'In Christ two natures met to be thy cure.' When George Herbert wrote these words, he captured the essence of Chalcedonian Christology, with all its strange complexity and simplicity, in a single elegant line. It is sometimes overlooked that the interest behind Chalcedonian Christology has always been largely soteriological. Herbert's line, however, makes the point very well. It is the saving work of Christ - to be thy cure - which serves as the guiding intention behind the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's person, just as the definition of his person (following Herbert) - in Christ two natures met - serves as the crucial premise of Christ's saving work. Change the definition of Christ's person - make him less than fully God and fully human at the same time - and the saving cure Christ offers changes drastically as well. In other words, just as it makes no sense to have a high view of Christ's person without an equally high view of his work, so a high view of Christ's work - in particular, of his saving death - cannot be sustained without a suitably high view of his person. The work presupposes the person just as the person conditions the work.

FOR AND AGAINST CHURCH AND SACRAMENT

Barth has a curious ambivalence towards the topic of this chapter. On the one hand, he called his great work Church Dogmatics (emphasis added). Each of its volumes (not to mention Barth's many other essays and books) speak within and about the church - or, as Barth came to put it, the body of Christ and thus provisional representative of all the world. In this sense, Barth was a key participant in a peculiarly modern debate over church and the rise of 'ecclesiology'. On the other hand, Barth was always a sharp critic of the church, whether in his early commentaries on Paul's letter to the Romans, his many essays on the German 'Church struggle' in the 1930s, or his smiles over triumphalistic claims that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are 'the century of the Church'. Indeed, he preferred to speak of 'the Christian community' rather than 'the Church'.What are we to make of this ambivalence? Barth's theology from the midst of this Christian community could all but guarantee that he would be marginal to those sections of the modern world for which the church is decreasingly a foothold for personal and professional fame and fortune. Yet his deep criticisms of the church could seemingly guarantee that Barth would also be marginal to the very community from which and to which he spoke. Barth forces us to ask how, if at all, we can speak with one voice for and about as well as against the church.

Barth's treatment of creation and providence in the Church Dogmatics is notable for its effort to make those doctrines distinctively Christian, meaning by that doctrines that reflect the centrality of Jesus Christ for understanding God and world. The methodological and substantive effects of such a project on the doctrines of creation and providence are the focus of this chapter.

First and most obviously, the attempt to make creation and providence Christian doctrines is part of Barth's attack on natural theology. One should turn to Jesus Christ for one's understanding of a world created and ruled by God rather than draw conclusions about such matters from more general observation of the world and its natural and historical processes. One should not, then, assume that the world exists and search for its cause; this way leads to the philosopher’s God, the Creator as world-cause (CD III/1, pp. 6, 11). Nor should one form conclusions about the point or direction of God’s rule over the universe – about the providential arrangement of things – by following the lines of observable trajectories of historical events (CD III/3, pp. 20–3). Both ways of proceeding subordinate understanding of God for us in Jesus Christ to what one supposedly knows on independent grounds about God’s creation and rule of the world, rather than the other way round.

Some years ago, the feminist critic Heidi Hartmann wrote an influential article entitled, 'The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism'. It was a brief against the easy assumption that feminism had natural and ready ties to Marxist theory, and that any feminist who thought the 'woman question' through to the end would become an 'historical materialist' - as Marx styled his own theory - and subsume the women's struggle into the class struggle. Hartmann hoped to put an end to such easy alliances; and a feminist approaching this chapter might hope to do the same. Feminism does not appear to be headed for a happy marriage to Karl Barth. Though comfortable in the presence of socialism, Barth was filled with misgivings about feminism. In the Church Dogmatics, Barth refers to feminism rarely, and then grudgingly. He appears suspicious of feminist claims to equality with men and reluctant to take up feminist theory into the work of dogmatic theology.

'As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one's own way': so Barth at his eightieth birthday celebrations, characteristically attempting to distance himself from his own reputation. Nonetheless, Barth is the most important Protestant theologian since Schleiermacher, and the extraordinary descriptive depth of his depiction of the Christian faith puts him in the company of a handful of thinkers in the classical Christian tradition. Yet firsthand, well-informed engagement with Barth's work remains - with some notable recent exceptions - quite rare in English-speaking theological culture. His magnum opus, the unfinished thirteen volumes of the Church Dogmatics, is not always studied with the necessary breadth and depth, and his theological commitments are still sometimes misconstrued or sloganized. The significance of Barth's work in his chosen sphere is comparable to that of, say, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, or Saussure in theirs, in that he decisively reorganized an entire discipline. Yet Barth's contribution to Christian theology is in many respects still only now beginning to be received.

