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Montale, Debussy, and Modernism
By Gian-Paolo Biasin PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06790-2
CHAPTER 1
Debussy and the Wind
J'aime à la fureur les choses où le son se mêle à la lumiére. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Les bijoux
Poetry and Music
Eugenio Montale makes a decisive assertion in the "Imaginary Interview" of 1946, from which it is appropriate to begin:
When I started writing the first poems of Ossi di seppia [Cuttlefish bones] I certainly had an idea of the new music and the new painting. I had heard Debussy's "Minstrels," and in the first edition of my book there was a little thing that tried to remake it, "Musica sognata" [Dreamed music]. And I had looked at Gl'impressionisti by the too defamed Vittorio Pica.
Even in its typically Montalean caution ("I had an idea," "I had looked at"), this a posteriori assertion of an intention and an awareness fundamental to the beginning of an entire poetic oeuvre maintains a basic importance, an importance enhanced by the recent reappearance in the critical edition of precisely that "little thing" mentioned here. In fact, the statement is a proud vindication of cultural openness and novelty ("the new music, the new painting" — the repetition of the adjective is not casual, but rhetorically revealing). Montale's words are to be taken as a valuable piece of information and not as a misleading indication for the critic tracking the origins of Montale's poetry and the cultural framework in which it belonged and succeeded.
To start with, there appear in the opening quotation Montale's three basic lifelong interests: poetry, music, and painting. It is not really necessary to recall the elements, the occasions, the biographical anecdotes in which these interests were articulated and variously expressed — from his pastels with delightful seascapes and smiling portraits to his studies to become a professional baritone, studies which Montale soon abandoned but never forgot, and transferred later to his punctilious activity as a demanding and even idiosyncratic music critic for the leading Milanese daily Il corriere delta sera. Rather, the interaction among poetry, music, and painting points out for the contemporary critic the complexity of culture, as it is theorized specifically in Bakhtin's dialogic principle, a complexity Montale had understood and noted clearly on his own, with great effectiveness. In fact, the interaction among different genres, expressive modes, languages, and codes by itself is not sufficient: it must be an active and innovative interaction, which should experiment with new possibilities and seek new horizons, by translating the results in one field into another and by transferring one language into another. And that is exactly what Montale did.
It is first necessary to ask why Montale points out the new music, particularly Debussy, and the new painting, particularly the impressionists. Certainly, these expressive forms have been congenial to poetry in a centuries-old tradition, from "ut pictura poesis" all the way to "de la musique avant toute chose." They are especially congenial to the young Montale, given the biographical data just mentioned.
But why the impressionists, and why Debussy?
Briefly we can say, echoing Félix Fénéon, that the impressionists were among the first to lay the foundations of modern painting, through the separation and matching of pure colors on the surface of the painting. The viewer had to mix and fuse these colors together by active perception, thus recreating that visual harmony — and hence the object itself of the painter's vision — which might have seemed lost at first impression: one thinks of Monet's Rouen Cathedral, St. Lazare Station, and haystacks, or of Seurat's Grande Jatte, with their elaborate variations of light and the "infinite delicacy of the modelling." It is therefore style, with its disjunction between sign and meaning, which the impressionists emphasize at the expense of representation and objectivity; and it is the active participation of the viewer's eye they require as an integral part of the artistic process — perhaps because, as Walter Benjamin has suggested, the experience of the urban crowd was a new spectacle to which the eye had to become accustomed, thus acquiring a new capacity for vision, of which the impressionist technique would be but a reflection.
Analogously, Debussy was among the very first to unhinge the traditional tonal system, with deliberate dissonances which broke the harmonic scale and had to be received and accepted by the ears of the listener, who was thereby oriented toward the intrinsic and autonomous musicality of the single sounds. In the new poetry, lexical dissonance and analogic words are the two critical categories that, after Friedrich, vigorously characterize the modern developments and their relationships with music and painting.
I do not know whether Montale had such relationships and analogies clearly in mind from the beginning, with all their complexity and ramifications. Probably he did not. But he had certainly understood the importance of the book by Pica, the Neapolitan art critic who had indeed been "too defamed," if one remembers that Ardengo Soffici called him "an imbecile," while Fénéon, in contrast, had stressed his "rare coherence" and mental openness without biases or dogmatism. To be sure, Gl'impressionisti presents a remarkable overview of the impressionist movement, from its English precursors to the late followers of Italian divisionism (Giovanni Segantini, Angelo Morbelli, Gaetano Previati, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, and others); above all, Pica's book contains an idea derived from Fénéon and still fundamental today for the understanding of the impressionists, that is, "their use of spots of pure colors which become fused at a distance on the pupil of the beholder" rather than on the palette of the painter.
