Category Archives: Music

The ascetic aesthetic

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Where philosophy ends, art begins. In a sense, after Schopenhauer’s “Nothing,” the word which concludes The World as Will and Representation, there is the emergence of the chord that opens Tristan und Isolde. It is not therefore a philologist who properly “corrects,” if that is the appropriate word, a philosophy which reaches its furthermost end, but a musician.

In this, the most Schopenhauerian of operas, Wagner repurposes eros as a means to renunciation and repudiation of the world as a means to experience the thing-in-itself, that which lies beyond the world. Below, a post from last June, in which I discuss a few associated issues. It has been slightly revised.

At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes:

Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will [in] no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity.[1]

I was reminded of this passage as I reached the midpoint of the new Cambridge University Press translation of The World as Will and Representation this weekend. If Beckett’s work might be seen as a philosophy wrapped in the guise of art (imaginative prose and drama), then Schopenhauer’s might be seen as a work of art wrapped in the guise of a philosophy (expository prose). This perspective may provide one explanation for Beckett’s continuing appeal to philosophers, and Schopenhauer’s to artists. As Calder suggests, the generic form of this content partakes of a certain oscillation of any given work among various forms, in this case the imaginative and the expository. Schopenhauer’s work has its longeurs and repetitions, like Beckett’s, like that of any artist who works in forms that express a problematic relation to time. The title of Ulrich Pothast’s book on Beckett and Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision, points to the same kind of oscillation. There is metaphysics and there is art: and they may be separate or fused.

I have written before of the architectonic structure of Schopenhauer’s main work (not dissimilar to that, in its power and sublimity, to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony), and he is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished prose stylists of 19th-century Germany in whatever form. It is also relevant to note Schopenhauer’s valuation of aesthetic work as a means to renunciation and resignation as superior to that of the philosophical treatise, the genre in which he pursued his project. The pursuit of philosophical ends through aesthetics, as Calder conceived Beckett’s enduring reputation, is mirrored by that of the pursuit of aesthetic ends through philosophy, which permits both Beckett and Schopenhauer to maintain significant footings in both genres. As Pothast notes, it’s not as if Beckett conceived of his project as putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy on stage or in the novel, and Pothast argues that as Beckett’s career went on it resembled Schopenhauer’s metaphysics less and less. I think the first part of his note is quite true but the second is not necessarily true, but even if it were, it only indicates that the work of no philosopher or artist constitutes a final end, but only a dynamic of concerns that evolve and change through an artist’s work.

That some philosophers and artists have elective affinities with each other is a lesson that Schopenhauer’s enduring influence on artists, and Beckett’s enduring appeal to critics and philosophers, demonstrates perhaps better than any other philosopher. Any mental or creative dialogue that an artist or a philosopher maintains through a lifetime must include a dialogue with the dead, and the communication of these affinities within groups of like-minded writers and artists permits of revision and reconsideration. Schopenhauer famously refuted what he considered Kant’s missteps in an extended appendix to WWR, but there’s no reason why an artist may not also participate in this revision and consideration as well.

To take one example particularly relevant to my own project, Richard Wagner was the first major artist to have his life’s work stopped and radically revised in the middle of his career as a result of a reading of The World as Will and Representation. It was through Schopenhauer’s work that this reconsideration occurred, but Wagner also revised his mentor. In his important new book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, Laurence Dreyfus cites an 1858 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck in which Wagner, then at work on Tristan und Isolde, does just this:

It is really a matter of proving — something no philosopher has done, not even Schopenhauer — that the recognized redemptive path to the complete pacification of the Will is through Love, and in fact not an abstract human love but rather by means of sexual love, that is, a love germinating in the attraction between man and woman.[2]

It is also important to note here Dreyfus’ gloss on Wagner’s letter:

Far from being doomed to failure and eternal disappointment as in Schopenhauer’s clear exposition, Wagner’s notion of sexual love becomes a means to assuage the gnawing desires of the Will-to-live. Even Schopenhauer admitted in his second volume that there is a difference between understanding renunciation as a philosopher and practicing it as an ascetic mystic, a statement that undercuts the effect of his philosophical conclusions … . Perhaps Wagner intended to air a legitimate criticism of Schopenhauer’s unconvincing pseudo-Buddhist account of renunciation. But as soon as one examines the composer’s assertion about sexual love, its logical inconsistency becomes glaring. For if sexual desire (according to Schopenhauer) embodies the essence of the Will-to-live, it is nonsense to allow sexual love to pacify the Will. It is like giving whiskey to cure an alcoholic, or pornography to treat a sexual obsessive.[3]

True enough, and Dreyfus here has stumbled upon a central paradox of Schopenhauer’s conclusion — that is, how can the will be turned by a helpless vehicle of that will, the human individual, against itself? The paradox is insoluble except through an appeal to mystery and mysticism — but it is this mystery and mysticism itself which constitute the possibility of any kind of true, redemptive aesthetic experience as well. That it is logically inconsistent, as Dreyfus notes, perhaps makes The World as Will and Representation poor philosophy (though only if philosophy must abjure any appeals to a mysticism and mystery — and this does not necessarily mean God or purposiveness — which is beyond human understanding). But that does not make it bad art — indeed, in its openness to aesthetic and imaginative possibility, it makes it very good art indeed. And it confirms that Kant, Schopenhauer and Wagner can all ascertain new forms and understandings of experience from each other’s work without ignoring the weaknesses and mistakes of each.

It is instructive to note that great philosophy that aspires to the condition of art has similar effects in the best critics and expositors of that philosophy. Bryan Magee concludes his magisterial The Philosophy of Schopenhauer not with a summation chapter, but with a poem — as if expository prose could not contain the enduring value and appeal of Schopenhauer’s work to that writer. More recently, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume survey of Howard Barker’s career is as much philosophy and art as it is literary criticism, as James Balestrieri noted upon the publication of the first volume: “Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker’s lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry. …  At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.” All of this argues for the possibility, indeed the value and the necessity, of an art which strains towards philosophy, and a philosophy which strains towards art.

Footnotes
  1. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 1. [↩]
  2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 71. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

In Houston: Nonken and Rothenberg play Kurtág

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Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken. Photo: Dabfoto.

My Houston readers (and there are a few) will want to hear about Da Camera of Houston’s Gyorgy Kurtág: A Composed Program, to be performed by the new music duo Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken on Tuesday, 31 January, at 7.30pm. The evening, a selection from the composer’s Játékok (Games) and his Bach transcriptions, is described thus:

The great Hungarian composer’s Games for piano four-hands and solo piano interweave with his transcriptions of Bach chorales in this “composed program,” created for and performed with his lifelong partner, Marta Kurtág. A deeply moving and intimate musical statement portraying Kurtág’s unique musical sensitivity and the haunting memories of music from the past that inspired him. Marilyn Nonken and Sarah Rothenberg, whose recent recording and performances of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen have received rave reviews, team up again.

The concert will be performed at The Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross Street in Houston; tickets are $35 and available here. More information about the performers themselves can be found at the serious music media Web site, and some information on the composer is available at the Boosey & Hawkes Web site.

“The dark is in reality my most precious ally”

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After the Three Dialogues, Samuel Beckett tended to embed his aesthetic statements within his drama and fiction themselves, and central to his postwar aesthetic was the “revelation” or “vision” of 1946, dramatized in the 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape. This dramatization, however, was incomplete, and appears in only a fragmented form in the tape that the character recorded at the age of 39:

Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening … What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely — (Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again) — great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality — (Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again) — unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire.

Beckett borrows for this image the visual sense of German Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. It is in part autobiographical, based upon Beckett’s own experience, which he told his biographer James Knowlson was in fact much less wild: “Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dun Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make that clear once and for all,” he told Knowlson in about 1987.[1] What Knowlson’s biography also provides, however, is the missing key to Krapp’s (and Beckett’s) revelation. Beckett completed Krapp’s “The dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality” in preparation for the theatrical notebook on Krapp’s Last Tape that Knowlson edited in 1987:

However, one element in particular of the Krapp passage relates it directly to Beckett’s own experience: the darkness of an inner world was, indeed, an image that Beckett reproduced with friends to whom he spoke about his revelation. Beckett explained precisely what he meant by this part of Krapp’s “vision.” He wrote that the dark was “‘in reality my most –’ Lost: [that is, when Krapp switches off the tape recorder and runs the tape forward] ‘my most precious ally’ etc. meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum.” Light was therefore rejected in favor of darkness. And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.[2]

