Music, metaphor and metaphysics

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Kramer, Lawrence

As to music, metaphors bring its sounding patterns into a reciprocal engagement with the array of subjective states and social conditions that constitute its historical world. Both The pelican and Autumn sonata use a piece by Chopin to articulate and explore an acute psychosexual conflict rooted in maternal abuse. For Strindberg at the fin de siècle, this usage was the stuff of up-to-the-minute psychological insight and the ferment of contemporary neurosis, the strange blend of analytic detachment and emotional warping that quickly came to be known as Freudian. For Bergman, a similar usage was an intellectual heritage and a dark emotional legacy, still compelling 70 years later but beginning to show signs of wear. Both the play and the film hear, and let us hear, more than mere mood music in their Chopin. The music has diagnostic value because it is taken to anticipate their entire climate of thought. The sensibility of later depth psychology emerges in part as a legacy from the sound of Chopin.

This is not an idea that the play and the film assert, but a relationship that they elicit by their utterance. In both cases, too, and this is typical, the utterance has specific focal points involving both form and performance. Bergman focuses primarily on the disparity between the ?-minor Prelude 's rueful melody, which comes in four quasi-symmetrical segments separated by silences, and the angular, dissonant accompaniment, which is continuous until the middle of the third melodic segment, at which point it begins to disintegrate. The question raised, in this case explicitly, is whether to emphasise the disparity of melody and harmony (the way of aggrieved reverie) or to reconcile them with the help of a certain ironic detachment (the way of suppressed pain). Strindberg highlights the texture of the FantaisieImpromptu's Allego agitato, which is both rhythmically tangled - continuous quaver sextuplets in the bass against virtually continuous semiquavers in the treble - and brimming over with notes, an overabundance of notes with which the pianist seems to compensate for the scarcity of love and nourishment his mother has inflicted on him. The situation invites a mode of performance that is not only frantic in pace, but also hard-driven, suggestive of the futility of the son's efforts as he in effect tries to burn the notes to keep himself warm.

FROM THESE INTERCONNECTIONS it would not be hard to make out a case for the presence of emotional hunger and oral rage in certain pieces by Chopin, and with them conceptions of drive and infantile sexuality that would become familiar and explicit only many years later. Nor need one be straightforwardly Freudian about this. We don't need to believe that Chopin 'had' such feelings or even that he expressed them, only that he gave voice and texture to the kinds of experience that would lead others to fantasise and theorise about them. Nor would it be hard to find characterisations that are not psychological at all. In a culture increasingly dominated by print media and riven by political and social uncertainty, it would not be surprising to find an efflorescence of oral nostalgia. The dark forms of it under review here might well find their more luminous complement in the bel canto style of Chopin's melody in genres like the nocturne.