Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

by Milan Kundera

  These two sentences summarizing the lesson Schoenberg drew from Bach (and from his predecessors) can be taken to describe the whole twelve-tone revolution: in contrast to Classical music and Romantic music, which are built on the alternation of differing musical themes occurring one after the other, both a Bach fugue and a twelve-tone composition, from beginning to end, develop from a single kernel, which is both melody and accompaniment.

  Twenty-three years later, when Roland Manuel asks Stravinsky: "What are your major interests these days?" the latter responds: Guillaume de Machaut, Heinrich Isaak, Dufay, Perotin, and Webern." It is the first time a composer proclaims so firmly the immense importance of the music of the twelfth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth centuries, and relates it to modern music (to Webern's).

  Some years after that, Glenn Gould gives a concert in Moscow for the students of the conservatory; after playing Webern, Schoenberg, and Krenek, he gives his audience a short commentary, saying: "The greatest compliment I can give this music is to say that the principles to be found in it are not new, that they are at least five hundred years old"; then he goes on to play three Bach fugues. It was a carefully considered provocation: socialist realism, then the official doctrine in Russia, was battling modernism in the name of traditional music; Glenn Gould meant to show that the roots of modern music (forbidden in Communist Russia) go much deeper than those of the official music of socialist realism (which was actually nothing but an artificial preservation of romanticism in music).

  The Two Halves

  The history of European music covers about a thousand years (if I take as its beginnings the first experiments in primitive polyphony). The history of the European novel (if I take as its start the works of Rabelais and Cervantes) covers about four centuries. When I consider these two histories, I cannot shake the sense that they developed in rhythms resembling, so to speak, the two halves of a soccer game. The caesuras, or halftime breaks, in the history of music and in that of the novel do not coincide. In the history of music, the break stretches over a big part of the eighteenth century (the symbolic apogee of the first half occurring in Bach's The Art of Fugue, and the start of the second half in the works of the earliest Classical composers); the break in the history of the novel comes a little later: between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries-that is, between Laclos and Sterne on the one side and, on the other, Scott and Balzac. This asyn-chronism shows that the deepest causes governing the rhythm of the history of the arts are not sociological or political but aesthetic: bound up with the intrinsic nature of one art or another; as if the art of the novel, for instance, contained two different potentialities (two different ways of being a novel) that could not be worked out at the same time, in parallel, but could be worked out only successively, one after the other.

  The metaphor of the two halves of a game came to me some time ago in the course of a conversation with a friend and does not claim to be at all scholarly; it is an ordinary, elementary observation, naively obvious:

  when it comes to music and the novel, we are all of us raised in the aesthetic of the second half. A mass by Ockeghem or Bach's The Art of Fugue are for the average music lover as difficult to comprehend as Webern's music. However enchanting their stories, the novels of the eighteenth century intimidate the reader by their form, to the point where they are much better known in movie adaptations (which necessarily denature both their spirit and their form) than through their written texts. The works of the eighteenth century's most famous novelist, Samuel Richardson, cannot be found in bookstores and are practically forgotten. Balzac, on the contrary, even though he may seem old-fashioned, is still easy to read; his form is comprehensible, familiar to the reader, and even more important, it is for that reader the very model of the novel form.

  The chasm between the aesthetics of these two halves makes for a multitude of misunderstandings. Vladimir Nabokov, in his book on Cervantes, gives a provocatively negative opinion of Don Quixote: overvalued, naive, repetitive, and full of unbearable and implausible cruelty; that "hideous cruelty" makes this book "one of the most bitter and barbarous ever penned"; poor Sancho, moving along from one drubbing to another, loses all his teeth at least five times. Yes, Nabokov is right: Sancho loses too many teeth, but we are not in the world of Zola, where some cruel act, described precisely and in detail, becomes the accurate document of a social reality; with Cervantes, we are in a world created by the magic spells of the storyteller who invents, who exaggerates, and who is carried away by his fantasies, his excesses; Sancho's

  three hundred broken teeth cannot be taken literally, no more than anything else in this novel. "Madame, a steamroller has just run over your daughter!" "Yes, yes, I'm in the bathtub. Slide her to me under the door." Must we bring charges of cruelty against that old Czech joke from my childhood? Cervantes' great founding work was alive with the spirit of the nonseri-ous, a spirit that was later made incomprehensible by the Romantic aesthetic of the second half, by its demand for plausibility.

  The second half not only eclipsed the first, it repressed it; the first half has become the bad conscience of the novel and especially of music. Bach's work is the best-known example: Bach's renown during his lifetime; Bach forgotten after his death (forgotten for half a century); the slow rediscovery of Bach over the length of the nineteenth century. Beethoven alone almost succeeded toward the end of his life (that is, seventy years after Bach's death) in integrating Bach's experience into the new aesthetic of music (his repeated efforts to insert fugue into the sonata), whereas after Beethoven, the more the Romantics worshiped Bach, the further they moved away from him in their structural thinking. To make him more accessible they subjectivized and sentimentalized him (Busoni's famous arrangements); then, reacting against that romanticization, came a desire to recover his music as it was played in its own time, which gave rise to some notably insipid performances. It seems to me that, having once passed through the desert of oblivion, Bach's music still keeps its face half veiled.

