexed and published, and retrieved in various ways on demand. B: Oppure i problemi che H. Robert Cohen affrontò per fondare il RIPM nel 1981. Durante una cena tenutasi qualche anno, forse nel 2012 in occasione del convegno dell’International Musicological Society organizzato a Roma dall’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, H. Robert Cohen mi diceva che, prima di fondare il RIPM, aveva condotto un’indagine su quali fossero le cause di fallimento dei progetti musicologici precedenti, scoprendo che un errore comune era quello di darsi un obiettivo troppo alto e troppo vasto per riuscire a metterlo in pratica. Ne aveva dedotto che sarebbe stata buona cosa agire al contrario, e cioè dandosi un piccolo obiet tivo che, ripetuto tante volte, sarebbe diventato grande passo dopo passo. Mi diceva anche che, secondo Barry S. Brook, imbarcarsi in un’impresa simile sarebbe stata una follia, ma in seguito Barry S. Brook gli fu sempre di sostegno e d’incitamento nella sua impresa.
801
Federica Riva
Per sapere come muoverci, dobbiamo innanzitutto individuare quali sono le tecnologie di cui disponiamo adesso; prima ancora fermiamoci però a considerare quale fosse la tecnologia disponibile nel 1976, quali furono le intuizioni di Barry S. Brook, come furono espresse, e cerchiamo di misurare, sulla base di queste nostre osservazioni, la distanza esistente tra quelle e quanto si è andato avverando in seguito. Così capiremo, anche, se quella di Barry S Brook fu una fantasia o una profezia!: Current experimentation with optical scanners, super-microphotography, photo-composed print-out; and consoles with television-type screens communicating with central computer memories provide tantalizing – and realistic – promise of future developments. In this brave new computerized world, the scholar will be able to sit in front of a screen in his office or in his private study pushing buttons with one hand and holding a gin and tonic with the other. His special typewriter enables him to hold ‘conversations’ with a computer many miles away. Note-taking is hardly necessary since any page passing before him on the screen can immediately be reproduced in paper form or be recalled at will at any time We may even dare dream of that famous little black box in which all the contents of the Library of Congress or of the Bibliothèque Nationale, or both, are stored in speedily recallable form. S: Quanto somiglia questa descrizione del 1966 ai nostri studi di oggi […] gin tonic incluso (anche io lo preferisco)! Gli scanner hanno acquisito un ruolo centrale nel processo di digitalizzazione, per cui l’industria ne sta producendo molti modelli diversi: dallo scanner tascabile per uso individuale ai grandi scanner planetari pensati per le istituzioni e gli studi professionali. Barry S. Brook sarebbe stato certamente entusiasta nello sperimentarne l’efficienza e le possibilità. Le microforme si sono evolute in granai di dati digitali e sono in continua evoluzione: la miniaturizzazione è il loro campo. La fotocomposizione è rimasta legata alla stampa. Grandi sono i cambiamenti che hanno investito le “consoles with television-type screens communicating with central computer memories”: il computer da tavolo collegato via modem a memorie centrali si è trasformato in uno strumento che segue gli umani che viaggiano, in un computer portatile o notebook, e poi in un tablet e in un telefono cellulare. Nelle “conversations” tra computer a distanza riconosco adesso il limite cui arrivò la tecnologia prima della nascita e diffusione di Internet. B: Infatti! Le nostre “special typewriters” che ci consentono di tenere “conversations” a molte miglia di distanza si chiamano ancora oggi computer 802
