Szymanowski, Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology

Stephen Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780947854102
• eBook ISBN: 9781351547239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski's work. This self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject. This book examines Szymanowski's exploration of the relationship between the authorial voice, mythology and eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture. Stephen Downes analyses mythological and erotic aspects of selected songs from the composer's early career, moving to an interpretation of the voice of the homoerotic lover, embodied as a mad muezzin, in terms of heroic notions of Orphic elegy. Discussing the encounters of King Roger with the voices of Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus, Downes shows how the composer uses the unifying Christ/Eros figure as a means of indicating that the King might be transformed from anguished despot to loving expressive subject. The book ends with an examination of Szymanowski's desire to fuse Slavonic and Middle-Eastern mythological inspirations in an attempt to fulfil a utopian vision of a pan-European culture bound together by the spirit of Eros.

1

Introduction: Mythic and Erotic Voices of the Authorial Subject

In 1936, with his health in serious decline owing to tuberculosis and alcoholism, Szymanowski drafted an introduction to a proposed set of memoirs:

When I reflect on the real problem, namely how my self-portrait is going to look, sketched with my own rather modest literary talents, woven from my own words, thoughts, confessions, all those events of greater or lesser importance in my life, I feel at times that the task is beyond my powers.¹

What Szymanowski believed he needed for the task was the ‘irresistible, suggestive power’ of Dostoyevsky, whose ‘vision of the “integral man” is like a magic formula, through which he suddenly reveals the hidden significance of seemingly the most paradoxical events and defines the confused content of the integral man’s inner life’.² The desire to voice the artistic revelation of the truth of a precarious, multi-faceted, yet integrated self lies behind much of Szymanowski’s work. In his musical and literary output the self is projected through the voices of deities who speak languages of love. The unifying figure is Eros, who may be embodied as Dionysus, Christ, Narcissus or Orpheus, and the gospel he proclaims tells of the resurrection and freedom of the desiring subject.

It is poignantly symbolic that the advanced stages of Szymanowski’s illness led to a severe weakening and periodic loss of his voice. Charges of epigonism and eclecticism had often been his critical lot. Such characterizations cut deep because he became convinced that his musical vocation was to emerge out of post-Wagnerianism into a fecund promised land where ‘all streams springing from “Universal” art mingle freely’.³ The inspirational route to this Elysium, which took the composer through Austro-Germany, Italy, North Africa, Persia, Greece and finally ‘home’ to Poland, was an odyssey charted by the oracular voices of erotic heroes. But Elysium is always haunted by Hades: death and loss are perilously close as the alienated but returning artist seeks a language and landscape in which to voice experience. It is a mythic journey recounted in apocalyptic, elegiac and epiphanic tones. Furthermore, those with the required powers of discernment may hear that the polyphony of these sybilline, mythological enunciations reveals not only secrets of an authorial origin, but also aspects of an expressive, creative subject which are either extensions of, or other than, those consciously intended. As Szymanowski wrote:

the whole, fraudulent, deceptive ‘ambiguity’ and ‘many-sidedness’ of man in his practical life, in what he is for the people surrounding him, is what is so immediately striking, but it obscures his deepest being. For everything depends on interpretation.⁴

Any such interpretative process must be constructed upon an understanding of the issues raised by Szymanowski’s concept of the ‘inner self’ or ‘integral man’, his preoccupation with epigonism and authenticity, and the manner of his recourse to a dazzling diversity of mythical figures as mouthpieces of a pervasively eroticized subject. In particular, it is crucial to explore the constellation of authorial voice, mythology and eroticism within the context of the crisis of the modern subject in Western culture.

AUTHORIAL VOICES

The existential crisis of the subject, with its sense of anxiety and alienation, is widely acknowledged to be the characteristic or authentic mark of modernity. In the face of the apparent failure of eighteenth-century rationalism to deal with the immediacy of the individual’s sensuous relation to the world, and the sense of loss, inhibited desire and fragmentation of identity in the ‘disenchanted’ world of the scientific-technological age, the modern subject turned to its own predicament in anguished self-contemplation.⁵ Within this reflective attitude there is a recurrent tendency to look back to an apparently stable, unified, self-determining predecessor, usually considered to have emerged in the Enlightenment, which functioned as a unique source and focus of meaning.⁶ Thus the subject is considered in terms of a crisis brought about by the disintegration of a unity believed to exist in some past golden age. This continuously precarious position evokes one of the central myths of Western culture – the Fall, which, with its sense of a perpetually ‘immanent end’, characteristically generates an ‘apocalyptic tone’.⁷ This may lead to Romantic nostalgia, expressive of a yearning for the subject’s utopian redemption (with a pessimistic or optimistic prognosis), or to modernist agony in the struggle with the negation of the certainties of faith in unified meaning, or to postmodern pleasures in decentred possibilities, the celebration of freedom granted by the supposedly inevitable death of the omnipotent authorial subject.

