English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Leaving time: simple past and imperfect 0:00 Yes, let's not beat around the bush either — I'm referring to that formula of Lévi-Strauss's. Everything happens as if music entered time only to leave it again. This is so important with respect to the essence of all music in general, always misunderstood, that I'd like to dwell on it a little. And I've already shown what gives it meaning at the level of everything in music that is the opposite of the flow of passing time: repetition. But there's another aspect.
0:32 The same thing that made them teach you this in primary school, when you started distinguishing the different tenses of verbs and their uses. You use the simple past for an event that ended, that was somewhat abrupt, for an action. And then, for things that required duration, that lasted a long time, that were repeated, that expressed habits and entire eras, that come back to memory, you use the imperfect. It's this aspect, this way of stepping out of time, of bringing the past back, so to speak, that I'd like to illustrate more precisely now.
A sentence by Proust: Madame de Guermantes at church 1:06 I'm going to do it starting from an excerpt from a text by an author who knew music admirably well compared to the average writer. I'm thinking here of Proust, whose sentences alone are immense musical sequences. I'll give you a sample where he's not talking about music — that's coming right after — but to show you the almost, you might say, freestyle side of these kinds of sentences, as rappers would put it. Or the improvisation, solo, chorus side, as jazz musicians would say. It's a passage where he's a kid — he never gives his age, the narrator, throughout In Search of Lost Time — but you understand roughly that he's a kid since he's at Mass with his mother.
1:44 He sees for the first time this famous Madame de Guermantes, who is something like the lady of the manor around there. He's heard so much about her, and he sees her for the first time as she enters the church, right in the middle of the service. "Her eyes were as blue as a periwinkle, impossible to pick, and yet which she seemed to have dedicated to me. And the sun, still darting the full force of its rays onto the flower-bed and into the sacristy, threatened by a cloud, gave to the carpet that had been laid out there for the solemn occasion, and over which Madame de Guermantes advanced, smiling, a carnation-pink flush."
2:17 "And added to their woolen texture a rosy velvet, an epidermis of light, that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness amid the pomp and the joy, which brings to mind certain pages of Lohengrin" — voice-over: that's an opera by Wagner — "certain paintings by Carpaccio" — second voice-over: a moment ago he was speaking of a geranium flush for the light setting the carpets ablaze.
3:00 And now he speaks of Carpaccio — Carpaccio, carnation, raw meat, notice how precise this is — "and which make one understand how Baudelaire could apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet 'delicious.'" So, it's not entirely by chance that I'm drawing on this author.
Swann's Way: Vinteuil's little phrase 3:33 We stay within musical time. That time when it seems as if the time of worries, the time carrying us toward the future, has been suspended as if by magic, and which makes a kind of eternity last. It's a paradox — how can time make something outside of time last? Well, we're going to see it in a passage I'm borrowing from one of the somewhat exceptional parts of the vast fresco that is In Search of Lost Time, called Swann in Love. You see the significant title — it's not the great love. We think it's the great love while we're living it, and then we realize afterward that all great loves have something in common that makes them not entirely unique, since they repeat themselves.
4:10 And so Swann in Love is just one love among so many others. So this takes place toward the end of the novel, when his love for Odette de Crécy is already badly wounded, when it's over, if you prefer. He's in enormous grief, and he realizes there's not much left between them, that she no longer loves him — so he's all the more in love. We always start loving someone a little too late. Aragon, you know — "the time to learn to live, it's already too late." "May our hearts weep in unison through the night, / how much regret it takes to pay for a thrill, / how many sobs for the slightest song, / how much sorrow for a guitar tune."
4:41 There is no happy love. Back to Proust. When the narrator — well, he's in this state of a love that's falling apart. And he's very much a society man, he belongs to very high society. He's invited to Madame de Saint-Euverte's, among the aristocracy. And a pianist — there was no hi-fi system back then, this is much better than that — there's a pianist and a violinist who are going to play a sonata for piano and violin. And then suddenly it's too late — he realizes the musicians have started playing, so he can't leave.
5:11 Out of courtesy, he's obliged to stay. I'll pick up the novel at that point, when he's obliged to stay a little reluctantly. And here is the passage: "But the concert began again, and Swann understood that he could not leave before the end of this new number on the program. He suffered from being shut in among these people, whose stupidity and absurdities struck him all the more painfully because, being unaware of his love, and incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest in it beyond smiling at it as a piece of childishness or deploring it as a folly, they made it appear to him as a subjective state which existed only for him, whose reality nothing external confirmed."
5:52 "He suffered above all, and to such a point that even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry out, from the prolonging of his exile in this place where Odette would never come, where no one and nothing knew her, and from which she was entirely absent." And the evening is going badly, full stop, new sentence. "But suddenly it was as though she had come in. And this apparition caused him such a searing pain that he had to put his hand to his heart." Notice that the imperfect has been replaced by the simple past. Something is suddenly happening.
6:23 Yes, I didn't tell you, but while they loved each other, they loved listening to the sonata the musicians are about to play. They didn't know they were going to launch into that particular sonata, because there's a little phrase in it that was, as he says elsewhere with a touch of humor, the national anthem of their love. We've all had that, haven't we — as a couple, a few shared musical refrains with the person we love. "But suddenly it was as though she had come in, and this apparition caused him such a searing pain that he had to put his hand to his heart. It was because the violin had risen to high notes where it lingered as if in expectation."
6:55 It's rare, you know — writers who know how to speak, not about music, but by making music itself speak. "An expectation that prolonged itself, without his ceasing to sustain it, in the exaltation with which he already glimpsed the object of his expectation drawing near, and with a desperate effort trying to hold out until its arrival." He hears all of that in the music. "To welcome it before expiring, to keep open for it a moment longer, with all his remaining strength, the path along which it might pass."
