ORIGINS

The young Carnap is not easy to classify. He was neither really a scientist nor a proper philosopher. Among scientists he felt temperamentally at home, but he regretted the slovenliness of the enterprise. The officers at headquarters, he thought, needed to bring some order to operations on the front. Unfortunately these “officers” – the neo-Kantian philosophers whose lectures he attended in Jena and Freiburg before the First World War – seemed too unsure of the terrain to guide the scientific sappers in their spadework of intellectual trench warfare.

But Carnap did not reject the neo-Kantian tradition he grew up in. He assimilated a good deal of it. The impulse for the revival of Kant in mid-nineteenth-century Germany had originally come from the natural sciences rather than philosophy, particularly from the great physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz. He and the philosophers who followed his lead had wanted to complete the job of eliminating metaphysics that Kant, in their view, had left unfinished. Helmholtz’s physiology of perception, they thought, could render the transcendental aesthetic metaphysically harmless. Though they held that the subjective feelings of spatiality and temporality are built into our perceptual system, just as Kant had argued, this did not mean that the geometry governing the perceived world was put there by human perception. We have no idea, Helmholtz said, whether physical space is Euclidean or non-Euclidean; this is an empirical question like any other, to be settled by going out and looking. So much, Helmholtz had thought, for Kant’s best example of supposedly synthetic a priori knowledge.

A distinguishing feature of analytic philosophy, or at least of one central strand in it, is the use of modern logic for the purpose of clarifying and solving philosophical problems. The most prominent figure in this tradition was Bertrand Russell; and second only to Russell was Rudolf Carnap. Directly and strongly influenced by Russell, Carnap passed on this influence to legions of later philosophers, including such widely influential figures as W. V. O. Quine. It is well known that Carnap was a main expositor and promoter of modern logic, as illustrated by his textbooks on the subject, from Abriss der Logistik (1929) to Einfuhrung in die symbolische Logik (1954). It is also well known that Carnap applied logic substantively, both in his own constructive endeavors in philosophy and in his criticism of metaphysics, as in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928a), “Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache” (1932d), and Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934c).

Less well known is the fact that, in addition, Carnap was actively engaged in research on pure logic and related questions in early metamathematics. In particular, during large parts of the 1920s – parallel and subsequent to his work on the Aufbau – Carnap was pursuing a major research project in this area. A main goal of this project was to combine, and to reconcile, the approaches to logic and the foundations of mathematics he had encountered in interactions with Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, on the one hand, and in the works of David Hilbert and his followers, on the other.

Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The logical construction of the world), first published in 1928, is a founding document of the analytic tradition in philosophy. During the heyday of the Vienna Circle, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it served, along with Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), as one of the twin testaments of logical empiricism. In the immediately following period, however, marked by the rise of Nazism and the Second World War, many of the leading representatives of logical empiricism, including Carnap, emigrated to the English-speaking world, and the Aufbau went largely unread. Indeed, the second German edition appeared only in 1961, and it was not translated into English until 1967 – four years after the appearance of the Carnap volume in the Library of Living Philosophers. Meanwhile, a small number of prominent English-speaking philosophers did learn about Carnap and the Vienna Circle, and they articulated an initial understanding of Carnap’s Aufbau against which they then reacted both constructively and critically. A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936) appealed centrally to the Aufbau in enunciating a notorious attack on all traditional metaphysics as meaningless, based on the principle of verifiability. W. V. Quine studied with Carnap in the early 1930s, and he later made the Aufbau a central object of criticism – rejecting the “dogma” of phenomenalistic reductionism – in his celebrated paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). Quine’s colleague Nelson Goodman, by contrast, strongly approved of phenomenalistic reductionism, and he attempted both to expound and to improve on the Aufbau in The Structure of Appearance (1951).

FROM SYNTAX TO SEMANTICS

Carnap's project to construct a comprehensive language of science, which occupied his attention from about 1935 to 1945, was centered on his search for a satisfactory definition of logical truth, or analyticity. The need for such a definition grew out of the logical syntax program he had first conceived in early 1931, which dropped the conception of meaning of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1922) and instead applied the metalinguistic methods of Hilbert, Tarski, and Gödel to the scientific language as a whole.

