Abstract
Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s inauguration of the field of musical semiology in 1975 heralded a chain of discursive responses and critical revisions, of which the present volume is an explicit continuation. The updated English translation of his subsequent monograph Musicologie générale et sémiologie (1987), published as Music and Discourse (1990), brought his systematic approach and philosophical erudition to a receptive Anglophone readership, where its intellectual reference and epistemological reach have secured its place at seminar tables the world over. Nattiez’s latest volume, on the Shepherd melody from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is perhaps best understood in this context as a critical exemplification of the tenets laid out in that translated monograph.
At the time, his stated view of music was explicitly multifaceted, encompassing a work’s “genesis, its [structural] organization, and the way it is perceived” (1990, p. ix). The principal categories of 1987 – the neutral (or immanent), the esthesic, and the poietic – have proven a durable model. Readers will recall that, for Nattiez, the poietic emphasizes creative genesis and production (linguistically, the sending of a message), the esthesic emphasizes acts of witnessing, reception and perception (receiving a message), while the neutral or immanent level analyses the structure of the message itself, and constitutes the remaining “trace” left behind when esthesic and poietic considerations are subtracted. Famously borrowed from the French linguist Jean Molino, the three semiological categories, in Nattiez’s hands, become an epistemological filter whose role is to reveal the paradigms, suppositions and contingencies supporting any individual analytical approach to any given music. From a certain perspective all analysis arguably has an esthesic function, of course, and, for those sceptical of linguistic systems, Molino’s categories can appear somewhat outdated (see, e.g., Taruskin, 2004, pp. 11–12). But for those who prefer to tarry within Nattiez’s intellectual framework, “music” remains inclusive, constituting both a “total social fact” and that which can be “constructed” as “symbolic form” (1990, pp. ix, 34), namely: the result of a complex process of creation (the poietic process) that has to do with the form as well as the content of the work; [and] … the point of departure for a complex process of reception (the esthesic process) that reconstructs a message. (1990, p. 17)
In 1987 as in 2013, the tripartite model yields six levels or “analytical situations”, of which the final level – like Schiller’s Spieltrieb – renders the system dynamic by promoting communication between the other levels and their agents (Nattiez, 1990, p. 140). The powers of synthesis required for such a synoptic perspective are considerable, and time and again Nattiez’s erudition and balanced reasoning have proven courageously disrespectful of disciplinary boundaries.
But the book under discussion is ostensibly a book about Wagner. Hence it has two identities. On the one hand, it is an encyclopedic study of one of Wagner’s most singular and enigmatic melodies, the 42-bar “alte Weise” that Tristan hears upon waking, weak and mortally wounded, in Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde. This diegetic melody not only signals news of the death of Tristan’s parents, but seemingly asks him “for what fate was I born at that time?”. Supplying the harsh answer: “to yearn, to die!”. 1 For Ernest Newman, its four phrasal segments constitute simply “one of the strangest and most poignant [melodies] ever imagined by the man” (1949/1991, p. 264). On the other hand, the melody is beside the point, becoming merely the prism through which to access analytical method; it brings into focus the situatedness of the different perspectives we adopt towards our objects of study within different analytical and musicological traditions – each seemingly in search of a greater truth. In this sense, Nattiez’s book is an extensive and cross-disciplinary study of 42 bars by Wagner, but will garner interest principally as a comparative critique of method that believes in the promise of greater self-awareness. 2 It effectively poses the Big Question about musical knowledge: where has the mainstream been hiding? The universal voices of the mid-to-late century, the grand old methods, are getting older and grander, but the land they preside over appears increasingly restrictive.
Divided into four sections and 11 chapters, it adheres to Molino’s tripartite model (“three points of view”) stated above, though Nattiez adds a fourth element – the hermeneutic – to the “grand musicological family” (p. 367). The first section – the longest and most detailed of the four – is devoted to comparative linear, formal and paradigmatic analyses of the melody’s structure; this incorporates Schenkerian and prolongational strategies by Allen Forte and Fred Lerdahl as well as “prosodic” and “implicative” analyses by Annie Labussière and Nattiez, respectively. In this, Nattiez emphatically answers earlier criticism that his perspective in Music and Discourse ignored the proto-structuralism of Schenkerian analysis (Agawu, 1992, p. 319); while he includes Schenkerian (Forte) and prolongational (Lerdahl) analyses of the melodic line, Forte’s analysis relates necessarily to one of the harmonized versions of the “alte Weise” that appears later in Act 3, which deviates from the unaccompanied version in a number of respects. The absence of an Ursatz indicates there is no actual close, and Forte speaks instead of “gestures of closure”. Nevertheless, this section is replete with detail and an illuminating comparative presentation of different understandings of the melody’s linear structure (Table 4, extending over five pages, offers a synopsis of the different groupings of phrasal units, though in doing so, it arguably privileges Lerdahl and Leichtentritt over the likes of Labussière, see pp. 93–97). The plentiful musical examples (numbering some 140) and analytical illustrations are beautifully presented, adding an essential visual aid for readers.
