Dominique Pagani devotes a whole session of his analytical reveries to Mignon, Goethe's creature: "Mignon ou le chant du silence" ("Mignon, or the Song of Silence"). There he stresses everything about her that remains undetermined: we do not simply know whether she is a girl, she is dressed as a boy and stands between two sexes and two ages. She comes from travelling people and is the child of incest; she twitters a vague German rather than speaking it. He sees her as a pre-social being whose socialisation is impossible1. By gathering all these indeterminacies, she embodies the spirit of music; she dies of grief when Wilhelm moves away2. He recalls that Wagner saw in her music that is made to suffer3. He links her to the Rhinemaidens, to the little girls of Senlis in Nerval, whom he calls "Angélique's Mignon", and even to the nursery rhyme of Kubrick's robot4. He states that his commentary grew out of a political concern. In 2024 he makes her the figure of an identity that cannot be found and is always fleeting, the opposite of becoming set in one's ways5.
Summary produced automatically from 22 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.
Who is this?
Mignon (French pronunciation: ) is an 1866 opéra comique (or opera in its second version) in three acts by Ambroise Thomas. The original French libretto was by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, based on Goethe's 1795-96 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The Italian version was translated by Giuseppe Zaffira. The opera is mentioned in James Joyce's "The Dead" (in Dubliners) and Willa Cather's The Professor's House. Thomas's goddaughter Mignon Nevada was named after the main character. The aria “I am Titania” was used repeatedly in the British feature film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
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Series · 7 Apr 2021#1 Mignon, or the song of silence
