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Overview
In Cherubino’s Leap, Richard Kramer unmasks such prismatic moments in iconic music from the Enlightenment, from the “chromatic” moment—the single tone that disturbs the thrust of a diatonic musical discourse—and its deployment in seminal instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; on to the poetic moment, taking the odes of Klopstock, in their finely wrought prosody, as a challenge to the problem of strophic song; and finally to the grand stage of opera, to the intense moment of recognition in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino’s daring moment of escape in Mozart’s Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail provoke a reflection on the tragic aspect of Mozart’s operatic women. Throughout, other players from literature and the arts—Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them—enrich the landscape of this bold journey through the Enlightenment imagination.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226384085 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 282 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cherubino's Leap
In Search of the Enlightenment Moment
By Richard Kramer
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-38408-5
CHAPTER 1
The Chromatic Moment in Enlightenment Thought
A Preamble on Portraiture and Language
Titles, in their terse ideogrammatic language, have a way of enfolding their subjects in enigma. A title does its work when it seduces the reader into the mysteries of the text that it prefigures, the text itself then a kind of unraveling, an exploration of the title that provokes it. And so to the title of this chapter. "Moment," at its center of gravity, holds pride of place here and in each of the chapters that follow. Leaning on the German Moment, it means to convey a sense of impulse, or even motive, something of substance leaching into the temporal instant, an essence of the music caught in this momentary inflection. In its specificity, the definite article further identifies this moment with the singular event that provokes the music to its extremities. To speak of the moment as chromatic — if that is its claim to prominence — is to inquire into the nature of its relationship to the diatonic environment within which it is defined. Must we apprehend this relationship as frozen in the hierarchies of a tonal spectrum, or ought we to hear its elements as variables in tension between two extreme positions?
To frame the question this way is to engage the music in the dialectical dramaturgy of Enlightenment thought. Without claiming to know what is the Enlightenment — or more to the point, what it was — I shall prefer, here and in the chapters that follow, to tease out those aspects of discourse — of music, of literature, of art and its criticism — that to my mind constitute a way of thinking, of holding a world teetering in ironic imbalance, of taking pleasure in the irreconcilable tension between reason and the irrational that is at the core of the Enlightenment mind.
For Moses Mendelssohn, it is the element of surprise — Überraschung is his word — that, in some measure, defines Enlightenment sensibility: "Our happiness depends upon enjoyment and enjoyment depends upon the swift sentiment with which each beauty surprises our senses. Unhappy are thosewhom reason has hardened against the onset of such a surprise." By these lights, it is not the timeless contemplation of beauty that is at issue, but the moment at which our sensibilities are caught off guard. Indeed, it is not clear wherein lies this Schönheit that is revealed to Mendelssohn's interlocutor, how it is constituted, even whether, as a thing unto itself, it exists at all, or whether what Mendelssohn has in mind is the experience of the moment, this Überraschung with which the sensibilities are overcome. These lines are in fact given to the fictive Euphranor, one of the disputants in an exchange of letters titled "Ueber die Empfindungen"; his counterpart, Theocles, will have much to say in defense of reason in the course of the expansive Platonic dialogue in which these matters are examined. And if there is some question whether Mendelssohn's sensibilities are in sympathy with the one or the other, perhaps it is enough that the eloquence of Euphranor's words endows them with an appeal that Mendelssohn himself must have found difficult to dispel.
From another perspective, Johann Gottfried Herder's ever-stimulating essay toward the "Origins of Language" sharpens its focus on the moment of recognition, the moment at which language is created, but also on the very notion of thought: "Placed in the state of reflection [Besonnenheit] which is inherent in him, with this reflection for the first time given full freedom of action, man created language. For what is reflection [Reflexion]? What is language?" For the Enlightenment mind, if we may take Herder's impassioned scena as symptomatic, it is the process of discovery that is prized. "Hemanifests reflection," continues Herder, "when, confronted with the vast hovering dream of images which pass by his senses, he can collect himself into a moment of awareness" — of Anerkennung. Of this signal moment, Herder isolates a recognition of the single distinguishing mark that would enable its expression as language: "The first act of this Anerkenntnis results in a clear concept." In a burst of enthusiasm, the act is celebrated: "Wohlan! Let us acclaim him with shouts of eureka!" As with Mendelssohn on beauty, it is the frisson of recognition that Herder wants us to imagine, this fleeting moment in which the world seems to hang in the balance, that is at the core of Enlightenment thought. In like mode, both Lessing and Goethe seek out this moment in coming to an understanding of the sculpture group Laocoon, to which we shall return in a later chapter.
In conjuring the iconic images of an Enlightenment sensibility, one that springs to mind is a portrait in profile by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a chalk drawing now at the Morgan Library in New York (shown as fig. 1.1). Its subject is Denis Diderot, age forty-seven, without wig, the exposed head a sign of the free-thinking, independent mind. Diderot thought it a more accurate representation than the famous painting by van Loo: "My children, I warn you that this is not me," he writes of the van Loo. "In the course of a single day I assumed a hundred different expressions, in accordance with the things that affected me. I was serene, sad, pensive, tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic. I had a large forehead, penetrating eyes, rather large features, a head quite similar in character to that of an ancient orator, an easygoing nature that sometimes approached the fool, the rustic simplicity of ancient times." Still better, in Diderot's view, was a portrait by "a poor devil named Garant, who," Diderot writes, "managed to trap me, just as a fool sometimes comes up with a witty remark. Whoever sees my portrait by Garant, sees me. 'Ecco il vero Polichinello.'" To assign to himself this burlesque rôle in the commedia dell'arte is of course a badge of honor, a refusal of the arrogance of the aristocracy, even if we read Diderot's self-deprecation with a whiff of skepticism. It is the sensibility of the man that Diderot wants depicted. More to our point, it is the transient sense of moment, the suggestion of character as always in motion, that Diderot finds lacking in the stiff formality of the van Loo.
The Greuze profile, with shirt opened casually at the neck, brings to mind a similar one: the curious lithograph of Joseph Haydn by Adolph Kunike (see fig. 1.2). With the exception of the bust in antique style engraved by David Weiss, this is the only representation of Haydn without wig; here, too, the shirt is loosely opened at the neck, the collar rumpled. Kunike's lithograph is riddled in contradictory messages, for it shows a man in his forties (Haydn in the 1770s or even around 1780), but imagined from a date no earlier than 1817 and perhaps as late as the 1820s. Its credentials as an "authentic" view of Haydn are without merit; at best, Kunike was formulating his Haydn from some contemporary image, perhaps an engraving of 1809 made from the pencil drawing (1794) by George Dance, which Haydn himself considered to be the best likeness. Kunike's rare glimpse of an unbuttoned, unwigged Haydn in rumpled house coat conjures the composer in his study, the busy detail of formal portraiture, its superficial signs of authenticity, replaced by an image of a different kind, reaching inward toward the unknowable Haydn beneath the surface. Unintentionally, it conjures Greuze's profile of Diderot.
Then there is Joseph Lange's provocatively unfinished oil of Mozart (shown as fig. 1.3) — "am Klavier," as it is called, though the keyboard remained sealed in Lange's imagination. The only authenticated image of Mozart without wig — "natürliches Haar (braun)," in Otto E. Deutsch's description of it — the painting captures the immediacy of mind, the eyes fixed with an intensity almost exaggerated, as though turned inward, focused on something not visible to us, oblivious of the painter and his audience. A snapshot, this seems, of the composer caught in the solitude of the moment.
Refusing the postures of conventional portraiture, undoing its masks, these images invite us into the private places of the mind. So it is with the music of the Enlightenment. The conventions are well known, and we admire the wit and originality with which the important composers take up their challenges. But then there are those moments when the composer's ear turns inward, beneath the elegant surface of the music to some less comfortable recess, beyond convention, and very nearly inscrutable, beyond our ability to seize the moment, to grasp its significance. It is this moment — Mendelssohn's Überraschung, Herder's Anerkenntnis — that is endowed, both as a mark in the great temporal expanse of music and as a signifier of refractory meaning. The quest to locate such moments, to grasp their significance, is the itch that animates the paragraphs below and the chapters that follow, where the chromatic inflection opens onto unsuspected terrain, capturing the internal probings of the composer caught between those salient contradictions that the Enlightenment mind struggled to hold in balance, where the music reveals its human face.
The Chromatic Moment
In the apparent bedrock of an opposition between diatonic and chromatic inheres a timeless abstraction which each generation of theorists, beginning in ancient Greece (and no doubt earlier and elsewhere as well), interrogates as an aspect of a more broadly conceived idea of how music goes. It is far from my purpose here to attempt anything foundational toward the defining of a theoretical problem, but rather to understand, empirically, how, in the music of the Enlightenment, the tension between these two conditions — the diatonic and the chromatic — plays itself out in a music that seems often enough an exploration of this very tension.
I
We begin in 1762, on the final page of Emanuel Bach's Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. Tipped into the book at just this place is a handsome copper-plate engraving of a Fantasia in D, a modest piece on its surface, far less challenging than the grand Fantasia in C Minor with which Bach brought to a telling conclusion his Probestücke, those eighteen study pieces published with Part 1 of the Versuch in 1753. This lesser Fantasia, a Probestuck of another kind, is however significant in quite another sense, for it was offered as a final illustration at the end of a lengthy disquisition titled "Von der freyen Fantasie" — offered, in fact, in two forms: as a Gerippe (literally, a skeleton), a representation of the piece as figured bass, typeset on the last page of text; and, in the engraved plate, as an Ausführung (a performance; a realization, in that paradoxical condition somewhere between improvisation and composition). (The two are shown in fig. 1.4.) The complex relationship between the two — between Gerippe and Ausführung — has been long admired, ever since Heinrich Schenker took this final chapter as the topic of his own essay toward a theory of improvisation.
