Christopher Norris
Metamorphosen*
Late on, surprised, he found that he could do The serious stuff, the whole deep-feeling bit, With practised skill, but with conviction too, So that his bombed-out audiences would sit
Moved and immobile when, with those last chords, The point came through: only in minor keys
Can music say the most that it affords Of truth, and what surpassed his expertise
At orchestration, or unrivalled share In all the tricks of his perfected trade. So far, it meant he didn't have to care When critics said his compositions made
Their impact through sheer brilliance, although They lacked the depth, the passion, or the 'heart' To rise above the virtuosic show And qualify as 'genuine works of art',
Whatever that might mean. Yet now he felt That maybe he'd been wrong to buy their line, Those echt-Mahlerian types ('Ich bin der Welt Abhanden . . . ', und so weiter), who'd assign
His music to some category above The merely 'popular', yet still far short Of works that conjured reverence or love, Since his, they deemed, were of that lesser sort
Where wit, inventiveness, or sheer technique Might serve for some to compensate the lack Of depth, sincerity, or that unique 'Authentic voice' which (as they said) no knack
Pesem je bila s strani avtorja posredovana v zahvalo za mednarodno izmenjavo Muzikološkega zbornika. The poem was submitted by the author in appreciation for the international exchange of Musicological Annual.
Of doing it to order could achieve. And so of course he learned to play the game, Internalised their verdict, made-believe That super-talented was all it came
Down to, and so spoke only half in jest When, during some rehearsal, hearing what Struck him as one notch better, he addressed The orchestra: 'Well, gentlemen, I'm not
A first-rate Komponist, but still a top-Class second-rate one'. Yet the words rang true Only as self-doubt-blockers, or to stop His ears against the cacophonic crew
Of carping critics, whose malignant hash He'd settled in Don Quixote. More than that, There came this curious unexpected flash Of non-self-doubt through which they turned out flat
Tone-deaf. And so the sorts of thing he'd done In all those brazen passages of heaven-Storming or heaven-defiance like the one Midway through Heldenleben or the Seven-
Veils dance in Salome, were none the less Powerful for that, or none the poorer for The way they managed somehow to finesse The crass imperatives of boor or whore
Into his version of the echt-sublime, Out-Mahlering Freud's Mahler in the drive To sublimate and yet, at the same time, Keeping the psychodrama still alive
By shots of dissonance and things that they, The jabbering critics, thought to patronise Through yet more talk of how his facile way With wrong-note harmony just helped disguise
His want of depth, or vulgar taste, or lack Of everything that made great music great, Or else - the gravamen of their attack -Whatever served to differentiate
Productions of a merely brilliant sort From products of high culture such as those, From Bach to Brahms, that all the experts thought Exemplary of how true genius rose
Above the mass of gifted second-class Pretenders to that title. Yet he knew How fine the line such brilliance had to pass To count as genius, and then, once through,
How readily the various knacks acquired, The hard-won skills and consummate technique, Served not just to elicit some desired Stock audience-response or subtly tweak
The listener's emotions but, much more, To strike a discord in that swelling theme, That arch-Romantic creed that lately bore The weight of art's high promise to redeem
A long-lost unity of sense and soul, Content and form, necessity and chance, Subject and object, all made new and whole. 'How can we tell the dancer from the dance?',
Wrote Yeats, and left his readers to conclude
The question was rhetorical, and meant Not to be answered in constructive mood -'Just looking, thinking clearly should prevent
Confusions on that score' - but to define His few choice readers as the ones that came To this climactic point (the final line Of Yeats's poem) and perceived its aim
As part of the high-symbolist crusade To sink such differences and so transcend All those false oppositions that once made Prosaic virtue of the need to fend
Off any such infraction of the code Laid down for keeping art and life apart, Or glimpse of what their union bestowed On lives transfigured or redeemed by art.