But the very fact that Montale cites the impressionists and Debussy together seems to indicate that he considered pictorial and musical impressionism on the same plane, while as far as Debussy is concerned, such a label, even if current then, has been critically reviewed and is no longer considered valid today. It is important to note, as Laura Barile did, that "attention to what was happening in the musical world is characteristic of the culture" of the early twentieth century: for example, "also [Renato] Serra was exploring the same area of the musicality of verse, a musicality intended in quantitative terms, arsis and thesis, rhythm and no longer melody." In such a context it seems useful to recall La dissonanza, the musical journal edited by Giannotto Bastianelli and Ildebrando Pizzetti, with its emblematically programmatic title pointing to the new music.
In any case, whether or not Montale was aware of all the implications of the relationship among the expressive novelties in the three arts is not really important. What matters, and it matters greatly, is that he lived this relationship from the very beginning with extraordinary sensitivity and timeliness; that all his early poetry was enriched by this relationship or interaction; and in particular (leaving painting aside for the moment), that he never disavowed his original preference for Debussy, but repeatedly and skillfully used it for his aims of poetic and cultural politics, in ways and contexts that are worth exploring.
Montale's discourse on Debussy is fragmentary, seemingly occasional and discontinuous, but actually intimately coherent and rigorous when its pieces are put together. Montale's remarks are theoretical, historical, and cultural. At the theoretical level, the relationship of music and poetry is acknowledged by Montale throughout musical aesthetics, from madrigals to opera librettos. The vexed question of the superiority of one over the other is solved in the sense that "poetry and music progress each on its own, and their encounter remains dependent on occasional chances" (as in the cases of Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Schönberg), because, says Montale, following Mallarme, "poetry is itself already music." He repeated this idea in 1962: "I know that the art of the word is itself music, even if it has little to do with the laws of acoustics."
It might be objected that such a proud assertion of the poetic word's self-sufficiency is contradicted by the initial statement implied in the effort of remaking "Minstrels": it is true, but only on the surface, because precisely by remaking Debussy Montale reasserts the superiority of the word over music, whose "asemantic" character, "a great acquisition of modern culture," is thus thematized, conceptualized, by the only form of art capable of carrying out such an operation explicitly, that is, the written word, and in particular the poetic word. This is so true that in the same imaginary interview Montale mentions the great contemporary "isms" prevalent in European philosophy: "Marforio's big words": Lev Šcestov's Kierkegaardian existentialism, Giovanni Gentile's absolute immanentism, Benedetto Croce's "idealistic positivism," and above all, for the years of Ossi di seppia, Étienne Boutroux's contingentism. He does so in order to deny all of them immediately afterwards — but the mentioning itself, which is "semantic," remains:
No, in writing my first book (a book that got written by itself) I did not rely on such ideas. ... I obeyed a need of musical expression. I wanted my word to be more adherent than those of other poets I had known. More adherent to what? It seemed to me I was living under a glass bell, yet I felt I was close to something essential. A thin veil, just a thread separated me from the definitive quid. The absolute experience would have been the tearing of that veil, of that thread: an explosion, the end of the deceit of the world as representation. But this was an unreachable limit. And my will to adhere remained musical, instinctive, not programmatic. I wanted to twist the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the cost of a counter-eloquence.
No "isms," then. But in light of poetry's autonomy and of its semantic character, this need for a musical expression says quite a lot about Montale's faith in the written word, from the very beginning. Perhaps it might be appropriate to try to point out possible functional and structural homologies between music and poetry, as Leonard Bernstein has done recently in Chomskyan terms, with impassionate remarks in which the transformations of generative grammar (at the phonologic, symbolic, and semantic level) are convincingly applied to the "reading" of great texts of Western music. But Montale's skepticism on the point remains, and the literary critic must acknowledge it and recognize first the fact that the poet's major efforts to link poetry and music in some way belong entirely to his very early period, and include only a few poems never collected in a volume, that is, never elevated to the dignity of the oeuvre in verse: "Musica silenziosa" (Silent music), "Suonatina di pianoforte" (Piano sonatina), "Accardi" (Accords), and the first section of Ossi, titled "Movimenti," musical movements a la Debussy ("Mouvements" is one of the Images for piano). The movements are, however, already metaphoric: "Ascoltami, i poeti laureati / si muovono ..." (Listen to me, the poets laureate / move ...). In the definitive edition, they include "I limoni" (The lemon trees), "Como inglese" (English horn), "Falsetto," and "Minstrels," while the suite "Mediterraneo" (Mediterranean Sea) indeed owes to Debussy's La mer, as Marzio Pieri noted, but I would say more as an idea than as a performance.
