"When music is literature, it is bad literature. Music begins where words end. What happens when music ceases? Silence. All other arts aspire to the condition of music. What does music aspire to? Silence." Julian Barnes published the story The Silence in December 2001. It is one of the last works compiled in Stories of Music and Musicians. From Voltaire to Ishiguro (1766-2013), and undoubtedly one of the most theoretical, with possible references to connoisseurs of musical matters in modernity, from Schiller to Adorno. However, what it proposes - the full realization of musical art in silence - is illustrated through the experiences of the protagonist, perfectly aware of the inadequacy of word and musical art, as Leonard Bernstein already pointed out by emphasizing that "only artists can explain the magic," and they do so precisely by creating. If we talk about music, he considers, "the only way to really say something about music is by writing music."
We certainly cannot know what music means, but instead we do understand, and unequivocally, what it evokes.The fruitless effort to put words or find adequate expressions for the musical fact has given rise to endless musicological debates well into the 20th Century. And yet, that theoretical impossibility is something that fiction, through more or less invented stories - and, therefore, through the use of a parabolic style - exploits and manages to communicate. We certainly cannot know what music means, but instead we do understand, and unequivocally, what it evokes, to the extent that wewe feel. The reader, immersed in that other world, apprehends as their own the musical experience of the characters in the plots -be they composers, performers or mere listeners-, associating facts and feelings with that sound discourse that, without meaning anything a priori, accompanies and modulates the mood.
The emotional swing, musically induced, is expressed in a masterful way in The Singing Lesson, by Katherine Mansfield. In the story, the music teacher, who has just received terrible news, makes her students sing mournful melodies; melodies that miraculously transform into a cheerful tune when she learns that the news was, in reality, a misunderstanding. The plot is simple, almost naive, but the merit of the narration -which captures the reader's attention and provokes their empathy- lies in the protagonist's internal monologue: the emotional affliction is interspersed in counterpoint and without interruption with the external reality -the musical one- shared with the students. Without knowing it, or hardly understanding anything, they unfold the soundtrack of their teacher's intimate life.
Also The Waltz, by the irreverent Dorothy Parker, makes use of this resource -that kind of maximally subjective voice-over- in a very funny way. The protagonist agrees to dance with a stranger, against her will and despite herself; for she will suffer stomps and all kinds of mishaps, which she internally glosses and to which the reader has access, but not the one responsible for them. An abyss opens -and, hence the humor- between her perfectly polite attitude towards him, and the slanders she shares with the reader. As we suggested, that participation in others' affections -by fully entering their emotional world- is not properly the work of music, but of the narration that incorporates it: it adds a common support to the plot, which allows the reader to empathize through the attentive listening -the interior reading, our interpretation- of everything that happens to the other selves.
THE MUSICAL RAPTURE: FROM THE DEMONIC TO THE CELESTIAL
The passionate character of music -the rapture it promotes- is not something that modernity has discovered, since obviously archaic civilizations already granted it a fundamental role in ceremonies and religious rites, with Orpheus -for example- being one of the most representative characters of the transport it propitiates, of its capacity to move all beings and even conquer death. That power will also be raised in one of the first narratives compiled in the volume we recommend, having been collected in its day by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm from popular lore: it is The Children of Hamelin, in which a flutist capable of freeing the town in question from rats collects what he has not been paid by taking the children.
Returning, however, to the series of stories that in more recent centuries have been written about that power, extremely sad is the story Janko, the Musician, written by Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1879. A story starring a fragile being who is endowed, however, with a special capacity to perceive music in all surrounding phenomena ("his mother could not take him to church because, when the organ began to play or the choir began a song with a sweet voice, the boy's eyes would cloud over and he seemed to be looking from the other world"), and who succumbs to his uncontrollable passion, in this case focused on the acquisition of a violin.
That string instrument has starred in some of the most incredible and dramatic stories about music, among which we must also highlight Rothschild's Violin, by Anton Chekhov. In one sense or another, many authors have pointed out the demonic aspect of music, the possession or rapture it awakens, inspired by archaic myths or those of their time. One only has to think of a Paganini, a living myth. In this sense, Leo Tolstoy illustrated in his Kreutzer Sonata the power of seduction inherent in music, the communion of souls that occurs through performance.
"The performer was sweating profusely and writhing like a monkey. In his frenzied music I could almost see the vague silhouette of satyrs and maenads dancing and whirling madly through boiling abysses, through clouds, through smoke and through lightning"
No less chilling, on the other hand, is Howard Phillips Lovecraft's story titled The Music of Erich Zann. Music that the protagonist remembers having witnessed in an apartment on a street he strangely can no longer find, music performed on the viola by a mute individual with inexplicable behavior, who acts as if possessed: "Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, the shrieking and wailing of that desperate viola increased. The player was sweating profusely and writhing like a monkey (…) In his frenzied music I could almost see the vague silhouette of satyrs and maenads dancing and whirling madly through boiling abysses, through clouds, through mists and through lightning."
The enigmatic aspect of music can also appear in its celestial aspect -still in "rapture" mode- for example in Maese Pérez the Organist, by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: "from each of the notes that formed that magnificent chord a theme developed, and some near, others far, these brilliant, those muffled, one would say that the waters and the birds, the breezes and the fronds, men and angels, earth and heavens, each sang in their own language a hymn to the birth of the Savior."
E. T. A. HOFFMANN, MASTER OF FANTASY
Of course, if we are to mention an author who stands out for his fantasy when it comes to crafting plots about music, we must choose Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, who changed his original third name (Wilhelm) to Mozart's second, due to the devotion he felt for him, and which he demonstrated, for example, in a fantasy dedicated to the favorite opera of the first Romantic generation: «Don Juan». A Fabulous Adventure Befalling an Enthusiastic Traveler. In addition, he wrote sinister -and masterful- stories such as The Sandman, was a composer and critic, attending premieres of some of Beethoven's symphonies. As if that weren't enough, he pulled a fictional character out of his sleeve - Johannes Kreisler - who would be his musical alter ego. Gustav Mahler read and reread Hoffmann, going so far as to state that "he has written about music with greater intelligence than anyone."
Let's conclude, then, with the mention of this author's story included in the valuable volume that inspires our post. It is Councillor Krespel, in which the eponymous protagonist seems to address the reader, as if reprimanding him for his incredulity: "laugh at me if you wish, this dead object [the violin] to which I alone give life and sound, often speaks to me in a very strange way and, when I first played it, I felt as if I were the only mesmerist capable of awakening that somnambulist to tell me aloud what is inside it." It is a story from 1818, published therefore 200 years ago, but due to the way it conveys musical alchemy - which so imperiously conditions the spirit, awakening unexpected affections in humans - it retains its power intact.
Featured image: From left to right and from top to bottom: Maese Pérez, the Organist by Gustavo Adolfo Béquer, Tales of Music and Musicians by Voltaire A. Ishiguro, The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy, Yanko the Musician by Henryk Sienkiewicz, The Singing Lesson by Katherine Mansfield, Councillor Krespel by Hoffmann, The Music of Erich Zann by H. P. Lovecraft