Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

The Call of the Past

In a 1931 radio lecture, Schoenberg speaks of his masters: "in erster Linie Bach unci Mozart; in zweiter Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms,"-"in the first place, Bach and Mozart; in the second, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms." In concise, aphoristic remarks, he goes on to specify what he learned from each of these five composers.

Between the Bach reference and the others there is a very great difference: in Mozart, for example, he learns about "the art of unequal phrase lengths" or "the art of creating secondary ideas," that is to say an utterly individual skill that belongs to Mozart alone. In Bach, he discovers principles that had also operated in all the music for centuries before Bach: first, "the art of inventing groups of notes such that they provide their own accompaniment"; and second, "the art of creating the whole from a single kernel"-"die Kunst, alles aus einem zu erzeugen."

These two sentences summarizing the lesson Schoenberg drew from Bach (and from his predecessors) can be taken to describe the whole twelve-tone revolution: in contrast to Classical music and Romantic music, which are built on the alternation of differing musical themes occurring one after the other, both a Bach fugue and a twelve-tone composition, from beginning to end, develop from a single kernel, which is both melody and accompaniment.

Twenty-three years later, when Roland Manuel asks Stravinsky: "What are your major interests these days?" the latter responds: Guillaume de Machaut, Heinrich Isaak, Dufay, Perotin, and Webern." It is the first time a composer proclaims so firmly the immense importance of the music of the twelfth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth centuries, and relates it to modern music (to Webern's).

Some years after that, Glenn Gould gives a concert in Moscow for the students of the conservatory; after playing Webern, Schoenberg, and Krenek, he gives his audience a short commentary, saying: "The greatest compliment I can give this music is to say that the principles to be found in it are not new, that they are at least five hundred years old"; then he goes on to play three Bach fugues. It was a carefully considered provocation: socialist realism, then the official doctrine in Russia, was battling modernism in the name of traditional music; Glenn Gould meant to show that the roots of modern music (forbidden in Communist Russia) go much deeper than those of the official music of socialist realism (which was actually nothing but an artificial preservation of romanticism in music).

The Two Halves

The history of European music covers about a thousand years (if I take as its beginnings the first experiments in primitive polyphony). The history of the European novel (if I take as its start the works of Rabelais and Cervantes) covers about four centuries. When I consider these two histories, I cannot shake the sense that they developed in rhythms resembling, so to speak, the two halves of a soccer game. The caesuras, or halftime breaks, in the history of music and in that of the novel do not coincide. In the history of music, the break stretches over a big part of the eighteenth century (the symbolic apogee of the first half occurring in Bach's The Art of Fugue, and the start of the second half in the works of the earliest Classical composers); the break in the history of the novel comes a little later: between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries-that is, between Laclos and Sterne on the one side and, on the other, Scott and Balzac. This asyn-chronism shows that the deepest causes governing the rhythm of the history of the arts are not sociological or political but aesthetic: bound up with the intrinsic nature of one art or another; as if the art of the novel, for instance, contained two different potentialities (two different ways of being a novel) that could not be worked out at the same time, in parallel, but could be worked out only successively, one after the other.

The metaphor of the two halves of a game came to me some time ago in the course of a conversation with a friend and does not claim to be at all scholarly; it is an ordinary, elementary observation, naively obvious:

when it comes to music and the novel, we are all of us raised in the aesthetic of the second half. A mass by Ockeghem or Bach's The Art of Fugue are for the average music lover as difficult to comprehend as Webern's music. However enchanting their stories, the novels of the eighteenth century intimidate the reader by their form, to the point where they are much better known in movie adaptations (which necessarily denature both their spirit and their form) than through their written texts. The works of the eighteenth century's most famous novelist, Samuel Richardson, cannot be found in bookstores and are practically forgotten. Balzac, on the contrary, even though he may seem old-fashioned, is still easy to read; his form is comprehensible, familiar to the reader, and even more important, it is for that reader the very model of the novel form.

The chasm between the aesthetics of these two halves makes for a multitude of misunderstandings. Vladimir Nabokov, in his book on Cervantes, gives a provocatively negative opinion of Don Quixote: overvalued, naive, repetitive, and full of unbearable and implausible cruelty; that "hideous cruelty" makes this book "one of the most bitter and barbarous ever penned"; poor Sancho, moving along from one drubbing to another, loses all his teeth at least five times. Yes, Nabokov is right: Sancho loses too many teeth, but we are not in the world of Zola, where some cruel act, described precisely and in detail, becomes the accurate document of a social reality; with Cervantes, we are in a world created by the magic spells of the storyteller who invents, who exaggerates, and who is carried away by his fantasies, his excesses; Sancho's

three hundred broken teeth cannot be taken literally, no more than anything else in this novel. "Madame, a steamroller has just run over your daughter!" "Yes, yes, I'm in the bathtub. Slide her to me under the door." Must we bring charges of cruelty against that old Czech joke from my childhood? Cervantes' great founding work was alive with the spirit of the nonseri-ous, a spirit that was later made incomprehensible by the Romantic aesthetic of the second half, by its demand for plausibility.

The second half not only eclipsed the first, it repressed it; the first half has become the bad conscience of the novel and especially of music. Bach's work is the best-known example: Bach's renown during his lifetime; Bach forgotten after his death (forgotten for half a century); the slow rediscovery of Bach over the length of the nineteenth century. Beethoven alone almost succeeded toward the end of his life (that is, seventy years after Bach's death) in integrating Bach's experience into the new aesthetic of music (his repeated efforts to insert fugue into the sonata), whereas after Beethoven, the more the Romantics worshiped Bach, the further they moved away from him in their structural thinking. To make him more accessible they subjectivized and sentimentalized him (Busoni's famous arrangements); then, reacting against that romanticization, came a desire to recover his music as it was played in its own time, which gave rise to some notably insipid performances. It seems to me that, having once passed through the desert of oblivion, Bach's music still keeps its face half veiled.

