3 - Seeing Sound
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
In 1860, Wagner conducted selections of his work at three performances in Paris. One of those attending was Charles Baudelaire, and what he wrote about it helped determine literary history. Here is Baudelaire's response to the overture to Lohengrin (1850):
involuntarily, I evoked the delectable state of a man possessed by a profound reverie in total solitude, but a solitude with vast horizons and bathed in a diffused light; immensity without other decor than itself. Soon I became aware of a heightened brightness, of a light growing in intensity so quickly that all the shades of meaning provided by a dictionary would not suffice to express this constant increase of burning whiteness. Then I achieved a full apprehension of a soul floating in light, of an ecstasy compounded of joy and insight, hovering above and far removed from the natural world.
Immediately obvious here are the themes of light and visual expansiveness, as emphasised by Baudelaire's own italics – which have been added, as Baudelaire subsequently indicates, to highlight parallels between his own response and those of two other writers he later quotes: the composer, Wagner, and Wagner's close associate and collaborator (and future father-in-law), Franz Liszt. Like Baudelaire himself, then – though without the latter's prior knowledge, as Baudelaire is at pains to stress – Wagner too has described this music in terms of solitude and massive spaces, whilst Liszt, also, has found himself thinking of light effects (an ‘iridescent haze’) and colours (‘gold’ and ‘blue’) (p. 329; emphases in original).
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- Information
- Sonic ModernityRepresenting Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts, pp. 89 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013