Among strategies for the study of the elusive Ravel is that of the ubiquitous ‘compare and contrast’ approach: Debussy and Ravel give insights by refraction even though their theatrical works could hardly be more different. If Ravel attended all the performances in the first run of Debussy's Pelléas, no wonder his two completed ‘operas’ are nothing like Debussy's: he knew he had to be different.

L'Heure espagnole in context

L'Heure espagnole was written between April and October of 1907, orchestrated in 1910, and described as a ‘comédie musicale’. It was around this time that Ravel's professional relationship with Debussy crossed the thin line from respect to rivalry. In 1906, there was the welldocumented conflict with Pierre Lalo when Debussy was credited with an innovatory style of piano writing which Ravel felt he had initiated in Jeux d'eau. In 1907, a further accusation was the last straw, this time of Debussy's plagiarism, in ‘La Soirée dans Grenade’, of a harmonic ‘trouvaille’ from Ravel's early ‘Habanera’ from Sites auriculaires. All the more reason for Ravel to distance himself from Debussy. This latter furore may have suggested that Ravel was particularly proud of his Spanish innovations. Manuel Rosenthal noted the strength of the composer's relationship with his mother, of ‘basquo-ibérique’ descent: there was a strong sense of his belonging to Spain, and of Spain belonging to him, as it could not have done to Debussy.

Given that Ravel's compositional output is relatively small for a major composer, his corpus of thirty-nine songs would appear to be significant by sheer size alone. However, once we discount the eight songs composed prior to the orchestral cycle Shéhérazade (1903) – all essentially student efforts, and the twelve folk melodies for which Ravel provided accompaniments as something other than fully composed, serious ‘art song’, we are left with quite a scant amount of work. How then does the genre of song figure within Ravel's oeuvre? Is its stature analogous, say, to that of solo song in Mozart, or perhaps Stravinsky – some tasty morsels obscured by works of far greater scope and quality? Or is the situation closer to Debussy, whose songs clearly are more significant and represent a critical component of his stylistic evolution?

Despite its relative obscurity, even for devotees of Ravel, the genre of song is crucial to his compositional development and achievement. Ravel himself cited among his favourite works the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé and the Chansons madécasses. More concretely, the songs (and the operas) provide a perfect conduit for characteristic elements of Ravel's musical voice, including exoticism, irony, ‘literalism’ (text painting on multiple planes) and archaism.

Innovation in orchestration and genius in the handling of shape and colour are generally undervalued in broadly analytical studies of music, even in work on early twentieth-century music where, arguably, these factors were increasingly used to grant the coherence that pitch relationships were no longer able to provide. Pitch-centred analysis of modernist music has tended to regard music as independent of its medium, and has helped to build an aesthetic that treats works that depend on colour and shape, Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole for example, as less significant than those that directly confront the problems of tonality's supposed demise. Furthermore, the popularity of such pieces has meant that analysts have been denied their crusading role: they have not had to invoke complex methods to help secure the place of these compositions in the canon. Given the scope of this chapter, analyses must be brief, and will often give explications of form, thematic interconnections and post-tonal harmonic structures in the time-honoured way, but there will be a little more attention to register, shape and colour than normal, indicating the essential rather than secondary role of these parameters in Ravel's music.

Shéhérazade (overture)

Ravel's first orchestral work, Shéhérazade, ouverture de féerie, was conducted by its composer in its first and only performance until recent times on 27 May 1899. It was the first of only four orchestral pieces that did not begin their lives as piano works or as ballets. I will consider these in the first part of this chapter and then proceed to Ravel's transcriptions.

