Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

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The fugue: a single theme sets off a chain of melodies in counterpoint, a stream that over its long course keeps the same character, the same rhythmic pulse, a single entity. After Bach, in music's Classical period, everything changes: the melodic theme becomes self-contained and short; its brevity makes monothematic composition nearly impossible; in order to construct a large-scale work (by this I mean: the architectural organization of a big-volume ensemble), the composer

must follow one theme with another; thus is born a new art of composition which, as an example, grows into the sonata, the ruling form of the Classical and Romantic eras.

Following one theme with another called for intermediate passages, or bridges, as Cesar Franck called them. The word 'bridge' makes explicit that in a composition some passages are significant in themselves (the themes) and other passages are there to serve the former and haven't the same intensity or importance. Hearing Beethoven, one has the sense that the level of intensity changes constantly: at various times something is coming, then it arrives, then it's gone and something else is on its way.

An intrinsic contradiction in the music of the 'second half (the Classical and the Romantic): it considers its raison d'etre the capacity to express emotions, but at the same time it elaborates its bridges, its codas, its development sections, which are demanded by the form alone, the residue of a proficiency that is completely impersonal, that is learned, and that has difficulty refraining from routine or from commonplace musical formulas (which occur sometimes in even the greatest, Mozart or Beethoven, but which abound in their lesser contemporaries). Thus inspiration and technique are always in danger of disconnecting; a dichotomy arises between the spontaneous and the worked-over; between material that seeks to express emotion directly and a technical development of that emotion as set into music; between the themes and the filler (a pejorative term but a thoroughly objective one: for it really is necessary to 'fill out,' horizontally, the time between themes and, vertically, the orchestral sound).

There is a story about Mussorgsky playing a Schumann symphony on the piano and stopping just before the development section to shout: 'Here's where the musical mathematics starts!' It is this aspect- contrived, pedantic, intellectual, academic, uninspired-that made Debussy say that after Beethoven, symphonies became 'studied, rigid exercises' and that the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky 'are competing for the boredom monopoly.'

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That intrinsic dichotomy does not make Classical or Romantic music inferior to the music of other eras; every era's art has its structural problems; that is what lures the artist to search for original solutions and thereby sets off the evolution of form. And the music of the second half was aware of this problem. Beethoven: he breathed an unprecedented expressive intensity into music, and at the same time, more than anyone else, he crafted the compositional technique of the sonata: that dichotomy must therefore have weighed especially heavily on him; to overcome it (not that he always succeeded), he devised various strategies:

– for instance, endowing musical material other than the themes-a scale, an arpeggio, a transition, a coda- with a startling expressiveness;

– or (for instance) giving another dimension to variation form, which, before him, was usually mere technical virtuosity, and rather frivolous virtuosity at that: like having a single fashion model strut the runway in different outfits; Beethoven turned the form inside out by considering: what are the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic possibilities hidden in a theme? how far can one go in transforming the sound of a theme without violating its essence? and what, in fact, is that essence? In posing these questions musically, Beethoven needed nothing that sonata form had made available, neither bridges nor development sections nor any filler; not for a single moment did he move outside what was for him essential, outside the mystery of the theme.

It would be interesting to examine all the music of the nineteenth century as a constant effort to overcome its structural dichotomy. In this connection, what I call Chopin's strategy comes to mind. Just as Chekhov never wrote a novel, so Chopin disdained large-scale composition and almost exclusively wrote collections of short pieces (mazurkas, polonaises, nocturnes, etc.). (Some exceptions prove the rule: his piano concertos are weak.) This was operating against the spirit of his time, which considered the creation of a symphony, a concerto, a quartet, the compulsory criterion of a composers significance. But precisely in sidestepping this criterion, Chopin created a body of work that, perhaps alone of its time, has aged not at all and will remain fully alive, almost without exception. For me, Chopin's strategy explains why in Schumann, Schubert, Dvorak, Brahms the pieces of lesser size, lesser sonority, seem more alive, more beautiful (often very beautiful), than the symphonies and concertos. For (an important observation) the intrinsic dichotomy in the music of the second half is a problem only for large-scale composition.

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In criticizing the art of the novel, is Breton attacking its weaknesses or its very essence? Let us note, first of all, that he is attacking the aesthetic of the novel that came into being early in the nineteenth century, with Balzac. The novel was in fullest flush then, for the first time establishing itself as an immense social force; armed with a nearly hypnotic power of seduction, it prefigured cinema art: so lifelike are its scenes on the screen of his imagination that a reader is prone to confuse them with scenes from his own life; to enthrall his reader, the novelist has available a whole apparatus for fabricating the illusion of reality; yet this apparatus generates for the novel a structural dichotomy like the one in Classical and Romantic music:

since it is meticulous causal logic that makes events convincing, no link of the chain can be omitted (however devoid of interest it may be in itself);

since the characters must appear to be 'living,' as much data about them as possible must be reported (however unremarkable);

and then there is history: its slow pace used to make it almost invisible, then it picked up speed and suddenly (here is Balzac's great experience), in the course of peoples lifetimes, everything around them is changing-the streets they walk on, the furniture in their houses, the institutions they live by; the background of human lives is no longer an immobile, predictable stage set; it turns changeable, today's look doomed to be gone tomorrow, and so it is important to seize it, to paint it (no matter how tiresome these pictures of time passing might be).

Background: painting discovered it during the Renaissance, along with perspective, which divided the picture between what is up front and what is in the rear. This produced paintings particular formal problem: the portrait, for example: the face commands more attention and interest than the body does, and still more than the drapery behind. This is quite normal, this is how we see the world around us, but nonetheless, what is normal in life does not correspond to the formal requirements of art: the imbalance, in a painting, between the privileged areas and those that are, a priori, secondary still had to be compensated for, remedied, brought back into balance. Or else radically set aside, through a new aesthetic that would cancel out that dichotomy.

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After 1948, through the years of Communist revolution in my native country, I saw the eminent role played by