Ravel and the critics

roger nichols

Like most composers, Ravel had his staunch defenders and his virulent opponents as well as one or two critics (in many ways the most interesting for us) who tried to take each of his works on its merits.

Of his defenders, the eldest was Willy (Henri Gauthier-Villars, 1859–1931) who, despite his love ofWagner, had also been one of the few early champions of Debussy’s L’Après-midi. If he was caustic over the early overture Shéhérazade, this was no more than Ravel came to be himself, and his willingness to praise the ‘orchestre de rêve’ of Daphnis may have been due in part to his pleasure in seeing fulfilled his prophecy of 1899 that Ravel might ‘become something if not someone in about ten years, if he works hard’.

Ravel’s remaining supporters were men nearer his own age. Charles Koechlin (1867–1950) had been a fellow student at the Conservatoire and, as a brilliant teacher of musical technique, naturally recognised Ravel’s abilities in this area and regarded him as one of France’s leading composers. Of L’Heure espagnole, Koechlin claimed that it was the work of a Japanese sculptor in ivory ‘with the impeccable sureness of his accurate line and his ironic, intimate view of objects’.4 Another friend, M.-D. Calvocoressi (1877–1944), one of the ‘Apaches’ and the dedicatee of ‘Alborada del gracioso’, became the chief music critic of Comoedia illustré. Even though he liked to think of himself as unusually objective, his unwavering support of Ravel prompted Debussy to dub him a ‘valet dechambre’

Most students of Romanticism will at some point find themselves confronting the challenge of theory and philosophy. This was not always so. The Romantics themselves certainly felt this challenge, perhaps most visibly in the career of Coleridge, but later commentators found ways to avoid it. John Stuart Mill's Autobiography presented a case for the therapeutic value of reading Wordsworth as a poet of the feelings rather than of ideas, and Matthew Arnold followed up with a recommendation that we ignore altogether the same poet's efforts at systematic thought and concentrate instead on his closeness to nature. Wordsworth was seen by both men as a great poet but a poor philosopher, and as such he was taken to instance the generic divide between poetry and philosophy that had preoccupied so many critics from Sir Philip Sidney on. The general notion of the ‘literary’ has indeed for the last four or five hundred years involved the assumption that literature is not philosophical, that it offers access to different sorts of truth and different imaginative experiences from those associated with abstract thought and logical argument. This same general notion has also supposed that literature is to be distinguished from history, from the accumulation and arrangement of facts and records and from the grand narratives of world-historical change.

Criticism, however, has not always kept itself so pure. In the 1970s, especially in the United States, Romanticism was visibly associated with the development of literary theory, and with a philosophic foundation. Since then, the most notable ambition in Romantic studies has been a historical one, an effort to situate the major writers within the life and thought of their times, and to fill in our knowledge of the literary tradition by recovering and discussing other writers (including many women) whom we have ignored or dismissed as of no interest. The effort at holding on to a model of the literary that is neither philosophical nor historical has always been under pressure from one or other of these alternatives, and sometimes both at once.

Of all ideas commonly associated with Romanticism in the arts, the idea of nature is perhaps the most inclusive and the most evocative. The only rival for this role would be the concept of creativity of the human mind and the power of the poetic imagination. Both ideas are closely interrelated. Romantic ‘nature’ is essentially a space of the imagination, which in turn draws from her most of its imagery. Romantic literature and painting abound in representations of pristine landscapes and scenes of blissful simplicity, of genuinely perceived particular phenomena of the natural world and bold visions of its overall harmony with the world of man. To be sure, there are also the experience of solitude and the adventure or despair of the wilderness, awesome and frightful sceneries symbolizing the abandonment of a soul adrift from the moorings of the familiar world. During the Romantic period, nature in its physical appearance emerged as the privileged material for expressing a human subject emancipated from the traditional restrictions of religion and society and experiencing the unfathomable depth of the soul. Confronted with a self-imposed freedom and the loss of sense of a ‘natural’ belonging, this subject developed, together with a rich and infinitely differentiated emotionality, an equally infinite longing for a lost unity and harmony resonantly evoked as ‘nature’.

Indeed, one way of defining the Romantic movement in Europe between 1770 and 1830 and accounting for its unity and specificity across the varieties and differences of individuals, media, genres, chronologies and, last but not least, national traditions, is to regard it as an aesthetic reaction to, and compensation for, the thrust of an onrushing modernity.