“Au Grand et cher auteur de Roméo et Juliette, l'auteur reconnaissant de Tristan et Isolde” – so reads the dedication on the copy of the full score of Tristan that Wagner sent to Berlioz, on 21 January 1860, accompanied by a brief and touching letter:

“I am delighted to be able to offer you the first copy of my Tristan,” writes Wagner, who urges Berlioz to accept the score “as a token of friendship.” Such attentiveness is a small indication, I think, that even as a mature composer nearing his forty-seventh birthday, Wagner continued to regard Berlioz, then fifty-six, as his senior and by no means conventionally benevolent colleague. In fact the gift was one of extraordinary generosity, both because this was indeed a first, and rare, pre-publication copy, sent by the publishers to Wagner only one week earlier, and because it was a costly item, whose list price of thirty-five thalers, or one hundred and forty-four francs, was equivalent at the time to the monthly income of many a professor, government functionary, or itinerant musician. What led Wagner to bestow such bounty upon Berlioz? And why, for Wagner, was the Frenchman still the “grand and dear author of Roméo et Juliette” – the now more than twenty-year-old dramatic symphony of 1839?

Berlioz left posterity an admirable performance legacy. The scores and parts published under his supervision and, for the most part, to his satisfaction, are sources that typically offer unambiguous direction as to his intent. They often reflect years of perfecting the manuscript materials in conjunction with live concerts under his own baton. His personal involvement with multiple performances of the symphonic works, unusual for its time (and far greater, for instance, than Beethoven's), led to meticulous and ongoing recomposition, and with his orchestration and conducting treatises he left useful guides to the performing forces at his disposal and his notions as to their most effective deployment. His sensitivity to the practical issues of live music-making, if not always to the cost of music and musicians, makes his work feel somehow welcoming to those who undertake it. With the exception of perhaps a half-dozen passages of legendary difficulty, the music lies well beneath the fingers and is rewarding to discover and re-create – that is, to perform.

Berlioz the conductor left across Europe a generation of professional musicians schooled in how his music was supposed to go – though too few conductors committed to his cause. By the end of his life, most of the completed works had been well performed. A good proportion of these had been heard often and were familiar to serious listeners both in Paris and elsewhere; a few – the Fantastique, the Pilgrims' March from Harold in Italy, the Roman Carnival Overture, the Hungarian March from Faust, and portions of L'Enfance du Christ – were even popular: hummed in the streets, known to hundreds.

“J'adore Mozart” wrote Berlioz in 1856. Ten years later, at a time when he took pleasure in not going to operas any more, he attended eight performances of Don Giovanni at the Théâtre Lyrique, where he was seen to “cover his face and cry like a child.” Yet neither Berlioz himself nor his biographers are ever inclined to include Mozart among the select pantheon of historical figures who inspired him most deeply, the names being more usually Shakespeare, Goethe, Virgil, and among musicians Gluck, Beethoven, sometimes Weber, sometimes Spontini. Mozart never displaced Gluck in Berlioz's mind as the greatest of eighteenth-century composers, a preference which very few would admit to in the present century when an admiration for Mozart has been a solid donné among professionals and amateurs alike. Where did Mozart stand in his critical perspectives, and what part did Mozart play in his work as conductor and composer?

The matter was admirably summed up by Berlioz himself in chapter 17 of the Mémoires, which is devoted entirely to his regard for Mozart. Written probably in 1848, or soon after, it describes the fiery passions of his student years: “I have said that […] I was taken up exclusively with the study of great dramatic music. I should rather have said, of lyric tragedy; and it was for this reason that I regarded Mozart with a certain coolness.” Gluck was performed in French at the Opéra while Mozart was sung in Italian at the Théâtre Italien, and that was sufficient to assign him to the enemy camp.

An important part of Ravel's compositional aesthetic is bound up with objectification, crystallisation and detachment, ideas that connect with Symbolist notions of imagery, Cubist notions of spatial and temporal planes and, beyond World War I, with the basic tenets of neoclassicism. Musical machines or mechanisms represent a particular embodiment of this aesthetic, and so this chapter probes Stravinsky's commonly invoked image of ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’. Although ideas of musical objects and machines are closely related (even interlocked), for the sake of clarity, and in keeping with the artificial subject-matter, they are here explored successively rather than simultaneously.

