Modern Listening: Proust, Beethoven, and the Music of Silence

This article analyzes Proust’s listening by placing it in the contexts of French reception of late Beethoven in Proust’s era. At stake are questions of perception of and through the work of art, of music as the figure of something greater than love or desire in Proust. Thinking music and silence together, through the framework of “modern” listening, allows us to see how Proust seeks new definitions of time within subjectivity. By bringing together Beethoven’s era, Proust’s, and our own, we can articulate how both Beethoven and Proust push the limits of tonality and temporality in order to hear what had never before been sounded and to which their work gives voice.