Musicology and fiction

Musicology and fiction
Michael Saffle
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
for Karl Precoda
As an aspect of human life and culture—frequently, as an overwhelmingly pervasive
and problematic aspect—music has found its way into novels, plays, poems, and other
forms of imaginative fiction. Musical facts (and fancies) can be found in Homer’s epics
as well as the tales of aboriginal peoples; in Dante’s Commedia as well as Hindu and
Arabic poetry; and in novels by Dickens, Dostoevskij, and James Joyce as well as sciencefiction stories and television screenplays. Entire dramas have been devoted to real-life
musicians: Puškin’s Mocart i Sal’eri is a case in point, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus another.
Other fictions describe imaginary composers and performers: consider Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus and Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer. (We shall return to Davenport,
Mann, and Shaffer below.)
A large number of historical, scientific, and speculative studies deal in some sense with
both music and fiction. A majority of these studies have been written from imaginativeliterary perspectives. Whether Homeric verse was actually sung; why Dante referred to
certain Gregorian chants; or which operas and street songs are mentioned in Ulysses—
investigations of these kinds mostly map music onto fiction, rather than the other
way round. A much smaller number of studies have been written from musicological
Portions of the article were presented during a discussion of “ Mozart and literature” at the colloquium “Mozart: A lasting
presence” sponsored by Carleton University and held on 19 January 2006 in Ottawa, Ontario. I would like to thank
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University for financial support that enabled me to attend both this event and
“Music’s intellectual history” held from 16–19 March 2005 in New York City. I would also like to thank James Deaville,
Karl Precoda, and Robert Wallace for reading and commenting on portions of the present text.
Throughout the present article I mostly avoid the more general term “literature”, because it is often also used to
refer to secondary sources of information, as in Fourscore classics of music literature: A guide to selected original sources on
theory and other writings on music not available in English, ed. by Gustave Reese (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957).
Occasionally I employ the phrase “imaginative literature” as a general term for novels, poetry, plays, short stories, and the
like.
Reprinted in English as Mozart and Salieri in The poems, prose, and plays of Alexander Pushkin, trans. by Avrahm
Yarmolinsky (New York: Modern Library, 1964) 428–37. Originally published in Russian in 1830. All references to this
and other fictions in the present article are to English-language texts or translations.
Peter Shaffer, Amadeus: A play (New York; London: Samuel French, 1981).
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, as told by a friend, trans. by H.T.
Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). Originally published in German in 1947.
Marcia Davenport, Of Lena Geyer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).
853
perspectives. How a given poem or play has been set to music; in what ways a Mozart
opera may have been influenced by literary traditions; or where (and why) text-painting
appears in particular Renaissance motets or Baroque oratorios—investigations of these
kinds mostly map fiction onto music. The Modern Language Association’s massive
bibliography as well as a great many other reference works continue to catalog studies
primarily written by and addressed to littérateurs. RILM, on the other hand, catalogs
studies primarily written by and addressed to musicologists.
Prior to the 1980s, musicologists mostly either ignored fictions or looked down their
nose at them, instead devoting themselves exclusively to musical “facts”. Nevertheless, the
number of studies devoted to musicological issues and works of imaginative literature
is substantial. Several outstanding monographs have already served generations of
scholars, and new contributions continually appear in print. Even if studies devoted
exclusively or even primarily to opera, song, choral compositions, text-painting, and
programmism are eliminated from consideration, the remaining books and articles
comprise an important part of musicology’s intellectual history.
The present article is devoted to exploring several issues associated with musicological
investigations into imaginative literature, especially those pertaining to reception and
formal organization. Most of the fictions discussed at any length have won acclaim
either as canonical masterpieces (e.g., Shakespeare’s sonnets), or as popular successes
(e.g., Ruth Rendell’s novel A judgement in stone10), or as models for what can and should
be done in specialized forms of fiction (e.g., Bruce Sterling’s and Lewis Shiner’s sciencefiction story Mozart in mirrorshades11). Most, too, have received at least a little attention
in musicological publications.
As Calvin Brown is said to have observed, there is no really satisfactory way to
“classify” the different possible relationships between fiction and music.12 In the pages
below I move, insofar as possible, from “earlier” to “more recent” as well as from the
“general” to the “specific”, beginning with factual and culturally situated references to
music in selected works of imaginative literature, before then proceeding—as Steven
Scher has suggested—by way of evocative references and devices to structural and
stylistic parallels and principles between fiction and music.13 Scher has himself cautioned
854
See, for instance, R.B. Moberly, “The influence of French classical drama on Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito”, Music
& letters 55/3 (1978) 245–67.
Timothy Dow Adams, et al., “When Euterpe meets Calliope: An annotated bibliography of music and literary
style, 1945–1981”, Style 19 (1985) 151–90. Unlike many literary bibliographies, this one includes citations from Music
& letters as well as the Journal of the history of ideas, the Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, and other interdisciplinary
periodicals.
In recent years RILM abstracts of music literature has also incorporated references to a great many publications
devoted to imaginative literature, cultural studies, and so on. RILM no longer covers unilaterally “musicological”
publications, which is one of many reasons it has proven so useful to scholars in a variety of fields.
Among other “classics”, all of them in this group devoted to musical issues and English literature, see John Hollander,
The untuning of the sky: Ideas of music in English poetry, 1500–1700 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961); Bruce Pattison,
Music and poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Metheun and Co., 1948); and John Stevens, Music & poetry at the
early Tudor court (London: Methuen and Co., 1961). Among “classics” devoted to musical issues and German literature
is Scher, Verbal music in German literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
10
Ruth Rendell, A judgement in stone (London: Hutcheson, 1977; rep. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
11
Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, Mozart in mirrorshades. Originally published in Omni (September 1985).
Reprinted in Mirrorshades: The cyberpunk anthology, ed. by Bruce Sterling (New York: Arbor House, 1986) 223–39.
Also reprinted in The best alternate history stories of the 20th century, ed. by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg
(New York: Ballantine, 2001); and other collections. Subsequent references are to the Cyberpunk anthology edition.
12
Quoted in Adams et al., “When Euterpe meets Calliope”, 151.
13
See Steven Paul Scher, “How meaningful is ‘musical’ in literary criticism?” Yearbook of comparative and general
literature 21 (1972) 25–56 passim; and other studies.


During the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the infant discipline of musicology
increasingly defined itself in terms of primary sources and positivist methodologies.
Western art music, especially German art music, became the sine qua non for scholarly
study, in large part because this kind of music was understood as most perfectly created
and preserved in writing rather than through performance or in terms of extra-notational
commentary. As early as 1885 Guido Adler went so far as to dismiss musical biography
for having “forced its way into the foreground” of a profession grounded in notational
science rather than speculation.16 Even the “oral traditions and socialized performances”
associated with folk and popular music were for decades accepted as “legitimate” only
after they have been transcribed and reworked into books and articles: as such—as
“forms to be dissected”—they could then be “placed in a library in a format that is
deemed to be knowledge.”17
As the discipline of musicology evolved it modeled itself to some extent on the
somewhat better established, yet equally “modern”, equally self-conscious disciplines of
political and social history. As Monika Otter has observed, “History as scholarly inquiry
concerned with archival research and documentation is only about two centuries old.”
Furthermore,
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
scholars against drawing “easy analogies” between music and fiction.14 On the other
hand, as Thomas Campbell has pointed out, “such analogies can prove useful if they are
carefully delineated.”15 I agree. In addition to identifying and evaluating useful analogies
throughout the pages that follow, I have attempted to construct a few of my own.
the mental habit of regarding historiography as a transparent medium with no literary
substance of its own, a self-effacing text that simply shows things “as they really were”
(“wie es eigentlich gewesen”), derives from nineteenth-century historicism.… To
classical, medieval, and early modern Europeans, history was not a separate academic
discipline, but a subsection of rhetoric (as was poetry and what we would call fictional
narrative).18
For a variety of reasons, early–20th-century musicologists often did not concern
themselves with “history” in the broader sense of that term.19 Instead, the centuriesScher has also observed that “organizing principles such as repetition, variation, balance, and contrast pervade
both musical and literary textures; and the straightforward way they usually function in [their] respective arts yields
many points of contact for legitimate comparison”. Steven Scher, “Literature and music”, Interrelations of literature, ed.
by Jean-Pierre Barricelli and Joseph Gibaldi (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982) 225–50
passim. Quoted in Thomas P. Campbell, “Machaut and Chaucer: ‘A
rs nova’ and the art of narrative”, The Chaucer review
24 (1990) 287.
15
Ibid.
16
Translated from Guido Adler, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft”, Vierteljahrsschrift für
Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885) 10. For additional information about the boundaries of early musicology, which often
excluded even such “narrative modes” of scholarly discourse as biography, see Jolanta T. Pekacz’s introduction to Musical
biography: Towards new paradigms, ed. by Pekacz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) esp. 2–4. For additional information about
the emergence of musicology as a “Germanic” discipline, see Alexander Rehding, “The quest for the origins of music in
Germany circa 1900”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/2 (summer 2000) 345–85.
17
Alastair Williams, Constructing musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 105.
18
Monika Otter, “Functions of fiction in historical writing”, Writing medieval history, ed. by Nancy Partner (London:
Hodder Arnold, 2005) 109.
19
See the introduction to Music and history: Bridging the disciplines, ed. by Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey
( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005) vii–xvii.
14
855
old assumption that history was itself “a branch of literature”20 was gradually replaced
by an assumption that history, literature, and musicology are freestanding intellectual
organisms, separate trees with separate disciplinary roots, branches, and intellectualecological habitats. And this, in contradistinction to Hans Robert Jauss’s contentions
that the (re)emergence of historical fiction in the early 19th century abolished “the
classical separation between res fictae, the realm of poetry, and res factae, the object of
history”, thereby transforming “poetic fiction” into “the horizon of reality” and “historical
reality” into “the horizon of poetry.”21
Rather than merge methodologies and interests with those of historians, sociologists,
or other scholars, musicologists largely consecrated themselves exclusively to “the study
of musical phenomena”, which they perceived as “existing in splendid isolation” from
other human activities.22 What John Kimmey has called an “historical/systematic dyad”
eventually developed. Traditionally, historical musicologists (some would say, “real”
musicologists) have concerned themselves with the sources, documents, and practices
associated with the evolution of European art music, while systematic musicologists
(including ethnomusicologists) have taken pretty much everything else “musical” as
their purview.23 Meanwhile, theorists (perhaps Kimmey should have used the term
“triad”) have increasingly devoted themselves to diagrams, charts, and even—in the
publications of Hans Keller—“wordless functional analyses”.24 In contradistinction to
the scientific and mathematical methods adopted by music historians, systematists, and
theorists (who, to a considerable extent, still strive to eschew subjective judgments),
journalists and popularizers have often “emotionalized” the effects of music on actual
men and women.
A few individuals, however, have long inveighed again an exclusively positivist
musicology, especially one fixated on “analysis” rather than other modes of criticism and
assessment. Joseph Kerman, for example, has maintained that musicology tends to
make information into an end in itself, rather than treating facts as “steps on the ladder”
to “a general field theory of [musicological] criticism”.25 As early as 1965, Kerman used
a then-recent anthology of musicological position papers26 as a stick to beat many of
his colleagues:
856
Someone has spoken about the growth of American musicology from infancy to
adolescence; the metaphor is irresistible. Yet as many readers have noticed with a
twinge, only Mantle Hood’s essay on ethnomusicology [published in the anthology
in question] conveys the sense of horizon, excitement, experimentation, and just plain
kicking around that one associates with even the most docile adolescents. Has historical
musicology somehow skipped this phase? I hope instead we are still in its infancy. The
20
Lionel Gossman, “History and literature”, The writing of history: Literary form and historical understanding, ed. by
Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) 23; italics in the original.
21
Hans Robert Jauss, Question and answer: Forms of dialogic understanding, ed. and trans. by Michael Hays
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 27.