Specifically, the need for a definition of analyticity had been precipitated by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which had shown that there are apparently true sentences of arithmetic that are not logically provable, even given the axioms of arithmetic. Before this, the obvious criterion of logical and mathematical truth had always been provability, but Gödel had shown that this identification is unfounded and that logical and mathematical truth could not be understood as provability in a fixed axiom system. This not only threatened the logicist thesis of the logical character of all mathematical truth; it also called into question the fundamental tenet of logical empiricism that non-empirical (a priori) knowledge is analytic in the sense of being trivial and ultimately tautological. It was in this way, in fact, that the Vienna Circle developed a new “logical” brand of empiricism through a novel combination of two recent scientific advances: Wittgenstein’s notion of tautology and Frege–Russell logicism. This new doctrine solved empiricism’s traditional problem of the status of mathematics in a way that had not been conceivable before.

INTRODUCTION

Carnap's intellectual development is documented in his “Intellectual Autobiography” (Carnap, 1963a). For present purposes it is worth recalling that he studied with Frege at Jena in the years 1910-14, taking two courses on Frege's conceptual notation or Begriffsschrift and the course “Logic in Mathematics.” His early relationship to Russell also merits mention. Shortly after the First World War, Carnap wrote to Russell asking where he might purchase a second-hand copy of Principia Mathematica; Russell responded by copying out by hand 35 pages of its central definitions. From the intellectual autobiography we also learn that Carnap's interest in philosophy of physics emerged early in his career. As a doctoral student, he formulated the intention of writing a dissertation on the axiomatization of special relativity. The less than enthusiastic reception of this idea by Max Wien, the head of the Institute of Physics at Jena, led him to write on the foundations of geometry instead. The dissertation was completed in 1921 under the title “Der Raum,” and it shows the central influence of Hilbert.

Rudolf Carnap is a curious figure in twentieth-century philosophy. His principal reputation is as a leading exponent of logical positivism (or logical empiricism), a school of thought that, according to lore, is notably rigid and technical as well as dismissive of other ways of doing philosophy. One of Carnap's most-read essays (Carnap, 1932d/ 1959) argues, for example, for the elimination or overcoming of metaphysics based on strict adherence to syntactic and verificationist strictures on meaningfulness. W. V. Quine's most famous essay - arguably, the single most famous essay in analytic philosophy - “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951/1980) singles out Carnap as its most important target and uses the notion of “dogma ” to characterize the key commitments of his version of empiricism. Quine’s essay begins with the bold claim that “modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas” – dogmas his readers would at the time closely associate with Carnap – and then argues that embracing an empiricism without these dogmas has two principal effects:

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) was a giant of twentieth-century philosophy. He was one of the leading figures of the logical empiricist movement associated with the Vienna Circle and one of the leaders of the analytic tradition more generally. In particular, the defining debates of this tradition involved, at its inception, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, in a later phase, Carnap and Willard Van Orman Quine. Moreover, Carnap was engaged in significant philosophical interaction with some of the leaders of the continental tradition, including Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Finally, Carnap was a central participant in key episodes in the development of modern logic associated with Kurt Godel and Alfred Tarski; and, after emigrating to the United States, he also interacted with important American pragmatist philosophers such as Charles Morris and John Dewey. He made major contributions to philosophy of science and philosophy of logic, and, perhaps most importantly, to our understanding of the nature of philosophy as a discipline. It is impossible adequately to understand twentieth-century philosophy without appreciating Carnap's central position within it.

The Magnificat is a ‘canticle’, a non-metrical, song-like passage of text drawn frombooks of the Bible other than the Book of Psalms. The Magnificat – the Song of the Blessed Virgin Mary – comes from the Gospel of St Luke, 1:46–53, and represents Mary's joyful response to the message given her by the Angel Gabriel that she was to bear the son of God. In the Catholic liturgy this canticle was set to be read or sung daily towards the end of the main evening Offce of Vespers. It forms the climax of the service, and while it is being sung a priest censes the altar. The Magnificat is preceded by the singing of an antiphon specific to the particular day on which it was being performed, and followed by the ‘Gloria Patri’ and a repetition of the antiphon. This whole unit is then followed by a prayer and the dismissal of those who have celebrated Vespers.

