English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Musicosophie: presentation and listening to a concerto 0:00 That's the time, everyone. All right. There, we're recording. You can go ahead, Dominique. Hello everyone. Yes, hello to everyone. Very happy to be back with everyone, starting with Emeric, and our faithful listeners, and followers, if I may say so, for these new chapters. Yes, these new chapters on... I don't dare say conversations on music, because the title already exists in bookstores, and since these are Furtwängler's conversations with Abendroth, I feel a bit overwhelmed.
0:46 I did take the provisional title, I was calling it Musicosophie, but that's not a book, so it's not... I found that it resolved pretty much all the questions we could ask ourselves, because the history of music doesn't work either, because it's a genre... Well, the way we treat it is more transversal than strict histories of music, which, as you pointed out very well in the first episode, are too often geographies of music confined to so-called Western music.
1:17 For example, so there you go, Musicosophie fits very well. Simply, this time I'd like, contrary to what we usually do, to start with the sound example, which I'll deliver right away, and then move on afterward... I'll say it right away, there's no... Where do I say it? Or no, I'll say it afterward, it's very short.
1:47 I'll say what it is afterward, so there's no representational influence at all, and so that those discovering it are all ears. It's a very well-known piece, it's a hit of classical music. By the way, Dominique, I realize, because I'm so focused on the audio, but we can't see you. So I don't know if that changes anything. How did that happen? You could do this as a radio broadcast too. Oh wait, I must not have pressed the camera button. Yes, I hadn't even thought of it, I'll show you. There, there.
2:18 Is that good now? Yes. Is the framing okay? Yes, yes. Anyway, I repeat that the goal is to end up with a book. Yes, yes, of course, of course, of course. But indeed, yes, it's true that what's really unfortunate is not being able to let people listen, but I also think that, as you said, this could be used later with musical excerpts. Yes, and it will be replaced by Alexis, by Alexis, by Pierre-Alain, with a real musical illustration online, and not like this, over there, you're going to hear it from above.
2:49 No, but it's very good to do it on piano, because you still get a certain sense of it. I know you don't have the bass, what's missing? You're missing the last octaves, right, on your piano? An octave and a half is missing at the bottom, there. Still. The extreme lows, yes, as soon as we're past Beethoven, that's missed a lot, still. Yes, I'll put it a bit loud, there, so we can still hear it. Yes, so there, it's a very well-known piece. Well, it's a very well-known concerto, I won't say more for now, except that the movement I'm going to play is a bit less popular than the first.
3:27 But there, music first and commentary afterward, it won't take long, I promise. So, there. Sorry, that's not it. Excuse me, that's it. There. There, we should hear it a bit poorly, these are pizzicatos.
4:25 That's it. There, that's great. So, this was of course the extremely famous Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat by Tchaikovsky, which is the war horse of all young pianists dreaming one day of winning the concerto prize.
Tchaikovsky's andantino, a happiness without ambivalence 5:00 The Tchaikovsky Prize in Moscow, the Marguerite Long Prize, whatever, I mean. The Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Prize, in all the great piano competitions, this concerto always places very well in general. I played the second movement, andantino. There. On purpose, because it allows us to move on to the extra-musical considerations we developed at length.
5:30 Some of you will find me going on too long about Rousseau, about the theme of happiness in the Enlightenment. That's why last time I started this time directly with the sound illustration, because how do we classify this music in the question of modern or old-fashioned? Right. It's typical. If we set up a contextualizing scenario, let me explain.
6:07 If I show up in the room of a young man or young woman, I show up invisible, don't worry, luckily for them, like Aladdin's genie. Right? And at the moment, a few seconds before he wakes up, I play this music. A bit like Wagner surprised his wife as a Christmas gift, having musicians hidden on the staircase play Siegfried Idyll for her upon waking. Since there was no hi-fi system at the time, it must have had quite an extraordinary effect.
6:37 Well. He had rehearsed in secret with musicians from the Zurich orchestra. And Nietzsche was among the guests during a blessed period he never found again. Anyway, so if I play them this, I wake up in earthly paradise. A kind of freshness, innocence, a paradisiacal quality, without even Schubert's melancholic and heartbreaking side, with happiness, without ambivalence, without any death-driven aspect.
7:17 We get the impression that on getting out of bed, we're going to take a walk in the orchard on the first fine spring day. So how do we classify this music on the axis of temporality? In no way does it have anything modern in the sense of transgressive, harmonically bold. I'm talking about the few bars I played. In the middle section, there's an incredible outburst of pre-Stravinskian innovation.
7:48 Here I'm only talking about this passage, all right? Which is a song, a lied. What hasn't aged a bit at the same time. The imaginary scenario I just evoked could take place in Oregon, in Siberia, I mean, in N'Djamena. It would be just as rewarding, in the same way, for anyone.
8:20 I had this experience when I was in Niger. It's quite extraordinary. Tchaikovsky is at once the roughest and least rough of the contradictory composers. I chose on purpose a musician who is often the object of slight or even significant contempt from so-called connoisseurs. Or rather, from those who thereby reveal something. And also the fact that it's ballet music too.
8:50 From those who thereby reveal that they're not concerned. No, but the Russians in general are the champions of ballet. They're a people of dancers like the Spanish. I note in passing that the two schools, in the geographical sense of the term, as we say the Italian school, the German school, the two musical schools where dance is most present in the music, in the score, are located at the two extremities, the two limits of the European world. The African limit with Spain, the Asian limit with Russia.
9:27 I note this in passing and close the parenthesis. I'm sure we'll have the chance to come back to it. It's no coincidence, yes. Of course. So, yes, we often hear people say 'Tchaikovsky, well, there are some decent things, but what bad taste, with sentimentality.' And then that Slavic side that goes from ecstasy to depression, constantly. Well, the inconstancy of the Slavic soul, to stay with the images.
9:57 In the clichés, yes. Yes, in the clichés. Let me slip in... It's Nietzsche who wrote 'People and fatherland,' he's the king of clichés, in Beyond Good and Evil. There's nothing but that. But let me slip in an anecdote about Mayakovsky visiting New York. He's being interviewed, and he starts to get exasperated. He says so to his interpreter in Russian so the others won't understand.
10:28 And I'm fed up with people saying that in my poetry we find constants of the Slavic soul. Oh yes, but you could talk about 'russkaya dusha,' that annoys them. There, there, there. Now, the only words he knew how to say in English were 'I would like a cup of tea.' Yes, indeed, to express the visit, it's quite more... So he suddenly explodes, and the journalists, realizing something is happening, ask his interpreter 'What is Mr. Mayakovsky saying?'
11:01 And the interpreter answers 'I would like a cup of tea.' I close the parenthesis. So, Tchaikovsky, when it's not saccharine, sentimental, it's concessions to bad taste. It's almost, one might say, well, you just have to look at the success of American music among the ill-bred American masses. Of Russian music, I admit my slip. I want to point out that the greatest western film composers are almost all Slavs, Russians.
