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R06 Muzikologija 68-78.P65 Lietuvos muzikologija, t. 7, 2006 Stephen DOWNES Stephen DOWNES (University of Surrey, Guildford, UK) Remembering and Dismembering the Music of Wagner: Allusion and Destruction in Poulenc, Shostakovich and Henze Prisimenant ir suplëðant Richardo Wagnerio muzikà: aliuzija ir destrukcija F. Poulenco, D. Ðostakovièiaus ir H. W. Henzes kûryboje Abstract This paper examines the topic of intertextual allusion in twentieth-century music with particular focus on the character and function of Wagnerian allusions in the music of Poulenc, Shostakovich and Hans Werne Henze. It offers fresh interpretations of the symbolic significance of Wagners music for composers working in widely differing styles. In each example the Wagnerian allusion performs a symbolic role in the exploration of how to mourn in the catastrophic twentieth-century. Works analysed are Poulencs operetta Les mamelles de Tirésias, Shostakovichs Fifteenth Symphony and Henzes Tristan. Keywords: intertextuality; Wagner allusion; mourning; symbolism; Poulenc; Shostakovich; Hans Werner Henze. Anotacija Ðiame straipsnyje nagrinëjama intertekstiniø aliuzijø tema XX a. muzikoje; ypatingas dëmesys skiriamas R. Wagnerio aliuzijø charakte- riui ir funkcijoms Franciso Poulenco, Dmitrijaus Ðostakovièiaus ir Hanso Wernerio Henzes muzikoje. Naujai interpretuojama simbo- linë R. Wagnerio muzikos reikðmë visiðkai skirtingø stiliø kompozitoriams. Kiekviename pavyzdyje aliuzija á R. Wagnerá atlieka simbo- liðkà vaidmená tiriant, kaip yra gedima nelaimiø kupiname XX amþiuje. Analizuojama F. Poulenco operetë Les mamelles de Tirésias, D. Ðostakovièiaus 15-oji simfonija ir H. W. Henzes Tristanas. Raktaþodþiai: intertekstualumas, aliuzija á Wagnerá, gedëjimas, simbolizmas, Poulencas, Ðostakovièius, Henze. Introduction music.3 I will focus on one aspect of intertextuality that which plays most deliberately and provocatively Compositional allusion to the music of significant with contradiction, where a composer employs allu- predecessors has a decidedly ambivalent and ambigu- sion or quotation apparently only to annihilate or un- ous role in the romantic tradition.1 Such figures are dermine its meaning through juxtaposing a conflicting highly charged and problematic in an aesthetic which allusion or quotation from opposing, polar sources, places the highest value on originality, authenticity and or from symbolic self-quotation. I say apparently, organic synthesis. The character and function of allu- because, in the cases discussed, out of the damage sions may become transformed or rehabilitated as the seemingly done to the original meaning unexpected romantic compulsion to dialectical synthesis moves to residual or transformed symbolisms emerge. From the modern doubleness, where mediation or transition is Wagnerian rubble new musical edifices are constructed resisted in an art of paradox, polarity, contrast and which retain the imprint of their symbolic foundation. conflict.2 In such an aesthetic the romantic symbolic Iconoclasm is a necessary cultural stage on the way to world is questioned as the theologies and philosophies reformation. which underpin its strivings for unification and redemp- In Lawrence Kramers terms, Wagner functions in tion become scrutinized, demythologized and/or rejec- the twentieth century as a cultural trope, as an au- ted. Given Wagners widely held cultural status as the thoritative, symbolic figure which assumes, in certain composer representing the zenith of the romantic modern works a disconcerting ambiguity. Wagner world-view, his music inevitably became the source of represents not the continuing power of symbolic in- allusions and quotations in post- or anti-romantic aes- vestiture but its recession into the dead past. Yet at thetics in which romantic meanings are stripped away, the same time he also represents the uncanny persist- parodied, or in some instances restored or revitalized. ence of investiture, its return to life in inverted form. David Metzer has recently published a wide-ranging Thus Wagners symbolic effectiveness both intrudes study of quotation and meaning in twentieth-century on modernity as a relic and haunts it with a piercing, 68 Remembering and Dismembering the Music of Wagner: Allusion and Destruction in Poulenc, Shostakovich and Henze even dangerous, nostalgia. Kramer is interested in the fragment is the intrusion of death into the work.7 In symbolic function of the actual sound of Wagners the examples which follow, the Wagnerian quotes fill music regarded not as a model or influence, but as the deathly gap, intruding into the work as a figure of acoustic object, a symbolic presence realized by quo- mourning. tation, in how Wagnerian modes of investiture are cited, troped, adapted, and travestied, in how Wagner Francis