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Chapter 7
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c h a p t e r 7 A Farewell, a Femme Fatale, and a Film Three Awkward Moments in Twentieth-Century Music Peter Franklin Having chosen to write about three of my favorite musical works—all of them lacking canonic authority, but all, I believe, rich in meaning and human value—I find myself up against the problematic mismatch between personal taste and History. Taking another look, recently, at the prologue to Lawrence Kramer’s Opera and Modern Culture, I was led to wonder if I were not simply slipping into the role of Don Giovanni in Kramer’s allegorical reading of that operatic antihero: defying a form of institutionalized Authority in search of ferocious reserves of musical subjectivity that no authority can touch, only to find myself investing these objects with the ‘‘implausible significance’’ of which Kramer speaks.1 Was I, like Opera in his account, trying ‘‘to retrieve the transcendental value of the abnorm in proximity to the norm . . . without a remainder’’?2 The pieces I want to speak about are in a sense all remainders, residues. They are ‘‘beyond the regime of the norm’’ and only arguably closer to what Kramer calls ‘‘best examples.’’3 All three of the works I discuss inspire complex questions about their multimediated status as ‘‘works’’ at all. The authoritative narrative of musical modernism has thus tended to flow over and around them. I will nevertheless proceed, accepting that I may prove less of a Don Giovanni than a sort of musicological Don Quixote. 150 151 Peter Franklin Part of the trouble is that we musicologists have always ‘‘done’’ musical Modernism so well—and I refer to the narrower, style-historical meaning of that term. We have always relied on those knowing smiles of complicit superiority when we rehearse mutually comforting stories about the scandals and misunderstandings that attended performances of Modernism’s canonic masterpieces. There was Le Sacre du Printemps, of course, and those items programmed by Schoenberg in his Vienna ‘‘Skandalkonzert’’ of 1913. Yes, as we embroider the tale, people then really did hit each other on the nose and call each other names. As if we would do such things: we, the unshockable allies of The New, the advanced who can take anything in our stride. Yet in the name of mutually reinforcing open-mindedness we nevertheless persist in closing ourselves vehemently off from other manifestations of ‘‘twentieth-century music’’ that still inspire scorn, unease , or even outrage for reasons that are of more than merely historiographical interest. My examples here are an embarrassing symphony, an even more embarrassing (and probably justly ‘‘forgotten’’) opera, and a simply shocking arrangement of Wagner (‘‘My dear,’’ the connoisseur exclaims, ‘‘you simply cannot imagine!’’). The mitigation of the horror of it all by a little parodic camping up of our affection for varieties of old kitsch is probably appropriate to my list of dramatis personae: at least two undone men and one undone woman, balanced by two femmes fatales and an homme fatale. Some of these characters were victims or creations of the tawdry and increasingly popular imaginative realm in which they mostly fade and die—albeit to music of extraordinary beauty that appears either to have lost faith with or lost comprehension of what Julian Johnson has boldly reaffirmed as ‘‘the higher spiritual and intellectual function of art.’’4 Two of my examples must be located retrospectively in historical corners of the popular Other, where the conventional binaries of the discourse of European high art have always raised ghosts and monsters of gender trouble from the multimediated ‘‘impurity’’ of popular aestheticism hostile to ‘‘art.’’ Forget the ‘‘difficult listening hour’’; we are heading for murky and rather mucky territory. But it is a richly populated territory, and no less rich, perhaps, in what Susan McClary (in her essay ‘‘Terminal Prestige’’) calls intelligence of a kind that inhabits and is provoked by the music I shall speak of: an intelligence ‘‘that accepts the experience of the body— dance, sexuality, feelings of depression and elation—as integral parts of human knowledge that accrue value precisely as they are shared and con- firmed publicly.’’5 [3.237.232.196] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:58 GMT) 152 A Farewell, a Femme Fatale, and a Film The awkwardness of my awkward moments, then, is conditioned by a knowledge about art that might threaten our very belief in art, even as it affirms our fatal attraction. The situation is close to the...