English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Mozart in the shift: the finale of Don Giovanni 0:00 Hello everyone, here we are again with Dominique Pagani for a new Musicosophie conversation about music and philosophy. And we're going to talk about Mozart again, because Dominique hadn't said everything. Hello Dominique, hello to you. Hello Aymeric, I hope you can hear me well. Yes, yes, yes. Because I've had a few problems, there was a small flood in our children's home last night, but apparently the connection is fine.
0:36 Yes, I greet our audience. Yes, I'm doing a second Mozart session, and I thank our audience for their loyalty. It's not that it's Mozart because I don't have, say, a Bach. Let's take the three B's, as they say in Germany. A Bach, a Beethoven, a Brahms would each deserve 50 episodes, wouldn't they? That's not the point. No, no. It's because of the historical moment we pointed to last time.
1:10 What I called, with a somewhat elliptical phrase, the tipping point. And I'm not trying to force Mozart by pulling him toward Romantic modernity, let alone post-Romantic modernity. No, Mozart remains within the Ancien Régime, but his music—this is what I'd like to try to develop further today—his music sees looming, not only everything that is to come.
1:47 I'm not trying to turn Mozart into a prophet, even though I'm not the only one—it's almost trivial to say—who notes that it's with Mozart that certain elements begin which the music of the new regime will never stop developing. It's obvious that the final scene of Don Giovanni, for example, with the sudden appearance of the Commendatore, who, the moment he strikes his terrible blows at the door and enters, the music suddenly undergoes a mutation compared to what?
2:29 Compared to the opera buffa style that had prevailed until then in Don Giovanni. Even though this opera buffa—I'm speaking here of Don Giovanni, and I want to stress this difference compared to Mozart's other operas of the same genre, The Marriage of Figaro, Così, etc.—even though the pace of the dramatic progression is a somewhat unsettling frenzy in Don Giovanni. But still, it remained buffa style, didn't it?
2:59 We get everything: the serenade under the window, all the obligatory numbers, as they say in music, don't they? And then suddenly the style has to change completely, announcing what will soon give us Verdi and Wagner, with the Commendatore scene. I'm not the only one to say this, already. The Force of Destiny. Yes, La forza del destino. That makes me think of Toscanini.
3:32 This finale poses, each time—I'm dwelling on this finale of Don Giovanni—because it poses a formidable problem for the performer. I mention it not to start talking, among connoisseurs, enthusiasts and music lovers, about the various interpretations. If there's one thing that's been well served on record, later on CD, and now on streaming, it's certainly Don Giovanni. I hope above all live, since that's still the best when you can go see it in concert. Don Giovanni is still one of the most performed operas in the repertoire.
4:05 No, no. It's the problem, I would say the historico-philosophical problem, that this finale poses. Because for the performer, either he doesn't carry out the break in style—which indeed is a little... There's nothing less classical than this sudden change of genre, of style, and of feeling, as they'd say in jazz.
4:38 That would harm the unity of his interpretation of the work. So either he keeps roughly the same style, but at the cost of smoothing over what is stunning in this final scene, or he brings out precisely what is new in it, at the cost of a stylistic break, which from a strictly aesthetic point of view is detrimental.
5:08 It's a dilemma every great conductor knows. But thematically speaking too, these repetitions of certain themes developed in the introduction? Yes, indeed, something that announces the future. Yes, the leitmotif is present in Don Giovanni. Yes, of course, we always think it was Wagner who invented the leitmotif. It's true he systematized it with a flexibility he was the first to develop, to deploy. But already in the melodramas of the early 19th century, in the theater, the sinister villain lurking in the shadows was always accompanied by more or less the same music that followed him.
5:46 Characters were already characterized musically. And I'm sure—though we have no recordings—that as early as the era of commedia dell'arte, it's obvious that when Harlequin appeared, a bit like in Children of Paradise, when Pierre Brasseur bursts in to play Frédérick Lemaître, it wasn't the same music as the melancholic, introverted Pierrot Lunaire that Barrault plays. I don't know, of course. Yes, of course. Besides, from the very first chord of the overture of Don Giovanni—you're right to point this out—and even before that first chord, on the score, it's clear, since there's a B-flat, that we're in D minor.
D minor, the 20th concerto and the aviary of winds 6:23 Now, D minor is always the register of the tragic in Mozart. This is well known among critics. To give a few examples, his most dramatic, darkest concerto, the one that the Romantic period, of course, placed above the other 27, is a wonderful garland. That's worth what it's worth. Here I'm moving into the subjective and anecdotal, since it only concerns me. But if I had to take with me to a desert island, you know, as they always say, if I were condemned to choose only one part of Mozart's repertoire, which would be heartbreaking, I would take the 27 piano concertos.
7:05 Actually, I would mainly take the last 12, because there are some he started when he was 6, which are charming. The last 12, not because they're my favorites—that's subjective, I won't bother you with that—but because they contain, in an exhaustive way, the most interesting elements. Across the different genres in which Mozart excelled, there are operatic themes, themes found in his piano sonatas, themes from his chamber music—all of it comes together in these concertos.
7:39 There's in particular an importance given to wind instruments in these concertos. I always make the little aside about the key of D minor, and so the 20th concerto. There's in particular a development of passages entrusted to wind instruments, which was quite incredibly new for the time. At the time, generally speaking, a concerto is a soloist with, let's say, an orchestra accompanying him, but apart from a few interventions of the winds on the fifth and the dominant, mostly in fortissimo passages, the orchestra basically comes down to what's called the string quartet.
8:18 It's a string orchestra. And then with Mozart, there suddenly comes a true aviary. Suddenly there are wind instruments that start conversing with each other—flute, bassoon. I'm thinking of the extraordinary 22nd concerto in E-flat, but there are plenty of others, the concerto in C minor. There, but here then, the concerto in D minor, dark, which moreover begins with this...
8:50 I don't know if you can hear the piano. Dark, but it goes like that. It's a kind of turn, as it's called, when there are several little notes like that. This little turn is exactly the motif.
The Commendatore motif, Blok and the time of myth 9:22 It's not a theme, it's not developed enough, but it's the motivic element that Mozart uses for the blows the Commendatore strikes at the end, at the door. I go to the door of the chord, as it happens, and in the same key. That's a lot of coincidence. There you go. There's a poem by Blok, Alexander Blok, about the Commendatore, where he compares him to an engine, the motor-like blow. That's odd, it must be a memory. I don't know that text, I love Blok a great deal. A wonderful Russian poet, contemporary of Yesenin.
10:00 What does he say about it? That interests me. I need to find the term. Right. Is it because of that, the score, that he says that? Yes, exactly. There's a motor-like quality to it. Right, right. Funny, because that's what the Russians in general said about their own music. They have a rhythmic obsession, somewhat motor-like. It goes 'do, na, na, pirouchas, prustani, ta, na, stani, pirouchas.' And at one point, you see the Commendatore arrive, and he says 'like a motor.' Right, right. Anyway, he appears in D minor and on this motif.
10:35 I repeat. You feel a kind of call, like that. And I would add another connection, apparently a bit more distant, but actually very close from a strictly musical point of view. It's one of the most unsettling themes, one of the most unsettling leitmotifs in the whole of Wagner's Ring, one that's called—it's true Wagner never named any of these leitmotifs.
11:07 It was later critics who, in order to classify them, gave them names. The 'sword' motif, which is artificial. And it happens, doesn't it, that we hear a theme without seeing any connection at all to what it's supposed to designate in the action at that moment. Which means we need to establish relationships more complex than the one-to-one correspondence, as mathematicians would say, between the set of leitmotifs and a single idea, or a single character. Anyway, that would take us too far afield.
11:38 Still, there is one theme, one of the most—let's say—terrifying, there's no other word, the most unsettling, it's the scraping of the Nibelung. Well, that's what I call it, I call it scraping—he scrapes away underground to bring down the palace of the gods. It's the gigantic stake of what lies beneath. Marx would say what is infrastructure, wouldn't he, and what is above, the world of the gods. There you go. And since the Nibelungs are miners, aren't they, who live underground, it's the world of the proletariat, scraping away, and it terrifies the bourgeoisie, especially poor Nietzsche, who volunteered to go fight against the Communards, during the events of 1870-71, and was rejected because, with his nearsightedness and his migraines, they told him, look, stretcher-bearer at most.
12:32 Well. Come on, let's leave that. I found it, excuse me, I found you Blok's poem. Thank you. It's a rough translation. Here we go. You know Russian better than I do, arch-voice. 'Steps of the Commendatore, sinking into the lights of night, black, calm, like an owl, motor-like, peaceful, heavy, the step of the Commendatore.' Well, well. Ah yes. Obviously, it's no small thing. In France, it would be considered over the top. Yes, yes.
13:02 Yes, I imagine. Yes, but still, there's a very modern discontinuity in that. D minor. I come back to my D minor. Key of Don Giovanni. Tragic. Which, right from the overture, isn't it, right from the overture, isn't it? Solemn, which goes like this.
13:34 Now, as they say, the first seconds of the overture, with the D minor chord, the perfect chord there. From the very first seconds, Mozart announces the last minutes of the work, that is, the Commendatore scene. That's interesting. Mozart used to say that when he composes a piece, generally, as soon as he sets down the first note, he already knows what the last one will be. We saw this when we discussed what's perhaps Lévi-Strauss's most interesting statement about music.
14:08 I don't agree with everything, but that one is very apt—that everything happens as if music, like myth, only entered time in order to exit it. It's the opposite of the incipit. That's it, it's not real time, actual time, which tears at us and is unpredictable and is the register of anxiety precisely because we don't know what's going to happen. It makes me think again of the Ring and of that extraordinary scene of the three Norns, those who are supposed to spin the cable of destiny—so a time that can be foreseen, so basically a false time.
14:41 And in matters of humanity, in matters of nature, we can predict eclipses a million years in advance. Nature is determined. So it's predictable. The human world is a bit more difficult because there's freedom here that comes to tangle the threads—the threads of the Fates, if we're with the Greeks, or the Norns, if we're on the banks of the Rhine—and I come back to it—and each time one passes the cable on to the next so the second can take over, and the third goes back to the first, and so on, announcing what's going to happen.