World Music Documentation System e notebook ma anche tablet, telefoni cellulari nonché tutti quei nomi che identificano la folta schiera di formati che hanno assunto gli apparecchi digitali atti alla telecomunicazione, ciascuno dei quali consente di fare un qualcosa in più e meglio rispetto a un altro formato. S: Già, chissà fra quanti anni si diffonderà l’uso di lettori elettronici (e-book reader) sui leggii dei musicisti. Per adesso ne ho visti pochi in giro, soprattutto sui pianoforti. Talvolta intuisci che siano usati negli spettacoli televisivi, ma il regista non te li fa mai vedere, anche se in fondo la cosa potrebbe anche incuriosire il pubblico. Credo siano assai poche le bande, le orchestre – sinfoniche o dei teatri lirici – i gruppi da camera che hanno affrontato con consapevolezza il passaggio storico alla cultura digitale e che collaborino con le industrie per elaborare uno strumento adatto. B: Sì credo anche io. Però qualcosa si sta muovendo, ed anche velocemente da quanto sentito in alcune relazione presentate al convegno IAML di New York. Non passerà molto tempo prima che le cose cambino. Intanto possiamo osservare che Internet è l’evoluzione tecnologica che negli anni Sessanta forse non ci si poteva immaginare. Barry S. Brook sapeva che si sarebbe potuta immagazzinare e facilmente accedere a una grandissima massa di dati conservati in una memoria unica, di grandissima capacità. Mi chiedo quanto abbia potuto immaginare, in altri successivi scritti, le conseguenze che avrebbe portato Internet, nel consolidare il suo World Music Documentation System. Mi pare, infatti, che sia proprio Internet lo strumento tecnologico che più corrisponde alle necessità di ricerca di Barry S. Brook. Con il potenziamento delle infrastrutture, Internet è en trata a pieno titolo anche nel campo della conservazione e del recupero dei dati, trasformandone i metodi. Nell’immaginario collettivo il colore dei dati oggi non è più il nero di “that famous little black box” (quella famosa piccola scatola nera) ma è il color del cielo, ha la consistenza delle nuvole e prende il nome di cloud. S: Toglimi una curiosità: secondo te la grande disponibilità dei documenti e dei dati ha davvero reso la tecnica dell’annotazione meno importante, come immaginava Barry S. Brook? B: A mio parere Barry S. Brook tirò in ballo l’annotazione manuale solo per rendere più evidente e allettante le potenzialità della tecnologia agli occhi dei ricercatori suoi contemporanei. Non ci ha pensato su molto. Ma se vogliamo approfondire il tema, direi che solo uno studio sociologico mirato alle abitudini degli studiosi potrebbe darci qualche seria indicazione in merito. E non sarebbe poi una grande novità; già nel 2015 sono stati presentati a New York al convegno dell’International Association of 803
Federica Riva Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) i risultati di un’indagine sulle abitudini degli studiosi rispetto alla tecnologia. Per parte mia posso dirti che uso sistematicamente l’annotazione manuale, su qualsiasi supporto – carta e penna o matita, computer, telefono cellulare (uso assai poco il tablet) – per mandare e per richiamare alla memoria quanto leggo, vedo, ascolto in ambito scientifico, ma anche non. Sono talmente affezionato all’annotazione come metodo di apprendimento da essere incuriosito dal modo in cui questo metodo migrerà nell’ambiente digitale. Il passaggio editoriale dalla stampa su carta alla pubblicazione elettronica - intese entrambe nel senso stretto di azioni umane atte a render pubbliche delle idee, cioè in uso a molti – non mi pare sia commensurabile con i metodi di apprendimento e di recupero delle informazioni che frequentiamo in privato. Sono ambiti diversi che hanno obiettivi diversi e usano tecniche diverse. Mi figuro che il mondo si stia popolando di una varietà di modalità utilizzate dai singoli, frutto delle interazioni e delle sintesi che ciascuno di noi compie nelle diverse situazioni della propria vita. Per quanto riguarda l’argomento che stiamo discutendo adesso, la ricerca bibliografica musicale, ammetto di fare uso, al bisogno, di qualsiasi mezzo mi serva. L’importante in realtà è riuscire a recuperare il contenuto dell’informazione: se il mio appunto a mano è scritto velocemente e male, io stesso non lo leggo; se non ricordo un termine di ricerca corretto per individuare il file che mi interessa nel mio computer, ho comunque perso quanto mi serviva; se non