O alter Duft aus Märchenzeit: Nostalgia and Contemporary Music
The quotation given in the title comes from the final song of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. In local context, this song completes the third of the three groups of poems by Albert Giraud that together constitute Schoenberg’s text. The first poem of this final group, Heimweh, concludes with the line “So modern sentimental geworden,” signalling the focus of this part of the work on the emotions of sentimentality, homesickness, and nostalgia that dominate the final third of the cycle. The final poem, also capping the entire work, opens with the following stanza, whose opening words—with the punctuation slightly changed—also close the three-verse poem:
| O alter Duft aus Märchenzeit, | O old perfume from fabled times, |
| Berauschest wieder meine Sinne; | Ravish again my senses! |
| Ein närrisch Heer von Schelmerein | A crazy swarm of vagaries |
| Durchschwirrt die leichte Luft. | Buzzes through the easy air. |
Although the poetry is now nearly a century old, Giraud’s words seem to have been prophetic for the time, for everywhere one encounters musical works strongly smelling of “alter Duft” and that evoke a pronounced nostalgia for the past. Of course, some kind of relationship between “present music” and “past music” has always central to the composition of music. Even in the earliest days of the polyphonic tradition, composers drew upon pre-existing music (largely chant) and used it as the basis of new compositions. Even in Handel’s time, when the notion of new, independently composed works was more fully developed, it was common practice to borrow pre-existing material, either from oneself or from other composers, and to fashion a “new” works. In recent years, however, this connection between past music and present music has taken on a new dimension through the near obsessional ways in which present composers quote from previous works, employing their quotations not in the veiled way that one encounters in Schumann (quoting Beethoven in his Fantasie in C major) or in Mahler (referencing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in his First Symphony), but in a direct, manner clearly intended shock. The majority of the quotations from the past that virtually litter modern compositions are explicit and stylistically often jarring, as if to force a connection between the past and a present that no longer seems to believe in its own ontological reality. The unmistakable effect is, ultimately, of a palpable nostalgia—“a longing for former happy circumstances,” as Mr. Webster chooses to define it.[1]An aspect of this phenomenon may, of course, be the omnipresence of past music now made available as never before through scores and recordings, musical artefacts that “become talismans that link us concretely with the past” [even though] “the aura they carry is ambiguous and even ironic.”[2]
In an era of unparalleled self-consciousness regarding the act of composition, it is only natural that composers choose to explain their references to music’s past. A locus classicus in the employment of direct quotation in a modern score is the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, in which the “St. Anthony and Fishes” movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony runs like a thread throughout, Berio’s own writing sounding much like a commentary on Mahler. What is going on here and why did Berio write the movement in this way? Ever the intellectual, Berio provides an answer, couched in a vein of writing still favored in European circles: “A dialogue between a pre-existing musical text and the otherness of an added text can . . . be developed through multiple forms of interaction, from the most unanimous to the most conflictual and estranged. But it is exactly through these moments of estrangement that a deep connection with the initial data, with the given material . . . will be both challenged and justified.”[3]
Pleasant words indeed, but it seems to me that beneath the academic verbiage lies both an anxiety and a simple truth, one experienced y many who have heard the movement: it is the Mahler element in the music that captivates that imagination, and it is, ultimately, Mahler who gains from the encounter, not Berio, for it is the power of Mahler’s musical imagination in the crucial compositional element of thematic invention that effectively throws Berio’s writing in the shade. Berio’s appropriation of Mahler is, in the end, an exercise in musical nostalgia, and his justifying remark, based on notions of the “open work” and other enigmatic phrases of this type, “invokes the authority of science while indulging in the rhetoric of nostalgia.”[4]
Berio is, of course, hardly alone in his appropriation of the past in a highly disjunctive fashion. Alois Zimmerman’s 1970 Photoptosis, an orchestral work of some size, quotes Scrabin’s Le poéme de l’extase, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, the Veni Creator Spiritus, and Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy all in the same work, sometimes at the same time. A similar collage-like approach to quotation is present in both Schnittke’s Third Symphony and the middle movement of his Third String Quartet. Similar examples can easily be cited.[5]
It is important here, I think, to distinguish between earlier examples of what might be thought to be a similar process found, for example, in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and the examples just cited. Stravinsky uses Pergolesi’s first Trio Sonata as the starting point for his contemporary reflections on the eighteenth-century past, a compositional procedure not so different from Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. In both these instances, past and present co-exist, but in a way that draws the works together, the composer serving as the mediating agent. However, Berio, Schnittke, and a host of other contemporary composers pilfer the past in a way that has largely conveys not a sympathetic engagements but rather a sense of compositional embarrassment over the inability to invent significant ideas—ideas that stay in the mind and that can serve as the starting point for a musical discourse. Technique is not the same thing as invention, and with the general musical public no longer willing to endure works seemingly without ideas (musical ideas, that is), the pressure on invention has become acute. Hence the turn to the past and the sense of nostalgia about a past in which composer faced and met the challenge of invention in a sense readily recognizable to a wide audience.
In this appropriation of the past there is something slightly desperate, as if there needs to be a rapidly acquired sense of pedigree, a pedigree that seemingly only the past can bestow. I am reminded in this respect of the scene from the second act of The Pirates of Penzance in which Major-General Stanley, having committed the unpardonable sin of telling the pirates that he was an orphan, tries to expiate his sin by imploring the forgiveness his ancestors by sitting night after night among their tombs. When Frederic points out that the General only bought the property a year ago, the General smartly responds, “I don’t know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are.” In much the same fashion, the appropriation of the past, with the references brassily bold and easy to pick out, provide an instant lineage with the “Duft aus Märchenzeit.”
A similar sense of nostalgia for the past has also invaded some aspects of popular music, especially a longing for the songs of the early days of Tin Pan Alley. It is suggestive here, I think, that Charles Hamm’s now classic study of American popular song bears the title Yesterdays, a title that in its valorisation of the past implies that the entire book is, in fact, an exercise in nostalgia.[6] Hamm’s title comes from one of Jerome Kern’s most nostalgic songs, Yesterdays, originally composed for the 1933 show Roberta, the same show, incidentally, that contains the song Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
Clearly, the power of nostalgia is not to be taken lightly, even if somewhere there is a lurking sense of a failure in the present that underlies such feelings. A sense of nostalgia, especially for those who are now not so young and for whom there is more past to contemplate than future, is probably an enduring aspect of the human condition. Those of us who ply the academic trade thus naturally feel a certain kinship with Professor Engel, the aging tutor of Prince Karl Franz in Romberg’s The Student Prince, who sings to his pupil the heartfelt words: “Golden Days in the Springtime of a happy youth/Golden days full of innocence and full of truth.” It is, in the end, the sense of a special “truth” located in “memory’s haze” (Professor Engel, once again) that gives nostalgia it special appeal and power over the imagination. And it is these singular emotions, perhaps felt by composers and the wider public alike, that seem to have inspired Marcel Proust to remark:
The places we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.[7]
Kenneth Delong
University of Calgary
Notes
[1] The social conditions for nostalgia are discussed by Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989): 1-17.
[2] ibid, p. 4.
[3] (Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993-94, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 44-45.
[4] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard university Press, 1987), p. 106.
[5] This issue, engaging the recent work of Lydia Goehr, is developed in Michael Talbot, “The Work-Concept and Composer-Centeredness,” in the Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, pp. 168-89, and in James Wishart, “Re-composing Schubert,” in the same book, pp. 205-230.
[6] Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).
[7] From Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past, as quoted in Nino Ricci, Lives of the Saints (Toronto: Comorant Books, 1990), p. v.