Like love, there can never be too much “good music.” The number of people who use it as a fuel to recharge their appetite for life is beyond counting. —Haruki Murakami in conversation with Seiji Ozawa
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| musical memory of mine—Woodleigh, 2011 |
The experience is universal, but here are some particulars: hearing a jingle from childhood, then reminiscing on bygone innocence. Nodding along to the car radio with a college boyfriend, only to hear a slow-dance song from prom and recall another’s swaying hug. Lacing fingers with a fellow concert-goer at particular moments in a piece, wondering if such euphoria was mutually detected. Every romance owns a soundtrack, if not a series of turning points anchored in music; thus, the telling of love stories contains particular potential for musical metaphor. In The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy details the culmination of both marital stagnation and musical restoration in a husband’s murder of his wife; in Swann’s Way, Proust muses upon the centrality of another sonata to the ultimate union of Charles Swann and Odette. Music interferes in both works by enabling expressions of struggle to either destructive or reparative romantic result.
As witnessed by both Tolstoy’s narrator Mr. Pozdnyshev and Proust's Mr. Swann, music serves as a medium for romance. Pozdnyshev observes in his characteristically-cynical manner that “among the most tormenting conditions for jealous men… are certain social conditions that permit the greatest and most dangerous closeness between a man and woman. You’d be a laughingstock… if you prevented such closeness at a ball, or when a doctor examines his patient, [or with] two people who are occupied with the noblest art, that is, music; a certain intimacy is necessary and has nothing reprehensible about it… Meanwhile, everyone knows that it’s precisely these pursuits, especially music, that account for the greatest number of adulteries in our society” (Tolstoy 50). Here, Pozdnyshev proclaims music the “noblest art,” but also the most relationally deleterious. The “certain intimacy” to which he refers tends to remain safely fixed within the realm of performance, which requires skillful acting from musicians. If controlled, this intimacy seldom infuses personal relationships; however, Pozdnyshev correctly asserts that musicians are especially susceptible to emotional manipulation. After the fateful salon-style performance of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata by his wife and her handsome violinist-friend, Pozdnyshev remarks, “I’d never seen my wife behave the way she did that evening. Those sparkling eyes, the severity and significance of her expression as she was playing, and then the absolute melting quality of her weak, pitiful, blissful smile when they finished. I saw it all, but didn’t ascribe any meaning to it other than…that she felt some new feelings, never before experienced, now revealed or recalled” (Tolstoy 56). Such “weak” and “pitiful” expressions are indeed symptoms of increased susceptibility; music, after all, carries its performers to emotional extremes not explored in daily life. Mrs. Pozdnyshev’s sudden “severity” reflects an intensity of experience exclusively within her imagination, and to return from such heights and depths of “[new feeling]” naturally results in a vaguely post-coital-seeming bliss to which Pozdnyshev is unfortunately privy. At a similar salon elsewhere, Swann compares the experience of hearing the fictional Vinteuil violin sonata to a visitation from an Athena-like Aphrodite: “[He] felt its presence like that of a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who, in order to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to speak to him had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed, light, soothing, murmurous as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, regretful to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form. He felt that [she] was whispering to him of Odette. For he had no longer, as of old, the impression that Odette and he were unknown to the little phrase. Had it not often been the witness of their joys? True that, as often, it had warned him of their frailty” (Proust 495). The particular “little phrase” to which he refers serves him in confidentiality: none other than Swann himself will ever detect that particular note-bundle’s romantic significance. As Proust writes beautifully, the little phrase formed a separate but simultaneous acquaintance with both Odette and Swann, and witnessed the unfolding of their romance, perhaps returning throughout its duration as a sort of motif.
