Latent Modernism: Formula and Athematicism in Later Roussel
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Latent Modernism: Formula and Athematicism in Later Roussel Larson Powell I. Latency Posterity has taken a dim view of Roussel's larger abstract forms: once cut free of the plastic or pictorial, his imagination had difficulty transferring a Charakterstück aesthetic to the monumental and discursive genres of sonata and symphony.1 Basil Deane compares him to Schumann in precisely this respect. The difficulty was moreover only intensified, not resolved, by the course of Roussel's development toward schematic form in the 1920s. This gives the symphonies in particular an explosive ambiguity: their highly characterized materials appear constantly to want to burst the classical forms within which they are only awkwardly and forcibly confined. The resultant tension is sometimes released in surprisingly violent conclusions, as that of the first movement of the Petite Suite or that of the first and last movements of the Concert pour Orchestre.2 The individuality of these materials suggests a narrative or symphonic-poem dimension to which the enforced architectonic symmetry of recapitulation does extreme violence. This is most painfully evident at the precise moment of recapitulation, whether at the astonishingly sudden reversion to Tempo Primo of the first movement of the Third Symphony (following the motto theme, four measures before rehearsal number 17),3 or the equally blithe binary return to the opening at rehearsal number 7 of the Suite en Fa (after the massive climax at rehearsal number 7). It is hard to imagine a more glaring instance of that "separation of outward form from inward principle"4 typical of much 1See Basil Deane, Albert Roussel (London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1961), pp. 153-5; Arnold Whittall Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 69-70; David Drew . "Modern French Music," in Hartog, Howard, ed. European Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Prager, 1957), pp. 258-9; Theo Hirsbrunner, Die Musik in Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert. (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1995), pp. 162-3. 2On these, the comments of Edward Neill, "Albert Roussel." Musicalia, I: 1 (1970), p. 10, are revealing: Roussel's music "introdusse per prima il gusto della dissonanza e sorpresa che viene a lacerare e a dirompere la trama relativamente ordinate del testo" [introduces first of all the taste for dissonance, which comes to lacerate and sisrupt the relatively ordered weave of the text]. In the conclusions of the Petite Suite and the Concert, "l'energia motore dilaga e si spegne all'improvviso in un accordo a sorpresa, disarmante e beffardo. Sono conclusioni che non concludono, apparenti chiusere di porte, chiavistelli che non scattano; e dietro lo spiraglio che ne risulta, il barbaglio di un lieve ghigno" [The motoric energy spreads out and spends itself improvisationally in a surprise chord which is disarming and mocking. These are conclusions which do not conclude, apparent closings of doors, door latches which do not click shut, and behind the glimmering that follows, the glare of a slight sneer]. 3Paris: Durand, 1931; ll of Roussel’s scores are published by Durand Editeurs. The score excerpts in this paper are used by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing France. 4Music in Transition (London: Dent, 1977), pp. 71-72. 1 twentieth century neoclassicism, and which has made it difficult to find any "aesthetic criteria of judgment"5 for this music. The ballets, vocal music, and overt character pieces such as Joueurs de flûte do not have to confront this formal problem and are less internally contradictory, but at the cost of remaining within the bounds of the descriptive or pictorial. Precisely in its closure and well-rounded balance, Bacchus et Ariane feels more conventional than the oblique complexities of the instrumental works. On the other extreme from ballet, mélodie, and character piece are not only the symphonies, but also the sonata form works in general, including the String Quartet and String Trio. Despite the attractiveness of much of the music of these pieces, their forms are often nothing more than convenus. The "finale problem" that troubled composers from the Beethoven 9th onward simply did not exist for Roussel. After a few early experiments with more flexible form (in the Sonatine for Piano and most importantly in the Second Symphony), his finales are cheerful little galops or last dances, unconcerned with monumentality and thus more apt for suites than sonatas. (The fugal finale of the String Quartet signally fails in its bid for a more monumental close.) Even the finale of the Fourth Symphony, with its powerful thematic transformation (at four measures before rehearsal number 63), which feels very much like a "breakthrough," still feels confined by its form. In evaluating the Third Symphony, it is difficult to distinguish how much of that work's apparent canonicity (or at least popularity) is attributable to its undeniably vivid materials, and how much