The text of the Magnificat is laid out in the Liber Usualis (an abbreviated compendium of texts and music for the Mass and Offce) as follows. (The English version is the one given in the Book of Common Prayer.)

Seven of the fourteen compositions comprising Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine are based on psalm or Magnificat tones, so it is appropriate that this analysis be devoted to one of those pieces. However, with the exception of the two settings of the Magnificat, which are parallel in many respects, the role of the psalm tone in the construction of each psalm differs significantly, and the psalms differ radically from the Magnificats. Therefore, the analysis of no single composition can serve as a model for the others, and each must be addressed separately, with quite different observations to be drawn from each. Of these seven compositions, the six-voice Psalm 121 (Book of Common Prayer 122), ‘Laetatus sum’, is the most complexly organised and the one whose compositional techniques most adumbrate methods of organising concertato psalms in subsequent decades. Rather than the chant serving as an organising force, as in the other psalms and the two Magnificats, the structure of the text is the principal organising element. The cantus firmus is mixed together with repetitive bass patterns, imitative polyphony, chordal homophony, virtuoso solo melismas, duets, trios and falsibordoni. The chant appears only intermittently, either as a solo vocal line or as a single voice in a four- or six-part texture. When it does appear, the chant is usually accorded some prominence either by its position in the texture or by long note values.

Does Mahler matter? A history in which eighty years of screen culture and emotion commerce have interrogated, reprocessed and cashed in vast areas of Mahlerian idiolect as patois, narcotizing a society his music was to have transformed and mobilized, presents a curious problem. If unorthodoxy rather than consensus is any measure of import, how is it possible or even desirable to abstract the once difficult from a repertoire in order to de-popularize it, to reclaim the margins for the formerly marginalized, even to ‘rescue the history of an unfavoured [Mahler] from oblivion’, and yet to resist the attenuation and certain retreat into the cloistered self-interest of the initiated that assimilation into collective consciousness brings? As performance and recording gluts continue to familiarize and congeal the de-familiarizing in a game of technical and technological catch-up followed by domination, Mahler's capacity to offend historical consciences and aesthetic sensibilities now in absentia, and in the age of Uri Caine when the previously exterior and disjunct claim centrality and conciliation, is seriously diminished. Where then lies the musical space he so violently transgressed, the sense of music history with which he toyed ironically, bitterly and comically? One who apparently resisted embourgoisement so resolutely, becomes deeply ritualized within it. The once hazardous Mahlerian experience is insulated and inimitable, glimpsed uncertainly through misted flights of imagination, submerging in the ‘death’ which, as sister to ‘fashion and manners’, characterizes the ‘huge performing market in our time’, itself uneasily encumbered by canonic interpretative legacies.

Monteverdi's music might seem to be relatively straightforward in terms of its surviving sources, given that the vast majority of it seems to have been printed during his lifetime. The main exceptions are the late Venetian operas surviving in manuscript, for reasons that will become clear. However, scholars have tended to assume that once print became a standard, and standardised, medium of musical transmission, at least by the 1540s, manuscripts increasingly gained a secondary status. They were still of use in local or individual circumstances – either for practice or presentation – or in the case of music for limited consumption or for particular instrumental repertories (often those not using mensural notation). But these sources and their contents remained marginalised from a mainstream that was more and more defined by printed musical texts. The Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources of Polyphonic Music compiled by the Musicological Archives for Renaissance Manuscript Studies at the University of Illinois (1979–88) stops at 1550, and the efforts to deal with later manuscripts on the part of the Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM) have been famously problematic, though RISM completed its catalogue of printed music by individual composers, 1500–1800, in 1981. Further, print is presumed somehow to grant the musical object some kind of permanence, and also some kind of status as a ‘work’ that therefore can be inserted (or not) into a canon, and into its place in music history.

