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| Winter
2001 | Excerpt
From the diary of a music analyst
Puffett’s progress
In the Winter 2001 print edition of MT, Kathryn Puffett
introduces extracts from the private diary of her husband, the distinguished
British writer on music, Derrick Puffett. We reproduce a number
of excerpts here. All bracketing except { } are from the original
diary.
Although many of the projects of his last years were not completed,
my husband did leave a rather substantial diary on his computer,
which is illuminating in relation to the projects that were occupying
his mind. The first entry is dated 1993, but the bulk is from the
autumn of 1994 onwards.
THE DIARY
13 Aug 1994 (revised 16 Oct)
FULLNESS OF HARMONY
Studies in the Musical Language of Wagner’s Maturity (?)
Wagner’s Later Operas/Musical Language Reconsidered (?) i.e.
reconsidered from the perspective of the end of the 20th century.
Cf. Wai-Ling’s work on Scriabin... The term ‘musical language’
is perhaps to be avoided. After all, I don’t say anything about
rhythm etc. And ‘Studies’ is useful as suggesting a tentative,
un-centred sort of enquiry. (Not ‘diffuse’, though!)
Introduction: Wagner and the ‘New Musicology’
Maybe in 2 parts?
1) New-Musicological approaches to Wagner: Reading and Analyzing
Opera, Unsung Voices (obviously), Kramer (the chapter on Tristan
in Music as Cultural Practice), Nattiez/Androgyny. Take
Abbate apart. Kramer and Nattiez have to be done more circumspectly.
But the centrality of Wagner for the New M and New-Musicological
approaches.
2) Other (‘Old-Musicological’) Approaches. A mini-history
of Wagner analysis?
Lorenz. Reaction against (Kerman et al.)
Kurth. (See Wintle in The Wagner Symposium — haven’t
checked this yet)
Boretz/Babbitt
Lewin (maybe group with last)
Dahlhaus: ought to come after Lorenz
or Kurth, but it makes sense to deal with him here, first because
of the tradition of discussing the dreaded ‘War Morold’
passage, with Schoenberg, Dahlhaus, Wintle and now Darcy (and
I want to defend Dahlhaus against some of Darcy’s
strictures, while basically agreeing with him — the concern
with symmetry, symm div of the octave etc is surely right) and
because Dahlhaus ties in nicely with the New Musicologists (his
influence on Abbate, whose reading of him seems a bit selective)
(Incidentally Darcy doesn’t seem to know about Wintle’s
reading of the Morold passage.)
1. Nicht mehr Tristan
(if such a phrase exists in T act 2!) oder Tristan and Scriabin...
All the things I’ve noticed, with the pivotal (in both senses)
uses of tritone axes (a) at the climax of the Prelude (b) midway
through Delirium phrase 3 (F mi/C flat)
2. Beckmesser the Progressive
3. The Last Four Acts of The Ring (The Magic Helmet? Shades of
the Crystal Bucket)
Mostly on the Tarnhelm in Götterd.
4. Parsifal/Falparsi — the summation (and back to Scriabin
again)
Conclusion: Wagner and the 20th century (or maybe this won’t
be necessary)...
29 Nov
O.K. So let’s get serious. (About Britten, I mean.)
First one or two recent thoughts about Tchaik. There’s an
article on the Pathétique in the Robin 50th-birthday
issue (Oct 93?) of MT. By Zawadski or whatever his name is,
and probably pretty silly, but it looks a bit more interesting and
considered than some of his other stuff. The possible connections
with Carmen etc. don’t interest me. But if you’re
talking about the P I suppose these things have to be considered.
Likewise the Jackson article, which came in a few days ago and looks
better than I expected. Probably we (MusA) should publish
it. If we don’t I shall doubtless feel I’m venting my
(barely repressed) hostility towards this sort of thing. I mean,
in an unacceptable way. (What do I mean?)
I should probably write the Tchaik soon. I.e., before the Wagner.
But Jackson has made me think (twice?) again about Pozhnansky, who
probably has his own ideological reasons for wanting to make T happy
in his gayness. On the other hand, I’m not going to go the
Jackson way either.
But back to Britten. Thinking about my former ideas, they’re
obviously too crude (the polarisation, I mean, between the creepy
libretto/adaptation of Mann and the haunting music) to be used in
quite that way. But just thinking about them has made me see that
the difficulty might be resolved, i.e. that there could be a connection,
and a meaningful one, between the two strands of the ‘argument’.
More about this in a minute. On the other hand, I must be careful
not to rush things — out of a desire to get the article tied
up a.s.a.p. (= laziness again) — so that the connections seem
arbitrary and forced. If they’re there, they’ll emerge
naturally.
