The Ellington Century (45 page)

La Mer
and the
Lyric Suite
, both associated with multidimensional life crises, blurred genre distinctions. Debussy called his work “symphonic sketches” rather than a symphony, just as Berg would reject the title of string quartet for its symphonic, developmental implications. Their extrasymphonic titles comport with the extramarital events that surrounded them. The course of these events was similar despite the fact that Debussy traded one wife for another, ruptured his important circle of friends, and transformed his lifestyle from bohemian disorder to anxiously high bourgeois comfort, while Berg apparently never contemplated divorce and was better at keeping up appearances. At age forty, the two composers passed from relative obscurity to worldwide fame with the premieres of their operas. Soon after these successes they both became involved with wealthy and cultured married women— “trophies,” we might say today—more suited to their new eminence. Similar patterns can be found in the marital history of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and, possibly, your accountant. In addition to their physical and personal charms, both Emma Bardac and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin were far more knowledgeable about music than the women they replaced (or, in Hanna's case, supplemented); the very fact that Berg prepared an annotated score for Mrs. Fuchs attests to her musical literacy. (The large literature on the Berg-Fuchs affair is stunningly uninformative about Hanna; mainly we learn that she was ten years younger than Berg and a “flirt.”) Both composers celebrated their new alliances, or their newfound celebrity, with works that combined monumental and provisional aspects in novel musical structures.

These are the intriguing factual parallels, but rather than reducing
La Mer
and the
Lyric Suite
to reportage, I suggest that we read them as complex symbolic statements about the interplay of the sensual and semiotic both in love and in music. Both works subvert older forms of erotic representation in music. As post-Wagnerian composers, Debussy and Berg knew that their musical depictions of love would have to coalesce in a climactic mimicry of orgasm, following the overwhelming model of the second and third acts of
Tristan
. Climactic moments, or “
Höhepunkte
” as Berg sometimes labeled them in his scores, were both mimetic and formal, imitating the curve of sexual activity and shaping
the curve of musical form; the high point marked the sexual union of composer and listener. After
Tristan
the representation of sexual climax became a musical game in which composers could juggle evocative devices to take the music to the brink of good taste—or over it. Standing at the brink myself, I suggest that in pursuit of their formal and expressive secrets we hunt for the Big O in each work.

At its premiere
La Mer
baffled most critics, who judged it either as a defective symphony or an inaccurate weather report; I suspect it was also badly played. Debussy, who, unlike Berg, never discussed the technical or thematic aspects of his own music, gave the three movements the evocative titles “From Dawn to Midday at Sea,” “Play of the Waves,” and “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.” Let's dub them more symbolically “Birth and Growth,” “Love,” and “Death and Rebirth.” We can hear
La Mer
, the only work in which Debussy engaged such fundamental existential issues on a symphonic scale, as Debussy's riposte to Strauss's
Also sprach Zarathustra
and as a Bergsonian interpretation of Nietzsche, in which change and transformation replace the illusions of certainty. Just as the sea, for Verlaine, was more beautiful than cathedrals, the inner self, for Bergson, was “a continuous flux, a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it.”
⁴³
Bergson's philosophy and Debussy's life experience demanded a formal approach different than the cathedral-like certainties of the symphony. “Jeux de vagues,” the centerpiece of
La Mer
, restates Bergsonian metaphysics in erotic terms.

For much of its duration “Jeux de vagues” defies formal analysis; it is even hard to tell where it starts, since the opening phrase seems to continue the harmony (D
= C#) of the previous movement, and the breathless flute filigree of the opening phrase never returns. Flux itself seems more thematic than any of the musical themes. The tempo changes constantly and the meter, although written mainly in
, implies
and
simultaneously in many places. Although the movement takes the place of a symphonic scherzo, it does not exhibit the expected tripartite ABA scherzo form. It falls instead into a multisectional form shaped by two orgasmic climaxes on a B
dominant ninth chord:

  1. Introduction (mm. 1-8)

  2. Exposition (mm. 9-88)

  3. Compressed restatement (mm. 89-114)

  4. Restatement interrupted and then building to first climax (mm. 115-59)

  5. Quasi-recapitulation leading to second climax (mm. 160-215)

  6. Coda (mm. 216-58)

This scheme is unusual in several ways. The exposition presents a succession of six different thematic ideas without repetition or much sense of tonal direction. Although two shortened restatements seem to give more shape to the music, the irruption of a new theme in the trumpet at measure 124, almost exactly halfway through the piece, alters the mood radically. Introducing a new idea midway through a movement violates classical notions of form, but here it recalls Wagnerian precedents, like the appearance of the sword motive (also in the trumpet) at the end of
Das Rheingold
. There is a Debussyan precedent as well. At measure 131 Debussy follows the trumpet motive, call it
X
, with a chromatic trilled idea in the clarinet, call it Y. The source for both new motives is the erotically charged action in
Pelléas
act 3, scene 1, where Mélisande leans out a window and lets Pelléas lose himself in her hair. The
Y
motive bubbles up when she sings “Je suis affreuse ainsi” as she unpins her hair, and it returns as Pelléas asks to kiss her hand. The first part of the
X
motive appears a moment later when their hands meet. The recollection of these moments in “Jeux de vagues” transforms its free-floating eroticism, splitting it into male and female components (
X
and
Y
) whose counterpoint sets off a sensual tsunami.

After this first climax the quasi recapitulation begins. Instead of repeating the loose thematic succession of the exposition, however, the music becomes a spiraling waltz, urged on by restatements of the trumpet theme. It achieves its second climax at measure 212 with a superimposition of
X
and
Y
. I leave an anatomical assessment of these musical climaxes to the reader, but at least one of them represents a sexual climax. Just as the succession of events in the first half of the movement only hinted at the ecstatic buildup to come, the coda, evoking at once detumescence and afterglow, suddenly takes the music to a new sphere of harmony, melody, and timbre, with the music finally resolving to a Lydian-tinged E major.

The climactic moment in “Jeux de vagues” feels simultaneously like a moment of sensual bliss and as a fleeting revelation—but of what? Here love, or at least sex, is no redemptive
Liebestod
, but, in the words of Cole Porter, just one of those things.

Debussy exhibited an aversion bordering on phobia about discussing his musical technique; Berg's obsession with form, by contrast, resembles the compulsive behavior of one of his operatic characters. His
Byzantine, overdetermined formal schemes pushed the music over the edge of rationality, and nowhere more clearly than in the
Lyric Suite
. The six-movement structure of the quartet is unusual for Berg in its avoidance of odd-number symmetry. In many of Berg's compositions a dramatic central moment serves as a defining point. In the
Lyric Suite
, as in the later Violin Concerto, however, the central event is a silent pause between movements, a sounding silence during which the action of the music up to that point takes a fatal turn.

The erotic action of the
Lyric Suite
appears in its third and fourth movements, marked “Allegro misterioso” (with an episode marked “Trio estatico”) and “Adagio appassionato,” respectively. The introduction to the score points out the “developmental character” of the Adagio, and most scholars hear it as a development of the Trio estatico since it quotes most of its material. Schoenberg, as Berg noted in his analysis of his teacher's
Kammersinfonie
, had similarly placed the development section after an intervening scherzo. The
Lyric Suite
may be less the “latent opera” that Adorno took it to be (all of Berg's instrumental works have that character) than a fragmented one-movement symphony portraying an off-kilter wild ride from musical certainty to the abyss.

The published score of the
Lyric Suite
exposed, however obliquely, the double nature of its vertiginous downward journey. The movement titles and the overt citations of Alexander von Zemlinsky's
Lyric Symphony
and Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
pointed to an erotic subtext. The Zemlinsky quote would not be obscure to anyone who has heard his
Lyric Symphony;
sung to the words “Du bist mein Eigen” (You are my only one), it's the most memorable theme. Zemlinsky's seven-movement song-symphony, based on poems by Tagore, traced a love affair from tentative beginnings to explosive passion to dissolution. Berg borrowed its trajectory as well as its love theme.