English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Toasts, dialogue and political context 0:00 Hello everyone. So we're resuming in 2021, so this is the first session in 2021, happy new year to all, the Musicosophie sessions with Dominique Pagani. I'll remind you that the purpose of these conversations, these conversations constitute a kind of draft toward a book that will be written and that will probably be published in autumn 2021. So, I think we'll have thirty or forty sessions. We'll see. In any case, it's a pleasure to talk with you. And also, these new technologies allow us, Dominique, at the same time, to share it with everyone and also to get certain remarks that might arise in the meantime.
0:42 So, they are still exploratory in character, of course, even if sometimes Dominique has a theme that comes to him, a guiding thread. This time we hadn't talked about it in particular, but from what I understood just before the show, Dominique had at least a small idea of a theme. And then we'll see how we develop that. Yes, hello to you, Dominique. Hello, Aymeric. Hello to everyone listening to us, to the friends, not of the visual thing, but of the auditory thing.
1:13 It's not because it's invisible that it's immaterial and that it's not without that. Well, still, you know, vibrations in the air, that's matter. Exactly. Take away the air, you don't hear anything anymore. I hope there's no hemiplegia from that point of view. There you go. We have several senses, a priori, to satisfy in different ways. Absolutely. So, I'm very, very, very, very honored and very, very gratified by their loyalty, to find them again already at the start of 2021.
1:48 So, I wish them, as I wish the best to those I wish it to, I have a formula, I'm going to make a barbarism, an 'inequational' one. There you go. I have a publisher who is a fine linguist, so it gives me temptations to tease him. And an inequational formula, well, you know what an inequation is in mathematics, it's often order relations, isn't it? And as we say in set-theoretic language, so I wish you a 2021 that is at least better than all those that preceded it.
2:21 You're not risking much with that, frankly. There you go. But I owe you that. I'll take the opportunity to renew my wishes to Aymeric. I'm very lucky to have such a knowledgeable interlocutor, in philosophy as well as in music, in the history of music, in musical consumption, in instrumental practice. So that makes for a lot of shared understanding in matters of sound, not to mention our political comradeship. So there you go, I mean, it's a stroke of luck one must know how to appreciate, because in dialogue, otherwise we'd have a dialogue, not like Plato's Gorgias, which is a real dialogue, but like the Laws.
3:06 Old Plato is a bit tired. In the Laws, Socrates does nothing but talk to himself. 'Yes, very well,' he says. Whereas in the Gorgias, Callicles, for three pages, keeps interrupting Socrates and threatening him with a beating. So, I'm delighted to pick up this fruitful thread again. And to start the year somewhat against the grain of this context, I'll speak by euphemism—a heavy one.
3:44 You don't know? At the very least a heavy one. I'm calming down, aren't I? But this context—I'm not just talking about the health situation, but above all the political one. There's a real pandemic. It must be taken seriously. We all, more or less all, have loved ones who are affected. Very close ones, that's my case anyway. So I take it very seriously. But the media-political exploitation of this pandemic is a scandal of a cynicism rarely observed—and that's saying something—in the powers that we supposedly delegated.
4:25 There you go. I say that because I'm speaking with Aymeric Monville, who is one of the rare people to acknowledge, to insist that we not forget that since a certain congress held at Versailles—symbols don't lie, do they? Versailles is rarely for the Republic, is it? At Versailles, I mean a certain congress brought together the right, the Socialist Party, and everyone to block your vote.
5:01 The 2005 vote. I don't know where we were rejecting the proposed European constitution. Well, you'll get it anyway. You'll get it where I think. Pardon me if I'm being crude. But that's a certain order. And Aymeric was saying, since then, we've been in a coup d'état. People talk about a coup d'état, at the Capitol, etc. I mean, there are those who are outraged by these people claiming that Biden is ready to hand America over to communism.
5:35 That shows you a bit the level of certain commentators. But those who are, aren't they, coup-plotters, putschists, I mean, dare to feign outrage at this coup d'état, when since 2005, aren't they, they've been governing us legally. Pétain was legal. But illegitimate.
Happy musics and morbid musics 6:05 Since Kant, and thanks to Rousseau who inspired Kant, we know that legality is not morality. There you go. I wanted to make this little preamble to recall that in these heavy times, I've decided to talk to you about happy music, or rather about a very interesting alternation in the history of music, in the history of musics elsewhere too. It's a very interesting alternation between musics that express—I'll speak very simply at first—happiness, I'm using a fairly broad, fairly vague term, without defining it too precisely for now.
6:44 Even though it deserves it. Well, we'll get to that soon. I mean, we gain by being more precise. By distinguishing it—we'll see this later—from enjoyment, from salvation, from peace. That's something else. But the musics that express happiness, and more deathly, more melancholic musics. And developing a parallel with the thymic side, to borrow a Greek root and be a bit snobbish about it.
7:20 You know, it's mood, thumos, it's cyclothymic, that means the mood flips, it goes from melancholy to mania. Nowadays we say polarity, it amounts to the same thing, you know, it's the magical use of language. We change the formulas to always say the same thing. When we don't quite know whether it comes from the soul or the body, we say it's psychosomatic. That way, everyone agrees, we're all set. That's the magical use of language. And on top of that we speak Greek, so it sounds impressive. It's like Molière.
7:51 It's to underline ignorance. For him, it was the virtus dormitiva. There you go, exactly. Those doctors used to say... It makes you sleep because there's a dormitive virtue. There you go, why does opium make you sleep? Because there is in it a virtus dormitiva. Because there is in it a dormitive virtue. You know, we could have spared ourselves Galilean-Newtonian mechanics. Why does the car move? Because there is in it a motive virtue. Motive.
8:21 Yes, that's true. Well, anyway. And why do I know my texts by heart? Because I have memory. Well, there you go. Isn't that right? To have the memory of these lessons is to be able to recite them by heart. So why do they recite them by heart? Because they recite them by heart. Well, that's called tautologies. You see? There you go. That's the magical use of language. No, no, I'm going to talk about happiness more precisely. But for now, I'd first like to set aside a bit, in what I'm going to talk to you about, this alternation of happiness and unhappiness when it's circumstantial.
8:54 That's interesting. But it's not quite my subject. For instance, take in Sicily or in Puglia, in southern Italy, take what's called a tarantella. 'Tarantella, it's frenzied.' 'Tant, tant, tant, tant.' 'Gopo so pare, gopo so pare, how the girl comes down.' 'Tant, tant, tant.' It's frenzied. You can't stay still when you hear that, can you? Well.
9:24 And it's a wild farandole. Few people know that if you look, if you let the name of the dance speak, the tarantella actually comes from a ritual. It's that musicians of the time would poison themselves voluntarily with the venom of the spider, the tarantula. It's common in the Mediterranean. When it starts to get a bit warmer, a bit drier. The tarantella is a bit like the Pythia at Delphi, isn't it, swallowing some herbs, some herbs, as people from the projects would say.
10:00 Isn't that right? Which inspired her, didn't it, prophecies. There you go. So, why am I talking about this? Because as much as the tarantella is Dionysian, joy, it's popular. You know, it's a triptych that Nietzsche saw rather well in his first work, 'The Birth of Tragedy,' where the best and the worst sit side by side, as is often the case with Nietzsche. But he saw very well that Dionysus is also, after all, the collective. As opposed to Apollo, who is the figure of individuation, more aristocratic—I'm not going to mix with the crowd, strolling in the street, at carnival, at the bacchanal.
10:39 Well, there's that, but in those same Sicilies and those same Pouilles, at times of death, you have mourners. There still are some where I'm from, in Corsica, even now, aren't there? Who come to the bedside, don't they? Into the family, like that, to tear their hair out, to lament, at the feet, aren't they? It's splendid, they're laments, piante, aren't they? How to put it? Cries, lamentations, almost professional and sacred at the same time, aren't they? And then, once her function is performed, she yawns a little, like the bonesetters, after having, isn't it, reset a cow's bone, isn't it, in the Berry region, and she asks for a coffee, and then, and then people chat a bit about the day's gossip.
11:25 So obviously, there, the difference between tragic music, lament, pianto—I'm returning to my subject—and the frenzied saltarella is a matter of circumstance, so that's not the alternation I'm going to talk about, which is due to the contingency of the event, etc. No, I'm talking, especially in the classical repertoire, to be very concrete, I'll start with an example, in a musical here-and-now, it'll be less abstract.
Debussy's passepied from the Suite bergamasque 11:57 I'll take this opportunity to warn our listeners, who might rightly be alarmed—I'll frown even more than they would—if we stuck to the first viewing of our videos, since you know that the sessions you're watching, this being, I think, the eighth one or so, yes, roughly, it might seem a bit pointless, some might think, and I'd think the same as them, if we stuck once again to first impressions, that it's a bit pointless to talk for two hours about music, to chat away without hearing a single note, that's rather counterproductive—well, let them be reassured, Aymeric Monville had the very good idea of putting them out, as they say, on YouTube, before the final editing, that is, in raw form, if you will, for the impatient, and for those for whom the philosophical content
13:08 is nonetheless the more important consideration—but in a second phase, at a not-too-distant date, I reassure you, the same remarks will be broadcast on video with, let's say, professional setups—I was about to say professional, because if I play a few piano notes to illustrate what I mean, it's not very good sound, it's microphone sound, that's fine, there, I won't dwell on it, I'm telling you this to say: this is a bit of an appetizer, if you will, and the main courses will come later, in terms of video, and let's not forget too that the essential goal is to arrive at a book.
13:57 Absolutely. But don't hesitate to use piano examples, because at least it gives an outline. You noticed last time that half the segment, we couldn't hear anything, the sound was cut every time, so that's why I say, let's wait for the final version to judge, but otherwise, I don't know if we can hear. Can we hear there? We hear very well. Actually, I think what's absolutely necessary is for me to let you play, and above all for me not to interrupt, because otherwise it puts the...
14:27 As soon as you pick up the piano, I think that will resolve the problem for the book, from that point of view. Someone advised me. I'm actually going to extend this piece a little, which perfectly expresses happy moments in the history of music. There, you were playing the passepied. There you go, we can't hide anything from you. It's the passepied, so it's a dance from the Old Regime, originally rural, like the Auvergne bourrée, like the...
14:59 I don't know if Bach wrote any in learned music—you find plenty of reuses of popular material. Take all of Bach's suites, they're dance suites called bourrées, gaillardes, gigues, all of that is very popular. Any Irish pub, isn't that right? You'll have the jig, which corresponds each time to things very well defined musically. The jig, that's it, dotted eighth-note rhythm, well. So, it's a passepied—it's not a jig, it's not a gaillarde, it's not a bourrée, it's a passepied, a rather rarer dance, but very popular in its time, which serves as the finale of the suite—again, suite implies always a dance suite—of the Suite bergamasque, these dance suites, I'll take the opportunity to give a bit of history of the form: dance suites are introduced by something that isn't a dance, but by what's usually called a prelude, and as the name says, before dancing, before entering the floor and dancing, there's a musical prelude
16:09 freer, less constrained by rhythmic requirements than the dance itself, isn't it? There you go. And prelude and fugue in Bach, isn't it? And prelude to the dance in the suites. There you go. So, in the partitas or in the suites, it's the same, these are forms practiced in the instrumental genre, partitas for solo violin, partitas for harpsichord, etc., or the Pièces de clavecin en concerts by Rameau or the admirable suites of Nicolas—sorry, yes, of Nicolas de Grigny, I was about to say, who was an organist—Nicolas d'Anglebert, who is, alas, under-appreciated, a French musician of the 17th century whom one must listen to, the extraordinary yet timeless quality, the freedom of writing of these preludes, that's why I mention it, preludes that precede these dance suites for harpsichord.
