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The hubris of speaking about Mozart, and his imageries 0:00 Hello everyone, so, Musicosophie resumes today with a real Everest to climb, which is Mozart. Dominique gave me this theme on the phone and indeed, it's quite intimidating, but I hope that in two hours we'll at least develop some interesting and unprecedented things, certainly things unheard-of. Over to you, Dominique. You're right to insist from the start on the hubris — you didn't say the word, but in fact, there is a hubris in claiming to talk about Mozart in two hours.
0:42 All respect, respectful and academic scruple set aside. It's not about — how can one even talk about Mozart, isn't it, already sacrilege? Isn't Mozart beyond words? Let's set all that aside, I mean. That's for the lazy ones. Doesn't Bach express God somehow? No, no, no, but that's a very good way to begin.
1:15 But before crossing this threshold you're proposing, in a few seconds, I persist in apologizing to the audience for tackling head-on — not this Everest, that's your image, because for Mozart it's a bit much, so to speak — but at the same time the sum of discourse there is on Mozart, who is no doubt the best-selling classical musician, the most distributed, to put it in quantifiable terms.
2:00 And then afterwards, and above all, someone whose reality of work, of music, is cluttered by a record, by a clutter of imagery — plural, imagery in the plural, because there are very different, sometimes even contradictory imageries. Sometimes it's the beloved child of the muses, the Raphael of sound, well, I mean, the somewhat seraphic and ethereal side.
2:37 Sometimes, in a famous film by Miloš Forman, Mozart appears with the features of a young Californian, visibly, judging by his face and manner of speaking, more used to San Francisco nightclubs than to a carriage ride from Salzburg to Rome. But anyway, then there's the Mozart of the Romantics, that of Hoffmann, who was an admirer — because we often forget that Hoffmann, the writer, the one of the tales, was also an excellent composer, I say this since music is still our main focus of interest, and I'll mention quickly his opera Ondine, on a text by Friedrich de La Motte-Fouqué, a possibly Huguenot name, one of the few Romantic texts that Goethe revered, saying it was perfection.
3:46 Why was he so harsh against the Romantics? Yes, you, there, there, there, of course. There's a somewhat pre-Nietzschean side, on the level — I'm speaking of pure aesthetics — no, he doesn't at all have, excuse me, the nonsense of Nietzsche — I'll make more than one person howl, but we talked about this well last time, I think I did him justice, he's still better than the Nietzscheans, let's be clear. But Goethe and Nietzsche both share this mistrust toward Romanticism and toward the Germans.
4:18 Nietzsche has a very fine formula, I think it's in Beyond Good and Evil, yes, that's it. He says, "Goethe will always be above the Germans, he will never belong to them." It's almost sacrilegious when you see the banner Goethe represents for Deutschkultur or the Kulturkampf, whatever you want to call it. But anyway, let's come back to Mozart, whom Goethe revered above all — though I don't know if Goethe is a good reference in music.
4:58 Nietzsche, yes, knows music well, but Goethe, I mean, was more turned toward the visual arts. It's — it's in order to get closer to Mozart that I'm making this whole cautious approach where I don't name Mozart or any of his works. But go on, let's get to it. Isn't it a legend that Goethe supported Schubert and his setting of his poems to music? No, of course not, nothing of the sort. And as for Beethoven, it's not that he didn't like him, it's that Beethoven terrified him.
5:30 But to speak of two of his greatest contemporaries, Schubert and Beethoven, he has classical tastes, of course, Goethe, which confirms the anti-Romanticism, his anti-Romanticism we were mentioning. But let's leave that, because it apparently takes us away from Mozart — but apparently... In fact, to show how close we are, let's recall some chronology. We often forget this about Mozart. Mozart's most performed works, I think, I don't know, Don Giovanni, Così, his last piano concertos, etc., are almost all later than the storming of the Bastille.
Works written after 1789, between the learned and the galant style 6:12 Yes, only two years later, in fact. So, the beloved child of the muses, little Mozart in a wig at Versailles, kissing Marie-Antoinette's hand. Yes, why not? But that's not what we listen to, actually. That's not his music. That's his childhood, his milieu. Wigs lasted longer, as you'd expect, in Austria, right? I recall Rousseau is the first to throw away the wig. And I name Rousseau here because I'm going to use a text by Rousseau, since Mozart isn't my subject.
6:48 Come on, let's be clear, because otherwise it would really be, if not an Everest, at least... we'd discourage everyone. Yes, yes, no, no, no. It's a subject I won't be equal to. And doubly so, I'll say it one last time, so it's quite clear — not only because of everything there is to say about Mozart, but almost on the contrary, because of the apparently insurmountable challenge of trying to restore, through words, the imponderable, the most important thing about Mozart.
7:24 There, I'm saying banal things. But still, we know very well that the partisans of the unsayable, of the ineffable, are lazy. If every writer, every poet, and every musician had thought that the essential could not be expressed, we'd be in real trouble. We wouldn't have museums, nor the recordings which are our constellation, while waiting, mind you, for an alternative to capitalism.
7:54 No, no. It's the same contradiction as with the skeptics, who blacken thousands of pages to say that truth cannot be told. Hello. Thank you. We need to cut for a second. Yes. Yes, it's the same contradiction we find among the skeptics, who blacken thousands of pages, as I was saying, to say that truth cannot be expressed.
8:36 So, there, it's doubly so. Because in Mozart's case, we really have — and here I'll dive a bit into his work to leave behind this somewhat awkward introduction. We'll see right away why. It's that many of Mozart's works — we'll see that his output is much more diverse than one thinks — but many of Mozart's works, in any case, if there's something truly, as we used to say, idiosyncratic about him, truly his own, it's the fact that sometimes his highest masterpieces aren't tied to any especially sought-after harmony, to any especially subtle or complex rhythm.
9:29 I mean, what one finds practically in all composers — he's perfectly capable of it too. We'll see there are works... I'm not trying to oppose the extreme simplicity of a Mozart melody. I'm not trying to oppose that to a learned Bach counterpoint. Insofar as Mozart, in the last part... All the variations, sir.
9:59 Yes, of course. In the last part of his work, Mozart shows he is a master of counterpoint. I'd even say — we'll get to it later, I think it will be a high point in our approach to Mozart — that... and the parallel with Rousseau returns. They may be the only two who tried to hold together two things that had never been synthesized before. I'm using an ugly word on purpose, well, ugly to express what we're saying, namely, I'm thinking of the finale of his last symphony, the Jupiter Symphony, which is a gigantic fugue, precisely.
10:39 And it's said that this finale seals the union, as musicologists say, of the learned style and the galant style. Right, yes, that's it. Now, Rousseau is someone who comes from the Ancien Régime and who founds the new aesthetic regime. Both are on the hinge. So I'm going to make two introductions for Mozart, to try to express the essential, because my theme, I repeat, isn't Mozart, period.
Saint-Just and listening to the concerto for flute and harp 11:19 That would be megalomaniac on my part. But, in a more targeted way, a theme we had treated, more through more recent musicians, the theme of happiness — we had treated it through Debussy, through the Russians, particularly through musicians reacting against the omnipresence of Romanticism in the second half of the 19th century.
11:50 So here, on the contrary, I go back a century and recall that an exact contemporary of Mozart, likewise linked to youth, is Saint-Just, known among other things for having said this phrase which remains more relevant than ever, unfortunately given the times we live in, namely that happiness is a new idea in Europe. The more capitalism drags on in its endless death agony, the more urgently true this phrase becomes, if I may say so.