11:32 I'm thinking of Dimitri Tiomkin, who wrote the music for the main westerns, starting with Rio Bravo, for example, and so many others. I'm thinking, of course, of, first and foremost, Gershwin, who is a Russian Jew and who created contemporary American music. Well, there. So, and we can note that there are elements of order, conditions of praxis that are shared. I'm alluding to the great open spaces. It's not old Europe with the Norman hedgerow countryside.
12:04 It's not that, or the Poitou countryside. It's immense spaces, whether in Ukraine, Siberia, or the Midwest, crossed by horse, by wagon here, by troika there, whatever. I mean, that gives that kind of rhythmic obsession, there are some shared structural elements. It's interesting. But let's leave that for now. I come back to this curious paradox. The public, but not only the public, critics, musicians too sometimes, contemporary ones, tend to turn up their noses at Tchaikovsky and say there are much more innovative composers, and above all much more profoundly Russian ones.
12:48 Because Tchaikovsky makes too many concessions to the West, sub-Brahmsian, in short, to German influence, to what remains, delayed romanticism, where we know that Germany and Austria played a... They said that about Rachmaninoff too. But exactly, exactly. So there was a general problem there. Except, who does this discourse scandalize the most?
13:18 It scandalizes those least likely to be conservative, retro, and to have pro-romantic sympathies. I'm thinking of Stravinsky. Stravinsky says it's because Tchaikovsky is the most profoundly Russian of all composers that he completely escapes Westerners who are fond of Muscovite picturesqueness. I'm quoting. Absolutely. Really. And yet, the one who precisely indulged in the picturesque, or embodied that picturesqueness, was Stravinsky for the West.
13:50 It was... There. So, precisely, what's admirable in Tchaikovsky is exactly what he's reproached for. And at the same time I see in it a symptom... Now I'm generalizing well beyond Tchaikovsky's name. Of the dilemma the composer has had to resolve since the appearance of musical modernity. Let me be more precise now. With Beethoven, two axes come together that until then had been completely separate.
Beethoven, the dance melody and the end of the forbidden mixture 14:20 scholarly music in the strictest sense. So, by definition, the antonym of popular music. The great church polyphony, or polyphony plain and simple, or works in the style of The Art of Fugue or The Musical Offering. Counterpoint. Or else the symphonic music of the Mannheim school, I don't mean...
14:51 Without what makes up the ingredient that facilitates popular listening, opera, a story, a plot, the voice, and above all the occasion. Music for a... because a battle was won or because there's a wedding. Pure music, in general, is a bit harder to access. So-called pure. All these words are approximate. That's the axis of scholarly music. And then there's the axis of popular music which is called, in conservatory analysis, which gave it this name, dance melody.
15:28 That is, the melody that people hum along to and that was often accompanied by gesture. Right? And Beethoven is the first to make dance melody resound, that is, what is the very essence of popular music, within the most constructed and composed music. In other words, the junction... If I understand, because Bach's suites are dance suites, so everything is still...
15:59 Yes. But you mean, they're worked through. Yes, there. They're not as such. Yes, yes. We recognize it. I won't go back over it, I covered that last time. We recognize, of course, rhythmic structures familiar even to the peasant's ear. The jig, the bourrée, the galliard, whatever you like. On the other hand, on the other hand, I mean, Bach's elaboration is of such sophistication, I mean, it's not what people listened to, obviously, on a daily basis, what I just mentioned.
16:29 whereas here, I mean, there are deliberate vulgarities in Beethoven, very calculated ones, I mean, that are as if glued and stuck onto an extraordinary fugato we just heard in a symphony or a quartet. I'm thinking of the second movement of the Archduke Trio. It's a Viennese little song of a couple frolicking in a tavern on the outskirts of Vienna.
17:17 It's a Viennese little song with a perfectly classical cadence, return to the tonic. But the treatment of this movement, which includes fugal and chromatic developments, is a striking contrast with the popular vein I just illustrated. What am I in the process of saying?
17:49 During the revolution, arriving at the Tuileries, the people of Paris asked Louis XVI to put the red cap on the balcony. This unprecedented collision... There's a real mixing of genres there. Yes, but precisely, the mixing of genres presupposes a mixing of classes which itself implies that we have left behind the Ancien Régime, whose essence was that there was a place for everything but each thing had to stay in its place. Exactly.
18:19 We all learned in school, without going far into Marxism, we all learned something that nonetheless confirms what we just said. It's that what characterizes classicism as opposed to romanticism, we could put it another way, the aesthetic criterion of the Ancien Régime, is to forbid the mixing of genres. In Racine, either there's tragedy, or exceptionally a comedy, I'm thinking of The Litigants, it happens to him, right?
18:49 Or he writes an epistle to the king because he needs money and writes an ode to the lady, the wife of some lord, for the recovery from her fever. There. But these are each time distinct genres, each with their own requirements, their respective rules, etc. There's no collision. And even within a single genre, for example, the confession can only be given by Oenone, it wouldn't be fitting otherwise, because it's she who hides a part of it, because otherwise it would be shameful not to do so.
19:22 Very good example, how could a princess reveal herself given the gracious nature of her status, if I may say so, 'état' meaning social class in the language of the time, a third estate, how could a princess of high rank stoop to slander? The slander has to be put in the mouth of the servant girl, well, the maid, the duenna. Very good example. Confidante, as we politely say, but that's really what it is. There, I come back to my collision.
19:52 The proof that it's a symptom of the era is that a little before Beethoven, Beethoven systematizes it, but a little before Beethoven, a Mozart in The Magic Flute manages to superimpose, throughout an opera, a genre, perhaps the most eminent one, the sacred genre, the oratorio genre. Some even see a symmetry between The Magic Flute and Parsifal, two initiatory rituals, two temples, two sacred communities, that of Sarastro's temple and, of course, that of the Grail.
20:30 Only, that's one aspect of The Magic Flute, but alongside the character of Tamino, the prince who will follow the initiatory stages, there's Papageno who spends his time saying, what I want is a slice of ham, a glass of beer, and if I could have a little wife now and then, she'd be welcome. In other words, and here's where I'm getting at, a response begins to emerge to the remark, one of the most sublime made by an actor of the French Revolution, I'm thinking of Saint-Just, happiness is a new idea in Europe.
Happiness, a new idea in Europe 21:10 There's a demand for happiness in the most popular sense of the term. That's what I just illustrated with the Tchaikovsky piece. Right? And I'm going to play it again for a second, so we understand better, overarched by this cloud of the word happiness, so we understand better what I mean. There. So, I repeat, a first concerto, in B-flat, and simply, andantino, a second movement.
21:50 So there, I'll pick up my version again, because there. There. Happiness, pure, unmixed. A freshness of the first ages.
22:29 Entrance of the piano. The strings behind the piano forming something like a choir of angels. Now, that's very modern.
23:18 There you go, much more discontinuous. I put this passage back on purpose to illustrate what I call happiness. And I'm going to dig into this word. And how, without losing sight of music this time, without getting caught up in an abstract problematic — quite the opposite — for, I say it in advance, this is going to pose a problem for modern composers from that period onward. It's always the same. The two great landmarks of modernity, the English industrial revolution, the French political revolution, it's the 18th-19th century transition, where it gets decided and which produces the world in which we're still struggling today.
