ISSN 1751-8229

Volume Eleven, Number Three

My Favorite Classics

Slavoj Žižek

Abstract

“Let me begin with the standard stupid question: if I were allowed to take only one piece of music to
a lone island, which one this would be? [...]”

Key Words: Classical Music; Opera; Chamber Music; Piano Music; Songs
 Let me begin with the standard stupid question: if I were allowed to take only one
piece of music to a lone island, which one this would be? For decades, my answer has
been the same: Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, What makes Gurrelieder really unique is
a mirroring between its musical line and the history of music itself: the shift from the
late-romantic Wagnerian heavy pathos to atonal Sprechgesang is rendered in the very
progress of the piece.

Otherwise, my tastes are classical, and definitely “Eurocentric”, with a preference for
chamber music... Seriously? How to bring this together with my total dedication to
Gurrelieder, which demands around 600 musicians for its proper performance?
Schoenberg’s preference for chamber music is well-known: in a nice swipe at American
vulgarity, he once said that everything in music can be told with a maximum of five or six
instruments – we only need orchestras so that Americans get it… How, then, to account
for Gurrelieder, which demands soloists, a full orchestra and three choruses? In the notes
to his recording, Simon Rattle proposed a wonderful formula: Gurrelieder is a
chamber-music piece for orchestra and chorus – this, effectively, is how one should
approach it.

So here we go with Bach: while I cannot follow any of his Passions without yawning,
I find his solo violin and cello sonatas irresistible. Take the second movement (fugue) of
Bach’s Three Sonatas for Solo Violin, in which the entire polyphonic structure is
condensed in one instrumental line, so that, although we “effectively” hear only one violin
line, in our imagination we automatically supplement it with other unheard implicit melodic
lines, and seem to hear the multitude of melodic lines in their interaction. However, the
actual condensation into one single line is thereby by no means simply suspended: the key
element of the artistic effect is that we are all the time aware of how we effectively hear
only one line – it is for that reason that the transcriptions of Bach’s solo sonatas for organ
or string trio or quartet, even when they are of the highest quality, retain an element of

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“vulgarity”, obscenity even, as if, when we “hear it all”, some constitutive void is filled in,
which is the elementary definition of kitsch.

With Mozart, it’s similar: my first choice is his string quintets and, among his operas,
Così fan tutte. I love Peter Sellars’s video version of Così, which takes place in the present
(a US naval base, with Despina as a local bar owner, and the two gentlemen – naval
officers – returning not as “Albanians”, but as violet-and-yellow-haired punks). The main
premise is that the only true passionate love is that between the philosopher Alfonso and
Despina, who experiment with two young couples in order to act out the impasse of their
own desperate love. This reading hits the very heart of the Mozartean irony which is to be
opposed to cynicism. If, to simplify to the utmost, a cynic fakes a belief that he privately
mocks (preaching sacrifice for the fatherland, say, while privately amassing profits...), an
ironist takes things more seriously than he appears to – he secretly believes in what he
publicly mocks. Alfonso and Despina, the cold philosophical experimenter and the corrupt,
dissolute servant girl, are the true passionate lovers using the two pathetic couples and
their ridiculous erotic imbroglio as instruments to confront their traumatic attachment. And
it is only today, in our postmodern age, allegedly full of irony and lacking all belief, that
Mozartean irony reaches its full actuality, confronting us with the embarrassing fact that –
not in our interior lives, but in our acts themselves, in our social practice – we believe
much more than we are aware of.

With Beethoven, things change – for personal reasons, Fidelio is my choice. This
was the first opera I listened to in its entirety in my early teens and it impressed me deeply
– even now, over half a century later, I shiver at the simple but sublime beauty of the
moment when the trumpet announces the Minister’s arrival at the very point when Leonora
puts her life at stake to save Florestan… I also think that the usual suspects for
Beethoven’s greatest achievement - the late string quartets, inclusive of the Great Fugue –
are grossly overrated. (The only great thing about the Great Fugue is that it seems to
announce Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock music.) From an immanent musical standpoint,
Beethoven’s late piano sonatas are much superior...

To put it bluntly, Beethoven’s music undoubtedly often verges on kitsch – suffice it to

mention the over-repetitive exploitation of the “beautiful” main motif in the 1st movement of
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his Violin Concerto, or the rather tasteless climactic moments of the Leonore 3 Overture.
How vulgar are the climactic moments of Leonore 3 (and 2 its even worse utterly boring
version) in comparison with Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute, where Mozart still
retains what one cannot but call a proper sense of musical decency, interrupting the
melodic line before it reaches the full orchestra climactic repetition and, instead, jumping
directly to the final staccatos! Perhaps, Beethoven himself sensed it, writing another, final
overture, the Fidelio-Overture – brief and concise, sharp, the very opposite of Leonore 2
and 3. (The true pearl, however, is the undeservedly underestimated Leonore 1, Op. 138,
whose very date is not sure – it is Beethoven at his best, with the beautiful rise to a climax
without any embarrassing excesses).

Is, then, Wagner really the kitsch-extension of what is worst in Beethoven?

No: Wagner’s true achievement was precisely to provide a proper artistic form for what, in
Beethoven, functions as a kitschy excess. (This is exemplary in Rhinegold, THE key
Wagner opera, the zero-level “music drama”, which clears the slate and thus renders
possible the return of “transubstantiated” operatic elements from Walküre onwards
(already in Act 1), which culminates in the revenge-trio of The Twilight.) Rhinegold is the
first and only pure music drama, the first and only work that fully follows the precepts of the
music drama (no free melodic improvisations, the music closely following the drama, etc.).

