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. Henze’s 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 Wagner’s 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 Poulenc’s operetta ‘Les mamelles de Tirésias’, Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony and Henze’s ‘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 Henze’s 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. Henze’s „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 Kramer’s terms, Wagner functions in tion become scrutinized, demythologized and/or rejec- the twentieth century as a ‘cultural trope’, as an au- ted. Given Wagner’s 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 ‘Wagner’s 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 Wagner’s 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 Poulenc’s setting of Apollinaire’s 1917 surrealistic spring to mind. The Tristan quotations in Debussy’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias generates a crazy, poly- Golliwog’s Cakewalk and Berg’s 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 Berg’s 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 Kramer’s 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 ner’s 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 opera’s 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 Poulenc’s 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 opera’s 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 play’s 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 closure.6 For Adorno, the only possible response to Prologue) is played Très lent, establishing an elegiac the impossible burden is the ‘sacred fragment’; for ‘the tone of mourning. The choir enters and requests that 69 Lietuvos muzikologija, t. 7, 2006 Stephen DOWNES those who are weeping at the events just occurred (the of his surrealism Poulenc ‘constructs musical equiva- deaths of Presto and Lacouf) should weep no more lents of crutches – the crutch as crotch, fetishized, eroti- and wish for victorious children. They hear a ‘strange cized, desired’) but there are still subsurface, symbolic noise in the pit’ (fig. 6). Over sustained, low G connections: Tiresias is divested, but meaning is still dominant-type chord figurations (whose instru- invested in the work’s apparently ridiculous antics. Tell- mentation and repetitiveness marks them as a dark ingly, in Poulenc’s description of the fragmented recollection of the magical music from the Concerto) compositional process of an Apollinaire song which a gaggle of new babies cry ‘Papa’ in falsetto tenor voices. he worked on whilst composing the opera (‘Mont- In ‘astonishment’ the chorus on stage lean over and parnasse’, 1941–5), he admits that never transposes sing a cooing ‘Ah’ on F-B-Eb-Ab. This is the Wagner sections from the key in which they come to him; his quote, for the ‘Ah’ is sung to the infamous ‘Tristan main technical problem is the linking of these frag- chord’: the allusion marks the étonnement of the love- ments. The sutures over which he takes so much care death, the pit as the womb of musical surrealism. This bring the compositional cadavre to a sort of secondary sound emerges from the underworld into which the organic life, one in which perverse or debased eroti- magical director had descended in the Prologue. If cism, the amour of the ‘abnorm’, mingles with those on stage perform comic antics like crazy, intoxicating verve and touching melancholy. As he irrational marionettes, they are being manipulated from wrote ‘the poem of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles beneath rather than above. The supreme conjurer lies de Tirésias, full of latent poetry, never descends into confined in the pit (where Wagner, the magic man of humour that is merely skin deep’. ‘Therefore it is es- the theatre, desired to hide), reaching up from his base- sential’, he continues, ‘to sing Les Mamelles from be- ment in the abyss in an attempt to perform his aes- ginning to end as if it were Verdi. It will perhaps not thetic illusions. be easy to make this understood by interpreters who The moment’s ambiguous tone – generated by the generally stick to the outward appearance of things’.11 coexistence of skittish humour (focussed on the Wagner And if you sing it like you would Verdi, you should quotation) and melancholic religiosity – is a defining also listen for Wagner’s surprising guest appearance. one in Francis Poulenc’s musical style. In Poulenc, hu- Philip Brett observed that in Francis Poulenc’s Con- mour’s pervasive ‘double’ is mourning.9 But, as Daniel certo for Two Pianos, the source of the magical figures Albright points out, in Poulenc’s music ‘clowning and of Les Mamelles, a café tune ‘strangely morphs itself weeping’ characteristically ‘switch too fast’, and seman- into a fragment of Wagner’s magic fire music’ from tics are thereby ‘violated or teased’. The abrupt juxta- the Ring cycle. This ‘little metamorphosis’, which position of tragedy and farce leads to Poulenc’s own ‘happens fleetingly but unmistakably’, is a ‘sign of brand of modernism, founded upon the ‘emancipation modernist cool’. For Brett, this draws Wagner’s music of semantic dissonance.’ The musical materials in them- ‘into the orbit of ironic mimicry’, a characteristic fea- selves may sound either traditional, old, or borrowed – ture of certain gay cultural practices.12 In Kramer’s the music is far from the ‘emancipated dissonances’ of view this allusion is ‘both a silly joke and an almost Schoenberg or the emancipated rhythms of Stravinsky – compulsory acknowledgement of the sneaking resem- but Poulenc’s assemblies and carefully controlled blance between Poulenc’s tune and Wagner’s motives.’ switches of expressive character and stylistic allusion For Kramer the crucial aspect is that ‘the citation is are path-breaking as well as image breaking. They are clear; what it means is not’, and that this ‘semantic also heart-breaking, for the funeral of Presto and Lacouf, indeterminacy may be just the point. Highlighting the the gamblers who shoot each other in a duel at the end status of the motive as an unfixed, roving signifier gives of Act One of Les Mamelles, is far from parody. Albright the index of modernity.’ Characteristic of artistic mo- concludes that Les Mamelles ‘is “authentic” in that there dernity, Poulenc’s allusion both embodies and traves- is not one moment of our lives in which there isn’t a ties ‘Wagnerian seriousness’ and ‘Wagnerian desire’. funeral march playing somewhere in the back of our For Kramer, this double character is assured as ‘its skulls.’10 Poulenc’s music often reminds us of this. It recycled motives retain much of their power, even their frequently sounds as a series of ephemeral, beautiful or magic, but they have lost their epiphanic value’, it is a familiar moments, which we prize and recognise at the ‘throwaway’. Inserted into Poulenc’s Concerto, the same time as we realise that their end is imminent, in magic fire music is ‘no longer an enchanting fragment their exquisite charm their loss is already felt, the aura of Wagnerian allegory; it is a fragmentary allegory for has already faded. the Wagnerian enchantment itself.’ ‘Such moments’, Tiresias’s body may be cut up (Albright hears Les Kramer continues, ‘testify to the authority of symbolic Mamelles as a cadavre exquis, and in the mutilated bodies investiture by investing in its reversal: they are moments 70 Remembering and Dismembering the Music of Wagner: Allusion and Destruction in Poulenc, Shostakovich and Henze of symbolic divestiture. They catch the sublimating world where love and death could still be concentrated movement that elevates the modest to a value beyond in the exemplary fates of a Siegfried or an Isolde.’17 reason And we hear this in the music itself, which In the finale motives may, however, still be heard to is, of course, not itself at all’13. Kramer’s analysis is a play a generative role, most notably when the ‘Fate’ finely judged assessment of the function of Wagnerian and Tristan motives are synthesised within the appar- allusion in Poulenc, though it actually rests on a far ently naïve Allegretto melody (3 and 4 bars after fig. 113). weaker or debatable allusion than the one described Indeeed, as Kramer notes, transformations of the ‘Fate’ above from the entr’act to Les Mamelles. motive ‘haunt the mourning process’, but the process of organic connection is contradicted by the doubly Shostakovich Symphony No 15 (1971) mechanical ending, based first on dwindling echoes Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony evokes con- of a pounding bass derived from the machine of flicts and contradictions through symbolic collisions bellicose destruction heard in the first movement of between humour and pathos, quotation and inward the Seventh Symphony, and secondly on the return of subjective expression, the mechanical and organic, the the rattle and bells of the machine music of Fifteenth’s human and inhuman.14 In this regard, though his own first and third movements.18 If this truly is musical style and characteristic expressive tone is about mourning music (Kramer hears the Tristan motive as far as one can imagine from Poulenc, their is much reduced to an ‘empty skeleton’, but all skeletons bear common technical and procedural ground. The first the essence of the structure of the dead body; they are movement famously quotes Rossini’s well-known Over- not truly empty) then a remnant meaning can still be ture to William Tell, which seems a comically incon- grasped out of the moment of gravest despair. The gruous gesture, a moment of surprising recognition quotations of Wagner function as