22
John A. Kimmey, Jr., A critique of musicology: Clarifying the scope, limits, and purposes of musicology (Lewiston, N.Y.:
Edwin Mellen, 1988) 197.
23
Ibid., 198–204.
24
See, for example, Hans Keller, “Functional analysis: Its pure appreciation”, The music review 18 (1957) 202–06;
and 19 (1958) 192–200.
25
Joseph Kerman, “A profile for American musicology”, Write all these down: Essays on music (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994) 8. Kerman’s essay was published originally in the Journal of the American Musicological Society
18/1 (spring 1965) 61–69.
26
Musicology, ed. by Frank L. Harrison, Mantle Hood, and Claude V. Palisca (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1963).
Although exclusively positivist researches and several varieties of analysis still flourish,
at least in certain circles, Kerman has lived to see the field of musicology transformed
in a variety of ways. In the process of transformation, more than a few musicologists
have embraced their own brands of self-assertiveness and “just plain kicking around”.
Entire volumes, for example, have been devoted to “gay” musicology—a development
no one would have predicted 40 years ago.28 Early–21st-century musicology seems to
be redefining itself in terms of interdisciplinary investigations into interrelated musical
and cultural issues.
In the process, music scholars have become critics as well as fact-finders: students of
emotion as well as cerebration, of pleasures and pains as well as precise measurements and
descriptions. Referring in 1995 to “current trends in music scholarship”, Pieter Van den
Toorn singled out Leo Treitler as exemplary of (inter)disciplinary redefinition, especially
because of Treitler’s insistence that musicology “acknowledge more fully and openly the
mundane social and political attitudes that … lie just beneath [music’s] surface”—and
this, even when “the prevailing winds would seem to favor an objective knowledge of
observation and fact processed in detached and impersonal tones.”29 Redefinition has
not solved all problems, of course, nor will it. Even among specialists, interdisciplinary
approaches to certain issues have proven themselves “both a blessing and a curse”, in part
because scholars “still often talk past each other” and “overarching coherence” is seldom
arrived at.30 Nevertheless, the search for what Lawrence Kramer has called “postmodern
musicology” continues.31 One aspect of this search has been an increased willingness for
musicologists to explore the extra-musical. Including imaginative literature.
The question remains: What can fiction—which is to say, the study of fiction—do
for musicology? What can novels and poems teach us about music? One answer to these
questions is: nothing at all. As Kevin Korsyn puts it, playing Devil’s Advocate in the
guise of an individual “who can converse intelligently about literary theory, art history,
[or] film studies”: Isn’t music “just something you do? You play it, compose it, listen to
it? Why, then, would anybody want to talk about it?”32 (Sometimes, instead of simply
talking about music, musicology seems increasingly to be concerned with “talk[ing]
about talking about music”.33) Furthermore, fiction is “false”, deceptive. Nor is it music,
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
critical profile [proposed elsewhere in Kerman’s essay] for American musicology would
supply some of this excitement. It would neither replace nor slight our traditional
scholarly pursuits, but would on the contrary … help [fill the] gap between the scholar
and the general public.27
857
27
Kerman, “A profile for American musicology”, 8. Other scholars agree with Kerman, at least to the extent of
questioning analysis as a royal road to musical understanding. Gary Tomlinson, for example, has also urged musicologists
to give fuller consideration to contextual elements “beyond the work itself, indeed beyond musical works in general”. Gary
Tomlinson, “The web of culture: A context for musicology”, 19th-century music 7/3 (April 1984) 360.
28
See, for example, Queering the pitch: The new gay and lesbian musicology, ed. by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and
Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994).
29
Pieter Van den Toorn, Music, politics, and the academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 44.
30
Michael J. Kramer, “The multitrack model: Cultural history and the interdisciplinary study of popular music”,
Music and history: Bridging the disciplines, 221.
31
See Lawrence Kramer, Classical music and postmodern knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
passim.
32
Kevin Korsyn, Decentering music: A critique of contemporary musical research (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003) 65; italics in the original.
33
Ibid., 34.
especially the European instrumental art music canonized by previous generations of
musicologists in the form of a self-contained system of “purely” structural coherences.
On the other hand, aren’t music and fiction both aural arts? Certainly poetry is
aural—although, as Karl Precoda has suggested, prose fiction is a post-aural art form,
written to be read “on” the page instead of out loud.34 Whether contextually “poetic”
or “prosaic”, the sounds of certain words and phrases sometimes suggest their own
meanings: Poe’s “tintinnabulation”, with its evocation of bells, is a case in point; so is
Tennyson’s “murmuring of innumerable bees.”35 Too, trumpet flourishes are linked
acoustically to their uses: as calls to battle, say, or as proclamations of royal personages.
The simplest spoken sounds are capable of evoking or even becoming music itself as well
as conveying meaning: Wallace Stevens, a poet “obsessed with sound”, sometimes treated
syllables as if they were “physical” phenomena—and this, even though his fictive Peter
Quince suggests that “music is feeling, then, not sound.”36
To separate music and fiction altogether from each other seems silly. Simply to
lump them together, however, seems equally silly. An example: As a poetic device,
onomatopoeia has nothing necessarily to do with music, just as the timbres and volumes
of musical instruments have nothing necessarily to do with extra-musical circumstances.37
Nor does music necessarily tell stories. Instead, as Carolyn Abbate and others have
suggested, narrativity should be understood “not as the normal condition of music, but
as something anomalous.”38 Or, in the opinion of Vera Micznik, degrees of narrativity
separate the style and works of Beethoven (less narrative) from those of Mahler (more
narrative).39
Along quite different lines, Russell Reaver has claimed that what “the aural effect
of literature” actually has “in common with music” manifests itself as an “interruption of
our line of logical expectation” in order to facilitate “a heightened awareness of life” as
“being” or “existence.”40 In this sense, music can be considered “philosophical” and even
“spiritual”—which means that, in some sense, it must also be “literary” (although not
necessarily “fictional”).41 Or, as German aestheticians such as Ludwig Tieck and Franz
Grillparzer put it centuries ago, music aspires to “ultimate” accomplishments beyond
those of the other arts.42 In every other sense, though, music is finally, only itself. As
Reaver himself puts it,
the sequence [of musical events, as in the events of a story ultimately] depends on
the inner dynamisms of music itself, on its expectations of movement in tonalities and
Karl Precoda, in a personal communication with the present author.
With regard to links in language between timbres and meanings, see Calvin S. Brown, Music and literature: A
comparison of the arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948) 33–35.
36
Mervyn Nicholson, “‘The slightest sound matters’: Stevens’ sound cosmology”, The Wallace Stevens journal 18/1
(spring 1994) 63; italics in the original. “Peter Quince at the clavier” is quoted by Nicholson on this and subsequent
pages.
37
Nor has onomatopoeia altogether remained in favor with littérateurs, one of whom recently described attempts to
“imitate environmental sounds” in both fiction and music as “dead metaphor”. See James Guetti, Word-music: The aesthetic
aspect of narrative fiction (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980) 1–41 passim.
38
Nicholas Cook, “Uncanny moments: Juxtaposition and the collage principle in music”, Approaches to meaning in
music, ed. by Byron Almen and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) 112–13.
39
See Vera Micznik, “Music and narrative revisited: Degrees of narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler”, Journal of the
Royal Musical Association 126 (2001) 193–249. Any additional discussion of narrative as an approach to understanding
music is beyond the scope of the present article.
40
J. Russell Reaver, “How musical is literature?” Mosaic 18/4 (fall 1985) 2.
41
Ibid.
42
Quoted in Lydia Goehr, The imaginary museum of musical works: An essay in the philosophy of music (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992) 154.
34
858
35
In spite of music’s independence from the other arts, or even its purported supremacy
over them, musicologists are sometimes required to enter the realm of imaginative
literature, just as littérateurs sometimes have to enter into the realm of music. Just as it
is necessary to know something about A midsummer night’s dream in order to perform,
or even listen intelligently to, the orchestral works of composers as different from one
other as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Sergej Prokof ’ev; so, to produce many of
Shakespeare’s plays “authentically”, it is necessary to know something about the role
of song in Elizabethan drama. For these and other reasons, many musical reference
works boast articles on “Shakespeare”.44 But Shakespeare’s plays and poems are unusual
insofar as the history of musicology is concerned. Few references to “poetry”, “drama”,
“the novel”, and similar fictional forms “overall” can be found even in contemporary
musicological dictionaries.45 As Robert Morgan reminds us, many musical scholars, “at
least in the United States, seem uncomfortable when confronted with larger questions
of intentionality, social and psychological context, or supra-musical influence”—and
thus remain “stubbornly formalistic.”46 No one can understand Mozart auf die Reise nach
Prag without knowing what Don Giovanni is about. Nevertheless, a great many Mozart
scholars seem to understand Mozart without even having heard of Eduard Mörike’s
novella.47 (We shall also return to Mörike below.)
Discussions of “supra-musical influences” exist, of course, and have for decades.
Consider Calvin Brown’s groundbreaking Music and literature, written during the 1940s
in “hope that it might open up a field of thought which has not yet been systematically
explored”: the various interrelationships between imaginative literature and music.48
Consider too the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, which, in
spite of certain conservative nationalist and methodological tendencies implicit in much
of its contents, boasts an excellent article on “music and musicians in fiction”—one
that ranges from Homer, the Brothers Grimm, and Thomas Mann to discussions of
“fictive music”, “the lyric”, and “musical anecdotes”.49 Moreover, and for most of a century,
musicological periodicals have published occasional articles about “musical” novelists or
poets, or about the appearance of musical figures or issues in imaginative literature.50
Russel Reaver, “How musical is literature?”, 2–3; italics added.
Christopher R. Wilson, et al., “Shakespeare”, The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, ed. by Stanley Sadie
(2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 2001) vol. 23, 192–98.
45
See, for example, Musicology: The key concepts, ed. by David Beard and Kenneth Gloag (New York: Routledge,
2005), which excludes most musical-literary subjects.
46
Quoted in Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Circumstantial evidence: Musical analysis and theories of reading”, Mosaic 18/4
(December 1985) 160. See also Robert Morgan, “Theory, analysis, and criticism”, Journal of musicology 1/1 (1982) 15–18.
Morgan’s words were written more than a quarter century ago; American scholars, I am convinced, have long since caught
up with their European counterparts.
47
Reprinted in English as Mozart’s journey to Prague, trans. by Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim (London: John
Calder, 1957; repr. ed. 1976). Originally published in German in 1855.
48
See Brown, Music and literature.
49
Uwe Schweikert, “Musik und Musiker in der Literatur”, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. by Ludwig
Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997) Sachteil vol. 6, cols. 801–14.
50
Three examples, identified in chronological order of publication, must suffice: Vilma Raskin Potter, “Poetry and
the fiddler’s foot: Meters in Thomas Hardy’s work”, The musical quarterly 65/1 ( January 1979) 48–71; Eric Valentin,
“Mozart in der französischen Dichtung”, Acta mozartiana 30/4 (1983) 71–74; and Daniel Herwitz, “The cook,
his wife, the philosopher, and the librettist”, The musical quarterly 78/1 (spring 1994) 48–76. Herwitz’s article deals
with interrelationships between Italian literature, the story of Don Juan, Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s opera, and
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
rhythms.… Since music—even program music—never has the literalness of literature,
music and literature cannot be compared example for example as though a literary
phrase must mean the same as a musical phrase.43
43
44
859
Finally, an increasing number of interdisciplinary publications are being devoted to
“music and …” subjects, such as “music and nationalism”, “music and cultural values”,
and “music and the media”.51 The time seems ripe for an overview of past and present
investigations into interrelationships between fiction and music.