12:30 So, this very specific happiness, I'm going to introduce it in two ways. First, through the ear — that is, I'll give two very short excerpts from a work Mozart wrote when he was barely 20. I'm thinking of the Concerto for Flute and Harp, and I'm thinking of its Andantino, its slow movement, its middle movement, however you want to call it — these are very well-known works. First the theme exposed once by the orchestra, since it's a concerto — I should note here that a concerto is a category of works, a genre, most often set in sonata form; here we see the difference between genre and form, the genre being what distinguishes this category from others like the symphony or the mass or the cantata, whatever, and the form being what organizes it from within, by contrast.
13:38 Well, what characterizes a concerto is a dialogue — one "concerts" together, as in the Italian, that's it, concerto, one discusses among — between what? Between an orchestra and soloists. Most of the time it's concertos for piano, for violin, for cello, for flute, and then there's Mozart, who was obsessed with timbres, who tried every timbre, so much did he have an ear extremely sensitive to the very materiality of sound, that he wrote concertos for barrel organ, for glass harmonica, and so on.
14:18 So, to come back to this, sometimes it's called a double concerto when there are two soloists — that's the case with Brahms, his Double Concerto for violin and cello, for example — but here it's flute and harp. So I'll give two versions of the introduction where the theme is simply presented, first by the orchestra — you hear almost only the strings, since generally at the time the orchestra was a large string quartet, which Mozart would enrich with the wind instruments' chatter so characteristic of him — and afterward, the same introduction with the two soloists, flute and harp.
14:56 So, first, the orchestral introduction, and it goes like this. I'm moving the camera for a moment so you can be near the speakers. There. Sorry, sorry for that start. There. It's here.
15:59 There, sorry, it's very short, but this burst of happiness needs to remain a burst. So I'll repeat it this time with the soloists.
16:29 There, of course, it's frustrating, but still, if we could keep this scent of happiness in our ear — that is, these two bursts which I think are evident here — and let them hover like a cloud throughout our conversation, that would be ideal for me.
17:00 And I feel like saying, as Hölderlin did, may I not lose the path that has led me here. Let's say it's the Concerto for Flute and Harp in C major, so people can... Yes, and second movement, Andantino, since tempo is often indicated by a nuance — Andantino, or Allegro when it's fast, or Adagio when it's slower, there. So that's my first introduction, and since we're on the theme of happiness, I now move on to an excerpt from Rousseau's Confessions.
The masterpiece, the meeting of an individual and a collective destiny 17:45 So our audience doesn't get lost, I'll say in advance where I want to get, for once — I want to show that the happiness Mozart expresses there, like everything most important in the history of art in general and music in particular, results from an exceptional conjunction between the fate of an individual and that of a collectivity.
18:16 I mean by that... We're staying with the concerto, in the end, the dialectic of the individual. We understand each other. I mean, let me clarify, going back to what I just said, that the individual side — for now I'll leave aside Mozart's detailed biography, anyone can find it, it's all very well documented. I don't know, that's a teenager's opinion. Notably by Jean Massin. Yes, that's by far — but thank you for citing it — Brigitte and Jean Massin, moreover, in general their Schubert, their Beethoven, their Mozart are monographs that are models of the genre, unmatched in the French-speaking tradition, as far as I know.
19:01 So, you're elsewhere too, I think. We're allowed to mention a colleague, Aymeric, aren't we? I know you're very good at musical catalogs at Fayard. The Rousseau text I'm going to read is what's common ground here.
19:35 When I speak of this double conjunction, I dwell on it a bit. I believe conductor Furtwängler said something similar too. He, speaking only of music of course, said that every masterpiece has two faces. That's his way, a bit more German and metaphysical, of putting it. Two faces — one connected to the era that saw the work come into being, and the other to eternity, he said. It's, structurally, somewhat the same as what I'm saying, that the most essential works in the history of art in general and music in particular — I repeat almost word for word — have the characteristic of combining what can only be explained by the creator's biography.
20:31 And here, I replace Furtwängler's eternity with collective, historical destiny, so to speak, which expresses itself even without the author's knowledge. The cunning of reason. There. And to illustrate this, I'll use one of Rousseau's happiest texts. I know Rousseau also knows how to lament, especially in his last works where he's afflicted by what some rather carelessly call his paranoia.
21:02 I'll note in passing that what characterizes paranoia as a pathology is that the subject becomes anxious and believes he is being persecuted imaginarily, whereas here, Rousseau is someone actually pursued by the police of the three greatest powers of the time — Prussia, France, the Austrian Empire, etc. There's the affair at Môtiers. I won't even mention the Protestant consistory of Geneva, mind you, which publicly burns his books.
21:32 They publicly burn his books, he's chased from house to house, his home is half stoned. Well, apart from that, it's strange, this man has ideas. Yes, it's true that after enduring such abuses, his mind became somewhat disturbed toward the end. It's true that sometimes he speaks ill of those best disposed toward him, doesn't he? And there, in short. So he sometimes discourages even the best intentions and his best friends.
22:05 But still, here, I know it's one of the happiest and most luminous texts in the Confessions. The Confessions were written in the 1770s, let's say, roughly speaking. That is, what — about twenty years before the concerto we just heard. And we know music always has a slight lag, doesn't it, compared to the other arts, as if... I thought the concerto was from the late 1770s. It's still not a very late work, what you did.
22:35 The concerto there, for flute and harp, I don't think it's a late work. No, it's not a late work, but Mozart had a very short life. Yes, in any case, that's for sure. He dies at 35, right? Of course. And he dies in '92, as far as I know. Yes, in '91, I think. Yes, in '91, there. So it's still striking to see that in both cases, with Mozart as with Rousseau, there's going to be — I say this in advance, because the text should speak for itself — everything that, well, let's say it, a non-Marxist approach could, quite rightly, find there, I mean, quite pertinently, this mixture of, a happiness that isn't at all contradictory with sensuality, we're well within — we're in the order, in the psychological field, in the—
Reading the Confessions: "I needed young ladies" 23:45 but, I'll start right away with a text where Rousseau raises the problem of relating all these forms of happiness to social class differences. It's so rare that I'll start there. We'll see afterward how Mozart plays on the same register. And so, here it is.
24:20 He speaks, he speaks of, of what attracts him in young women in general. I say women, young women in particular, in general. And so, enough commentary, I think this is clear. "Moreover, seamstresses, chambermaids, little shopgirls tempted me hardly at all. I needed young ladies."
24:50 "Everyone has their fancies. This has always been mine. And I don't think like Horace on this point." It's not at all, however, vanity of rank. I recall that at the time, "État" meant social class, think of the Third Estate. "It is not, however, the vanity of rank and station that attracts me. It is" — and here it becomes concrete — "a better-preserved complexion."
25:20 As if it took wealth and praxis to preserve one's complexion, after all. "More beautiful hands." So, in winter, chapped and swollen and cracked, it's not the same. "More beautiful hands, more graceful adornment, an air of delicacy and cleanliness about the whole person, more taste in the manner of dressing and speaking, a finer and better-made dress."
25:53 We hear Mozart's music. "A daintier shoe, ribbons, lace, better-arranged hair. I would always prefer the less pretty one having more of all that." Here I make an interruption, I can't help but think of Nerval, of Nerval, picking up on the phrase "all that."
26:26 This makes one think a lot of Proust's descriptions of young girls in flower. Fully so, of course. We can clearly see that this was a young man who was like that. "I would always have preferred the less pretty one who had more of all that." It's this "all that" which intrigues me, it's not this "all that" which sums up the extraordinary precision that has just been deployed. I think of Nerval, who happens to be in Vienna, both in Voyage en Orient and in Aurélia, but let's move on, or in Pandora, and who writes to Théophile Gautier.
