The Orpheus myth and the powers of music 9781576471760

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page vii)
Abbreviations (page viii)
Introduction (page xi)
Chapter 1: Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero (page 1)
Chapter 2: Plato's Orphic Song (page 29)
Chapter 3: The New Song (page 43)
Chapter 4: Mundus est fabula (page 61)
Chapter 5: Transcending Aestheticization (page 85)
Chapter 6: The Modernist Orpheus (page 103)
Chapter 7: The Non-Finale (page 129)
Chapter 8: Conclusions (page 149)
Bibliography (page 165)
Index (page 177)

Citation preview

The Orpheus Myth and the Powers of Music

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The Orpheus Myth

and the Powers of Music by Vladimir L. Marchenkov

INTERPLAY: MUSIC IN INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUE No.7

Magnar Breivik and Siglind Bruhn, General Editors

PENDRAGON PRESS Hillsdale, NY

Other Titles in the INTERPLAY Series No.1 Masqued Mysteries Unmasked: Pythagoreanism and Early Modern North European Music Theater by Kristin Rygg (2000) No.2 Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting by Siglind Bruhn (2000) No.3 Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representation of Religious Experience Eleven essays edited by Siglind Bruhn (2001) No.4 The Musical Order of the World: Kepler, Hesse, Hindemith by Siglind Bruhn (2005) “No.5 Neo-Mythologism in Music: From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb by Victoria Adamenko (2007) No.6 Sonic Transformations of Literary Texts: From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis Nine essays edited by Siglind Bruhn (2008)

Cover design by Stuart Ross

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marchenkov, Vladimir L. The Orpheus myth and the powers of music / Vladimir L. Marchenkov. p. cm. -- (Interplay: music in interdisciplinary dialogue ; no. 7) Includes bibliographical references and index.

Copyright 2009 by Vladimir L. Marchenkov

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Vil Abbreviations Vill

Introduction XI General Theme XI “The Orpheus Myth” Xi Method Xil Synopsis XVi

Chapter 1: Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero 1

Shamanistic Syncretism 2 The Mystagogue 13

, The Aesthetic Phase 27 20 Powers of Music Chapter 2: Plato’s Orphic Song 29 Plato’s Musical Mythosophy 34 Musical Theosis 4] The Orpheus Myth in Plato’s Philosophy of Music 30

Chapter 3: The New Song 43 _ Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Medieval View of Music 44

Polyphony 57 Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius 60 The Dynamics of Cultural Genera 54

Chapter 4: Mundus est fabula 61 Renaissance Magic, Humanist Scholarship, and Opera 62

From Symbol to Allegory 70 From Mythopoeia to Melopoeia 83 Chapter 5: Transcending Aestheticization , 85

The Enlightened Eurydice | 87 , From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty 91 Music in the System of the Arts 101 v

vi Table of Contents Chapter 6: The Modernist Orpheus , 103

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia 104

Quest for Reality 117 Quest for Transfigurative Song 127

Chapter 7: The Non-Finale 129 The Grand Finale of Modernism 131

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism 133 Powerless Music and Powerful Non-Music 144

: Chapter 8: Conclusions 149 Form, Cultural Genus, Music 149

Transcendence and Immanence 154

Index 177

The Song of Wonder — 160

Bibliography 165

Acknowledgments It is impossible to mention here everyone whose support and interest have sustained this project. [can express my profound gratitude only to those

most immediately involved. Tom Carpenter read the first chapter and provided guidance in artistic and mythological matters of Antiquity. The grant I received from Ohio University College of Fine Arts to study ancient , Greek vase-painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York resulted in insights that were as surprising as they were hoped-for. They were also made possible in large part by Joan R. Mertens’s friendly and expert assistance at the Museum. My colleagues and students at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts were unfailingly supportive and I continually drew on their encouragement. I have repeatedly resorted to Scott Carson’s expertise in ancient Greek philosophy. My editors Magnar Breivik and Siglind Bruhn showed remarkable patience and wisdom without which this book was unlikely to see the light of day. Jeffrey Kurtzman made numerous valuable suggestions upon reading the manuscript. Where I have failed to follow his advice it is no doubt to my own detriment. My only excuse is that, while making no claim to exceptional originality, the thoughts that I have pursued 1n this book came from deeply personal reflection and demanded to be expressed in a corresponding manner.

And, most important, my wife, Ludmila, and daughters, Maria and Darya, are the first and the final cause of my work.

Vil

Abbreviations , A G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art AMC _ W. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults

BT F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy CPJ I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment DE M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment DM A. Losev, The Dialectics of Myth EM E, Cassirer, An Essay on Man GR W. Burkert, Greek Religion MRM _— G. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic MWC — G. Agamben, The Man Without Content OMM _ J. Warden, ed., Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth

PS G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit PSF E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Two: , Mythical Thought

PT M. Ficino, Platonic Theology SL G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic

vill

To Eurydice

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Introduction General Theme The subject of this book is the Orpheus myth as a factor in the history

of beliefs about the powers of music. From its earliest appearances to this day the myth has been used by sculptors, painters, poets, musicians, and philosophers to express their ideas about what music can do. The story of _ Orpheus and Eurydice puts artistic creativity in the center of human experience and links it to such fundamentals as love, death, religion, and philosophy.

It is artists’ tale about themselves, their art, and their place in the universal order of things. The Orpheus myth is also the subject of a large scholarly literature. It has been examined by classical philologists, historians of religion,

philosophers, ethnographers, and literary scholars—to name only the most obvious disciplines. In his study of the myth the classical scholar Charles Segal looked at Orpheus as a symbol of “the relation of art to life.”' This book pursues, mutatis mutandis, a similar goal, with emphasis on music. No — such investigation has been undertaken so far, although there is a considerable amount of commentary on Orpheus as a musician in all of the areas

mentioned above. |

The answer to the question about the powers of music at any given time

is far from obvious or simple. Today it is presumed almost a priori, for example, that music’s effects are confined to human psychology—at the broadest, to man as a political animal. Unlike earlier eras, we tend to think of the cosmic or mystical dimensions of music only in terms of quaint poetic

license. Modernity has taken reality away from the beautifully ordered universe and from the touch of ineffable transcendence, and passed it to the human subject and society. One of the lessons taught by the study of myths, however, is that what is merely assumed is fraught with the greatest problems.

Myths are stories about such things; they are the original articulations of that | which is silently consented to, and precisely for this reason they are among the most problematic creations of the human mind. Today’s subjectivist view of music, in other words, springs from yet another myth that implicitly contains a long history of insights, conflicts, and biases. To reflect on its genesis is necessary for grasping its strengths and limitations—and even, perhaps, for discerning the possibility of moving beyond it. ' Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet, 1, italics added.

xl

xu Introduction ‘‘The Orpheus Myth” The astonishing diversity of Orpheuses and Eurydices in history makes one wonder whether they can each be brought under a single heading. Martin

L. West, an authoritative writer on ancient Orphic poetry, points out the

singer’s evanescent identity when he remarks that over the centuries “Orpheus was all things to all men.”” This is a warning against hasty generalizations and it should be heeded—although not to the extent that Orpheus

be denied his own unique voice, physiognomy, and history. But what is meant by “the Orpheus myth’? Its ancient core consisted of several types of materials. There was a more

or less stable cluster of traditional stories about the magical singer of that name. These included Orpheus’ s participation in the journey of Argo and his

descent to the underworld in order to rescue his wife. There were also cosmogonic and ritual texts that were attributed to Orpheus, most notably Orphic theogonies, hymns, and funerary inscriptions. Then there were theological commentaries on myths and mystical teachings attributed to Orpheus.

The most famous of these is contained in the papyrus found at Derveni in 1963. In its subsequent history this core was built upon and transformed by artists in all genres, theologians, and philosophers. The phrase “the Orpheus myth” in the broadest sense encompasses the sum total of these metamorphoses. In fact, one of the things that this book attempts to show is that, baffling though this sum may be, there is a fundamental continuity of meaning that links together Orpheus the artist, lover, mystagogue, and mythopoet. In short, Orpheus is viewed below as a mythical figure that gives shape to the belief that music is of utmost importance to the life of the cosmos, civilized society, religious cult, and individual self-awareness.

Method 2 In order to understand what ideas and beliefs this myth conveys at any given time one must ask three closely related questions: what does the story say, what kind of story is it, and, finally, what does it mean’? The questions arise from the following considerations. At different times in its history different narratives belonging to the Orpheus myth were favored, while others withdrew into the background or were dissociated from the main body of the myth altogether. The most vivid example is the singer’s wife, Eurydice, who is absent from the voyage of

2 West, The Orphic Poems, |. |

Method xiii Argo, appears as a nameless, generic character in other early sources, but then, as the myth evolves, grows into a richly suggestive symbol and intri-

cate, powerful personality. Another example is the outcome of Orpheus’s . expedition to the underworld. His success and failure are two contrapuntal - themes in the web of widely varying interpretations. One must therefore follow the historical changes in the form of the myth. Secondly, the same story about Orpheus could belong to different cultural genera depending on how it was intended and perceived. By a cultural genus is meant, roughly, a distinct area of culture as a whole. It is close to Ernst Cassirer’s (18741945) symbolic form that refers to such things as language, myth, science, religion, and art. Helpful as it 1s, Cassirer’s term bears, nonetheless, neoKantian connotations that the more neutral, if admittedly vague, “cultural

genus” should help avoid. The genera that are of key importance in the chapters that follow include myth in the technical sense, art, and philosophy. _ The Orpheus myth has been widely used in all three of these domains but in each of them its import varies.

Paraphrasing Theodor Adorno’s (1903-1969) opening statement in Aesthetic Theory, one could say that the only thing that goes without saying in myth theory today is that nothing goes without saying.” The category of myth has been thoroughly problematized to the extent that the very existence —or at least the universal nature—of the object that it denotes is now suspect. “It 1s entirely possible,” remarks Fritz Graf as he surveys the existing theories of myth, “that in speaking of ‘myths’ in non-European societies we are projecting our own conceptions, which go back to fifth-century Athens, onto those societies.”* No one writing on myth can any longer automatically presume that his or her readers will have shared assumptions. The field is

_ $trewn with old theories over whose remains new ones wrestle with one another. It has become necessary to display one’s own colors before venturing into interpretation; one must explain what one means by “myth.” To a

| mythologist this presents a dilemma. There is an inherent weakness in merely explaining the theory that one has decided to rely on, for the choice must be defended rather than simply declared. To require a full defense, however, seems unreasonable: given the vast discourse engendered by the problem of myth, such a defense can easily take up the whole book and still remain unconvincing. Perhaps this is why Roland Barthes in his Mythologies offers theoretical observations mostly in 3 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1.

* Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction, 56; Graf refers to the work of Marcel Detienne, Claude Calame, and his own, in which the concept of myth is questioned as an Eurocentric construct.

xiv | _ Introduction the course of interpreting examples of contemporary myths, summarizing them eventually into acoherent whole. A somewhat similar strategy is adopted in the present study. The argument about what constitutes myth and how it interacts with art and philosophy is spread over the entire book. Specific aspects of myth are addressed in conjunction with specific instances of the

Orpheus myth throughout its history. To give only four examples, the | miraculous element in myth is dealt with in the next chapter, as part of the

, explanation of how myth is related to mysticism. Another basic element, namely myth’s immediate relation to reality, is the focus of chapter 3, that addresses Plato’s treatment of Orphic ideas. A detailed discussion of the question of myth vis-a-vis allegory is delayed until the chapters on Orpheus in Baroque and Enlightenment opera. And the analysis of the effect of modern

infinitism, 1.e., acceptance of infinite regress as rational spans the chapters from Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) to Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934).° It concludes with a critique of Adorno’s negative dialectic and of Jacques Derrida’s theory of philosophical language as circularly metaphorical.

The theory of myth that the book advances is derived from many sources, among which Ernst Cassirer’s and Aleksei Losev’s doctrines pro-

vide the dual guiding thread.° Briefly, myth is taken to be a tale about miraculous reality, i.e., a narrative that describes miraculous events and is considered to be true. Perhaps the most novel feature of the theory is an analysis, in conjunction with the miraculous, of the concept of mystery that leads, in turn, to the dialectic of immediacy and mediation. For this part of my argument I draw heavily on G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770-1831) analyses of this dialectic.’ The relation between these two aspects of thinking illuminates the logic of the Orpheus myth’s evolution from myth proper to an artistic image to a philosophically charged symbol. It casts a particularly helpful

light on the problem of myth in modernity and allows to avoid both the uncritical veneration and the hypercritical dismissal of myth.

> The term infinitism is derived from the German Infinitismus, used in Vittorio Hésle’s study Wahrheit und Geschichte: Studien zur Struktur der Philosophiegeschichte unter paradigmatische Analyser der Entwicklung von Parmenides bis Platon.

© The most extensive explication of these ideas can be found in A. F. Losev’s 1930 study Dialektika mifa, now available in English translation as The Dialectics of Myth. Losev subse-

quently developed his view in numerous works on ancient and modern mythology and . philosophy. The dialectic of immediacy and mediation is a constant theme in Hegel’s writings. The texts that are particularly important for my argument include Encyclopaedia Logic. Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, Hegel’s Science of Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit, The Philosophy of History, and Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols.

Method xv To put it in preliminary and unavoidably simplistic terms, as a myth proper the story of Orpheus is taken to be literally true; as a work of art it is presumed to be fiction; and in philosophical discourse it can fulfil a variety of functions ranging from allegorical illustration to figurative hypothesis to

a symbolic closing of an argument. If the story about Orpheus singing to rocks, plants, and animals is a myth, then the magical effects of his music are

accepted in earnest. If this story is a poetic account, then these effects are seen as a hyperbole, metaphor, or some other such figure but neither the author nor his or her audience think of them as literally real. When used allegorically, as in Horace’s Ars poetica, it is a mere illustration of music’s civilizing effect on human nature. And, finally, a philosopher may crown his argument with an Orphic myth, such as the vision of Er in Plato’s Republic, where it becomes mythosophy. The matter is vastly complicated by the fact that one and the same image can be multi-layered and belong to several, perhaps even all of these genera at once. Thus, thirdly, the meaning of the myth (in the broad sense) is determined both by its form and cultural genus.

. Such goals dictate an interdisciplinary approach. The material for the history of the Orpheus myth 1s drawn from literature, visual arts, history of religion, folklore, music history, and philosophy. Since the myth has been repeatedly interpreted by artists and thinkers this material requires an initial hermeneutic perusal which constitutes the first phase of the method. Analysis of the cultural genus to which this material belongs is necessary to determine whether the story should be read as a myth proper or some other type. The use of philosophy of myth is crucial here and, since myth must be defined in relation to art and philosophical thought itself, such an examination perforce becomes also a study in aesthetics, as well as a reflection on basic problems in philosophy. And, finally, this analysis should yield a philosophical grasp

of what the Orpheus myth means in terms of a particular conception of music’s powers. From what has been said it is clear that the book is to a large extent an

exercise in the history of ideas. Yet it is not undertaken solely with the

archivist’s purpose in mind. The motivating belief behind it is that knowledge of history is necessary for any attempt to “get to the truth” of any matter. This is true of philosophy even more than of historiography. What may seem at one time or another to be an immediate effect of music is in fact

mediated by a complex history of prior beliefs about its powers. The philosopher’s task is to know what the powers of music are—which means also knowing what powers it has been endowed with in the past.

xvi Introduction Synopsis The argument presented in this book can be divided into three mutually connected planes, corresponding to the three questions posed above. The first plane has to do with the external history of the Orpheus myth—primarily its

manifestations in the history of music. The second plane goes deeper into | this history and shows how the myth evolved gua myth. The third plane spells out the joint music-philosophical implications of the first two. The title of the next chapter, “Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero,” encapsulates the trajectory of the Orpheus myth from the archaic to early classical period in Greek culture. During this time Orpheus becomes a symbol of the universal

powers of music. His image evolves from a syncretic shamanic figure into the leader of a mystery cult and then into a character in the artistic renditions of the myth. Rather than being imposed from without, this evolution is driven by the inner dynamics of mythical thinking itself. Beliefs about the powers of music are increasingly subjectivized and aestheticized but their evolution is not successive: once Orpheus’ s new hypostases appear they become active factors alongside, rather than instead of, older ones. Without losing their universal nature, these beliefs are gradually specialized into cosmogonic, mystical, and aesthetic ones—all closely intertwined with one another. The rise of philosophical thinking manifests itself in the emergence of

intellectual reflection as an independent organizing principle of being. Mythical imagery is now transformed into a speculative doctrine of the musical-mathematical structure of the cosmos, i.e., the famous “harmony of the spheres.” Just as in shamanism and mystical cult Orpheus’s song connected different worlds, in Pythagorean cosmology and psychology music, too, is an harmonizing principle. This principle becomes, in turn, the object of intense mathematical, cosmological, and mystical speculation which lays the basis for further transformations of the Orpheus myth in Platonism. _ Even as he ridicules and chastises its popular forms, Plato accepts and further develops the speculative thrust of Orphism. The main themes of the Orpheus myth become the foundation of Plato’s own philosophy of music

that connects psychology with politics and cosmology. At the same time : Plato’s mythopoeia is not simply one of his modes of expression but is fundamentally rooted in his philosophy. His dialectic culminates in mysticism,

as will also be the case—openly so acknowledged—in both pagan and Christian Neoplatonism. As with miracle in myth, mystery in Bacchic cult, and reality in art, by highlighting the enigma of the world’s simultaneous unity and multiplicity Plato makes its resolution the first priority for philosophical thought. Plato’s mythopoeia is a way of disclosing the content, otherwise cloaked in mystery, of the hypernoetic realm. His myth-making

Synopsis xvil neither reproduces traditional myth nor completely dissolves the latter in | rationalistic allegorizing, but rather creates a hybrid form that can be called mythosophy. Music, now explicitly divided into an intellectual and practical aspect, links myth with philosophy, as well as the individual with the polis, the cosmos, and divinity. The medieval history of the Orpheus myth unfolds in the space defined

by interactions among three main elements: local mythopoeia, classical heritage, and Christian mythical and theological thought.® The story of the magical musician Sadko is an example of local mythology coming into initial contact with Christian myth. The Middle English poem Sir Orfeo 1s a product of assimilating the classical Orpheus to Celtic mythology. The third line

pursued in this chapter has to do with the anonymous treatise Musica enchiriadis (ca. mid-tenth century) that invokes Orpheus and Eurydice in

| order to lend metaphysical weight to the newly emerging art of polyphony. The mysticism that underlies the medieval outlook as a whole and is consciously affirmed by such thinkers as Johannes Scottus Eriugena (ca. 810ca. 877), serves as the soil for myth’s continued existence. This mysticism is the root of the medieval penchant for miracles; the miraculous nature of Orpheus’s musical powers—whether as a shamanic trickster, courtly knight, or metaphysical allegory—treinforces the medieval mind’s faith in the veracity of the ideas that his stories communicate. Music retains the powers that it had in late Antiquity but in medieval polyphony it also transforms

itself into the sonic expression of the Trinitarian view of the world. Polyphony is both the result of and a vehicle for the intensifying selfawareness of the human person who revels in her at once mysterious and rational relationship with the triune Absolute. The musical thought of the Renaissance aims to replicate the legendary effects of ancient music that Orpheus epitomized. In the hands of sixteenth-

century theorists like Girolamo Mei (1519-1594) and Vincenzo Galilei | (1533-1591) this project becomes increasingly aesthetic in nature. The longing for magic that was characteristic of Marsilio Ficino’s Orphism remains but it is now almost entirely subsumed under the desire to enchant

the audience. This is the context in which the Orpheus myth appears in Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio’s (1573-1630) opera L’Orfeo (1607). The main theme of L’Orfeo is man’s desire to vanquish nature in her cruellest aspect, death. In terms of cultural genus Monteverdi and Striggio’s

Orpheus still partly belongs to the project of the Renaissance and thus retains, if only residually, the features of the Ficinian magus.” But he is about * Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages. ? MRM 229-46.

XVIII Introduction to become a Baroque allegory, a mere phenomenal manifestation of the world’s underlying rational mechanism. The dissolution of Renaissance magical symbolism into the rationalistic

allegorizing of the early modern period retroactively casts light on a fundamental trait that was shared by both Antiquity and the Middle Ages but is now beginning to recede into the past: an inherently holistic view of the world. Early modern thought replaces this vision with the infinite regress of immanent universes. In contrast to Aristotle and Aquinas, the endless alter-

nation of causes and effects is now perceived as legitimate and even more rational than their sublation in a causa sui. This precludes the immediate oneness of a mundane phenomenon with its ultimate design, and as a result miracles become impossible. A miracle turns into a sign of falsehood rather than truth and myth, into a fable rather than a tale about the surest reality. Another process that undermines the possibility of myth is the closely related replacement of an immediate response to reality with scientific hypothesis. René Descartes’s (1596-1650) treatise Meditations on First Philosophy

(1641) is evidence, however, that this new course is quite problematic. A dramatic soliloquy, the Meditations culminate in reinstating God as both the most immediate content of consciousness (“clear and distinct concept’’) and the sole guarantor of the unity of human experience. God’s at once indispensable and fortuitous appearance in Descartes’ s argument is, however, that

of an operatic deus ex machina; far from recultivating the soil for myth Descartes only emphasizes the precarious nature of the connection between

the thinking subject and objective reality in modernity. Not only is Orpheus , an allegory now but the very conception of music’s powers that he conveys in Baroque opera is allegorical in nature. The theory of affects rests on the vision of a human being that is ruled by universal emotions no less certainly than nature is ruled by universal laws. In both cases a concrete phenomenon merely exemplifies these laws and can be replaced by an endless series of similar examples. The emerging modern scientist replaces the Renaissance magus while retaining the aim of control over these sprawling phenomena.

The initial overcoming of this allegorism is evident in Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) and Ranieri Calzabigi’s (1714-1794) opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). The opera is driven by the psychological drama between Orpheus and Eurydice. The world of nature metaphysics and royal politics, the twin hothouses of Baroque allegory, is left behind and the story unfolds within the human psyche. Orpheus and Eurydice (who finally begins to speak with a full voice) are now purely aesthetic phenomena; there are no traces of their mythical and magical past. Nor are Gluck and Calzabigi’s hero

, and heroine allegories but images of concrete human persons that evince the most poignant dilemma faced by the Enlightenment subject—that between

Synopsis | XIX faith and reason. The anthropocentric tendency that began in the Renaissance now culminates in subjective aestheticism. The powers of music shift accord-

ingly from vanquishing nature toward expressing subjective psychology. Touched ever so lightly by moralizing, art finally becomes pure play—the standing it could not fully attain either in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages.

Implicit in this treatment of the Orpheus myth are the ideas that are soon to | be elaborated in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and to serve as a source of inspiration for romanticism. It would seem, then, that no room is left for myth in the culture of the mature Enlightenment but this is not so. Despite its rationalistic bias, Kant’s thought contains the germ of myth. In his epistemology one finds two opposite

and unreconciled moves that justify, one explicitly and the other implicitly, immediacy as a necessary moment in thinking and experience. The explicit justification comes from Kant’s argument for the unity of knowledge and

phenomena; the implicit one is his immediate, faith-like acceptance of infinite regress in nature metaphysics. But, above all, Kant openly preaches naturalistic mysticism in his doctrine of artistic genius. The recognition and conscious elaboration of the dialectic of immediacy and mediation occurs later, in the work of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel’s unique conception of art in general and powers of music in particular at once fulfils the promise - and reaches beyond the boundaries of modern thinking. As such it was and, apparently, still remains without its own artistic equivalent. In the opera Sadko (1895) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and Vladimir Belskii (1866-1946) Orpheus is required by romantic nationalism to wear a local costume and by current realism to serve the good of the society. The use of the newly rediscovered medieval legend in it is inspired by the idea that a nation’s age-old wisdom is sedimented in its traditional lore. Romanticism leans heavily on this tenet for its claim that the powers of

art stem from that lore. But the opera simultaneously advances a vision of society’s progressive march into the future. The musician Sadko is now - almost outshone by the romantic sea-princess Volkhova, while the other, earthly Eurydice of the opera serves to ground him in the “real” world.

Colorful though she may be, the fantastical Eurydice is nonetheless sacrificed for the sake of the mercantile city of Novgorod.

The status of myth in romanticism poses some of the most difficult problems both for myth theory and aesthetics.’ On the one hand, romantics

are acutely aware that myth is rooted in the immediate operation of '0 This status is the subject of Manfred Frank’s study Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen tiber

die neue Mythologie (The Coming God: Lectures on the New Mythology). Cf. also his Einfiihrung in die friihromantische Asthetik: Vorlesungen (Introduction to Early Romantic Aesthetics: Lectures).

xx Introduction consciousness. On the other hand, they propose to revive myth through art, 1.e., in a highly mediated manner. Furthermore, along with immediacy the key element of myth, miracle, was expelled from the precinct of reality by the Enlightenment. It is now consigned to the fairy tale, i.e., the genre that flaunts the unreality of its subject-matter. Rimsky-Korsakov’ s opera belongs precisely to this genre. Romantic imagination is, however, irresistibly drawn to the miraculous. Its difference from Antiquity and the Middle Ages in this regard consists in the fact that reality is now confined to the subjective realm and the type of the human subject that is asserted most forcefully is not a hero, knight, or saint, but artistic genius. The inscrutable nature of this genius forms the core of romanticism’s aesthetic mysticism. The only way for this genius, however, to bring the world and human experience, fragmented as they are by the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment, into a unified whole is to place this ultimate synthesis in the ludic realm of art.

| Somewhat eclectically, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko is informed by both fantastical romanticism and critical realism. It may seem, therefore, that the romantic view of art is counterbalanced by the realist one that helps restore the artwork’s connection with reality. But just as in romanticism reality is aestheticized, in realism it is entirely hypothetical. There is a deep affinity, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) notes, between rationalistic epistemology

and the realist aesthetic outlook.'! Thus both in romanticism and realism

objective reality is dissolved and turned into an object of uninhibited manipulation by the artistic genius and the scientist, respectively. The former

collapses reality into a ludic fairy tale, while the latter reduces artistic creation to technological production. Vladimir Solov’év (1853-1900), by contrast, advances the view of art

as theurgy. As part of his overall project to reconcile mysticism and rationalism, theurgy was Solov’év’s attempt to sublate (in the sense of the . Hegelian aufheben) both romantic aestheticism and realist pragmatism. His theurgy was a post-romantic Christian-Neoplatonist revival of Orphic theosis: as it continues the cause of divine creation, Solov’év believed, humanity becomes one with God. The composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) draws

inspiration from Solov’év but at the same time brings to the ultimate pitch romanticism’s subjectivist implications in his design for the Mysterium—a

grand synaesthetic ritual that will supposedly lift the world into a free, spiritual state.'* Scriabin brings romantic Orphism to its culmination but as Cf. his essay “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, 3-43. "2 de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic and Taruskin, “Scriabin and the Superhuman,” in his book Defining Russia Musically: Historical Hermeneutical Essays, 308-59.

Synopsis xxi he does so he finds himself facing the limits of art. He begins as a hyperromantic and, despite some subsequent sobering-up, remains to the end in the grip of extreme subjectivism and aestheticism. The imagery of divine play

is prominent in Scriabin’s music, poetry, and mystical speculation but the place of divinity is now defiantly usurped by the human artist. The transfigurative cosmic powers of music rest, in Scriabin’s view, solely on artistic genius. An attempt to break beyond the aesthetic subjectivism to which romanticism confines art is made in Russian symbolism. This attempt receives an especially articulate form in the work of the poet and theorist, Viacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). Orphic roots are consciously affirmed 1n his version of theurgy. From Solov’év Ivanov takes veneration of the religious-philosophical tradition; from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the emphasis on art combined with an eager anticipation of a new era. The result is at once traditionalist and modernist. I[vanov’s ideas about the powers of music are as exalted as Scriabin’s but, in contrast to the composer’ s extreme self-reliance, the poet invokes religious, humanistic, and artistic tradition as his ally and

inspiration. |

The most conspicuous musical rendition of the Orpheus myth in the late twentieth century, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Zinovieff’s opera The Mask of Orpheus (1986), is also an attempt to summarize the Orphic tradition. The form that the Orpheus myth assumes in this opera is a collection of virtually

all classical hypostases of the magical singer and his wife; the extent to which the opera is shaped by scholarship is quite remarkable. Inspiration wears here, as it were, both Apollo’s wreath and the white coat of a research

scientist. In a striking contrast to Ivanov’s holistic vision of tradition, however, Birtwistle and Zinovieff bring out the multiplicity of the myth’s variants. At the same time the opera is structured in a palpably rigid manner and in this sense is far from chaotic. Armed with charts, drawings, and other quasi-scientific paraphernalia the ostensibly rigorous libretto battles with the unruly proliferation of Orpheuses and Eurydices. Birtwistle’s music evokes the atmosphere of a mystical rite but the opera’s characters now wander in an irrevocably fragmented world. The opera is not a myth in any sense of the word; it is a purely aesthetic event. In fact, it takes demythologizing to the limit. Even “The Children’s Story,” the outline upon which Zinovieff builds his libretto, refuses to be a fairy tale. In a Jungian reduction, Orpheus’s catabasis is explained as a trivial, if vivid and even horrifying, dream. Previously the possibility of miracles, no matter how tenuous, was still preserved thanks to the residual | unity of modern consciousness. By the late twentieth century, however, the ©

constructed nature of the thoroughly mediated underpinnings of the

XXxil Introduction Cartesian-Kantian subject became too obvious to serve as ground for any immediate synthesis. Kant spoke of genius as an inexhaustible life-giving force; Roland Barthes (1915-1980) diagnoses its death. The only memory of mystery and myth in this fractured world is a futile longing for them. The mystery of life is hidden in the folds of a forbiddingly complex artwork. As

in chaos theory, the unknown acquires now the shape of impenetrable complexity. Such a consequence logically flows from accepting infinite mediation, which Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) articulates as “negative dialectics” and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), as the vicious circle of the metaphoricity of language. The dissatisfying nature of this rationalistic infinitism makes itself felt in the hopelessness that hovers over the events of the plot. One realizes that only mysticism can underlie an optimistic view of Orpheus’s powers; the

enlightened rationalist inevitably feels that they can be nothing but a delusion. Replacing reality entirely with play—which is the characteristic gesture of poststructuralism—is but a helpless attempt to conceal the selfinflicted defeat of modern aestheticism. Birtwistle and Zinovieff’s opera longs to be magic but its detachment from real life is even more glaring than that of Scriabin’s Mysterium which at least sprang from a fervent hope to transfigure the world. Adorno’s despair seems justified: music is amessenger from a utopian realm, a melancholy choir of fleshless specters over a reality that has been consumed by mass-produced simulacra. This ghostly picture only underscores, however, the need to learn once again to hear music as a truly transfigurative praxis—a vision that can no longer be sustained either

by a reversion to myth and mysticism or by adherence to abstract rationalism. The solution must be sought in surmounting these one-sided

views and in discerning the mutual necessity of both immediacy and mediation in thinking.

Thus in terms of its form the Orpheus myth projects the images of music’s omnipotence, the unity of psychology and cosmology, mystical nature of song, and its eschatological import. The combined themes of music, love, and theosis are the unifying factors in its proliferation.

The specific meanings that these themes acquire are defined by their status in culture. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages the myth is still preserved as a myth proper—even alongside the unceasing elaboration of its aesthetic and philosophical versions. The status of the story as a myth is first seriously threatened in the modern period, with the decline of the medieval holistic and

teleological view of reality. The progressing subjectivism of the modern period, combined with the dissolution of objective reality into an aesthetic, hypothetical phenomenon, undermine the status of myth in culture. The -. underlying causes of this process have to do with the dialectic of immediacy

Synopsis XXII and mediation in thinking: the former provides the soil for myth, whereas the

latter is responsible for abstract rationalism. But this rationalism itself contains the germ of myth and mysticism because it inevitably makes immediate leaps to absolute claims. Thus the denial of the unity of the world and human experience is at once the cause of modern mythophobia and the

source of its own closet mythology. At the end of the modern period, in postmodernism, the irrational nature of this denial becomes fully apparent. The impossibility of myth thus turns into a symptom of enlightened reason’s own fatal flaw. And, finally, ideas about the powers of music evolve from a syncretic

omnipotence in early Antiquity to mournful impotence in the late avantgarde. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice highlights the deficiency of both mystical and aesthetic views of music. The former is optimistic about transfiguring the cosmos and the human psyche but the constantly shifting, living reality slips away from its hasty grip. The latter is locked into a ludic space and ultimately confesses its inability to transform reality. The Orpheus myth has now become a reminder of the mystic’s unfulfilled promises, but also of the losses caused by mythophobic rationalism. The story poses the demand for overcoming the equal one-sidedness of both views of music, and for surmounting their limitations. The Orphic voice sings today of the need for a dialectical metanoia. The full significance of its message, however, can present itself only in the light of the myth’s long and rich history.

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| Chapter 1

Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero’

The initial stage in the history of the Orpheus myth prior to its absorption into Plato’s philosophy of music spans the time from the archaic

to classical period (the seventh to mid-fifth centuries BC). The myth’s evolution during this time includes three main phases. In its earliest instances the image of Orpheus has shaman-like features. In the next phase the myth

develops forms that show a tendency toward intellectual reflection. This tendency finds its most typical expression in Orphic theogonies. As a result of reflection there emerges a more explicit recognition of the ineffable essence of life, both cosmic and individual, that confronts the increasingly — self-aware human subject. The new awareness manifests itself in Bacchic mystery cults in which Orpheus and writings attributed to him are a prominent

factor. The third phase consists in the transition from the cultic-theological state of the myth to its artistic representations. The myth becomes an object

of aesthetic contemplation in the work of visual artists and poets. : Although this process did unfold in successive stages, it would be misleading to construe it as a straightforward progression from initial naiveté to rational self-consciousness, “from myth to reason.”” Rather, the myth’s different stages of growth coexist simultaneously and new interpretations do

not supplant older ones. The early artistic renderings of the myth do not abolish mythopoeia—nor do they leave the latter intact. At the same time, the aesthetic attitude, opposed to mythical consciousness though it is, arises from none other than this consciousness itself. This process underlies changing ideas about the powers of music. In its earliest forms the myth articulates a syncretic view, in which the intellectual content of music-making is indistinguishable from actual performance and sound. As the myth undergoes initial reflection in the theogonies, its imagery receives speculative treatment, which results in relatively abstract notions half-emerging from the mythical narrative. The intellectual aspect of music "An abridged version of this chapter appeared as the article on “Orpheus as an Ancient Music-Philosophical Symbol” in Hera’s Peacock. An International Thematic Interdisciplinary Journal, No. 1: Orphée (2), May 2006, 13-30. * For a discussion of problems associated with such progressions see Richard Buxton’s introduction in: From Myth to Reason?, 1-11.

|

2 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero begins to detach itself from performance and concrete embodiment. In an Orphic theogony it appears as the semi-allegorical pair of Harmony and

Persuasion, and in mysteries it manifests itself as the use of music for psychological effect. Finally, in artistic representations the powers of music become an object of intense aesthetic contemplation: artists hold music up

before their spectators and audiences, and marvel at it. Such thoughtful observation heralds explicit recognition of an intimate link between music and the individual psyche. This, in turn, becomes a prelude to Plato’ s inquiry into the powers of song. It is crucial to avoid viewing the intellectualization of music as though early Greek thought were discovering some preexisting Ideal Forms behind actual music-making. The intellectual aspect of the art of music was being elaborated, among other things, through increasingly

speculative interpretations of music mythology in which Orpheus was perhaps the most important vehicle that carried and shaped a constantly evolving set of ideas.

Shamanistic Syncretism The Orpheus myth as it first appears on the Greek cultural scene projects a view of the powers of music that can be called syncretic—that 1s, music is thought in it to affect all aspects of human experience at once, without the differentiation that one finds in the myth’s later history.

The Greeks believed that, as one of the Argonauts, Orpheus predated Homer and Hesiod. But his name first appears in extant literature when the poet Ibycus, who lived in the sixth century BC, mentions him as “famous Orpheus.”? A similar reference is found in Pindar’s sixth Pythian ode, where

Orpheus is called “the father of songs." Identified by an inscription, the singer also appears as an Argonaut in a metope from Delphi, dating from before or around the middle of the sixth century BC.” What this name may have meant to Ibycus, Pindar, and the sculptor of the relief, however, can be

gleaned only from later renditions of Orpheus’s story. The version best known today comes from Virgil and Ovid, who wrote half a millennium later; in between there are relatively numerous but fragmentary allusions ; Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 1; Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus, 3; and Segal,

Orpheus, 14. ,

* Pindar, Pythian IV 176, in The Odes of Pindar, 68. > Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus, 1-3; Timothy Gantz points out that the musician standing next to Orpheus in the relief may be Philammon, another son of Apollo (Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, 344).

Shamanistic Syncretism | 3 scattered across literary, historical, and philosophical sources. There is also a fair amount of visual representations of Orpheus from the sixth century onward. Taken together, this evidence allows us to form an impression of

how the Greeks imagined and understood Orpheus. He was a magical musician, pillar of the Greek civilization (culture hero), founder of mysteries, and author of mythological poetry marked by an emergent tendency toward metaphysical speculation. His music had power over nature, human beings, and even the gods. He went to the underworld to rescue his wife from death and was later torn limb from limb by women in a sacrificial Bacchic ritual.° Related to this group of narratives were the Orphica, an assortment of writings attributed to Orpheus in which a mystical doctrine, recognizable but none too coherent, was expounded.’ The possibly shamanistic roots of the Orpheus myth have been noted by a number of scholars. Mircea Eliade points out that the myth “displays several elements that can be compared to the shamanic ideology and techniques.”

The most prominent among these is Orpheus’s descent to the underworld. Others include his healing powers, musical magic, association with animals, and prophesying. “Even his character of ‘culture hero,’” writes Eliade, “‘is

not in contradiction to the best shamanic tradition—was not ‘the first shaman’ the messenger sent by God to defend humanity against diseases and

to civilize it?” Finally, Orpheus’ s death at the hands of bacchantes, after which his severed head floats to Lesbos and utters prophecies there, is “clearly shamanic” in Eliade’s opinion.* Neither Orpheus’s association with the Bacchic cult nor Orphism, on the other hand, are shamanic in nature.’ Further, in Orphism it is perhaps only the funerary gold plates, Eliade thinks, with inscribed instructions to the deceased how to proceed in afterlife, that have a shamanic character.’°

° These motifs have been repeatedly summarized in the literature on Orpheus. Cf. West, The Orphic Poems, 4 and OMM vii-ix. | ’ Guthrie’ s book referred to earlier is the most extensive, if dated, argument for the existence of an Orphic cult in pre-Classical and Classical Greece. The sceptical examinations of evidence by Linforth and West are the definitive statements against a unified Orphic movement.

Emmet Robbins suspends judgment, linking the question to the problem of Orpheus’s historical existence (see his article “Famous Orpheus,” in OMM 12-14). Although the question of Orphism as a religious movement seems to have lost its poignancy in contemporary scholarship, it resurfaced in Radcliffe G. Edmonds’s 2004 book Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets. ® Eliade, Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 391. -? Bliade, Shamanism, 388, 391-2. '° Bliade, Shamanism, 392.

4 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero Eliade’s observations are taken seriously by Martin West who believes that the image of Orpheus was shaped by shamanism, spreading from India and Bactria to Scythia and Thrace.’ From Thrace it reached the Greek world, and Orpheus’s Thracian origin reflects this process. As a result, West points out, Orpheus is not an epic singer of the Homeric type; rather he is “one who can exercise power over the natural world and who can countermand death itself, a ‘shamanistic’ figure.”’'* As a shaman, Orpheus can travel enormous distances, negotiate with the gods, bring messages from other worlds, and report his adventures and esoteric knowledge in songs.” Fritz Graf is convinced, by contrast, that the roots of Orpheus’s image

lie not in shamanism, but in the initiation rites of aristocratic warriors.“ West’s argument does not, strictly speaking, preclude such a connection. There is an intimate link, according to West, in world traditions between shamanism and the initiation rituals that reenact the motifs of death and rebirth. These are in turn similar to the story of Dionysus Zagreus—an Orphic deity who is destroyed by the Titans and restored to life by his father Zeus.'° Be that as it may, all commentators agree that for the Greeks Orpheus was, as Graf puts it, “the most gifted musician and singer” and “an author of theological poetry.”!® The magical effects of Orpheus’s music on the natural world are among

the most frequently evoked motifs of the myth. Even inanimate nature responds to the singer’s art, although it is odd to call “inanimate” beings that do so.'’ Virgil remarks, for example, that the mountain Rhodope felt wonder and joy for Orpheus.'* Diodorus Siculus speaks of Orpheus’s song calming

sea storms and of his prayer winning the favor of a sea god.’” Euripides mentions rocks and trees following the singer and Ovid gives a long list of plants that gather around Orpheus as he sings.”” Animals are equally i West, The Orphic Poems, 146.

] 2 West, The Orphic Poems, 4. 13 West, The Orphic Poems, 5. West refers to a number of authors who also regard Orpheus , as a Shaman: K. Meuli, E. R. Dodds, A. Hultkrantz, M. Eliade, and W. Burkert (p. 5 n8). '4 Graf, “Orpheus: A Poet Among Men,” 98. > West, The Orphic Poems, 143-6. '© Graf, “Orpheus,” 99.

'” Cf. Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus, 32-5. '8 Virgil, sixth Eclogue, ll. 27-30; quoted in Segal, Orpheus, 15.

? Diodorus, Library IV 43 and 48.57; referred to in Graf, “Orpheus,” 96. 0 Cf. Bacchae 560-564 and [phigenia in Aulis 1211-14, in Euripides, Bacchae. Iphigenia in Aulis. Rhesus, pp. 63-4 and 297, respectively; Ovid, Metamorphoses X 90-106 and XI 1-3, pp. 70 and 121.

Shamanistic Syncretism 5 responsive to Orpheus’s song. “Above his head flutter innumerable birds,” writes Simonides of Ceos, “and from the dark-blue sea fishes leap straight up in harmony with his lovely song.””’ Ovid summarizes a tradition of many centuries when he draws a picture of universal grief at the singer’s death: The mourning birds wept for thee, Orpheus, the throng of beasts, the flinty rocks, and the trees which had so often gathered to thy songs; yes, the trees shed their leaves as if so tearing their hair in grief for thee. They say that the rivers also were swollen with their own tears, and that naiads and dryads alike mourned with disheveled hair and

| clad in garb of somber hue.”

Orpheus surrounded by spellbound plants and animals is easily the most popular scene in visual representations of the singer throughout Antiquity and beyond.” Segal remarks that this bucolic aspect of the Orpheus myth suggests the dissolving of “barriers between man and nature [. . .] in a world full of beauty, song, and love.” The singer’ s connection with nature is not, however, always so peaceful. It becomes antagonistic, for example, in the episode with the Sirens from the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes.” The Sirens, demonic creatures with female faces and bodies of birds, are daughters of the river-god Achelous and Muse Terpsichore. Their chthonic past is evident from their association with

Persephone, whose retinue they once belonged to. Like Sphinx, another female monster, they are destroyers of men. They are well-known from an episode in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey. Orpheus engages the Sirens in a contest, in which he outsings and outplays their “liquid melody.” “The girlish voices were defeated by the lyre,” writes Apollonius, “and the west wind [. . .] carried the ship off. The Sirens’ song grew indistinct [. . .]””° Whereas Odysseus avoids the Sirens’ lure by immobilizing himself and becoming pure hearing, Orpheus makes their song ineffectual by contrasting *! Simonides, frag. 567, in Page, Poetae Melici Graeci; quoted from Segal, Orpheus, 13. *2 Ovid, Metamorphoses XI 44-49, p. 123. 3 Pausanias describes a sculptural group on mount Helicon in which Orpheus was surrounded by “beasts of stone and bronze listening to his singing” (Guide to Greece IX 30.4, p. 372). 4 Segal, Orpheus, 6.

29 Apollonius’s work is late (usually dated in the fourth century AD) and its use for interpreting the archaic Orpheus myth is admittedly problematic. Nonetheless, while the specific details of his rendering of Orpheus should be treated with caution the motif of Orpheus as a culture hero, i.e., someone who brings humanity out of its natural state into a civilized one, may have had archaic roots. 26 Apollonius of Rhodes, The Voyage of Argo: The Argonautica IV 893-900 and 906-910, pp. 171-2.