17:14 Nicolas d'Anglebert with an A. So, the Suite bergamasque is no exception, there's a prelude, isn't there? And there's a slow movement, the famous Clair de lune, isn't there, which gets used for all sorts of purposes in advertising. It's very curiously used for luxury ferry cruises, Costa cruises, etc.—pardon me for naming brands—well, if you want to go to the Baltic or cruise off Capri, Corsica, or the Balearics, well, you can embrace your girlfriend, can't you, against the backdrop of Debussy's Clair de lune.
17:56 Well, which is the third movement of this Suite bergamasque, an allusion, you see, to carnival, Bergamo, the masks. An allusion to Verlaine, of course, that's the era. Clair de lune, yes, that's it, especially. There you go, because the title itself is a poem by Verlaine: 'Your soul is a chosen landscape / Where charming masks and bergamasques go / Playing the lute and dancing, and almost / Sad beneath their fantastical disguise.' So, we're in that atmosphere, but not sad at all in Debussy, because that's precisely what I'd like to illustrate.
18:30 The finale obeys the function of the finale in music from the Old Regime up to Mozart—it's observable, apart from the extraordinary exception of the symphony in G minor, which you all know, without even knowing what Mozart is sometimes, which serves as a jingle, doesn't it, on Samsung, whatever. But the finale ends in minor, ends in complete tragic collapse, like hunted game collapsing under the pack of hounds, it's dreadful. Apart from that, up to Mozart, one doesn't leave the listener in the melancholy of a slow, median movement, etc.
19:06 One leaves them in good spirits with a finale, which is generally a rondeau with a rather dance-like refrain with a rhythmic element. Well. Here, Debussy conforms to this rule and gives us this passepied, I don't know, which—I have a piano that's had an octave and a half break which doesn't work, but fortunately we don't need it for the part I'm going to play you, the very low extreme notes. We don't need... don't need it. I'll stop there.
20:08 We're not in unhappiness here. There's a little dog trotting along with you, there, in the meadows or in the forest, whatever, I don't know. It's grazing, it's frolicking, however you like. Well, France has never been so rich. This is the period preceding the war of 1914. It's the longest period of peace.
20:43 Never has there been such a long period of peace and stability, hence the economic boom. There was first the era of Napoleon III, the Saint-Simonians, well, I'm not going to give you a history lesson, France gets covered with railways, there's the electric fairy taking hold at the start of the century, the 20th. Debussy dies during the war of 1914, that gives you some markers, doesn't it? This suite was composed at the end of the 19th century, it spills over into the first quarter of the 20th century. Debussy is well placed for our subject.
21:14 I'm telling you this because we'll see the same return of happy music after the last world war. We'll come back to that. But here, there's not only, you see, the lightness, with this staccato ostinato, as they say, it's marked on the score. The staccato must be maintained from one end to the other. I saw on a forum, like that, I was trying to compare interpretations on YouTube, I saw an American listener saying that since he worked on this piece, he says it's the best exercise for the left hand there is.
Lightness versus the spirit of gravity 22:00 To achieve the length, yes. There you go, there you go. So, there is in all of it—this is where I'll start to refine a bit my story about happiness—there are all forms, let's say, of positive mood, to use a rather clumsy periphrasis. Firstly, there's this lightness, the opposite of what Nietzsche, once again, fled in Romanticism, namely the spirit of gravity. You see? The deathly side, you know, for Nietzsche, between us, truth and falsehood, he doesn't care about that, Nietzsche.
22:32 That's not his problem. The problem is health, illness. Except that it's clear to me, it's a bit less clear to him. He believes he's sometimes talking about the true and the false, when actually his real values are—it's not indefensible—the healthy and the unhealthy. There you go. Except that for him, health should be reserved for only a small elite of masters. Well, that's another problem. Yes, yes. So, fine. There are positive sides, because after all, happiness, as Saint-Just said, is a new idea in Europe, and in Saint-Just's mouth, it's not very elitist.
23:05 On the other hand, I mean, it can go from a revolutionary aspect, of making happiness a value, to a fascistic aspect, when it's like Nietzsche, isn't it, to distinguish oneself from the masses who are in material unhappiness, and therefore in slave morality, and therefore slave aesthetics, and therefore lamentation, and therefore melancholy, and so on. And this debate matters a lot, because, you see, depending on whether the music is happy or unhappy, that doesn't mean the people, that the composer lives in unhappiness or happiness.
23:44 I'll take the example of Chopin. Chopin lived in the finest Parisian high society, didn't he, in what's still called in Paris the little Athens, the new Athens, isn't it, the ninth-arrondissement neighborhood, you see, the neighborhood just above the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was the fashionable neighborhood at the time, as, a bit later, the Boulevard Haussmann was—in other words, the Parisian establishment fought over having a private mansion there. You can always go visit, I recommend it, the Musée de la Vie Romantique. The Museum of the Romantics.
24:14 There you go, there you go, yes, a very beautiful garden, to play on a piano that Chopin touched, it was very nice. There you go. So, this isn't someone who lived in unhappiness. So, his music is often deathly, right? Not only, mind you. There are waltzes, there's all that, there are happy pieces, splendors of vision, ecstatic happiness, no, no, of course. But if there's something that isn't rare in Chopin, it's fits of melancholy, to speak more precisely and more clinically.
24:50 So here, this is linked to—it's not the individual—this melancholy doesn't express only that of the individual Chopin, but of the era in which one lives. It's no coincidence that we speak of a generation of disenchantment, of the school of disenchantment. I'm thinking of Bénichou, the critic, it's a Weberian concept too. Absolutely, but Bénichou did an admirable study of writers, particularly those who orbit around what's called the Parnasse or art for art's sake, who, in the middle of the century, start abandoning Romanticism.
1848, art for art's sake, Verdi and Wagner 25:33 We arrive at a story of happiness-unhappiness, don't we? Who start to find, I don't know that... But they don't say it's because Romanticism is unhappy and we want to make more pleasurable music. No, no. They start by saying that art must be made for art's sake, and not like Mr. Lamartine's politics, Mr. Hugo's, etc. In fact, it starts, as I said, in the middle of the century. What does that mean? 1850? History is never, never arithmetic.
26:04 When we say the 17th century runs to 1700, it's really 1610, the death of Henri IV, to 1715, the death of Louis XIV. You have to be a bit more concrete, that's what I mean. Well here, the break comes in 1848. 1848. The failure of the revolution of 1848 in France and Europe suddenly induced a withdrawal of part of the intelligentsia into the ivory tower of the art-for-art's-sake poets, removed from concerns, isn't that so?
26:37 How do the reactionaries put it? Basely material. Matter is always down below, that's curious. Form was up above and matter down below. Yes, sorry. No, no, it's rather strange, since we see, on the contrary, I'm thinking of Wagner or Verdi who are right in that era and who experience that same break in the same way. But for them, it's the break of Italian unification, of German unification. So there's a Germania triumphans side, obviously, with Wagner asserting himself. And we see it in Verdi too.
27:07 We move from a more romantic era, more Carbonarist I'd say, to a form of wisdom that's a bit more... Let's say, it ends around Falstaff, Otello. So that's the late Verdi who perhaps becomes a bit more... precisely Wagnerian. But there, we have... I'm asking whether that break you're making wasn't perceived more strongly in France. Because there, obviously, it's the reaction that appears completely, and it's true that the failure of the Commune only reinforced that.
27:39 It's true that what you say about the belle époque, it's an era of peace and an era of social peace, but imposed through terror. And of prosperity. And of prosperity, yes, that's true. Obviously on the back of the proletariat, but there it is. Ah, well there you go, there you go. But I think that... In fact, what I mean is that there's a euphoria among the Italians and the Germans linked to the fact of having a state, which is no small thing, and that masks that state of mind a little. I wrote it like that. Yes, they aren't affected by the disenchantment the way France is.
28:11 Yes, there you go, maybe a bit less. Exactly. One couldn't better illustrate my point. There you go. But it's obvious, even when Lukács shows himself, for instance in The Destruction of Reason, he also makes 48 the pivot. It's the moment when, a little, including in the mind, in philosophy, the philosopher starts no longer reading, no longer reading each other, no longer reading the people who criticize him. We see phenomena like Schopenhauer. We go from Hegel to Schopenhauer? Schopenhauer. And then, up to Brahmanism.
28:44 Yes, and then there's the reason as the thing in the world most equally shared. There's reason, and the privilege of an elite. But this phenomenon is nonetheless global, though it's perceived more in France, indeed, because in Italy, in Germany, there's a certain euphoria. No, that doesn't refute my point. First, because I said and I maintain that 48 is a European phenomenon, not just a French one. On the other hand, on the other hand, the anti-romantic reaction of art for art's sake, etc., is very specific to France.
29:15 Yes, yes. It's no accident that Nietzsche, in his later anti-romantic crusade, would be very laudatory toward this Parnassian movement and art for art's sake, which had the merit, according to him, isn't that so, of no longer falling into the deadly traps of romanticism. Of course, of course. And you were perfectly right to cite the two musicians historically linked to the incredible simultaneity of Italian unity, Verdi, and German unity, Italian unity around Piedmont and Cavour — yes, Cavour — for unity as in Germany around Prussia and Bismarck at the same moment.
30:03 Whereas France belongs to those old nations, like England, which no longer have the national complex, and that also explains why it's Italy and Germany that will give rise to fascism, because the notion of nation is still so new that it's still fantasmatic, it's not yet... it expresses the opposite of what it expressed in the years of the Convention or the early years of the French Revolution, where the nation was, on the contrary, isn't that so, against the kingdom, something progressive.
30:33 Careful, let's not confuse things. The same concept does not express the same realities at all depending on the contexts and moments of history. The same concept that is an accelerator of progress in one era can be an appalling brake in another, isn't that so? It's a nation here and as long as... It's true that Wagner himself was on the barricades in '48, so one doesn't see... Well exactly, there you go, there you go. That's why you did very well to take these two examples. First, because both Verdi and Wagner, whom you chose, were both born the same year, 1813.
31:05 Exactly. So it's exactly the same generation, and Wagner dies the same year as Marx, in '83. You couldn't make that up. That's true. And he dies in Venice. Ah yes, that's it. I take this opportunity to show Mahler's music, which I'm joking about. Yes, yes, very good. But precisely, to show to what extent — and if we leave it there, because there's Schoenberg too in that film, there's Death in Venice, there's Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, there's Mahler, isn't that so?
31:37 There's Schoenberg, all that. In short, it's so complex that, for example, Wagner's great inspirations — the emblematically Germanic musician — actually come from Italy. He himself says that the fundamental chord, the famous E-flat with which the Tetralogy opens, Das Rheingold, well, I mean, until February 4th, you can listen live on France Musique — well, live, deferred, sorry — on France Musique, in replay as they say, to a very fine version by Philippe Jordan, son of Armin Jordan, isn't that so?
32:23 Conductor of the Rhine, masked version, I mean, studio version, you see, they had the good idea to still perform the complete Ring — Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung — under lockdown conditions, hats off, I mean, excellent acoustics, yes, the fundamental chord that opens this gigantic work, which is the longest in the history of the West after the great days of the Panathenaea of ancient Greece, begins on a chord which Wagner says was revealed to him in a reverie in the Rousseauian sense, that is, in a half-sleep, when he was in his bathtub in Naples, well, on vacation in Naples anyway.
33:15 Everyone knows that the magic of Tristan — which will play such a great role, the Tristan version, in twentieth-century music — the music of Tristan is an emanation of the lagoons of Venice, where Wagner went to drown his sorrow after the failure of his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, well, the worldly failure, because she went back to her husband. Italy, there you go — so when it comes to Verdi and Wagner, it's not even cut with an axe, all this is intertwined, each one has the other's scores on his piano even if he pretends not to talk about it, isn't that so?
33:49 When you listen to the prelude of Lohengrin, a sort of ethereal violin that will inspire Baudelaire's "Élévation," above the clouds, the woods, the valleys, my spirit, you move with agility. In fact, when you listen to a work by Verdi composed earlier — to be honest — the prelude to La Traviata, those divided, ethereal violins like that, you can tell Wagner was listening. Yes, that's it. There you go, so you chose your examples very well, only, precisely, precisely, you mentioned Falstaff, that the work by Verdi, an old man over 80, ends with a bit of a lark, a farce that wasn't even originally meant for the public, but was meant to be played among connoisseurs at home, so to speak, a casa.