Poulenc, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1944) becomes a symptom of modernity under the sign of negation.4 Certain familiar examples immediately Poulencs setting of Apollinaires 1917 surrealistic spring to mind. The Tristan quotations in Debussys play Les Mamelles de Tirésias generates a crazy, poly- Golliwogs Cakewalk and Bergs Lyric Suite, for exam- semantic, shape-shifting musical world. Its Prologue ple, are both well known and much discussed, with the is delivered by an artist-dramatist who, as a magician first of course decidedly more ambivalent and parodic capable (in the image of the surrealist artist) of assem- than the other, where the quote is synthesised in Bergs bling and animating disparate objects and moods, has own musical processes. In what follows I discuss less the universe as his playground, the world at his ludic familiar examples which reward close scrutiny and ex- fingertips. He can, he says, create truthful likeness pand our understanding of a crucial aspect of twenti- but it is up to the audience to sustain the creative spark, eth-century music, especially in the light of Kramers the magical fire. Poulenc sets this passage to a series discussion of the ambiguous symbolic status of Wag- of fluid tonal shifts based on chains of half-diminished ners music, and the recent preoccupation in English- chords moving to unresolved dominants. These suc- speaking musicology which the function and character cessions lead to a climax which purports to be a revela- of intertextuality. tion of truth on Eb minor, a key which has a semitonal My discussion is also focussed on the conjunction relationship to the opening D minor. Tonally it is of Wagnerian allusion or quotation with a single and paradoxical: a rise of semitone into an even darker highly problematic expressive function in twentieth- key. It is also, as we shall, tonally prophetic of the century music that of mourning. In its modern forms operas darkest moment. There is then a call to make the elegiac, which is the tone of the artistic work of as many babies as possible (during the war, of course, mourning, offers a codification of the breaks and la- the French suffered terrible loss of life) before a magical cunae, disjunctions and elisions, the testings of con- allusion to exotic, Balinese figures which bear close ventions, the silence and absence and the unspeak- resemblance to the opening figures from Poulencs Con- able. Such forms characteristically invoke a modernist, certo for Two Pianos (1932).8 This recalled musical polysemous language, through which is sought a break- object is, however, brusquely brushed aside by the per- through rather than irretrievable breakdown. Thus functory closing gesture of the Prologue. But its sym- the elegiac tradition registers the revolutions of post- bolic status as a figure of (pro)creative import is as- Cartesian epistemology ultimately the feeling of loss sured, for in its original context in the Concerto this is more profoundly to do with how and what we can exotic figure can be heard as a source of many of the know, rather than loss of an individual. Thus, also, apparently disparate materials which follow. In the there emerges a complex relation between the private Concerto these opening figurations provide the spark and public domains, between the personal response to which ignites the generative processes which lie beneath loss and cultural institutions, precepts and practices.5 the surface stylistic contradictions and gestural incon- The apparent impossibility of mourning in modernity gruities. This magical quality is transplanted into the with its experiences of the catastrophic results of in- Prologue of Les Mamelles. But in the opera their future humanity, the approach to nihilism in the face of the role is limited to one moment only, when they return apparent death of God was an especially potent after the operas one overt Wagner allusion. And in preoccupation for Adorno. The issue raised for him a this moment, comic though it is, they are darkened number a fundamental cultural-artistic questions: how and debased. The passage in question occurs in the to reinvigorate petrified conventions of past forms of entr-acte in the stuff between acts, during the mulling mourning in a godforsaken, post-metaphysical world; over of action between the sheets (if you will), the rest how to discover a hope without being sentimental or between the plays ridiculous call for thousands of anachronistic how to avoid to avoid the false refuge of copulations, the time after the little death, during the a fading theology, the illusions of totality and meaning temporary loss of desire. An instrumental chorale in grasped through resolution and the struggle to achieve Eb minor (recall that this was the key of truth in the
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