06.13.09

Raveling Proust

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:38 pm by Miracle ♪♫

Noted in pencil inside my score of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. II is Maestro Valery Gergiev’s advice: “To get deeper into Russian music, read important Russian literature.” I have attached weight to this statement to the length of observing its reversed order by getting deeper into literature by accompanying it with significant music. Since these Frenchmen, Marcel Proust and Maurice Ravel, breathed the same era, imagine what euphoria caressed me when I listened to one of my former lullabies, the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, while reading these lines from Swann’s Way:

…the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless… But then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony – he did not know which – that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils… An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, sine materia. Doubtless the notes which we hear at such moments tend, according to their pitch and volume, to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable – did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow… He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound.  It had at once suggested to him a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing else could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire…

Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation…

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The thirst for an unknown delight was awakened in him by the little phrase, but without bringing him any precise gratification to assuage it. With the result that the parts of Swann’s soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all concern for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men alike, were left vacant by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to inscribe that name of Odette.

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There was a deep repose, a mysterious refreshment for Swann - whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life - in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity, blinded, dprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world through his hearing alone. And since he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication did he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole armour of reason and make it pass unattended through the dark filter of sound! (Forgive my overdoing the citations but when everything’s worth citing, one cannot easily stop.)

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But of course, Proust could not have written this passage with this particular piece in mind. It is after all the famous musical enigma that Swann related with his beloved. A phrase from a violin and piano sonata… one which nobody, as far as I know, has established whether it is imagined or based on a real composition.  How provoking yet wondrous that it should remain a mystery!

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Related Entries:
Losing Time in Proust

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