What the Sorcerer Said

Author(s): Carolyn Abbate

Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), pp. 221-230
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746503
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What the Sorcerer Said
CAROLYN ABBATE
Narrative music is a commonplace; we think
immediately of Till Eulenspiegel, of the Sym-
phoniefantastique. Perhapsthe notion of "nar-
rative music" is not often scrutinized, perhaps
it cannot survive closer scrutiny, for it is at once
pervasive and ill-defined. Program music and
symphonic poems are somehow narrative, and
we all have a casual understanding of their
pleasant conceits, their representation of turns
in a literary story by musical gestures. In this
case, the "narrativemusic" is a shadow thrown
by a literary narrative, and the musical narra-
tive is child's play-the gong stroke in Tod und
Verklirung as death's hammer, shattering the
protagonist's earthly shell. We soon learn to put
1 9th- Century Music XII/3 (Spring 1989). ? by the Regents of
the University of California.
'See Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Mu-
sical Representation (Princeton, 1984), chap. 9 ("Music as
Narration").
this kind of understanding aside, as a game in-
herited from the nineteenth century and now
turned trite, simple-minded, unprofitable.
Narrative in literature is so rich and funda-
mental that it must loom very large and intimi-
dating above things like Till Eulenspiegel. Nar-
rative music is of course by no means trite or
simple, and by no means limited to symphonic
programmusic. But while literary narrativehas
devices, tricks, shapes that have been examined
within a sophisticated critical tradition, think-
ing about music and narrative is yet in a rela-
tively young state.2 Contemporary theorizing
2There are exemplary studies of narrative in opera, such as
Reinhold Brinkmann's numerous studies on Wagner,
"Szenische Epik. Marginalien zu Wagners Dramenkonzep-
tion im Ring des Nibelungen," in Richard Wagner: Werk
und Wirkung, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1971), pp.
85-96; " 'Drei der Fragen stell' ich mir frei': Zur Wanderer-
Szene im 1. Akt von Wagners 'Siegfried'," Jahrbuch des
staatlichen Instituts fur Musikforschung (Berlin, 1972), pp.
120-62; "Richard Wagner der Erzihler," Osterreichische
221
 19TH
CENTURY about the nature of literary narrativethus has a
MUSIC particular allure; might it at once enable us to
redefine musical narrativeand enrich our inter-
pretation of music? "Narrativemusic" as a dull,
unprofitable lump-an amalgam of "program
music" and conventional interpretations of it-
is due, it seems, for transmutation.
Interpretation of music can be enriched by
critical stances borrowedfrom disciplines con-
cerned with words. That is another common-
place, one continually refurbishedand defiantly
unwilling to settle down from fanfareinto rea-
sonable and unremarkable fact. Given the ex-
plosion of musicological writing informed by
modes in literary criticism, historiography,lin-
guistics, and philosophy, any hortatory words
about cross-disciplinary contexts are beginning
to sound merely obligatory, even a bit vieux jeu.
We might, then, object to the cross-discipli-
nary fanfares out of a distaste for last year's
hemlines. But there is another cause for skepti-
cism. Fanfares can be perilous. If invigorating,
they are occasionally deafening; they make it
difficult to think. We sense that casual analo-
gies between literature and music may be
forced, twisted to make closed systems, meth-
ods, and answers.3 This gloomy noise echoes
my uneasiness about the analogy between mu-
sic and narrative, which I fear may be used un-
thinkingly to elude secret convictions that mu-
sic has no meaning. More than this: if we
fashion out of post-structuralist criticism a sin-
gle explanation of how music narrates,we per-
vert the subtleties of the literary theory we have
evoked by ignoring ways in which meaning can
escape, and explanation fail.
The phrase "narrative music"-this is im-
plied by all that I have said so far-raises large
issues and poses serious questions: How does
Musikzeitschrift 37 (1982), 297-306; "Sentas Traumer-
zahlung," BayreutherProgrammheft1984 (Bayreuth,1984),
pp. 1-17. On the problemof programmusic, among others,
see CarlDahlhaus's "Wagnerund die Programmusik," ahr-
buch des staatlichen Instituts fur Musikforschung(Berlin,
1973),pp. 50-63; and his "Thesen uber Programmusik,"in
Beitrige zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, ed. Dahlhaus
(Regensburg,1975). See also nn. 1 and 4.
3As Carl Dahlhaus sensibly advised in his introduction to
the 1975 cross-disciplinarysymposium on musical herme-
neutics, caution is necessary: in a laudable wish to avoid
provincialism,we may let our enthusiasm for the methods
and problems of other disciplines lead us to sterile acts of
imitation; sterile when they do not connect to the history of
musicians' thinking on music (Dahlhaus, Musikalischen
Hermeneutik,pp. 7-8).
222
music narrate?What parallels can we draw be-
tween literary theories of narrative and means
to explore narrative music? I want to circle
around these questions, but by looking at a
work that is small, minor, banal, even frivolous:
Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a
"symphonic scherzo" based on a verse narra-
tive, Goethe's ballad Der Zauberlehrling. Henri
Blaze's French translation of the poem was
printed with every edition of the score (see box).