It has been well said that the pervasive elegance in the music of Berlioz is a reflection of his cultivated mind. Genius, it is true, can create masterpieces without the aid of intellect and general culture. But their presence does no harm; they develop that second-level simplicity which, when allied to conciseness, yields elegance. In every art one can distinguish those masters who have been men of thought from those in whom native gift has reigned alone. Turner and Daumier in painting, Schubert and Brahms in music come to mind as projecting the artistic power in its first simplicity. That characteristic implies no limitation of sensibility or technique.

The other category – take for examples Delacroix and Schumann – is the one to which Berlioz belongs. His uncommon upbringing ensured that he would have the self-awareness and detachment of the highly literate. It proved a source of imaginative richness in his music and of spiritual distress in his life.

As he makes a point of telling us in his Mémoires, Berlioz was reared in the Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church. His mother was a believer, his father an eighteenth-century “encyclopedist”; that is to say a man of advanced ideas, for whom religion had a much attenuated meaning. As a physician he rejoiced in the progress of science and passed on to his son his own broad curiosity about it. Scientific method implied an a priori rejection of the supernatural and a steady skepticism.

Literary history was created in the Romantic age. René Wellek traces its origins to English and Scottish intellectuals of the eighteenth century – Robert Lowth, Thomas Percy, John Brown, Thomas Warton and many another. They thought their way to the basic concepts of literary history (The rise of English literary history, pp. 200–1). If their contributions are now less remembered, a reason is that in Germany Herder collected their ideas, along with those of Leibniz, Kant, Hamann and Winckelmann, and voiced them more assertively. He is perhaps the father of literary history – at least of its programme, though he was unready to chew as much straw as is necessary to write it. There were important essays by French writers, such as Madame de Staël's On literature considered in its relations with social institutions (1800) and Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity (1802), but after the 1780s, the development of literary history proceeded mainly in Germany.

Which was the first literary history? We are speaking, of course, of the first in a modern kind. The older kind was a history of learning, historia litterarum, a project Francis Bacon had recommended: ‘the general state of learning to be described and represented from age to age… without which the history of the world seemeth to me to be as the statua of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most show the spirit and life of the person’. As time passed, the histories of learning became more sophisticated, but as late as 1839, in Henry Hallam's impressive volumes, they were still essentially compendia.

In the reminiscences of Berlioz which he addressed to Eduard Hanslick in the Revue et Gazette musicale ten years after the composer's death, Stephen Heller recalled his friend's response to a performance of Beethoven's E-Minor Quartet (the second “Rasumovsky”), which they attended together in the eighteen-sixties:

To that anecdote we may add Berlioz's account of a rehearsal of a late Beethoven quartet, perhaps Op. 127, which was in the repertory of the Bohrer Quartet when they played in Paris in February and March 1830:

Titles, cycles, collections

On the face of it, Berlioz is a composer for whom genre was a secondary issue. Working within a genre creates definite expectations, but Berlioz – unlike Monpou and Niedermeyer in their romances, Haydn and even Beethoven in their symphonies, Auber and Meyerbeer in their operas – seems to have preferred not to operate in this way. Berlioz's overtures, among his most popular and readily understood works, do adhere to expected outlines, but his symphonies evoke the theatre, his operas pay only nominal tribute to established categories, and his liturgical compositions (the Messe solennelle, Requiem, and Te Deum) present generically conventional surfaces which prove, on closer examination, to be deceptive.

Berlioz implicitly acknowledged a difficulty by providing generic subtitles for otherwise purely descriptive titles. At the time of their composition, the Épisode de la vie d'un artiste, Harold en Italie, Roméo et Juliette, La Damnation de Faust, and L'Enfance du Christ were the sole occupants of their generic categories – respectively Fantastic Symphony (Symphonie fantastique en cinq parties), Symphony in Four Movements with a Solo Viola (Symphonie en quatre parties avec un alto principal), Dramatic Symphony (Symphonie dramatique), Dramatic Legend (Légende dramatique), and Sacred Trilogy (Trilogie sacrée). Despite such specificity, however, Berlioz could not always avoid misunderstanding. If the subtitle for Harold en Italie tells us that in this symphony there is more than a trace of the concerto, terms such as “dramatic legend” convey little about genre: some contemporaries mistakenly alluded to the Damnation as a symphony, for example, but Berlioz would not accept the designation “Symphonic legend.”