15:13 Each time she says this ritual phrase, 'Weißt du, wie das wird?' That's it. 'How will it turn out?' You see, it's not obvious to translate. I'll translate it word for word, so it's a bit clumsy, but: do you know what will come of it? How will this turn out? I would say, in more colloquial French, how is all this going to turn out? How are we going to get out of this lockdown? All right, let's get back to it. Let's hope it doesn't last an eternity, because it's...
15:45 I feel that this is a bit what's on the mind of our authorities. They're not going to hand us a winning formula. You didn't know that, but in fact we're not out of it. Sorry? You didn't know it, but officially we're not. It's because we're under curfew. Yes, yes, yes. Of course, of course. I don't know. You would have said that a while ago. I'm using it here in a broad, generic sense, in which everyone recognizes we're far from returning to the status quo ante, aren't we? And that if those governing us could decide once and for all that this is the definitive form, the definitive way of governing us, they wouldn't deprive themselves of it.
16:24 Well. They're not going to give up such a winning formula. The beginning and end of Don Juan, aren't they, a sixth on this most dramatic of keys, D minor, in Mozart. The 20th concerto, I mentioned it. Well. With the same motif. Rising, like that. But there's also the incredible quartet in D minor.
The D minor quartet, Eastern strings and French winds 16:55 Here, I ask listeners to search for Mozart, quartet in D minor. It's very well served in terms of recordings. So, on streaming, you have... In general, I don't want to recommend one particular version, but to be sure of having an excellent version, always choose string quartets from Central or Eastern Europe. The string quartet is very much a Central European affair, simply because what the guitar is to Spain, the violin is, originally, as a folk instrument.
17:32 In Bohemia, the greatest violinists, when they're not Russian, are Hungarian; when they're not Hungarian, they're Romanian. I'm thinking of Enescu—there you go, I mean, it's a tradition. Gypsies, you see, for the Roma, it's the violin. In short, quartets—I'm thinking of the Borodin Quartet, for example—whatever they play, whether Beethoven, Bartók or Mozart, rank at the very top, but still, it's very well served by a few Germanic quartets, like the Alban Berg Quartet, or others.
18:05 And why, conversely, do we talk about French woodwinds? We do have excellent quartets in France—underrated ones, I'm thinking of the Via Nova Quartet, whose first founder and first violin I knew well, Jean Mouillère, a remarkable figure, a great friend, with a great sense of humor, and of whom critics say they gave the best interpretation of Schumann's chamber music—the chamber music of one of the most German of composers, far more German than Wagner, despite appearances.
18:39 It's often said that the best interpretation of the whole of Schumann's chamber music, including works for strings and piano, is by the Via Nova Quartet. Yes, but on the other hand, the reputation of French instrumentalists worldwide, in the whole classical repertoire, is really about wind instruments. Take the flute, for example—thank you for prompting this apparent digression—but I mentioned this aviary earlier, on which, sometimes, Mozart's serenades open, where all the wind instruments seem to chatter, there's no other word, among themselves, like birds of paradise in a cage, or rather set free.
19:26 When you consider, just for the flute, the importance of names like Jean-Pierre Rampal, like Maxence Larrieu, like Michel Debost—you know the well-known song, familiar to our audience too, 'People,' 'Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille' by Dutronc—it's Maxence Larrieu who plays the flute part, a classical flutist; it was recorded in studio, I believe, since it was ranked among the ten most beautiful French songs of the last half-century, not so long ago, wasn't it.
20:00 So there's this quartet in D minor, the... Yes, I'll finish though, since you opened the door to it, with French woodwinds, a clarinetist like Lancelot, and first of all, the instruments—even the manufacturing, you always have to go back to the material basis. Charlie Parker, the greatest saxophonist in the whole history of jazz, and probably one of the greatest musicians of all time, but that's another story—Charlie Parker played a Selmer saxophone. Selmer, that's on Boulevard Saint-Michel.
20:40 Right, there you go—I don't think Wagner... well, as far as I know, Parker never set foot in the workshop; he had very brief stays in Paris, and it was his agents who organized his travels, but in any case, for example, the prestige, in the world of clarinets and oboes, the benchmark remains France, from manufacturing to performance. That's interesting to know. I'm thinking of Pierre Pierlot on the oboe, of Jacques Lancelot on the clarinet, among others.
21:15 And if, to give one illustration, I'll stop here—for those who aren't scared of contemporary music, even when it's outright serial and twelve-tone, but it's splendid—listen at least to the slow movement, which will be more accessible, of Schoenberg's extraordinary wind quintet, in the version specifically performed only by French instrumentalists.
Dramatic, tragic, desolation: the minor keys 21:46 The version released by Musidisc at the time. I come back to our D minor, Don Giovanni, the concerto in D minor, the quartet, don't we? And so Mozart knows how to express the tragic, he knows how to express the wildest gaiety, the lightest, the voluptuous—we saw this last time—the voluptuousness whether solar, the pleasure, the happiness whether solar, let's put some order into all this, as in The Marriage of Figaro from start to finish, the mad day, or more twilight-like, more secret, even more sensual still, as in Così fan tutte—we know all the modes of pleasure, of joy, of happiness, and that's why, being very limited in terms of musical illustration, but let's not forget that all our conversations are being made—and this is why I thank my publisher—to result in a book—who was it who said the world was created
22:58 in order to result in a book—that's Mallarmé, isn't it? Yes, it's Mallarmé, there you go—so, a book in which, let our listeners rest assured, all of this will be recorded: which are, no doubt, the reference recordings, the works I've cited, their opus numbers or Köchel numbers in Mozart's case—I often think of one of his most famous works, which is used as a jingle for Samsung—or in Bach's case, which is the opening of one of the most tragic works in the whole history of music—here I don't say dramatic, dramatic means there's action, which can be joyful action, but the most tragic music, and probably the only work in the classical symphonic repertoire, among Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, that ends its finale in catastrophe on a minor chord that doesn't even resolve the problem, that doesn't bring forth any light—it's incredibly bold—whose last movement is a kind of hunt in which the composer
24:08 is both hunter and prey at once. Because I said that D minor—and I'm not the only one to say this—is the key of the tragic in Mozart, of the dramatic in Mozart; C minor, the key of the tragic, that has been noted too; and G minor, the key of that symphony, the key of desolation—these are important nuances—with no glimmer of light at all. So wait, D minor—how were you saying it was tragic?
24:40 D minor, the dramatic, C minor, the tragic, and G minor, desolation. It's worth what it's worth; we're moving from a purely musical notion like tonality to a psychological term, we're not dealing with mathematical one-to-one correspondences. But still, it's not badly observed. To be a bit more concrete and therefore more relevant, I'd point out that one of Mozart's most tragic works, so here, tragic, that's C minor, is the incredible Adagio for strings, Adagio and Fugue, which begins with an Adagio, as is often the case—fugues are preceded by an introduction, in Bach too, by an introduction, a prelude, a fantasia, first fantasia and fugue, prelude and fugue, toccata and fugue.
25:38 After this very slow, very somber introduction for strings, there's a fugue on this theme. You see, right away, the chromaticism, which I didn't insist on enough—that deserves a second session, all this. So there's the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, there's his concerto among the last piano concertos, in C minor of course, where the finale itself, and the famous theme and variations, is in minor, and as for G minor, there's the symphony I'm talking about, and also—I'll stop here for now, I'll cite other works, but as far as tonalities go—also the string quintet, we're in the string quintet here, in G minor, which is of a chromatic boldness, I say this for our listeners for whom these are
26:49 technical terms, that it's quite simple—chromo, but correct me, I know you're a better Hellenist than I am, it does originally mean a half, I believe, because in painting, it's the tiny gradation—sorry? It's also a notion of color. Yes, but originally, well—for example, a chromatic study in painting is a gradient of green, from dark green to pale green, it's the smallest intervals, in music—here's the diatonic scale, and here, on the same interval from C to C, the chromatic scale, in other words, there are twice as many notes since we've divided each interval by two, instead of doing—here's the chromatic scale.
27:44 Chroma, I just checked, does indeed mean tint, colors, chromatic hues. All right, all right, all right. So in any case, the common point with painting is that it's the smallest differences, apparently the hardest to discern. So it's a subversive instance in any work. Chromaticism introduces indecision. What key are we in? They say that contemporary music, that of the twentieth century, the kind Schoenberg pushed to its paroxysm, was initiated by the incredible chromatic outburst of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
28:23 Isn't that so? When you see a theme like this one. The smallest intervals, the smallest interval in our Western music, is the semitone. Right? When I go from C to D, that makes a whole tone. In between, there's C sharp or D flat, it's the same thing.
28:58 That's right, the semitone is the smallest interval. It's not the smallest interval the human ear can perceive. Violinists, you know, can still fit in quarter tones and eighth tones. But still, our ear barely perceives them because it isn't trained to—it's like a muscle that needs training—since we've had nothing but the smallest interval imposed by the dictatorship of keyboards in both composition and listening, we've long lost the habit of perceiving, except when there are glissandi like that, in cartoons, we've lost the habit of perceiving intervals smaller than semitones.
29:42 Now, I don't understand why people don't insist more on the fact—they always say it starts with Wagner, with Tristan, the exasperation of chromaticism. But we skip over the Mozart stage in matters of chromaticism. It's granted that Mozart is innovative for this, for that, but not for his harmony. Now, if I take this variation from a famous sonata in A major, the one that ends with the famous Turkish March, which Mozart never called the Turkish March, but Rondo alla Turca...
Turquerie and Mitteleuropa as mediation 30:12 I recall that in Mozart's time, the Turks were laying siege to Vienna. Right? They laid siege to Vienna, a bit earlier, but Christendom and the Holy Roman-Germanic Empire, the Holy Empire, were saved by a great Polish military leader, Sobieski, in the service of the emperor, and that if you go get pastries from the baker for coffee, that comes precisely from that era when the Turks were laying siege to Vienna with their standards bearing the Islamic crescent.
30:54 And so, to celebrate their victory over the Turks, croissants became emblematic of Viennese bakery. I close the parenthesis. But where it becomes musical and Mozartian again is that this explains the proximity of the Turkish world and the fascination it exerted, which was extremely refined at the time. There wasn't the disproportion between the developed world of Chicago and the underdeveloped world of a sub-Saharan African country or a Latin American one. I'm not naming any country.