Ravel's objectivity and ‘l'objet juste’

Beyond the elusive essentials of inspiration and imagination, composition for Ravel involved a life-long striving for the highest technical achievement: ‘conscience compels us to turn ourselves into good craftsmen. My objective, therefore, is technical perfection.’ Ravel then goes a step further: ‘The truth is one can never have enough control. Moreover, since we cannot express ourselves without exploiting and thus transforming our emotions, isn't it better at least to be fully aware and acknowledge that art is the supreme imposture?’ As a subsidiary non-musical pursuit, Ravel also had a passion for collecting meticulously honed objects at his small house in Montfort-l'Amaury: glass ornaments, figurines, clocks and mechanical toys.

This chapter serves to point up the significant position of ballet within Ravel's smallish oeuvre, and the idea of dance forms as a way of connecting between music and choreography, focused on movement, phrases (enchaînements) and patterning. Additionally, these two arts share an interest in animating space and time; as Mackrell comments, ‘Space isn't simply a neutral area where the dance takes place. Like the stillness between movements, it's part of the dance itself’, and ‘It is rhythm too that allows choreographers to play with Time – to drive it forward, freeze it or make it race.’ Although music and choreography exist as autonomous arts, they may still come together for greater collective effect. Despite our main focus on the musical portrayal of dance, ideas from classical ballet and flamenco will influence analytical readings of Daphnis et Chloé, La Valse and Boléro (works whose main embodiment is as ballet rather than as piano music). The first quotation heading this chapter is used to encapsulate Ravel's highly stylised and varied approach to dance (exemplified by Daphnis); the second quotation suggests the obsession intrinsic to closed dance forms which leads to Ravel's ‘apotheosis of the dance’ as a glorified ideal, followed by its destruction in La Valse and Boléro. (For more on the ‘dance-machine’ trajectory, see Mawer, Chapter 3.)

On 5 June 1821, only five months before a provincial stagecoach deposited an unsuspecting young medical student named Hector Berlioz in the “capital of the world,” Gioachino Rossini's Otello had its overwhelmingly successful Parisian première, sparking the first skirmishes in an all-out paper war that was to be officially “declared” on the very eve of Berlioz's arrival. Written for Naples and based partly on Jean-François Ducis's French adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy, Otello (1816) was the first of the twenty-nine-year-old Pesarese's serious operas to be produced at the Théâtre Royal Italien by a management still so partial to the older Italian school of comic opera that it had only reluctantly presented Il barbiere di Siviglia two years before. For comparison's sake, Rossini's radically new setting had been faced off against Paisiello's genteel thirty-seven-year-old one, and an aggressive advance publicity campaign waged in the press by the paisiellisti. When the senior Barber closed after only two performances, other comic operas by Rossini, including the clever Italiana in Algeri, were given in eviscerated versions adapted to older Parisian taste yet borrowing so promiscuously from works soon to reach the stage as to hasten Rossini's reputation for repeating himself. When the semi-serious Cenerentola was given in 1822, for example, the over-worked heroine had already been “deflowered” by the buffo Turco in Italia in 1820, her music set to new words. And Torvaldo e Dorliska, a lesser opera semiseria quickly pronounced a “bad parody” of a revolutionary-era rescue opera then enjoying a revival at the Opéra Comique (Cherubini's Lodoïska), had been mounted that same year seemingly to provoke just such unflattering comparisons.

For Berlioz, music journalism was a double-edged sword: a financial necessity and a burden, on the one hand; an opportunity to make his views heard and to change public taste, on the other. During nearly four decades of activity as a music critic he left over nine hundred journalistic items ranging from opera and concert reviews to stories, discussions of aesthetics, and technical articles on conducting, organology, and pitch. Musical insight and literary flair combined to produce a body of criticism unparalleled in its richness but tinged, for the modern reader, with the regret that in writing so much journalism Berlioz necessarily wrote less music. Yet in using criticism to justify his art, Berlioz was at the forefront of a nineteenth-century tradition presaged by E. T. A. Hoffmann and continued by both Schumann and Wagner – a tradition of educative and even propagandistic writing (at its Wagnerian extreme) that acknowledged and attempted to close the gap between avant-garde composition and a predominantly bourgeois public with considerable purchasing power but conservative taste.