“Impact” – the forceful contact or collision of one body against another – is a particularly appropriate word to describe Hector Berlioz's effect upon his contemporaries, whether the composers of his own or of the next generation, the public, or colleagues in the press. Many in France acknowledged the genius of Berlioz the musician, but in his own time true appreciation of his achievement tended to reside mainly with a few ardent admirers, for Berlioz cultivated a style that was so distinctive, subjective, and exploratory that general audiences did not embrace the bulk of his works.

In 1870, only a year after his death, a youthful Adolphe Jullien stressed the personal character of Berlioz's music by characterizing the man and his art as one and the same: “he acts, he thinks, he lives in his works. Each page of his music is made in his own image.” Younger composers, intent on building their careers, tended to avoid the risky course of adopting wholesale his innovations and individual style. In 1871 Georges Bizet expressed both the deep admiration and the wariness symptomatic of his generation's attitude toward Berlioz as a model:

Poetics, language, hermeneutics

A persistent concern for problems of language that was shared by most Romantic writers did not come to them as an afterthought. Rather, their novel poetics, which posited the primacy of the creative imagination over an inherited system of rules and conventions, would make them focus on the poetic medium, language itself, and put them on a collision course not only with eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics, but also with the linguistic opinions that had been handed down to them by Enlightenment philosophers and theoreticians. Kantian and idealist philosophy on the other hand, whose basic beliefs they shared, though it stressed the creative nature of the human mind and ascribed a formative function to the imagination, did not engender any new philosophy of language. In fact, the rise and flowering of linguistic thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was so much part of the empiricist and rationalist traditions that in the eyes of the idealists the entire linguistic enterprise had become flawed. Thus the Romantics felt obligated to raise for themselves the fundamental issues of language, that is, its relation to thought, the nature of reality and human creativity, and to articulate linguistic theories that would be relevant to their own endeavours. This was their way of breaking with the rationalist and empiricist traditions and the deeply ingrained representational notion of language upon which neoclassicism had erected its mimetic ideals of literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that Romantic literature not only reveals a new and different conception of language that we can refer to broadly as Romantic, but that the major writers such as the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schleiermacher in Germany, Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant in France and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England have articulated a coherent conception of language that takes issue with and replaces the traditional seventeenth- and eighteenth-century views associated with the names of Hobbes, Descartes, Locke and Condillac.

The difficulty of our topic emerges into view when we consider Wordsworth's claim in the Preface to Lyrical ballads (1800), certainly one of the key programmatic statements of European Romanticism, that the poet has ‘taken as much pains to avoid… as others ordinarily take to produce’ what he calls ‘poetic diction’ The term refers to exactly that sort of linguistic stylization that traditional rhetorical doctrine, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, had prescribed as the ornamental technique appropriate to poetic speech. Wordsworth's insistence throughout the Preface on the ‘very language of men’ or even the ‘real language of nature’ as the proper stylistic paradigm of poetry amounts, then, to a radical dissociation of poetic writing from the prescriptions of rhetorical doctrine. Coleridge, of course, did not share Wordsworth's adherence to common parlance, but his contention that ‘whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction’ nevertheless implies a cognate renunciation of rhetoric insofar as the principle of the substitutability of expressions is the foundation of traditional rhetorical elocutio. Nor are these disparagements of rhetorical doctrine unique to their authors; they exemplify a widespread attitude formulated as early as the 1770s and characteristic of Romanticism generally. In this sense, one can agree with the historical diagnosis of Ernst Robert Curtius that Romanticism represents a decisive rupture in the European literary tradition precisely to the extent that it evacuates rhetorical doctrine, which had linked that tradition to its roots in antiquity, of theoretical and pedagogical significance.