31:26 When I say underdeveloped, it's never a value judgment. For me, a country can be underdeveloped materially, economically, in output per unit of time, and be far superior to us morally or aesthetically. That's not... Let's be clear. So, where it becomes very important musically is that Turquerie, as it was called, became a musical genre. In Mozart, we find The Abduction from the Seraglio, which is the first great opera. There are little sketches.
31:57 But the first great opera in the German language, which was a great success as such, especially with Joseph II, no doubt the sovereign most favorable to Mozart. Unfortunately, he died a bit early. So there's The Abduction from the Seraglio. There are of course the countless alla turca pieces. There's even a Turkish March by Beethoven in The Ruins of Athens. That's the best known. And the famous passage, this one, that's it.
32:33 Sorry, my piano isn't tuned. With the left hand, it goes like this. They say it's the drums that terrified the Viennese. Oh yes, yes. By which, yes, yes. The Turks' war drums, fairly stylized, which went around the ramparts of Vienna. So, Turquerie—but those are the best known. As you say, we find it in Beethoven too. The Holy Empire, which would later be called, as it happens, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hungarians being descendants of the Huns—let's not forget—and the role Attila plays in the Nibelungenlied, in the most important epic reference of archaic, medieval Germanic literature, let's not forget that we're here in Mitteleuropa, in the middle Germany, and like any middle, there's a mediation between West and East.
33:30 It's no accident that the region most mediating vis-à-vis the East in Europe is the Balkans. A seismic zone—I'm playing on the word deliberately because unfortunately for its inhabitants, it's seismic in the literal sense, right? This is where the African plate—right?—collides with the European plate, hence the tectonic instability of Italy, of our own Côte d'Azur where a big one could happen one day, and above all of the Balkans, of course, where it's much more frequent.
34:05 But it's also the passage from Islam to Christianity, from Orthodoxy to Catholicism—I'm thinking of the war between Serbs and Croats, or rather the confrontation between Serbs and Croats, on which, of course, NATO's henchmen never stopped fanning the flames, right? These are extremely conflictual mediations; it's no accident that the First World War began with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, right?
34:37 That was the pretext and the spark, but it means the powder keg was there all the same. So that's why I'm dwelling on this a little, and I've given the Mozart references—the best known, the Turkish March, but there's also the finale of the third violin concerto, where there are explicitly variations on a theme alla turca, meaning on the Turkish theme, and also in Così fan tutte—let's remember that our two young men who say mine is the most faithful, mine is the most beautiful, etc., and I forbid anyone to say they're all the same, Così fan tutte—when asked to disappear and come back in disguise, they come back disguised as Bashi-Bazouks, which, in the strict, literal sense and not merely as an insult in Captain Haddock's mouth, is simply a unit of the Ottoman army.
35:35 In the Balkans, yes, there you go, in the Balkans, the Serbs, the Illyrians as they used to be called, often formed elite units of the Ottoman army. So Mozart is at the crossroads of all these influences. It occurs to me because you mentioned Beethoven—in Beethoven there are often Hungarian refrains, sorry, Gypsy ones, as in the finale of the fourth concerto or in the Kreutzer Sonata, where it's obvious, since there's a very developed violinistic part, that the Viennese public delighted in the Gypsy connotations.
36:21 It plays somewhat the same role as African music does in today's mainstream audiences, doesn't it? It ranges, like jazz, from learned and popular at once, to more mainstream forms like reggae, etc. Each time it's the African origin, right, that's decisive here. This same role, with that touch of nearby exoticism, was played by the Gypsies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of whom—we don't really know, they say they come from the Indian subcontinent, anyway, there you go.
37:00 Linguistically, that's true. Yes, of course, linguistically, yes, of course, and also from the hair standpoint. The hair. Yes, all right, yes. I said that because I lived in Niger, as you know, far from all this. Now, the Tuareg in Niger—often those meeting them for the first time say, because they're white in comparison, well, they're light-skinned, very light, because there are completely black Tuareg too, there are some, and then there are very white Tuareg, whiter than me, and then there's the whole gradient in between, but most are considered white in the languages there.
37:45 When Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Battuta speak of whites and compare them to blacks, for him the whites are the Tunisians and the Arabs, I mean. And so, the Tuareg... Ibn Khaldun was really Arab, wasn't Berber. Yes, of course, especially since Ibn Battuta makes clear that 'Arab' isn't an ethnicity at all, it's whoever lives in the bled, it's social, it's whoever isn't a city-dweller. So they say the Tuareg, those who see them say, they remind me of Pakistanis or...
38:18 You see, it's interesting, because of the hair in particular. Black and rather shiny, glossy like that, which isn't at all the case in either the Arab world or the black world. There. Well, the parenthesis isn't very interesting in itself. Let me get back to... We started from D minor and the most tragic, even the most dramatic instance in Mozart. And now I move to exactly the opposite. This was to introduce and come back to that famous theme of happiness.
Glenn Gould: "Why Mozart Is a Bad Composer" 38:48 And that's why I needed a second session to bring in a current problem. That's why, otherwise, I mean, it would deserve fifty sessions. But search a bit on YouTube, you'll come across—type in Glenn Gould, Mozart. But no, not a performance. Glenn Gould does sometimes play Mozart, it's not exactly his cup of tea. No, certainly not.
39:19 It's interesting because I'm talking about the composer whom I say may be the one who most opened the door to that happiness Saint-Just spoke of. I'll sum up the essential. He says it's a new thing in Europe. And we have seen, and we'll come back to, what justifies that claim. Because one could say happiness is as old as humanity. But yes, but not for the masses.
39:52 It was reserved for a happy few, as they say. You see, in 'happy.' It's more like enjoyment, actually. Yes, exactly. They had a happy few. Exactly, there you go. That's what we saw. It's a social construction. That's what we saw last time. There's a kind of immanent punishment in the crime. It's the pleasures that are reserved. I'd say, when you deny happiness to the masses and reserve it for an elite, that elite in fact has no right to happiness but only to enjoyment. Let me return to this matter of happiness and to Gould.
40:25 There's actually an interview where Gould, for over an hour, bears this title—it's the title you'll find it under: 'Why Mozart is a Bad Composer.' Oh yes, I listened to it. All right. Saying that he repeats himself, motifs that repeat. Let me start by pointing out that Gould is one of the ten greatest pianists of his generation. And when I say one of the ten greatest, for many he's the greatest.
40:58 It's pointless to single out just one. But in general, when there's a consensus around a single figure as the greatest pianist of his century—and I stress pianist here, not the greatest musician of the piano, which is yet another thing. Because there I'd give it to Richter without hesitation. But the greatest pianist, that is, the one most staggering in the secrets of the pianistic thing, of its mechanism...
41:32 It's generally Horowitz who's picked, right? He's the very metonymy of the pianist, isn't he? There you go. But Gould can perfectly well lay claim to the title, at any rate when he went to Moscow in the 1950s for the first time—completely paranoid, he was a paranoid. This is important for understanding what I'm going to say about Mozart. He's a puritan, he's Canadian. That's his culture—so what? Bach emanates from a puritan culture, that doesn't make for bad music.
42:02 Puritanism is very English, it's born first in England, the Puritans, it's not exactly... Of course! You mustn't confuse Protestants and Puritans. Yes, well, still. No but of course, there are links, yes, I know. On the whole, the Reformation is more puritan, right? Yes, that's certain. Well, you're talking to a Corsican. There you go, back home, a girl who comes back an unwed mother, she's 'Ouna Poutana,' right? She'll be called every name, a fallen woman, etc., by her mother, but as soon as the first bambino arrives, it's tears of joy and you make peace with the good Lord.
42:40 All right? We never pray to him because that bearded fellow up there isn't very reassuring. A jealous God, the God of hosts. The Son, we don't bother him too much with our prayers because he looks so unhappy, poor thing, we won't pile on our problems too. We turn to the Virgin Mary, to the Madonna. She understands everything. That's the Catholic world. There's no Madonna in the Protestant world. All right, let me get serious now. The first quantified study on suicide—Durkheim. Durkheim, the founder of sociology, Durkheim tells us—these are measurements, not opinions—that the record for the suicide rate in France, for the monument associated with suicide, like throwing yourself off the Eiffel Tower or the towers of Notre-Dame, is the tower of Strasbourg Cathedral.
43:23 And Durkheim explains very well, as a sociologist, that in the Protestant world, a societal deviation, as we'd say today, a deviation from the moral order—an unwed mother, for example—has much more trouble being reintegrated into society. Look at an American film, the one where whoever has committed a fault always ends up badly. There's no forgiveness, as they say in Africa. This is important. I may seem to be speaking gratuitously as if I'm dragging things in by the hair.
43:58 This is where I'm being most serious. It's a method like any other. But if you want to be objective, take an emblematic musical like Show Boat in the United States, a Broadway musical, the one with the famous 'Ol' Man River,' right, which our great comrade Paul Robeson made famous the world over, right. Show Boat, where Ava Gardner acts, the film made from the musical, right, by the simple fact, right, that she was suspected of prostitution, right, she ends badly in the film, that's it, I mean, there's no coming back from it.
44:44 So, let's return to Glenn Gould, Canadian, Protestant, paranoid—that is, he dressed in white, in light-colored clothes, out of fear of a nuclear attack. He'd heard that light colors, right, reflected heat—totally absurd, I mean, he's not—there are many great creators and great artists who have quirks, I'm not saying—Nerval had hallucinations far more serious than Gould's, that's not—because he's excellent as a critic, many times, you just have to see the incredible interview where he talks about the one who could have been his main rival, Sviatoslav Richter, at the time one of the greatest of his contemporaries, and God knows performers don't much like each other, the greatest tribute to Richter was paid by Glenn Gould, for example, no, no, but there, for Mozart, our puritan, as it happens, who never managed to play Mozart well, let's be clear, some might think, because there are those who only know Gould, I should say at the piano, I mean, because he's a bit more
45:54 known among those who know the classical repertoire less well than other great classical pianists—if I say Wilhelm Backhaus, he's by far the reference for Beethoven for a long time—well, there are two composers on whom Gould slips, if I may say so, where you find much better among his performances, and that's precisely Mozart and Beethoven, that is, out of the great classical triad, Mozart, Beethoven—there you already have two out of three on whom he's not convincing, let's say, by way of euphemism.