conosco bene il sistema di ordinamento delle foto nel mio cellulare, e se non scarico regolarmente i dati, non recupererò celermente, o, forse non recupererò proprio più al momento del bisogno, la nota che so di aver fotografato l’anno scorso in biblioteca da un libro che ho penato mezza giornata a farmi dare in lettura […] sì, lo so, sono un esempio di transizione mista. Forse esistono già dei luoghi di ricerca, delle università o delle biblioteche, dove l’uso della carta non è più un uso ma solo un ricordo. Da noi non è così. Non penso di sbagliare sostenendo che nella maggior parte del mondo odierno non è così. Penso piuttosto che le punte tecnologicamente avanzate siano esattamente delle punte, cioè delle minoranze molto agguerrite, il cui ruolo nella società mondiale caratterizzata dalle tecnologie globali non finisce nel guardare solo in avanti ma consiste anche nel guardare indietro. Hai presente il dio romano Giano bifronte? S: Sì l’ho ben presente – anche grazie al busto conservato ai Musei Vaticani – come dio degli inizi, materiali e immateriali, una delle divinità più antiche e più importanti della religione romana, latina e italica. E potrei anche 804
World Music Documentation System aggiungere che sarebbe bello se nel campo della bibliografia musicale si facesse come quando si va in montagna … B: E cioè, vorresti dire? S: Per essere sicuri di arrivare sani e salvi alla meta vige una sola regola: si va al passo del più lento, in maniera da consentire a tutti di arrivare, e di arrivare insieme, perché questo è lo scopo del viaggio. B: Bel paragone! Anche se non è per niente ovvio capire come questo principio possa migrare dalla montagna fisica alla montagna d’informazioni prodotte dalla ricerca bibliografica musicale, senza ostacolarne lo sviluppo. S: Sì, nemmeno io ho ben chiaro come si potrà fare, ma ci ragioneremo sopra un’altra volta. Per il momento mi pare che siamo d’accordo su un secondo principio e cioè che la riuscita del lavoro bibliografico passa per la corretta ed efficace gestione dell’informazione scientifica da parte dei ricercatori che fanno buon uso dalla tecnologia: Whatever the future may hold – and let us be wary of naive speculation – the present already contains many valuable techniques that we musicians and humanists must learn to utilize. Unfortunately, the humanities seem to be sinking rather swimming in their uncharted sea of documentation. It must be made very clear that automation offers no immediate pie in the bibliographic sky. A genuine contribution to knowledge can be made with only a minuscule amount of information but a third-rate intelligence is not likely to produce anything significant with even an oceanful of computerized data. … “Having a computer is no substitute for having idea”. B: Contribuire all’approfondimento della conoscenza, ecco il punto. Mi fa venire in mente il carteggio che - pressappoco negli stessi anni in cui scriveva Barry S. Brook – Claudio Sartori (1913–1994) teneva da Milano con il bibliotecario e musicologo austriaco Ernst Hilmar (1938–2016) allora al Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, nel preparare la sua Biblio grafia della musica italiana vocale profana pubblicata dal 1500 al 1700, edita poi nel 1977. Ho potuto leggere parte del carteggio grazie alla cortesia della Zentralredaktion del RISM e del suo direttore, nell’ambito di ricerche che sto conducendo – quando riesco – sull’inf luenza che ha avuto Claudio Sartori nell’evoluzione della bibliografia musicale in Italia e a livello internazionale. Se hai un attimo di pazienza, posso fartele leggere direttamente sul mio pc: [B fruga tra i pacchi, trova la borsa, ne estrae il notebook, lo apre, lo accende e lo gira a S che legge:]
805
Federica Riva
806