The second section – the esthesic perspective – addresses principally semiotic and immanent structure(s) rooted in the “rules of perception” proposed by Lerdahl and Jackendorf’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music, a touchstone for much of Nattiez’s work in the esthesic domain. And within Chapter 5, through Irène Deliège’s extensive experimental verification of grouping structure from 1998, this section seeks to probe and substantiate those rules. The third section investigates Wagner’s melody at a poietic level, incorporating manuscript sources and ethnographic transcriptions, Wagner’s (five) relevant written statements about it, comparable works by Liszt and Mendelssohn, and an account of the melody’s compositional genesis. In the opening “neutral” analytical section, Nattiez historicizes the methods – linear, formal, paradigmatic – under discussion, pinpointing their origins within the field; the application of source criticism in the third section exemplifies this historical sensitivity, for it persuasively, if straightforwardly, follows Wagner’s autobiographical pronouncements about his inspiration for the melody. To take one example, Wagner describes being awoken at 4 a.m. by an alpine horn whose music he couldn’t get out of his head when trying to rekindle his sleep, and which he took to inform the Shepherd’s “very amusing melody” (sehr lustige Melodie, p. 226); 3 as a result the entire genealogy of le ranz des vaches becomes a valid field of enquiry, and is only delimited by those melodic instantiations that Wagner may have conceivably heard or read about (including Rousseau’s intriguing transcription in the 1768 Dictionnaire de musique). A similar rationale – and letter – leads to the genealogy of Venetian gondola songs (p. 227). As an aside, readers may be pleasantly surprised to see full colour reproductions of Wagner’s three sketches for the melody from the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, all subsequently transcribed (pp. 269–281).
In the fourth section, Nattiez addresses hermeneutic methods more directly, defining them as “the interpretation of meanings by connecting the materials with horizons” (p. 293). This breaks down into two intellectual zones: the theory or philosophy through which practices and musical works are interpreted; and the context that determines the horizon against which the interpretation is undertaken. Hence, Nattiez admits this isn’t really a separate section in Molino’s terms, for hermeneutics “has not been absent from the preceding chapters” (p. 293). Again, following a familiar biographical bias, the discussion of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics yields a number of thought-provoking conclusions. One example is Nattiez’s explanation for why Wagner consistently titled the end of Tristan “Verklärung” (transfiguration) before the world acquiesced to Liszt’s term, “Liebestod”: The apotheosis that ends the opera allows us to see and hear the transfiguration of Isolde in her eternal union with Tristan finally realized. But it is also the transfiguration of the [Schopenhauerian] spirit of the music that gave birth to Tristan. Finally, it is the immediate expression of the will by which Wagner the Redeemer brings us redemption with Tristan und Isolde. (p. 365)
Poetics aside, the Schopenhauerian reading of the opera’s achievements in the metaphysical sphere contrasts with Wagner’s lengthy caution to Liszt not to depict “Paradiso” in a postulated third movement of the latter’s Dante Symphony (“I must have a little chat to you about that. … dearest Franz, there is in reality a considerable difficulty”). 4 Liszt as we know settled instead for a symbolic Magnificat with female chorus at the close of “Purgatorio”. This reluctance explicitly to depict aspects of the metaphysical within the musical leaves open a historical question about the extent to which the “will” itself can be thematized within a musical narrative.