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| from Ari Benjamin Meyers: Solo for Ayumi |
Indeed, music twines its listeners together by stirring otherwise-untapped emotions and memories. Both Swann and Pozdnyshev find musical language well-suited to describing their emotional flux; the latter admits in the milli-moment before forcing a dagger through his wife’s corset that “[he] might still have refrained and not done it, if she’d remained silent. But… these last words of hers…demanded a reply. And the reply had to correspond to the mood [he’d] brought upon myself, which was rising in a crescendo, and had to continue growing. Rage also has its own laws” (Tolstoy 65). A harrowing admission from a generally levelheaded storyteller, whose ears react to the breach of silence, directing the hands to murder accordingly. Lost in the momentum of his emotion, Pozdnyshev violently relinquishes control, not unlike the way some performers spew their fury onto the keyboard via crescendo and accelerando. The terrible notion that “rage has its own laws” echoes ominously throughout the remainder of the novella. Swann suffers similarly regarding Odette, although he never physically expresses his frustration: “‘Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt—that would be fun!’ And his hatred, like his love, needing to manifest itself in action, the pleasure urging his evil imaginings further and further, because, thanks to the perfidies of which he accused Odette, he detested her still more, and would be able… to take the opportunity of punishing her, and of venting his mounting rage on her” (427). Swann envisions a release of rage comparable to Pozdnyshev's, collapsing all of Odette’s “perfidies” and general misbehaviors into a permanent personality flaw. While his handling of the “tone-deaf newt” echoes Pozdnyshev only in motivation, music heightens both characters’ suspicions that their loved ones have engaged in a string of “perfidies.” At the same musical gathering, other guests experience surges of sentimentality: “[When] the pianist [began] a prelude by Chopin, [one Madame turned to another] with a fond smile of knowing satisfaction and allusion to the past. She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only to return more deliberately—with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry out—to strike at your heart” (471). With this, Proust constructs the most incredible characterization of Chopin, surely as affecting in its structure and content as the aforementioned prelude itself. The first Madame, evidently the recipient of a fine music education, naturally falls into the proper state of “fondling” and “cherishing” the turns of melody, reveling in her non-nouveau riche-ness (as is her right to: familiarity with Chopin is a challenging and worthy undertaking). As the “long sinuous phrases” “[reach] out” with the elasticity characteristic of romantic music, the audience-members similarly slip between past and present.
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| same piano, not Woodleigh, 2015 |
Music also tethers people across time through both muscle and involuntary memory. Proust’s narrator notices that “[Madame des Laumes] had had lessons some fifteen years earlier from a piano-teacher of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a woman of genius who towards the end of her life had been reduced to penury and had returned, at seventy, to instruct the daughters and granddaughters of her old pupils. This lady was now dead. But her method, her beautiful tone, came to life now and then beneath the fingers of her pupils, even of those who had become in other respects quite mediocre, had given up music, and hardly ever opened a piano. Thus Madame des Laumes could wave her head to and fro with complete conviction, with a just appreciation of the manner in which the pianist was rendering this prelude, since she knew it by heart” (Proust 473). This “just appreciation” by the Madame springs from a sensibility carefully cultivated in her youth. The piano-teacher mentioned inculcated the descendants of her old pupils with wisdom funneled through time by long-gone teachers; the traditions and techniques of classical music thus weave their way into modernity, from the physical touch of one teacher to another teacher-in-the-making. In an exercise of brain-muscle memory, the Vinteuil sonata catalyzes Swann’s return to a lost time, the early days of his courtship of Odette: “In place of the abstract expressions ‘the time when I was happy,’ ‘the time when I was loved,’ which he had often used… he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips the address ‘Maison Dorée’ embossed on the note-paper on which he had read ‘My hand trembles so as I write to you’… could feel the showers which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all the net-work of mental habits, of seasonal impressions, of sensory uniform meshes in which his body found itself inextricably caught” (Proust 491). Each image, delicately catalogued, progresses to the next in a way characteristic of Proust and his cinematographic principle: “a sequence of separately insignificant differences to produce the effect of motion or animation in objects seen. It vividly conveys the sensation of flux, of a steady linear change from one moment flowing into the next. Thus a series of stills in sequence can create the illusion of movement when riffled through rapidly under our eyes or thrown on a screen” (Shattuck 50). The reader, too, returns to these stepping-stones in the Swann-Odette story; somehow, the music recalls sudden remembrance of things past, reminding Swann to finalize a future. The potency of Swann’s memory permits him to momentarily bottle the volatile smoke of happiness that seems to leave most people the moment it arrives. Sadly, such a foray surely ends as soon as the music does.