In subsequent developments of Montale's poetry there will be only echoes or calculated musical references without any systematic intention, as, to give just two examples, in the motet "Infuria sale o grandine" (Salt or hail rages), which hearkens back to Debussy's "La cathedrale engloutie" ("very likely"), or in "La bufera" (The storm) with its memory of "Jardins sous la pluie," again by Debussy.
Meanwhile, however, at the historical level, Montale knows well that music, painting, and poetry follow their parallel paths, which may or may not coincide in time and correspond in space. Let us consider along with him "some dates" concerning decadentism:
The pre-Raphaelites were active in England when in Italy the like of [Antonio] Fontanesi and [Michele] Cammarano were painting, who were classical notwithstanding their romanticism. Rimbaud and Mallarme write at a time when in Italy the "scapigliati" group is barely born; our "macchiaioli" painters wake up when they encounter French impressionism; Debussy is a contemporary of Puccini and Mascagni. D'Annunzio cannot be explained without his foreign sources, which are innumerable. While in Vienna expressionism rages, in Italy [Alfredo] Casella and company propound a return to the eighteenth century.
Let us agree that "luckily in Italy we are late," as Montale asserts in concluding his survey with a smiling but salutary historiographic irony. However, in doing so Montale has dotted his i's and given us the basic data to understand his cultural operation, in which Debussy — a true litmus pa per — plays a central function. Let us follow Montale's discourse in the literary field:
[Guido Gozzano] reduced D'Annunzio just as Debussy had scaled down Wagner, but without ever achieving results that could be termed Debussyan. Gozzano's poetry remains in that climate that scholars of the late nineteenth-century Italian melodrama called "verista" — a climate which ultimately is not of decadent origin. ... It seems certain to me that in Gozzano the romantic-bourgeois "verista" element was the most fruitful one. Gozzano reduced the Italian poetry of his time to a lowest common denominator, and here the comparison with Puccini is again irresistible.
Actually, against the reductive arguments of some contemporary detractors, "try to erase Puccini and Gozzano from the framework of their time and tell me if an unfillable void would not be created." But, once the historical judgment and the value judgment are established, we should note the impeccable exactness of Montale's reasoning, in which the musical references are in a dialogic relationship with the literary data. In such a context, we know that Puccini was, polemically for Montale, "late" in comparison with Debussy, and that if we use a qualitative criterion Gozzano cannot be considered a wholly successful innovator ("without ever achieving results that could be termed Debussyan"). And if Montale gives Gozzano his due ("he was the first who made sparks by making the aulic clash with the prosaic"), nevertheless Montale also reminds us of his own Verlainean intention "to twist the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the risk of a counter-eloquence." Therefore, although Debussy is at the center of the argument, the true target is actually D'Annunzio. Just as in modern music Debussy reduced and hence in a sense replaced Wagner, so in Italian literature D'Annunzio would be reduced and superseded not by Gozzano, but by Montale — the same Montale who "passed through" D'Annunzio. After all, music was added to D'Annunzio (in Le martyre de Saint Sébastien) by Debussy, who in turn was "set to poetry" precisely by Montale!
2. Claude Debussy
It is appropriate to devote some further attention to Debussy, and try to understand better (or more explicitly, in a more detailed manner) than Montale did the novelty and the importance of his work both in the development of contemporary music and in its relation to literature. We have to consider a cultural context of which music is part as a signifying system "where particular relationships occur between signifier and signified, and in its own way this system symbolizes the great themes of culture: the relationships with the Other, with nature, with death, with desire."
In musical historiography, Debussy holds a very singular position. The Italian musicologist Guido Salvetti characterizes him as a "participant in the intellectual and moral engagement of the Wagnerian-decadent composers, inclined toward a 'light' art, made of innuendoes and analogies; an indefatigable searcher (who renewed himself till his death) for a musical language that should express both the spiritual evanescence of inner experiences and the formal rigor of a conscious and perfectly responsible artistic operation."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Montale, Debussy, and Modernism by Gian-Paolo Biasin. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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