Cherubino's Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment by Richard Kramer (review)

Upon his election to the Académie française in 1753, the polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, entertained his fellow colleagues with a discourse on the subject of the scholar's literary style. In good eighteenth-century academic fashion, he began with benign flattery of the Académie's own literary endeavors and then systematically tackled the concept of "style"—its basic definitions, parameters, and pitfalls. Far from adopting a circumscribed approach to his topic, Buffon wound up contemplating human nature and the very quality of enlightenment. In spite of Buffon's delicate protestations to the contrary, the Académie's exalted membership may have found cause to take umbrage at some of his more pointed observations: "nothing runs more contrary to enlightenment [la lumière], which establishes itself and spreads uniformly through writing, than a series of sparks that one only extracts by force by knocking words against one another and that dazzle us for a mere instant only to then leave us in darkness" (Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, "Discours sur le style, prononcé à l'Académie française," ed. Adolphe Hatzfeld [Paris: Lecoffre fils, 1872], 20 [my translation]). The surprising collision of ideas might well taunt us with a promise of illumination, Buffon argues, but such ideas are too quickly consumed again by darkness: real enlightenment foregoes the excitement of such scintillating moments in order to shatter obscurity more permanently through sustained understanding and work. Buffon's dictum—that the scholar ought to suppress the temptation to play idly with juxtapositions and incongruities—sounds relatively sensible in theory. In practice, Buffon's strict sense of good scholarly style perhaps forecloses on rewarding discoveries made accessible by the more "sparkling" style he denounces. Certainly, Richard Kramer's latest book puts to the test just such an approach with a view to recharacterizing the "established" and "uniform" Enlightenment as a self-contradictory and fragmented aesthetic praxis.

In many ways, Kramer turns Buffon's logic on its head to argue that far from establishing itself and spreading uniformly, Enlightenment music radiates vividly, momentarily, and spontaneously through scintillating disjunctions—Überraschungen (p. xiii). Conventional, patient, scholarly style promising a kind of permanent illumination cannot hope to capture such intense sparks, implies Kramer, who characterizes his method as a series of "snapshots" that do not depict as much as "anticipate" beauty-filled surprises that promise to "reclaim for us a place and a time long after its players had vanished" (p. xiii). Unlike a conventional photo album, Kramer's eschews all sense of historical chronology; his discussion largely focuses on the period 1760–1815, but various "players" and accompanying examples enter as though impervious to the linear passage of time. Like a scrapbook of half-forgotten occasions and group photos without captions identifying the sitters, Kramer unfurls an extended family of Aufklärung composers, poets, and theorists and a strikingly diverse series of music examples. What knits the assemblage together is a tacit assumption of generational heritage and the sense of intangible affinity among distant relatives. Presuming rather than asserting connections, Cherubino's Leap springs nimbly across decades, characters, and musical works. The German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, for instance, casually populates several of Kramer's snapshots alongside contemporaries like Ludwig van Beethoven, and Kramer's evenhanded treatment of both men assumes a readership intimately familiar with the life and accomplishments of this eclectic cast. Such bold gestures recur throughout the book and in their own way testify to a historiography wholly committed to inducing the feeling rather than the knowledge of the historian's thesis. It is as though Kramer bravely resists the rigid demands of a scholarly audience accustomed to being shown the way rather than being content to stay put and admire the fireworks. Perhaps in this sense, Kramer has innovated a strategy to forestall the formulaic sequence of apologias and contextualizations...