The Sorcerer'sApprentice may provide Duka-
sian insights into musical narrative in greater
works (by Debussy, or Beethoven), or may sug-
gest the perils of that assumption; it suggested
in any case adopting without fanfarea number
of pedigreedapproachesto analysis of narrative.
Let's start in the middle. In stanza 6 of
Goethe's ballad is a moment of forgetting. The
apprentice, having brought the broom to life
with a spell ("que pour l'ceuvre l'eau bouil-
lonne," etc.), has forgotten the word to reverse
the spell: "Malheur!j'ai oublie le mot!" With-
out the word, he cannot make the broom inani-
mate once more, "le mot en partde qui le rendra
en fin ce qu'il etait tout a l'heure." He murders
the broom with an axe ("voyez, il est en deux!").
What happens next is a child's nightmare: both
pieces rise up undeterredand resume repetition
of their task. The apprentice is rescued in the
end by the sorcerer.
How does the music of The Sorcerer'sAp-
prentice narrate a moment of forgetfulness?
The apprentice's spell is often identified with
an idea at the end of the slow introduction, a
brassfanfareof augmented chords (ex. 1 is repro-
duced from a typical analysis, a sort of Wolzo-
gen for Dukas). This motif d'evocation is fol-
lowed by the creatio ex nihilo of the famous
bassoon theme. The augmented chord fanfare
returns at the end of the piece, followed there by
nihilo ex nihilo: no bassoon, no theme, silence.
Any statement that the augmented-chord
fanfare represents the "evocation of magic" is
born of the most familiar approachto narrative
music. This is a fundamentally leitmotivic ap-
proach:the musical element is the signifierfor a
dramatic idea or object; here, the dramatic idea
is at once the words of the evocation ("Quepour
l'ceuvre," etc.), and the word itself, evocation,
incantation. The relationship is arbitrary;in a
moment I will suggest that in this case it is
wrong. But the form of analysis is common
enough. Wagner and works Wagnerian un-
 CAROLYN
L'APPRENTI SORCIER, FROM GOETHE, POESIES, TRANS. HENRI BLAZE ABBATE
Whatthe
Enfin, il s'est done absente, le vieux maitre sorcier! Et maintenant c'est a moi aussi de commander a ses Esprits; SorcererSaid
j'ai observ6 ses paroles et ses oeuvres, j'ai retenu sa formule, et avec de la force d'esprit, moi aussi je ferai des
miracles.
Que pour l'oeuvre l'eau bouillonne et ruisselle, et s'6panche en bain a large seau!
Et maintenant, approche, viens, viens, balai! prends-moi ces mauvaises guenilles; tu as 6et domestique assez
longtemps; aujourd'hui songe a remplir ma volonte! Debout sur deux jambes, une tete en haut, cours vite, et te
depeche de m'aller puiser de l'eau!
Que pour l'oeuvre l'eau bouillonne et ruisselle, et s'6panche en bain a large seau!

Bravo!il descend au rivage; en verite, il est d6jaau fleuve, et, plus prompt que l'6clair, le voila ici de retour avec un
flot rapide. D6ja, une seconde fois! comme chaque cuve s'enfle! Comme chaque vase s'emplit jusqu'au bord!
Arrete, arrete! car nous avons assez de tes services. Ah! je m'en apercois!-Malheur! malheur! -j'ai oublie le
mot!

Ah! le parole qui le rendra enfin ce qu'il 6tait tout a l'heure? Il court et se d6emne. Fusses-tu donc le vieux balai!
Toujours de nouveaux seaux qu'il apporte! Ah! et cent fleuves se pr6cipitent sur moi.
Non! je ne puis le souffrir plus longtemps; il faut que je l'empoigne! C'est trop de malice! Ah! mon angoisse
augmente! Quelle mine! quel regard!

Engeance de l'enfer! faut-il que la maison entiere soit engloutie? Jevois sur chaque seuil courir deja des torrents
d'eau. Un damne balai qui ne veut rien ententre! Buche que tu 6tais, tiens-toi donc tranquille!
Si tu n'en finis pas, prends garde que je ne t'empoigne, et ne fende ton vieux bois au tranchant de la hache!

Oui-da! le voila qui se traine encore par ici! Attends que je t'attrape! Un moment, Kobold, et tu seras par terre. Le
tranchant poli de la hache l'atteint. Il craque! bravo, vraiment fort bien touche! Voyez, il est en deux! et mainte-
nant j'espere et je respire!
Malheur! malheur! deux morceaux s'agitent maintenant, et s' empressent comme des valets debout pour le
service! A mon aide, puissances sup6rieures!

Comme ils courent! De plus en plus l'eau gagne la salle et les degr6s; quelle effroyable inondation! Seigneur et
Maitre! entends ma voix! -Ah! voici venir le maitre. Maitre, le p6ril est grand;les Esprits que j'ai 6voqu6s, je ne
peux plus m'en d6barasser.
"Dans le coin, balai! balai! que cela finisse, car le vieux maitre ne vous anime que pour faire servir a ses
desseins."

