Making Time: A Study of Stravinsky, Proust, and Sartre

To speak of Stravinsky without full competence to deal in musical terms with his style, structure, and technique is to run an intellectual risk of the first order. In a lengthy and single-minded career that includes five books of articulate commentary, the composer has insisted that his music means exactly what it says and no two ways about it. He sees no reason for translating his works into any profane language of program or philosophy or cultural context. So be it. Yet the literary man such as I, who must resign himself to being (in Stravinsky’s own terms) an “incompetent critic,” may have to run the risk of making interpretations. He does so not in order to avoid the music but to come to it with statements that carry his sense of its significance. In short, Stravinsky means something to me. I believe I can best approach the music in itself by first considering it in a context of associations, and then detaching it from them. For me these associations are primarily literary, and French. The oblique approach to Stravinsky’s music through the neighboring country of French literature will at least allow me to delimit his works if not to seize them alive.

Themes of music and musicians have contributed a good deal of shoddy to literature, particularly in the field of fiction. The image of the composer as sentimental parvenu that comes oozing out of Jean-Christophe contributes not one ounce to the musical understanding of the reading public. Yet Romain Rolland’s novel was one of the intellectual classics of thirty years ago. Vastly superior both as fiction and as a work of musical perceptiveness, Thoma Mann’s Doctor Faustus skirts close to the same region. Because of Leverkiihn’s pact with the devil, which gives him fifteen years of solitude in which to discover and develop atonal music, the composer assumes the role of a culture hero rather than of a human artist. The service to atonal music is dubious. Probably the greatest novel on musical themes in our time has a singularly wooden ring.