History as a Landscape Emerging from the Mists

Rather than discuss the forgetting of Bach, I could turn my idea around and say: Bach is the first great composer who, by the enormous weight of his work, compelled the audience to pay attention to his music even though it already belonged to the past. An unprecedented phenomenon, because until the nineteenth century, people lived almost exclusively with contem-porarv music. They had no living contact with the musical past: even if musicians had studied the music of previous times (and this was rare), they were not in the habit of performing it in public. During the nineteenth century, music of the past began to be revived and plaved alongside contemporary music and to take on an ever greater presence, to the point that in the twentieth century the balance between the present and the past was reversed: audiences heard the music of earlier times much more than they did contemporary music, and now the latter has virtually disappeared from concert halls.

Bach was thus the first composer to establish his place in the memory of later generations; with him, nineteenth-century Europe not only discovered an important part of musics past, it also discovered music history. Europe saw that Bach was not just any past but rather a past that was radically different from the present; thus musical time was revealed abruptly (and for the first time) not just as a series of works but as a series of changes, of eras, of varying aesthetics.

I often imagine him in the year of his death, in the exact middle of the eighteenth century, bending with clouding eyes over The Art of Fugue, a composition whose aesthetic orientation represents the most archaic tendency in Bach's oeuvre (which contains many orientations), a tendency alien to its time, which had already turned completely away from polyphony toward a simple, even simplistic, style that often verged on frivolity or laziness.

The historical position of Bach's work therefore reveals what later generations had begun to forget- that history is not necessarily a path climbing upward (toward the richer, the more cultivated), that the demands of art may be counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and that the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress. Indeed, the future that Bach could discern in the art of his contemporaries and of his juniors must to his eyes have seemed a collapse. When, toward the end of his life, he concentrated exclusively on pure polyphony, he was turning his back on the tastes of his time and on his own composer sons; it was a gesture of defiance against history, a tacit rejection of the future. Bach: an extraordinary crossroads of the historical trends and issues of music. Some hundred years before him, another such crossroads occurs in the work of Monteverdi: this is the meeting ground of two opposing aesthetics (Monteverdi calls them prima and seconda prattica, the one based on erudite polyphony, the other, programmatically expressive, on monody), and it thus prefigures the move from the first to the second half.

Another extraordinary crossroads of historical trends: the work of Stravinsky. Musics thousand-year history, which over the course of the nineteenth century was slowly emerging from the mists of oblivion, suddenly toward the middle of our own century (two hundred years after Bach's death) stood revealed in its full breadth like a landscape drenched in light; a unique moment when the whole history of music is totally present, totally accessible and available (thanks to historical research, to radio, to recordings), totally open to the examination of its meaning; this moment of vast reappraisal seems to find its monument in the music of Stravinsky.

The Tribunal of the Feelings

Music is "powerless to express anything at all: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state," says Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life (1935). This assertion (surely exaggerated, for how can one deny music's ability to arouse feelings?) is elaborated and refined a few lines later: music's raison d'etre., says Stravinsky, does not reside in its capacity to express feelings. It is curious to note what irritation this attitude provoked.

The conviction, contrary to Stravinsky's, that music's raison d'etre is the expression of feelings probably existed always, but it became dominant, widely accepted and self-evident, in the eighteenth century; Jean-Jacques Rousseau states it with a blunt simplicity: like any other art, music imitates the real world, but in a specific way: it "will not represent things directly, but it will arouse in the soul the same impulses that we feel at seeing them." That requires a certain structure in the musical work; Rousseau: "All of music can be composed of only these three things: melody or song, harmony or accompaniment, movement or tempo." I emphasize: harmony or accompaniment; that means everything else is subordinate to melody: it is melody that is primordial, and harmony is merely accompaniment, "having very little power over the human heart."

The doctrine of socialist realism, which two centuries later was to muzzle Russian music for over half a century, asserted this same thing. "Formalist" composers were berated for neglecting melody (the chief ideologue, Zhdanov, was indignant because their music could not be whistled on the way out of the concert); they were exhorted to express "the whole range of human feelings" (modern music, from Debussy on, was denounced for its inability to do so); music's faculty for expressing the feelings reality arouses in man gave it "realism" (just as Rousseau said). (Socialist realism in music: the principles of the second half transformed into dogmas to block modernism.)

The most severe and thorough criticism of Stravinsky is surely Theodor Adorno's in his famous book The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949). Adorno depicts the situation in music as if it were a political battlefield: Schoenberg the positive hero, the representative of progress (though a progress that might be termed tragic, at a time when progress is over), and Stravinsky the negative hero, the representative of restoration. The Stravinskian refusal to see subjective confession as music's raison d'etre becomes one target of the Adorno critique; this "antipsychological furor" is, he says, a form of "indifference toward the world"; Stravinsky's desire to objectivize music is a kind of tacit accord with the capitalist society that crushes human subjectivity; for it is the "liquidation of the individual that Stravinsky's music celebrates," nothing less.

Ernest Ansermet, an excellent musician and conductor, and one of the foremost performers of Stravinsky's work ("one of my most faithful and devoted friends," says Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life), later became his implacable critic; his objections are fundamental, they are concerned with "music's rai-son d'etre." Ansermet says it is "the affective activity latent in men's hearts… that has always been the source of music"; the "ethical essence" of music lies in the expression of that "affective activity"; with Stravinsky, who "refuses to invest his person in the act of musical expression," music "thereby ceases to be an aesthetic expression of the human ethic"; thus, for instance, "his Mass is not the expression of the mass but its portrayal, which might just as well have been written by an irreligious musician" and which, consequently, provides only a "ready-made religiosity"; by thus undercutting the true raison d'etre of music (by substituting portrayals for religious avowal), Stravinsky fails in nothing less than his ethical obligation.

Why this fury? Is it the legacy of the previous century, the romanticism in us striking out at its most significant, its most thorough negation? Has Stravinsky violated some existential need hidden within us all? The need to consider damp eyes better than dry eyes, the hand on the heart better than the hand in the pocket, belief better than skepticism, passion better than serenity, faith better than knowledge?

Ansermet proceeds from criticism of the music to criticism of its author: if Stravinsky "neither made nor tried to make his music an act of self-expression, it's not out of free choice, but out of a kind of limitation in his nature, a lack of autonomy in his affective activity (not to speak of his poverty of heart, a heart that will stay poor until it has something to love)."

Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?

What Is Superficial and What Is Profound?