Modernity does not like modernity 46:32 Now, you see how much I'm trying to nuance this—one could say the classical style just doesn't suit him. Don't be so sure though: for me, Gould's greatest record is precisely his Haydn sonatas. There again I'm being sacrilegious, but how—if the Goldberg Variations, Gould, that's Bach, well, all right, that's also for those for whom music stops before the French Revolution, I mean, well, after that it's the reign of the masses and bad taste, you know that theme—let me take the opportunity to mention a contemporary instance you'll find on Facebook, a Facebook page called 'La Convergence des Luttes,' which I especially recommend to our lute-playing comrades—L-U-T-H-S—founded by our friend Rémy Cardinale, sorry to pronounce it the Italian way, but I'm sure Rémy won't hold it against me, he lives in Marseille, he's an immense pianist, especially in chamber music, I heard him recently in Brahms, it's a marvel,
47:45 and I heard him perform the Hammerklavier, you know, which many performers say is unplayable, he founded La Convergence des Luttes at the time of the Yellow Vests, and it was a way of paying tribute to that extraordinary event which an old fogey like me had never seen before—all the staff you never see from the Paris Opera or the Opéra Bastille, out on the stands, on the forecourt of the Opera, expressing their solidarity with the Yellow Vests, because you never know what becomes of a little rat of the Opera at forty.
48:23 Yes, at the time of the pension reforms too. There you go, no but you understand. The special regime, yes. There you go. He wants to make them dance until they're ninety maybe. You've understood very well. So, well, dance now, as the famous ant would say. Well, the Bundesbank ant, right, to the Greeks. So Rémy Cardinale founded La Convergence des Luttes, one of whose axes—I don't like the word 'ideological'—whose most important theoretical axis, theoretical in the fruitful sense, that is, one that lets you identify real divisions corresponding to actual history, is the critique of neoclassicism in music.
49:10 And to show that there is—you have to look, for example, it's a fight found also in Aragon, when Aragon rehabilitates and resurrects Hugo, who was, right, considered a bit like—the way early critics of Balzac used to say Balzac invented the novel where people sit down to eat, right, well anyway, they don't like the masses, right, and especially whoever is part of them is the one who likes the masses least in general, right, that's what they say, people are terrible, people are disgusting, they forget they're part of 'people' themselves, right, in the metro again recently, there was an old woman telling me—because there were two young people talking, not provocatively at all, talking a bit louder in their corner, but among themselves, without bothering anyone—can you imagine how disgusting people are nowadays, I don't know anymore, I told her, madam, I'm one of them, so are you, I'm sorry—there, modernity doesn't like modernity, the Romantic doesn't like Romanticism, the Romantic is Baroque-loving, what's that figure of speech called where the same word expresses two different meanings in the same sentence, there's a name for it, I'm forgetting it right now,
50:20 but I'll have to find it, because figures of speech are like the list of syllogisms, the kind of thing you always forget—there's litotes, if you say the false—no, that's not litotes, it's a very precise term where you make a pun, but one that's allowed because the word changes meaning within the same sentence, well, that's what I just did, right, when I say the Romantic doesn't like Romantics—whoever has an anti-Romantic discourse in music demands authentic performances, right, of Bach's music, of Vivaldi's, they must be played on period instruments, well, there are already those who, in terms of repertoire, say that music—that the beginning of the end is when the piano appears, like everything imaginary, like everything imaginary and fantasized, it varies—there are those for whom, as soon as you leave Gregorian chant, you enter musical decadence, oh no, no, but I was talking with people like that, are there some for whom, as soon as there are two voices, it's over, it's a concession to popular bad taste, so as early as the twelfth century music is done for, but are there some further back too?
51:29 If you go with Nietzsche's line starting from Socrates, it's finished—after Heidegger, after the Presocratics? Oh no, no, the record holder is Heidegger, yes, after the Presocratics, that's when it's finished. Since you're tempting me, I'll offer my own bit, right? The partisans of Heidegger, who are all fiercely anti-Marxist, anti-communist, needless to say, who say the gulag was already in Lenin, and the proof is it's already in Marx, it's in Hegel, look—you mention Hegel to Popper, for Popper Hegel is truly the closed discourse, the totalitarian, the great totality, well, the true and the whole, you see, the great elite, in short, I've never understood—there's nothing more democratic than totality, totality in power means no one is left aside, it seems to me, I mean, the whole is when everyone is included, no?
52:20 Let's move on, let's move on, let's move on. But it's already there in the camp, well actually, it's in Plato, you just have to look at the Republic, the first gulag, right? And there, you're right. We're left with Parmenides, Parmenides' poem. The only ones who find favor are the Presocratics. Because there, you have a line and a half from one, three lines from another, from Aristotle you sometimes get a few pages, which is exceptional, like Parmenides' poem, you have a few fragments of obscure Heraclitus, and so, it's a bit like from Australia, it's a bit like Democritus, it starts to...
53:03 There you go, you can make it say pretty much whatever you want—circulate, nothing to see here, Nartoun, Nable, name of an SS division, right? It's frightening, this work of erasure, twenty-five centuries of the history of philosophy dismissed, right, as the decline of Being, with fourteen circumflex accents. There, I'll stop there, I'm going to get worked up. So there are people like that for music too, right? So, the beginning of the end is the new regime, it's Romantic music—there's nothing more Romantic than this critique of the Romantic.
53:39 The Romantic interpretations are bloated, we need to strip away this rust, of conventions, don't we. The rust, that's Toscanini, that's Fournier, that's Wilhelm Backhaus, that's Yves Nat, it's unbelievable. But above all, it's completely anti-historical, because it's the Romantic Mendelssohn who solemnly, before a German musical audience moved to tears, performs Bach's St Matthew Passion, resurrects that repertoire which Bach's contemporaries had found outdated, preferring instead the birth of the galant style.
54:16 I don't know, Beethoven always had the Well-Tempered Clavier on his piano, Schumann says that Bach is our father, all of us, I mean, there's nothing more Romantic than the resurrection of the pre-Romantic repertoire. The modern person doesn't like modernity. So, to come back to it, the one who is part of the masses doesn't like the masses. So I won't go back over the theme, which isn't a foolish one, of Bourdieu's distinction, that's what it means too.
Delayed dissonance and Viennese classicism 54:49 I have to distinguish myself. The more mediocre I am, the more I'll seek out some element that sets me apart from those masses I'm part of. There, my parenthesis here is important for understanding. I come back to Gould, where there's this mixture at once of dread, isn't there, of the threat of modernity, of the defilement of atomic war, etc. Who does he go after? Perhaps the happiest musician there is.
55:23 That's where I see the depth of this passage in Gould. It's no accident, that's what I mean. If it's a Mozart he goes after. In other words, someone as astute as Gould. I don't just mean an immense pianist, because that goes so much without saying that it would be insulting on my part to insist on it. But also someone who's an excellent critic in general. Why does he suddenly make such a blunder about Mozart? It's precisely because, and he's right if you take it detail by detail, if you take it detail by detail, that often his writing isn't as dense as a Bach's or a Telemann's, that his harmony—again we'll need to look at it from a distance, we saw the chromaticisms earlier—that his harmony is neither that of a Rameau nor that of a Debussy, to take very different periods.
56:23 But that's precisely it, the miracle of Mozart isn't there. It's that even in a theme that seems as simple as—you'd say a little girl humming on a swing—isn't it? It's quite simple. But as soon as there's the variation. You see the chromaticisms? Yes.
57:02 It's dissonance with delayed resolution. So it's much more... Yes, but it's delayed dissonance. From this delayed dissonance a voluptuousness emanates. And that's what Gould doesn't want to hear. No, but that's his problem. I mean, I'm not being ironic at all. I have profound admiration for Gould. I owe him some of the greatest pleasures of my life. He's someone who, for a pianist, has an excellent knowledge of a non-pianistic repertoire.
57:32 I'm talking about Wagner's music, which he knows very well and of which he made admirable piano transcriptions. Listen, perhaps one of the greatest moments in the pianistic recordings of our time is those two fugues, not by Bach, but written by Wagner in Twilight of the Gods. I'm quoting it, put on Gould playing Wagner, that's enough, you'll find it right away. It's Siegfried's Rhine Journey, where there's a staggering fugue on four subjects, and even more breathtaking.
58:11 I'm talking about a fugue here. But indeed, it's in the same album. It's a marvelous interpretation of the Siegfried Idyll. And, but above all, the fugue that's in the overture—it's in the overture of the Meistersinger. It's hard to believe what you're hearing, strictly from a pianistic point of view. So, I don't know, to redeem myself I'll say once more all the admiration I have for Gould and everything I owe him in terms of musical pleasure.
58:41 But there's a form—it's this one—that corresponds to Mozart's era. It's not just any pleasure. But this happiness elevated, since it's no longer merely the privilege of a minority as in the Baroque era. Here I'm obliged to become a bit musicological again. Mozart occupies the median position, hence the most classical, of Viennese classicism. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. There, I'm really dealing with simple, broad things.
59:14 So when we say musical classicism, we think first of Mozart, who along with his two companions Haydn and Beethoven elevates it, but with him it's undoubtedly the acme that brings it to perfection—that's not a value judgment, it doesn't mean Beethoven is lesser—but to perfection in the strictly formal sense, as an equilibrium of all the forces at play in genres as complex to master as the symphony, the concerto, and the sonata.
59:45 Well, I recall that not all composers wrote symphonies—many wrote only one, I'm thinking, we never think of it, of our own Bizet, who wrote a symphony that's a gem, you'd think it was a mistral wind washing the landscape of all its mist, it's a marvel, Bizet's Symphony in C major. Many wrote only one; a fairly large number wrote four—the four of Brahms, the four of Schumann—no, but these numbers are interesting, there's the club of nine, the club of nine of course, the nine symphonies of Dvořák, the nine symphonies of Bruckner, the nine symphonies of Mahler, which are of course haunted by Beethoven's nine, to the point—I told you, I believe I told you last time—that Mahler rushed to start a tenth, because he said if I compose a ninth, it means I'm going to die soon.
