Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, we had told ourselves so many times that we were on the border of the promised land, the edge of utopia, that in our exhaustion we could no longer believe our own story. We want a permanent Eden, but get the hell of a stagnation that rushes to devour itself, leaving us devoid of satisfaction and hungry for the empty promises of the next horizon. There is an increasingly bitter sense of irony as we traverse an ever more complicated and twisted house of mirrors. We are all divided, we are all mortal, and our knowledge is contingent. And still, meaning eludes us.

The story of Faust has come to us in many forms: stories, plays, films, poetry, paintings, operas, ballets, sculptures, in virtually every art form one can imagine. There is a long history of intertwining texts that link not only these various versions, but a seeming infinity of other kinds of texts: philosophy, ethics, history, literature, religion, mysticism, magic, music, psychology, astrology, science, literary theory, and so forth. Ironically, what is “Faustian” about the Faust story is that its meaning, in the larger sense, is inarticulable. Yes, we have libraries full of brilliant and not-so-brilliant interpretations and tropes on the work—all the way through to the Cliffs Notes version. But no one in their right mind would call any of them a satisfactory encapsulation of the meaning of the Goethe masterpiece. The meaning of the masterpiece is the masterpiece. Knowledge about the work is not its meaning. There is something in the piece that resists all attempts at a satisfactory reduction to the terms of knowledge—to discourse. There is something intuitive, emotional, or sensual that eludes reductionist approaches. We find in it a connection that will not be put to words, yet somehow speaks to us.

Goethe’s Faust, and indeed all the texts that converge in this book, play variously on these human themes. In so doing, they play on us. They choose us. It is not just that this or that author cleverly and neatly links them, one with another, but that we cannot disengage ourselves from them; we cannot clinically hold ourselves apart, cannot produce an objective analysis of their meaning that is not caught up in the reflexivity of those very texts. Voice teachers know this from the study of many different composers and poets.