Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms

by Andrew Davis

Overview

In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253028938
Publisher:	Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date:	08/21/2017
Series:	Musical Meaning and Interpretation
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrew Davis is Dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Houston and author of Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style (IUP).

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CHAPTER 1

Fragmentation: Aesthetics of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism

Addressing questions such as those posed in the introduction requires considering the constellation of Romantic aesthetics and ideologies pervasive among European artists in the first half of the nineteenth century. These are normally understood as being marked by a skepticism toward older, Classical forms and procedures, the employment of which in music, literature, or other of the arts would have been viewed by the Romantics as something of an exercise in form — as the replication of older procedures for the sake of conformist repetition, as an endorsement of Enlightenment ideals that had long since become outdated. One of the clearest articulations of such a view appears in the literary and cultural criticism of one of the chief spokespersons for German Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel, who remarked that "The customary divisions [that is, genres] of poetry are only a dead framework for a limited horizon"; another appears in writings of one of the movement's principal musical emissaries, Robert Schumann, for example in his oft-cited observation that, since the founding of his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834, "Isolated beautiful examples of this genre [that is, the sonata — although we are invited to think that any of what Schumann saw as the traditional Classical forms, including the symphony and the concerto, might have served the point just as well] might certainly appear here and there, but on the whole it seems as though the form has run its life course, and this is to be sure in the order of things, for we should not repeat the same things for another century but rather be mindful of seeking out the New." Both views jibe nicely with the understanding of European Romanticism that has taken shape over about the last century of literary criticism, in which the movement has been described as unified by its favoring the new over the old, and innovation over tradition, in all aspects — materials, forms, styles — of the arts. In literature, furthermore, in explaining Romanticism critics have normally given special emphasis to the centrality in the movement of the individual, of personal experience and expression, and of the deepest reaches of the visionary artist's own imagination in the creation of an artwork — the act of which, Wordsworth wrote in 1800, was to be the result of a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." More specifically, many have pointed to the importance of nature as an artistic topic: in Romantic literature, nature becomes both thematized within the work as well as the deeper stimulus, the source of inspiration, for the bold, new ideas of the artists themselves; such thinking is an important part of what some view as a certain kind of collapse (or a "mystical union") of subject and object characteristic of Romantic art.

Many such features of the Romantic movement — indeed, the very movement itself — are products of a larger trend in nineteenth-century thought, one that has been explicated by Michel Foucault as an epistemic shift that occurred approximately in the years 1775–1825. The shift was one in which knowledge and worldviews ceased to be organized within their eighteenth-century, taxonomic forms (Foucault: "the great circular forms in which similitude was enclosed") concerned with enumeration and identification of individual, observable elements in a system, but rather came to be governed by a way of thinking concerned with the complex, hierarchical, often invisible relationships between, and functions of, the organic components of such systems. Such thinking has numerous ramifications for the organization of knowledge in a wide range of disciplines, including the arts; it gives rise to, among other consequences, a situation in which the interior, unobservable facets ("the dark, concave, inner side") of a being or a system — those facets that lie beyond pure empirical observation and representation — rise to the level of a central interest for inquiry; individual components (organs in an animal, words in a language) become pieces or fragments of a larger, organic whole, subject to the complexities of their own relationships and to their own interior temporal associations rather than independent, autonomous features subject to description and definition purely on their own terms. A taxonomic organization of knowledge concerned with description, observation, and representation thus gives way to a narrativized form concerned with identity, subjectivity, and being.

All such features of Romanticism and nineteenth-century thought, moreover, account well for certain prominent stylistic features of the movement as manifested in literature and music — especially those having to do with an enhanced sense of subjectivity and self characteristic of Romantic artworks. First, Romanticism tends to involve narratives focusing on the "common man" and "common life," rather than the aristocratic upper classes. Again Wordsworth: "The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these poems [Lyrical Ballads] was to chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them ... in a selection of language really used by men"; and it is, furthermore, in "low and rustic life" that "the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity." These concerns stem directly from the movement's rejection of Classical or Enlightenment values and attitudes. Second, the movement is marked by an attraction to the supernatural, nonrational, marvelous, or fantastical; such emphases grow out of its concern for the inner reaches of the artist's soul or consciousness, which the Romantics would have regarded as beyond the reach of — that is, unexplainable within — traditional eighteenth-century Enlightenment, taxonomic forms of logic. And third, the movement is often characterized by a preference for heroic, revolutionary, salvational, questing, or (especially in music) pastoral narratives. All such generic preferences follow from what the early nineteenth century would have viewed as the promise of the French Revolution and the crisis of confidence that resulted from the abdication of that promise. All such narrative types, furthermore, tend to invite readers to identify the protagonists in a narrative either with themselves or with what the Chicago School of literary criticism would call the narrative's implied author: the author whose skills, values, preferences, ideologies, and aesthetics are revealed to readers through the rhetorical choices that readers observe the implied author making as they read a given text.

