The Hermeneutics of Lament: A Neglected Paradigm in a Mozartian *Trauermusik’ Laurence Dreyfus Music Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Oct., 1991), pp. 329-343. ble URL: bttp//links jstor.org/sici?sici=0262-5245% 28199 1 10%2910%3A3%3C329%3ATHOLANS3E2.0,.CO%3B2-%23 ‘Music Analysis is currently published by Blackwell Publishing, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at butp:/\vww jstor.orglabout/terms.huml. ISTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/wwww jstor-org/journalsblack hum Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR isan independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to ereating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals, For more information regarding JSTOR, please contaet support @jstor.org, hupulwwwjstororg/ Wed Nov § 16:44:53 2006LAURENCE DREYFUS ‘THE HERMENEUTICS OF LAMENT: A NEGLECTED PARADIGM IN A MOZARTIAN TRAUERMUSIK In this essay, I present an analysis of Mozart's Adagio and Allegro in F minor, K.594 (1790), in an attempt to reflect on some methodological issues underlying music analysis in general, issues that bear especially on the interpretation and criticism of instrumental music. In my reading of this admittedly unusual piece, originally composed ‘for an organ in a clock’ — Mozart’s description of the work in his catalogue entries of 1790 ~ I try to support the view that the analytic selection of the most significant objects within a piece of music needs to be relatively independent of the systematic tonal grammar that shapes its overall form. In other words, analyses of musical signification, if they are to aspire to more than a manipulation of the harmonic system itself, must inevitably provide a sense of how musical signs take on meaning by appealing to genres and styles whose concepts lie outside the piece. From this vantage point, I obviously take issue with analysts such as Schenkerians for whom great works are inspired unfoldings of a pre- existing monistic system of voice leading. Yet at the same time I also part company with much humanistic criticism (whether in the hands of Tovey, Cone or Rosen) which, in its readings of individual works, routinely privileges schematic form over other musical parameters. To my mind, these approaches tend both to exaggerate the importance of large-scale syntagms (tonal form) and to neglect relationships between inflected paradigms (e.g. parallel passages). This imbalance not only results, I think, in a methodological weakness from a logical point of view but, far worse, amounts to a kind of benign betrayal of musical experience, which, if one is honest, is far less in thrall to the sequence of events ~ ‘the myth of passage” = than most analysis is prepared to admit. While it would be silly to suppose that the nominal order of musical events and processes is ever unimportant (a point that cannot be underscored too emphatically), it seems to me crucial that one take stock of an implied consciousness ~ a musical memory, if you will ~ whose fundamental impulse is to dart back and forth between present and past, comparing and contrasting like Music aNatysts 10:3, 1991 329musical objects both internal and external to the work at hand. This active hermeneutic can be thought of as exploring the nexus where musical meaning is both produced (by the composer) and received (by players and listeners). ‘Mozart’s Adagio and Allegro, commissioned as a memorial tribute to Field-Marshal Gideon Baron von Laudon (1717-90) and intended to be realized on a mechanical organ in Count Deym’s Kunstkabinett, has long been admired for its depth and complexity, though many writers have been struck that such profound music should have been composed for a mechanical medium, which, given the spectacle of a machine inside an imitation mausoleum emitting ‘an exquisite funeral piece’, can only have trivialized the grave melancholy inscribed so remarkably within this work.’ ‘Mozart considered the work in any case significant enough to list it in the ‘catalogue of all {his] works’, where it is found, together with proper incipits, sandwiched in between the D major String Quintet, K.593, and the Bs major Piano Concerto, K.595. ‘As an example of a Trauermusik for an important national hero ~ the Field-Marshal had liberated Belgrade for the Austrian emperor Joseph II in. the war with the Turks in 1789 — K.594 displays appropriate musical signs at the opening of each section of the work: a chromaticized Jamenzo bass for the Adagio and a victorious fanfare for the opening of the Allegro (see Ex. 1). As I shall try to show through the analysis, it is the subtle trans- formative relationships between these two signs that constitute an index of the greatness of the piece. For rather than isolating two discrete topics and their associated