23:56 So there's going to be this demand, a call for happiness, for simple, non-puritanical enjoyment, which doesn't have to go through learned writing, which doesn't have to — which comes from the growth of the popular strata, I say strata on purpose to have a term more extensive than class, right — who discover, well today we'd say they're discovering, in the Third World, running water, electricity — you just have to see the prodigious, perhaps one of the greatest mutations in the history of humanity, the one China is currently producing, on an unprecedented scale. Nothing exasperates me more than seeing environmentalists say that if the Chinese start having washing machines, we'd need six planets — as if that means we can wash our clothes, but not them, well, we can wash our clothes, but not them.
25:06 Let them go explain that over there and get lynched by a crowd of housewives. Mike Pompeo says the same thing. Sorry? Mike Pompeo says the same thing. Well, of course! Him again — he's a bit more consistent because he's the loser in this affair, he's a bad loser but he's not... There you go, yeah. Okay. But for people who claim to be transgressive and anti-capitalist to say that is... So they confuse anti-capitalist with anti-industrial and anti-happiness — I'll come back to that.
Alternation and collage: Bartók's quartet 25:39 Right. We can finally move toward values worth living for once we're not spending the whole day at the washhouse, chapping our hands and catching whatever diseases we can imagine. So I'm dwelling on this theme because it's going to lead somewhere, and it gives leads for what would be a well-differentiated history of music taking all these factors into account.
26:09 This lead would be that there's an alternation, from the emergence of modernity onward, between formal progressions — progressions in form, in writing, which we'll come back to — and at the same time, returns of a much less sophisticated popular demand. Without excluding, as we just saw, the overlaying of one onto the other, which — I repeat — Beethoven is not the first to do systematically. There's, well, we'll need to insert this into what we're saying but we'll handle that in editing — there's a Bartók quartet, sorry, from memory I'm having a mental block, we'll have to check whether it's the fourth or the fifth, it's one of the two, I promise.
26:59 I do believe it's the fourth. Yes, in the finale — it's Bartók, it grates on the ears like everything contemporary does for anyone who's stuck at, say, Debussy's Clair de lune as the most modern thing there is. You see, there are quite a few people, millions of people, for whom in classical music nothing goes beyond the first cracks, so to speak, in sonata form. So there, it's Bartók, and suddenly the music stops for a split second and we hear a melody of such silliness, like a child singing slightly off-key.
27:39 Of course, all of this is admirably calculated, right? Taken up in polytonality — polytonality is not tonality, it's not the absence of tonality, it's the superposition of two tonalities, which creates a terrible dissonance. Let me give a very simple example, I'll do it in C, and I'll do it in C sharp, that is, the same melody but I do both at the same time.
28:10 Now that grates on the ears. Bartók does that but with a melody of such silliness — it's truly a folk tune all of a sudden. Except that it's... There you go. So there will be this dialectic — I don't see another word for it — between the popular and the learned that will animate all of so-called modern music, historically speaking.
National schools, an infusion of fresh blood 28:44 If I make a division within this problematic, we understand to what extent it was fed by the explosion, especially in the second half of the 19th century, of so-called national schools of music. We alluded to Grieg for Norway last time, Enescu for Romania, and each time, of course, there's a locally rich background, as everywhere.
29:18 I'll set the Russians aside, of course, who are the most diverse, but a Kodály or first a Liszt, then a Kodály, then a Bartók in Hungary. And even this demand you mention, of a sort of popular theme followed immediately by its variation — that's practically a program, it's jazz. We'll get to jazz, which will be — well, I repeat, the formula seems worn threadbare but it's never been more apt.
29:52 It's that jazz is the most learned of popular musics and the most popular of learned musics. At the same time. Exactly, simultaneously, we'll come back to that. But even before jazz — I'm really talking two or three generations earlier — I go back to the second half of the 19th century, I think of Spain, the emergence of a Manuel de Falla, a Rodrigo, the Albénizes, the Granadoses, etc. I should mention that in Granados there's a series of dances called the Spanish Dances, a small collection in which I recommend the sixth dance, called Andaluza.
30:32 I don't have very good Iberian pronunciation, but it ends in -UZ, and it was... If there were a metonymy for sonorous Spain, it would be this little piece. It's prodigious. But here we're really looking at a perfectly successful synthesis of popular music and learned, classical writing — as the layman would say. I mention it only because originally it was composed by Granados for piano. Of course, it's become a favorite piece for guitarists.
31:05 It lends itself very well to that — guitar, piano, that works, they're instruments that can play chords, and transcriptions from one to the other are quite common. Why am I mentioning this? Only — and I'll close my parenthesis — to point out an exceptional version where the immense guitarist who revived the entire Spanish guitar repertoire, Andrés Segovia of course, plays this piece as a duet with Yehudi Menuhin. There you go, the classical violinist — I recommend it.
31:35 You can find it, of course, on streaming. Andaluza, Spanish Dance, Granados, Menuhin, that's enough, you'll find it. So this miraculous flourishing of the so-called national schools was, on the one hand, a fresh infusion of new blood into a more elitist, more learned music, but one that was starting to wither a bit and smell of the drawing room.
32:16 Or simply an infusion of fresh blood at the level, this time, of the psyche, psychologically speaking, because music can be sublime but deadly. We saw that with Schubert. I'm thinking of Brahms, who never stops finishing off Romanticism. Brahms goes almost into the early years of the 20th century, he lives a long time, and he wants nothing to do with innovations, Brahms. For him, Wagner, all of that, exactly.
32:46 For him, Wagner and Liszt, all that — those are guys who are ruining music with their story about the music of the future, which gives us a formula of Liszt's and Wagner's. But let's leave that aside — he remains very attached, Brahms, to the classical framework of sonata form, the symphony, the concerto, and also to the popular vein — but the popular vein of the piano bar, which was his job when he was destitute, that's how he started out. Well, it's magnificent, that's not the question.
33:17 But this music needed boosting, this dying German music trying to warm up late autumn and the beginning of winter, the last sunlight of an agonizing Romanticism. I'm thinking of the 1880s, there are plenty of examples, the post-Wagnerians, Mahler, Bruckner — I'm not talking about Strauss, who has a different dynamic each time, a sort of protean quality, a kind of post-Wagnerian Handel, a vitality, in short, that contrasts with all that.
33:55 But anyway, Death in Venice chose a Mahler movement, as it happens, for the film, which was very well found — a sort of ecstatic death that lasts 20 minutes. So when I speak of an infusion of fresh blood or a breath of fresh air, these aren't random metaphors. And there, the popular schools — I said boosting earlier, I use that neologism deliberately — with this, this extra soul, no — that still feeds the nostalgia.
34:32 But with this real jolt — I was searching for the word — drawn from the rhythmic element inherent in dance music and present in all popular musics, and which we also find in music as sophisticated, as written, as Sibelius's music in Finland. And at age 40, the very beginning of the 5th Symphony — it begins, we're very far from all that, it begins with landscapes only Scandinavia can show, a kind of elsewhere outside time but not outside space, of immensity, of wildness — I don't say savagery, wildness — savagery implies there are savages, and there's no one there.
