(the following is a bit of an English abstract of my 1959 Yale dissertation and has served as raw material for various lectures on the subject).
Do you know what I think? asks Adrian Leverkuehn.
"Musik ist die Zweideutigkeit als System." Music is Janus-faced by its
very nature. It can move and paralyze. "What passion cannot music
raise and quell," exclaims John Dryden in his Song for St. Cecilia's
Day, 1687. Music is an expert in the use of opiates, asserts
Settembrini
in The Magic Mountain, and Nietzsche speaks of her dual, intoxicating
and befogging, nature. Shakespeare's Desdemona "will sing
the savageness out of a bear" (IV, i) and the merchants in Novalis'
Heinrich von Ofterdingen tell the story of another Orpheus whose
song so charms a sea "monster" that it saves the singer's life and returns
his treasure to him. John Dryden's Thimotheus "to his breathing
flute and sounding lyre, could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire"
(Alexander's Feast, 1697). "Musica Consolatrix" and "Musica Tremenda".
She is the "Mysterium tremendum et fascinosum" in Kleist's novella
about the power of music.
While English late 17th and early 18th century literature
offers a particularly rich harvest of poetry celebrating the contradictory
qualities, or effects, of music, there is in fact testimony to this at
all stages of our tradition.
In the beginning there is Orpheus, probably of
Egyptian origin, whose song not only "moves" the deities of the underworld
to release Euridice, he later on literally moves trees who uproot
themselves to be closer to him and his music, while wild animals
become a tame audience in his presence. Tamino's magic flute has
the same effect on the animals in Sarastro's game park, and Papageno's
Glockenspiel disarms the lascivious Monostatos. Gregor Samsa,
changed into a huge insect, asks himself at a critical moment: was he an
animals since music so obviously moved him? The answer is as ambiguous
as music itself: Jein / Yes and No. In myth it is all life forms, plants,
animals and humans, who are touched by music. Why not an insect with a
human soul?
David soothes the raging Saul with music.
Oskar
Mazerath's concentrated voice shatters church windows and cuts holes
in display cases. Joshua's musical demolition squad brings down
the walls of Jericho. (Check the phenomenon of resonant
frequency). The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised,
sings the bass in Handel's Messiah. Singing proves deadly for the
artist Antonia in ETA Hoffmann's Rat Krespel, and in the
third part of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. Playing the piano score
of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde hastens the death of Gabriele
Kloeterjahn. Homer's sirens and Heine's Loreley lure
sailors to their death by means of exquisite song. And all ages and cultures
know the magic of the lullaby on one hand, and of martial music on the
other.
Rilke is quite aware of this tradition, less at
first, fully during his later years. By his own admission he was tone deaf,
a fate he shares with Goethe, Heine, and others. But he also
realizes early on, that lyrical sound and musical melody have little in
common, and that the laws governing both are different.
Rudolf Kassner, exaggerating to make a point,
states that Rilke was so obsessed with spatial perception, seeing, that
he seemed to have no ears at all. Like Rilke he was a trusted member of
Marie
von Thurn und Taxis' inner circle, and the two genuinely enjoyed each
other's company. Princess Marie loved music, and there was plenty of it
in Lautschin, her estate in Bohemia, and Duino, her castle
by the Adriatic (destroyed in WWI). In order to moderate his strident
hostility towards Austria she takes Rilke to performances of Mozart masses.
While visiting the artists' colony in Worpswede
he hears much music. On one occasion the whole group travels to Hamburg
for a performance of Mozart's Magic Flute. Rilke enjoys it, typically
with his eyes closed in order not to be distracted by what happens on stage,
until Papageno's babble spoils the whole thing for him. He never develops
a taste for opera or music drama, and will tolerate the combination of
text and music only in song. Orpheus, therefore, becomes the artists
par excellence (or, because Orpheus is the artists par excellence, Rilke
feels obliged to tolerate the combination of text and music? You decide).
In 1914 he expects a miracle work from the gifted pianist
Magda
von Hattingberg, namely an access, once and for all, to the world of
of music. In 1919 he meets the young Wanda Landowska,
a recent widow and a refugee from revolutionary Russia, already a musical
legend, and attends her concerts. His Muzot landlord Werner Reinhart
visits him and brings along Alma Moodie, a young violinist who creates
a climate of music, he says, "in which I, dumb as a rock, cut a strange
figure, dumb but grateful." His ears were sensitive, however, and unwanted
sound could move him to rage. The installation of a saw mill in his vicinity
prompts the confession that for a thought to take hold he has to
be able to hear it in his mind, and for that he needs a noise free
environment. He writes from Paris: "My apartment has finally settled and
become mine; and just as I was to sit back and relax and say 'Now', my
neighbor got himself a piano which will probably kill me. It is terrible,
noisy children in Venice, the climate in Duino, and now this oaf who wants
to amuse himself." Princess Marie suggests that he slay the offender.
But he takes the piano out of contention instead. It dare not move, he
writes to Magda von Hattingberg, I have silenced it by force of fury.
But music for him is more than organized, or disorganized,
sound. The word can stand for a variety of things, some of them having
nothing to do with music at all.
There is an early poem called Musik from the year
1899 which serves as a good example. An anonymous "I" addresses a young
man, a boy still, a flute player. It is one of the first examples of Rilke's
use of the word to summon associations like danger, seduction, submission,
squandering. This "music" is an unproductive endeavor, it is fake
artistry before experience, an expression of yearning and untested emotions
rather than life. "Music" here is a metaphor for premature and precocious
creativity, unconscious, unstable, even destabilizing.
Similarly, in the cycle "David plays before Saul"
David is incapable of recalling to the aging Saul the fullness of his former
life, his erotic life in particular, because the singer David is too young
to have experienced it himself. David's mission fails, but he pleads with
the old king to allow him to lie with women "instead of my harp".
In his monograph "Worpswede" (1902/publ.03) the
associations become even more negative. Music is non-art, it stands for
formlessness, is without contour, and is therefore the opposite of painting.
The most striking rejection of music is found in a letter
to Lou Andreas-Salomé dated 8/8/1903. Overwhelmed by Rodin's
art, the making of "real things" (Verwirklichung) he discards music as
formless and sloppy, of dissolving reality, a liquefaction of solids as
it were. There is more here than meets the eye. It is also a description
of two vastly different work habits. Rodin's (and, later, Cézanne's)
disciplined methodical manner ("on faut travailler, toujours travailler,
rien que travailler" he tells the young poet who is now his secretary)
and the literal making of things, as opposed to Rilke's impulsive, irregular,
"musical" habit of creating whole cycles in a few days or weeks or, the
Cornet,
in a single night. He is desperate to learn to make poems 9 - 5 as it were.
Music has become a metaphor for dilettantism, his own easy wordiness included.
He will change, he will work in solitude. Even casual conversations will
be shunned because they are wasteful, "sin", "music" and "surrender' (this
from a letter to his wife Clara dated July 24, 1904).
Lou's answer, however, to Rilke's violent denunciation
of music contains words like non-verbal art, rhythm, form, Gesetz, vocabulary
not entirely unknown to Rilke, and he becomes increasingly willing to consider
the other side of music: organization, creation, re-creation. Still, music
as mortal danger - because it weakens the will and destroys those under
its spell - prevail in such poems as The Island of the Sirens (Die
Insel der Sirenen) and Snake Charmer (Schlangenbeschwoerung). But
there are wonderfully appreciative descriptions of music like Abelone's
Song in Malte, Gregorian chant he hears on Rodin's newly acquired
phonograph, the birth of music from the silent grief over the death of
Linos
(First Duino Elegy). And no music is ever formless when played in a cathedral,
for its outer contours are those of the church' interior.
Beethoven, as Rilke portrays him in his
Malte, becomes the supreme laborer in the medium of music, as Rodin is
in his. Deaf, he no longer rearranges and brings order to a world of sound,
but he creates such a world from within himself, out of nothing as it were,
like the divine creator creating ex nihilo, and his creation, small wonder,
is truly a musica tremenda et fascinosa.
Theory usually comes along in time to fortify impressions.
While in Spain in late 1912 and early 1913 he encounters a book by Fabre
d'Olivet. La Musique tells of the mathematical foundation of music
and its revered role among ancient peoples. That in China a certain
basic tone (frequency) had the status of supreme law, that the reed (flute)
producing it was used as a measuring device both for length and content
(space and volume) remaining in force generation after generation. Fabre
speaks of secret Pythagorean schools that taught the secrets of
music, the magic of numbers, to a select few. Rilke finds himself in enthusiastic
agreement. Schopenhauer had held similar notions about the relationship
of music and the universe (i.e. matter and energy, sound and knowledge):
if one could adequately render in conceptual language what music (sound)
expresses directly, one would have an instant and complete explanation
of the universe, i.e. true philosophy.
Mathematics as the foundation of music (die andere
Seite der Musik); the most formal of human instruments and expressions
intimately related to what he had once believed to be the most formless.
Music, then, as a revelation of cosmic laws, of what governs the universe
at the core (Faust's "was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhaelt").
Hearing, properly schooled, a much finer instrument of perception than
the eye. "Werk des Gesichts ist getan, tue nun Herzwerk" he would
exhort himself a few months later, replacing sight with insight.
And the gifted pianist Magda von Hattingberg was to make
it all possible. But Rilke remained basically insensitive to formal musical
training, and the whole experience turned out to be an unproductive detour,
much as he appreciated her musicianship.
It wasn't formal music anyway that fascinated him now,
but the phenomenon of sound in general, and what it might reveal about
objects both small and cosmic in scale. How to make visible things audible
and to comprehend them, better, with two senses simultaneously. He remembers
a physics lesson. You speak into a kind of funnel the narrower end
of which is covered by a membrane with a needle stuck in it. The vibrations
of the membrane are transferred to the needle which engraves them in a
wax covered drum that is slowly rotated by means of a crank. Reverse the
process, the needle will retrace its own path and the "written image"
of the human voice becomes sound again and is heard from the funnel which
now acts as a loudspeaker. The rudimentary imitation of a phonograph.
In a fertile mind this creates fabulous possibilities.
What if we lead the needle along any irregular line in nature, say, the
sagital suture of the skull, or along the ragged edge of a rock, or the
path of an insect under the bark of a tree? What music would we hear, and
what would the ear teach us that the eye cannot? Crazy? Maybe. Until we
remember that mystics and philosophers saw creation as God's signature
(Boehme speaks of signatura rerum) to be deciphered by man. We then
realize that this seemingly hare-brained scheme has a long and venerable
tradition. Looking over God's shoulder. It is here that physics and
mysticism confess to the same agenda. And if you don't believe me please
read Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and take it up with
him. What Rilke has in mind is an intensity of experiencing and absorbing
that engages all senses at once: that must lead to perfect poetry at last.
In a late poem, again called Musik, musical vibrations
recreate and transform our visible world in sound. Music becomes a mystical/mythical
force, the ultimate art, spanning the here and the beyond, and is at home
in the same unity of space and time in which Rilke's angels
reside.