1:00:46 There, and so we have a sketch of what would have been the Tenth Symphony. Mozart wrote 41. But there's Haydn's model. Again, in more scholarly current musicology, manuscripts have been recovered like that, not always finished or not always circulated. It's likely that in fact there are about fifty, but in the official catalogue—I started from there, saying that in the book our conversations should lead to, all these classifications would be included.
1:01:17 Now, usually, it's an opus number—opus 105, opus 111 in Beethoven; in Mozart, we say K. The Symphony in G minor is Köchel 550, the second-to-last. The one that follows it, the 41st and last, is Köchel 551, the Jupiter. It's an opus number. Why K? Because it's Mr. Köchel, the musicologist, who placed Mozart's works in order, who studied their chronology. There.
When the hope for a better tomorrow was reversed 1:01:49 And so, I come back to it here. I made this long detour through Glenn Gould to say that we haven't finished with this form of happiness. That's why I planned a second session on Mozart. It's a very particular one. And it's the one—otherwise I won't come back to it—that is most in rupture, or that is symmetrically most opposed to the times we've been living in for a while now.
1:02:25 No, no, I'm not just thinking of the lockdown here. I'm thinking since the great counter-revolutionary turn of the 70s, roughly. I'll come back to these turning points where we go from a period broadly carried by the hope that tomorrow will be better than today. Come on, let's keep it simple. When people were living much worse materially, strictly speaking, in the so-called period of the Trente Glorieuses, weren't they?
1:02:55 You have to see how many toilets there were inside apartments in Paris in the 1960s. Look at your statistics, it's rather frightening. Most were on the landing in apartment buildings. In the 1960s, I'm not talking about the Middle Ages here. When I was a student, I was a student on Rue Grégoire-de-Tours, a super residential neighborhood today in the 6th arrondissement. The toilets were on the landing. I had a maid's room, I was a student. Now nobody can afford a student room, or only a privileged few. Communal showers among people?
1:03:27 Where am I getting at? That the passing of the Thirty... Why is it a happier era despite these shortcomings—the least one can say, materially? It's because the parents of that time had crossed a threshold thanks to the greatest, the most real government France has had since the Convention, since the French Revolution, namely the one that emerged from the Popular Front and the one that was set up—thanks Ambroise, Croizat and the others—at the Liberation, particularly in '47-'48, with the creation of what we're currently being stripped of: social security and the pay-as-you-go pension system.
1:04:07 We're in serious territory here. I come back to happiness, this time spread among the masses and not the pleasure reserved for a few sovereigns. Do you remember Rousseau's triangle from last time? It's to come back to that, precisely, to Gabrielle d'Estrées. Now, the essential thing—even if materially it was precarious—was that parents told themselves, 'our children will live better than us.'
1:04:41 Which parents can say that to themselves now? All I hear around me is people saying 'what's going to become of my children?' Isn't that so? And not at all in the mode of the environmentalists who say 'what world are we going to leave to their children?' To which Negroni magnificently replied, quoting someone else moreover: 'What children are we going to leave to our world?' There. What children are we going to leave the world to? When you see this Greta they keep going on about, don't you, who, to make us feel guilty for wallowing in consumption—
1:05:13 Takes a yacht worth several billion centimes made of an avant-garde composite material, because I'm very happy for her. This kid, she's not responsible for anything, poor thing. Around her are the richest people in Sweden coaching her. The richest people in one of the richest countries in the world. No, no, but I said something specific, I'll finish with her. The twelve crew members had to buy a plane ticket to come back. They weren't going to make the crossing without her for nothing, were they?
1:05:43 So, twelve plane tickets to save one, that's... They're mocking us. Poor unfortunate girl. Yes, I'll quote a sentence from Negroni, the one I prefer about her, who had devoted to her a little... an item from a pamphlet, which is his specialty. When he says... She keeps repeating that they stole her childhood and her youth. I'm afraid they stole her maturity. It's superb.
1:06:13 So yes, those people don't say that tomorrow will be better than today. You see, when did that reverse? That's the point I keep circling around. When did it darken? What is it that makes the figure of Siegfried... I read you the beautiful text by Nietzsche, where he opposes the figure of Siegfried to that of Parsifal. Siegfried, the joyful hero, the one who converses with the birds at high noon in the vast forest, sparkling with youth, and then all of a sudden the gloomy finale of the Tetralogy, the Twilight of the Gods.
1:06:54 What is it that made us go, from Dionysus to Schopenhauer? What is it... Yes, I'm showing that we're dealing with a structure here that can reproduce itself at different moments in history. What is it that made us go from happiness expressed through the song 'What are we waiting for to be happy? What are we waiting for to celebrate?'—one of the most sung refrains in the 1950s by Ray Ventura and his Joyous Companions orchestra. Those aren't accidents—there aren't songs like that anymore.
1:07:25 Now it's the pounding either of hard rock, or of screaming metal, fine, you're going to get that stuck in your head, where young people are forced to sing the praises of the bars of the sonic prison they're locked in, that is, the bar of the measure, as you hear at a rave, as they say, that is, you hear it from a distance because your walls protect you from the rave your neighbors are throwing, you only hear the bass, there are only low frequencies, it's terrible, that is, you have the rhythmic poverty of this music, which hasn't moved in 60 years—but I won't repeat myself, I've said it often and you'll find it elsewhere.
Happiness, enjoyment and salvation 1:08:07 So when does the shift happen? When do we go from that 'extraordinary garden' of Trenet, for example, to the sonic ghetto I denounced in another episode of Musicosophie? That's where it becomes important. Mozart is at that turning point, and I'll come back now to his era to introduce a text by Rousseau that I didn't have time to present last time, which alone justifies coming back to it, and which is very close to the one where he says 'I needed two young ladies' in the Confessions.
1:08:48 The theme of happiness—now I'll set music aside, I'm in literature—and it's a classic of literary history teaching to say that if there's one theme that sums up the whole ideal of the Enlightenment, it's indeed happiness. It's even the only theme on which a Rousseau and a Voltaire, who otherwise can't stand each other, to put it very colloquially, agree that it's an ideal, and that's where I'm going to be more precise for the first time.
1:09:18 Pleasure, everything one might confuse with happiness—I said a few words earlier but I'll dig into it here—pleasure can be of an almost infinite intensity, but it's brief. It's its relation—it's the relation to time that distinguishes pleasure from happiness here. Pleasure is fleeting, evanescent. There's a beautiful text by Rilke where he says wait for that, the taste of, and it's already gone, the taste of the orange, isn't it, it's beautiful, dancing the orange as he says, trying to dance the orange.
1:09:48 And then there can be the other extreme, opposite to pleasure, salvation, the beatitude of the saints, which was valid for a Pascal in the 17th century, well before the Enlightenment, but that's not of this world. What characterizes happiness are these two determinations. A duration, a thickness of duration in time, which is what excludes pleasure, and a positive and necessary relation to the world, and not to the beyond, and not to a beatitude promised at the price of death, etc.
1:10:28 That's where we see that Saint-Just's phrase is relevant. I keep coming back to it, it's my reference point for Mozart. Happiness is a new idea in this sense. That is, the relation to the world—people have always been told the world is a vale of tears, suffer, and you shall be consoled, isn't that the whole theme of the Beatitudes precisely in the Gospel. An admirable text, but I mean, it's tied to an era, to a consciousness so unhappy that one had to wait for death to be delivered from it. I'd say the same of Buddhism.
1:10:58 I have great respect—not for the fashion of Buddhism, which is pre-Nazi, you know, we don't publicize enough the historical complicities that existed between the Nazi regime and the power of the Dalai Lama in Tibet during the last war, and the exchanges that took place. Put that on YouTube, don't take my word for it. There's the former SS officer who told his memoirs and made a film, in fact, a mainstream Hollywood film. Yes, there, exactly.
1:11:30 and Harrer, and Schopenhauer was a fanatic of Brahmanism and Buddhism, as it happens. The one who called the police to say, they're there, the demonstrators, the barricade, it's two streets from my house. Yes, he lends them his glasses. Yes, it holds together, it holds together. Let's leave that. But, on the other hand, Buddhism in itself has nothing Nazi about it. The Buddha's teaching is entirely, on the contrary, about charity, about renunciation.
1:12:04 Now, what could be better, in this infinite misery of the world of India, than to withdraw from the game, which is what the Buddha's teaching admirably does, to suppress all desire in order to suppress all suffering. But still, that's surgery. It's not healing, it's surgery. Your stomach hurts, so we'll remove it. You see, these are unhappy consciousnesses, in fact. In other words, one does obtain peace. It's a bit like the Stoic's ataraxia too, even if it's very different.
1:12:34 But still, there's this in common: each time it's negative. Yes, of course. The solution. That's not the case with happiness. Happiness has a positive relation to the world. That's why I never say anything against pleasure. Except when one wants to reduce happiness to pleasure. Then I suddenly become Platonic, that's the whole theme of the Philebus. 'Watch your tongue,' I cried out. Or even the Gorgias. When in the Republic, Glaucon says to Socrates, 'When you speak of the good, I presume you don't mean pleasure.'
1:13:04 'Watch your tongue,' I cried out. So, happiness. But he doesn't oppose it to pleasure. He doesn't say happiness must be set against pleasure. As for me, I'll never say a word against pleasure, especially when it harms no one, when it's at nobody's expense. But a pleasure that lasts is one demand more than pleasure, not less. Isn't it? That's the complete opposite of puritanism. It gives happiness, and moreover, a necessary relation to the world.
Happy sexuality in Mozart and Gould's staccato 1:13:35 There, here and now. So, for the masses. Well, often people still say 'what a bore, this Rousseau!'—I'm deliberately using a slang word. Isn't that so? What's tiresome? You see his ex-Protestant-from-Geneva side. Women should stay in their place. The man eats red meat where the woman eats white. It's true that Rousseau says that. Yes, the man eats meat, the bloodthirsty hunter, and the woman eats fromage blanc and creams and whipped cream.
1:14:09 Isn't it? Mit Sahne, as they say in German-speaking countries. You can't be served a coffee without cream in Brussels. I knew a friend—I won't give her name—who had a rather biting wit, because she used to say 'Belgians are Germans who speak French.' Yes, it's true that in Brussels... I'll bring you the coffee, yes. Yes, there. Even in French-speaking Belgium, Wallonia I should say—I'm going to get insulted—in Walloon Belgium, isn't it, as soon as you're served a coffee, they give you a little pot of cream.