35:19 It's fjords stretching to infinity, lakes, forests, so we're at the opposite of... And suddenly, and suddenly, we hear, laid right on top of it, almost like a chorus coming out of a tavern, in Helsinki or some lakeside town. There you go, so I mean, this is going to multiply.
35:49 And so this is one of the modes of this dialectic I'm alluding to. There's a music that's apparently less innovative but that has the advantage of rejuvenating, of giving a breath of fresh air, and thus of converting millions of individuals belonging to the new middle strata — converting them to something other than the soup offered to them by variety music, so-called commercial music, even if that's a stupid term, since music can do very well commercially and still be excellent.
36:24 Well, as opposed to worthless music — we talked enough about sonic ghettos last time, I won't go back over it — in every era there's been something that served that function, even if it never had the carcinogenic quality that ours has today, which I denounced last time, to the point that the same music can be heard, as I already said, in Tokyo, Florida, Abidjan, and Paris between 11pm and 2am.
36:54 There, that's really new and contemporary, it's a crisis. But otherwise, there's always been something, including in literature, everywhere — Béranger, that's still not Victor Hugo, that's very popular, right, nobody reads Béranger anymore, Béranger's songs. If it were only a cancer — that's part of the metaphor — there's also the metaphor of drugs, that is, it prevents you from living a full, whole life, just as drugs set you apart. What you were talking about is also that it perverts one's capacity to listen, in a way.
37:26 Yes, yes, but what's worrying is that drugs isolate you, set you apart. Some people are dying on their carpet with opium or with hash, whatever, especially with heroin — that's the most serious of all, alkaloids — whereas here, it's millions of masses who, on the contrary, come together and socialize inside these sonic ghettos, which is really the zero degree of sociability.
37:57 And when you see 500 young people doing this, standing in a room, facing a pianist who plays standing up, one and a half chords because he doesn't know many others, and who thrashes about frantically with his body while his music doesn't move at all. You were talking about jazz earlier, I think of Parker — we have very, very few filmed documents of Parker unfortunately, but there's a stunning document where he's in a studio fiddling with his sax mouthpiece while his illustrious predecessor from just before him in jazz, Coleman Hawkins, one of the greatest tenor saxes, for Remy Doljias plays a solo.
38:36 Parker watches him like that, both respectfully and mockingly, a bit mockingly, and suddenly Parker plays a solo, but you hear 40 notes a second, it modulates on almost every beat of the bar — modulating means changing key — it's a tour de force, you can barely see his fingers move, whereas the rock pianist over there twists in every direction but his music doesn't move at all. So there, I maintain my cancer analogy, but I come back to the way the 19th century managed, willy-nilly, to clear a path for the progression of musical history by alternating — that's the order of succession — or by overlaying one onto the other in a kind of collage, as we'd say in the Cubist era, within the same piece, as I illustrated with Bartók and Beethoven earlier, the most learned writing and the
The European periphery, from Bach to Eastern Europe 39:46 most spontaneous, most popular refrains. And we owe a lot of that to the awakening of the so-called national schools. Now it's no accident that these national schools essentially emerge on the periphery of what had until then been cultural Europe, because when we talk about Finland, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Romania, these aren't countries that had left a glorious mark on art and literature before then — except for a few encyclopedic connoisseurs, I mean — otherwise the French, English, German, Italian intelligentsia superbly ignored the literary and artistic productions, whether popular or learned, of those countries. What's interesting, moreover, is that as early as Bach's time, we were already at the borderline, since there are already French Suites, English Suites, Italian Concertos — so in fact they already kept themselves informed of everything being done across Europe. There are people who've said that the French Suites are actually English suites, etc. And as you say, there weren't yet these margins that would later appear.
40:56 I'm quite glad you take this example, because what you're saying, in effect, is that Bach, at the junction of the 17th and 18th centuries — that's his floruit, as they say in Latin — Bach occupies, two centuries earlier, the position that the musics of Eastern Europe would later occupy. Because Germany was already at the border — for a German musician at the time, the whole point was precisely not to make German music, and yet they made it admirably. But Bach spent his whole youth copying note for note Vivaldi's concertos to train his hand — a beautiful dialectic: by copying, he acquires originality. You recognize immediately that it's Bach within three notes, within three bars of a Bach work, you can tell it's him, with his incomparable writing. To achieve an unquestionable originality, you have to start by working on others. Yes, sorry, in the little Anna Magdalena notebook,
42:06 which gave him models to play, of course, the models of the time. But of course. And to make a living, they did as their sovereign did — a little duke of Saxony, I'm thinking of — was it Augustus the Strong of Dresden, whatever he was called — anyway, they all had musicians, most often Italian, at their courts, or French — conflicts, German musicians couldn't find work in Germany. Of course. Yes, not enough prestigious work. Yes, for weddings, banquets. Yes, that, yes — Bach writes a Coffee Cantata, a Wedding Cantata for a friend who just got married, those are the rare secular cantatas he wrote, or a Hunting Cantata, you hear a lot of horns, of course. But otherwise, I should say, when it comes to noble people, that was taken up by the great Western European schools — that's interesting.
