Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity

Introduction

Introduction 1 The change that is the subject of this book is well captured when you place two paintings side by side—Nicolas Poussin’s Il ballo della vita humana (A Dance to the Music of Time) of ca. 1639–1640 and Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Novo (The New World) of 1791 (Figures 1 and 2). The earlier of the two abounds in circular images: bodies move along circular orbits to the music of Time’s lyre. Poussin’s time is cyclical, ruled by the sun’s daily rising and setting, the annual succession of recurring seasons, turns of the wheel of fortune—all the eternal cycles that govern human life.Tiepolo, by contrast, observes from behind a thoroughly modern crowd assembled to gawk at a spectacle made possible by the newest technological medium (shortly to be featured also in Faust II)—a magic lantern displaying the exotic marvels of “the new world.” These humans are not subject to an eternal , unchanging order. On the contrary, they are children of a unique historical moment, their gaze fixed on a dimly imagined future, a new, emerging world. Tiepolo’s time is linear, progressive, oriented toward the future (one might go further and say that Tiepolo contemplates the human condition not with the awe that Poussin had shown but with detached irony). It is the shift from Poussin’s to Tiepolo’s view of time that will be my subject here. The generation of Europeans from after the fall of Napoleon, whose memories reached back to the days of the ancien régime, shared the sense of having lived through the most profound upheaval and transformation in human history. This sense is the leitmotif running through Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe, where it found its perhaps most unforgettable expression. “The old men of former times,” Chateaubriand wrote in 1822, were less unhappy and less isolated than those of today: if, by lingering on earth, they had lost their friends, little else had changed around them; they were strangers to youth, but not to society. Nowadays, a straggler in this life has witnessed the death, not only of men, but also of ideas: principles, customs, tastes, pleasures, sorrows, opinions, none of these resembles what he used to know. He belongs to a different race from the human species among which he ends his days.1 The leitmotif received its pithiest formulation in the preface of 1833:“I’ve seen the beginning and the end of a world.”2 And Chateaubriand was hardly alone. In an article originally published in Heidelberger Jahrbücher in the winter of 1817–1818 Hegel spoke of “the last twenty-five years, possibly the richest that world history has had, and for us the most instructive, because it is to them that our world and our ideas belong.”3 Nearly two centuries later—and this despite the seemingly still more profound disruptions Europe experienced after 1914—this conviction, whether expressed with Hegel’s sobriety or voiced in Chateaubriand’s sonorous tone of somber melancholy, still rings true. 2 / Introduction figure 1. Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time, ca. 1639–40. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. Ernst Robert Curtius opens and closes his 1948 meditation, titled European Literature and the Latin MiddleAges, with some thoughts on the temporal shape and limits of his subject.4 The development of European literature , he thinks, is marked by two caesuras.The first was “the fallow period of decline which extended from 425 to 775” and separated the ancient from the medieval world. The second caesura is where we still find ourselves today : “A new period of decline begins in the nineteenth century and reaches the dimensions of catastrophe in the twentieth.” Elsewhere he posits that this new period began around 1750.5 Here Curtius follows the English historian G.M.Trevelyan, who in his English Social History of 1944 proposed extending the medieval period into the eighteenth century up to the Industrial Revolution, which “changed human life more than did the Renaissance and the Reformation.”6 (This notion of the “long Middle Ages” extending to the Industrial Revolution is, by the way, still alive in Jacques Le Goff’s 1985 book L’imaginaire médiéval.)7 Similarly, for Curtius, “a break with the more than millennial European literary tradition also makes its appearance in England about 1750.” Elsewhere...