4—
Liszt, Goethe, and the Discourse of Gender
The finale of Liszt's Faust Symphony is supposed to be a setting of the "Chorus Mysticus" that concludes Goethe's Faust . Liszt's repetitions of the text, however, suggest that the movement is primarily a setting of just two lines: the famous closing couplet, "Das ewig Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan." As this emphasis informs us, Liszt is attempting here to represent Woman under the aspect of eternity. Another way of saying that might be that he is just trying to keep women out of history. He would certainly not be the first male artist to come up with that idea. In this chapter, I propose to bring history, with women in it, into dialogue with the expressive rhetoric of the Faust Symphony. Liszt's celebration of a certain eternal feminine can be understood as part of a broad cultural project for the representation of sexual difference. In manifold ways, the musical processes of the symphony overlap with the techniques by which nineteenth-century literature and painting idealize—and sometimes resist idealizing—the rigid but unstable gender system of bourgeois patriarchy.
This chapter, accordingly, has two subjects: the Faust Symphony, and the cultural discourse in which it participates. The symphony will anchor the discussion that follows, but it will also serve repeatedly as a lens through which a wide variety of representational prac-
tices can be brought into focus—through which, indeed, it becomes possible to rethink the representation of gender in the nineteenth century.
I
Liszt's Faust Symphony originally consisted of three movements, each one a musical portrait of a leading character in Part 1 of Goethe's Faust : Faust himself, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. In 1857, three years after completing this version, Liszt added the choral finale. The movements are full of the thematic interweaving that is characteristic of Liszt's large-scale works. Faust's themes reappear in the "Gretchen" movement, and Gretchen's motto theme returns first in the "Mephistopheles" movement and then in the finale, where it provides the melody for the key phrase, "Das ewig Weibliche." The "Mephistopheles" movement famously realizes Goethe's conception of Mephistopheles as the spirit of negation by confining itself to parodies of the motives, themes, and structure of the first movement.
I will be referring to the themes of the symphony fairly often, so it will be best to begin by characterizing them (not a neutral activity: a gradually expanding process of interpretation will begin at the same time). The "Faust" movement, a sonata form with an extended slow introduction, begins by stating a pair of primary motives.[1] The first of these, the Faust motive proper, is all-pervasive. It occurs at all the most important structural junctures of the movement and eventually appears as a counterpoint to all three of the themes assigned to Faust in the exposition. The motive accentuates two cardinal elements: the tone G
[1] On sonata form in Liszt, see Richard Kaplan, "Sonata Form in the Orchestral Works of Liszt: The Revolutionary Reconsidered," 19th-Century Music 8 (1984): 142–52. Although I find the analyses in Kaplan's essay convincing, it will be obvious that I disagree with his claim that "if we are fully to appreciate Liszt's music, we will surely have to hear it and understand it not merely as a vehicle for the depiction of characters, events, or ideas, but in and of itself" (152). For me, this is a distinction without a difference.
etition as a referential sonority in the form C–E–G
The first Faust theme of the exposition, Allegro agitato ed appassionato, derives from the Faust motive. Like the motive, it is structured by groups of descending semitones—initially the same semitones that structure the motive itself (Example 12). The second theme, Affetuoso, is a straightforward expansion of the dolente motive. Liszt seems to associate this theme with Faust's passion for Gretchen; it is the first of Faust's themes to recur in the "Gretchen" movement, and the one most fully developed there. Part of the sense of longing that the theme carries for most listeners may come from the striking division of its two-bar phrases between winds and strings—in the first instance between clarinets and horns and solo viola. The third Faust theme, Grandioso, is a relatively independent element, though its contour and rhythm derive loosely from the Faust motive.
Liszt is more parsimonious in the second movement, at least as far as Gretchen is concerned; he gives her only two themes. Gretchen's motto is evidently conceived as a restrained and spiritualized counterpart to Faust's Affetuoso theme. The link between the two is drawn by parallels in structure and scoring. On its first appearance, Gretchen's motto is sung by a solo oboe against accompaniment figuration on solo viola, with the rest of the orchestra silent. Faust's earlier antiphony of winds and solo viola in paired two-measure phrases is echoed and sublimated in Gretchen's unbroken homophony of solo viola and oboe in paired four-measure phrases. Gretchen's second theme, Dolce amoroso, is little more than a pendant to the first; the two share the same key and phrase structure. By introducing some register shifts in its second half, the Amoroso theme intensifies the musical processes associated with Gretchen, but otherwise it simply repeats them.
In grouping the themes that characterize Faust and Gretchen, Liszt, consciously or not, follows the terminological convention that identifies the beginnings or endings of melodies as masculine if they are accented, feminine if they are unaccented. Both of Faust's germinal motives begin on a syncopated accent that is tied over the bar
Example 12
Liszt, Faust Symphony. Analysis of Agitato theme,
"Faust" movement.
line, as if to suggest the unyielding dynamism at the core of his character. The three Faust themes run the gamut of masculine possibilities: a masculine beginning (the Affetuoso theme), a masculine ending (the Grandioso theme), and both (the Appassionato theme). Gretchen's two themes are feminine both at the beginning and the end. I do not want to give undue weight to this metrical gendering of themes, but it does show Liszt mobilizing, or being mobilized by, the cultural codes that support the standard terminology. Certainly the traditional representation of femininity as a form of lack—as masculinity with a minus sign—hovers behind this melodic grouping. In the same vein, Gretchen's themes can be said to behave like the nondeveloping second theme of a first-movement sonata form: the theme that nineteenth-century theorists, once more spotting a lack, customarily called feminine.[2]
Liszt's sorting of Faust's and Gretchen's themes according to gender extends beyond metrical convention into a whole series of stylistic oppositions, the stuff of a rigid and exhaustive binary logic that
[2] My thanks to Richard Taruskin for pointing this out to me. On the origin of the masculine/feminine usage for themes, see the communication by Peter Bloom in Journal of the American Musicological Society 27 (1974): 101–2. My thanks to Ruth Solie for drawing this document to my attention.
is itself marked as masculine in patriarchal culture.[3] Where implacable semitones rule Faust's Appassionato theme, Gretchen's motto traces a placid diatonic pattern—a transparent articulation of the
These formal oppositions can easily, almost glibly, be thematized in terms that conform to patriarchal representations of sexual difference. Liszt's Faust and Gretchen radically separate strength from sweetness, passion from tenderness, vitality from stability, force from beauty. Faust's thematic diversity suggests a masculine Becoming that divides from and idealizes the Being embedded in Gretchen's thematic redundancy. Faust's restless mind, assuming its identity in the tonal void of parallel augmented triads, strives after the repose of nature locked within a perfect major triad.