34:44 And that Wagner wrote Die Meistersinger, which is said to be his only comedy — yes — and at the same time contains some of his most sublime passages. So, yes, and likewise, in Falstaff, it's no longer like — we alluded to this last time, mixing or separation of genres — so let me give a quick reminder: we can see that since romanticism, it's irreversible, modernity must contend with the mixing of genres.
Mixing of genres and pleasure reserved to an elite 35:16 This is a marvelous African statuette from the Ashanti group, isn't that so? That is, roughly, from Ghana or Ivory Coast. So I have an African statuette at home, but also, you see, this cover for Mozart's Così fan tutte showing a boat, isn't that so? Wait, but someone from Racine's time didn't have this mixing of genres, there weren't mixtures of eras. There was a 17th-century style or a Louis XIII style, which was homogeneous when it could be.
35:53 Whereas we can have a Picasso on the wall and next to it a reproduction of a Titian, an African sculpture, and Indonesian puppets. So it's something irreversible in modernity, and that's exactly what's happening. Let me get back to... There's cheerfulness, to resume my point, which is one of the dimensions of the notion I'd like to pin down, which I call positive mood, while waiting to find a term that gathers all this together.
36:32 For now, I'll say happiness. But you see, it's staccato. And suddenly, I need to find the passage again. Yes, that's it. That's it.
37:27 Here I'm slowing down, because there's a change. Well, look. Here I'm no longer doing staccato. Here, it's legato. So it's another form of happiness, it's enjoyment now, isn't that so? Pleasure, if you prefer. We're in France here. There's a good table, there's Talleyrand with his guests. You know, he had an excellent cook, Talleyrand. And suddenly, melody takes precedence over rhythm.
37:58 You see? So there are all sorts of forms. When I say happiness, you see how much it needs to be differentiated. I'm doing it on purpose. And you remember, there are thirds that are particularly hard to get through, I recall, in this... Yes, yes, no, but... The rhythmic part is very hard, but you see... I'm not doing great, I'm handicapped by two things. I'm not saying this like bad performers who always find some excuse for making mistakes. I make mistakes, I won't deny it. But anyway, given the level of young professional pianists nowadays, a six-year-old Korean girl, I mean, playing Liszt's Transcendental Études flawlessly, without the slightest mistake.
38:39 In any case, we're all amateurs. No, no, but I mean, on top of that, I'm getting early arthritis. I don't want to tell you all the miseries of old age, as De Gaulle said, old age is a shipwreck. On my right index finger in particular, I have a rather sharp pain. If I don't rest it completely, which causes me some trouble, I go to the piano and above all I have the piano that fell, because of my wretched cat, I don't know, trying to avoid it. And there's an octave and a half I can't use.
39:10 At the extreme end there, that way. So, yes, I'm showing several attributes of what I call, several facets if you prefer, of what I call positive mood, happiness. It can be happiness, it can be enjoyment, it can be peace. And here I'd like to come back to philosophy, to instinct. Because these are important stakes. Because, you know, there's Philippe Sollers who says, one must screw, one must screw, one must screw, that's what happens.
39:43 Deadly romanticism, he thinks he's Nietzsche. It's Kant with Sade, it's the categorical imperative. No, but exactly. But just with Sade, the number of people who are Sade specialists, from that era right up to Annie Le Brun today, may she forgive me. I mean, some have made it their bread and butter, haven't they? That era is a bit over now, though. Sorry? That era is a bit over. But yes, it's... Yes, yes, yes, yes. All that fell apart with the crisis. But I mean, there are some who think it's still transgressive, forgetting that it was the height of libertinage back then, in the 18th century.
40:19 Libertinage was the privilege of the feudal lords. Well, in The Marriage of Figaro, the master, the droit du seigneur, is the count, Almaviva. That's for sure. That's a marquis. Les Liaisons dangereuses doesn't take place among the proletariat or the peasantry. There you go. What's interesting about Les Liaisons dangereuses is that there's precisely a class struggle within it. I don't think it was at the time of '68 that suddenly people discovered the body. No, but I mean, we let loose. That's why I'm talking about this music, because the body is there.
40:50 We're happy to feel our body. Maybe it's because of the lockdown that I came to talk about happy music. We're fed up with being shut in. We want, when I listen to this music, to frolic about a bit. And all those metaphors of tension and release are obviously sexual. But of course. Some believe it started in '68, when they suddenly discovered the body. It's been that way forever, isn't that so? For thousands of years, the Egyptians, you know, they didn't wait for us to look at their paintings.
41:25 They didn't wait for us for the promotion of sensuality. But pleasure was reserved for a certain elite. The others made children. The poor. But it's not the same thing, is it? Libertinage, that is... Then again, making children, that's already... I believe we had children, we didn't "make" them like that. Yes, yes, exactly, we agree. Even if it meant putting them in the foundling home, since we always think of Rousseau. But I mean, the figures are monstrous. They say 41% of couples left their children at the foundling hospital in the 18th century, in Paris.
Revolution, counter-revolution and the middle strata 42:02 That's enormous. Well, let's move on. So there you go. This becomes interesting, my story of pleasure reserved for an elite, or reaching the masses. Now, we have to wait — and that's where Debussy comes back in — we have to wait until the end of the 19th century for this happiness, which according to Saint-Just is a new idea in Europe, but so new that it's revolutionary, that despite all the misfortunes that will follow the French Revolution — don't think I'm hard on the Revolution, it's the counter-revolution I'm hard on, of course, isn't that so?
42:41 I often tell my listeners that we're not living through a revolution, we're not living through a counter-revolution, we've been living, ever since the storming of the Bastille, through a permanent struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, unfortunately with much longer periods of counter-revolution — the Restoration, for example. So you can date it starting from Bonaparte or after Waterloo, it doesn't matter, I mean, at the Congress of Vienna, but I mean, that says it all — revolutionary ideas get locked down for a long time, and it takes cataclysms for revolutionary ideas to come back.
43:23 Look, '45, I'm jumping ahead, I mean, at the end of the last war, there are tremendous social advances, there are great revolutions. Bernard Friot can think what he likes, but he has the merit of pointing out that there is already a revolutionary reality there, with gains achieved, and it's no accident that capital works so hard against those gains — pensions, redistribution, social security, in short, the extraordinary efforts of Ambroise Croizat, Marcel Paul, and our comrades of that time.
43:58 But immediately, there's the counter-revolution. There's de Gaulle who leaves, who resigns, we don't want to compromise ourselves with these Bolsheviks. There's worse, the Fourth Republic, isn't that so, which flatly thinks it's not the time to wage war on the brown plague. One might think that was the urgent matter at that moment. We never did that again. No, no, no, we wage war on the red plague, and that's when the Cold War begins. So you see, I mean, unfortunately we're in counter-revolution for much longer stretches.
44:29 I'm not even talking about the great counter-revolutionary sequence that begins, isn't that so, out of the failures of '68. Out of the impasses of '68, because there were advances in '68 and successes, and then there were failures. Precisely because there were advances — the revolution, the doubling of the minimum wage, union rights recognized in the workplace — there's immediately a counter-offensive. Capital takes back its winnings little by little, but then with Mitterrand it accelerates. Giscard is first, isn't that so. Then with Mitterrand, it accelerates.
45:01 And then afterward, isn't that so, and each time it's accompanied by an ever-greater integration of France into the Atlanticist fold and into the integrated [NATO] command, which is even more serious. That is, there could suddenly be some fit of madness by an American leader that plunges us into a nuclear war and we get vitrified, isn't that so. Paris, yesterday the Soviet Union, perhaps tomorrow China, isn't that so. While the French people have nothing to do with it. These are serious matters. So, we're not in revolution, we're not in counter-revolution, we're in the struggle between the two. So let me get back to my Debussy, to the end of the 19th century.
45:32 There was a long counter-revolutionary period, but the idea of happiness is so revolutionary, and thus so inscribed in the desiderata of the masses, that it could not be entirely eradicated, so that part of the middle strata — you see, I do like Clouscard, I try to be precise about my terms, it's not "the middle classes," that's too vague. We have to make distinctions, including between a great doctor and myself, stuck in 18 square meters in a retirement home — we're still both in the middle strata, because we're neither among those drowning in the Mediterranean, isn't that so, nor in the MEDEF.
46:08 I mean, so, between the two... That's a lot, that's a lot of people. So it's not operative, it's too vast. On the other hand, the middle strata, with their distinctions, isn't that so, and their own particular distribution, including what Clouscard ironically called the elementary structures of kinship — Clouscard loves using the adversary's own formulas and turning them around. How the scion of a family who flunked his prep classes, in the 16th arrondissement, goes to reinvent himself at Séguéla's to design an ad campaign, isn't that so, with his pseudo-philosophical background, well, anyway.
46:45 So, doing PR. Among these middle strata, there's a part that escaped the hell of the factory of that era, isn't that so, escaped L'Assommoir. But that's still a lot of people. It's this world we discover in the great novelistic tradition, it's Moreau, the hero of Sentimental Education, these are Balzac's characters — not aristocrats, isn't that so, we rarely see workers or peasants, mostly it's a middle stratum, isn't that so, but one with a thirst for enjoyment, for happiness — Paris, it's just the two of us now!
47:29 Whereas what? Up until then, only the king had dared, Henri IV, you know, Paris is well worth a mass. I imagine, following Berne's example. You don't think, Majesty, you're not Catholic, you'll never be able to govern Paris. So what? With the Parisians like that, and good food, I don't care, Paris is well worth some silly religious quarrel. We can well imagine it. But there's this sort of tradition such that the Germans say "glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich."
48:00 They don't say "happy as God in paradise," which would be logical. No, "happy as God in France," as a way of saying — pathetically — what an admission that is, isn't that so. It really explains the love and the hatred, isn't that so, quite a fine ambivalence between the two nations. It's just not possible that a country with 200 kinds of cheese like that, isn't that so. It seems that originally it comes from some particularity of Gallicanism in France, but obviously, if the phrase survives in German, it's because it speaks to everyone. In any case, it's very popular in Germany. I know its origin, I'm not a historian, but it's very popular in Germany.
48:31 And you should see, in Strasbourg, well in Alsace, every summer, during holidays and vacations, the rush of Germans for cheese. And then we come back to the cheese and the fine cooking of Alsace, which is a great gastronomic region. Alsace is the dream for a German, isn't that so? You understand German there and you eat French food. No, honestly, that... Last night's Arte documentary on Bugatti. Apparently, it doesn't happen in France, nor in Germany, nor in Italy, it happens in Alsace. Well there you go! Arte, huh!
49:02 Ah, that's nice! That's nice, yes, yes. All the more so now that we're building a European community. No, no, I'll say it, there's a slightly worrying side to it. As Anatole France said, people think they die for the fatherland, they always die for the industrialists, and many have died for those industrialists after all. You're spot on, because it's the same people who are supposed to fight against separatism. When it's Muslim, then it's separatism. Yes, that's it. And when Alsace looks more toward Baden-Württemberg than toward the [French] hexagon, we no longer talk about separatism, we say it's... It's not France, fine, ok.
49:33 It's Europe. It's joyful. It's the Eurodistrict. Well, it's the Eurodistrict. There you go. So, let's be clear, that happiness, never, at the end of the 19th century, in France, had there been so many people who enjoyed a certain standard of living. You know, back in our very first conversations, I started with the introduction of the piano into households. There's nothing more bourgeois than having a piano at home.
50:03 There. That proves that we've left misery behind. Still, we're not in misery. Our daughter is going to play a few Chopin waltzes or a little Mozart or Haydn sonata. Yes, it's not to invite them. It's very curious. I come back to the man-woman problem here, don't I? I... Sorry. I'm going to talk about myself for a few seconds. But on the boat that took me to Indochina when I was in Africa, when I was quite pre-adolescent, I must have been 12-13 years old, I was playing about on the piano, I don't know, the waves following one another through the portholes, you see, the happiness of playing.
