Unfinished Music

422 Pages·2008·7.6 MB·English

by  Richard Kramer

Every perfect work is the death mask
Every perfect work is the death mask
of its intuition.
ofits intuition.
The work is the death mask of
The work is the death mask of
conception.
conception.
WALTER BENJAMIN
WALTER BENJAMIN
RICHARD KRAMER
1
2007
2008
1
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kramer,Richard,1938–
Unfinished music / Richard Kramer.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-19-532682-6
1. Music—Psychological aspects. 2. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics.
3. Composition (Music)—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
ML3830.K7295 2007
781.1(cid:1)7—cd22 2007009450
This volume is published with generous support from the Manfred Bukofzer
Publication Endowment Fund ofthe American Musicological Society.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Alex,Adam,and ever Martha
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PREFACE
When Walter Benjamin came to publish the aphorism that, in its two forms,
serves as the motto of this book,he drew back from the notion of the vollkom-
menework.1All works,whether measurably perfect or not,partake ofthis axio-
matic truth:that in their completion,they die.And he drew back as well from the
sense ofcreation as,purely,intuition.Konzeptionis the broader,the more com-
mon term.But the governing idea remains a breathtaking one.Stumbling upon
it in a volume ofBenjamin’s letters,I was struck all at once how its central para-
dox resonates in each ofthe essays that follow.
The motto itself articulates no simple thesis. Each of its substantives is
riddling.The death mask conjures a fleeting moment:the face frozen in death yet
warm with life.At death,the features are fixed in a certain way.In this final instant
of perfect resolution,of timeless calm,the vicissitudes of a life are effaced.Ben-
jamin’s stark image dares us to believe that a powerful undercurrent ofmeaning lies
in what we can reconstruct ofthe complex,turbulent,rich processes antecedent
to this moment in which a text is fixed.We have come to speak ofthis,in the old
cliché,as a moment ofbirth.In the playing out ofthe creative process,a work is
born.At the moment of its birth,something of essence in the work is muted.
What happens subsequently is oflittle consequence,at least for an understand-
ing ofthe work.Ifone must have a history ofart,it will be a history ofwhat lies
beneath these masks.“The research ofcontemporary art history always amounts
1.“Jedes vollkommene Werk ist die Totenmaske seiner Intuition.”Walter Benjamin: Briefe,ed.Ger-
shom Scholem and Theodor W.Adorno (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp Verlag,1978),I:327;The
Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and
Theodor W.Adorno,tr.by Manfred R.Jacobson and Evelyn M.Jacobson (Chicago and London:
The University ofChicago Press,1994),227.“Jedes vollkommene Werk”suggests the sense ofper-
fection more as a “making whole”than as an aesthetic absolute.
“Das Werk ist die Totenmaske der Konzeption.”Einbahnstraße,inGesammelte Schriften,ed.Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser,in collaboration with Theodor W.Adorno and Ger-
shom Scholem,IV/1,ed.Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp Verlag,1972),538;and
Walter Benjamin,Selected Writing,I: 1913–1926,ed.Marcus Bullock and Michael W.Jennings
(Cambridge,Mass.,and London:Harvard University Press,1996),459,in which the aphorism is
the thirteenth entry in the section “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses.”I have altered their
rendering “ofitsconception”(my emphasis),which seems not quite what Benjamin intends.
viii Preface
merely to a history ofthe subject matter or a history ofform,”Benjamin wrote a
month earlier,“for which the works ofart provide only examples,and,as it were,
models;there is no question ofthere being a history ofthe work ofart as such.”2
For years during the writing ofthis book,improvisation—the improvisatory
as an act ofmusic—figured in its imagined title.It continues to figure in the text,
whether implicitly or as a topic of inquiry in itself.In music,improvisation is
cherished as the emblem of intuition.Ephemeral by nature,the improvisatory
act vanishes,as texts do not.Much ofthis creative process that we are at pains to
document is a quest for the evidence of the improvisatory. Indeed, the act of
composition may be said to emulate the spontaneity ofimprovisation,to capture
intuition.In the fixing oftext,intuition is embalmed,masked over.
This moment at which text is “fixed”is itself an epistemological problem of
some magnitude.At precisely what moment can the work be said to be com-
pleted,finished,vollendet?The composers whose works are studied here trouble
this question each in a different way.Emanuel Bach’s obsession with the further
Veränderung—alteration,variation of considerable substance—of works other-
wise finished (and even published) now strongly implicates the act of perfor-
mance as a text-defining moment,further complicating the very notion of Vol-
lendung.For Haydn,the imagining ofprimal Chaos provokes the improvisatory
urge to create.Beethoven’s compulsive sketching,drafting,rehearing ofeven the
least ambitious ofhis works,concretizing the process ofmind in its struggle to-
ward the notion of the completed work, seems a model for what Benjamin is
after.This idealizing ofthe moment offinish and the anxieties that it induces in
the Romantic artist was not lost on Schubert.A considerable repertory has sur-
vived of important work left unfinished.Fragments,they are:works in eternal
limbo,not quite born,nor,in Benjamin’s sense,yet dead.Fragments,like sketches,
exist as texts.We have learned to construe them as early stages in a process.But
they were not so construed at their conception.They,too,wear masks.
The final essay returns to Benjamin’s aphorism,exploring the contexts and cir-
cumstances that nourished its conception.In Benjamin’s interrogation ofGoethe’s
Wahlverwandtschaften,in his pursuit ofthe idea ofbeauty,we are offered a dark
and difficult prism through which to hear again the familiar music that is the
subject ofthis book.
For Benjamin,the very condition offinish,ofcompletion,signifies the end of
a life.Whose life? Resisting an answer,the question yet forces us to think hard
about the nature ofartistic creation,to imagine the ephemeral moment during
which the work is separated from its author. This moment is what Benjamin
2.In a letter of9 December 1923 to Rang.Briefe,I:322;Correspondence,224.
Preface ix
seems intent upon actualizing.The separation is now labored,troubled,difficult,
now imperceptible.That there exists such a moment of separation,both in the
aesthetic sense,at which the autonomy ofthe work is established,and in the psy-
chological sense,triggering the convoluted anxieties ofthe author,is an assump-
tion that underlies each ofthe studies that follow.They each seek to apprehend
the moment as an event,impalpable though it may seem,at which something
called the work is now “finished,”and all the disparate evidence ofcreation,ofthe
author’s engagement with composition and context,is swept away,the author
along with it.But it is a condition ofart that the work,alive in its afterlife,is in
some sense never “finished,”and that the evidence ofits creation,and ofits cre-
ator,is everywhere implicit in its text and constitutes a grain ofits meaning.
Learning to live with the pleasurable discomforts of these paradoxes is the
modest resolve ofthis book.