The last of these five narrative types — the pastoral narrative — is especially important in Romantic music. (Note that my concern here is with the pastoral as a specific narrative paradigm or plot framework and not necessarily as a topic governing stylistic and expressive gestures in the music, although certainly the two issues overlap to some extent.) Recent literary criticism has suggested that pastoral narratives can be either narrowly or broadly defined. The narrower definitions refer to a literary form that derives from Greek and Roman poems about the beauty of life in the country; until the early seventeenth century, moreover, the pastoral was defined as an idyll concerned mainly with shepherds living in a primeval natural environment. In the seventeenth century and after, the form begins to appear in dramas and, later, in novels; the shepherds often disappeared, while the landscapes and natural environments in which they had existed remained a central focus. Such narrower definitions are essentially those invoked in specific musical instances of the pastoral such as Monteverdi's Orfeo, Haydn's Creation, or Beethoven's Symphony no. 6 in F major, op. 68 ("Pastoral"). Wider definitions of the form refer to mythical narratives of wish fulfillment, in which the central concerns are broadly drawn oppositions between, for example, humans versus nature, urban versus rural, or generally anything conceived as idealized (and unattainable) versus something else understood as less than perfect (human frailties, urban environments, or a present-day, complex world fraught with distress and anxiety). Themes of retreat and return are characteristic and, indeed, critical in pastoral plots: retreat and return in this context are normally metaphorical, but generally speaking, they take the form of a retreat from some sort of flawed, presenttense site or state of being into a simpler, more innocent, venerated, and always intentionally fictitious time or place that came to be known by the generic name Arcadia — perhaps an escape from the city to the country, from the real to the unreal, or from the conscious to the unconscious mind. There follows an eventual return to the original point of departure, lessons having been learned.

As these examples suggest, Arcadia itself comes in various shapes and sizes in pastoral narratives; in fact, it is best understood as a generalized abstraction rather than specifically as some kind of pristine natural environment or scene — even though the latter may describe well the form in which it often appears in pastoral artworks (including, for example, in Romantic landscape paintings or in musical examples such as the Pastoral Symphony). Pastoral narratives, furthermore, normally adopt a celebratory attitude toward their constructions of the Arcadia image: the retreat to the imagined paradise is actively yearned for and desired, even while it remains fictitious, distanced and unreal, and ultimately lost and unrealizable. And most literary constructions of Arcadia invoke a shift in tense, where the escape is from a problematic present into a more perfect past; that is, the fictional paradise, in whatever form it may take, is typically framed in the narrative as the product of a wishful, hopeful, reminiscent look backward — one tinged with lament, loss, and regret — into a lost golden age unspoiled by the inadequacies of modern life. At the same time, such narratives also imply, paradoxically perhaps, a concern for the future: the nostalgia for a lost past simultaneously suggests the presence of a vision for a better, freer, more blissful life yet to come, and thus it is possible to think of pastoral narratives as concerned with such oxymoronic constructions as "Utopian Arcadias" or "Arcadian Utopias." The multiply directed historical temporalities implied in such formulations can be understood as the product of larger a cultural trend, one in which the clear teleology inherent in Enlightenment thinking (all events "progress" toward a better future) breaks down in favor of a greater awareness of a subject's moment in historical time as well as that subject's relationship with both the future and the past. Such trends are consistent with the epistemic shift discussed in Foucault, from which, as mentioned, there emerges in the nineteenth century a greater awareness of historical and cultural subjectivity.

Pastoral narratives broadly construed comprise a central focus — one of the central concerns — of the art, literature, and music of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Romanticism, especially in England and Germany. That this is true follows from the concern in the Romantic movement with subjectivity and with themes of limitless imagination and emotion, dissatisfaction and restlessness, and infinite longing or yearning for a better past or a better future in which the imperfections of modern life will be cast off and left behind. For the Romantic, art was responsible in part for creating modern civilization, but it was also responsible for cutting off humankind from its original, unspoiled, simplistic state; the re-creation of the pastoral paradise was thus one of the most pure of all artistic endeavors. A number of critics of Romantic literature have emphasized this aspect of the movement: one of the best examples is Northrop Frye, who defines Romantic narratives as those that are marked by a concern for the "world of original human nature, now a lost paradise or golden age," which, in the Romantic imagination, became "a better and more appropriate home for man than his present environment, whether man can regain it or not." Interpreting such narratives involves attending to the various ways in which they construct their fundamental opposition between perfect and imperfect; as Terry Gifford writes, interpretations of the pastoral need to stem from "alert readings that are capable of making critical judgments about their inner tensions, their contextual functions, their multiple levels of contradiction."