43:16 What we're saying is interesting because it means the Cold War was already germinating, geopolitically, in the unequal economic development of Eastern and Western Europe. Europe took centuries and centuries to make people forget that Eastern Europe, and especially the Slavic countries, had been the great reservoir of slaves in antiquity. Yes, and then there would be the second serfdom throughout that whole area, of course, and even later, under the Ottoman Empire. And as you rightly say, until almost the modern era, serfdom — even a guy like Tolstoy freed quite a few, but he had hundreds of serfs on his estates. Absolutely, in fact serfdom was actually increased precisely to cope with the surge of capitalism, the competition. Yes, exactly, yes, yes — that class is merciless. There you go. So for music to express all that
The disliked 19th century: Hugo, Rimbaud, Beethoven 44:26 presupposes a richness, an abundance, an extraordinary century — that's why I'm dwelling on this century that's unloved by post-modernity — not by true modernity, which doesn't care about any of that, but by the postmodern, the early-music purist, for instance — for him the 19th century is the definitive eruption of bad taste, which we turn our backs on. The French Revolution finished tipping the masses into bad taste, as everyone knows. And there we find again the old conservative and reactionary critique of Victor Hugo in literature — it would take the courage of an Aragon, avant-gardist par excellence, member of the Surrealist movement, before the Surrealists engaged in political excommunications — it would take Aragon to say, yes, yes, you're anti-Hugo because Hugo was popular, because Hugo is the exile whose texts are read by candlelight, the father figure of Les Misérables in working-class homes. There you go, so we find the same thing again with music, that's why
45:37 we often find, in anti-Beethovenian predicates, isomorphisms with anti-Hugolian predicates — curious, isn't it? Simplistic thinking, right? Lapses into bad taste, clichés — even the young Rimbaud, in the letter to Georges Izambard, when he talks about Hugo says 'Hugo saw well' — in the last volumes, Stella, a very beautiful poem, gives roughly the measure of Hugo's vision, because Stella has an admirable opening, but afterward, when Hugo says 'I am the angel liberty, the giant light,' with all his bombast, Rimbaud says 'too much Belmontet, too much Lamennais, too much Jehovah, columns, old cracked enormities' — well, with that — but he does recognize the genius, and suddenly Rimbaud, showing he's not among those who criticize Hugo from a conservative standpoint, as people did in his time and as still happens today, Rimbaud suddenly adds, in the same text, 'I have at hand'
46:47 Les Misérables, a real poem — which finds favor in Rimbaud's eyes, a man of extraordinary severity, in this letter to his rhetoric teacher, the letter to Paul Demeny, where he takes it upon himself to give a historical overview — the student allows himself to give a course in literature to his master, that's it, a course in literature that in two pages goes from the Greeks up to himself, right, taking in more or less everyone, including Baudelaire — well, that wakes up — 'first seer, king of poets, a true god, but the form so praised in him is petty, he lived in too artistic a milieu' — well, everyone gets their share, right — and when he gets to Hugo: 'I have at hand Les Misérables, a real poem.' There you go — the real poem for Rimbaud is Hugo's prose work. Good heavens. So all of that is expressed musically through song, that extraordinary song that a Beethoven opens up to sonic expression, and which we've really only understood since the 20th century, at the level of the public I mean, at the level of criticism, because musicians saw very early on that it was an incomparable
47:57 source of inspiration — but the composers, and especially the best ones — otherwise we've been talking about Beethoven for half a century with a relevance, a knowledge — first of all we're no longer — well that's always the same few works that get played everywhere, that didn't exist before. Beethoven's late quartets are closer to 20th-century music than many Romantic works that came after Beethoven. For instance, I'm insisting on the historical-musical complexity of the 19th century — when I say the 19th century I'm giving it a broad extension, up to the war of 1914, up to the outbreak of the war of 1914. This complexity doesn't get resolved afterward. What does that mean? What's the inspiration for a musician of the 1920s or 1930s? I'll draw on the great breaks made by the French Impressionists, who have just upended harmony, the forests — Debussy, Ravel — national schools, mainly the Russians — let's not forget that the Rite of Spring is 1913 — and already
49:11 in 1911 there was Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire — so there's an extraordinary palette, not to mention the national traditions that continue to waver between the very positive, learned use of the popular fund and its reduction to mere sonic folklore, as is very often — too often — the case. There you go, I've summed up a bit the temporal cartography, if I may permit myself this oxymoron, the temporal cartography of the great musical curtain that separates us from the rest of the history of music, let's say up until the appearance of the new regime, that is, this very complex 19th-20th century with all the currents running through it. There you go — something similar happens — people say that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the birth of avant-garde painting. Look at the complexity — there's Avignon, Avignon is already the South, and not just any South.
50:22 There's the mistral blowing hard, it blows nowhere as hard as in Avignon, that is, a raw light — we've left behind Impressionism and the haziness of Île-de-France, the haziness of Honfleur, that's over, a gust of mistral sweeps all that away, the colors are raw, whether with Cézanne — Cézanne is Aix, not far from Avignon, right — so the fact of coming down from Île-de-France for painters, Van Gogh the northerner going down to Arles in the full mistral, Cézanne in Aix constantly returning to Mont Sainte-Victoire, right, Picasso — Avignon, Picasso — Avignon, Vallauris, the Côte d'Azur, and outright Gauguin going all the way to Tahiti — a change of light — there's always this sort of attempt to flee, what?
Tristan and the political ambivalence of romanticism 51:24 The death drive. There you go, the dialectic is starting to become clearer with Isolde's death, with Tristan, with the four and a half hours of Tristan — something happened in music, we'd never gone further into the death drive. You were talking about unhappiness, death, the drive — I'll come back to the relationship between happiness and Wagner, that will let us refine this business of forms and genres, which I haven't talked about, the form-genre dichotomy, but for now let's not let the trees hide the forest from us. I'll stay in the forest — the expression of modernity, the first expression, up to today, is Romanticism. Romanticism is neither reactionary nor conservative — sorry, I like absurdity — it's neither reactionary nor progressive, it makes me think of that anatomy professor Freud refers to in order to illustrate the notion of the absurd — he says: we had an anatomy professor in Vienna who said the nasal cavity is complicated,
52:34 and in all of Vienna, I challenge you to find — well, those who know their nasal cavity in any relevant way, you can count them on the fingers of one hand — the fingers of one hand, yes, what, no, yes — Romanticism can produce the worst reactions and, on the contrary, the most innovative things — that's its essentially ambivalent nature, typical of modernity and its contradictions. Let me give a non-musical illustration for them, even an ideological one — I'm thinking of Lukács's admirable texts on the relationship between Nazi theorists of Hegel's era and their period. Now when you read these texts by Lukács — the article by Lukács is called 'German Fascism and Hegel' — you can find it online too, in The Destruction of Reason of course, but here I'm focusing on what he says there — that is, he gives a panorama
53:44 of theorists we haven't heard much about since — Bäumler, Krieck, I don't know if you know Krieck, well anyway — there was Richard Kroner too — yes, exactly — but they all say that the enemy is Weimar, the enemy is German humanism, it's Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and that the fault of these people was to have been anti-Romantic. So that's the most reactionary version of Romanticism, that is, a glorification of everything that is — and this will be taken up by Heidegger — the term Abgrund, oh, the abyss — especially the abyss for others, because as for me, I have my house with geraniums in the windows, I'm not in the abyss. And then there's also a co-opting of Hegel by Italian fascism, of course — you mean Croce and Gentile — a misreading that marked all of fascism, that's the case, absolutely. Victor Cousin even thought he could use Hegel to say, well, it's to tame the French revolutionaries or the anarchists a bit, there you go, we need rationality — an extraordinary misreading.
54:54 Extraordinary, well, so — including Hegel's fight against the Romantics, which, moreover, was a political fight — a progressive one — since these Romantics — well, there you go, Hegel fights against the nocturnal, deadly side of the Romantics, right, he describes it, above all what's even more — but when he says the French Revolution was a marvelous dawn, in his last letters, letters to his wife when he goes to Paris — this is old Hegel, he remained unfailingly faithful to the glorious days of July 1789 — when he says that, you hear Beethoven's Ninth and its finale. So it's important, and here again we find my dichotomy, or rather my trichotomy, between the Old Regime and the New Regime — there's the dichotomy — and I insert between the two — this is one of my pet themes, I'm sorry — I insert between the two the transitional period running from the storming of the Bastille to Waterloo, when the dice haven't yet been cast, when we don't know how it will turn out, before the Anglo-Saxons become the dominant power, as they've remained more or less to this day.