symbols of lost cul- for the listener, but one which nonetheless contains tural responses to death, but in opening up that world demonstrable motivic relationships to surrounding the Symphony’s bleak outlook is tinged with the mer- materials (i.e. the quote is understood in retrospect est glimmer of hope of constructing a successful, le- as prepared by certain figures preceding its appear- gitimate, and ‘authentic’ mourning process in a post- ance). In the last movement musical symbols of the Stalinist, post-Second World War world. deathly and sexual appear in the guise of quotations of Wagner’s Fate motive from the Ring cycle and the Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous (1963) opening melodic gesture of the Prelude to Act 1 of and Tristan (1971) Tristan and Isolde. Shostakovich thus raises Rossini’s The conjunction of profound mourning and com- ‘Operatic’ antipode, for if we take Wagner to be the plex intertextuality is one of several features in Shos- German operatic successor to Beethoven then this takovich which often carry a strong Mahlerian tone. polarity can be heard to sustain (and of course in Similar debts to Mahler can be heard in the (otherwise Shostakovich’s Symphony also parody) the Rossini- very different) music of Hans Werner Henze. As Henze Beethoven opposition which Carl Dahlhaus famously wrote, Mahler’s music ‘contains much grief for things raised as a great divide in nineteenth-century music.15 that have been lost, but messages for the future of man- The meaning of such quotations in the Symphony kind should also be discerned: one of them is hope; seems puzzling and opaque. Christopher Norris writes another, directed at the very essence of music itself, of the ‘impenetrably cryptic character’ of ‘riddling love’. ‘Its provocation lies in its love of truth and its gestures’ which ‘often sound like a defence built around consequent lack of extenuation.’19 In an essay of 1963 the private places of memory’; ‘the unsettling coexist- he wrote: ‘we may develop the line of thought of ence of a deep lyrical impulse with a reflex desire to [Mahler’s] music, for above and beyond its incontest- mock, subvert or defensively cover the sources of able necrological qualities, it contains many new start- emotion.’16 The finale can be heard as a cryptic re- ing-points, challenges and stimuli’.20 Aesthetically, this sponse to the deathly tone of the slow movement. is reflected in Henze’s preoccupation with conjunctions Kramer argues that a move out of death into redemp- of beauty, love, death, abjection and regeneration, in tive transcendence or transfiguration is no longer pos- a visionary art which offers the possibility of ‘redemp- sible in Shostakovich’s world, for it ‘has had too much tion’ but one which is ‘multilayered’ in its ‘illusions death for any symbolic power to manage’. ‘Love is and Utopias’.21 absent’, he continues, and ‘heroic death impossible, In the summer of 1963 Henze set Rimbaud’s ‘Be- because the world is no longer one in which meaning ing Beauteous’, from Illuminations (1872–3) for high is credible, even allegorically.’ The finale’s passacaglia soprano, harp, and four cellos.22 The poem speaks of thus ‘constitutes an extended act of mourning for the metamorphosis through destruction and creation. 71 Lietuvos muzikologija, t. 7, 2006 Stephen DOWNES

Sounds (music and whistlings) cause the adored, beau- predecessor at moments of heightened expression. This tiful body to expand and burst open, into vibrant colour, cultural legacy and technique is also manifest in an movement and sensuality. The spectators become embedded allusion to the opening of Wagner’s Tristan acolytes, initiates intoxicated by the new beauty, em- and Isolde towards the final section of Being Beauteous braced and reclothed by it. But the whole is mingled (bb. 189–192). The allusion occurs as the beautiful with death and violence. In the final lines the ‘Being form in Rimbaud’s text is most imperilled and yet also Beauteous’ becomes a grotesque dummy: most alluring. It emerges from the texture after the line ‘Oh! Nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps Devant une neige un Etre de Beauté de haute taille. Des amoureux.’ (Oh! Our bones are clothed with a new sifflements de mort et des cercles de musique sourde font and amorous body.) Henze’s musical allusion therefore monter, s’élargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré. suggests that it is the Wagnerian erotic tone which Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se might be borrowed to clothe the skeletal, deathly body, dégagent autour de la vision, sur le chantier. Des blessures that the Wagnerian might be drawn upon as a source écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Et les fris- of new beauty and new life. Wagner’s melody is sons s’él vent et grondent, et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se è transposed, rhythmically altered and texturally em- chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques bedded but remains in its original register, played on que le monde, loin derri re nous, lance sur notre m re de è è the cello. It also retains a suggestion of the expressive beauté, – elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh! Nos os sont rev tus ê rhetoric of resolution to the dominant of A minor, d’un nouveau corps amoureux. la face cendrée, l’écusson Ô and the cello is of course the instrument which carries de crin, les bras de cristal! Le canon sur lequel je dois m’abattre the erotically-charged melos of Wagner’s opening travers la m lée des arbres et de l’air léger! à ê gesture. [Against the snow a high-statured Being of Beauty. Both of these Henze’s Tristan allusions (the liter- Whistlings of death and circles of faint music cause ary one in his essay and the musical one in the Rimbaud this adored body to rise, expand, and quiver like a setting) are examples of non-satirical intertextuality. ghost. The colours proper to life deepen, dance, and (They are comparable, therefore, with Berg’s Tristan detach themselves round the vision in the making. reference in the Lyric Suite rather than Debussy’s Scarlet and black wounds burst in the fine flesh. And Tristan cakewalk.) Neither irony nor alienation are shudders rise and rumble, and the frenetic flavour of the prime interest for Henze. By contrast with Mahler, these effects is filled with the mortal whistlings and one of Henze’s beloved models for musical allusion the raucous music which the world, far behind us, and intertextuality whose preoccupation with fate, death hurls at our mother of beauty – she recedes, she rears and mourning often leads to ironic or parodic styles, herself up. Oh! Our bones are clothed with a new and Henze’s intersections of Eros and Thanatos may in- amorous body. O the ashen face, the escutcheon of clude contrasting functions, including the parodic, but horsehair, the crystal arms! The cannon at which I largely lack Mahler’s characteristic tendency to imbue must charge across the skirmish of the trees and the this with devastating irony. light air!]23 Being Beauteous is in effect a miniature, a small- Henze recently wrote, in words and images which scale and intimate exploration of erotics and death echo the vision of Rimbaud’s poem, aesthetics partially viewed through a lense more or The sight of beauty moves us, we feel a sacred less overtly stolen, via Mahler’s example, from Wagner. awe, it plucks a string within us which vibrates and Henze continued and intensified his search for a re- reverberates. It causes something to happen inside us, demptive mourning process through Wagnerian allu- perhaps it’s a kind of conversion. Wounds and sores sion in Tristan (1973), a large-scale piece for piano, disturb this harmony, as we know. We cannot prevent orchestra and tape in which the private and the public our thoughts from turning from the sight of a hand- spheres coexist, where multiple quotations are flaunted some human face to pictures of its destruction. And in massive textures and explosive gestures. Henze de- we cannot prevent mourning and regret sounding like scribed the piece’s origins as lying in a Dionysian orgy an incessant dissonance, distracting us from the con- of creation and destruction, in which various objects templation of beauty, a steadily dripping poison which were thrown around in a ‘diabolical, neurotic, evil, clouds our sight and makes our eyes smart. ‘Whoever lunatic element’. Amongst the work’s many intertextual looks on beauty is already in death’s hands’.24 materials (which include the ambigiously ‘Wagnerian’ Henze’s final line is a quotation from the ‘Tristan’ opening of the First Symphony of another Wagnerian Venetian Sonnet of August von Platen (1824). It is antipode, Brahms) Henze included a ‘violation’ of the characteristic of Henze to recall and quote a beloved all-too-familiar Funeral March from Chopin’s Second 72 Remembering and Dismembering the Music of Wagner: Allusion and Destruction in Poulenc, Shostakovich and Henze