Such views of Romanticism, while certainly capturing some of the most important, prevailing artistic tendencies of the period, also have the effect of suppressing some of the movement's other important stylistic features — especially those backward-looking features that connect Romantic art more directly to its Classical antecedents. To simply map the movement onto a neat, coherent, linear narrative in which the past is rejected in favor of inexorable progress toward the future is a reductive oversimplification of reality — as are most such attempts at a teleological telling of history, whether in the arts or elsewhere. Notwithstanding René Wellek's description of a unified Romanticism (in which he found an underlying coherence, writing that an examination of Romantic literature "all over the continent" reveals "throughout Europe the same conceptions of poetry and of the workings and nature of poetic imagination, the same conception of nature and its relation to man, and basically the same poetic style, with a use of imagery, symbolism, and myth which is clearly distinct from that of eighteenth-century neoclassicism"), the movement may also be understood in terms that foreground its competing strands of ideologies, its internal contradictions, and, indeed, its links to older, Enlightenment ideals (something like what Arthur Lovejoy may have had in mind when he described "a prima facie plurality of Romanticisms, of possibly quite distinct thought-complexes," rather than Romanticism as "the heaven-appointed designation of some single real entity, or type of entities, to be found in nature"). These kinds of conceptions of the movement have the effect of foregrounding its links to the past: that is, Romantic artists, rather than — as many of the artists themselves would have us believe — absolutely abandoning their past in favor of revolutionary new modes of expression (abandoning, as Friedrich Schlegel's brother August Wilhelm put it, the Classical "poetry of perfection" in favor of the Romantic "poetry of infinite desire"), instead engaged in a provocative, reflexive, intertextual, and self-critical dialogue with the artworks of the past.

These are important features of Romanticism that manifest specifically in the dialogue in Romantic art with the wide, complex system of stylistic and generic norms that dates from the eighteenth century and before and within the direct or indirect commentary, often found in Romantic artworks, on their Classical forebears. They suggest a view of Romanticism not as a movement that rejected Classicism outright but rather joined a Classicism-in-progress — where the Romantic movement explored and fully realized the implications of (even while it also questioned) Classical and Enlightenment values. And such views are not inconsistent with contemporary aesthetic positions: for example, even in many expressions of the Enlightenment worldview — in, for example, "the vitalism of Diderot, the passion of Rousseau, and the skepticism of Hume" — one can see a critical attitude toward the indiscriminate application of cognitive reason above shared human feelings, a concern for the role of individual emotion and imagination, and a preoccupation with natural purity and simplicity, along with an effort to reject the complexities of a rapidly advancing society. All are often understood as fundamentally Romantic concerns, or at least, within Enlightenment thinking, as harbingers of Romanticism. Likewise, on the other side of the coin, artists who identified with the Romantic movement were also much slower to reject Enlightenment rationality than is often thought: literary criticism has recognized for some time now that the "spontaneity" to which Wordsworth referred in his description of Romantic poetry is probably best understood not in the sense of "irrational" or "unpremeditated" but more in the sense of "free" — in the sense, that is, of a "voluntary" expression of the artistic and intellectual predilections of the inner self, where that expression is fully developed in dialogue with past precedents rather than one that stems simply from indiscriminate adherence to some externally imposed, contemporary ideals. This is one reading, perhaps, of Wordsworth's notoriously enigmatic statement that "Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings."

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Romantic Musical Discourse, Or, A Rhetoric Of Romantic Music

Part I. Fragmentation and Atemporality
1. Fragmentation: Aesthetics of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism
2. Atemporality in Narrative and Music

Part II. Structural and Rhetorical Strategies in Music with and Without Text
3. Music With Text: Two Slow Movements by Brahms
4. Music Without Text: Forms of Atemporality

Part III. Brahms's Piano Sonatas
5. Treatment of the Medial Caesura
6. Treatment of the S-Space
7. Treatment of the Development and Recapitulation
8. Treatment of the Slow Introduction and Coda

Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

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