Historical trichotomy, cunning of reason and death drive 56:04 even if it's going to take a hit on the planet, well, these are divisions, and the most convenient divisions are the most relevant, I'm not imposing the division, the storming of the Bastille, Waterloo, we could stop before Waterloo, at Thermidor, that's why Napoleon disgusts me, I'm thinking of our dear, what's his name, the historian, Guillemin, yes, but precisely, even the Jacobins, what we don't know is that the Jacobins were making a comeback at the end of the Directory, we don't pay enough attention to the Directory, we think everything was over after Thermidor, and precisely, we realize that things weren't settled during the Directory, that's also why there was Brumaire, but the problem was definitively settled by Hegel with his concept of the cunning of reason, it's no accident that he always uses the example of Napoleon to illustrate it, that is to say, I don't care about the individual Napoleon, a small ambitious and vain Corsican, that's not the point, what matters is that reason, modern reason, uses the demonism of the individual Napoleon
57:14 to set up the modern state, and then afterwards throws him away at Saint Helena, he fulfilled his historical function, ciao, I mean, that's it, that settles the problem. On the other hand, you can hang on Napoleon all the most reactionary epithets you like, especially at the societal level, his position on women, as a good Mediterranean Corsican in his process—but Napoleon's enemies feared in him the spread of the French Revolution, that's what matters to me. If England financed the slaughters that would unleash after the Peace of Lunéville and the Peace of Amiens—I'll remind you all the same that Bonaparte, I won't say Napoleon anymore, Bonaparte had miraculously managed to finally make peace since the revolutionary wars, we hadn't seen that, a peace, the Peace of Amiens, that's 1800—since Lunéville, when the world wavers, suddenly people think a paradisiacal era is going to open, and that's what gives rise to
58:24 in Hölderlin one of his most beautiful hymns, "Feast of Peace"—that's why he'll say that we made war. There, Bonaparte takes on huge proportions, he gets mixed in alongside Dionysus and Christ, well, we see the old Tübingen theologians—but you have to understand that if war started again afterward, it's because England, as all geopoliticians and historians well know, never tolerated a power remaining enlarged on the continent. It wasn't Napoleon who restarted the wars, that suited him fine, the status quo, I don't know why he would have changed it. So I'm in the process of explaining what I call my trichotomy: there's the Ancien Régime, the New Regime, and between the two, these periods when the dice aren't cast—it's no accident that this is the period of Beethoven, and in his shadow, Schubert, whom we saw last time is much more modern than we think. So I'm coming back to my Tristan story, right, there's the death drive which I take very seriously
59:34 in the sense that Freud developed it very well when he subjects it to a materialism—not historical—in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that's it, twice over—but a radical, uncompromising materialism. He says that at the bottom of the Trieb—you know German well—of the drive, of desire, whatever you want to call it, there is somewhere what is ultimately aimed at: the extinction of desire, that is, the return to inert matter. You can't be more radically materialist—inert matter preceded living matter, everyone in science agrees on that, the cosmos didn't start with bacteria, it started with clusters of galaxies, well anyway, and with stars, and so with nuclear reactions. So I'm reminding you that this death drive has never been developed as much as it has been since Romanticism, because
Defining happiness: salvation, joy, pleasure 1:00:45 the demand for happiness—I've been holding onto this thread from the start—to say that it's a right. But that's enormous, the expression, the right to happiness. Let me recall here, a small philosophical parenthesis, but one that's clear on many aspects of the pieces of music that will illustrate our subject. It's that, to clarify a term, you have to distinguish it from all those it resembles, with which it could be confused.
1:01:17 We're not going to dwell on the difference between this piano and a clod of earth. Fine, no need, nobody's going to confuse them. On the other hand, between an Asian elephant and an African elephant, you need to specify what allows you to tell them apart. Between a cheetah, a jaguar, and a leopard, well, it's in what resembles each other that it's most urgent to point out differential determinations. Now, happiness—there's pleasure, with which it can be confused.
1:01:48 There's salvation. Salvation, a religious concept—a century before the Age of Enlightenment, Pascal, his problem isn't happiness. There's joy, which is biblical. There's laetitia. It's possible to be in a bad way. I'm keeping it for last because joy will give rise to jouissance. But for now I'll stay with salvation. Salvation is sacred, it's beyond death. Whereas happiness has an earthly dimension. That's what's revolutionary—I'm not going to wait for the beyond, it's here and now that I want to change my condition.
1:02:20 On the one hand, first determination: happiness has a positive relation to the world. I'm not disparaging salvation. I'm not disparaging peace—the peace one can have in prison. Peace, being at accord with oneself, that's something else. The admirable letters of those condemned to death to their families, saying "I die happy for the cause of communism and the liberation of peoples"—I will never say a word against that. But that's not happiness. Happiness is a positive relation to the world.
1:02:52 First determination. Second: a certain duration, a temporal thickness. Otherwise it's jouissance or joy. Joy, joy, tears of joy, as Pascal says in his vision—that's a nocturnal quotation from November 23rd in the Memorial. But jouissance can be of an almost infinite intensity, yet it's fleeting. So happiness, double determination: a certain duration in time. That's why in literature it's always expressed in the imperfect tense.
1:03:25 Time, for the long duration, for repetitions. "That was the time when I used to go to school accompanied by my governess." Well, I'm not a good writer, I'm not going to say just anything. But there it is, it's the imperfect tense that implies it occupied a certain duration in time, either through duration simply, or through repetition. And second, the positive relation to the world. That is, one must never say a word against pleasure. Happiness shouldn't be reduced to pleasure, but there's no happiness without pleasure.
1:03:57 As Hölderlin admirably says in Andenken, which is translated as "remembrance," whereas remembrance is Erinnerung. Myself, I prefer to say evocation, thinking of, word for word. Andenken. Or "Memories of Bordeaux." Evocation, Andenken, it's more evocation. There, I prefer to translate it that way. Remembrance is a kind of interiorization. Exactly. And the proof is that it's the memories of Bordeaux that haunt him. He has just returned, madness is beginning to set in, and he's haunted by memories, let's say, of Greece in his head.
1:04:27 Because he had declared—for us, Bordeaux is the far North, for us Corsicans. But for a German like Hölderlin, he discovers the lemon tree, he discovers the olive trees. He speaks of the delicious foreign land, the land of the olive trees, where dark-skinned women tread ground soft as silk. I'll note in passing that Heidegger had the nerve to say that in this passage he was talking about German women. Yes, of course. There, we must congratulate Adorno for setting him straight. Well. So Hölderlin says in this poem, "It is not good to have in one's soul no perishable thought."
1:05:04 Careful, there are three negations. "It is not good to have in one's soul no perishable thought." One must have perishable thoughts in one's soul. Having a drink with friends right after the grape harvest, at sunset, above Bordeaux, that must have been quite something. It changed things a bit from Protestant rigor all the same. There, so happiness, that dimension, a positive relation to the world, which is never a negation of pleasure. I insist because the plague of our time is puritanism, which is due to the fact that these are powers of puritan culture that have advantages elsewhere.
Puritanism, the plague of our time 1:05:42 I'm not saying everything is negative in Luther's initiative. I mean, there are things—the resource, the fact of translating the Bible into German, of not going through priests who say "outside the Church, no salvation," all that is progress. Well, the massacre of the peasants, a bit less so. So I insist. The planet—yet he authorized music, precisely, Luther. Oh yes, of course. He promotes it, so it's not that it's going to—we'll come back to it. How can music be a counter-censorship even without the censors knowing it?