rhetoric — the solemn public eulogizing of a military hero versus the bombastic recollection of his glorious deeds — Mozart encloses the second within the first so that the heroism and struggle in the Allegro (the less persuasive section of the piece) ultimately surrender (in the framing Adagios) to a lament, the power of which eclipses any connection to the worldly subject memorialized by the commission. Instead, the lament evokes a remarkably desperate portrayal of personal grief quite out of keeping with the commercialized conceit with which Deym hoped to attract paying customers to the Baron’s ‘mausoleum’. In the end, Mozart relates precious little about the Field-Marshal but quite a lot about music’s ability to evoke that recursive state of mourning which seems, in its seem- ingly timeless duration, to return perpetually to the site of loss and despair. "Mozart’s means towards this extraordinary depiction is a work in neo- Baroque high style, a style that did not always come naturally to him. This was, in fact, a style with which Mozart apparently struggled and yet which, towards the end of his life, seems especially to have seduced him with its promise of other-worldly necessity and enduring validity. Yet one should not lose sight of the fact that, for Mozart, high style was a matter of great imagination: it was not a matter of copying ‘old masters’ but of reinventing a musical metaphysic through the use of extreme chromaticism, strict part writing and imitation, contrapuntal artifice and, above all, an appeal to 330 Music ANaLysis 10:3, 1991nearly extinct gestures from the musical past. “The extinct gesture in this case was the falling minor tetrachord of the Jamento, a familiar sign since the seventeenth century and heard at the opening of K.594 in the conventional chromaticized variant resulting in six chromatic semitones starting on f and ending on c. A common casting of the traditional /amento bass was of course the chaconne-like ostinato of a descending bass ground (in triple time) over which variations were spun out that altered both the rhythmic patterns and the harmonic inflections of the bass line. The most remarkable fact about the framing Adagios in K,594 is that Mozart begins by invoking a recognizable neo-Baroque topic of lament and then goes about reinventing a new and far more plastic constructive principle for the exegesis of this basic idea. ‘The analytical graphs in Ex. 2 show some aspects of this Mozartian hermeneutic by isolating two related parameters of the inflected paradigm: harmony and voice leading are highlighted on the left while melody and rhythm are accentuated on the right. Reading down the graphs on either side separately shows the set of projections which expound on the subject matter of the lament, while superimposing the right upon the left column, and then reading down the page demonstrates the astounding lack of proportion between related members of the paradigm, a feature that contributes to the distinctively discursive character of this beautiful work. Before going any further I must own up to a disingenuous sleight-of- hand concealed by the graphs, a sleight-of-hand that must nonetheless be countenanced because it was, in my view, Mozart’s primary mechanism in crafting the Adagios, and is the key to understanding the power and novelty of the piece. I'am referring to the fact that the lamenting hexachord is not a stable chromatic descent but mutates into several different diatonic versions. This trick would amount to no more than analytic alchemy of the most spurious kind if Mozart had not gone out of his way to shape key phrases in patterns of descending spans of sixths. Consider in this light the melodic outlines in the treble line of the score to the following phrases: bs 8-11, bs 12-20, bs 21-4, bs 25-30. Surely these diatonic falling sixths are scarcely coincidental, especially since they are framed at cither end by the reigning chromatic hexachord. As far as I can guess, this innovative kind of *hexachordal mutation’ ~ shuttling between the chromatic and diatonic species ~ is a Mozartian invention, and quite a remarkable tool it is. For by crafting such a plastic shape for the ostinato, ‘Mozart is easily able to vary the style and ‘diction’ of the lament, not to mention that it can also be connected to the bass line which begins the opening fanfare in the Allegro.’ Consider the passage at bs 8-11, where the funeral oration evokes the memory of an untroubled past by its innocent succession of sixth-chords underlying the hexachord in the diatonic major mode, or the passage at bs 21-8, where the musical rhetoric strikes a pathetic tone (in diatonic minor mode) with its sighing appoggiaturas citing contemporary operatic tragedy. It might not even be exaggerated to Music aNatysts 10:3, 1991 331Ex. 1 Mozart, K.594 a) bs 1-39 Adagio 332 Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991“THB HERMENEUTICS OF LAMENT Ex. 1 cont. b) bs 40-4 sce page 336 Music ANaLysts 10:3, 1991 333LAURENCE DREYFUS Ex. 1 cont. ©) bs 118-54 1 Adagio 334 Music aNatysts 10:3, 1991Music aNaLysis 10:3, 1991 335Ex. 1 cont. b) bs 40-4 Allegeo claim that next to this brilliant bit of musical wizardry, albeit in miniature, another neo-Baroque artifice from nearly a century later — the last movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony — will sound formulaic and stodgy, since it too is based on an evocative ‘mixed-mode’ ground bass yet treats the ostinato as a rune engraved in stone to which the piece pays unfailing obeisance. Let me return to the analytic graphs, which also highlight devices that propel the diction of K.594 into high style. There is, first of all, the trans- formation of a bass ostinato into a treble line, an occasional migration in Baroque chaconnes and passacaglias here turned into a permanent resettlement. In addition, there are canonic stretti (such as at bs 33-4 and bs 133-9), simple diminutions of the hexachord (bs 29, 31ff.), several versions of the hexachord in motu contrario (bs 35-6 and in the concluding Adagio) and, most striking of all (in bs 138-42), a contrapuntal com- bination of three statements of the hexachord in diminution over a retrograde of the original chromatic bass. Finally the graphs display a quasi-permutational scheme according to which forms of the hexachord (whether descending, ascending, chromatic or diatonic) begin on ten out of the twelve possible chromatic scale degrees. It would be foolish to claim that every device is strictly carried out according to a precise compositional algorithm or that every identified occurrence represents an exact compositional intention, (The graphs also show several scattered, loose applications of the basic structural prin- ciples.)’ Instead, I am suggesting that Mozart relied on a self-imposed regimen of variations so as both to compose the piece and to impart its meaning. Moreover, it is surprising how much musical territory this regimen was actually able to claim: nearly all the material in both Adagios can be chalked up to some transformation of the basic hexachordal paradigm, a consideration that I shall take up shortly when considering the role of the large-scale design. Before leaving the graphs, let me return to the question of musical 336 Music aNaLysts 10:3, 1991experience in both hearing and pondering K.594. My goal, as I put it earlier, was to include a sense of an honest phenomenology within the analytic and interpretative scheme. In the simplest sense of this honesty, I would submit that the most powerful rhetoric of the Adagios in K.594 is not the trajectory of large-scale tonal processes or the contrast between open and closed forms but rather the multiplied jumble of recompositions to which the hexachordal paradigm is subjected. Yes, there is certainly a kind of informal, associative logic to the order of the paradigmatic scheme: by and large there is a gradual move within each Adagio from the simple to the complex, as in the ‘metric modulation’ within the opening Adagio from slow and regular to fast and irregular, or from a plain statement of the diminution to the canonic treatment of the theme. But a far more pronounced impression is that Mozart’s inventive treatment of the lament is so multifarious that one cannot keep track of all the variants: instead, the recursive conceit of lament - the sign that spins out cycles of similitude ~ convinces us that one cannot easily escape from the expression of grief. As music, then, a lament figures as both mimesis and catharsis. A corresponding musical memory that grasps this experience is not therefore predicated on a precise recollection of events, but is rather inclined to random recall and even partial amnesia, since it is so overladen with similarities. While the paradigmatic layout of the graphs is not intended to record this phenomenological stance, the vertical arrangement of inflected ideas encourages us to think about the piece as a sum of aural traces rather than a process entailing a significant sense of absolute order. Substituting for ‘narrative’ linearity is therefore a set of cyclical gestures that circumscribe a central topic. To put it another way: although the piece itself proceeds as though it were an arrow moving in time, the musical understanding it imparts pursues a more roundabout and exegetical path. ‘This inclusion of a ‘phenomenological’ dimension in my explication of the inflected musical paradigms should in no way be taken to mean that I wish to impute any anarchy to the nominal musical ordering of the piece. Indeed, the linear scheme of events in the Adagios is premised, as we all know, on a super-rational harmonic scheme: the conventions we subsume under the rubrics of harmony and form. Example 3 illustrates the tonicized scale degrees on which the internal harmonic areas are ordered: after an initial move to the relative major (where the diatonic hexachord is first displayed), the opening Adagio moves towards a prolongation of the dominant. The second Adagio begins identically but only passes briefly through the relative major (and the tonic) to set up a contrasting dominant pedal that closes with a perfect cadence in the tonic. This tonal path is easy to plot, though different analysts will accentuate ifferent features: some will identify different points of articulation, others ll observe another segmentation of the main harmonies, while still others will try to fill in the overall voice leading and the movement of a generative Music ANALYsts 10:3, 1991 337LAURENCE DREYFUS.“THE HERMENEUTICS OF LAMENT Music ANALysis 10:3, 1991 339LAURENCE DREYFUS Ex.3 ep descant in an abstract middleground. The question that one must put to each of these readings is the relative importance assigned to the harmonic design in assessing either the structure or the meaning of the piece. My ‘own sense is that the greater the amount of organic tissue assigned to the formal shape of the piece as a whole, the more one is inclined to neglect objects such as the hexachordal lament and its transformations that I have been describing. One purpose, therefore, in presenting the paradigm and its transformations first was to appropriate enough analytic territory so that it would feel intuitively comfortable to relegate schematic form to a subordinate position. To put it simply: if the composer expended so much energy on varying a simple idea in ingenious ways, how much interest could he have had in planning a hierarchically determining formal design that controlled the shape of local events? In a sense, then, making schematic form an ancillary compositional concern supports the theoretical claim that, by privileging paradigms of invention, one does greater justice both to analytic adequacy and to the representation of compositional intentions (should one’s taste favour either of these mandates). Perhaps a paradigmatic method does no more than help to distinguish the general features in a piece of music from the specific ones. Whereas harmonic conventions dictate (by and large) that certain kinds of utter- ances take place at appropriate occasions (expository statements at the beginning, contrasting events shortly thereafter, concluding events at the end and everything else in the middle), the identification, analysis and interpretation of paradigmatic utterances give this piece its meaning. At the same time, though, one need not give up on the importance of the relative sequence of musical materials, either as an element of musical ‘rhetoric’ or as a mechanism that generates meaning. It is just that analysis commonly confuses temporal ordering (e.g. first, then second) with contiguity and proximity (e.g. this next to that). If one disengages one parameter from the other ~ hearing relationships across the span of inflected paradigms - more interesting observations can often be brought to light. 340 music aNatysts 10:3, 1991Consider; finally, Ex. 4, which juxtaposes paradigmatic readings between relatively parallel passages in the two Adagios. Here are passages that Mozart surely intended to be heard in temporal succession and yet are separated from one another by six minutes or so of intervening music. The second passage can only be understood as a frighteningly laconic com- pression of the two diatonic hexachordal descents (which had occupied nearly thirteen bars on first hearing) into four bars. And only by hearing ‘version 2° against ‘version I’ is it clear that Mozart infuses the later utterance with a surprising sense of resignation by landing hastily on the tonic in b.128, Yet on its own the passage cannot produce this effect: one must first be aware that the second descent from f to ay at bs 127-8 proceeds too abruptly, a message related only by a subjective memory. ‘The tortuous bars that follow (bs 129-32) — clearly the most anguished in the entire piece — though they do not seem constructed around a ‘positive’ form of the hexachord, actually contain its negative, ‘shadow’ pitch-class set: whereas the prime form fills intervallic space of the lamenting, falling fourth from f down to c, the complementary set fills a corresponding, rising intervallic space from gh’ to c* to ‘complete’, as it were, the chromatic octave. This unique ascending figure not only rises to reach its climax on the ominous dominant pedal, but draws on an especially jagged passus duriusculus to represent its pain, Yet another dimension to this extraordinary passage