27:07 they're guys, I'm deliberately saying guys, they're guys who among themselves talk about "nana," about young women. I recall he was with Théophile at the Lycée Charlemagne, they're pals at that level. Nerval tells him, he's at an evening gathering with three women and there's one who seems to be a little bit at the start of "return of age." He describes, he shows all the seduction she exerts and then after describing her lace, a bit like Rousseau, this is Françoise Luch [sic], Nerval says, we don't quite know what's underneath all that but all that is so well arranged.
27:47 I think that perfectly explains what Rousseau means. An apology for fetishism. Truly, yes. No, and also for décor without a subject. We don't really know what's in the middle of all that but all that is so well arranged. Well there you go, the "all that" is precisely what presupposes a certain social level here all the same. It's quite crazy, isn't it? So, "were she," as he says, "the least pretty"?
28:21 One could not be less naturalist and clearer. This is not ancillary love affairs. There, it's quite the opposite. Let me repeat this incredible passage. Besides, seamstresses, chambermaids, there you have the ancillary ones, little shopgirls, hardly tempted me. I needed young ladies of quality. Everyone has their fancies, that was mine. Yet it's not at all the vanity of rank and status that attracts me. It's a better-preserved complexion, more beautiful hands, a more graceful adornment.
28:53 There. Let me recall this essential passage. Now, I imagine the reader of the Confessions, or our audience here, among them there are certainly some who discover this passage of Rousseau and say "But who does he think he is?" Really, where does he come from? No, but if he were the Marquis de Carabas, I could understand. Right?
Leaving nature for the city: the century of revolutions 29:23 But after all, he's a vagabond on the roads, he comes out of the petty craftsmen's world of Geneva, doesn't he? He plays the exhibitionist in front of young girls at the well in villages, to the point where he narrowly escapes a thrashing from a father who catches him in the act... You have to see that in the Confessions, it's quite a passage. And then, all of a sudden, monsieur only selects marchionesses—what's this story about?
29:57 That's exactly the crux of what I'm going to get to. It's that this happiness—common, sorry, contemporary—that expresses itself doubly in Mozart and in Rousseau, let me recall that Rousseau is the greatest musician of his time on the level of his prose. I recall that. Because on the level of musical notes, he doesn't come close to Rameau as a composer of notes, but as an elaborator of sentences, doesn't he?
30:31 I think of the Confessions, the Reveries, don't I? Or of La Nouvelle Héloïse, don't I? He's the first to make modern music resound at that level. So, what they have in common—it's such a big claim what I'm about to say, I don't believe I'm equal to the importance of such a content, so I'll say it to you as it comes, as it could be summed up, assuming that's possible—it's a happiness that expresses the historically determined passage of a society that is beginning to have the means to escape from nature into the city.
31:14 We are here exactly between two revolutions. The English industrial revolution begins to spread its effects across Europe, and the French political revolution, contemporary—not quite for Rousseau, it's very near-future, though it was so much in the air, as they say, it was in the air, that Rousseau says clearly in Émile that we are approaching an age of crisis and the century of revolutions. Watch out! If ever anyone was a prophet, it was indeed this so-called paranoiac who lives in the imaginary—no, no, if there's only one who sees reality to that degree in his time, he doesn't say "we are approaching the century of revolution."
31:58 "We are approaching an age of crisis"—that's very topical—"and the century of revolutions." As if he saw coming both 1789, and 1830, and 1848, and the Commune, and 1917. That's really extraordinary. I recall that in our textbooks and in our schooling, we've always paired numbers with words. I'm joking a bit, I mean the 18th century, there's a number, it's the century of the Enlightenment, there's the words. The 16th century, there's a number, the Renaissance, the century of humanism, there's the words.
Against naturalism; Haydn and the classicism of Vienna 32:32 The 17th, the Grand Siècle. The 19th, what is it? We have the number, do we have the words? "The century of revolutions," yes. If we talked about the words, and Rousseau lets the cat out of the bag, it is indeed the century of revolutions. It's curious that we don't say so, maybe we don't have enough hindsight yet, I don't know, it's still too close, but still. So, this is the thesis that seems enormous, even scandalous, in an age that wants to be eco-naturalist—although I have respect for collective, democratic ecology, based on a democratically constituted plan—I do fight against the regression that demonizes man and deifies nature, recalling that the first nature protection reserves appear in the Third Reich, in the 1930s, on German territory, Naturschutzgebiet—so, it seems scandalous, but I can't help thinking of Haydn's last symphonies,
33:42 I'm beginning to show that this was circulating in the air at the time—Haydn, for whom Mozart had such filial affection, since he called him Papa Haydn, isn't that so—Haydn, who was born well before Mozart and dies well after him, Mozart having had such a short life. Generally, genius doesn't like contemporary genius, that's well known, just look at the relations between Wagner and Brahms, to name only that, or Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but let's move on—but in the case of these two, it's truly exceptional, Haydn telling Mozart's father, "Your son is the greatest of composers, in every art and in every age, and I tell you this before God and as an honest man"—that's rather rare, isn't it—and as for Mozart, he dedicates to Haydn those six "Quartets"
34:33 the most elaborate ones, doesn't he, Haydn having played the role we know in the very existence and emergence of the string quartet. So, why am I talking about Haydn here? These last symphonies, they're called the London symphonies, and the grand classical form of which these symphonies, along with Mozart's and Beethoven's first and second manner, constitute the apex of what's called musical classicism, or else the first Viennese school—I recall that in German musicology, classicism means Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, it's not Racine and Corneille, it's Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, that is, the apex of the classical form where all tensions remain disciplined, where lyricism, which is going to come afterward invading everything with Romanticism, never sucks up the totality of the work at the expense of narrative.
35:43 Dramatic, not at all in the tragic sense, it can be very cheerful, very, very happy—I'm thinking of many works of Haydn—it's Furtwängler who said, "I've never understood why Wagner didn't understand Haydn"—this is Furtwängler speaking, who says Haydn is the joy of living, the happiness of living in abundance. But there is each time a narrative, interruptions, episodes that are characteristic of sonata form with its bithematism, with its alternation of active themes, decisive ones—called "virile," because of the distribution of sexes in ancient ages—and internalized, tender ones, said to be "feminine."
The Mozartian break and Rousseau's voluptuous sadness 36:30 This alternation of mood, these episodes, these ruptures that did not exist in the baroque repertoire, where there's a kind of metrical and rhythmic continuity—it's not the same thing—but both, throughout the work, except when there's an exception—I'm thinking for instance of the Fourth Brandenburg, where there is that finale.
37:07 It's a fugue—as I can't do the four voices—from beginning to end, it never stops. It doesn't stop until the end, except at one point near the end. It's a moment of humor, it lasts a few seconds, it's suspended, and immediately
37:37 And it picks back up until the end and it concludes. It was as if to say: I'm joking, I'm pretending to stop, I'm joking. It's not a rupture like in Schubert or in Mozart where suddenly there's a discouragement, where there's suddenly a temptation to stop. What's the point? I see a very significant occurrence of this in the finale of Mozart's last concerto, the end of an ending. His concerto for clarinet.
38:07 in A major. I think it's 623 or something like that. More than 600, among these last works. And it's often been noted that the clarinet is the instance of sensuality in Mozart as timbre, and moreover, there is a key that's associated with sensuality in Mozart, which is A major. And here is this clarinet concerto, in A major.