6 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero it with his own and thereby rendering it meaningless.”’ Chthonic feminine magic, still half-submerged in nature, meets its rival here, the masculine Apollonian hero-singer. This was a theme that repeated itself in other episodes of the Orpheus myth, particularly in Ovid’s description of the singer’s contest with the chorus of bacchantes.”® Just as it affirmed the unity of man and nature, the myth also pointed to

music’s role in assuring cohesion within human community. Euripides represents Orpheus’ singing as work-song. “At the mast in the ship’s middle,” he writes, “Orpheus’ Thracian lyric sang out the boatswain’s orders

of far-moving strokes to the oarsmen, now for swift motion, now for rest from the pine-wood oar.””’ There are similar episodes in Apollonius’s Argonautica. More dramatic, however, is Orpheus’s part in quelling strife among his companions, when he joins the other Argonauts in restraining Idas. The nature of the song that calms the quarrel is significant: it is an excerpt from a theogony beginning at the reign of Uranus and Gaia and ending on the eve of Zeus’s ascent to power.’ The myth is used to call to order a hero in a rebellious, titanic mood. The discord arises from Jason’s despair, which provokes Idas’s impiety. Two opposite extremes of the human psyche—insecurity and hubris—threaten to tear the group apart. Myth sets

the despair and the resulting turmoil in a universal theogonic context and thereby puts them in their place. The “deadly strife” of which Orpheus sings sunders the original unity of things—only to be quelled by a new order. This will in turn be changed, as Orpheus’s audience surely knows, when the older

generation of the gods, along with the happy Titans, is toppled and Zeus enthrones himself. Orpheus’s companions, proud heroes, listen humbly to the

silence that falls after his song. Once again they know their place in the divinely ordained course of things, and Jason is their Zeus. Orpheus’s impact on human society also has an economic side. In a rare

interpretive move, Themistius (fourth century A. D.) credits him with the , introduction of agriculture, linking it to the singer’s religious role. “The cultivated fruits which husbandry offers us,” explains Themistius, “have a civilizing effect on human nature in general and on the habits of beasts; and ?7 The most insightful interpretation so far of the Sirens episode in the Odyssey belongs to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno who view Sirens as symbols of mythical thought and Odysseus of “instrumental” intelligence or abstract rationalism (DE 46-7).

28 Ovid, Metamorphoses XI 15-19, p. 121. Cf. also Marcel Detienne’s remarks on the Bassaridae in his essay “L’ Orphée de la Mer Noire” (The Orpheus of the Black Sea) in Les Métamorphoses d’Orphée (The Metamorphoses of Orpheus), 16-17. *? Euripides, Hypsipyle, frag. 1.3.8-14; quoted from Segal, Orpheus, 13. *° Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 1.450-520, pp. 48-50.

Shamanistic Syncretism | / the animal passions in our hearts it excises and renders harmless.”*’ Remarkably, Themistius blends together the features of a poet, hierophant (revealer

of sacred knowledge), and culture hero.” In the social effect of Orpheus’s art one can already discern the power that music and poetry were believed to have over the individual human psyche. This power extends from gentle persuasion to healing to guiding souls between the worlds of the living and the dead. The singer’s descent into Hades to bring back his wife is doubtless the most well-known motif in the Orpheus myth. It first occurs in Pseudo-Eratosthenes, a fifth-century author, who is retelling Aeschylus’s tragedy Bassaridae that is no longer extant. He merely mentions the fact that Orpheus went down to Hades “because of his wife,” who remains nameless.* There is no direct reference _ to Orpheus’s singing in the underworld, but the excerpt is preceded by the story of his lyre, originally given by Hermes to Apollo, passed on to Orpheus, and then, finally, elevated to the starry sky. Orpheus is commemorated in the

constellation of the Lyre as a musician of magical ability and PseudoEratosthenes probably presumes that the singer’s musical skill gained him access to the world of the dead. At least this is how Orpheus’s “scheming” minstrelsy figures in Phaedrus’s derisive remarks in Plato’s Symposium. Stl, although Orpheus is sent “away from Hades empty-handed,” his failure is that of a lover (whose love fails to overcome his fear of death), not a musician. Plato’s version of the story may well be his own invention that puts the

traditional tale on its head. But in general the crucial question of whether Orpheus was successful in bringing his wife from the world of the dead is shrouded in ambiguity already in the earliest evidence. Emmet Robbins believes, for example, that this evidence suggests the tradition of a successful Orpheus.” Pseudo-Eratosthenes gives no indication either way, however, nor 31 Themistius, Orationes XXX 349b; quoted in Guthrie, Orpheus, 40-1. >? | inforth mentions Themistius’s remark in conjunction with vegetarianism as a tenet of the Orphic way of life. He notes that there is no evidence for the legend in classical times but admits that it may still be old (Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus, 70n). A recent revival of the

of Music. : discussion of music in conjunction with economy, political power, ritual sacrifice, and

prophecy can be found in Jacques Attali’s 1977 spirited essay Noise: The Political Economy °3 Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Katast. 24; quoted in Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 722. Gantz thinks that Pseudo-Eratosthenes’s account may only partially coincide with Aeschylus’s version of the story. On the names of Orpheus’s wife in Antiquity see Robbins in OMM 16. 34 Plato, Symposium (179d) in Hamilton and Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato,

Including the Letters, 533-4. All subsequent references to Plato are also to this edition. Somewhat misleadingly, Michael Joyce uses the name “Eurydice,” which is not mentioned in the Greek original, in his translation of Phaedrus’s speech (see note 33 above). °° OMM 16.

8 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero is Orpheus’s putative success entirely unequivocal in Euripides’s Alcestis. The meaning of Admetus’s farewell speech to his wife, whom he says he would rescue if only he had “the lips of Orpheus,” is a matter of controversy among commentators.*° William Guthrie finds that it implies Orpheus’s success, whereas Timothy Gantz suspends judgment. “Perhaps Euripides knows a version,” he remarks, “in which [Orpheus’s] wife was successfully reclaimed, but Admetus may well mean simply that he would not repeat Orpheus’ s crucial mistake.””’’ Here again, however, as in Plato’s case, doubt

may be cast over the general outcome of the journey, in which Orpheus’s musical-magical prowess is not the sole factor. The other, perhaps more important, determining cause of this outcome is his ability (or inability) to follow a divine interdiction. In other words, already at the time of Attic tragedy those who comment on the myth focus more on the singer’s ethos rather than his magic in its “technical” aspect. In Plato’s philosophy of music

the link and the conflict between these two sides of artistic creativity will become the chief concern. Though different in other details, the renditions of Ovid and Virgil are almost identical in this respect. Both accept that Orpheus’s singing sways divine judgment, and what frustrates the singer’s near triumph over death is his erotic passion. In Virgil, the lament of distraught Orpheus puts a spell over “the very house of Death and deepest abysses of Hell.” The “fearful king” of Hades, the Eumenides, Cerberus, and the souls of the dead are all enchanted.*® Ovid’s Orpheus is more of a rhetorician; he bemoans his loss but also argues his case before the gods. The effect of his music, however, is similar: Persephone and her consort cannot refuse the poet’s plea.” For the

moralizing Virgil the passion that lets Orpheus down is subita dementia, sudden frenzy, whereas for the romantically inclined Ovid it is extraordinary —almost praiseworthy—love. Accordingly, Virgil’s Eurydice reproaches her

husband for his furor, while Ovid’s barely whispers a forgiving farewell

(vale). 36 “Had I the lips of Orpheus and his melody to charm the maiden daughter of Demeter and her lord,” assures Admetus, “and by my singing win you back from death, I would have gone beneath the earth, and not the hound of Pluto could have stayed me, nor the ferryman of ghosts, Charon, at his oar. I would have brought you back to life” (Euripides, Alcestis 357-

363, p. 278). |

>7 Guthrie, Orpheus, 31; Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 723.

38 Virgil, Georgics IV 469-484, in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, p. 253.

9 Ovid, Metamorphoses X 40-47, p. 67. 4 Virgil, Georgics IV 489 (incautum dementia cepit amantem; Eurydice calls it furor [IV 495]); Ovid, Metamorphoses X 58-63.

Shamanistic Syncretism 9 That Orpheus’s music was so omnipotent was assured, first of all, by his divine lineage. Guthrie even advances a hypothesis that Orpheus himself was

once a god of vegetation, “a form of Dionysus [. . .] a pre-Greek deity of similar function whose place Dionysus usurped.’”' The chthonic side of Orpheus, Guthrie argues, suggests that he may have been a figure similar to Hyacinthus, Persephone, Adonis, and the Egyptian Osiris; like Orpheus, these gods and goddesses mediate between the underworld and the upper world.” Guthrie’ s theory lends further weight to the divine origin of Orpheus’s music

but it seems to have remained without a following. More common are allusions to the various ways in which Orpheus is associated with the gods. According to Apollodorus, his father was either Oeagrus, a Thracian river god, or Apollo; his mother, Muse Calliope.** Orpheus is thus affiliated to Apollo and the Muses in a literal sense. As was mentioned above, he also received his lyre from Apollo, which in mythical parlance probably means not only the instrument itself, but also a gift for magic and prophecy.

And yet Orpheus is a mortal man, not a god. His humanity casts a singular light over his art. When his music is depicted as influencing the gods, Orpheus’s image acquires the features of a hero, 1.e., a strong individual prepared to challenge the most formidable authority. An echo of | this heroism can be heard in the legend, according to which Orpheus was

struck down by Zeus’s lightning “because he revealed sayings in the mysteries to men who had not heard them before.’”“* This is a sudden Promethean side of the usually gentle, pious singer. His piety was, however,

unequally or at any rate ambivalently distributed among the gods. The triangle of Dionysus, Apollo, and Orpheus is no less ambiguous than the rescue of Eurydice. It suggests, however, that Orpheus serves as a mediator and bond between the two gods. Aeschylus’s lost tragedy unfolded around,

according to Pseudo-Eratosthenes, his conversion from a follower of Dionysus to that of Apollo. “Having gone down into Hades because of his wife,” the excerpt goes, “and seeing what sort of things were there, he did not continue to worship Dionysus, because of whom he was famous, but he thought Helios to be the greatest of the gods, Helios whom he also addressed as Apollo.”* The conversion brought on him the wrath of Dionysus and the

singer was killed by the female followers of the god. This may not be a “! Guthrie, Orpheus, 53. *2 Guthrie, Orpheus, 55-6.

8 Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology 1 3.2, p. 30. “4 Pausanias, Guide to Greece IX 30.5, p. 372. Graf agrees with Linforth’s suggestion that this

myth is of pre-Thracian origin and points to other occurrences of it “Orpheus,” 85). *° Pgeudo-Eratosthenes, Katast. 24; quoted in Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 722.

10 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero titanic rebellion against divine rule in general, but it is certainly a story of a conflict between a mortal hero and a god. The outcome repeats the common theme of Attic tragedy: the futility of opposing the order of things sanctioned

by fate. Euripides brings this motif to a full pitch in a chorus that is frequently quoted in the literature on Orpheus: I myself, in the transports of mystic verses, as in study of history and science, have found nothing so strong as Compulsion nor any means to combat her, not in the Thracian books (tablets) set down in verse by the school of Orpheus, not in all the remedies Phoebus has given the heirs of Asclepias to fight the many afflictions of man. She alone is a goddess without altar or image to pray before. She heeds no sacrifice. [.. .] All Zeus even ordains only with you is accomplished. [. . .] There is no pity in the sheer barrier of your will.

This is different from Plato, Virgil, and Ovid. Failure awaits all effort

to bend the will of the gods, the chorus is saying, which means that Orpheus’s singing cannot succeed in persuading them either. It is unclear from the passage whether divine necessity (ananke) or Zeus rules the world, and the difference would be significant. We shall see in an Orphic theogony an attempt to clear up this point. For the time being, the upshot of the observations made so far is that Orpheus symbolized the sway of music over all strata of ancient cosmic hierarchy: natural, human, and divine. Several things suggest that Orpheus’s poetry and his image in general were the stuff of genuine myth in the early period. Archeological evidence, such as the funerary tablets (lamellae) with instructions to the deceased, shows that Orphic beliefs about initiation, purification, and afterlife were taken seriously enough to be part of ritual.*’ Orpheus’s reputation as the

founder of Bacchic mysteries, attested by a variety of texts, is another indication of earnest faith in his powers. And the third clue, while oblique, is, nonetheless, decisive. Precisely from the later criticisms of traditional mythology in emerging philosophical thought it is clear that this mythology was alive and well as part of wide-spread beliefs and magical practices. It is also clear that these beliefs, which among other things comprised music mythology, did not remain unchallenged. The miraculous is the greatest obstacle to taking myth seriously by a modern theorist. One is struck, however, by the contrast between modern

| thaumatophobia and ancient thaumatophilia. Socrates’s remark in the Theaetetus is typical: “[The] sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. “© Ruripides, Alcestis 961-981, pp. 302-303.

*7 On funerary gold leaves in conjunction with mysteries and Orphic beliefs about afterlife see, for example, GR 293-5; also AMC 76 and 87; and West, The Orphic Poems, 22-6.

Shamanic Syncretism I] Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas” (155d).** Aristotle notes in Metaphysics that “myth is composed of wonders” and develops Socrates’s theme further: wonder is the common ground for the philosopher and “the lover of myth” (I, 2, 982b 11-19).” In most modern discussions of myth, by contrast, the miraculous is dismissed as nonsensical, fantastical, or merely imaginative.

This is not surprising, for enlightened consciousness, taken in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s sense, is fundamentally incapable of accommodating miracles. The reasons for this will become especially obvious in the early modern period, when the Orpheus myth becomes the stuff of opera. But by failing to take the miraculous into account one loses sight of myth’s most crucial component. To dismiss it, as Barthes does, by calling it “arbitrariness” is to preclude rather than facilitate its comprehension.’ How indispensable miracles are to myth becomes evident if one imagines the story of Orpheus without them, 1.e., if one explains Orpheus’s musical magic through natural causes or psychological mechanisms. Such explanations turn the myth into an allegory—the favorite genre of rationalistic reductions.”

Aleksei Losev’s analysis of myth is an exception from this rule. His formula of myth as an “unfolded magical name” puts the miraculous in the foreground.” Losev defines miracle as a coincidence of a person’s ideal archetype with her actual state. ““A miracle is the dialectical synthesis,” he writes, “of two planes of a person, when she fully and thoroughly fulfils the

design of her prototype lying in the depth of her historical evolution.” In Orpheus’s musical magic, as this approach suggests, the ideal conception of a musician’ s powers is fused with the realization of this ideal in the mundane world. This illuminates the rather complex phenomenology of miracle. In the first place, in order for the miraculous to become part of people’s conscious-

ness the world in their perception must be divided into the perfect ideal

Greek Myth, 17-18.

*8 Tris was the messenger of the gods and Thaumas the god of miracles; cf. Gantz, Early ® Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, 692. Subsequent quotations of Aristotle are from this edition. »° Barthes, Mythologies, 134. >! Such reductions of the miraculous during Baroque and the Enlightenment will be discussed in Chapters IV and V. The term “allegory” has, of course, a long history and is not always used in the same sense. Graf’s Greek Mythology can serve as an introduction to the history of this concept. >* DM 143-73 and 186. >> DM 157.

12 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero domain, on the one hand, and the imperfect mundane domain, on the other. One should hesitate, incidentally, to construe this opposition in terms of the ideal and the real. What counts as real at a given moment in history—and, furthermore, for a given type of consciousness—is a difficult problem that has a direct bearing on the cultural genus to which the Orpheus myth belongs

in one rendition or another. To concentrate on the matter at hand, the division between the ideal and the mundane planes of existence in a miracle must also be surmounted. Thus a miracle involves the dialectical move from undifferentiated unity to its division and then restoration, but on a higher,

more complex plane, where the interest consists in seeing the mundane accommodate the perfection of the ideal and, conversely, the ideal manifest itself in the mundane. And, finally, this synthesis occurs in a mysterious, that is to say, obvious yet incomprehensible way. The ecstatic quality of Orpheus’s singing is therefore not accidental. With a shaman, ecstasy is “a state in which his spirit leaves his body and undertakes journeys and adventures beyond the reach of ordinary humans.”

Contrary to appearances, such ecstasy is not the abandonment of selfconsciousness but the latter’s first step toward realizing its own, independent standing. It is a crucial event in the evolution of consciousness; in it arises

the recognition of thinking as distinct from the purely physical, corporeal existence of the human being. In the journey of the shaman’s spirit the immanent unity of human existence is sundered. There are worlds other than

this one, and they are accessible—but only when the human person is transformed into an entity that is both immanent (body) and transcendent (spirit). This is an act of self-reflection that eventually matures into philosophical analysis. It is misleading, therefore, to call this experience “soul loss,” as Gary Tomlinson does in his discussion of shamanism.» Far from being lost, the soul arises for the first time in such a moment. Music has a subtle but intimate connection with this act. In music the human being finds a perfect medium for ek-stasis. Giorgio Agamben observes, for example, that rhythm, this basic element of any artwork, introduces a “split and a stop” into the continuous flow of time.”° In other words, consciousness interrupts the monotonous continuity of its own existence and thus becomes capable of reflecting upon itself. This is perhaps why Eliade can speak of the “amazingly rich theoretical content” of shamanism.”’ *4 West, The Orphic Poems, 5. >> MRM 145ff.

°° MWC 98-9.

>’ Bliade, Shamanism, 14.

The Mystagogue 13 At the same time, in Orpheus’s ecstasy the work of the intellect does not yet become an isolated function as it will in philosophy. The division of the

whole human being into pure intelligence and the material body is only a remote possibility. The intellect begins to realize its own distinctive nature but is still diffused throughout the body and the natural world. Other worlds where the shaman’s spirit wanders are imagined as parallel to, rather than essentially different from, this one. Orpheus the psychopomp guides the souls of the dead in an underworld that is made up of the things one finds in the world of the living: paths, trees, springs, and houses.°*® Orphic afterlife,

remarks Burkert, “is repetition of the mysteries.” True, in mysteries much

stress is laid on marking them off as distinct from ordinary life but the transcendent has not yet acquired at this stage a starkly different complexion from the immanent. And yet transcendence does begin to develop its distinct

forms. While still one with the entire human being, the emerging selfconsciousness at the same time makes the body step out of itself, as it were, in dance and thereby brings such a body into awareness of itself. The voice, too, leaves ordinary speech behind and transfigures itself in singing. Miracle, the shaman’s trance, and music are thus fundamentally interconnected as they stem from the same movement of evolving intelligence.

While far from simple even at this moment, self-consciousness assumes increasingly complex, dynamic forms in its further unfolding and reaches yet another degree of intensity in mystery cults.

The Mystagogue It was already noted above that Orpheus was believed to be the founder of Bacchic mysteries, whose poetry and music revealed divine knowledge. His standing reflects the importance that was attached to music in Dionysian

ritual. Plutarch left a description which, as Burkert notes, combines a postmortem vision with the language of initiations: Wanderings astray in the beginning, tiresome walkings in circles, some frightening paths in darkness that lead nowhere, then im-

mediately before the end all the terrible things, panic and shivering | and sweat, and amazement. And then some wonderful light comes to meet you, pure regions and meadows there to greet you, with sounds and dances and solemn, sacred words and holy views; and there the initiate, perfect by now, set free and loose from all bondage, 8 Cf. text from a gold leaf from Hipponion-Vibo Valentia, quoted in GR 293. »” GR 293.

14 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero

his feet.” | walks about, crowned with a wreath, celebrating the festival together

with the other sacred and pure people, and he looks down on the uninitiated, unpurified crowd in this world in mud and fog beneath

Later philosophers were also keenly interested in the ecstatic effect induced by music. Plato notes that bacchants become possessed and out of their senses under the influence of melody and rhythm (/on 534a). Aristotle

observes that “sacred melodies” can “excite the soul to mystic frenzy (enthousiasmos),” with the effect that resembles “healing and purgation (katharsis)’ (Politics 1342a).°' From the context it is evident that he has Bacchic rituals and tunes in the Phrygian mode in mind. The striking point in these and similar observations is the emphasis on the transformation of the individual psyche. In mystery cults a spiritual rather than “contractual,” as it were, relation between the worshiper and divinity begins to be formed. In contrast to the immanentist nature of the archaic votive prayer and sacrifice that are performed for immediate gain, in mystery cults the purpose of the ritual is theosis, the worshiper’s intimate unity with the god.” The emergence of such a spiritual connection was apparently a gradual process. Burkert notes that, like archaic votive prayers, early Orphic hymns ask for health and long life in this world. Still the Orphic revolutionary doctrine of the transmigration of the souls is evidence of a great, “psychological” turn in thinking.®° It is no accident that such a turn occurs in the context of a mystery religion. In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel points to Egypt as the place where the divine world was first recognized as an enigma. Incapable of fully grasping itself, he explains, spirit in Egyptian culture raises, nonetheless, the guestion about its own nature, i.e., this nature emerges before

thinking as a problem and the secret of its own being.” One is hardly justified in locating, as Hegel does, this development in a specific geographic

area or historical period.™ Still the rise of mysticism is inherently a turn © Plutarch fr. 168; quoted in AMC 91-2 (italics added). Music is mentioned in almost exactly

the same context in Dio of Prusa’s florid description of a mystic’s experience (Dio

Chrysostom, Orationes 12.33; quoted in AMC 89-90). , °! Aristotle, The Basic Works, 1315. °? AMC 18 and GR 295. °° GR 300.

4 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 207.

° The enigmatic nature of theogony and cosmogony is quite prominent in the Vedic literature. See Johan Huizinga’s discussion of brahmanic riddle-solving contests in Homo ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 105-109.

The Mystagogue I5 toward reflection, and the Orphica exemplify this tendency with especial vividness.

The most prominent writings among them are the theogonies whose widely acknowledged distinctive feature is their intermediate standing between myth and philosophical thought. The novel aspects of Orphic theogonies include extending, at both ends, the line of ruling deities known from traditional myth. In contrast to Hesiod’s Theogony, for example, that begins with the reign of Uranus, the Orphic version starts with Phanes Protogonos and Nyx (Night) before it gets to Uranus; rather than with Zeus as the last ruler of the gods, it ends with his son Dionysus. The “reinvention of the genesis of the world” and “rewriting of the entire history of the gods,” as Marcel Detienne describes it, are the Orphic authors’ attempt to look more deeply into the origins of things.®’ The comprehension of the cosmogonic process requires that mediating stages be introduced into the earlier account. The anthropogony contained in the myth of Dionysus Zagreus, the god who is destroyed by the Titans and then resurrected, is likewise a mediating link between the divine and the human worlds: humanity arises from the ashes of

the Titans mixed with the blood of Dionysus, which explains the human tendency to rebel against the gods. The desire to explain, too, betrays a growing rationalistic attitude. Myth, by contrast, directly states what it has to say; its aim is not to explain, but to present reality to consciousness.™ “Thus, the [Orphic] mythical tale,” comments Graf, “was, to a greater degree

than Hesiod’s Theogony, a vehicle for speculative thought, which was expressed in a traditional form.”” -

Perhaps the most well-known Orphic text came down to us in the Derveni papyrus, found in a funeral pyre dating from about 300 BC.” It contains fragments of acommentary on a theogony that was authored, as the commentator is convinced, by Orpheus. The text was written at some time in the fourth century but reflects earlier mythical beliefs and philosophical ideas. 6° M1. L. West gave the most extensive overview to date of Orphic theogonies in The Orphic Poems, 68-258; they are usually believed to be three in number, although West has identified

as many as six. For the speculative nature of Orphic mythology see GR, chapter VI “Mysteries and Asceticism” and AMC 72-3; Martin Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, 222-3; OMM ix; Aleksei Losev, Mifologiia grekov i rimlian (The Mythology of the Greeks and Romans), 172, 178-9, and 708-709. 67 Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus, 156. °8 Cf. DM 41 and PSF 35-6. © Graf, Greek Mythology, 97.

” Cf. Laks and Most, eds., Studies on the Derveni Papyrus. |

16 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero The episode in this document that is of greatest interest with regard to music is the birth of Harmony and Persuasion. These deities, who are in fact

concepts rather than anthropomorphic goddesses, are born alongside Aphrodite Urania, the Heavenly Aphrodite.’ According to the passage, Zeus swallows Protogonos and becomes “the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything.” He also swallows Fate, the mighty Moira (line 26). Endowed with Protogonos’s generative power, he then fashions the golden Aphrodite from his own semen and alongside her there appear Harmony and Persuasion. Like Aphrodite, they are described as “enchanting” (lines 30-33). Commenting on these lines, Burkert observes that they may be the beginning of “the philosophical speculation which culminated in the pantheism of the Stoics.” “Zeus is the world as a whole,” he paraphrases, “and especially the thinking fire which pervades everything, forms everything, and holds everything in

limits.”

Zeus’s assimilation of Moira signals the rationalizing of older beliefs. Fate is the “universal self” of the gods, Hegel remarks in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which “hovers over them [. . .] as the irrational void of Necessity.”” The anthropomorphic gods are “determinate natures” who do not recognize themselves in this pure, distinction-less void. Orphic speculation gropes for

a way in which the realm of the irrational can be comprehended and accommodated by the rational world-principle epitomized in Zeus. That the god is indeed “the thinking fire” as Burkert calls him is confirmed by the decisive role of intelligence in the theogonic process. The Orphic Zeus is, above all, “wise”; he drew his wisdom from the ineffable prophecies of the

omniscient goddess Nyx, who foretold him everything that he was to accomplish (lines 7-16). These lines also show, however, that the rationaliZing in question is neither complete nor consistent, for despite his superior

wisdom Zeus is still subject to Fate and his future is preordained by something other than himself. The abstract, hollow purity of fate, Hegel would say, must be recognized as a moment in the god’s own self rather than as an alien principle reigning over him. The theogony retains, however, the

mythical mode of articulating this demand. , The three deities, Heavenly Aphrodite, Harmony, and Persuasion, corre-

spond to the themes that shape Orpheus’s mythical image. The unconsum- , mated love of the spouse, the enchanting harmony of music, and the magical

persuasive power of poetry are his defining features. The presence of these , ™ As Johan Huizinga notes in his Homo ludens, deities that are the personifications of abstract concepts are already common in Hesiod’s Theogony (p. 138). __

” GR 131. | ® PS 443.

The Mystagogue 17 concept-deities at an important moment shows that the familiar story about Orpheus and Eurydice is not something extraneous to Orphic theogony, but that the two are connected at the level of basic thematic content. A similar point needs to be made about Orphic mythology and Bacchic ritual. Burkert remarks that mysteries themselves and the accompanying “spiritual doctrine,” to which the Orphica belonged, were not “essentially dependent” on each other.’* There is a deep level, however, where they are

connected. A mystical ritual is the expression of the idea of mystery. Everything in such a ritual announces the discovery of this notion: holding the rite in a secret place, the ban on disclosing the content of the teletai, and, most important, the ineffable union with divinity which is the goal of the entire exercise. A special place among the markers of mystery belongs to the mask of Dionysus. Walter Otto describes its significance particularly well

- when he interprets it as a symbol of “the eternal enigmas of duality and paradox” that constitute the essence of Dionysus. The appearance of the god as a mask, writes Otto, “thrusts Dionysus violently and unavoidably into the here and now—and sweeps him away at the same time into the inexpressible

distance. [. . .]| The final secrets of existence and non-existence transfix mankind with monstrous eyes.”” The thought of the riddle of life here is, however, still almost completely fused with external actions, 1.e., with ritual.

The mystai think with their bodies, voices, and senses. , The act of confronting the insoluble enigma of the world’s life by human consciousness 1s neither accidental nor primordial. To become aware of this mystery requires relatively advanced intellectual reflection. One must

realize that there is a domain of the unknown lying beyond the limits of one’s knowledge, i.e., that the meaning of the world is not exhausted by ancient tales. One must further endow this domain with utmost importance: it must acquire divine attributes. This does not happen without the work of reason because by itself the unknown does not possess any specific qualities, apart from the fact that one does not know what it is. In order for it to assume

divine poise the unknown must be put in an appropriate context, its emptiness and ambiguity must be surrounded, and thereby implicitly filled,

with profound meaning. Mythopoeia accomplishes this by creating a narrative about a person, Dionysus, who epitomizes at once the mystery of the world’s life and the divine stature of this mystery. Orpheus’s inspired

poetry unconceals, to borrow Martin Heidegger’s term, the meaning of Bacchic teletai, while the teletai give a spatial and temporal shape to this meaning. AMC 87-8.

® Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 91. .

I8 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero In philosophy the awareness of the unknown will assume the form of Socrates’s famous admission: “I am conscious of my ignorance” (Apology

2i1d and 23b). Socrates sets, however, only a relative limit to human knowledge; his mysticism notwithstanding, he suspects this limit to be inherently surmountable.” In the mysteries, by contrast, the enigma of universal life is acknowledged as insoluble in principle. Whether it is understood as

aporrheta, “forbidden,” or arrheta, “unspeakable,” the mystic’s mystery admits of no ultimate explanation.’” Moreover, its meaning remains hidden even when it is communicated. “And the nature of [Orpheus’s] words cannot

be said,” explains the anonymous commentator in the Derveni papyrus, “even though they are spoken.”’® The only way to grasp it is to experience it immediately as one’s inexplicable unity with divinity.

According to Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Orpheus’s original patron god was Dionysus. Losev notes that the myth of Dionysus Zagreus is characterized by “the human individual’s extremely palpable communication with cosmic life.”’”” It poses, Losev remarks, in mythological idiom fundamental philosophical problems, such as unity vis-d-vis multiplicity or disintegration (analysis) vis-a-vis restoration (synthesis). Detienne observes, likewise, that “Orpheus incarnates the pure man, the ‘Cathar’ who reconnects himself with Apollo, the principle of unity, but only after having traversed the multiplicity of forms and by a detour through Dionysiac polymorphism.” The appearance of this myth presupposes, therefore, a highly developed individual selfconsciousness. “Such mythological conceptions cannot arise,” writes Losev, “when there is yet no clear distinction between the cosmos and the human being, when the human person has not yet separated herself from overall natural and cosmic life, and, most important, when human consciousness has not yet grasped the contradiction between subjective life and the objective world order.” The advent of the Orphic Dionysus means, Losev continues, that the human person begins to assimilate the cosmos of the earlier myth “into her inner, intimate self-perception.”®! 7® He does seem to set an absolute limit to human knowledge by contrasting it with divine wisdom in 23a but, as so many other things Socrates says, his praise of impenetrable divine knowledge has more than a touch of irony to it. Like Socrates’s faith in the gods of tradition, his mysticism is ambivalent; more of this in the next chapter. ” AMC 9. ——— ® Derveni papyrus, Column VII, in Laks and Most, Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, 12 (English translation by Laks and Most).

” Losev, Mifologiia grekov i rimlian, 178. | ®° Detienne, “L’ Orphée de la Mer Noire,” 17 (my translation—V. M.). 81 T osev, Mifologiia, 178.

The Mystagogue 19 The youngest among the Olympian gods, Dionysus is the god of universal subjectivity par excellence.*’ The innermost conceptual kernel of the myth is best captured in the light of Hegel’s analysis of life, by reference to “the subjective unity of the living being.”**’ Nietzsche speaks of the same subjectivity as the Dionysian essence of lyrical poetry. The self of the lyrical poet, says Nietzsche, “is not the same as that of the empirically real waking man, but rather the only / which truly exists, the eternal /, resting on the ground of things, the / by means of whose copies the lyrical genius sees through to the very ground of things.”** Euripides’s Bacchae demonstrates this particularly well: in the tragedy the god works his magic by affecting the human psyche. His opponent, the enlightened king of Thebes Pentheus, is brought to an horrid end through his own and his mother Agave’s madness

induced by the offended god. This madness takes the form of Bacchic ecstasy in which the worshiper gives up his or her normal, rational self and becomes filled with the god. The extremes by which the behavior of the maenads and bacchantes is marked, such as nursing the child Dionysus—

only to rend him limb from limb as a victim, flow from the insight that individual forms of life cannot adequately express the idea of life as such. The worship of Dionysus therefore requires the annihilation of the empirical forms in which he appears: fawns, bulls, and even men. Significantly, the

unreality of these limited forms that the bacchantes’ actions bring forth manifests itself in the increasingly ludic character of the ritual. The Bacchic

orgy that has stirred the imagination of outsiders from Antiquity to the present day was, most likely, a dance in which costumed satyrs chased the maenads. The serious element consisted in the transformation of conscious-

ness rather than in the actual abandonment of sexual restraints or in | devouring the raw flesh of the victim. As with shamanic ecstasy, at first glance it may seem that subjectivity and self-consciousness are denied in this experience but in fact the opposite is the case. In the worship of Dionysus the human person comes to know herself—that is, she develops universal subjectivity as her fundamental core. Its newly acquired J becomes the individual’s most cherished possession and for that reason also the most valuable sacrifice to the god. Possessing a self means nothing if this self cannot be at the same time surmounted. Orpheus’s death at the hands of the maenads is one of the images that captures the new

117. :

82 Cf Erwin Rohde’s description of him as “Lord of the Souls,” quoted in Otto, Dionysus,

83 Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusdtze). Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 292 (§217). ** BT 36.

20 Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero human subject’s self-transcendence. The subjectivity that one sees here, though, remains merely universal, 1.e., the concrete individual must give way | and perish before it. At the same time the sacrifice of Orpheus is the overcoming of the older heroic individualism. The latter derives from the gods in an exclusionary manner: the god who is his father impregnates the hero’s mother. Orphic

anthropogony, by contrast, advances a more universal conception of humanity. In Bacchic cult any person may be united with the god; initiation rather than lineage makes one chosen. The expanding sense of the human being also finds expression in the fact that Bacchic cults are embraced, first and foremost, by the middle class and groups, most emphatically women,

that are disenfranchised under aristocratic patriarchy.® And yet without aristocratic individualism a more universal conception of personhood could not have arisen—even in the limited form in which it existed in the ancient world. The sacrifice of Orpheus, an heroic figure, is a necessary element in creating the human subject that takes shape in Bacchic mysteries. Unlike

, Pentheus’s, this subject’s connection with divinity is no longer assured through clear-eyed and strong-armed, Zeus-like rationality; the mystic becomes one with the god through the “feminine” ecstasy of dance and song.

The Aesthetic Phase It was noted above that the mystic’s self-consciousness, the intensification of which is the hallmark of mystery cults, grows out of myth itself, namely through myth’s fixation on the miraculous. In exactly the same manner myth’s emphasis on the reality of its object is the germ from which arises art’s openly ludic attitude toward reality in general. The transformation of the one into the other involves, however, an intermediary stage that can be illustrated by the figure of Odysseus. Self-consciousness is consciousness divided within itself and aware of this division. Odysseus’s main weapon is cunning, i.e., the ability to pretend

to be someone he is not. In his book on the evolution of Attic tragedy Vittorio Hésle evokes Plato’s comparison of Achilles with Odysseus in the Lesser Hippias (370a).* The forthright hero Achilles, Socrates argues, does 8° “Behind [the spread of the cult of Dionysus],” notes Burkert, “there is clearly an impulse directed against the nobility, which comes from the lower classes of craftsmen and peasants

[...]” GR 290. ,

86 Hosle, Die Vollendung der Tragédie im Spdtwerk des Sophokles (The Fulfilment of Tragedy in the Late Work of Sophocles), 28-36.

The Aesthetic Phase 21 not really know the truth and as a result keeps making sincere but false promises. He threatens, for example, to leave the siege of Troy but then fails to carry out his threat (370b-d). By contrast, Odysseus, who knows how to dissemble the truth, stands in a conscious relation to it. “In lying the subject . puts forth,” comments Hésle, “what distinguishes even a sentient organism, to say nothing of the mind, from inanimate nature: the difference between the inner and the outer. He then presents this difference to another subject.’®’ Odysseus’s shrewdness signifies a further step beyond the shamanistic journey and mystical transport.** The human subject begins to treat “the other world” in which the shaman performs his exploits as the product of its own thinking. The shaman’s attitude is different inasmuch as he or she believes

that the worlds in which the soul travels exist independently of his or her own mind. Likewise, the initiate does not yet perceive the significance of mystical experience as created by his or her own intelligent action, merely as the result of an elaborate staging of the ritual. Odysseus’s ability to deceive his adversaries, by contrast, rests on the conscious manipulation of his appearance to others. And yet Odysseus still retains some of the immediacy of a mythical subject; contrived though it may be, his deception is driven by practical, vital needs and those whom he deceives are deceived in

earnest. Once this last vestige of the mythical attitude is left behind the trickster may finally turn into the artist: Odysseus, into Orpheus. Two scenes from Attic vase painting, “The Return of Hephaistos” on a sixth-century black-figure column krater and “Kitharist and Listeners” on a red-figure bell krater from the mid-fifth century BC (see Figures 1 and 2 overleaf), illustrate the moment of transition from cult to art. Lydos, to whom

the first painting is attributed, shows Dionysus’s jubilant train bringing Hephaestus back to Olympus.” The event is momentous: Hera is about to make peace not only with her son Hephaestus, whom she cast down from Olympus for his ugliness, but also with Dionysus, in whose mother’s death

she had a hand. Dionysus is on his way to being fully accepted into the Olympian family.” Dionysus and Hephaestus are accompanied by music87 Hosle, Die Vollendung, 30 (my translation—V. M.); cf. also similar observations by Socrates in the Phaedrus (262a-b). 88 Cf. DE 53.

8° Metropolitan Museum of Art (31.11. 11.). For a list of references on the krater see Beazley,

The Development of Attic Black-Figure, 41-5 and 110. Steven H. Lonsdale’s account is focused on Hephaestus as a “working-class” member, as it were, of the Olympian family and

on dance as a “disruptive force” (Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, 83-8, 89ff). Thomas Carpenter’s book Dionysian Imagery in Archaic Greek Art: Its Development in Black-Figure Vase Painting contains a chapter on “The Return of Hephaistos” (13-29). ”° Gantz, Early Greek Myth, 75-6.

Zz Shaman, Mystagogue, Hero

Viachelsav Ivanov (not to be confused with the poet and theorist discussed later in this book) and Vladimir Toporov view Sadko’ s image as a transformation of the Indo-European mythical

bridegroom of Ocean’s daughter. Cf. “Sadko” in Ie. M. Meletinskii, ed., Mifologicheskii slovar’ (Mythological Dictionary).

Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Medieval View of Music 45 Music is a prominent theme in two of the song’s three main episodes."

In the first the itinerant gusli-player Sadko from the mercantile city of Novgorod charms the Tsar of the Sea, who rewards him with great wealth.°

In the second Sadko, now a prosperous merchant on a return sea voyage from a trading expedition, is sacrificed by his crew to the same Tsar in atonement for impiety. Sadko’s playing in the underwater kingdom causes a catastrophic dance-storm that threatens to engulf the upper world.° On the

verge of a deluge he is stopped by a mysterious old man, frequently identified with St. Nicolas, the patron saint of seafarers. As a reward for his music (and as a way to entice him to stay), Sadko is given a sea-princess for a wife but upon the saint’ s advice abstains from consummating the marriage. This ensures his safe return to Novgorod where he enjoys wealth and glory ever after. In the triumphal ending another Christianizing detail is added: in fulfilment of the vow he gave in the nether world Sadko erects a cathedral

| consecrated to his savior (line 386). A trickster like Odysseus, Sadko is formulaically described as cunning and wise but, like Orpheus, he wields his magical powers through music. Again, like Odysseus, Sadko is ultimately successful in his quest (his own, rather than his wife’s, return from the other world); like Orpheus he is a sacrificial victim and leaves his spouse behind in the other world. Sometimes

he bears traces of a pagan priest whose dwelling is decorated with cosmological motifs (lines 89-92). The view of music’s powers in the song

takes us into an archaic, heroic world.’ In cosmological terms, music is primarily associated here with the aquatic element, limitless in nature and harboring both great riches and universal destruction. In the beginning music

brings the trickster success. Similarly to the votive prayer mentioned in chapter 2, the good is understood here as the hero’s direct and tangible gain.

But the culminating moment of the song, the Dionysian dance of the sea * The main variants can be found in Smirnov and Smolitskii, Novgorodskie byliny (The Novgorod Bylinas), 148-242. All subsequent references to the bylina’s text are to the first variant on 148-57. > The name of Sadko’s zither-like instrument, gusli, belongs to the family of terms that denote music-playing, magic, entertainment, and deception. Cf. Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 626-7.

© Smirnov and Smolitskii observe that the dance episode is the most frequently encountered and perhaps the most archaic part of the bylina (cf. the list of bylina’s variants containing it in Novgorodskie byliny, 391). "Cf. Vladimir Propp’s thesis that the hero’s quest for a wife is the sine qua non of epos as a genre that reflects the evolution of social (family) relations. Propp’s study on Russian heroic epos contains a detailed discussion of the song about Sadko in this light. Propp, Russkii geroicheksii epos (Russian Heroic Epos), 41-4 and 87-109.

46 The New Song kingdom, brings forth music’s inherent dangers that are at once moral and cosmological. The highest authority in the story, the pagan sage (or deity) who is barely concealed behind the Christian saint, bans music and sex to prevent their calamitous effects. The moral is curiously Platonic: in order to ,

serve a good purpose the powers of music must be harnessed by higher

wisdom.

Unlike the legend of Sadko, which remained part of oral culture until modern times, the Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo is a product of a literary tradition. It dates from the thirteenth century and is based on a nonextant mid- to late twelfth-century Breton lai. The /ai was in turn a retelling of the classical Orpheus and Eurydice story derived most likely from such sources as Virgil, Ovid, and Boethius.® Classical elements are, however, densely mixed in Sir Orfeo with medieval chivalric and mythological Celtic ones.” Possible local sources include such legends as The Wooing of Etain (which, incidentally, shares some motifs with the legend of Sadko) but the

anonymous author of the lay seems to have depended on Celtic lore in general rather than any particular story.’ The lay consists of three main parts: the abduction of Dame Heurodis by the fairy king, King Orfeo’s sojourn as a hermit in the forest, and the rescue of his wife from the fairy kingdom. Music is an important motif in all three sections but its significance

varies somewhat in each. ,

In the beginning of the poem King Orfeo is introduced as a self-taught harpist of superior skill.’ Like Sadko, he is described as a “sharp-witted” musician but also a model knight (lines 30 and 39-42). The trickster motif is evoked throughout the song: tales of “treachery and guile” are mentioned in the prologue (line 7), adumbrating the episode in which Orfeo sneaks into the fairy king’s castle in a minstrel’s disguise, after which he plays a trickster almost to the very end. His music transports the listener into a paradisiac state (lines 36-7) but, in contrast to classical Orpheus, his lineage emphasizes knightly virtues rather than musical skill. His father descends from King Pluto and mother from “King Juno.” Both these ancestors, says the author

(who turns Jupiter’s wife into a chivalrous king), used to be considered * Cf. Bliss, ed., Sir Orfeo, xxxiii. | ? On Celtic elements in the poem cf. Marie-Thérése Brouland’s 1990 detailed study Sir Orfeo:

Le substrat celtique du lai breton anglais (Sir Orfeo: The Celtic Substrate of the English Breton Lay). '© Cf Bliss, Sir Orfeo, xxxiv and lii-liii. With regard to the Irish legend as a source for Sir Orfeo, Bliss refers to George Kittridge, “Sir Orfeo,” American Journal of Philology, vol. vii, No. 1 (1886):176-202.

'! Auchinleck MS., lines 25-38, in Bliss, Sir Orfeo, 4-5; all subsequent references are to this manuscript.

Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Medieval View of Music 47 deities for their illustrious deeds (lines 43-6). This innocent explanation introduces an element of typical medieval euhemerism into the story.” As a hermit in the forest where he retires after losing Heurodis Orfeo assumes combined features of the bucolic classical Orpheus and Merlin Silvestris."° Surrounded by charmed animals and birds, he is the antique and medieval | allegory of concordia mundi as well as the Good Shepherd (lines 269-280). The effect of his playing in the fairy king’s palace is similar: far from unleashing elemental frenzy as Sadko’s music did, Orfeo’s harping suspends everything in blissful, Apollonian stillness (lines 435-46). When upon successful return Orfeo plays in a beggar’s disguise at his own court his music

is not so much magical as, like Odysseus’s bow, the “signature” of the legitimate king of the realm. A faint echo of Orpheus’s sparagmos sounds in this episode, as the “poor minstrel” invents the scene of King Orfeo being torn apart by lions and wolves (lines 535-41). The deception is designed to test the loyalty of his subjects. Weak as they were in the song about Sadko, there are no obvious Christianizing elements in Sir Orfeo. Half-submerged in the magical world, music in the poem is at the same time described as entertainment at the feudal court; Orfeo is a mixture of a

shaman and minstrel. The wild excitement of Sadko’s gusli-playing that threatened to dissolve all limits yields to the calm ecstasy of aesthetic pleasure. In Sadko’s case there is no emphasis on the psychological effects of music; in Sir Orfeo they are quite prominent. The term gle, repeatedly used in the poem, refers, for example, to the minstrel’s art of entertainment and revelry—at once an activity and emotional state.’ Like the sitting figure in Polygnotos’s vase-painting, the fairy king “herkneth & sitt ful stille” in

silent, contemplative enjoyment (line 443). The bylina’s style is wholly , unsentimental, whereas the skillful author of the lay knows how to press a tear from the reader’s eye. Sadko is largely a stock character, a type; King Orfeo is, by contrast, a more distinctly outlined individual.” He plays “at his will,” which may refer to improvising and emphasizes the fact that he is an autodidact (line 271). In a striking contrast to the song about Sadko where the hero’s wife is an indifferent, generic character, Dame Heurodis is Orfeo’s equal in the adventure. She is, in fact, the original visionary who visits the

fairy kingdom in her sleep. (Sadko likewise descends to and ascends from ? For aclassic discussion of euhemerist justifications of ancient myth in the Middle Ages cf.

Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in

Renaissance Humanism, 1 (ff. , '5 Bliss, Sir Orfeo, xxxvii.

'4 Cf. Bliss’s entry for gle in the Glossary on p. 63 and the use of the term in line 267. 'S Cf. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages, 160.

48 . The New Song the sea tsardom while he sleeps.) The shamanistic quality of her image is,

however, almost entirely hidden under an elaborate portrait in the romance style. The tendency that is evident here is similar to the one that transformed the mythical Orpheus into an aesthetic one in Antiquity. The mythical quality continues to prevail, however, in another Orpheus-figure created early in the

Middle Ages. | |

Orpheus-Christus is formed by two currents, running simultaneously in opposite directions. One is the assimilation of Orpheus to the new, Christian mythopoeia as it develops its main character; the other, the survival of the ancient image as it adapts to a new cultural-historical situation.'° In truth, though, these are two aspects of a single process. Early Christian apologists, such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius, compensated for the lack of a

musical dimension in the Christ of the gospels by giving Him Orpheus’s features. To the same purpose these authors also enlisted the biblical trope of the “new song” and King David." But the transfer went smoothly because

classical Orpheus was already a Christ-like personage. The anonymous author of the Testament of Orpheus, believed to be a Hellenistic Jewish forgery, correctly grasps the message of ancient Orphism when he makes the

singer an early promulgator of monotheism.'® As they shape Christ in Orpheus’s image, Clement and Eusebius continue, in fact, the work of Pythagoras, Plato, and pagan Neoplatonists. The New Song of the Christian theologians stands for cosmic harmony, the moral force of the new religion, the mystical doctrine itself, and its soteriological power. This “pure song” is,

according to Clement, “the stay of the universe and the harmony of all

things, stretching from the center to the circumference and from the extremities to the center.”'? Like Orpheus and David, Christ becomes the healer of discord in the soul. This healing is closely linked to the saving power of the Word of God.”” The divine minstrel, says Clement, “has come to bring to a speedy end the bitter slavery of the daemons that lord it over us; 1© Ror discussions of Orpheus-Christus cf. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages, 38-85, as well as Irwin, “The Song of Orpheus and the New Song of Christ” and Vicari, “Sparagmos:

Orpheus among the Christians,” both in OMM 51-83. A collection of Orpheus-related early , Christian texts can be found in Skeris, Chroma Theou. On the Origins and Theological Interpretation of the Musical Imagery Used by the Ecclesiastical Writers of the First Three Centuries, with Special Reference to the Image of Orpheus. 7 Trewin provides an extensive list of biblical allusions to the trope of the “new song” in OMM 58.

'8 Cf Friedman, Orpheus, 13-26, and Skeris, Chroma Theou, 26-8. 19 Protreptikos 1 5.1-2; quoted in Skeris, Chroma Theou, 58.

*° Cf. Eusebius’s Tricennial Oration 14.5; quoted in Skeris, Chroma Theou, 118 and in Friedman, Orpheus, 57.

Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Medieval View of Music 49 and by leading us back to the mild and kindly yoke of piety he calls once again to Heaven those who have been cast down to earth.””’ Orpheus’s catabasis is likewise conflated with Christ’s harrowing of hell and Eurydice is interpreted as the human soul who is now truly saved.” Even Plato’s theurgy is recalled: in contrast to false ancient tragedy, says Clement, Christ is an actor (agonistes) in the real drama unfolding “in the theater of the whole cosmos.” As it creates a legitimate place for Orpheus in medieval culture, the mythologem of Orpheus-Christus at the same time foregrounds the moral and, above all, mystical significance of music. The New Song is a mystical symbol par excellence in which actual music is almost completely obscured. Yet these two images represent the most intimate assimilation of Orpheus to the heart of the medieval world view, the myth of the Savior. Still the Middle Ages were not only a time of original mythopoeia but also heir to the classical interpretive tradition that survived the transition to Christianity and continued to thrive in medieval scholarly literature. The most influential source in this literature is Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (524 AD) in which the story of Orpheus and Eurydice appears in a poem accompanied by a moralistic, Platonizing commentary. Orpheus

is the intellect striving after the luminous fount of goodness but he is weighed down by Eurydice who represents heavy earthly bondage (gravis terrae vincula).”* Boethius’s treatment spawned a large following in which music as such was, however, for the most part meticulously allegorized away.” The typical example is Ovide moralisé, an anonymous late thirteenth-century

French paraphrase of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Orpheus’s singing stands for eloquence, the strings of his lyre for seven virtues, and even the lyre’s pegs are similarly “explained.’””° This prolific hermeneutic effort did, however, gradually transform the antique story into a medieval one and the ancient hero into a medieval figure. Along with the moralistic one there was also a less conspicuous musicalmetaphysical version of the story, transmitted by late Hellenistic and medieval mythographic literature. The account that stands out in it is Fulgentius’s 21 Drotreptikos 1 3.1-2; quoted in Skeris, Chroma Theou, 56-7.

72 Tn conjunction with the theme of Christ’s success where Orpheus failed, commentators refer to a fourth-century hymn by Ephraim of Syria. Cf. Friedman, Orpheus, 57-8 and Irwin in OMM 55-6. ?3 Protreptikos 1.4.15-16, quoted in Irwin, OMM 52; also 1.2.3-4, quoted in Skeris, Chroma Theou, 56. *4 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 293-97.

*° These allegorical interpretations are discussed in Friedman, Orpheus, 91ff. 2° Cf. Friedman, Orpheus, 125.

50 The New Song treatment of Orpheus and Eurydice in his Mitologiae where Orpheus represents technical skill and Eurydice the metaphysical underpinnings of music.”’ Fulgentius’s interpretation (derived from Virgil) eventually inspired the author of the ninth-century treatise Musica enchiriadis. The anonymous

- music theorist presents Orpheus as orea phone, “the best voice.” His rival Aristeus, a “good man,” seeks eur-dike, “profound judgment,” but, even as he is about to grasp her, she dies from a snakebite. (Somehow the serpent now acts in accord with divine wisdom.) Like Dame Heurodis, Eurydice is here Orpheus’s equal in the story; in fact, she represents a wisdom that is superior to the singer’s skill. Like the meaning of Orpheus’s words in the Derveni papyrus, she both emerges in response to “the most noble sound of song” and vanishes “as soon as she seems to be seen.” She is the transcendent mystery of music’s power over the psyche. So, as in other things that we discern only partly and dimly, this discipline does not at all have a full, comprehensible explanation in

this life. To be sure, we can judge whether the construction of a melody is proper and distinguish the qualities of tones and modes and other things of this art. Likewise, we can adduce, on the basis of numbers, the musical intervals or the symphonies of dissonance. But in the way music has so great an affinity and union (commutatio et societas) with our souls—for we know that we are bound to it by a certain likeness—we cannot express easily in words.”

The medieval musician feels the need to set his otherwise practical and matter-of-fact discussion of polyphonic composition in a broad metaphysical context. He chooses Orpheus and Eurydice as patron saints of this new art.” By itself this allegorizing may not seem too profound but, like the tip of an iceberg, it points to a more fundamental way in which the Orpheus myth informs medieval thinking about music. In his Periphyseon (ca 867), a treatise roughly contemporaneous with the Musica enchiriadis and created in the same Carolingian cultural milieu, *1 Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, 96-7 (III 10); cf. also Friedman, Orpheus, 89. 8 Palisca, ed. Musica Enchiriadis and Scholica Enchiriadis, 31. ”? Tn his commentary on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology (ca. 904) Remigius of Auxerre speaks of Orpheus as “corporeal and transitory notes” and of Eurydice as “the profound theory of music” that “cannot appear in notes,” leaving Orpheus sad because he possesses mere sounds without possessing “the underlying principles.” As in the Musica enchiriadis, the relation between Orpheus and Eurydice established by Boethius is reversed:

the singer is no longer the nous but mundane physicality and Eurydice is no longer the epithumia but “thought itself.” Cf. Vicari, “Sparagmos: Orpheus among the Christians,” in OMM 67, and Friedman, Orpheus, 100-102.

Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Medieval View of Music 51 Eriugena continues the tradition of viewing music as an intrinsic element, at all levels, of the universal order of things.” Alongside St. Augustine, Eriugena’s sources of inspiration are the Greek theologians—Gregory Nazianzen (ca. 330-390), Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662), and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth century)—who were largely responsible for assimilating Platonism to Christianity. Among Plato’s followers in late Antiquity it was widely acknowledged—not without due cause—that Platonism was the continuation of Orphism.** Orpheus is not mentioned in the treatise but, like the earlier Neoplatonists, Eriugena is his true disciple. “[T]he beauty of the whole established universe,” he writes, “consists of marvelous harmony of

like and unlike in which the divers genera and various species and the different orders of substances and accidents are composed into an ineffable unity.”°” Music exemplifies this cosmic harmony, continues Eriugena, through “a variety of qualities of sounds” which, “attuned to each other in accordance

with the fixed and rational rules of the art of music,” resolve into “a natural sweetness.” Music is also intertwined with basic metaphysical principles, in particular the relation between intelligible and sensible things. Rather than from audible sounds, the “sweetness of the harmony,” Eriugena notes, is derived from “the proportionalities between them.” As these proportionalities are perceived by the intellect “and appreciated by the interior sense,” just so intelligible things are the true source of sensible ones, for “it is they that produce and control that most noble harmony in the things that are.”*? And when, hinting perhaps at the hexachord, Eriugena next evokes the number Six it is impossible to tell whether the allusion is musical or metaphysicalcosmological, for the number is an archetype of all existence, visible and invisible alike.** Music is equally revealing of the divinely ordained moral order. The existence of punishment for sinners, for example, is the necessary contrast required by the “harmony of the whole creation.” “So it does not disturb me to hear,” Eriugena confesses, “that that most beautiful harmony shall be produced by the punishments of evil wills and the rewards of good ° For a summary of the debate on the relation of Musica enchiriadis to Eriugena’s work see Palisca, Musica Enchirtadis, xliv-xlvi. >! Warden quotes Proclus and Olympiodorus (/I. sixth century AD) to this effect: “All Greek theology is the offspring of the Orphic mystical doctrine” (Theologia Platonica 1.6) and “In every respect Plato imitates the teaching of Orpheus” (In Platonem Phaedonem commentaria 70c); cf. OMM 89.

°° Briugena, Periphyseon (Division of Nature), 255 (Ill 637D). °3 Eriugena, Periphyseon, 647-8 (V 965C-966A). ** Briugena, Periphyseon, 648 (V 966A).

52 The New Song wills [. . .] for I have the example of harmonies composed of the mingling,

in due proportions and proportionalities, of high, low and intermediate notes.”*° The aesthetic of contrast supports a moral point. The prominence of contrast is something new and peculiarly medieval. Umberto Eco observes that, whereas Boethius considered only similarity as desirable and dissimilarity as detestable, a few centuries later the medieval

mind begins to perceive contrast “as important for aesthetic judgment as similarity.”*° “It was a view common to all the scholastics,” Eco points out,

“that beauty was born out of contrasts. [. . .] Evil itself became good and

beautiful, for good was born from it and shone out more brightly by : contrast.’”°’ This trend can be traced as far back as Augustine for whom the aesthetics of contrast was founded on the sacred order of divine creation and suffused all being, manifesting at once the wisdom, goodness, and beauty of God’s design. “For what are called antitheses,” he remarks, “are among the

most elegant figures of speech. [. . .] Just as the opposition of contraries bestows beauty upon language, then, so the beauty of this world is enhanced by the opposition of contraries, composed, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things.”*® The causes of this attitude should be sought in the new, Trinitarian model of existence in which difference is embraced as part of divine mystery. Eriugena inherits this model from his sources.

Augustine believed that the Holy Trinity “is revealed to us in the creation” and the human self is modeled after it as well.*’ Pseudo-Dionysius

likewise elaborated a systematic triadic vision of the spiritual world in his speculations about celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies.” In Eriugena’s philosophy the Trinity assumes an especially dynamic aspect. The promise of the harmony that Eriugena envisions will be fulfilled only when things “return” to their Creator (966B). He conceives of the entire created being and

its destiny in terms of procession (processio) and return (reditus): the creature issues forth from its Creator—only to return to Him in the end. Music serves as an instance of this process as it begins, Eriugena points out,

with one note, builds up “harmonies whether simple or compound,” and

returns to its point of departure “in which resides its act and all its °° Briugena, Periphyseon, 648 (V 966B-C). 36 Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 31. In this passage Eco refers to Boethius’s De Institutione Musicae, | 1.

37 Eco, Art and Beauty, 35. ,

°8 Augustine, The City of God XI 18, p. 472.

» Augustine, The City of God, 484 (XI 26). *° Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 143-91 and 193-259, respectively.

Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Medieval View of Music , 53 potencies.”*' Especially significant is Eriugena’ s idea that in her reunion with God the human person is not wholly reduced to her absolute counterpart and

“all men [can] be restored into some mystical unity, although each retains unimpaired the properties of his body, his soul, and his Mind.” Once again, music illustrates how this mystery is possible because in it “every sound, whether of the human voice, or of the pipe, or of the lyre, retains severally its own quality while many of them in unity produce with suitable agreement

a single harmony.” One finds here a new conception of theosis that fulfills the promise of Orphic funerary tablets. “A god you have become from a man,” says one of those older inscriptions, describing the soul’s bliss in the beyond, “Kid you fell in the milk.”** But, the doctrine of metempsychosis notwithstanding, the individual identity of the traveler in the beyond leads a precarious existence in the ancient cosmos, and this eventually comes to be perceived as a lack.

Virgil and Ovid’s renditions of Orpheus are enveloped in autumnal melancholy for a good reason. The reunion of Orpheus and Eurydice in the

other world is too bland a reward for the magic of music and lovers’ suffering. The Platonic solution no longer satisfies—if it ever satisfied—the poets’ acute sense of the worth of the immanent human being. There is a hint in Platonism itself that the doctrine of ideal forms is haunted by a deficiency. Plato’s Parmenides unfolds his arguments after Socrates rejects the idea that

“undignified objects” like mud or hair may possess their own forms. Parmenides, on the other hand, holds that true philosophy must not despise anything (Parm. 130c-e). Matter itself, in other words, must be redeemed.

Parmenides’s own answer to this challenge, as we saw in the previous chapter, remains ambivalent. The promise is fulfilled by the new, Christian myth. At the same time the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a further elaboration of the Platonic One. This is especially evident in the degree to which Pseudo-Dionysius’s Trinitarianism, for example, depends on the speculative dialectics of Proclus (412-485 AD).“ Even more than Bacchic mystery, the

One is the product of long and arduous labor of thinking and as such implicitly contains in itself this its genealogy. Rather than simple unity, in logical terms the One is what Hegel calls “being-for-self”’: it consists of abstract being as such (the simple unity just referred to above), the negation | *" Eriugena, Periphyseon, 533 (V 869). * Eriugena, Periphyseon, 550 (V 883A-884A).

*° Quoted in GR 295. “* Cf. E. Osborn, “Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Borchert, ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd edition).

54 : The New Song of this being by something distinct from it, and, finally, the relation of the latter to the former.” It is this logical schema that, among other things, the Platonic One supplies for the Trinitarian world view. In the Holy Trinity the human person finds her own absolute counterpart

and source: the Son. In Losev’s terms, the ancient attributive person becomes , the medieval substantial one. The ancient person, Losev observes, possesses mere attributes of personhood and once she is stripped of them her cosmic essence becomes apparent. In the depth of this essence lies chaos and the faceless darkness of fatum.*° Ancient theosis thus results in the dissolution of the human being in impersonal nature, of the courses of the human soul in the courses of the starry heaven. As the vision of Er shows, the latter are presided over by mute necessity. Hegel refers to a similar aspect of ancient religion when he remarks that it is not anthropomorphic enough.*’ But medieval Christianity turns ancient tragedy into commedia; a pessimistic and fatalistic ending, into an optimistic one. Dante’s visionary self does not lose

itself in the contemplation of the ultimate mystery but stands before it, retaining its own identity. The irreducible nature of this type of person is assured by the fact that in the Trinity she sees herself (la nostra effige, “our image’’).* The song of heaven is thus no longer sung by the Sirens and the

Fates; it is now the New Song of God-man. Orpheus’s mystical hymn becomes a part in this song and Orpheus himself, part of the Absolute Person.

The Dynamics of Cultural Genera As far as their cultural genera are concerned, the juxtaposition of the song about Sadko and Sir Orfeo can be illuminated by Mikhail Bakhtin’s observations on the relation between epic and novel. Relying on Goethe and Schiller, Bakhtin describes the time depicted in epos as “the absolute past.” “The epic past,” says Bakhtin, “is not called ‘absolute’ by accident; as an axiological (hierarchical) past it lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, * SL 163-4. *© Cf. Losev, “Antichnaia filosofiia i obshchestvenno-istoricheskie formatsii” (“Ancient Philosophy and Socio-Historical Formations’) in Losev, Antichnost’ kak tip kul’tury (Antiquity as a Type of Culture), 54-5. 47 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, 4. *® Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, 346-7 (Canto XXXII, lines 124-133), italics added.

® Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 15, translation modified. Cf. original in M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Questions of Literature and Aesthetics), 457.

The Dynamics of Cultural Genera 55 purely temporal transitions that might connect it with the present. It is walled off absolutely from all subsequent times, and above all from those times in which the singer and his audience find themselves.”°° From a mythologist’s

point of view, this past is nothing other than a means of making sure that

miracles remain legitimate even as they are no longer unquestionably believed. Temporal distance is a tool that divides the world into the present, which is mundane and ordinary, and the past, which is full of wonder and adventure. The complete, finalized time of the absolute past, sharply distinct

from the fundamentally incomplete present, makes miracles not merely possible, but necessary. The song about Sadko thus exemplifies the moment when the miraculous reality projected by myth is still perceived as a selfsufficient whole but, in contrast to the immediacy of the mythical attitude proper, this reality is now seen from a distance, from a remote present. The miracles that epos describes are still accepted as real but they are no longer possible in the here and now. In Sir Orfeo, by contrast, the boundary between

the epic past and the present becomes permeable and the reality of the miraculous element begins to wane. The genre of the lay, Bakhtin would say, begins to turn epos into the novel but the new, aesthetic detachment grows

out of epic distance. Euhemerism that interprets mythical events as historically actual is the middle phase between the two. The mythologem of

Orpheus-Christus shows, however, that the reverse development is also possible. Clement performs a seemingly simple but at bottom ingenious operation: he exploits the ancient philosophical criticism of poetry in order to affirm the truth of the new faith. He presents Orpheus’s music as at worst

deception and at best aesthetic play, and pits Christian myth against it precisely gua myth, i.e., a true story about miraculous reality. This is not merely a clever move but a manifestation of a typical trait in medieval consciousness. As the original articulation of a miraculous world, myth remains just as vital in the Middle Ages as it was in Antiquity. Medieval writers can afford

their characteristically heedless allegorizing precisely because medieval culture offers myth such a nurturing and secure environment in the first place. Myth’s flourishing in it is guaranteed by the medieval mind’s acute sense of the mysterious nature of things. The medieval person never tires of

marveling at the universe, human being, music, and, above all, the Holy Trinity. Informed though it is by philosophical concerns no less than Plato’s mythopoeia, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is yet inno sense amythosophy — because it resolutely declines any hint of a hypothetical attitude. In the heart °° Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 15-16 (Voprosy, 459).

56 The New Song of this doctrine is genuine myth, miracle, and mystery. Medieval musical mythopoiea, too, springs from this inexhaustible source. Eriugena’s treatment of music raises the question, however, of the relation between symbol and allegory. Music in his treatise occupies the - liminal space between the two. The critical difference is that a symbol is _ $upposed to contain the energy of the actual reality it embodies and to that extent is that reality, whereas in allegory the represented reality is linked to the representation only by virtue of abstract similitude. Couched in the terms of the time, this contrast was at the heart of the eighth-century iconoclasm controversy in Byzantium.°' The theme was then picked up by Charlemagne’ s

theologians in the Libri carolini (Charlemagne’s Books, ca. 790) who attempted the middle course between iconoclasm and the cult of images.” On the question of divine energy’s presence in the image, however, the author(s) of the Libri took the iconoclast position and firmly argued against the identity of the image and its prototype. Those who believe in such identity deceive

themselves. “Their real experience brought about by the beauty of the painting,” paraphrases Arthur Armstrong, “depends purely on the artist’s skill and is in no way the result of religious devotion, which characterized the man used as the portrait’s subject.” As they confront their Byzantine opponents, Charlemagne’ s theologians promulgate the aesthetic, 1.e., ultimately allegori-

cal view of art and acknowledge language as the sole adequate means of communicating divine mysteries or even moral lessons.” Music in Eriugena’s thought is intertwined with the innermost operation

of the Holy Trinity. At the same time it is everywhere invoked in terms of simile and example, and thus borders on allegory. Eriugena is too much of a Platonist to resist the enchantment of the symbol but he is also a schoolman

and is equally beholden to a rationalistic metaphysics. This metaphysics breaks the world up into strictly separate sensible and intelligible domains and nourishes the taste for allegory. Still myth and allegory are not entirely distinct in this era. The thoroughly symbolic nature of the medieval universe does not allow the degree of separation between the sensible image and the

abstract idea that a genuine allegory requires. They will become clearly divorced only later, when the medieval universe gives way to the modern conception of reality. >! For a summary of this debate see John Meyendorff’s book Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 42-53 (chapter 3, “The Iconoclastic Crisis”). °2 Armstrong, “Development of Thought in the Carolingian Empire,” in Armstrong, ed., The

Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, 565-86. | 3 Armstrong, “Development of Thought,” 569.

Polyphony 57 Polyphony The myth of the Holy Trinity, combined with the aesthetics of contrast

and scholastic rationalism, gradually transforms musical thinking and stimulates the rise of medieval polyphony. This new art, of which the Musica enchiriadis is the earliest unequivocal evidence, is routinely described today

as the defining feature of occidental music. Music historians often remark that polyphony “completely transformed the creation and appreciation of music in the West,” reflected “a conception of music which was fundamentally different from everything in its previous history,” “was undoubtedly the most important event in the history of Western music,” and became “the foundation of a whole musical culture.” The unanimous appreciation of its

uniqueness is combined with the sense that, as David Wilson puts it, polyphony’ s causes are “one of the great mysteries of music history and musical aesthetics.””* The existing explanations of this mystery are inconclusive

and do not withstand close scrutiny. A detailed discussion of their virtues and limitations, however, would be out of place here. It should be noted only

that the origins of polyphony present a problem that cannot be solved by music history alone but requires an interdisciplinary effort and, as Wilson suggests, collaboration between music history and philosophy. An example of such an approach is Ernest Ansermet’s theory that comes closest to explaining cogently polyphony’s causes.” Ansermet proposes to view the rise of polyphony in the West as the result of the evolution of consciousness in general and musical consciousness in particular. The hypothesis outlined

below adds myth theory to music history and philosophy in order to take Ansermet’s insight a step further. Namely, the development of what Ansermet calls “harmonic” consciousness from its earlier “melodic” counterpart should be seen in the light of the transition from ancient myth to its Christian

rival-cum-heir. The myth of the Holy Trinity forms the core of this new mythology and 1s primarily responsible for the changes in musical consciousness that led to the emergence of polyphonic composition. Polyphony reproduces in music the relations among the persons of the Holy Trinity. In the terminology of the Musica enchiriadis, the vox principalis of organum represents the origin of the whole composition; it corresponds to the first person of the Trinity. This voice is then supplemented by the vox - Quotations respectively from G. Adler, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 159 (my translation—V.M.); Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 125; Hoppin, Medieval Music, 187; Wilson, Music in the Middle Ages. Style and Structure, 97. °> Ansermet, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (The Foundations of Music in Human Consciousness).

58 } The New Song organalis that is at once identical to and distinct from its own origin; it | corresponds to the second person. Alongside the two simultaneous but different voices, the third critical element is the rules of harmony that define

the relation between them. These rules determine, for example, whether organum will be simple, with the vox organalis moving in parallel to the vox principalis at the octave, fifth, or fourth below it; or composite, with further doubling of one or both voices at the octave. This third element is not heard directly by the ear but is appreciated by the intellect, by what the medieval

philosopher calls “the inner sense.” To put it even more plainly, cantus firmus generates discantus just as God the Father generates the Son, and, just as their mutual bond is the Holy Ghost, harmony links the two voices with each other.

The author of the Musica enchiriadis chose a phrase pregnant with unintended symbolism for his examples of polyphonic settings: Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius (Thou art the everlasting Son of Father).*° The “good news” of polyphony is the simultaneous mutual identity and difference of the

Creator and the creature that are expressed through the movement of the descant, the voice of the human being, alongside the voice of heaven, cantus firmus. The latter is drawn from Gregorian chant that “the most blessed Pope Gregory composed,” as medieval legend has it, “with the assistance and at the dictation [. . .] of the Holy Ghost.”°’ The former is a human invention. As it permeates medieval culture, the Trinitarian model of all existence reaches music, too. This model redeems difference and motion—the two concepts that were strictly excluded from the Eleatic and Platonic One, or from Plotinus’s “This.”°° Difference, movement, and even matter—albeit in a transfigured form—now become part of the Absolute. Polyphony articulates musically

the simultaneous fragmentation of the One into multiple planes that are qualitatively irreducible to one another, and their intrinsic unity. The idea of

unity is raised to a new qualitative level. Unity can now hear itself as internally differentiated identity and self-identical difference. It can be, as Ansermet puts it, “at a distance without distance from itself.” In addition to simultaneous different voices medieval polyphony is also marked by features that make it unique among its folk and non-western *6 Palisca, Musica Enchiriadis, 19-22 and 29-30 (Mus. ench. chapters 12-15 and 18); the example is also quoted in Hoppin, Medieval Music, 191. > John, On Music (De musica), chapter 17, in Palisca, ed., Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music, 136. *® Plotinus, The Enneads, 52 (1.6.7).

»? Ansermet, Les fondements, 74.

Polyphony 59 counterparts.” Firstly, the new sense of human agency elevates the role of the composer. The type of person that this polyphony projects is scholasticallyminded, which finds expression, secondly, in the written nature of this music

and, thirdly, in the rationalistic approach to developing its rules. The authority of the individual composer was established over time, apparently, against the earlier practice of improvised many-voiced singing and represents what Albert Seay describes as “the ever-increasing domination of the creator over the reproducer.’”®! “True polyphony in the highest of senses,” remarks Seay, “could not be improvised; it had to be composed by someone aware of both practical and philosophical requirements.” Accordingly, the monastic

and ecclesiastical musical sensibility treats the original “polyphonic incentive,” as Paul Lang calls it, in a highly rationalistic manner. The work of

the music theorist resembles that of a grammarian who derives abstracttheoretical rules from an existing language. “Just as letters are the elementary and indivisible constituents of speech (vox articulata),” writes the author of the Musica enchiriadis, “from which syllables are put together, and these in

turn make up verbs and nouns, and from them is composed the fabric of a complete discourse, so the roots of song (vox canora) are phthongi, which are called soni in Latin. The content of all music is ultimately reducible to them.’”® Nancy van Deusen argues, further, that the decisive stimulus for musical troping, which is widely believed to be the earliest manifestation of medieval polyphonic thinking, “came from scriptural exegesis—the interpretational modes—and its pervasive influence on the form and content of the Mass.” Eco likewise advances a view that resonates with Ansermet’s ideas

and emphasizes polyphony’s rationalistic roots. “Harmony,” he writes, “a ‘fitting union of different sounds’ (diversarum vocum apta coadunation; Musica enchiriadis, ch. 9), had become a technical aesthetic value realized °° Schneider, Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit: historische und phdnomenologische Studien, 3 and 10-11. Schneider’s book, the first volume of a larger study that was never continued, deals with polyphony among the so-called “natural” nations (Naturvélker). 61 Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 127, Palisca, Musica Enchiriadis, p. xxxiii, and Seay, Music in the Medieval World, 77. 62 Seay, Music in the Medieval World, 79-80.

3 The pervasive influence of the grammarian on the emergence and early development of medieval musical notation is the subject of Leo Treitler’s study, “Reading and Singing: On the Genesis of Occidental Music-Writing,” in Fenlon, Early Music History 4. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Music, 135-208. Cf. also Gallo’s remarks that the analogy between language and music is an old tradition, beginning perhaps with Pythagoreans and carried on in Plato and later in the Aristotelian school. Gallo, Music of the Middle Ages II, 1. 64 Von Deusen, The Harp and the Soul. Essays in Medieval Music, 167.

60 The New Song in lived experience. [. . .] A metaphysical principle had become an artistic

one.” The medieval polyphonist is at once a grammarian, exegete, and metaphysician—all inspired by the Holy Ghost.

Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius Like its antique counterpart, the medieval view evinces the full gamut of ideas about music’s powers. It carries an archaic set of beliefs that come into initial contact with Christianity and will persist well into modernity. It also develops, largely under classical influence but also driven by its own inner logic, an aesthetic attitude toward music. The Pythagorean song of the cosmos continues but its import becomes increasingly allegorical rather than mythosophic as in Plato. Still aesthetic detachment and allegory are enveloped in the genuinely mythical cultural atmosphere as medieval mysticism produces the final blossoming of open and unequivocal myth. The content

of this myth is, however, quite different from its ancient precursor. The “harmony of the spheres” now becomes only one part in the new song of the human being who has begun to realize its independence from the Absolute. Music enunciates this newly articulated irrepressibility of the human person in a truly mythical mode: even as they give it away, medieval commentators remain unaware of the connection between polyphony and the Holy Trinity. The connection thankfully escapes the allegorizing faculty of the medieval theologian who, had he become conscious of it, would have doubtless run wild with it. What polyphony cannot escape, however, is the schoolman’s pervasive rationalism which it articulates, in fact, as eloquently as it does the freedom of the human agent. But it is these two factors, abstract rationalism

and individualistic freedom, that will eventually explode the holistic and

| finalized medieval world and transform it into an open-ended, infinite, and inanimate space. However infinite it may be, this new universe will still find itself in the grip of its sole living inhabitant, man-the-artist. As before, this

| artist will wear Orpheus’s Thracian garb and carry the ancient singer’s lyre.

© Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 38.

Chapter 4 Mundus est fabula Heralding the growing self-consciousness of the artist, Orpheus becomes extraordinarily popular during the Renaissance." In addition to being a bearer

of moral and metaphysical truths, the image of the ancient singer increasingly turns into a mirror in which the Renaissance painter, poet, and musician examine their own features. The Neoplatonist, magical Orpheus becomes such a mirror in the thought of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and in

the musical-astrological trend that his influence encourages. Humanist thinkers likewise see in Orpheus’s legendary powers a challenge to the modern

musician, and by the end of the sixteenth century the several trajectories of the myth combine to forge a new art form: opera. Monteverdi and Striggio’s “fable in music” L’ Orfeo encapsulates these trends and gives shape to a new conception of music and its powers. The aesthetic sensibility captured in this conception is of a piece with contemporaneous cosmology and epistemology and as such makes itself felt in René Descartes’s Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641). These Meditations are a monologue on the metaphysical underpinnings of the modern subject that gives pride of place to the favorite theatrical device of the Baroque, deus ex machina. The most striking realignment that the medieval constellation of cultural genera undergoes during the Renaissance is the triumph of allegory over symbol. Allegory’s ascendance peaks in the early Baroque period. The mythosophic Orpheus flourishes in Renaissance musical magic and is eventually

absorbed by the increasingly aesthetic understanding of the myth. But Orpheus’s aesthetic and allegorical status differs now from what it was in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The beginning of the modern period is

marked by the dissolution of the pre-modern sense of reality. Already evident in late medieval culture, this process steadily gathers momentum during the Renaissance and matures in the Baroque. It consists in the aestheticization of consciousness brought about by the division of the world into the intelligible and sensible domains that from now on vie with each other for reality. The second, closely related tendency is the emergence of modern infinitism, i.e., the acceptance of infinite regress as more rational ' Cf. Scavizzi, “The Myth of Orpheus in Italian Renaissance Art, 1400-1600,” OMM 111-162.

61

62 Mundus est fabula than pre-modern holism. The underlying logic of this infinitism renders miracles impossible, and they become from now on signs of falsehood, error, and fiction. The only manner in which the synthesis of the intelligible and

the sensible is considered possible now is allegorically. What was a tale about reality is now a fable. Monteverdi and Striggio’s favola in musica articulates arguably the most

important project of modernity: the quest for immanent immortality. The new, immanentist conception of the human subject transforms medieval and Renaissance polyphony into early modern monody. Instead of a plurality of equal voices, it projects the predominance of one voice over a multiplicity of others, of melody over harmony. As it leaves behind the relatively static, mystical equality of polyphonic voices, monody develops a dynamic, progressive dimension of harmony. Simultaneously Monteverdi and Striggio’s treatment of Orpheus as an artist who overcomes nature makes it evident that will is the essence of the emergent modern subject. Early opera enunciates,

in other words, the shape of the modern universe from its cosmology to politics to aesthetics and, finally, to an immanentist anthropocentric theosis.

Renaissance Magic, Humanist Scholarship, and Opera | The new art form of music drama that arose in the late sixteenth century is, as Gary Tomlinson puts it, “inevitably and rightly implicated in a magical history.” The Orpheus myth is involved in the articulation of this new genre on virtually all levels: it supplies the story, invites an intimate integration of —

music into theatrical spectacle, and evokes a philosophy of music that is focused on exploring its effects.’ Music historians view opera, to use Ruth Katz’s expression, as “quintessentially the search for an answer to questions about the nature and powers of music.’” The history of this search includes two distinct but closely intertwined strands. The one evolved under the influence of astrological magic, with the Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino attending its early stages, and the other was a more technical but equally

driven extension of humanistic music theory, fostered by the sixteenthcentury learned music historian and theoretician Girolamo Mei and the forward-looking scholar and composer Vincenzo Galilei. * Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera, 4. Fora thorough historical treatment of this involvement see Pirotta and Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi. * Katz, Divining the Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera, 15; cf. also Kerman, Opera as Drama, 19, and Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 12 and 16.

Renaissance Magic, Humanist Scholarship, and Opera 63 In his article “Orpheus and Ficino” John Warden summarizes the pervasive influence that the Orpheus myth exercised on the founder of the Floren-

tine Platonic Academy. As faithful as he is to the Christian-Neoplatonist tradition, Ficino at the same time brings to the forefront its humanistic dimension by placing the human being at the center of the order of things and arguing for man’s powers of self-creation: the human artist is costruttore

de sé. The historian of Renaissance philosophy Paul Kristeller notes that Ficino purposely modified the Neoplatonist tradition in order to accommodate “the central position of the human soul.”° Man is capable, Ficino argues, | of expressing the divine music of the cosmic soul and this ability rests on the affinity between human spirit, spiritus humanus, and the spirit of the word, spiritus mundi. When properly used, music prepares man’s soul for receiving the astral spirit: musical meditation constitutes the initial phase of Orphic

ascent to divinity. The development of self-consciousness is the crucial factor in Ficino’s musical magic, as well as in attaining divine inspiration;

it is through the latter that man transforms himself into a theurgist, i.e, ‘‘[m]Jan the artist” who “follows in the footsteps of God the artist.” The doctrine of Platonic love is both the apex of Ficino’s erotic cosmology and the culmination of his Orphism. Rather than by the fatum of Antiquity, Ficino’s cosmos is governed by love, and it is love that ties together all of Orpheus’s hypostases: culture hero, theologian, musician, and lover proper.® In Ficino’s

commentary on Plato’s Symposium Orpheus is quoted to testify to love’s powers. Love, says Orpheus, “holds the keys to everything” from musical intervals to songs to the arts in general and, finally, to cosmic life in its entirety. Love is the universal innate drive “for the spread of [. . .] perfection.” “This desire compels seeds to sprout out into shoots,” glosses Ficino, “it draws out from the heart of each thing the powers of that thing, and conceives offspring; and opening the thing as though with a kind of key, it leads the offspring into the light.”’ Amatory madness is the highest among the other types of divine furor: poetic, mystical, and prophetic. “The books of Orpheus,” remarks Ficino, “are all testimony that he was seized by all four madnesses.’* Music’s most important task and power is, further, to provide

a link between the immanent, sublunar world and the transcendent, divine

one. What stands out as Ficino’s unique and novel contribution to this

| familiar picture is his doctrine of musical magic. > Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 128. ° OMM 90-103.

’ Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Third Speech, chapter III, quoted from Hofstadter and Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty, 215. ® Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 238 (Seventh Speech, chapter XV).

64 ' Mundus est fabula The doctrine was discussed in considerable detail a few decades ago as part of the history of ideas by D. P. Walker and more recently in the context of the history of musical culture by Gary Tomlinson.’ Its basic mechanism

rests on two crucial, closely related concepts: song and spirit. Ficino develops a striking theory of song as a rational organism. The matter of song, he observes, “is air, hot or warm, still breathing and somehow living”; the song itself is “like an animal, it is composed of certain parts and limbs of its own and not only possesses motion and displays passion but even carries meaning like a mind, so that it can be said to be a kind of airy and rational animal.’ In the Three Books on Life Ficino places this “animal” in the middle of his hierarchy of things suitable for astrological magic, ascending from minerals at the bottom to supra-rational, divine intelligence at the top. Music is the fourth element in this seven-tier ordering between odors below and creatures of imagination above."' Ficino proposes three main rules for composing

magically effective songs. The first is to select a text appropriate to the , character of the celestial spirit to whom the song is addressed. The second is

“to take note of what special star rules what place or person and then to observe what sorts of tones and songs these regions and persons generally use, so that you may supply similar ones [. . .] to the words which you are trying to expose to the same stars.” The third rule broadens the second beyond musical habits, as well as beyond their regional scope, and recommends that the song imitate the “speeches, songs, motions, dances, moral behavior, and actions” induced in people in general by certain positions and aspects of celestial bodies.'* As the magus endows it with these “gifts from the stars,” his song, “a most powerful imitator of all things,” becomes filled with “celestial power” and “wonderfully arouses our spirit upwards to the celestial influence and the celestial influence downwards to our spirit.”

Music’s middle position in the order of things ensures the pervasive nature of its powers. In an oft-quoted passage from his Commentary on the Timaeus Ficino argues that “by its nature, both spiritual and material, [musical sound] at once seizes and claims as its own man in his entirety,” , 1e., from the highest mental to the lowest physical strata of the human being.'* Music’s position and comprehensive reach are directly analogous to ? Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, 3-44 and MRM 101-144.

'0 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 359. | '! Ficino, Three Books on Life, 356-357 (III 21:24-40). 2 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 358-59 (III 21:65-70). '? Bicino, Three Books on Life, 357 and 359 (III 21:41ff and 75-82). 4 Ficino, Comm. in Tim., ch. xxviii; quoted in Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 9 and in MRM 111.

Renaissance Magic, Humanist Scholarship, and Opera 65 Ficino’s conception of the human person. The human being, too, is placed in the middle of the world hierarchy and, like music, man himself claims the entire cosmos as his own. This is especially true of man the artist. “In inhabiting all the elements and cultivating them all,” writes Ficino in Platonic Theology, “he performs the office of God: while present on earth he is not absent from the aether.” Furthermore, along with elements and animals, the human artist “uses the supernal and celestial beings for instruction and for

the wonders of magic.’ Both music and the human person are in turn modeled after the central constitutive element in Ficino’s entire outlook, the concept of spirit. Ficino’s cosmos sings and dances much as Plato’s did but now, rather

than by musical-mathematical divinities, the proscenium of this cosmic theater is taken over by mediating spirits. These spirits already played a prominent part in Plato’s vision of the animated, rational cosmos in which the human soul makes its journey. The Eros of the Symposium is the most vivid example; he is one of the “envoys and interpreters” who, as Diotima

points out, “form the medium of prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and sorcery” (203a). In Ficino’s spiritualistic metaphysics these “demons” likewise belong to the innumerable class of beings whose activity ensures that the world’s disparate

parts, especially man and planetary deities, remain connected with one another. Their communion is the medium of Ficino’s musical magic. Ficino describes spirit as “a certain vapor, very thin and clear, produced by the heat of the heart from the thinnest part of the blood.”’° As it mediates between

corporeal blood and the senses, which form soul’s lower edge as it were, spirit provides the link between body and soul, partaking of the nature of both. “Spirit is a very tenuous body,” he writes, “as if now it were soul and not body, and now body and not soul.’’”” Its mixed nature accounts for spirit’ s

susceptibility to musical influence. “For sound and song arise from consid-

eration in the mind, the impulse of fantasy and the desire of the heart,” explains Ficino, “and in disturbing the air and lending measure to it they vibrate the airy spirit of the listener [. . .] arouse the fantasy, affect the heart, , and reach the inmost recesses of the mind; they still, and also set in motion, the humors and the limbs of the body.””®

'S PT, XII, Ill, 2-3. , 16 Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, VI, 6; quoted in MRM 106. '” Ficino, Three Books on Life, Ul, 3, p. 257. 187 etter to Antonio Cani giani in Ficino, Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino, 62; Walker describes Ficino’s addressee as Antonio Canisiano (Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 6).

66 Mundus est fabula Ficino seems to have taken these ideas seriously enough to practice them in secret. Walker’s reconstruction of his musical-magical rites provides their

basic hypothetical outline: “He is playing a lira da braccio or a lute, decorated with a picture of Orpheus charming animals, trees, and rocks; he is singing [. . .] the Orphic Hymn to the Sun; he is burning frankincense, and at times he drinks wine; perhaps he contemplates a talisman; in day-time he — is in sunlight, and at night he ‘represents the sun by fire.’”!” Yet generally the

attitude assumed by Ficino and his fellow-members of the Florentine Academy is described as that of serio ludere, “serious play.”’’ Commentators frequently note that the atmosphere of the Florentine Academy was marked by a palpable aestheticism.”' There is an episode, described in Ficino’ s letter

to Cosimo de’Medici, that rarely fails to be mentioned in accounts of Ficino’s magic and vividly exemplifies this attitude. When he had just sung, Ficino writes in a mildly humorous tone, the Orphic Hymn to the Cosmos in which he asked for a tranquil life of a scholar, a letter came from Cosimo

announcing that his wish was granted.” This aestheticism is even more pronounced in the work of humanist scholars. Even though it took its cue primarily from rhetoric, subsequent humanist music-theoretical thought was driven by the fascination with reproducing “the marvelous effects of the music of the ancients” as much as Ficino’s magic was.” Girolamo Mei’s researches into the music of Antiquity were motivated in large measure by his dissatisfaction with contemporaneous musical practices. He deplored these practices as aiming at “the delectation of the sense of hearing” and contrasted them with ancient music’s “object of

leading someone else to the same affections as one’s own.””* Modern music’s failure to pursue a similar goal and to reproduce similar effects is caused, Mei thinks, by the very nature of polyphony. The greatest shortcoming that haunts it is that different simultaneous voices obscure the text; its second cardinal flaw is that these voices cancel out one another’s effects. “[T]he quality of one [voice],” Mei is convinced, “ought necessarily to impede the operation of the other, the two being opposites.” Orpheus is invoked '? Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 30. On the instrument that Ficino might have played see pp. 19-20.

*° Cf. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 30, and OMM 207-208. *I Cf. Warden, “Orpheus and Ficino,” OMM 100. ** Walker, The Ancient Theology, 25. °° Cf. MRM 138ff.

*4 Mei, “Letter [to Vincenzo Galilei] of 8 May 1572,” in: Palisca, ed., The Florentine | Camerata. Documentary Studies and Translations, 66.

Renaissance Magic, Humanist Scholarship, and Opera 67 to support the argument that even in their instrumental accompaniment ancient musicians followed the sung melody note for note.” Through enthusiastic efforts of Mei’s younger follower, Vincenzo Galilei, these ideas inspired among the members of the Florentine Camerata attempts at creating

a musical-theatrical spectacle that was intended as a revival of ancient tragedy.”° Ottavio Rinuccini’s rendering of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was especially favored by the composers who were involved in , these efforts.”’ In comparison with Ficino, the humanistic music scholars do not only narrow the scope of music’s desired effects to individual, subjective affetti,

but also focus on technical rather than metaphysical questions. They are preoccupied with the formal properties of musical compositions designed to make sure that the emotion carried by the piece take hold of the listener. The

results their work eventually produces are arrived at through historical research, theorizing, and experimentation. The manner in which Giulio Caccini (d. 1618), for example, goes about creating the new, monodic style is not that of a magus in mystical ecstasy, but a series of trials that test a hypothesis.”* Rather than relying on mediating spirits, Caccini achieves the

desired outcome “of speaking musically” by his own deliberately and purposely applied effort. The conception of music’s powers that eventually comes to undergird Monteverdi and Striggio’s L’Orfeo brings out both the subjectivist and the voluntaristic dimensions of this effort. The only episode in the opera in which Orpheus directly demonstrates the powers of music is his dialogue with Caronte (Charon) in the beginning

of Act III. The music historian Barbara Hanning calls it “the central psychological climax of the drama.’”’ Nino Pirotta observes, further, that by a stroke of genius Monteverdi and Striggio turn Orpheus’s aria “Possente Spirto” (“The Mighty Spirit’) “into an “Orphic’ rite, a highly stylized and

hieratically formalized incantation, through which a superhuman singer soothes and subdues the forces of darkness blocking his path.”*° In this 20 Palisca, The Florentine Camerata, 58 and 72. © Cf, Anderson, Baroque Music from Monteverdi to Handel, 11 and Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 15-16.