This brings us to the great duo: Schubert and Schumann. The first movement of
Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in G major (D 894) is a piece I am ready to listen to again
and again (which I am also doing in real life, never getting tired of it). As for Winterreise,
yes, who can resist it, but it is crucial to listen to it in its entirety and not just privilege
popular hits like “Der Leiermann”. I’ve downloaded around 50 versions of Winterreise and
my secret wish is to write a kind of history of the shifts in the European ideological mood in
the last century as reflected in these versions – for example, Hans Hotter’s outstanding
1942 recording of Schubert’s Winterreise seems to call for an intentionally anachronistic
reading: it is easy to imagine German officers and soldiers listening to this recording in the
Stalingrad trenches in the cold Winter of 42/43. Does the topic of Winterreise not evoke a
unique consonance with the historical moment? Was not the whole campaign to Stalingrad
a gigantic Winterreise, where each German soldier can say for himself the very first lines
of the cycle: “I came here a stranger, / As a stranger I depart”? Do the following lines not
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render their basic experience: “Now the world is so gloomy, / The road shrouded in snow. /
I cannot choose the time / To begin my journey, / Must find my own way / In this
darkness”.

As for Schumann, I am almost pathologically obsessed by his piano masterpieces –

I’ve written extensively about Humoresque, which is not a simple piano piece but a song
without the vocal line, with the vocal line reduced to silence, so that all we effectively hear
is the piano accompaniment. This disappearance of the voice is strictly equivalent to the
“death of man”, and what is crucial here is not to confuse man (“person”) with the subject:
the Lacanian subject qua $ is the very outcome of the “death of man”. In clear contrast to
Foucault, for Lacan, humanism is something which emerged in the Renaissance, and was
disposed of with the Kantian break in philosophy – and, we might add, with Schumann in
music. This is how one should read the famous “inner voice” (“innere Stimme”) added by
Schumann (in the written score) as a third line between the two piano lines, higher and
lower: as the vocal melodic line which remains a non-vocalized “inner voice”, a kind of
musical equivalent to the Heidegger-Derridean “crossed-out” Being. What we actually hear
is thus a “variation, but not on a theme”, a series of variations without the theme,
accompaniment without the main melodic line (which exists only as Augenmusik, music for
the eyes only, in the guise of written notes): No wonder that Schumann composed a
Concerto without orchestra [revised by Schumann in 1853 and published as Piano Sonata
No. 3 in f-moll, op.14, A/D], a kind of counterpoint to Bartok’s Concerto for orchestra, Sz.
116. This absent melody is to be reconstructed on the basis of the fact that the first and
third levels (the right and the left hand piano lines) do not relate to each other directly, i.e.
their relationship is not that of an immediate mirroring: in order to account for their
interconnection, one is thus compelled to (re)construct a third, “virtual” intermediate level
(melodic line) which, for structural reasons, cannot be played. Its status is that of an
impossible-real which can exist only in the guise of a writing, i.e. physical presence would
annihilate the two melodic lines we effectively hear in reality (as in Freud’s ‘A child is being
beaten’, in which the middle fantasy scene was never conscious and has to be
reconstructed as the missing link between the first and the last scenes). Schuman brings
this procedure of absent melody to an apparently absurd self-reference when, later in the
same fragment of Humoresque, he repeats the same two effectively played melodic lines,

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this same darkness: “Let bitter tears flow. / Weep. . . weep. . . unhappy soul! / The enemy
here shall come. / So much blood shall flow. / And the fire shall destroy. . . . Oh, terror! oh,
terror! . . . Allow thy tears to flow, / Wretched people!” So what if “People” doesn’t exist as
a single agent with a collective Will but is precisely the name for the chaotic density of
humanity that thwarts all plans for liberation imposed on it by human agents, the chaotic
density which can actualize itself only in the guise of self-destructive fury? Khovanshchina
brings this insight to its logical extreme, concluding with a collective suicide as the only
imaginable act of redemption…

Now comes a bad surprise for most of my readers: no Mahler, no Richard Strauss, in
my universe (I agree with the old Viennese saying “When Richard, then Wagner; when
Strauss, then Johann”). My ultimate anti-Adornian sin: I prefer Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony
to all of Mahler. And, in the same confessional mode, I have to admit some further guilty
pleasures: Shostakovich’s Symphonies No. 8, 10, 14, and his first Violin Concerto, plus
SOME of his string quartets (No. 3 with its wonderfully Hitchcockian third movement, but
NOT the vastly overrated No. 8 which is too close to kitsch), Prokofiev’s first Violin Sonata
plus his film music (Aleksandr Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible), and, why not, Rossini’s
Cenerentola and Donizetti’s L'elisir d’amore, a love potion that again clearly functions as
the Lacanian objet a. There are many other wonderful moments in this Donizetti’s
masterpiece – say, towards the end of Act 1 there is a passage that exemplifies in a
musical way the basic thrust of the Hegelian Aufhebung (“sublation”, or retroactive
re-positioning). It is basically a trio sustained by a chorus; the love triangle is composed of
Adina, a beautiful and wealthy farm owner, Nemorino, a simpleton who deeply loves her,
and Belcore, an arrogant and boasting sergeant who also wants to marry Adina. Upon
hearing the news that Adina is ready to marry Belcore the same evening, Nemorino
entreats her to postpone the marriage, and Belcore brutally tells him to fuck off: “Thank
heaven dolt, that you are mad / or drunk with wine. / I would choke you, reduce you to
shreds / If at this moment you were yourself. / So that I can keep my hands under control /
Go away, fool, hide from me”. The magic, of course, resides in how this simple exchange
is put into music: the most impressionable phrase – “va via, buffone, ti ascondi a me” (to
be translated as “casse toi, pauvre con” or “fuck off, jerk”) is first sung in an aggressive
mode, but is later re-positioned as the background of the predominant love duet.

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