doubtedly played a role in shaping this deep-
rooted assumption about how music narrates.
Interpretations of Wagner's narratives, cer-
tainly, focus unswervingly on Leitmotive and
their symbolization of the story being narrated;
how a chain of symbolic motives evoke nodal
points in a tale.4 Rheingold, Ring, Giants, Ni-
belheim, Curse, Erda,will do for the essence of a
musical story.5
We are now in a position to undermine our
first analysis. The motif d'evocation also recurs
4See for example Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner'sMusic
Dramas (Cambridge,1979), pp. 84-87, and the discussion
of Wotan'snarrativein Die Walkiire,pp. 122-24.
SNarrativecan be encapsulated in a string of critical words,
as in HumbertHumbert'sstory of how his mother perished:
picnic, lightning. The reader creates the connections and
the details, just as the listener might weave the links be-
tween the associations called up by the Leitmotive.
in the center of the piece. Here it precedes a car-
dinal moment in the musical story, the murder
of the broom and its uncanny resurrection as
two-two bassoon themes, played in canon.
But here the assumed relationship between mu-
sical symbol and dramatic idea has broken
down. Goethe's apprentice cries of absence, of
the magic work forgotten. If the motif d'evoca-
tion indeed represents the word, then Dukas
has addedhis own turn to the story, making the
apprentice experiment with one futile spell af-
ter the other, repeating the augmented-chord
fanfare over and over in upward transposition,
before resorting to the axe.
But perhaps the musical gesture indeed no
longer signifies the word and floats without an-
chor or fixed meaning. In that case, we would
claim that the brassfanfarerecurs in the middle
of the piece for some reason not having to do
with Goethe's story, some wholly musical rea-

223
19TH son.6This interpretive escape route has become
SENTRIY a typical strategy in Wagneriananalysis; indeed
in most analysis of texted music. The blame for
contradiction (fanfare,you have appearedwhere
there isn't any evocation) is put off on the sign.
And the sign is punished. When a motif's ap-
pearance seems contradictory in terms of its
symbolic force, it will be stripped of its sym-
bolic meaning. Its recurrence is written off to
the exigencies of purely musical logic.
We can in fact forgive the fanfare and rescue
the first readingby listening more closely to the
score. The word-the magic instant when lan-
guage changes the world-has not been ig-
nored, nor the word forgotten. The symbol for
forgetting is absence. Something as small and as
ordinaryas a word is lacking in the central "in-
cantation" episode. If we look again at the motif
d'evocation passages at the beginning and end
of The Sorcerer'sApprentice (ex. 2a and b), we
see the exotic, augmented-chord fanfare ends
ratherbluntly, recitative-like, with a single, ba-
nal chord. This monosyllabic expletive also
concludes the sorcerer'sincantation at the end.
But the chord is missing from the middle state-
ment. The chord, not the exotic fanfare, repre-
sents the magic word. The sign is lodged else-
where, and the semiotic reading can be
restored.7
II
Simple leitmotivic-semiotic readings richly
deserve their peril. Though I like the idea that
powerful spells might be depicted not by musi-
cal exotica but by banality-a C7 chord-my
fondness does not blind me to the limitations of
this variety of analysis. For one thing, we must
6Thenotion that motives with textual associations often re-
curforlargelymusical reasonsand aredevelopedmusically,
without necessarily carryingthe baggageof their referential
meanings, is another truism of Wagneriananalysis: see Al-
fredLorenz,Das Geheimnis der Formbei RichardWagner,
vol. I (Berlin,1924),pp. 73-74; CarlDahlhaus, "Formprinzi-
pien in Wagners'Ring des Nibelungen'," Beitrdgezur Ge-
schichte der Oper,ed. Heinz Becker(Regensburg,1969),pp.
112-13. Fora briefhistory of the dialectic of "form-defining
themes" and "referentialmotives," see Carolyn Abbate,
introduction to Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner,ed.
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1989),pp. 6-7.
7Perhapswe overlook the significant thing because it is so
ordinary:as Poe's Dupin points out in "The PurloinedLet-
ter,"we are continually dupedbecause we do not expect the
things we search for (a letter, answers, solutions, meaning)
to be visible in plain sight-especially when surroundedby
exotic hiding places.
224
, Vif k k r i, 7
r
- M
; ir
b"b~~~~~~EV
Example 1
remember that any Leitmotiv has more than
just the two terms, musical and literary, and in-
volves more than a simple association between
musical gesture and poetic idea. This is a tru-
ism, but needs to be stressed. The word "incan-
tation" itself signifies an idea, or image or dra-
matic action, embracing a web of potential
connotations. In the same way the musical idea
refers not only to incantation, but to other mu-
sical ideas and topoi; its field of associations in-
cludes music itself.8
Here we can turn to a second reading of The
Sorcerer'sApprentice by stripping the piece of
its title and hence its immanent text, and seeing
it as the scherzo, as music without extraneous
literary baggage. What, then, is the musical
stretch that begins with exs. 1 and 2a? The aug-
mented brass chords are an atonal fanfare, ex-
hortations to listen; the fanfareis repeatedin se-
quence, motion toward the event announced.
The blunt C7 chord-the "recitative chord"-
alludes to opera,to the phatic dithering that pre-
8Asaf'ev'snotion of intonatiya may clarify this point. Asa-
f'ev arguedthat musical ideas originated as expressions of
human actions and experiences, but that over historical
time they came to expressmusic, to referto one anotherand
not things outside the musical universe. To take one ele-
mentary example: a fanfareis played by a king's trumpeters
to signal his arrival,to exhort and signal the crowd. In the
course of time, the musical idea may lose its specific and in-
evitable expressive meaning and become "sound formu-
lae"; a fanfarein a Mahlersymphony refersto other fanfares
in hundredsof other symphonies. See J.R. Tull, trans.,B. V.
Asaf'ev, Musical Form as a Process (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State
University, 1976),I, 184-95; II,543ff. and 625-33.
For Asaf'ev, music could nonetheless not be seen as a
wholly tautological, as a closed, self-referentialsystem. For
every fanfareis linked back throughhistory in a chain of in-
numerable members and is distantly, subliminally bound
by this filament to its origins in referentialsound. If I have
simplified an elaboratetheory, the summary will suffice to
suggesthow Asaf'ev'sthinking impinges both on the notion
of musical topos as interpretedby, for example, FritsNoske
in The Signifierand the Signified(TheHague, 1977),and on
the broadertradition of Hegelian musical aesthetics, and
the neo-Hegelian tradition of musical hermeneuticists like
Kretschmar(whom Asaf'ev occasionally cites).
a. Tpt. CAROLYN
. K I k K I k i I k i I , I I I t ABBATE
I~k~,1i~~ : "NsHs"~Nt
!7ZHLi:Ivq .4l i U,F: 7-
--~--i5 ii Whatthe
SorcererSaid
Hn.

9:l~b- ' W V
Cb.

Ww.,Str.

.
r
v~ ~~~~~~~~=012SMM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-
r r
.I ~ ~ T'

~~~~".5~~~~~~~~~i

A. ~ I
9P
i S< b bb[Silence
Silence
7Timp.

I I

tutti

Example 2

cedes the real beginning, the real event, the ity." For example, the entire piece-called a
number. If we read the chord according to the scherzo- might been seen as a comment upon a
harmonic code, it is a dominant, the annuncia- historical type, or an invocation of the proce-
tion of an F-minor tonic that has been adum- dures of all the past scherzos in all past sym-
brated throughout the slow introduction. Lis- phonies. Certain sequences refer back to spe-
ten: something is introduced and will now cific works. The example toyed with here, the
begin. What begins is the creatio exnihilo of the sequence of hortatory fanfare, blunt recitative
bassoon solo. chord, and woodwind solo, cites another work
In this interpretation, the narrativeis again a whose opening "narrative"is similar and given
string of musical items, but now they are readas in ex. 3 (listen-annunciation of a beginning-
executions of gestures codified by musical con- the inanimate is animated): that is, the opening
vention, rather than as arbitraryassociations of of Saint-Saens's Danse macabre.
music and dramatic or literary cues. In this second analysis we have again readthe
The small units-the augmented-chordfan- narrativeat the beginning of The Sorcerer'sAp-
fare, the C7chord- cast above themselves para- prentice in terms of a literary-theoretical mod-
digmatic connections to similar sonorous for- el-perhaps the most common of those applied
mulae; to all fanfares, or to opera. But so do to music: classic structuralism. An irreversible
largersequences, creating what could plausibly syntagmatic progress through time (the three
be seen as a musical version of "intertextual- musical gestures) brings with it implications,
225
 19TH Vn.
Scordatura Vla.
CENTURY
MUSIC Vn. solo I:,,
,
5 11N vn v vo vo v n uo v vo .IV vn
Ii II n
A n
.
I.n f .

v- j II
I
6
= PE PE
a Iall H I ;
av ::!
"-

pEwr
L
Mlm-
I F--- 0 10
"---r
i
lul F i iff
dr I w
I

I
I P---
.) A
I
I
Fl.
etc.
- AD AO
w w iw r- t
x
9: O x x F
dp
ldp 10 10-

(pizz.) -
I7
Vc.
Cb. + Harp

Example3

LEXIAS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Semes b r, n
Culturalcodes

Antithesis

Enigma1 0

"Deep in" j
-

"Hidden" d--

Example 4

references, associations, potentially infinite, story.10Example 4 is by now itself a notorious

which hover paradigmatically and timelessly icon: Barthes's interpretation of the first para-
above each gesture and above the sequence as a graphsof Sarrasine,translating his five "codes"
whole. of narrativeinto musical terms.
Our reading might be read by drapingover it Dukas's triple sequence-fanfare, recitative
terms borrowed from any number of classic chord, creatio ex nihilo of a bassoon theme-is
structuralist narrative theories; ex. 4 suggests an action sequence, irreversible in time; in
one option with an obliqueness (not to say an air Barthes's terms, such sequences are governed
of mystery) that is calculated. Barthes'sfamous by the proairetic code, the code of action, how
reading of Balzac's Sarrasine in S/Z, is a whim- events are enchained, how they begin and end.
sical choice on my part, suggested by the un- (We might say, for instance, that the musical
canny coincidences that resonate from his title, proairetic code dictates that upward transposi-
S/Z, the subtitle of Dukas's work (scherzo),and tions in sequence end in stasis, in a goal.)
the French translation of Goethe's title (L'ap- In Barthes's score there are two action se-
prenti sorcier, Der Zauberlehrling).9Barthes's quences begun at the story's beginning (the pro-
idiosyncratic structuralism is easily turned to- tagonist's being "deep in thought" and being
ward music, for he sees the musical score as a "hidden behind a curtain"). They are irrevers-
symbol for his experience of narrativein two di-
mensions-syntactically through time, para-
digmatically in sensing at every moment reso- I'More than one structuralist has seen in the musical score a
nances and associations that could flash symbol of his interpretive vision; indeed, one could argue
forward or backward, out of time, out of the that structuralism itself is a method of text criticism that
mimics music, or mimics entrenched nineteenth-century
music-theoretical views of music's "structural" logic. See
9Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, Harold S. Powers, "Language Models and Musical Analy-
1974; original edn. Paris, 1970). sis, " Ethnomusicology 24 (1980), 16-25 (Levi-Strauss).
226
ible. Each initial action brings with it a chain of
gestures that debouch in closure (in the action
of hiding oneself, one hides, one pulls the cur-
tain shut, and one later emerges from the lair:
this ends the action of hiding). An initial ques-
tion later answered ("enigma I") belongs to the
hermeneutic code, equally irreversible,as a rid-
dle is posed, false answers suggested, solutions
blocked, suspense engendered, an answer given
at last (the tonal choreographyof a piece might
be compared to the hermeneutic code: the an-
swer comes when the tonic arrives).Both codes
move in one direction only. In Barthes's score
they are visualized as white notes, cantus
firmus. They are described as embodying musi-
cal continuousness and irreversibility, and as
instrumental personalities.11
The instantaneous flashes sent upwardfrom
each of Dukas's three musical gestures, the as-
sociations-like the reference to Danse maca-
bre, or the connection between the blunt chord
and operatic recitative-these correspond in
our analogy to Barthes's semiotic and cultural
codes: signs, references to history and its actors.
One of the signs in Sarrasine'sfirst pages is a re-
curring reference to pale trees, white ground,
silver moon: color as a culturally defined sign
for winter, for cold. The three paradigmatic
codes (semiotic, symbolic, cultural) in Barthes's
symbolic score are visualized as upwardflashes
above the whole-and-half note pedal points and
are described as individual instants, uncon-
nected, not bound to the unfolding time of the
story.'2
Barthes, in short, likened the proairetic code
to long pedal points and typically continuous
instrumental timbres, and the paradigmatic
codes to instantaneous sixteenth- or eighth-
notes, flashes in the percussion or brass. My
analysis makes very different analogies, of
course: the musical proairetic code involves
l"Roland Barthes, S/Z, p. 29: "what sings, what flows
smoothly, what moves by accidentals, arabesques,and con-
trolled ritardandosthrough an intelligible progression(like
the melody often given to the woodwinds) is the series of
enigmas, their suspended disclosure, their delayed resolu-
tion ... what sustains, what flows in a regularway, brings
everything together, like the strings, are the proairetic se-
quences, the series of actions, the cadence of familiar ges-
tures."
'Ibid., p. 29: "Whatstands out, what flashes forth,what em-
phasizes and impresses arethe semes, the cultural citations
and the symbols, analogous in their heavy timbre, in the
value of their discontinuity, to the brassor percussion."
the enchaining of musical events over time, the CAROLYN
semiotic and cultural codes, not blasts from the ABBATE
Whatthe
percussion, but something more directly analo- SorcererSaid
gous to their literary parallels-actual musical-
historical references, citations, and symbols.
My musical analogies for Barthes'scodes are
not more or less plausible than Barthes's own.
Yet what the analogies do have in common is a
concealed statement about the nature of music
vis a vis narrative.Any music with sequences of
events-thematic ideas, harmonic processes,
cadences, instrumental exchanges-in short,
almost all music, can be said to be "narrative."
The model borrowedfrom classic literary struc-
turalism brings us to seeming absurdities, that
"narrativemusic" could be so broadly defined
that all music narrates, and without conveying
any particularmeaning. Referringto exs. 1 and
2a as augmented-chord fanfare, C7 chord, to be
followed by bassoon theme, means a reversion
to (putatively) neutral terms to describe music,
and with them we strike what LeonardMeyer
would call an "absolutist" stance, even as we
evoke language and literature to impose sense
upon the musical material.13
If our little structuralist analysis has hinted
that as an extreme case, a formalist/absolutist
could analyze all music as narrative, yet still
view music as void of specific expressive con-
tent (not to mention cultural or referential or
ideological content), this hints that evocation of
literary-theoretical analogies is sterile. What
does it tell us if we speak of music with narra-
tive metaphors (a modulation as a "departure,"
13Musicalsemiotics, similarly, has concentrated on analy-
sis of the "niveauneutre"the (allegedly)puremusical mate-
rial, though its apparatusis borrowedfrom disciplines ob-
sessively concerned with language, messages, and
meanings. Most musical semioticians have arguedthat the
"niveau neutre" is the only properspherein which to begin
analysis, staging what David Lidov criticized as an escape
from basic issues. See "Nattiez's Semiotics of Music," Ca-
nadian Journal of Research in Semiotics 5 (1977-78), 17:
"the theme... is plain enough, but its development is com-
plex in the hands of both Molino andNattiez. Whatdisturbs
me is their construction of a semiotics which discards so
lightly the distinction between communicative and non-
communicative use of symbols. To me this distinction is
paramount.Whateverits justification in theory, the tripar-
tition [ofthe sign into the niveau neutre, the niveau esthesi-
que, and the niveau poietique] has been utilized in practice
to stage a retreatfrom the problemsof meaning."Lidov,like
many critics of Nattiez's musical semiotics, does not note
that consideration of the "niveau neutre" is proposedonly
as a first step in the semiotic project, that questions of
meaning are, accordingto Nattiez, properlydealt with at a
later stage.
227
 19TH a harmonic period as an "action sequence"), or
CENTURY catch at the skirts of literary criticism to give us
new categories and names? Perhaps only, as
Jean-JaquesNattiez has intimated, that music
analysis is itself born of a narrative impulse,
that we create fictions about music to explain
where no other form of explanation works.'4
Perhapsthe idea of narrativeis so central to hu-
man rationalization of experience that we can-
not resist pursuing the analogy of narrativeand
music, no matter how arbitraryand fruitless it
might be.
III
Here the gloomy noise heardat the beginning
is recurring.The analogy between narrativeand
music need not remain fruitless, but its fruit is a
paradox: literary theories of narrative suggest
ways in which music cannot narrate, and how
our metaphor of narration collapses and lies
empty-in strange folds and curves.
Does music have a past tense? Can it express
the pastness all literary narrative accomplishes
by use of past or preterit verb tenses, "it was
early spring,and the second day of our journey."
To linger over "was" as opposed to "is" is to ex-
clude music from the canon of narrativegenres.
The pastness, implicit in "it was" tells us many
things at once. It tells us that there is a narrator,
someone who lived past the end of the story.
Knowing this, we relax. The past tense, as Paul
Ricoeur put it, nudges the reader into detach-
ment:
Whatis essentialto the narratedworldis foreignto
the immediateor directlypreoccupyingsurround-
ings of the speaker.The modelin this regardis still
the fairy tale . .. the expressions 'once upon a time,'
'il 6taitunefois,'... serveto markthe entryintonar-
rative.Inotherwords,it is not justthepastthatis ex-
pressedby the pasttense, but the attitudeof relaxa-
tion, of uninvolvement.15
In terms of the Aristotelian distinctions, what
we call narrative-novels, stories, myths, and
the like-is diegetic, epic poetry and not the-
ater. It is a tale told later, by one who escaped to
14Jean-Jacques Nattiez, "The Concept of Plot and Seriation
Process in Music Analysis," trans. Catherine Dale, Music
Analysis 4 (1985), 107-18.
'5PaulRicoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. II (Chicago,1985),
p. 68. Music seems excluded from this narrativeworld, cer-
tainly by Ricoeur. On pp. 29-30 he catalogs (as a rhetorical
device) the things that can narrate;music is absent fromhis
list.
228
the outside of the tale, for which he builds a
frame to control its dangerousenergy.
But music is fundamentally different, not
diegetic but mimetic; like any form of theater,
any temporal art, it traps the listener in present
experience and the beat of passing time, from
which he cannot escape. Mimetic genres per-
form the story, in the present tense. They can-
not disarm the story, or comfort us, by insisting
upon its pastness.
Forthis reason, of course, Goethe, Hegel, and
the neo-Hegelian critics of the nineteenth cen-
tury saw ballad poetry as a powerfully subjec-
tive genre.16Ballads are mimetic; they are dra-
matic conversations or monologues that act out
the story. The poet and the listener are trapped
in unfolding disaster; the objective narratoris
often wholly absent. The Zauberlehrling ballad
is a present tense monologue for the apprentice,
whose voice calls out what happens ("he is al-
ready at the river," "he is chopped in two!").
Does music have a past tense? Recent Ger-
man literary theories have put the mimetic-
diegetic distinction another way. Diegetic gen-
res, with their surviving narrator, play both
with Erzdhlzeit, the time it takes the narratorto
tell, the time of reading, and erzahlte Zeit, the
expanse of time that is told about.17In mimetic
genres the two are fused, or perhaps neither is
wholly there. The time of telling is the time be-
ing told about; there is no teller, only time it-
self.
This opposition has, of course, haunted theo-
rizing about verbal narrative, taking many
forms. Peter Brooks has written that with its
first preterit verb narrative"everand inevitably
presents itself as a repetition ... of what has al-
readyhappened."1'Put another way, in the first
instants of narrating, of Erzdhlzeit, all the
past-erzahlte Zeit-is immanent. We could
speak more conventionally with the structural-
ist critical establishment of a story (fabula)-
the illusory played-out events that we assume
'6See,for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetik, ed. Friedrich
Bassenge(Berlin,1985),II,474-80.
'7Thecoinage goes back to GuntherMiiller, "Erzahlzeitand
erzahlte Zeit," Festschriftfir P. Kluckhohn und Hermann
Schneider, 1948 (rpt.in MorphologischePoetik, Tiibingen,
1968); Genette began his classic Narrative Discourse
(Ithaca,1980)by evoking the distinction with its suggestion
of "pseudo-time."For a brief summary, see Ricoeur, Time
and Narrative II, 61-99.
18PeterBrooks,Readingfor the Plot (Oxford,1984),p. 25.
have taken place because they are described in
literary discourse (sjuzet). Genette wrote of his-
toire and recit; Chatman of "story" and "dis-
course"; while there is disagreement about
boundaries and definitions,'9 while the opposi-
tion has been challenged, it has seemed a neces-
sary fiction of reading.20Music seems excluded
from this game with time. Can music have a
past tense?
We can explore analogies once more. A musi-
cal work can certainly evoke the past by invok-
ing history, by calling upon established conven-
tions or inherited past models; a musical work
may unfold in a transgressionof the convention
or a transformationof the model (this is, in a va-
riety of forms, a familiar and fruitful approach
to analysis of nineteenth-century music).21But
to view the code, the convention, as a set of illu-
sory past events and the piece at hand as a spe-
cific discursive narration, as it were, of the so-
nata story, is perhaps a misleadingly broaduse
of "narrative."22The literary concept invoked
19Fora summary see JonathanCuller, "Storyand Discourse
in the Analysis of Narrative," in his The Pursuit of Signs
(Ithaca,1981),pp. 169-87.
20Readingfor the Plot, p. 97: "Narrativealways makes the
implicit claim: to be in a state of repetition, as a going over
againof groundalreadycovered:a sjuzet (the novel, the dis-
course) repeating the fabula as the detective retraces the
story of the criminal."The Russian formalists' formulation
has been challenged by Richard Belknap, who has asked
whether the distinction is pointless, as "story"has no real-
ity and is only constituted through "discourse";see "The
Minimal Unit of Plot," in Literatureand History: Theoreti-
cal Problems and Russian Case Studies (Stanford,1986),pp.
221-29.
2'Dahlhaus's Wagnerianstudies-for example, his classic
"Formprinzipienin Wagners 'Ring des Nibelungen'," Bei-
trage zur Geschichte der Oper, ed. Heinz Becker (Regens-
burg, 1969), pp. 95-129-suggests this approachfor analy-
sis. Anthony Newcomb's interpretation of Schumann's
transformation of a basic symphonic model, Critical In-
quiry 10 (1984),614-42, is an exemplarygeneric interpreta-
tion. On the side of Italian opera lie studies such as Philip
Gossett, "Verdi,Ghislanzoni, and Aida: The Uses of Con-
vention," Critical Inquiry 1 (1974),291-334; and HaroldS.
Powers, " 'Lasolita forma' and 'The Uses of Convention',"
Acta musicologica 59 (1987), 65-90. A case could be made
for associating "generic"musical analysis with another lit-
erary (or at least linguistic) idea: Umberto Eco's sign-type
"replica"and its sub-class "stylization" (he gives the exam-
ple both of literarygenre, and of musical genre, of any given
march as a particular, unique replica of the musical type
"march").See A Theory of Semiotics (Indiana, 1976), pp.
237-41.
22Anthony Newcomb's analysis of "narrative" in Schu-
mann's symphonic work, "Schumannand LateEighteenth-
Century Narrative Strategies,"this journal 11 (1987), 164-
74, musically sensitive as it is, over-simplifies the notion of
"narrative"by equating it with a refashioning of standard
lies closer to "genre" as established artistic CAROLYN
ABBATE
codes or formal patterns that are implanted (in Whatthe
both author and reader)by the author's choice of SorcererSaid
formal vehicle. To show how David Cop-
perfield as novel transforms pedigreed devices
associated with memoir and autobiographyis to
read the novel in context of novels past. It is not
to take up its past tenses, and what is set in mo-
tion by "was," "I was born ... on a Friday, at
twelve o'clock at night": the past tense that at
once roars of the narrator,hence of the played-
out story, David's life, as opposed to the narra-
tive discourse in the time of telling.
Can music have a past tense when Mahler
quotes Wagner?A citation is intertextual, a ref-
erence to history; it evokes an artifact from the
past, but cannot create a past tense. When
Goethe's apprentice in stanza 3 cites the bibli-
cal words of John the apostle-"habe ich doch
das Wort vergessen"-history, another text, is
cast up, but without forcing the catastropheun-
folding around the apprentice-splashing,
broom marching, flood-from the fatal present
into the harmless past.
Can music have a past tense when we hear
the last few minutes of Tristan, and are re-
minded of something in the past? Is act II the
played-out event, and the end of act IIIthe narra-
tive repetition? Here we may be drifting closer.