Anyway, back to my polarity. It seems to me that what I’m
objecting to isn’t the creepiness as such (i.e. the homosexuality,
though on some level or other it probably is, and I’ll have
to find a way of dealing with this), but the way the Mann has been
adapted, i.e. reduced, simplified, romanticised and (back to the
creepiness) turned into a moral tale about an English gentleman
who behaves badly. Actually that’s not it either: the ‘moralising’
is much stronger in the Mann, though it’s done implicitly,
through ironic commentary. In the B there’s no moralising at
all. Maybe what I’m objecting to is really Pears. Though the
part is written so closely into the music that I’m not sure
it can be done any other way — certainly Tear isn’t v
different. (I wonder what Langridge does/will do with it!)
One thing that doing the Tippett has taught me is that I’ve
got to be really honest about the way I feel. And trust my ears.
{...} So I have to be honest and admit that I really do find the
B creepy, and the fact that I choose that word (and keep coming
back to it) means that my feelings probably do have something to
do with the subject. But I can’t deal with all that yet. Tonight
I’m just supposed (!) to be writing my initial reactions to
things.
The creepiness is partly in the treatment. And the ‘treatment’
is for me summed up in those ridiculous passages where Asch brings
out his book (the symbol of his novelist’s trade, or whatever
it says in the text) and THINKS ABOUT LIFE. Look at these passages,
esp. the words. (And of course Pears can’t helping bringing
something of the crusty English gent to everything he does.) But
the romanticisation is also important. (No irony at the end.)
The Englishness of it all is something else again. What
gets left out in translation... The title-page of the score describes
it as being based on M’s ‘short story’...
Then the music. The image of the unclenched hand (not in the libretto?)
evoked in those wonderful passages where B lets the harmony relax.
‘So be it’ on p. 137 (here the libretto actually says
that Asch lifts his hands); so shall I go beyond the mountains (scales);
A surrendering to his feelings at the end of the first act.
[7 Sept 95: Maybe the way to resolve the paradox is this: that
the best (most haunting) music occurs where the novel is most romanticised
(traduced) (???)]
Motivically it’s tight. RGH on B as a natural serialist; talk
to him about this. And maybe to Olly K12 about the orchestration.
Does Palmer say it uses only 2 tbns? (Like Priam: NB both have a
tuba.)
Must read AW; Travis; B book of photos; B companion; anything in
Keller or Tippett? Clifford Hindley (possibly in ML)? Brett
(PG — NB he also has a bibl of gay musicology in the
150th-anniv MT).
6 Oct {1995}
Work on Wagner petered out a bit (a lot) after the last entry.
I did the Bibliography, rearranged it in order of urgency and started
to read a few things. I also got all the bar numbers (for the 4
operas I’m doing) sorted out — no small job. These have
been checked for Tristan and Gd; I still need to check
Meist and Pars.
In the last week I’ve been working on Berg: deadline 1 December.
Listened to Op.6 twice and begun to formulate a few ideas. On the
face of it they don’t have much to do with Mahler, but the
time has come to put them down.
What I’ve done, mainly, is to begin a three-stave reduction
of the pieces, beginning with ‘Reigen’. Although I’ve
only done two thirds of this mvt, this has already been very useful
and will be even more so when I get down to examining it in detail.
The published score is microscopic and, with all the transpositions,
virtually unfathomable. Three staves is (are?) sometimes too few
but at least get it all down in readable form. I’ll have to
check carefully, though, as I’ve already made some big mistakes
— like failing to tranpose a clarinet part and getting a line
doubled in thirds with the horn, which, given that such doublings
are a feature of ‘R’, could well have been correct.
Maybe the most important insight to come from this is the way a
theme will emerge halfway through a piece and then take over (the
horn figure that is heard in the middle of the texture, almost unnoticeably,
some way through and then dominates the last pages). This is like
Debussy (La Mer...Other exx?). Did he know La Mer?
And did he know Rondes de P?
Another is the intensely symmetrical nature of the harmony. Lots
of whole-tone stuff, but I’m thinking esp. of the passage in
4ths which climaxes in a 12-note chord. This must have been noticed
by others: see what they have to say about it.
My feeling about this piece, before looking at it closely,
is that it’s more thematic than I thought, i.e. fewer thematic
loose ends. Is this true of the other pieces too? My impression
of them — at least of the endings — is that there’s
a lot of thematically free stuff in them. The Clarinet Pieces are
largely non-repetitive. The Altenberg combine ‘free atonal’
writing with the pedantically systematic. If this latter characteristic
is true of the orch pieces too then it says something important
about the work: the combination of two opposing ideas, the avoidance
of repetition and the systematic use of principles (like inversion,
canons etc.) that rely on repetition. And this makes a curious analogy
with the treatment of harmony: the extensive & wide-ranging
use of tonal-sounding sonorities with the avoidance of large-scale
(‘tonal’) relationships. This isn’t a new insight,
but one could perhaps make more of it.