“Milano 18/1/68 Prot. 41/68: Carissimo Hilmar, grazie mille delle preziose fotocopie, che mi sono utilissime. Oggi debbo chiederle altre notizie generali, e mi scusi, Lei sa dove e come sia finita la Biblioteca privata di Emil Vogel, che esisteva a Berlino e che possedeva un unicum del Borsaro: BORSARO Arcangelo - Il 2° Libro delle Canzonette a 3 e 4 voci… Venetia, Amadino, 1590 ?. Lei sa se a Londra esiste ancora la Ruth Collection? …Grato di tutto quello che potrà dirmi, molto cordialmente Claudio Sartori” e dopo due giorni: “Milano 20/1/68 Prot. 50/68. Carissimo Hilmar, le fotocopie sono arrivate e mi sono utilissime. Grazie moltissime. Immagino che lei avrà moltissimo lavoro e non si preoccupi che capisco perfettamente le sue difficoltà. Ma credo che un’attiva collaborazione come si sta svolgendo tra di noi sarà utilissima per tutti e due. Io per parte mia sto preparando la copia del mio schedario per Lei. Quindi mi risponda quando può, ma per favore risponda a tutte le mie domande (sono molte, lo so!) anche se in modo negativo. E’ sempre utile avere un punto di partenza sicuro. Oggi debbo aggiungere un’altra richiesta alle precedenti. Mi sa dire quanti esemplari conosce di quest’opera? BONONCINI, Giovanni – Duetti da Camera … Opera Ottava. Bologna, F. M. Monti, 1691. Ne esistevano esemplari nella Bibl. Wegener e di Berlin. Grazie di tutto. Molto cordialmente.” E Hilmar rispondeva dal RISM all’ansia di sapere di Sartori con altrettanta acribia: “22.1.68. Ill.mo Prof. Claudio Sartori Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali, 20121 Milano Via Clerici, 5. Carissimo professore, ben inteso le risponderò a tutte le Sue domande anche se in modo negativo, ma può darsi che qualche volta si ritardi. Comunque sono sempre a Suoi graditi, e molto d’accordo che vogliamo profittare della nostra collaborazione. La biblioteca di Vogel è finita nella Deutschen Staatsbibliothek a Berlino e lì è andata perduta con l’altro fondo della Staatsbibliothek. La grande parte della Ruth Collection esiste come un fondo al Brit. Mus. a Londra, altre indicazioni non conosco. La biblioteca del Kircheninstitut a Berlino è stata trasferita alla Biblioteca della Hochschule für Musik (Berlino-Ovest), ma purtroppo non l’intera. Del Biffi lì non c’è nessuna segnalazione. Il fondo della Peters Kirche a Frankfurt oggi è nella biblioteca statale e universitaria di Francoforte. Il Biffi si trova sotto la segn. Mus. W.119. Nella sua ultima del 20 mi chiede del Bononcini. L’edizione prima del 1691 esiste nelle biblioteche italiane: Genova Liceo, Modena Estense, Venezia Marciana. L’esemplare a Berlino è sparito e quello della Wegener finora non possiamo precisare. Può darsi che sia quello della Marciana (dott. Mischiati mi parlava che pochi esemplari della Wegener siano finiti là). La parte più grande della Wegener è finita nel Conservatorio di Bruxelles, ma del Conservatorio presso il RISM finora sono solo le schede dalla L – Z. Chieda pure: Di quello che m‘intendo e posso precisare sempre interamente risponderò, anche che sia negativo, perciò Lei andasse sicuro. Molto cordialmente (Dr. Ernst Hilmar)
World Music Documentation System S: Mi pare un ottimo esempio di come, con le tecnologie dell’epoca, si potesse dare la “maximum accessibility and utility to the information contained”. B: Giusto. Concordo. Intanto Barry S. Brook guardava altrove: First, we need a working meeting of those who have developed input languages for musical notation. Information retrieval may be interdisciplinary but music has a peculiar problem of its own. Its written language is made up of a set of special symbols, rather than conventional numbers and letters. That problem – one of coding – we will have to solve on our own. Prevedendo la necessità di isolare il tema della codifica della musica notata, di fatto Barry S. Brook ha identificato ante litteram una comunità scientifica, che è effettivamente poi nata grazie agli studi iniziali di Perry Roland negli USA, Virginia ed alla sua collaborazione con Johannes Kepper in Europa, Germania e con diversi altri studiosi. È la Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Gli studiosi che stanno lavorando all’iniziativa si sono dati per scopo la codifica in ambiente web di tutte le diverse notazioni usate per scrivere la musica colta occidentale, dai neumi alle intavolature alla notazione moderna. Anche questa comunità è stata molto