1:14:41 We can illustrate that with his children. Yes, you know it well. You know it well. Good. So, this Rousseau, a bit of a curmudgeon, saying that Molière is immoral—well, I mean, it's easy to snub him in favor of Philippe Sollers. You see, one must fuck, sorry—pardon me, I'm quoting Philippe Sollers. Oh, sorry. I'm not speaking in my own name. Literally, more sensitive to his letter. Fortunately he said it, because before him, apparently, according to him, people didn't fuck.
1:15:12 It took May '68, suddenly, for man to discover sexuality, apparently. There are people who'll believe that, aren't there? When you listen precisely to Mozart's music, it makes you laugh. I recall that in Così fan tutte, there's a domestic air of the marvelous Despina, who's much more mischievous than her colleague Susanna in Figaro, and who sings that aria about how at fifteen, a girl must know how to do everything.
1:15:44 I'll stop there. We're in Mozart and Da Ponte. Yes, che sapete che cosa è amor. Yes, since you tempt me, we're in what displeases Gould about Mozart, let's be clear, sexuality. Happy, happy—no, I wasn't trying to howl—no, I come back, since you're there, to the Marriage of Figaro, since you cite one of the most beautiful arias of the repertoire, that cavatina, that romance.
1:16:33 I recall that Mozart is a genius essentially melodic, and where others fuss over a block of concrete—that's not a melody, that's a theme, careful—it's melos in terms of temporal analysis, but it's not a melody, it's not an air, it's not the marioso woman. Beethoven's genius is that with that, with nothing, it's nothing, neither rhythmically nor melodically, he creates a universe. That's exactly the opposite of the Viennese process, the native Viennese I should say, Mozart, Beethoven lived in Vienna but he comes from Bonn and probably from Holland, which also explains Beethoven's popular gaiety, his Bruegel side, that peasant quality, less aristocratic than Mozart's music for instance—whereas Mozart, where all the others would make a development, that's what Beethoven does admirably, out of nothing at all like that he makes a cosmic development—Mozart, at the moment when others make a development, has new themes surging up instead, an extraordinary melodic fecundity, new tunes, it's extraordinary.
1:17:44 So let me give an example quickly to make myself understood, because I don't have the sound illustration here, just listen among other things to the finale of the Concerto in A major, the 23rd, one of the most sensual, you see again, we again see the connotation A major and sensuality, as I said for the works, for clarinets. So listen to the finale of the concerto in... Its finale is a miraculous fountain of new themes, you'd think he had a kind of cornucopia from which he draws as many themes as he wants, melodies that are all as beautiful as one another, some bursting with laughter, others in rapture, it's breathtaking.
1:18:27 So, this marvelous romance that Cherubino sings — now Cherubino's main aria in the whole of Figaro isn't that one, even though this one is marvelous too, it's Non so più, cosa son, cosa faccio, that is, an adolescent between two sexes, between two ages, where nothing is yet quite settled, who chases after pretty much every female in the château but without really touching them, like a kid, and who is therefore unbearable to the Count.
1:18:59 "Will I find that damned page everywhere?" You know, every time he lifts a piece of linen, Cherubino is hidden underneath it, in the Countess's bedroom he fondles the gardener's daughter, Barbarina, a bit, doesn't he? The Countess, Susanna, marvelous Cherubino, that's Mozart. We know the salaciousness of his letters to his sister, etc. It's not salaciousness, but mischievous, mischievous, boyish, mischievous. Isn't it? So, since you...
1:19:30 Yes, he always says in those letters, he says "joking aside," "joking aside." But yes, but it's you who got me started on Cherubino, so I'm going to finish my digression on Cherubino anyway. It's that this aria, "Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio," which is the aria of an adolescent, "I no longer know what's happening to me, from time to time my cheeks are burning," well, going through puberty, "stay calm in my blood," ends with "I speak to the wall, to the tree, to the bird, to the sun, all alone." And everyone knew he was alluding to masturbation.
1:20:00 At the time, it was well known, there was an audience, you know, far less puritanical than today's, sadly, politically correct audience, which I've been railing against this whole time. And I'm not for moral laxity. No, no, no, no. I did say that when happiness harms no one — I'm not talking about rape, of souls or of bodies, or both at once, alas.
1:20:33 There's no reason, you know, to restrict it. So, this form of happiness, since I can't illustrate it musically, we don't have it here, the logistics — I just wanted to... Just to finish on Gould, what are the reasons that... Maybe you thought you'd already finished. I mean, the confirmation of the fact that there's a puritan foundation in him, that he's emblematically known for an admirable interpretation of the baroque repertoire and particularly of Bach, that is, where there's none of the pleasures we'll only discover starting with Romanticism, as if by chance.
1:21:17 That's where the coherence of my point about Gould lies. He never said a word against Chopin, even if he's not the greatest interpreter of Chopin, he plays him very well, doesn't he? And then he plays Brahms very well, for example, who is one of the most romantic of the romantics, more so than Wagner, who is a post-romantic, isn't he? Brahms, and more so than Beethoven, who is basically a classicist who never lets himself be locked into a feeling but pushes it to arrive at a dramatic resolution. Generally, a triumph in major key in the finales.
1:21:49 Brahms, who is truly a romantic, even a late one, even, some would say, a belated one, plays one of the greatest records there is, the late pieces, the Intermezzi, the Scherzi of Brahms, by Glenn Gould. But it's with Mozart that he succeeds least. Listen to this sonata! Listen to that one, you'd think it was a farce, a caricature, so much does he torpedo it, doesn't he?
1:22:20 He does it with a prodigiously exaggerated staccato, doesn't he? I'm answering your question right now. A lot of people are drawn to Glenn Gould because of his staccato, aren't they? Because if I play... There, I'm playing legato where I read... Yes, an Invention in A minor by Bach for two voices. It sings there, it's connected. But if I play...
1:22:51 That's staccato. You don't let the note resonate, do you? It's pricked. What I'm saying is statistical. Gould can wonderfully play legato if he suddenly feels in the mood to grant it to us. But generally speaking — and here I'm not blaming him, because he's an immense musician — most baroque performers who don't have his genius systematically shorten the note.
1:23:21 As if they were afraid we might enjoy it too much, even a little. Whether it's in the strings... The art of the harpsichord was to play very connectedly because, since you didn't have the pedal anyway, you had to recreate... But there you go. You see it holds together. Good. So there, I don't know if I could have attacked... No, yes, sorry, I... But it's no accident that the musician who succeeds least is the one where happiness is most intense. But this very particular happiness that I keep insisting on and that I'm now going to illustrate with an example borrowed from literature, in this case again the Confessions, since I can't render it in sound.
Reading the Confessions: the day at Thun 1:23:56 If you don't mind, it's just the time it takes because my computer went into standby. There. Let me... There. It'll take three seconds. And here I find this incredible thing about the Confessions, which begins with a beautiful summer morning, in June even. You see, it's not summer ending and heralding autumn. It's not... I remember Clouscard desperately waiting for the rains after August 15th in Corsica to sweep away that summer dust.
1:24:33 and afterward the finest season begins in Mediterranean countries, for those who know what happens at the start of autumn. There. So, where was I getting to? Are we agreed? We're here. There. So, the Confessions. There.
1:25:07 I've dwelt on this long enough. I still have some time. May I read the text? Of course, of course. Good. Rousseau, this is when he's still in Chambéry. He's quite young. "I had unwittingly wandered away from town. The heat was rising and I was walking under the shade along a stream in a small valley." What a scene! You'll tell me, well, it's rather banal. No, no, but no, for the period, no one had ever, ever lingered over this kind of notation before. I challenge you to find, in Racine — and God knows for me the two greatest poets in the French language are Rimbaud and Racine.
1:25:41 So that's not pejorative. But still, apart from a few vague allusions to setting in Mithridate — "Come flee the sight of this wild climate which speaks to your eyes only of sad slavery; an entire people awaits you on its knees in Rome, under a happier sky, more worthy of you." That's a bit vague. We can guess the sky is blue if it's a happy sky. There, there's no state, and nobody lingered over it. And here? "Sovereign of the seas that must bear you" — that's the one. Yes, exactly. It's a marvel. "I had unwittingly wandered away from town, the heat was rising."
1:26:14 People say Rousseau is feeling, even sentimentalism. Excuse me, but heat is not a feeling, it's a sensation. Rousseau is more modern than many of the romantics who succeeded him. It's not feeling. The body is present. "I had unwittingly wandered away from town, the heat was rising and I was walking under the shade" — so again, a sensation, shade and light, heat and coolness — "in a small valley along a stream. I hear behind me the sound of horses' hooves, sounds, gleams," it's extraordinary.
1:26:46 "The sound of horses' hooves and girls' voices." Speaking of which, "the shrill laugh of tickled girls," that line from Valéry's Le Cimetière marin, who is nonetheless somewhat drowsy on a beach, isn't he? We understand what Valéry means, "the shrill laugh of tickled girls." "I hear behind me the sound of horses' hooves and girls' voices, which seemed embarrassed, but laughed heartily nonetheless." There starts to be that tone, "laughed heartily nonetheless." "I turn around, someone calls me by my name, Monsieur Rousseau."
1:27:16 "I approach, I find two young women of my acquaintance," Mademoiselle de Graffenried — here we are in another social class, one might say today — "Mademoiselle de Graffenried and Mademoiselle Galley, who, not being excellent horsewomen, did not know how to make their horses cross the stream." So that's the pitch. They find two young women, embarrassed because the horses are afraid to cross the river. So, let me move on, they say why — in fact, Mademoiselle de Graffenried was accompanying Mademoiselle Galley, an aristocrat, accompanied by her lady companion, who is in fact another aristocrat, but who'd had some little moral troubles somewhere in Fribourg, Switzerland, and so was entrusted to the company of Mademoiselle — let's leave that, I don't know, it's like Marivaux, good girlfriends, that sort of thing.
1:28:14 Mademoiselle de Galley — here's the important part — is bringing Mademoiselle de Graffenried to see her parents' château, during her mother's absence, which lies beyond this river, and it's precisely this river the horses can't manage to cross. I'll spare you the description of the two young ladies, which amounts to each being ravishing, well. "Both loved each other tenderly, and their good nature toward one another could only sustain this union for a long time, if no one came to disturb it."