The Mahlerian things are obvious and mostly to do with gesture:
the waltz clichés (esp. from the 7th), the sledgehammer,
the D minor heavings from the 9th (in the Prael and Marsch) and
doubtless many other things. Which of course I’ll list. But
Berg has clearly gone on several stages. (Robin’s piece on
the 3-act Lulu is useful here.) Berg’s remark about
the pieces sounding like Mahler’s 9th and AS’s 5 Orch
Pieces played at the same time...writing out the music with the
Haupstimme on a single stave (top) has made me realise its melodic
continuity, a bit like the Obbligato Recit. I think it’s important,
too, to do all the bits of a piece in the right order — maybe
I shld have done the Prael first — because one gets a better
sense of the form (i.e. an important thematic idea emerging halfway
through) that way. Has anyone done any work on the form of
‘Reigen’? (I’ll soon find out!) I can’t say
yet whether my initial (over several years!) aural impression of
the piece as a succession of dances, or bits of dances, introduced
and separated by dream-like episodes (like La Valse) is true
or not. But the parallel is there. As people like to say nowadays,
R is about the waltz as a genre, indeed it’s a critique
of the waltz, just as the Marsch is ‘about’ (‘critiques’)
the march. More on the march in a minute. The idea of a piece about
a piece, or a genre, is obviously Mahlerian, as is the multi-layered
structuring of some of the sections. And while I wouldn’t want
to go as far as Benjamin, who says (if I remember him correctly)
that La Valse writes the origins, history and disintegration
of the waltz, there’s a certain amount of truth in it.
My preoccupation at the moment is: what does the title mean? What
is a round-dance? Has it anything to do with a round? Is the idea
a succession of dances, interspersed (or not) with contrasting episodes?
What, if any, is the connection with Schnitzler, whose work B evidently
knew well (Schroeder article — and see Esslin in the B Companion,
as well as the B—S Corr)? Is the real title of his play
Reigen (I’ve got an idea it is)? Does the form of his
play — A + B | B + C | C + D etc. up to Z + A — have anything
to do with the Berg? Is there a mathematical term for this form
(chain form?!)? If S’s play is called Reigen [later:
and it is], is there any closer connection?
In any case this form has obvious bearings on the ‘cyclic’
aspect of the Lyric Suite — each mvt containing a quote
from the previous one — as well as on cyclic aspects of Op.
6 itself (a theme of minor importance in one mvt taking on greater
importance in another).
If my feelings about the use of this form in R are correct, then
they give a new twist to the ‘Berg the miniaturist’ (minimalist/maximalist)
debate. R forms an important stage on the way between the clarinet
pieces, which are obviously small, even if their gestures are large,
and the constructions of Wozzeck — which, incidentally,
start with v small units (Act I is very bitty and Act II curiously
unbalanced) before going on to structures, in Act III, encompassing
whole scenes. In other words he builds up large forms by stringing
together a lot of small ones. Concatenation is the word. (Not ‘lapidary’,
though!)
My only thought about the march so far is that it’s not a
march in the direct Mahlerian sense. Even the most barnstorming/apocalyptic
Mahler marches, like the finale of the 6th, are meant straightforwardly,
i.e. they don’t dismantle the genre in the way B’s march
does. Yet it’s important to distinguish this latter from parody
(e.g. the parody-march in Wozz Act I/iii). The march of Op.
6 is definitely not parody; and yet after this there can only be
parodies. How many of Mahler’s marches, by the way, does he
actually call ‘march’? Some research needed here.
No doubt Floros has done the topos bit (some research needed on
him too).
The Symphony sketches are relevant to all this (the stuff about
form). And of course to any discussion of B & Mahler. How could
he write a symphony (on huge Mahlerian, 1914-Schoenbergian lines)
when he could only write short pieces? Do the sketches offer any
clues to this? Are they motivic? Check date of orch pieces, too.
[Later] One thing I didn’t get into the above was the idea
of R as a sequence of waltzes (à la Johann Strauss).
Maybe the march is a sequence of marches.
5 Aug {1996}
Well, I’ve finished it — the first draft, at any rate.
It’s a bit scrappy, but I did it very fast. Why do I feel uneasy
about it? I think it’s what I wanted to say.
{The last line of the entry for 3 October reads: ‘Try
to avoid being too rhetorical. Nobody’s going to read this
garbage except you.’ I hope my husband would have forgiven
what I have done. — KP}
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