[3] On binary thought as a patriarchal institution, see Hélène Cixous, "Sorties," in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La jeune née (1975), in English as The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsey Wing (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), 63–130.
[4] Kaplan ("Sonata Form," 148) notes this episode, which he calls a "false exposition repeat." I prefer the term mock repeat because the episode is not deceptive.
Liszt plainly invites us to understand these suggestions, which are supposed to be unproblematical within his cultural framework. But the symphony carries other suggestions, too, suggestions more equivocal, more fully engaged with the cultural practices that define and regulate gender. We can understand much more.
The most consistent element in Liszt's binary logic is the portrayal of Gretchen in terms that suggest almost complete immobility in opposition to Faust's dynamism. If I had to name the chief representational practice by which nineteenth-century ideology tries to regulate femininity, symbolic immobilization would be my choice. Like most cultural icons, the immobilized woman forms a vehicle for numerous and conflicting meanings, among them sexual purity, erotic passivity, self-abnegation, commodification, and—perhaps above all—availability to be gazed at. (Of the last, more later.) The immobility of Liszt's Gretchen initially seems to suggest an ideal purity of character: the unworldly sweetness of the Victorian Angel in the House. As daughter, wife, and mother, the domestic angel was supposed to preside over a "place of Peace" set apart from the contested spheres of historical time and public life. To achieve this, she was asked to practice self-renunciation in order to cultivate qualities that were supposedly hers by nature: simplicity, altruism, moral beauty.[5] "Above all," wrote Virginia Woolf, "—I need not say it—she was pure. . . . If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it."[6] Woolf's description applies poorly to Goethe's Gretchen, whose love for Faust takes at least the whole chicken and destroys her family in the process. Liszt's Gretchen is another matter. With its exhaustive opposition between Gretchen's thematic redundancy and Faust's protean diversity, Liszt's music projects Gretchen as unself-conscious and psychologically whole, Faust as re-
[5] The classic statement of this ideology appears in John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies in the essay "Of Queen's Gardens" (1865); Coventry Patmore's volume of poems The Angel in the House appeared in 1854. Bram Dijkstra, in his Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford, 1986), 1–24, surveys the nineteenth-century literature on this topic. Dijkstra's work must be used with caution, however. Though invaluable as an archive, it is (with intermittent exceptions) crude, glib, and very often misleading as commentary—largely incapable of grasping what is complex, self-divided, or problematical about any text whatever.
[6] Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women," in Collected Essays , vol. 2 (London, 1960), 285.
flective, self-divided, and conflict-laden. Where Faust's themes signify diverse aspects of his character, which transcends all of them, Gretchen's themes portray—or capture—her essence. As Gounod was to do in his nearly contemporary Faust , Liszt idealizes Gretchen by representing her in terms more suited to bourgeois melodrama than to Goethe's radically heterogeneous text. His musical portrait of Gretchen implicitly belongs to a Sinfonia Domestica , with a figure of vestal simplicity at its center.
Liszt's Gretchen is also implicated in an immobility that might be called hermeneutic: the separation of women from the cultural production of meaning, the prohibition of woman as subject from participation in the interpretive practices that invest her with meaning both for herself and for others. Under this rule of exclusion, women become subjects only insofar as they are taken as objects of male interpretation.[7] Their subjectivity is not abolished, but it is reduced to what may be signified to a man by the woman's body, gesture, or behavior. Women are thus rendered all surface, like images in a picture plane; hence Nietzsche's notorious remark that women are not even shallow.[8] (The latent association between the "profundity" thus denied and the maternal/erotic "depths" traditionally ascribed to women is worth pondering.) Liszt's Gretchen is hermeneutically immobilized by the structural process at the heart of the movement named for her: the juxtaposition of her music with Faust's. Barred from any development of their own, Gretchen's themes become significant only in and through the lyrical new forms that their proximity evokes—evokes abundantly—from Faust's. Gretchen's music "attracts" Faust with its unchanging surface; Faust's music explicates that attraction by continually transforming its own expressive character.
The ideological and hermeneutic types of feminine immobility
[7] On discourse and rules of exclusion, see Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 215–20.
[8] In full: "Women are considered profound. Why? Because one never fathoms their depths. Women aren't even shallow" (from Twilight of the Idols , trans. Walter Kaufman in his Portable Nietzsche [New York, 1962], 470). On Nietzsche and femininity (and much else), see Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles , trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, 1979).
overlap in one of the most important of patriarchal institutions, a specifically visual form of domination that also, as we will see, takes on musical form in the Faust Symphony. I am speaking of the gaze: a prolonged or repeated look, often from a concealed position, by which a man scrutinizes a woman's body, gesture, or intimate (private, secret) behavior. This structure of looking may be recreated by a painting, represented in a text, or practiced in various social spaces from the bedroom to the marketplace.[9] It may have private or neurotic motives in a given instance, but it is always authorized as a privilege of gender. The gaze has its most familiar tradition in the painting of the female nude, though it also has a literary tradition, especially in the form of poetic inventories of women's "beauties," a rhetorical technique of fragmentation that derives its highest authority from the example of Petrarch.[10] In the nineteenth century, the gaze moves into a position of unusual preeminence as the male's power to scrutinize the female body is everywhere institutionalized, from the crass commodification of Degas's brothel monotypes to the sublimated voyeurism of Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes":[11]
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake.
(226–32)
[9] For a further exploration of the gaze in nineteenth-century discourse generally, and music in particular, see my "Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex," Cambridge Opera Journal 2, no. 3 (1990).
[10] On Petrarch's rhetoric of feminine fragmentation, see Nancy J. Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–80.
[11] Charles Bernheimer relates the gaze to the Degas monotypes in his essay "Degas's Brothels: Voyeurism and Ideology," Representations 20 (1987): 158–86. Degas's work has become something of a crux in the history of the painterly gaze; see Carol M. Armstrong, "Edgar Degas and the Representation of the Female Body," in The Female Body in Western Culture , ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 223–42.
As Keats's imagery suggests, a strong culturally coded complicity plays between immobility and the gaze. The gaze ordinarily catches or places its object in a condition of immobility, as if to defer the reconcealment of what has been revealed. Conversely, immobility is instituted as the paradigmatic feminine position in order to perpetuate the structure of the gaze across the whole cultural field.
For twin icons of the nineteenth-century gaze, one can hardly do better than to choose Manet's Olympia and the first chapter of the novel that Flaubert called "the moral history . . . of the men of my generation," Sentimental Education .[12] Commenting on Olympia , Norman Bryson notes that "the image addresses two extreme, and incompatible, codes, in this case codes of sexual representation: woman as Odalisque, objet de culte , woman presented for consumption as spectacle, woman as image; and woman as Prostitute, available physically and not only visually, woman as sexuality in its abuse, as sexually exploited."[13] What is even more disturbing than the conflict between these codes, however, is the ease with which they overlap and blend, at once lending the glow of art to prostitution and casting the glare of prostitution over art. (But then, "What is art?" asked Baudelaire, and answered: "Prostitution.")[14] More disturbing still in this conflation of looking and "possessing" is the suggestion—a suggestion hard to resist—that for the nineteenth century the sexuality of looking, or scopophilia, rivals genital sexuality as a means of satisfying male desire. It is no accident that Olympia also invokes a third code that synthesizes the two mentioned by Bryson: the novel code of pornographic photography.[15]
Perhaps this trend is so strong because the gender system of the nineteenth century is so unstable, or perhaps because the association of gender and power is at once more thoroughgoing and more contested at this period than ever before. Be that as it may, the preem-
[12] Gustave Flaubert to Mme Leroyer de Chantepie, Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert (Paris, 1928), no. 800.
[13] Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, 1983), 145.
[14] Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals , trans. Christopher Isherwood (1930; rpt. New York, 1977), 3.
[15] On this topic see Gerald Needham, "Manet, Olympia, and Pornographic Photography," in Woman as Sex Object , ed. Thomas Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), 81–89.
inence of the gaze and of its scopophilic force is fully explicit in the episode that impels Flaubert's novel: Frédéric Moreau's "vision" of Mme Arnoux, the ne plus ultra of love at first sight:
As she stayed in the same position, he took a few turns to right and left, in order to conceal the purpose of his movements; then he stationed himself near her sunshade . . . and pretended to be watching a launch on the river.
He had never before seen anything to compare with her splendid dark skin, her ravishing figure, or her delicate, translucent fingers. He looked at her workbasket with eyes full of wonder, as if it were something out of the ordinary. What was her name, her home, her life, her past? He longed to know the furniture in her room, all the dresses she had ever worn, the people she mixed with; and even the desire for physical possession gave way to a profounder yearning, a poignant curiosity that knew no bounds.[16]
Everything is here: the immobilized woman, the privileged and concealed position of the spectator, the shift from erotic to scopophilic desire—or more exactly, through erotic to scopophilic desire—in a look that seems to touch the body fixed before it.
The hegemony of the gaze is often attributed to male fears of female sexuality, but while this suggestion is undoubtedly persuasive, it does not go very far. The most venturesome work on the gaze has called attention to male narcissism as a social and cultural agency. In the language of Jacques Lacan, what the gazer both seeks and is authorized to find is a "specular" image: an image in which the subject's privileged sense of self is crystallized.[17] The immobilized woman is appropriated, not only as an object in which to take
[16] Flaubert, Sentimental Education , 18.
[17] Lacan's account appears in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1981), 67–119. Luce Irigaray extends the concept of the specularization of woman to Western tradition as a whole in Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985). Other discussions will be found in the essays by Bernheimer ("Degas's Brothels") and Armstrong ("Edgar Degas"), and in Naomi Schor, "The Portrait of a Gentleman: Representing Men in (French) Women's Writing," Representations 20 (1987): 113–33. Not surprisingly, the gaze has been much discussed in film theory. For the classic statement, see Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 14–28.
pleasure, but also as a covert image of the pleasure taken. She serves as an extension of the gazer's own sexualized body, as a measure of his masculinity, and as a confirmation of his idealized self-knowledge. It follows that the object of the gaze must be both arrestingly visible, her privacy or private parts exposed, and yet subject to an unacknowledged effacement by the gaze itself. In "Turning" ("Wendung"), a poem about the gaze, Rilke accordingly suggests that the gaze alone brings women fully into the masculine realm of the visible—and in so doing defeminizes them, imprisoning them in a repertoire of images that reflect masculine knowledge and desire. (Visibility here is polarized against invisibility, as the male to the female genitals.)[18] In sum, the gaze is the paradigmatic means by which women, as Virginia Woolf wryly put it, "have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the image of man at twice its natural size."[19]
Detached and controlling, the gaze uses its specular structure not only to gain pleasure but also to keep power. The patriarchal gender system requires men to maintain social power over women and rewards them with sexual pleasure from women. Yet the demands of power, the overlapping needs to police, to defend, and to symbolize power, have a way of deferring the pleasure, even of spoiling it. Problems caused by this disparity were particularly vexing in the nineteenth century, when masculine power typically sought to delegitimize a key factor in its destined pleasure: feminine sexuality itself. All such problems, however, vanish before the gaze. For the gaze is the privileged act through which power and pleasure are harmonized. In his History of Sexuality , Michel Foucault observes that the nineteenth century used physical examination and insistent observation to compile an elaborate medical/psychiatric inventory of sexual "perversities." The aim of this practice, he suggests, was not only to "say no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities," but also to produce "perpetual spirals of power and pleasure." The medical power that took charge of sexuality, writes Foucault,
[18] Irigaray develops this theme throughout the first section of Speculum , "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry."
[19] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; repr. New York, 1957), 35.
set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled moments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. . . . Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered.[20]
I would like to give this argument of Foucault's a deconstructive twist and suggest that the spiral of power and pleasure created by observation is not a special case, exterior to normalized sexualities, but rather the most privileged form of normalized nineteenth-century sexuality itself. "Wine," wrote the early Yeats,
comes in at the mouth,
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you and I sigh.
("A Drinking Song")
To look: to enjoy: to consume. Perhaps the famous blinding of Charlotte Brontë's Mr. Rochester allows Jane Eyre to marry him precisely because he will never be able to absorb her into the sexual economy of looking that Yeats takes to be a cardinal truth.
Goethe's Faust never really gets to exercise the gaze on Gretchen, though it is almost the first thing he wants to do, and he even hides in her empty bedroom to do it in imagination. Goethe in Faust is both preoccupied with the gaze and deeply suspicious of it. He withholds Gretchen from Faust's eye in the bedroom scene, yet before the scene ends he offers her as a spectacle to the reader (or to himself as author). Slowly undressing, Gretchen sings the ballad "Es war ein König in Thule."[21] The song of undying love makes her an especially seductive specular image—all the more so when she stands, un-
[20] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality , vol. 1: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 44.
[21] My thanks to Cyrus Hamlin for drawing my attention to the importance of the "König in Thule" scene.
clothed but adorned with jewelry left in her room by Mephistopheles, in front of a mirror. Later, in the dungeon scene that closes Part 1 of Faust , Goethe confronts the violence always latent in the gaze when he has Gretchen, at daybreak, imagine herself at the public spectacle of her execution.
It is tempting to speculate that Liszt's musical "portrait" of Gretchen stems from the association of singing and looking in Goethe's "König in Thule" scene. Be that as it may, Liszt's Gretchen is represented in terms that faithfully reproduce the structure of the gaze. She belongs in the company of Donna Elvira in the balcony scene of Don Giovanni , of Brünnhilde as Siegfried breaks the ring of magic fire, of the nymphs that Mallarmé and Debussy "perpetuate" through the eyes of a faun. The movement named for Gretchen is the implicit incidental music for a scene of gazing.
A closer look at the structure of the movement will show in what sense this is true. The music follows an ABA¢ design. The A section, in the key of
On this description, the two essential activities of the "Gretchen" movement are the displacement of Gretchen's music and the lyrical softening of Faust's. Each of these procedures serves as a trope that conforms to a key dimension of the gaze: displacement to narcissism, and softening to the spiral of power and pleasure. In the first case, the music does quite literally what the structure of the phallicized gaze prescribes: it immobilizes the feminine by means of representation and receives back an image of the masculine in idealized, libidinally rewarding form. By the A¢ section of the movement, where Gretchen's music explicitly keeps dissolving into Faust's, Liszt's musical portrait of Gretchen confesses itself to be—to have been from the
Example 13
Liszt, Faust Symphony. Faust's Affetuoso theme.
(A) "Faust" movement. (B) "Gretchen" movement.
start—no more than a trope for the narcissistic self-reflection that a man derives from idealized scopophilic love. What we have been calling Gretchen's music is really Faust's—hence perhaps the intrusion of that Affetuoso fragment in the A section. What the movement does as a whole is to trace Faust's specular image as it merges with and emerges from its feminine surface.
What is all-important to note about this narcissistic pattern is that it is not presented as a sign of private perversity, but as an instance of cultural normality, fully authorized and highly valued. Faust's musical interventions in Gretchen's movement are all constructive, not compulsive. They alone give the movement its tonal and thematic dynamism; they alone impart an intelligible large-scale structure to the static repetitions of Gretchen's melodies. Faust's music does cultural work, even in the act of gazing.
Within this framework of sanctioned narcissism, the spiral of power and pleasure ascends. In the B section of the "Gretchen" movement, Faust's melodic material exchanges the ardent, somewhat hectic propulsiveness of its original form for something slower, more sensuous, unclenched enough to be erotic. Though broad in its the-
matic range, the music proceeds by dwelling on one block of repeated melodic figures after another; its foremost activity is to protract the pleasures of its own sonority. Liszt's thematic transformations involve details of tempo, articulation, dynamics, and contour, but above all it is his orchestration that makes the difference. The Appassionato theme, introduced in the "Faust" movement by first and second violins in unison against tremolos and sforzandi in the lower strings, now sounds on first violins alone against murmuring string triplets and sustained or slow-moving chords on the oboes and bassoons. From the outset, the Faust of this episode flushes with a "feminine" luxuriance that belongs, not to Gretchen, but to the pleasure of fantasizing about her. The Affetuoso theme no longer divides its phrases between winds and strings, but sounds in continuous lines that constantly change in tone color—first scored lightly against harp arpeggios, then enveloped in a pianissimo tutti passage complete with delicate strokes on the cymbal. Between these two episodes Liszt interposes a kind of serenade in which a continuous accompaniment on triple flute rises and falls while solo string combinations repeat a fragment of first-movement melody based on the Faustian sonority of the augmented triad (Example 14).
This music, then, concentrates intensively on the material pleasures of mixed tone-colors and transparent instrumental textures. And these are pleasures inextricably linked with the power of Faust's music to displace Gretchen's, whose themes no more participate in the erotic scena they provoke than a gazed-at body shares in the pleasure the gazer takes in it. Like concealment in the space of the gaze, Liszt's musical displacement—the endless deferral of a counterpoint between Faust's themes and Gretchen's—transfixes Gretchen's music as a term of reference, an object of interpretation that is always the same whether it sounds or not. With Gretchen's themes held in abeyance, Faust's music recasts the conflict-laden complexity that empowered it heroically in the first movement as a conflict-free power of self-delighting metamorphosis. By the final measures of the movement, Gretchen's music has dwindled to a void that Faust's music fills in the act of completing itself. Gretchen's Amoroso theme loses its tonal stability, its contour blurring as it subsides onto an
Example 14
Liszt, Faust Symphony. "Faust" section of "Gretchen" movement.
Note how the violins "persuade" the cellos to shift (on their
last appearance) from a perfect to an augmented triad—indeed, to
the primary augmented triad C–E–G
from the common tone
refer to the Eulenberg study score.)
The musical gaze, asserting its full privilege, exhausts and consumes its object.
For a literary counterpart to Liszt's Gretchen, we might look to the artist's model of Christina Rossetti's poem "In an Artist's Studio" (1856). With her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Siddal, in mind, Rossetti describes a woman who has yielded herself up to the gaze of an artist
who fills all his canvases with an unchanging image of her, so that "every canvass means/The same one meaning, neither more nor less" (8–9). The artist sees his model as willingly, indeed joyfully, immobilized in an identity that fulfills his wishes and underwrites his symbolism. He does not see that he consumes her, "feeds upon her face," or that his portraits show her "Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;/Not as she is . . . /But as she fills his dream" (12–14).
The situation is not perfectly simple, however. Rossetti's poem is far from denying the peculiar power of the victimized model, the half-esthetic, half-erotic allure that makes her the object of male wonder, fascination, and even obsession. Taking a cue from the work of Nina Auerbach, we can locate the source of that power in a metamorphic fluidity that the artist takes as his own, a fluidity that allows the model to become a queen, an angel, and "a nameless girl in freshest summer-greens" with equal perfection.[22] In isolation, each of the artist's paintings forms an attempt to limit and appropriate the model's metamorphic power. Taken together, though, the long series of paintings inevitably constructs a sign of her resistance. Paint her as he will, the artist can never fully retrieve her from the position she often took, "hidden just behind [the] screens" that were used to block naked models from unauthorized eyes.
Liszt's "Gretchen" movement allows a similar equivocation to sound in the fleeting transpositions of Gretchen's motto, their minor mode rendered especially poignant by abruptness and isolation. For a moment, Liszt's Gretchen slips out of focus, blurs her portrait: and in that moment the movement named for her half concedes its technique of domination. Like the paintings of Rossetti's artist, the movement pays tribute to the fascinations of the immobilized woman by taking as its own her all-too-mobile power to fascinate.
This insight, however, is withdrawn almost as soon as it is tendered. As the first transposition concludes on a somewhat clumsy "feminine" ending, it is interrupted by a snatch of Faustian melody—the Affetuoso fragment we considered earlier. Shortly afterward, the motto returns in "proper" form, as if to correct or undo the deviant transposition. Gretchen, like Lizzie Siddal, is made to hold still.
[22] Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
II
Thinking back over what has been said so far, we might observe that the process by which Liszt consumes or derealizes his Gretchen is the same as the process by which he idealizes her. We can hear as much in the sheer sound of her music, music that begins each A section with a texture of arresting idiosyncrasy and grows steadily more conventional in scoring as it grows more ardent. This mode of idealization, which invests women with erotic or spiritual charisma in and through a form of privation, is basic to nineteenth-century discourse on gender. Women become erotic ideals when they arouse desire in men before they can feel or recognize desire in themselves—the case of Liszt's Gretchen. And they become spiritual ideals, agents of redemption, through their limitless capacity to suffer the consequences of the desires they arouse in men or, worse yet, find transmitted to them, implanted in them, by male desire—the case of Goethe's Gretchen. (Transmitted: like what used to be called a venereal disease, as if sexuality itself were the prototype for syphilis. Implanted: like a child. Hence the sickly or ill-fated children of so many "fallen women" in fiction: Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles christens her short-lived son "Sorrow.")
Formed out of these negations, the bourgeois equivalents of Adam's rib, the idealized woman embodies a tenderness and beauty that can restrain and shape masculine energy, an energy that is inherently excessive, that would expend itself in meaningless rough-and-tumble unless it were confronted by a woman with the pathos of a lack. Rilke, summing up this iconology in quasi-Freudian terms, appeals to the woman to cure the man of an infatuation with his own precultural, psychosexual interior:
. . . how could you know
what primordial time you stirred in your lover. What passions
welled up inside him from departed beings. What
women hated you there. How many dark
sinister men you aroused in his young veins. Dead
children reached out to touch you . . . Oh gently, gently,
let him see you performing, with love, some confident daily task,—
lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs
the heaviest night . . . . . . Restrain him . . .
( Third Duino Elegy , 76–85; ellipses Rilke's)
Only under the woman's restraining hand does the man have access to the garden, the space of order, fertility, innocence, and sweet labor, for which his restless energy searches. It is idealized femininity alone that makes masculine energy available for cultural work.
But ideals cast shadows. It is generally acknowledged, at least by those who understand cultural discourse as inevitably gender-marked, that feminine ideals are always paired with dangerous contraries. The gazed-at woman, for example, has an obverse often figured by the Medusa: the woman who transgresses the visual order, who returns the gaze and immobilizes the gazer.
In its most extreme form, the splitting of woman into ideal and contrary creates the notorious opposition of angel and monster, madonna and whore, a division so ingrained in late-nineteenth-century male mentality as to produce an epidemic neurosis that makes virulent misogyny the precondition of sexual potency.[23] More generally, the ideal/contrary relationship seems to embed in cultural discourse an early-infantile defense against ambivalence: the division of the object of love, in the first instance the parents, into "good" and "bad" versions.[24] As a result, men in patriarchal culture find themselves polarized not against one lopsided version of femininity, but against two: one fixed, the other mobile, one a figure of restraint, the other of excess. Liszt is no exception. As we will see in a few pages, the Gretchen of the Faust Symphony is really two Gretchens.
The practical trouble with splitting women according to the terms of male ambivalence is that cultural defense mechanisms do not work any better than their psychological counterparts. The system of po-
[23] On the angel/monster syndrome, see Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), 1–44. The classic account of the neurotic overlap of potency and misogyny is Freud's essay "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life" (1912), reprinted from the Standard Edition in Freud, Sexuality and the Pyschology of Love , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1963), 58–69.
[24] First proposed by Freud, this concept of defensive splitting was developed most fully by Melanie Klein. See her "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic Depressive States" (1934), in Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis (London, 1950).
larizations is intrinsically, almost impulsively, unstable; its feminine terms cannot reliably be told apart. Goethe's Faust makes that discovery during the Walpurgisnacht, when he sees a pale and shackled girl whom he takes for Gretchen. Mephistopheles warns him off: the girl is the Medusa, he says; every man thinks she's his sweetheart. Faust does not deny it, but neither can he cease gazing at this beautiful Medusa, nor cease desiring her. Knowing who she is, he continues to see Gretchen's "dear, sweet body" in her (Goethe pointedly elides any reference to her head). Faust goes on to justify his continued gaze by invoking the twin conditions of the privative ideal: "What suffering! and what delight!/I can't tear my eyes from that sight" (1.4201–2).[25]
For the nineteenth century, the doubling of women into ideal and contrary almost always plays itself out in terms keyed to bourgeois sexuality. The feminine ideal domesticates sexuality by separating desire from pleasure. As a virgin, she desires marriage without reference to the pleasures—or disappointments—of consummation. As a wife, she may receive sexual pleasure—covertly, if she's lucky—but must not set herself up as a subject who desires. The feminine contrary rules over a seductive but terrifying social space that breaks all bourgeois bounds: a carnivalesque scene of frenzy, perversion, adultery, prostitution, impotence, and castration. (Here we encounter Wagner's Venusberg and any room whatever occupied by Zola's Nana. Joyce's Nighttown is a belated version of the same thing.) This is not necessarily a space to be shunned; it is more a space to be mastered by a combination of masculine self-possession and economic power. Its danger is the threat of reversal: an addiction to its pleasures that ends in erotic and economic enslavement.
Given these dangers and instabilities, it is inevitable that the relationship of the man to his feminine ideal would be shadowed, sometimes even overshadowed, by the need to defend the ideal against contamination by the contrary. If the gaze, for instance, marks a scene of power folded into pleasure, it is also marked by the anxious traces of voyeurism and fetishism, in which an always-deferred pleasure is predicated on the dread of impotence.[26] Thus
[25] Adapted from Goethe, Faust I & II , trans. Charles E. Passage (Indianapolis, 1965).
[26] On this subject, see Bernheimer, "Degas's Brothels."
Goethe's Faust, enchanted with Gretchen, almost immediately demands a fetish, a bosom cloth or garter, and asks to be concealed in her bedroom where he can "see her, have her"—terms his rhetoric comes close to merging.
Each side of the feminine ideal has its own requisites of cultural/psychological defense. With the female sufferer, the man must deny that suffering is a form of empowerment that can invest the feminine subject with authority and charisma. In her novel Villette , Charlotte Brontë dwells on that power and its ambivalence. Drawing on her experience of a performance by Rachel, Brontë writes of an actress in whom "what hurts becomes immediately embodied":
Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, make a meeker vision . . . than Vashti [Brontë's sobriquet for the actress]. . . .
Pain, for her, has no result in good. . . . On sickness, on death itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is strong; and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome Grace.[27]
Perhaps it is to negate this strength, to reclaim its territory for beauty and grace, that nineteenth-century male artists notoriously find their ultimate image of the suffering woman in her dead body: the Mignon of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister ; Robert Browning's Evelyn Hope; the Ophelia of John Everett Millais's much-imitated painting, whose floating corpse is so intimate a part of the landscape that envelops it that the beauty of the body blends seamlessly into the beauty of the scene.[28]
On the erotic side, the idealizing man must protect his ideal from internalizing the very desire that she inspires. Here the issue is not so much sexuality as a function of the body, but the role of sexual desire as a culturally authorized signifier of psychological and social power.
[27] Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1979), 339, 340.
[28] On Ophelia in the nineteenth century, see Elaine Showalter, "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), 77–96. Dijkstra (Idols ) has a chapter on the cult of the sick and dying woman's body (25–63) which contains striking illustrations, some of them of a really frightening extremity.
The right to desire, we might say, is the reward of power successfully maintained. But desire, like money, is hard to take out of circulation; it passes inexorably from hand to hand and is sometimes repaid with interest. The dilemma wrought by desire finds a perfect illustration in Torvald Helmer, the husband of Ibsen's A Doll's House and a walking compendium of middle-class values. Torvald must somehow reconcile his strong sexual desire for his wife, Nora, with his more distanced idealization of her as his "little lark," a merry and irresponsible creature who lives on his social and economic largesse. His solution is to imagine her recurrently as his virgin bride on their wedding night, the helpless girl who knows nothing of either money or sex:
I pretend that you're my young bride, that we're just coming from the wedding, that for the first time I'm bringing you into my house—that for the first time I'm alone with you—completely alone with you, your trembling young beauty. All this evening I've longed for nothing but you. When I saw you turn and sway in the tarantella—my blood was pounding till I couldn't stand it.[29]
Torvald's defensive technique executes a kind of triple play. It incorporates the structure of the gaze, with the accompanying circle of narcissistic reflection and spiral of power and pleasure; it establishes Nora's virginity as a renewable resource, thereby securing the bourgeois separation of feminine pleasure and desire; and it isolates Nora from the position of social and economic empowerment to which her actual desire would—does—lay claim.
As Brontë's bloodthirsty imagery for Vashti and Torvald's conflation of sexual and economic domination suggest, the bedrock issue in the preservation of the feminine ideal is the preservation of sexual difference itself as an inviolable absolute. Not only do the ideal and the contrary repeatedly blur into each other, but the contrary also encroaches dangerously on masculine identity. Swordplay and making money are for men to do; if women can do them (and even overdo them), then cultural masculinity does not require biological maleness for its embodiment. When the feminine ideal is disrupted, women inevitably gain in psychological, social, and economic power. Linked together by phallic representations of authority, these three terms
[29] Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays , trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York, 1965), 101.
constitute the traditional sphere of masculinity itself. For nineteenth-century men, it seems as if women's entry into that sphere would immediately feminize it altogether or, more radically, appropriate its phallic power on behalf of an enigmatic, metamorphic femininity that would shift men toward the "feminine" positions symbolized by lack of desire and abundance of suffering. Deny sexual difference, deny any part of it, and the feminine would at once replace the masculine as the core gender of humanity. To prevent this, the hegemonically masculine culture erects a law: male and female may couple, but they must not mix. Their mixing, as the medical sexology of the period affirms, breeds only perversion.[30]
We can now return to Liszt and ask how the defense of the feminine ideal against its contrary is articulated by the Faust Symphony. By confining Gretchen musically to the same one meaning, neither more nor less, Liszt wards off the beautiful Medusa; yet in that very act he invites her, even impels her, to make an appearance. The effect is one of repression, and we can detect it in part by recalling Goethe's Gretchen and noting what Liszt fails to see in her: everything that is bold, impassioned, corruptible, erotically awakened, guilty, masochistic, irrational. In a word: almost everything. In more specifically musical terms, however, we might hear the inviolable purity of Liszt's Gretchen as a proleptic defense against the kind of mocking transformation of her music that Berlioz wrote in the "Witches' Sabbath" movement of his Symphonie fantastique , a work that had a profound impact on Liszt. In Berlioz's famous episode, the beloved escapes from the composer-hero's idealization of her, his immobilization of her in an idée fixe represented by a single recurring
[30] On this subject see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud , vol. 2: The Tender Passion (New York, 1986), 219–327; George Chauncey, Jr., "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," Salmagundi 58–59 (1982): 114–46; and Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (1984): 101–33. According to the period's theory of "sexual inversion," male homosexuality is the result of a female psyche in a male body. Sander Gilman cites a complementary trend in late-nineteenth-century medicine that regards (female) prostitutes as "hidden" males; see his "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 204–42, esp. 223–29.
melody, and returns to him in the "base, trivial, and grotesque" form of a dance tune to take part in a raucous orgy.[31]
The threat of such a Berlioz-like travesty is raised explicitly by the parody technique of the "Mephistopheles" movement. That same threat is laid to rest (or so it would seem) when Gretchen's motto does indeed return, but without any mocking distortions, and for a moment suspends Mephistopheles' wild parade of negations.
But what if we were to listen to the "Mephistopheles" movement in disregard of the conventional wisdom about it, as represented by the introduction to the Eulenberg study score: "Gretchen alone remains completely untouched by this wild and obscene ado: her theme always appears entirely unaltered in its original purity"?[32] Example 15a shows Gretchen's motto in its original form; Example 15b shows what happens to it in the "Mephistopheles" movement, where it appears at the close of the development. The "Mephistopheles" version is, and is meant to be, the most lyrically entrancing statement of Gretchen's motto in the entire symphony. It becomes so, however, only by utterly violating the melodic and harmonic stillness at the core of the original music. The theme does not return in Gretchen's key of
Amid this play of discontinuities, Gretchen's music steadily undoes its own celestial rhetoric. The high shimmering strings of the
[31] Quotation from Berlioz's program, reprinted in Fantastic Symphony , the Norton Critical Score, ed. Edward T. Cone (New York, 1971), 24.
[32] Franz Liszt, Eine Faust-Symphonie (London and Zurich, n.d.), v.
Example 15
Liszt, Faust Symphony. (A) Original form of Gretchen's motto.
(B) Gretchen's motto in "Mephistopheles" movement.
Example 15
beginning gradually descend through three octaves and shed their tremolo; the motto theme itself deepens in timbre, its penetrating sweetness on the oboe giving way to the more sensuous color of the solo horn. The Gretchen of this episode has all the subjective force that Goethe gave her but that Liszt has earlier repressed. She is roused from her rigid sweetness, released into self-transformation, imbued with a restless eroticism. Far from being untouched by Mephistopheles' wild and obscene ado, Gretchen is demystified by it. Her music breaks the delicate membrane of sexual difference: it takes as feminine the tonal and melodic dynamism, the freedom of contour, and
the pleasure in tone color that are characteristic of Faust's musical style—and of Liszt's.
No sooner is Gretchen evoked in these terms, however, than she is swept away in the rush of more Mephistophelian mockery. The uncanny return à la Berlioz cannot be prevented, after all—but it can be repudiated, and with a vengeance. The episode does not bring back Gretchen alone, but also the deconstructive (affirmative, self-questioning) impulse that earlier prompted the minor-mode transposition of her motto. What makes her return disturbing is not an explicit danger, not the gross obscenity that Berlioz memorably evokes in the squeals of the piccolo clarinet. The disturbing force is precisely the impassioned dynamism that Liszt associates with cultural hegemony.
III
Within the tonal plan of the symphony, Gretchen's return in the "Mephistopheles" movement forms a large-scale dissonance of special importance. As I noted earlier, the primary Faust motive is centered on the augmented triad C–E–G
of structural tensions; that it be overwhelmed by Mephistopheles' becomes essential to the resolution of large-scale harmonic tension. The tonal order of sonata form—and of the symphony—bluntly demands that the E-major Gretchen be repudiated. Liszt complies by moving quickly to the retransition, which leads to the tonic through the same quasi-dominant E major that Gretchen has briefly appropriated and "feminized." The resolution is decisive: E major is not heard from again.
Gretchen, however, is not the only object of repudiation here. It is arguable that Liszt's recapitulation in this movement undoes his own earlier representation of Mephistopheles as the spirit of pure negation, and thereby also undoes the heroization of Faust. There is no mistaking the malicious parody that rules Mephistopheles' exposition and development as Faust's themes are literally taken apart and tossed in fragments from one instrumental group to another. But parody and transformation are both forms of metamorphosis, and the recapitulation here does much to blur the distinction between them. Especially as the second and third theme groups return in C major, the music assumes a straightforwardly festive and ebullient character, with only intermittent patches of grotesquerie. One episode even gives the third theme a light-footed playfulness that borders perilously on the Mendelssohnian, a quality far more puckish than diabolical. We might speculate that as the recapitulation proceeds, Mephistopheles gradually metamorphoses from the spirit of negation into the spirit of virtuosity, inventiveness, untrammeled fantasy. This shift from a musical Walpurgisnacht to carnival festivity is strikingly confirmed when the second and third groups reverse their order in the recapitulation, and the second—originally a cacaphonous G-minor fugue—comes out as a miniature scherzo, built sequentially of fragments of the fugue subject, minus the grating counterpoint. Mephistopheles thus evolves into a fantastical, charismatic figure who resembles no one so much as the Liszt of the virtuoso years, the Paganini-inspired Liszt who delighted in a certain studied diablerie as a part of his artistic persona.
In his private life, Liszt experienced that diablerie in consistent opposition to the two women he loved and admired the most: Marie D'Agoult, who endlessly belittled his virtuoso career, and Carolyne Wittgenstein, with whom he associated his retirement from the con-
cert stage. Liszt's renunciation of his diabolical persona, however, could not be expected to happen overnight, and it may be that in the "Mephistopheles" movement of the Faust Symphony the diabolical Liszt returns for a last hurrah.