38:39 Right? It bathes in this kind of voluptuousness, a twilight sensuality with this voluptuous melancholy. It seems contradictory. But here again, we see how fruitful the exchange, the back-and-forth between Mozart and Rousseau is—this ambivalence of feeling, to speak like today's meteorologists, we see it appear for the first time, to my knowledge, in a letter, in the third letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes.
39:26 When, speaking of his agitation in the forest of Montmorency, of his ecstasies in the woods, in response to this good man Malesherbes who was trying to act as an intermediary today between the adversaries of the same—well, explain yourself, you're defending yourself poorly. He's a decent fellow, Malesherbes. And he was opposed to certain forms of censorship. He was still someone rather decent for a great aristocrat like him. And he said to Rousseau: "What do you find in the forest?
39:59 "We're still better off with carpets, a good fire in the hearth, some fine music, a pretty woman." And Rousseau recounts his days at the Hermitage. And he arrives at this passage where he says that his ecstasies sometimes reached a limit, saying: "I soon felt the nothingness of my chimeras, which suddenly came to sadden my soul. Well, sir, this was not my enjoyment, for I was so penetrated by a sadness that I would not have wished not to have."
40:37 There, we see emerging this form of happy sensuality that is perhaps brought to its perfection, let's say, in the last Mozart's clarinet works. I was speaking of the concerto, and there is of course the admirable clarinet quintet, which pushes that feeling even further. So why was I talking about rupture, when I said that suddenly the metrics stops itself, not at all humorously to show that it could go on like this indefinitely as in Bach, who masters the procedure perfectly, but almost like the beginning of...
From the finale of the clarinet concerto to the 22nd concerto 41:18 There's an English term that I have trouble translating into French: "dejection," "discouragement," we often say. It's the title of a very beautiful poem by Coleridge, written in a fit of depression, one might say more colloquially today. Now, this is already Baudelairian spleen in full, but which doesn't yet have, let's say, the almost worrying somatic, physical symptoms of...
41:54 of Baudelaire, there's more pleasure, whereas in Baudelaire, spleen is of course an extension of the mal du siècle, but with a much more pronounced dose of anguish, up to auditory hallucination, as in "Spleen," "hurling toward the sky a hideous howl"—in short, there are morbid images like the bat that bangs its head, with great hearses, there—"without drums, without music," there, that's it. So then, I go back to thinking of this finale of the clarinet concerto where Mozart suddenly interrupts—what?
42:44 the finale of his concerto, a rondo—there's nothing less melancholic than a rondo, in principle—one must, I've already said this about other works, leave the audience, after the somewhat melancholic deepening of the slow, median movement, which is ideal for expressing certain states of mind—yes, that's in sonata form—one must leave on a good impression, there, and then a breath of fresh air—I don't know, the one that Valéry will launch to get out of Romanticism in Le Cimetière marin with the famous invocation, no, no, "up! into the successive era, one must try to live, to live"—there, we've rarely been so classical, neo-classical in the post-romantic sense, haven't we—but here, we're not there yet, we're in classicism proper, with this romantic temptation into which we don't go—we're well-mannered, we want to leave the listener with a happy impression—and this is that finale, with these little chromaticisms
43:55 in Mozart, the secret is here, and so the clarinetist unleashes himself gently, does cartwheels, arpeggios, scales, as he hadn't had the occasion to push his virtuosity that far in the earlier movements, everything's going well, and suddenly the discourse stops, there's a silence, he tries to restart it, and it breaks off again, a second silence—I don't know how many angels pass by—and then it resumes and concludes. Now, Mozart almost made a genre out of this rupture, we find it again in his 22nd piano concerto in E-flat, in the finale, likewise—there won't be more than a simple, happy theme that seems to be frolicking, after a very meditative slow movement, right, and here
45:06 then, the orchestra stops, and there arrives, not a silence this time, but a musical sequence that has nothing to do with the preceding discourse of the finale, at a much slower tempo, with almost only wind instruments, we hear a melody that comes from far away and that expresses a certain happy weariness, and when I say weariness I deliberately choose that word, I no longer say melancholy, because it concerns the body as much as the soul—a weariness, and I can only compare it to that of children—you know, anyone who has children knows that it's hard to pull them out of the water, whether at the beach, the mountain stream, the pool, the sea, the bath, isn't it, children are happy in the water, you see, when they've played all day at the beach, etc., and you tell them it's time to go home, there's a moment of melancholy, a moment where they're stuffed with gestures, with mad running around
46:16 and suddenly the sun is setting, they know it's time to go home, and it's that weariness where the body is at once fulfilled, happy, and a little weary from all that happiness that is expressed in that passage I'm speaking of, in the finale of the 22nd concerto—for those who want to know more about this passage, who would rightly rather, instead of listening to me chatter, listen to Mozart's music that I'm alluding to, I'll allow myself, once is not a habit, to refer to a commentary I made on it in some short films made by Alyosha Allard, whom I salute here, who made the short film "La fausse note" in the form of an interview with yours truly, and who also recorded quite a few sequences, he calls them—well, I call them "entries," I don't remember his term, which is perfectly appropriate—but at one point I choose this concerto, this passage
47:26 in the finale of the 22nd concerto to talk about it—you can find it in a series of short excerpts called "Il n'y a pas que la pop," there, I give it to you in a word starting with "Il n'y a pas que la pop," Alyosha Allard—I pay tribute to him here and express all my gratitude—and there you hear the sound illustration, interspersed with a very beautiful performance by Robert Casadesus and George Szell, you hear this theme that comes suddenly, and you have the impression, not of returning to paradise, but of already regretting, barely having entered, having to leave again already, and no sooner has this incredible phrase settled in your ear than the phrase resumes, but this time with the soloist, with the piano, which until then had been silent during the statement of the phrase by the orchestra, and finally, the theme as stated has so much affinity
Mozartian opera, ambivalence, and ensembles 48:36 with those that, at the same period, multiply in his opera that is undoubtedly his most accomplished from a strictly musical point of view—there's no point in saying "the best," "the most beautiful"—I recall that there is Italian opera as a well-defined genre with many subgenres within it, nothing is more different than Mascagni's verismo and Rossini's humor or Bellini's melancholy—anyway, there is Italian opera with its primacy given to arioso form, to song, to melody, of course, to the aria, I'm not teaching anyone anything here—there is French opera, Rameau being one of its greatest representatives, but I mean also the 19th century, the Carmens and the Gounods, that will show you—to name only the most famous—there is German opera, there is Russian opera, these are ways
49:47 of making the opera genre resound very differently each time, and then there is Mozartian opera. Many musicologists agree that Mozartian opera is yet something else entirely, there's nothing comparable to Mozart's operas, there's no equivalent—Mozart is undoubtedly the greatest Germanic composer, the greatest Italian composer, and one of the best French composers—there, because I'm alluding to Così fan tutte, which are, as a genre, created in Italy, particularly by the Neapolitan school, opera buffa—well, we find in this finale of the 22nd concerto in E-flat precisely themes and melodies very closely related to Così, and that's where I wanted to get to—Così fan tutte—I keep coming back to these ambivalences on which I've been moving all along—I didn't say ambiguities, that would sound a bit hypocritical, forgive me for speaking French—it sounds a bit two-faced, this guy is ambiguous, meaning he's not clear, in French-speaking Africa
50:57 they say, "that guy there isn't clear," meaning he doesn't really tell us what he thinks. Ambivalence is different, it's contradictions that are unbeknownst even to the subject himself, it's deeper—not by chance is it a very important notion in the Freudian field, for instance, ambivalence—and so, happiness, sensuality, melancholy—we've just seen that it's one of the forms of that ambivalence—and I come now to Così, why—because the plot is a masterpiece of a plot for an opera buffa.
