Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated by Theodore Ziolkowski (review)

At the beginning of his engaging study, Theodore Ziolkowski mentions that originally, he planned to give it the title “Euterpe Takes the Pen,” playfully imagining that the Greek muse of music may at times put down her preferred instrument, the flute, in order to use “words rather than sounds to express her feelings” (1). I wish the author had preserved that original title because more than its current descriptive one, chosen in the “interest of clarity and accessibility” (1), it evokes a trajectory of issues related to interdisciplinarity and intermediality that Ziolkowski does not fully spell out, even though they inform his argument methodologically. The image suggests that (classical) music, despite its classical-romantic definition as an autonomous realm of sonic beauty presumably transcending the arbitrary relation of verbal signifier and signified, is by nature predisposed to communicate with the other arts, not only with visual representations, but also and especially with verbal discourses. Textual writing—to reverse the image—is eminently able to take up Euterpe’s pen and return the favor: poetry, novels, dramas may metaphorically reveal hidden meanings that musical sonority cannot spell out explicitly, while musical hermeneutics strives to illuminate the structure, content, and context of compositions through analytical conceptualizations that go beyond the auditory experience.

Although it is regrettable that Ziolkowski does not always engage in an indepth conversation with the considerable body of theoretical scholarship—among other fields, in cultural musicology, musical hermeneutics, and sound studies—his study offers a wide-ranging and often insightful survey of three topics related to the interaction between music and text. The first concerns composers writing criticism, literary works, and even their own libretti (Carl Maria von Weber and E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and their followers, as well as Anthony Burgess). As Ziolkowski explains, their activities reflect the changing social status of composers and music itself from the time of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to the following generations. Weber, Hoffmann, Berlioz, and Schumann “lampooned what they regarded as the pretentiously poor taste of most so-called music-lovers and opera audiences of their day” (223). While Weber and Hoffmann did not write the libretti for their own operas, many others did, either adapting already existing texts (Schumann, Berlioz, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Alban Berg), or writing truly original and aesthetically accomplished texts (Wagner, Franz Schreker, Hans Pfitzner, Paul Hindemith). For these figures, Ziolkowski provides rich biographical material, philological sources, and cultural background information. But he often goes into extended paraphrases of the libretti without providing sufficient analysis of the music beyond vague remarks such as that the score of Schumann’s Genoveva “contains a number of striking musical effects, and many of the themes are anticipated in the familiar overture” (56). This lack of sustained musical interpretation is rather remarkable, considering that Ziolkowski remarks, for instance, that in Wagner’s libretti, “music and literature are in true balance, regardless of any ideological critique of the libretto” (82), or that Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron “is notable musically, and has been extensively analyzed, as an opera based on a twelvetone scale,” but then concerns himself “as in the earlier cases, not with its score but, rather, with the libretto” (105). Ziolkowski is certainly right in stressing that libretti such as Wagner’s deserve serious critical appreciation as literary texts and sociopolitical documents (65). Still, in a study exploring the transformation of music into fiction, one can expect a more extensive interrogation of the intrinsic intermediality of opera as a mixed genre, where text and music are structurally inseparable and, in terms of their spiritual meanings and emotional effects, mutually illuminating.

Ziolkowski’s second topic is the use by literary texts of musical techniques and genres. Methodologically, this part strikes me as more convincing, with respect both to its wealth of intriguing material, much of which may be unknown to many readers, and its interpretive depth. There is a fascinating chapter on the...