English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The fire at Notre-Dame and the school of Notre-Dame 0:00 Thank you, this is serious, because frankly with this weather, I would have had other ideas than listening to Dominique Pagani. Especially since the Seine isn't far. Yes, the Seine. The bodies of a great tragedy, we have all been witnesses. And that's why I've slightly modified the program. But normally, today, there should have been the continuation of our series, our serial. I'm trying to catch flies.
0:32 Nature or landscape? Question mark. And I thought I'd make a parenthesis, apparently unrelated to this subject, while still thinking about the building we cared about most, on the banks of the Seine. Are you showing the rose window? Yes, I can show it.
1:03 Yes, this rose window isn't there just for pictorial reasons. First of all, it's not painting. First of all, you can only marvel that it withstood the fire, because lead does melt after all — the specialists say it's around 300, 400 degrees, no? There, as soon as it becomes practical, the great researchers shy away. I think it's somewhere in that range. Whereas tungsten is 3400 degrees. And I think it was used for filaments in light bulbs, in the old days, before ecology. And this rose window is actually used as an illustration for an album I recommend to you.
1:42 An album of so-called early music. It covers a vast period, so it's not very precise, but here, very precisely, it's music that illustrates the transition from the old style to what was called in the 13th century the novum organum, the new way of doing things, a new organ, a new tool. Organum is the tool. In Aristotle, it's the tool, meaning that whether in zoology, biology, or geology, there is always logic, the logos, so one must work on the tool, do logic, before studying the other disciplines.
2:18 That's where the Greek title of Aristotle's Logic comes from, it's Organon. Well, novum organum, what is it? Ah, it's moving, you'll see. We'll play it in audio. I recommend the album because the ensemble is admirable, it's very hard to restore. Gregorian chant requires long studies of the ways one deciphered, decoded these old scores that were called antiphonaries or neumes. I'm not obligated to remember all that. And I chose this album because it's situated in what is called — we're not going to give a course on the history of music, but in the history of music — the Notre-Dame school.
2:55 This is a bit of a tribute. The Notre-Dame school, which, at the time, was the main center of musical renewal for the whole of Western Europe — so it's very important — in connection with the basilica of Saint-Denis. Saint-Denis, at the time, was a town that rivaled Paris. You know our kings are buried in the basilica of Saint-Denis.
3:25 There, there's a great historian who comes to mind, I'll stop trying to remember, perhaps of the edition. And the event illustrated by this album, which, frankly, is very moving, is the transition from the old style, better known as Gregorian chant, Per omnia saecula saeculorum — that's the line. The equivalent in drawing is the line. There's no chord, no harmony, it's the line.
3:55 It's really the purest style. There are even purists — but for me, they're idiots — for whom, beyond that, that's it, that's the decadence of music. You know, like there are those who say that from the piano onward, it's over. In short, there are those who already say, as soon as there are two voices, it's over, there's no more music. So precisely, this album — I'm building suspense on purpose — is the transition from monody, mono-ode, one ode, one song, from music that has a single voice, even if a thousand chests sing it, I exaggerate, but here, you'll see, there are four or five, sometimes five or six in the choir, but who sing the same melody, what's called in unison, if you prefer.
4:36 That's monody. And suddenly, in the same piece, a mass made for Christmastime, which was celebrated for the first time in Notre-Dame, suddenly, the voices diverge. A bit like the Romanesque-Gothic transitions, you all learned this, it's ogives that suddenly diverge, like that, like a sheaf. So we're not so far from the subject, which was nature or landscape, another one.
5:06 So, what are you telling me? It's an artificial connection — after all, landscape, the countryside, is green, Notre-Dame is in the heart of the city, it's concrete — no, it's not concrete, it's the beautiful stone of Chartres. Easier to work with than concrete, still. But nonetheless. But there is a connection, and here I come back a bit to what is perhaps most tragic in this event — I'm not saying most odious, what's odious is the exploitation that's being made of it, you know. You'd better not demonstrate tomorrow, because that means you have no pity for Notre-Dame.
5:41 You've heard that, in the media. No, no, no, no, what I mean is, what's most tragic is still the loss of the framework, you know, eight centuries old, a framework of oaks felled eight centuries ago. A framework which, in the discourse of the initiated — well, big word — all those who dealt a bit with the restoration of Notre-Dame, the historians, the architects, were nicknamed, as you probably know.
Hölderlin, the carpenter, and the vault of forests 6:12 Thank you, the forest. Thank you, Anne, the forest. And you see, we're not so far from our subject, nature or landscape. If you were attentive, I hope you were, down to the last comma, to my last talk, which was filmed at home, since the center here wasn't available — thanks to the good care of Philippe, Hugo and others — I quoted quite a few poets, in particular Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Rilke, I believe, and at one point, I quoted, not a poem, but rather, a sketch of a poem.
6:47 It's the unfortunate Hölderlin, as they say, with a certain tone, a certain compassion, at the time, for those who visited him. It had already been a few years since he'd been shut away in his tower and in his madness. I don't think it was fake or anything. I'm no specialist. And so, overwhelming with titles His Majesty, etc., all those who came for grand visits, recognizing none of his former fellow students. With intellectual Germany parading past, even poor Léry.
7:20 And he was sheltered, as you know, for 37 years, by someone who came knocking on the door of his little quarters to say, I can take him in if you don't know what to do with him. He was a carpenter. You see, the framework. And they told him, you can take him anyway, he only has 6 months to live. He stayed 37 years at the carpenter's. He wasn't a bad man, the carpenter. Him and his family. They were lovely. He was a companion in the household.
7:51 Neither pity nor deification. He was a companion. I'm quoting the carpenter's own word. And what's interesting is that one day, it's the carpenter who tells a few visitors like that. He only speaks when asked. He has work to do. And he says that one day, the last one, he came down the stairs leading from his room. I recommend you go. Tübingen is a marvelous town that descends in terraces like that, along the Neckar, that kind of small town in Germany, a secret, a small university town where the student youth, who make up about half the population, and who, for once, in that poor pre-war Germany I think, population-wise, was spared by the bombings.
8:39 So he comes down from his room, from where he had a view over the Neckar, and he sees in the stairwell an engraving depicting a Greek temple, which was very common at the time. It's in the neoclassical style, and he tells the carpenter, you should make one like that. So the carpenter says, I answered him that I already had enough trouble feeding my family and that I didn't have the leisure to live in philosophical rest like he did. You see, a nice little class struggle between the carpenter and the man he was housing.
9:13 And he has a reply — it's true, but I'm still quite unhappy. And there, he improvised these few words that I quote to you. To you, my friend, I will tell my secret. Of Daedalus, that is, he was Minos's engineer, the one who built the means to escape captivity and servitude. To you, I will tell my secret of Daedalus, you have genius and the forest.
9:44 Not so mad, the madman. Speaking to the carpenter, he says, you have genius and the forest. Genius is needed because a table isn't made with hands alone, the mind has to work too. You need the ingenium, as they used to say, don't you? So, in essence, Italian... all that made me think of the forest of Notre-Dame, and I stay on this image of the forest because these ogives that you admire in the Gothic cathedral, these diverging lines, have often rightly been compared.
10:19 I'm no specialist, the specialists say it's no accident that the Gothic style — I'm making a parenthesis, but I mean, in Germany, you'd travel 300 kilometers to admire the church, the admirable church of Freiburg, for example, in Breisgau, for example. Well. But here, 300 kilometers, there's nothing like that between the two. Here, in Paris alone, you have within a small handkerchief's space — I won't even say a kilometer, 600 meters — you have Saint-Séverin, Notre-Dame, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, it's unheard of, France for that.
10:50 She spoke of the Gothic spiral, you know, which starts from Paris, and then there's Chartres, Laon, Senlis, etc. I don't know. It's still a flowering, to use plant metaphors again. So I come back to this comparison, the naves have often been compared with these arches — I'm no specialist, I use the terms that come to mind — they've been compared to the canopy of trees in the forest. And that this had likely been inspired in these peoples, since it was covered with forests, it was marshes and forests, all that, no?
11:23 Sorry? Yes, we got cut off there, right? No, but I mean the Vikings, all that, I mean the style, the churches of Normandy, Proust compares the church of Combray to a nave, an upturned Viking longship. So it's therefore, almost, not only figuratively but almost literally, that the forest, which was the framework, remains present, remained present in the vault, in a good part, that was the basis.
11:57 So, since we lost the architectural, sculptural part, in this case, of this priceless sample of heritage — as all those who don't give a damn about heritage say these days — I thought of something that cannot collapse, which is the music of the period. That's why, if you'd get ready, we're going to hear a few seconds of the ritual of the Christmas mass, by Léonin, Léonin and Pérotin being the two greatest representatives of the so-called Notre-Dame school, who truly initiated the emergence of polyphony.
Listening to Léonin's Christmas mass 12:51 So, of Léonin and Pérotin, here it's Léonin, Christmas mass. I'll leave a few seconds in monody so the contrast is all the more moving when suddenly other voices come in. There. Pause. It's dreadful, I'm sorry. Hearing my voice, on top of that, I have a bit of the flu, I'm a bit weak, contrasting with these such beautiful voices, but Puer, puer, at the piece.
13:46 there, there are several chests but a single voice — if polyphony is about to arrive soon
15:03 I'll stop here before we leave monody, but I presume some of you have already noticed, it comes from the East, it's Eastern psalmody — sorry — thank you, it's Eastern psalmody that we're hearing there, it passed through the Byzantine style, the oldest Christian rites, it's probably Armenia, at the time, the mountains of the Caucasus, one had to pass through there to come from East to West, or via the Danube, and I don't want to talk about my own origins, but I'll mention Marcel Pérès, who directs this ensemble — coincidentally, I have nothing to do with it — is currently preparing a performance at the festival of Corsican polyphonies, because Corsica, like islands often are, especially islands so protected by the terrain against the outside, against outside penetration, Corsica is a true natural conservatory whose polyphonies many researchers study to see the state of the most archaic aspects of our European polyphony. There, I'll just note in passing, but here you clearly feel the psalmody, it's not far from the muezzin's call to prayer, if you look closely, I'll add
16:14 that flamenco, largely at the vocal level, also comes from this Eastern tradition — when you think that not only the armies but the Arab culture and civilization, Andalusian in particular, remained seven centuries in Spain, that leaves traces. There, I'll note in passing all these filiations, let's go, we're still in monody, on the hymn
17:35 Thank you. Thank you for the fade. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt. Strangely, this 13th-century music has aged less than the French opera school of 1820–1830, for example. I mean, you don't often listen to... Even fervent music lovers don't often listen to operas by Auber, Halévy or Meliac. There. Or Boieldieu. Too bad, Boieldieu isn't bad. It's not quite... But anyway, that made me feel dated.
18:06 It ended on the Kyrie, as you all rose. Do you know that's where the word 'kyrielle' [litany/string] comes from? I got a litany of insults, that's where it comes from. Do you know why? Some of you may know? Rabelais, Rabelais... Because it had become so debased, the habit of listening to the mass like Latin gibberish.
18:37 People didn't understand, they didn't fully understand French at the time either. They were Picard, I don't know, from Corsica, but Picard, Occitan, etc. And Latin was incomprehensible. And so they repeated mechanically Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, kyrielle. Yes? Rabelais uses it to denounce bad education, based on rote learning, on stuff that doesn't reflect on what it means — the rote-learning method, in passing. Well, there. I couldn't...
19:07 I'll stay with this tribute to Notre-Dame. I'm not done. Not that I'm delaying the subject — well, landscape — it's that we're right in it. We're in the process of entering it. You were handed a series of texts, I believe. Except that I — oh, I wouldn't have left a copy, I'd really need one — do you have it, please? Oh, sorry. There, there, yes. Well, I only have an excerpt here, but it's the one I need, so that's fine. Thanks, that's kind of you. Thank you very much. I'll begin, you see, with a poem by an author with whom I ended my last talk.
Rilke and the interiorization of what surrounds us 19:46 You see, that was before the Notre-Dame fire. I'm picking up my earlier thread. I had ended with Rilke. I had ended, not with the Sonnets, which are practically his poetic testament, but with the great elegies, what are called the Duino Elegies. Duineser Elegien, as they say in German, because they were written in a small town, a small Italian one, a bit like Noh theatre — no, but I mean the theme was interiorization.
20:18 Perhaps we are here, we are in the world in order to interiorize what surrounds us. Perhaps pears, bananas, if we take that example, the sideboard, the furniture — the furniture Baudelaire speaks of, you know, the gleaming furniture, polished by the years — the décor, our art, all of it, everything we see is perhaps made to pass into us and be restored through speech, by means of an interiorization. That's the guiding thread of my talk today, the interiorization of the exterior.
20:48 That's where there is a connection. The architecture of Notre-Dame collapsed — I'm not saying it isn't a loss, for the framework — I don't know how, it's practically an irreparable loss, I mean. The spire, well, that can actually be rebuilt, it's not that old, and we now have all the plans on microfilm from back then, on digital now. But on the other hand, I think... Well, but anyway, we've seen that the miracle Notre-Dame sheltered for centuries is preserved, in the Hegelian sense, sublated, in this music.
21:22 And it's this process of interiorization I'd like to illustrate, through the very first of the sonnets that open the collection — I mean, practically Rilke's last collection — the Sonnets to Orpheus. Let me make, as a preliminary, a very brief foray into his biography — not really his biography, I mean not in the tabloid sense, but into his relationship to writing. He had just gone through a long period of desert, as mystics say, right, he wasn't inspired, he wasn't writing anymore.
21:58 That happened to him several times, an essentially modern problem, apart from du Bellay, who makes a brief allusion, a magnificent poem in the Regrets, during the Renaissance — otherwise, especially in the modern era, this problem of being haunted by literary sterility, think of Mallarmé, 'the blank paper that whiteness defends.' Defends against what? Against the attack of my pen, no doubt — it's not 'the blank paper' as a shield 'that whiteness defends'.
22:30 So he had gone through these periods of dryness, and he emerged from them twice — once for the great elegies of Duino, the two are bound together in one volume, at Garnier-Flammarion, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, a small volume like that, which costs less than 10 euros I believe. Sorry, I'll put it down, but it's to encourage you, it's not a huge expense, but it's magnificent. And bilingual too.
23:00 For the Duino Elegies, he was walking on cliffs near Genoa when he heard a voice, and it inspired him — I won't go into detail — suddenly, the miraculous fountain of the great elegies. I say 'great' because in France this genre is rarely developed, the best translator of all this... including for Hölderlin, by the way, I'm thinking of Armel Guerne, who was a great Resistance fighter, which is fairly rare in this field. Swiss — look him up, Google Armel Guerne, there's an association of the Friends of Armel Guerne, he's a figure worth knowing, G-U-E-R-N-E.
23:40 He himself says, Armel Guerne, that lyricism in French doesn't amount to much, and that the great lyrical breath isn't really our thing. You see, Ronsard wrote 'Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,' that's the small form the French excel at, the little tableau, if you will, a bit like a jewel, the Enamels and Cameos, as Théophile Gautier would say, and impeccably crafted miniatures. On the other hand, the large form, in music, the symphony, the fugue, etc., that's rather the domain, the Germans' domain.
Reading of the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus 24:10 So it's the same with the elegies. The sonnet brings us to the small form. The form has to be impeccable. And it's the first one, and what was the occasion — now I get to it — for a return to writing, after that dry spell. He had extensive correspondence with a number of ladies. He had many lady friends, seriously, they were friends. And I had the chance to know a lady who had known Rilke. Ah, that makes me feel old all of a sudden. Lotte Schwarz, Charlotte Schwarz, who took care of children whose parents had disappeared in the bombing of Dresden.
24:45 And, I tell her, Valmont, who has an extraordinary culture, she had known — Mahler, Lenin, I say in no particular order, her father was a diplomat. And Rilke, she told me, poor Rilke, he was kind, but everything drooped, the eyes, the eyelids. Sorry, I'll leave it there. He had extensive correspondence with these ladies, and with one in Russia, in particular, whom I'll speak of now, whose daughter had gone on to become the dancer of the century.
25:15 She was a pre-teen, thirteen or fourteen years old. That's it. And this girl was struck by an illness, how shall I put it, an endocrinological illness, she gained weight. She gained weight, she was forced to give up dancing, and she died fairly quickly, at fifteen.
25:49 Excuse me. This tragedy shaped what she writes. He saw it as a kind of sign, because she tried to dance right to the end. Now, in the myth, Orpheus, the myth as reported by the Greeks, Orpheus is stoned by the Maenads, those are the kind of deities who follow Dionysus, dangerous deities, of frenzy, bacchantes of a sort. And the sound of Orpheus's lyre irritated them, and they stoned him, he died under the blows of the stones, but it seems that right up to the last stone, he kept singing.
26:27 So, you'll see the connection with Notre-Dame, since it's a question of a temple. So it's assumed that Orpheus has just died. Do you have the text? It's the only sonnet. There. So: A tree rose up. Oh pure transcendence, oh song of Orpheus.
27:01 Here again, you see a conjunction of a plant figure, the tree, and song. Oh song of Orpheus, oh great tree raised up in the ear. It's not a landscape offered to sight, but a voice to be heard, if you've been following, then, the previous episodes of our series. I repeat: A tree rose up, oh pure transcendence, oh song of Orpheus, oh great tree raised up in the ear, and everything fell silent.
27:32 Yet, within that very unanimous silence, a new beginning takes place, sign and metamorphosis. Animals of silence tore themselves away from the forest. You know that, according to legend, Orpheus's song was so beautiful that lions came to listen to it religiously without giving up their ferocity, and came to listen to this concert, this midday performance. Animals of silence tore themselves away from the forest, clear and freed from their lairs and nests.
28:05 In other words, it's not the utilitarian side, the raising of animals. It's not about reproduction or food. And it turned out then that neither cunning nor anguish—two elements that play such a great role in ethology, as we now call it, in animal behavior almost all, almost every moment of the time, isn't that so? Cunning and anguish. And it turned out then that it was neither cunning nor anguish that made them so silent, but the desire to hear.
28:36 Roaring, cries and bellowing seemed small in their hearts. And where, until then, there had scarcely been a hut to welcome such a song, a poor shelter born of the most obscure desire, with an entrance whose doorposts trembled—there you created for them, in hearing. So there, it's the ear.
29:07 There you created for them, in hearing, temples. And we come back, don't we, to our building. There. But in reverse—there, we started from sound and came back to architecture. There, I wanted to mark the occasion a little for this tragedy, hoping we will soon see her among us again. So, I remain, of course, on this theme of nature or landscape, and I'm making another connection, another link, to the last episode.
Rereading of Rimbaud's "Aube" 29:47 among other texts, I had considered—I don't say analyzed, because that would take more time, analysis is a rather big word—but I've already told you that I hate interpretation and that I prefer to stick to analysis, that is, to note that here there is an imperfect tense, a simple past, without looking for interpretations, except when they are practically imposed by the text itself.
30:18 I had commented on this excerpt from the Illuminations, "Dawn"—Aube, without an article, A-U-B-E—which is the most beautiful sunrise in our literature, if not in all literature, written by an eighteen-year-old kid, no less. I would have said the whole thing since it isn't long, it's half a page. I'll say it before—the text: I embraced the summer dawn. Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces. The water was dead. The camps of shadows did not leave the woodland road.
30:54 I walked, waking the warm living breath, and the gemstones watched, and the wings rose without a sound. The first venture was, in the path already filled with cool, pale gleams, a flower who told me her name. I laughed at the blond waterfall that tumbled through the pines: on the silvery summit, I recognized the goddess. Then, one by one, I lifted the veils, in the lane, waving my arms. Across the plain, where I denounced her to the cock. In the great city she fled among the steeples and domes, running like a beggar over the marble quays.
31:31 I chased her at the top of the road, near a laurel wood. I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, and I felt her immense body. Dawn and the child fell down at the bottom of the wood. When I woke, it was noon. With this rather abrupt ending in a wood full of secrets. When I woke it was noon. Dawn and the child fell down at the bottom of the wood. So, I tell you, sometimes I'm a bit at the borderline between analysis and interpretation. It's obvious there is a maternal relation there.
German Romanticism and Novalis's fragments 32:02 In any case, I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, dawn and the child. This is intertextual, it's not an interpretation imposed from outside. I'll move on now to a completely different text, but there's a common point too, in the attempt to express through speech, since today, I remind you, our guiding thread is the interiorization of the outside. The outside is the landscape. In nature, the sods, in which there would be no landscape at all, but which is not sufficient, as nature, to define landscape.
32:37 Now, this is an excerpt from a novel, one of the many novels, long novels, in several volumes, by the novelist who was the most fashionable at the time of Hegel, at the junction between this very rich period, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This very rich period, isn't it, that we call, in our tradition, pre-Romanticism. I don't much like that expression, just as I don't like the expression "precursor"—it's not that I have anything against the prefix pre-, but when we say Rousseau is the precursor of Romanticism, that means he did a little of what the others afterward did a lot.
33:11 Whereas Rousseau often did much more than the French Romantics—he sometimes actually anticipates Rimbaud, as we're about to see. Often, in Rousseau, you find a whole series of impressions, of sensations, which presuppose an important role for the body, for bodies, and not only for the heart and feeling, as in Romanticism. There, I mean, I'll develop that later, I won't linger on it now. But this extremely rich period, that of German Romanticism, you know—I often insist on this—is marked by a hecatomb of its protagonists.
33:41 Most of the German Romantics died mad, or by suicide, very young. For many beautiful women, captains, and poets died among us. And so this one is one of the rare novelists of the group. You'd say, they're poets, essayists, or writers—they're not made for the novel, unlike Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, I mean, it's collections of aphorisms, excuse me, I mean fragments, for example, a collection by Novalis, who is one of the most emblematic figures of German Romanticism, whose most famous work, one that alone amounts to a whole program for German Romanticism, is the Hymns to the Night.
34:27 This night, in that word which is Hegel's when he said one must not take the absolute for the night in which all cows are black. Well, the Hymns to the Night are marvelous. It's night, night, the night of the queen of the night—that is, it's not night in the sense of the darkness of nothingness, it's the opposite, it's night as a screen on which there bursts forth, as in a dream, isn't it, a whole luminous phantasmagoria—that's Novalis's world, very sensual at the same time. So, there, he wrote a collection called Pollen, made of fragments, bits, let me quote you a few fragments at random, like this: "Water is a wet flame," nice, water is a wet flame, that's Novalis, "strange that the true root of cruelty should be sensual pleasure," 1796, "we will surely never know each other, but we will do much better than know each other"—you see, it's a challenge to knowledge—and then, very interesting, two things that bring him close to Hegel, though they're often set in opposition to each other: first, "speaking for the sake of speaking is the formula of deliverance," very modern, that,
35:37 and second, "the philosophical act par excellence is the murder of oneself"—that's Novalis for you. So you see, these are small scattered works, fragments, pollens—he wrote only one great novel, Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which he wanted to outdo Goethe and, in turn, write a Bildungsroman, as they said at the time, a novel of formation—the model being Rousseau's Émile—you take the main protagonist from his birth to his fulfillment, to his maturity, and the masterpiece of the genre is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, at the time, which culminates in the formation of the modern petit bourgeois; and Novalis, being the very opposite, as you might expect, wrote a much more mystical novel, if you will, to go quickly, and it's not a great success—he's far better in poetry, the poem, although within it there is a Märchen, as they say over there, a tale which by itself is a marvel.
Jean Paul, a forgotten novelist most read in his time 36:39 well, the great novelist of that period is Jean Paul. I say Jean Paul because that's how he's known in German literature—well, "known." You won't see it much—if you have friends in Germany, on Erasmus or whatever, mention Jean Paul to them, they'll say, Jean Paul who? He's hardly read anymore, but he was surely the most read at the time. You see, a very famous musician like Schumann, for instance, who up to his thirties had written almost nothing but works for piano.
37:09 Until Liszt told him—the providential Liszt, always so generous, always so inspiring to his friends—he told him, "Now, I want to hear things from you with trumpets and timpani," meaning a piece for a large orchestra, "come on, get out of the piano, the introspection a bit, one must strike the crowds." Liszt knew about that, he certainly knew how to strike the crowds. So, a parenthesis—when he had a broke friend, he'd say, "Need money? Wait, I'll give a concert tonight," just like that. It's fantastic, people like that. He's the greatest virtuoso of all time. "Oh damn, don't even worry about the takings!"
37:39 Fantastic. And when Wagner was caught by the police with gunpowder on his hands, and after the 1848 barricades, he was under threat of death, the repression was in full swing—it's thanks to a providential passport, from a fierce German journalist. That man was Liszt. Marvelous musician. So, Jean Paul inspired Schumann's first symphony, which he called "Siebenkäs."
38:12 That's the name of the hero. "Seven cheeses," that's what "Siebenkäs" means. "Käse." "Siebenkäs." Yes, Jean Paul had a lot of humor. That's what saved him. He died neither mad nor by suicide. He lived a long life. He too had a large readership—a female readership that was very attached to him, he gave all sorts of practical advice, which wasn't obvious at the time. He constantly converses with the reader, with the female reader. "I know my reader would very much like to know here what my hero is thinking, but I won't tell her everything." And at one point he says, "I'm lingering a bit, but I'll always have, before the flyleaf, room to keep going."
38:48 This was quite new, this way of stepping back from the work and immediately striking up a conversation with the reader. It comes to us from England, at the time it was the avant-garde of Sterne and of Swift, you know, the author of Gulliver. So there's this humor, and alongside the humor, an immense sensibility, sometimes an exacerbated sentimentality. He's known in France above all for his dreams, since he was the first to make dreams a literary genre, well before Nerval. You see, Nerval actually translated some of his dreams.
39:20 It's true that Nerval, at nineteen, made his name by translating Goethe's Faust, he's a creative Germanist. And if you look at the José Corti editions—Corti, which unfortunately disappeared, it was near the Luxembourg Gardens, Anne must have known that, the Corti bookshop. On the internet there should still be a collection, a selection of dreams, that's the exact title, edited by Albert Béguin, a great specialist of that period—honestly, it's worth a look.
39:52 A master of the oneiric, already, Jean Paul. But that's not what this is about; his hero is a hero. That's why I chose it, because it's fitting for the season. He has just gone through a terrible winter, which we all know about, with a companion he was very much in love with, whom he married—his wife—afterward, they have household troubles, quarrels, because she makes noise with her wool distaff while he's working, they're both broke, well, that's the novel. The novel is the ideal genre to express what Hegel calls the prose of the world, in the absence of poetry, isn't it?
40:26 But that's exactly what was needed: he receives a letter from his best friend—a constant theme in Jean Paul—his best friend is a double, and moreover, his friend is named Leibgeber, that's fine, but it simply means "body-giver," the one who gave the body, he resembles him—who tells him, "Come join me at Bayreuth"—Bayreuth at that time had nothing to do with Wagner, it was long before, Wagner wasn't even born yet, but it was known for being at the heart of Franconia, the most romantic spot, German Romanticism's country of medium-sized hills, there are no very high mountains as in France, between the south of Germany and the north, this middling Germany of the Rhine uplands if you like as well, and he invites him there, to Bayreuth, at the end of winter, and so he's going to mark the start of spring with this walk on foot—I'll read you a few extracts—and it's this walk on foot that inspired Schumann's first symphony, which he titled "Spring."
From Chateaubriand's fixed shot to the march in Siebenkäs 41:26 You see, the importance of Jean Paul, even though he's largely forgotten. So, I'll read it to you because our guiding thread is the interiorization of the outside. Now, the outside here—and that's why I insisted on starting the first episode of this series with Chateaubriand, where we were motionless, watching a landscape in which everything moves, the birds fly off, the bison graze on the American prairies, but we don't move. We are the fixed-shot camera, that's what we are. There. Thank you. I'm not sure.
41:56 And here, it's the opposite. We had already seen, in Rousseau, that the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, his literary last will and testament, are divided into "walks." A walk is a movement. It's the complete opposite of a fixed shot. And here, you'll see—I just made an allusion to cinema, which I don't know as well as some of you here in the room might, I'd like to. I think we'll put him at ease with Midi et Lyosha, to make them uncomfortable.
42:29 But you'll see that in the text there are notations that are cinematic avant la lettre, even though we're in 1700, the very last years of the eighteenth century. There are still wigs, lots of wigs. Well yes. Rousseau was the first to shock people by saying, wigs, we're dead, I'm not going out there with my hair. Later it was Schiller who did that. Schiller, who was made an honorary citizen by the first French Republic for his hymns. There's the good and the bad side of Germany.
43:02 Well then, he has gone through this terrible winter. Well, he has tenderness for his wife despite the quarrels, and they never actually break up. You know that, it's in every song. And now he is ready to go join his friend. His wife—he has prepared his little pack, and he lets her fall asleep and spends the night in the armchair, and he will leave at dawn. So I'll take him up at that moment. You see the sequence as a unity of time. We leave at dawn. I'll move on to the text. "The night watchman's leave-taking"—I already have to stop there.
43:34 The night watchman was a mythic figure in the imagination of the time. I already pointed out to you the Nightwatches of Bonaventura, one of the most extreme texts of German Romanticism. It's a night watchman who keeps his journal—well, "journal," one should really say "nocturnal." At the time, it wasn't... it was someone who walked through the streets and blew a horn to mark the hours. It wasn't bells, it was a horn signal. There. So when it says "the night watchman's leave-taking," that's what it is. And the figure of the night watchman, almost mythical, appears in the second act of Wagner's Meistersinger.
44:08 It's not... in the little town of Nuremberg, asleep in the night of June 21st. The night watchman's leave-taking finally pushed him out of the drowsy armchair, into the starry, breath-filled morning. But beforehand, he slipped once more into the room, beside the rose-cheeked woman lost in her ardent dream. He went to sleep his wife. He closed a window whose draft was stealthily striking her defenseless heart. He held back his lips from the kiss that would have woken her, and contented himself with looking at her, as much as the starlight and the paleness of dawn allowed, until the moment when he turned his gaze away, overtaken by the thought that this might be the last time he saw her.
44:48 This idea of a last time—you'll see the cinematic quality—was further heightened outdoors by the slight dizziness that emotion and lack of sleep had caused in his bodily head. The body is present, it's not feelings, it's sensations. I repeat: the slight dizziness that emotion and the lack of sleep had caused in his bodily head.
45:21 Through the melancholy glances he cast back at his house receding into the distance, at the town plunged in darkness—the metamorphosis of foreground into background, a zoom effect, no less. And on the fleeing walks along every height—the landscape begins to appear—where he had carried and warmed his heart, numbed and seized by the ice of the previous winter. Behind him, it teems with metaphors, behind him, the leaf on which, caterpillar, tortrix moth and worm, he had crawled, gnawing at it, especially through the winter, the leaf fell like a skeleton of a leaf.
46:02 But already, the first foreign land, which had not yet marked the stations of his suffering, drew from his heart, in the manner of the serpentine remedy, a few drops of sorrow. That's a bit of humor. In just a few moments of walking, he's already in foreign land. An allusion to Germany, which at the time was divided into four hundred small states. You walk two hours and you go from the Duchy of Baden to the Kingdom of Bavaria. It goes fast. Well. They're not big nations, as the Germans say when speaking of France—the great nation.
The sunrise and the hymn to spring 46:33 So, but already the first foreign land, which had not yet marked the stations of his suffering, drew from his heart, in the manner of the serpentine remedy—that was a remedy of the time—a few drops of sorrow. Look at the progression. Now the flames of the sun kept licking, closer and closer, the glowing clouds of morning. It's the same progression as Rimbaud's "Dawn." Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces. The camps of shadows did not leave the woodland road—but then all of a sudden the blond waterfall and the silvery summit, I recognized the goddess.
47:05 You see there, it begins to blaze. So, now the flames of the sun kept licking, closer and closer, the glowing clouds of morning. Finally—now, well, now we're on the time axis. In the sky, in the streams and the ponds, in the dew-flowered calyxes, a hundred suns rose at once, and from the sky sprang a single, brilliant light. You saw that kind of crescendo up to the last sentence. Now I have to go back a bit, because when you read the Bhagavad Gita—I'm jumping from one thing to another, but it's probably one of Jean Paul's sources, since he does that constantly throughout his work.
47:44 It shows up a few times in his aesthetics. Yes, in the Bhagavad Gita it's said that the sun is reflected wholly, and not in part, in every drop of dew. There's already Leibniz's monadology in that. I don't know what you specialists think of it. Yes indeed, that's profound. Each individual is an absolute in its own way. The sun is reflected wholly, not in part, in every drop of dew.
48:14 So, in the dew-flowered calyxes, a hundred suns rose at once and, conversely, wholeness, unity, and from the sky sprang a single brilliant light. Destiny stripped Firmian's soul—that's his first name, Siebenkäs, Firmian, seven cheeses, that's his name—destiny stripped Firmian's soul, as the gardener does in spring for the flowers, of most of its yellow, withered leaflets. The walking diminished the dizziness rather than increasing it. In his soul there rose a supraterrestrial sun alongside the other one in the sky.
48:48 In every valley, the landscape begins to widen out; in every valley, in every grove, on every height, Siebenkäs cast off a few oppressive rings from the narrow chrysalis of winter's life and sorrow. So we're building a sequence. We wouldn't have this springtime jubilation if we hadn't gone through winter. You see, from that wintry sorrow, he spread—look, this is beautiful—he spread his wet wings and let himself be carried by the May breezes into the sky, with four wings unfurled—note the precision—among the lowest butterflies and above the highest flowers.
49:27 This foreground, this sense of miniature, is exceptional. To say that we're among the lowest butterflies but above the highest flowers, that's still quite precisely targeted. There you go, May breezes, it's so much in season, I said to myself, it's still a text, because there is a text on landscape. So, I can skip because it's a bit long, but it describes a bit the whole life that begins to swarm, to stir, the insects, we constantly move from a global vision, the mountains, to a horsefly coming out of the calyx of a flower.
50:02 It's often the case, you see, there's no fixed focal point here, it goes from one extreme, as they say, micro-photography for the insects, to the opposite, a panorama. So, I pick up right at the end of this long paragraph, after the dash, you see, above the vast pleasure camp, that's how they refer to the landscape, above the vast pleasure camp, the calyxes of flowers and heavy drops unfolding. Have you ever seen a drop unfold?
50:33 That's writing, you know, it wasn't obvious at the time. Heavy drops unfolded on all sides like peopled tents. The ground was covered with swarming broods of grasses and tiny hearts, that's it, that's it. And one heart after another detached itself, winged, or with fins, or with antennae. It detached itself from what? From the burning broods of nature, and it buzzed and drank and clattered and sang. And for every honey-proboscis, the calyx of joy had long been open.
51:04 So nature is celebrating. And there, look, it ended a bit like Rimbaud's Dawn. The dawn and the child fell at the bottom of the wood; on waking it was noon. And there you have the spoiled child of nature, all alone. Man was all alone, his gaze clear and happy on the marketplace of the living, sunlit city, full of light and noise. And he cast his drunken eyes all around through the countless streets. Before continuing, it should be noted that 'full of light and noise' still isn't feelings, it's sensations.
51:37 Light is for the eye, noise is for the ear. Full of light and noise. And he cast his drunken eyes all around through the countless streets, but his eternal mother rested, veiled, in immensity. Listen, there's a telescoping of intertextuality, Rimbaud says literally, at the top of the road, near a laurel wood, I wrapped her in her gathered veils, same term, the veil, and I felt a little of her immense body. And Jean-Paul speaks of immensity and of the veil.
52:08 And apart from that, there's really not much connection between Jean-Paul the prolific novelist and the tiny but fabulously dense work of Rimbaud. Rimbaud is much more avant-garde, that's it. No, but even so, I mean, there's something trying to make itself heard under the pen of both one and the other. And which didn't exist before this blossoming of modernity, which I always come back to, which we can date, the initial period at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, that is, on the eve of the industrial revolution — I always say the two great fractures, the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, which produced the world we still live in.
52:56 Otherwise, I won't dwell on it. So, I'll skip a passage, I'll go to the next paragraph purely for sequential purposes, when he came out, the brightness melted into clarity. You see, the somewhat solemn brightness of dawn, a bit like in Rimbaud, nothing was moving yet at the front of the palaces, it was a bit still and solemn, and suddenly, in the alley, waving his arms, it accelerates. The brightness melted into clarity, enthusiasm into cheerfulness. I'll skip ahead, because it's full of details, but I won't skip the admirable end of this paragraph after the colon.
53:33 You see there, the last third of this paragraph, after 'distant.' No hazy corner of his soul, no enclosed space could remain any longer without sun or spring. The moss of gnawing, devouring worry — that's winter — which only grows in humid shadow, detached itself in the free nature of its bread-trees and of freedom, and his soul was forced to willingly join the flying, buzzing voices of song, and to sing along with them, to sing what?
The ranz des vaches and childhood regained 54:05 And that's the end of this paragraph. Life is beautiful, youth is more beautiful still, and above all, spring. I couldn't resist sharing this hymn to spring with you. So, I'll continue up to a passage where there will be a break, because afterward, as I promised you, we'll move on — as I've been hinting, suggesting, without being certain — to how perhaps the most beautiful landscapes are not the ones given to be seen, but to be heard, in music, perhaps.
54:37 In any case, I'm going to offer a sample through an excerpt from a symphony by Schubert in a few moments. And there, we're in the march, and suddenly, the march is going to pause for a moment, and you can turn the page, oh dear, yes, the second paragraph of page 637, which isn't cheerful, but seems readable to me. 637. Sorry, I'm trying to photograph the pages of my book, but my cat is stopping me from taking photos.
55:14 So, yes, in the afternoon, at 3:30, in a village, I'm in Swabia again, whose name he hadn't asked, quite suddenly, in his — sorry — quite suddenly, in his soul, melted into water, into tears, it's the period when emotion is welcomed, so much so that he was himself astonished at his own tenderness, it's Marievas. His surroundings would rather have suggested the opposite. There was an old may-tree, a 'mai' — we'd say back home a 'mai,' a farm, 'mai' — this is badly translated here, I think it's a typographical error.
55:49 There was an old may-tree, a may-tree, a bit tilted, dried out at its top, the peasant women on the common meadow were sprinkling the linen that gleamed in the sunlight and throwing eggs and chopped nettles as food to the yellow-wool geese in front of them. Interesting to see what happens for me there. Hedges were being trimmed by a gardener from the Manor House, and the sheep, already shorn, were being gathered by the herdsman's Swiss horn around the may-tree. You know what's called the ranz des vaches, the call of the Swiss horn. We're in Tibet, in Switzerland, a high mountain country, you find these long brass calls, interesting like that.
56:24 So that they can be heard from very far by those lost in the valleys. It's interesting to see that there are instruments that impose their constraints across cultures separated by thousands of kilometers. Let me open a parenthesis. You see, I lived for a long time south of the Sahara, in shepherd countries, where the vegetation is so sparse, where water is so scarce, that there's only pastoral activity, not enough for farming, only for herding. It's the kingdom of the Fulani, the herders. And they all have wind instruments.
56:55 All over the world, you know, the shepherd, the herdsman, always has a pipe, a flute, an oboe, in our imagery. You see, a wind instrument. It's interesting. Whether it's the algaita, a term that comes from a form of Arabic, which came like that, which is of Iranian origin, but which came through Arabic across the Sahara, through travelers. Ibn Battuta was the first to give us a historical account of these regions. And it's interesting because Nigeriens say it's their national instrument. And it comes from Iran.
57:26 And so, it's a kind of, a bit like the sound of a Breton bagpipe. But you see, again countries where sheep are grazed, whether it's Scotland, or Brittany, or south of the Sahara — it's not at all the same rainfall, there's too much water in one, not enough in the other — it's the wind instrument, always a bit melancholic, that is the shepherd's song. Because the shepherd is the solitary man, the one far from the village, from the city, from his beloved, from the community, who grazes his flocks, far from transhumance.
57:58 I'm thinking of Corsica too, of course. Far off in the mountains, there. And in absence, of course, it's not cheerfulness that's promised. Schubert's final work, a few days before his death, is The Shepherd on the Rock. He died at 31. We have a hundred thousand works. The average for the Romantics is about 150 works. Sorry for these accounting-like considerations. So, hedges were being trimmed by a gardener from the Manor House.
58:31 The sheep, already shorn, were gathered by the herdsman's Swiss horn around the may-tree. So we hear a sound. Everything had such a youthful, sweet, Italian appearance. That's a German speaking. It's sweet, like this, I saw, it's Italian. So Italian, the beautiful month of May had undressed everything. Halfway or completely. The sheep, the geese, the women, the horn-blower, the hedge-trimmer and his hedges. So, it's a rather cheerful, pastoral landscape.
59:02 So, he says, why did he become so overwhelmed with emotion in such a cheerful land? Less, at bottom, because today he had been joyful all day long, than especially because the shepherd-bassoonist, that is, the one calling the cows, was calling with his comic pipe his herd toward the may-tree. A hundred times in his childhood, he had, under the crook of the pragois and shepherd-musician, brought home the paternal sheepfold — this ranz des vaches suddenly revived his rose-crowned childhood.
59:32 There's an almost Proustian passage here, isn't there? Childhood rose up, out of its morning dew and its bower made of buds and sleeping flowers. These are metaphors, of course. She advanced, childhood still, she advanced toward him as if come from heaven. Thank you. She smiled at him with an innocent air, full of a thousand hopes, and said to him, look how beautiful I am. We played together, I already said, I gave you great kingdoms.
1:00:03 I'm reading badly. Meadows, gold, and a beautiful, great paradise beyond the mountains. But you lost it all. Oh darn! That's not the right continuation. Wait, wait, no joking. Let me take a small pause. Fortunately I have a backup. Second volume, second volume. Okay, these are long novels. So, it should be fine.
1:00:36 So, there. It's silly to stop there, honestly. Here we go. But you lost it all. We were there, weren't we? And you're so pale. Come play with me. Voice-over of the author. Oh, for which of us is childhood not awakened a thousand times by music?
1:01:06 She speaks to him. She asks him. The rosebuds I gave you, haven't they bloomed yet? And we answer, oh certainly, they have, but they were white roses. There you have this passage of sudden emotion within a march that was devoted to happiness, to jubilation. So now we're going to move on to the Schubert excerpt. So, one more little introduction. Schumann — Schubert died at 31.
Fugue, sonata form, and the discovery of the Ninth 1:01:38 Schumann, who is a wonderful, generous music critic, and who wrote famous articles on Schubert in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, coined an expression that has since become famous, when he spoke of the divine lengths in Schubert. The divine lengths. Well, in particular, it's a heavenly length. It means, it's so beautiful that these lengths, you don't want them to end. I'm forced to be apparently a bit musicological and abstract, but honestly, it's worth it.
1:02:09 I told you there's the grand form. That's not necessarily a compliment. You can write a symphony that's terrible. That's not the case with Schubert. The grand form — there are mainly two. There are others, but there's the fugue form, Bach being the master, of course. The form is also called imitative, meaning, as in Frère Jacques, the voices imitate one another, pursue one another. Counterpoint. Note against note, point against point, that's where it comes from. And then there's sonata form.
1:02:39 Very briefly. What characterizes the first, the fugue, is that there's a single theme. It's developed in an extremely learned way, I won't dwell too much, through inversions, symmetries, countersubjects. And there's just one theme that carries the whole work through to the end. Whereas in sonata form, there is conflict between several themes that oppose each other completely on, let's say, a psychological level, to simplify.
1:03:09 For a very well-known example, there's a work that begins like this, Beethoven's Fifth, let's not talk about the ninth. A few bars later, there's an incredible contrast between something menacing and then suddenly this tender outpouring, like that — that's typical of the bithematism of sonata form, much more in tune with the new sensibility after Rousseau, with modernity, with internal conflict, you see? That is, dramatic form succeeds either epic or lyric form.
1:03:43 There you go, I don't want to be too abstract, but it's important to know. Here, we are in the symphony, so in the grand form, in sonata form. And little Schubert — I say little Schubert because he was short, he didn't appeal much to women, he was clumsy, but he was adored in society because he played the piano, played waltzes, always cheerful things, he who was perhaps the greatest musical genius one has ever known, wasn't he? 'Come on, Franz, surely you'll play us another waltz, won't you? Won't you?' And this Schubert ventures into the grand form because he's obsessed with the example, the example of his generation, which is Beethoven — they're all obsessed with the great Beethoven.
1:04:21 Schubert dreamed of being recognized in his last years by Beethoven, to whom he had paid his respects, but Beethoven wasn't even aware that Schubert existed. Schubert lacked a coach, as we'd say today. And, yes, and so, I return to my Schumann. Schubert died. He's supposed to have written eight symphonies, the last of which, the famous Unfinished, which we now know isn't actually unfinished, but he knew he was going to die very soon. And so he wrote works that were increasingly fast, that are perfectly complete artistically, but lack a movement according to the usual conventions.
1:04:53 There's no time. And then, Schumann arrives at Schubert's brother's place, to look into things a bit, write an article, gather material, and his brother says — you don't have anything, are you sure there aren't some scores lying around? He says, I don't know, there's an attic, there's a bunch of stuff there. And that's how they stumbled upon the greatest symphony of musical Romanticism. I don't know, it was sheets of paper in the attic of Ferdinand Schubert, Franz's brother. Thanks to Schumann, who brought it back and wrote a famous article where he speaks of these famous divine lengths, going so far as to say that whoever hasn't heard this symphony doesn't know Schubert, which is astonishing given what he had already given us.
The andante: the march between interiority and panorama 1:05:29 There, that's my preliminary introduction. So, it has four movements, I'll skip through them, it's long, and even though it's long, I always find it too short, it's over, but I say the same about the end of Tristan which lasts five hours, I don't know. And we wish it would start again. I'll skip the first movements, right from the start, we can see it's a symphony of travel, that's why I quoted it, not to illustrate the music, nor to illustrate a text, but both are variations on the same idea, in the sense, if you prefer, the Ossianic one, with the same isomorphisms, and in particular, you'll see the march.
1:06:08 I had already mentioned this to you, that's why I'm dwelling on it, when we spent a whole year on Nerval's text, a great walker, on Angélique, where he keeps chasing after the search for that book, do you remember? It starts on the banks of the Main in Germany, and it ends unfinished in the rivers of Île-de-France, 40 km from here, near Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville, with this sentence which I recall because it announces the tempo we're about to hear. I arrived yesterday... I arrived in Compiègne, pursuing the Bucquoys in every form, with that slow persistence which is natural to me.
1:06:46 That's exactly the rhythm we're about to hear, this persistence. In fact, in music, when something repeats, it's called an ostinato, a blank. So, I'll skip the first movement, which sets the scene magnificently, and I'll move to the famous andante, second movement, with this marching rhythm, this rhythm of the Wanderer, as it's 'wander' in English, wandering like that, at random, this Wanderer.
1:07:16 And there, I won't say anything more, because I'll be more explicit as we go through the piece, so to speak. Start of the andante. Let me remind you that andante means to walk, walking.
1:08:06 Passage in the major key.
1:08:36 Pause. Thank you. We don't stop the tempo, it continues, but suddenly, it's not so much... an inner voice, you see, against the marching background like that, there's a little melody heard on the oboe, then on the clarinet, it's very inward, and then suddenly the whole orchestra, at the same tempo, continues the march as if we were moving at every instant from interiority to panorama.
1:09:13 It's moving from interiority to panorama. That's what's going to happen and repeat. So, we'll leave it for now.
1:10:04 Again. It could go on like this for a while, alternating, interior, exterior, until... we'll get there.
1:10:34 There, one last time, it repeats, I skipped some passages, it repeated two or three times. You have it in your ear now. Passage in the major key. A bit more paradisiacal, there you go. Let me check with Chouvet.
1:11:04 Stop. And there, it should pick up again, pam, pam. And then something incredible happens. Suddenly, the tone drops, silence falls, and doors — enormous doors — open. Those are the doors opening onto paradise. That's typical Schubert. It's what happens in the passage where Jean-Paul asks why, suddenly, Siebenkäs became so moved. The call of the ranz. There truly is an entrance into paradise. You'll see the doors, I'm not making anything up. So, here we go.
1:11:47 There's a phrase, at 10, if you look.
1:12:19 I'm just going to note here the layering of planes. We're in the landscape. Sometimes it's in the foreground, then the flutes answer from far away, as if they were mountain ridges seen in the distance. So you can rewind just a few seconds. And in the distance, the flutes.
1:13:02 The strings much closer. Again, the beautiful phrase.
1:13:48 Lower it a little, just a tiny bit, lower the sound, the volume. The march resumes, almost a bit reluctantly, you see? As if it were hard to leave that spot. The layering of planes.
1:14:23 Again the beautiful theme, but this time on the horn. Attention. Stop. Here, yet another event happens within the event. Everything is going to stop. Let's try it.
The horn call and the exit from time 1:14:53 Music is within time. Lévi-Strauss says it explicitly in the introduction to The Raw and the Cooked. What he calls the overture under the sign of music. It's a preface. The overture, thank you, to The Raw and the Cooked. When he says everything happens as if music only entered time in order to better exit it. Here you're going to see an attempt unique as far as I know, at any rate one with no precedent at that time. It's not an exit from time. You'll see that the horn is going to suspend the grand form. Schubert would like to write a Beethoven-style symphony. Beethoven, for his part, wastes no time. There's an implacable dramatic economy in Beethoven.
1:15:27 Whereas here, it's as if he couldn't tear himself away from the paradise that has opened up to us. And likewise, you remember, there is nonetheless a continuity. I'm trying, in what I'm saying. Just as Rousseau in the Fifth Walk which initiates this whole sensibility. Just as he says, plunging into a delicious reverie. I had stressed the fact that it's an oral metaphor, where night often surprised me without my noticing it, to the point that I would be called by the appointed hour and signal.
1:15:59 There's the sound of the horn. At the time, it must have been used to call people for dinner. To the point that I would be called by the appointed hour and signal. I could not tear myself away from there without effort. We almost, mind you, reached a state that escapes even temporality. A kind of eternity within time. Which is the great Romantic dream ever since Goethe wrote that passage in Faust, you remember, the deal with the devil. I am ready to give my soul. Because the devil, that's what he wants, it's always the soul.
1:16:30 If and only if you make me feel a happiness of such intensity that I see myself in that happiness for an eternity without tiring of it, giving the lie to all the great French moralists, Pascal, Axéa, who say that boredom sets in after ten days a week. It's true that if you eat your favorite dish, the best dish in the world, every day, it will end up boring you. I'll stick with the dish. Make me feel a happiness such that I could say at that instant — these are exactly Goethe's terms in Faust — "Verweile doch, du bist so schön," stay, you are so beautiful.
1:17:04 We're going to hear it literally, it's not the incarnation. Schubert is not the sentimental, it's not Schumann, it's not that naive. Which is not at all a handicap for making sublime music, that is to say. And the proof is, we're going to see this horn call where the discourse is interrupted, the form is interrupted, the construction, the syntax, the logic. A horn call that doesn't stop, that doesn't stop, that stays on the same note. And you'll see how hard he finds it to tear himself away from it. Here we go.
1:18:04 And we set off again. There, you see, we wanted to bring you this far in Schubert's footsteps. We're lucky to have a hiking musician. There, we've opened the gates of paradise.
1:18:36 It doesn't last, it doesn't last, but does duration matter? When you see this sequence of horns, I encourage you to listen to it. Ninth Symphony, in this version if possible, because it's by the immense conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. 1953, because he conducted it often... Excuse me, I need to specify. 1953 — if you don't want to just take my word for it, that is if you're good listeners, you should never just take a speaker's word for it.
1:19:06 I took a look at the forum, you know, the one that follows on YouTube like that. You rarely see so many comments saying it's one of the greatest recordings in the history of recording, etc. And on top of that, a good recording, because Furtwängler often had a poor sound quality at the time. That was his own fault, because he thought it was weak stuff — he wasn't entirely wrong, technically, about recordings of that era. So he refused studios in favor of live recording. And here, an exceptional recording quality for the time. A bit better since then, but still, it's more than listenable, it's good sound. There. So, 9th Symphony, 2nd movement.
The rural landscape, a nature transformed 1:19:38 Wilhelm Bill, if you prefer, it's the same. Wilhelm Furtwängler. With the Wiener Philharmoniker, that is, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. There's also a very beautiful Berlin version. There. So, I come back to this nature-landscape problem.
1:20:09 You saw the passage that moved the walker so much when he arrives in front of the farm. I'm joking, there's always humor in Jean Paul. But the trimmed geese, the trimmed hedge, right? The trimmed sheep. Anyway, big spring grooming. And this is not a wild setting. We're not in the high mountains, we're not in the desert, we're not in the polar ice, even less so. It's not in the Colorado Canyon either. These are truly samples of nature that owe nothing to any arrangement man might make of it.
1:20:47 Whereas here, afterward, we're in the hedgerow countryside, in short, in what used to be called the countryside — la campagne. I remind you that campagne comes from that region around Naples which is Campania, originally — which was, you see, the vacation resort, the California of the Roman patricians, who were fed up with, I was going to say orgies, excuse me, but that's roughly it, and who went to restore their physical and moral health among the shepherds and shepherdesses, the shepherds of poetry — that's the whole subject matter of Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics.
1:21:19 These are exchanges like that between shepherds and shepherdesses. The Pastorals of Longus, the Greek bucolic poet, you see. We watch how the goats and sheep mate. The young adolescents wonder if that doesn't concern them a bit too. The rules. So it's a pastoral landscape in the proper sense, that is, we're not in nature, but in a nature where the natural element, marsh or forest, has been transformed to make a field.