No sane commentator has ever doubted Ravel's talent. He was a wonderful technician, a superb orchestrator, a consummate stylist … but … The sense of disappointment is as often an undertow as a fully fledged current. Jim Samson, for instance, sums up Ravel's harmonic practice by saying that ‘ultimately … the more astringent harmonies in his music are an extension and enrichment of a traditional type of tonal thinking rather than a reshaping of tonality along new, radical lines’. Samson might reasonably argue that this is a neutral, non-value judgement; but in the context of a book entitled Music in Transition it is, I submit, easier to read it as a criticism than as a eulogy. There is surely more than a little truth in Michael Russ's contention with regard to the two piano concertos that ‘Musicology is wary of declaring as “canonic” works which set out to entertain rather than those which confront the audience with what it might find unpalatable as a necessary part of discovery and self-expression’ (‘The Concerto in G and jazz’: Chapter 6). It is, in essence, the ways in which Ravel is thought to fall short of the canonic, the ‘but’ of my first paragraph, that I want to examine, for what they tell us not only about Ravel but also about the twentieth century and the demands it has made of its ‘serious’ composers.

“The Jupiter of our Olympus was Gluck,” Berlioz recalled, when speaking of the feelings he had had as an aspiring twenty-year-old composer. To this youthful metaphor of sincere admiration it is instructive to compare the expression of disillusionment set down in the Postface of the Mémoires by the now veteran artist approaching the end of his career:

This unspoken confession, with its telling ellipsis, leaves us with the impression that there was still unresolved dissonance at the end of Berlioz's long engagement with Gluck. That engagement, always marked by Berlioz's recollections of famous voices such as that of the great dramatic soprano Caroline Branchu, extended from an early, defensive phase – saving the composer from oblivion, on the one hand, and from impertinent arrangers, on the other – to a later, illustrative phase – “reproducing” his works (the word is Berlioz's) and transmitting them to posterity as models of excellence. Berlioz's participation in the revivals of Orphée in 1859 and of Alceste in 1861 and 1866 marks the culmination of a militant campaign waged by the French composer on behalf of the man whom he recognized, very early on, as both his master and his model.

Like genre theory in general, Romantic novel theory in particular takes radically different guises in different countries. My chapter, like Tilottama Rajan's, highlights German contributions, which are systematic and abstract in ways that are rare in other countries. However, the theory of the novel is by nature more oriented toward practice, which makes the more empirical and pragmatic English and French expressions more worthy of extended notice than is the case for genre theory. A central question is whether it makes sense to speak of Romantic novel theory as a whole, given the radical national differences becoming manifest. I begin with a survey of the situation of the novel and of novel theory confronting the first generation of Romantic writers; a common tradition guaranteed a certain commonality of approach, while growing divergences foreground the question of unity. I proceed with a synopsis of leading themes of novel criticism, mostly linked to two famous, synthesizing utterances of Friedrich Schlegel. Having defined some common ground, I then present the four most distinctive Romantic contributions: Goethe's comments on the novel in Wilhelm Meister, Friedrich Schlegel's essay on Wilhelm Meister, the novelist Jean Paul Friedrich Richter's Aesthetic primer, and the writings of Walter Scott. Scott's work sums up the tendencies formalized in the German writers and forecasts leading concerns of subsequent novel theory; a brief closing consideration of Balzac's preface to the Comédie humaine characterizes the later destiny of Romantic thinking about the novel.

Introduction

More than any other element of Romantic aesthetics, Romantic irony contradicts the pervasive popular view of what Romanticism means. Irony is the other side of Romanticism, attuned to rationality rather than feeling, to calculation rather than sentiment, to self-reflection rather than self-expression. Conventional accounts of Romanticism have often been distorted by failing to take account of its central role for romantic aesthetics, not just in the theoretical sites where one might expect to find it (most notably the German romantic theories of Friedrich Schlegel and Karl Solger), but in innumerable literary texts where one might simply read past it (the poetry of Keats, for instance, or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Seen genetically, Romantic irony links Romanticism both to the immediate past (to such late Enlightenment figures as Immanuel Kant or William Godwin) and to subsequent revivals of romantic sensibility or epistemology (Friedrich Nietzsche's self-critical romanticism, Oscar Wilde's aestheticism, even postmodern theory and practice). Indeed, a scrupulous genealogy of Romantic irony might well confirm Friedrich Schlegel's claim that it is the incomprehensibilities of irony on which, ‘the salvation of families and nations rests … and of states and systems’ (‘Ber die Unverständlichkeit’, Kritische Ausgabe, II, p. 370). Or if not that much, a good deal nonetheless.

Although irony has long had its own secure niche within literary criticism, it was the New Criticism of the 1940s that gave it a particularly privileged position within Anglo–American critical discourse. Cleanth Brooks articulated most forcefully the new role assigned to irony when he described it as ‘the most general term we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context’.