The peril of such didactic writing lay in the critic's duty to denounce what he saw as artistically suspect, which in Berlioz's case meant the music of contemporaries almost all of whom were more commercially successful than he. As a critic of integrity, Berlioz had little option but to allow his readership to know, or at least to glean, his own points of view; as a composer in need of support from more established figures at the Opéra, Conservatoire, and Académie des Beaux-Arts, he could ill afford to be perceived as a petulant spoiler of reputations.

Berlioz made it easy to become acquainted with his short stories when he included them in Les Soirées de l'orchestre, a comic masterpiece that appeared in 1852 and has remained in print to this day. The creation of that volume out of previously published stories, biographies of composers, and other journalistic writing about music was a stroke of literary genius parallel to the musical inspiration, six years before, of La Damnation de Faust, which cast into dramatic form the individual scenes he had set from Goethe's poem in 1828. Of such mid-career recastings the most famous contemporary example was Balzac's Comédie humaine, announced in 1842 on the basis of previous and projected writings, and still in progress at the writer's death in 1850. It seems fitting that Berlioz should mention Balzac at the start of both Les Soirées and its sequel of 1859, Les Grotesques de la musique. By their extraordinary range and variety, Berlioz's two volumes put one in mind of a human comedy of the musical world – comedy both in the usual sense of farce, wit, irony, and humor, and in the Balzacian sense (derived from Dante) of drama in the world-theatre of human events.

The many masks of Ravel

Our image of Maurice Ravel is still partly obscured by mystery and intangibility, and by some lingering misunderstandings. This situation arises as a result of various factors: Ravel's own actions, his elusive blend of French, Basque and Spanish traits and the quirks of reception across the years (for instance, the emphasis on his undoubted skills of orchestration has to some extent down-played the actual substance of much of his orchestral music). Even in his lifetime, an interviewer for De Telegraaf exclaimed, literally and figuratively: ‘It is not easy to find the hiding place of Maurice Ravel.’

How then might we think about Ravel? He himself sometimes adopted the metaphor of masks, so popular in contemporary dramatic and balletic productions. Castigating the self-conscious academicism of Georges Witkowski, a pupil of d'Indy, he declared: ‘How far this repulsive intellectual logic is from sensibility! Nevertheless, behind this dour mask, one discerns a profound, vibrant musician at every moment.’ Among Ravel's early biographers, Vladimir Jankélévitch, especially, developed this image of masks in relation to the composer's compositional aesthetic: ‘Ravel is friend to trompe-l'œil, deceptions, merry-go-round horses and booby-traps; Ravel is masked.’

So what is the nature of the masks, or distorting mirrors, behind which we might seek Ravel? (In posing this question, we're aware of the impossibility of the quest: in peeling off one mask there is invariably another beneath; furthermore, the masks are so bound up with Ravel's identity that, at one level, they are part of him. No mask: no Ravel.)

Berlioz was no ordinary symphonist. In the course of his career he wrote four works that he himself categorized in that genre, but not one of these is traditional in either form or style. By far the most famous of the group is the Symphonie fantastique, a work whose curious autobiographical program and unusual orchestrational effects have kept it alive in the orchestral repertory ever since its première in 1830. The other three symphonies of Berlioz are less well known, but equally non-traditional. Harold en Italie makes use of a concerto-like solo viola to help depict recollections of Italy. Roméo et Juliette draws heavily on the use of solo and choral singing to reinterpret Shakespeare's drama. And the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale is clearly a work for concert band. In many ways these works are not symphonies at all – at least not when measured against the familiar German repertory of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Berlioz's symphonies frustrate and defy attempts at traditional generic classification by presenting listeners with an exceptional fusion of elements drawn from both opera and symphony. The result is something completely new – an unorthodox hybrid genre for which he coined the term “dramatic symphony.”

Symphonie fantastique (1830)

Berlioz's first symphony appeared only three years after the death of Beethoven – a fact that bears keeping in mind as one assesses the remarkable innovations in this work. What shocked and intrigued listeners at the première was the extremely detailed program that Berlioz attached to the work and distributed to the audience in the form of a printed leaflet. That a symphony could be inspired by a “poetic idea” was something Berlioz surely learned from Beethoven, whose Third and Fifth Symphonies he had heard in performance only two years earlier. But that a symphony could be so unreservedly autobiographical and self-confessional, in the manner of contemporary French and English literature (where novels of this type had been popular for some years), was fresh to music at that [53] time.