50:40 And the boys my age who were roaming around the boat, who suddenly saw me in the lounge playing, they'd say to me, "Hey Chopin!" Well, I got along with the girls who played piano. All right? Well, that annoyed me a lot. But actually, in the end, it's curious. There, I close the parenthesis, there's an injustice. Maybe not anymore now, but well. No, no, but no, fortunately, I was talking about little Korean girls earlier, I can't speak of Korean boys because now the girls are exploding, and all the better.
51:10 But I mean, for a long time, it was a showcase role. It was the young lady of the house who played, but I think the two of them were more like lovers. There, but as a concert performer, it's Mr. Chopin, Mr. Thalberg, Mr. Liszt, at the time. So there has never — you have to look at the objective, material balance sheet — there has never been so many people who have gained access to happiness. And now, I'll be philosophically precise, I promised I would, I have to keep my promise.
Two determinations of happiness 51:42 Because distinctions need to be made. Sorry, but it's a philosophical imperative I'm trying to develop here, if I may. Separations are all the more necessary when we're talking about things that can be confused. I'm not going to dwell on drawing distinctions between a piano and a bird. Right. Or between a tree and a penholder. There's no possible confusion. On the other hand, between an African elephant and an Asian elephant, some people stammer when you ask them the difference.
52:14 Isn't that so? Between a mammoth and a mastodon. There's still a question of ears. Well of course! There's a question of ears too. They're smaller in the Asian elephant. Well. And so on. That's where distinctions need to be made. Now, between happiness, pleasure, and enjoyment, it's perhaps time to put things in order. So quickly, we're not going to spend the whole day on it, but still, the essential thing is that in happiness there are two determinations proper to it.
52:46 First, there is a necessary relation to the world. Which is not the case for salvation or beatitude. Because someone will say, yes, happiness, blessed. No, no, the beatitude of the saints, which is a theological notion. Or Marian joy too, for example. There. One obtains it after death, beatitude. Because one has lived according to the Gospel and in faith, strictly speaking, in Christian discourse.
53:16 But that's after death. It's extra-worldly. And my kingdom is not of this world. My kingdom is not of this world. And then, the beatitudes, blessed are they, for they shall be comforted. But later, afterward, not now. Here, it's a vale of tears. All right. Happiness is not that. Happiness presupposes a positive relation to the world. But what happiness, this foie gras, all the same. Well, all the same. Isn't that so. So, sorry, there are vegans listening to me, certainly. I'll say, what happiness, this pound cake.
53:48 I'm checking, I hope the wheat... No, careful, gluten-free. Yes, absolutely, gluten-free, thank you. So, first determination, positive relation to the world, to the here and now. In prison, one can have peace, the beatitude of the saints, the peace of one who is a sage, who is in prison, who meditates, etc. That's already Stoic. It comes from Epictetus. I was thinking exactly of that, quite so.
54:19 And that famous Stoic, whose leg was being crushed under torture and who bursts out laughing. The executioner says to him, but how is it that you're laughing? He says, because you're leaving the other one intact. You see, that's how it is. The peace... That's a fine consolation, yes, indeed. Yes, as you say, that gives you something to think about. The one that's left me, that's a fine consolation. There. So one can have peace, but one is not in the world, it's not happiness. In prison, it's not happiness.
54:49 Happiness presupposes a positive relation to the world. I'll stop repeating it. Second determination, a temporal thickness. Because otherwise I just have enjoyment. And pleasure — that's where you see the distinctions. Pleasure can be fabulously intense. It's fleeting. It's fugitive. I will never say a word against pleasure. I don't want to reproach it. I'm not a puritan. I'm not speaking against pleasure. On the contrary. I wish it would last. But at that point, I'm in favor of happiness.
55:19 And we suddenly understand what Saint-Just means. Good grief. Yes, that's it. It's not the opportunism of a moment. It's accessible to the household, to families, to the one who works elsewhere and who also has a right to happiness. It's a whole recent world historically that is being put in place there. It's a fabulous phrase, Saint-Just's, as an anticipatory power of what's to follow. So, the maintenance, these middle strata, end up...
Individual, collective and Corsica according to Rousseau 55:51 I think it's even in the American Constitution, in the 1776 Declaration. Ah, but you know me, you know the eyes. The pursuit of happiness. That's part of... Ah yes, there's like a pursuit. In the United States, quite so, absolutely. Obviously, with an underlying liberal vision, but... It's linked to pragmatism, Anglo-Saxon pragmatism. The truth of the pudding is that you eat it, after all. That's good, that's good. Yes, yes, that's it. Which will lead to William James, that's not good.
56:24 But... Because in any case, there are great American lights. William Penn is an Aufklärer, how to put it, in Germany. Sorry. Afterward, it's the problem, indeed, of the collective or purely personal character. We'd have to look at the American text, but it's that each person, individually, seeks happiness for themselves. I think that's how it happens there. There are laws, one can even see them. You see, as a Marxist, I'm making a major concession to the adversary, one can even conceive of them in an ahistorical way, like Hegel's Logic is not his philosophy of history, but a general rehearsal in a kind of ideal empyrean.
57:05 But history will not escape the determinations developed in the Logic. Let me explain, I sound obscure. But that makes me think... You're being Heraclitean about it. No, no, no, I'm making a connection between individualism and collectivism. One might think, and it's true, that a certain standard of living, an industrial production, is needed before the notion of the individual starts to gain importance. Because, I've lived enough in Africa, I won't spell it out, or in so-called developing countries, in any case, where economic production is still essentially, sometimes alas almost entirely, in the so-called primary sector, in agriculture, and even subsistence agriculture.
57:51 When export crops aren't imposed on top of that, which is the last straw... which is the last straw... in a structural adjustment. There, to their misfortune, when on top of that they have to sacrifice subsistence crops for export crops, on the plantations, in a world of scarcity and want, the weight of the collective is much more important, of proximity solidarity, with a high price to pay.
58:24 Women have to have holes like this in their ears, I mean, they mustn't think of their husband's name when they have their period because it soils him and makes him miss the hunt. No, we shouldn't idealize either. It's not communist collectivism. No, no, no. I say it because it's important. There's a weight of the collective because it's proximity solidarity. It's a Corsican speaking to you. When a Corsican fled Corsican poverty at a time when there was no tourism, and misery and the vendetta, or both, because he'd gotten a girl pregnant and had an interest in putting some distance, going as close as Marseille or as far as Saigon.
59:08 He could immediately count on a small Corsican community that was there. Unfortunately, it was generally within mafia marginality because, for poverty, there aren't many options. You do the slot machines. I don't know, I heard that recently because there are the figures. I believe that today Corsica gets 30% of its GDP from tourism directly, and 70% if you look at the tourism spillover. Of course. So it's gigantic. You said a mouthful, that's the word for it. Autonomist voices, not only as a political organization, but in Corsican public opinion.
59:44 Above all, it's getting worse with the crisis, a somewhat xenophobic, sometimes allophobic side, insisting that everyone arriving in Corsica must be required to show a negative passport, the tests, etc., or not come at all. And of course, internal contradiction. It's the 70% who say, no, that's not right, you're sending us to the slaughter. All right? Me, I rent my garage to a German family, charging them a maximum price, that's not right. Well. There, I'm caricaturing.
1:00:14 Because many of those who are regularly in Corsica say the welcome is magnificent. There, so... But at least Rousseau, with his draft constitution, did establish the viable, independent character of the project. I don't know how... He was sensitive to the economic aspect, which muddled things — he should have been an excellent consultant, since he was hired as one in this affair. Mr. Rousseau, draw us up a draft constitution. All right? And Paoli's emissary was named Buttafoco, of all things.
1:00:48 That says... Well. And you know that Rousseau, at first, refuses. It's an extraordinary people, it's the Vietnam of the time, in a way. The struggles and independence of Corsica against the Genoese, then the French. Voltaire said Europe is Corsican, you see, people talked a lot about the Corsican people in the Parisian salons. So, you say to yourself, it's a great honor, you're doing me, but I'm at the end of my rope, I'm too old, I'm no longer up to it, I mean, I have kidney stone disease, I walk around with catheters in my urethra, you're kind, well, he doesn't say all these details, but it means all that — you're kind, go look elsewhere.
1:01:21 Then, since the other one insists, second letter — the correspondence you can find distributed by Delga in mainland France and published by Materia Scritta, in partnership with the Corsican publishing house — draft constitution for Corsica by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, bilingual, Corsican-French, it exists. There. And the publisher had the excellent idea of appending this correspondence to Rousseau's text, it's five letters, it's not long, but it's extraordinary.
1:01:55 Because starting from — I'm going a bit fast — well, the second one, there's an evolution, Rousseau starts to get caught up in the game and becomes a consultant, he asks for information on the morals of the clergy, on Paoli's relationship with the clergy, on mining resources — it's very rare to see a Rousseau with industrial concerns. Yes, because most of the time, his dream is simply the small landowner turned secretary. That's the limit of Rousseau, compared to Marx, obviously. It's a bit more significant — Rousseau's model would have been to divide France into small landowners with plots of equal size.
1:02:29 There are still some of those, because there... I know, I know. And France, everything could be... beside France, but that's exactly why I cite the text on Corsica, it's one of the rare ones where Rousseau takes an interest in mineral resources, because it's absolutely necessary, he says, and this is topical, to ensure independence, not to depend on foreign powers and the grip of predators. There. Different imperialisms, even ships of Tsarist Russia cruising off Corsica at the time — it was a very important geopolitical stake.
1:02:59 Well. So, and then, starting from the third letter, he says, forget the draft constitution, I'm too old, I'm tired, let me come die at your place. Oh, we almost had Rousseau's tomb in Corsica. Had it not been for the crushing of the Corsican Republic at Ponte Novu, isn't that so, which was still the sacred place, rightly this time, for the independence fighters, under the armies of Louis XVI, there was a massacre — had that collapse not happened, Rousseau might have come to die in Corsica.
1:03:35 Afterward, he left the draft constitution unfinished — you don't make a constitution for a people that isn't independent. There. I close my parenthesis. But, precisely, you're absolutely right, Rousseau, with a clear-sightedness, he who never set foot in Corsica, says very well: listen, Corsicans, your main enemies are your clan quarrels, your divisions, etc. Well, of course, he saw it very well. As he'll also say to the Poles. Because the Polish Diet — you have to see, the Polish aristocracy, I mean, if Poland got carved up by the great powers, it's because it wasn't helped by its aristocracy throughout its history.
1:04:13 There. That's the least one can say. Actually, it's more than that too. Yes, still today, moreover. Yes, I'll finish with a little Polish anecdote. I can't remember the name, I'd have to ask my former roommate, Arnaud Le Gall, who knows his European history well, and who told me — say, I just saw there was a conversation between Ribbentrop and the deputy, I couldn't find his name, the deputy of...
1:04:43 The deputy of Beck, is that it? Of Colonel Beck, at the time, of the Polish government, who was going to become foreign minister, who says to Ribbentrop, we have some disagreements. There's Danzig, this is a few weeks before Germany's rush into Poland. We have some disagreements, the corridor, Danzig, etc. But still, we're speaking among civilized people, it's not like with the Popovs, with the Soviets. There, I recall that indeed, the Polish executive, throughout history, hasn't exactly done Poland's affairs any favors.
Montesquieu and the natural conditions of French happiness 1:05:17 I'll stop there. To come back to happiness, two determinations. Let's take stock. Positive relation to the world, temporal thickness and duration. And that requires time to emerge. That's why I say, I went back to Henri IV, the chicken in every pot. But yes, what do you want me to tell you. We were walking, I remember, in the Auvergne not long ago, there's a marked tree, planted at the time, they say by Colbert. No, it's not Colbert who came, it's the seed, of course.