Fictions may (or may not) be “musical”. If “musical”, however, are they necessarily
“unusual”? Or do “musical” fictions merely “prove the rule”: viz., that imaginative
literature has, for the most part, little to teach musicologists? Three authors—Geoffrey
Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Hardy—produced imaginative literature
that has been read as “musical” in one way or another. A few of their poems illustrate
certain of the possibilities and limitations inherent in examining fiction as a source of
musicological fact.
In his verse, including portions of his celebrated Canterbury tales, Chaucer often
refers music. Although he names no contemporary composer in his writings and
mentions only one theorist, Boethius (whose treatise on music he himself translated),
Chaucer demonstrated his considerable musical knowledge primarily through a “large
and varied assortment of figures of speech based on music”, especially those of everyday
experience.52 Consider the opening of the “Pardoner’s tale”, which describes “syngeres
with harpes” and
… a compaignye
Of yonge folks that haunteden folye,
As riot, hazard, stywes, and taverns,
Where as with harpes, lutes, and gyternes
They daunce and playen at dees both day and nyght,
And eten also and drynken over hir myght …53
(Adolescents, it seems, have long been beer-addled pop-music fans.)
Furthermore, Chaucer’s knowledge especially of Guillaume de Machaut’s literary
and musical output unquestionably influenced his own verse. Chaucer’s Book of the
Duchess, for example, “is dependent upon no [fewer] than four of Machaut’s narrative
dits for its general subject matter; and hundreds of specific lines can be traced to
Machaut” in this and other of Chaucer’s poems.54 In comparing The parliament of fowls
860
Kierkegaard’s Enten/eller (see note 83).
51
In recent years German nationalism has often been discussed in conjunction with Wagner, Hitler, and National
Socialism. See, for example, Thomas S. Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as national opera (1868–1945)”, Music and
German national identity, ed. by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press,
2002) 78–104. See also Potter, Most German of the arts: Musicology and society from the Weimar Republic to the end of
Hitler’s Reich (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1998). Finally, see Vaget’s “Wagner-Kult” essay, cited in note
162.
52
Clair C. Olson, “Chaucer and music of the fourteenth century”, Speculum 16/1 ( January 1941) 71, 85. See also
Robert Boenig, “Musical irony in the Pardoner’s tale”, The Chaucer review 24 (1990) 253–58; D.S. Brewer, “Chaucer’s
attitudes to music”, Poetica: An international journal of linguistic-literary studies 15–16 (1981) 128–35; David Chamberlain,
“Musical signs and symbols in Chaucer: Convention and originality”, Signs and symbols in Chaucer’s poetry, ed. by John
P. Hermann and John J. Burke (University, Ala.; University of Alabama Press, 1981) 43–80; and David Leon Higdon,
“Diverse melodies in Chaucer’s General prologue”, Criticism 14 (1972) 97–108.
53
Quoted from The complete poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by John H. Fisher (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1989) 224.
54
Campbell, “Machaut and Chaucer”, 276.
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
and the “Miller’s tale” with the music and verse of Machaut’s Je puis trop bien, Thomas
Campbell has identified links between words and music, including: (1) a reluctance “to
resolve ambiguities or to justify the presentation of disparate, even exclusive, solutions
to a problem”; (2) a preference “for the simultaneous, rather than the serial, depiction
of related events”; and (3) a preference “for concatenation, where several perspectives,
situations, or scenes are deftly nestled beside, or inside, one another.”55 In other words,
Chaucer’s poetry incorporates “literary” processes analogous to “musical” dissonance,
polyphony, and cadences. Like Machaut’s Je puis, several of Chaucer’s poems—or so
Campbell argues—approximate the separate medieval systems of musique naturelle
(poetry) and musique artificielle (music) in that they “respond to or decorate one
another, while simultaneously remaining independent.”56 Thus, in the “Miller’s tale”,
the complexities of the several overlapping plots are suddenly resolved and “climax
together … within twenty short, snappy lines” that call to mind “simultaneous, separate
[musical] themes which occur in parallel, but not harmonic relationship”.57 Thus, within
Chaucer’s poetry, music functions as an organizational metaphor, not merely as an
experiential and cultural metonymy.
Like many of Chaucer’s poems, several of Shakespeare’s sonnets deal explicitly with
musical issues. Consider no. 128, which describes a girl playing a keyboard instrument58
and begins:
How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand59
In Renaissance sonnets and sonnet sequences, music was often linked with sexuality and
gender.60 Throughout Shakespeare’s poem, music serves as a metaphor for heterosexual
love—more specifically, as a synecdoche (the “trope par excellence of reduction”) for
jealousy.61 In line 1, for example, the poet lays claim to “his” music (the girl); and in
lines 5–6 he envies the “nimble jacks” who kiss her hand. Helen Vendler begins her
description of the “metaphor of music” present throughout this sonnet with an
introductory reference to the “tonic note” of the poet’s “opening sigh”; she also observes
that the poem as a whole “exists to amplify the sense through which, by synecdoche, the
861
Ibid., 277–78.
Ibid., 283.
57
Ibid., 286.
58
According to John Benson, who wrote in 1640, as well as many subsequent scholars, Shakespeare’s first 126
sonnets were addressed originally “to a male”, with “masculine pronouns [changed] to feminine” and titles introduced
“which directed sonnets to the young man to a mistress”. Even if true—and more than one scholar has contested
Benson’s claim—sonnet no. 128 falls historically into another group of poems. See Margreta de Grazia, “The scandal of
Shakespeare’s sonnets”, Shakespeare’s sonnets: Critical essays, ed. by James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 2000) 89.
59
Quoted from The unabridged William Shakespeare, ed. by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright
(Philadelphia: Running Press, 1989) 1304. Other editions may differ in spelling or punctuation.
60
See, for example, William J. Kennedy, “Petrarchan textuality: Commentaries and gender revisions”, Discourse of
authority in medieval and Renaissance literature, ed. by Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England, 1989) 151–68 passim.
61
See Helen Vendler’s essay on sonnet 128 in Vendler, The art of Shakespeare’s sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 1997) 543.
55
56
lady can be called the lover’s music”—and this largely in terms of two “erogenous zones”:
lips and fingers.62
Clearly Shakespeare’s sonnet is “about” music, even if it may not be as “contrapuntal”
as some of Chaucer’s verse. To what extent, however, is it factually reliable in terms
of musicological information? Students of Renaissance performance practices would
probably consider sonnet no. 128 a poorly written—or, at best, an eccentric—description
of how an actual virginal works. In line 2, for example, Shakespeare seems to confuse
the wooden soundboard of the instrument (the poet’s metaphorical rival in love63) with
its wooden keys, either by mistake or through “a kind of metonymy” in which wood is
associated with the poet’s rival.64 In line 3 Shakespeare describes the girl as swaying
unnecessarily from side to side—although “sway’st” may also refer to control or mastery
exercised by that rival. In line 5 he seems to confuse “jacks”, the quills that pluck the
strings, with the keys the lady depresses to work the jacks. (Or does he? Shakespeare’s
description takes into account the optical illusion of keys rising, instead of being
struck, to “kiss” the girl’s hand. It is also possible, as David Crookes has done, to read
Shakespeare’s reference to jacks metaphorically, in terms of a “ceremonial greeting to a
superior.”65). And so on. In the last analysis, however, sonnet 128 has little or nothing to
teach us about actual music-making, save in the realms of poetic license and imagery.
Another reading of this poem, however—this one proposed by Fred Blick—links
sonnet no. 128 with other portions of Shakespeare’s literary output by way of esoteric
internal references to the Pythagorean tradition of “mathematical” music. According
to Blick, the locations within Shakespeare’s cycle of both sonnets 8 and 128 (those
most explicitly devoted to musical issues) reveal the poet’s awareness of “the general
Pythagorean philosophy of numbers” also cited in act 5, scene 1, of The merchant of
Venice.66 Since the number “128” calls to mind vis-à-vis “8” the ratio of a given tone to
another tone precisely four octaves lower (128:8::16:1); since, too, “four octaves was the
range of the virginal in Shakespeare’s time”; and, finally, since another of the sonnets (no.
141) employs a pun on “base” (i.e., physically and morally “low”) and “bass”: therefore—
or so Blick’s argument concludes—Shakespeare’s sonnet “conjures up the image of a
fortunate keyboard “tikled” erotically by the fingers of the Dark Lady [herself a “base”
figure] in the presence of the unhappily envious poet.”67 For John Hollander, aspects of
sonnet no. 8 also suggest the realm of musica speculativa: of “sympathetic vibrations” as
862
Vendler, The art of Shakespeare’s sonnets, 546–47.
Renaissance commentaries on contemporaneous sonnets, including Petrarch’s, associated certain “rhetorical
situations” with “male competition”. Kennedy, “Petrarchan textuality”, 163.
64
Hollander, The untuning of the sky, 136.
65
See David Z. Crookes, “Shakespeare’s sonnet 128”, Explicator 43/2 (winter 1985) 14–15. Crookes also refers to
Richard II, act 3, scene 3, and provides a diagram showing “how an individual virginal-key operates” mechanically.
66
Fred Blick, “Shakespeare’s musical sonnets: Numbers 8, 128, and Pythagoras”, The upstart crow 19 (1999) 155. For
additional information about Elizabethan poetry and metaphorical images of musical instruments, including references
to Pythagorean theory, see Gretchen L. Finney, “A world of instruments”, ELH 20 (1953) 87–120. Regarding sonnet 8,
see Kennedy, “Petrarchan textuality”, 164–65.
67
Blick, “Shakespeare’s musical sonnets”, 161–62. The “Dark lady” is one of three “characters” in the poet’s sonnets
and is first introduced in sonnet no. 127.
An even more complex argument about the placement of sonnet 128 (among others) in the whole of Shakespeare’s
sonnets may be found in Thomas P. Roche, Petrarch and the English sonnet sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989) 456
and elsewhere. See too Claes Schaar, Elizabethan sonnet themes and the dating of Shakespeare’s “sonnets” (Lund: Håkan
Ohlssons, 1962); and Brents Stirling, The Shakespeare sonnet order: Poems and groups (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968).
62
63
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
well as the “three-part polyphony of the familial unit” described as “sier, and child, and
happy mother” mentioned in line 11.68
If Shakespeare’s sonnet can be more perfectly understood in terms of insights into
musical instruments and Pythagorean arcana, Thomas Hardy’s “Lines to a movement
in Mozart’s E-flat symphony” can perhaps be better understood in terms of scansion
and melody. At first glance, however, “Lines” appears to lack any meaningful musical
content. For one thing, only its title mentions “music” (a Mozart symphony); the poem
itself—the first of its four stanzas is reprinted below—seemingly has nothing to do
with music in general or Mozart in particular:
Show me again the time
When in the Junetide’s prime
We flew by meads and mountains northerly! –
Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fullness, fineness, freeness,
Love lures life on.69
To complicate things, the very existence of a poem about “art” music flies in the face of
statements by several of his biographers that Hardy only enjoyed “folk” tunes.70 In point
of fact, Hardy knew more than a little about classical music.71 Furthermore, Robert
Gittings has suggested that “Lines” constituted “an attempt [by Hardy] to fit words to
Mozart’s well-known symphony in E-flat, the minuet and trio movement.”72 If Gittings
is correct, a musicological puzzle would appear to be embedded in Hardy’s imaginativeliterary text, with the title providing a clue to its solution.
Of the four canonical works in that key,73 no. 39, K.543, would appear the most
plausible link with Hardy’s “Lines”, if only because that symphony has always been the
most frequently performed of Mozart’s “E-flat” symphonies. Unfortunately, the poem
cannot in any way be made to “fit” (whatever that might mean) the minuet-and-trio
movements in any relevant Mozart symphony, including K.543. Instead, according to
Colin Boone, the poem incorporates distinctive rhythmic patterns derived from the
principal theme of the second (or “Andante”) movement of Mozart’s symphony no. 19,
K.132.74 Although not entirely convincing, Boone’s argument makes sense. Compare,
for example, Hardy’s first line, which Boone reads as:
Show-- / --- / me-a / gain-the / time-- / --
Hollander, The untuning of the sky, 136–137.