Piano Sonata, generated first through the ‘mating’ of first playing: ‘like veritable waves, the counterfeit ver- a piano with a recording on a pianola mechanism and sions flooded over us, voluptuous, soft, and mellow in then through distortions on tape. Henze described this their droning. Suffering and reconciliation, death and process as leading to effects of ‘overpowering hideous- redemption in one, emerged from this hothouse; more ness. Now it sounded grotesque, terrifying, this viola- and more new experiences of suffering, information tion, this battering of music. Bruitismo. Brutalism. about suffering, and new forms of suffering were Physical aggression. Clattering, groaning, howling, accumulated.’30 However, by contrast with the hideous roaring.’25 Kramer has recently written on the multi- results of the violation of the Chopin Funeral March, ple meanings of the Chopin Funeral March in the recovery, restoration and the ‘transfiguring value’ of context of ‘modern death and the crisis of symboliza- Wagner’s Tristan is suggested; ‘but what is recovered’, tion’. Heard as an example of the continually rein- Kramer argues, ‘is only the performative magic of the vented figures of symbolic order, it marks a key original, not its content’. It is neither rapturous nor moment in the social-historical context of the debase- Utopian, but what Henze recovers is ‘sorrow without ment of death and new means of commemoration. irony. He does so by putting the third act lament in Kramer relates Chopin’s march to the symbolic ‘log- the place of Isolde’s transfiguration, but not to oust it: ics’ of catacombs, the Paris morgue and the cemetery. to become it, rather, as befits the modern age. The He also recalls its use at the Kennedy funeral in 1963, rehumanized voice of the final prelude brings with it when the recourse to this nostalgic symbol at a mo- the capacity to mourn, to let grief overflow, and so to ment of trauma and apparent meaningless only con- replace horror by lament ’31 The crucial dimension firmed that ‘it may be that the world in which Cho- here is probably autobiographical: Henze wrote the pin’s funeral march can do any form of cultural work epilogue in Venice in the wake of the deaths of Salva- has become a thing of the past’.26 In 1973 Henze dor Allende, Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden and Ingeborg resurrected this tired old musical symbol from its own Bachmann – a confluence of political and personal di- apparent demise, but in a perverted, incestuous union mensions of death and horror, suffering and torture. of the piano, the instrument of Chopin’s poetically In the light of the symbolic legacy of the Chopin Fu- expressive world, with its own mechanical, uncanny neral March as discussed by Kramer it may be possi- reproduction, in a hideously hybrid double that had ble to hear the violence done to this theme in Henze’s to be pummeled into oblivion. work as a manifestation of inadequate postures of ‘pub- Wagner, the previously abhorred Wagner (Henze’s lic’, political mourning, with the Wagner quotation antipathy and avoidance of Wagner in post-Third Reich symbolizing the contrastingly private, personal mourn- Germany was hardly surprising) is then turned to as a ing. As in ‘Being Beauteous’ the expressive and sym- further potential source of mourning and meaning. But bolic qualities of Wagner’s music are retained, re- as Kramer says, ‘the problem is the old one of the valued, and re-authenticated. “Wagner case” made new by the immolations of re- As Arnold Whittall has said, the significance of cent history: what do you when the Wagnerian en- Wagner’s legacy for Henze goes beyond mere allusion chantment becomes the Wagnerian horror?’27 The cli- to ‘emblematic Wagnerian fragments’. The turn to mactic peak of the work is the scream of death at the Wagner performs a sort of ‘exorcism’, allowing Henze end of the fifth movement (‘no longer simply that of to move through cool, Apollonian, brittle iconoclasm Izolde or Tristan’, Henze wrote, ‘but of the whole suf- into lament and transformation. There is, Whittall con- fering world, which seems to burst the bounds of con- cludes, a ‘defiant Dionysianism’ in many of Henze’s cert music’28), a devastating effect including material works – so that in the Requiem (1992) (which, for on tape derived from a recording of a Wagner soprano. Oliver Knussen Tristan points to, because of the lat- The Epilogue which follows begins with a piano solo ter’s ‘polyvalent form, and the dream-like deployment which seeks a response to the horrific through recol- of layers of experience and polyphony alike, the surre- lection of ideas from earlier movements. When this alistic juxtapositions, shifts and references’32) there dies out unfulfilled, we hear a heartbeat (the last ves- are recollections of the harmonic world of Henze’s tige of hope of life?) and a child’s voice reciting the Tristan, as Apollonian coolness seems to recede just lover’s anguish over an extremely slow rendition of as the ‘Wagnerian’ qualities that Henze sought to con- the first four bars of Tristan Act 3 and the Wesendonck trol or police through quotation rise to carry the prin- Treibhaus song.29 This is followed by a quotation and cipal expressive burden of the mourning process.33 computer-generated transformation of Wagner’s mu- Thus Wagner’s music is both dismembered and re- sic on tape, accompanied by memorial bell sounds. membered. Henze described the effect of the tape material on its 73 Lietuvos muzikologija, t. 7, 2006 Stephen DOWNES