51:43 Mozart has his best librettist, a defrocked priest by the way, Da Ponte, isn't it, who will end his career in the United States, incidentally, quite an adventurous life. It's with Da Ponte that he'll write the famous trilogy that are the summits of sung Italian opera. I don't say Italian opera, sung Italian opera, namely, in chronological order, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così.
52:14 And Così, well, I'm not the only one to say it, connoisseurs, if that word means anything, say that it's really Mozart's secret garden. In any case, what's certain, objectively—now this is measurable—in no other opera are there so many ensembles. I recall that in an opera, there are arias for the soloists, Figaro's aria, the Countess's aria, Don Giovanni's aria, Leporello's aria, whatever you like. And then, there are the ensembles, when several characters sing simultaneously.
52:46 Yes, that's what it's called. So, either they sing while suspending the action, and that's typical, not of opera buffa, but of opera seria, seria being the opposite of buffa. Mozart excels in both genres. He started with Idomeneo and Mitridate, re di Ponto, which are opera seria. It's a bit more stilted, a bit more solemn.
53:17 And there, every time there's an ensemble, it's a pure lyrical moment. So the dramatic action is suspended. What Mozart is the first to inaugurate, in particular in the first of our great Da Ponte trilogy, namely in The Marriage of Figaro, is that the action continues during the ensembles. So I refer here those who want to know more, and above all illustrate it musically, to the extraordinary second act of The Marriage of Figaro, which is a kind of musical flow, non-stop, one will have to wait for Wagner to see a musical sequence without interruption like that, non-stop, where the action is breathless, don't forget it's "the crazy day," with plot twists, turns of event, recognitions.
Così fan tutte and the farewell quintet 54:10 And to what degree the number of ensembles that overlap, sometimes three, sometimes four, sometimes five, trio, quartet—well, Così is the apex of that. From the moment the curtain rises in the first act, we're dealing with—I'm introducing here the passage I want to talk about, where there's the apex of the ambivalence I was speaking of, to pick up my thread, but let me contextualize this passage by presenting Così in general—when the curtain rises, we see three guys, I'm deliberately saying guys, because there's not a single woman, we're in a tavern with no women, isn't it, a tavern in Naples, with two young men, two officers of the king, two young men, each of whom says the most faithful, the most beautiful, is mine, etc., each has his girlfriend, fine, and then, a somewhat more mature man tells them, yes, listen, that's all very well, but I mean, they're all the same, così fan tutte, word for word, they all do the same thing, isn't it, don't attribute to me, don't attribute to me ideas particular to the libertinism of the era,
55:22 I'm only reporting what is—and then, the others get angry, but what, they draw their swords, watch out, "fuor la spada," and forgive my accent, Corsican, I'm sorry, mind you, in Naples, it's not very far, from the Corsican accent, which owes much to the Neapolitan accent, and then, of course, it calms down, he says, I'm a man of peace, put away your swords, listen, let's make a bet, this is where the action's going to start, I'll bet you that your young ladies, who are angels, who are perfections, whatever you like, they will betray you within the day if you do what I tell you, well, whatever, well, they bet a hundred sequins, you see, Freud would have noted the money stake involved, all the same, isn't it, especially since the mature man is going to involve the maid, the maid, the companion of the two young women, in the matter, saying, we'll give you half if you do what I tell you, you help me, you help me get her to betray these gentlemen, you see, well, so I come now to the scene I want to talk about,
56:34 Don Alfonso, the mature man, tells them—he's their longtime friend, and so he also knows the girls, because he often goes to have tea at their place with his two friends—Don Alfonso tells them: right, you do exactly what I tell you, you're going to disappear on the pretext that the king is calling you to war, very bad news for the young ladies who think that, any day now, they'll be announcing marriage instead, whereas here, it's going to be that they're practically going off to their death, you're going to war, and you come back in disguise—I like this part, because the maid is going to say, oh my, what a handsome moustache he's got, that's nice, isn't it, what is this face, oh, that we're not used to, in fact she says—there's the whole Balkan problem already there—are these Wallachians, Turchi, Valacchi, well, Bashi-Bazouks if you like, if you want to speak in Tintinological terms—so that's what they do, and the scene, no, I'm not going to get into it now, I'll get there—it's the one where the young women announce to their beloveds,
57:44 to their two beloveds, where Don Alfonso, the mature man, comes to tell them, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your two friends, the king is calling them to the Field of Mars, to war, so, he has them come, they arrive ashamed, dragging their feet, isn't it, and, while a boat—all this paid for by the mature man—a boat with a fake army, isn't it, tells them, come on, we don't have much time, you must embark, go to the battlefield, and so, this passage is called, in musicology, the farewell quintet, we are five, the two young men, their two near-fiancées, and their friend Don Alfonso, we are in full opera buffa, we laugh, we know it's false, that they're not going to war, isn't it, and here, as soon as the quintet begins, as soon as the action stops, and the five begin to sing, Mozart writes the most overwhelming music, as if,
58:56 Suddenly, something oneiric, a dream cloud, it starts with onomatopoeias, like broken-off tears, it's introduced, if you look on Youtube, by Di scrivermi ogni giorno, promise me you'll write to me every day, isn't that right, and of course, these phrases are broken up with sobs, very restrained, little onomatopoeias, the voices move apart, come back together, diverge, converge, with a stunning mastery of writing, we arrive at what is most, let me just finish this, I'll take the floor, we arrive at what is hardest to express, and perhaps the most important thing, is that in a scene where we're supposed to pretend, because all of this is fake, we, we know, we, the spectators, as Hegel would say in the Phenomenology addressing a reader, for us, or in itself, we know that, but consciousness itself doesn't know it, isn't that so, we are spectators of what is going to happen to this poor consciousness which doesn't know it's walking into disaster, isn't that so, so, for us, in itself,
Watteau, Fragonard, and Verlaine's Fêtes galantes 1:00:06 we're in the middle of buffoonery, but then, why write such overwhelming music, like never before, perhaps the most beautiful ever written, in the farewell quintet, I'll give you back the floor. No, no, no, I'm absolutely, I even apologize for interrupting you, because it's fascinating, but, for me, what strikes me, precisely, in your way of putting it, is that you actually dialecticize this relationship between the galant style and the Sturm und Drang side, or the Empfindsamkeit too, we speak of that for the musicians of this period, you show clearly that it's not, contrary to what some write, it's not that this or that piece is written in that style, it's mixed together all the time, it's not, obviously, there are emblematic pieces, symphonies, Don Giovanni, the Requiem, where indeed the dramatic side is more obvious.
1:00:52 Yes, and I was going to say, to make an anachronism, this romantic Mozart, even though he's pre-romantic, indeed, it's what most disturbs the mind, but what's most poignant, as you say, is that he holds both ends, it's that ambiguity, but in this aesthetic you're talking about, the quintet from Così, and I don't know, I have the impression that it was the musical illustration of a Watteau painting, with that embarkation for Cythera feel. Well then, you're spoiling me, it's as if you spied on me while I was preparing the…
1:01:22 because I was fully intending to draw a parallel with the fêtes galantes. Yes, maybe it's also because we know each other, it will also be about shared memories. Oh no, no, but no, but it's because you know, if we know, we can't help but make the connection. It's the aesthetic of that era too, there you go, but it's to push each other toward knowing each other. As Verlaine puts it so well in a collection of poems with an eponymous title, Fêtes galantes, isn't that so? So inspired by that unique atmosphere given off by Watteau's painting, which is so different, in the same period, from Fragonard's.