One of Nattiez’s abiding premises is that analysis begins from a “neutral” or immanent level, wherein “the poietic and esthesic dimensions of the object have been ‘neutralized,’ and … one proceeds to the end of a given procedure regardless of the results obtained” (1990, p. 13). In the case of Wagner’s Shepherd melody, this began with linear analysis, and the resulting paradigmatic relations, we learn, can be used not only to illuminate relations between phrasal units but also to show the melody’s prolongational structure. The later admission that “analysis at the neutral level is far from absolutely fixed” (p. 368) in the hands of different analysts, begins to undermine the possibility of its neutrality. But Nattiez’s pragmatic response is that notation is a closed system, and it is precisely the immanence of that system that underpins its value as a “neutral” starting point: It is illusory to suggest that musical works signify if one does not specify, each time and systematically, what musical realities these significations are supported by. … Without the immanent [or neutral] analysis I cannot say what I mean, as musicological discourse is never built from nothing. That is why, throughout this lengthy enterprise, I have consistently tried to lean as much as possible on the completeness of the musical “text” without ever letting it go. (p. 372)
This has some very practical consequences. As part of his study of how cor anglais players on recorded performances organize phrase structure, Nattiez proposes his own phrasal divisions that indicate where players are to breathe (p. 157). The flipside of such pragmatism is a certain recourse to top-down models of “analysis to performance” that figures such as Nicholas Cook, Jonathan Dunsby and John Rink have been at pains to overturn. 5 Nevertheless, this is merely implied, and the gesture of seeking to solve an ostensive problem for performers adds a degree of utility to what remains a scholarly text.
Amid a series of robust mid-century debates over melodic theory, melody was often defined – in the shadow of language and Philologie – along national lines, and a number of German writers, Wagner included, allied it in the strong sense to Bellinian form. Even into the late 20th century, the puzzling nature of the Shepherd’s melody in Tristan has made it an irresistible object of analysis. The specific impetus to use Wagner’s cor anglais melody as an explicative case study for articulating a semiology of music dates back to the early 1990s. At that time, Nattiez asked Forte, Lerdahl and Deliège to undertake analytical studies of the melody; the initial results were presented in four lectures at the Collège de France in 1993. The papers resulting from a subsequent, related symposium on the topic in 1997 were published in a special issue of Musicae Scientiae in 1998. 6 While it is undoubtedly true that Nattiez’s ideas are in a constant state of development, the current book, appearing 15 years on, represents a bold synthesis of this scholarly undertaking vis-à-vis the original project of musical semiology.
In 1987 an underlying premise of Nattiez’s system – to think through not only the process of a work but also analyses of that work – was to offer an answer to the question: “How can we reconcile formal and hermeneutic description, the analysis of a neutral level, and a material trace, with the web of interpretants?” (1990: 28). Readers of his current Wagner monograph may feel the degree to which it highlights the multiplicity of analytical constructions and proposed networks of signification implicitly endorses a familiar relativistic agenda, one that has dominated postmodern discourse. To this end, it is telling there is an inevitable embrace of pluralism in Nattiez’s interpretations (“as far as was possible I have consistently avoided talking ‘of’ meaning, and I prefer the term ‘meanings’, often in the plural, to emphasize their proliferation”, p. 372). But he rejects the label of relativism, instead calling for a sober acceptance of “fragments of truth” and “partial truths” uncovered in the momentary confluence of approaches: So can we speak of the truth or validity of this or that musicological discourse? The acquisition of music and musical works is always fragmentary. Otherwise we would not witness the appearance of new methods made necessary by the emergence of unresolved problems and unexpected enigmas. Whether it is a question of immanent analysis, the poietic and esthesic investigations or exegesis, we have to resign ourselves to the fact that we only have access to fragments of truth. There is no real knowledge of the work’s totality, only partial and particular constructions of some of its moments. A definitive statement based on our tentative attempts to elucidate the mysteries of music is not possible. Yet even if our proposals are fragmentary, we can rejoice in achieving some success. To do so we must obey certain fundamental principles. (pp. 370–371)
To invoke fragments in pursuit of unknowable truth or wholeness is perhaps redolent of an older literary romantic tradition, that of Victor Hugo and Friedrich Schlegel, where what is fragmentary can gesture to the infinite precisely by virtue of its incompleteness while at the same time being “isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself”. 7 This, it seems, is the paradoxical condition to which Nattiez’s impressively detailed, synthesizing enterprise can lead us. Along the way, the journey is at times illuminating, at times fascinating, as a spur to critical self-reflection. While some may not see the value in such methodological self-awareness, the clarity and quantity of research data – structural, historical, critical, epistemological – that informs this book makes it invaluable for anyone with a serious interest in seeking to understand Wagner’s music. For this reader, the conclusion cited above begins to undermine the putatively ahistorical status of the tripartite system organizing Nattiez’s approach. But if firm conclusions prove elusive in a study that prefers to sift judiciously, self-conscious of its methodological footprint, it undoubtedly offers an erudite demonstration of comparative applied theory. In this capacity it will prove invaluable for researchers and graduate students alike, and to that end an English translation would be a helpful next step.