to a formal "clarity" that is frequently rigidly schematic and formalistic. These works thus appear at first as aesthetic ruins,6 and as such, suggest philosophical interpretation. One should however beware of the temptation to make this last allegorical. The obvious model, Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch, could be pursued in detail: Roussel's tone of depersonalized mourning, his peculiarly unstable combination of energy and rigidity recall the familiar Dialektik im Stillstand (arrested dialectics) or erstarrte Unruhe (frozen unrest) of Benjamin's Baudelaire. Such a comparison might sketch in another model of modern musical allegory than that of Adorno's Wagner. Yet it would ultimately remain within a familiar hermeneutic circle, reiterating aesthetic- historical topoi shared by a great many early modern turn-of-the-century artists (especially those affected by Symbolism), rather than developing the specific "criteria of judgment" for which Danuser's look at the 1920s called. (Kant's insight that aesthetic judgment should be coordinating rather than subordinating is still helpful, even in a time when attacks on “judgment” as such have become familiar.) Instead of allegory, what follows will develop the less burdened term latency, which may be elaborated after a look at some elements specific to Roussel's practice, especially the melodic formula. Latency means here a parallel modernity, one distinct from, but related, to the latter's mainstream. It is historically linked to French and modal traditions marginalized by Adorno's influential model of musical modernity. As will become clear, this latency is central not only to Roussel's larger (historical and individual) poetics––thus conditioning his limited public reception to date––but also to his technique, specifically as it develops in his later, more classicizing works from the 1920s onward. 5Hermann Danuser,"Die ‘mittlere' Musik der zwanziger Jahre." La musique et le rite sacré et profane, ed. M. Honegger and P. Prévost. Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg, 1987, pp. 703-722, esp. p. 705. 6So Charles Rosen saw Schubert's chamber music as a "degenerate style" (The Classical Style, New York: Norton, 1972, p. 455). 2 II. Schematization The most obvious aperçu or petit fait vrai one quickly encounters with Roussel––what was once, in hermeneutics, called the dunkle Stelle––is the nonidentity of form and material, a characteristic of much of his work. Giselher Schubert7 noted that already in Résurrection, "Roussel emancipates the musical means of representation––the plan of the movement, the instrumentation, the syntax, the type of movement––from the thematic events." Similarly, Françoise Andrieux found in the First Symphony a tendency to a paradoxically "athematic profile" of many melodic ideas. This athematicism can also be acquired over the course of a movement. Thus the symphonies, as thematic, need themes of "sufficiently pregnant profile." But this is often only an illusion. There is more than one movement where, after one had believed in the original character of the themes put forth (énoncées), one watches their depersonalization.8 An example is the finale of the Fourth Symphony, where it is no longer clear whether the development is based on the first or the second theme. Andrieux goes on to generalize further: Traces of this tendency to thematic uniformization can be found on the level of entire works or in the group of the symphonies. It may be explained by the privileged place Roussel's themes give to disjunct intervals, intervals which are rather large and––as it seems––stated (énoncés) in almost aleatory fashion. The line does not answer to a strongly directed logic, but lives from an intense movement that is not afraid of surrendering to disorder.9 Carl Dahlhaus found a similar apparent intervallic randomness in Bruckner;10 in both cases the looseness points to the primacy of rhythm. This is why many of Roussel's developments11 tend less to unfold the dynamic potential of his opening statements than condense them into hardened abbreviations, in a process less of expansion than of petrification. The gradual schematization of his language12 after World War One is often 7"'Classicisme' und 'neoclassicisme': Zu den Sinfonien von Albert Roussel." Studien zur Musikgeschichte: Eine Festschrift fur Ludwig Finscher. Kassel: Barenreiter 1995, pp. 668-679. 8"Les quatre symphonies de Roussel." In Albert Roussel. Musique et esthétique. Actes du Colloque International Albert Roussel, ed. Manfred Kelkel (Paris: Vrin 1989), p. 187. 9Andrieux, p. 190. The final phrase is ne craint pas de sacrifier au désordre, suggesting that the fearless self-sacrifice of Padmâvati to the flames allegorizes something central to Roussel's compositional technique. 10Nineteenth Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 273. 11Instances: the slow movements of the 2nd Violin Sonata, the 3rd and 4th Symphonies, perhaps that of the Suite en Fa as well. 12Schematic form is often seen as characteristic of academic (Reger) or neoclassical (Stravinsky) composition, but in Roussel’s case melody was also affected.