Quoted from The complete poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976) 458.
70
Vera Mardon claims that Hardy“never wished to discuss classical music or composers”, even though she acknowledges
that “classical composers and their music … formed themes for some of his poems”. Colin C. Boone, “Hardy’s poem Lines
to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony – Which symphony?” The Thomas Hardy journal 6/1 (February 1990) 63. See
also Mardon, with James Stevens-Cox, Thomas Hardy as a musician (Beaminster, Dorset: Stevens-Cox, 1964) 21. On the
other hand, folk songs, singers, and instrumentalists figure in many of Hardy’s works, often as symbols of “old” English
ways and rural cultures. See Harold Toliver, “The dance under the greenwood tree: Hardy’s bucolics”, Nineteenth-century
fiction 17 (1962) 57–68; and other studies.
71
Hardy is known to have attended classical concerts in London during the 1890s and 1900s. See F.B. Pinion,
A Hardy companion: A guide to the works of Thomas Hardy and their backbround (London: Macmillan, 1968) 187–93
passim.
72
Robert Gittings, The older Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1978) 96.
73
Four E-flat symphonies by Mozart are considered genuine: nos. 1 (K.16), 19 (K.132), 26 (K.186), and 39 (K.543).
A fifth work, identified in some iterations of the Köchel catalogue as K.18 and sometimes referred to as “no. 0”, was
actually composed by Carl Friedrich Abel. See Neal Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies: Context, performance practice, reception
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), passim.
74
See Boone, “Hardy’s poem Lines to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony”, 61–69. Mozart composed two slow
movements for K.132, the second designated andantino grazioso. See Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies, 233.
68
69
863
with the opening measures of Mozart’s melody:
Example 1: Mozart, symphony no. 19, andante, mm. 1–6 (first violin part)
Each syllable or hyphen in Boone’s reading indicates a beat in Mozart’s tune; each diagonal
slash indicates the end of one measure and the beginning of another.75 In order to make
this first example work, however, one must ignore the tie at the beginning of measure 3.
Similarly, Boone maintains that lines 4–5 can be read (with some alterations) as
Yea-- / to-such / freshness- /-fairness / full-ness / Love lures life / on--
These lines recall subsequent portions of Mozart’s tune:
Example 2: Mozart, symphony no. 19, andante, mm. 13–19 (first violin part)
864
The fact that Hardy called his poem “Lines to a movement”, rather than “Lines to a
minuet”76 (as Gittings erroneously implies), also argues for the andante in question.
Finally, we should remember that Hardy was under no compulsion to follow Mozart’s
metrics precisely.77
Coincidentally, perhaps, Mozart’s andante is an unusually long and complicated
composition. Its reputation too is unusual: Alfred Einstein considered it “full of spiritual
unrest and rebellion”, while Luigi Della Croce and Neal Zaslaw have described it as
“exceptional” and so “personal” as to call for replacement within K.132.78 In addition,
the opening of Mozart’s melody “reproduces the incipit of a Gregorian Credo”, while its
later phrases reproduce part of “a popular German Christmas carol, Joseph lieber, Joseph
mein”.79 Although symphonies were sometimes performed during church services, the
presence of similar “liturgical” references in the subsequent, “all-too-worldly” minuetand-trio suggest an “ironic or parodistic” (rather than “sacred”) interpretation.80 Did
Hardy agree with any of these experts? Was he even aware of the facts they cite?
Probably not.
What ultimately makes most of Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, and Hardy’s fiction
musicologically significant is not references to or incorporations of particular
compositional strategies, instruments, mathematical ratios, or tunes. Instead, and for
Boone, “Hardy’s poem Lines to a movement in Mozart’s E-flat symphony”, 67–68.
See The variorum edition of the complete poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979)
no. 388 (p. 458).
77
Nor may Boone’s thesis help littérateurs read Hardy’s poetry. In Calvin Brown’s opinion, employing musical
notation to “explain” English verse is “in general more of a nuisance than a help”. Calvin Brown, “Can musical notation
help English scansion?” Journal of aesthetics and art criticism 23 (1965) 333.
78
Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His character, his work (London: Oxford University Press, 1945) 222; and Luigi Della
Croce, Le 75 sinfonie di Mozart: Guida e analisi critica (Torino: Eda, 1977) 145. Quoted in Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies,
236.
79
Zaslaw, Mozart’s symphonies, 233–34.
80
Ibid., 83.
75
76
81
For a general review of musical reception, especially insofar as 1980s European musicology is concerned, see
Rezeptionsästhetik und Rezeptionsgeschichte in der Musikwissenschaft, ed. by Friedheim Krummacher and Hermann
Danuser (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1991).
82
Examples of such studies include Belinda Cannone, La réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse parisienne (1793–
1829) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991); Ulrich Drüener, “Die Frührezeption von Mozarts Werken im Musikaliendruck”, Acta
mozartiana 40/2 (1993) 39–49; and M. Schmidt, “‘Dreams of flying’: Zur Mozart-Reception in Schönbergs ‘Spätstil’”,
Acta mozartiana 52 ( June 2005) 81–93.
83
Reprinted in English as Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. by Howard Vincent Hong and Edna Hatlestad
Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Originally published in Danish in 1843. Among studies of
Mozart and Kierkegaard, see Jörg Zimmermann, “Philosophische Musikrezeption im Zeichen des spekulativ-erotischen
Ohrs: Sören [sic] Kierkegaard hört Mozart’s Don Juan”, Rezeptionsästhetik und Rezeptionsgeschichte, 73–103.
84
Reprinted in English in The case of Wagner / Nietzsche contra Wagner / Selected aphorisms, trans. by Anthony
M. Ludovici. The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche 8 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964). Der Fall Wagner was
originally published in German in 1888.
85
Reprinted in English as Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe, trans. by Gilbert Cannan (New York: Modern Library,
1938). Originally published serially in French in 1905–06.
86
Rolland’s Beethoven-Bild has recently received attention from German musicologists. Among other studies, see
Stefan Hanheide, “Die Beethoven-Interpretation von Romain Rolland und ihre methodischen Grundlagen”, Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft 61/4 (2004) 255–74; and Maria Hülle-Keeding, Romain Rollands visionäres Beethovenbild im JeanChristoph (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997).
87
A very few of these fictions, including works by Hermann Hesse, are identified and described in Carol Wootton,
“Literary portraits of Mozart”, Mosaic 18/2 (fall 1985) 77–84. See also Erich Valentin, Die goldene Spur: Mozart in der
Dichtung Hermann Hesses (Augsburg: Die Brigg, 1966); and Paulina Salz Pollak, “The influence of Mozart’s The Magic
Flute on Hesse’s Steppenwolf ”, Proteus 8/2 (fall 1991) 50–56. Other surveys, similar in certain respects to Wootton’s,
ignore Hesse in favor of Mörike, Puškin, and Shaffer’s Amadeus. See, for example, Gerhard Vom Hofe, “Mozart-Bilder
in der Literatur”, Mozart: Ansichten, ed. by Gerhard Sauder (St. Inberg: Röhrig, 1995) 101–27.
88
Stephanie Cowell, Marrying Mozart: A novel (New York: Viking, 2004).
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
many readers, the principal musical value of fiction involves reception. Like hundreds,
possibly thousands of other literary works—and not only essays, articles, and reviews,
but novels, plays, short stories, and so on—the poems examined above tell us how their
authors and contemporaries “heard” music.81 In other words, all “musical” fiction may be
grist for reception-oriented musicological millers.
Today, for instance, every student of Mozart’s 19th- and early 20th-century repu­
tation turns to reviews of performances preserved in magazines and newspapers, as well
as to portraits, scores, and other form of cultural documentation.82 The same students
might also turn—and, increasingly, are turning—to Søren Kierkegaard’s Enten/eller,83
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner,84 and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe85 for
additional information and insights. Although Nietzsche mostly uses Mozart as a stick
for Wagner-beating (at least in his later writings), and although Rolland is better known
for his opinions about Beethoven,86 all three authors have more than a few things to say
about how their contemporaries and themselves understood and enjoyed “their” Mozart.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is an especially interesting figure insofar as imaginative
fiction and reception issues are concerned, because an unusually large number of
novels, poems, plays, and short stories mention him and his music.87 More than a few
of these fictions devolve upon the composer’s real or imagined personality or social
circumstances: Mozart as prodigy, profligate, or pauper. In Mozart auf die Reise nach
Prag, for example, Mörike depicts the composer as good-natured, sensual, and somewhat
absent-minded, a man fascinated by beauty of all kinds: at once an embodiment of
Biedermeier domesticity and a proto-Romantic critic of late–18th-century Europe’s
stifling social order. In Marrying Mozart, on the other hand, Stephanie Cowell depicts
her protagonist as a rebellious, aloof, and sexually compelling youth.88 Mörike addressed
his novella to a small, highly sophisticated readership, one sympathetic to subtle ironies
and romantic inflections; his knowledge of the composer’s music informs much of his
865
866
Fig. 1: C.D. Bradlee, Mozart: A poem (Boston: privately printed, 1883).
Brown University Library.
89
Richard Howard, “After K452”, Like most revelations: New poems (New York: Pantheon, 1994) 57–58. Originally
published in 1991 in The New Yorker.
90
Arthur Margolin, “Mozart’s D major string quintet, K.593, 2nd movement, mm. 53–56”, Perspectives of new music
18/1–2 (1979–80) 381, 383–90.
91
See Charles Renouvier, Uchronie 1876: Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire): Esquisse historique apocryphe du
développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être (repr. ed., Paris: Arthème Fayard,
1988).
92
Bernard Bastable, Dead, Mr. Mozart (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
93
Leon Botstein, “Aesthetics and ideology in the fin-de-siècle Mozart revival”, Current musicology 51 (1993) 6, 10.
94
Ibid., 13.
95
C.D. Bradlee, Mozart: A poem (Boston: privately printed, 1883). The author thanks the trustees of Brown
University Library for permission to reprint in facsimile this unique document.
96
Richard Specht, Mozart: Zwölf Gedichte, illus. by Heinrich Lefler (Wien: M. Munk, ca. 1910). The volume is
unpaginated.
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
story. Cowell’s larger readership probably consists mostly of “true romance” enthusiasts,
and she employs tropes from that genre as well as from historical novels of several kinds.
She has little to say about music, however.
Other fictions deal primarily with one or more of Mozart’s compositions. “After
K452” by Richard Howard89 and “Mozart’s D major string quintet K.593, 2nd movement,
mm. 53–56” by Arthur Margolin90 are cases in point. (Die Zauberflöte, Don Giovanni,
and the Requiem have been much more frequently fictionalized.) Musicologists may not
care for Howard’s and Margolin’s poems, however, because neither actually mentions
“music”—and this, in spite of the fact that Margolin’s effort was published in Perspectives, a
professional, peer-reviewed journal. Still other novels and stories about Mozart belong to
the literary genre 19th-century fantasist Charles Renouvier dubbed uchronias: “alternate”
histories of imaginary futures.91 Imagine that Mozart moved to England in his youth and
lived there into his sixties, where he composed an opera entitled Susan and Michael but
never wrote a Requiem: this is the premise of Bernard Bastable’s novel Dead, Mr. Mozart.92
Bastable’s book is primarily a crime thriller, whereas Mozart in mirrorshades—as we shall
see below—combines distopian uchronia with pointed social satire.