The soldiers of the heart assail Stravinsky, or else, in an effort to salvage his music, they try to disconnect it from its author's "erroneous" ideas. That noble determination to "salvage" the music of composers who might have too little heart occurs quite often with regard to the musicians of the first half, including Bach: "The twentieth-century epigones, who were frightened by the evolution of the musical language"- meaning Stravinsky with his refusal to follow the twelve-tone school-"and who believed they could redeem their sterility through what they called the 'return to Bach' are deeply mistaken about Bach's music; they had the effrontery to represent it as 'objective,' absolute music with none but a purely musical meaning… Only mechanical performances, in a certain period of craven purism, could give the impression that Bach's instrumental music is not subjective and expressive." I have emphasized the terms that show the passionate quality of this 1963 text by Antoine Golea.

By chance, I came upon a little commentary by another musicologist; it concerns Rabelais's great contemporary Clement Janequin and his so-called descriptive works, like "Le Chant des oiseaux" ("Birdsong") or "Le Caquet des femmes" ("Women's Chatter"); the determination to "salvage" is the same (here again the italics are mine): "Nonetheless, these pieces remain rather superficial. Now, Janequin is a far more complete artist than people are willing to admit, for aside from his undeniable pictorial gifts, his work displays a tender poetry, a penetrating ardor in the expression of feelings… This is a poet of subtlety, sensitive to nature's beauties; he is also a peerless bard of womankind, to whose praise he brings tones of tenderness, admiration, respect …"

Note the vocabulary: the poles of good and evil are designated by the adjective "superficial" and its understood contrary, "profound." But are Janequin's "descriptive" compositions actually superficial? In these few works, Janequin transcribes nonmusical sounds (birdsong, women's chatter, the racket of the streets, the sounds of a hunt or a battle, and so on) by musical means (choral singing); that "description" is worked out polyphonically. The union of "naturalistic"

imitation (which provides Janequin with some wonderful new sonorities) and erudite polyphony, a union, that is, of two nearly incompatible extremes, is fascinating: this is an art that is elegant, playful, joyous, and full of humor.

And yet: it is precisely the words "elegant," "playful," "joyous," "humor," that sentimental rhetoric sets in opposition to the profound. But what is profound and what is superficial? For Janequin's critic, superficial are the "pictorial gifts" and "description"; profound are the "penetrating ardor in the expression of feelings" and the "tones of tenderness, admiration, respect" for womankind. Thus "profound" is what touches on the feelings. But one could define "the profound" in another way: profound is what touches on the essential. The problem Janequin touches on in his compositions is the fundamental ontological problem of music: the problem of the relation between noise and musical sound.

Music and Noise

When man created a musical sound (by singing or by playing an instrument), he divided the acoustical world into two sharply distinct parts: that of artificial sounds and that of natural sounds. In his music, Janequin sought to put them together. In the middle of the sixteenth century, he thus prefigured what in the twentieth century would be done by, for instance, Janacek (his studies of spoken language), Bartok, or, in an extremely systematic way, Messiaen (in the works inspired by birdsong).

Janequin's art reminds us that there exists an acoustic universe outside the human soul, one that consists not merely of nature sounds but also of human voices speaking, singing, and giving sonic flesh to everyday life as well as to festive occasions. He reminds us that the composer can give a great musical form to that "objective" universe.

One of Janacek's most original compositions: The Seventy Thousand (1909): a piece for mens chorus about the fate of the Silesian miners. The second half of the work (which should be in every anthology of modern music) is an explosion of shouts from the crowd, shouts that tangle together in a fascinating tumult: a composition that (despite its amazing dramatic emotional charge) comes curiously close to the madrigals that, in Janequin's time, turned the street cries of Paris and London into music.

I think of Stravinsky's Les Noces (written between 1914 and 1923): a portrayal (the term Ansermet uses as a pejorative is actually quite appropriate) of a village wedding; we hear songs, noises, speeches, shouts, calls, monologues, joking (a tumult of voices prefigured by Janacek), accompanied by an orchestration (four pianos and percussion) of fascinating harshness (which prefigures Bartok).

And I think of Bartok's piano suite Out of Doors (1926), the fourth part: nature sounds (the voices of frogs at a pond, it seems to me) suggest to Bartok rare and strange melodic motifs; then into these animal tones merges a folk song that, human invention though it is, lies on the same plane as the frog sounds; it is not a lied, that song of the Romantics meant to display the "affective activity" of the composer's soul; it is a melody come from the outside as a noise among other noises.

And I think, too, of the Adagio of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto (a work of his last, his sad, American period). The hypersubjective theme, ineffably melancholy, alternates with a second, this one hyperobjective (which incidentally recalls the fourth part of the Out of Doors suite): as if a souls sorrow could find consolation only in the nonsentience of nature.

I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud). I remember the gloomy years I spent in Bohemia early in the Russian occupation. I fell in love then with Varese and Xenakis: those pictures of sound-worlds that were objective but nonexistent spoke to me of a life freed of human subjectivity, aggressive and burdensome; they spoke of the sweetly nonhuman beauty of the world before or after mankind moved through it.

Melody

I listen to a polyphonic chant for two voices from the twelfth-century School of Notre-Dame in Paris: underneath, in augmented note values, as a cantus firmus, an ancient Gregorian chant (a chant that goes back to an immemorial and probably non-European past); above it, in shorter note values, unfolds the polyphonic accompaniments melody. This embrace of two melodies belonging to two different eras (centuries

apart) has something marvelous about it: like reality and parable at once, here is the birth of European music as art: a melody is created to go in counterpoint with another, very old, melody whose origins are almost unknown; so this new one is there as something secondary, subordinate, it is there to serve; though "secondary," it is this voice that brings to bear all the invention, all the labor, of the medieval musician, whereas the melody it accompanies has been taken unchanged from an antique repertoire.

This old polyphonic composition delights me: the new melody on top is long, unending, and unmemoriz-able; it is not the product of some sudden inspiration, it did not spring forth as the direct expression of some state of mind; it has the quality of an elaboration, a "craftsman"'s work of ornamentation, a work done not to let the artist open his soul (show his "affective activity," to use Ansermets term) but to let him, in all humility, embellish a liturgy.

