All art has the power to move us, but there is a particular potency in music. Augustine’s treatise about music (De musica), an early work that antedates his full conversion to Christianity, is derivative and in truth very dull, yet nonetheless of interest in suggesting some of the widely shared aesthetic assumptions of Latin antiquity. It was a common Neoplatonic belief that experiencing music could actually move the soul for good or ill, thus presenting the listener with an ethical problem as well as a perceptual one. The rational faculty, supposedly unique to the human race, was required for the appreciation of music. Boethius and others use the image of “the ass before the harp”—a brute animal unable to respond to celestial harmonies. This may be a slander against jackasses, of course. Recent studies suggest that even houseplants thrive more vigorously if frequently exposed to classical music. The old doctrine is difficult to understand, since it requires as a preliminary the belief in something called the soul, or at least a union of the material and the immaterial in the self. Self-conscious spiritual experience is hard to come by, but I am more likely to find it at a concert than a church service. And “spiritual experience” is the term I would choose to describe my sense of a performance of the Tetzlaff Quartet last week.
Franz Schubert
They played three pieces so beautifully that I was able to respond even to the Alban Berg, whom I continue to regard as a far-out modernist, despite the fact that he died the year before I was born. But the piece that transported me—really all of us, I think—was Franz Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden”. We call the impulse to the preservation of life the essential human instinct. What “maiden” means in the Germanic languages is a young woman, a sexual virgin, with implications of innocence and a tender vulnerability and sacred potentiality. And if life’s preservation can seem an unquestionable imperative even to one ancient of days and already much reduced by natural decay, how much greater is the cosmic insult of the death of infancy or youth?
What is “Death and the Maiden” about? Are works of art about? Archibald MacLeish gained permanent fame with two short lines: “A poem should not mean/ But be.” My own view is that all art is about aboutness, an aboutness prone to vary considerably among readers, viewers, and especially listeners. This is because it is a necessary collaboration with moving parts between a creator and an audience. “Death and the Maiden” (the quartet) is in one sense about “Death and the Maiden” (the poem written by a minor poet named Matthias Claudius and set to music by Schubert), which is itself about the whole tradition of the Danse Macabre or Dance of Death, which is about the somber fact that in Adam we all die, and seldom in our view opportunely. It is also implicitly about love, because Schubert was a Romantic and that’s the way he saw things. If there is a beginning to the romantic tradition, surely it is in the first line of the Old French Tristan: “Milords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and of death?...”
The implication of a theory of aesthetic cooperation is that no two experiences of a work of art are likely to be identical, or perhaps even markedly similar. We all recognize that in music the quality of performance plays its role. No less do the associations brought by the audience. Schubert wrote the quartet in 1824. He had a dread disease and knew he was dying—which he did four years later, at the age of thirty-one. The sorrow of young death is timeless, boundless. But any lover of English poetry who hears this piece and knows something of its circumstances must immediately think of another doomed youth whose early death seems a similar cosmic crime: John Keats. Keats was already three years dead when Schubert composed “Death and the Maiden.” He had died at twenty-five! Surely some scholar—literary critic or musicologist—has written about this parallel. Perhaps many scholars have. For Keats, too, wrote brilliantly on Schubert’s subject and in the same complicated way. He wrote a song “about” a song. Keats’s “Death and the Maiden” is his “Ode to a Nightingale,” written in 1819 amid a burst of genius without which the history of English poetry could not be as it is.
The medieval Dance of Death was a grave moral genre that applied to human morbidity the gloomy attitudes of the ascetic mind as it meditated upon the terrors of a punitive theology. The ubiquity and capriciousness of human mortality, a reality of the actual conditions of human existence, were there for all to see, and all to dread. Death, the Universal Enemy, though a Latin feminine (mors) was almost necessarily personified in masculine form--as an animated skeleton, or the Grim Reaper, or the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, pale rider on pale steed. In Schubert the terror is made more ambiguous, and in Keats it is perhaps finally overcome entirely. In both there is an element of complicated eroticism: love and death, as in the romance of Tristan and Iseult. Death was the fourth element added by the Romantics to the scandalous triad known in our own age as sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
The “plot” of “Nightingale” is ostensibly simple. The poet is thrilled by the singing of a nightingale, rather as I was thrilled, I suppose, by the Tetzlaff Quartet’s rendition of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”. The bird’s song makes him think of his own mortality—in a world where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies—but it also seems to offer a kind of immortality through art. The poem behind Schubert’s composition borrows the medieval legend, but is Romantic in substance. Death is an importunate male lover, the Maiden the terrified object of advances against which all resistance is futile. The eroticism is overt. The Maiden is loath, indeed, but Death’s seemingly benign promise to her is rest within his arms. The situation in Keats is very different. For many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death/called him soft names…/Now more than ever seems it rich to die,/to cease upon the midnight with no pain/while thou [nightingale] art pouring forth thy soul abroad/in such ecstasy!
There is another ancient legend complicit in “Death and the Maiden” and the “Nightingale” ode: that of the swan’s song, an achieved supernal beauty so great as to be fatal. Not everyone who uses the term swan-song to denote an artistic finality or indeed a last act of any kind may be familiar with its ancient origins in the unnatural natural histories of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The swan, a bird whose beauty inharmoniously contrasted with its honking and hissing voice, was supposed, just before the moment of death, to sing one song of transcendent loveliness. The fatal beauty of art is a common theme in the Romantic period. Schubert’s own response in his “Swan-Song” * might be described as something to die for. Metaphorically of course.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7CXom-D
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