Yet in verbal narrative, repetition and transfor-
mation of formulae (like the "leitmotifs" in
Thomas Mann's novels) belong to Erzdhlzeit;
that is, they remind us of the elapsed time of our
reading-or our listening, experiencing-and
belong to the artifice of discourse, not the story
it allegedly represents. My repeated question
about whether music has a past tense thumps
through the elapsed time of this present narra-
tive of mine; it is a sonorous device.23Certainly
a long tradition of musical analysis rooted in
Hanslick's aesthetics of form would argue that
repetition actually creates structure, architec-
ture, hence stasis: time frozen.
musical patterns, conventions, and models (which he asso-
ciates with the structuralists'"paradigmaticplots").
23Indeed,the musical Leitmotiv is in some sense parallelto
Barthes's "code symbolique": the abstract symbols re-
peated, encountered (in various guises) over the course of
the story; each repetition refers back to previous appear-
ances and forwardto future recurrences.The repetitions re-
mind us of the past of our reading, but they are not analo-
gous to past tense, which does not depend on repetition of
the formula over elapsed time to establish pastness, but
which can evoke pastness instantaneously.
229
19TH The collapse of the analogy between music
CENTURY and narrative is preferableto satisfying or even
satiating conclusions that posit narrative as a
new secret, a lift picked up on the long march to
musical meaning, or a magic word (narrative)
that creates a new music-critical method, the
magic servant. Perhapsmusical works have no
ability to narrate in the most basic literary
sense; that is, to posit a narratingsurvivorof the
tale who speaks of it in the past tense. But this
incapability cannot be said to impoverish mu-
sic; ratherit lends music a terribleforce to move
us by catching us in played-out time. When mu-
sic ends, it ends absolutely, in the cessation of
passing time and movement, in death.24
A musical shadow is a particularly apt
shadow for Goethe's ballad of the sorcerer'sap-
prentice. Dukas's The Sorcerer'sApprentice is
not a retelling of events; it is a depiction of
events, happening as we listen. The poem itself
is like music in this respect: a dramatic mono-
logue for the apprentice who speaks in the
present tense and whose experience happens as
we read. The Sorcerer'sApprentice is extraordi-
narily successful as a representationof this text,
for this reason: at every moment, it can be un-
derstood as an acting-out, with Goethe's poem,
of the dramacommon to both. Neither narrates
a tale retrospectively, at a distance.
But after all that's been said, perhaps both
Dukas and Goethe have a covert past tense, a
moment when a narratorappearsand makes of
the enacted drama a thing past. This past tense
takes shape in a set of quotation marks, in a
slow epilogue. At the end of Goethe's poem, we
hear the sorcerer's voice, restoring order to the
world:
"In die Ecke,
Besen! Besen!
Seids gewesen.
Denn als Geister
Ruft euch nur, zu diesem Zwecke,
Ersthervor der alte Meister."
24This is pointed out by Caryl Emerson in her analysis of
Mussorgsky's revisions to Kutuzov's texts for the "Songs
and Dances of Death." Composersknow what music is and
what it can do; music is a markingof experiencedtime that
ends without a narratingsurvivorwho could tell the tale in
the past tense; when Mussorgsky eliminates the framing
230
(Into the corner,
Broom!Broom!
Let it be as it was.
Foras spirits
You are only conjuredup, for this purpose,
First by the old master.)
But why are his words given in quotation
marks?Who, now, is telling us what is happen-
ing by quoting the sorcerer?We sense instantly
that the poem is no longer in the apprentice's
hands, yet it is not in the sorcerer's either-to
be quoted signals another, the person quoting. A
third voice enters the poem at the site of the
quotation marks and speaks a silent he said af-
ter the sorcerer'swords. So there is a third per-
son beside the other two, a third person narra-
tor, to us unheard, who peers out from the
quotation marks that betray his presence.
Dukas's scherzo does not conclude with a
representationof the sorcerer'swords-the mo-
tif d'evocation. Instead ten slow measures end
the piece. This is the usual epilogue-coda, and
many musical-formalist reasons could be ad-
duced to explain its presence (closure by restat-
ing the opening, as in Beethoven's late piano
variations, for example). The slow epilogue has
no bearing on the story, for it lies outside Du-
kas's musical representations of spells spoken,
brooms in motion, water, and axes.
Does music have a past tense? We end where
we might begin, with a question. Do the last ten
measures pass over to the other world, speaking
in the past tense of what has passed?Is this the
orchestral he said? Then the slow epilogue is
the voice of the third person, who in the poem is
mute and leaves his mark, the quotation marks,
only in the poem's final stanza. Perhaps this
narrator, who in Dukas's scherzo is not "si-
lent," even continues beyond the he said. If so,
he tells us what happened-after we ,
have heard what the sorcerersaid.
narratorfrom Kutuzov's poems and changes all past tenses
to present, he is compelling language to imitate the condi-
tion of music. See Caryl Emerson, "Real Endingsand Rus-
sian Death: Mussorgskij's Pesni i pljaski smerti," Russian
Language Journal 38 (1984), 199-216.