Beckett and Krapp are of course not equivalent (when he wrote the play, Beckett was much closer to the 39-year-old Krapp than he was to the 69-year-old Krapp that holds the stage). And Krapp’s irritable, angry, and perhaps fearful desire to skip over or repudiate the lessons of his revelation certainly was not a rejection shared by his creator, who would use this darkness as the mine from which he would bring out the great postwar plays, novels, and prose. But it does confirm Beckett’s essential pessimism: as Knowlson puts it, “Light was … rejected in favor of darkness.” And it should also be noted that, as Knowlson points out, this was less a sudden revelation than a crystallization of tendencies to which Beckett’s work had been leading for years. It was a synthesis of suspicions about the nature of existence that, first, became clear, and second, provided the basis for extended aesthetic discipline, productivity, and experience. But make no mistake: this is pessimism. And Beckett — if not Krapp — learned to embrace it not in celebration but in contemplation. It is a difficult embrace but one that must be made once the recognition is experienced; if not, the work and the life are lies.

On another note, it is sometimes an unexpected pleasure to have one’s biographical information about Beckett corrected. I wrote both last week and a few years ago that Beckett had an indifference, if not distaste, for Wagner’s music, but apparently this did not extend to all of Wagner’s operas. In doing the research for the above, I came across a brief memoir by Duncan Scott, the lighting engineer at the Royal Court Theatre where Beckett directed several of his own plays in the 1970s. Discussing music with Beckett, Scott noted, “We spoke of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok and Wagner. He said he did not like Wagner in general, only Tristan und Isolde. When I suggested that Parsifal was Wagner’s definitive statement, he showed interest, but said he didn’t know the music.”[3] So perhaps my drawing of a parallel between Beckett’s work and Tristan, at least, was not entirely without biographical basis as well.

Footnotes
  1. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 319. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds.,  Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2006, p. 215. [↩]

Friday video/From the archives: Beckett/Wagner

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Waltrud Meier as Isolde in the Heiner Müller production of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth.

A few years ago (in 2008 to be precise) I wrote the below essay after seeing Dieter Dorn’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met. A much shorter version of this essay appeared on 1 April 2008 at the Guardian theatre blog.

I’ve appended two videos to the essay — the Liebestod from the 1993 Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, sung by the extraordinary Waltrud Meier, and the first part of Samuel Beckett’s Play, as directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project — to offer an interesting comparison and contrast.

On the face of it, there couldn’t be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett — the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays — often quiet, approaching silence — that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert’s songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation — the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett’s own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there’s just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. “Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre,” said the editors of an anthology of Wagner’s prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music’s abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.

There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner’s production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-accurate sets and costumes as exemplified by the work of Saxe-Meiningen. (It’s still done, as Sir Peter Hall demonstrated in his Ring cycle of several years back.) As effective as Tristan und Isolde was when it premiered in Munich in 1865, it didn’t seem to come into its own until Appia’s theory — which was heavily indebted to Wagner’s more metaphysical operas – became current in the 1920s. With the abstraction of the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, shape and color became more evocative of the poetic currents that lay beneath photographic realism. Appia demonstrated that this was true in the theatre just as much as on the canvas.

In the post-war era, Bayreuth’s directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett’s first plays were being performed in Paris — plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett’s 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett’s later work, until 1972′s Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.

Dorn’s production for the Met marries Beckett’s stage practice to Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett’s conception of colorless existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three pure-white cycloramas that are gathered into a very visible vanishing point upstage center, a vanishing point that suggests the unity and nothingness for which the two lovers yearn. (This is not unlike the “very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance” that Beckett specifies in the stage directions for Happy Days.)

In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear — the words and the music — that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. “[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form,” Wagner wrote in “The Music of the Future.” “… I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul.” This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner’s final operas, Beckett’s dramas from 1962′s Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.

Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.

For more about Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer and philosophy in general, I guide you towards Bryan Magee’s excellent The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.

Via YouTube: Waltrud Meier sings the Liebestod at the end of Act III of Tristan und Isolde, from the Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, filmed in 1995:

And, again from YouTube, the first half of Anthony Minghella’s film of Samuel Beckett’s Play:

New York, stad med ständig Klang!

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Sarah Rothenberg and Marilyn Nonken. Photo:: Dabfoto.

Earlier this week, Sweden’s Sveriges Radio broadcast an hour-long interview by Birgitta Tollan with pianists Marilyn Nonken (my much, much better half) and Sarah Rothenberg, which is embedded below. Ms. Tollan’s commentary is in Swedish, but Marilyn and Sarah’s responses are in English; the profile also includes extensive excerpts from their recent release of Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen for Bridge Records and Marilyn’s album of Drew Baker’s collected piano music, Stress Position, for New Focus. Happy listening: