La Musique dans la pensée et dans l'œuvre de Stendhal et de Nerval by Anna Opiela (review)

This book, based on a doctoral thesis, is divided into three main parts. The second part focuses on music in the works of Stendhal; the third, on Nerval. The first, which is the longest, will be the most useful for many students of the relationship between music and literature. Entitled 'Problèmes de philosophie et de méthode', it is in effect a double literature survey. First, Anna Opiela gives a history of the evolution of attitudes to the relationship between music and letters from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. Then she goes over some of the ways in which modern academic research has engaged with these attitudes since the pioneering work of Calvin S. Brown. These are fields that have been well trodden, certainly, by many in word and music studies since the 1990s. Nonetheless, this is an unusually readable, well-plotted, coherent, and down-to-earth narrative, especially interesting for its inclusion of a rich Polish academic tradition to which anglocentric views have not hitherto done justice. I would recommend it to anyone looking for an introduction to these questions. The sections on Stendhal and Nerval disappoint slightly in that they do not take forward the academic project outlined in the first part with as much intellectual rigour as one might have liked. Since the work of Steven Paul Scher, whom Opiela cites, word and music studies have learned to be wary of loose structural analogies between music and literature. But Opiela allows herself some very imprecise such analogies, for example when she compares Nerval's literary forms to those of the symphony (p. 302). Symphonies, she tells us, for example, habitually contain variations. Variations she then likens, formally, to the return of folksong motifs in Nerval's prose. But she could have said the same about the Wagnerian leitmotif or of Haydn's use of melodic cells, and it would have been neither more nor less accurate or illuminating. Much more useful is her narrative overview of the ways in which music is cited and experienced in the works of Nerval and Stendhal. This throws up some very interesting contrasts, well summarized in her conclusion, between Stendhal, whose view of music is inherited from the Enlightenment and exemplified in the experience of attending Italian opera, and Nerval, whose more romantic sensibility tends to look to a music that is not present, but unreliably remembered from an inaccessible elsewhere.