Szymanowski’s work exhibits a complex negotiation within this subjective predicament. In Poland in the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century there was a widespread reaction against an intellectual climate of positivism and realism which had prevailed since the failed uprising of 1863–4. In this climate the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche became texts of enormous significance.⁸ In response, the predominant tone of the work of Polish artists may be pessimistic or utopian, but, whichever inflection dominates, the abyss of self-destruction is approached. The Schopenhauerian diagnosis is that the aim of life’s desire is death, since the Will can be fully experienced only in self-annihilation. Nietzsche’s view, in The Birth of Tragedy, is that in the festivals of Dionysus the principium individuationis, the source of life’s anguished unfulfilment, is destroyed, and the subject, released from the will of the conscious, empirically real man, is able then to experience the rapture of primal unity. In both these viewpoints the ultimate aim is the death and transformation of the individual subject: for the Schopenhauerian, in nirvana’s eternal rest; for the Nietzschean, in Dionysian collective ecstasy. By contrast, Nietzsche’s later writings describe the revitalized Dionysus as a Christlike but sensual (rather than ascetic) god who incorporates within himself aspects of the Apollonian promise of cohesive identity and promises new life and meaning in the affirmation of the struggles of the strong man. Nietzsche thus arrives at a ‘divine’ image which proposes a strategy for the survival of the subject in which the pain of individuation and the contradictions of existence cannot be ignored but must be acknowledged if this subject is to remain authentic and thus alive. The ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ thereby gained is based on loss, on the cooling of the flames of intensity, but this is the cost of self-identity, a necessary fiction for survival.⁹ If this is achieved then the revitalized subject, tested by fire, can voice its message in authorial creations which are ‘true’ to the modern predicament.

This Nietzschean view of art, tinged with Schopenhauerian pessimism, infuses Adorno’s analysis of the modern, where the approach to the ‘abyss’, ‘the historical end of the individual and of humanity’, is a ‘source of anguish’ which, when acknowledged by the authentically creative modern subject, is immanent in the material of the artwork produced, as it reflects the conflict between demands for unity/integration and the loss of faith in the face of fragmentation. Like Nietzsche, Adorno knew the cost of self-identity – the ‘pain’ of individuation, evinced by the continuous threat of incoherence – but the notion of an authentic subject is not abolished. By contrast with this perilous yet productive authenticity, Adorno characterized ‘resigned art’ as that which bypasses the struggles of subjective expression, eschews deep reflection and as a result produces a surface mirroring of meaninglessness. Authentically modern art, Adorno stated, ‘is expressive when a subjectively mediated, objective quality raises its voice to speak: sadness, strength, yearning’.¹⁰ This is a voice which Adorno believed may be ‘heard’ in the structural fissures of the musical object. As Alessandro Ferrara puts it, the artwork thus ‘enters a metaphoric relation with such constitutive aspects of subjectivity as the tension between cohesion and fragmentation, self-congruity and dispersion’: a ‘well-formed’ artwork does not assuage the tension between the ‘integrative’ and the ‘antagonistic’ (for both are constituents of an ‘authentic subjectivity’) and thus echoes the opposition between formal conservation and fearful instability, the beautiful and the sublime, or the Apollonian and the Dionysian. As these tensions reflect those between the aesthetic ideal and the artistic material, with its resistances to intended unity, they give ‘substance to a radicalized reflexivity which modernity has posited as an ultimate aesthetic value’.¹¹ This is how Ferrara, in answer to the question ‘What form of authenticity can come after the postmodern critique of foundationalism?’, posits a subjective plenitude, not an absence or void.