And it's my impression that until Bach the art of melody would keep that quality the earliest polyphonic composers gave it. I listen to the Adagio of Bach's E Major Violin Concerto: like a kind of cantus firmus, the orchestra (the bass instruments) plays a very simple theme, readily memorizable and many times repeated, while the violin melody (the focus of the composer's melodic challenge) soars above, incomparably longer, more various, richer than the orchestras cantus firmus (to which it is nonetheless subordinate), beautiful, spellbinding yet elusive, unmemorizable, and for us children of the second half, sublimely archaic.

The situation changes with the dawn of the Classical. Composition loses its polyphonic nature; in

the sonority of the accompaniment harmonies, the autonomy of the various singular voices disappears, and disappears still more as the great innovation of the second half-the symphonic orchestra with its thickness of sound-gains prominence; the melody that was "secondary," "subordinate," becomes the main point in composition and dominates musical structure, which incidentally undergoes a complete transformation.

Then the character of melody changes too: no more is it the long line that runs through an entire piece; it can be reduced to a phrase of a few measures, a phrase that is very expressive and concentrated, and thus easily memorizable, that can catch (or provoke) a direct emotion (more than ever before, music is set a great semantic task: to capture and musically "describe" all the emotions and their nuances). This is why the present-day audience applies the term "great melodist" to the composers of the second half-to a Mozart, a Chopin-but rarely to Bach or Vivaldi and still less to Josquin des Pres or Palestrina: the current idea of melody (of what constitutes beautiful melody) was shaped by the Classical aesthetic.

Yet it is not true that Bach is less melodic than Mozart; it is only that his melody is different. The Art of Fugue: the famous theme

is that kernel out of which (as Schoenberg said) the whole is created; but that is not the melodic treasure of The Art of Fugue; the treasure is in all the melodies

that arise from this theme and form the counterpoint to it. I like very much Hermann Scherchen's orchestration and recorded interpretation; for example, Contrapunctus IV, the fourth single fugue: he conducts it at half the customary speed (Bach did not prescribe the tempi); immediately, at that slow tempo, the whole of its unsuspected melodic beauty is revealed. That remelodization of Bach has nothing to do with roman-ticization (no rubato, no added chords in Scherchen); what I hear is the authentic melody of the first half, elusive, unmemorizable, irreducible to a brief phrase, a melody (an entwining of melodies) that bewitches me by its ineffable serenity. Impossible to hear it without great emotion. But it is an emotion essentially different from one stirred by a Chopin nocturne.

As if, behind the art of melody, there hid two possible intentionalities, contrary to one another: as if a Bach fugue, by bringing us to contemplate a beauty of being that is outside the subjective, aimed to make us forget our moods, our passions and pains, ourselves; and as if on the other hand Romantic melody aimed to make us plunge into ourselves, feel the self with a terrible intensity, and forget everything outside.

Modernism's Great Works as Rehabilitation of the First Half

The great novelists of the post-Proust period-I have especially in mind Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz, or, in my generation, Fuentes-were highly sensitive to the nearly forgotten aesthetic of the novel previous to the nineteenth century: they incorporated essayistic

reflection into the art of the novel; made composition freer; reclaimed the right to digression; breathed the spirit of the nonserious and of play into the novel; repudiated the dogmas of psychological realism in creating characters without trying to compete (like Balzac) with the etat civil-with the state registry of citizens; and above all: they refused any obligation to give the reader the illusion of reality: an obligation that reigned supreme throughout the novels second half.

The point of this rehabilitation of the first-half novelistic principles is not a return to this or that retro style; nor is it a simpleminded rejection of the nineteenth-century novel; the point of the rehabilitation is more general: to redefine and broaden the very notion of the novel; to resist the reduction worked by the nineteenth century's aesthetic of the novel; to give the novel its entire historical experience for a grounding.

I do not mean to draw a facile parallel between the novel and music, the structural issues of the two arts not being comparable; but the historical situations are similar: like the great novelists, the great modern composers (Stravinsky and Schoenberg both) determined to encompass all the centuries of music, to rethink and remake the scale of values of its whole history; to do this, they had to extricate music from the rut of the second half (by the way: the term "neoclassicism" commonly pinned on Stravinsky is misleading, for his most decisive excursions into the past reach into eras earlier than the Classical); from which comes their reticence: as to composition techniques originating with the sonata; as to the preeminence of melody; as to the sonic demagogy of svmphonic orchestration; but from which comes, above all: their refusal to see music's raison d'etre exclusively as an avowal of emotional life, an attitude that during the nineteenth century became as coercive as did the requirement of plausibility for the novel.

Although that inclination to reread and reevaluate the entire history of music is common to all the great modernists (if it is, as I believe, the mark that distinguishes great modern art from modernist trumpery), still, it is Stravinsky who expresses it more clearly than anyone else (and hyperbolically, I would add). That, by the way, is the focus of his detractors' attacks: in his effort to root himself in the whole history of music they see eclecticism; a lack of originality; a failure of invention. His "incredible diversity of stylistic procedures… amounts to an absence of style," says Ansermet. And Adorno, sarcastically: Stravinsky's music is inspired only by music, it is "music about music."

Unfair judgments: for while Stravinsky, like no other composer before or after him, did turn for inspiration to the whole span of music, in no way does that lessen the originality of his art. And I do not merely mean that the same personal traits are always visible beneath the shifts in his style. I mean that it is precisely his vagabondage through musical history-his conscious, purposeful "eclecticism," gigantic and unmatched-that is his total and incomparable originality.

The Third (or Overtime) Period

But what is the significance, in Stravinsky, of this determination to encompass the whole span of music? What is the point?

As a young man, I would answer without hesitation: to me, Stravinsky was one of those figures who had opened the doors onto distances I saw as boundless. I thought he meant to summon up and mobilize all the powers, all the means available to the history of music, for the infinite journey that is modern art.

The infinite journey that is modern art? Since then, I've lost that feeling. The journey was a short one. That is why, for my metaphor of the two game halves of music history, I've imagined modern music as a mere postlude, an epilogue to the history of music, a celebration that marks the end of the adventure, a sky ablaze at the end of the day.

Now I do hesitate: even though it is true that the time of modern music has been so short, even though it has lasted only a generation or two, and has thus really been no more than an epilogue, still, by reason of its enormous beauty, its artistic importance, its entirely new aesthetic, does it not deserve to be considered an era complete unto itself, a third for overtime) period? Should I not revise my metaphor about the histories of music and of the novel? Should I not say that they happened over three periods?

Yes, I do revise my metaphor, and all the more willingly as I am deeply, passionately fond of that third period, that "sky ablaze at the end of the day," fond of that period which I believe I myself am part of, even if I am part of something that is already finished.

But to return to my question: what is the significance of Stravinsky's determination to encompass the whole span of music? What is the point?

An image hounds me: according to a popular belief, at the moment of his death a person sees his

whole life pass before his eyes. In Stravinsky's work, European music recalled its thousand-year history; that was its final dream before setting out for an eternal dreamless sleep.

Playful Transcription

Let us distinguish two things: on the one hand: the general trend for restoring forgotten principles of music of the past, a trend that runs through all Stravinsky's work and that of his great contemporaries; on the other hand: the direct dialogue that Stravinsky carries on with Tchaikovsky, then with Pergolesi, then with Gesualdo, and so on; these "direct dialogues," transcriptions of this or that old work, in this or that particular style, are a procedure of Stravinsky's own that we find in practically no other of his composer contemporaries (we do find it in Picasso).

Adorno interprets Stravinsky's transcriptions thus (I emphasize the key terms): "These notes"-the dissonant notes, alien to the harmony, which Stravinsky uses in Pulcinella, for instance-"become the marks of the violence the composer wreaks against the idiom, and it is that violence we relish about them, that battering, that violation, so to speak, of musical life. Though dissonance may originally have been the expression of subjective suffering, its harshness shifts in value and becomes the sign of a social constraint, whose agent is the style-setting composer. His works have no other material but the emblems of that con-straint, a necessity external to the subject, having nothing in common with it, and which is merely imposed from the outside. It may be that the widespread effect of these works of Stravinsky's is due in large part to the fact that inadvertently, and under color of aestheticism, they in their own way trained men to something that was soon methodically inflicted on them at the political level."

Let us recapitulate: a dissonance is justified if it expresses "subjective suffering," but in Stravinsky (who is morally guilty, as we know, of never discussing his sufferings) that very dissonance is the sign of brutality; a parallel is drawn (by a brilliant short circuit of Adorno thought) with political brutality: thus the dissonant chords added to Pergolesis music prefigure (and thereby prepare) the coming political oppression (which in this particular historical context can mean only one thing: fascism).

I had my own experience with the free transcription of a work from the past when, early in the 1970s, while I was still in Prague, I set about writing a variation for the theater on Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot being for me the embodiment of a free, rational, critical mind, I experienced my affection for him at the time as a kind of yearning for the West (to my eyes, the Russian occupation of my country represented a forced de-Westernization). But the meaning of things keeps changing: today I would say that Diderot embodied for me the first half of the art of the novel and that my play celebrated various principles well known to the novelists of old, and dear to me as well: (1) the euphoric freedom of composition; (2) the constant association of libertine stories and philosophical reflections; (3) the nonserious, ironical, parodic, shocking nature of those reflections. The rules of the game were clear: what I did was not an adaptation of Diderot, it was my own play, my variation on Diderot, my homage to Diderot: I completely rewrote his novel; the love stories are taken from him, but the ideas in the dialogue are largely mine; anyone can instantly see lines in it that are unthinkable from Diderot's pen; the eighteenth century was optimistic, my time is not, I myself still less so, and in my play the Master and Jacques characters indulge in dark excesses barely imaginable in the age of Enlightenment.

After that little experience of my own I can only call stupid those remarks on Stravinsky's brutality and violence. He loved his old master as I loved mine. In adding twentieth-century dissonances to melodies of the eighteenth, perhaps he imagined he might intrigue his master out in the beyond, that he might tell him something important about our time, that he might even amuse him. He needed to address him, to talk to him. The playful transcription of an old work was for him like a way of establishing communication between centuries.

Playful Transcription According to Kafka

A curious novel, Kafka's Amerika: indeed, why should this young twenty-nine-year-old writer have laid his first novel in a continent where he had never set foot? This choice shows a clear intent: to not do realism; better yet: to not do a serious work. He did not even try to palliate his ignorance by research; he invented his idea of America from second-rate readings, from

popular prints, and indeed, the novel's image of America is (intentionally) made up of cliches; the main inspiration for the characters and plot (as he acknowledged in his diary) is Dickens, especially David Copperfield (Kafka describes the first chapter of Amerika as "a sheer imitation of Dickens'): he picks up particular motifs from it (and lists them: "the story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial labor, the sweetheart in the country house, the filthy living quarters"), and he draws on its characters (Karl is an affectionate parody of David Copperfield) and especially on the atmosphere that all Dickens's novels bathe in: the sentimentality, the naive distinction between good and evil figures. Adorno speaks of Stravinsky's music as a "music about music"; Kafka's Amerika is a "literature about literature," and within the genre it is even a classic work, perhaps a seminal one.

The first page of the novel: in the port of New York, Karl is about to leave the ship when he realizes that he has forgotten his umbrella below. In order to go back for it, with a gullibility that is barely believable he entrusts his steamer trunk (a heavy trunk holding everything he owns) to a stranger: of course, he loses the trunk and the umbrella both. From the first lines, the spirit of playful parody generates an imaginary world where nothing is completely plausible and everything is a little comical.

Kafka's castle, which exists on no map anywhere, is no more unreal than that America conceived as a cliche picture of the new civilization of gigantism and the machine. In the house of his uncle the senator, Karl comes across a desk that is an extraordinarily complicated machine, with a hundred compartments keyed to a hundred push buttons, an object at once practical and utterly useless, at once technical wonder and nonsense. I counted ten such devices in the novel, all marvelous, entertaining, and implausible, from the uncles desk, the mazelike country house, the Hotel Occidental (monstrously complex architecture, diabolically bureaucratic organization), to the Oklahoma Theater, itself another enormous, incomprehensible administration. So it is through parodic playing (playing with cliches) that Kafka first set out his greatest theme, that of the labyrinthine social organization where man loses his way and proceeds to his ruin. (Genetically speaking: the comical mechanism of the uncles desk is the ancestor of the terrifying castle administration.) Kafka managed to capture this theme, grave as it is, not by means of a realistic novel, grounded in some Zolaesque examination of society, but by just that seemingly frivolous means of "literature about literature" which allowed his imagination all the freedom it required (freedom for exaggerations, for enormities, for improbabilities, freedom for playful inventions).

Heartlessness Masked by a Style Overflowing with Feeling

In Amerika, there are many unaccountably excessive sentimental gestures. The end of the first chapter: Karl is already set to go off with his uncle, the stoker is staying behind, abandoned in the captains cabin.

Then Karl (I stress the key phrases) "went over to the stoker, pulled the man's right hand out of his belt and held it lightly in his… Karl drew his fingers back and forth between the stoker's, while the stoker looked around with shining eyes, as if blessed by a great happiness, but one that nobody could grudge him.

"'Now you must get ready to defend yourself, answer yes and no, or else these people wont have any idea of the truth. You must promise me to do what I tell you, for I'm afraid, and I've good reason for it, that I won't be able to help you anymore.' And then Karl burst out crying and kissed the stoker's hand, taking that seamed, almost nerveless hand and pressing it to his cheek like a treasure that he would soon have to give up. But now his uncle the senator was at his side and with only the slightest compulsion led him away."

Another example: At the end of the evening at Pollunder's country house, Karl explains at length why he wants to go back to his uncle's. "During this long speech of Karl's, Mr. Pollunder had listened attentively, often, particularly when Uncle Jacob was mentioned… pressing Karl to himself. …"

The sentimental gestures of the characters are not only exaggerated, they are inappropriate. Karl has known the stoker for barely an hour and has no reason to be so passionately attached to him. And if we decide that the voung man is naively touched by the prospect of a manly friendship, we are all the more amazed when, a moment later, he so readily lets himself be carried off from his new friend, without any resistance.

In that evening scene, Pollunder knows full well that the uncle has already thrown Karl out of his house; that is why he takes Karl in an affectionate embrace.

Yet when, in Pollunder's presence, Karl reads the uncle's letter and learns of his own sad fate, Pollunder shows him no further affection and offers him no help.

In Kafka's Amerika, we find ourselves in a universe of feelings that are inappropriate, misplaced, exaggerated, unfathomable, or-the reverse-bizarrely missing. In his diary, Kafka characterized Dickens's novels by the words: "Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling." Such is the real meaning of that theater of showily displayed and instantly forgotten feelings that is Kafka's novel. This "critique of sentimentality" (an implicit, parodic, droll, never aggressive critique) is aimed not at Dickens alone but at romanticism generally, at its heirs, Kafka's contemporaries, particularly the expressionists, with their cult of hysteria and madness; it is aimed at the entire Holy Church of the Heart; and once more, it brings together those two apparently very different artists, Kafka and Stravinsky.

A Little Boy in Ecstasy

Of course, one cannot say that music (all music) is incapable of expressing feelings; the music of the Romantic era is authentically and legitimately expressive; but even about that music it can be said: its worth has nothing to do with the intensity of the feelings it provokes. For music can powerfully stir feelings with no musical art at all. I recall my childhood: sitting at the piano, I would throw myself into passionate improvisations for which I needed nothing but a G-minor chord and the subdominant F minor, played fortissimo over and over again. The two chords and the endlessly repeated primitive melodic motif made me experience an emotion more intense than any Chopin, any Beethoven, has ever given me. (One time my musician father, completely furious-I never saw him so furious before or after-rushed into the room, lifted me off the piano stool, and with a disgust he could barely control, carried me into the dining room and set me down under the table.)

What I was experiencing during those improvisations was an ecstasy. What is ecstasy? The boy banging on the keyboard feels an enthusiasm (or a sorrow, or a delight), and the emotion rises to such a pitch of intensity that it becomes unbearable: the boy flees into a state of blindness and deafness where everything is forgotten, even oneself. Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion).

Ecstasy means being "outside oneself," as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one's position (stasis). To be "outside oneself" does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time).

We can see the acoustical image of emotion in the Romantic melody of a lied: its length seems intended for sustaining emotion, building it, causing its slow enjoyment. Ecstasy, on the other hand, cannot be mirrored in a melody, because memory strangled by ecstasy is incapable of retaining the sequence of notes in a melodic phrase, however short; the acoustical image of ecstasy is the cry (or: a very brief melodic motif that imitates a cry).

The classic example of ecstasy is the moment of orgasm. Think back to the time before women had the benefit of the pill. It often happened that at the moment of climax a lover forgot to slide out of his mistress's body and made her a mother, even though, a few moments earlier, he had firmly intended to be extremely careful. That second of ecstasy made him forget both his determination (his immediate past) and his interest (his future).

The instant of ecstasy thus weighed more heavily on the scales than the unwanted child; and since the unwanted child will probably fill the lovers whole life span with his unwanted presence, it may be said that one instant of ecstasy weighed more than a whole lifetime. The lovers lifetime faced the instant of ecstasy from roughly the same inferior status as the finite has facing eternity. Man desires eternity, but all he can get is its imitation: the instant of ecstasy.

I recall a day in my youth: I was with a friend in his car; people were crossing the street in front of us. I saw a person I disliked and pointed him out to my friend: "Run him over!" It was of course only a verbal joke, but my friend was in a state of great euphoria, and he hit the accelerator. The man took fright, slipped, fell. My friend stopped the car just in time. The man was not hurt, but people crowded around and threatened (understandably) to lynch us. Yet my

friend was not a murderer by nature. My words had sent him into a momentary ecstasy (actually, one of the oddest: the ecstasy of a joke).

We are used to connecting the notion of ecstasy to great mystical moments. But there is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy: the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium. Living is a perpetual heavy effort not to lose sight of ourselves, to stay solidly present in ourselves, in our stasis. Step outside ourselves for a mere instant, and we verge on death's dominion.

Delight and Ecstasy

I wonder if Adorno ever found the slightest pleasure in listening to Stravinsky's music. Pleasure? By his lights, Stravinsky's music offers only one such: "the perverse pleasure of deprivation"; for all it does is "deprive" itself of everything: of expressivity; of orchestral sonority; of developmental technique; casting a "spiteful look" on the old forms, it deforms them; "grimacing," it is incapable of invention, it only "ironizes," "caricatures," "parodies"; it is just "negation," not merely of nineteenth-century music but of music altogether ("Stravinsky's music is a music from which music is banished," says Adorno).

Curious, curious. And what about the delight that beams from that music?

I remember the Picasso exhibition in Prague in the mid-sixties. One painting has stayed with me. A woman and a man are eating watermelon: the woman

is seated, the man is lying on the ground, his legs lifted up to the sky in a gesture of unspeakable joy. And the whole thing painted with a delectable offhandedness that made me think the painter, as he painted the picture, must have been feeling the same joy as the man with his legs lifted up.

The delight of the painter painting the man with his legs lifted up is a double delight; it is the delight of contemplating delight (with a smile). It is the smile that interests me. In the delight of the man lifting his legs up to the sky the painter glimpses a wonderful tinge of the comical, and he rejoices in it. His own smile spurs him to a merry, heedless invention, just as heedless as the gesture of the man lifting his legs to the sky. So the delight I'm talking about bears the mark of humor; this is what sets it apart from the delight of other ages in art, from the Romantic delight of Wagners Tristan, for instance, or from the idyllic delight of a Philemon and Baucis. (Is it a fatal lack of humor that makes Adorno so unreceptive to Stravinsky's music?)

Beethoven wrote the "Ode to Joy," but that Beethovenian joy is a ceremony that requires us to stand at respectful attention. The rondos and minuets of the Classical symphonies are, so to speak, an invitation to the dance, but the delight I'm talking about and that I love would not proclaim itself as delight through the collective act of a dance. This is why no polka makes me happy except Stravinsky's "Circus Polka," which is written not for us to dance to but for us to listen to, with our legs lifted up to the sky.

There are works in modern art that have discovered an inimitable delight in being, the delight that shows in a euphoric recklessness of imagination, in the pleasure of inventing, of surprising-even of shocking-by an invention. One might draw up a whole list of works of art that are suffused with this delight: along with Stravinsky {Petrushka, Les Noces, Renard, the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the Violin Concerto, etc., etc.), everything by Miro; Klee's paintings; Dufy's; Dubuffet's; certain Apollinaire writings; late Janacek (Nursery Rhymes, Sextet for Wind Instruments, his opera The Cunning Little Vixen); some of Milhauds works; and some of Poulencs: Les Mamelles de Tiresias, his comic opera on a text by Apollinaire, written in the last days of the war, was denounced by people who thought it scandalous to celebrate the Liberation with a piece of fun; and indeed, the age of delight (of that rare delight which humor sets aglow) was over; after the Second World War, only the very old masters Matisse and Picasso still managed, against the spirit of the times, to keep it going in their work.

In this listing of the great works of delight, I cannot overlook jazz music. The whole jazz repertory consists of variations on a relatively small number of melodies. So it is that all throughout jazz we keep catching sight of a smile that has slipped in between the original melody and its elaboration. Like Stravinsky, the great jazz masters enjoyed the art of playful transcription, and they composed their own versions not only of old Negro songs but also of Bach, of Mozart, of Chopin; Ellington does transcriptions of Tchaikovsky and Grieg, and for his Uwis Suite, he composes a variant of a village polka that recalls Petrushka in spirit. The smile is not only invisibly present in the space that separates Ellington from his "portrayal" of Grieg, it is fully visible on the faces of the old Dixieland musicians: come the moment of his solo (which is always partly improvised-that is, always brings a few surprises), the musician steps forward a little, then yields to another musician and gives himself over to the pleasure of listening (the pleasure of other surprises).

At jazz concerts people applaud. To applaud means: I have listened to you carefully and now I am declaring my appreciation. The music called "rock" changes the situation. An important fact: at rock concerts people do not applaud. It would be almost sacrilege to applaud and thus to bring to notice the critical distance between the person playing and the person listening; we come here not to judge and evaluate but to surrender to the music, to scream along with the musicians, to merge with them; we come here to seek identification, not pleasure; effusion, not delight. We go into ecstasy here: the beat is strong and steady, the melodic motifs are short and endlessly repeated, there are no dynamic contrasts, everything is fortissimo, the song tends toward the highest range and resembles screaming. Here we re no longer in those little nightspots where the music wraps the couple in intimacy; we're in huge halls, in stadiums, pressed one against the next, and, if were dancing at a club there are no couples; each person is doing his moves by himself and together with the whole crowd at the same time. The music turns the individuals into a single collective body: talking here about individualism and hedonism is just one of the self-mystifications of our time, which (like any other time, by the way) wants to see itself as different from what it is.

Evil's Scandalous Beauty

What irritates me in Adorno is his short-circuit method that, with a fearsome facility, links works of art to political (sociological) causes, consequences, or meanings; extremely nuanced ideas (Adorno's musicological knowledge is admirable) thereby lead to extremely impoverished conclusions; in fact, given that an era's political tendencies are always reducible to just two opposing tendencies, a work of art necessarily ends up being classified as either progressive or reactionary; and since reaction is evil, the inquisition can start the trial proceedings.

Le Sacre du printemps: a ballet that ends with the sacrifice of a young girl, who must die for springtime to return. According to Adorno: Stravinsky is on the side of barbarism; his "music does not identify with the victim, but rather with the destructive element." (I wonder: why the verb "identify"? how does Adorno know whether Stravinsky is "identifying" with something or not? why not say "paint," or "portray," "show," "represent"? Answer: because only identifying with evil is culpable and can justify a trial.)

I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires under-

standing its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty-there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced-stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness-it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of "propaganda." It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.

Just as he made a portrayal of the mass and a portrayal of the Shrovetide fair (Petrushka), here Stravinsky made a portrayal of barbaric ecstasy. It is all the more interesting in that he had always, and explicitly, declared himself a partisan of the Apollonian principle, an adversary of the Dionysian: Le Sacre du printemps (particularly its ritual dances) is the Apollonian portrayal of Dionysian ecstasy: in this portrayal, the ecstatic elements (the aggressively beating rhythm, the few extremely short melodic motifs, many times repeated but never developed, and sounding like shrieks), are transformed into great, refined art (for instance, despite its aggressive quality, the rhythm grows so complex through the rapid alternation of measures with different time signatures that it creates an artificial, unreal, completely stylized beat); still, the Apollonian beauty of this portrayal of barbarity does not obscure its horror; it makes us see that at the very bottom point of the ecstasy there is only the harsh

rhythm, the sharp blows of percussion, an extreme numbness, death.