1:28:48 "They told me they were going to Thoune, an old château belonging to Madame Galley; they implored my help to get their horses across, unable to manage it alone. I wanted to whip the horses, but they feared for me the kicking, and for themselves the jolting. I resorted to another expedient. I took by the bridle Madame Galley's horse, which led the way, then, pulling it after me, I crossed the stream with water up to mid-leg." Do you picture the scene? Rousseau soaked to the waist, well, to mid-leg, sorry, and the two young ladies on their horses.
1:29:19 "And the other horse followed without difficulty. That done, I wanted to greet these two young ladies and go on my way" like a fool. Rousseau, a bad flirt. "They said a few words to each other quietly. Mademoiselle de Graffenried, addressing me: 'No, no,' she said, 'you shall not escape us like that. You got wet in our service and we must in conscience take care to dry you off. You must, please, come with us. We are taking you prisoner.' My heart was pounding.
1:29:51 "I looked at Mademoiselle Galley. 'Yes, yes,' she added, laughing at my startled look, 'prisoner of war. Get up behind her. We want to give an account of you.' 'But Mademoiselle, I don't have the honor of being known to your mother.'" You see, in the manners of the time, that wasn't done. "'I don't have the honor of being known to your mother. What will she say when she sees me arrive?'" Her mother — Mademoiselle de Graffenried — "'is not at Thoune. We are alone. We're coming back this evening, and you'll come back with us.'"
1:30:22 And there's the day that she's planning to spend in a château with two ravishing young aristocratic ladies, without their mother, mind you. Honestly. "The effect of electricity" — which was brand new at the time — "is not more sudden than that which these words produced in me. Springing onto Mademoiselle de Graffenried's horse, I trembled with joy." Again, the body is present. "And when I had to embrace her to hold on, my heart pounded so hard that she noticed it."
1:30:52 "And she told me that hers was pounding too, from fear of falling. It was almost, in my position, an invitation to check the fact. I never dared. And throughout the whole ride my two arms served her as a very tight belt, in truth, but without ever shifting for a moment. Any woman reading this would gladly slap me, and would not be wrong." You see we're very far from the Marquis de Sade, aren't we? But is it any less pleasure? That's what we're going to see. Isn't it? That's the incredible problem posed by this text.
1:31:23 So, let me skip ahead because it's rather long. So, they arrive, they dry off and, of course, they prepare lunch. We go from one pleasure to another, don't we? And back then there wasn't the corner grocer you could stock up from to prepare a feast. No, no. Not in Switzerland. "Then we had to see to the important matter of preparing dinner. The two young ladies, while cooking, would every so often kiss the farmwife's children." The farmwife who keeps the château when they're away.
1:31:53 "And the poor kitchen boy watched, champing at the bit. Provisions had been sent from town, and there was enough for a very good dinner, especially in the way of sweets. But unfortunately, wine had been forgotten." Third pleasure. Alcohol, think about it. The Dionysian. "Wine had been forgotten. This oversight was not surprising for young women who scarcely drink any. But I was sorry, for I had somewhat counted on that help to embolden me." Since he's shy, if there'd been wine it would have helped him a bit. It's even sweet.
1:32:26 A moment ago you tried to draw a distinction for me between Protestant and puritan. I'm fine with that. But it's a classic of American film. Let me come back to it: in puritan cultures, well, cultures of evangelical religion, let's say, there are spots a bit outside town, with a nice view of the river, where the cars meet up and where young people make out in the car. We've seen that several times. I'd take, for instance, Home from the Hill, the admirable Minnelli film, Home from the Hill, with one of my favorite actresses whose name escapes me, the redhead, what's her name, never mind.
1:33:11 Now, right before taking the girl in his arms, in the car, there's a little flask of whiskey in the door that has to be drunk. That's puritan cultures for you. You can't just go from nothing to that instantly. No, but it matters, you have to drown the inhibition somewhere with some artifice, the Tristan potion. So they were counting on that, weren't they? And besides, Mademoiselle Galley made two rounds between the two of them.
1:33:41 "They sent for wine everywhere in the vicinity; none was to be found, so sober and poor were the peasants of that region." Interesting, from a documentary standpoint, wine was scarce. "As they showed their distress to me, I told them not to be so troubled, and that they had no need of wine to intoxicate me. That was the only gallant thing I dared say to them the whole day." You see we're really not in Dangerous Liaisons here. "But I believe the rascals could see well enough that this gallantry was a truth. We dined in the farmwife's kitchen, the two friends" — I'll comment less, I'm reading because this text — "the two friends seated on benches on either side of the long table, and their host between them on a three-legged stool."
A diffuse sensuality and the dilation of time 1:34:18 "What a dinner! What a charming memory! How, at so little cost, could one taste pleasures so pure, so true, and want to seek others? Never did a supper in the petites maisons" — here we move on to houses of prostitution — "never did a supper in the petites maisons of Paris approach this meal." The "casinos," as they were called. Yes, there, they've moved on. "I say this not only for the gaiety, for the sweet joy" — mind the precision — "I do not say this only for the gaiety, for the sweet joy, but I say it for the sensuality."
1:34:52 Extraordinary text. Freud was the first to say — he never conflated sexuality with genitality. Here it's diffused throughout the whole body, it's not in the foods one tastes. "After dinner, we made an economy. Instead of taking the coffee left over from lunch, we kept it for our afternoon snack with cream," and I could feel it coming. I'm not exaggerating.
1:35:24 I tell you, it's when I'm joking that I'm serious — "for our afternoon snack with cream and cakes they had brought, and to keep our appetite going, we went" — that's not enough — "we went into the orchard to finish our dessert with," well, with what? With the color of temptation. What's the color of temptation? Snow White, what is it? Cherry. There it is, it's red. Red. I mention this because those studying for the agrégation in literature, when they study the fairy-tale figure and take the example of Snow White — if Snow White leaves the road to her grandmother's to take the shortcut through the forest, in the tale it's called the path of red fruits.
1:36:03 And in Germanic countries, which is where this tale originates, we know very well that red fruits — raspberries, currants, berries, as they say in German, Erdbeer, that's strawberries, literally "earth berries," Johannisbeeren, "John's berries," Saint John's berries, currants, and so on. In short, this color was missing, you see — white, paleness, is purity, is virginity, and against the white, against people, the theme has to designate the woman of the time, sensuality, the woman, the lilies and the roses, doesn't it?
1:36:43 "After dinner, we made an economy; instead of taking the coffee left over from lunch, we kept it for our afternoon snack with cream and cakes they had brought," and to keep our appetite going, a refinement — "we went into the orchard to finish our dessert with cherries. I climbed the tree and threw them bunches of it, and they threw the pits back to me through the branches." He doesn't say whether they blew them or threw them with their hand. "Once, Mademoiselle Galley, holding out her apron and pulling her head back, presented herself so well, and I aimed so accurately, that I dropped a bunch right into her bosom, to much laughter."
1:37:23 "I said to myself that if my lips were cherries, I would throw them there just as gladly." There's an outpouring of sensuality in this text, if you look closely. "The day passed in this way, frolicking with the greatest freedom and always with the greatest decency; not a single equivocal word, not a single risky joke; and this decency we did not impose on ourselves at all" — so there we've left puritanism behind. It came all on its own. "We took the tone our hearts gave us."
1:37:54 "In the end, my modesty" — others will say my foolishness, that's Sollers — "was such that the greatest liberty that escaped me was to kiss Mademoiselle Galley's hand just once," under circumstances I'll skip because the other one had disappeared for a moment — well, "her friend came back and seemed ugly to me at that moment." Finally, she remembered that they mustn't wait until nightfall to return to town. "We had only just enough time left to arrive by daylight, and we hurried to leave, pairing off as we had come. Had I dared, I would have reversed that order, for Mademoiselle Galley's gaze had so moved my heart."
1:38:26 "But I did not dare say anything, and it was not for her to propose it. As we walked, we said the day was wrong to end. But far from complaining that it had been short, we found that we had had the secret of making it long." You see the happiness there? Its dilation in time. "Of making it long, through all the amusements we had known how to fill it with. I left her at almost the same spot where she had picked me up. With what regret we parted, with what pleasure we planned to meet again!" The future, what lies ahead, suddenly unfolds.
1:38:59 This happy present, doesn't it, opens a door onto the future. "Twelve hours spent together were worth centuries of familiarity to us." What a dilation of time! "The sweet memory of that day cost these lovely girls nothing. The tender bond that reigned among the three of us was worth livelier pleasures, and could not have survived them. We loved one another without mystery and without shame, and we wanted to love one another always thus. Innocence of manners has a voluptuousness of its own, quite as good as the other, because it has no gaps and acts continually."
1:39:34 Here we see clearly that it is indeed the relation to time that distinguishes happiness from pleasure. "Innocence of manners has a voluptuousness of its own, quite as good as the other, because it has no gaps and acts continually. For my part, I know that the memory of so fine a day touches me more, charms me more..." There, he writes this when he's old, he has kidney stone disease, he's on rue Plâtrière, as it was called then, today's rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Marais. Aristocratic Europe files past to see him, and he turns away nine-tenths of his visitors. What he does amid these sufferings is enchant himself, literally, incantare, as if by an incantation, through his memories.
1:40:09 He is going to write the Confessions, then the Reveries, which will be its final flourish. So, I mean, so — what remains of everything we've lived through? That's where you see the truth. We can no longer cheat at that point, about what's worth having lived for. "For my part, I know that the memory of so fine a day touches me more, charms me more, comes back to my heart more than that of any pleasure I have tasted in my life." And when you read the Confessions, you know he indulged himself physically with the Italian woman in the boat in Venice.
1:40:41 Or with Madame de Larnage near Lyon, well, let's leave that aside, go read the Confessions. So, nothing touches me anymore, of all the pleasures I have tasted in my life. I didn't quite know what I wanted from these two charming women, but I was very interested in both of them. I don't say that if I had been master of my own arrangements, my heart would have been divided. I felt a slight preference. I would have made my happiness in having Mademoiselle de Graffenried as a mistress, but if I had my choice, I think I would rather have had her as a confidante.