1:01:52 Both are peaks of painting, but Fragonard breathes. Fragonard is more like The Marriage of Figaro. It's really… It's a flood of happiness across practically three acts, it never stops. Whereas I'm thinking of The Bolt, The Swing, you know, it's a swing in a shoe, it flies off. That's a bit like what you were saying about the famous ribbons that end up mattering more than the girl's beauty. Exactly, exactly.
1:02:22 Whereas with Watteau, it's more crepuscular and more melancholic. And no one has expressed it as closely as Verlaine when he says: singing all the while in a minor key, of conquering love and opportune life. Together, the minor key isn't meant to express conquering love and opportune life. There you go, C major, there's C minor. It's not possible, is it?
1:02:52 Singing all the while in a minor key, of conquering love and opportune life, they don't seem to believe in their happiness, and their song mingles with the moonlight, the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful, which makes the birds dream in the trees and the fountains sob with ecstasy. You see again, sob with ecstasy. You see the oxymoron, sob with ecstasy the fountains, the great slender fountains among the marbles.
1:03:23 And here again, it's somewhat oxymoronic, this way of bringing together the most fluid, the fountains, with marble, the hardest. There's something here that has to do with what I call the historical tipping point. We're no longer quite in the Ancien Régime, but we're not in the New one either. The New one will come after Waterloo. It will begin to reach practically down to us, with the domination of the Anglo-Saxon and Puritan world over the world.
1:04:00 I challenge anyone to dispute that starting from Waterloo, we're in the process of handing over the reins, with the emergence of China, but for now, the entire period since Waterloo is hollowed out by Anglo-Saxon domination, where England later hands the baton to the United States. We need to be clear. We're not in that New World time yet, but many elements, including the ones I've just pointed out, particularly the ambivalence, mean that we're no longer in the Old one either.
The Marriage of Figaro and the true nature to flee 1:04:37 And here I come, I return to The Marriage of Figaro after my detour into Così, to talk about the character of Susanna. To make a remark, you'll ask me, are you talking about Beaumarchais or Mozart? Well, wait, is it really a coincidence? These three operas, this Da Ponte trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro, still in chronological order, Don Giovanni and Così, are all three incredibly corrosive and subversive for their time.
1:05:11 Beaumarchais, yes. And the borrowings from the French avant-garde by Beaumarchais, who achieves this tour de force of getting his audience of aristocrats to applaud the ruin of their own privileges. Because The Marriage of Figaro is, after all, about Count Almaviva being ridiculed from beginning to end, unable to impose his droit du seigneur. And the hero, the couple of heroes, Figaro and Susanna, his fiancée soon to be his wife, come from the common people, and not even just a barber, since among the common people there's also, I don't know, a president of the Parlement de Dijon.
1:05:57 We're far from that. We're really leaving, we're not far from rurality. That's what I call the tipping point. You're starting to understand when I said that the happiness I'm talking about, and that they're trying to express, is the enemies bejeweled with lace, young ladies with lace and so on. We're at the opposite of today's ecological naturalism. It's not about fleeing the city to go into nature, but about fleeing true nature, which is death, illness, suffering, misery, to move toward what the progress of praxis is beginning to offer for living together, something livable, precisely.
1:06:40 I know I'm going very fast for things that are very concrete and very complex. But otherwise, when and where will it be said? This is precisely the era when it's being decided. And when Saint-Just, I repeat all these references coming together, says happiness is a new idea in Europe. Because it's a slightly intriguing phrase, one could say but still, I don't know, you read a novel by Chrétien de Troyes, there are very happy moments. Yes, yes, yes, of course, yes, for the princess in her tower with braids falling from the third floor down to the ground floor, plaits, sorry, waiting for her beloved to return from Jerusalem where she sent him if he wants to earn her love.
1:07:23 I mean, I don't mind, but that's not the peasants. The peasants are a few Gauls we come across from time to time among these great Viking Norman knights, isn't that so, and who are subhumans, who are black and small. Sorry? In Yvain, the Knight of the Lion by Chrétien de Troyes, there's a description of the peasant, actually. But there you go. He's practically a fantastical character. It's striking. And this is the 13th century, even the 12th, for that matter.
1:07:54 I'm not even talking, even in the 17th century, you have to see La Bruyère's incredible text about the peasants. We see strange animals in the countryside, when they stand up, we notice, despite their black faces, that they're men who murmur, I'm not quoting from memory, who murmur a few barely comprehensible syllables. La Bruyère. We also see the Le Nain brothers' paintings. There you go, exactly. It's the same vein. The Bouches and Dante paintings.
Life expectancy, the third world, and the end of prehistory 1:08:27 No, no, but we're living in such an era that from Michéa to whatever kind of ecology, which isn't Michéa's case, to be fair. It's commonly said that things were better before, in some way, but we should really keep in mind. A peasant's life expectancy under Louis XV was 35 years, that is, the age at which Mozart died, and we consider that a scandal. In retrospect, obviously. Listen, you're talking to someone who lived 34 years of his life in countries where life expectancy today is still 42.
1:09:03 Yes, in Niger. Yes. It also holds the record for birth rate because there, the average is nine children. It's really staggering. But to keep two of them. It's like the 18th century. Between malaria, cholera, every dry season, etc. But of course, let's stop opposing African identity and European identity. In fact, these are differences in time, not in space. These are differences in historical moments if we want to understand the problems our brothers and comrades in what used to be called the Third World are grappling with.
1:09:41 We need to see them as our ancestors, and not each time frame it in an exoticism that doesn't own up to its name. It's not ex, it's in, we carry it inside us. It's like an obscure remembrance. And I'll take the opportunity to examine a bit more closely a notion that takes us away from Mozart for a moment, that of the Third World. Noting, let's be very rigorous now, that here, 'third' is an ordinal number.
1:10:11 It doesn't mean there are three worlds, it means there is one that is the Third World because it comes third. What does that mean? There are two before it, yes. There's the capitalist world and the communist world at the time. And everything that was neither one nor the other, we put it in the Third World. Which is absurd, it's an imaginary notion. Where do we put Cuba? Where do we put Vietnam? Where do we put West Germany? They spoke of the tricontinental. Sorry? That's why with Cuba, it's the tricontinental. Of course.
1:10:42 Already, the Non-Aligned Movement is a more objective label, isn't it? I'll close the parenthesis. So, when I say emerging, we are only just beginning to emerge from the darkness. That's what I mean. And I don't forget perhaps the greatest Marx, the one who, instead of and in place of, and at the moment when Hegel speaks of the end of history, speaks of the end of prehistory.
1:11:15 In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he says that if we get rid of the capitalist mode of production, then, no, that's not the end. It's not the end of time. It's not... So they got married and lived happily with many children. It's not the end of history where nothing more happens. No. It's the beginning. It's the beginning, yes. Because before, it was prehistory. We're emerging from darkness. I'm not praising capitalism by saying it pulled us out of the old regime.
1:11:48 No. It's the cunning of reason that made reason choose the class that was the most advanced at that moment relative to feudalism. But immediately afterward, the conflict that had reigned for centuries between the peasantry and the aristocracy would arise between the bourgeoisie and the working class. So we're seeing essential things here. We didn't believe it could come through the lace and curls and frills of Rousseau and Mozart.
