Joel-Francois Durand in the Mirror Land

Durand, Bernhard, and Form

DURAND, BERNHARD, AND FORM JONATHAN W. BERNARD HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERATURE and music has a venerable place in Western cultural history, but it is only in relatively recent times that it has received sustained attention from either artists or critics, in detailed or appreciably technical terms. That there are by now so many examples to be cited of the impact that a novel, play, poem, or philosophical treatise has had on a musical composition may be assessed as one of the more significant legacies of modernism—which, among its many other effects on the arts of the twentieth century, greatly stimulated their mutual influence. And it is to modernism, most likely, that we owe as well our awareness of this influence and the impetus to talk about it—something that, to judge from the work of many a contemporary composer, may turn out to be one of its most lasting effects. Readers of Joël-François Durand’s self-interview “In the Mirror Land,” elsewhere in this volume, can already appreciate that this composer, for one, is a serious reader, with eclectic and wide-ranging tastes; but among the authors from whom he has drawn instruction and artistic nourishment , surely the postwar Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) must stand in first place. Durand’s encounter with Bernhard, which began with Bernhard’s novel Correction (Korrektur, T 212 Joël-François Durand In the Mirror Land 1975) in 1978 and has been renewed continually since then, registers most strongly, perhaps, in pieces written during the 1980s, starting with the earliest works he now acknowledges as his. Even over the past decade, though, it is clear that the influence of Bernhard continues to resonate for Durand, and remains special for him even beyond that of the numerous other authors to whom he accords more than passing mention. Before discussing what Durand has absorbed from Bernhard, in ways that are specifically reflected in his compositions, it is worth considering what there is about the work of this writer that might be of special interest to a composer. The plot details in some of the novels, of course, seem almost guaranteed to attract the attention of musicians: the fictional Glenn Gould in The Loser (Der Untergeher, 1983), for example, who resembles the real Glenn Gould in certain respects, but in others decidedly not; the narrator of Concrete (Beton, 1982), who has been working for ten years on the definitive study of Mendelssohn but who has yet to write a word of it, owing to an inability to think of the right opening sentence. (The type of character represented by the latter, the blocked writer monstrously exaggerated, appears in many of Bernhard’s works: someone whose creative efforts produce only pathological effects, and whose portrayal cannot help but evoke a response of morbid fascination from anyone who has ever felt the afflictions, be they mild or severe, of artistic blockage.) But the first thing that probably strikes any reader picking up a book by Bernhard for the first time is, simply, the unusual appearance of the text on the page: the prose unrolls in sentences that are often extremely long even by the standards of the German language—sometimes going on for a page, or even more—and often without paragraph or chapter breaks. The novel Correction falls into two sections, the first of which in the English translation runs to 138 pages, the second 131, with not a single paragraph break in either section; the novel The Lime Works (Die Kalkwerk, 1970), after an opening, fairly brief passage in which ellipses mark several line breaks (not quite paragraphing), proceeds for the remainder of its 239 pages with no breaks at all. This format alone might well suggest the idea of flow, in the musical sense; but it is the qualities of Bernhard’s diction that are particularly suggestive of an analogy to music. The “seamless” look of the text is not, after all, simply the author’s stylistic conceit: often cast as an interior monologue, whether in first or third person, the narrative is possessed of a remarkable continuity that quite readily brings music to mind for anyone, it would seem, with the least sensitivity to that art. Bernhard himself vouched for the analogy on several occasions; for example: “I would say, [writing, for me,] is a question of rhythm and has a great deal to do with music. Yes, what...