7:25 "As one holds up a door that would otherwise fall shut. And before Swann had had time to understand and to say to himself, 'It's the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata — let's not listen!', all his memories of the time when Odette had been" — imperfect — "in love with him, and which he had managed until that day to keep hidden in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden ray of the time of love that he believed had returned, awoke, and flew swiftly back up to sing to him wildly, with no pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness."
7:57 And there, full stop, new sentence — we shift into the imperfect, the long duration. "Instead of the abstract expressions 'the time when I was happy, the time when I was loved,' which he had often used up till then without suffering too much, since his intelligence had enclosed in them from the past only supposed extracts that retained nothing of it, he now recovered everything that had fixed forever, of that lost happiness, its specific and volatile essence. He saw again everything: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum that she had thrown into his carriage and that he had kept pressed to his lips, the embossed address of the house on the gilded letter in which he had read, 'My hand trembles so as I write to you.'"
8:38 "The knitting together of her brows when she had said to him, in a pleading tone, 'It won't be too long before you send word to me, will it?' He smelled the odor of the curling-iron with which the hairdresser used to raise his quiff while Lorédan went to fetch the little seamstress. The thunderstorm rains that fell so often that spring, the icy ride home in his victoria by moonlight, all the meshes of mental habit, of seasonal impression, of cutaneous reaction which had stretched over a succession of weeks a uniform net in which his body found itself caught."
"We hold as hostage these divine captives" 9:13 "At that moment he was satisfying a voluptuous curiosity by getting to know the pleasures of people who live by love." Let's not forget the essential point of our discussion — how music enters time in order to leave it, that is, in order to recover even eternity. The stakes are enormous. And I should point out here, so as to give full force to what I'm about to read, that Proust was someone extremely lucid, who did not believe at all in eternal life or anything of that kind. What we're about to read is all the more extraordinary — the power music can have in the face of what seems so desperate about time.
9:48 Just before the final line that expresses what I've just said, I'd still like to insert a short passage where he says that the little phrase speaks to him, without it being in words, as you might imagine. And you remember he said at the very beginning that these people were unbearable to him, that this evening had nothing to do with his love, that it seemed superficial to him, that he wanted to leave. If it hadn't been for the concert, he would already have left. And above all, what annoyed him was that these people would have laughed at his love if he'd spoken of it, saying, "It's childish at your age," etc. — we've all experienced that, in short.
10:18 And here, he's going to show that the little phrase also tells him that his love is nothing — but in the opposite sense: not nothing in the sense of being less than reality, but in the sense of being more. This is what I'd like to read to you now: "Of those sorrows which she used to speak to him about long ago and which he saw without being touched by them, carried along smilingly in their sinuous and rapid course, of those sorrows which had now become his own without his having any hope of ever being delivered from them, the little phrase seemed to say to him, as once before of his happiness, 'What is all that?"
10:51 'It is nothing at all.'" When it was the little phrase speaking to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found sweetness in that very wisdom which, a moment earlier, had seemed intolerable to him when he thought he read it on the faces of the indifferent people who regarded his love as an insignificant digression. For the little phrase, whatever opinion it might have had about the brief duration of states of the soul, saw in them something not, as all those people did, less serious than life, but on the contrary something so superior to it that it alone was worth expressing.
11:32 "Those charms of an intimate sadness — it was those that it tried to imitate, to recreate, even down to their essence, which is nonetheless to be incommunicable and to seem frivolous to anyone but the one who feels them. The little phrase had captured them, had made them visible, so much so that it made all those very listeners confess their worth and taste their divine sweetness — provided they were a little musical — even though they would later fail to recognize them in real life, in each particular love they saw arising near them." And he arrives at this final line.
12:02 For this man who didn't believe in God or in eternal life, we see a kind of victory. I think of that passage in Revelation, in the Gospel, with John's cry, "O death, where is thy victory!" "Thereby the phrase of Vinteuil — that's the musician in the novel who is supposed to have composed the sonata — the phrase of Vinteuil, like, say, a certain theme from Tristan, which also represents for us a certain sentimental acquisition, had, by espousing our mortal condition, taken on something human."
12:32 "...its fate was bound up with the future, with the reality of our soul, of which it was one of the most particular, the most finely differentiated ornaments."
13:45 "We feel that it will have to be that these musical phrases, these notions, too, are nothing." We sense — you see how cautious he is — "We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives." These musical phrases to which we are all attached in our lives — each of us has our own, perhaps a popular little tune, no matter — "We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives, which will share our fate. And death with them has something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable, about it."
14:23 There you have it. You can't go any further than that.
Schubert's trio and Barry Lyndon 14:55 I don't want, after such an admirable text, to stop talking without giving the floor to music itself, by opening up a new side door. I'm going to open it onto the last part of the second movement of a Schubert trio, so beautiful that a great filmmaker like Kubrick used it in a rather famous passage of Barry Lyndon. Because Schubert lets us hear this admirable theme right at the beginning of the movement, on solo cello, and then afterward makes us forget it. That's the whole art of the composer.
15:25 Afterward we head into other, much more cheerful developments, much more worldly ones — in a somewhat light sense, even at times triumphant, which is fairly rare for Schubert, almost solar. And suddenly this theme comes back with its immortal melancholy — but an admirable, wholesome melancholy, not a deadly one. Exactly as Vinteuil's phrase returns in the passage from Proust. And it's this excerpt from Schubert's trio that I'd like you to hear now.