My purpose is more modest. I want simply to root around in Bach's language, savoring his way of talking through the events of the Fantasia, seeking an entry into our larger topic. The text of the full paragraph has been given many times. Here is the core of it:
At (1) we see the long sustaining of the harmony in the principal key at the beginning and at the end. At (2) a modulation to the fifth is advanced, where we remain for quite a while, until, at (x) the harmony proceeds to E minor. The three notes at (3), under which a slur is drawn, elucidate the preparation for the following repetition of the chord of the second, which is retaken via an inversion of the harmony. The preparation at (3) is realized through slow figures, in which the bass has been intentionally omitted. The transition from the B with the seventh chord to the following B[??] with the second chord reveals an ellipsis, for a six-four chord on B or a triad on C ought really to have preceded it. At (4) the harmony appears to proceed to D minor, but instead, with the omission of the minor triad on D, the augmented fourth in the second-chord on C is taken, as if one were to modulate to G major, but G minor is taken in its place (6), whereupon, through frequent dissonant chords, the music is returned to the tonic, and the Fantasia closes with an organ point.
No talk here of anything resembling thematic substance. In a comparison of the earlier C-minor Fantasia with this one, Bach writes merely that the earlier one is "mit vieler Chromatik vermischet" (interlarded with much chromaticism) while this one consists "mehrentheils [emphasis Bach's] aus ganz natürlichen und gewöhnlichen Sätzen" (for the most part of quite natural and usual passages). Harmony is the main business — not, however, as a thing in itself, admired for its sonorous beauty or its shaping of phrases, but rather as a function of what might be called the chromatic moment. What matters here is the gradual and deliberate deployment of chromatic tones toward a point of greatest remove from the tonic, the advance of each tone celebrated in some new Figur, in turn setting off a music that approaches the condition of theme. The very first chromatic tone, the G? marked by Bach's numeral 2, provokes just such an event, as if liberating the music from a locked-down tonic. (The numerals are entered only in the figured-bass example, and, tellingly, not in the full-blown fantasy.) Even at the moment of its resolution, the bass having moved to A, it is the G? that lingers, isolated high in the treble and sustained, dissonantly. Only the most austere player would resist the temptation to indulge that high G? with Bebung, that tremulous vibrating of the string that, among keyboard instruments, only the clavichord can produce. At the end of its duration, the tone is embellished with a Doppelschlag, pressing toward a resolution that is frustrated by the introduction of the next chromatic tone: a D? which at once divests the A of its function as the root of a new tonic. Now a dissonant seventh above B, it drives the music to a farthest reach in its chromatic adventure. Bach's X only signals what is to happen here — or rather, what might happen — in the Ausführung. Bach speaks of a modulation to E minor, and to a subsequent "ellipsis" when the bass moves from B[??] (a root) to B[??] (a seventh below a root C).
It is precisely here, where the theoretical idea of the piece is at its most extreme, at the continental divide between sharp side and flat side, where the drive outward toward ever more remote fifths from the tonic is corrected, abruptly and, so to say, irrationally, at the turn toward the subdominant — in this case, and in many others, toward the minor subdominant (achieved, finally, at Bach's numeral 6): it is here, at this inscrutable moment — this ellipsis, as Bach calls it — that the music springs to life, as though in search of its meaning. Runs and arpeggiations give way to music of substance. Those big dotted chords announce the moment. An eloquent rhetoric is engaged. The deep B is sustained beneath a serpentine elaboration of the seventh chord, now in languorous eighth notes, whose curves intimate thematic shape. And here is where theory and practice are in dispute. The sustained B in the Gerippe can't account for all those notes that evolve from it in the Ausführung. Even Bach's description of the ellipsis — the theoretical gap between this deep B and the B[??] that follows — doesn't quite explain what happens here. It is as though Bach pushes the music to its limit, toward a tension at the edge of coherence.
Ellipsis is a device that toys with reason, containing within its space a violation of some syntactic rule: reason and its adversary head to head. It is this tension, at the elliptical moment, where imagination (the improvisatory Ausführung) and its staid companion (the grounded structure of a figured bass, and its extension in some greater tonal design) go at each other. What is creation, Bach seems to say, if not this drive toward the edge, the control of reason holding hard against the flight of the imagination? This latter condition is eloquently amplified by Johann Georg Sulzer as a music performed "from a certain fullness of feeling and in the fire of inspiration" [aus einer gewissen Fülle der Empfindung und in dem Feuer der Begeisterung]. Sulzer's powerful metaphor for the unleashing of the creative act overshadows his failure to recognize the grounding of the act in the no less powerful restraint of what might be called the theoretical imperative.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cherubino's Leap by Richard Kramer. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsPreface
Preliminaries
1. The Chromatic Moment in Enlightenment Thought
A Preamble on Portraiture and Language
The Chromatic Moment
Moments Musicaux
2. The Fugal Moment: On a Few Bars in Mozart’s Quintet in C Major, K. 515
3. Hearing the Silence: On a Much-Theorized Moment in a Sonata by Emanuel Bach
The Klopstock Moment
4. Oden von Klopstock in Musik gesetzt . . .
5. Composing Klopstock: Gluck contra Bach
“A Poet among Composers”
“A Klopstock Who Worked in Tones”
6. Beethoven: In Search of Klopstock
Dramma per Musica
7. Anagnorisis: Gluck and the Theater of Recognition
8. Cherubino’s Leap
9. Konstanze’s Tears
Works Cited
Index