Comparatively few and far between, early–19th-century fictions often praised
Mozart for moral as well as musical qualities. This made sense for several reasons—
chief among them the fact that, prior to the last one hundred years or so, only a handful
of Mozart’s works were performed with any frequency. As Leon Botstein has explained,
his subject’s reputation was transformed during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when
Mozart was perceived as an “ideal candidate for aesthetic renewal” because of his
innocence, stylistically “sweet” compositional style, universal appeal, and psychological
profundity.93 These qualities eventually led to what Botstein has epitomized as “an
almost unbearable excess” of late–20th-century “Mostly Mozart” broadcasts, festivals,
and recordings.94
Botstein supports his arguments largely with references to musical journalism and
the opinions of musicologists and conductors, including such “antique” authorities as
Eduard Hanslick and Richard Strauss; he eschews fiction in favor of belles letters as a
source of information. Nevertheless, novelists and poets have also helped remake Mozart
in their own images. Consider the poem published in 1883 by Boston’s C.D. Bradlee,
which refers to the composer as a “perfect artist” and possessed of “a great, uplifting, holy
grace” [fig. 1].”95 Richard Specht, who later edited Der Merkur, published an early–20thcentury tribute of his own: twelve “Mozart poems” epitomizing and exalting individual
operatic characters [fig. 2].96 By World War I, in other words, Mozart as international
musical superstar had “arrived”.
867
868
Fig. 2: Richard Specht, Requiem from Mozart: Zwölf Gedichte
(Wien: M. Munk, ca. 1910).
We know the Mozart of our fathers’ time
Was gay, rococo, sweet, but not sublime,
A Viennese Italian; that is changed
Since music critics learned to feel ‘estranged’;
Now it’s the Germans he is classed amongst,
A Geist whose music was composed from Angst,
At International Festivals enjoys
An equal status with the Twelve-Tone Boys.97
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
In 1956, to cite a more recent example, W.H. Auden published his Metalogue
to “The magic flute”. An assessment of the composer’s character as well as his music,
Auden’s Metalogue reflects its author’s expert knowledge of 18th-century opera and
verse: it was Auden who, together with Chester Kallman, wrote the libretto for The
rake’s progress. In one passage Auden facetiously summarizes a century and more of
Mozart-Rezeptionsgeschichte in terms of national identities, with a little mid–20thcentury Existentialism thrown in:
(Or possibly, as Botstein has suggested, a position of cultural superiority—rather than
mere equality—insofar as Schoenberg’s and Webern’s 21st-century reputations are
concerned.) In another part of his Metalogue, Auden brings the story of Die Zauberflöte
up-to-date, costuming its cast as American academics. The Queen of the Night, for
example, is presented as “A highly paid and most efficient Dean / (Who, as we all know,
really runs the College).” Sarastro—the poet’s “voice”—finds himself “Teaching the
History of Ancient Myth / At Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Bennington or Smith”.98 Pamina, in
the meantime, works as a fact-checker for Time magazine, while her graduate-student
husband acquires “manly wisdom as he wishes / While changing diapers and doing
dishes”—a suburban adaptation of Tamino’s Trials by Fire and Water.99
Of importance especially to the post-1970s Mozart reception has been the success
of Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of Shaffer’s stage play.100 Auden’s Mozart,
who “indulged in toilet humour with his cousin” even as he “created masterpieces by the
dozen”, anticipates Forman’s film portrait and, in this, anticipated a thousand Salzburg
gift-shop souvenirs. Because it presents the composer as a “wild and crazy guy”, freespirited and sexy (even as it preserves and reinforces his status as creative culture-god),
Amadeus transformed Mozart into a pop icon, a composer of movie music and cell-phone
ring tones.101 Thanks to Forman and other Hollywood film-makers, compositions such
869
97
W.H. Auden, Metalogue to “The magic flute”. Repr. in Auden, Selected poetry (2nd ed., New York: Vintage, 1970)
174. The use of music as a way of situating fictions in terms of national cultures as well as ethnic political causes is
becoming ever more widespread. See, for example, Sean V. Golden, “Traditional Irish music in contemporary Irish
literature”, Mosaic 12 (1979) 1–23.
98
Auden, “Metalogue”, 175.
99
Ibid., 175–76.
100
Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman (1984).
101
Although they have little to do with imaginative literature, “classical” ring tones have become important to students
of postmodern culture. As Erkki Pekkilä explains, “a high-pitched musical fragment from a Mozart symphony”, when
employed as a ring-tone—today a downloadable source of musical information—transforms its users and listeners into
“creators or conveyers of new cultural signifiers”. Erkki Pekkilä, “A theme (and world) of one’s own: The semiotics and
ownership of cell-phone ring tones”: a paper presented at the 17th congress of the International Musicological Society,
Leuven, and summarized in IMS 2002: 17th International Congress. Programme abstracts, the congress program (Leuven:
Alamire Foundation, 2002) 166.
870
as Eine kleine Nachtmusik and portions of the Requiem have become almost as familiar
in pop-culture circles as certain songs by Irving Berlin and the Beatles.102
The various ways Mozart’s career and creations have been described, distorted,
or speculated upon in post-Amadeus imaginative literature also exemplify aspects of
the composer’s emerging postmodern reputation and influence. Consider three recent
Mozart fictions: the bizarre “alternative” Künstlerporträt of Sterling’s and Shiner’s Mozart
in mirrorshades; Rendell’s A judgement in stone, with its sophisticated and ironic references
to Don Giovanni; and the academically precise playfulness of The Mozart forgeries, a
“caper novel” by Daniel Leeson.103 Mozart in mirrorshades satirizes the retroactive
corruption of a lost and lovely past by an unspeakably awful “present”. For its authors,
Mozart’s status as postmodern media “star” personalizes a tale of endless “alternative”
Europes ready and waiting to be looted by late-capitalist American corporations. Before
the end of the story the young musician manages to secure a green card and escapes to
the United States, where one of his pop tunes has already reached “number five on the
Billboard charts! Number five!”104 The very existence of science fiction “about” classical
music suggests that “pop culture” is becoming a synonym for “culture”. Unlike many other
recent fictions, Sterling’s and Shiner’s story has even been evaluated in a professional
musicological periodical.105
A judgement in stone, on the other hand, draws upon the stern justice meted out in
Don Giovanni as well as upon Mozart’s reputation as a “classy” composer, one that up-todate, well-to-do people ought to—and often do—listen to. The Statue that confronts
Da Ponte’s fictional libertine is transformed by Rendell into “a stone that breathed”:106
housemaid Eunice Parchman. An illiterate, lower-class servant, Eunice murders her
sophisticated employers the Cloverdales (husband George, wife Jacqueline, daughter
Melinda, and adopted son Giles) because they live a life of pleasure she can neither
understand nor sympathize with. Rendell coordinates Eunice’s fictional butchery with
a televised broadcast of Mozart’s dramma giocoso. Thus, as a van driven by Joan Smith,
Eunice’s partner in crime, enters the Cloverdale’s drive, we “hear” the Don singing “O
guarda, guarda” (Look, look!).107 A few minutes later, Jacqueline—who declines to
accompany her husband into the kitchen, where Eunice and Joan are preparing to kill the
entire family—settles “back against the sofa cushions” as act 2 begins with the quarrel
between Leporello and the Don: “Ma che ho ti fatto, che vuoi lasciarmi?” (But what have
I done to you that you wish to leave me?).108 In the kitchen, as Eunice and Joan shoot
George in the neck with a shotgun, we hear in the background, “O, taci inguisto core” (Be
silent, treacherous heart).109 Although it predates Amadeus by seven years, A judgement
in stone is perhaps even more critical of social stereotypes associated with music than
102
See Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, Amadeus: Milos Formans Film als musikhistorisches Phänomen (Graz: Akademische
Drunk- und Verlagsanstalt, 1999).
103
Daniel N. Leeson, The Mozart forgeries: A caper novel for the serious Mozart aficionado (New York: iUniverse,
2004).
104
Sterling and Shiner, Mozart in mirrorshades, 238.
105
See René T.A. Lysloff, “Mozart in mirrorshades: Ethnomusicology, technology, and the politics of representation”,
Ethnomusicology: Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology 41/2 (1997) 206–17. A few other works of speculative fiction,
including Philip K. Dick’s influential novel Do androids dream of electric sheep? (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968),
may also have been influenced by Mozart. See Patrick A. McCarthy, “Do androids dream of magic flutes?” Paradoxa:
Studies in world literary genres 5/13–14 (1999–2000) 344–52.
106
Rendell, A judgement in stone, 156.
107
Ibid., 147.
108
Ibid., 153.
109
Ibid.
See, for example, Leeson, “The miracle of the Mozart manuscripts”, Musical America 111/1 ( January 1991) 23–25.
An especially interesting review of The Mozart forgeries, written by D.W. Krummel, appeared in Notes 61/3
(March 2005) 777–78. See also, The clarinet 32 ( June 2005) 76.
112
Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (London: Chatto & Windus, 1923).
113
See John Aplin, “Aldous Huxley’s music criticism: Some sources for the fiction”, English language notes 21/1
(September 1983) 58–62. Aplin also comments on “comparable passages” devoted to Bach and Beethoven in Point counter
point (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), and on adaptations from Huxley’s reportage in his story “Young Archimedes”.
See also Zack Bowen, “Allusions to musical works in [Huxley’s] Point counter point”, Studies in the novel 9 (1977) 488–
508. Finally, see Werner Wolf, “‘The Musicalization of Fiction’: Versuche intermedialer Grenzüberschreitung zwischen
Musik und Literatur im englischen Erzählen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts”, Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines
interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets, ed. by Jörg Helbig (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1998) 133–64; Wolf ’s essay considers not
only Huxley’s novel, but “fugal” works by Thomas de Quincey and Gabriel Josipovici.
114
See E.M. Forster, Howard’s end, ed. by Alistair M. Duckworth (New York: Bedford; St. Martin’s, 1997) esp.
42–52. Forster’s novel was originally published in 1910.
115
Reprinted in The collected tales of E.M. Forster (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) and other anthologies.
116
Willa Cather, The song of the lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).
117
In spite of the importance of music within her novels and short stories, Cather “recognized fully her own limitations
where music was concerned”. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living: A personal record (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) 48.
Although she took piano lessons as a child, Cather “was more interested in what her teacher could tell her about other
things, especially his European past, than she was in playing” the instrument itself. Richard Giannone, Music in Willa
Cather’s fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968) 4. Cather’s real-life interest in her foreign-born teacher
suggests Thea’s interest in Andor Harsanyi’s invented background and knowledge of poetry.
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
Mozart in mirrorshades. Throughout Rendell’s pages, gendered depictions of power are
consistently inverted: It is the Cloverdales, men and women alike, who are “feminized” in
terms of their cultivated tastes, while Eunice, their murderer, is “masculinized” in terms
of her appearance, strength, and unshakable Philistinism.
Finally, The Mozart forgeries. Reminiscent of situations scattered throughout
detective stories from the 1960s to the present day, Leeson’s novel pursues to the bitter
(hypothetical) end the problems inherent in faking and selling not mere copies of extant
Mozart manuscripts, but newly “created” 21st-century holographs of the clarinet quintet,
K.581, and clarinet concerto, K.622. Filled with musicological facts, including the titles
of actual reference works, The Mozart forgeries also mentions such real-life musicologists
as J. Rigbie Turner, recently of The Morgan Library and Museum; some of the novel’s
most exciting scenes are set in or near Sotheby’s and Christie’s actual New York auction
houses. Leeson is not only himself a Mozart expert110 but a storyteller who entertains
us with his expertise. His novel remains one of a very few contemporary fictions to have
been acclaimed in the professional musicological press.111
With the exception of a few novels, including Davenport’s and Leeson’s, “musical”
fictions have mostly been written by musical amateurs. This is not to argue, however,
that educated and even expert musical opinions are rare in fiction. Aldous Huxley’s
Antic Hay,112 for instance, contains a scene adapted from a review of Mozart’s G-minor
string quintet, K.516, written in 1922–23, when Huxley served as music critic for the
Westminster gazette.113 The celebrated fifth chapter of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s end wittily
“reviews” an imaginary performance of Beethoven’s fifth symphony as well as masterpieces
by Brahms, Debussy, and Elgar.114 “Coordination”, another of Forster’s stories, even
includes Beethoven as a character.115 Finally, Willa Cather’s Song of the lark—the story
of a Great Plains farm girl who becomes a celebrated singer—incorporates conductor
Theodore Thomas, singer Lilli Lehmann, and other real-life musicians into its cast of
characters.116
The song of the lark, however, penetrates farther into music than do Forster’s and
Huxley’s fictions.117 So does Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer. Thea Kronborg, Cather’s
protagonist, is modeled on Olive Fremstad, a Swedish-born Wagnerian soprano raised
110
111
871
in Minnesota;118 other characters and incidents recall Cather’s own Nebraska girlhood.
