UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___July 28, 2005_______ I, ___________Christopher Michael Barry________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Music in: Music Theory It is entitled: Tilting at Windmills: The Suspension of Disbelief in Three Tone Poems of Richard Strauss This work and its defense approved by: Chair: __Robert L. Zierolf________________ __David Carson Berry______________ __bruce d. mcclung________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Tilting at Windmills: The Suspension of Disbelief in Three Tone Poems of Richard Strauss A thesis submitted to the Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music in Music Theory in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music Summer 2005 by Christopher M. Barry B.M., Appalachian State University, 2002 Committee Chair: Dr. Robert Zierolf Abstract It is unusual and ill-mannered for a playgoer to leap onstage and steal Juliet’s knife prior to her suicide. Human reactions to representational artworks can produce such extreme responses, but more commonly involve lesser emotional reactions such as tears, smiles, or fear. Our reactions to these explicitly unreal artworks imply that we assign some degree of reality to them. Describing this apparent contradiction, Samuel Taylor Coleridge appealed for a “willful suspension of disbelief” from his readers. Indeed, the idea that appreciators of representational artworks set aside reservations about the reality of objects or events is intuitively appealing. The interpretations of Walton, Holland, Tooby and Cosmides, Radford, Lamarque, Currie, Pavel, Zemach, Schaper, and Galgut (among others) also reveal the corollary concept of fictional worlds, in which hierarchical belief dossiers reflect the primacy of represented fictional propositional information over that of the real world. The immersion in such worlds can, however, be disrupted (“broken”) by techniques trumpeting the work’s fictionality, such as self- commentary, direct address of the appreciator, or excessive concentration on the medium (rather than the content) of representation. The suspension of disbelief has not been applied to music because of disputes over the possibility and nature of musical representation: if one is to suspend disbelief in a musical work, there must be propositional information conveyed by that work to disbelieve. Instrumental programmatic music, however, claims extramusical representation. Its representational apparatus, clarified in the work of Kivy, Walton, Robinson, Wollheim, Goodman, Scruton, Levinson, and Davies (among others), reflects its hybrid origins: both extramusical text and the musical content itself may represent. Analyses of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Eine Alpensinfonie, and Don Quixote reveal the intricacy of musical worldmaking and the suspensions of disbelief required for such works. In particular, the conceptual (rather than perceptual) nature of music’s extramusical content becomes clear. Musical techniques of character-differentiation, event- progression, and description are evident, as are disruptive examples of musical suspension- breaking. The suspension of disbelief and the breaking thereof are as relevant in instrumental programmatic music as in the other arts. Contents List of Musical Examples . 2 Introduction: Tilting at Puppets . 3 1. Why Does Hamlet Speak English? The Willing Suspension of Disbelief Defined . 7 2. Beethoven’s Cuckoo and Mendelssohn’s Ass: Musical Representation Reconsidered . 43 3. A Theory of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief in Instrumental Programmatic Music: Concepts and Conditions . 87 4. Tilting at Windmills: The Suspension of Disbelief in Three Tone Poems of Richard Strauss . 113 Bibliography . 169 Musical Examples 1. Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, II (“Scene by the Brook”), mm. 129–33 . 43 2. Felix Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Overture), mm. 198–201 . 43 3. Richard Strauss, Don Quixote, mm. 222–26 . 76 4. Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, mm. 369–71 . 78 5. Richard Strauss, Don Quixote, mm. 181–98 . 79 6. Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie, mm. 834–50 . 83 7. Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, mm. 46–49, 97–102, 113– 16, and 211–14 . 121–22 8. Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, mm. 6–12, 229–33, and 485–93 . 123 9. Richard Strauss, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, mm. 410–18 . 128 10. Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie, mm. 46–53, 122–26, and 74–81 . 136 11. Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie, mm. 853–58 . 140 12. Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie, mm. 566–70 and 603–607 . 144 13. Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie, mm. 653–73 . 145 14. Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie, mm. 706–13 . 147 15. Richard Strauss, Don Quixote, mm. 13–17, 211–14, 246–48, 382–84, 510–15, 582–90, and 616–17 . 152 16. Richard Strauss, Don Quixote, mm. 1–5 and 123–27 . 154 Introduction Tilting at Puppets And so said, so done, [Don Quixote] unsheathed his sword, and at one spring he planted himself close to the [puppet] show, and with a violent and unheard-of fury, began to rain hacks and slashes upon the Moorish puppets, overthrowing some, and beheading others, laming this, and demolishing that. Master Peter cried out, saying: “Hold, Señor Don Quixote, hold, and consider, that these figures you throw down, maim, and destroy, are not real Moors, but only puppets made of paste-board: consider, sinner that I am, that you are undoing me, and destroying my whole livelihood.” For all that Don Quixote still laid about him, showering down, doubling and redoubling, fore-strokes and back-strokes, like hail. In short, in less than the saying of two Credos, he demolished the whole machine, hacking to pieces all the tackling and figures, King Marsilio being sorely wounded, and the head and crown of the emperor Charlemagne cloven in two. The whole audience was in a consternation; . even Sancho himself trembled mightily, for he had never seen his master in so outrageous a passion. The general demolition of the machinery thus achieved, Don Quixote began to be a little calm, and said: “. [H]ad I not been present, what would have become of good Don Gayferos, and the fair Melisendra? I warrant ye, these dogs would have overtaken them by this time, and offered them some indignity. .” . [Later Don Quixote continued:] “I protest to you, gentlemen, that hear me, that whatever has passed at this time seemed to me to pass actually and precisely so: I took Melisendra to be Melisendra; Don Gayferos, Don Gayferos; Marsilio, Marsilio; and Charlemagne, Charlemagne. This it was that inflamed my choler; and, in compliance with the duty of my profession as a knight-errant, I had a mind to assist and succour those who fled; and with this good intention I did what you just now saw.” Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part II, Chapter 261 That Don Quixote attacks wooden puppets is not a surprise, given that he also attacks windmills, sheep, and wine containers in the course of Cervantes’s novel. At the root of his gallant inanity is an inability to distinguish reality from imagination, sensory perception from mental conception. What is most significant about Don Quixote’s attack on the puppets is that it reflects, to an extreme degree, the human relationship with art. The knight-errant is convinced— never mind his mental fragility—of the reality of characters in the puppet show despite obvious sensory markers to the contrary, such as their wooden material and diminished size. The art of the puppet play is enough to spur him to action in the vain belief that his works can affect 1 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Charles Jarvis, ed. E. C. Riley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 641–43. persons and objects that do not exist in the same sense that he does. The audience member who leaps onstage to whisk away an endangered heroine in a play suffers from the same affliction, as does the observer who tries to grab and eat a pear painted on a canvas. Ultimately, they wind up rescuing an actress who needs no rescue and grasping for a two-dimensional cluster of dried oil, respectively. Art, in all forms, has a curious hold on the human mind. Representational art (as opposed to abstract art) uses the basis of reality both so that its appreciators can relate to it and so that it may present novel concepts; but representations themselves bear the implicit assumption of un- reality, of perceptual existence for imitative purposes. Appreciators laud creators of representations for those representations’ conviction or striking similarities to reality, or for fresh, ingenuous use of media to represent. And yet human emotions seem too easily prone to gullibility and manipulation in representational art: we chuckle at the absurdity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern onstage, gasp at Harper Lee’s descriptions of Scout Finch’s nocturnal peril, and gaze, enraptured and content, at floating water lilies. Representational art has some ineffable characteristic that, despite its existence outside of (but somewhat parallel to) verifiable reality, compels its appreciators to react to it as if it is indeed real. The “willful suspension of disbelief,” a term popularized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seeks to describe and justify this apparent contradiction. Coleridge asked a willful suspension of disbelief