is that the rising set of sixth chords can be heard as displacing the position and reversing the direction of the sixth chords in bs 8-11. Asa result, the special amalgam of hope, resignation and despair in the two parallel sections is maintained in a kind of bizarre equilibrium, although the affective sense of the later passage is radically heightened both in degree and in kind, Ex.4 Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991 341‘The Adagios in K.594 are of course unusual for Mozart in their severe restriction of compositional inventions to a single, significant paradigm. ‘This is one way of defining what it meant for Mozart to write in high style. (In other works one has to focus on sets of paradigms.) The point, then, of taking an exceptional example to reflect on a general methodological issue is that the analysis pinpoints a central value displayed by masterpieces ever since Romantic historiography and idealist philosophy conspired to ‘canonize’ them: the ability of musical works to demonstrate that they think. By showing an extreme example of this kind of thinking, I hope to have highlighted analytic procedures that help to articulate it, even when, in other general contexts, Mozart’s musical thought is more of a relaxed affair." ‘The aesthetic achievement of Mozart’s little funeral piece, K.594, can be understood in part through the traditional dialectic of innovation within tradition, though this hardly does justice to the peculiarity of the piece within the composer's oeuvre. The high style attained by the elevated diction of the Adagios did not, interestingly enough, depend on the usual invocation of Bachian or Handelian fugue — as, for example, in the other F minor companion piece for the Laudon memorial, K.608 ~ but rather took as its task the construction of a new kind of Trauermusik. For by mutating the descending hexachord by species, Mozart at once broadened the field for the potential topics of the discourse, and by disabling the metric regularity of the traditional /amento, did away with the formalized ritual of dance rhythms so as to begin speaking in that personalized ‘musical prose’ so beloved of his Romantic successors.’ It is in this sense that K.594 can be heard neither as a generic funeral piece nor as a particularly ‘exquisite’ (auserlesen) occasional work which, as Count Deym put it in a newspaper advertisement for the mausoleum, ‘is perfectly suited to the object for which it was designed’ (dem Gegenstande, fdr welchen sie gesetzet wurde, ganz angemessen ist). Instead, by virtue of its extraordinarily affecting representation of grief, the piece must be seen to have both eclipsed and escaped its occasional function, entering into that pantheon of cherished musical works whose substance and aura invite a sustained analytic gaze. NOTES 1, This was not the work which Mozart, in a letter to Constanze of 15 October 1790, said bored him and for which the intended organ mechanism was ‘too childish’ because of its little treble pipes. The Laudon mausoleum was housed in a separate room in the exhibition and its organ mechanism was undoubted- ly on a fairly grand scale, though its bass range did not extend below c, See Wolfgang Plath’s foreword to Neue Mozart Ausgabe, Vol. IX/27. The four- hand version of K.594 through which most of us know the work was an carly 342 Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991nineteenth-century arrangement: the autograph, now lost, had laid out the work in a four-stave format, judging from surviving early nineteenth-century copies. 2. The Allegro does not otherwise make any use of the hexachord. 3. Examples of these are the extra chromatic notes at b.17 and b.132, the aborted canonic stretti at bs 33 and 34, and the incomplete statements of the hhexachord in canonic stretto at b.143 4. This notion of articulating musical thought that attempts to grasp large domains of a musical work is something akin to and yet distinct from traditional organicism, which has always been committed to demonstrating the unity of parts and wholes. As a method interested in musical thought, paradigmatic analysis is akin to organicism by insisting on a web of connections and opposed to it in denying the supernatural importance of ‘whole’ forms. Yet another departure from organicism is a rejection of an exclusive focus on a hermetic musical work. For musical thinking inevitably draws on relations that are external to pure structure: I am thinking, of course, of relations to other musical works via systems of resemblances as well as to concepts accessible via language. 5, Other notable earlier successes in this genre are the lamenting Tombeaux for Lully and for Ste Colombe (1701) by Marin Marais, found in his Pies de voles, Book 2. Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991 343