1:05:49 A very beautiful poem by Brecht, isn't it? Yes, they say that... Yes, there. They made the king who built Thebes of the seven gates — did anyone see the king carrying the stones? Did anyone see the pharaohs working on the sand? No, no. Where were the masons sent after the Great Wall was built? Isn't that so? Yes, that's it. Magnificent poem by Brecht. But anyway, I mean, there is this concern to make... There, I'm moving a bit from Marx and Hegel, my usual references, even from Rousseau, to someone too often neglected — I pay him homage on this point, unlike Althusser — to Montesquieu.
1:06:29 I want to stress the importance of Montesquieu, who is too often neglected because it's the first strictly materialist determination. Even if it's still a largely naturalist materialism, but still, when you have a climate and a geographical situation like that of France, with a South that begins right where it will get too hot, too dry — that's Castile's wasteland — and a North where it will get too wet, too humid — that's Great Britain. This little island which of itself has only a bit of coal and fuller's earth, as Voltaire says.
1:07:00 Yet he's very Anglophile. Yes, but he says expressly, it's a subject strong enough to send three fleets to the ends of the earth because it trades. Precisely, like all those who have no resources, they trade in others' resources. So France is a country blessed by the gods in terms of climatic and natural situation. The 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the Pole, between too hot and too cold, passes through Bordeaux. You couldn't make it up. So it's no surprise it's the country of great gastronomy and good wines.
1:07:32 Well yes, of good food. Come on, happiness. I'm not preaching gluttony. Why not, though? If some are interested. I'm saying the conditions lend themselves to it. It's no accident that you can't impose just any puritanism on them. Yes, that's for sure. I say that because after all the world is run by a handful of convulsed Texans.
1:08:02 No, I'm oversimplifying a bit. We mustn't forget that for quite a while now the planet has been dominated — even if with China's challenge it's on the wane — that explains a lot of very recent crises in the United States. Anyway, still, by Protestant and puritanical powers. Still! Yes, sorry. No, and then, this idea of a novel idea in Europe, there's also the French reality in Europe. That's it too. Moreover, in the depths, if we look at the undertones of Saint-Just's phrase, that idea is there too.
1:08:37 It's the affirmation of a certain French idea in Europe, hence the national ideal that will be universalizable according to the conception. There, and so, I'll come back to Debussy because we shouldn't stray too far from music, but still, let's finish this geopolitical journey, this geopolitical sequence. Even when happiness had not yet extended to the popular strata — not in the proletarian sense, but to what we might call the middle strata, as we used to say — the world in which the characters of a Balzac or a Flaubert bustle about.
1:09:08 Well, even when it hadn't reached that far, even when it remained the privilege of an aristocracy — and God knows how rarefied it was, because I'm now going to allude to Frederick's Prussia or Catherine's Russia, Catherine II. Now, Frederick didn't want German spoken at court, they say it was a language for horses. At court, one must speak French, because for a good aristocrat, it's a way of saying: at my place, there's good food, there's pleasure.
1:09:38 So there, I won't say happiness, because it's not widespread, precisely. As soon as I step outside the palace, isn't that so, it's misery. Especially just a few generations after the appalling Thirty Years' War. Little is known, but the sack of Magdeburg meant 20,000 dead at the hands of the Catholics. Massacre — women, children, the elderly — 20,000 dead in one night. In 16 [something], I believe, something like that. Anyway. So, sorry, in 1631, excuse me, at the time of Descartes.
From the war of 1914 to the Luberon of the 1960s 1:10:15 So, I'm coming back to music. In fact, we're right in it, because I'm going to keep talking about happiness. So I'm now going to take an example. Hic et nunc, after Debussy, I place myself again just before the other war, just before the war of 1914. When France was lending gold to Japan in 1910. Yes? No, but that's it. Lenin describes the French as coupon-clippers. Of course.
1:10:45 And the Russian railways, I won't even mention them, isn't that so? which would never have been built that way without French savings. Isn't that so? There. And all of that collapses into the estuaries of death, to borrow the title of a famous novel. And I have a friend who did her thesis on the trajectory of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Isn't that so? It begins at Combray, in the establishment of those who have a vacation home, and Parisians.
1:11:18 There, at Combray, it doesn't end. It's a stone's throw above Paris. It's shelled by the Germans in '14. And she points out that we've gone from Vinteuil's white sonata to the red septet. Yes, that's it. Well, then it ends with the Christmas of children who no longer have a home. But there. It's interesting when you see that Hegel, in his preface to the Phenomenology, says, in a fairly ironic allusion to Schelling, it's as if we only had two colors left on the soul's palette.
1:11:48 Green for landscapes of nature and red for historical scenes. Historical scenes are rarely pastoral. There. So, the other carnage — because already, just before the war of '14, people said there won't be a war. The armaments of today, the armaments before the war of '14, are so powerful that it would exterminate humanity. You see the blindness. Barely 20 years after '18, it starts again on another scale.
1:12:21 Exactly. So, I'm not saying this to worry families, but still, I mean, to remind everyone that there is nothing more important than war and peace. And, even if, as Aragon developed in one of the finest texts there is, in the preface to Diane française, peace is not made at any price. The Vietnamese, it wasn't for pleasure that they went to war. No, it was imposed on them. So, three times over: the Americans, the French, and very briefly the Chinese who quickly...
1:12:54 The Japanese too. Oh, well, I myself was born under the Japanese occupation. One eye. Absolutely. In common with the Piziers, whom people talk about a lot, actually. Sorry? In common with the Piziers, whom people are talking about a lot right now. Yes, you're well informed, yes, there are some revelations, is that it? Yes. Yes, it's an unhappy family, so to speak.
1:13:25 After the second world carnage, our hic nunc now, is that I'm going to ask you to transport yourselves with me out of lockdown, into one of the most beautiful of our provinces, in the north of Provence, in the Luberon. There, where Clouscard situates, without naming it, without naming the Luberon, the country house in one of his most famous developments. I don't know, because he used to come visit me in the Drôme. Regularly, I took him around Gordes in the Luberon and I picture myself there, the building, it's there where Lacan treats her, you know, possibly good, maybe it doesn't stop there.
1:13:59 He takes out his notebook, he takes notes, watch out. The country house. That's it. Tradition, the miserly father, the prodigal son. And the courtyard, you know, the interior. But yes, the Moroccan craftsman who makes Scandi-hippie jewelry, but which people claim is local and typical. Anyway, the sixties, that is, the moment when the Marshall Plan reaches its maximum extension among the masses.
1:14:30 Look at the chronology. Let no one say I'm being mechanistic. No, on the contrary, it's the system we live under that is terribly mechanical. That's history. I'm for self-managed history, I'm not for history that's merely undergone. I want peoples to run their own history, collectively, all the same. This isn't anarchist self-management. Well, but we ourselves. So, there, that wasn't the case. It's mechanical.
1:15:00 So, the Marshall Plan—you shouldn't think the Marshall Plan was decided in 47-48 and that immediately, from 1950 on, there was running water and sanitation. No, look at all the farm campgrounds, green tourism, stopover lodges. It starts at the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies—that's when sanitation was brought to the countryside. There wasn't any before. This is recent, what I'm talking about. There wasn't any. You see, it's... So this explosion—how can we talk about happiness without all that, without hot water and running water in winter, all the same.
1:15:37 Think of the women who go to the washhouse. I say this because there are people who say, "Ah, if the Chinese equip themselves with machines, live like us, Brexit-style industrialization, we'll need ten planets for..." But that's exactly it, that means we get to have fun, we put the laundry in the machine, we go watch Onfray's lecture on television afterward, and meanwhile, the Chinese women can just go to the washhouse. No, but if they said that again in China, they'd get lynched, and rightly so.
1:16:07 Well, I'm not for lynching, at least not verbal lynching. So, it's not... that other sinister character who never stops talking about hedonism, happiness and Nietzsche, I mean, this Onfray who is one of the most sinister people I know. He's someone who has managed to speak on behalf of the left while dismissing in advance the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins. Not bad. Yes. The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution.
1:16:37 The far right figured that out long ago. Spokesman of the left. To get back on its feet after Vichy, it had to position itself to the left of the left. That's called a certain May '68. A certain one, for the workers' gains of '68. But there it is, what was being said to the left of the Communist Party was to the right of De Gaulle. And De Gaulle never proclaimed himself left-wing. So when I say to the right of De Gaulle, that means really far right.
Fleeing romanticism: Fauré, painting of the South, Stravinsky, timbre 1:17:07 De Gaulle is a Catholic Maurrassian. Well. All this is serious business. It's serious, the economy, indecency, and company. You know, libertarians in '68 and liberals in '78, as he himself used to say. Liberals in '78. So, no, let me go back to the era before all that. We're in the sixties. We start to find it again, there. There's a lightness there. There. In the Luberon. And there, this time I'm not alluding to Lacan-Althusser, but to René Char.
1:17:40 You host Heidegger at Le Thor. You know, Le Thor is near Avignon. But yes, there are famous meetings. At L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue? And then there's Cézanne, there. There's... I never met Cézanne. I worship Cézanne. I'm not the only one. But I mean, we flee. You see how it repeats itself. Modernity, Hegel. He saw something—that history skids from his era onward.
1:18:10 Art for art's sake, to return to my point. And in music, in painting, in literature, we flee romantic unhappiness. Already, with Fauré, there's an invasion of pleasure into music that wasn't there in Schubert or in... Pleasure, I mean specifically. In Schubert, there can be a miraculous ecstasy at times, alternating with moments of irrepressible depression. But there's no pleasure. Whereas in Fauré, you have the languors of Brahms, minus the spirit of gravity of the Protestant puritan who wrote a German Requiem, right?
1:18:48 Not to be confused with a Catholic mass that smells of incense and pleasure. So, I adore Brahms, you can be sure of that, but there are admirable languors. This happened in the 19th century. There, repetition again. We flee impressionism, which is quite recent, in painting—it's the avant-gardes. Late 19th century, what produces Debussy in music, Fauré and Ravel, produces Monet in painting, and all of it will become almost an academicism.
1:19:28 I'm not talking about the painters, I'm talking about the way the public will often stop there, as if that were modern painting. But it's precisely there that it doesn't stop, thankfully, for the painters—it's that impressionism presupposes the mists of the Île-de-France. Or rather, the somewhat hazy light of the Île-de-France or Normandy. I think of Van Dongen, I think of Sisley, I think, you see, but then, all of a sudden, one of them flees to Arles, Van Gogh, another to Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne, several, many, to the Provençal coast, later, Marquet, Derain, and there's Gauguin who goes all the way to Tahiti, even if his last painting is a Breton village under snow.
1:20:11 What we're seeing is important, this alternation—it's not sunny, happy music. And why do I talk about the postwar Luberon? Because at that moment there's someone who reigns over musical consumption: Stravinsky. It's the era when Romanticism becomes the musical anti-value par excellence, whether in the taste of music lovers or among composers.
1:20:44 Stravinsky goes so far as to say "deo-crestic" and unheard-of things. And as for the conductors who are somewhat demiurgic, in the style of, say, Bruno Walter, Toscanini, Furtwängler—very different people, indeed opposite ones, if you think of Toscanini and Furtwängler. Still, these are great demonic conductors, if I may say so. Whereas Stravinsky says, "All I ask of the conductor is to play what I've written, I'll take care of the rest." You see, there's really a return to neoclassical rigor.
1:21:16 But there's also this in Debussy's markings, actually, if we come back to Debussy, the almost excessive annotations—well, in any case, let me allow myself to mention it. That is, there's no effusiveness. Basically, the performer can't indulge in effusion. It's as if it were the end of subjectivism and one had to impose a supposed sonic objectivity. And that has musical advantages.
1:21:47 Thus, the parameter of timbre was taken into account, which had not been the most important one in music. The parameters in music, the three parameters, were roughly rhythm, harmony, melody. The timbre parameter—look, as it happens, it's an impressionist poet, I'm thinking of Verlaine, who says in Art poétique, "Dream calling to dream, and horn to flute." Oh, the nuance, when he says "For we want nuance still," not color, nothing but nuance.
1:22:17 Oh, nuance, the only trust, the only thing one can rely on. "For we want nuance still, dream calling to dream, and horn to flute." The flute, the horn, the bassoon—these are timbres, they're spiced, there are velvety qualities on one side, there's roughness on another. Timbres, that's it, that's the material instance par excellence in music. So, there are also advantages in returning to a musical objectivism.
1:22:49 It's no accident that a work which is emblematic of this whole rupture I'm trying to express, The Rite of Spring, is in music the equivalent of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon for painting. Music would never be the same again after it. And at the premiere in Paris, under the baton of Pierre Monteux—a conductor who also had a career in the United States, by the way, and who, past the age of 80, conducted sitting down, the poor man, an immense conductor, Pierre Monteux—whose premiere had been a scandal, the Battle of Hernani seems almost peaceful by comparison, where Florent Schmitt is said to have shouted, "Shut up, you whores of the 16th arrondissement!"
1:23:32 no doubt addressed to ladies who, in the boxes, were saying, "But what is this savage, barbaric music, who do they take us for?" You see, that's it, The Rite of Spring, it's... Now, I was talking about timbre—what does it start with? Do the blind test, ask someone, what instrument is that at the very beginning? Solo instrument, there! Actually, it's not there, it's there!
1:24:02 Everyone thinks it was an oboe, some such thing... It was a bassoon in the extreme high register, that's why it can't be identified, because the bassoon isn't usually heard in that high range. You see? There's research on timbres, and when you have Schoenberg, at that time and even a bit before, he speaks of "Klangfarbenmelodie," that is, there are series—well, I don't want to get into the fact that serial technique is a bit complicated—there are series of notes, twelve notes, dodecaphony, I'll skip that, but there are also series of timbre.
1:24:42 Ah yes, of course. To the series flute, clarinet, oboe, I can make correspond horn, bassoon, cello. It's arbitrary, but it's to show that I can make series, symmetries, you see, with timbres, which wasn't done before—it becomes a variable. It was only used as a solo feature in a concerto. So, there, look, look, look. I started with a piece by Debussy, French music, music of a country where happiness, for reasons—well, let me sum it all up—both climatic, natural, historical, revolutionary, everyone.
Russian and French schools, often confused 1:25:19 where happiness, to go back to Saint-Just, matters more than in any other country, no doubt, at that time at least. Until further notice, as they say. Well, run the tests. Listen to different kinds of classical musicians and ask, not who it is, but simply which school, meaning geographically. Is this a German, Italian, Russian, French musician? Just that.
1:25:50 You'll see, but make a chart, don't just take my word for it. What I'm saying can be measured. It's quantifiable. You'll see that you'll almost never confuse a Russian musician with a German one. The two schools—you'd never confuse Schumann with Prokofiev. Whereas you will systematically confuse a Russian musician with a French one. That's why I'm talking about this. Because among the French—an old people, preserved, not confined, but preserved, in its gastronomic, real-estate, climatic happiness, whatever you like, the country house.
1:26:38 In Debussy, there was also the trip to Russia. That's partly chance, but it adds to it too. Exactly, you're going too fast, but you know too much. The man who knew too much. Precisely, the Russians are the opposite, it's not an old country. It's brand new in classical music. It started much later. You have to wait for Glinka—he's the founder of the Russian school, mid-19th century, whose credentials were rock-solid at the time. You have to wait for Glinka for Russian music to start counting in the classical repertoire.
1:27:14 No, not that there was no folk music of extreme richness. But still, nobody talked about it. It's consumed locally, which is the fate of truly popular music. Unlike "people" music that's listened to between 10pm and 2am. In Russian, there are two verbs for "to dance." You don't dance the same way when you're... there's "pliassat'," "tantsevat'." You dance one way as a peasant, another way as an aristocrat. Basically, it's not the same verb. That, you'll have to send me in writing. Yes, that's true that...
1:27:44 I'll take that. That says a lot. Of course, that's such a confirmation. Right, that's such a confirmation. Ah well yes, between the New Year's ball in Vienna—there, that was something else. With 2000 couples starting up the eternal Strauss waltz, right? There. And the bourrée we were talking about earlier, the jig. It doesn't mix. Ah, no. Well. That reminds me, actually, of a scene I recommend to you.
1:28:14 You're going—forgive the expression, we're among French people, pissing ourselves laughing—but it's François 1er with Fernandel, a film, a very French-flavored film, I don't know, comedy, Christian-Jaque, I believe. François 1er, through some trick, a magician, is transported to the era of Fernandel, who is a poor wretch employed in a circus, starving to death, transported to the court of François 1er, and there he has an extraordinary success because he has the little Larousse dictionary under his arm and so he easily predicts the future for everyone.
1:28:44 Even a certain Monsieur de la Palisse whom he meets at court—he says, as for you, wait, let me find the page on La Palisse, he says to him, a quarter of an hour before your death, you'll still be alive. He's an extraordinary man, you see, it's a comic film, and at one point the king comes to ask him—François 1er, who is in conversation with Henry VIII—and Fernandel is already something of the darling of the court and so he's become everyone's advisor, and the king's line is, "You don't seem to want to dance."
1:29:14 He says, it's your dances, Your Majesty, going back to what you were saying, your dances, you see, if you'll allow me—so he takes the king's dance partner, saying I'll show you the dance, this isn't a distancing, it's a contact, he takes her and launches into a wild java, the java of the working-class quarters, and of course, the whole court, well, they dance the java too. But of course, it's different. So, Russia, a newly arrived nation, fine, but one that precisely is not in the melancholy of dispossessed generations, of post-revolutionary situations, not in that deathly melancholy, which is still in the Rite of Spring, I'd say, wow, it's extraordinary for that, I know, that's why Russian music and French music get confused for an unwitting music lover, I mean one who doesn't know the names of the musicians but who has the ear and who can clearly see there's something in common—that's interesting, and above all, what?
1:30:20 A positive relationship to the world, for dance is the extraversion of the body. Still, it's not the neurotic body. We see a mourning ritual in Black Africa, whereas here, a bereavement can cause a depression lasting years. Mourning and melancholia. I don't know, I'm thinking of a counter-example, but I don't know, there's a pleasure in bel canto that's self-evident.
Italian opera, a salutary tragic 1:30:50 Why? Italian tradition, I don't know—still, certain Protestant puritanisms may have weighed on certain German determinisms, why not? But I mean, it's something you can find elsewhere. Oh no, no, no, no. It's true that at the same time, we move past a kind of pleasure of bel canto. In Puccini, there's an ecstatic side, it almost goes as far as a cry, in fact. Yes, but between the two. That's an evolution that says a lot, including—it says a lot, about the imperialist stage too, in my opinion. Yes, but between the two, you're forgetting the mediation.
1:31:21 It's that there's verismo. Yes, verismo, that's true. That is, the operatic equivalent of what would later be, in the age of cinema, Italian neorealism. No, how do you say it? Yes, that's it. That is, Italian poverty. You can't imagine Italian poverty after the war, before the Italian economic miracle. But verismo is tragic. Yes, absolutely. Mascagni's stories, Leoncavallo's story... Cavalleria rusticana.
1:31:53 How do you call it... Ah, that was one of the greatest roles. Ah, I can't find it... There's Mascagni and the other one. Leoncavallo. Yes, but precisely, his most famous opera, where there's... Pagliacci. Pagliacci, there, Pagliacci. There. I mean, it's an appalling story. Right? And when you get to Verdi, you're... It's not... There's bel canto in Verdi.
1:32:23 There's ornamentation, but he's not the most bel-cantist. Belcanto, as it's also called, yes. He's not the most bel-cantist. Bel canto was a bit earlier. Yes, but sure. It's Bellini in melancholy, it's Rossini in buffoonish extraversion. Right? But you're right, there isn't... Yes, well spotted, well spotted. There isn't... In any case... But with Verdi, is there anything more appalling than a Verdi libretto, well, Il Trovatore. The woman who throws her child into the fire by mistake because she wanted to throw her...
1:32:53 And it's her own child that she puts into the furnace. Yes, of course. The gypsy woman, there. Still, it's staggering. Of course, it's very dark. Yes. All the way to Tosca where everyone... And you're right, it's not expressed in a deathly way. This tragic music, this tragic quality isn't morbid. It's healthy, in a way. That's what I'm saying. I'll even tell you... But there isn't... There's a pleasure of... That's what interests me enormously. Yes. For me, Italian opera music, especially Verdi's, the thing it reminds me most of...
1:33:27 I'm going to scandalize those listening to me who'll think it's an insult. But no, I worship Verdi. It's the smell of cat piss in the entryways of buildings in certain Italian cities. There's a popular side to Verdi, but a popular side that's not far from... And yet, this is before verismo. Because there, it's... And there you go! It's a characteristic of verismo, but we're before it. Ah, there's no Marshall Plan yet, far from it, huh? Right. There's a frenzy to want to live happily. That's not German, not romantic. That's very good. Visconti saw that well, in The Leopard, when he has them play, I believe, at Chepulsi's, La Traviata.
1:33:59 And then, we see the... how to put it... the Sicilian dust that covers the orchestra. Really, they're almost... He knows it well. There's another Visconti reference, that's Senso. Oh yes, ah yes, Senso. Ah yes, there's also one on Bernoulli. The film opens with the scene from Il Trovatore, where it's the only opera in which you see a fortress stormed on stage during the performance. That's really... well yes, it was... it's spectacular. The Italian revolutionaries, the Piedmontese, rise up, shouting, Viva Vittorio Emanuele!
1:34:29 Viva Verdi! Visconti had known Puccini, that is, we really see it's a temptation to extend opera, in his own way. Of course. And when you think how all this intersects, Toscanini knew Verdi, it's... Yes, yes, that's it. Between the 20th and 19th centuries, there's an exchange. Well. So you were quite right... You're right, there isn't... Because that gives us a variant. Tragedy that is healthy. Not... I quite agree with you, there is tragedy, there is pleasure, but there is no happiness.
1:35:01 There, no happiness. The propositions, they're not there, yes. There's gaiety. Yes, that's it. There's joy, whatever you want, but there's no happiness. Yes, of course. But it's not happiness. It's a challenge. Besides, it's the sovereign who's singing there. It's the king who's amusing himself. It's inspired by Le roi s'amuse, a Rigoletto. Ah yes, yes. It's Paris that's the underlying model for Hugo, just as La Traviata will be inspired. The beginning, yes. The turn of La Traviata, yes, for example.
1:35:31 By Dumas fils. There you go. Because everyone, including Wagner, his dream at that time — he's not yet antisemitic, etc. — is to be performed in Paris. If you're not performed at — it's still called that now, the Boulevard des Italiens, because there's the opera. People didn't say going to the opera, they said going to the Italiens. Yes, of course. But the capital of Italian opera was Paris. Well, it's Milan. But still, it was Paris that gave consecration even for Verdi. There you go. I'll close the parenthesis.
1:36:01 So, you're quite right to make this triangle. France, Italy, Russia — it's not the same school as Germany, which dominates the classical repertoire's scene, let's say, the period running from Bach to Wagner. We have to wait for the French Impressionists for German hegemony to suddenly fade. That's interesting. So, there you go. I'll go back to my Luberon, to the postwar period.
Baroque and rock: the reign of regular meter 1:36:32 It took 50 million deaths, plus the Marshall Plan, plus the rivalry between the two blocs, which meant that in the West a minimum standard was needed... We can't go back to the misery of the fathers and Clouscard's analyses. Soon there needs to be a capitalism — Clouscard will be the first to say, 'We need to put the pill in the shops.' And that's fine. Instead of reason, you have to consume. It's no longer the capitalism of saving, of prewar effort. Well. That's when the popularity of the music of the Groupe des Six comes in, the Poulencs, the Russians.