1:06:17 I'll come back to it when we talk about Asian performers today. But yes, you had alluded to it. There, there, there, I'll come back to it because it's contemporary, we need to dig into it. But when I say puritan, I mean essentially the Anglo-Saxon world, of Protestant origin. Let's not forget that the United States was founded by a core group of fanatics, I'm thinking of those who embarked on the Mayflower in the seventeenth century, who fled Holland because Protestant and puritan Holland wasn't puritan enough for their taste.
1:06:51 If we were going to seek a promised land, we could be even more radical. And that's why it was first called New Amsterdam. And Wall Street was really the street of the wall, and the wall against the Indians already—a log wall, that. You'd think of Nietzsche's brother-in-law, who goes looking for people even more Nazi than himself, to create his colony of pure Aryans. In South America, yes. And his sister, that was exactly it. It's of course Anglo-Saxon puritanism, with its naturalism, its anti-humanism, of course.
1:07:29 But equally, and it's no coincidence that they're geopolitical allies, Islamist fundamentalism—sorry, Islamist. The first victims are Muslims, statistically, and by far. At the moment I'm speaking, how many Muslims are being torn apart by a bomb somewhere between Pakistan, Iraq, and—well. Bombs placed by the people we finance—well, not me, not you. No, no, no, we understand each other—by Atlanticism. So when we see the wave of puritanism, we understand why I'm dwelling on happiness.
1:08:06 Because it's frowned upon. You know what they say in Germany: "Glücklich, wie Gott in Frankreich." Happy as God in France. He'd say "happy as God in paradise." My word, that wouldn't be very surprising. And if God himself prefers France to paradise, something's going on. It's that there's good wine, that there are pretty curly-haired brunettes or gorgeous blondes, whatever—I mean, imagine the face of the one who says that. And above all, 230 cheeses. I say that because Alsatians, you'll know this, always say that Germans raid the cheese shops every weekend.
Fauré, Debussy, Ravel: the return of pleasure 1:08:43 I've known some who lived off nothing but cheese, German students in Paris. And so there it is. Now, that is found again in music. It's no accident that the successor to this flowering, unprecedented, that is pianistic Romanticism, the luxury we have of choosing—not choosing, since one doesn't exclude the other, fortunately—but of having, on our market, sorry for the expression, when we do our musical shopping, our musical consumption, between Schumann and Schubert—it's nothing alike.
1:09:21 Schubert is as level and floating as Schumann is agitated, anxious, and worried. Schumann flees his own shadow by walking on it. Whereas Schubert is entirely, in a level way, either in total depression or in ravished ecstasy, in an almost celestial sense. Well, we have Schumann, we have Schubert's body of work, that's not enough. There's Chopin, my goodness, beautiful as Chopin. There's Brahms at the piano.
1:09:51 I'm not talking about the Beethovenian corpus that came before, nor Mendelssohn. There's this Romantic music. But at the moment when, precisely, it declines from the dramatic whip-crack that Beethoven maintains until the end of his life, in the death drive of the purely lyrical, which doesn't have that dramatic whip-crack, the successors are who?
1:10:21 It's Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, historically. There's a logic to it, it's practically algebraic. That is, the irruption of happiness, of jouissance. When we listen to the early works, Debussy will almost be ashamed of the Suite bergamasque. He'll say it smells too much of Massenet, he said. It's a youthful work, of course, the end of the 1880s. And what a compliment! What's wrong with Massenet? It's very good. And above all, I mean, when you see the success of "Clair de lune," you're not mistaken.
1:10:53 Yes, that's the Pasquier thing, for example. But there's a sensuality, a jouissance. There, it's not puritan music at all. Fauré, let's not even talk about it. Fauré overflows—I didn't say drips. It's very controlled and very well written. But Fauré overflows at every moment with a jouissance maintained by a rather astonishing craft of writing—compare his first sonata for piano and violin to his second. It's interesting, because he wrote the first when young, and the second is one of his last works.
1:11:24 Let's look at this evolution. The second is an extraordinary chase-fugue between violinistic and pianistic melismas that concentrate all the jouissances that had appeared since the blossoming of French musical Impressionism. It's really extraordinary. So there's a logic of alternation. In order not to yield to the death drive, up sprang the Faurés, the Debussys, the Ravels. I'm not even talking about a joyful genius like Chabrier.
1:11:56 Or Ernest Chausson too, perhaps? Of course! Pierné! Of course! Chausson's concert in D major remains unequaled. Of course! No, no! And then I haven't spoken of Roussel. It's no coincidence—yes, one can confuse them—I'm speaking of Roussel, Albert, not Raymond. A naval officer who at fifty starts composing.
1:12:27 And who still has his tomb in Normandy facing the sea. It's magnificent! Somewhere between Veules-les-Roses and Saint-Valéry-en-Caux. And Roussel, who follows in the wake of Debussy and Ravel, is one of the rare musicians who can practically almost be confused sometimes with the so-called "motoric" Slavic musicians. Certain aspects of Prokofiev. And of course, the Czechs...
1:12:59 Ah, no, my dear—Janáček? Sorry? Tana? Dvořák? No, not you! Janáček? A bit later, a bit—but there, contemporary with Janáček, there's the other one, it'll come back to me, a bit more motoric. Yes, but you can confuse them, Janáček and Roussel. Ah, Martinů perhaps. Martinů, thank you, there. That can very well be confused. That can very well be confused, bravo. Now, when you listen to Roussel's Bacchus et Ariane, it's an absolute masterpiece.
1:13:30 That's it, it's his second orchestral suite, the arrival of Dionysus, as it happens—the god of drunkenness and jouissance indeed. The arrival of Dionysus at Naxos, at a moment, rescuing Ariadne from the brink of suicide, and carrying her off in a dizzying, unbridled rush with a pre-Stravinskian—well, Stravinskian, rhythm, because Stravinsky had already written The Rite of Spring. It's prodigious. So all that prevents one from yielding to the temptation, the terrible temptation of the Liebestod, of Isolde's eternal death, which would fascinate all of musical modernity.
Schoenberg or Stravinsky: following or leaving Isolde's death 1:14:14 That's where we see what really separates a Schoenberg from a Stravinsky. So I have a lighter hand than Adorno, even in criticizing Stravinsky—one has to be fair, he's right on the substance—Stravinsky becoming retrograde, retrograde compared to Stravinsky himself. It was obvious that the music... the telluric, antediluvian forces... the music of the ballet Agon, etc., of Pulcinella, of Jeu de cartes, is less innovative.
1:14:46 Even in The Rite he's critical from the start. Yes, but there he's wrong, because The Rite, even now, hasn't aged a bit. It's less innovative than that of The Rite. Or even as aggressively dissonant and unbelievable for the time as The Rite—sorry, Prokofiev's Scythian Suite, which, as the epithet indicates, doesn't hide its barbaric side.
1:15:19 So it's that barbaric side that would be most lacking in the music that came after The Rite of Spring. A barbarian who knows his history of musical writing well. So there it is. The dichotomy between that modernity and that of a Schoenberg who, on the contrary, prolongs, throughout the whole first part of his work, punctuated by masterpieces like Verklärte Nacht, Kammersymphonie No. 1, and of course the enormous edifice of the Gurre-Lieder, the largest symphonic forces ever assembled.