In addition to exploring the possibilities of musical biography in her conjoined TheaFremstad heroine, Cather attempts at least once in The song of the lark to “reproduce the
emotional effect of the Wagner operas upon the printed page.”119 Of eight short stories
published by Cather between 1915 and 1920, four portray “artists who live by their
voice[es], whose singing is their work” in life.120 One of these stories, A Wagner matinée,
has been called “the most poignant account of Wagner’s music jarring awake dormant
feeling” in American women filled with “fin de siècle ferment”.121
Perry Meisel approaches The song of the lark and other fictions from a quite different
but equally interesting perspective. For him, Cather’s novels, including The song of the
lark, “dramatize in thematic as well as rhetorical ways” the same “loops or crossings” he
perceives “at work in electric blues and rhythm and blues”: chiasmi (in the language of
classical rhetoric) that reveal the problematic paired illusions “of deep mind and open
space, interior and exterior, inside and outside, dandy and cowboy, East and West”.122
In other words, as Thea travels from rural Colorado to Chicago (and back), she
dramatizes—as do the blues and rock ’n’ roll—certain key conflicts in America’s cultural
and social development.
Of Lena Geyer is also exceptionally “musical”, especially insofar as it embodies its
author’s intimate personal knowledge of composers, performers, and works associated
with the operatic stage. Davenport’s novel is full of precisely phrased musical history,
including descriptions of Vienna at the turn of the last century and of the Metropolitan
Opera in New York City. Herself the daughter of celebrated diva Alma Gluck, Davenport
contributed columns about music to The New Yorker magazine and published a wellknown biography of Mozart.123 Yet surprisingly few musicologists have taken her
seriously.124 True, Davenport distanced herself from certain autobiographical aspects of
her novel, asserting that Geyer was not her mother and reducing Guido Vestri, Geyer’s
fictional conductor, coach, and lover, to the significance of “a wooden Indian” who “leaks
sawdust”.125 In explaining how she struggled to complete her book, however, Davenport
confessed that, unless she “could recreate the authenticity of the several years between
1908 and 1915 when Maestro [Arturo Toscanini] at the Metropolitan made operatic
history that has no parallel, there [would have been] no novel.”126 (Of Lena Geyer also
includes Gustav Mahler among its personnel.) Even Joseph Horowitz, who sought out
almost every existing source of information about the impact of Toscanini’s conducting
on American culture, scarcely acknowledges Davenport’s existence in his “culture god”
872
See Cather, “Three American singers”, McClure’s magazine 42 (December 1913) 33–48.
Quoted from Cather’s preface to Gertrude Hall, The Wagnerian romances (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925) vii.
120
Giannone, Music in Willa Cather’s fiction, 99.
121
Joseph Horowitz, “Finding a ‘real self ’: American women and the Wagner cult of the late nineteenth century”, The
musical quarterly 78/2 (summer 1994) 191, 195.
122
Perry Meisel, The cowboy and the dandy: Crossing over from romanticism to rock and roll (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999) 85–86.
123
See Davenport, Mozart (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).
124
With reference to Geyer as a fictional diva and from a feminist perspective, see Susan J. Leonardi, “To have a
voice: The politics of the diva”, Perspectives on contemporary literature 13 (1987) 65–72. An essay of my own considers
Davenport’s novel as an exemplar of America’s fondness for and reception of Viennese operetta traditions. See Michael
Saffle, “‘Do you ever dream of Vienna?’ America’s glorification of musical central Europe, 1865–1965”, Identität – Kultur
– Raum: Kulturelle Praktiken und die Ausbildung von Imagined Communities in Nordamerika und Zentraleuropa, ed. by
Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner, and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2001) 59–76 passim.
125
Davenport, Too strong for fantasy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967) 216–17.
126
Ibid., 217.
118
119

Saffle | Musicology and fiction
study.127 And this, even though descriptions of a “fictional” Vestri caused a furious reallife Toscanini to exclaim, “It is not me, not at all. Vergogna! Shame on you!”128 One feels
the Maestro may have protested too much.
Save, perhaps, for some of Chaucer’s poetry and for Hardy’s “Lines”, none of the
imaginative literary works discussed above appears to incorporate anything essentially
or especially “musical” in its organization or style. Even if Meisel is correct and Cather’s
fiction in some sense “works” like rock and the blues, The song of the lark is far more
“about” music than “of ” it. Can fiction be put together “like” music? If so, how? Four
pairs of works, each composed of a fiction and a musical composition, appear to share
formal, expressive, or stylistic similarities: Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations and
Bach’s eponymous masterpiece; Eduard Mörike’s Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag and Don
Giovanni; Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice and Mozart’s piano concerto no. 9, K.271;
and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Beethoven’s sonata op. 111. A fifth work of
fiction, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, can be read in terms of the musical as well as more broadly
cultural traditions that inform its contents and textures.

For centuries, speakers of English have used the word “form” to refer to shapes as well
as boundaries, collections, populations, and regulations; “form” is also understood as
suggesting a “style of expressing the thoughts and ideas in literary or musical composition,
including the arrangement and order” of their “different parts”.129 For Carl Dahlhaus,
musical form involves structural coherence on a large scale—the overall coherence,
for example, of a sonata movement rather than the significance of particular chords,
key changes, timbres, or tunes within it.130 In this sense musical form seems to exist
independently of individual composers or styles. Melodies and modulations, for example,
may come and go, but the “sonata idea” (to borrow a phrase from William S. Newman)
persists—if not forever, at least for quite a while.131 On the other hand, musical coherence
may exist outside of, or in addition to, formal traditions and patterns. A piano piece may
be called “sonata” but have nothing to do with so-called “sonata form”.
In describing his own evolution as an author of imaginative literature, Gabriel
Josipovici has already answered the first question posed above (“Can fiction be put
together ‘like’ music?”) with a qualified “yes”.132 What’s more, in Goldberg: Variations he
See Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How he became an American culture-god and helped create a new
audience for old music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). Horowitz mentions Davenport twice (ibid., 153 and 187n);
on both occasions, however, he acknowledges her only at second-hand.
128
Quoted in Barry Paris, “Unconquerable (Marcia Davenport)”, The New Yorker 67/9 (22 April 1991) 66. For a
more detailed account of the author’s encounter with Toscanini, see Davenport, Too strong for fantasy, 222–23.
129
The Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) vol. 6, 78–82.
130
Among a host of publications in which he considered formal aspects of musical compositions, see Carl Dahlhaus,
Between romanticism and modernism: Four studies in the music of the later nineteenth century, trans. by Mary Whittall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) passim.
131
See, for example, William S. Newman, The sonata since Beethoven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1969), as well as other volumes and editions of Newman’s “History of the sonata idea”.
132
See Gabriel Josipovici, “Music and literary form”, Contemporary music review 5 (1989) 65–75. I write “qualified”,
because “Music and literary form” was published in 1989, Goldberg: Variations in 2002. Nevertheless, Josipovici seems
always to have taken seriously the musical possibilities of fiction. Among other things he explains that Stravinsky was
the “presiding genius” over his own ( Josipovici’s) first novel, which he constructed out of dialogue and lists instead of
narrative prose. Josipovici’s realization that such a thing was possible called to his mind Stravinsky’s “recognition of
the musical possibilities” inherent in ignoring conventional Russian syntax when setting Russian verse to music. For
Stravinsky, this “was one of the most rejoicing discoveries of my life. I was like a man who suddenly finds that his finger
127
873
answers the second question (“If so, how?”) by way of demonstration.133 As Werner
Wolf has explained, Josipovici’s novel embodies more than “structural analogies between
textual and musical form.”134 Instead, it constitutes
one of the most remarkable additions to the field in which fiction attempts to meet
music.… [It] not only discusses music, as countless other authors before [ Josipovici]
have done, mostly on the basis of fictional biographies of musicians and composers …
but also aspires to the condition of music … in a much subtler way and moves beyond
a merely plot-related concentration on music.135
Here is a work of imaginative literature that, at least to some extent, can be “read”
(listened to) as if it were a piece of music: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Aria mit verschiedenen
Veraenderungen, BWV 988,136 popularly known as the “Goldberg variations” (after
Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, musician to one of Bach’s patrons, Count Keyserling of
Dresden).
In its division into thirty chapters, for example, Josipovici’s novel resembles Bach’s
composition—itself made up of 30 variations, as well as a binary theme or“Aria” presented
before the variations begin and repeated after they end.137 Even the novel’s absence of
“theme”—there is no “aria”—is analogous to a musical puzzle pointed out recently by
Peter Williams. If Bach’s “thirty movements” are variations on a given theme, Williams
asks, “why is [that theme] never heard again or even hinted at … until it is repeated, sans
différence, at the end” of the entire cycle?138 Does Josipovici’s novel even have a theme?
If so, what is it? In part paraphrasing Stephen Abell, Wolf insists that “there is not a
single chapter [of Goldberg: Variations] that cannot in some way be related” to “creative
capacity”, and hardly any chapters “in which emotional human relations do not play
a role.”139 Josipovici, however, does not anywhere identify either of these “themes” (or
single two-part theme) as such. Nor are all of his chapters as unmistakably concerned
“thematically” with creativity or human relations as Bach’s variations are constructed
upon a common fundamental harmonic progression that begins
Example 3: Harmonic foundation of Bach’s “Goldberg variations”, mm. 1–8
874
can be bent from the second joint as well as from the first” (quoted in “Music and literary form”, 67). Later, Josipovici also
explains that other works were influenced by particular compositions, including a performance of Harrison Birtwistle’s
The triumph of time (ibid., 69–70).
133
Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations (London: Carcanet, 2002).
134
Werner Wolf, “The role of music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations”, Style 37 (2003) 295.
135
Ibid., 294–95.
136
In full, and in the original German: Clavier Übung bestehend in einer Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen vors
Clavicimbal mit 2 Manualen. See Peter Williams, Bach: The Goldberg variations (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001) 3–4. Like Bach’s Count, Josipovici’s Mr. Westfield asks his own Goldberg to “read to him till
dawn or else till I am sure he is asleep, whichever is the first”. Josipovici, Goldberg, 1.
137
For a general discussion of fiction in terms of variations form, see Brown, “Theme and variations as a literary
form”, Yearbook of comparative and general literature 27 (1978) 35–43. This intriguing article suggests that both Eve’s
morning song to Adam in John Milton’s Paradise lost, as well as the whole of Robert Browning’s Ring and the book, are in
certain ways analogous to musical theme-and-variations form. Wolf, on the other hand, compares only Bach’s individual
variations to Josipovici’s individual chapters.
138
Williams, Bach: The Goldberg variations, 35.
139
Quoted in Wolf, “The role of music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations”, 302. See also Stephen Abell,
“Scales, trills and runs: Gabriel Josipovici, ‘Goldberg Variations’”, Times literary supplement (20 December 2002) 21.
Finally, Bach’s variations are arranged in ten groups of three variations
each, with every third variation a canon.140 No such subdivisions are present in
Josipovici’s novel, even though some of its chapters are called “canons”.