Emigration Arithmetic

The life of an emigre-there's a matter of arithmetic: Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (famous under the name Joseph Conrad) lived seventeen years in Poland (and in Russia, with his exiled family), the rest of his life, fifty years, in England (or on English ships). He was thus able to adopt English as his writing language, and English themes as well. Only his allergy to things Russian (ah, poor Gide, incapable of understanding Conrad's puzzling aversion to Dostoyevsky!) preserves a trace of his Polishness.

Bohuslav Martinu lived in Bohemia till he was thirty-two, then for thirty-six years in France, Switzerland, America, and Switzerland again. A nostalgia for the old country always echoed in his work, and he always called himself a Czech composer. Yet after the war, he declined all invitations from back there, and by his express wish, he was buried in Switzerland. Foiling his last will, in 1979, twenty years after his death, agents of the motherland managed to kidnap his corpse and solemnly install it beneath his native soil.

Gombrowicz lived for thirty-five years in Poland, twenty-three in Argentina, six in France. Yet he could write his books only in Polish, and the characters in his novels are Polish. In 1964, during a stay in Berlin, he is invited to Poland. He hesitates, and in the end, he refuses. His body is buried in Vence, in the south of France.

Vladimir Nabokov lived in Russia for twenty years, twenty-one in Europe (in England, Germany, and France), twenty years in America, sixteen in Switzerland. He adopted English as his writing language, but American themes a bit less thoroughly; there are many Russian characters in his novels. Yet he was unequivocal and insistent in proclaiming himself an American citizen and writer. His body lies at Montreux, in Switzerland.

Kazimierz Brandys lived in Poland for sixty-five years, moving to Paris after the Jaruzelski putsch in 1981. He writes only in Polish, on Polish themes, and yet, even though since 1989 there is no longer a political reason to stay abroad, he is not going back to live in Poland (which provides me the pleasure of seeing him from time to time).

This hasty scan reveals, for one thing, an emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.

Emigration is hard from the purely personal standpoint as well: people generally think of the pain of nostalgia; but what is worse is the pain of estrangement:

the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign. We experience that estrangement not vis-a-vis the new country: there, the process is the inverse: what was foreign becomes, little by little, familiar and beloved. The shocking, stupefying form of strangeness occurs not with an unknown woman we are trying to pick up but with a woman who used to belong to us. Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.

I think often of Gombrowicz in Berlin. Of his refusal to see Poland again. Distrust toward the Communist regime still in power there? I don't think so: Polish Communism was already falling apart, cultivated people were almost all involved in the opposition, and they would have turned Gombrowicz's visit into a triumph. The real reasons for the refusal could only have been existential. And incommunicable. Incommunicable because too intimate. Incommunicable, also, because too wounding for the others. Some things we can only leave unsaid.

Stravinsky's Home

Stravinsky's life divides into three parts of roughly equal length: Russia: twenty-seven years; France and French Switzerland: twenty-nine years; America: thirty-two years.

The farewell to Russia was accomplished in several stages: Stravinsky is initially in France (starting in 1910) as if for a long study trip. These years are incidentally the most Russian in his creative work:

Petrushka, Zvezdoliki (based on a work of the Russian poet Balmont), Le Sacre du printemps, Pribaoutki, the beginning of Les Noces. Then conies the war, and contacts with Russia become difficult; still, he remains a Russian composer with Renard and Histoire du sol-dat, inspired by the folk poetry of his homeland; only after the Revolution does he realize that his birthplace is lost to him, probably forever: the real emigration begins.

Emigration: a forced stay abroad for a person who considers his birthplace his only country. But the emigration stretches on and a new loyalty develops, this one to the adopted land; that's when the break occurs. Little by little, Stravinsky abandons Russian themes. He goes on in 1922 to write Mavra (a comic opera based on Pushkin); then, in 1928, Le Baiser de la fee, that recollection of Tchaikovsky; and thereafter, aside from some few marginal exceptions, he never returns to them. When he dies, in 1971, his wife, Vera, complying with his wishes, rejects the Soviet governments proposal to bury him in Russia and has him taken to the Venice cemetery.

Without a doubt, Stravinsky, like all the others, bore within him the wound of his emigration; without a doubt, his artistic evolution would have taken a different path if he had been able to stay where he was born. In fact, the start of his journey through the history of music coincides roughly with the moment when his native country ceases to exist for him; having understood that no country could replace it, he finds his only homeland in music; this is not just a nice lyrical conceit of mine, I think it in an absolutely concrete way: his only homeland, his only home, was music, all of music by all musicians, the very history of music; there he decided to establish himself, to take root, to live; there he ultimately found his only compatriots, his only intimates, his only neighbors, from Perotin to Webern; it is with them that he began a long conversation, which ended only with his death.

He did all he could to feel at home there: he lingered in each room of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every piece of the furniture; he went from the music of ancient folklore to Pergolesi, who gave him Pulcinella (1919), to the other Baroque masters, without whom his Apollon Musagete (1928) would be unimaginable, to Tchaikovsky, whose melodies he transcribes in Le Baiser de la fee (1928), to Bach, the godfather of his Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924) and Violin Concerto (1931) and whose Chorale Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch" he arranges (1956), to the jazz he celebrates in Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918), in Piano-Rag Music (1919), in Preludium for Jazz Ensemble (1937), and in Ebony Concerto (1945), to Perotin and other old polyphonists, who inspire his Symphony of Psalms (1930) and especially his admirable Mass (1948), to Monteverdi, whom he studies in 1957, to Gesualdo, whose madrigals he transcribes in 1959, to Hugo Wolf, whose two songs he arranges (1968), and to the twelve-tone system, about which he initially was reserved but in which, eventually, after Schoenbergs death (1951), he recognized yet another room in his home.

His detractors, the defenders of music conceived as expression of feelings, who grew irate at his unbearably discreet "affective activity" and accused him of "poverty of heart," didn't have heart enough

themselves to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music.

But that's no surprise: no one is more insensitive than sentimental folk. Remember: "Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling."