III
Tristan und Isolde , then, is a radical work not only in its musical procedures but also in its sexual ideology. Yet for all that, it does not make a perfectly clean break with prelibidinal modes of thought. The desire that it celebrates can only find satisfaction through the loss of an object, but there is still only one object in the world whose loss can, so to speak, inflict that satisfaction. And although the desire
that speaks through Isolde's Transfiguration is neither masculine nor feminine, Isolde still embodies it as a woman who dies into the image of a beloved man—as, indeed, she has been taught to do by that man himself in the original form of her
Hugo Wolf's "Ganymed" (1888) is less apocalyptic but more thoroughgoing in its commitment to libidinal desire. We will need to begin here with the text (by Goethe), from which the music diverges in principled ways—a technique, as I have argued elsewhere, that is basic to the Lied as a genre.[46]
Ganymede is a marginal figure in classical mythology: a comely Trojan youth carried off to Olympus by an eagle of Zeus, or by the enamored Zeus himself in the form of an eagle. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Ganymede's rape by the eagle was a fairly widespread icon of homosexual love, both in poetry and (especially) in the visual arts.[47] By the eighteenth century, this tradition was in eclipse, but some trace of it seems to have guided Goethe when he
[45] From Freud's case study of the famous paranoic Daniel Paul Schreber, in Freud, Three Case Histories , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1963), 173n .
[46] I have argued this most fully in Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 125–70. See also my essay "The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies , ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln, Neb., 1986), 200–236, which also contains an analysis of Schubert's "Ganymed."
[47] On this subject see James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven, 1986).
wrote his "Ganymed" around 1774. Goethe's version of the rape story is strongly revisionary: no eagle is involved, and neither is Zeus's desire. What drives this Ganymede into Zeus's arms is his own sexual awakening.
The poem, a monologue by Ganymede, falls into two unequal parts. The first portrays Ganymede's deeply erotic longings to embrace Nature, Beauty, the Earth—all terms gendered feminine in Western culture; the second redirects these longings skyward toward the masculine bosom of the "alliebende Vater" ("all-loving Father").[48] This reorientation does not involve a lapse or sublimation of eroticism; if anything, the reverse is true:
Es schweben die Wolken
Abwärts, die Wolken
Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe.
Mir! Mir!
(23–26)
The clouds hover down, the clouds incline themselves to yearning love! To me! To me!
Using a fragmentary, exclamatory rhetoric, the poem matches its rhythmic impetus to the urgency of Ganymede's desire. Much of this urgency stems from the lack of an object, or rather from the way that Nature both veils and reveals the object—we are not yet dealing here with libidinal desire. The poem is deeply object-centered, almost an allegory of what Freud would later call object-finding. Ganymede
[48] For text and a translation of the poem, see the Appendix. It is striking that the poem presumes the feminine affiliations in its first part, while it explicitly states the masculine affiliations of its second part. This difference (which Carolyn Abbate drew to my attention) can be taken to support a reading in which Ganymede concretizes an indefinite mass of desires by assigning them a masculine object.
The reading pursued here, which traces a movement from a feminine to a masculine object, is neatly encapsulated in the climactic image of the clouds' Schoß . The German word can mean both lap and womb. Thus, Ganymede is either borne off by masculine clouds that replace the famous eagle or born to Zeus's embrace from the womb of nature. (I take this opportunity to correct my mistranslation of "eurem Schoße" in both Music and Poetry and my essay "The Schubert Lied"; the mistake, which I thank Marshall Brown for calling to my attention, does not affect my arguments there.)
repeatedly personifies the natural objects to which he directs his desire; he turns all perception into a caress as he seeks another body to join his in a mutual embrace:
Ach, an deinem Busen
Lieg ich, schmachte,
Und deine Blumen, dein Gras
Drängen sich an mein Herz.
Du kühlst den brennenden
Durst meines Busens,
Lieblicher Morgenwind!
(11–17)
Ah, I lie on your breast, languish, and your flowers, your grass
press upon my heart. You cool the burning thirst of my breast,
lovely morning wind!
Schubert's setting of the poem (1817), which is as much Wolf's point of departure as the poem itself, is object-centered in the same way. Schubert idealizes the process of object-finding in extravagant terms, at some cost to the eroticism of the text. The effect is clearest at the close, when Schubert elaborates the phrase "Alliebender Vater" through three increasingly long and florid melismas.
Wolf's setting recasts Goethe's text as a libidinal idyll. The means to this end is the Lust -trope, which is applied in multiple, overlapping ways so that no element of the song remains unaffected by it. Wolf binds together Ganymede's convulsive advances toward fulfillment with music of undisturbed continuity; moments of textual bliss are enveloped by the pleasures of texture and sonority but not matched by musical closures. The song is as subject-centered as the text is object-centered. Wolf subdues the candid physicality embedded in Goethe's rhythm and imagery by subduing the physicality of the music. The song is prevailingly quiet; it avoids sustained climaxes; its pianistic texture emphasizes the high treble; its tessitura is undemanding. The emphasis thus falls on the fluid movement of desire itself as it slips from object to object, as it hovers, swells, and at every moment renews itself.
Unlike Wagner's, Wolf's Lust -tropes do not focus on specific textual climaxes. Instead, they are diffused throughout the song, as
independent of the text as libidinal desire is of its objects. At certain moments, one trope or another does crystallize into implicit commentary on the text, but never with enough dramatic force to impede the prevailing impression of an endless, self-delighting flow of desire.
The most fundamental of Wolf's Lust -tropes is realized at the level of large-scale tonal movement. Cast in ternary form, "Ganymed" is in D major. Both the first and the final sections begin with an extended (and perfectly straightforward) harmonic projection of the augmented triad
The middle section falls into two parts. The first consists of a simple D-major progression; the second is an ambiguous passage that concludes with a sudden tonicization of
The harmonic processes of Wolf's "Ganymed" thus shuttle between diatonic and whole-tone allegiances. D major forms a lucid and strongly cyclical tonic, but it is a tonic heard continually against the structural projections of a scale that can have no tonic, that can neither accumulate nor release harmonic tension, that encompasses tritonal movement with perfect fluidity. A more complete harmonic realization of libidinal dynamics, of recurrent attachment within a context of pure mobility, would be hard to find.
Cadences also play a major role in Wolf's Lust -trope technique—or, rather, their absence does. There are precious few of them to be found, and of these none is a perfect cadence. More important, the primary large-scale process in the song is the gradual dissolution of cadential movement. As the ecstatic union between Ganymede and Zeus draws nearer, the prospect of matching it with a culminating cadence on the model of Tristan und Isolde dwindles and disappears. Thus the articulation of harmony in "Ganymed," like the underlying
Example 26
Wolf, "Ganymed." At the close of m. 40, the dominant of
occurs in the parallel location in m. 38 fails to appear. It is replaced
by a dominant of D at the start of m. 41. Is it coincidental that the
arpeggios in mm. 38 and 40 outline a half-diminished seventh—the
basic sonority of the Tristan chord?
harmonic conception, exceeds even Isolde's Transfiguration in radicalizing the Lust -trope—that is, in taking a rapturous deferral as the trope of fulfilled desire.
The anticadential process unfolds about as follows:[49]
1. The conclusion of the first section begins with two cadences to the tonic sixth chord (Example 27a). These are sufficient to establish the tonality, but they are also rhythmically and registrally unobtrusive, almost tacit.
2. The middle section begins on an interrupted cadence and generates no cadences of its own—except to the tritone.
3. The recapitulation begins with a rhythmic displacement that conjures away the articulation of a seemingly inevitable cadence (Example 26, mm. 41–42). The effect is all the more telling because the recapitulation begins with the first root-position triad in the song.
4. Later, the recapitulation alters the second of the paired cadences by which the first section establishes the tonic,
5. The vocal line ends over a tonic six-four chord, which some other song might use to herald a full cadence. Not this song. Instead we are given a piano postlude that repeatedly echoes the quasi-plagal move from iv7
[49] This process may, incidentally, be understood as Wolf's principal critique of Schubert's setting, which is virtually an exaltation of the cadence—not only at the close, but even at phrases like "Lieg ich, schmachte."
Example 27
Wolf, "Ganymed."
sonority, here coaxes a root-position tonic into the transitional role. To the last measure, his "Ganymed" identifies fulfillment with ecstatic deferral.
What is true of harmonic cadences in the song is equally true of melodic ones. Ganymede's vocal line never comes to rest, and it is at its most ecstatic where it is most restless—notably in the important parallel phrases "Unendliche Schöne" and "Umfangend umfangen," which end on the seventh of a dominant-seventh chord. No vocal phrase in the whole song ends on the first degree of a triad, let alone a tonic triad. In any but the most local sense, there simply are no melodic cadences in this music. Wolf also takes pains to elongate the syllable Lieb wherever it occurs, a technique applied to both key terms in the phrase "der sehnenden Liebe." The emphasis is another way of favoring the subject over the object, the movement of desire over the goal of desire. A similar emphasis arises from the tendency of the vocal line to conclude its phrases with a melodic descent, as if to embody a desire that continually folds back on itself, that avoids the climactic intensities of the tenor's highest notes. Only once does the voice rise as high as the G at the top of the staff.
Wolf's harmonic and melodic processes are paralleled by a large-scale rhythmic projection of the movement of desire. Ganymede's vocal line is a model of suppleness and fluidity. Its phrases never begin on the downbeat of a measure, and they end there only once or twice, as if by chance, during the first half of the song. It is continually syncopated but never locked into strong cross-rhythms. Its declamation is perfect, but deliberately smudges points of textual closure. In sum, like libidinal desire, the vocal line responds to fixities and boundaries by sliding past them.
As the song proceeds, the accompaniment undergoes a process of rhythmic loosening, as if the voice were drawing the rest of the music into Ganymede's sphere of all-enveloping desire. The piano part of the first section is largely foursquare, with steady quarter-note motion in the left hand and steady eighth-note motion in the right. The closing measures of the section introduce dotted figures in cross-accents that form a rhythmic transition to the middle section, where the right-hand part is continuously syncopated. The second half of the middle section advances on the fluidity of the first; it introduces
sixteenth-note figures that swirl upward in the left hand, the first six measures of them in the irregular pattern
The desire represented by Wolf clearly possesses an immeasurably greater independence from its object than its counterpart in Wagner, but I have not yet commented on the most radical aspect of this independence, its explicit bisexuality. Ganymede's desire turns from a heteroerotic to a homoerotic object, a turn that on a psychoanalytic reading is enhanced rather than diminished by the fact that the new object is an all-loving father. Neither Goethe nor Wolf articulates any difference in quality between Ganymede's desire for nature and his desire for the father; the two desires are equally physical, equally sensual, equally imbued with yearning. Wolf affirms this equivalence, simply and without fuss, by his handling of sectional divisions. Both outer sections of the ternary form trace a movement from recognition to impulse. The first section begins as Ganymede hails springtime as his beloved, and ends with his urgent wish to grasp natural beauty in his arms. The recapitulation begins as Ganymede proclaims that his desire has changed direction, and ends with his even more urgent wish to reach the father's bosom. The musical parallelism between these sections testifies to their libidinal parallelism. As far as desire is concerned, a difference in object is no difference at all.
Some well-placed thematic cross-references arise to confirm this principle. Most notably, the setting of "Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne" with reference to natural beauty finds an echo in the setting of "der sehnenden Liebe" with reference to the father. We have already remarked on the similar tie between "Unendliche Schöne" and "Umfangen umfangend." Ganymede's desire, however, is inclined not only to disregard the gender of its object, but also to
dismantle the gender of its subject. The ease with which Ganymede evades metrical and harmonic boundaries in his vocal line, all the while coursing from one love object to another, would suggest a feminized character to a late-nineteenth-century audience, a personal subject that shuttles undecidably between a masculine and a feminine identity. Gender, in this context, is no longer even a pretext for desire; it is simply a repository for erotic images.
In conclusion, a reflection: It is commonplace to speak of a "hot-house atmosphere" when describing fin-de-siècle eroticism, as if sexuality had condensed into a palpable sultriness around the year 1890. It may well be that this habit is no more than a metaphorical projection of the libidinal split between desire and its object. As free-flowing subjectivity, libidinal desire invites representation by rhetorical figures that deemphasize its material, corporeal dimension without rendering it intangible. Hence desire as water, as humidity, as excess of light or darkness. To put this another way, libidinal desire is detachable from the human body. The traditional identification of the body as the lower part of human nature, a site of shame, dirt, and disease, no longer need carry over to a desire conceived of as libido. Libidinal representations, therefore, open up the unprecedented possibility of idealizing sexuality as the means by which the body transcends itself. What I hope to have shown in this chapter is that the music of the late nineteenth century develops this possibility as intelligibly as any other cultural practice of the age.