1:16:00 Likewise, there are ten horns. Ten horns! Well. I don't know how many flutes to make an entire chord out of flutes alone. Well, anyway. Even if they're often treated in miniature and as chamber music, which Mahler knows how to do admirably. Mahler—people think it's all big machinery, but when you listen to his Lieder for voice and orchestra, what's admirable is that this great machine is treated as chamber music. Which is not the case with a Bruckner, who is always a bit thicker, or a Strauss, who is always swept away by the philharmonic gale, to take the three main post-Wagnerians.
Baudelaire's Harmonie du soir, a frozen dusk 1:16:38 So it's this hesitation between drawing the logical consequences of Isolde's death or breaking with it, getting out of it, turning one's back on it, but at the risk of regression. And that, in literature, I go back and forth between literature and music so it's clearer for those who have certain works still to discover. I envy them for having masterpieces like that still to discover, having them ahead of them—even though, having listened to them 527 times, on the contrary, it's like fine wines, you savor them even better.
1:17:15 But Spinoza would say there are goods that increase through sharing; I would add that there are goods that increase through repetition—there aren't many of those. Here's an example. There are sub-economic theories about homo economicus, with Pareto curves and pleasure decreasing with repetition. No, but these things are worth digging into, it's not stupid to model them. But the solution hasn't been put forward, because ideological armor comes in to somewhat force these models for now.
1:17:49 It works the same with a glass of water. The more glasses of water you drink, at first, indeed, if you haven't drunk in two days, yes, obviously. Oh yes, the fourth glass of water is less pleasant. It's torture, yes. Oh yes, when you come off the beach, obviously. Yes, yes. Well, it's not an old Nigerien like me who's going to say otherwise. Yes, that's it. The driest place I've ever lived. But I'm coming back to this discovery. At the risk, then, of regression, I look at literature, where even this very risk can produce a masterpiece.
1:18:25 Let me explain, I'll take the example of Baudelaire's poem in Les Fleurs du Mal called "Harmonie du soir" (Evening Harmony). I choose it on purpose. A poem which—and it's a plague, one might say—since the beginning of Romanticism, the sunset and/or autumn, that is, two figures of decline, in temporal terms, either of the day or of the year, one must be very precise, becomes an obligatory figure, let's say.
1:19:00 It started with Senancour who, as early as Napoleon's time, said, speaking of Fontainebleau, "Even here, I only like the evening. Dawn pleases me for a moment, the day that must follow it will be so long." And he adds, at the end of that admirable letter, he adds, "Spring is more beautiful in nature." But man has done so much—allusion to history, there's praxis, take note—spring is more beautiful in nature, but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter.
1:19:31 Now, that's exactly it, one can... That's superb, but there isn't the deathly side in our Enlightenment offspring, aristocrat though he was, Étienne Pivert, of this passage of time. On the other hand, in Baudelaire, who is a thoroughgoing reactionary on many themes—when he says "there is nothing good in the city but the poet, the priest, and the soldier"—even Marine Le Pen wouldn't dare say that in an election campaign. She can't anymore, because of 1945 and the Red Army's victory.
1:20:01 Yes, there. No, but that comes from de Maistre, from Burke and company, I mean. It was a time when reaction wasn't afraid of being taken for fascist. So, back to this poem. "Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige, chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir" ("Now is the time when, trembling on its stem, each flower evaporates like a censer"). I'm not going to do a literary analysis. "Voici venir les temps," that sounds a bit biblical. It's twilight, "les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir" ("sounds and scents turn in the evening air"), all that.
1:20:32 It's great because there's no plot, no story, no drama at all—not Beethovenian at all. It's all impressions. Each line expresses an impression that's juxtaposed with the previous one. "Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu'on afflige" ("the violin trembles like a heart that's afflicted"). "Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir" ("each flower evaporates like a censer"). "Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir" ("the sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar of repose"). There it is, there it is. Then we're right in the midst of Impressionism, very well. But at the end, there's a slight dramatization, that is, one line links to the next. "Un cœur tendre qui hait, du verbe haïr, un cœur tendre qui hait le néant vaste et noir" ("a tender heart that hates—from the verb 'to hate'—a tender heart that hates the vast black void").
1:21:06 That's eliminated. I mean. It gathers up every vestige. It gathers up every vestige. So there, that's regressive in the literal sense. It's made explicit by the author. I turn my back on those who are ahead of me. On the nothingness that is coming. On death, on all of that. So it's not about yielding to death like Isolde's death. It's not a voluptuous death. We turn our backs and we look. We try to freeze time. That's the compromise, in an eternal twilight. A twilight.
1:21:36 Yes, yes. Absolutely. Where the sun stops at the moment of twilight. Yes, yes. That's true. We can't... For instance, you gave the formula in words for what you were describing there, that temptation. There it is. We can no longer go back to noon, to the morning, and so on, because we know too much. As Nerval says so admirably, in the same period, ignorance cannot be learned. Something worth pondering, which brings us back to degrowth, to sobriety — ignorance cannot be learned. Well.
1:22:08 We don't make modern anxiety out of approximation and imposture, to paraphrase a very fine passage from Merleau-Ponty. But at the same time, by turning our back on what is coming. So we freeze the sun. Besides, the rhythmic magic of this poem, the sonic magic, is perhaps a sorcerer's work to stop the march of time. Like those who sing to make the rain fall. And the proof… O time, suspend your flight — it's not just a program, he set it right at the top. You're taking the words out of my mouth.
1:22:38 It's that, when I say he stops the sun, it's not interpretation. It is written literally at the end: the sun has drowned in its own blood, it freezes in place. Let's leave it there. Like that Monet painting where you see a blood-red sun over the Thames, next to Westminster. Right? And luckily he captured that instant, so we can enjoy this eternal twilight when we contemplate that painting. So, music from the 19th century up to today will keep hesitating between a return to the little tune, the whiplash — either through the lightest, poorest aspect, the least rich in harmonic, rhythmic ingredients, etc., the least creative — or, on the contrary, in an extremely elaborate way as in Stravinsky, trying instead to recapture that deathly jouissance, which is the rarer legacy overall,
1:23:48 the harder, rarer legacy of Tristan. There. I think we can leave it there for this time, because... You, who often speak of Hölderlin, you really make use of this poem, which is one of my favorites — the one about who thought most deeply, loved most intensely, in Socrates and Alcibiades. Exactly! Because, precisely, once we've gone all the way through the pattern, things need to be revitalized, in fact. Let me give another quotation from Hölderlin that echoes what you just gave.
1:24:19 I'm glad that Pierre-Alain Giraud, who is kind enough to take care of our site and update it, has the very good idea of putting up a quotation now and then that changes. But one of the most recurring ones at the top of the site is a very short one from Hölderlin: 'If you have both heart and reason, don't show them together — no one will ever believe you.' That makes a counterpoint to the one you just gave. Yes, exactly.
1:24:49 It's because the quotation does the opposite. But there. And in fact, you illustrate it wonderfully. Thank you very much, Dominique, I'm going to cut here and we'll pick it up again. Thank you. And it will continue, of course. Thank you for listening, I hope.