The first two sections of [the novella] present Mozart in his encounter with the rococo,
showing how it wastes his human resources but bears splendid fruit in that part of his
musical creation which was adaptable to rococo style. The last two sections present the
Mozart whose warm humanity transcends the limits of the rococo and whose tragic
genius transcends human comprehension. The balance of gaiety and tragedy, harmony
and conflict … is symbolized within each part in a pair of thematic images: spilling
liquid and spontaneous growth, the artfully nurtured tree and the symmetrically
140
See Williams, Bach: The Goldberg variations, 41–42 and elsewhere for tables and charts of organizational materials
and principles in Bach’s composition.
141
Josipovici, Goldberg, 112.
142
Wolf, “The role of music in Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations”, 300; italics in the original.
143
Ibid., 298. Interestingly enough, Wolf begins his lengthy article with a quotation from Walter Pater: “All art
constantly aspires towards the condition of music”. Ibid., 294.
144
Raymond Immerwahr, “Narrative and ‘musical’ structure in Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag”, Studies in Germanic
languages and literatures: In memory of Fred O. Nolte, ed. by Erich Hofacker and Liselotte Dieckmann (St. Louis:
Washington University Press, 1963) 103.
145
Ibid., 106.
146
Ibid.; italics added.
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
On the other hand, aspects of Josipovici’s fiction point unmistakably and
imaginatively toward certain of Bach’s variations. The greater length, stylistic stance, and
unusual “sectionality” of chapter 16, for example, suggests the greater length, ceremonial
rhythms, and sectional divisions of Bach’s sixteenth variation. It is precisely this chapter
that alludes in its “plot” to the historical origins of Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer, BWV
1079. Just as Bach was asked to improvise on a musical theme provided him by Frederick
the Great, so Josipovici’s protagonist Samuel Goldberg is asked to improvise on a verbal
theme: “A man who had enough wanted everything…. As a result he was left with
nothing. Treat this not as a morality but as a tragedy.”141 Wolf epitomizes this scene as “a
mise en abyme” that comprises “a complete imitation of the form” of Bach’s variation, itself
a French overture.142 Explicit references to appropriate musical materials and processes
also occur throughout Josipovici’s novel. Among these is a discussion of fugue—itself,
perhaps, a kind of verbal fugue—in chapter 18, which suggests at least something of
the contrapuntal structure of Bach’s 18th variation. Wolf has argued that a verbal text
“can never really be musicalized”.143 Nevertheless, Josipovici makes numerous gestures
toward a kind of fictive “musicalization”.
Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag refers to Don Giovanni in several places, but Mörike
never claimed to have modeled his novella on Mozart’s opera. According to Raymond
Immerwahr, however, Mörike’s “unique achievement”—which in large part resides in
a fictional “evocation of creative genius in another art” (i.e., music)—embodies certain
“formal principles” evocative of Mozart and his age.144 Furthermore, “in each of the
[novella’s] two climactic sections, the crux of the narrative is Mozart’s creation of music
for Don Giovanni: in the one the rustic wedding dance, in the other the music of the
statue and of infernal retribution.”145 Immerwahr finally insists that a “two-peaked
structure was … imposed upon Mörike by the musical subject of his novella”, modeled
upon the four halves of Mozart’s two acts:146
875
ordered fountain, solid handicraft and agrarian cultivation, consuming fire and icy
cold.147
Like other students of “musical” fiction, Immerwahr considers themes and motifs.
Unlike many of his colleagues, however, he seems more interested in “spirit and
structure”.148 In other words, he moves from structure and motif (liquid, tree, fountain,
and so on) to overall “style” and sensibility. For Wallis Field, on the other hand, particular
“colour relationships and symbolism” provide a way of uncovering Mörike’s underlying
“symmetry of themes and form”.149 Field’s discussion suggests a fugal analysis that begins
with the locations and harmonic characteristics of the novella’s subjects, counter-subjects,
and episodes. Immerwahr’s suggests a Schenkerian reduction from which details have
been removed, rather than located, in order to reveal an underlying “line”. Incidentally,
no one seems to have read Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag in terms of musical form per
se, but Immerwahr himself published another, quite different interpretation of Mörike’s
masterpiece.150
All this aside, can fictions like Goldberg: Variations and Mozart auf die Reise nach
Prag actually help us understand music? The answer would seem to be no, at least not
insofar as Josipovici’s and Mörike’s literary relationships with Bach’s and Mozart’s scores
are concerned. If, however, one thinks of music as more or other than “scores”, the answer
would seem to be yes. Our perception and reception of music involves a great deal more
than music “itself ”. As Nicholas Cook has suggested, music and especially (but not
exclusively) musical performances should be understood as scripts rather than texts.151
Scores may exist in splendid isolation from everyday experience, but music heard,
felt, and thought about does not and cannot. Cook’s arguments call to mind drama
theorist Baz Kershaw’s assertion that “no item in the environment of performance”, even
what happens “off-stage”, “can be discounted as irrelevant”.152 Just as every performance
contributes to the reception of a given composer or conductor or soloist, so every
reading—and reader—contributes, consciously or unconsciously, to new ways of
understanding a given literary device or character or cultural circumstance. Many post­
structuralist critics would agree that reading is itself a form of “performance”.153
Robert Wallace has argued that Jane Austen’s novels share what he calls “general
stylistic achievements” with Mozart’s music, especially with certain piano concertos,
and that both kinds of works can better be understood in terms of each other.154 For
Wallace, Mozart and Austen employ the same or similar “essential forms” of expression;
876
Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 118.
149
G. Wallis Field, “Silver and oranges: Notes on Mörike’s Mozart-Novelle”, Seminar: A journal of Germanic studies
14/4 (1978) 244.
150
See Raymond Immerwahr, “Apocalyptic trumpets: The inception of Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag”, PMLA 70
(1955) 390–407. Still other scholars have examined Mörike’s novella from a psychological angle in order to foreground
issues of creativity. See, for example, Ursula Mahlendorf, “ Eduard Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague: Stages and
outcomes of the creative experience”, Mörike’s muses: Critical essays on Eduard Mörike, ed. by Jeffrey Adams (Columbia,
S.C.: Camden House, 1990) 95–111.
151
See Nicholas Cook, “Music as performance”, The cultural study of music, ed. by Martin Clayton, et al. (New York:
Routledge, 2003) 204–14 passim.
152
Baz Kershaw, The politics of performance: Radical theater as cultural intervention (New York: Routledge, 1992) 22.
153
What is sometimes called “reader-response criticism” has a lengthy history. See, for example, Louise M. Rosenblatt,
Literature as exploration (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938). Nevertheless, such criticism is sometimes claimed by
poststructuralist theorists as a method of their own.
154
Robert K. Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart: Classical equilibrium in fiction and music (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1983).
147
148
Ibid., 2, 5.
Ibid., 45.
157
Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). Originally published in 1813, in three
volumes.
158
Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart, 45–46 and 93.
159
Information about these subjects may be found in Patrick Piggott, “Music”, The Jane Austen companion, ed. by
J. David Grey, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1986) 314–16. For information especially about Pride and prejudice, see
Patrick Piggott, The innocent diversion: A study of music in the life and writings of Jane Austen (London: Clover Hill, 1979)
50–63.
More than a few scholars have devoted themselves to issues associated with music, culture, class, and gender in
Austen’s fictions. See, for example, Hélène La Rue, “Music, literature and etiquette: Musical instruments and social
identity from Castiglione to Austen”, Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place, ed. by Martin Stokes
(Oxford: Berg, 1994) 189–205; Kathryn L. Shanks Libin, “Music, character, and social standing in Jane Austen’s Emma”,
Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 22 (2000) 15–30; and Mollie Sandock, “‘I burn with
contempt for my foes’: Jane Austen’s music collections and women’s lives in regency England”, Persuasions: Journal of the
Jane Austen Society of North America 23 (2001) 105–17.
160
Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart, 5, 83.
155
156
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
As a consequence, their compositions and fictions resemble each other as exemplars of
“classical equilibrium”.155 In effect, Wallace postulates a sophisticated pedagogy that uses
fiction to “explain” music. And vice versa: Wallace argues that we may be able to learn
more about either music or fiction (or particular works of music or fiction, or the epochs
in which they were created) if we compare them with one another.
More specifically, Wallace suggests that Mozart’s works tend to remain “within
boundaries” and “close” to home keys, just as Austen’s characters tend to “remain indoors,
seldom venturing out—or far—for travel”.156 If “ home” and “indoors” are analogous to a
“home key”, the shift in locale from Longbourne to Netherfield in chapter 7 of Pride and
prejudice157 may be said to resemble (as Wallace suggests) the harmonic transition from
tonic to dominant in the opening movement of Mozart’s E-flat major piano concerto,
K.271.158 In presenting and defending these analogies, Wallace pays comparatively
little attention either to the music Austen owned and probably played, or to musical
references in her novels.159 He appears less interested in content than in structure, and
less interested even in broad-based structural principles than in his readers’ appreciation
of “essential” expressive devices and stylistic gestures.
Taken at face value, some of Wallace’s assertions are musicologically problematic.
He implies, for example, that Mozart’s harmonies seldom or never wander far from
home. But how far is “far”? In Mozart’s C-minor concerto, K.491, the first movement
wanders all the way from that key to F-sharp minor, about as far around the circle of
fifths as tonal music can go. Again: if chapters 1–10 of Pride and prejudice are compared
in functional-harmonic terms to the first movement of Mozart’s E-flat concerto, the
“modulation” from Longbourne to Netherfield takes place much too late to match
the analogous portion of Mozart’s exposition. Wallace, however, readily admits both
that Austen “did not consciously model her works on the structure of Mozart’s”, and
that “many Mozart concertos would have served about as well as K.271” insofar as his
discussion of Pride and prejudice is concerned.160
In other respects, Wallace is perhaps more “musicological” (as well as more
interdisciplinary) than many of his colleagues. He does not merely refer to compositions,
but reproduces examples from them on his pages and discusses those examples as a
professional musicologist might. As a teacher of music and fiction, Wallace asks “whether
the kind of juxtapositions we often find on parallel time charts of the arts [can] be given
more precise meaning” by avoiding “influence studies”; he encourages his students to
877
compare works “as isolated art objects” even before they turn to “the history of style in
the separate arts.”161
Whether Mörike strove in Mozart auf die Reise nach Prag to suggest the alternating
emotional currents of Don Giovanni is uncertain, although his novella is certainly “about”
Mozart and his opera. Thomas Mann, on the other hand, openly acknowledged that he
modeled—or remodeled—his Doktor Faustus on Beethoven’s sonata in C minor, op.
111. Mann’s several musical fictions, including the novellas Der kleine Herr Friedemann
and Tonio Kröger, have several times been examined in light of Wagnerian leitmotive162
and dodecaphonic compositional techniques.163 In his earlier works, “love-deaths”
were themselves a kind of leitmotif for Mann. At the climax of his novella Tristan,
for instance, Gabriele plays fragments of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—including the
“Liebestod”—on the piano; a day later “her condition worsens, and, like Hanno after
the exertions of his improvisation in Buddenbrooks, she dies.”164 Later, Mann sometimes
positioned musical modernism in juxtaposition with cultural decline: Much of chapter
XXII in Doktor Faustus, for example, is devoted to a detailed explanation of Arnold
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, while the novel’s concluding chapters chart the
catastrophic results of German nationalism under Hitler. At the same time Faustus also
consists of a series of carefully constructed fictional “themes”, “keys”, and “modulations”,
articulated by means of mostly unambiguous sectional divisions, some of which mirror
(as well as refer to) both the sonata-allegro form of Beethoven’s op. 111 first movement
and the theme-and-variations form of his second.165
Several kinds of evidence bear witness to Mann’s extraordinary juxtaposition of
fictional and musical materials. First, in chapter VIII of Doktor Faustus, Mann has
Wendell Kretzschmar, one of his minor characters, deliver lectures on Beethoven’s
sonata and other late works. So vivid is Kretschmar’s lecture that portions of it have
been reprinted in musicological reference works.166 Second, fragments from that lecture
Robert K. Wallace, “Teaching music and fiction: Austen and Mozart, Brontë and Beethoven”, Ars lyrica 6 (1992)
18. See also idem, “Nineteenth-century fiction, music, and painting”, Teaching literature and the other arts, ed. by JeannePierre Barricelli, Joseph Gibaldi, and Estella Lauter (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990)
103–07.
162
See, for example, George W. Reinhardt, “Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: A Wagnerian novel”, Mosaic 18/4
(December 1985) 109–23. Other studies of Mann and Wagner include Erkhard Hefrich, “Richard Wagner in Thomas
Manns Joseph-Tetralogie”, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch. Neue Folge 35 (1994) 275–90; Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Im
Schatten Wagners: Thomas Mann über Richard Wagner. Texte und Zeugnisse, 1895–1955”, Thomas Mann, ed. by
Hans Rudolf Vaget (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999) 301–36; and Ette Wolfram, “Vom Ursprung weg und in den
Ursprung hinein: Zum Mythos bei Wagner und Thomas Mann”, Richard Wagner: Konstrukteur der Modern, ed. by
Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999) 227–59. Another of Vaget’s essays, this one entitled “WagnerKult und nationalsozialistische Herrschaft: Hitler, Wagner, Thomas Mann, und die ‘nationale Erhebung’” [published in
Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloß-Elmau-Symposion, ed. by Saul Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (München: Beck,
2000) 264–82], exemplifies recent studies in the conjoined fields of German nationalism, music, and the Nazis.
163
Examples include Michael Neumann, “Zwölftontechnik? Adrian Leverkühn zwischen Schönberg und Wagner”,
Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch im Auftrage der Görres-Gesellschaft 43 (2002) 193–211; and H.J. Schaal, “Thomas
Manns Musikerroman Doktor Faustus: Der Einfluss von Arnold Schönberg und Theodor W. Adorno”, Das Orchester
46/1 ( January 1998) 2–7. Like the books and articles identified above in note 162, all of these studies appeared in print
since the completion, but not necessarily since the publication, of Michael Saffle, “Text as music / Music as text: Thomas
Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Beethoven’s sonata, op. 111”, Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongreß der
Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, ed. by Hermann Danuser, et al. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1999)
215–21.
164
Walter Frisch, German modernism: Music and the arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 196.
165
Again, see Saffle, “Text as music / Music as text”, passim.
166
See, for example, The Beethoven companion, ed. by Thomas K. Scherman and Louis Biancolli (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1972) 1051–55. Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune refer in passing to Kretzschmar’s lecture (although they
misspell the character’s name); they also mention the op. 111 sonata as “provok[ing] a particularly moving passage” in
Mann’s novel “that is meant to reveal its effect on the state of mind of the German avant-garde” prior to World War II.
161
878
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
are reproduced not merely “elsewhere” in Faustus, but mirror in their locations and uses
analogous passages from Beethoven’s sonata. One of these fictive-musical fragments is
the German word Wiesengrün (“meadow green”), which calls to mind the middle name
of Frankfurt School cultural critic and musicologist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.
We know Adorno helped Mann write Faustus, because Mann says so in a second book:
his Story of a novel.167 The passage is worth reproducing in its entirety, because Mann
rarely revealed his often ironic and subtle aesthetic intentions as straightforwardly as he
does here—and because one of his intentions in Faustus was, unmistakably, Beethoven’s
sonata:
Adorno sat down at the piano and, while I stood by and watched, played for me the
entire Sonata opus 111 in a highly instructive fashion. I have never been more attentive.
I rose early the following morning and for the next three days immersed myself in a
thorough revision and extension of the lecture on the sonata, which became a significant
enrichment and embellishment of [chapter 8] and indeed of the whole book.168
Third, Beethoven’s sonata has two movements; the lecture refers to “Wiesengrün”
in that the three syllables “Wie-sen-grün” are conjoined with the motif C–G–G in the
second movement of Beethoven’s sonata:
Example 4: Beethoven, sonata in C minor, op. 111,
2nd movement, mm. 1–2
This motif, together with its conjoined musical-fictional implications, serves as the
“theme” for an interlocked series of “variations” that comprise most of the second half of
Mann’s novel. It is here (in chapters XXVI–XLVII and epilogue), too, that most of the
references to both the word “Wiesengrün” and Beethoven’s motif appear.
A great many other structural similarities and devices link sonata and novel.
Among them is a long-term “modulation” associated with the youth and early manhood
of Mann’s protagonist Adrian Leverkühn. This modulation, which mimics the I–V/
The Beethoven companion, ed. by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (London: Faber & Faber, 1971) 146 and 524.
167
See Thomas Mann, The story of a novel: The genesis of ‘Doctor Faustus’, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). Also published in England as The genesis of a novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961).
For a detailed comparison of Mann’s Faustus and story (with references to both editions), see Patrick Carnegy, Faust as
musician: A study of Thomas Mann’s novel “Doctor Faustus” (New York: New Directions, 1975).
168
Mann, The story of a novel, 48; italics added. Adorno’s influence on Mann’s novel was enormous. In addition to
Schaal’s essay (cited in note 164), see HansJörg Dörr, “Thomas Mann und Adorno: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des
Doktor Faustus”, Thomas Manns “Dr. Faustus” und die Wirkung, ed. by Rudolf Wolff (Bonn: Douvier, 1983) vol. 2,
48–91. Dörr provides matching columns of textual parallels (ibid., 69–83) between Faustus and such books and articles
by Adorno as Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1949), and “Über den Fetisch-Charakter der Musik
und die Regression des Hörens”. The former work has been reprinted as Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of modern music,
trans. by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum, 2003); the latter as “On the fetish-character
of music and the regression of listening”, in idem, Essays on music, ed. by Richard Leppert; trans. by Susan H. Gillespie
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) 288–317.
879
X–I harmonic organization of classical sonata movements,169 takes place in the novel’s
first half as Leverkühn at first embraces (in chapters III–IX or “exposition”) and then
abandons music (in chapters X–XVII or “development”), only to return to it after his
university studies in theology are over (in chapters XVIII–XXIV or “recapitulation”).
Furthermore, Mann’s fictional “first movement” is separated from the second by a
“document” (chapter XXV) that stands outside the rest of the novel’s unfolding story:
an account of Leverkühn’s encounter, real or imagined, with the Devil. Interruptions in
the opening chapters resemble the breaks in mm. 2 and 4 of Beethoven’s first movement,
while narrator Serenus Zeitblom’s high-flown literary style is suggestive of “antique” (i.e.,
French overture) gestures in Beethoven’s introduction (mm. 1–16). Finally, overlapping
stories of lost love and innocence echo aspects of Beethoven’s second movement, with its
references to “heav-en’s blue, lov-ers’ pain, fare-thee well.”170
In conclusion, Toni Morrison’s Jazz.171 This novel poses special problems, because
there is no musical “form” in jazz—at least, not insofar as widely accepted sectional
divisions, prescribed modulations, and the like are concerned. There is, however, a social
form of jazz (or, rather, several such forms), and throughout Morrison’s novel they are
often expressed in terms of gender as well as class and race. And there are jazz styles. As
a genre, jazz is widely understood and enjoyed as a collection of variegated and often
individualistic gestures and tropes: rhythmic patterns, performance practices, chord
progressions, and so on. A talented performer can “jazz” anything, even though that
“anything”—a familiar popular song, perhaps, or a chord progression—may not itself
“be” jazz. And style is elusive: no question about that. Scholars appreciate Beethoven’s
contributions to the sinfonia characteristica tradition,172 but none of them has yet written a
second, equally accomplished “Pastoral” symphony. Nor has anyone put Charlie Parker’s
distinctive spin on a stylistically analogous but otherwise new performance of Koko.
According to Tracey Sherard, Morrison’s novel is about the blues and black women’s
narratives.173 For Sherard, the medium or form through which the blues as a “specifically
female cultural form” of music is disseminated is the phonograph record.174 Jon Panish
emphasizes race rather than (or in addition to) gender. In his discussions of still other
jazz novels, including The horn by John Clellon Holmes, Panish emphasizes the “primary
performer/audience nexus” that comprises “the slowly dissipating [black] saxophone
legend Edgar Pool, the ‘horn’, and two white hipsters.”175 Jurgen Grandt, on the other
hand, argues that Morrison’s novel employs narrative strategies of style and structure
similar to those in another Jazz: a novel by Czech author Hans Janowitz.176 Finally,
880
169
See Leonard Ratner, Classic music: Expression, form, and style (New York: G. Schirmer, 1985) 217–47 passim.
Ratner’s emphasis on keys rather than themes as defining 18th- and early–19th-century sonata practices is crucial to
understanding both sonata-form traditions and ways in which sonata form may be appropriated in works of imaginative
literature.
170
Mann, Doctor Faustus, 54.
171
Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
172
See F.E. Kirby, “Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ symphony as a ‘sinfonia caracteristica’”, The musical quarterly 56/4 (October
1970) 605–23.
173
Tracy Sherard, “Women’s classic blues in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”, Genders 31 (2000). Available at www .genders
.org/g3/g31_sherard.html.
174
Ibid.
175
Jon Panish, The color of jazz: Race and representation in postwar American culture ( Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1997) 89. See also John Clellon Holmes, The horn (New York: Random House, 1953).
176
Jurgen E. Grandt, “Kinds of blue: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the jazz aesthetic”, African American review
38/2 (summer 2004) 303–22. See Hans Janowitz, Jazz (Berlin: Verlag die Schmiede, 1927; repr. ed., Bonn: Weidle,
1999). A Czech Jew who turned to pacifism after World War I, Janowitz is best known for his collaboration with Carl
Mayer on the script for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, a film directed by Robert Wiene (1920).
Saffle | Musicology and fiction
for Dirk Ludigkeit, Morrison’s novel is “above all an experiment in narrative designed
to reconfigure the relationship between the text and the reader”, based on “patterns of
adaptation created in black music”.177
Ludigkeit’s observations have perhaps the greatest immediate relevance for
musicologists, because they examine Morrison’s fiction as if it were music. Ludigkeit
likens the novel’s narrator to a “jazz performer” who him/herself introduces three
main characters (the “ensemble”), and he epitomizes “the City in 1926” as a setting that
“determines the course of events [in Jazz] in much the same way that the harmonic
structure of a tonal musical composition proscribes the possibilities for melodic
variations.”178 Finally, rather
like the leader of a collectively improvising ensemble, the narrator structures the
performance to allow shifts in emphasis, foregrounding first one, then [“than” in
the original] another of the voices within the collective…. These shifts in focus are
sometimes condensed into subtle variations even within longer passages to highlight
different interpretations of the same events … an extension of improvisational tech­
nique … [recalling] a variation of basic call-and-response techniques … prominent in
African music.179
In short, Morrison’s Jazz is not merely multi-formal in that it can be read in terms of
musical, social, and technological practices. Nor is it necessarily altogether “original”, in
that aspects of its dense and lively African-American story may have been adapted from
(or, at the very least, resemble those of ) a European model. Instead, Jazz is metafictional
in that it can be read in terms of narratives that enclose other narratives, as a jazz
performance encloses—but does not necessarily shape or “standardize”—a wealth of
melodies and musical devices. For critics such as Grandt, Ludigkeit, and Sherard—as
well as for novelists such as Holmes, Janowitz, and Morrison—jazz music itself provides
us with new ways of understanding musical form, social as well as musical. Which is to
say, it provides us with ways of understanding how musical style functions outside music
or in addition to it, as well as ways of exploring metastructural issues through musicalfictional representations of race, class, and gender.
881
177
Dirk Ludigkeit, “Collective improvisation and narrative structure in Toni Morrison’s Jazz”, LIT: Literature,
interpretation, theory 12/2 ( June 2001) 165–87.
178
Ibid., 176.
179
Ibid., 176–77.