If so, that would suggest a more than esthetic reason for Liszt's revision of the symphony. In the original ending, Gretchen's motto, again on the horn, makes a short-lived reappearance in F, the tonality in minimum tension against the tonic. A brilliant C-major crescendo follows, based on a nonparodic variant of Faust's Grandioso theme. The original symphony thus ends with a rhetorical triumph in which antinomian genius overrides a feminine call to order. In the revised version, the crescendo becomes a diminuendo, a transitional passage that interprets the reappearance of Gretchen's motto as a Beatrice-like revelation of the feminine principle. The finale promptly heeds that revelation, and in so doing allows Liszt to make reparation for his earlier gynophobic gesture. Yet no reparation can fully escape the gender-based logic that rules the symphony as a whole. Like the "Gretchen" movement, the "Chorus Mysticus" can celebrate woman only by negating her. Liszt's hymn of praise to the eternal feminine is unmistakably fervid, but it is also specular, in the manner of the gaze: a thinly disguised celebration of the eternal masculine.
This internal contradiction appears both expressively, in Liszt's choice and disposition of vocal resources, and formally, in the disruption of large-scale harmonic and melodic activity.
The most obvious element of male-centeredness in the "Chorus Mysticus" is the fact that the music is for male chorus and solo tenor. In contrast, the "Chorus Mysticus" of Goethe's Faust is deliberately left ungendered at the conclusion of a slowly evolving antiphony of male and female voices. Goethe's chorus removes sexual difference from the sphere of persons to the sphere of principles: the eternal feminine is precisely that which beckons, leads onward, an "us" that is both male and female. But the "us" of Liszt's "Chorus Mysticus" is explicitly and exclusively male. The feminine may lead this "us" to the fulfillment of "our" energetic striving, but she can do so only as a rhetorical figure within the discourse of a band of brothers in which she has no part.
Similarly, at the end of Goethe's play, Faust remains mute, while
"a penitent, formerly called Gretchen," eloquently celebrates his ascent. In the symphony it is Gretchen who is mute, or muted, her melody sung by a solo tenor who, in his sudden individuation from the choral mass, inevitably seems to embody Faust himself. Like the earthly Gretchen, whose significance can articulate itself only in the Faustian music that displaces her own, Liszt's eternal feminine is quite literally indistinguishable from the male conception, the male expression of her. She can make herself heard only in the tones of a male voice.
Even at that, it is not clear whether she is heard at all. The tenor part repeatedly calls attention to itself at the expense of the text, a process that begins with its opening gesture: the transformation of Gretchen's motto into a long, sensuous melisma. As we will see shortly, the tenor plays a destabilizing role in this movement. His principal action seems to be to keep on singing, to prolong the ecstatic contour of his melodic line, which soon expands to incorporate Faustian melodic leaps. Closely akin to the Faust of the "Gretchen movement," he appropriates where he adores. For the tenor, to praise the eternal feminine is to form a specular image for masculine depth of feeling.
In formal terms, what I am tempted to call Liszt's deconstruction of his own celebratory pattern turns on the question of closure for the symphony. Here again the structural augmented triad C–E–G
The finale begins with the chorus slowly arpeggiating the tones of the C-major triad until all but the last few lines of Goethe's lyric have been heard. With the phrase "Das Unbeschreibliche, hier wird es getan" ("The indescribable here is attained"), the music moves emblematically onto Gretchen's tonal level of
Example 16
Liszt, Faust Symphony. Opening of "Chorus Mysticus."
becomes the turning point through which the symphony finds large-scale resolution, the "attainment" spoken of in the text. The music passes from
Both strophes are governed by an important division of labor. Only the solo tenor sings the phrase "Das ewig Weibliche"—and each time he sings it he pauses, strangely reluctant to go further. The chorus, meanwhile, softly interjects "Zieht uns hinan" into the pauses, as if to prompt the tenor to complete his affirmation. As far as the text goes, the tenor eventually complies; he begins to sing "Zieht uns hinan" on the dominant of C, thus linking transcendental attainment with a future tonic cadence. Musically, however, completion is just what the tenor seeks to avoid. All his melodic phrases but the last end inconclusively, most of them on a half cadence—the musical icon of incompletion. Heard in
The crucial passage ends the second strophe. After a breathless buildup, with harp arpeggios swirling through sustained blocks of wind and string sonority, the music breaks off abruptly. The harmony at this juncture is governed by a C-major German sixth. The tenor then enters unaccompanied and slowly, ambiguously draws two tones from the German sixth to sing "Zieht uns" one last time:
It remains for the chorus to stabilize the sonority by taking up the tenor's missing C and reiterating it in unison over a pair of plagal cadences. The tenor, we might say, acts as if he were setting only the word hinan , taking it as a sign of the mobility that he cherishes throughout the movement. The chorus, whose allegiance is to unity, not mobility, reintegrates the phrase "Zieht uns hinan" and recloses the circle that links "hinan" to "Das ewig Weibliche." The climax of the movement follows accordingly as the chorus expands its vital unison C into a full tonic triad while arpeggiating the same triad melodically. This resolution forms an answer to the structural augmented triad of Example 16, then leads us onward to a fortissimo outburst on the organ that proclaims the close.
In their divergence, the chorus and the tenor act out a troubling duality that no social ideal can escape: the ideal as myth, object of belief, self-present value, versus the ideal as ideology, instrument of
Example 17
Liszt, Faust Symphony. Close of tenor line in "Chorus Mysticus."
power, rhetorical construct. For the generic masculinity represented by the chorus, a redemptive submission to the eternal feminine is possible. The cultural order that idealizes woman by privation is, it seems, strong enough to restrain the metamorphic power, the deviant mobility, by which she threatens the bounds of gender. But the individuated male represented by the solo tenor can never quite believe in that restraint, and so can never quite yield to the illusions of his own ideal. His hesitation may find a gloss in one of Nietzsche's cautionary aphorisms about those "quiet, magical beings . . . women ": "The magic and most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans ; but this requires first of all and above all—distance ."[35] Reluctant to utter the words of redemptive submission, Liszt's tenor finally pronounces them with a profound scruple of reservation, the undertone of a psychosexual resistance that is also a cultural privilege. Though touched by the hope that the eternal feminine leads us onward, he acts on the principle that she merely leads us on.
[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), 124 (aphorism 60).