?7 Cf. McGee, “Orfeo and Euridice, the First Two Operas,” in OMM 163ff. | 8 Cf. Caccini’s preface to Nuove musiche (1601) in Weiss and Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, 169-71. 2? Hanning, Of Poetry and Music’s Power: Humanism and the Creation of Opera, 120.

* Pirotta, “Early Opera and Aria,” in Austin, ed., New Looks at Italian Opera, 102; quoted in Katz, Divining the Powers of Music, 91.

68 Mundus est fabula famous aria Orpheus asks the stern boatman to grant him passage to the underworld. Long, elaborate, and heavy with melismata, the first part of his appeal leaves the recalcitrant “Mighty Spirit” only slightly impressed. “Ma lunge, ah, lunge sia da questo petto/Pieta (But far, ah, far from my breast

| must pity lie),’” is his verdict. It is Orpheus’s second attempt—shorter, more spontaneous, and less ornamented—that overcomes the monster’ s resistance. It begins with a mixture of self-pity and outrage but then quickly turns into

, a sequentially. ascending incantation that carries a thrice-repeated formula sounding more like an exasperated command than a humble plea: “Rendetemi il mio ben, tartarei Numi! (Give me back my love, ye gods of Tartarus!).”*! This puts Caronte to sleep; Orpheus repeats his magic spell one more time and crosses the “inky pool” that separates him from his goal. The ensuing Chorus of Spirits, in the tradition evoking both Sophocles

and Ficino, praises the enterprising man and explains the meaning of the scene: Orpheus’s success stands for the cosmic advance of man, his mastery of the elements, and bold “disarming” of nature.** Characteristically, the Renaissance artists suppress Sophocles’s warning in the Antigone that man’s

artistry can have a repulsive side (lines 365-375). Similarly elided is the mention of death as the ultimate limit of man’s progress. Monteverdi and

Striggio make death rather the greatest but surmountable obstacle in Orpheus’s triumphal march. Immortality is what Orpheus really seeks. True, he descends into the womb of nature in order to bring back his spouse. But Eurydice’s docile, and, except for two brief exclamations, voiceless presence in the opera turns her into a mere aspect of Orpheus himself. In the bucolic

first act she joyfully gives herself up to Orpheus and the singer almost invariably refers to her as his “soul.” He eventually makes it clear that this usage goes beyond an amorous cliché. “Non vivo io, no, che poi di vita é priva,” he argues before Caronte, “Mia cara sposa, il cor non é pit meco (I am not living: no, for since my dear wife is deprived of life my heart no

longer remains with me).”°’ There is, however, another hypostasis of Eurydice in the opera that is detached from her persona proper and assumes the shape of the nymph who brings Orpheus the news of his spouse’s death. Though tragic, this voice is far more articulate, passionate, and alive than Eurydice herself. Eurydice on the way from Hades to the world of the living

represents, by contrast, that moment immediately before a person’s 3! Notes to the compact disk recording Monteverdi and Striggio, L’Orfeo. Favola in musica, 98-101; translation by Lionel Salter.

> Monteverdi and Striggio, L’Orfeo. Favola in musica, 101. °3 Monteverdi and Striggio, L’Orfeo. Favola in musica, 96-7.

Renaissance Magic, Humanist Scholarship, and Opera 69 awakening which is so subtly captured by Rainer Maria Rilke. She is then, Rilke imagines, “in anew maidenhood,” closed “like a young flower toward the evening (in einem neuen Mddchentum [. . .| wie eine junge Blume gegen Abend),” and is promptly assimilated back into the subterranean, pre-human

dormancy.” Hegel describes this kind of innocence as “indifferent selfidentity” that “spontaneously relates itself to its other and thereby falls to the ground or, in a positive sense, withdraws into its ground.”*>

The theme of immortality in the opera reaches back to Ficino who viewed man’s mastery of nature, political craft, and liberal arts as phases of

theosis.°° “He who rules over the body in so many ways and in such important ways,” he wrote in Platonic Theology, “and who performs the role

of immortal God is undoubtedly himself immortal.” His paean to the arts closes by saying that man “has almost the same genius, so to speak, as the author of heavens, and [is] capable in a way of making the heavens, should he ever obtain the instruments and the celestial material.’°’’ A new sense of immortality makes itself felt in these dreams of grandeur. The medieval person wished to preserve her immortal soul and was willing to sacrifice her bodily existence for it. Even as he argues in the traditional Platonic mode for the immortality of the soul, Ficino raises the immanent human person to a stature all but equal to that of a transcendent immortal being. Monteverdi and Striggio’s Coro di Spiriti, as it lauds the techne of the human artist, marks the

fruition of this tendency. What is desired now is immanent immortality,a __ perpetual, deathless existence in this world and in this, untransfigured body. It can be achieved by means of artistry crowned with man’s impassioned,

irresistible will. At the same time, unlike Ficino’s magical musical rite, Monteverdi and Striggio’s creation is an aesthetic event. The thread that connects Ficino’s astrological magic to early modern opera is part of the broader transition from the medieval, mystical-symbolist view of music to the modern, rationalistic-allegorical one. In the end, however, Orpheus does not succeed by his own effort. He loses Eurydice through the despair caused by doubting the gods and through the hubris of over-relying on the power of his own love. The balance is eventually restored by Apollo, who gives his mortal son a lecture on the virtue of 34 Rilke, Ausgewdlte Gedichte (Selected Poems), 60. Eurydice as Monteverdi’s “musical construction of ‘maidenhood’” is discussed in Susan McClary’s book Feminine Endings:

Music, Gender, and Sexuality; quoted in MRM 233-34. . 39 SL 437.

°° Cf. Kristeller on immortality as a central theme in Ficino’s philosophy (Renaissance Thought, 130).

°1 PT XIII, Il 3 and 6 (vol. 4, pp. 175 and 177).

70 Mundus est fabula moderation. Neither joy nor grief must be excessive, the god teaches, and

, and bliss. |

Orpheus is rewarded, finally, with Platonic rather than immanent immortality

Along with articulating new content Orpheus’s song assumes a new form: stile rappresentativo. Rather than a return to monophony, the revival of ancient poetic expressiveness occurs as monody, 1.e., a monophonically inclined, as it were, form of polyphony. The melodic solo part steps forth, while multiple simultaneous voices align themselves as its accompaniment.

These voices no longer move in counterpoint to one another, but rather proceed homophonically, in agreement among themselves. From being the chief part, cantus firmus is demoted to basso continuo, the bass that merely stands in attendance to the melody, which in most cases unfolds in the treble or soprano. Composers and theorists begin to abandon the older practice of deriving voices one by one from the cantus firmus and develop a new vision

in which the many-voiced fabric no longer consists of independent, if mutually coordinated, threads but presents itself as a synchronic vertical arrangement. And, last but not least, as modal thinking increasingly yields

composition.” |

to tonality and functional harmony, a purposeful, dramatic unfolding becomes one of the most important aesthetic dimensions of the musical

From Symbol to Allegory In the course of the Renaissance the Orpheus myth undergoes perhaps the most drastic transformation in its entire history. It comes about as a result of two radical changes that erode the basic conditions of myth’s existence. With the rise of the modern outlook the medieval immediate availability of reality dissipates and the way of thinking that necessitates miracles yields to a mindset that is inhospitable to their very possibility. The former trend can be described as a progressive aestheticization of consciousness and the latter is rooted in the acceptance of infinite regress—against ancient and medieval teleology. The two changes are closely intertwined with each other and their

| joint dynamics determine the destiny of Orpheus gua figure of myth on the threshold of modernity. Several stages can be detected in this process. As it is absorbed into Renaissance magic, medieval symbolism is sufficiently “softened” to flow imperceptibly into the humanist euhemerisms of the sixteenth century that in turn prepare the soil for the flourishing of allegory. The relation between *8 Cf. Anderson, Baroque Music, 15.

From Symbol to Allegory 71 the transcendent and the immanent planes of being that underlies these changes likewise goes through several phases. The two planes form a mystical unity in medieval consciousness but Ficino’s magic begins to dissolve it by inserting between these planes the ever-multiplying chains of __ spiritual influences. The immediate mystical node is then largely concealed under rationally graspable series of causes and effects in humanistic hermeneutic exercises. But as a result the transcendent plane is gradually displaced by its immanent counterpart. The mechanism of this displacement consists

in breaking the transcendent up into divine mystery, which is left in the beyond, and the supra-sensible structures that used to shore up this mystery

but are now transferred into the immanent domain where they become natural laws. The immanentist mindset now holds the entire world in its grip but the gain comes at a price: the world is not whole any more. The weakened sense for immediacy problematizes the link between the world’s intelligible

and sensible aspects. The progressive dissolution of this link inaugurates allegory as the most adequate means of expression. The quest for a new way of connecting thinking with objective existence becomes the Key project of

early modern philosophy. |

The highest and the most secure instance of reality for the medieval

view of things is Jesus Christ. Part of the philosophical meaning of the , mythologem of Godmanhood consists, as was pointed out in the previous

chapter, in assuring a mystical bond between the transcendent and the immanent domains. The medieval approach can be called transcendentalist because it places the crucial meaning of all human activity, including music, beyond the confines of the immanent. It is not, however, simply transcendentalist because it also insists that the immanent domain be redeemed, 1.e., taken into and reconciled with its transcendent counterpart. Their reconcilia-

| tion is the theme, for example, of the apocryphal story about the Harrowing of Hell—a tale in which the Savior displays a particularly vivid resemblance

to Orpheus.” The Christ’s victory over the nether world signifies the redemption of immanent being but, just like the unity of the divine and the human natures in Him, this event remains irreducibly mystical. The mutual connection between the immanent and the transcendent is not recognized as a demand of reason but is taken to be something external to it. Medieval consciousness is transcendentalist in this precise philosophical sense. By the end of the Renaissance the view of the world as consisting of the transcen-

dent and immanent dimensions is replaced with the view of it as an immanent system. From this, the modern point of view the world is no longer ? Cf. chapter XII in The Gospel of Nicodemus. In Thirteen Chapters..., 29-33.

72 Mundus est fabula directly governed by God; it is ruled instead by its own, intrinsic laws. Thoughts of eternity are no longer suggested by the twinkling icon-lamp in a monastic cell but are now inspired by vast terrestrial and infinite cosmic vistas. Rather than through visions of the beyond, the artist constructs the luminous expanses lying before him through keen observation which he

subjects to and purges by the strict laws of geometric perspective. Importantly, the immanent should not be confused with the material. The modern divide between the intelligible and the sensible is drawn along a different line than the medieval divide between God and creation. Both of the mutually separate planes are conceived by modern thought as inhabiting the space “this side,” as it were, of the chasm between God and man. At the same time mystical transcendentalism needs rationalistic imma-

nentism. Both are necessary aspects of medieval thought that constantly overflow into each other and the mechanism of their mutual transmogrifications illuminates the basic problem of the medieval outlook. The former

defines the absolute by distinguishing it from the created world but the images of this world turn out to be indispensable for such definition. What Huizinga calls “a marked tendency of thought to embody itself in images” in the Middle Ages is not extravagance but is driven by the logic of mystical thinking itself.” The mystic needs these images either positively, as material

for the popular genre of visions, or negatively, as a foil for the esoteric constructs of apophatic theology. Reminiscent of Hades in Orphic funerary tablets, Dante’s paradise is filled with meadows, rivers, flowers, and even festive processions, while the Areopagite’s negative theology builds itself up by expelling from the precinct of divinity all sensible imagery and even abstract concepts.

Medieval consciousness, in other words, contains the germ of its own demise in what constitutes one of its most essential features: the symbolic . vision of the world. In his classic study The Waning of the Middle Ages Huizinga amply documents the process by which this expansive, omnivorous

mysticism drives itself into a corner. The desire to see a mysterious link between the creature and the Creator in all things results, Huizinga observes, in “a constant blending of the spheres of holy and of profane thought” and,

further, in “an irresistible tendency to reduce the infinite to the finite, to disintegrate all mystery.’*! If everything is divine mystery, nothing is; the mystery loses its transcendent silhouette and is now completely assimilated into the body of the immanent. What Huizinga calls “familiarity with sacred * Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 136. "| Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 137 and 139.

From Symbol to Allegory 73 things” is a sign of the reduction of the transcendent to the immanent, of the

divine to the natural. The reduction is comprehensive: it affects the understanding of the absolute, the human person, the arts in general, and music in particular. But as the imprint of God’s hand becomes the object of inquisitive attention, medieval myth falls victim to the dialectic that inheres in miracle—just as archaic myth did in Antiquity. This dialectic, to repeat, consists in the fact that the synthesis of the transcendent and the immanent, which is supposed to be utterly immediate from the point of view of mythical consciousness, in point of fact can acquire all its profound significance only as a result of an extensive build-up of its meaning by the work of reason. This mediating activity is what isolates itself and steps to the foreground in modern times—obscuring by this confident gesture both the unwarranted

assumptions that constitute its point of departure and the embarrassing absence of a final destination. As it takes shape, modern consciousness draws away from medieval mystical transcendentalism, whose excesses Huizinga so eloquently exposes, and plunges into the opposite extreme of rationalistic immanentism.

Ficino’s philosophy of music corresponds to the middle phase of this process. The Orpheus of the Hermetic tradition suits the purposes of this philosophy particularly well because there is an important affinity between Hermeticism and the burgeoning immanentist conception of the human artist.

Hermeticism’s distinctive contribution to the history of ideas, Losev proposes, should be described as “personalism,” i.e., “a doctrine about the absolute person who is above all that exists, including the world and the human being.” But there is another side to the matter. “This singular and fully personalistic deity,” Losev continues, “gets involved with its own creature and begins to act, not as the absolute person, but as a limited, partial, and conditional one. It assumes human features—both positive and negative

ones.”” This doctrine, according to Losev, is a milestone on the path from ancient impersonal cosmologism to Christian absolute personalism. Ficino reverses the course that brought into existence the Hermetic vision: he begins to naturalize an already available personalistic absolute. The Hermetic attempt to extricate the absolute from the natural human being and the Renaissance

efforts to elevate the latter to divinity share the naturalistic element that assures their compatibility in Ficino’s thought. The air of liminality becomes even denser around Ficino’s musical magic.

His doctrine still retains residual mysticism but at the same time it betrays everywhere the philosopher’s desire to explain. The decisive ingredient in ” Losev, Istoriia antichnoi fulosofiit v konspektivnom izlozhenii (A History of Ancient Philosophy: Conspectus), 180.

/4 Mundus est fabula Ficino’s explanations is the concept of spirit. Spirit is, as a matter of fact, the

true substance of those allegedly substantial worlds that it is supposed to

connect, the sensible and the intelligible. Neither of the latter two is conceivable by itself, both are determined only by their mutual contrasts that

bind them together, and Ficino’s spirit fulfills the function of just such a problematic link. Ficino himself does not yet clearly understand that this link

is not merely an auxiliary component but intuitively he did grasp its significance and concentrated his attention precisely on spirit, especially in his ruminations on musical magic. The mystical element in this concept consists in the immediate synthesis of the intelligible and the sensible which Ficino simply leaves unexplained. The synthesis is something that his vision requires but his thought cannot comprehend. At the same time the number

of mediating links that make astrological influences possible becomes

| potentially infinite, which threatens to render magical song impotent. Nowhere is this contradiction more glaring than in Ficino’s discussion of miracles. In Platonic Theology miracle is defined as the “transmuting of the species of things,” which is distinct from simply “forming and shaping matter through the rational principle of art.” “The resulting work is called a miracle,” goes on Ficino, “not because it is the supernatural work of our soul when it becomes God’s instrument, but because it induces wonder, being a

mighty event and one that happens rarely.”

He explains further that malefic magic relies on imagination, phantasy,

and emotions, which the sorcerer uses to harm his victim. By contrast, benefic miracles are performed through the application of reason, as it soars away from the sensible and toward a supra-rational unity with God. Thus miracles performed by mystics are possible thanks to the “golden chain” of

six links, depending from supra-intellectual divinity down through the intellect, soul, soul’s “idolum” (ideal image), aetherial corporeality, and, finally, to elemental (material proper) body. Miracles, Ficino argues, are quite rational and to be expected, given the order of the world; they “have been prescribed in the universal law of things and in an everlasting series of causes (serie causarum).” These miracles, performed by those who become God’s instrument, are, however, distinct from “far greater miracles which God performs through Himself” and which Ficino prefers not to touch.” The effect of these explanations consists in the substitution of mediation for the earlier ineffable immediacy. The fact that spirit plays a part only in the operations of the sorcerer but not in the benefic operations of mystical reason 3 PT XIII, IV 1 (vol. 4, p. 183). “4 PT XIII, III 8-9, 12, and 15 (pp. 193-197, 201 and 205); V 4 and 6 (pp. 213 and 217).

From Symbol to Allegory 75 is evidence not only of Ficino’s politic caution in matters of religion, but also of a gradual shift away from the medieval Trinitarian dialectic in envisioning

the universal connectedness of things. God’s direct involvement in the ordering of the world that warrants and indeed requires miraculous events is respectfully bracketed. The subsequent history of myth capitalizes on precisely this foregrounding of mediating series causarum coupled with turning _ an all but disinterested eye on the proximate presence of the immediate. In conjunction with this it should be noted that Tomlinson’s use of the

concept of similitude, borrowed from Michel Foucault, as a means of explaining the nature of the connections that hold Ficino’s world together is appropriate only to the extent that it points to the increasing dissolution of the world’s whole and aestheticization of consciousness.” It confuses more than it clarifies, however, if it is intended to explain what glue still prevents

this world from complete disintegration. For Ficino, the link between the ideal prototype and its sensible manifestation is still ontologically real. Tomlinson is right to point out that “signs and correspondences, signification and being, cannot be easily sundered in the Renaissance episteme” and that

suppressing the reality of the sign’s denotatum “would run counter to the Platonic and Neoplatonic underpinnings of magical thought.””° Foucault’ s similitude, by contrast, describes the disappearance of all prototypes, sensible and intelligible alike, and the resulting self-enclosed, circular relation of the

similar to the similar.*’ As such it marks a poststructuralist climax of the tendency whose beginnings can be discerned in Ficino’s thought only with great effort and even then, perhaps, only with the benefit of hindsight. As she draws a contrast between the Neoplatonist and the humanist sources of Ficino’s magic, the historian of early modern thought Frances Yates calls the dreams of Renaissance humanists “more modest” than the aspirations of the advocates of magic.*® But in fact the humanist’s attitude

, toward music is marked by an even greater, if more subtle, hubris. This attitude leans on the assumption that music can be fully grasped in terms of rational understanding. It is this thought, barely hidden under the surface of

consciousness, that drives Mei and Galilei in their attempts to revive Orpheus’s fabled magic. Their euhemerist Orpheus is a real figure in the history of music and to this extent he preserves his mythical stature. But he is at the same time stripped of the magus’s mantle: the effects of his singing * Cf. MRM 48-49, “© MRM 55.

47 Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things, 17ff and passim; This is Not a Pipe, 23-24. 48 Yates, Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. Collected Essays, vol. 2, 75.

76 Mundus est fabula can be analyzed, explained, and replicated at will. The assumption of the total cognizability of all being precludes magic; the latter stands and falls with the recognition of an insoluble mystery. By contrast, the humanist ' shoves aside any doubt as to whether the riddle at hand may be cracked open. The authority of tradition did nothing to stop Isaac Casaubon in 1614 from dispelling the mythical aura of the Hermetica by establishing that it had

been compiled in late Antiquity rather than dating back to early Egyptian times as Ficino believed.” On the contrary, this authority was, one suspects, what provoked Casaubon’s investigation in the first place. The conviction that all things are subject to rational understanding is adopted by modern consciousness not because it is rational, but under the

pressure of factors that are external to reason. Or rather, to put it more accurately, these factors do belong to reason but are not acknowledged as such. The force that drove Baroque consciousness toward a new, so-called “scientific” view of things was not, ultimately, the desire to know the truth, but the will to power and possession. As Horkheimer and Adorno note, knowledge becomes instrumental in this era, a mere means for achieving dominion over nature. “Knowledge [. . .] knows no limits,” they sum up Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) attitude, “either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. [. . .] Technology is the essence of this _ knowledge.’””° Another way of putting it is to say that the avowed, if already diluted, Ficinian ideal of vita contemplativa is finally replaced with the ideal

of vita activa. The successes of modern knowledge can be assessed only from the vantage point of conscious and purposeful manipulation of natural

phenomena. As their trajectories intertwine in the twilight of the Renaissance, the dreams of both the magus and the humanist coincide in a new type of cognitive subject and practical agent—a type that is based on the joint promise of rationalism and voluntarism celebrated in Bacon’s famous formula: “Knowledge is power.” The first part of Orpheus’s aria ““Possente spirto” speaks to the rationalistic conception of music as techne; it corresponds to the subject in this formula. The aria’s second part exemplifies the voluntaristic conception of art; it corresponds to the driving force behind the

predicate, will. Another crucial member of the equation that determines the early

modern outlook is imagination. The tendency toward imagistic thinking, so notable in Ficino, eventually begins to compete with the sense of reality. Serious as their aim is, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy evoke

the atmosphere of Baroque drama. They tell a tale of man’s solitude in a

~° DE 2. |

49 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 398ff.

From Symbol to Allegory 77 world that is, as John Donn put it, “all in pieces.” “I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things,” says

the hero as he sets out on his journey, “are nought but the illusions and dreams [.. .]”°' Pursued by inexorable doubt, he finally finds refuge in the inmost recesses of self-consciousness. He is “a thing which thinks,” i.e., that

: which “doubts, understands [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.””” But the affirmation of the ego as the only self-evident reality in fact empties it, for, aside from abstract self-awareness,

the ego’s entire content is fatally threatened by illusion. “The Ficinian subject forged a central link in an integral chain of being,” comments Tomlinson. “The Cartesian subject is left to contemplate a void between itself and the material world.’”° It is not an accident that this subject finds itself looking to God for salvation from isolation and emptiness because only in God does the chain of causes and effects teleologically conclude and the formal side of thinking coincides with its real side.* At this moment a deus — ex machina appears to the Hamlet-like self and restores the equilibrium upset by pervasive doubt. The reality of the ego is then counter-balanced by the

reality of the external world. But it also turns out that the content of the concept God constitutes the most immediate content of the philosophizing self. This God is nothing other than the most “clear and distinct” idea that is

just as innate as the idea of the self.> In other words, it is a myth; it is identical to the immediate content of the artist’s consciousness of which Hegel speaks in his lectures on aesthetics, when he draws the key distinction between pre-modern and modern art.°° The Cartesian God is fully assimilated by the immanent “thinking thing”; He is the content of this ego—albeit a content that the ego reaches for in the hope of getting beyond the vicious circle of abstract self-reflection. Can such a God perform the task that Descartes’ s hero desperately needs Him to? Alexandre Koyré remarks that in Descartes’s philosophy “[t]here is

no analogy between God and the world; no imagines and vestigia Dei in mundo; the only exception is our soul, that is, a pure mind, a being, a substance of which all essence consists in thought, a mind endowed with an intelligence able to grasp the idea of God, that is, of the infinite (which is

> Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation I, in The Essential Descartes, 169.

>* Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 174. : >3 Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 38. | *4 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 185. ’S Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 188 and 192. °° 417 and 603-605.

78 Mundus est fabula even innate to it), and with will, that is, with infinite freedom.”°’ Such a God is no less an aesthetic phenomenon than the admittedly fictional product of the philosopher’ s imagination, “the powerful demon.” Apollo in Monteverdi's Orfeo and later Amor in Gluck and Calzabigi’s Orphée are operatic embodiments of the same deus ex machina who rescues the hero of the Meditations. The immediately given reality distinct from the play of imagination has vanished and its place has been taken by infinite mediation, 1.e., the perpetual parallelism of the intelligible and the sensible planes of being. Descartes is aware of this basic problem and attempts to reconnect the soul and the body

through “animal spirits.” But, in contrast to Ficino, he can no longer conceive of spirit as the synthesis of the intelligible and the sensible; against

his own purpose he maintains instead that “animal spirits” are “material bodies of extreme minuteness.’”* Quantitative criterion, size, is evoked as the

threshold where the sensible is supposed to pass into a new quality, the intelligible. Another attempt involves the soul’s key faculty, will, but, as a rational activity distinct from the unconscious reactions of the body, will

cannot affect the latter directly and Descartes resorts to the medium of images. “Our passions cannot [. . .] be directly excited or removed by the action of our will,” he proposes, “but they can be so indirectly by the representation of things which are usually united with passions which we desire to have [. . .]”’ Will is, however, responsible both for acts of phantasy and acts of pure, conceptual thinking. The images that it creates are, on the one hand, supposed to be different from dreams and illusions produced by bodily

impressions but, on the other hand, invoked by the arbitrary motion of spirits, these illusions can be almost indistinguishable from real impressions.” “[A]ll the same things which the soul perceives by the intermission

, of the nerves (i.e., through genuine perception),” writes Descartes, “may also be represented by the fortuitous course of the animal spirits (1.e., through the uncontrolled play of imagination), without there being any other difference excepting that the impressions which come into the brain by the nerves are usually more lively or definite than those excited there by the spirits [. . .] the latter resemble the shadow or picture of the former.”°’ The argument between reality and illusion hinges, in the final analysis, on the aesthetic categories of clarity and distinctness. °7 Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 100.

8 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Essential Descartes, 356 and 366; cf. also Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 40. >? Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 365. © Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 358.

ol Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 360. ,

From Symbol to Allegory 79 _ Descartes’s most basic error is rooted in his conception of rational thinking. In a letter to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia he claims that to think soul and body simultaneously as separate and forming a unity is to fall into a contradiction. Just as Plato did in the Laws with regard to the one and the many, Descartes considers such a task beyond human reason. It should suffice,

he believes, that “everyone experiences in himself” their union “without philosophizing,” i.e., that we find as a matter of immediate subjective experience that “there is a single (seule) person who has at the same time a body and a thought (pensée).”” In other words, Descartes thinks in abstractrationalist terms: the unity of the body and the soul presents itself to him as something transcending reason and accessible only to immediate subjective contemplation. Understanding is capable only of decomposing this original unity; it is, in other words, merely analytical. In truth, however, Descartes can never free the thinking ego from the body because he obtains the former

through the negation of the latter. The demand for their reunion stems, therefore, from the ego’s letting its own history sink into oblivion. That is to say, if the thinking self did not forget that it had to strip itself of the body in the first place it would not have to look for a way to reunite with it. Similarly

the body cannot be separated from the thinking ego, for it attains corporeality | only by distinguishing itself from pure thought. Taken together, these two circumstances, which are merely aspects of a single relation, show that God’s appearance as the restorer of the link between “the thinking thing” and the

body of the world is at bottom not an arbitrary occurrence, but stems from the requirements of rational thinking. Descartes can no longer think, however, the synthesis of res cogitans and res extensa in terms other than those of a deus ex machina. And yet his attitude cannot be reduced to pure aesthetics: his interest in reality, God, and, most important, the human subject is too serious. He is no sophist delighting in the relative nature of human existence,

let alone a cynic descrying advantage in the unhinged order of things. For him, human dignity clamors for a firm foundation and the predicament of the thinking subject in the splintered world of early modernity is intolerable. But

at the same time, even though Descartes’s psychological attitude remains serious, his argument no longer warrants such seriousness. Despite the dramatic, almost somber tone of the Meditations, they initiate the reader into the subjectivist, aesthetic mythology whose dreamscapes will fully emerge

only later, in post-Kantian romanticism. | The impossibility of myth and miracle in the modern world is sealed by the second trend that was mentioned above: infinitism. In the book quoted above, Koyré examines the process by which the belief that the immanent © The letter of 28 June 1643, in The Essential Descartes, 379.

80 Mundus est fabula

1716). |

universe has no limits established itself through a series of arguments stretching from Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) to Gottfried Leibniz (1646-

This [seventeenth-century] scientific and philosophical revolution .

[. . .] can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance from philosophically and scien-

tifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole [. . .] and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being.

Koyré notes that Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) served as an inspiration for many of the early modern thinkers who contributed to this outcome— even though in most cases his ideas were misunderstood. In Cusanus’s view, the otherwise infinite physical universe comes up against its limit in God. In an infinitely large circle, for example, the center must, as Cusanus points out,

coincide with the circumference.” When a curved line becomes identical with a straight one their opposition is canceled; thus when the physical world

reaches its limit it makes a transition into a concept, for the identity of a curved and straight line cannot be imagined; it can only be thought. God is _ this moment of coincidentia oppositorum in which the intelligible and the sensible meet and merge. Genuine reality, according to Cusanus, consists in their dynamic relation with each other. “[T]he universe is triune [. . .],” he

teaches, “there is nothing that is not a unity of potentiality, actuality and | connecting motion [. ..] no one can subsist absolutely without the other [. . .]

all these are in all [things] in different degrees [. . .]”© Ficino, who is a younger contemporary of Cusanus, too, subscribes to the Trinitarian vision of things but in his magic the work of the Holy Trinity is taken over by the swarming hosts of spirits, by multiple hierarchical gradations imaginatively inserted between the purely intelligible and the purely sensible. The ideal and the material planes retain their significance as mutually limiting sides of being in Descartes’ s thought as well—as res extensa and res

cogitans—but, unlike Cusanus or Ficino, he can only think of them as infinitely separate, parallel planes. This infinitism is, further, not limited to individual thinkers, but makes itself felt throughout the culture of the period. Michel Foucault’s observations about language in sixteenth-century thought 63 Koyré, From the Closed World, 2. 64 Koyré, From the Closed World, 11.

© Nicolas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, |. Il, cap. ii; quoted in Koyré, From the Closed World, 10.

From Symbol to Allegory 8] echo Koyré’s remarks about early modern cosmology. “Perhaps for the first time in Western culture,” writes Foucault, “we find revealed the absolutely open dimension of a language no longer able to halt itself, because, never being enclosed in a definitive statement, it can express its truth only in some future discourse and is wholly intent on what it will have said; but even this future discourse itself does not have the power to halt the progression, and

what it says is enclosed within it like a promise, a bequest to yet another discourse. . . .”°° Since the universe never comes to a completion and since the ideal and

the material in it never fully intersect with each other, miracles are unthinkable. The only way these planes can be brought together is through an act performed by the artist-technologist. That this act should be arbitrary belongs to its essence; it is supposed to evoke the idea that the synthesis does not rest on any natural order but depends solely on the will of the human individual. Allegory is undergirded precisely by this non-dialectical, abstractrationalistic vision of things. It is an expressive form that projects a world split in twain: on the one hand, there is abstract content and, on the other, external form. These two sides of existence recede into infinity as two parallel planes. The perpetually deferred synthesis of content and form is the weak side of allegory; it extinguishes one’s hope for a full grasp of truth. At the same time the mindset that produces allegory is something unified in itself and as such it prevents a complete separation of its two sides. But the unifying work of thinking remains merely implicit, i.e., in allegory the holistic singularity of this thinking expresses itself only obliquely, as an absence. In his comments on Horace’s celebrated phrase, “the poets wish both to educate and to delight” (et prodesse volunt et delectare poetae; Ars poetica

333), Hegel observes that in allegorical art “the universal nature of the content represented is supposed to emerge and be explained directly and explicitly as an abstract proposition, prosaic reflection, or general doctrine, and not to be contained implicitly and only indirectly in the concrete form of art.” He also notes that “by this separation the sensuous pictorial form [. . .] becomes a useless appendage, a veil and a pure appearance,” underscoring

the mutual separation of “the sensuously individual and the spiritually universal” that are treated as “external to one another.’®’ Further, in the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel ties this development to a particular historical period, 1.e., early modernity. Philosophy came to be understood, he points out, as science that ascertains “the standard and the Universal in the ocean of empirical individualities” and “the necessary element, or Laws, to be °° Foucault, The Order of Things, 40-1.

7 A151,

82 Mundus est fabula found in the apparent disorder of the endless mass of the fortuitous.” These observations sharply illuminate the devastation that the Renaissance had visited upon ancient and medieval myths. Old mythology has become the ocean of the fortuitous, the superficial, and the illusory. Its sole function consists now in a purely fictional representation of the abstract laws of nature. “The fact as experienced,” continues Hegel, “thus becomes an illustration

and a copy of the original and completely self-supporting activity of thought.” The external world becomes something ephemeral, a mere means of achieving a goal that is posited apart from it. Not only reason and art have become instrumental, but with them nature herself.’° Nature has been turned

into a mechanism; Caronte should be represented in L’Orfeo as an automaton.

Allegory is thus produced jointly by rationalistic immanentism and infinitism. But in order to ensure even such tenuous synthesis as it is capable of supplying an effort is necessary on the part of the only agent who remains on the stage: man. In the arsenal of human faculties there are left now only

two that are suitable for such an operation: imagination and will. Both of them stand between the two planes: imagination is thinking that assumes the forms of external phenomena and will ensures the transition from thinking to external action. The will of the human artist replaces medieval mystery; it becomes the undecomposable principle that forms the core of the modern person and manifests itself as the je ne sais quoi of the artwork. Allegory demonstrates precisely the arbitrary voluntaristic conjunction of content and form. Apollo in L’Orfeo may indeed, as Tomlinson points out, “stage the

immersion of human souls in a broader play of forces extending from immaterial to material realms” and “enact [. . .] the force of Apollinian harmony over all sublunar souls.””’ But the allegorical status of the god underscores at the same time the extent to which this “Apollinian harmony” has come to depend on the will of the artist and the resonating will of his audience. That is why later allegory will appear so unconvincing and begin to leave a strong aftertaste of awkwardness, indeed of illegitimacy. But the consciousness of the Baroque delights in it because allegory expresses its own essence: a new sense of reality and a new order of things in which the world of phenomena becomes a pure illusion. Mundus est fabula, the world

is a fable in which man steps forth as the sole hero, driven by the will to

immanent immortality. |

” DE 2. | | | °8 EL 12 (87).

°° EL 22 (§12).

” Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 33. |

From Mythopoeia to Melopoeia 83 From Mythopoeia to Melopoeia There is a melancholy note in Tomlinson’s observation that the voice and spirit have been reduced to their material dimension. “The early modern voice,” he goes on, “conveys a dualistic subjectivity in which it does not touch the soul.””” A slightly more precise way of describing the situation is

to say that in the new order of things both the body and the soul find themselves within the domain of the immanent, in perpetual separation from the transcendent unity of the world. For the power of moving the human soul Orpheus has given up the power of moving the gods. Still the thoroughgoing aestheticization of music in the Baroque does not mean a diminution of its powers. This process occurs against the background of the overall aestheticization of the entire world view and, therefore, when Orpheus sings in the space of the opera theater his song expresses the most important new idea of the epoch. Operatic voice enunciates human subjectivity as the only selfevident reality, woven of three threads: abstract understanding, imagination, and will. What used to be felt as reality earlier is now displaced and finds itself outside the walls created by Orpheus’s “metaphysical song.” That old reality still retains a vague presence but it can be viewed now only through

_ the prism of subjective consciousness. As the theurgist at the helm of the cosmic ark exchanges his robes for the frock of the technologist, God retires into the distant, murky regions of irrelevance. Operatic melopoeia is the new mythopoeia and opera is the myth and ritual of early modernity. Its mythical standing should, however, be regarded in the light of the withdrawal of the real and the impossibility of miracles. In essence, it is sufficient to speak only of the latter condition. Like Descartes’s God, the concept of miracle comprises as one of its aspects the reality of the

event at hand and, conversely, the concept of reality comprises—and arguably even consists in—the unity of its various manifestations. Operatic effects, by contrast, are phenomena of a completely different order; they are mechanical rather than miraculous. Distinguished, as was noted by Socrates,

from a mystical rite by the fact that it is based on rational knowledge,

final and complete one. ,

technology perpetually accomplishes only partial syntheses and never the The mysticism of voluntaristic genius is the inevitable reverse side of this state of affairs. The world where Orpheus’s aria sounds is not mythical, but mechanical and there is only one arche in it that is capable of realizing man’s goals: will. Thus, instead of partaking of the Eucharist in the humble hope for salvation, the Orpheus of Baroque opera commands nature to give up her secret. Accordingly, instead of reveling in the mystical unity of the ” Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song, 41.

84 Mundus est fabula Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, music embodies in sound the purposedriven, active will of the individual who resolutely leads forward and upward the community of natural human beings and indeed nature herself. Monody conveys, however, not only the triumph of this individual, but also his or her suffering, bucolic joy, grief, and happiness—in short, the fascinating variety of affects. The focus in it is not so much on the relation per se between the immanent human being and its transcendent other as on how this relation is refracted through the subject. However the constituent parts of monody are

interpreted—whether the melody and the harmonic accompaniment are viewed as the Creator and the creature, absolute monarch and his or her subjects, man and nature—all these relations are seen as those of the subject with whatever lies outside and yet is linked with it by unbreakable threads. Or, to put it more precisely, the focus is on the subject itself; what is outside is there in order implicitly to define it. Like the Cartesian ego without the external world, melody in monody is unthinkable without harmony but on the surface their relation looks as though it were uni-directional, as though harmony were merely determined by the melody. But the most important thing that is communicated by monody and tonal harmony as its integral part is the thought of the subject’s movement toward its goal, i.e., that this subject is really defined by its history. Rather than only an immediate unity with the

absolute, what is of moment for this subject-melody is the purposeful progressive unfolding of its own infinitely varied content.

Chapter 5 Transcending Aestheticization In the century and a half that passed between Monteverdi’s favola in musica and Gluck’s “reform opera” the story of Orpheus and Eurydice had become one of the standard plots in the operatic repertoire across Europe.’ But after opera’s first steps Orpheus quickly yields his lead to other mytho-

logical personages. The historian of opera Donald Grout notes that Orpheus’s story trailed behind that of Iphigenia and both were decisively

outshone by Hercules.” And yet at the time when Baroque allegory approaches exhaustion as the preferred mode of articulating meaning in the arts Orpheus and Eurydice once again step forth to introduce a new vision of the powers of music. Gluck and Calzabigi’s re-invention of the traditional story is driven by this new vision. Focused on the notions of naturalness and simplicity, their operatic aesthetic signals the transformation of allegory— finally—anto an artistic image properly so called. What becomes evident and attractive now in this image is its unabashed aesthetic quality in which play is combined with architectonic completeness. This transformation coincides with two other developments: in the eighteenth century both the modern science of mythology and aesthetics as a philosophical discipline are born. Philosophical thought had long been aware of the peculiar nature of myth and aesthetic experience but now the unique significance of each comes under systematic scrutiny. Myth’s status as a cultural genus is drastically affected by this heightened attention. Immanuel

Kant’s 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment is the fulfillment of the tectonic cultural changes that were set in motion by the Baroque sensibility and intellect—a fulfillment that bares to a striking extent the limitations of the world view that undergirds allegory. From an occasion for pleasure the infinite parallelism, punctuated by voluntaristic conjunctions, of subjective

thinking and objective reality turns into an inevitable constraint on cognition, | morality, and aesthetic judgment. At the same time the mystery of artistic genius is now fully transposed from the transcendent into the immanent domain. Poetic furor comes to be seen as the gift of nature and its ineffability

' Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera, 3. | ? Grout, A Short History of Opera, vol. 1, p. 13.

8)

86 Transcending Aestheticization stands in sharp contrast to the enlightened subject’s need to conceive of nature as a rational system and of itself as an autonomous rational agent. Even as he still firmly holds on to infinitist metaphysics, Kant develops the theme of synthesis in such a forceful manner that the unresolved opposition between the two becomes an embarrassment from which neither “natural” nor “critical” reason ever recover. Reversing the Enlightenment’s attitude, Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) calls for the creation of new myth, “the

original poesy,” as the ground for an organic-teleological, rather than mechanical-infinitist, vision of knowledge, art, and religion. Shortly thereafter Hegel makes the next step and offers a doctrine in which art at once

replaces myth and assimilates the transformative goals of magic. The Hegelian dialectical reversal of reversal articulates the destiny of reality, wholeness, and their representation in mature modernity. But as it does so it leaves behind the modern view of art, whose task from now on becomes to live up to Hegel’s vision—a task that despite repeated attempts appears to have remained unfulfilled to this day.

Ideas about the powers of music are profoundly shaped by these changes. As the theory of affects yields to that of expression, music’s task is gradually re-formulated from reproduction to creation. At the same time the aesthetic, ludic nature of its creations becomes not merely evident, but also attractive, fascinating. Since, however, in a concurrent development “serious” activity—be it cognition or moral life—has become all but indistinguishable from purely subjective play music turns into a romantic symbol. As such it does not so much represent as constitute reality. Rather than bringing it into

higher relief, artistic creativity begins to displace reality by subsuming it under an aesthetic phenomenon. If Kant, whose philosophy promotes this tendency only inadvertently, still insisted that nature can be regarded as an artist only in provisional, hypothetical terms, Schelling sees in her a cosmic artist whose features are identical to those of the romantic genius. Schellingian nature sings in unison with genius. Aimed at overcoming this romanticism, Hegel’s philosophy of art makes it an explicit tenet that what is ordinarily regarded as reality in fact derives its value and meaning from art—and yet

remains a necessary counterpart to the latter. Genuine transformation of reality is now understood as possible only through artistic creativity. Even as they fully retain their ludic nature, music, poetry, and drama are transfigu- : rative, in the Hegelian universe, in the most earnest of senses. As acollective efficient cause, they are at once praxis elevated beyond satisfying immediate needs and /udus that has overcome its detachment from life. Thus as soon as art attains an independent standing among human pursuits its limitations find

themselves in the limelight of reflection that leads philosophical thought

The Enlightened Eurydice | 87 beyond both mysticism and abstract rationalism. From its external shape to the subtlest layers of philosophical import, the Orpheus myth once again

weaves itself, with a sinuousness matched by few other stories, into the fabric of this process.

The Enlightened Eurydice | The continuity between the late Renaissance opera and Orfeo ed Euridice has been noted by several music historians. Edward Dent sees Gluck and Calzabigi’s work as part of the music-historical axis that connects the Florentine Camerata with Count Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), whose ideas influenced the two artists, and later Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Eve Barsham likewise remarks that the opera was inspired by “the first principles

of the Florentine Camerata.” Its small cast of characters, she observes echoing Calzabigi’s own statements, helps focus “the spectator’s attention on the central conflict,” while the straightforward nature of the plot, stripped of sub-plots in defiance of opera seria conventions, ensures unity of action “reminiscent of Greek tragedy.” Even more explicitly than Monteverdi and Striggio’s Orfeo, Gluck and

Calzabigi’s “reform opera” was a product of new theoretical ideas. Calzabigi , consciously strove to create a libretto that would move away from opera seria and exemplify the new ideal of “beautiful simplicity.” In this new opera

the “natural passions” of the admittedly imperfect human heart displace opera seria’s moralistic allegorism. “Miracles” were foremost among the “unnatural” elements that became the target of Calzabigi’s disdain. In 1755, years before Orfeo ed Euridice was to be written, he praised those French operas that relied on “purely human actions [. . .] to the exclusion of pagan divinities, devilry and magic—in a word, all that is beyond human control.’” Even though in his own libretto the deus ex machina does not entirely leave the scene, still in all other respects Orfeo ed Euridice becomes a realization

of a new, Enlightenment aesthetic sensibility. “All is nature here, all is passion,” Calzabigi writes in his letter to Prince Kaunitz of 6 March 1767, “there are no sententious reflections, no philosophy or politics, no paragons > Dent, “Introduction,” in Gluck and Calzabigi, Orpheus: An Opera in Three Acts, XVI. * Howard, C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, 7-8. 7 Quoted in Howard, C. W. von Gluck, 18, emphasis added. Cf. also Gluck’s statement about the ending of his Alceste where “everything is brought about naturally, without any need for miracles” (letter to Roullet of 2 December 1775 in Howard, C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, 26).

88 Transcending Aestheticization of virtue [. . .]’° Gluck and Calzabigi sought to replace these “with the language of the heart, with strong passions, lively situations, and ever-varied spectacle.”’ The new conception of the powers of music is evident in the two

most dramatic episodes of the opera, Orpheus’s taming of the Furies and Eurydice’s awakening. The novelty of the artists’ approach is felt in their - treatment of the hero but even more so in that of the heroine, who almost takes over the leading role and becomes the drama’s driving force. When he comes to the gates of the underworld Orpheus faces the stern Chorus of Furies and Specters (Coro delle Furie e degli Spettri). His music conquers them not by the power of the singer’s irresistible will, as did that of Monteverdi and Striggio’s hero, but by letting the monsters know the “unknown and tender feeling (incognito affetto flebile) that comes so sweetly

to soothe [their] pitiless fury.”* As they yield to the victor, Orpheus’s adversaries twice utter this formula of surrender. The Italian flebile is reminiscent of the Latin flebile in Ovid’s description of Orpheus’s severed head and lyre floating down the river Hebrus. “[M]idstream the lyre gave forth some mournful notes,” Ovid wrote, “mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured, mournfully the banks replied (flebile nescio quid queritur lyra,

flebile lingus murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae).”” But now, instead of impotently querying about no one knows what, the lyre’s tender notes show their omnipotence. Orpheus enters the Elysium and Eurydice is about to be restored to him. In the second episode it is Eurydice who steps forth. Howard is right in calling Calzabigi’s libretto “a psychological drama” with the focus on the characters’ “capacity for sorrow and joy” but it is hardly Orpheus who, as she claims, is at its heart.'° Rather than by “the calculated predominance of

Orpheus,” the culminating moment in this drama is dominated by his consort. In her book In Search of Opera Carolyn Abbate describes Gluck and Calzabigi’s Eurydice as “a woman so distressing that she is only indirectly

present” and compares her to Rilke’s personage in “Orpheus. Eurydike. _ Hermes,” the poem that was quoted in the previous chapter."' This is true in the sense that Eurydice’s personality is far more intense and vivid than any other in the opera. Rilke’s silent maiden is, however, a poor parallel to this © Howard, C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, 23.

von Gluck, 23-4. , 7 Gluck and Calzabi gi, letter to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1769, quoted in Howard, C. W.

® Raniero de’ Calzabigi, Orfeo ed Euridice, Libretto, 20-21 (notes to a compact disk recording).

? Ovid, Metamorphoses XI 52-53, p. 125. '° Howard, C. W. von Gluck, 21.

'l Abbate, In Search of Opera, 47-48.

The Enlightened Eurydice 8&9 “forceful character,” to use Abbate’s own expression. This Eurydice is not “closed like a young flower (zu wie eine junge Blume),” but a woman fully in her own right.'* In contrast to the adolescent soul in Rilke’s poem, she does not wonder listlessly who it was that turned around to look at her, but instead demands from her rescuer proof of his fidelity. Whereas Rilke’s

Eurydice is only about to emerge from her half-vegetative state, to be extricated from root-like existence in the “wondrous mine of souls (der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk),” Gluck and Calzabigi’s heroine is conscious

of herself and, moreover, painfully aware of the dark secret behind her newly-granted life.

Neither “blinded by jealousy,” as Alfred Einstein berates her, nor concealed in the patriarchal folds of operatic metaphysics, as Abbate would have it, this Eurydice awakens from the dolce riposo of the Elysium as the

critical reason of the Enlightenment rises from dogmatic slumber.'? She immediately wishes to know how her resurrection became possible. “Come? Ma con qual arte?” she asks, “Ma per qual via? (But how? By what art? By what means?)’”’'* The lovers’ predicament consists in the conflict between myth and reason. Bound by his treaty with the gods, Orpheus cannot give Eurydice an honest answer because it will spell her second death. The stern law, legge crudel, that forbids Orpheus to look at his wife derives its force

from mystery and if the latter arises plainly before enquiring reason, questioning must stop. And, conversely, exposed to this inquisitive reason, myth loses its force and becomes something unjustified, unreasonable, and

tyrannical. In order to realize herself Eurydice must leave behind “the happiness of peaceful oblivion (contento d’un placido oblio).”° But if she is to gain full awareness of the causes of her own existence, Orpheus’s compact with myth must be dissolved; the secret of his victory must out. The same antinomy haunts Orpheus’s musical powers. Amore’ s gift must remain a secret but its substance consists in joining musical genius with irrepressible curiosity and thus spells the dissolution of the mystery that cloaks the gift. The god’s own appearance is sudden and inexplicable but it gives rise to the

questioning of his actions and powers by the same heroine whom it is supposed to save. 2 Dent compares Gluck and Calzabigi’s Eurydice to the woman in Tarare, a 1787 opera by Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) and Pierre Beaumarchais (1732-1799), who alone among the souls yet to be born “knows that the one thing she craves is l’amour’ (Dent, Orpheus, xix). '? Binstein, Gluck, 74.

' Calzabigi, Orfeo ed Euridice, 30. Andrew Huth translates the Italian arte by the English magic but in this context art seems slightly more appropriate. '? Calzabigi, Orfeo ed Euridice, 39.

90 Transcending Aestheticization : And yet what Eurydice longs for is “memory, love, constancy, and faith (la memoria, l’amore, la costanza, la fede).”'© All these notions share in the idea of unity and completeness. Endless questioning without a final answer, without Orpheus’s glance meeting hers, is unbearable for her—yjust as it is unbearable for Orpheus. “Ma il dolor, che unite del dono,” they sing together, “é insoffribile per me! (But the pain that you [the gods] have coupled with your gift is more than I can bear!)” The divine mystery that turns to Orpheus its benevolent face arises before Eurydice as a “fatal, terrible secret (funesto,

terribile segreto).” The lovers’ tormented duet brings us to the brink of realizing that the disclosure of the secret will put an end both to questioning and to the ineffable spontaneity of musical creativity. Eurydice and Orpheus

| both must die, leave behind their separate existences, in order to be resurrected in a renewed unity. Ficino described love precisely as such dying

and resurrection in which the lovers turn into each other. “Orpheus calls [love] “bitter-sweet’ because love is voluntary death,” he wrote in his com-

mentary on Plato’s Symposium. “[Flor a lover dies within himself the moment he forgets about himself, but he returns to life immediately in his loved one as soon as the loved one embraces him in loving contemplation.”"” The Ficinian dialectic of Eros is, however, only felt by the artists; Gluck and

Calzabigi show in music, poetry, and “ever-varied spectacle” that this dialectic constitutes the core of Orpheus’s powers but still perceive lingering in them some residual mystery. Amore’s role in restoring justice as he grants the dying lovers their wish is strikingly superfluous; the resolution is already prepared and flows from the preceding high drama. “Jn choosing this happy ending,” observes Howard, “Calzabigi was surely intending to replace the baroque solution of Striggio’s libretto with a modern, rational, enlightened

ending.” An equally significant contrast with Monteverdi and Striggio’s work is that the Enlightenment lieto fine offers the reward of immanent, rather than transcendent, immortality for the hero and heroine. “The only appropriate conclusion to their reunion,” remarks Howard further, “is an earthly marriage.’’'® Neither Orpheus nor Eurydice are transgressors in this story; instead they make the gods look unreasonable and the lovers’ serious predicament makes Amore’s antics look like gratuitous play. The gods, these

, unnecessarily cruel tyrants, must ultimately surrender, however, to an honest and faithful human heart, joined with an open mind. 16 Calzabigi, Orfeo ed Euridice, 34.

'’ Ficino, Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 144-45 (Second Speech, chapter VII Exhortation to Love. On Simple and Mutual Love). 'S Howard, C. W. von Gluck, 36 and 39.

From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty 91 Coincident with those of love, the powers of music are absolute, the opera suggests, but they still stem from something extraneous to reason. Music’s mystical and rationalistic sides are held together by the drive toward overcoming their mutual limitations but the force that unites them is not yet recognized as inhering in these sides themselves; rather it remains something alien to them.

The disdain for allegorical “miracles” in opera is the result of the growing awareness that the integrity of the work of art is ensured by the independent activity of the artist. It also means that this integrity, 1.e., a purely intrinsic aesthetic characteristic of the work, moves to the foreground and displaces the work’s extra-aesthetic significance. The task of opera is no

longer to illustrate in an entertaining manner moral truths, aristocratic , virtues, or metaphysical principles. It consists rather in elaborating the artistic form that would best fulfill the ideal of “naturalness.” “[I]n art we can in the end rival nature only when we have learned,” remarks Goethe in his

“Introduction to the Propylden” (1798), “at least in part, her method of procedure in the creation of her works.”” For, as it follows its own immanent laws, artistic form thereby most faithfully imitates nature that likewise lives by its own laws and barely needs a supernatural arche. This principle, God, becomes little more than an unnecessary hypothesis. But even this heterogeneous, alien presence of divinity is almost dissipated. Orpheus and Eurydice are about to find out that their mutual love overcomes the void that separates them and that this love is their shared essence.

One more reflecting glance—that seems to be turned backward but in fact propels them onward—and they will rise above the last traces of this mist. The separate sides of a single creative person will unite in that whole which they

have always been in their truth but which has so far been obscured by the division of the world into subjective reason, devoid of substantial existence, and objective, extra-rational being. In Kant’s philosophy the tension between what Hegel calls the subject and substance similarly reaches a melting point and puts in high relief the intolerable nature of their mutual separation.

From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty The evolution of cultural genera that the Orpheus myth allows to trace in this era consists in the movement away from Baroque allegory toward a romantic symbol and, further, toward Hegel’s doctrine of art’s transfigurative powers. '9 Goethe, “Introduction to the Propylden,” 7.

92 Transcending Aestheticization In the Middle Ages there existed an impassable abyss between ancient and Christian myths: the radical change brought about, as the medieval mind

was convinced, by divine revelation. No matter how much he may be admired, Virgil cannot follow his own disciple, Dante, to the higher regions of spiritual illumination (The Purgatorio, Canto XX VII 127-143). The Enlightenment attempts to close this abyss by pushing the notion of revelation into the background and by replacing it with an immanentist vision of an homogeneous cultural-historical continuum. The latter is analogous to what Koyré describes, we may recall, as auniverse “bound together by the identity of fundamental components and laws.” The fables of Antiquity are similar to the contemporary fantasies of the savage and both are subsumed under. religious superstition. “[T]he Inca Manco Guyna Capac, child of the sun,”

remarks Bernard Fontenelle (1657-1757) in his essay “Of the Origins of Fables” (published in 1724), is a creature of fable like Orpheus and their | mutual likeness “shows that the Greeks were, for a while, savages.””° The miraculous and the magical are, according to this view, fictions created by those who lack knowledge and experience. The mind of the savage is thus qualitatively similar to the enlightened mind; like the operatic furies and specters it merely needs to be disabused of superstition and prejudice, both of which are the effects of ignorance. But instead of the irruption that separates the pre- and post-revelation segments of sacred history the unity of

human experience is now haunted by the chasm between subjective understanding and objective being, between thought and sense. The peculiar, Enlightenment nature of this chasm is of crucial significance for the problem of myth during this period. The two conditions necessary for myth’s existence that were elaborated

- in the preceding chapters include the availability of an immediately given reality and the presence of the miraculous. The latter presupposes, in turn,

two further conditions: the synthesis of the ideal and the real (of the immanent and the transcendent) that occurs in a mysterious fashion. In Kant’s philosophy all these conditions are problematized in the extreme. The whole of human experience in it falls apart into the sensible phenomenon and

the supersensible thing-in-itself. In contrast to traditional empiricism, the Kantian phenomenon is not, however, something immediately given. It consists rather of chaotic intuitions that are brought together by the knowing subject in accordance with a priori (pre-experiential), transcendental conditions

and rules. Nature herself, says Kant in the First Introduction to his Critique

of the Power of Judgment, “is a totality of mere appearances (kinds of , 20 Fontenelle, “Of the Origins of Fables,” quoted in Feldman and Richardson, eds., The Rise of Modern Mythology, 15-16.

From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty 93 representations), which can have its objective reality only in experiences.” The only thing that holds these sprawling phenomena together, both each individually and their sum total, is, Kant continues, “a subjectively necessary presupposition that such a disturbingly unbounded diversity of empirical laws and heterogeneity of natural forms does not pertain to nature, rather that nature itself [. . .] qualifies for an experience, as an empirical system.””! The phenomenal world is thus not a reality, but an illusion—“nothing,” as Kant puts it, “apart from our representations.” Reality, according to him, belongs

exclusively to things-in-themselves but as such it is not given in experience , and cannot be empirically known. As a matter of fact, it cannot be known with any degree of certainty by non-empirical, speculative means either. Neither pure nor practical reason, Kant insists, “can provide a theoretical cognition of its object (and even of the thinking subject) as a thing in itself,

which would be supersensible, the idea of which must underlie the possibility of all those objects of experience, but which itself can never be elevated and expanded into a cognition.”” The question about the possibility of miracles emerges as the problem of teleology, 1.e., the coincidence of the phenomenon with its final purpose. Such a coincidence, Kant believes, is thinkable only in hypothetical terms and what used to be its mysterious nature is now explained as indeterminacy: because of its inherent limitations human reason must cognize the world in

indefinitum. “I am not entitled,” Kant states, “to make any assertion at all respecting the whole object of experience—the world of sense; I must limit

my declarations to the rule, according to which experience or empirical

knowledge is to be attained.” But this rule, he continues, “requires [cognition] to proceed from every member of the series [. . .] to one still more remote [. . .] and not to cease at any point.”** Thus there is no objective

limit to the purely quantitative progress of empirical knowledge. Modern infinitism is an immanentist version of medieval mysticism. _ The absence of extra-subjective final goals is particularly evident in the treatment of the concept of God, that still used to guarantee the closure of the metaphysical series causarum for Descartes, but is now deprived of this its role, too. “[T]he concept of a causality of nature in accordance with the rule of ends,” Kant explains, “even more the concept of a being the likes of which

is not given to us in experience at all, namely that of an original ground of

3 CPJ 63. | 2! CPJ 13-14.

*2 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 304. 24 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 311.

94 Transcending Aestheticization nature [. . .] is not good for any dogmatic determinations (i.e., those that pertain to objects of experience), because since it cannot be drawn from experience and is not requisite for the possibility of experience its objective ; reality cannot be guaranteed by anything.”” Actually, Kant contradicts himself when he claims that the concept of purpose “is not requisite for the possibility of experience.” As he explains in the First Introduction, this possibility rests precisely on “the concept of purposiveness of nature” without which we shall not “be able to judge the particular as contained under the general and subsume it under the concept of nature.””° But even so, Kant hedges, “there is still possible such an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws and such great heterogeneity of forms of nature [. . .] that the concept of a

system in accordance with these (empirical) laws must be entirely alien to the , understanding, and neither the possibility, let alone the necessity, of sucha

whole can be conceived.””’ |

Curiously, Kant views the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite as entirely irrelevant with regard to the universe as a thing-in-itself. “For [the latter] remains as a permanent quantity,”’ he remarks, “whether I

deny the infinite or the finite regress in the series of phenomena.” The Kantian thing-in-itself performs, in other words, the same role as Cusanus’s coincidentia oppositorum and, Kant summarizes, the irrelevance of reason’s limited categories hints at the existence of noumenal reality, as well as at the illusory nature of phenomenal being.”** Our predicament is therefore such that both the existence and the non-existence of the final cause are nothing but hypotheses. These two hypotheses stretch into infinite distance without ever overcoming each other, 1.e., without either of them becoming definitive truth. Thus the basic conditions for myth’s existence seem to be ruled out in the

Kantian universe. And yet there are in it several rudiments of earlier

mysticism. One has to do with the origins of a priori knowledge. Transcendental categories are indispensable for the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic activity—furthermore, for the very existence—of the thinking subject and thus constitute its most immediate and intimate content. But they come from an unknown place, a place that is as mysterious as the region of the noumenal things-in-themselves. Another survival from the past is the familiar notion of spirit. Just as Ficino used it to capture the unity of the intelligible and the sensible, Kant > CPJ 268.

7 CPJ9. : 26 CPJ 8-9.

28 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 304.

From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty 95 uses it to describe the factor that holds together a work of art. “One says of certain products, of which it is expected that they ought, at least in part,” he writes, “to reveal themselves as beautiful art, that they are without spirit,

even though one finds nothing in them to criticize as far as taste is concerned.’””’ Somewhat reminiscent of Descartes’s notion, spirit, he explains further, is what “enlivens” the work of art, the “animating principle in the mind.” This principle is, in turn, nothing other than an inexhaustibly suggestive “aesthetic idea” or mental image “that occasions much thinking [. . .] without it being possible for any determinate thought, 1.e, concept, to be adequate to it, which, consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible.” In other words, spirit is just as ineffable as “an idea of reason

[. . .] to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.”*’ The allusion to “animation” recalls Kant’s concept of organism that is so instrumental in the hypothesis of nature as an artist who creates with an end in mind.”

And, finally, the miraculous returns explicitly in Kant’s doctrine of artistic genius. Here Kant openly professes naturalistic mysticism. Namely, he maintains that genius is originally given to the human being by nature but even the person who receives this gift does not understand how it produces its effects.*” Genius gives the rule to art, says Kant, “as nature, and hence the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or according to plan.””° Still genius is the power that puts spirit into the work of art, i.e., accomplishes the synthesis of the intelligible and the sensible in accordance with “final goals.” But since this synthesis remains a mystery, every great work of art is a miracle and the activity of

artistic genius is inherently miraculous. Even if it restricts them to the aesthetic domain, this theory implicitly allows for the syntheses without which miracle and myth are desiccated skeletons from our “savage”’ past. Despite Kant’s titanic effort in the Third Critique to keep them distinct from one another, the synthesizing operations of the cognitive subject and moral agent are indistinguishable from those of the aesthetic subject. As a matter of fact, it is precisely Kant’ s indefatigable insistence on distinguishing them that shows how difficult this task is in the thought-world that he created.

”°° CPJ 191. | CPJ 192. | 31 Cf, CPI 8-9. | *? CPJ 186-7.

3 CPJ 187.

96 Transcending Aestheticization When he calls special branches of knowledge “merely art” he puts moral philosophy above them and claims that the “legislative power” of this “ideal teacher [. . .] resides in the mind of every man, and it alone teaches us what kind of systematic unity philosophy demands in view of the ultimate aims of reason.””” But in fact all three kinds of synthesizing operations are based, in the final analysis, on nothing other than this subject’s dire need to have reliable knowledge, morality, and aesthetic judgment. As Hegel describes it, in Kant’s thought “all reality falls within self-consciousness.””” An unwitting,

perhaps, awareness that the problem of the unity of human experience retained some of its mystical aura moved Kant to make the famous statement

in the end of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) that has become emblematic of his attitude: that the harmony of the external universe and the inner moral law evoked in him the feeling of awe and admiration. With regard to our theme the most important lesson that Schelling draws from Kant’s thought is the romantic desire for myth’s revival. The need for anew mythology is derived by the romantic mind by carrying to its logical

conclusion the aestheticization of reality that began with the original formation of modern consciousness. Against infinitism Schelling adopts the

view of reality as a product of art, the wondrous work of genius. “The objective world,” he writes in the beginning of his System of Transcendental

Idealism (1800), “is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit [. . .]” “What we speak of as nature,” he reiterates in the end, “is a poem lying pent in a mysterious and wonderful script.””*° The philosophy of art thus becomes “the universal organon of philosophy—and the keystone of its entire arch.”’’ The mysterious immediate synthesis of the object’s transcendent goal and its immanent condition becomes an openly acknowledged, as well as welcome, necessity—and is modeled after the unity of artistic form. The riddle of the world reveals itself, Schelling rhapsodizes, in “the odyssey of the spirit, which, marvelously deluded, seeks itself, and in seeking flies

from itself.” Through the sensible world “glimmers [. . .] the land of fantasy.” This land is actually the truth of the objective world that “gleams but imperfectly through the real.” “Nature, to the artist,” says Schelling, “is

nothing more than it is to the philosopher, being simply the ideal world appearing under permanent restrictions, or merely the imperfect reflectionof a world existing, not outside him, but within.” Conversely, the work of art Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 475. %9 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, 426.

°° Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 12 and 232. 37 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 12.

From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty 97 becomes a window into the realm of truth. “Each splendid painting owes, as

it were,” Schelling writes, “its genesis to a removal of the invisible barrier dividing the real from the ideal world, and is no more than the gateway, through which come forth completely the shapes and scenes of [the] world of fantasy [. . .]”°® As it becomes the site where reality and art fully permeate each other, the romantic artwork coincides with the medieval symbol— except for one substantial point. A medieval symbol is the meeting place of the transcendent and the immanent and as such it serves as a link between God and the human person. But this means that in a symbol the phenomenal world is visited by its truth and thus becomes real rather than illusory. In a romantic symbol, by contrast, the phenomenal world is overtaken not by an objective absolute, but by the Kantian transcendental subject. Romanticism is the subjectivist phase of Orphic theosis. Schelling understands that by substituting art for reality he has, in effect, come close to turning art into myth. Even as they originated from it, philoso-

phy and the sciences, he argues, will return to poetry in the end. | Nor is it in general difficult to say what the medium for this return

of science to poetry will be; for in mythology such a medium existed, before the occurrence of a breach now seemingly beyond repair. But how anew mythology is itself to arise, which shall be the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race, personifying, as it were, one single poet—that is a problem whose solution can be looked for only in the future destinies of the world, and in the course of history to come.””

Schelling’s position can be described as aesthetic mysticism. At the heart

of it are the intuition and will of the artist, both equally ineffable; just as Kant’s genius, Schelling’s productive spirit does not and cannot ultimately know itself. (This is what is meant by the spirit’s “marvelously deluded” odyssey.) The key internal contradiction in the romantic call to revive myth is that original immediacy is supposed to be restored through the mediating activity of art. But, paradoxically, there is logic even in this error, for after Kant’s critique art is the only kind of activity where a compelling synthesis of human experience is still possible. Thus art, which inflicts a mortal wound on myth, turns out to be also the healer that alone can breathe new life into it amid rarified reality. What Schelling calls for is therefore not myth proper, _ but mythosophy. The difference between this new mythosophy and that of Plato is that now instead of the sunlit cosmic theater we find ourselves in a %8 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 232. 39 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 232-3.

98 Transcending Aestheticization world that arises like a shimmering mirage from the inexhaustible artistic

subject. Still, just as in Plato, the main limiting feature of Schelling’s philosophical position is his understanding of the ultimate synthesis as abstract identity—the notion from which his philosophy in fact takes its name. By contrast, rather than absolutizing it, Hegel understands this abstract

identity as only one among the necessary elements whose interplay constitutes reality. The latter, for Hegel, is nothing other than spirit, the unity of subjectivity and substantiality. Its essence is neither intuition nor will, but

dialectical thinking in which, nevertheless, both immediate intuition and restless will are preserved as moments. Hegel’s reality is, in other words, the

synthesis of being and thinking, immediacy and mediation. It is more appropriate, further, to speak of it as actuality, for the term better expresses the irreducibly active, dynamic character of what he regards as the real. In keeping with its nature, actuality is not fixed, but intensifies from the merely objective natural world to the world of art to religion and, finally, to philoso_ phy or pure Concept. As the “sensuous realization of the idea of beauty,” art is precisely the middle ground where the intelligible and the sensible come together. Spirit, says Hegel, “generates out of itself works of fine arts as the

first reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient, between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.””’ Nature, which still bears the name of reality in Schelling’s system, loses its prior standing and becomes “less

real,” as it were, than art. Hegel rejects both Plato’s dismissal of art as “deception” and the modern reduction of reality to the “inner world of sense.”

| Only beyond the immediacy of feeling and external objects is genuine actuality to be found. For the truly actual is only that which has being in and for itself, the substance of nature and spirit which

indeed gives itself presence and existence, but in this existence remains in and for itself and only so is truly actual.“!

Further, in Hegel’s thought the synthesis of the transcendent and the immanent, of immediacy and mediation, of the one and the many finally comes to be recognized as rationally necessary. The transcendent idea that does not manifest itself in the immanent phenomenon is for that very reason fundamentally flawed and untrue. Likewise, immediacy and mediation equally participate in the formation of what is real and their collaboration in

MATS. |

*TAT8.

From Allegory to the Realization of the Idea of Beauty 99 this project is utterly rational. “[T]here is nothing, nothing in heaven or in

nature or mind or anywhere else,” Hegel states in the beginning of his Science of Logic, “which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them to be a nullity.””” The miraculous is therefore taken to be mysterious only insofar as its rational nature remains unrecognized. Perhaps the most striking feature of Hegel’s philosophy of art, from the point of view of this book, is the extent to which his concept of art coincides with what in the preceding chapters has been called “myth.” The Greek poets and artists, Hegel observes, for example, “gave the nation a definite idea of

the behavior, life, and effectiveness of the Divine, or, in other words, the definite content of religion.” This activity was, according to Hegel, truly original in the sense that it presented to consciousness something that had not been present before. “[I]t 1s not as if these ideas and doctrines were already

there,” he emphasizes, “in advance of poetry, in an abstract mode of consciousness [. . .] and then later were only clothed in imagery by artists and

given external adornment in poetry; on the contrary, the mode of artistic production was such that what fermented in these poets they could work out only in this form of art and poetry.” By contrast, what has on the preceding pages been discussed as art in 1ts aesthetic dimension is, according to Hegel, the product of that phase in history at which art loses its direct ties with life

and becomes a purely formal pursuit. This is the theme of his oft-quoted lament about the modern artist who no longer finds in himself an immediate | content for his work and is divorced from the substantive life of spirit.“* But such a view fails to comprehend, Hegel is convinced, art’s genuine signifi-

cance. Instead it must be understood, he argues, precisely as a serious | transfiguration of reality that pursues, ultimately, the philosophical goal epitomized in Apollo’s commandment gnothi seauton, “know thyself.” “The universal need for art [. . .],"” Hegel explains, “is man’s rational need to lift

the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes his own self.””° He offers, in other words, a theurgic conception of art. “Art liberates the true content of phenomena,” he writes, “from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit. Thus, far from being mere ? SL 68.

9 41102. 4 A T 605-606.

A131.

100 Transcending Aestheticization pure appearance, a higher and truer existence is to be ascribed to the phenomenon of art in comparison with [those of] ordinary reality.””° Music and poetry belong to the. so-called “romantic” phase of art, at once preceded and supplemented by the symbolic and the classical phases. These are both diachronic and synchronic, historical and systematic catego-

ries in the community of the arts. The unique role of music in this community is to give aural and temporal shape to “pure subjectivity,” the innermost life of spirit. As such it must necessarily be joined with other art forms and, above all, with poetry—if it is to break beyond the indeterminacy

of pure feeling. And then, as poetry objectivates this inner life through pictorial imagination and philosophical concepts, art morphs at once into religion and into philosophy.” Interestingly, the transition from religion to philosophy parallels the transition from music to poetry. Religion is the sphere where spirit finds the inwardness appropriate to its nature but at the same time, in order to acquire genuine depth and fullness, this inwardness must unfold into the conceptual content of philosophy. And, finally, the system of the arts becomes that power which is called upon to accomplish the theurgic transfiguration of the natural order, to carry out the final synthesis of the one and the many. Plato believed, once again, this task to be beyond human capacity; Kant agreed with him—even as he insisted that, insofar as reason allows, we should fashion our thoughts into systems; but Hegel sees in the simultaneous unity and diversity of systematic thinking the highest manifestation of actuality. He is firmly convinced that, far from being superhuman, the task is nothing if not human and rational, that what is supposed to lie beyond reason is, in fact, non-actual, i.e., empty, passive, and impotent. His aesthetics can be called systematic theosis. In

artistic creativity, he maintains, “God is just as operative as he is in the phenomena of nature”; the Divine finds in art “a suitable thoroughfare for its

existence.” This theosis has distinctly Orphic features: music, poetry, religion, and philosophy are interwoven in it into an integral whole. “The beauty of art,” says Hegel in the opening passages of his Lectures on Fine

Art, “is beauty born of the spirit and born again [. . .’” This otherwise cryptic phrase becomes transparent as a reiteration of the idea that was captured in the inscription on a bone lamella from Olbia, bios-thanatos-bios

*8 4 130. | ATS.

*7 4 1 103-104 and A II 968.

® AJ 2. The author of the English translation of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, T. M. Knox, comments on the “obscurity” of this statement (A I 2n1).

Music in the System of the Arts 101 (“‘life-death-life’’), as well as in the light of this idea’s history that has been traced in previous chapters. Like Orpheus-Christus, Hegel’s remark suggests, nature dies in art in order to rise again to a new life. What Hegel calls “the sphere of absolute spirit,” 1.e., the unity of art, religion, and philosophy, is the mythologem of Orpheus, transposed to .a conceptual key.

Music in the System of the Arts The ideas about the powers of music evolve from the reproduction of

emotional states toward expression of feeling and culminate in the transfiguration of reality. Expression describes a state of affairs when an emotion is not regarded as something existing objectively apart from the artist, but flows spontaneously from the artist and acquires external shape thanks to the effort of his or her will. The whole gamut of human experience, embracing natural phenomena and the inner life of the soul alike, becomes

the immediate content of the composer’s own inner, inexhaustible world. This world presses forth and pours out in sounds, imprinting itself on the enchanted consciousness of the audience. What is normally considered as the

real world is almost overwhelmed by this outpouring: the artistic subject absorbs the remainder of independent objective reality. After enlightened critique this remainder can hardly resist such an assimilation. Like the absolute of the mystics, the noumena, these pale shadows of objectivity, are devoid of any content other than their ineffability and as such are easy prey

_ for the genius’s Faustian, unquenchable thirst for possession and equally

inexhaustible energy. : Having absorbed reality in its entirety, the romantic subject becomes increasingly aware of its own divided nature and the inexorable contradiction

in its own depth. The unfolding of this contradiction, the mute dramatic | conflict between the opposing forces that struggle within, becomes the underlying dynamic of the sonata-form. The resolution of the conflict, 1.e., the principle that holds together mutually contradictory themes within the turbulent romantic soul is now concentrated in the very heart of conscious| ness. Kant calls this core of the mind “the transcendental unity of the subject,” Schelling “will,” and Hegel “pure subjectivity.” The Kantian a priori unity of the thinking ego and the Schellingian will are at once immanent to the thinking subject and inaccessible to reason: the subject, both philosophers insist, is incapable of fully knowing itself. Hegel understands, however, that, no matter how indispensable it may be, this dynamic inwardness is comprehensible only in conjunction with the equally necessary pleroma of its own external manifestations, the unfolding of its content in the external forms of

102 Transcending Aestheticization art. The fact that music is woven as a thread into the system of the arts and, moreover, that it constitutes a necessary, if not the absolute, moment in that transfiguration of reality which these arts collectively accomplish—this fact is now in the focus of the philosopher’s attention. Orpheus’s ancient ties to the chorus of the Muses evolve into a doctrine about systematic relations among the arts. Music and poetry become participants in a comprehensive

transformation of the world in accordance with the idea of beauty. They have, no doubt, always implicitly participated in this project; initiation into

mysteries, Attic tragedy, Christian liturgy, and modern opera are all examples of the synthesis of the arts. But now these relations become the object of the reflecting intellect and are aligned into a system. The contours of this system are determined by those of the broader philosophical context to which a particular aesthetic doctrine belongs. In Hegel’s aesthetics, for example, music flows into poetry, poetry into religion and philosophy, whence the Concept, having fulfilled itself, overflows back into poetry, music, and the other arts. A sweeping current of metamorphoses, art sublates the opposition of illusion and reality—an opposition that is inherent in the very essence of things—and thereby creates a new, spiritualized reality. The final goal is the actualized complete self-awareness of the great All whose line of descent extends to Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

Hegel’s aesthetics is a theory of practice; it is theurgy purified of abstract mysticism just as it is rational practice purified of equally abstract rationalism. Hegel’s artis at once myth that has passed through the peripeteia and emancipated itself from naive immediacy, and aesthetic play that has become fully aware of how serious its allegedly “disinterested” activity is. This speculatively re-articulated Orphic vision exercises a profound influence on subsequent musical thought but in its ramifications the vision itself loses its unity: it bifurcates into what is at once a symbiotic and antagonistic coexistence of romantic fantasy and positivist realism. Their problematic mutual conjunction is the theme of the next turning point in the history of the

: Orpheus myth. Even as it unfolds in the ludic space of late nineteenthcentury opera, the new, deeply conflicted story of Orpheus and Eurydice strives to break beyond the confines of musical theater and to become an active factor in the life of an equally conflicted modern nation.

Chapter 6 The Modernist Orpheus _ Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Vladimir Bel’skii’s opera Sadko and Alexander Scriabin’ s unfulfilled synaesthetic project Mysterium are the most notable music-historical milestones on the path that Orpheus and Eurydice traverse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The opera is an

example of Rimsky-Korsakov’s characteristic aesthetic outlook in which romantic elements are mixed with the so-called “critical realism” current in the arts and letters of the time. Sadko emerged from the composer’s attempt to set his music-philosophical house in order; it was a product of strenuous, if ultimately frustrating, theoretical deliberations.’ Aiming to sublate the opposition between romanticism and positivism, Vladimir Solov’év (1853-1900)

invokes Orpheus as he outlines art’s metaphysical trajectory culminating in a theurgic death-defying song. Like Solov’év’s theurgy, Scriabin’s extrava-

gantly ambitious design is intended to overcome the limits of the aesthetic view of art. But, in contrast to the philosopher’ s classical poise, the composer casts himself as a hyper-romantic Orpheus, 1.e., an artist who, propelled by his own genius, leaves prior history behind in a fiery breakthrough into the beyond. In Viacheslav Ivanov’s writings, both poetic and theoretical, Orpheus is asymbol that reconciles cultural tradition with modernist aesthetic flights. This period can be regarded as yet another blossoming of the Orpheus myth, similar to the one that occurred in early modernity. The blossoming is likewise accompanied by changes in the myth’s position among cultural genera. The Orpheus myth evolves during this time from an aesthetic phenomenon into a symbol enlisted to overcome the aesthetic view of music. Its use

in the former capacity is exemplified by Rimsky-Korsakov and Bel’skii’s opera, while in Solov’év’s thought it becomes the latter and eventually inspires, among other things, Scriabin’s attempt at theurgic praxis. Ivanov builds on both Solov’év’s and Scriabin’ s ideas to formulate his own doctrine in which he amplifies the all too briefly stated insights of the philosopher and

ameliorates the extreme subjectivism of the composer. His solution leans heavily on the notion of cultural-historical tradition that becomes the lens through which he surveys the current state of affairs and the history of the ' Rimsky-Korsakov, My musical life, 287n.

103

104 The Modernist Orpheus arts. Thus we see a progression from artistic image to burgeoning mythosophy to an attempt at mystical praxis and, finally, to an elaborate, full-fledged mythosophy. Just as.in Antiquity, however, these genera are not arranged into a neat evolutionary chain but form a complex dynamic configuration of simultaneous multilateral interactions. Still transitions from one genus to another are not haphazard and unmotivated but arise rather as answers to questions that each genus poses.

From an instrument of articulating national identity and of critical commentary on social affairs music comes to be understood as the primary factor in the world-transforming collaboration of the arts. Solov’év makes Orpheus’s song the speculative symbol of this power. Scriabin, too, comes

to regard music as a force capable of liberating the world-spirit from materiality, from gravis terrae vincula. The notion of the solitary genius remains, however, central to his view—a limitation that troubles Ivanov who

, moves beyond romantic solipsism. Like Nietzsche, Ivanov regards music as the Apollonian-Dionysian source of artistic creativity in general. Its ecstatic impulse is balanced by the logos of poetry and Ivanov encodes the equilibrium of the two in his symbolist Orpheus-Christus. As the pulsating heart of the ritual that gathers, similarly to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, all of the arts together, music is to become a force for transforming humanity. Yet for Ivanov the true overcoming of the aesthetic and ludic nature of music ultimately remains only a dream. Such a cause is to be pursued, he comes to believe, by religious tradition and the time of its fulfillment is hidden in the folds of an eschatological view of history.

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia Broad circles of Russian musicians have been familiar with the classical image of Orpheus at least since 1671 when Nikolai Diletskii’s textbook Ideia grammatiki musikiiskoi (The Idea of Musical Grammar), derived primarily

from Polish sources, appeared in print. This long-lasting introduction into contemporaneous western music theory was widely used in Russian church schools well into the eighteenth century. In 1811 the classical Orpheus made

, his debut in Russia as a musical subject in Dmitrii Bortnianskii’s cantata Sreten’e Orfeem Solntsa (The Meeting of the Sun by Orpheus). RimskyKorsakov and Bel’skii’s opera was, however, the first noteworthy attempt to | transplant the Orpheus myth to the Russian soil. The medieval Russian epic that was discussed in a previous chapter was chosen as the vehicle for this transplantation.

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia I05 The composer seems to have conceived of the opera as a combination of Gluck’s Orphée and Richard Wagner’s Gétterddimmerung.’ Its form is determined at the most basic level by the division of the subject-matter into

two contrasting yet inextricably connected worlds: those of reality and fantasy, represented by the human society and nature, respectively. Dressed in vivid national colors, this society is torn by contradictions whose root lies

in its conflict with nature. The city of merchants, Novgorod stagnates without direct access to the sea and this stagnation is the cause of strife among its divided populace. Nature, by contrast, is unified and exhibits no internal conflict. Its diversity, imaginatively depicted in the colorful parade of sea creatures in Tableau VI, is devoid of the dissension that plagues the human order. In its depth it answers to Hegel’s description of nature as “the indeterminate [. . .] the self-identical essence of the world.’” At the center of the natural world is the Sea Princess Volkhova who is at once the Schellingian __ World Soul and das ewig Weibliche, the eternally feminine of the German romantics. In accordance with this basic division, the main characters of the Orpheus myth are each broken in twain, too. Orpheus is divided between two

singers: the younger yet epically composed Nezhata and the heroically restless Sadko. The former is firmly planted in the community, faithfully chronicling with his contralto important events in Novgorod’s life. He is the suardian of the city’s mythical tradition and occasionally provides insight, in the manner of a choryphaeus, into the meaning of unfolding events. He

steps forth as a prophet when he predicts, with appropriate obliqueness, Sadko’s adventures in a song about the legendary shaman Volkh Vseslav’evich (Tableau I). By contrast, Sadko’s dreams of Novgorod’s future make

him an outcast; he is a genius who is misunderstood and rejected by his fellow-men. He is driven away by insults and ridicule from the feast of merchants and later sacrificed to the Tsar of the Sea. This Sadko 1s a postKantian, romanticized version of the archaic trickster who mediates between different planes of reality, upsets their balance, and disrupts the orderly course of things. This figure is eventually transformed, however, into a paragon of civic virtue. The composer and librettist follow in this regard the advice of Vladimir Stasov, a patriarch-critic and impetuous polemicist on behalf of the so-called “New Russian School” in which Rimsky-Korsakov was one of the * Cf. Rimskii-Korsakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works), vol. 4, 447; quoted in Rakhmanova, “N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov (1890-e i 1900-e gody)” (N. A. Rismky-Korsakov [the 1890s and 1900s], in Keldysh, Levasheva, and Kandinskii, eds., Istoriia russkoi muzyki (A History of Russian Music), vol. 10, p. 61.

SL 464,

106 The Modernist Orpheus pillars. “In the end, from wondrous and fantastical emotions and events,” recommends Stasov in his comments on a draft libretto, “Sadko returns to real life: to Novgorod, his family, and useful activity [. . .]” Eurydice is likewise divided between two women: Sadko’s earthly wife Liubava, whose name is derived from the Russian word for “love,” and his | dreamlike inspiration, Volkhova. The latter’s name is the feminine version of the eponym Volkhov—the river that will eventually flow through the happily reconciled Novgorod.” The main plot unfolds as the love-struggle between these two contrasting worlds, opposed to each other and yet in the end fusing together to create a new reality that soars onward and upward. The duality of the opera’s world is also conveyed by musical means, through what the music historian Marina Rakhmanova describes as “the contrast between song-like diatonic and fantastical chromatic writing.” The _ former relies on the use of Russian folk idiom—not so much for direct

quotation as for characteristic ways of shaping melody, rhythm, and harmony. The latter is marked by intentionally “non-folk” means of articulation, foremost among which are the whole-tone scale and the so-called “scale of Rimsky-Korsakov,” known in English as octatonic: a potentially infinite series of cells, each consisting of a tone and a semitone. These sequences of

notes are among the tools by which, alongside other musical codes, the composer expands and deepens the expressive possibilities of his music. It should be noted that these chromatic, “transcendental,” as it were, modes were vehicles for the romantic tendency toward dissolving tonal harmony. Rimsky-Korsakov consistently relates tonal writing to the real world and the tonally ambivalent transcendental scales to the world of fantasy.’ The most general idea about the powers of music that the opera advances

in several episodes is that music stirs creative imagination and thereby acquires the capacity for transforming the real world. This is the theme of | Sadko’s first encounter with Volkhova—the encounter that allows him to * Stasov’s letter to Rimsky-Korsakov of 7 July 1894, in Rimskii-Korsakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (literaturnye proizvedeniia i perepiska) (Complete Works [Literary Writings and Correspondence]), vol. 5, 421; quoted in Rakhmanova, “N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov,” 59. > The composer used to say humorously that “all things in Sadko come in pairs: two gusliplayers [. . .] two women in love [. . .] two jugglers [. . .]” Rakhmanova goes on to remark that the principle of duality permeates the opera’s entire plot which consists of two main parts, includes two finales, and so on (Rakhmanova, “N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov,” 64).

6 Rakhmanova, “N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov,” 54. , , ’ Richard Taruskin examines the history of these scales, adopted by Russian composers from their Romantic models, especially Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt, in his essay “Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s ‘Angle’.”

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia 107 triumph over Novgorod’s conservative merchants. Enchanted by his music, Volkhova uses her magical powers to help Sadko win a wager that enriches him and leaves his opponents penniless. She does eventually summon him, however, into the depths of her own realm. Yet the closer they are to being united in marriage, the more destructive Sadko’s music becomes, driving as it does the Underwater Tsardom into a frenzied, world-engulfing dance. In the end fantasy inherent in the natural world must be sacrificed for the sake

of social reality; the Underwater Tsardom is reduced to passive natural phenomena in the service of human progress. As Volkhova turns into the

river Volkhov, the conflict that set the plot in motion is resolved. The river is nothing other than human society’s path toward a brighter future blazed by creative genius. Music-fantasy opens infinite vistas before the human being yet in the end its boundless power over the psyche must submit itself to moral authority. The Mighty Elder who stops the bacchanal of the Underwater Tsardom in Tableau VI is supposed to embody the moral outlook of the Russian folk. In the fulfillment of his will Novgorod’s religious and social controversies are pacified. Yet the vagueness of his persona borders on complete effacement; his crucial role in the story notwithstanding, the

Elder is the least developed character in the opera, an atavistic deus ex machina. Still there is a hint at what the composer and the librettist saw as the source of this moral authority. The Elder’s aria recalls the song of the pilgrims that is a contrapuntal theme in the competitive polyphony of Novgorod’s marketplace in Tableau IV. The song tells of the mythic battle between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, that is finally resolved by a revelation from the miraculous Book of the Dove (Golubinaia kniga). The pilgrims are representatives of unofficial, folk Christianity but beyond using the melody of their song the Elder is religiously neutral.* (Rimsky-Korsakov and Bel’ skii will offer a vision of reconciliation between the two strands of Russian religious life, official and folk, in their last signature opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Maiden Fevroniia, 1907.) The

composer and librettist thus propose a view of the powers of music that answers in the end to the moralistic demands of critical realism: art must serve the good of the folk. The frequently noted eclecticism of RimskyKorsakov’s aesthetic stems from his inability to embrace unequivocally the

one or the other side of his own artistic persona; in Sadko this aesthetic ’ The suppression of the Elder’s religious dimension was not entirely intentional. Originally, the character was to be St. Nicholas, the patron saint of Novgorod, but government censorship did not allow representations of religious subjects in opera. See Vasilii Yastrebtsev’s records for 10 and 13 November 1895 in his Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, 127.

108 The Modernist Orpheus hovers hesitantly between romanticism and realism.’ Perhaps, rather than Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, a more appropriate pair to Wagner’s Gétterddmmerung for describing Sadko would be Jacques Offenbach’s 1858 operetta ~ Orphée aux Enfers, a social satire on the Parisian musical world. Solov’ év evokes Orpheus as he ponders a way to get past this hesitation. In his 1882 poem “The Three Labors” Orpheus represents the theurgic phase

of music’s powers. Pygmalion transforms stone into Galatea, who comes alive under his hand in response to his passion. The next hero, Perseus, saves

this living beauty, Andromeda, from the monster that threatens to destroy her. By raising his mirror-shield before it—by letting it reflect upon itself— __ he causes the mundane side of life to crumble to dust. But it is only with Orpheus’s song that the beauty brought into life by the artist and protected by the philosopher overcomes the ultimate obstacle: death and decay. ““The waves of invincible song,” the poem concludes, “shook the vault of Hades and the master of pale-faced death released Eurydice.””°

Ivanov interpreted the poem as an allegorical gloss on Solov’év’s doctrine of theocracy; the three stages of creativity, he thought, represented “the labor of the chisel, the labor of the sword, and the labor of the cross.” But the poem’s symbolism is better understood in the light of the ideas that Solov’év elaborated eight years later in a series of essays on aesthetics. In these essays Solov’év defines art as “any sensuous depiction of any object or phenomenon from the standpoint of its ultimate condition, or in the light of the future world.”’* He engages the two main warring camps in the debate

on art: the realists and the aesthetes who are inspired by positivism and romanticism, respectively. Among the authors of positivist orientation Solov’év responds in particular to the work of Nikolai Chernyshevskii (1828-1889). Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) describes this type of a thinker ? Simon Morrison argues that Kitezh, the 1907 opera mentioned above, became the work that fulfilled the aspirations of the symbolist movement for transforming art into religion. Cf. Morrison, Russian Opera and Symbolist Movement, 170.

10 Solov’éy, “Nepodvizhno lish’ solntse liubvi...” Stikhi. Proza. Pis’ma. Vospominaniia sovremennikoy (“The Sun of Love Alone Remains Unmoved...” Poems. Prose. Letters. Reminiscences of Contemporaries), 33-4. I discussed the poem in my paper on “Vladimir Solovyov and Vyacheslav Ivanov: Two Theurgic Mythosophies,” in van der Bercken, de Courten, and van der Zweerde, eds., Vladimir Solov’év: Reconciler and Polemicist; Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Solov’év Conference held at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in September 1998, 214-17.

! Ivanov, Selected Essays, 87-8, quoted in Bird, The Russian Prospero: The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov, 192-3.

? Solov’év, Filosofiia iskusstva i literaturnaia kritika (Philosophy of Art and Literary

Criticism), 93.

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia 109 in unsympathetic but accurate terms. “The radical critic was concerned exclusively with the welfare of the people,” he observes, “and regarded everything—literature, science, philosophy—as only a means to improve the

social and economic situation of the underdog and to alter the political structure of his country. He was incorruptible, heroic, indifferent to the privations of exile, but also indifferent to the niceties of art.” These critics, according to Nabokov, “all may be grouped under one heading: political radicalism affiliated to the old French social thinkers and to German materialists, foreshadowing the revolutionary socialism and stolid communism”

of the twentieth century.’ Yet Solov’év manages to uncover an implicit theurgic strain even in this trend. “If one leaves aside the rude and sometimes entirely nonsensical statements of the recent aesthetic realism (and utilitarianism),” he writes, “and comprehends the substantive meaning of its demands, then one finds in the latter an unconscious and self-contradictory yet for that

very reason the more valuable acknowledgment that beauty has worldhistorical significance: its apparent detractors assign it the task of saving the world.”!* Solov’év was being generous. Dmitrii Pisarev (1840-1868) did

not title his enthusiastic response to Chernyshevskii “The Destruction of Aesthetics” without cause. In his treatise on “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Life” (1855) Chernyshevskii insisted, contra Hegel, that the beauty of life is higher in value than the beauty of art. The task of art, then, is to reproduce

life; mimesis is “the universal typical attribute of art, constituting its essence.” As they imitate them, works of art also serve as explanations of and pronounce judgment on life’s phenomena. “Art merely reminds us by its reproductions,” concludes Chernyshevsku, “of those things that interest us in life and attempts to acquaint us to some extent with those sides of life, of

interest to us, that we have not had the occasion to experience or observe firsthand in reality.”’> Pisarev wholeheartedly accepts this view and takes it a step farther. “Art must not put itself above reality; to admit its true position

is not demeaning to it,” he writes. “Science is not ashamed to say that its purpose is to understand and explain reality, and then to apply this understanding for the benefit of man; let art not be ashamed either to admit that its goal is, in the absence of a fuller aesthetic pleasure supplied by reality, to reward man by reproducing as best it can this precious reality and to explain it for the benefit of man.”’° The “temple of true art,” he proposes, should be 13 Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, 4.

4 Solov’év, Filosofiia iskusstva (Philosophy of Art), 30. | 'S Chernyshevskii, Estetika (Aesthetics), 177. © Disarev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Selected Writings), 383.

110 The Modernist Orpheus “a workshop of human thought where researchers, writers, and draftsmen will aspire, each in their own way, toward one great goal: to eliminate poverty and ignorance.”'’ The mistake of such a utilitarian view consists, Solov’év believes, in failing to grasp the unique contribution of art to human pursuits and in dissolving art’s task in extra-artistic interests.

By contrast, the aesthetes, charges Solov’év, plunge into the opposite extreme. They “go so far as denying any substantive link between [art] and other human activities, as well as its necessary subordination to humanity’ s overall goals, and regard it instead as something self-enclosed and absolutely

self-sufficient; instead of legitimate autonomy they preach aesthetic separatism.”'* Such a separatism has little to do with art’s genuine functions

that consist, according to Solov’év, in “(1) direct objectivation of those deepest inner determinations and qualities of a living idea that cannot be expressed by nature; (2) the spiritualization of natural beauty; and, thereby, (3) the perpetuation of its individual phenomena.” These three tasks, let us note in passing, correspond to the labors of Pygmalion, Perseus, and Orpheus

in Solov’év’s poem. As long as history continues art performs these functions only partially, in the manner of “inspired prophecy.” Art’s ultimate goal is, however, the “realization of absolute beauty” in the immanent world.

The perfect reality “whose anticipations we find in genuine art,” writes Solov’év, “will be based not on the absorption of the human element by the

divine one, but on their free collaboration.” The completion of this joint work by God and man will coincide with the end of history.” The Eurydice of the poem is a passive, nondescript figure, a cliché used

to illustrate an idea. But she points to a far more vivid and developed feminine presence in Solov’év’s oeuvre: Divine Sophia. “Sophia is God’s body, the matter of Divinity,” writes Solovyov in his 1878 Lectures on Divine Humanity, “permeated with the principle of divine unity.” She is the “ideal or perfect humanity, eternally contained in the integral divine being, or Christ.””? As a perfect organism, Sophia “consists of a multiplicity of elements of which she is the real unity” and ensures that “each of these elements” is “recognized as eternal in the absolute or ideal order.”*' She is the world soul that “occupies a mediating position between the multiplicity

of living entities [. . .] and the absolute unity of Divinity.” As such a '” Pisarev, [zbrannye proizvedeniia (Selected Writings), 376. '8 Solov’éy, Filosofiia iskusstva (Philosophy of Art), 91.

Solov’év , Filosofia iskusstva (Philosophy of Art), 82-3. *° Solov’év, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 108.

*I Solov’év, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 113 and 118.

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia Ill mediator, Sophia “enables the Holy Spirit to actualize itself in the all.””” In

the poem “Three Encounters” written between 1862 and 1876 Solov’év describes, in alternating humorous and lyrical modes, his mystical visions of Sophia. In the third and most dramatic of these she appears, “with eyes full of azure fire” as the radiance of the first day of creation. Encompassing the beauty of the world, she is “a single image of female beauty” whose measure accommodates the immeasurable.”

As he examines its multi-faceted significance, Losev points out that Solov’év “was literally obsessed” by this image and invoked Sophia “in absolutely all central points of his world view.””* On the most general level Sophia stood in Solov’év’s thought, according to Losev, for the identity of ideal and material being, the “final and inseparable unity” of a thing’s idea and “the thing itself.””° For the purposes of this discussion it is notable that Losev discerns in this image “the principle of cosmic beauty that cannot be overcome by any powers of evil and that will inevitably lead the entire world to salvation.” This side of Sophia, Losev remarks further, is closely linked

to her eschatological dimension, where she assumes the aspect of “the woman clothed with the sun” from the book of Revelation.” Finally, Solov’év’s doctrine of Sophia is, Losev sums up, “nothing other than an artistic expression of [his] philosophy of all-unity.”’’ In the essays on aesthetics mentioned above, Solov’év links artistic creativity precisely to the realization of “genuine all-unity” as the ultimate goal of history. “No, art is not for art’s sake,” he writes, “but for the realization of that fullness of life which necessarily comprises also the individual element of art, 1.e., beauty— yet as something that has a substantial and inner connection with the rest of

life’s content rather than something separate and self-sufficient.” “By genuine, or positive, all-unity,” he explains, “I mean such a state of affairs in which unity exists, not at the cost or to the detriment, but for the benefit of all. A false, negative unity oppresses or absorbs the elements that constitute it and thus turns out to be emptiness; true unity preserves and strengthens its elements, realizing itself in them as the fullness of being.””®

*2 Solov’év, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 131-2. : 23 Solov’év, “Nepodvizhno lish’ solntse liubvi...”. (“The Sun of Love Alone Remains Unmoved. . .”), 123.

4 Losev, Vladimir Solov’év i ego vremia (Vladimir Solov’év and His Time), 243. *° Losev, Vladimir Solov’év, 257. 26 Losev, Vladimir Solov’év, 240-1. 27 Losev, Vladimir Solov’év, 259.

8 Solov’év, Filosofiia iskusstva (Philosophy of Art), 95 and 95n.

112 The Modernist Orpheus Solov’év’s philosophy of art offers a formulation of the OrpheusChristus tradition in the context of modernism. Though openly Christian, his

eschatology is not medieval in nature but, as Losev correctly notes, stems from disappointment in “liberal-bourgeois progressivism” understood as humanity’s surge into abstract infinity.” By the same token, Orpheus’s song is the culmination of the entire history of the arts and the primary symbol of this song, Divine Sophia, comprises the Eurydice whom the author of the Musica enchiriadis invoked as he pointed to the mysterious underpinnings of music’s powers. In contrast to Solov’év’s speculative predictions, Scriabin’s work on the Mysterium—philosophical, poetic, and musical—was an attempt to embody Orpheus the theurgist, to realize in historical actuality the dream encapsulated in the Orpheus myth. At the same time, in Scriabin’s hands the Orphic theme reaches its romantic apogee. Inspired in part by Solov’év, in part by

the theosophy of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), and in part by Wagner’s dream of Gesamtkunstwerk, the composer conceives of a one-time worldtransforming event which he is called upon to bring about.*° The cataclysmic

spiritualization of the world is to be triggered, according to Scriabin’s design, by the power of his own artistic genius. In the beginning this vision was, however, marked by a naiveté that made even the composer’s friends

wonder about his sanity.*' Still, as I shall presently explain, insanity had nothing to do with it; the composer was not suffering from “a serious spiritual ailment,” as Ivanov let it slip in exasperation. In any event, itdidnot _ take Scriabin long to recognize the overambitious nature of his own plans. Rather than attempting an immediate cosmic catharsis, the composer began to lay the ground for it in the form of the Preliminary Act. He died before completing this work, leaving an unfinished libretto and several dozen pages of musical sketches. Assuming the simultaneous roles of a hierophant, philosopher, poet, and musician, Scriabin steps forth as Orpheus—a posture that is recognized and

, 2° Losev, Vladimir Solov’év, 257. } *° For Anglophone discussions of Scriabin’s project most relevant to the theme of this book see de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mysic, 177-306 (chapters “Mysterium” and “‘Acte

Préalable”); Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, 184-241 (chapter “Scriabin and Theurgy’’); and Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 308-59 (chapter “Scriabin and the Superhuman: A Millennial Essay’”’).

*! Cf. Ivanov’s letter to Nikolai Ul’ianov and Sabaneev’s statement quoted in Morrison, Russian Opera, 193 and 221, respectively; Sabaneev’s meandering ruminations on poetic madness in his book Modern Russian Composers, 49ff; and Taruskin’s ironic remark that

academic musicology has consigned Scriabin the mystic to the category of “lost wits” in | Defining Russia Musically, 358.

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia 113 indeed encouraged by several of his friends, especially Ivanov. His Eurydice is the Voice of the Feminine in the Preliminary Act. This voice is woven of motifs that hearken back to the Romantic das ewig Weibliche and Solov’év’s Sophiology. “Iam Thy will,” she sings to the Voice of the Masculine (whom she calls “the Lord”), “I am the mighty tool / Of Thy great attainments / By

my power dost Thou turn dreamy intoxication / Into the crystals of Thy creations.”*” The Orphic sparagmos vastly expands to take the shape of “the dematerialization of the cosmos.” The entire physical universe becomes the sacrificial victim whose rending is to signal the ultimate liberation of spirit. Further, in contrast to Solov’év’s old-fashioned chastity, the atmosphere of the verses prepared for the Preliminary Act is saturated with fin-de-siécle eroticism. The familiar Platonic tropes of lovers dying in each other—only to be resurrected as “two links of one being,” are heavily laden with imagery

that barely attempts to veil its own vaginal and phallic origins. | Most important with regard to the powers of music, Scriabin’s prose and poetry is filled with declarations of the artist’s divine omnipotence. “Flourish, peoples, create, negate me and rise against me,” challenges the main protagonist of the libretto. “Rise against me, elements! [. . .] Everyone and all, seek to destroy me and when everything rises against me, then I shall begin my divine game. I shall conquer you by love. I shall give myself away and take you in return. [. . .]| You will be gods, for I am God.” This version of theosis is articulated, further, in openly ludic terms. “Ours will be a joyous, free, and Divine Game,” exclaims Scriabin’s hero.” This hero thinks that he acquires his mystical insights and inspiration solely from himself, his own inexhaustible and intractable genius. As Schloezer describes the composer’s state of mind in the early stages of his work on the Mysterium, Scriabin “relished his exclusivity and solitude and made no attempt to establish a connection with the past, to find predecessors or precursors.”** Yet the content of the rite was to consist of recapitulating “the history of the universe, which was also the

history of the races, which was also the history of individual spirit,” culminating in a breakthrough to a purely spiritual mode of existence.” To sum up, music for Scriabin is the chief means of accomplishing the

universal transition from immanent to transcendent existence, from the 32 Scriabin, “Predvaritel’noe deistvo” (Preparatory Act), in Gershenzon, ed., Russkie propilei, 239.

°3 Scriabin, “Zapisi A. N. Skriabina” (A. N. Scriabin’s Notes), in Gershenzon, ed., Russkie propilet, 152; cf. also “Predvaritel’noe deistvo” (Preliminary Act), 237 and 243. ** Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mysic, 180-1.

> Schloezer, “Zapiska B. Shletsera o Predvaritel’nom Deistvit” (B. Schloezer’s Remarks about the Preliminary Act), in Gershenzon, ed., Russkie propilei, 104.

114 The Modernist Orpheus material to the spiritual. It is the center that gathers around itself all the other arts-——mystical energy that spills over into a synaesthetic ritual. Presiding

over this ritual is the Orphic figure of the poet-musician-philosopher. Characteristically, as Scriabin gets closer to the practical realization of his

design, the part assigned to this figure splinters into various constituent threads. These are picked up by other members of the performing thiasos; the Mysterium is to be an act of collective creativity. Romantic faith in the power of individual genius yields to the recognition of artistic-spiritual community as the Mysterium’s true agent. And yet Scriabin remains a romantic to the end. Aware though he is of his own inadequacies as a poet, he cannot entrust the writing of the text for the Preliminary Act to anyone, including the most

sympathetic of friends among symbolist poets. Jurgis BaltruSaitis (18731944) and Ivanov are invited to a reading of the libretto—a circumstance that

only underscores the fact that they remain the versifying composer’s audience and advisors rather than co-creators.*° Scriabin’s demon, remarks Ivanov with compassion, misled him into thinking “that the select few take decisions on behalf of all humanity in secrecy and that external cataclysms come to pass in the world as fulfilment of their secret creative will.”°’ But even as he still clings to the paradigm of the romantic genius, Scriabin is

forced to reckon with the fact that he cannot achieve his aims without a protracted build-up, painstaking work, and extensive collaborative effort on

the part of large numbers of people. In short, he is forced to reckon with tradition—an evolution in his views that is driven by their own intrinsic logic, as well as urged by his friend Ivanov. Although he is equally aware of the creative energies of individual genius, Ivanov directs his main theurgic effort toward overcoming the titanic solitude that attaches itself to the image of genius in romanticism. The Orphic theme permeates Ivanov’s entire creative output. Orpheus for him is, in the first instance, “a two-faced and mysterious embodiment” of both Dionysus and Apollo. “A lyre-player, like Phoebus, and the arranger of rhythm (eurhythmos),” writes Ivanov, “he sang in the night the harmony of the sounding spheres and invoked the sun through their movement; like Dionysus,[he was] himself a nocturnal sun and a sufferer of passions.” The dualism of this image is resolved, Ivanov proposes, in the figure of OrpheusChristus. “Orpheus is the creative Word that moves the world,” he notes,

“and signifies God the Word in the Christian symbolism of the first | centuries. [. . .] To invoke Orpheus is to invoke the divine organizing power °° Schloezer, “Zapiska,” 116. 37 Ivanov, “Skriabin i dukh revoliutsii” (Scriabin and the Spirit of Revolution), in Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), vol. II, 193.

Romantic Opera and Mystical Utopia 115 of the Logos in the darkness of the ultimate depths within a person who | cannot grasp her own being without it: ‘fiat Lux.’”** In his poetry there is a monumental work, Man, whose ambitious scope resonates, as Robert Bird

points out, with Scriabin’s Preliminary Act. Written in 1915-1919 and published in 1939, the poem is a panorama of spiritual history, built as an elaborate network of imagery drawn from classical and Christian mythology. Orpheus and Eurydice are presences that hover about many episodes in the

poem, now condensing into a direct allusion, now dissolving into a subtle

suggestion. In the closing verses of the second part Ivanov’s hero is a bereaved singer who is commanded by a messenger from above to announce

the affirmation “Thou Art” on his bride’s grave. | | [. . .] Carry this light,

Resident of this forlorn earth,

As a message to your darling bride | And revive the Soul.” The poet became a widower in 1907 and the verses have about them a palpable air of identification with the hero. In Ivanov’ s theoretical essays Orpheus is also often featured as a symbol of the powers of art. The question about these powers assumes for Ivanov the form that has been especially encouraged by the Orpheus myth; namely, it becomes the problem of the relation between art and religion. Bird observes that Ivanov’s outlook evolves from an early fascination with the Dionysian force of poetry to a theurgic conception of its powers to, finally, the view of art as an aesthetic activity complementary to but distinct from religion. The latter phase, writes Bird, “was personified by Orpheus, who partakes of both divine (ecstatic Dionysian and theurgic Apollonian) principles as human and artist.”*° As a key symbol in this “personalist and hermeneutic” aesthetic, to use Bird’s expression, Orpheus stands for art that seeks to transform life without replacing religious ritual. Ivanov offered the following interpretation of Orpheus and Eurydice’s story in response to Scriabin’s Mysterium: When artists ascended to a considerable height on the way to the summits of theurgy [. . .] the secret of their path was unveiled before

their eyes: then they were pierced by the suddenly resurrected memory of the One Woman, whom Orpheus called Eurydice: with tremor and enamored torment they turned their gaze back, toward the abyss of nonbeing, whence there arose behind them the Life-bearing 38 Ivanov, “Skriabin i dukh revoliutsii’ (Scriabin and the Spirit of Revolution), 706.

? Ivanov, Chelovek (Man), 57. 40 Bird, The Russian Prospero, 152.

116 The Modernist Orpheus Beauty that they were leading out of darkness. Thereupon, their magic power abandoned them, and they remained on this side of the theurgic threshold.*!

Regardless of changes in Ivanov’s views over the course of his long and productive life, there is one theme that runs through it as the common thread.

This theme is the cardinal significance of cultural-historical tradition in human experience in general and in art in particular. Even with regard to his own life he always had to arrange past events into coherent narratives. This was not, as Bird correctly notes, so much a “premeditated construction” as the tendency to see things as truly meaningful only when they became the past, the stuff of tradition.” In contrast to Scriabin’ s, Ivanov’s Orphism is the product of a patient, fastidious reconstruction of this past—in unshakable confidence that it inheres in the here and now and, jointly with the present, defines the future. Accordingly, music for Ivanov is everything it was for Scriabin but the source of its powers resides not simply in the individual consciousness of a

genius, but in the long line of geniuses whose common archetype is the divinely inspired, magical singer. Ivanov’s creative persona is suffused with

admiration for this tradition. All-unity presented itself to Solov’év as an ethically-charged dialectic of the one and the many; to Scriabin, as the brilliant diversity of worlds flowing like waves from, and then back into, the inexhaustible and omnipotent imagination of creative spirit; to Ivanov this same all-unity glimmers like the golden chain of spiritual continuity linking

the deepest abysses of our culture’s past with its present and future. The work of inspired poet-musician-philosophers, wounded by Eros’s arrows and straining their powers to the limit in order to restore what has been lost, is

the living fabric of cultural history. Orpheus, Dante, Goethe, Novalis, Beethoven, and Nietzsche are Ivanov’s favorite dramatis personae in the continuous lyric-epic unfolding of this line.” Ivanov’s Eurydice is at once Psyche, Maenad, and Muse; she is the poet’s soul that has tasted too soon the

bitter-sweet cup of death and calls her psychopomp to lead her out of the domain of irretrievable losses. To guide her to daylight, to link the past with the present and the future is, according to Ivanov, the task that casts the proper light on the purpose of music and poetry. Indeed even Ivanov’s future is the past reversed and cast forward.

*! tvanov, Selected Essays, 215.

” Cf. Bird, The Russian Prospero, 21-2 and passim.

43 of Ivanov, Selected Essays, 219. |

Quest for Reality 117 Quest for Reality The cultural situation of myth during this period is defined by the trend

that can be described as the quest for extranoetic origins of reason. The Hegelian dialectical ontology at whose heart the philosopher placed selforiginating rational thought is universally rejected by influential postHegelian thinkers. They develop various aspects of Hegel’s system but decline its central tenet, the identity of thinking and being, and seek the sources of reason anywhere but in reason itself. Different schools take up different facets of human experience—the natural world, human society, subjective will, or religious tradition—and adopt them as that reality whence

rational thinking is supposed to spring. Among these trends positivism and : voluntaristic idealism provide the underpinnings of realism and romanticism, respectively. The struggle between these two ways of seeing the world determines the conditions of myth’s existence in the culture of early modernism.

In the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Oscar Wilde compared the aesthetic sensibility of his time to a monster torn by two opposite resentments. “The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban,” wrote Wilde, “seeing his own face in a glass.” The same century’s disdain for romanticism, he continued, “is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”“* Realism is positivist in the sense that it apparently sets itself the task of depicting reality. On the surface of it the latter is understood

as something positively given and thus the less subjective element is admixed to this immediately available objectivity, the more faithfully it can | be reproduced. Cassirer notes that nineteenth-century realist artists “maintained a radical and uncompromising naturalism.” Though an improvement on the earlier “transcendentalist’” romanticism, this naturalism, according to

him, suffers from the failure to acknowledge the power of the artist’s imagination in the sense that the artist does not merely copy reality, but always represents it as transformed in the work.” But the matter is far more complex. Imitation is indeed present in realism but it is auxiliary rather than dominant. The most important thing for realist art is, to build on Wilde’s metaphor, to show Caliban his own ugliness in the hope that this will move him to change for the better. Emile Zola or Leo Tolstoy are not interested in mere representation for aesthetic contemplation; naturalism is useful to them only as an instrument for the betterment of human reality. Contrary to appearances, positivism’ s reality consists not in observable phenomena—te they natural, sociocultural, or psychological—but in their “* Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Aldington, ed., The Portable Oscar Wilde, 138. * EM 157.

118 The Modernist Orpheus manipulation based on exploiting the laws and regularities that lie in their depth. All human action, maintains Chernyshevskii, relies on the laws of nature. “Nature,” he continues, “is [. . .] merely a hospitable or inhospitable arena for human activity.“ This manipulation is designed, in turn, to serve the infinite progress of immanent humanity. The impossibility of miracles in the realistic universe is predicated precisely on the infinite nature of this process. The final synthesis seems impossible in principle because it is sup_ posedly unthinkable that human progress may end. It may appear, then, that this progress is the essence of reality for this type of consciousness but it cannot live up to such a role. The logic inherent in the notion of progress renders its infinitist version absurd. Infinite progress is a contradictio in adjecto, an internally contradictory combination of concepts, for without the final goal it is impossible to measure movement in its direction and without such an assessment (point B is closer to point C than point A) itis impossible to speak of progress. Progress is possible only in those contexts where the concepts of the finite and the infinite are equally taken into account, whereas positivism conceives of infinity as the endless repetition of the finite, thereby condemning itself to a perpetual failure to reach genuine infinity. Obsession with the finite manifests itself in positivist realism’s attention to the process

of manipulation itself—a narrowing of vision by virtue of which reality becomes technical through and through. It is precisely unfinalizability that, as Mikhail Bakhtin perceptively notes, becomes the fundamental aesthetic category that marks modernity’s chief literary genre: the novel. Bakhtin links the appearance of the modern novel to the rise of modern

thought. The novel, as he notes, “is the only genre that was born and nourished in the new era of world history and therefore it is deeply akin to that era.”*’ Three aspects of the modern revolution in consciousness were,

according to Bakhtin, of particular importance to the rise of the novel: epistemology, view of time, and representation of reality. “When the novel

becomes the dominant genre,” he remarks, “epistemology becomes the dominant discipline. [. . .] Thus a new, sober artistic-prose novelistic image and a new critical scientific perception came into being simultaneously.”” The novel is a “sober” genre in comparison with the life of a saint because it does not allow miracles; these would be “unmotivated discontinuities” in

*° Chernyshevskii, Estetika (Aesthetics), 78. “7 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 4; originally in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Questions _ of Literature and Aesthetics), 448; cf. also the remark that the novel has an “irrepressible “modernistic nature’,” ibid., 474.

“8 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 15 and 39.

Quest for Reality 119 its plot.” Further, the “radical revolution in the structure of the artistic

the present. : |

image” is made possible by what Bakhtin calls a “revolution in the hierarchy of times,” which replaces the authority of the past with an intense focus on The present in its so-called “wholeness” (although it is, of course, never whole), is in essence and in principle inconclusive; by its very nature it demands continuation, it moves into the future, and the more actively and consciously it moves into the future, the more tangible and indispensable its unfinalized character becomes. [. . .] The temporal model of the world changes radically: it becomes the

model of a world where the first word (the ideal principle) is non- , existent, and the final word has not yet been spoken.””

The new epistemological stance and the emphasis on the present jointly become responsible for the hypothetical nature of reality in the novel. “The novel has a new and quite specific problematic character,” writes Bakhtin, “characteristic for it is an eternal re-thinking and re-evaluating. The center of the activity that gives meaning to and justifies the past is transferred to the

| future. [. . .] Reality itself in the novel is one of possible realities; it is not necessary but accidental, and is pregnant with other possibilities.”°' The novel as a genre, in other words, presents an infinite number of possible realities, none of which completely captures reality as such. This is precisely the nature of a hypothesis in modern science, which is a tentative account of

reality that stands only as long as it is not replaced with a more adequate one.” At the same time, a hypothesis must explain all phenomena within its scope and the presence of facts that it cannot accommodate is a sign of its inadequacy. In other words, it is required to possess formal completeness

while remaining provisional in essence. Exactly the same applies to the ~ novel. “The absence of inner finality and exhaustiveness,” notes Bakhtin, “leads to a much stronger demand for the external and formal finality [.. .].°°? Unfinalized character marks only the novel as a genre, whereas an individual specimen must possess as finished a form as possible. ” The literary theorist Michael McKeon observes that what looks to modern critics as such “discontinuities” in medieval literature is, in fact, a logical consequence of “the tacit intrusion of the otherworldly.” Cf. his book The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 38. °° Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 30 (translation modified). >! Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 31 and 37 (translation modified).

>? This formulation owes much to Kuhn’s analyses in his 1962 study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. >3 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 31.

120 The Modernist Orpheus But this only emphasises, further, the realist novel’s paradoxical detachment from reality. When Bakhtin calls the novel “a working hypothesis” he

grasps the very essence of the matter.” “Reality” is understood here as an entity that ever slips away. It can never be grasped and expressed; it can only be presented as probable. It remains, therefore, the hollow universal that can

be expressed only by an infinite row of mutually replaceable individual phenomena none of which individually does it justice. This, as we may recall from the previous chapter, is the dynamic typical of allegory. The allegorical nature of positivist consciousness is especially evident in the science of mythology that flourishes in this period. Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) views myth and magic as “a spurious system of natural

law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct’; they are, he quips, “a false science as well as an abortive art.””’ Whatever part of the world they come from, individual myths refer to some universal aspect of human experience and the significance of each boils down to its capacity for expressing such an abstract universal meaning. Being a form of confused knowledge, world myths are a mélange of stories that the mythologist must sort into categories,

such as stories of regicide, tabooed objects, divine animals, and others. Magic has its theoretical side but the magician thinks just “as he digests his food in complete ignorance” of essential principles underlying his actions. “It is for the philosophic student,” prescribes Frazer, “to trace the train of thought which underlies the magician’s practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science behind the bastard art.”°° The stories and practices mean nothing by themselves; they are interchangeable and can inspire earnest faith only in

“ignorant and dull-witted people everywhere” who are fooled by their fellow-tribesmen, the “cunning and malignant savages in Australia, Africa, or Scotland.”°’ The underlying interest here, one begins to suspect, has less to do with myth and magic as such than with constructing a panorama of the enormous distance that the “philosophic student” has traveled away from his own humble origins. The destiny of myth and magic is to be replaced by

science and technology; the enlightened modern mind demonstrates its superiority over the “cunning and malignant” ancestor by dissecting the body of world myth as Doctor Nicolaes Tulp dissects a cadaver in Rembrandt’s * Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 61; also quoted in McKeon, The Origins, 11. >> Frazer, The Golden Bough, 13.

°° Frazer, The Golden Bough, 13. >’ Frazer, The Golden Bough, 14.

Quest for Reality 121 1632 painting. Music is, according to Frazer, a particularly suitable medium for religious feeling and its history parallels that of mythology and magic. “Every faith has its appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might almost be expressed in musical notation,” he observes. “The interval, for example, which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the stately ritual of the Catholic Church is measured by the gulf which severs the dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies of Palestrina

and Handel.’°® Musical progress serves as an allegory of the process by which the savage impulse in human nature is gradually subdued, civilized, and finally given the form that corresponds to the true dignity of the homo sapiens. Insults to this dignity stem not only from the childhood of humanity at large, but also rise like evil vapors from the childhood of the individual. According to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), individual consciousness is seized by neurosis when it fails to master its own shadow, the unconscious.

The evolution of world views in history presents itself to Freud as “the libidinous evolution of the individual.” “We find that the animistic phase,” he writes in Totem and Taboo (1913), “corresponds in time as well as in content with narcism, the religious phase corresponds to that stage of object

finding which is characterized by dependence on the parents, while the scientific stage has its full counterpart in the individual’s state of maturity where, having renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself to reality, he seeks his object in the outer world.”” The child-savage unconsciously construes objective reality under the pressure of his own psychic states. “[S]pirits and demons were nothing but the projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses,” Freud points out further, “he personified the things, he personified his affects, populated the world with them and then rediscovered his inner psychic processes outside himself, quite like the ingenious paranoiac [. . .] who found the fixations and detachments of his libido reflected in the fates of the ‘God-rays,’ which he invented.” The only domain of culture where such a belief can still be tolerated is the purely ludic realm of art.

In art alone it still happens that man, consumed by his wishes, produces something similar to the gratification of these wishes, and this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth effects as if it were something real. We rightly speak of the magic of art and compare the *8 Frazer, The Golden Bough, 389. >? Freud, The Basic Writings, 877.

© Freud, The Basic Writings, 878.

122 The Modernist Orpheus artist with a magician. But this comparison is perhaps more important than it claims to be. Art, which certainly did not begin as art for

greater part ceased to exist.” art’s sake, originally served tendencies which today have for the

The overcoming of myth is conceived as the liberation of the rational subject. The Freudian subject frees itself from the pathogenic power of myth

by dragging it from the night of the unconscious into the daylight of reflection. This vision of deliverance is at odds with Freud’s own claim that myth and magic are rooted in the idea of “the omnipotence of thought”—the

belief that is, the psychoanalyst argues, the basic source of error in the primitive mind. The claim reveals to what extent Freud failed to grasp the true nature of myth and magic: they are indeed products of thinking but, rather than the idea of its own omnipotence, what is typical of this thinking is precisely the self-imposed constraint on the possibility of grasping the ultimate truth and reality. The faith in the ability of rational discourse to protect consciousness from its own subterranean demons links the Freudian view to the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment. Its focus on the self-

conflicted psyche of the individual, by contrast, lends it affinity with romanticism. Now romanticism is, as Wilde points out, the reverse of realism. The observable, imitable phenomena of realism are for it a thin, deceptive film that conceals true reality, which is the intractable, inimitable will of creative

spirit. The genuinely real world arises before the romantic gaze as the

: dramatic, often tragic struggle of the creative ego with the sluggish, obdurate, and uncreative non-ego. It is a dynamic, processual reality, full of

conflict and contradiction. It is not only elusive, but also thoroughly mediated by subjective creativity. Romanticism’s reality is, in other words, the opposite of immediacy and objectivity. But romanticism upholds instead the other condition of myth’s existence: the possibility of a breakthrough to the ultimate state of affairs, the absolute synthesis. In contrast to the realist, the romantic urges the world toward the end, pleroma, and entelechy. He unfolds the grandiose narrative of creative spirit’s struggle with inert matter (or cruelly indifferent fate) not because he elevates the process over the goal, but precisely in order to show how important this goal is, to fill it with the highest possible significance, and to put it on the pedestal of his own titanic

effort. When this fascination with The End is still tempered by infinitist realism, as is the case with Rimsky-Korsakov, the miraculous—manifestations of phenomena “from the standpoint of their ultimate condition,” to use ®! Freud, The Basic Writings, 877.

Quest for Reality 123 Solov’év’s phrase—is treated as the fantastical. The latter is the fairy-tale of the modern world, driven at once by condescending ridicule of and guilty

nostalgia for the final fulfillment. But when the romantic artist has the temerity to dispense with earthbound realism altogether, as is the case with Wagner and Scriabin, his preoccupation with the ultimate drives him to a theurgic view of his art. In his Science of Logic Hegel makes the dialectic of the finite and the infinite the subject of a lengthy discussion.” He points out that the choice

between either concept as the true one by itself results in one-sided abstractions that lead, in turn, to contradictions. The reason for this is that these concepts are dialectically related to each other: each contains the other as its own implicit determination. These simultaneous mutual determinations

are not, further, something extraneous to the concept in question; on the contrary, they are indispensable to the specific nature of each: the finite is determined by distinguishing it from the infinite and, vice versa, the infinite by distinguishing it from the finite. As aresult, observes Hegel, they contain each other in themselves and to this extent are identical with each other. It is this dialectic that defines the relation between romantic aestheticism and positivist realism. The essence of the former is captured in the following passage. “The infinite determined as such,” Hegel writes, “has present in it the finitude which is distinct from it; the former is the in-itse/fin this unity, and the latter is only determinateness, limit in it; but it is a limit which is the sheer other of the in-itself, is its opposite; the infinite’ s determination, which is the in-itself as such, is ruined by the addition of such a quality; it is thus

a finitized infinite.” The picture is reversed in positivist realism—only to remain essentially the same. “Similarly, since the finite as such is only the negation of the in-itself,” Hegel continues, “but by reason of this unity also

has its opposite present in it, it is exalted and, so to say, infinitely exalted : above its worth; the finite is posited as the infinitized finite.”” Modernist consciousness, in fact, implicitly acknowledges the mutual identity of the two approaches to reality by its own perpetual oscillation between the finite and the infinite, i.e., by rushing from realism to romanticism and back. Hegel calls such swinging of the pendulum “spurious infinity.” He offers a solution to the challenge that this problem presents to a philosopher —to which we shall turn in the next chapter. In the meantime it should be noted that aestheticism and realism do merge with each other in one crucial

point. Both are forms of worshiping the immanent human subject that ° SL 137ff. ® SL 145.

124 The Modernist Orpheus | rearranges the world in accordance with its own needs. Despite all its flights into the beyond, the romantic-aesthetic subject, in the final analysis, deifies none other than itself, the earthly, immanent human being. And, conversely,

despite assurances of strictly adhering to the “objective” world, the positivist-realist subject in point of fact directs all its remarkable energies toward overcoming this world—likewise in the interests of the immanent human being. Solov’év’s view of art is driven by a desire to overcome the reductive

pragmatism of realist aesthetic and the “aesthetic separatism” of late romanticism, now expiring in décadence. Dissatisfied with both of these alternatives, Solov’év formulates his view as a third way. In contrast to both positivism and romanticism, Solov’év’s world view contains both conditions for the existence of myth that nourish a theurgic conception of music. The ultimate reality that Solov’év proposes is the whole that he calls “all-unity.” This reality is derived from two opposite, equally specter-like domains: the phenomenal world and the world of ideal essences. As did Hegel, Solov’év sees gradations in this synthesis, the more and the less perfect forms of its realization, the highest manifestation occurring only in the end of history. Here we approach the second condition of myth’s existence: the possibility of miracles.

The most palpably miraculous event in Solov’év’s order of things is precisely the end of history, the final fulfilment of God’s design. This event is irreducibly mystical and, while rationally necessary, still resists complete comprehension and explanation. Solov’év’s quest for reality thus culminates

in mysticism. In his treatise The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge (1877) he identifies three modes of knowledge with theology occupying the place above philosophy and natural sciences. This tripartite hierarchy is nestled in a larger hierarchy formed by three chief domains of “universal human life”: creativity, knowledge, and practical life. As the highest mode of human existence, creativity, says Solov’év, is mystical at heart, for “in mysticism life is immediately connected to the actuality of the absolute principle, life divine.” Mysticism is, further, nothing other than “the creative relation of human feeling to the transcendent world.” The cultural genus of this doctrine is that of a budding mythosophy: the Orpheus of the poem is an artistic image on the verge of blossoming into a symbol 4 Solov’év, F ilosofskie nachala tsel’nogo znaniia (The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge), in Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works), vol. 1, 256-7. © Solov’év, F ilosofskie nachala (The Philosophical Principles), 264-5. 6 Solov’év, F ilosofskie nachala (The Philosophical Principles), 263.

Quest for Reality 125 whose meaning, while ineffable in the final analysis, is built up by philosophical ideas and theories. A fuller transformation into mythosophy is evident in Solov’év’s elaboration of Eurydice-Sophia. This elaboration

elevates the feminine character to aetherial heights that far exceed the significance of Orpheus himself. Solov’év’s Sophia is the principal agent of , theurgy; Orpheus barely attends her cosmic work. Scriabin’s Mysterium represents the late romantic phase of the modernist Orpheus myth. Its mythical status rests on the absorption of all reality into the ego of the artist. Reality is, further, conceived here as the totality of all existence whose ludic diversity culminates in and is held together by individual creative consciousness. The same ego serves as the pivot of aesthetic mysticism. The spiritual-cosmic drama, by means of which reality is purged — of objectivity and materiality, resolves in the abstract unity that one finds in the depth of the Kantian subject. The denouement is just as miraculous as

Solov’év’s eschatological merging of ordinary art and theurgy but, in contrast to the Solov’évian all-unity, it takes place in a thoroughly subjective : universe. Still it is unprofitable to reduce, as so many commentators do, Scriabin’ s project to its aesthetic dimension. The aesthetic attitude preserves the eternal parallelism of play and reality, whereas the theurgist is keenly interested in

merging them. It is a distortion, therefore, to say, as does Morrison, that “what [Scriabin] most valued about the [Mysterium] was its openness, its incompleteness and indeterminacy” and that the composer “came to understand that elements of ambiguity and uncertainty were crucial to his objective.’°’ Incompleteness and ambiguity are high on the list of postmodern values; more characteristic of Scriabin’s frame of mind is the notion of mystery whose irreducibility to mere uncertainty has been, I hope, sufficiently

demonstrated in this and preceding chapters. Morrison’s comment echoes Schloezer’s argument that Scriabin’s Preliminary Act wholly replaced the Mysterium for the composer. The notion that his mystical passion boils down to an aesthetic reminder and mere “promise of spiritual synthesis,” as Morrison puts it, is, however, deeply antithetical to Scriabin’s own attitude. True, these ideas themselves remained nothing but a promise and Schloezer

is right to insist that Scriabin’s most compelling legacy is his artistic achievement. But this does not change the fact that Scriabin himself thought

of the Mysterium as an actual transformative, genuinely theurgic event. There is no need to lock the mystic up in a closet in order to appreciate him °7 Morrison, Russian Opera, 196. °8 Schloezer, “Zapiska,” 104-105; quoted in Morrison, Russian Opera, 196.

126 The Modernist Orpheus as an artist. [tis hard to see how Scriabin’s faith in the necessary conclusion of the human journey is less reasonable than the modern faith in an infinite ascent to a non-existent summit.

As it did for Solov’év, reality for Ivanov consists neither in mere observable phenomena, which he calls realia (the real), nor in the spiritual essences, which he calls realiora (the more real), but in that work of human spirit—now mythically grand, now humble—which aims at a continuous transformation of the immanent into the transcendent, and vice versa. Ivanov perceives it as an inspired but unhurried dynamic of multiple ascents and descents, uninterrupted undulation of the expansive tapestry of creative

spirit’s history. In Ivanov’s world mythosophy is the very air that phenomena breathe; his world view is mythosophic throughout. Reality is both immediately given and mediated by the entire prior work of spirit. Pure

myth finds no place here but is preserved only as a recognition of its _ necessity. But pure intellect can find no refuge here either: both in individual phenomena and their general destiny Ivanov discerns inexhaustible, tender mystery. It is not within the reach of the human person, he is convinced, to

cross by her own effort the chasm between herself and God. And yet this chasm is not unbridgeable either; the hope for the final synthesis is not extinguished. Universal redemption will certainly take place and it will be the ultimate justification of the cultural tradition but the time of its advent is an enigma. Ivanov’s view of reality can be described as intuitively-dialectical. Although reality is seen as a continuous interplay of opposites—Dionysus and Apollo, the male and the female, ascent and descent, and, above all, the

immanent and the transcendent—the vision does not culminate in acknowledging this intelligible motion as the source of all being. Rather as its acme Ivanov affirms a suprarational principle. And yet, analogously to _ previous instances of mysticism, it is impossible to avoid the impression that this principle acquires its significance and value precisely inasmuch as it crowns a cultural-historical tradition. Ivanov’s mythosophy of Orpheus and Eurydice absorbs—in its design anyway—all preceding history of these images along with their interpretations. Its unity is assured by the “tender mystery” that they enunciate in many tongues, from one epoch to another. Faced with the immanentist infinitism of the twentieth century, however, the mystery proves incapable of holding together either mythosophy as acultural genus or the unity of the Orpheus myth.

Quest for Transfigurative Song 127 Quest for Transfigurative Song As he examines the evolution of Scriabin’s compositional language, Richard Taruskin traces the composer’ s movement away from tonal harmony

and the role that non-diatonic scales played in this tendency. In Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, for example, Taruskin finds a structure formed by “an almost infinitely extended, graded, and variegated dominant” resolving into “a crushingly asserted tonic.” This harmonic relation expresses, Taruskin

argues, Scriabin’s ideas about the growth of human consciousness. Its “inchoate, undifferentiated, selfless’’ phase, depicted with the help of the whole-tone scale, evolves into “an overwhelming manifestation of desire,” soaring eventually to a “breakthrough to universal consciousness,” which is signaled by the use of the diatonic scale.© Then in the Prometheus Scriabin goes on to use the octatonic scale that, according to Taruskin, “can afford an even greater sense of non-progressive, ‘hovering’ harmonic movement— movement within stasis—than the whole-tone scale.” Scriabin needs such a coincidentia oppositorum, notes Taruskin, to express the transition from the “small” individual ego to the “large” ego of universal consciousness. The expression of the former in modern music has been the business of “functionally directed harmony.” The octatonic scale opens for Scriabin the way to bring about, says Taruskin, “the actual experience of ego transcendence [. . .| a mode of feeling that can be said to have begun in music with the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which famously caused Nietzsche

to imagine himself ‘floating above the earth in an astral dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart’.”’° The Prometheus is structured, then, as a “conflict between the whole-tone and tone-semitone scales,” and diatonic writing almost entirely withdraws behind the curtains. But then, curiously, it reemerges at the crucial moment as the symphony ends with the F-sharp

major chord. This ending stands, according to Taruskin, as “the blazing if disconcertingly arbitrary conclusion” which is “not a functional cadence at all.” “[W]e are left with a sense of sudden elevation—or, in the language of the Russian theurgic symbolists, of [. . .] a transporting burst.” Finally, in his sketches for the Preliminary Act Scriabin achieves “the final breakthrough to the realiora’”’: the full chromaticism of the twelve-tone chord. “A twelvetone chord 1s literally the [. . .] universal,” writes Taruskin, “and 1n its literal plenitude, exhausting the pitch-class vocabulary of the tempered tuning

system, it is [. . .] a representation of the pleroma. [. . .] A twelve-tone © Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 336-7. © Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 343-4.

128 _ The Modernist Orpheus harmony 1s the ultimate invariant harmony. It can be neither transposed nor inverted. It is everywhere, and everything, at once.” Thus from the uses of diatonic and chromatic writing for expressing the

contrast between the immanent and the transcendent, the natural and the supernatural, this metaphysical-technical quest finally arrives ata complete _ displacement of the immanent and natural by the transcendent and supernatural. But it must be noted that since the rise of Orpheus-Christus the true Orphic theosis consists not in the dissolution, but in the transfiguration of the human person. As it purifies the human being, such a transfiguration simultaneously preserves it, including its materiality. Solov’ év still insisted on this

thought but Scriabin’s spiritual evolution takes a different path. It is a haunting question for the lover of music: had the composer adhered to a more Solov’évian view of theosis how would he have expressed the true synthesis of the immanent and the transcendent? Taruskin closes his essay on “Scriabin and the Superhuman” by tracing the parallel development of Arnold Schoenberg’s (1874-1951) ideas, inspired by a similar drive toward transcendence and leading to similar results. Both realism and romanticism reject music as a purely aesthetic activity,

but they do so in mutually opposed ways. The former demands useful, positive results from the musician and the poet, whereas the latter urges them

toward an aesthetic transformation of the mundane world. One thinks that music’s ludus is a waste, while the other wishes that it replaced reality. The brief episode in the history of the Orpheus myth described in this chapter, barely spanning two decades, is a tale about musicians, poets, and philosophers who struggled with this dichotomy. But the dialectic that they embrace in order to resolve the opposition eventually yields to the mystical void that

acts as a means of preventing precisely that synthesis of ludic and serious transformative practices which they seek. The next—and so far the last— Stage in the history of the Orpheus myth is shaped by the effects of this unreconciled state of affairs.

” Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 346.

Chapter 7 The Non-Finale In The Mask of Orpheus Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Zinovieff gather

virtually all key versions of the classical Orpheus myth and use them as material for a work of avant-garde musical theater. In this respect the opera is an illustration of Martin West’s statement, quoted in the beginning of this book, that “Orpheus was all things to all men.” Commentators have noted the fragmented nature of the world depicted in the opera. Fragmentation does indeed pervade its entire structure but it is not chaotic. The ostensibly baffling hubbub of the myth’s variants is contrasted with the equally ostensible “scientific,” systematic handling of this material. And yet the parameters of this treatment are, in turn, set by the artists’ idiosyncratic imagination. As a result the quality that stands out among all others in this work is its complexity; its rigidly regulated components, both musical and literary, are brought into forbiddingly intricate relations with one another—so intricate, in fact, that the whole ultimately eludes clear comprehension. The most important theme that the opera puts forth is theosis, Orpheus’s passage from man to

god, but the magical singer’s journey to immortality turns a man into a puppet. The deus is openly swallowed by the machina, yet there is no hint as to whether this is a sardonic or tragic commentary on the destiny of the artist in late modernism. The genre of The Mask of Orpheus has been variously described as

“opera,” “lyric tragedy,” and “music drama.” Birtwistle’s biographer Jonathan Cross compares it to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. But in

contrast to Wagner Birtwistle has emphasized the formalist motivation behind his approach and the overriding nature of formal concerns is brought into higher relief by the work’s somber treatment of mythical material. The opera projects the Orpheus myth as a purely aesthetic phenomenon and is, in fact, polemically poised against any non-aesthetic interpretation. Such an attitude highlights the cultural genus of the Orpheus myth in this period; it

is not determined merely by the subjective aims of the two artists but exemplifies the situation of myth in general. This situation is determined by the transition from modernism to postmodernism and foremost among the changing conditions of myth’s existence is the dissolution of the subject. Whether romantic-aestheticist or positivist-realist, modernism prized above 129

130 The Non-Finale all else the goal-driven unfolding of the creative potential of the subject whose progressive march assured the unity of human experience. But

contradictions within modernist subjectivity and the impossibility of resolving them by abstract-rationalistic means eventually give rise to the postmodern critique that lays bare the irrationality of modernist conceptions of personhood and teleology. The tropes of the “death of the author” and “death of art’ become Key signifiers for the situation in the art world. But even as it critiques modernism, postmodern thought still cannot completely part ways with it and retains its most treasured, if only half-acknowledged, philosophical heirloom: immanentist infinitism. It seeks a non-resolving resolution to the problem of the subject’s identity and creative agency. The result is anon-singular subjectivity within a non-teleological historicity—an

admittedly self-contradictory state of affairs that nourishes the quasi- | mythology of a generating chaos.’ This strange construct falls short of being

a genuine myth in one crucial respect: it clings to the Enlightenment’s

. thaumatophobia. Postmodern chaos desperately resists the immediate synthesis of the immanent and the transcendent (not least by denying the legitimacy of the latter concept), while simultaneously claiming the role of the universal and absolute generatrix who is celebrated under the names of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and unfinalizability. The only trace of reality that remains any longer is a thoroughly immanentist, rhizomic spreading of what appears to be real but 1s, in fact, constructed by discursive practices pursuing irreconcilably diverse agendas. This is the period when predominant conceptions of music’s powers are

not merely aestheticized thoroughly and completely, but even the idea of breaking beyond the bounds of the purely aesthetic view of art loses its grip on musical culture. Formalism and pragmatism become the two equally authoritative paradigms that define music’s role. The one is cultivated by the musical avant-garde, the academy, and the institutionalized world of “art” music in general, while the other is embraced by mass culture. Neither of them encourages a desire to transfigure the world and both harbor an acceptance of existing conditions. The one turns away from them in disgust and despair, while the other gleefully contrives to exploit them for effects that have nothing to do with artistic creativity. The Mask of Orpheus registers the death of the theurgic dream or, to put it more accurately, the inability of the

modernist outlook to accommodate a theurgic view of art. Postmodern critique is modernism’s own last attempt to surmount the dichotomies in which it has wedged itself. But rather than seeking to reconcile these ' Cf. Marchenkov, “Art and Religion in the Age of Denounced Master-Narratives.”

The Grand Finale of Modernism 131 dichotomies, poststructuralist thought invites one to acknowledge their artificial character. Further, there is no “nature” to contrast with this artifice, no immediately available reality, and no innocent ear that can hear things “as they are.” There is, above all, no simple, singular subjectivity that can say unequivocally “I am that I am” in order to reveal the untruth of things that are what they are by virtue and for the sake of something else. Everything is equally contrived and instrumental, and music becomes a means of pragmatically navigating in the labyrinths of culture—navigating, however, without any final destination or hope of leaving the increasingly intricate passageways.

The Grand Finale of Modernism Paul Griffiths observes that the Orpheus myth is seen in Birtwistle and Zinovieff’s opera “as if in a broken mirror, or a troubled pool, elements of the story being repeated, or omitted, or distorted, or used as occasions for telling other stories.”” The opera’s three acts contain one hundred and twenty

six rigidly defined episodes; the libretto includes charts and diagrams that explain how these episodes should be related to one another in music and on the stage. Each of the main characters, Orpheus, Eurydice, and Aristaeus, falls apart into three hypostases: human being, hero, and myth represented by asinger, mime, and puppet, respectively. The characters’ different avatars | participate in the action both individually and in various combinations. In Act I, Scene 2, for example, Aristaeus the mime pursues Euridice the singer, is turned away by her, and immediately goes on to seduce Euridice the puppet. When two snakes kill both Eurydices, Aristaeus silently tells Orpheus the mime the story of their death. Still, the division of characters has a discernible underlying theme, namely stages of increasing dehumanization.’ Things get less orderly when the same episode is repeated, with variations, from one context to another, creating non-linear temporal digressions from the more or less traditional overall sequence of the plot. Eurydice’s death is treated in this manner, reappearing at various moments in the story with changes in details. The sense of non-linear temporality is further enhanced by unexpected processions, set to electronic music, of two mime troupes: the ominous Passing Clouds of Abandon and the lyrical Allegorical Flowers of Reason. The 2 Quoted in Cross, “The Mask of Orpheus,” notes to the recording of Birtwistle and Zinovieff, The Mask of Orpheus, 12.

> Adlington, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle, 17-18.

132 The Non-Finale commingling of different versions of events, laced with temporal interferences, comes to a head in Act 3, Scene 2, when Orpheus dies three deaths: by suicide, Zeus’s thunderbolt, and Bacchic sparagmos. Eurydice’s death is

also included in this shuffling of stories. And yet the course of events, interrupted and complicated as it is, follows the overarching structure defined by three rituals: Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding, Eurydice’s funeral, and the sacrifice of Orpheus. The palpably mystical aura of these events cannot conceal the fact that the incomprehensibility of the entangled whole can be explained as the product of a mere dream. This is made especially obvious in the key episode that has to do with Orpheus’s magical powers. Orpheus’s journey to Hades is described in the libretto as the distraught singer’ s dream in which he crosses the valley between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The two worlds are connected by an aqueduct that consists of seventeen arches. The arches represent things in Orpheus’ s world, such as countryside, crowds, wings, and glass, ending in fear at the threshold

to the world of the dead. There are two rivers of time in the picture, one flowing westward over the aqueduct from the world of the dead to the world of the living and the other running across between the past in the south and the present in the north. The designations of some arches seem to be more or less related to the traditional story. This is true, for example, of the eighth |

arch, signifying secrecy, or the fourteenth arch of ropes, with serpents | writhing under it. In other cases, however, the designations seem to be quite arbitrary, based, one surmises, on some deeply subjective, private associations. Such is the arch of knives or the arch of weather in the world of the dead.

Remarkably, the optimistic variant of Orpheus’s journey to Hades is omitted; the general course of events is taken over from Virgil’s and Ovid’s accounts. Furthermore, the melancholy mood of the Latin poets is condensed here into hopelessness. The psychological reduction of Orpheus’s magical powers is set in doubt only once—and even then in the most ambivalent of

terms—in what Zinovieff calls “The Children’s Story,” a more or less streamlined account of events that make up the opera’s plot. Accompanied by Euridice’s awful scream, the excerpt goes, Orpheus emerged from Hades, “unable to recognise that his terrible series of dreams had been so realistic as to have been real life.’”* Reality is indistinguishable from the play of the unconscious, and the powers of music accordingly become purely formal, having to do with “the telling of the story” rather than what the story tells.>

The complex web of motifs, rhythms, and textures, the interplay of live * Birtwistle and Zinovieff, The Mask of Orpheus, 8. > Adlington, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle, 18.

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism 133 sound and electronic tape—all these means serve to explore the formal possibilities of musical expression. Birtwistle states that in writing the opera

he “wanted to invent a formalism that does not rely on tradition [.. .] a formal world that is entirely new.”° The composer no longer feels, in other words, a need for a system, be it the exploration of increasingly smaller units of the tempered scale or operations with tone-series. His task is now rather

: to exercise his freedom from systems, even as he remains a meticulous specialist conscious of his own methods and procedures. Thus the conception of music’s powers projected by the opera is that of pure play uninhibited by

any suggestion of the art’s transformative potential or task. The theme of | music’s transfigurative power is present only as a reminiscence of an immemorial past, preserved in confused archetypal dreams. Sealing the singer’s regress into a puppet, the Exodos shows how Orpheus’s challenge to Apollo ends in the silencing of his song, overtaken by the electronically synthesized voice of the god. ‘The fascination with variants—variants of stories, variants of ways of telling—may be understood,” writes Robert Adlington, “as a manifestation of Birtwistle’s obsession with complexity, and more specifically the idea of the complex multi-dimensional object, to be perceived from a number of different perspectives but never grasped in its totality.”’ Cross describes Birtwistle’s style with a similar emphasis on unfinalizability. “His music 1s always in motion, is in aconstant state of flux,” he observes, “and yet it rarely arrives fully at a definitive destination. The image of the frozen moment is an apt one: motion within the context of something essentially static.’*

What assures stasis in this constant flux “with its many time shifts and reversals, its attempts to allow past and future to exist simultaneously in the present,” as Cross puts it, is the will of the artist, the vestige of romanticism

in late modernism. The entirely arbitrary and ludic nature of this will 1s, however, no longer obscured by any extra-aesthetic pretensions.

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism The Mask of Orpheus bears witness to the final elimination of conditions

for myth’s existence as a vital cultural genus. One of the most poignant themes in the philosophical discourse of the late twentieth century is the dissolution of immediately available reality. The expulsion of the immediate © Adlington, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle, 18.

’ Adlington, The Music of Harrison Birtwistle, 17. 8 Cross, Harrison Birtwistle, 202.

134 The Non-Finale is captured in Adorno’s philosophy and is made, in fact, the central theme of his negative dialectics. The dialectics is negative precisely in the sense of

rejecting any overarching synthesis; leaning heavily on Hegel in other respects, it defines itself contra him by refusing to grant the immediate the Same standing as the mediated, to put the two concepts on an equal footing. Partial syntheses are just as inevitable as they are false and yet the possibility of the final and true one is firmly declined. Adorno asserts this so-called “absolute negativity” as the only permissible stance for a philosopher today.

It is not just the synthesis of the immanent and the transcendent that he denies; he wishes to attach an inexorably negative moral aura to the concept

| of identity as such. The negative view of this concept is what distinguishes, Adorno maintains, his approach from its Hegelian source. In Hegel there was coincidence of identity and positivity; the inclusion of all nonidentical and objective things in a subjectivity expanded and exalted into an absolute spirit was to effect the reconcilement. On the other hand, the force of the entirety that works in every single definition is not simply its negation; that force itself is the negative,

the untrue. The philosophy of the absolute and total subject is a particular one. The inherent reversibility of the identity thesis counteracts the principles of its spirit. If entity can be totally derived from that spirit, the spirit is doomed to resemble the mere entity it means to contradict; otherwise, spirit and entity would not go together. It is precisely the insatiable identity principle that perpetuates antagonism by suppressing contradiction. What tolerates nothing that is not like

itself thwarts the reconcilement for which it mistakes itself. The violence of equality-mongering reproduces the contradiction it eliminates.’

It is apparent that Adorno understands “the identity principle” similarly

to how Solov’év describes “negative unity”: the identity that suppresses difference. In order to interpret Hegel in this manner, however, Adorno must

ignore several key aspects of Hegel’s treatment of the matter. Hegel does indeed maintain that the relation between the whole and the part is marked by “an inseparable identity and one self-subsistence only.” But this identity involves a complex process in which each side becomes self-reflective as it reflects the opposite side. “This self-relation of each of the two sides,” Hegel writes, “is their self-subsistence; but this their self-subsistence which each has for itself is rather their self-negation.” The self-negation is the result of

the fact that the part and the whole each derive their significance from the other. “Accordingly, each side has its self-subsistence,” Hegel continues,

“not within itself but in the other; this other [. . .] is its presupposed ? Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 142-3.

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism 135 immediate which is supposed to be the first, and its beginning; but this first of each side is itself not a first, but has its beginning only in the other.” Hegel calls the whole negative unity in order to underscore the dynamic nature of

this identity. To imagine it as Adorno does is, by contrast, to slip into abstractions. “The whole which is indifferent to the parts,” Hegel explains, “is the abstract identity which 1s not internally differentiated.” The true relation between the two is expressed, according to him, by their mutual bond in which identity and difference are equally active factors; the identity of the whole and the part moves within the sphere of their reflective relation to themselves and to each other. The most astonishing omission in Adorno’s objections to Hegel has to

do with the twentieth-century philosopher’s favorite Hegelian concept: mediation. Hegel states that mediation is precisely what the relation between the whole and the parts resolves into; “its essence,” he sums up, “is the nega-

tive unity in which both the reflected and the simply affirmative [seiende] immediacy are sublated.”’® What is formed as a result of this sublation is “reflected unity.” It would seem that Hegel’s insistence on the mediated and reflected nature of the identity that inheres in the whole should insulate him against the charge that difference is suppressed in a whole so conceived. It is worth recalling, further, that the relation in question, which forms the beginning of his doctrine of essence, is not something absolute and final in Hegel’s philosophy and from the logical point of view it is not clear why it should attract such sharp attention. Quite a bit more happens in the Science of Logic after these concepts take their place in the unfolding of rational thought. But Adorno’s objections are not driven, in the final analysis, by logical considerations. We shall presently return to the question of his motivations. In the meantime it should be noted that Adorno’s refusal to admit

the equal legitimacy of identity and difference amounts to—paradoxical as , it may sound, given his reputation as a master-dialectician—the denial of sublation, and without sublation no method can claim the privilege of being dialectical. Adorno’s “negative dialectics” turns out to be a return to abstractrationalistic thinking with its starkly opposed immanence and transcendence.

What Adorno offers instead of the reconciliation of opposites is the Argus-like vigilance of the critically-minded subject against the intrusions of the immediate. The dreams of Dame Heurodis, Sadko, and the Jungian Orpheus submerge these characters into the world of myth; the sleep of the diurnal, enlightened ego sets loose the impersonal, unconscious id. These dreams are the sworn enemy of the Adornian subject. The constant return of myth that rises from the place, to use Joseph Campbell’s expression, “where '? SL 515-16.

136 The Non-Finale . dreams come from’ and the ease with which these vaporous threads are woven by the culture industry into the smooth fabric of mass consciousness,

: testify to the difficulty of the task undertaken by this subject.'' Adorno grasped with especial clarity the connection between immediacy and myth and his commitment to an unflinching critical subjectivity is deliberately upheld as a preventive measure against these eternal returns. “In the process of demythologization positivity must be denied all the way down to the reason that is the instrument of demythologization,” he prescribes. “The idea

of reconcilement forbids the positive positing of reconcilement as a concept.” Needless to say, such a “reconcilement” becomes a utopian end amidst a totally instrumental reality. Without reconcilement the subject can no longer accommodate reality; the latter splinters among many subjects reconciled neither within nor among themselves. Rather than cosmic or psychological, Adornian reality is thoroughly social in its nature and by the mid-twentieth century becomes, the philosopher notes, the product of premeditated simplification, a fraudulent cultivation of primitivism perpetrated in order to stifle any attempt at grasping the unsettling complexities of the modern world. Reality is now in the grip of forces that continually generate myths promoting either infinitely expanding consumption or apathetic political submission or both. This type of pervasive mythopoeia, lurking behind the most mundane things, becomes the object of Roland Barthes’s incisive analyses in his Mythologies (1957). Barthes’ s critique leads, however, to results that threaten none other than the critical mind itself; the battle waged against the immediate finally reaches the holiest precinct of modernism, the knowing subject. Barthes realizes that

consistent vigilance against the immediate must result in the dissolution of this subject and finds such a process in modernist literary practice.’* “Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space,” he states in his famous 1968 essay on “The Death of the Author,” “where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.’”’* Barthes also recognizes the consequences of the subject’ s disappearance; the

resulting world is stripped both of a vertical dimension and of limits to its own lateral sprawl. Incessant but directionless signification fills this boundless plane. “In the multiplicity of writing,” he continues, “everything is to be i Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 41. For other allusions to a connection between myth and dreams see Campbell’s Myths to Live By, 16, 24 and passim. For a Jungian interpretation of Birtwistle’s handling of myths see Cross, Harrison Birtwistle, 93-4.

12 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 145. 'S Cf. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 25. _ 4 Barthes, Image—Music—Text, 142.

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism 137 disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed [.. .] at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly

to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.” Among further consequences of this development, Barthes notes with satisfaction the

disappearance of mystery and, as a result, emancipation of consciousness from myth: “[Bly refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), [literature] liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—treason, science, law.”'> And, finally, the expulsion of the singular author, mystery, and myth is undertaken for the sake of the reader who now takes over the part assuring the completeness and unity of the work but pays for his or her gains with almost as much effacement as the author. “The reader is the space,” explains Barthes, “on which all the quotations that make up a writing

are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the

written text is constituted.”'© The theme of this replacement returns in Barthes’s essay “Musica Practica,” where he imagines that it is not the composer, nor even the performer, but the listeners who are the true players of music.'’ Barthes loosely reproduces Scriabin’ s dream of a collective event in which there is no division into performers and audience but openly treats it as autopian fantasy. The inconsistency of Barthes’s critique lies precisely in this: he is still unable to rid himself completely of the idea of the subject’s unity and thus merely transfers this unity from the author to the reader. And yet, dispossessed of “history, biography, psychology,” the reading and listening subject is so hollowed out that it can no longer withstand the pressure of mass-produced pseudo-reality. The only means of resistance that

it has at its disposal, critical thinking, is taken away in the next phase of critique. Jacques Derrida deconstructs this critical faculty in his essay on “White Mythology.” The main idea that Derrida advances is the identity of the philosophical and figurative modes of expression, 1.e., the identity of concept and metaphor. Philosophers delude themselves, argues Derrida,

when they think that concepts are capable of leading to a truth that is qualitatively different from the “untrue” metaphorical meaning. In fact their '> Barthes, Image—Music—Text, 147. 16 Barthes, Image—Music—Text, 148.

'” Barthes, Image—Music—Text, 153-4.

138 The Non-Finale concepts are nothing but poetic metaphors worn flat from long usage. Philosophical truths are thus indistinguishable from poets’ fantasies and philosophy itself is mythology bleached white—mythology that has lost all its colorful, vivid, and picturesque quality. It goes without saying that for Derrida the word “mythology” signifies nothing other than poetic fiction.

The crux of Derrida’s argument against the possibility of transcending figurative language is the denial of completeness as viable in principle. If we wanted to conceive and classify all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, there would always be at least one metaphor which would be excluded and remain outside the system: that one, at least, which was needed to construct the concept of metaphor, or, to cut the argument short, the metaphor of metaphor. [. . .] Because of what we might for convenience call metaphorical supplementation (the extra metaphor being at the same time a metaphor the less), no classification or account of philosophical metaphor can prosper. The supplement is always unfolding, but it can never attain the status of a complement. The field is never saturated.”®

The last proposition is, like its numerous cousins (e.g. “all judgments are

subjective” or “all master-narratives are oppressive’), a self-cancelling reflective statement.!? The worn pattern of this declaration, barely dressedin _ the garb of an argument, is familiar from seventeenth-century musings about the unimaginable first or final cause. The essay closes with a trite, if labored, metaphor in which a living heliotropic flower stands for poetic expression and a dried flower flattened between the pages of a book, for philosophical

concepts. Derrida restates his original claim by saying that a complete anthology of metaphors is impossible. “Unless an anthology were also a lithography,” he adds unexpectedly the last word. “Indeed, the heliotrope is a stone too: a precious stone, greenish and veined with red, a kind of Eastern jasper.””° This mannerist twirl transparently hints that instead of the senseless

quest for truth the philosopher should acknowledge his or her work as an . exercise in rhetorical imagination—an exercise that has no other goal than the endless reproduction of itself. Derrida’ s example demonstrates particularly well the special place that imagination holds among the causes of modernity’s hostility toward myth. Imagination operates with mental copies of the phenomenal world; it is limited, therefore, by the material that this world supplies. The limit of the spatial universe or the end of history cannot be imagined any more than one '8 Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” 245. !? For a detailed analysis of such statements, see Hésle, Objective Idealism, 27-8. *° Derrida, “White Mythology,” 287-8.

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism 139 can imagine the enlightened gentleman’s sword turn into nothingness as it pierces from the inside the wall of a circus tent. And yet this limit can be thought conceptually—just as Cusanus could think of a curved straight line,

Nietzsche thought of tragedy as the unity of Dionysus and Apollo, or contemporary physics conceives of a certain phenomenon as both a particle and a wave. Moreover, only a little reflection is needed to recognize the fact that the infinite and the finite, the one and the many are unthinkable without each other and that their interaction is the only mode of existence where they have any meaning. This interaction is, further, the proper medium in which

the real can be located and where it can manifest itself. But one cannot escape from abstract infinitism merely by looking at the interaction as a pointless seesaw. Ordinary consciousness dismisses such seesaws by calling them “the problem of the chicken and the egg.” Still, rather than a solution, this dismissive gesture is a sign of impotence. Such a consciousness turns away from the most important question that, far from going away, constantly hovers above our busy pursuit of everyday ends. Hegel proposes that the outcome of the joint work of the finite and the infinite 1s the ideal—and the truly infinite. “This infinite,” he writes, “as the consummated return into self, the relation of itself to itself, is being—but not indeterminate, abstract being, for it is posited as negating the negation; it is,

therefore, also determinate being for it contains negation in general and hence determinateness. It is and is there, present before us.””’ The ideal is a broader category that comprises the real as a narrower and less developed one. “True infinity [. . .] which is posited as affirmative in contrast to the

abstract negation,” Hegel continues, “is reality in a higher sense than the former reality which was simply determinate; for here it has acquired a concrete content. [. . .] Thus reality is further determined as essence, Notion,

Idea, and so on.” As containing the real, the ideal does not remain in the beyond but becomes a necessary constituent moment in the unfolding of reality; reality transcends itself, in other words, as it rises above its own primordial immediacy. This dynamic is common to both Hegel and Schelling who maintained that “the ideal is the real and is much more real than the socalled real itself.””? Poststructuralist thought comes close to this vision but ultimately stops short of accepting it. Like Schelling and Hegel, it views the world as an idea but, unlike them, declines to grant this idea any objective reality. And yet it is precisely this discovery that is postmodernism’ s greatest philosophical achievement—an achievement whose true dimensions remain, 7! SL 148-9. ** SL 149,

*3 Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, 35.

140 The Non-Finale however, concealed from poststructuralist thought itself. This type of consciousness does not deny that reality should be understood in holistic terms, as the unity of multiplicity. But against Hegel it sides with Plato: it is beyond human capacity to reconcile the one and the many, it holds, and therefore the multiple as such must be admitted as the only proper element for immanent human existence. Concomitant with this is the demand that all master-narratives be abandoned—and, in fact, actively resisted—in favor of local and particular ones, petit recits.”* The despair to bring unity within the compass of human experience is typical of the modern outlook in general

| but, despite itself, the modern subject still heroically attempted to do so. Postmodern thought finally accepts the apparent impossibility of the task and makes a virtue of necessity. Barely concealed by the air of playfulness, this despair is the deepest cause of the postmodern suspicion with regard to myth. Thus, as it turns upside down some of them, the postmodern critique of culture leaves untouched other significant strata of the modernist outlook.

Perhaps the most important among these is the motivation behind this critique. Barthes’s advocacy on behalf of the collective reader and listener _ against the tyranny of a singular author is driven, in the final analysis, by his commitment to the ideological principles of the Enlightenment: liberty, equality, and the brotherhood of immanent humanity. The sight of the rule of one over many is an insult to the democratic sentiment and the needy reach of ordinary consciousness for unity and reconciliation is an insult to the Enlightenment’s critical sensibility. Likewise the aspirations of diffuse , subjectivities in the thoroughly aestheticized and mediated dynamic environ-

ment of postmodernity are motivated by the moral imperative. Michel Foucault condemns the modern cognitive stance not because it is illogical, but primarily because he sees in it a power-hungry, “murderous” force that is “opposed to human happiness.”” Derrida likewise denounces the very

concept of concept as a metaphorical reference to the greedy grasp of a possessive hand, a “gesture of power.” This attitude is rooted in the sentiment captured with particular clarity

by Adorno. Acknowledging the insufficiency of his logical arguments against Hegel, Adorno offers an explanation of the real cause behind his disagreement with absolute idealism. The line between Hegel and him, he writes, “is drawn by our intent: whether in our consciousness, theoretically and in the resulting practice, we maintain that identity is the ultimate, that is absolute, that we want to reinforce it—or whether we feel that identity is the 24 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv, 60. 25 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 162-3.

© Derrida, “White Mythology,” 249.

The Triumph of Immanentist Infinitism 14] universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion [.. .]””’ Let us set aside Adorno’s compelling insight about the dialectic of overcoming coercion and reflect instead upon the fact that, for him, the criterion is not logical, but moral. Coercion and freedom form the two poles of the divining rod by which the philosopher discovers the fount of truth. That morality must wrest the philosophic scepter from logic is made abundantly clear, Adorno concludes, by the catastrophic events in twentieth-century political history. “After Auschwitz,” he writes, “our feelings resist any claim about the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victim’s fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make a mockery of the construction of immanence as

endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence.”””®

But this moralist pedigree brings forth the fatal contradiction within the

postmodern subject. On the one hand, justice, according to the poststructuralist view, results from sociocultural praxis but, on the other hand, by

shunning its own internal unity the subject renders itself incapable of practical action; its agency continually expires in the frozen moment of selfinduced sparagmos. When the time comes for it to leave its glass beads game

and to leap into the cold waters of worldly affairs the subject’s core collapses. It finds itself, therefore, dependent on its own modernist rival who continues to act as though nothing had happened. When Lyotard issues his

famous call to wage “a war on totality” he ceases to be postmodern and assumes the modern posture of a warrior on behalf of unfree humanity.” The cause for the return of modernity—its uninterrupted presence rather—lies

deep in poststructuralist thought itself. The impossibility of a consistent denial of critical subjectivity—the subjectivity that brought poststructuralism into existence in the first place—forces its adherents constantly to reach back

for the modernist intellectual arsenal. The philosophical underpinnings of this dependence have been grasped by Manfred Frank who insists on calling

poststructuralism “neostructuralism,” i.e., refuses to acknowledge that postmodern thought surmounted the modern frame of mind. Frank levels his criticisms at the heart of the postmodern outlook, the model of self-consciousness that he calls “reflective.” He sees, further, this model as parallel to Hegel’s doctrine of Absolute Spirit. (Suggestive as it 1s, 27 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 147. 28 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361.

2? Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 82.

142 The Non-Finale the parallel is ultimately erroneous: poststructuralism parts company with Hegel precisely on the cardinal question about the nature of spirit.) In his critique of Hegel Frank evokes Schelling’s counterargument. “Schelling addressed to Hegel,” he writes, “the question of how it could be possible for the absolute spirit to recognize itself as itself at the end of its path leading to self-knowledge, if it had not already had some knowledge of itself: nothing would be able to recognize itself as itself if it did not have a criterion for its identification in the form of a preceding (and self-familiar) knowledge.”*° Accordingly, the analysis of Hegel’s teachings about the unity of being and thinking, negation of negation, and the reflective model of the ego, or self-

consciousness, leads Frank to a Schellingian result. He concludes that reflection—along with the inherent dialectic of negation of negation—can be rationally comprehended only on the condition that there must exist some pre-reflective identity. “This perhaps becomes apparent,” Frank explains, “in the following parallel: just as reflection must be grounded in a prereflective and nonrelational familiarity with itself, the synthesis of semblance and resemblance (Schein und Widerschein) must be grounded in a presynthetic identity that has to be conceived as nonrelational ‘Being’.’”*' It must be remarked in response to this that the notion of identity is indeed—as it was held by Schelling, Frank, and Jean-Paul Sartre to whom Frank also refers— indispensable for the ego, negation of negation, and reflection. It is equally indisputable, however, that this notion and its necessity do not spring from

some “pre-reflective,” extra-rational, and extranoetic realm, but is the product of an intense and complex work of thinking—the work that is undertaken by Schelling, Sartre, and Frank themselves. The philosopher must not lose sight of his or her own position and role in these deliberations, lest he or she unwittingly assume the posture of some absolute reason that resides outside the universe of discourse and yet determines its dynamics.

Far from being pre-reflective, the identity that Frank posits is, in fact, something derived from, and in this sense subordinate to, rational thinking. The latter neither denies the need for identity and unity nor elevates them to the hegemonic status of the absolute origin. The incisiveness of their respective critiques notwithstanding, the myths that Adorno and Barthes see at their invidious work in contemporary culture are not, after all, genuine myths. Adorno himself notes perceptively that the

culture industry dispenses with all mystery in its productions. It has unraveled the Kantian “secret mechanism within the psyche” that “preformed *° Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, 260. *! Frank, What is Neostructuralism ?, 276-8.

The Triumph of Immanenitist Infinitism 143 immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason.””*” The “dreamless

art for the people” is shrewdly manufactured under the supervision of “earthly production management.” Devoid of mystery, one might observe, mass art is not symbolic, but rather allegorical. Its clichés exist only for the

sake of exemplifying, as Adorno puts it, “the schema by acting as its constituents.” Benjamin dreamed of creating a work that would consist entirely of quotations and imagined it as the ultimate accomplishment in appropriating tradition, of harvesting the precious concretions of the past.*° Barthes came to the conclusion that all texts consist of nothing but quotations and accepted this circumstance as the reader’s liberation from the hegemony

of the author. Oblivious of theoretical niceties, mass culture practices continuous circulation of worn-out trivia, making a mockery both of Benjamin’s cultural pearls and Barthesian emancipation. _ Suggestive of a mythical substance as it is, the plastic whose quasimythical qualities Barthes so eloquently describes suffers from the same predicament: it is supposed to be the product of an utterly rational process.” When operation of modern industry is called “magic” it is implied that

science and technology have accomplished by rational means what ““rrational” myth and magic could only impotently dream of. The term returns only as a means of celebrating a triumph over what it signifies. By joint effort immanentism and infinitism make myth impossible in the context of postmodern culture. Earthly being has nowhere to fly away from itself; moreover, behind any such flight the postmodern deconstructive gaze espies that same heroically erect subject whose errors and arrogance have led to the

deplorable current state of affairs. Infinite abiding on the flat plane of mundane existence where a diffuse subjectivity perpetually eludes the hegemonic grip of the heroic individual—this is the form that the Socratic

juxtaposition of Odysseus and Achilles takes in postmodernism. But, in contrast to his ancient counterpart, the postmodern trickster can no longer transform himself into Orpheus; he has made the entire domain of existence ludic and aesthetic but remains himself a positivist at heart, 1.e., he radically subjugates art to the practical needs of the human commonwealth. He justifies this unresolved contradiction within himself by denying the possibility of resolving any contradiction. The dialectic of postmodern consciousness fully exposes the absurdity of modernist infinitism. This dialectic demonstrates, negatively, that the unity and completeness—or finalizability, at any

DEB. °3 Cf, Arendt’s “Introduction” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 47ff. ** Barthes, Mythologies, 97-9.

144 , The Non-Finale _ rate-—of human experience, the need to conceive of it as something whole

are indispensable rational moments in this experience. , This need is shrewdly grasped by the culture industry, and exploited on a grandiose scale. Yet this industry by its design cannot produce any genuine

unity. Mass music can only substitute manufactured and mechanically

reproduced ersatz answers to questions about the purpose of human existence. The flaunted optimism of mass music is not supported by a deep grasp of the human condition; when it is not used to accelerate consumption, the optimistic major mode is no more than a pose instinctively struck by the modernist subject as it shrinks away from its own inner vacuum. When it does muster the courage to look into the abyss inside the subject becomes a forlorn aesthete, who marks, now with bitterness, now with melancholy resignation, the extinction of its early hopes. And yet it strains to hear: will new music echo the harmony sung by heavenly Sirens?

Powerless Music and Powerful Non-Music The ear is strained in vain. The final synthesis is no longer tolerated even in art and avant-garde music; the musical creativity that is driven by the idea of progressive intellectualization ought to pursue, according to Adorno,

a complexity that guards against any hint of complicity in corrupt reality. New music is the seismograph, says Adorno, that registers the shattering of reality as it “repudiates the claim that the universal and the particular are reconciled.”*” The philosopher muses joylessly, “How fundamentally disturbed life is today if its trembling and its rigidity are reflected even where no empirical need reaches, in a sphere that people suppose provides sanctu-

| ary from the pressures of the harrowing norm, and that indeed only redeems its promise by refusing what they expect of it.”°° And it is by this denial of completeness that the work maintains, Adorno holds, its own integrity. “The

moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality [. . .] does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content,

inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which the _ discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for | identity.”*’ Turned by industrial society into its own trace, nature offers itself up as a will-less object for the subject; it is turned into pure plasticity. As ° Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 36. 36 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 5. *’ DE 103.

Powerless Music and Powerful Non-Music 145 Barthes observes, plastic is “less a thing than a trace of movement’; man’s power over it “gives him the euphoria of a prestigious free-wheeling through nature.” This plasticized nature is “wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used,” Barthes continues. “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized [. . .]”°** One can recall that The Mask of Orpheus does not end with Orpheus’s death. It concludes rather with Aristaeus’s propitiations as a result of which he recovers his bees. The final sound is the electronic buzzing of the bees, which is also the sound of nature, as well as that of the divine Apollonian voice. Orpheus

dies, and as his song grows silent it yields to the song of nature, busily producing from the colorful variety of flowers a sweet, homogeneous substance for the benefit of the pious and industrious agriculturalist. The idea of the natural no longer inspires the forward-looking composer. In the twentieth century tonal music with its beautiful, rounded melodies degenerates into a utensil in the hands of the culture industry; as such it loses its standing as a genuinely creative practice. “The ‘second nature’ of the tonal system 1s an illusion originating in history,” Adorno observes. “It owes its dignity to the closed and exclusive system of a society that is based on exchange, whose dynamic tends toward totality and with whose fungibility all the tonal elements stand in profound agreement.””’ The stupefying repetitive music that is produced for the masses is counteracted by atonality as “an act of defense against mechanized art merchandise.”*’ Genuine music is torn asunder by contradictions—a state of affairs that reflects most faithfully the condition of society. “The truth of [avant-garde] music,” writes Adorno, “appears to reside in the organized absence of any meaning, by which it repudiates any meaning of organized society—of which it wants to know nothing—rather than in being capable on its own of any positive meaning." And, finally, as it reaches into the innermost recesses of the human subject, music bears witness to near-inexpressible sorrow. Adorno remarks, “[T]here has accrued to art [. . .] in the boundless suffering that crashes over mankind

and in the traces that this suffering has left behind in the subject itself a darkness that by no means interrupts an achieved enlightenment intermit' tently, but, on the contrary, completely overshadows enlightenment’s most recent phase and through its real force almost bars its portrayal in the 38 Barthes, Mythologies, 97-9.

? Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 13. Cf. also Attali, Noise, 46. “9 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 9. *! Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 19-20.

146 The Non-Finale image.” The light, harmony, and reconciliation with reality whose promise comes from the blinking and tinkling culture industry machine are the false comforts that the disagreeable music of the avant-garde must expose for what they are. Art is, therefore, the antidote against immediacy, conformity, and myth.* As the singular subject disintegrates, however, so do the activities that were borne by it. “The outstanding feature of music since 1970 is probably its divergence,” observes Griffiths. Even the history of music, i.e., the story of events past and therefore presumably unchangeable, takes on a different, non-Adornian complexion. “Looking back over the last hundred years [. . .],” Griffiths continues, “the whole history of modern music begins to seem less a jostling of rival alliances than an increasing turmoil of separate voices.

Correspondingly the notion of musical progress, essential to the idea of modernism, begins to appear quaint.” This is the age of “the new multiplicity.”** Rather than by the idea of progress, the contemporary musical | scene is characterized by the “intermingling” of the present “with so many musical pasts.” Luciano Berio remarks about a contemporary opera that in

it “the main personage [. . .] is the history of music, not out of the old Faustian urge to use the past but out of the desire and the need to deal with realities wherever they may be.”” In place of a singular authoritative story, many particularized narratives spring up. They in turn become yet another domain where artists can exercise their supreme right: the right to many choices. Many composers, Griffiths notes, “have chosen their own particular

histories, so that the history of modern music becomes a history of histories.”*° History, in other words, is aestheticized like everything else; the musical tradition is no longer an authority but becomes instead something

that the artist can play with as he or she plays with every other kind of material. It may seem, then, that the postmodern musical scene has settled to a

comfortable acceptance of multiple possibilities. But the picture is less peaceful than Griffiths’s account suggests. Under the veneer of equanimity the contradictions that propelled modernism’s march continue to boil and

threaten to explode the illusion of tranquility. In the end of his book on “ Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 16. *8 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 102.

“ Griffiths, Modern Music: A Concise History, 191-2. * Quoted in Griffiths, Modern Music, 198. * Griffiths, Modern Music, 198.

Powerless Music and Powerful Non-Music 147 Birtwistle Cross describes starkly opposed responses to the composer’s music. One “ordinary music lover and amateur musician” expresses resentment at “being lectured so patronizingly by musical snobs who sneer at those of us who like real tunes and melodies in preference to the tinnitus-inducing cacophony of [. . .] Harrison Birtwistle.” Part of the press regards the music as an “atrocity of epic proportions,” while another finds “magical breaths” in it. The general public’s stubborn adherence to “real tunes and melodies”

evinces, Cross observes, “a popular desire for a return to earlier (tonal) values and a deeply rooted antagonism towards the new.” “Modernism,” he concludes, “has still not been fully accepted in 1990s Britain.”*” Modernism

is, however, nothing if not “a battleground for conflicting views,” to use Cross’s own phrase, where new music shapes itself by struggling uncompro-

misingly with its older foe. Further, the sweet melodies of the latter are | manufactured by the very same modernist subject that, split within itself, sings at the same time its intentionally disturbing, “cacophonous” song. _The postmodern Orpheus—a wise child in a hermetically sealed aesthetic

sphere purposelessly playing with the plasticized world of sound—does enunciate, after all, the truth about the irrational foundations of modernism. The result of the theosis depicted in The Mask of Orpheus is creatures that are at once toys and mechanisms. As such they are unsuitable for serious activity and devoid of the will of their own. These Orpheus and Eurydice cannot surmount the contradictions that they themselves make so apparent. They cannot reconcile mass-produced music with avant-garde, aesthetics with praxis, the irrepressible impulse to play with the equally inescapable reality, the masculine with the feminine, and the immanent with the transcendent. This Eurydice is no longer Sophia, the wisdom and conscience of the world, but a fragmented being that speaks in broken syllables. The only guise under which she is tolerated is that of an unreal and will-less creature. Still there are consistencies in Orpheus’ s behavior. In the above pairs of opposites his choice is always in favor of the first term. Avant-garde music is merged with popular forms, theurgy is acknowledged only as an aesthetic activity, reality as play, Eurydice as no more than another puppet, and the transcen-

, dent as reduced to the immanent. He remains, in essence, a modernist artist who has grasped the vanity of his dreams of god-like immortality. His part consists, therefore, not so much in resolving these contradictions as in highlighting the need to move beyond the limits that modernist consciousness has

imposed on philosophical and musical thought. He is the spirit who, in contrast to Goethe’s Mephistopheles and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Woland, has *” Cross, Harrison Birtwistle, 245-6.

148 The Non-Finale not yet learned to be a part of the power that, “ever wishing evil, ever creates the good” (ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft).” To put it even more precisely, he is the spirit that, meaning well, stopped at abstract negation. Music continues to strike a precarious balance as a leading tone that can be resolved in a variety of ways and the refusal to seek the right resolution is continually challenged by those who plunge into

resolutions without deliberation. The behavior of the latter is irrational, however, exactly to the same extent as the former’s affectation that there is comfort in a perpetual multiplicity of choices. In the meantime both are treated as mere channels for infinite consumption by the culture industry that continues to charge ahead. Having reverted back to the pragmatic trickster,

, Orpheus the technologist sets the rhythm for his indefatigably rowing crew. Unlike Odysseus, however, he is not homeward-bound and does not seek

refuge in the constancy of the past. His ship continues its Promethean _ journey into the boundless ocean of the future. Yet, in fact, without a goal he is neither Odysseus nor Prometheus any longer, but a Sisyphus caught in the utter absurdity of his own hard labor.

** Goethe, Faust: Der Tragédie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust, 47 (lines 1335-1336).

Chapter 8 Conclusions Form, Cultural Genus, Music The form of the Orpheus myth, its cultural genus, and import as regards

the powers of music are intertwined, mutually determining factors in its history. A close look at multilateral interactions among these three threads in the fabric of the story suggests that ancient mystical beliefs, for example, must have projected Orpheus’s success as the soul’s guide in afterlife. It 1s hard to fathom what role he would perform in a cultic practice that aims at the union of the human soul with divinity if his assistance were to be believed ineffective. Inscriptions on the funerary lamellae and the subsequent history of Orpheus as a figure in mystical literature bear out this impression because mystical interpretations of his song’s powers—be it the Corpus Hermeticus, Ficino, or Solov’év—draw the picture of a successful theurgist. Doubt about his success is rather the product of aesthetic and philosophical consciousness. Once this doubt arises, it becomes an integral part of the myth’s evolution. The poetic tale of Orpheus’s failed journey to Hades takes shape under the pressure of the growing awareness that a simple presentation of immediate reality is insufficient—especially as regards the mystical unity that holds together the world order enunciated by myth. The catastrophic consequences of Orpheus’s backward glance capture the effect of reflection on myth: it poses a mortal challenge to myth by raising the question about the relation between reality and illusion. At the same time the sadness that envelopes this tale harbors an implicit rejection of the world where a magical song cannot reach its goal of the immortality not only of the transcendent, but also of the immanent human person. The poetic disillusionment in myth is, nonetheless, incapable of displacing it from culture as long as the latter is dominated by the vision of the world as something whole. Ancient monophony is the musical expression of that moment in consciousness which assures precisely the holistic nature of human experience.