Conclusion 11 Francis Poulenc, Diary of My Songs [Journal de mes mélodies], dual language edition with a translation by Winifred Radford Henze’s Tristan is, of course, far removed from the (London: Gollancz, 1985), 77, 79. The emphasis on ‘sing’ (‘chanter’) is Poulenc’s. aesthetic and musical style of Poulenc’s Les Mamelles or 12 Philip Brett, ‘Queer Musical Orientalism’, paper presented indeed Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony, but beneath at the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the multiple compositional styles of twentieth-century the Society for Music Theory, Columbus, Ohio, Oct-Nov music there lie concerns and practices which may unify 2002. Quoted in Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 115. the apparently disparate. This essay may itself seem to 13 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 116–118. be a rather surrealistic juxtaposition of examples, in 14 ‘Musical Languages of Love and Death: Mahler’s Com- which unrelated musical expressions jostle uncomfortably positional Legacy’, in Jeremy Barham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, together in an attempt to generate some new, unforeseen forthcoming). meaning. But the aim – as serious as the problem of 15 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford mourning which is the thematic thread that ties them Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 8– together – has been to illustrate and thereby enhance 11. Lawrence Kramer offers a critique of this division in Classical our understanding of a widespread technique in Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of twentieth-century musical composition, examplifying California Press, 1995), 44–48. 16 how, in the creative imagination of otherwise radically ‘Shostakovich: politics and musical language’, in Christopher Norris (ed.), Shostakovich: The Man and his Music (London: different composers, the symbolic status of Wagner’s Lawrence & Wishart, 1982), 167, 182. On the ‘double’ char- musical legacy remains an ambivalent source of both acter of the Rossini allusion (euphoric and dysphoric) and its anxiety and admiration. connection to motives in other Shostakovich works see Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music References of Shostakovich (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 198–204. 17 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 117–118. 1 See the recent studies by Christopher Alan Reynolds, Motives 18 Shostakovich apparently often experienced difficulties in for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music completing finales: the Fifteenth being a case in point. See the (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003) and reminiscence of Venyamin Basner, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, Anthony Newcomb, ‘The Hunt for Reminiscences in Nine- Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber, 1994), 436. teenth-Century Germany’, in Karol Berger and Anthony 19 Hans Werner Henze, ‘Gustav Mahler’ [1975], in Music and Newcomb (eds.), Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Cam- Politics: Collected Writings 1953–81, trans. Peter Labanyi (Lon- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 111–135. don: Faber, 1982), 157–158. 2 On doubleness see Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, 20 Henze, ‘Instrumental Music’ [1963], in Music and Politics, 132. Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Univer- 21 Henze, Bohemian Fifths: an Autobiography, trans. Stewart sity Press, 1998), 15 and elsewhere. Spencer (London: Faber 1998), 57. For more, see my ‘Hans 3 David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twenti- Werner Henze as Post-Mahlerian: Anachronism, Freedom, and eth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, the Erotics of Intertextuality’, twentieth-century music 1/ii (Sep- 2003). tember 2004), 179–207, from which the comments which 4 Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and follow on ‘Being Beauteous’ are derived. Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 110– 22 For a useful, brief analysis of the work’s formal functions and 112. symmetries, motivicism and instrumentation see Hans Vogt, Neue 5 W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions Musik seit 1945 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1972), 311–317. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 23 Translation by Oliver Bernard, from the CD Henze, Versuch 6 Daniel K. L. Chua, ‘Adorno’s Metaphysics of Mourning: Über Schweine, etc., Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, et al. DG 449 Beethoven’s Farewell to Adorno’, The Musical Quarterly 87/3 869–2, (1996). ((October 2004), 523–545. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic 24 Henze, Language, Music and Artistic Invention, trans. Mary Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Whittall (Aldeburgh: Britten-Pears Library, 1996), 22. University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 152–153. 25 Henze, ‘Tristan’, [1975], in Music and Politics, 223. 7 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32. 26 ‘Chopin at the Funeral: Episodes in the History of Modern 8 For Wilfrid Mellers, the allusion to these figures in the pro- Death’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001), logue of Les Mamelles is a ‘magic’ moment; Francis Poulenc (Ox- 97–125. ford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 99. 27 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 122; Götterdämmerung 9 On Poulenc and mourning see my The Muse as Eros: Music, was a particularly problematic work for Henze. Erotic Fantasy and Male Creativity in the Romantic and Mod- 28 Henze, ‘Tristan’, 227. ern Imagination (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), chapter 8; 29 The child recites words from the twelfth-century Tristran of ‘Poulenc’s erotics of humour, melancholy, abjection and re- Thomas: ‘She takes him in her arms, and then, lying at full demption.’ length, she kisses his face and lips and clasps him tightly to her. 10 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Mu- Then straining body to body, mouth to mouth, she at once sic, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: Chicago University renders up her spirit and of sorrow for her lover dies thus at his Press, 2000), 299–300, 307. side’. It is read in a ‘slight cockney accent’. 74 Remembering and Dismembering the Music of Wagner: Allusion and Destruction in Poulenc, Shostakovich and Henze

30 Henze, ‘Tristan’, 224. neris funkcionuoja XX a. kaip „kultûrinis tropas“, kaip 31 Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture, 123–124. autoritetinga, simbolinë figûra, ágaunanti kai kuriuo- 32 Sleeve notes to Henze, Konzert für Klavier und Orchester nr.2; se nûdienos kûriniuose „trikdantá dviprasmiðkumà“. Tristan etc (Henze Collection) DG 449 866–2 (1996), 7. R. Wagneris „atstovauja ne besitæsianèiai simbolinës 33 Arnold Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music (Cam- investitûros jëgai, o jos atsitraukimui á nebegyvà pra- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139–142. eitá. Taèiau kartu jis liudija ir slëpiningà tos investitû- ros iðtvermingumà, jos inversiná gráþimà á gyvenimà“. Santrauka Straipsnyje nagrinëjama intertekstiniø aliuzijø te- ma XX a. muzikoje; ypatingas dëmesys skiriamas vag- Intertekstiniø aliuzijø charakteris ir funkcija yra neriðkø aliuzijø pobûdþiui ir funkcijoms F. Poulenco, transformuojamos ar reabilituojamos, nes romantiðka- D. Ðostakovièiaus ir H. W. Henze’s muzikoje. Kiek- sis dialektinës sintezës bûtinumas yra pakeièiamas nû- viename pavyzdyje aliuzija á R. Wagnerá atlieka sim- dieniu susidvejinimu, kuriame pasiprieðinimas media- boliðkà vaidmená tiriant, kaip yra gedima nelaimiø ku- cijai ar moduliacijai yra iðreiðkiamas per paradoksà, piname XX amþiuje. F. Poulenco operetëje „Les Ma- poliariðkumà, kontrastà ir konfliktà. Tokioje estetinë- melles de Tirésias“ Tristano akordas pasigirsta antrakte je teorijoje romantiðkasis simbolinis pasaulis yra kves- tuo momentu, kai po gedëjimo komiðkai vaizduojamas tionuojamas, nes teologinës ir filosofinës teorijos, grin- atgimimas. D. Ðostakovièiaus 15-osios simfonijos fi- dþianèios jo unifikacijos ir iðpirkimo siekius, yra tyri- nalo pradþioje aliuzijos á „Tristanà“ ir likimo motyvas nëjamos, demistifikuojamos ir/arba atmetamos. Ka- ið „Nybelungø þiedo“ tampa veiksniu, lemianèiu mu- dangi Richardas Wagneris buvo visuotinai pripaþintas zikos gimimà po lëtosios dalies laidotuviø garsø. H. W. kaip geriausiai romantiná pasaulio ásivaizdavimà atspin- Henze’s „Tristane“ R. Wagnerio muzika yra cituoja- dintis kompozitorius, nenuostabu, kad post- ir antiro- ma ir iðkraipoma elektroniðkai, kai vaizduojamas su- mantiðkoje estetikoje jo muzika tapo aliuzijø ir citatø sidûrimas su XX a. koðmarais. Taigi ðiame darbe nau- ðaltiniu, kur romantiðkos prasmës yra nuplëðiamos, pa- jai interpretuojama simbolinë R. Wagnerio muzikos rodijuojamos, o kai kada ir restauruojamos ar atgaivi- reikðmë visiðkai skirtingø stiliø muzikà raðantiems namos. Naudojant L. Kramerio terminologijà, R. Wag- kompozitoriams.

75 Lietuvos muzikologija, t. 7, 2006 Stephen DOWNES

Example 1. Francis Poulenc, Les Mamelles de Tirésias; Entr’acte

76 Remembering and Dismembering the Music of Wagner: Allusion and Destruction in Poulenc, Shostakovich and Henze

Example 2. Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony no. 15; finale – opening

77 Lietuvos muzikologija, t. 7, 2006 Stephen DOWNES

Example 2 continued

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