Bourgeois feminism, pleasure, and the character of Suzanne 1:12:21 We've arrived at these considerations. But finally we're getting to all that. What Rousseau called 'all that.' I always preferred the less pretty one having all that. Having all what? But everything that pulls us out of horror. And that's why when I see bourgeois feminism, because there is a feminism I'm a fervent supporter of, when we still see the gap between men's and women's wages, there's still a lot to be done for the cause of feminism.
1:12:54 But bourgeois feminism, the kind for which the enemy is man and not the women and men who exploit millions of other women and men. Because we're not going to claim that Madame Lagarde, Madame de Bettencourt, may the earth rest lightly on her, or Condoleezza Rice, are among the poor wretched women exploited by their bastard husbands. And they've done a number on people. When Madame Lagarde went through Estonia, old women's pensions dropped to 50 years old.
1:13:24 Ah, excuse me, to 50 euros. Yes, I can barely say it, it's so outrageous. So they're not exactly kind to women, these women, are they, in their discourse? Yes, yes, of course. They'll justify the intervention in Afghanistan to unveil women. Now it's worse than ever, the regimes. They're making deals with those who stoned women. And throwing acid in their faces. Sorry? And throwing acid in their faces. There you go, in passing. And they back the same people in Syria, those who stone people in public squares or slit the throats of 14-year-old children.
1:14:02 No, what we're seeing is serious. What I reproach bourgeois feminism for, above all, among other themes, is that of woman-as-object. It's a scandal, isn't it, to make woman into an object. But wait, the dream of the Malian woman who walks 10 kilometers every morning to fetch water and another 10 kilometers to fetch wood to heat that water, her dream is to be, for one hour in her life, a woman-object, when her back is broken in two.
1:14:36 Isn't that so, by the 10 pregnancies she's endured to, again, to keep some, because they'll say yes, it's their husbands who haven't, her too. A woman who has no children there is hated first by other women, despised by other women. Well, one who has only boys, I'm having trouble saying it, one who only has girls, is already very poorly regarded. And if she has no children at all, she'd better leave the village. You see, so. So her dream is to be, to be able to be that woman-object.
1:15:11 What luck to have as your only problem that someone brushes a bit too close to you in the subway. If that's it, I mean, it's detestable. But I mean, when those are the only problems left to denounce, it means we've been saved from what, from the darkness I was talking about? I would need young ladies, more delicate hands, isn't that so, and better-arranged hair. I'm taking up everything Rousseau says. And I'm taking up what Saint-Just says.
1:15:44 Look how everything fits together now. Happiness is a new idea. That is, happiness which used to be the privilege of only a few, and so it wasn't happiness, it was pleasure. Look closely at the libertines, it's the height of pleasure. It's Mozart's era. It's Rousseau's era, it's the height of pleasure. Its literary expression, moreover, whether it's Dangerous Liaisons or something else, or the Marquis de Sade, there's no shortage of that, is there.
1:16:18 And it already starts as early as the 17th century, there are excellent texts by La Fontaine, isn't that so, or even in the Renaissance, Brantôme's Gallery of Ladies, but there's a whole libertine tradition, isn't there, especially in our sweet France, isn't it, well, who am I talking about there, Monsieur Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade, I'm not reproaching him for being an aristocrat, but I note that it runs counter to those who believe sexuality was only discovered starting from May '68, because we're made to believe that, the sexual revolution, no, what's new from the late 18th century, and what the character of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro illustrates, is that pleasure is no longer the exclusive right of aristocrats.
1:17:08 The character of Susanna is the first maid, I use that demeaning word on purpose, isn't it, to have a leading role, a prima donna role, because there are maids in Molière, and they're wonderful, Martine the servant is unforgettable, my God, I haven't studied like you have, I speak plainly like we speak where I'm from, isn't that so, she's wonderful and has much more common sense than her foolish mistresses, isn't that so, but she remains a maid, she's kept in her place for eternity, we can't imagine, can we, an extraordinary duet — and here I'm switching from Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro back to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro — the extraordinary duet of Susanna and the Countess, when they need to arrange the fake, the false rendez-vous, isn't it, to trap Figaro, the famous duet Sotto i pini, rendezvous by moonlight under the pines, where it's a kind of, I'm searching for the word, babble, between two supernaturally inspired birds,
Rousseau's triangle and the sciences of history 1:18:20 between a mezzo and a soprano, how to put it, there you go. And here again we find Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, well its sensibility on display in Beaumarchais, but it's prepared by Rousseau. It's no coincidence he places it in that milieu, Rousseau, it's always the answer to the question of who he thinks he is. Well, Rousseau is the challenger, yes, I'll take woman where she is. The woman of the Bible, well, woman, I mean, it's not the female sex, it's Woman.
1:18:53 It took millennia to produce that femininity. And so here we find the famous triangle of Rousseau, I allowed myself to coin this concept, though I'm not its author, it's Nerval, the first to formulate it. But I claim the phrase, the triangle of Rousseau. To sum it up, Nerval in Angélique, when they arrive close to Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville, they first pass, three kilometers before Ermenonville, with his friend Sylvain, they go visit, like good tourists, the abbey of Chaalis.
1:19:34 And there, there's this incredible passage, they arrive in front of the small château where Henri IV sheltered his love affair with Gabrielle d'Estrées. You see the continuity of what we're discussing. And he says the gamekeeper's son, so a peasant, the gamekeeper's son who was showing us around, tells us, here is the beautiful Gabrielle's tower. Gabrielle, Henri IV's favorite. Every evening Rousseau would come and pluck his guitar beneath her window, and the king, who was jealous, eventually had him killed.
1:20:07 Nerval starts by laughing, like you and me. Well, really, how ignorant peasants are, to make such anachronisms, not understanding that Rousseau comes two centuries after Henri IV. And Nerval puts a period, moves to the next line, and stops laughing. This formula is perhaps truer than one thinks, he says. Rousseau, by refusing Madame de Pompadour's hundred louis, ruined the edifice founded by Henri.
1:20:37 everything collapsed, his immortal image remains standing upon the ruins. There's the triangle of Rousseau. Henri IV, Gabrielle, and the challenger. So it's almost funny to picture Rousseau a bit like Casanova with a rope ladder, coming to pluck his guitar beneath the window of the extraction of surplus value. That's where I want to get to. What does Gabrielle represent here in the symbolic order, other names are inexhaustible.
1:21:09 In short, the instrument of the pleasure of power. That's exactly what's at stake, the sovereign. What does it symbolize, if not this pleasure which is precisely the privilege of power. And so millennia of surplus-value extraction. And it's no coincidence that this same Henri IV, whom people had told, before he reigned, over Paris, 'Majesty, don't even think of it, you're a Protestant, you'll never be able to reign over the capital of the eldest daughter of the Church,' well, I mean, of France, 'you'd have to convert.'
1:21:50 And so, Paris is well worth a Mass. So, Paris with its girls with backsides like that and curly hair, I don't care about religion. Not stupid, Henri IV, you see, we're seeing serious things here. He had well understood that pleasure was what was at stake. A chicken in every pot for the peasant, and Gabrielle for himself. For the peasant on Sundays, and Gabrielle every day. You're not talking about him. The triangle of Rousseau, the sovereign, the favorite,
1:22:25 the challenger. And what characterizes, in what I call the tipping point at the end of the 18th century, is precisely that there is a challenge. Before, the rival was within the aristocracy. That's all of Racine's tragedies. Yes. 'I remained wandering long in Caesarea.' Yes indeed, I remained wandering long in Caesarea. I recall that a great communist was haunted by this line.
