Download KMBB Lecture 9

KMBB Lecture 9
Terror and Melancholy
Mixed feelings in Mozart’s slow
movements
Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (Harper
Collins, 1994): ‘In several of Mozart’s most
characteristic adagios and andantes a calm,
contemplative, or ecstatic condition gives way
to a troubled state—is penetrated by hints of
storm, dissonance, anguish, anxiety, danger—
and this in turn is succeeded by a restoration
of the status quo ante, now suffused and
transformed by the memory of the turbulent
interlude’ (p. 187).
Mozart, Sonata in A minor (K. 310,
1778), ii (Andante cantabile)
‘The slow movement is marked andante
cantabile con espressione, a designation
intended to describe the singing, expressive
opening section. We have entered a selfcontained, windowless, protected space
within which, moving at a quiet tempo, we
quietly experience sensations of surpassing
intensity—oceanic, comforting, and rapturous’
(ibid) PLAY EXPOSITION
Cont.
‘But now, without raising his voice or quickening his
pace, Mozart opens a trapdoor through which
flood disturbing and destabilizing powers,
threatening to annihilate what has gone before’
(Ibid) PLAY DEVELOPMENT SECTION
‘Mozart has no intention of giving way to chaos and
disruption, however. Instead, after the outburst
has spent its force, he moves to reinstate the
original Edenic condition’ (190) PLAY RECAP
Solomon’s Conclusions
In K. 310/ii Mozart invented the Romantic character piece
(ABA) ‘capable of symbolizing vast realms of experience and
feeling’ (194); expressive contrasts of this intensity
resonate with the most profound patterns of our lives.
For Solomon, those patterns are described best by Freudian
psychoanalysis . He ‘discovers’ here the (as he has it)
blissful experience of being at one-with the mother, and
the terror of individuation (of the permanent separation
involved in becoming oneself).
Solomon implies the movement reflects Mozart’s own
(autobiographical) experience: the death of his mother, and
more broadly his attempts to break away from his parents
and Salzburg.*
Viennese Classical Style vs Musical
Autobiography
There is a tension in the reception of Mozart’s music
between the notion of the composer’s self-expression
(the music conveys his feelings and reacts to his life)
and of universality (his music is beyond personal and
worldly matters – beautiful, abstract, universal, purely
musical). Solomon’s argument is notable in finding a
middle path. When VCS was the main way of
understanding Mozart, Solomon’s argument would
have seemed absurd. But based on our studies, there
is some historical basis for self-expression – and
thoughts of death – in freer keyboard music (cf the
fantasia lecture). But Solomon’s psychoanalytic
framework seems anachronistic.
Using Topical Analysis and Galeazzi on
Sonata Form
It’s useful to explore other approaches to
understanding the expressive content of this
piece. How about topical analysis – what
might that add? And, given that Solomon
appears unaware that this is a sonata form,
what about Galeazzi’s ideas of form (the
‘parts’ of a sonata form) – which he frames as
parts of an oration or discourse -- are any
parts particularly extended or intensified?
Class exercises
Label topics, and potential associations, at bb. 14; 8-14; 15-18. Consider key, harmony, meter
as well as melodic style.
Has Solomon fully captured the expressive
character of the opening of the piece?
In Galeazzi’s terms, what ‘parts’ of the sonata
form exposition are bb. 15-22[beat 1], and bb.
22-29 [beat 1], and bb. 29-31? Are the
lengths of these parts notable?
The development section, or, in Galeazzi’s
terms, the ‘second part’ and ‘modulation’
Solomon speaks of Mozart ‘opening a trap door’
but how, more precisely, does the change of
character/expression take place in bb. 32-37? Is
anything programmatic or ‘representational’
suggested?
What topic or topics are employed in bb. 43-51?*
Overall, what does a topical analysis suggest this
piece is ‘about’ – and, specifically, what is the
causes and referent of ‘terror’.
Summary
So in terms of essay writing techniques we’ve made
the following moves:
1. Introduced the issue– terror– with a music
example
2. Summarised one key piece of secondary
literature that provides an existing
interpretation of the topic of ‘terror’
3. Looked more closely at the piece, applying
things we’ve learned to arrive at a different
understanding of ‘terror’
What next (in an essay)
More abstractly, we have captured ‘what is already
known’ (Solomon) and provided something like
an antithetical reading of the same composition,
so that the essay has gone A/B, or thesis and
antithesis. So what next?
