Eighteenth-Century Music.(Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity)(Book review)

Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. By Karol Berger. (Simpson Imprint in Humanities.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. [xi, 420 p. ISBN-13: 9780520250918. $39.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographical references, index.

Time in music is often a slippery and difficult subject to master, particularly since it seems not to be perceived as a smoothly flowing, continuous stream. Modern music, of course, diffuses the conventions of time; for instance, aleatory, while sometimes taking place within a strict framework bounded by precise measurements, allows for a more random effect within it, so that sound is continually evolving within the performances and their parameters. This, as Karol Berger describes it, "post-Christian world view" requires time to be flexible, to create a linear flow that is synchronized with the music in a forward motion that is an evolutionary experience for the composer and audience. The opposite of this is a chronological stasis that he ascribes to a "premodern Christian outlook" where in time is cyclical, based upon a successions of events or episodes that are circular, based upon a present understanding of time as a constant where future and past are indelibly linked in a continuous circle.

This is largely a philosophical argument that Berger develops over the course of the book, using as his examples the sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach as the epitome of circular time, and the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the pivotal point of change towards a more progressive view. In addition, several other topics are treated in less detail: a prelude that looks at Monteverdi's L'Orfeo as "an early modern paradigm shift" (p. 37), an interlude that focuses upon the theological shift between the Augustinian Christian viewpoint and the more enlightened humanistic thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a postlude that argues that the solidification of the temporal shift occurs irrevocably in the "revolutionary" works of Beethoven.

Each of the main sections has chapters devoted to specific works meant to demonstrate each of these points. Bach's music is divided into three chapters, incorporating discussions on both the St. Matthew Passion and the Well-Tempered Clavier. This Trinitarian approach is chosen because "Bach's music displays a double temporality, developing unquestionably up-to-date goal-directed momentum but relativizing and subordinating its forward propulsion to a sense of cyclical or entirely timeless stasis worthy of his Medieval predecessors" (p. 12). On the other hand, the focus in Mozart, is on the operas, specifically Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflote, providing a bi-level approach that incorporates formal flexibility with a broad aesthetic purpose. For example, he states regarding Mozart's use of sonata form: "I see Mozart's form not as a rigid mold but as a flexible recipe with a few indispensable ingredients and procedures that a creative cook can supplement in a variety of ways." (p. 191). But later, in comparing the overarching philosophical connections between Don Giovanni and that quintessential German eighteenth-century play, Goethe's Faust, the concepts become metaphorical and monumental: "Aspiration to absolute freedom, pursuit of desire without limits, the paradoxical commitment to a lack of commitment, the privileging of becoming over being--all of these belong to a modern outlook ... and it is this aspect of modernity that is embodied in the stories of Don Juan and Faust, perhaps the only true modern myths we have" (p. 271). The final chapter on Beethoven shows a synthesis that, while "suspending, or at least drastically slow[ing]" time in the late eighteenth century sense, incorporates a state wherein the cyclical world of Bach is present in a contemplative sense: "This other, alternative, world is not the world of action but of contemplation. The object of contemplation during the suspension of normal time is either the interiority of the individual or God--either the world within or the world beyond" (p. 333).

Given the broad scope of Berger's philosophy, it is often difficult to know where to begin the discussion. His arguments assume that the reader is well-versed in several different fields--music, rhetoric, theology, literature, and philosophy--all of which are brought to bear on his central thesis, that a drastic paradigm shift in the use of time as a constant, occurred during the eighteenth century. That a more humanistic view, which contradicted the prescriptive thought derived from religion, happened cannot be doubted, but the central issue here is sometimes difficult to follow, given that the author's scope is limited to figures of the traditional musical and literary canon. This provides a sequence of people and music that may be what the traditional German conservative succession of "great composers" provides, but if fails to take into account the context within which even his principal figures (Monteverdi, Bach, Rousseau, Mozart, and Beethoven) lived and worked. For example, in the "Prelude" Berger states that "the main job of art before it became fully modern in the late eighteenth century was to give sensuous embodiment to the eternal cosmic or divine--order and truth" (p. 42). This in turn presupposes that several examples of artwork from the seventeenth century showing Apollo (of the Daphne story) and Orpheus can be Linked to Monteverdi, not only as reflections of the sensuous eternal "order and truth," but also as "meditations on the dilemmas faced by poet-musicians in general and on the opportunities and perils of the new genre in particular" (p. 28). Perhaps, but a more realistic approach might have been to see how Monteverdi's work both embodied and defied the conventions of cyclical religious thought of the time; one might note that lessons of morality--faithfulness, honor, etc.--found in L'Orfeo are conspicuously absent from, for instance, Monteverdi's later work L'incoronazione di Poppea. Here one might argue that a modern sense of time moving forward "like an arrow" can already be found.

What is more, in Grimmelhausen's Adventures of Baron von Munchhausen from the end of the seventeenth century, one begins to find the same sort of introspective synthesis of static and progressive time, at least in literature. The central portions, of course, dwell upon Bach and Mozart, again two giants from the canon, neither of whom during their age achieved the sort of status we accord them today. It is true that Bach was primarily a church composer, but this may have been out of necessity more than choice, and his composition (and re-composition) of the many cantatas and Passions reflect the requirements of his position more than particular assays in philosophical and theological realms. No doubt Bach himself was religious and carefully composed the works illustrated with theological ideas in mind, but to state that these reflect the notion that "our only hope of permanence is the promise that we may be translated into God's time ... because it allows the faithful to say Et expecto resurrectionem motuorum" (p. 120) is to give a philosophical weight to Bach's works (in this case, the St. Matthew Passion) that is difficult to prove the composer in tended. So too with Beethoven's "divinization" of the Well-Tempered Clavier (p. 121), which the author sees as that composer's understanding of Bach's temporal view. Perhaps reading from Carl Friedrich Cramer's Magazin der Musik (1783) might have been instructive: there, the report is that the Well-Tempered Clavier is clearly said to be just what Berger seems to deny, an example of a certain genre that could be used for reference.

The chapters on Mozart are equally nineteenth century in their views, and lacking some of the context that history otherwise provides. For example, Die Zauberflote is considered a modern work performed in "a modern capitalist venture" (p. 280); in other words, Mozart consciously writing a monumental opera for public consumption without court sponsorship. The context, however, is rather more complex, given that Schickaneder's troupe was only one in a long line of successful smaller theatres in Vienna, and that Die Zauberflote was not Mozart's first venture there; one only has to note his involvement with Der Stein der Weise, as David Buch has noted. And to raise its stature to the first modern German opera is to give it a status the composer may not have understood; Mozart was certainly aware that it was a good, popular work, that it was German, and that it contained some of his best music, but he was equally aware that he could write other things in the future. That the future was limited is a matter of historical record (which Berger does not mention), but the work is far from the most innovative or philosophically-challenging work later writers have made it out to be. Some discussion of its transmission and why E.T.A. Hoffmann seized upon it as a critical work would have helped in the transition to Beethoven.