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Who among them has not marveled at Wolf’s settings of Italian poets, Machaut’s renderings of sacred texts, or Poulenc’s masterful settings of Eluard? Who among them has not been overcome with emotion at the discovery of a text set to music that speaks to our deepest, most intimate being? It is in the mirror of every present, living being that the image of the past is rearticulated. It is in the reflection of our present that the past endures and the seed of the future takes root—on the surface of a mirror.
It is no surprise, then, that Goethe is not the only one who has made Faust’s dilemma the task of a lifetime.
This dilemma lies at the very root of the arguments comprising this book. Only one brief indication of its centrality can be offered here. Some years ago, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book entitled The Denial of Death, the eminent social psychologist Ernest Becker made the point that human beings are themselves the very source of contradiction: our rational being is only too conscious of the infinity of time—and only too painfully aware, by comparison, of the pathetic shortness of our individual lives. He saw the primary manifestation of this phenomenon as the striving for a kind of personal heroism, or at the least, identification with heroic sociocultural entities—that is, the heroic categories of coal miner, police officer, soldier, homemaker, and so forth. In this way, humans could, beyond the reproduction of children, attain either a kind of individual or collective immortality. Therefore, we say that Beethoven, because of his monumental works, is “immortal,” or we say that the soldiers who laid down their lives for their country will “never be forgotten.” The idea, particularly with regard to composers, that some individuals attain a kind of immortality through the continued performance of their works over decades and even hundreds of years is, indeed, our dilemma: an overabundance of immortals is choking the very life out of the musical children of our own time.
Contradictions Without
Most of us are familiar with the old joke posed in the form of the following question: “How far does the rabbit run into the woods?” The answer is, of course, “Halfway—after that, she starts running out of the woods!”