1:21:50 Apart from praxis, you see, to come back to it. That's why I care so much about this. For now I'll conclude the input for today, because we have 20 minutes left for our discussions. But from the very first session that opened this Nature and Landscapes series, I had insisted on making a triptych on the left, if you remember, with Poussin's painting, The Shepherds of Arcadia, the classical landscape, a nature perfectly ordered by human presence. Arcadia being the very model of this pastoral world.
1:22:22 By the way, the title of the painting is The Shepherds of Arcadia. At the other extreme, on the right, a couple looking at the moon, by Caspar David Friedrich, a painter who died mad, as many others have also, decidedly. A hallucinated painting, nocturnal, fascinating and hypnotic. And in between, no doubt — and I put it in the middle on purpose, I didn't put a landscape, I put Delacroix's very famous painting — for its topicality, you see?
1:22:52 It's Liberty on the barricades, with or without a yellow vest. Because if this event hadn't happened, if there hadn't been the storming of the Bastille, as a metonymy for the events of the French July and what follows, we can't understand how one could pass from a universe like that to its opposite — from a nature perfectly policed, the Shepherds of Arcadia, which I love very much, I'm not making aesthetic judgments, it's a masterpiece in that style, to two men looking at the moon, in a forest setting, very far from any cultivation, any vineyard, any field.
Surface: relation is not substance 1:23:28 There. So, I mean, we will never reflect enough on the fact that — I'll end with this quip, I had told you, when we spoke about the process of interiorization of the exterior, it all started when we shifted into the concept of surface. There. I'll close on that, shall I? The surface, the liquid gold there on the surface of the sea or a lake, doesn't matter, on the Seine. It happens often, especially on these beautiful days we're having.
1:23:58 We have the impression that there's gold on the surface of the water, like that, right? And if you take a glass, you're disappointed, there's nothing at all, there's no gold. It's H2O, with a bit more salt when it's sea water. I don't know what disappointment, but yes, it's because we forgot that what we were seeing wasn't the real, nature. We're not in physics. Physics is the science of nature. We're at the contact between sky and water. We're neither in the sky nor in the water. So, at the point of meeting, we're in nothing.
1:24:28 Because the relation is not the substance. There, we come back to philosophy, but you see it took us almost getting lost. And with what delight, in the tracks of Schubert, in Schubert's footsteps, to get there. I give you the floor, if you have questions about what has been raised or read today. Or heard. I give you the floor, because I don't know if no one's volunteering. Go ahead, please. It's just to follow up on the last point.
1:24:59 When you talk about surface, you say there's nothing. What do you mean by this nothing? For me, I hear a reflection. That's it. There is still a contact, so there is something. It's not nothing in the sense of being a nothingness. Ah no, of course, of course. Nothing in the sense of inessential. No, no, no. It's without value judgment. No, no. Thank you. No, no, no. I mean that I ended by saying it's a relation and not a substance. A mother exists. Her daughter or son too.
1:25:29 But the mother-son relation is not an existence. Aristotle: there is knowledge only of the general, existence only of the individual. There is a certain link. Agreed? The relation is not simple. The relation is an effort of thought. Agreed? The contact... Of course, we could give an optical theory, right, of why we see the water looking golden like that. And why is the sky blue? Because the atmosphere — I lose myself in it. And there, I know that as soon as you go a bit high up, it turns black, like in Tintin, right?
1:26:05 Or in Rimbaud, that magnificent passage where Rimbaud, summing up his adventure, says in his hell: I removed from the sky the azure which is black, and I lived, golden spark of natural light. Isn't that so? There. But otherwise, in reality, it's a reflection, as you say. Right? You put a reflection of a banana in the forest, the monkey doesn't stop at it. No but there. But he knows it's nothing. Not for humans, though, because man is very caught up in the imago function, in the image.
1:26:35 Because that reminds me of something. This reflection, well, maybe it's nothing. And there you're right. It's nothing materially. It's not water. Because as soon as you put — I had used this image — a needle on the surface of the water, as soon as you go a millimeter down in depth, there's nothing left. There's no more golden color, etc. It's over. There are fish, there are strange things descending into the water. That's actually what fish eat. I'm joking. And there's mud, at the bottom, never mind.
Reflection, sign, and aesthetics 1:27:05 And then, above, there are clouds. It's the meeting of the two that creates this miracle. But onto this surface, something is projected. You're a filmmaker, you understand what I mean? Onto this screen which is nothing, which is white, all of a sudden, there, something is projected. Agreed? But Gary Cooper isn't there. It's his reflection. Gary Cooper, excuse me, that dates me. There. I say that because my mother adored him. And Audrey Hepburn.
1:27:40 But, and that's why this question is interesting, this nothing refers to something being projected. This elsewhere is not nothing. And here we're not far from Plato. What I see is the back wall of the cave which has reality only insofar as, and only to the extent that, there is a relation of analogy, of resemblance — that's Plato — with something that is not there. There is a sensible world, you see, which reflects, or rather evokes rather than reflects, because that's a bit mechanistic — it's a great quarrel within Marxism, this mechanistic conception of reflection, which Lenin saw clearly was very reductive.
1:28:20 But there is rather an evocation, allusion, suggestion — the back of the cave points toward something else. Because if I say a reflection, that's mechanical, cause-and-effect. If I say pointing toward, that's sign-meaning. You remember we had stressed this dichotomy. So thank you for your question, which is somewhat well-aimed. Now, what I'm trying to spell out is exactly what the word aesthetic designates, in general, in its etymology, which we find in anesthesia — that is, the universe deployed by our senses.
1:29:00 Our senses are not in contact with truth and reality, but with a surface. Our senses make us believe that this is solid. Any physicist knows that there's much more void than solid matter in there. Atoms separated by billions of light-years. I'm exaggerating a bit. And there, I see the ground motionless while we're spinning at 30 km a second around the sun. That, the senses don't show us. Marx says very well that if the senses and the appearance of things were identical, listen carefully to this sentence, because I'm annoyed by a recurring positivism in Marxism, which happens periodically, and which is refuted by the Marx who says that if the senses and the appearance of things were confused, all science would be useless. You'd only have to bend down in the gutter to pick up truth and reality.
1:29:50 You have to make an effort, a detour, which leads Lenin, for example, to say that there is no concrete except through the abstract, which leads Plato, in the Republic, to say that if you want to get out of it and change politics, you must make a great detour through abstraction, my comrade, etc. So, but, while waiting for this detour, and here I come back to your question, there is something that incites us to the detour, which is this reflection shimmering there, for better or for worse. There are unsettling reflections sometimes, it can be a specter, I mean. Specter, spectacle.
1:30:21 Specter, glasses — we're still in the world of surface. There. We could dig deeper into this concept. If you understand well my questioning of the concept of surface with which I began this cycle, you grasp the essential of what I'm trying to unfold there... instead of thinking about your questions, you're thinking about whether you'll get a table at the restaurant.
1:30:56 I say that because in Africa, I learned to hear my listeners think. It scared me because they take it seriously. I would say, you didn't say it, but you're thinking it, I can hear you thinking it. And that scared them because they believe in the marabout. But you shouldn't do that — steal other people's thoughts. Patrick, no? Sorry, what were you telling me. Sure, you have plenty of ideas.
1:31:29 A filmmaker too. Jean. Yes, make way for the young. Etienne. You think the notion of surface — you should question it more.
1:32:03 Aesthetic. What appears. Yes. No? Well, let's go eat. In any case, thank you for your attention. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks to the technical crew. This is a first for us, trying to do musical analysis. Just to let you know.
1:32:34 Bravo. Thank you very much. It's not easy, is it.