  History as a Landscape Emerging from the Mists

  Rather than discuss the forgetting of Bach, I could turn my idea around and say: Bach is the first great composer who, by the enormous weight of his work, compelled the audience to pay attention to his music even though it already belonged to the past. An unprecedented phenomenon, because until the nineteenth century, people lived almost exclusively with contem-porarv music. They had no living contact with the musical past: even if musicians had studied the music of previous times (and this was rare), they were not in the habit of performing it in public. During the nineteenth century, music of the past began to be revived and plaved alongside contemporary music and to take on an ever greater presence, to the point that in the twentieth century the balance between the present and the past was reversed: audiences heard the music of earlier times much more than they did contemporary music, and now the latter has virtually disappeared from concert halls.

  Bach was thus the first composer to establish his place in the memory of later generations; with him, nineteenth-century Europe not only discovered an important part of musics past, it also discovered music history. Europe saw that Bach was not just any past but rather a past that was radically different from the present; thus musical time was revealed abruptly (and for the first time) not just as a series of works but as a series of changes, of eras, of varying aesthetics.

  I often imagine him in the year of his death, in the exact middle of the eighteenth century, bending with clouding eyes over The Art of Fugue, a composition whose aesthetic orientation represents the most archaic tendency in Bach's oeuvre (which contains many orientations), a tendency alien to its time, which had already turned completely away from polyphony toward a simple, even simplistic, style that often verged on frivolity or laziness.

  The historical position of Bach's work therefore reveals what later generations had begun to forget- that history is not necessarily a path climbing upward (toward the richer, the more cultivated), that the demands of art may b
e counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and that the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress. Indeed, the future that Bach could discern in the art of his contemporaries and of his juniors must to his eyes have seemed a collapse. When, toward the end of his life, he concentrated exclusively on pure polyphony, he was turning his back on the tastes of his time and on his own composer sons; it was a gesture of defiance against history, a tacit rejection of the future. Bach: an extraordinary crossroads of the historical trends and issues of music. Some hundred years before him, another such crossroads occurs in the work of Monteverdi: this is the meeting ground of two opposing aesthetics (Monteverdi calls them prima and seconda prattica, the one based on erudite polyphony, the other, programmatically expressive, on monody), and it thus prefigures the move from the first to the second half.

  Another extraordinary crossroads of historical trends: the work of Stravinsky. Musics thousand-year history, which over the course of the nineteenth century was slowly emerging from the mists of oblivion, suddenly toward the middle of our own century (two hundred years after Bach's death) stood revealed in its full breadth like a landscape drenched in light; a unique moment when the whole history of music is totally present, totally accessible and available (thanks to historical research, to radio, to recordings), totally open to the examination of its meaning; this moment of vast reappraisal seems to find its monument in the music of Stravinsky.

  The Tribunal of the Feelings

  Music is "powerless to express anything at all: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state," says Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life (1935). This assertion (surely exaggerated, for how can one deny music's ability to arouse feelings?) is elaborated and refined a few lines later: music's raison d'etre., says Stravinsky, does not reside in its capacity to express feelings. It is curious to note what irritation this attitude provoked.

  The conviction, contrary to Stravinsky's, that music's raison d'etre is the expression of feelings probably existed always, but it became dominant, widely accepted and self-evident, in the eighteenth century; Jean-Jacques Rousseau states it with a blunt simplicity: like any other art, music imitates the real world, but in a specific way: it "will not represent things directly, but it will arouse in the soul the same impulses that we feel at seeing them." That requires a certain structure in the musical work; Rousseau: "All of music can be composed of only these three things: melody or song, harmony or accompaniment, movement or tempo." I emphasize: harmony or accompaniment; that means everything else is subordinate to melody: it is melody that is primordial, and harmony is merely accompaniment, "having very little power over the human heart."

  The doctrine of socialist realism, which two centuries later was to muzzle Russian music for over half a century, asserted this same thing. "Formalist" composers were berated for neglecting melody (the chief ideologue, Zhdanov, was indignant because their music could not be whistled on the way out of the concert); they were exhorted to express "the whole range of human feelings" (modern music, from Debussy on, was denounced for its inability to do so); music's faculty for expressing the feelings reality arouses in man gave it "realism" (just as Rousseau said). (Socialist realism in music: the principles of the second half transformed into dogmas to block modernism.)

  The most severe and thorough criticism of Stravinsky is surely Theodor Adorno's in his famous book The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949). Adorno depicts the situation in music as if it were a political battlefield: Schoenberg the positive hero, the representative of progress (though a progress that might be termed tragic, at a time when progress is over), and Stravinsky the negative hero, the representative of restoration. The Stravinskian refusal to see subjective confession as music's raison d'etre becomes one target of the Adorno critique; this "antipsychological furor" is, he says, a form of "indifference toward the world"; Stravinsky's desire to objectivize music is a kind of tacit accord with the capitalist society that crushes human subjectivity; for it is the "liquidation of the individual that Stravinsky's music celebrates," nothing less.

  Ernest Ansermet, an excellent musician and conductor, and one of the foremost performers of Stravinsky's work ("one of my most faithful and devoted friends," says Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life), later became his implacable critic; his objections are fundamental, they are concerned with "music's rai-son d'etre." Ansermet says it is "the affective activity latent in men's hearts… that has always been the source of music"; the "ethical essence" of music lies in the expression of that "affective activity"; with Stravinsky, who "refuses to invest his person in the act of musical expression," music "thereby ceases to be an aesthetic expression of the human ethic"; thus, for instance, "his Mass is not the expression of the mass but its portrayal, which might just as well have been written by an irreligious musician" and which, consequently, provides only a "ready-made religiosity"; by thus undercutting the true raison d'etre of music (by substituting portrayals for religious avowal), Stravinsky fails in nothing less than his ethical obligation.

  Why this fury? Is it the legacy of the previous century, the romanticism in us striking out at its most significant, its most thorough negation? Has Stravinsky violated some existential need hidden within us all? The need to consider damp eyes better than dry eyes, the hand on the heart better than the hand in the pocket, belief better than skepticism, passion better than serenity, faith better than knowledge?

  Ansermet proceeds from criticism of the music to criticism of its author: if Stravinsky "neither made nor tried to make his music an act of self-expression, it's not out of free choice, but out of a kind of limitation in his nature, a lack of autonomy in his affective activity (not to speak of his poverty of heart, a heart that will stay poor until it has something to love)."

  Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?

  What Is Superficial and What Is Profound?

  The soldiers of the heart assail Stravinsky, or else, in an effort to salvage his music, they try to disconnect it from its author's "erroneous" ideas. That noble determination to "salvage" the music of composers who might have too little heart occurs quite often with regard to the musicians of the first half, including Bach: "The twentieth-century epigones, who were frightened by the evolution of the musical language"- meaning Stravinsky with his refusal to follow the twelve-tone school-"and who believed they could redeem their sterility through what they called the 'return to Bach' are deeply mistaken about Bach's music; they had the effrontery to represent it as 'objective,' absolute music with none but a purely musical meaning… Only mechanical performances, in a certain period of craven purism, could give the impression that Bach's instrumental music is not subjective and expressive." I have emphasized the terms that show the passionate quality of this 1963 text by Antoine Golea.

  By chance, I came upon a little commentary by another musicologist; it concerns Rabelais's great contemporary Clement Janequin and his so-called descriptive works, like "Le Chant des oiseaux" ("Birdsong") or "Le Caquet des femmes" ("Women's Chatter"); the determination to "salvage" is the same (here again the italics are mine): "Nonetheless, these pieces remain rather superficial. Now, Janequin is a far more complete artist than people are willing to admit, for aside from his undeniable pictorial gifts, his work displays a tender poetry, a penetrating ardor in the expression of feelings… This is a poet of subtlety, sensitive to nature's beauties; he is also a peerless bard of womankind, to whose praise he brings tones of tenderness, admiration, respect …"

  Note the voca
bulary: the poles of good and evil are designated by the adjective "superficial" and its understood contrary, "profound." But are Janequin's "descriptive" compositions actually superficial? In these few works, Janequin transcribes nonmusical sounds (birdsong, women's chatter, the racket of the streets, the sounds of a hunt or a battle, and so on) by musical means (choral singing); that "description" is worked out polyphonically. The union of "naturalistic"

  imitation (which provides Janequin with some wonderful new sonorities) and erudite polyphony, a union, that is, of two nearly incompatible extremes, is fascinating: this is an art that is elegant, playful, joyous, and full of humor.

  And yet: it is precisely the words "elegant," "playful," "joyous," "humor," that sentimental rhetoric sets in opposition to the profound. But what is profound and what is superficial? For Janequin's critic, superficial are the "pictorial gifts" and "description"; profound are the "penetrating ardor in the expression of feelings" and the "tones of tenderness, admiration, respect" for womankind. Thus "profound" is what touches on the feelings. But one could define "the profound" in another way: profound is what touches on the essential. The problem Janequin touches on in his compositions is the fundamental ontological problem of music: the problem of the relation between noise and musical sound.

  Music and Noise

  When man created a musical sound (by singing or by playing an instrument), he divided the acoustical world into two sharply distinct parts: that of artificial sounds and that of natural sounds. In his music, Janequin sought to put them together. In the middle of the sixteenth century, he thus prefigured what in the twentieth century would be done by, for instance, Janacek (his studies of spoken language), Bartok, or, in an extremely systematic way, Messiaen (in the works inspired by birdsong).