1:41:14 Be that as it may, it seems to me, on leaving them, that I could no longer live without one or the other. Who would have told me that I would never see them again in my life and that our ephemeral loves would end there? Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallant adventures. This time, I did not experience it with the same pleasure as usual, and I kept myself from telling her how I... sorry. Yes. Oh, my readers, do not be mistaken. And this is the conclusion. I may have had more pleasure in my love affairs by ending with that furtively kissed hand than you will ever have in yours by beginning that way, at least.
The Marriage of Figaro, a wedding indefinitely delayed 1:41:52 That was entirely the tone that reigns in The Marriage of Figaro. What is The Marriage of Figaro? It was a wedding indefinitely postponed because the master of the house — everything takes place in the castle of Count Almaviva. It's interesting to see that nine-tenths of the characters, if I except Bartolo and Marcellina, nine-tenths of the characters are the household staff of the castle, the servants. Gardeners, chambermaids, cooks.
1:42:23 When they all gather to sing, you know, it was the custom for a servant, before marrying, to ask permission from the lord, from her master, from her employer, if I may put it that way. And they turn pale with almost furious astonishment at seeing that the count, out of spite at seeing that Suzanne loves her husband, her husband-to-be, takes the white linen that was being offered — it was the custom, you know, a very archaic one — the white linen offered to the count, he takes it and throws it on the ground in front of the whole assembled household of the castle.
1:43:02 And the whole castle knows very well that the count exercises his droit du seigneur by always finding a pretext to delay the wedding. So this is The Marriage of Figaro — it's not the music of a wedding, it's quite the opposite. The wedding will take place only after the final fall of the curtain. It's the whole alternation between the joy of the coming marriage and the anguish of its being delayed. Even the duettino — I'll go into the detail of the score — the little duet which is a marvel, not small in its musical qualities, between Suzanne and the count, is the only moment when she lies, when she makes the count believe she is going to yield to his harassment, isn't that right?
1:43:49 It's that moment when the count says "Mi sento dal contento pieno di gioia il cor." You see, the count believes it, he thinks it's happened, doesn't he? And meanwhile Suzanne says to the audience, sotto voce, "Forgive me if I lie, but I must save my fiancé." Well, I'm playing along. But it's a marvel, in A major, in D major. I recommend here, for those who might find it easier to discover all this on video, because the drama helps a bit with the score.
1:44:28 I would advise those who are more musically trained to listen to the great audio versions, even without image, wouldn't you agree? But for once, here, both are combined. One that is among the summits of the musical version — I'm thinking of Karl Böhm, who performed The Marriage countless times and recorded it countless times, but there is one version in particular on video with Kiri Te Kanawa, who is of Maori origin, by the way — extraordinary. Kiri Te Kanawa playing the Countess, Mirella Freni playing Suzanne, dream voices, Fischer-Dieskau playing the count in a way that is not at all ridiculous or caricatural, but almost unsettling somehow, reminding us that he is still the master.
1:45:10 I don't know. He only speaks in his big aria, doesn't he, in which he mimics Figaro. So — and Figaro played by Hermann Prey, who comes to us from the stables of communist East Germany, which is not from the West. I'll mention in passing that there is a very fine version on Deutsche Grammophon that you can find streaming, The Marriage of Figaro, the Karl Böhm version.
1:45:40 And make sure to check that Fischer-Dieskau is in it, the greatest baritone of the century, and you can't go wrong. It's a very beautiful production staged by Ponnelle, who also does excellent actor direction, because often singers, even when they're marvelous, even when they have the right voice, are not actors. And here there is an admirable direction of actors, a bit like what Chéreau would do for The Ring with Wagner.
Twilights of Così, Baudelaire and the flower maidens 1:46:10 So, there you have it, I wanted to pay tribute to this melody of happiness in The Marriage of Figaro. I did the same for Così last time. But in Così there is already a voluptuous, twilight quality that foreshadows the endless twilights that would multiply all the way to decadent poetry — not pejorative, I mean Baudelaire, Mallarmé, careful now. Precisely, since you mention Baudelaire, the theme of the green paradise of childhood loves.
1:46:40 Yes, but still, that's rather rare in Baudelaire. And everything that the idyll has that is most childlike. There, exactly. But you see, he evokes it as a past, as a lost paradise. Yes, but that somewhat relegates it to history. Otherwise his presence, his reality, is more like: here come the times when, vibrating on its stem, each flower evaporates like a censer. It's a sunset over Paris with the scent of incense, with a violin trembling like an afflicted heart. Well, that's not quite children's laughter, but you're right, that unforgettable line.
1:47:10 So, look at the connotation, since we're on the subject, Baudelaire-Wagner. You know it was Baudelaire who revealed Wagner. Nerval was first, but he was unknown, nobody paid attention, with his suicidal discretion. But it was Baudelaire who first pounded the table. Read the famous letter from Baudelaire to Wagner — type in "letter from Baudelaire to Wagner" and you'll find it — which ends with an overwhelming postscript. It brings tears to your eyes, where Baudelaire says: "I am not giving you my address so that you won't think I have something to ask of you."
1:47:40 One of the greatest men of the century lowering himself to say that — it's extraordinary. Yes, but another connotation is precisely this: in Wagner's late work, which Baudelaire could not have heard because he died before the great works, having known only the great Romantic operas of Wagner's youth, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin — Lohengrin, which he adored, Lohengrin which gave us the poem "Élévation" in The Flowers of Evil. But let's not wander off — in the scene of the flower maidens frolicking in the magician's garden, in the enchanted garden, where Klingsor, the defrocked priest, to put it quickly, has transformed the desert into a garden of delights in which he makes strange beings grow that are flowers from the waist down.
1:48:29 And with a chest and a face and arms above, the flower maidens whose function is to seduce the knights of the Grail, in order later to turn them into an army of darkness and one day extinguish the Grail. Well, there. And the flower maidens, who among themselves are like the daughters of the Rhine. There's even a musical intertextuality there. Let me go quickly. The three, the three attendants of the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute. Three women's voices. Soprano, mezzo.
1:48:59 The three Norns in Wagner. The three daughters of the Rhine and the flower maidens, and among... let me go back to Wagner's youth — the chorus of the spinning women in The Flying Dutchman. Sorry, there, let's close the list. Go ahead. No, no, I'm just saying, in Freud it's birth, life, death. The symbolism is... But of course, it's childish babble. There are also the three daughters of Lear. It's childish babble. We come back to the aviary, somehow.
1:49:30 So, there it is, the green paradise of childhood loves. When the old Wagner attends the rehearsal in the great empty hall of Bayreuth, which is his obsession — what does Wagner feel, the gaze of the other, doesn't he, of the crowd — and attends for the first time the complete hearing of the scene of the flower maidens, which he has just composed. He said... bravo! He applauds himself, doesn't he? It's the green paradise of childhood loves that suddenly enchanted him all over again.
Cherubino, the shift, and the conclusion on Marx 1:50:00 Isn't that right? So, yes, of course. But you see, that's not... let me go back to the difference. The Marriage, Così — I've gone back one notch chronologically, only chronologically, not in quality. But The Marriage will always retain something of that solar happiness, of that mad day, of eternal youth. And it's no accident that the most Mozartian figure in the whole cast — I come back to it again — is still Cherubino, between two ages, between two sexes.
1:50:36 I say between two sexes because there is an extraordinary scene, no doubt the richest in the creation of new musical themes, the famous finale of the second act which I recommended you listen to last time, where one theme chases another, it's inexhaustible — the scene where the Countess and Suzanne, so, just among women, decide to dress Cherubino, to disguise him as a girl. I'm serious. All right? And they say he's too cute to be a boy. You see, it's very ambiguous, very between-two-sexes, very eighteenth-century, all of that, isn't it?
1:51:12 And, and of course, the count bursts in and knocks at the door just as they are in the middle of it. How does he put it? He sings, his collar undone, his chest bare — but actually, what is this business of him being nu, en nu? Does he let one rip? No? All right, and the young Cherubino, who is an adolescent at that point, just has time to flee through the window. And since he's as light as a bird, he doesn't hurt himself, does he? There, that's to give you all the twists and turns.
1:51:43 But, so, between two ages, between two sexes, Mozart is at the tipping point. And in that tipping point he held everything that the world to come ought to be — I'll end on this — and so I'll conclude with Marx. Marx says, in the preface of '59 — men have never raised problems, never posed questions, except when history had already given them the means to find a solution.
1:52:14 It's in the preface of '59 — the productive forces have to reach a certain point, as happened after the English industrial revolution which had just occurred just before Mozart's maturity, and the French Revolution which would extend it across the territory and tend, doesn't it, toward the other strata of society — for there to be a possibility of enjoyment extended, extended — I don't like the term "the masses" because it's undifferentiating — but extended to the people, in the plural, isn't it?
1:52:49 And to the populations that make up the people, if you prefer. It's at that moment that enjoyment turns into happiness, and that we can finally speak of those eras, when we have some distance, like Rousseau earlier, in the imperfect tense, over the long term. Thank you for your attention, I hope you don't hold it against me for having droned on at you for two sessions about Mozart, but once again, even if I did fifty, I would not consider I had covered even half the ground, and by far — and it's magnificent to make them hear it also in words, with Rousseau — and, oh, I just thought of it — happy birthday, since we'll see each other — ah, thanks, I'd forgotten — it's next Saturday — it's a year in advance — well, that's it, basically it's next Saturday — that's very kind of you to think of it — everyone knows it since you were born on a February 6th, so everyone knows it — but the meaning of your birth is the opposite — I chose a great fascist date to be born — no, no, if I had chosen, I'd remember well — I was born quite far from that, ten thousand kilometers away, far — Vietnam? — no, I don't know.
1:54:01 Flattery aside — what to say, I think that's precisely what you invert, that symbolism there — oh but no doubt, no doubt, it's not up to me to psychoanalyze myself, but I mean the continuity of my whole thought despite all its detours is "never again that" — yes, absolutely — and even down to your refusal of convulsive attitudes and, so to speak, folded-in resentment, which is not a left-wing sentiment, contrary to what people believed — from India I'm rather more on the right — there — neither puritan nor libertine — there — and so we'll conclude on that, it's rather thought-provoking actually as a conclusion — see you Monday, in principle — thank you for everything, Aymeric, my friend — thanks — it's Dominique.
