Wendy Lesser: October 2011 Archives
Last night I attended a brilliant concert at the Morgan Library & Museum, focusing on the music that mattered most to Marcel Proust, in his life and in his writing. Organized by the Helicon Foundation and held in the gorgeously intimate Gilda Lehrman Hall, the concert featured songs by Reynaldo Hahn (Proust's sometime lover and longtime friend), Camille Saint-Saëns' Violin Sonata No. 1, and César Franck's Piano Quintet in F Minor. Both Saint-Saëns and Franck have been suggested as models for Proust's Vinteuil, composer of the famous "little phrase" that Swann treasured so deeply and associated with his love for Odette--though ultimately the phrase itself is as fictional as its composer: it can't actually be found in any real-life music, but only in the marvelously descriptive words of its author.
The high point of the evening came when Richard Howard, noted Proust translator and excellent poet in his own right, read aloud the section of In Search of Lost Time in which Swann first discovered Vinteuil's "little phrase." Howard read his own English translation beautifully, giving full poetic weight to each verbal phrase, but also giving comprehensible meaning to each sinuous and strangely conversational sentence. And then, immediately after he spoke, Pedja Muzijevic (on piano) and Jennifer Frautschi (on violin) gave such a splendid and mutually complementary rendition of the Saint-Saëns sonata that I almost seemed to be hearing Proust's account all over again, twining within and around the music as they played. The performance, that is, lived up to the matchless prose--and that is saying a great deal.
As I left the concert hall, invigorated by the whole concept as well as its flawless execution, I wondered if there were any other writers whose musical tastes could be celebrated in a similar way. We could have Beethoven's Fifth played in conjunction with E. M. Forster's Howards End, or Thelonious Monk combined with Arne Dahl's Misterioso. Last year's White Light festival gave us Samuel Beckett's prose mingled with the Schubert lieder he loved, and this year's will offer us T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Beethoven's Opus 132. But none of these combinations has the power of the Proust analogy, for the simple reason that none of these poets and novelists wrote in the manner of their favorite composers. Only Proust accomplished this seemingly impossible task: he turned language into music at the same time as he allowed it to retain its descriptive function. And last night's concert did full justice to his achievement.
The high point of the evening came when Richard Howard, noted Proust translator and excellent poet in his own right, read aloud the section of In Search of Lost Time in which Swann first discovered Vinteuil's "little phrase." Howard read his own English translation beautifully, giving full poetic weight to each verbal phrase, but also giving comprehensible meaning to each sinuous and strangely conversational sentence. And then, immediately after he spoke, Pedja Muzijevic (on piano) and Jennifer Frautschi (on violin) gave such a splendid and mutually complementary rendition of the Saint-Saëns sonata that I almost seemed to be hearing Proust's account all over again, twining within and around the music as they played. The performance, that is, lived up to the matchless prose--and that is saying a great deal.
As I left the concert hall, invigorated by the whole concept as well as its flawless execution, I wondered if there were any other writers whose musical tastes could be celebrated in a similar way. We could have Beethoven's Fifth played in conjunction with E. M. Forster's Howards End, or Thelonious Monk combined with Arne Dahl's Misterioso. Last year's White Light festival gave us Samuel Beckett's prose mingled with the Schubert lieder he loved, and this year's will offer us T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Beethoven's Opus 132. But none of these combinations has the power of the Proust analogy, for the simple reason that none of these poets and novelists wrote in the manner of their favorite composers. Only Proust accomplished this seemingly impossible task: he turned language into music at the same time as he allowed it to retain its descriptive function. And last night's concert did full justice to his achievement.
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