In her influential discussions of the notion of ‘voice’ in music Carolyn Abbate opposed the ‘monologic and controlling “composer’s voice”’ described by Edward T. Cone with ‘an aural vision of music animated by multiple, decentred voices …, an interpretation of music shaped by prosopopoeia’. These are voices heard in disruptive events, in ‘isolated and rare gestures … that may be perceived as modes of subjects’ enunciations’.¹² For example, Abbate hears Strauss’s Elektra as a Bakhtinian work which speaks with several tongues other than the ‘stolid, monolithic utterance of the composer’. One such voice is identified with the character of Elektra herself. She has a voice (not merely heard in her singing, but discernible in the instrumental fabric) that laments and cries in a manner suggesting the madness of the hysteric and is manifest in developmental motives and musical forms (threnody, dirge, lament, epicedium) which intensify the work of mourning. Elektra’s elegiac, crazy voice is a creative one (she is thus an authorial image) which is heard because Strauss’s composer’s voice is temporarily silenced. Abbate reveals Strauss’s ‘means for creating this illusion’ and suggests, furthermore, that Elektra’s creative voice may be heard to overwhelm or transcend that of ‘Strauss’, carrying the expression of this dramatic-musical figure. Strauss is therefore constructing images of authorial creation, generating a complexity of tone which, while it periodically sounds as a negation or transcendence of his own voice, serves only to reinforce the central issue of how a subject, in moments of great peril, may retain the power of self-expression.¹³ Such polyphony offers a refined characterization of ‘authorial’ voices which is vital for the interpretation of modern musical works. It can be developed by following Abbate in a reconsideration of the declaration of the monological authorial voice’s demise in Barthes and Foucault.

According to Barthes the author is constructed as an ‘author-god’, an omnipresent, masterful subject with a voice which claims to speak commandments of universal Truth, who is a worthy adversary, ripe for the killing. For Barthes the very act of writing needed reinterpreting as ‘the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin…. As soon as a fact is narrated… the author enters into his own death, writing begins.’ Since Mallarmé he argues, ‘it is language which speaks, not the author’: its subjects are ‘born simultaneously with the text’, and given voice only with the ‘birth of the reader’.¹⁴ Foucault, similarly, seized on Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God as the message that necessarily brings about the odyssey of the last man. He thus located here the beginning of the end of the ‘modern’ episteme and of its human subject and the concept of the ‘work’. In the famous essay ‘What is an Author?’ Foucault reverses the relationship of writing and death found in ancient Greek narrative and epic or in Arabic stories which were ‘designed to guarantee the immortality of the hero’, a ‘strategy for defeating death’. Now writing sacrifices, or murders, its author as the ‘writing subject endlessly disappears’ in the ‘interplay of signs’. Significantly, in place of the ‘name of the author’, which assures a unity of discourse and an ultimate resolution of textual contradictions, Foucault posits an ‘author-function’, which is ‘not universal or constant in all discourse’, but just one of several fluid, fragmented subject positions referred to by the similarly fragmented text. Thus the ‘subject’ is not ‘wholly abandoned’ but ‘reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies’. The questions Foucault asked of a text are not designed to produce an exegesis of authorial meaning: ‘no longer the tiresome repetitions: “Who is the real author?” “Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?” “What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?’” Foucault thus echoes Beckett and asks, ‘What matter who’s speaking?’¹⁵

Abbate argues that the author slain by Barthes and Foucault is a reduction or abstraction whose death denies critical contexts for consideration of a female authorial voice. (Barthes’s dead author is replaced by ‘pleasures of the text’ and the ‘grain of the voice’, which are characterized as feminine in their emasculation, lack and physical sensuousness.)¹⁶ In the work of Szymanowski, erotic desire which turns to ‘deviance’ couples with an ‘Otherness’ as Pole in a cultural predicament of suppression, marginality and alienation. As Richard Taruskin says of Russian art, often produced under similar circumstances (ironically, since Russia was Poland’s fiercest political enemy), it is therefore ‘multivoiced’, ful...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Mythic and Erotic Voices of the Authorial Subject
• 2 Schopenhauerian Pessimism, the Promethean Voice, Apocalyptic Climax
• 3 Homoeroticism, Madness and Orphic Song
• 4 Narcissus, the Siren and Dionysus: Calls of Seduction in King Roger
• 5 After King Roger: Eros, Slavonic-Sufistic melody and Pan-Europeanism
• Bibliography
• Index