Some essays would now expand on B to consolidate
that different understanding. What would that
involve?
Some essays would attempt to integrate or
reconcile A and B. What would that involve?
5 Minute Break!
Melancholy
Of all ‘emotions’ melancholy has attracted the most
academic interest – not least among music
historians. One of the reasons is that melancholy
– as that rather up-market term suggests – is an
‘elevated’ sadness associated with high(er) social
status (and so with identity); with ‘depth’,
inwardness and self-awareness; with complexity
– pain mingling with some element of pleasure;
with creativity and intellectual achievement, and
– notably -- as something that music can both
rouse and banish.
Music’s Affinity With Melancholy
From the lute songs of John Dowland, through Johann
Jakob Froberger’s ‘Plainte faite a Londres pour passer
la Melancolie’ (Suite XXX), C. P. E. Bach’s Trio Sonata
‘Sanguineus und Melancholicus’ (1749), to ‘Porgi
Amor’ for the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, to
Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18/6/iv ‘La
melanconica’, to Robert Schumann, ‚Melancholie‘ in
Spanisches Liederspiel 6, to Grieg, ‚Melancholie‘ in Lyric
Pieces Op. 47/5– to, well ... Francis Poulenc,
‚Melancholie‘ for solo piano, music seems to enjoy a
special intimacy with the bitter sweet!
A few highlights of the secondary
literature on melancholy
Guenter Bandmann, ed., Melancholie und Musik:
Ikonographische Studien. Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften,
1960; repr. 2013. Shows the Classical and Biblical pedigree
of music and melancholy with specific reference, for
example, to King Saul, possessed of an evil spirit, calmed by
David’s harp (Book of Samuel).
Melanie Wald-Furmann, ‘Ein Mittel wider sich selbst‘.
Melancholie in der Instrumentalmusik um 1800. Bärenreiter
2010. Despite – or as part of – the general trend towards
music as pure and otherworldly around 1800, there was
also an interest in the representation of melancholy in
abstract instrumental music, for example, in Beethoven‘s
String Quartet Op. 18/6/iv.
Cont.
Annette Richards, ‘Solitude and the Clavichord Cult’
in The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque
(Cambridge UP, 2000). Though not about
melancholy specifically, traces the ideal of
solitude surrounding performance on the
clavichord in later 18th-century Germany, solitude
connected variously with genius, madness, and,
more prosaically, the clavichord as the heart’s
sounding board. Sets CPEB’s ‘Farewell to my
Silbermann Clavichord’ in this context.
Cont.
Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society [1967],
trans. Gaines and Jones (Harvard UP, 1992). A
sociological analysis of what social classes
have claimed to be affected by melancholy
(which he tropes as boredom and ennui).
Emphasises the political impotence of the
middle class of the German 18th-century, and
the corresponding flight into the imagination.
Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, p.
73
Louise Ziegler had a grave dug in her garden so
she could savour the feelings of someone
dying or deceased – and weep; in his ‘Ode to
Ebert’, Klopstock imagines his (still living)
friend deceased; Matthias Claudius requested
Gerstenberg to write a tragedy in which ‘one
really must weep’; in Johann Martin Miller’s
novel Siegwart: A Monastic Story (1796) there
are 555 instances of characters weeping.*
Nancy November, ‘Haydn’s Melancholy Voice’,
Eighteenth-Century Music 4/1 (2007): 71-106
Melancholy was discussed in the later 18th
century as ‘dialectical, involving the interplay
of such elements as pleasure and pain,
freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and
absorption. ... Musical melancholy arises, I
argue, when ... the vocal character in a song or
the “composer’s voice” in an instrumental
work exhibits an ironic distance from his or
her own pain’ (Author’s abstract, p. 71).
Cont.
For Edmund Burke* (pp. 72-3) musical beauty
relaxed the body, and the melody or harmonic
progression lead the listener through a maze:
the overall effect was of ‘melting’ and
‘langour’ in which the listener’s body
resembled the body of the melancholic. At
the same time, music insulated the listener
from melancholy symptoms such as ‘eating
cares’ and brooding.
A case of melancholy? Mozart’s Adagio
in B minor (K. 540, 1788)
Class to complete this slide by relating the piece
to the discourse of melancholy: