¹ L'Innomable (Paris, 1952), trans. Beckett, Samuel, 1959, as The Unnamable (London, 1994).Google Scholar

² Other instances of music on tap in his bedroom, even live, could be cited: the command performances given there by the Poulet Quartet, for example.Google ScholarSee Painter, George, Marcel Proust (London, 1989), II, 168,Google Scholarand Hayman, Ronald, Proust (London, 1990), 343.Google Scholar

³ A la recherche du temps perdu was originally published between 1913 and 1927, initially by Grasset and subsequently Gallimard. All quotations here will be from the new Pléiade edition (Paris, 1987–89; hereafters A la recherche) andGoogle ScholarMoncrieff's, C. K. Scott translation, Remembrance of Things Past, revised by Kilmartin, Terence (Harmondsworth, 1983; hereafter Remembrance).Google Scholar

⁴ Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, Act III scenes 2–3. Proust mentioned the scene several times in letters, and even referred to it obliquely in the novel (A la recherche III, 208; Remembrance II, 842); see Painter, Marcel Proust, II, 168.Google Scholar

⁵ The obligatory point of departure for work of this kind is now Abbate's, CarolynUnsung Voices (Princeton, 1991). If there is a new voice to be teased out from behind A la recherche du temps perdu, we follow the line taken by Abbate in not simply assuming that it must be the author?'s.Google Scholar

⁶ The cultural currency of wagnérisme in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, particularly as evinced by the writings of Baudelaire and Mallarmé (the former's essay, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser a Paris [1861], and the latter's sonnet Hommage à Richard Wagner [1885], publ. 1886), has been well researched. The most interesting aspect of the wagnérisme phenomenon is its capacity for self-propagation: literary reception of Wagner is always, as in the case of A la recherche, potentially the reception of ideas about Wagner which are themselves already literary digests. Thus, the music is represented only at one remove or more, if at all.Google Scholar

⁷ The spirit of this approach is by no means dead: see Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Proust musicien (Paris, 1984);Google Scholartranslated by Puffett, Derrick as Proust as Musician (Cambridge, 1989.Google Scholar

⁸ There is a tradition of treating ‘Proust and Music’ in precisely this way: see for example Matoré, Georges and Mecz, Irene, Musique et structure romanesque dans la ‘Recherche du temps perdu’ (Paris, 1973) andGoogle ScholarPiroue, Georges, Marcel Proust et la musique du devenir (Paris, 1960).Google Scholar

⁹ Mention is also made of Debussy, Franck, Fauré, Schumann and many other composers, both in their own right and as part of the composite that is Vinteuil. Wagner and his operatic corpus are of course referred to many times.Google Scholar

¹⁰ We stop short of Vinteuil's Septet, a piece that appears only much later in the novel, and the hearing of which, in traditional readings of Proust, enables the narrator to set off on the final leg of his journey towards being a writer. Thematising projects have tended to add together all the musical moments of the novel as though there were some coherent and natural progression between them.Google Scholar

¹¹ Proust originally assigned to Wagner (specifically to Parsifal) the function of mentor. He was to be the custodian of the Proustian Grail, a writer's vocation. In the end Vinteuil's Septet usurps this pre-eminent position.Google Scholar

¹² Music at the Verdurin salon: A la recherche I, 205–9; Remembrance I, 227–31.Google Scholar

¹³ A la recherche I, 205–6; Remembrance I, 227–8.Google Scholar

¹⁴ A conclusion apparently in line with the thesis of Proust's 1908–9 critical essay Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. Clarac, Pierre and Sandre, Yves (Paris, 1971), in which acts of intuition are privileged over acts of intelligence. Although written before Proust had formulated his project for A la recherche, and left unfinished, Contre Sainte-Beuve forms the kernel of the later work. The narrator in this instance seems to credit Swann with the attributes of a good listener. At this, his second encounter with the sonata, Swann is only hearing a salon pianist play a reduction, but describes a note sustained — for two whole bars — above the piano texture. To the extent that this novel is supremely about remembrance, Swann here fulfils several Proustian criteria for artistic success: remembering the sound of the original violin part as well as relying on his intuition (A la recherche I, 208; Remembrance I, 230).Google Scholar

¹⁵ See Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, ed. Bowers, Fredson (London, 1980), 207–49,Google Scholaron the uses of the colour red in A la recherche, and also Jean-Pierre Richard's excellent essay, ‘La Fadeur de Verlaine’, in his Poesie etprofondeur (Paris, 1955), 165–85, on the fading of metaphorical valency.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Verlaine's ‘Clair de lune’ (from the Fêtes galantes) was set by several composers, includin Debussy and Fauré. The metaphorical force of moonlight in fin-de-siècle literary and musical referential terms was itself, however, already attenuated almost out of existence: Swann hears music in an inescapably nineteenth-century way.Google Scholar

¹⁷ ‘like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases’ (A la recherche I, 206; Remembrance I, 228). A digression away from Swann's perspective is taking place, the content of which (metaphorical musing on labour or fabrication in the musical context) will have important ramifications.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Once again Swann's imagination turns out to be populated with nineteenth-century intertexts. This well-worn trope, the unknown female passer-by, was immortalised by Charles Baudelaire in ‘A une passante’: ‘Fugitive beauté / Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître, / Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité? / … Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, / O toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!’.Google ScholarIn Tableaux parisiens from Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1964), 114.Google Scholar

¹⁹ A la nchenhe I, 207; Remembrance I, 229.Google Scholar

²⁰ A la nchenhe I, 215; Remembrance I, 238.Google Scholar

²¹ A la recherche I, 215; Remembrance I, 238–9.Google Scholar

²² Notice the gender of Swann's personification of the. petite phrase, more than just grammatically feminine in A la recherche, it is entirely consistent with many other nineteenth-century representations of music.Google Scholar

²³ A la nchercbe I, 260; Remembrance I, 288 (Forcheville is Odette's probable lover).Google Scholar

²⁴ ‘He now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all’ (A la recherche I, 340; Remembrance I, 376).Google Scholar

²⁵ A la recherche I, 344; Remembrance I, 381.Google Scholar

²⁶ A la recherche I, 521; Remembrance I, 571.Google Scholar

²⁷ Painter, Marcel Proust, I, 173–4; ‘Dédicace à Monsieur Jacques de Lacretelle’, Contre Sainte-Beuve, 564–6.Google Scholar

²⁸ ‘The charming, but ultimately mediocre, phrase from a sonata for piano and violin by Saint-Saëns, a musician I don't like.’Google Scholar

²⁹ See also Nattiez (see n. 7).Google Scholar

³⁰ A la recherche III, 664; Remembrance III, 155. O n the preceding page, a note from Albertine — reassuring the narrator that she will return home — clearly names him Marcel. The narrator's name — hence his Identity — is a famous Proustian acrostic. Is it significant that, at a moment of musical discovery, the narrator also ‘comes out’ from behind his onomastic vacillations? Does this de-cipherment signal the presence in the text of an authorial manifesto, or is it merely further textual seduction, leading us to useless biographical aporia?Google Scholar

³¹ A la recherche I, 345; Remembrance I, 381.Google Scholar

³² A la recherche III, 664; Remembrance III, 155.Google Scholar

³³ ‘And as the friend then examines a photograph which enables him to specify the likeness, so, on top of Vinteuil's sonata, I set up on the music-rest the score of Tristan’ (A la recherche III, 664–5; Remembrance III, 155).Google Scholar

³⁴ For a brilliant illustration of this, see Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19th-century Music, 5/2 (1981), 117–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ A la recherche III, 667; Remembrance III, 158.Google Scholar

³⁶ Tristan und Isolde, Act III scene 1, lines 24–6 and 258–64.Google Scholar

³⁷ Whereas Nattiez argues for an authentic source of the alte Weise in a Venetian gondolier's song, Abbate prefers to interpret the connection as one of otherworldliness and distance: ‘What Wagner describes is of course less some ethnomusicological exercise than the experience of hearing phenomenal music at a distance and outside one's own consciousness. It is the otherness or outsidedness, the phenomenality of the gondolier's song, that resonates most powerfully into the “Alte Weise” ’ (Unsung Voices, 266 n. 23).Google ScholarWagner's remarks on its origins are to be found in Prose Works, trans. Ellis, William Ashton (London, 1892–1899), V, 73, while Nattiez's interpretation is in Proust as Musician, 16.Google Scholar