presente nel 2015 al convegno IAML di New York. La Music Encoding Initiative è nata da contatti individuali e si sta sviluppando anche attraverso le Music Encoding Conferences che si tengono ogni anno, a maggio. Il primo convegno si è tenuto proprio qui a Mainz, presso l’Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur nel 2013. Sono poi stati organizzati convegni negli Stati Uniti (Charlottesville 2014), in Italia (Firenze 2015), in Canada (Montréal 2016). L’anno prossimo, nel 2017, torneranno in Europa, in Francia esattamente a Tours. All’interno di ogni convegno si svolge un non-conference day dedicato al confronto libero tra i ricercatori o al lavoro in piccoli gruppi. Chissà se fra qualche anno, definita la codifica della musica scritta, la comunità MEI non passerà a occuparsi anche della musica di tradizione orale. Vedremo allora forse avvicinarsi le comunità di quanti si occupano della digitalizzazione della musica notata con quanti si occupano della digitalizzazione dei documenti sonori. Iniziative come la “Digital Philology for the Preservation of Multimedia Archives” - che hanno lo scopo di conservare la memoria sonora dell’umanità - si occupano di individuare gli standard e le tecniche che consentono di trasferire in ambiente digitale i documenti sonori registrati prevalentemente su supporti analogici nel corso del Novecento. S: Se ho capito bene, siamo quindi arrivati a parlare degli oggetti digitali e mi hai appena citato le due comunità musicologiche più preparate dal punto di vista tecnologico. 807
Federica Riva B: Esattamente, le comunità scientifiche dove competenze musicologiche e tecniche si fondono in ciascun ricercatore, creando figure più vicine, diciamo così, a un Leonardo da Vinci che non ai bibliografi musicali dell’Ottocento e del Novecento. Ci possiamo facilmente immaginare che gestori dei contenuti degli oggetti digitali e gestori delle descrizioni bibliografiche degli oggetti fisici e digitali, si confronteranno sempre più nei prossimi anni, per mettere in comune terminologie, usi scientifici e norme di comportamento, mappe concettuali. Grazie al fatto che utilizzeranno gli stessi strumenti del linguaggio informatico – come, ad esempio, i LOD, Linked Open Data – daranno vita nella dimensione digitale a un dialogo nuovo tra le cose, le idee, le comunità di utilizzatori e i singoli ricercatori, le loro abitudini e i loro usi, che potrebbe portare un po’ di sano ordine nella babele del mondo, fisico e digitale: The earlier, the better. Mi accorgo però che si è fatto molto tardi: abbiamo commentato solo poche pagine di quanto ha sostenuto Barry S. Brook nel 1976, quarant’anni fa. Mi sarebbe piaciuto scambiare qualche idea con te su tanti altri argomenti, soprattutto sull’organizzazione e sugli aspetti economici della ricerca bibliografica musicale; sulle opportunità offerte dall’interazione tra il sistema legale di tradizione latino-germanica e il sistema legale anglosassone, argomento che rischia di diventare sempre più spinoso, adesso che è finita la presidenza di Obama negli USA e che gli inglesi si sono pronunciati a favore della Brexit! Il discorso ci avrebbe probabilmente portato a commentare i costi elevati delle pubblicazioni digitali e quanto essi incidano nel rallentare la diffusione degli strumenti di ricerca e quindi lo sviluppo della ricerca, costituendo, a ben vedere, un danno per le pubblicazioni digitali stesse, i loro editori e distributori, e ovviamente, gli utenti: i ricercatori e, soprattutto, gli studenti. Avremmo anche potuto indagare quale impatto hanno oggi gli aspetti economici e organizzativi sullo sviluppo della ricerca e della collaborazione internazionale e, più in generale, quali soluzioni siano state sino a oggi trovate per rimuovere gli ostacoli; oppure come possa cambiare e adeguarsi ai tempi il ruolo delle associazioni professionali. S. Mi chiedo se sia quindi giunto il momento di indirizzare quegli studenti che possono far leva su adeguate competenze tecnologiche, biblioteconomiche, musicali e musicologiche, a cercare e a trovare quelle nuove forme organizzative che consentiranno alla ricerca di passare dal volontariato diffuso alla diffusione del professionismo. Mi viene in mente, mentre parliamo, che le tecnologie innovative potrebbero essere usate, ad esempio, per arricchire il lavoro di un gruppo di professionisti, non solo con i contributi 808