1:22:57 I think it's in Aurélien, isn't it? Yes, it's the opening. There you go. You see, at the start, we were in the psychic field, ambivalence, a mixture of melancholy and pleasure, etc. And now we arrive at another order. We move from the psychic field to the historical field, I don't quite know how to put it, the sciences of history that remain to be built. I shocked a few Marxist-Leninist comrades recently, shocked, they're friends, one of the comrades, when I told them that 'scientific socialism,' one can put it that way quickly, but it's just an expression.
1:23:41 Personally, I prefer the word discipline. That means discipline, it's not opinion, it's more than doxa. Careful. But something that moves toward, that aims at a scientific expression collectively. Marx is the first to say that we would need to bring together, in a multidisciplinary way, economists, biologists, geographers, etc. It's teamwork. The sciences of history are still to be made. Marx's great merit is to have opened the door leading to it, or rather, if I may say, the gateway onto the road leading to it, to have lifted the barrier that prevented taking that road.
1:24:20 Besides, Engels's text should be recalled, it's From Utopian Socialism to Scientific Socialism. Of course. If we're speaking in relative terms, the expression scientific socialism doesn't bother me. If it's in relative terms as opposed to the daydreams of, what was it called, in Proudhon, the... The phalansteries. Yes indeed, and other utopian daydreams that we know of, I mean, it's certain that in that case the epithet scientific isn't undeserved, I mean, but there it is.
1:24:55 But for it to be raised to the level of rigor and formalization found in the natural sciences, for example, that's a collective task that can only be accomplished on the assumption that we've freed ourselves from the straitjacket of bourgeois relations of production, capitalist relations of production. It looks like I'm getting a bit far from Mozart, but we're right in the middle of it. Mozart chooses three works that are at the avant-garde, no question about it.
Combative Mozart: freemasonry, The Magic Flute, the turning point 1:25:25 And even then, for it to get past the censors, it's Il dissoluto punito. Which ends badly, doesn't it? But still, it's him who fascinates us from beginning to end. It's Don Juan. There, Rousseau was right to say what one likes to say. In Molière too, we still admire the one who does evil. And then, let's not forget, the late Mozart, his initiation into Freemasonry.
1:26:02 And at the time, it wasn't a co-optation between mobsters like in the Nice underworld circles. Well, I'll stop there. If it were known, I would stop. There's plenty not to stop about, isn't there? At the time it was a formula of mutual aid for the most destitute. And Nerval… But him, we got involved. Mozart found, precisely, Mozart found among... brothers, we don't say comrades, brothers in Freemasonry, I'm thinking of Süssmayr who would finish his Requiem, of Schikaneder who would write...
1:26:40 Ask for the… Who would write the text of the Flute. And from whom he would ask for a sheet to bury one of his children. Let me come back a bit to… We're coming out of the darkness. Let me recall that Mozart's parents had six children. Only Wolfgang and his sister Anna-Marie, known as Nannerl, survived, didn't they? Let me recall that between Wolfgang, who was the youngest — the eldest died a newborn — between Mozart and his little sister, there were three deaths, three children who died.
1:27:17 That Mozart, in turn, had five children with Constanze, didn't he? Three of them died. I'm saying this to come back a little to my sequence 'we're coming out of the darkness.' And in Haydn's London symphonies, we see on the rooftops, on the steeples, a city sky somewhere, like a profile of a future starting to become livable.
1:27:48 Symbolically, it's not the dreadful London that would come to stink up the place in 1840 and that Dickens would depict so well, it's not the London of Oliver Twist. It's the London of 23 years old. Insofar as London here is a metonymy for the city, Civitas Dei, built by men. Sorry? No, no, it's Voltaire's London. There you go. It's the English model for the most advanced of the Enlightenment thinkers, of course. The English novel. If Voltaire's first important publication is the English Letters.
1:28:23 There you go. So I'm not turning my back on Mozart here and extrapolating. Mozart chooses the subjects that are the most avant-garde societally, as we'd say today—first, the libertines, corrosive ones. Moreover, with Freemasonry, I mean, he fully inscribes himself within the Enlightenment ideal, within secularism and critique. And he never stopped—Mozart, and this hurt his career a great deal—having an enormous, I don't like the word resentment because it's not very Mozartian, but he was implacable in his rejection of aristocratic arrogance and injustice.
1:29:15 I would still recall that Mozart was the object of an appalling hatred from the Viennese aristocracy, which did not improve when he joined the Freemasons. Imagine, in hyper-Catholic Austria... But already, by the very fact that he wanted to make a popular opera, and therefore in Austria, a German one. I'm thinking of The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Magic Flute, whereas the Italians reigned at court.
1:29:48 And so it was that the woman, what's her name, Paisiello's widow, they say, at the court of Leopold who succeeded Joseph II, who had a certain fondness for Mozart. But he died prematurely, and moreover Così fan tutte had, for once, a resounding success in Vienna—bad luck, isn't it, we're confined. Because Joseph II kicks the bucket, and so, because of the decreed days of mourning, every concert is suspended, and once the mourning is over, everyone has forgotten Così fan tutte.
1:30:34 There are curses like that. Now, meanwhile, Paisiello's widow, with the new sovereign who detests Mozart, says upon hearing The Marriage of Figaro that it's musical swinery, musical swinery. Or a porcheria tedesca. Musicale, tedesca, yes, sorry. That's precisely because, you see, one senses that at the time, you know, there were Italian musicians at every court in Europe.
1:31:10 There you go. So there was a prejudice in favor of the Italian at the time. Yes, but we underestimate this combative side in Mozart on that level, and it culminates. And there, Mozart is downright Rousseauian in expression. Of course, it was Schikaneder who wrote the text of The Magic Flute, wasn't it, but the extraordinary dialogue between Sarastro and the three priests of the Temple of the Sun, of the Solar Temple, isn't it?
1:31:40 When one of the priests, at the moment when Sarastro announces to them that Tamino will undergo trials—there, we're in classic initiatory rituals—when Sarastro lists the trials of water, fire, silence, etc., one of the priests says, 'Do you think Tamino will be able to endure them?' Remember, 'Er ist ein Prinz,' and Sarastro replies, 'Mehr, er ist ein Mensch.' More than a prince, he is a man.
1:32:12 There you go. You think he'll be able to withstand these trials, for after all, remember he's a prince. And so Sarastro replies, 'More, he's a man.' That's pure Rousseau. From the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, and a fool can fill just like so many others, he rises to the state of man, which so few men know how to fulfill. There you go. I'm not equal to the beauty of Mozart's music—who could be?
1:32:44 But I wanted to show that this pivot—and I'll perhaps finish on your allusion to Watteau—and I don't want to neglect either the unprecedented side, not only at that time but even up to today. That is, trying to live the very last years before something that could turn out badly, before a revolution that could be hijacked, that could be diverted. And that's the Fêtes galantes.
1:33:14 And that's why we prolong the moonlit serenades, why we try to live the last moments of, what was it, the Trianon, yes, but because something is coming and no one knows if they'll come out unscathed. Mozart's music is entirely within this pivot. That's why I began with the burst of happiness of the Concerto for Flute and Harp, which remains the horizon, I'll go ahead and say it, of the popular masses only from that period onward.
1:33:47 There you go, they no longer have the privilege of a confined aristocracy. Listen, it's magnificent, we started from genius to arrive at humanity, as a program, I'd almost say. So Mozart didn't steal his place as the most listened-to classical musician, after all. Good, we understand well why. There you go, thanks to you. And, listen, we'll stop there and say see you next week. With great pleasure, Aymeric. Thank you. I thank you all for your loyalty.
1:34:18 Thank you.