Specifically, one’s reaction to music reveals aspects of his or her character and background. Proust catches these subtleties with particular humor. For instance, in the human metronome episode, one of the aforementioned madams—the recipient of a sound musical education—beats time with her head, inspiring her neighbor to wonder “whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played…whether to abstain from them might not be evidence of incomprehension as regard the music and of discourtesy towards the [metronome madam]; with the result that…at one moment she would confine herself to straightening her shoulder-straps or feeling in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds [while scrutinizing with cold curiosity her impassioned neighbor], and at the next would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forget her independence, against the rhythm” (Proust 467). This neat series of cause-and-effect unfolds algebraically (the oscillations of the metronomic madam and her neighbor’s fan alternate to account for all on- and off-beats), and assails the social stratification caused by such assemblies of inattentive audiences. Proust, after all, is the ultimate character-assassin. Next, he procures Swann’s contrastingly intellectual interaction with the music: “[the strain of waiting for the little phrase elicited] one of those sobs which a beautiful line of poetry or a sad piece of news will wring from us, not when we are alone, but when we impart them to friend in whom we see ourselves reflected like a third person whose probable emotion affects them too. It reappeared, but this time to remain poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only…like an iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow whose brightness is fading seems to subside, then soars again and, before it is extinguished, shines forth with greater splendor than it has ever shown, so to the two colors which the little phrase had hitherto allowed to appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and made them sing” (Proust 500-501). Swann “seeing himself” in the music is akin to the process of reading literature, a process that rather greedily claims portions of the story as one’s own life experience. The beautiful characterization of the Vinteuil’s “little phrase” that follows, enriched by optical language, inspires such awe that one cannot help but to admire Swann a little more for having noticed “chords shot with every hue in the prism.” Swann’s solitary engagement with the music thus seems less superficial than that of the two ladies, who perhaps listen with ulterior social motives.
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| musical memory no. 2—Woodleigh, 2013 |
Why and how, exactly, does music permit recovery of the past, tickling the Pavlovian pup in both Pozdnyshev and Swann? The former asks throughout his wife’s performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata: “What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does… It seems to me that under the influence of music I feel something more than what I really feel, I understand more than I really understand, and I can do more than I can really do. I explain this by saying that music acts like yawning, I yawn; there’s nothing to laugh about, but when I hear someone laughing, I laugh” (Tolstoy 54). Here, Pozdnyshev gestures to the excess production of emotion and the heightened perception experienced by all listeners with their preferred auditory strains—the sort of perfect understanding that elevates the listener. The reference to involuntary yawning and laughing is particularly Pavlovian, as are the following mentions: “Consequently, music merely arouses; it doesn’t culminate. When they play a military march, the soldiers march and the music achieves its end; when they sing a mass, I take communion, and the music also achieves its end. Otherwise, it’s only provocation, and what follows as a result of that provocation is lacking” (Tolstoy 55). The slightly disturbing observation that music arouses without culminating refers once again to that excess of feeling produced by music-making and absorption. As in watching a film, one exits his or her present circumstances for a time, but only mentally; therefore, the conclusion of such reveries brings about only frustration and longing. Music that fulfils a distinct function, however, such as summoning from its listeners a physical action, is beneficially performed. Such ruminations are easily assailable: one could argue that the activation of imagination is in itself a form of repair. The unrelenting Pozdnyshev provides a sublime summary of his reasoning: “Excessive emotion that has no outlet… Is it really possible to play [The Kreutzer Sonata] in a drawing room in the presence of women wearing low-cut gowns? To play it and then applaud, to eat ice cream afterward, and gossip about the latest rumors? These pieces can be played only in certain important, significant circumstances, and then, only when certain important actions, corresponding to the music, are demanded… Otherwise the arousal of energy and emotion suited to neither the place nor the time, lacking an outlet, can’t help but produce a harmful effect” (Tolstoy 55). He has a fair point: music, trapped in its hermetic performance venues, reaches its target with increasing rarity. Applause sounds silly and digestifs turn sour following certain sounds.
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| same piano, not Woodleigh, 2017 |
Proust provides insight into the mechanical aspects of musical manipulation. After hearing Vinteuil’s “little phrase” performed for a second time, Swann “sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that…it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon the certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience)” (496). Here, Swann acts as a music theorist, tracing the “closeness of the intervals” and their “constant repetition,” attributing the “frigid and withdrawn sweetness” he experiences to these details. The “certain equivalents” he mentions refer to the system of symbols that comprise musical notation, which like words on a page contain no inherent meaning, but grant satisfaction through analysis. Swann continues theorizing, positing that “the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another)” (Proust 498). Between the piano’s highest C and lowest A, there indeed lies infinite variety of pitch, interval, rhythm, dynamic, etc. (the vast canvas of space and time should assure any listener that he or she has not heard every possible combination). Oddly, some tonalities do correspond directly in composers’ minds to “[tenderness, passion, courage, and serenity];” apparently Vinteuil had been one of those musicians, and although his sonata “might present a clouded surface to the eye of reason, one sensed a content so solid, so consistent, so explicit, to which it gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it on equal footing with the ideas of the intellect” (Proust 497). This is a bold claim: that the brain processes music as it does, say, natural language. Nevertheless, such sounds present “a clouded surface” to the inquisitive empiricist, resisting complete rationalization. Vinteuil’s “little phrase” existed in Swann’s mind “on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned” (Proust 498). Sensations, not substances—such are the phenomena that, as Proust writes quite adorably, “[diversify and adorn]” our interior perceptions. That said, intensive exposure to music does not necessarily vary directly with the ability to produce it, though it does calibrate taste. Pleasures tend to be absorbed, enjoyed, and forgotten; thankfully, music performance ensures repeatability of pleasure. Proust concludes this extended passage by noticing that “so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object…In that way Vinteuil’s phrase, [which represents to us also a certain emotional accretion], had espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was peculiarly affecting” (Proust 498). So long as we live and hear, we remain subject to music’s wiles, susceptible to its clothing our bodies and coloring our thoughts. Representation of “emotional accretion” becomes our reality, as we cannot resist reacting physiologically to the stimulation of stereocilia.
Both Pozdnyshev and Swann marvel at both Beethoven’s genuine and Vinteuil’s fictional genius, respectively. During his wife’s performance, Pozdnychev remarks that “[music] immediately transports me to directly into the spiritual state of the composer. My soul merges with his and I’m simultaneously transported to another state” (Tolstoy 55); similarly, Swann expresses “a wave of pity and tenderness towards Vinteuil, towards that unknown, exalted brother who must also have suffered so greatly. What could his life have been? From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?” (Proust 495). It is natural to inquire after the source of a stroke of genius. Thus, to this day, music students submerge themselves in music history, constructing some context for their interpretations, lest they besmirch a composer’s intentions. In this way, moving performances do foster empathy, forging connections such as Swann’s “wave of pity and tenderness” across centuries. Beethoven’s riotous thundering, for example, remain as relevant to listeners today as when he first summoned such sounds. Thus, the composers of classics tapped—perhaps by divine appointment—into a well of universal value.
At the heart of each story, music is neither truly to blame nor to thank for that which transpires (marriage in Swann’s Way, murder in The Kreutzer Sonata): fate had ripened these characters to its influence. Pozdnyshev reflects that “from [his wife’s first meeting with the violinist] I saw that her eyes glowed in a special way…it seemed as if some electric current was immediately passed between them, evoking identical expressions, glances, and smiles. She blushed, and he blushed; she smiled, and he smiled” (Tolstoy 47). That Pozdnyshev took note of such mimicry and interactive “tightness”—so fundamental to musical teamwork—implies that he was looking for such signs to begin with, and also that his wife did not bother to conceal her emotions. That said, the flow of “electric current” remains out of mere mortal control. His wife’s emotional infidelity was the product of mounting discontent; Pozdnyshev surmises that “If the thing that happened had never happened, I’d have lived to a ripe old age [in perpetual fog], and I’d have thought, as I lay dying, that I’d lived a good life, not an especially good one, but not a bad one either, a life just like everyone else; I’d never have understood the abyss of unhappiness and the foul lie in which I was wallowing” (Tolstoy 39). True misery. Perhaps most miserable is the ambivalence that characterizes Pozdnyshev’s attitudes, one that feels hyper-realistic to the majority of those who lead “not an especially good, but not a bad” existence, numb to gratitude or indignation, for whom good and evil blend ambiguously. Recall that Pozdnyshev operates under rage’s own laws. While Tolstoy wrote with a moral agenda, Proust characterizes fluctuations in affection more mildly: “Physically, [Odette] was going through a bad phase; she was putting on weight… [Swann] would gaze at her searchingly, trying to recapture the charm which he had once seen in her, and no longer finding it. And yet the knowledge that within this new chrysalis it was still Odette who lurked, still the same fleeting, sly, elusive will, was enough to keep Swann seeking as passionately as ever to capture her” (Proust 414). Swann’s love for Odette was pre-existing; Vinteuil’s sonata only mediated, rather than directed, their conversation. His appreciation for the complex “chrysalis” of her character seems to survive changes in circumstance; thus, Swann and Odette receive a somewhat “happier” outcome than Mr. and Mrs. Pozdnyshev. Transferring culpability from the violinist to himself, Pozdnyshev emphasizes that “Everything occurred because of the terrible abyss that existed between us…in the face of which the first occasion was sufficient for precipitating the crisis…If he hadn’t appeared, it would’ve been someone else” (Tolstoy 44). Humans alone pluck the strings and strike the keys that influence their actions, trusting—or not—an omniscient conductor to spare them from the lawlessness of rage.
Works Cited
- Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, edited by D. J. Enright.
- Shattuck, Roger. Proust's Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu." 1963.
- Tolstoy, Leo. The Kreutzer Sonata Variations: Lev Tolstoy's Novella and Counterstories by Sofiya Tolstoya and Lev Lvovich Tolstoy. Translated by Michael R. Katz, New Haven, Yale University, 2014.