World Music Documentation System di una cerchia più ampia ricercatori, ma anche con i contributi provenienti da volontari attivi su scala assai più ampia, come sta accadendo nell’ambito delle scienze della terra per il rilevamento dei terremoti. Tantissime persone – chiunque è interessato in teoria, e cioè: i ricercatori accademici e non accademici, gli amanti della musica, il pubblico dei concerti e degli spettacoli lirici - potrebbero collaborare allo sviluppo della ricerca inviando a un centro specializzato dati rilevati sul campo, che nel caso della ricerca bibliografica musicale sarebbero poi informazioni relative a pubblicazioni con un contenuto originale (escludendo quelle meramente compilative), come ciascuno di noi già sa. Mi sto chiedendo anche se in questo continuo adeguamento allo sviluppo tecnologico potranno avere un ruolo gli strumenti che coinvolgono un numero assai grande di persone. Sto pensando al crowdfuding, ai sistemi didattici aperti – Open Educational Resources (OER) – che sfruttano le potenzialità della comunicazione mondiale utilizzando piattaforme d’insegnamento a distanza per realizzare corsi online su larga scala (Massive Open Online Courses, MOOC). B: Proprio ieri sera a cena, una collega mi diceva essere molto contenta dell’esito del suo primo MOOC, Biblioteca digitale in teoria e in pratica, cui hanno aderito in tutto oltre mille persone! S: Mi pare che abbiamo discusso piacevolmente e forse nemmeno tanto inutilmente, come se il genius loci, Johannes Gutenberg, ci avesse sostenuto, non soltanto offrendoci un luogo adatto al conversare come questo piacevole caffè. B: Sì, abbiamo avuto modo di sondare tanti temi, alcuni urgenti, altri meno. Non so se sarei capace o avrei mai il desiderio di discuterne in pubblico, anche se so che una rif lessione più ampia non potrebbe che essere di beneficio alla causa comune. [B fa cenno alla cameriera che si avvicina al tavolino e fa loro il conto.] S: A proposito come va con il progetto che hai avviato nel 2014 e di cui mi parlavi la volta scorsa; hai fatto dei passi avanti? B: Sì. No. Ni. Al momento sto ancora ragionando sugli aspetti preliminari: sul nome, qualcosa come “Italian R-projects Coordination Center”; sto consolidando i contatti nazionali e internazionali; sto ragionando su quale sia la più corretta e aggiornata forma organizzativa da dare all’impresa e come finanziarla. [B e S nel frattempo si sono alzati; B ha ripreso in mano i suoi pacchetti ingombranti.] S: Ti ascolterò volentieri un’altra volta anche su questo. Intanto incamminiamoci, così riusciremo a dare un’occhiata ai negozi attraversando a piedi la città, prima che chiudano. 809
Federica Riva
[B intanto ha aperto la porta a vetri che dà sul cortile del Gutenberg Museum e fa strada a S. Attraversano il cortile insieme prima di sparire sotto l’arco che porta alla piazza.] B: Io invece vorrei arrivare al fiume prima che cali la sera perché in città c’è l’usanza di ritrovarsi a chiacchierare, bevendo un bicchiere del loro ottimo vino seduti sulle rive del Reno mentre si sente arrivare la sera. Lì, se ti andrà, potremo continuare ancora per un poco i nostri discorsi. [Cala la tela]. ZDRZDRZRZDRZDRZDRZ vkvkkvkvkvkvkvkvkkvkvkvkvkvkvkvkvkvkvkkvkkvvkvkkvkvkkvkvvkvkvkkvkvkvkkvkvkkvkvkkvkvvkvkvkk OOOOOOOOOliver!!!!!! Gatto birba, quante volte ti ho detto di non salire sulla tastiera!
References inn the essay: Page 800: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Shera (last accessed: 14.05.2017) Page 801: "Caminantes / no hay caminos / hay que caminar". Title of a composition by Luigi Nono (1924–1990), paraphrasing the verse "caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar" of the poem "Caminante, no hay camino" by Antonio Machado (1875-1939).
810
www.hollitzer.at