As it comprehends Orpheus’s tale, philosophical thought takes its lessons both from myth and poetry. What allows Socrates to smirk at the poetic images of Orpheus is his conviction that the unity and reality of the world are necessary, unavoidable concepts. At the same time, traditional 149

150 Conclusions mythology with its direct identification of the immanent and transcendent likewise evokes a contemptuous smile from the philosopher who ridicules , the colloquial picture of postmortem Orphic bliss as everlasting drunkenness. Against the aesthetic-sophistic approach the philosopher insists on the world’s unity as the highest reality and against the mythical one he insists on

the need to derive this unity in a rational fashion. In its new form the Orpheus myth preserves its mystical core but the latter’s position is now changed. In contrast to myth, the mythosophic tale is elaborated not as a direct enunciation of the real, but as a wondrous vision to be attained at the peak of the dialectical ascent. The song that articulates the truth at the summit is sung by the Sirens and the fates under the watchful eye of silent

necessity. ,

Despite its mysticism, however, this solution already contains the germ

of the recognition that the one and the many, the transcendent and the - immanent, identity and difference, are mutually necessary—yjust as the aesthetic transformation suggested the mutual necessity of reality and illusion. Aristotle called the Prime Mover eromenon, the object of universal love. As thinking whose main business consists in relating to itself, the eromenon connotes that the love of all things toward it is reciprocated. Christian mythopoiea spells out this connotation. “And I have declared unto [my apostles] thy name,” says the messiah to his heavenly father, “and will declare it; that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). The transcendent and the immanent thus form an internally differentiated unity and the subsequent mythopoeia, hand in hand with philosophy, construes the entire spectrum of human experience in accordance with this triune whole. From monophony music evolves into medieval polyphony that

enunciates the Trinitarian nature of all existence and especially of the relation between the human person and her absolute origin-cum-goal, her alpha and omega. Polyphony is the “New Song” that the early apologists of Christianity promised humanity, and their tale about Orpheus-Christus is the myth that gives shape to the new musical sensibility. The rise of new forms and cultural genera does not spell doom for the existing ones; rather it leads to a redistribution of roles among the dramatis

personae. Orpheus the magus, for example, does not vanish with the emergence of Orpheus-Christus but merely withdraws from the proscenium, awaiting his hour of return. The allegorical Orpheus of Antiquity coexists with both and enters new mythological contexts. In the case of Sir Orfeo this encounter is accompanied by the aestheticization of the Celtic myth: the tale of a magical bard becomes a form of court entertainment. All cultural genera are continually involved in multilateral interactions and continually cause

one another to change. The rise of modern opera in the twilight of the

Form, Cultural Genus, Music 151 Renaissance is a vivid example. Magic, euhemerism, and allegorism jointly give the Orpheus myth a new form in which the old elements acquire new significance. What used to be allegory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages becomes myth in early modernity. Magic is preserved but it now finds itself in a thoroughly allegorical, fabulous space. The basic split within this space is made evident by the metamorphosis in which Monteverdi and Striggio’s

Eurydice divides herself into a silent, passive essence and a living tragic - voice lamenting its own parting with this essence. Orpheus’s musical magic is now driven not by Renaissance astrological spirits, but by the artist’s

- unbending will toward immanent immortality. Even though human will cannot yet decisively overcome extrinsic universal laws, the latter, try as they | may to retain their power, are limited by their own abstract nature and can offer Orpheus and Eurydice only so-called “Platonic” immortality. The allegorically conceived reality that rises over the remains of its medieval symbolic ancestor does not allow a mystical transfiguration of the integral human person. The power of these laws is defective; the human subject

rebels against them and asserts as its goal the fulfillment of its will in the here and now rather than in a fabulous Elysium. Eurydice is now neither broken in twain nor silent but demands answers to her questions. It is she who guides Orpheus away from darkening metaphysical spheres into the bright world of terrestrial bliss. Their song 1s, accordingly, the celebration of

the “natural” human being whose spontaneous, noble, and sincere passion disarms the hostile forces of savage ignorance and tyrannical authority. This world likewise quickly loses all connection with reality; it becomes

aesthetic through and through. At the moment when, in the heat of the Enlightenment, Orpheus and Eurydice are finally forged into genuine artistic images, the fundamentally aesthetic nature of the modern Weltanschauung begins clearly to manifest itself. The Baroque fable still preserved a residual trace of objective moral content. Music was, accordingly, a tool for manipulating the affects of the audience. When the philosopher and the artist comprehend the subjective origins of this content music becomes an expression of the free, uninhibited play of imagination and understanding that unfolds within the autonomous subject.

And yet artistic image is not myth in the true sense of the word. The culture of modernity demands that it perform the function of myth—to assure

the integrity of human experience and view of the world—but the image

cannot cope with the task. Its ludic nature dialectically demands the simultaneous presence of non-ludic reality which, in the meantime, has turned into a problem that interminably awaits a solution. This dilemma underlies the division of artistic image into two hypostases: pragmatic-realist and ludic-romantic. Neither of them can make the modern world view whole.

152 Conclusions The former is a mere tool for achieving extra-artistic goals—the condition that renders it thoroughly instrumental and thus inherently incomplete. The only manner of finality that is tolerated in it is the formal completeness of its particular instances—which, however, stands in sharp contrast with the basic unfinalizability of the realist image as a genus. The romantic variety does put forth the final synthesis of human experience as its own defining feature but treats this synthesis as purely fantastical, openly detached from reality. It compensates for this by attempting to subsume all reality under aesthetics. The opera Sadko is an attempt to reconcile these two trends. The dyadic principle that permeates it from overarching structure, both dramatic and musical, down to individual characters flows from the authors’ desire to surmount the basic dilemma in the art of burgeoning modernism. Yet the very medium in which Rimsky-Korsakov and Bel’ skii undertake this attempt makes it impossible to break away from the aesthetic approach to things. The solution that they seek lies outside the walls of the opera theater. Solov’év understands this and calls the desired new genus of artistic creativity theurgy. Remarkably, rather than Orpheus it is Eurydice-Sophia who becomes the main channel for elaborating his ideas and inspires his mythosophic vision. In this vision are woven together multiple historical threads that give shape to the notion of the “broad judgment” and mysterious wisdom, the wisdom that empowers Orpheus’s song and is exercised by the feminine soul of the world. Orpheus, by contrast, becomes an auxiliary,

almost allegorical figure. The cause of this imbalance is the doubt that Solov’év feels at the sight of an individual genius’s effort. Theurgy is the task not for a single artist, but harmonized, artistic humanity at large. And, conversely, where the thought of overcoming aestheticism remains captive

to the charms of the romantic genius Orpheus, the masculine creative principle, completely dominates the feminine element that suffuses the readily malleable cosmos. Such is Scriabin’s Preliminary Act. Solov’év’s approach rests on the self-realizing universal concept, whereas Scriabin’ s is driven by the spontaneous movement of his own creative spirit. [vanov’s theurgic mythosophy aims to reconcile the universalism of the former with

the particularism of the latter; Orpheus and Eurydice occupy equally important places in the world of his symbols. This world, further, unfolds as a cultural tradition; correspondingly, one finds in it multiple hypostases of _ the singing poet and his spouse. As long as this tradition is conceived as a process whereby art is to be transformed into theurgy the multitude of its personages remains unified. But as the dream of theurgy fades, tradition falls apart into fragments lacking inner mutual connections, assembled in a mechanical, external fashion. From a dramatic tone-canvas that depicts the suffering and triumphs of creative

Form, Cultural Genus, Music 153 genius in mortal combat with the forces of the non-ego music turns into either manipulations of sound entirely devoid of objective content or a strictly objective tool for manipulating the external world. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) captured the nature of the latter process when he spoke of art losing its mystical “aura” in the world of total mass production. His analysis

succeeds to the extent that it recognizes that what art loses in the expansionist march of the culture industry is not a power conferred upon it by an external authority, but its inner essence.’ Art in general and music in particular are hollowed out and become mere apparitions of themselves. The contemporary drama of music unfolds within the current produced by the tension between these two poles. The Orpheuses and Eurydices that inhabit our cultural tradition, the genera that they gave expression to, and, finally, the ideas about the powers of music that give life to these images exist and

interact today within this splintered space. The multiple conflicts that pervade it have done little, however, to slow down the modern musical project. If Gluck and Calzabigi were to rewrite their opera today, rather than with Orpheus and Eurydice’s earthly happiness, they would have to end it with Odysseus harnessing the lovers, absorbed in an argument, into the team of his rowers who propel his ship past the mythic song of the Sirens. The most powerful contemporary cultural dynamic does not so much elevate or degrade the masculine Orpheus or feminine Eurydice as grind them both into a homogeneous paste that feeds infinitely expanding production. And yet the frenetic activity of this pragmatic trickster can no longer conceal his inner failure. Without a final destination his vigorous labor increasingly looks like punishment: Odysseus has in turn morphed into Sisyphus, the cunning but luckless hero who wished to attain immortality but is now condemned to the endless repetition of the same. Still it would be a mistake to imagine the music of either avant-garde or that of mass culture as demonic monoliths. The postmodern desire to erase

the boundary between “high” and “low” art is propelled by a healthy impulse. But this impulse is perverted as the categories of the whole, unity, and immediacy are artificially suppressed. As a result the conflict between

“high” and “low” art is resolved by denying them both, that is to say, denying art as such. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that John Cage’s project of “all-sound music,” for example, should involve not only the erasure of the difference between musical and non-musical sound, but also

a similar erasure of the difference between art and life. “What is more musical,” Cage muses with soft irony, “a truck passing by a music school or : Benjamin, [//uminations, 221.

154 Conclusions a truck passing by a factory?” All and nothing, according to this view, equally is and is not music. An answer to the dilemmas and dichotomies of contemporary musical culture can be derived only in a dialectical manner. A book on the history of one myth is hardly the place for a lengthy disquisition into this complicated

matter but some basic observations seem in order. If one resists the temptations of abstract schemata, then it is impossible to deny, for example, that genuine art exists in both “high” and “low” registers. These categories

have to do with anything but art itself. Neither the sophistication of the former nor the simplicity of the latter are by themselves responsible for the

higher or lower quality of a musical work. This quality varies from immeasurably great to undetectably small in both categories—as well as in all attempts to bridge the gap between them. On both sides of the divide our

mind is captivated by the sound-image of unity in diversity, by a living whole. Arnold Schoenberg and Bob Dylan belong to the same category of artists who can express the simultaneous infinite variety and irreplaceable

unity of human experience. No matter how cerebral or intuitivist their respective creative universes may seem, in both cases the power of their song

| flows from the dialectic of the one and the many, immediacy and mediation, spontaneous insight and meticulous elaboration, creative ego’s instantaneous breakthrough beyond its own limits and attentive comprehension of unfold-

ing panoramas. The power of this song diminishes as it departs from this dialectic, slipping into either one abstraction or the other. This has, however, been the case throughout the modern period. The novelty of the current moment consists, perhaps, in the fact that it is no

longer feasible to hide from the awareness that the main factor in this dynamic picture—“‘factor’” literally meaning “maker”—is nothing other than

thinking. All attempts undertaken in the grandiose post-Hegelian quest for extranoetic sources of reason, to find an extranoetic Ithaca for Odysseus the practical intellect and an extranoetic Eurydice for Orpheus the soul’s guide,

have exposed themselves as so many cases of reductio ad absurdum. |

Transcendence and Immanence | The analyses of their specific instances, offered in the course of this book, show that the cultural genera of stories about Orpheus in one setting or another depend on two key factors: the availability of an immediately given reality and acceptance of the mysterious synthesis of the immanent and * Miller, John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (Video Recording, 1990).

Transcendence and Immanence 155 the transcendent. The evolution of these conditions can be summarized as follows. In Antiquity the immediately given reality is understood as the beautiful and living cosmos. The transcendent and the immanent are thought to be held

together by super- or rather extra-human, transcendent necessity. The manifestations of the latter’s omnipotence are encoded in ancient stories about miracles. But this basic conviction does not remain unchallenged or immutable; on the contrary, it is eventually confronted and transformed by the aesthetic and the philosophical frames of mind. Nor is the transition from one view of reality to another haphazard but flows from the intrinsic logic of the phenomena involved. The aesthetic attitude toward things stems from its mythical counterpart: the latter’s heightened attention to objectively-given

reality inevitably leads onto the arena an equally keen fascination with subjectively-produced illusion. The philosophical critique of myth similarly grows out of the aesthetic attitude because the latter sets illusion and reality

in contrast to each other and suggests their mutually conditioned nature. And, finally, all three participants in this process find themselves in continuous multilateral transformative interactions. Plato’s mythosophy is an | attempt to fill with significant content the otherwise empty unity that he affirms as the highest point in the cosmic hierarchy. It is also philosophy’s concession both to myth and poetry: the pretension to uncover the truth is tempered in it at once by the mysticism of the former and probabilistic, as Aristotle would put it, nature of the latter. But philosophy returns its debt to myth with interest. Raised in the acutest terms, the problem of the immanent and the transcendent, of their interaction on the cosmic, social, and especially

personal planes stimulates ancient mythopoeia that produces its own response to this challenge. A new mythological system arises that becomes, in turn, the object of artistic and philosophical attention. In the Middle Ages the ancient cosmic reality yields to the mystical unity of the Creator and the creature epitomized in the mythologem of Jesus Christ. The figure of Orpheus-Christus is a response to unresolved difficulties in ancient Neoplatonism where the dialectic of the one and the many has become of utmost concern. Their mutual necessity is almost openly acknowledged but still arises before thinking as something alien to reason. Yet at the same

time what used to be mute transcendent necessity is counterbalanced by human form and everything in the world that manifests the mysterious union

of the two is perceived as miraculous. Mystical consciousness makes the inner essence of the human person, rather than the external actions of the rite, the keystone of the arch connecting the here and the beyond but what holds

the person herself together remains a divine mystery. The vacuum at the heart of this mystery pulls in all phenomena of human experience.

156 Conclusions Yet as it takes unlimited hold of all existence mythical consciousness consumes none other than itself; furthermore, the medieval flourishing of myth becomes fatal not for a particular kind of mythology, but for myth as such. In Antiquity the inherent incompleteness of mythical consciousness manifested itself as a multitude of mythologies. Christianity puts forth a comprehensive universalist mythology that is intended to replace this infinite

variety. The fall of Christian myth is therefore experienced by modern consciousness as the fall of myth in general. The cause for the displacement of medieval myth by early modern allegory lies in the insatiable mystery at the heart of the former. Medieval symbolism turns everything in the world into intercourse between the immanent and the transcendent but, because of its inner emptiness, the enigma of their union is eventually concealed from view by immanent reality. The natural world begins to display before the ~ human mind the bright and vivid colors that Plato and Dante used to reserve for the supra-celestial realm. The Hermetic Orpheus as he is reconstructed in Renaissance musical magic represents the aspiration to analyze divine

mystery into a rationally comprehensible chain of causes and effects. Thus

in the modern era the mystical unity of the transcendent Creator and immanent creature yields to the perception of the world as immanence unlimited by transcendence. And yet, far from vanishing, the medieval division of the world into two contrasting dimensions is partially preserved as it is superimposed onto the immanent universe where it assumes the shape of natural phenomena and natural laws. As immanent, both are presumed to be infinitely cognizable. However, since cognition supposedly goes on ad infinitum certain knowledge of reality becomes impossible and is replaced by an infinite series of hypotheses. Reality becomes something merely probable,

and the world view is thereby thoroughly aestheticized. Concurrently mystery in the ancient and medieval sense is rejected in favor of the idea of

something yet unknown, of more knowledge lying ahead, rather than something unknowable in principle. These developments lead to a curious situation: allegory takes the place of myth in a more profound sense than is suggested by mere rivalry among

cultural genera. Since the picture of the early modern world is itself allegorical through and through, allegory adequately expresses the basic sensibility of the time. The distinctive feature of the allegorical outlook is the vision of two parallel planes: infinitely replaceable phenomena and abstract universal laws that reign over them. Their strict parallelism precludes their mutual synthesis and turns the miraculous into the automatically untrue. The concepts of will and imagination play an especial part in this process because

they become the mysterious centers of the modern subject that are called

Transcendence and Immanence 157 upon to hold the otherwise split modern universe together. They are the only rudiments of the miraculous in the new world order and by their joint effort

they push into the background the wonders of divine creation. Divine mystery is transmuted into an intractable gift conferred by nature upon the genius who creates his own worlds by wilful imagination. The more arbitrary the heroic labors of this genius, the more faithfully they convey the idea of

his omnipotence. But as the mystery of this gift is, in turn, filled by the naturalistic mythopoeia of the Enlightenment “nature in its mode of procedure” offers itself instead as the model for artistic creativity, and with this the days of allegory are numbered.

The voluntaristic vector in the genius’s energetic effort eventually becomes responsible for the realist tendency in art; its imaginative counterpart, for the romantic one. The wide-spread opinion that realist art aims to imitate the facts of life misses the point because it ignores the purpose of this “mimesis.” Realism is deeply pragmatic; rather than imitating, its goal is to change factual reality. As a result, this reality itself and its imitation in art become mere instruments in the hands of the positivist subject. Reality as it existed for his ancient and medieval predecessors has vanished for the realist artist. The so-called “facts” of realism are not actually facts; they resemble reality but are never equal to it. They are mere likenesses of an unreachable original. Realism is thus an accessory in the thoroughgoing aestheticization of reality—which, however, is aestheticized in the interests of some utopian

“real” life. Upon a closer look, this “life” boils down to satisfying the appetites of the immanent human subject. The modern displacement of poiesis by praxis, driven by subjugating reason to will, theoria to orexis, is persuasively demonstrated by Giorgio Agamben. As he points out, “central to praxis was the idea of the will that finds its immediate expression in an act, while, by contrast, central to poiesis was the experience of pro-duction into presence, the fact that something passed from nonbeing into being, from concealment into the full light of the work.” “The essential character of poiesis,” he continues, “was not its aspect as a practical and voluntary process but its being a mode of truth understood as unveiling, &-ArOe1m.”’ The will is, further, construed by modernist thought as the vital drives of the human organism. In an attempt to preserve the reality that is slipping away empiricism, naturalism, and positivism reach for the presumed certainty of the immediately given sensuous world. In the

meantime, romantic idealism seeks a similar remedy in an immediately experienced subjectivity. The common notion that it is “transcendentalist” > MWC 68-9.

158 Conclusions is belied by the fact that, just like realism, romanticism is obsessed with the particular, immanent subject for whose sake alone its fantastical flights into

the beyond are undertaken. And, finally, contrary to appearances, these quests for the real are not mere atavistic habits of the psyche that futilely _ gropes for lost certitudes. They stem from the basic logical conundrums into which philosophy is driven by infinitism. Considered in this light, the existence of art in modernity is marked by a dilemma that is quite different from the ailment that Nietzsche diagnosed | when he complained about modern culture’s lost capacity for tragedy. “The whole of our modern world,” he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, “is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture and takes as its ideal the theoretical man _ who is equipped with the highest powers of knowledge, works in the service of science, and whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our means

of education have originally had this ideal in view, every other form of existence has to struggle laboriously upwards alongside it, as tolerated but not intended forms of existence.’”” Far from being something “incredible and astonishing,” the “non-theoretical man” is the driving force of modernity. Vita activa rather than vita contemplativa is the “intended form of existence” for the modern world. Contrary to Nietzsche, the existence of genuine art in modernity is threatened not by excessive contemplation, but by obsessive, insufficiently reflective activity. The intrinsic evolution of the modern world view exposes the absurd nature of its own immanentist infinitism, and eventually reality comes to be understood, paradoxical as it may sound, as the absence of reality; its only trace is the supposedly misguided, utopian hope for grasping the nonexistent

real. Poststructuralist thought declines the assumption of the infinite cognizability of all existence and yet at the same time it likewise rejects the possibility of absolute synthesis. As a result, neither the impossibility nor the possibility of miracles seems obvious. The indecision is, however, merely a

_ matter of surface appearance. Even as it contemplates their devastating implications, postmodern critical thought continues jealously to guard the two sacred cows of the modern world view: immanentism and infinitism. Myth remains its arch-enemy and is tolerated only in eviscerated, thoroughly aestheticized forms. On the logical level, the transition from modernism to postmodernism is driven by the recognition of the irrational nature of infinite

| regress. Yet at the same time postmodern thought finds itself powerless to surmount the logic of infinitism. It continues to view rational thinking as so many abstractions confined within a vicious circle. As long as it does so it * BT 97.

Transcendence and Immanence 159

wrestles with. | itself remains a form of none other than the abstract rationalism that it

The Baroque mind loved the myth that, through the effort of the

Renaissance, had been turned into an harmless toy. The Enlightenment took a more serious attitude: it regarded myth as its sworn enemy. The romantic mind at once adored myth and thought that it could be created at will; in fact,

the newly created myth was to become the highest achievement of the romantic spirit. The positivist intellect declared myth a passing phase that, when it persists, becomes a pathology: “the disease of language” or neurosis. The modernist mind looks for the synthesis of positivism and romanticism and finally finds it in the cultural tradition which, however, has always been internally contradictory. Thus instead of universal synthesis modernism arrives at pervasive conflict: reason against myth, technology against art, totality against particularity. When the historical subject’s desperate gaze manages to pierce through the smoke of these battles the subject finds itself in a world that is all in pieces. Thus Benjamin—for whom, as Hanna Arendt notes, the “question of tradition as such was decisive” —perceives it as a pile of “wreckage upon wreckage” produced by the catastrophic storm that “we call progress.” The storm, Benjamin astutely observes, drives history away from the paradise of original mythic unity.’ The historical subject itself by now has neither the power nor the desire to prevent the rampant fragmentation; moreover, it has no inner unity that can serve as a model for constructing a new oikos for the human spirit. This unity, understood as universal

essence, was the cherished achievement of ancient mystical cults and, absorbing ever-changing content, remained the hidden nexus that held together all subsequent world views. It becomes intolerably oppressive to postmodern consciousness which sees humanity’s salvation only in unbounded difference and variety. Explicit or implicit as the case may be, the acceptance of infinite regress as arational model of being is the chief obstacle to overcoming both abstract

rationalism and mysticism. The former accepts this model and attempts to construe all its beliefs in accordance with it, whereas the latter rejects it and turns away from reason. But the logic of infinite regress drives the one into a reductio ad absurdum, while the other is forced to fill, bricoleur-like, the barren unity with an already given content. Their mutual interactions produce a variety of hybrid forms. Avant-garde composers—such as Olivier | Messiaen, Arvo Part, or Galina Ustvol’skaia—may pursue the most orthodox

forms of religious mysticism. Conversely, the arm-waving masses of > See Arendt, “Introduction” and Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Benjamin, [//uminations, 37 and 257-8, respectively.

160 Conclusions entranced fundamentalist worshipers enunciate their theosis to the same “real

tunes and melodies” to which the culture industry sells its infinitely disposable wares. Contemporary mysticism offers nothing new and its positive role consists in exercising negative pressure on abstract rationalism. By its

incessant irruptions it makes evident the latter’s inability to fulfill the promise of the Enlightenment: to rid humanity of the monsters bred by the sleep of reason. The impotence of abstract rationalism, in turn, flows from its own irrational nature, from the defect that makes it mysticism’s twin. The defect is moralistic in origin. The final synthesis of thought and being is rejected by critical reason as a matter of moral concerns. The latter are tied to the vital needs of the human person, her practice, and, finally, will.

The elevation of will, practice, and morality over and above reason is responsible for abstract rationalism’s inability to move beyond its own endless alternation between “on the one hand” and “on the other hand.” Socrates was mistaken when he recommended that “the practice of virtue” should steer clear of the “phantoms” of poets in order to make the human person “like unto God.” Plato was a great deal closer to a solution when he proposed that praxis be elevated into poiesis and the latter take itself at least as seriously as the former. Meanwhile, the demand for the final synthesis that is continually enunciated by mythical consciousness isin its depth perfectly reasonable—no matter what fantastical forms it may at times assume. Its

| irrational and unjustified element consists in denying the role of reason in such a synthesis. In this mysticism concurs with abstract rationalism that likewise believes such a synthesis to be alien to reason. Or rather, like Ivan Karamazov, this rationalism concludes that, even if reason demands it, the synthesis must be declined because it will allegedly justify the evil that has irrevocably smashed into pieces what seemed like the rational order of things. Dialectics is silenced by moral outrage.

The Song of Wonder These problems of general character have a direct bearing on how

musicological scholarship treats the issue of music’s powers. As he contemplates Ficino’s hopes and designs for musical magic, Tomlinson must face the question whether these hopes were reasonable from our own point of view. His answer is twofold. In Ficino’s world, he claims, “magic works.” In absence of definitive proof, Tomlinson believes, this conclusion ought to be accepted “almost as a matter of faith [. . .] in anthropological difference

and in people’s ability to construct through language and deed their own

The Song of Wonder 161 worlds, unfettered by the world rules others have made.’® And yet it is not so much faith per se as deference to our historical others that is behind this startling concession to mysticism: It is, more than most, a coercive question. The truest understanding we can gain of Ficino’s magic results in part from our resistance to such dominating impulses. [. . .] It arises from our acknowledgment that certain questions we might pose constitute invasions of a space

beyond the dialogical middle ground, a space in which we are unwelcome, a space that must remain Ficino’s own. The truest understanding of his magic, finally, emerges not only from the questions that we ask but also from those we realize we must refrain from asking.’

Tomlinson fears that if we continue to “see through” Ficino’s beliefs “with greater and greater clarity,” we shall thereby dissolve the otherness of our object and assimilate it to the extent that, as he puts it, “it will in itself in the same process become less and less visible.”*® We should therefore abstain

from the final judgment about the efficacy of the Renaissance magus’s musical exercises and allow our other to retain its distinct identity. | The moral nature of Tomlinson’s reservations does not escape Taruskin who is, nonetheless, disinclined to concede the point. To him the reverse side

of excessive respect for others looks like a “merciless repression of | ourselves.” He sees such “epistemological abstinence” as breeding grounds for abuse of reason and insists on carrying on the modern cognitive project, and inflects his argument polemically: “The critical and skeptical posture we have inherited from the traditional practice of our discipline is a hard-won and precious thing, the truest trophy of positivism.”” But when he comes to deal with Scriabin’s mysticism Taruskin himself can approach it only as an aesthetic phenomenon—one of extraordinary spiritual vision and ambition, perhaps, but inevitably falling short of the theurgy that Scriabin and Ivanov had in mind. The prime example of “the transcendence of the small ego” that was allegedly accomplished by the composer comes from what Scriabin wrote only in preparation to, rather than fulfilment of, his theurgic plan. Tomlinson is right, after all, to have apprehensions with regard to the infinite cognizability of our others—even if the danger that this dogma poses is the opposite of the one he points out. It is not that the musical magus’s face may ° MRM 247.

"MRM 251.

° MRM 252. , ” Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, xxvii and xxx.

162 Conclusions be dissolved without a trace in the analytic solvent of positive knowledge, but that this face may never take its true shape at all, no matter how long one may peer into it. This is why Taruskin’s optimism with regard to some idealized “positivism” is as unjustified as Tomlinson’s reluctance to push forward for fear of consequences. It is impossible to be optimistic facing an endless upward slope. Common sense and dialectics concur in the demand that the process—any process—have an end. Only bearing this demand in mind can one begin to unravel the knot in which both the valuable and misguided threads of Scriabin’s project are tangled together. Infinitism leads only to a rejection of this design as such and transfers it from a theurgic to an aesthetic plane, as though it were self-evident that this plane cannot be transcended. In the meantime, to break out of the vicious circle of aestheticism is not only possible, but is, in fact, what a rational approach to music requires. The

refusal to leave this circle leads simultaneously to the disappearance of reality in the swarm of simulacra and dissolution of the meaning of the aesthetic itself. Paradoxical though it may appear at first glance, Agamben’s

observation on this point is quite apposite: “Aesthetics [. . .] is unable to think of art according to its proper stature, and so long as man is prisoner of

an aesthetic perspective, the essence of art remains closed tohim.”'°Intruth, of course, neither is Tomlinson a mystic nor Taruskin a positivist. The former’s interrogation of Renaissance musical magic is driven by a palpable

desire to understand his object and the latter passionately expands musicology’s concerns beyond both formal analysis and simplistic moralizing. But if their respective quests for a viable alternative approach are to succeed

the philosophical limitations of both “the traditional practice of [the] discipline” and its poststructuralist permutation must be surmounted.

Still the triumph that the aesthetic view of reality celebrates in postmodernism is not something evil. The transition from modernism to postmodernism is not revenge visited by history upon the modern subject for voluntaristic hubris. The aesthetic attitude toward reality exposes “practical

reason” for what it is because it represents a more advanced form of con- : sciousness. But it threatens to turn into such revenge unless it can overcome itself precisely as aesthetic. What is needed, then, is not “a destruction of aesthetics” that Agamben ponders in order “to bring into question the very meaning of aesthetics as the science of the work of art,” but a transcendence of it—which, nonetheless, will grow out of the problems that the aesthetic

view of things itself poses before philosophy."’ In the end of his book Agamben proposes a vision that aims precisely at such transcendence: '° MWC 102. 'T MWC 6-7.

The Song of Wonder 163 [A]t the limit of its aesthetic itinerary, art [. . .] again comes closer to the mythic-traditional systems [. . .] Yet, although it can reach the

, threshold of myth, it cannot cross it. If man could appropriate his historical condition, and if, seeing through the illusion of the storm that perennially pushes him along the infinite rail of linear time, he could exit his paradoxical situation, he would at the same time gain access to the total knowledge capable of giving life to a new cosmogony and to turn history into myth.’”

To this one might add only that, rather than a return to some “original measure of [man’s] dwelling in the present” that Agamben envisions, the theurgic tradition that the Orpheus myth has borne in the history of western musical thought points forward, beyond the indecision enforced by “the infinite rail of linear time.” The most valuable consequence of postmodern critique as regards our > theme is that its attempts at disentangling problems created by modernism _ have led to an implicit recognition that myth, art, and philosophy are the key factors in articulating our sense of reality. In the postmodern emphasis on _ culture there is an unwitting admission that art and philosophy, song and ~

thinking are more potent and more real forms of human activity than economic production or politics. This was certainly the view of Plato the Orphic who—in his seemingly more utopian but, in fact, more lucid moments—argued that even such a concentrated “extension of politics” as war was a lower grade of reality than the “games” of religious ritual, artistic creativity, and philosophical discourse because, instead of elevating the human being, war spelled degradation. One can make a similar observation

about “wars” declared and waged against concepts, such as the rational integrity of human experience. Having the latter wars in mind, it would be a mistake simply to turn around and join the strikingly monophonic chorus of postmodern voices that insist on erasing the distinction between the real and the ludic. The discourse that turns the events of real life into fictions— manufactured by technology that takes orders from ideology—remains a prisoner of the same form of consciousness that it attempts toovercome. Nor | is the answer to be found in Apollo’s old counsel to strike a perfect mean between the poles on which, crucifix-like, the meaning of our musical project is painfully expiring. A dialectical comprehension of this relation leads one to conclude rather that the externalization of thought, the vivid colors and the enchanting chords that announce its exit from the invisible and soundless domain, are the work of thinking itself. Thus the modern obsession with finding extranoetic foundations of reason, including the postmodern idée fixe of reducing reason to an epiphenomenon of the will to power, promise no '? MWC 114.

164 Conclusions solution to the intensifying contradictions in contemporary musical culture.

Today myth and reason, as well as praxis and poiesis find themselves

perhaps even more at odds with each other than in the era of the Enlightenment. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice retains its vital cultural

role because it gives shape to the intuition that the inner and the outer transformations of the human person are incomplete, and to that extent false, without each other. The genuine reality of human existence consists only in

their mutually-determined dynamic unity. This dynamic, further, can be neither an endless string of ascents and descents nor can it resolve itself into

some supra-rational ecstasy. The history of the myth about Orpheus and Eurydice traced on the preceding pages suggests the need for a different outcome. And yet the mere hints that this myth offers, evocative though they are, only suggest and cannot replace the work of thinking that is necessary for grasping the nature of this outcome. The light that guides Orpheus and Eurydice can only be the light of reason that gives a concrete contour to the goal of their journey. This contour, finally, can be neither fixed nor indefinite-——it is rather like song that remains meaningful only as long as it is

moving.

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Index

Abbate: 88-89 Bacchae: 4, 19

Achilles: 20, 26, 143 : Bacon: 76

Adorno: xii, xiv, xxii, 6, 11, 76, Bakhtin: xx, 37, 54-55, 118-120

134-136, 140-146 Baroque: xiv, xvili, 11, 61, 67, 70, 76,

Aeschylus: 7, 9, 24 82-83, 85, 91, 151, 159

162 142-143, 145 Agamben: 12, 157, 162-163 Bassaridae: 6-7, 24

aestheticism: x1x-xxil, 28, 66, 123,152, Barthes: xiii, xxii, 11, 136-137, 140,

Agave: 19 Bel’ski: 103 -104, 107, 152 Algarotti: 87 ~ Bird: 108, 115-116 allegory: xiv, xvii-xvill, 11, 43, 47,56, Birtwistle: xiv, xxi, xxii, 129, 131-133,

60, 61, 70-71, 81-82, 85, 91, 120, 136, 147

121, 151, 156-157 Boethius: 46, 49-50, 52

Ananke: 10, 33 Brisson: 36-37

Antigone: 68 | Andromeda: 108 : Bruno: 76, 80

Ansermet: 57-59 Burkert: 4, 13-14, 16-17, 20, 29, 34, 36 Antiquity: vii, Xvil-xx, Xxii-xxilil, 5, 7, © Caccini: 67

19, 43, 48, 51, 54, 55, 61, 63, 66, Calliope: 9 73, 76, 92, 104, 150-151, 155-156 Calzabigi: xviii, 78, 85, 87-90, 153

Aphrodite: 16 cantus firmus: 44, 58, 70 Apollo: xxi, 2, 6, 7, 9, 18, 24, 47, 69, | Carpenter: vii, 21-22 78, 82, 99, 104, 114-115, 126, 133, Caronte: 67-68, 82

139, 145, 163 Casaubon: 76

Apollodorus: 9 Cassirer: xiii, xiv, 25, 27, 30, 117

Apollonius of Rhodes: 5-6 Charlemagne: 56

Aquinas: xvili Chernyshevskii: 108-109, 118 Argonaut: 2, 6 Clement of Alexandria: 48

Argonautica: 5, 6 Commentary on the Timaeus: 64 Aristaeus: 131, 145 Consolation of Philosophy: 49

155 149

Aristotle: xviii, 11, 14, 37, 102, 150, Corpus Hermeticus (see also Hermetica):

Astakhova: 4 4 counterpoint: 70 | Attali: 7, 145 , Cusanus (see Nicolas of Cusa)

Augustine, St.: 51-52 Cyclops: 26

| 177

178 Index

David: 43, 48 Gluck: xviii, 78, 85, 87-90, 105, 108, Derrida: xiv, xxi, 137-138, 140 153

Derveni papyrus: xii, 15, 18, 50 Goethe: 54 , 91, 116, 147-148 Descartes: xviii, 61, 76-80, 83, 93, 95 Gétterddmmerung: 105, 108

Detienne: xii, 6, 15, 18 Graf: xii, 4, 9, 11, 15 Dionysus: 9, 13, 15, 17-22, 24, 45, 51, Griffiths: 131, 146

104, 114-115, 126, 139 Grout: 85

Diotima: 33, 38, 65 Guthrie: 2, 3, 7-9 discantus: 44, 58 Dylan: 15 4 Hades: 7-9, 23, 29, 68, 72, 108, 132, 149

Eco: 52, 59, 60 Handel: 67, 121

Eliade: 3-4, 12 Hanning: 67

Empedocles: 34 Hegel: xiv, x1x-xx, 14, 16, 19, 25, 41, Enlightenment, the: xiv, xvili-xx, 11, 53, 54, 69, 81, 82, 86, 91, 96, 9886, 87, 89, 90, 92, 122, 130, 140, 102, 105, 109, 117, 123-124, 134-

151, 157, 159, 160, 164 - 135, 139-142, 154

Enneads: 58 Heidegger: 17

Er: xv, 31, 33-34, 54 Hephaestus (Hephaistos): 21-22

Eros: 65 , 90, 116 Hera: 21

Eriugena: xvii, 43, 51-53, 56 Heracleitus: 34 : Euripides: 4, 6, 8, 10, 19, 22 Heracles (Hercules): 27, 85 Eurydice: xi-xil, XVii-xix, XXi, XXIli, Hermes: 7, 88 7-9, 17, 43-46, 49-50, 53, 67-69, Hermetica: 76

, 85, 87-91, 102, 103, 106, 108, 110, Hesiod: 2, 15, 16, 33 112, 113, 115-116, 125, 126, 131- Heurodis: 46, 47, 50, 135

Eusebius: 48 80

132, 147, 151-15 4, 164 Holy Trinity, the: 41, 43, 44, 52-57, 60, Horace: xv, 81

Fates: 33, 40, 54 | Horkheimer: 6, 11, 76

Ficino: xvu, 61-69, 71, 73-76 , 78, 80, Howard: 87-88, 90 , 90, 94, 149, 160-161 Hosle: xiv, 20-21, 138

Fontenelle: 92 Huizinga: 14, 16 , 24, 25, 72-73

Foucault: 75, 80-81, 140

Frazer: 120-121 infinitism: xiv, xxii, 61, 62, 79, 80, 82,

Freud: 121-122 93, 96, 126, 130, 133, 139, 143, Friedman: 47-50 158, 162 Fulgentius: 49-50 Iphigenia: 4, 85 Furies: 88 Ivanov: xxi, 44, 103-104, 108, 112-116, | 126, 152

Galatea: 108

Galilei, Vincenzo: xvii, 62, 66, 75 Kant: xix, 85, 86, 91-97, 101

Gantz: 2, 7-9, 11, 21 Katz: 62 , 67

Index 179

Kerenyi: 29 mystery: xiv, xvi, xxii, 1, 13, 14, 17-18,

Kirk: 22 20, 24, 29, 35, 38, 40, 41, 43, 50,

Kristeller: 63, 69 52-54, 56, 57, 71, 76, 82, 85, 89Koyré: 77-81, 92 90, 95, 125, 126, 137, 142, 143, 155-157

Laks: 15, 18 Mythologies (Barthes): xii, 11, 136,

Lang: 57, 59 143, 145, 156

Lectures on Divine Humanity: 110-111 mythopoeia: xvi-xvii, 1, 17, 30, 35, 36,

Leibniz: 80 48, 49, 55, 83, 136, 150, 155, 157

Libri carolini: 56 mythosophy: xv, xvii, 30, 34-39, 55, Linforth: 2-4, 7, 9, 23 97, 104, 124-126, 152, 155 Lippman: 31

Liubava: 106 Nabokov: 108-109 , Losev: xiv, 11, 15, 18, 25 , 30,54, 73, | Neoplatonism: xvi, 4 3, 155 111-112 Nezhata: 105 Lydos: 21 Nicolas, St.: 45

Lyotard: 140-141 Nicolas of Cusa (Cusanus): 80, 94 , 139 Nietzsche: xxi, 19, 24-26, 104, 116,

The Mask of Orpheus: xxi, 129-133, 127, 139, 140, 158

145, 147 Novgorod: xix, 45, 105-106

Meditations: xviii, 61, 65, 76-79

Mei: xvii, 62, 66-67, 75 Odysseus: 5-6, 20-21, 23, 26, 39, 45,

Messiaen: 159 47, 143, 148, 153, 154 miracle, the miraculous: xiv, xvi-xxi, | Offenbach: 108 10-13, 20, 26, 32, 38, 41, 55-56, Olympus: 21 62, 70, 73-75, 79, 81, 83, 87, 91- Orfeo: xvii, 61, 67-68, 78, 82, 87

93, 95, 99, 107, 118, 122, 124, Orfeo ed Euridice: xviii, 87-90, 108

125, 155-158 Orphée: 78, 105

Mitologiae: 50 Orphée aux Enfers: 108 :

modernism: xxiii, 112, 117, 129-133, | Orpheus-Christus: 43, 48-49, 55, 101, 136, 139, 143, 146-147, 152, 158- 104, 112, 114, 128, 150, 155

159, 162-163 , Orphica: 3, 15, 17, 29 Moira: 16, 33 Orphism: xvi, xvii, xx, 3, 18, 28, 36, monophony: 70, 149-150 48, 51, 63, 116

Monteverdi: xiv, xvii, 61, 62, 67-69, | Osiris: 9 :

78, 85, 87-88, 90, 151 Otto: 17, 19, 24, 25 ,

Morgan: 33-34, 36-38 Ovid: 2, 4-6, 8, 10, 25, 31, 46, 49, 53,

Most: 15, 18 88, 132 Muse(s): 5, 9, 32, 33, 102, 116 Ovide moralisé: 49

Musica enchiriadis: xvii, 43, 50-51, 57-

59, 112 Palestrina: 121

Mysterium: xx, xxii, 103, 112-115,125 | Parmenides: xiv, 34-35, 53

180 Index

Part: 159 Renaissance: xvii-x1x, 47, 61-63, 68-71, Pausanias: 5, 9, 23 73, 75-76, 82, 87, 151, 156, 159, Pentheus: 19, 20 161-162 Periphyseon: 50-53 Rilke: 69, 88-89

Perseus: 108, 110 romanticism: xix-xxi, 79, 86, 97, 103, The Philosophical Principles of Integral 108, 114, 117, 122-124, 128, 133,

Knowledge: 124 158, 159 -

Phoebus: 10, 114

The Picture of Dorian Gray: 117 Sadko: xvii, xix, 43-47, 5 4-55, 105-

Pirotta: 62, 67 107, 135

Pisarev: 109-110 Sadko (opera): xix, xx, 44 , 103, 106Plato: xiv-xvi, 1-3, 7-8, 10, 14, 20, 28- 108, 152 41, 48, 49, 51, 53-55, 58-60, 63,65, Scavizzi: 61 69-70, 75 , 79, 90, 97-98, 100, 113, Schloezer: xx, 112-114, 125

140, 151, 155, 156, 160, 163 Schneider: 59 ,

Platonic Theology: 65, 69, 74 Schoenberg: 128, 154 Platonism: xvi, 29, 36, 43, 51, 53, 56 Seay: 59

Pleroma: 101,122,127 - Segal: xi, 2, 4-6

Plotinus: 58 Sirens: 56, 26, 33, 40, 54, 144, 150, 153 Plutarch: 13-14 Sir Orfeo: xvii, 43, 46-47, 54-55, 150 Polygnotos: 23, 47 Sisyphus: 27, 148, 153

Polyphemus: 26 Smirnov: 44-45 polyphony: xvii, 43, 57-62, 66, 70, 107, | Smolitskii: 44-45 150 Socrates: 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 29, 31, 33, positivism: 103, 108, 117-118, 124, 157, 35-39, 53, 83, 149, 158, 160

159, 161, 162 Solov’év (Solovyov): xx-xx1, 103-104,

158, 162 149, 152

postmodernism: xxii, 129, 139, 143, 108-113, 116, 123-126, 128, 134, Preliminary Act: 112-115, 135, 127,152 Sophia: 110-112, 125, 147, 152

Prometheus (Scriabin): 127 Sophocles: 20, 68

Prometheus Bound: 24 Sphinx: 5

Propp: 45 Sternfeld: 85

Protagoras: 29 Striggio: xvii, 61-62, 67-69, 87-90, 151

Protogonos: 15-16 symbolism: xviii, xxi, 58, 70, 108, 114,

Pseudo-Dionysius: 51-53 156 Pseudo-Eratosthenes: 7, 9, 18

Pygmalion: 108, 110 teleology: 70, 93, 130 Pythagoras: 29, 48 Testament of Orpheus: 48 Pythagoreanism: 29, 31 Thaumas: 11 thaumatophobia: 10, 130 realism: xix-xx, 38, 102, 103, 107-109, | Themistius: 6-7

117-118, 122-123, 128, 57-58 Theogony: 15-16, 30, 33

Remigius of Auxerre: 50 Three Books on Life: 64-65

Index ISI Tomlinson: 1, 62, 64, 67, 75, 77-78, 82- Warden: 51, 63, 66

83, 160-162 Wilde: 117, 122

Toporov: 44 Wilson: 57

Totem and Taboo: 121 West: xii, 3-5, 10, 12, 15

Ustvol’skaia: 159 |

The Wooing of Etain: 46

Xenophanes: 34 Virgil: 2, 4, 8, 10, 46, 50, 53, 92, 132

Volkh Vseslav’evich: 105 Zagreus: 4, 15, 18 Volkhova: xix, 105-107 Zeus: 4, 6, 9, 10, 15-16, 20, 132

voluntarism: 76 Zinovieff: xxi-xxil, 129, 131

vox organalis: 57-58

vox principalis: 57-58 ,

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