This is the opening piece of the cycle of five continuo madrigals that Monteverdi placed at the end of the Fifth Book. As I argued in the preceding chapter, these madrigals, all but one of which are taken from Battista Guarini's Rime, are arranged to form a kind of narrative. Beginning with ‘Ahi, come a un vago sol’ we are introduced to the opening stages of an amorous infatuation – brought on by the glance of a woman's beautiful eyes – into which the poet allows himself to be drawn in spite of his better judgement. His ambivalent attitude is made clear in this poem, in which he laments that ‘it does no good to hide’ even if, because he has been in love before, he knows that he will be hurt again. In the next poem, ‘Troppo ben puòquesto tiranno Amore’, his ambivalence is the focus, as fear and temptation compete, but by the third madrigal, ‘Amor, se giusto sei’, it is clear that the lover has given in, and he begs Love to be just and make his beloved as receptive to him as he is to her. By the fourth poem – “‘T'amo, mia vita’”, la mia cara vita’ – he wallows in the sound of his beloved's words (‘I love you, my life’), and in the fifth – ‘E così poco a poco’ – he is consumed by the affair, ‘like a moth to the flame’, conscious that to try to put out the blaze merely makes it worse.

Acting Hare under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark must be akin to playing a Beethoven sonata conducted by Simon Rattle: so sure are the hands in which you find yourself as a performer, it is nigh on impossible for your 'instrument' to sound out of tune. In the course of this chapter, I explore my involvement with Hare's play The Permanent Way, a co-production between Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint theatre company and the National Theatre, London. However, the structuring and writing of The Permanent Way was not necessarily the way in which Hare would traditionally work: far from being a solitary task, the process of assembling the material included a number of actor-researchers, as well as the director himself. Indeed, my own involvement with the play began with the early research in February 2003, when I first met Hare, and continued through to the production's final performance in Sydney during March 2005.

I begin by concentrating on the collation of the original material, and thereafter examine the ethical issues involved in a play that essentially draws upon living people’s accounts – an area which particularly provoked both me and Hare – and the impact on the acting choices raised by those issues.

‘Ecco mormorar l'onde’, deservedly the best-known madrigal of Monteverdi's Second Book (1590), occupies a centrally important place within that volume; it represents a particularly rich version of imitatio (see Chapter 3, above), and established durable new models for musical form and tonal organisation. Anna Maria Monterosso Vacchelli has suggested that it is also the central madrigal of an interrelated group of three, ‘Mentr'io mirava fiso’, ‘Ecco mormorar l'onde’ and ‘Dolcemente dormiva la mia Clori’ (Nos. 12, 13 and 14 in the Second Book), together projecting the most modern aspect of the volume. (These are their numbers in the first edition, not in the less reliable later editions, nor in Malipiero's Collected Edition.)

Essential models for modern style in the Second Book include Marenzio, already identified in Chapter 3, above, and the Eighth Book of Madrigals for five voices (1586) of Giaches de Wert, a friend of Tasso, who supplied most of Monteverdi's texts for this volume. ‘Ecco mormorar l'onde’ interweaves two sharply different models from Wert's Eighth Book, ‘Io non son peròmorto’ and ‘Vezzosi augelli’; both have been identified hitherto, but only in isolation from one another.

Any thorough understanding of Gustav Mahler and his music must probe the complexities of his thoughts about life and existence. Mahler's pursuit of these fundamental questions went far beyond idle speculation, haunting his personal reflections and informing his artistic project with a nearly obsessive quality. In significant ways, Mahler's works represent a response to this existential inquiry, an extension of an overriding need to somehow fathom the universe.

The composer as thinker

The intensity of Mahler's intellectual interests struck virtually everyone who knew him. The recollections of such friends and acquaintances as Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Richard Horn, Anna von Mildenburg and Richard Kralik all make noteworthy references to Mahler's effusive tone in conversations about life and art. Bruno Walter, for a time Mahler's assistant and one of the most philosophically inclined of his conversation partners, referred to his private time with Mahler in Hamburg as mainly preoccupied with ‘confessions of the soul, philosophy, and music’. Mahler's uncanny ability to grasp new concepts and develop intriguing perspectives impressed them all. As Walter also pointed out: ‘Friends of his, professionally occupied with natural science, were hard pressed by his deeply penetrating questions. An eminent physicist whom he met frequently could not tell me enough about Mahler's intuitive understanding of the ultimate theories of physics and about the logical keenness of his conclusions and counter-arguments.’