³⁸ We opened with Proust hearing music from afar on the theâtrophone, an idea that harmonises neatly with this moment in the opera (both Proust and Tristan are listening to piped music).Google Scholar

³⁹ ‘[Before the] great orchestral movement [that precedes the return of Isolde]’ (A la recherche III, 667; Remembrance III, 158).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ A la recherche I I I, 665; Remembrance III, 155.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Translated by Singleton, Esther as The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner (London, 1898).Google ScholarThere is evidence that Proust was familiar with this work, in its fifty-seventh printing by 1903; see Nattiez, Proust as Musician, 17–18: ‘What Lavignac says, even if his facts are wrong, corresponds too closely to Proust's own poietic processes to be ignored’. Some of Lavignac's (biographical) facts were wrong, and the places where his inaccuracies — and prejudices — match Proust's own betray most clearly the latter's reliance on the Voyage artistique à Bayreuth. The solecism Proust most obviously shares with Lavignac is mistaking the date of composition of the Good Friday music in Parsifal: PROUST: ‘ L[morceau] that Wagner wrote before he ever thought of composing Parsifal, and which he inserted [introduisit] afterwards’ (Contre Sainte-Beuve, 274). LAVIGNAC: ‘It is called The Spell (or The Enchantment) of Good Friday. It is also sometimes called The Flowering Meadow. It was written long before the rest of the score’ {The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner, 467). Actually, it wasn't, and Proust's regurgitation of this assertion is what closely links him with Lavignac's book. The citation of Adolphe Adam (1803–56) as an archetypally shallow and un-Wagnerian composer constitutes another such link: see A la recherche III, 665 (on Adam's Postilion de Long/umeau); Remembrance III, 156, and The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner, 25.Google Scholar

⁴² ‘In him, however great the melancholy of the poet, it is consoled, transcended — that is to say, alas, to some extent destroyed — by the exhilaration of the fabricator’ (A la ncherche III, 667; Remembrance III, 158).Google Scholar

⁴³ A la recherche III, 667; Remembrance III, 158–9.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ A la recherche III, 667; Remembrance III, 159. Proust seems delighted by these extra-musical referents — he mentions the scarf-waving signal in Tristan — and especially ‘phenomenal’ sound like the shepherd's pipe, and the hammer-blows in Siegfried He transforms the nacelle of Lohengrin into an aeroplane (see below). He loves the idea of music being grounded in the material, in humble details; Wagner remains honest, and does not try to obliterate reality with art.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ A la recherche III, 667–8; Remembrance III, 159.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ A la recherche III, 668; Remembrance III, 159. Much later in the novel, during the First World War, Robert de Saint-Loup, friend of the narrator, and a soldier, talks admiringly of the German bombers in the night sky over Paris: ‘ “Et ces sirenes, était-ce assez wagnérien, ce qui du reste était bien naturel pour saluer l'arrivée des Allemands, ça faisait très hymne national, avec le Kronprinz et les princesses dans la loge impériale, Wacht am Rhein; c'était à se demander si s'était bien des aviateurs et pas plutôt des Walkyries qui montaient.” II semblait avoir plaisir à cette assimilation des aviateurs et des Walkyries et l'expliqua d'ailleurs par des raisons purement musicales: ‘Dame, c'est que la musique des sirènes était d'un Chevauchée! Il faut décidément l'arrivée des Allemands pour qu'on puisse entendre du Wagner à Paris.” ’ [‘And then the sirens, could they have been more Wagnerian, and what could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? — it might have been the national anthem, with the Crown Prince and the Princesses in the imperial box, the Wacht am Rhein; one had to ask oneself whether they were indeed pilots and not Walkyries who were sailing upwards.’ He seemed to be delighted with this comparison of the pilots to Valkyries, and went on to explain it on purely musical grounds: ‘That's it, the music of the sirens was a “Ride of the Valkyries”! There's no doubt about it, the Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.’] (A la recherche IV, 338; Remembrance III, 781.) The German bombers ‘fonr apocalypse’.Google ScholarThe Ring has, naturally, often been associated with other apocalyptic visions: a more recent dramatisation of precisely the same idea was incorporated by Coppola, Francis Ford into his film Apocalypse Now (U.S.A., 1979). Inevitably, it is the ‘Ride of the Walkyries’ that the insane American commander plays as his helicopters attack a Viet-Cong position.Google Scholar