Still, there were reasons to reject that creed, Among them reasons of the sort that his Unheldenleben gave him cause to heed With special care. On this the record is
At best ambiguous, and at worst a case Of shrewd self-interest plus a Nietzschean way Of willing his self-image to efface What those Berlin performances might say
About his staying on while all around Life gave the lie to art, and the remains Of all its monuments now strewed the ground Of a high culture whose exultant strains
He'd once hit off so splendidly. And yet, All this (and more) placed on the debit side, There's more to say: for one thing, that he set No store by that Wagnerian cult that vied
With Nietzsche's in the Kulturkampf to win The ear of Volk and Fuehrer. Even less Was he much taken, or much taken in, By high-toned summonses to acquiesce
In paradoxes of the Yeatsian kind, Or such seductive stratagems as tempt Even those readers/listeners of a mind Well-fortified against them, to exempt
Some favoured masterwork, and let it sweep All their defences down. This might suffice To sort one goat from all the echt-Deutsch sheep: That not a note of his had helped entice
More Uebermenschen down the Bayreuth road From warring Siegfried as the dumb-blond beast To that last metamorphosis that showed, Looming beyond, Nietzsche's ascetic priest,
Re-christened Parsifal and charged to bring Redemption to the catastrophic scene, To cast his sickly gaze on everything, And so transvalue all that had once been
Vital and strong to its pale counterpart By dint of the symbolic wound so placed, Like poor Sir Clifford's, as to need small art In the deciphering. No mere lapse of taste,
That pious fakery, but just what spurred His ex-disciple now turned Anti-Christ To damn the very works that once he heard As blessings; no mere shift in the Zeitgeist
From old heroic to new meek and mild, But rather everything he diagnosed As rotten in the creed that reconciled What now, post-Parsifal, for Nietzsche posed
A flat-out war of contraries that brooked No kind of holy synthesis achieved By symbol-mongering techniques that looked Suspiciously like those he now perceived
At work across the whole slave-moralist And decadent regime of values turned Against themselves by a malignant twist Of crass slave-logic. Whence the lesson learned
By Wagner's literary heirs like Yeats And fellow modernists to whom it seemed That image, symbol, and their correlates Like metaphor (which Aristotle deemed
The one true mark of genius) might afford A wisdom higher than could be attained Through plain-prose reason or the poet's word When hobbled, hemmed, its energies constrained
By logic, syntax, or the dull behest That they make sense according to the rules For good sense-making laid down as a test Of formal rectitude by all the schools
Of inkhorn classicists whose feeble line Ran out with the Edwardians. Still there's A counter-narrative that would assign The main roles in reverse with all their shares
Of praise and blame. In which case he comes out, Our self-professed top-class though second-rate Composer, still with cause enough for doubt And room for endless scholarly debate
Concerning what he did or didn't do, In evil times, to help himself along, To get his works performed and listened to, Or - charitably - show that they were wrong,
Those Kulturkaempfer of the Nazi stripe And perfect Wagnerites who claimed to speak
For Germany, or represent the type In which all German art must henceforth seek
Its model as the heir-elect of those Who went before, the first-rate top-class ones From Bach to Wagner (at which point they chose Conveniently to halt), and as true sons
Of Volk and Vaterland whose life and art Grew seamlessly from that pure native root. Yet listen to his music and you start To think at any rate the question's moot
Whether he cocked an ear or cocked a snook When savvy music theorists saw their chance To take a leaf from Heinrich Schenker's book, And use their geared-up methods to advance
A version of analysis that makes Those same works set the analytic norm, Or token all the qualities it takes -Coherence, unity, 'organic form',
Voice-leading, theme-and-variation style, Motivic contrast, long-range tonal links -To gain admission to the canon, while By showing this the sharp-eared critic thinks
On the one hand to burnish up the work And on the other certify his own Guild membership. Along with that large perk There came the virtuous sense of having shown,
In true Schenkerian style, how the deep bond That held the work together not despite But on account of striking out beyond All extant formal schemas, therefore might
Be taken, diachronically construed, As analogue or metaphor for what Those aesthetes and ideologues pursued Through fabulation of a master-plot
Transcending all coordinates of space And time since fixing its delusive sights On a domain whose landmarks found no place In any habitus save the far heights
Of a locus imaginarius Whose dwelling was the twilight of the gods, And in whose glare crepuscular those various Mere circumstantial details made no odds.
And so he had good cause, our Komponist Of altogether less exalted strain, To give himself some credit as the least Siegfriedian of heroes, and explain
That even Heldenleben had its share Of mock heroics to offset the more Heldenhaft passages. And just compare The Zarathustra imaged in his score
With Nietzsche's prototype, and then you'll hear -After the opening bars that Stanley Kubrick So tellingly deployed - the message clear: That with such heady stuff the safest rubric
Is 'Make the most of this, but do still show A decent sense of everything that counts Against the Overman, and let us know That Untermenschlich sanity amounts,
Sometimes, to more than its brave opposites. Besides which, it was Bizet and his French Esprit that later on saved Nietzsche's wits, Though briefly, not the Geist of Uebermensch.
Think too, when you reflect on those twice-bom Serene works of the Straussian afterglow -The Duett-Concertino, Second Horn Concerto, Sextet from Capriccio,
Or, strangely kin, the searing threnody Of his Metamorphosen - that he'd earned The right to sound new depths that previously, Instructed by the jabberers, he'd learned
To sublimate or simply keep at bay By all those tricks at his expert command, From firework orchestration to the way His compositions give the upper hand
To dramatis personae of the most Diverse or Ionesco-scripted sorts, With their attentive dramaturge as host And counsellor. Ignore, then, the reports
And wry self-estimates and hear him find, Like the Tin Man, not that he'd suddenly, In those last works, acquired another kind Of depth, compassion, shared humanity,
In short, by some new magic gained 'a heart', But rather - to his own unfeigned surprise -That they were wrong, those critics of his art, Who praised his orchestration to the skies,
Along with his inventiveness, his fine Ear for sonorities, melodic flair, Harmonic daring, strength of vocal line, Consummate stagecraft, faultless sense of where
To place his master-strokes, etc., yet Praised only with faint damns since they went on, Those certified depth-plumbers, to regret That his achievements were too quickly won,
That sheer technique had triumphed over soul,
The 'rootless cosmopolitan' betrayed His native roots, and so - in short - the whole Bad litany that, after Dresden, made
Him thankful he'd done nothing in the style Of those late-blooming fervent Wagnerites Who gained high approbation for a while, Then obloquy; or those who raised their sights
Yet further, and wrote chalice-boilers like Pfitzner's Von Deutscher Seele to declare This Reich sole portal to that Himmelreich Conjured in every true believer's prayer.
And so it seemed to him that he'd done well,
Or not done badly, to resist all such High-minded soul-corrupting stuff, and tell Some low domestic truths that just might touch
The mind and heart (not soul) of some half-fledged Wagnerian neophyte, and let them learn Something of what he'd learned as twilight edged Its way toward darkness, with no day's return.