1:37:10 You can mix up Poulenc and Prokofiev in several pieces. Look closely, listen closely. But not only that. Also the Baroque repertoire. People had stopped talking about it, and suddenly, in the 1950s — in the 19th century there had been a return to Bach among connoisseurs, in very educated and cultivated circles, but the masses didn't listen to Bach at all. Bach becomes a musician everyone knows. Everyone knows. As soon as you step into an elevator, you'd forgotten.
1:37:40 Even without — 'that's Bach, that's Bach' — sometimes everyone knows. Well. But that took until the 1950s. The years I'm talking about. That's why I sometimes write baroque as B-A-R-O-C-K, because it's the same period when rock'n'roll appears. No, but I hold to this parallel. As if, at that moment, the invariant element — with variations depending on whether it's in the working-class suburbs, I'm thinking of the 'blousons noirs,' bicycle chains in hand, on the rock scene. It's not very menacing.
1:38:11 Well, it wasn't much use. With slicked-back hair, well. Rock'n'roll, and in a more bourgeois milieu, etc., where you listen to the Four Seasons, the baroque B-A-R-O-C-K, I insist on it — the invariant is the metrics. And a purely musical parameter common to both is the constant rhythmic pulse. We're no longer in Beethoven.
1:38:44 Yes, that's true. Absolutely. We work above it. It sweeps you off to the right, in front, behind, without warning, you can never know what's going to happen because freedom has taken power with Beethoven. Absolutely. Indeterminacy, unpredictability. That's no longer it. A rock rhythm — whether the orchestra is good or bad, it doesn't matter. I'm not making a value judgment. No, but the lightening, I think it's a feeling. If you've heard one bar, you know all the bars — rhythmically there will be no more surprise at all. Yes, but precisely what distinguishes this baroque-or-rock from the Debussy example you give is that at some point there's still a letting-go.
1:39:19 The repetitive character still brings about a kind of release. There, there. There you go. Yes, pleasure. Absolutely. That's interesting what you're saying, because it's what jazz musicians reproached rock for. There's no tension-release alternation that characterizes swing. It's always rushing ahead on the strong beats. It's even truer in heavy metal, in techno. There's no tension-release alternation, which is so organically important.
1:39:49 There, Lévi-Strauss — we saw this right at the start — has the merit of reminding us that music always plays on two grids. A cultural grid, the pentatonic scale here, the hut mode there. But there are also natural grids: breathing, inhalation, exhalation, systole, diastole for the heart, etc. I mean, we don't have that. So I'll come back to my sequence in the Luberon, Provence, if you like — that is, where life is good. I'm not talking about the Luberon as a region, but as an annex of the 16th arrondissement or the Latin Quarter.
1:40:23 Because that's what Clouscard used to say. All of that is 'the neighborhood.' He calls it 'le quartier.' Lacan and Althusser meet up in Gordes, in the Luberon. There you go. Two popes of Parisian intellectualism, no less. And what are we listening to? An excerpt from Purcell? That's it — at the time, people rediscover the countertenor repertoire.
1:40:53 It's the era of Alfred Deller's first albums, exactly. No, but all the better. We receive all these repertoires. And the Groupe des Six — we listen to Poulenc, we listen to Milhaud. The Surrealists loved Milhaud's Le Bœuf sur le toit. Right? It's a kind of fiesta. We're at the opposite of morbid music. Tadadam, a bit Hispanic-flavored, of course.
1:41:25 That's why I say fiesta. Or else, people listen to the Russians, the ballets, Béjart — the marriage of avant-garde choreography like Béjart's at the Avignon theater. These are pairings that happen in the same region, all of that. I don't believe in coincidence. There's a breath of happiness over the middle classes, but a very ambiguous one, very ambivalent.
Ambivalence of the middle strata and of schoolteachers 1:41:56 I'm not saying it's progressive or revolutionary or reactionary. I'm saying the worst and the best rub shoulders there. Because we don't know if it really comes from the revolutionary advances of pay-as-you-go pensions, from wage struggles which, at the time, were often victorious, or from the Marshall Plan. Capital, at that moment — that's why it absolutely had to get out of what was a nightmare for it in that era — is caught between the Red Army on one side, the Bolshevik bastards equipped with the atomic and even thermonuclear bomb.
1:42:36 It was enormous, these events. And internally, the communist parties were powerful. Good Lord! And a CGT that was powerful. People used to say, 'When Billancourt coughs, all of France catches cold.' We're far from that now. Nowadays Billancourt is a modern art museum. It was a bit like a liberation that was granted, a bit like the Charter granted in 1815. There you go! In 1818 — that's the ambivalence. There's a very fine concept in Kant, it's amphiboly.
1:43:08 The amphiboly of concepts. Let me take a moral example. And then there's something that... Sorry, go on, I want to keep my thread. Excuse me, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but with Clouscard there's something I liked a lot. He talked about the transformation of the 'petit chose' into Topaze. That is... But exactly! There's the ambivalence, Topaze! Yes, because there we're talking about... it's the crooked turn, right! What you're describing there, about the postwar period, what played a big role is the 'black hussar of the Republic' transforming into a title, or a PS teacher.
1:43:45 And afterward, gives out grades with a smile. We've seen that. You're the one who named it, as Racine would say. There you go, yes, I own it. No, no, a title is beautiful, I wouldn't have dared. But since you brought it out, I have something I'm suppressing, so I'm letting go. I mean, because you can't bring it out. It's the transformation of the 'petit chose.' It's the function of the schoolteacher. I think back to a cinematic masterpiece like La Femme du boulanger, where you find the two fundamental characters of the rural French village of that time.
1:44:16 It's the priest and the schoolteacher who argue. The priest says to the schoolteacher, 'Tell me about this. It seems some pupils say you told them Joan of Arc believed she heard voices. Believed — what does that mean?' There you go, they wage their little war, like Don Camillo. A bit. Well, the schoolteacher — I have nothing against him. But, you're right, those in power did everything to corrupt part of the teaching profession by saying: education and all that, better a well-formed mind than a well-filled one, knowledge, culture — none of that matters.
1:44:52 What matters is pedagogy. And pedagogism begins. But beyond that, isn't every teacher... isn't every... it's not... is the whole... Do the popular classes reach absolute knowledge? And beyond that, it's not just the teachers, it's a whole tradition of enlightenment... But of course. It's social democracy, it's the PS basically, roughly. There you go, of course.
1:45:22 You're alluding to the SNI. There you go, exactly, yes. No, but... We'll get back to music, but it's true, it's... No, but one of my best friends who — I won't give his name, I won't talk behind his back, but I mean who militated his whole life in the PC, which he left like many others in the era of Robert Hue and company, and who has just rejoined because he hopes for a new breath while remaining very lucid and without illusions — was a schoolteacher his whole life. Yes, of course.
1:45:52 I'm not talking about... born of his students... I'm only talking about... I'm only talking about the PS schoolteachers, those who gave of themselves... There you go. That's what resonates. Well, we won't dwell on that, but I mean, of course the attack was made, the ideological attack was made on the most vulnerable parts. It's a... And here we come back to philosophy, the median part. Take a segment AB, take the point M in the middle. Imagine that AM is fresh red paint and MB fresh blue paint.
1:46:26 What color will point M be? Anyone knows it'll be purple. We don't know what color it is. The middle is vulnerable. It's red-brown. Today, it's the red-browns. Exactly, yes. Absolutely. And Dominique, I'm just going to look for a cable to connect my computer. That'll pause things for a minute. Because... There you go. I was going to say... I'm being asked for coffee since that's how it is. Ah, well there you go, yes. OK. It's fine, I'll put it back on.
1:47:09 So... There you go, sorry for the interruption. I'm coming, I'm coming. It's fine, no, because I really wanted to make sure. Ah, well, we're traveling through your library then. She's interested in you, I notice. I don't know how to put it, it's not politically correct.
1:47:44 No, but since she's black from the tip of her muzzle to the tip of her tail, I call her Bintou, it's a Guinean first name. No, you can't know what draws you to me. No, but it's cute, it's lovely, no, it's cute. Yes, that's fine. She's the one who went to the door and heard voices. She's a bit of a concierge. When I saw the score, when I saw that it doesn't do... that's the perfect chord, it does.
1:48:18 This E natural before a B-flat major chord, you really have to dare do that. You thought they were clashing? Yes, I thought they clashed. It's relentless. I've plugged it back in, Dominique, we can continue. It's fine. I just figured out how to pause and there you go, it's wonderful. Now, are we not online? Yes, we are online. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, darn. No, but it's not a problem, we'll pick up the thread.
1:48:52 I'll need a minute to warm up. Ah, all right. Did you shave your beard? Wait, there you go. There you go, so sorry for the little break. Now I've just figured out how to pause without disrupting the recording. We won't have this kind of problem anymore, and we can take a coffee break whenever we want.
"Stripping" romanticism: Boulez, then the return of Mahler 1:49:26 I don't mind indulging in the last bit of dope I'm allowed, it's a bit of coffee because I had a heart attack, I stopped everything, tobacco, I was never an alcoholic but still, there you go. Yes, exactly, to get back to it, I think of all the ideological stakes that have concentrated on these seemingly purely aesthetic and even musical problems — I'm being precise.
1:49:58 How romanticism became an anti-value starting in the 1950s, but especially in music — for example, in interpretations, there was a word that kept coming back, a verb, it was 'to strip down' [décaper]. 'Ah, Boulez's conducting, it's good because it strips away the rust.' What is the rust? What is it that got stripped away? The rust is Furtwängler, Toscanini. Yes, that's it, yes. It's still extraordinary. Let me be clear, he's a great conductor, I'm not criticizing Boulez, I'm criticizing the discourse of those who promoted him, which isn't quite the same thing.
1:50:34 They — that he alone absorbed two-thirds of the music budget in France. That's an issue that's about more than purely musical matters. That doesn't take anything away from him, does it? He had a bit of an inquisitorial side. You'd need — from the conductor, the composer, and perhaps above all the greatest thing about Boulez, for me, is the pedagogue. You should see his rehearsals, sorry. No, but he had an inquisitorial side. Oh well yes, of course. No, but especially, especially this kind of... That's why I criticize his discourse, even with Boulez — not his musical writing nor his conducting, but I criticize his discourse because he wrote an essay called 'Penser la musique aujourd'hui' [Thinking Music Today]
1:51:15 at the end of the 1950s, which is exactly a caricature of everything I'm describing here. It's the neoclassicism, the anti-romanticism of the period. And in it, he's insulting toward Wagner. Why not? He has every right to be. And then he goes on to become one of the absolute and justified references in conducting Wagnerian works when he discovers them. And there he makes an apologia for them. There's opportunism there all the same.
1:51:48 Right? He completely failed at his project, and when he wanted to depict gods and such, he only produced bombast, and when he wanted to portray simple humans, as in the Mastersingers or Tristan, there he made masterpieces. But as a result, it's the Ring cycle that became immortalized with Chéreau. Yes. And afterward he said what's extraordinary about Wagner, what's modern — even more than any other composer — is this way of always going forward, never repeating himself, never doing refrains — to show that it's not very musically consistent.
1:52:21 The weight of ideology is enormous. Yes, that's true, exactly. That said, coming out of the war, being anti-Wagnerian doesn't bother me. In the end, he's still another representative of that left-wing chic, contrarian to the grain, in the end. That's exactly it. But with different aspects. Because he doesn't have the caricatural side of Onfray — 'you have to let loose' — or of Sollers — 'you have to let loose,' he's the libertine. Onfray, you have to let loose, but Boulez is grim. Yes, yes, it's the failure of the project.
1:52:51 Boulez is the severe neoclassical variant. Yes, but that's also part of a... a French tradition too. Absolutely. The great mathematical tradition, as he says, of the Comte de Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse. Ah yes, that's it — 'I want to sing the beautiful on a golden lyre,' or something like that. Severe mathematics. Yes, it's poetry after the Chants de Maldoror. Yes, there's that tradition in Boulez. And then that of Boileau — 'what is well conceived is clearly stated.'
