Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism
426
Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism
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Overview
Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection—composers’ treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad—could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226337128 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 426 |
| File size: | 30 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow
Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism
By Deirdre Loughridge
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-33712-8
CHAPTER 1
From Mimesis to Prosthesis
In 1777, Haydn composed an opera based on Carlo Goldoni's libretto Il mondo della luna (1750). The opera tells a familiar buffa tale of a father thwarting his daughters' romantic happiness, but the intrigues that lead finally to love-based marriages stem from inquiries into the world of the moon. The opera begins on the astronomer Ecclitico's roof, where four students prepare to carry his new, giant telescope up into his observatory tower to discover if the moon is filled with people. Just then, Buonafede — an amateur astronomer and father of two lovely daughters — arrives, troubled that he can find "no theory explaining what the moon is." Ecclitico tells Buonafede that the moon is a transparent body inside of which there is another world, and when Buonafede asks how he knows this, Ecclitico explains: "I have built a telescope which pierces through so much that it offers a view of both the surface and the core. Not only does it show kingdoms and provinces, but also houses, squares and people. With my big telescope I can see up there, to my pleasure, the women undress themselves before going to bed." Eager to see for himself, Buonafede enters Ecclitico's observatory, looks through his giant telescope, and spies lunar men and women engaged in various private activities. Little does he realize, the telescope is trained not on the distant moon but on an earthly machine. When Buonafede enters the observatory, Ecclitico commands his servants to "move the machine, drag it near the telescope so that, by looking through it, Signor Buonafede thinks he sees every figure move in the World of the Moon." Meanwhile the opera audience, according to Goldoni's stage direction, sees "an illuminated machine drawn to the top of the telescope, inside of which some figures are moving."
Goldoni designed this observatory scene such that while Buonafede looks through the telescope, the false astronomer addresses the audience in recitative, mocking Buonafede's credulity (his name means "good faith") with remarks such as "Buonafede now believes he sees lunar women up there, while lunar women are down here." When Haydn set the scene to music, however, he altered Goldoni's design by adding instrumental numbers. As Buonafede views a young girl caressing an old man, the audience hears not Ecclitico's commentary but rather a brief, wordless intermezzo. With its stilted and repetitive melody and bass line tick-tocking between scale degrees one and seven, the opening phrase of the intermezzo suggests the mechanical movements of the figures in the false moon. Delicately scored for divisi violins with mutes, the number also sounds distant and extraordinary, inviting us to believe with Buonafede that we are truly peering into another world (example 1).
Haydn's transformation of Goldoni's observatory scene registers a growing acceptance of magnifying instruments outside the narrow circles of natural philosophers — a shift from suspicion to enthusiasm for their ability to reveal other worlds. It also opens onto connections that began to take shape in the 1770s between magnifying instruments, musical techniques, and their associated modes of looking and listening. As Jonathan Sterne has noted, media technologies are often assumed to have either a visual or auditory nature, but there is much to be learned by setting aside such classifications to examine the ways the senses have been used "through and around media." While the magnifying instruments of the laboratory, drawing room, and parterre extended vision alone, the operatic stage and philosophical and fictional literatures forged analogies between magnifying instruments and artificial extensions to hearing. Haydn's observatory scene demonstrates one such analogy in its link between telescopic looking and muted tone. Another was obtained between magnifying instruments and keyboard improvisation, which were likened as means to reveal the otherwise imperceptible, and were said to position the observer as a secret peeper or eavesdropper. At a time when musical listening was generally regarded as an interactive, sociable activity, analogies with magnifying instruments helped familiarize a covert, outside position for the listener. Additionally, the prosthetic power of magnifying instruments provided an alternative to the aesthetic frameworks of mimesis and expression, equipping listeners to accept what they found unfamiliar and incomprehensible as contributing to their knowledge of worlds beyond the unaided senses.
The prosthetic mode — being both a listening attitude and musical techniques able to call forth that attitude — provided a historical and conceptual intermediary between mimesis and metaphysics: by mimicking this worldly technologies, muted tone and keyboard improvisation suggested access to other worlds. These acoustic analogues to magnifying instruments — these musical forms of sensory extension — came together in the slow movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 5, where their prosthetic resonances have since dissipated to leave present-day critics with general impressions of intimacy and a higher reality. A precondition for the prosthetic mode, however, was not merely the invention of magnifying instruments but also their popularization as instruments of knowledge — a cultural process that Goldoni's Il mondo della luna and its setting by Haydn allow us to trace.
Magnifying Instruments
From their introduction in the seventeenth century, telescopes and microscopes were conceived as what we would now call prostheses: they extended vision to the distant and to the small, revealing not only new objects — or "new worlds," as was often said — but also a deficiency in the God-given eye. Thus, Robert Hooke wrote of the senses suffering from "infirmities" that could be rectified by "the adding of artificial Organs to the Natural," and sought "to promote the use of Mechanical helps for the Senses, both in the surveying the already visible World, and for the discovery of many others hitherto unknown." The use of instruments to reveal unknown phenomena to the senses was novel, and differentiated the emerging brand of natural philosophy — pursuing knowledge of nature through experiment and observation — from mathematical sciences, with their long-standing use of measuring tools for largely practical ends. Today, the notion of prosthesis not only finds ready application to magnifying and other scientific instruments that expand the range of perceptible phenomena, but also reigns as a paradigm for thinking about media in general, which through various interfaces with the body function to extend the action of speech, memory, and other human capacities across space and time.
But if the telescope was emblematic of sensory extension, it was equally emblematic of sensory deception. Before being applied to the study of nature, magnifying lenses were devices of "natural magic," their main purpose being to produce wondrous effects by hidden means — to trick the senses. Well into the eighteenth century, magnifying instruments retained strong associations with illusion and error. The dubious status of the telescope finds expression in the frontispiece to Laurent Bordelon's L'histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufle (1710), where it is allied with conjurors, tricksters, and the "extravagant imaginings" of the story's eponymous character (figure 1.1). For the French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius, the telescope furnished a ready illustration of human susceptibility to illusion. In his treatise De l'esprit (1758), Helvétius recounted the "well known story of a country clergyman and an amorous lady." Having heard that the moon is inhabited, the lady and clergyman try to view the lunar people through their telescopes. The lady sees two shadows inclining toward each other and identifies them as happy lovers. The clergyman too sees a pair of shadows, but dismisses her interpretation: clearly, the two shadows are the two steeples of a cathedral. The telescope features here as an instrument through which people see what they wish to see, finding not another world but themselves reflected back.
The satirical popular culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fueled such views of magnifying instruments, providing a site of critical resistance to the claims of natural philosophy to reveal nature's secrets through instrumental practice. It was in this popular culture that Goldoni's Il mondo della luna had its roots. At the suggestion of his patron Count Grosberg, who remembered the piece from the "old fair of Paris," Goldoni adapted the story of a comedia dell'arte piece first performed at the Comédiens Italiens du Rois in Paris in 1684: Nolant de Fatouville's Arlequin, Empereur dans la Lune. Like Goldoni's, Fatouville's comedy concerned a moon-world hoax. It too began at a telescope, as Pierrot and a Doctor debate the existence of a world on the moon. But the telescope in Fatouville's scenario provided only a backdrop, an occasioning factor for the philosophical debate and subsequent hoax perpetrated against the Doctor. The telescope did not entail stage machinery; and it was not employed in the ruse, which instead involved a false lunar visitor to Earth who described his fantastic world to the Doctor.
Goldoni's expanded role for the telescope allowed not only for the spectacle of an illuminated machine, but also for greater dramatic development of the issues attending telescopic vision. Buonafede's experience illustrates a number of themes common to depictions of magnifying instruments, among them the telescopic viewer's blindness to the world around him; his curiosity or desire for knowledge; and his status as a secret observer. For comic writers like Goldoni, as well as for philosophers who distrusted optical instrumentation, these themes furnished material for satire and critique. But as Haydn's setting of Il mondo della luna, and subsequent invocations of magnifying instruments in musical contexts, suggest, they could also be reinterpreted as the necessary conditions for genuine contemplation of other worlds.
The pompous philosopher blind to the goings-on around him was a popular stereotype of eighteenth-century opera buffa, invoked in Il mondo della luna when Buonafede's daughter Clarice remarks about the astronomer Ecclitico, "as long as he thinks about the moon and the sun, his wife will be free to do whatever she wants." As Catherine Wilson has noted, the "absorption of the learned in their subject is always potentially comic (because of all that they do not see)." Magnifying instruments, however, represented a heightened form of absorption and blindness, for they literally altered what the eyes could take in, excluding the surroundings and tuning them to phenomena on a different scale. According to critics, this sensory tuning did not bring observers closer to knowledge but rather removed them from the world with which they should be concerned. As Patrick Singy has shown, many eighteenth-century philosophers were suspicious of differentials in sensory acuity, instead prizing the very commonality that allowed for agreement among different observers, and which thereby furnished a firm ground for knowledge. This attitude also had an ethical dimension, for to go beyond the God-given sensory apparatus was also to upset the natural order. Alexander Pope expressed this ethic in his internationally read Essay on Man (1734):
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind;
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature and his state can bear.
Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.
Pope's poem gave sober voice to what theater and opera expressed through comedy: that those who seek knowledge of all God's creation are fools; the wise remain in their God-given sphere.
Goldoni's telescope scene offered a similar critique of science: if Buonafede had looked around with his own eyes rather than through the telescope, he would have seen the false lunar world and the trick. One of numerous anonymous rewrites of Goldoni's libretto, this one set by Gennaro Astarita for Venice in 1775, sharpened the critique. Goldoni's original choral finale related only obliquely to scientific inquiry, instead offering a chastising lesson about social order: "This is what happens to people who want to change their fortunes: they hope and believe in everything; in the stars and in the moon. But he who wants to become a lunatic will regret it in the end." The final chorus of Astarita's version, by contrast, reiterated the folly of the natural philosopher: "The world of the moon looks beautiful to the ignorant, but people with brains stay in this world."
Magnifying instruments were thus tied up with broader debates about the scope and means of human inquiry, at a time when the desire for knowledge — curiosity — was seen as highly problematic. In his intellectual history of the modern age, Hans Blumenberg credits Galileo's telescope with initiating the "unfettering of curiosity," its special influence among emerging scientific methods owing to its adaptability to "the classical ideal of the contemplation of nature," by contrast with experimental apparatuses that intervened in nature's operations. Early proponents of magnifying instruments indeed identified the advantages of distanced observation over active intervention. As Robert Hooke explained in 1665, contrasting the messy vivisectionist with the stealthy microscopic viewer:
when we endeavor to pry into [nature's] secrets by breaking open the doors upon her, and dissecting and mangling creatures whil'st there is life yet within them, we find her indeed at work, but put into such disorder by the violence offer'd, as it may be easily imagined, how differing a thing we should find, if we could, as we can with a Microscope in these smaller creatures, quietly peep in at the windows, without frightening her out of her usual bays.
Yet while Hooke meant to reflect positively on the microscopic observer's covert, outside position, his account also suggests the uncomfortable proximity magnifying instruments introduced between contemplation and peeping — between a nobly intellectual and a salaciously embodied form of looking.
Goldoni's telescope scene puts the resemblance between reputable contemplation and unseemly peeping on comic display. Buonafede comes to Ecclitico with a purely intellectual curiosity about the moon — a desire for some "theory" regarding its nature. At the telescope, however, his intellectual curiosity is transformed into lusty enthusiasm. As Buonafede describes what he has seen in a series of arias, the pleasure of viewing overrides any knowledge gained: "Oh, what a blessed world! Oh, what great joy! What pleasure, what delight, what fun it gives me!" By exposing the similarity between natural philosopher and Peeping Tom, the scene holds investigators of nature up for ridicule.
Goldoni's scene also credits the telescope with granting access not just to the distant but also to the interior of things. While fantastic in the context of Ecclitico's extravagant claims, the idea that magnifying instruments penetrated interiors was founded in scientific practice. Hooke's characterization of microscopical observation as "peeping in at the windows," for instance, appears in his description of a water-insect with "transparent shell" that allows the observer to see inside the living creature. The ability to look within was commonly featured in treatises on microscopy, which by the 1730s were being pitched to a general audience of amateurs and connoisseurs.
The rise of scientific writing for general audiences helped transform the popular culture around magnifying instruments from one of satirically minded critique to one of acceptance, even idealization. Here, too, roots are traceable to late seventeenth-century France. Bernard de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) introduced a popular style of scientific writing that put the latest astronomical theories in layman's terms (or rather, laywoman's — the text was pitched especially to women), to great international success. Francesco Algarotti's Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) — also widely translated and frequently reprinted — likewise presented the discoveries of natural philosophers in dialogues between a learned gentleman and naive lady, enlivening the subject matter with conversational banter appropriate to genteel society. Popular scientific literature expanded with the work of authors who were also instrument makers, such as Benjamin Martin in England and Cosmus Conrad Cuno and Martin Frobenius Ledermüller in Germany. These authors placed particular emphasis on the telescopes and microscopes (among other devices) that they offered for sale.
The intersection of philosophical and commercial interests enabled telescopes and microscopes to transition "from experimental instrument to philosophical furniture," to use Jan Golinski's phrase for the movement of such apparatus from the specialist domain of the laboratory into middle- and upper-class households. The contrast between Bordelon's frontispiece and one from Benjamin Martin's multivolume The Young Gentleman and Lady's Philosophy shows the resulting shift in the popular image of magnifying instruments (figure 1.2). Featuring a telescope in a well-appointed parlor between a lady and the gentleman who instructs her, the frontispiece illustrates the acceptance of magnifying instruments — and with them the desire for knowledge "beyond mankind" — into cultured life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow by Deirdre Loughridge. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Audiovisual HistoriesOne From Mimesis to Prosthesis
Two Opera as Peepshow
Three Shadow Media
Four Haydn’s Creation as Moving Image
Five Beethoven’s Phantasmagoria
Conclusion: Audiovisual Returns
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index