1:53:27 Yes, but I was talking precisely about the stakes involved and it's going to... Very curiously, I observe — since we're supposed to be doing a history of music, we're not doing it in a bluntly chronological order when we see it taking shape at every moment — that this historical postwar sequence, for example, is going to evolve toward the opposite. There's a return of romanticism, perhaps not the most defensible kind.
1:53:57 I'm talking about the public, the bobo public, roughly, as it's called today. But starting with films like Death in Venice, Mahler becomes a popular musician again. Whereas Mahler, in the 1950s, I'd say — 'what are these gigantic Teutonic things, that's finished' — as Rimbaud said speaking of Hugo? 'Too many Colonnes, Belmontets, Jehovahs, old burst-open enormities.' Yes. That's what was said of Bruckner and Mahler and Strauss after the war.
1:54:28 and now it comes back. And Bruckner, I tell myself — you were talking about Senso, but it's in Senso too that Bruckner is heard. There's already this return to Bruckner and Mahler. Yes. No, no, I'm talking about the public. I'm talking about the public. Yes. That's cultured, of course. Yes, of course. No, but the public — Mahler has become almost a celebrity thanks to the slow movement of the 5th Symphony in Death in Venice. Of course, yes. That's interesting.
1:54:58 I sense, and indeed I observe, that the break happens at the moment mass unemployment returns. Again, I'm not being mechanistic. What I'm saying is mechanical. I'm the first to admit it. But it's not me who's the mechanist. It's the people concerned who die back down in the 1950s and who suddenly rediscover unhappy sentimentality. Visconti's genius, in the end — apparently he also wanted to make The Magic Mountain.
1:55:32 After the years, after Death in Venice. What would Death in Venice have been without Doktor Faustus? Because he had really dug into that consciousness of the 1920s. He didn't accept the status quo after 1945 in his country. He understood that fascism hadn't been totally annihilated, so he wasn't content with... Yes, on one side, and at the other extreme, the Marquis Visconti, I believe, is actually a prince. Yes, yes, whatever you like. It's quite common.
1:56:03 There's no title of 'prince' in the French nobility. When there are some, like the princes de Broglie and so on, those are Italian names. In France, only the king's son is a prince, but otherwise... Yes, indeed, both one and the other saw what there was — of that ambivalence I mentioned earlier as feminine. Are these new middle classes feasting away in Fellini's La Dolce Vita...
1:56:36 Right? Or that we see coming back a little in Vittorio De Sica's comedies, a beginning of happy consciousness. Right? Bread, Love and Dreams — those are quite significant titles, the most famous films of the era, of the era of Gina Lollobrigida, or rather, of Sophia Loren. Well. Meanwhile others, more lucid — I'm thinking of Francesco Rosi — make Hands Over the City, about real-estate speculation in Sicily, and above all the admirable Illustrious Corpses, which is perhaps the best film made about the Years of Lead in Italy.
1:57:21 A bit before that even? Oh yes, if so, I'm seeing this in terms of the Years of Lead. No, but really what shows the collusion that Pasolini denounced early on, along with it, between the extreme-left, terrorist situation, right? We'll learn afterwards that it was actually the extreme right that carried out the Bologna attack, right? Yes, that's it. And the extreme left, and the NATO forces who want to stage a plot in Italy so as to get rid of those two countries, the Gladio networks, between France with its Communist Party at nearly a quarter of voters, and Italy even more so.
1:58:03 Those countries have to be brought into line. But in any case, there's no communism at all left in Italy now, and there's almost none left in France either. There you go. Yes, yes. If we go back to your sequence, there's a kind of neo-classical illusion that follows the post-war period, let's say, that accompanies the Marshall Plan, and with the crisis, a return to... There were still the means, I insist, between the pay-as-you-go pension system, the social progress won through struggles, and the Marshall Plan, which was granted from above.
1:58:36 That's where you see the ambivalence. On one hand, the fear that if the old poverty were left as it was, the Communist Party would go up to 40%, while we're at it—that means there's a moment that's objectively happier for the working classes than before the war. There you go, sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, but... It's important to see that. That's the moment when the baroque comes back, B-A-R-O-Q-U-E. That's the moment. Very much so, yes. But is there a genuine romantic turn with the crisis of the moment in September?
Nietzsche and German depth 1:59:09 Unfortunately, again, that romanticism, it would be heuristic, it would let us understand things. I'm not wrong to ask the question. It's less systematic than the absolute reign of the regular metric that I call baroque in the '50s and '60s. On the other hand, and that's why I don't talk about it too much, one would have to leave properly musical singing behind, but in ideology, it's ecology, it's bourgeois feminism, it's societalism—these are nothing but regressive themes. That is to say, themes that go back to identities that owe nothing to history or to class differences.
1:59:42 Yes, yes, that's for sure. To put it quickly, for me, these are men and women who exploit other men and women, far more numerous than themselves. Yes, of course. There are millions of men dominated by women like Ms. Lagarde or Ms. Condoleezza Rice, I mean, or Thatcher. Or von der Leyen. Or Merkel. And as for von der Leyen, she's one of the most formidable, with her air of not touching anything. There you go. As Nietzsche says, in one of his best pages, don't confuse the German with his dressing gown.
2:00:13 It's one of the finest texts, indeed. That's true, there you go. I think I'd like to conclude on that. If you don't mind, I'm going to read an excerpt from that text. Because it's prophetic—it's as if he had warned Germany. But at the same time, and in every respect typical of Nietzsche, disturbing and prophetic. So, there you go, there you go. That's exactly it.
2:00:45 It won't take long, well, I'll skip over some passages, but the problem he poses is superb. Paragraph 244 of Beyond Good and Evil. There was a time when it was customary to grant the Germans the flattering epithet of 'profound.' Deep down. Nowadays, nowadays, because there had just been the war with France, Prussia, etc., which crushed France, Austria too, I should say. Nowadays, it's quite other honors that the German aspires to. And all profundity now seems to him no doubt a lack of drive.
2:01:15 So it is almost timely and patriotic to ask whether that old praise wasn't in fact a mistake all along. In short, whether German profundity isn't in reality something else, and worse. A quality—since he sees the ambivalence, he says 'worse,' he's already announcing the anti-romantic schools of the postwar period—of wanting to rid oneself of that somewhat heavy profundity, that poor digestion from bad cooking. Well. In short, if German profundity is not in reality something else and worse, a quality of which we are, thank God, on the point of ridding ourselves.
2:01:49 That's the disturbing side. Profundity, at the same time, is a bit sluggish. Now, that has to be torn away—it's Lorraine in twenty-four hours. Well. So let's try to bring things together a bit. You were talking about the neoclassical temptation and the contempt for romanticism, and about what truth it contains. We're right in the middle of it here. So, a return to the musics, plural, of the aristocracy. Yes, the baroque, that's it, isn't it? He adored Handel. Yes indeed.
2:02:20 So I'll skip over the whole passage on German profundity—there's plenty to draw on—but I can't help reading the ending, because it's a masterpiece. The German makes himself comfortable. Please, I ask those following us to think of Mrs. Merkel. Sorry, it's rare for me to make an argument ad hominem, ad feminam. Ad feminam. But really, how can one not think of it, even against one's own will? The German makes himself comfortable. He fixes on you the empty gaze of his honest German blue eyes.
2:02:50 And the foreigner immediately confuses him with his dressing gown. That's what I wanted to say. Whatever it... Oh, sorry, I went on. Perhaps today, of all the disguises the German knows how to assume, the most dangerous and the most successful is precisely this German honesty—familiar, von der Leyen-like, considerate, always playing with cards on the table. Not like the French with their worldliness and all that, and then a bit blunt, the French.
2:03:20 We're not democratic anymore. That's his truly Mephistophelean talent, and it can lead far. It's an extraordinary text. I no longer remembered the Mephistophelean part, yes, with the... Yes, yes, the direct ones, except that he forgets that if he had... He has a relationship to Goethe that I like. The good side of Nietzsche is his... I'd say, it's his thoroughly... But it's true, though. He says Goethe had this quality of distrusting the Germans, and when he does, he has Mephistopheles say: if you despise science and reason, the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost.
2:03:59 As if Goethe had been calling out to Germany two centuries ahead, to France. In any case, that was the enemy. Because that was before Schopenhauer. If you despise science and reason, before, technology—if you despise... but... If you're fond of Van Gogh and you look down on your tanks, I'm going back to Avignon here, and you despise the machine, or ITER and the particle accelerator, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost.
2:04:31 I have the impression that what you're saying is incomprehensible unless we understand that there's a form of rationality you want to save within romanticism, and that the so-called caustic side isn't rationalism, isn't true reason. There you go, you've understood me very well on that, and it's true that it's hard to convey because it's ambivalent. That's it. That's why I don't say ambiguous. Ambiguous is someone who isn't being clear with us, who knows what he wants but hides it from us. That's conscious.
2:05:01 Ambivalence is something the subject himself is unaware of. Yes, exactly. It's a Freudian term. That's why we need to come back to it. I dread aggression because it's in me. It's my own aggressiveness. And I can't protect myself from it, it's inside me. And I believe it comes from outside. I put up twenty bolts, etc., but I harbor the enemy within. That's Germany, haunted by the penetration of the Jew, the Bolshevik, the Judeo-Bolshevik. So it's Germany itself that's the danger for all of Europe.
2:05:34 That Germany—the German comrades who went through hell are that Germany. Yes, but precisely because we're not at war doesn't mean that Germany isn't triumphing right now. There you go, there you go, there you go. It still exists. I told myself, it has to hold on. Yes, sorry for this rather unmusical parenthesis, but what's happening in China right now. Yes. And speaking of unmusical, I just saw a report on piano schools in Shanghai. Yes. Well, you should show that to your daughters.
2:06:04 But no, but when we talk... It's ordinary. In any case, when we talk about Germany, we're also talking about music. It's quite telling. 75 million piano practitioners now, just in eastern China. Sorry? No, no, exactly. And besides, no, because I mean, when we talk about Germany's destiny, that's also expressed in music. In any case, it's expressed through music. Yes, what's funny is that Nerval called Germany the China of Europe. Well, let's move on. Yes, but it was France that used to be called the China of Europe. No, he meant the Middle Kingdom.
2:06:36 Ah, he meant the Middle Kingdom. Yes, because in fact, it's... Mitteleuropa, you see, Germany. It's like... As France was the... the savages, the Slavs, the slaves, the savages, the serfs, and the old civilized, refined nations, self-assured like France and England. There's Germany trying to be as elegant as France, as efficient as England, and it outdoes them every time. Yes, yes. Obviously, well, after the migrants, I think we're going to have the Europeans on our backs, but well, that's...
2:07:10 Yes, no, but I'm thinking about that. You showed me, you had a painting of the GDR, a GDR flag, to show that there are at least two Germanys. You can show it on screen. There you go, so, at least... I notice that the GDR put the hammer, there you go, for the worker, the sheaves of wheat, there you go, for the peasant, but there's the compass too. The compass, exactly. No, it's not the Freemasons there. It means there's the tertiary sector, there's the engineer, isn't there?
2:07:42 Absolutely. Well there you go, let's end on this tribute to the GDR. Absolutely. And to the man who composed the GDR's anthem, Paul Dessau, a wonderful composer who's been forgotten. There you go. Absolutely. It's a shame we can't do more with Brecht's lyrics. If we could encourage our listeners to listen to Dessau and, what's his name? The musician... Ah! Eisler? Eisler, there you go. And not only The Threepenny Opera, because that's one of the few works of his that's still performed, but I'm thinking of that.
2:08:15 His chamber music is a marvel. Ah yes. Let's end on that—listening to the sextet from Eisler's chamber music, E-I-S-L-E-R, you'll tell me what you think. There you go, very good. When we do an improved version of this... Variations on an American popular theme, you see, we're not being clear enough. Very good idea. There you go. All right, let's stop, see you soon. Thank you very much for the dialogue. What have we...
