Fearful [A]Symmetries: Musical Romanticism and the Broad Gothic Imagination

by Dr. Greg Pepetone

Broad Gothic Defined:

Mindful of the need for clarity of thought, I would like to begin this sequel to the chapter on "Musical Classicism and the Newtonian World View" by offering a few remarks pertaining to terminology: This discussion has its origins in a team-taught course entitled "The Gothic Imagination." Given our purely pragmatic approach to definitions, distinctions within or between genres, and historical demarcations, my IDS team-teaching partner, Dr. Rob Viau, and I have toyed with the idea of calling it "The Varieties of Gothic Experience." This title, of course, refers to The Varieties of Religious Experience by the nineteenth-century American psychologist William James. He was more interested in accurately observing religious attitudes and behaviors than he was in defining religious terms. Similarly, Dr. Viau and I are more interested in understanding gothic attitudes and behaviors than we are in defining musico-literary terms and distinguishing the ways in which they are used by others. To those for whom words like romantic, and gothic (to say nothing of broad-gothic) seem unclear and imprecise, we commend the wisdom of I. A. Richards: "We want to do something, and a definition is a way of doing it. If we want certain results, then we must use certain definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or any authority to bar us from other purposes." Elaborating on this insight, media analyst and educational theorist Neil Postman writes, "What students need to be taught, then, is that definitions are not given to us by God; that we may depart from them without risking our immortal souls; that the authority of a definition rests entirely on its usefulness, not on its correctness." Realizing that gothic is a term that is defined variously within different critical contexts (sometimes signifying an aesthetic evaluation, an historical period, a genre designation, or a philosophical orientation), Dr. Viau and I have coined the term "broad-gothic" to justify our choice of certain texts gleaned from the Middle Ages to the present.

Our subject matter concerns a rich nexus of concepts and corresponding emotions that existed prior to the Middle Ages and have continued to manifest themselves in various art mediums subsequent to the historical Gothic. Consequently, we use "gothic" and "romantic" almost interchangeably and without qualification, though we tend to limit "Romantic" to expressions of the nineteenth-century gothic imagination. In light of the fact that historical Romanticism was so heavily indebted to Medieval culture, we find this conflation of terms entirely appropriate. Still, we do attempt to be consistent about using upper case letters when referring to Gothic or Romantic as historical periods. Of necessity, our focus is on commonalities that transcend a specific historical or aesthetic context. However, we by no means disparage the value of quarantining a work of art critically from the larger stream of events and ideas to which it belongs. Conversely, we do not see an invariable need to do so. "But, is it not anachronistic," one might ask, "to refer to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus as ‘gothic’ or to the grotesque facades of a Medieval cathedral as ‘romantic?’ Our answer to that question is "Yes, it is anachronistic." Does that answer in any way invalidate our approach? We don’t think so; not unless a definition has "authority apart from a purpose."

We intend to expose students to as many meanings of the gothic in music, literature, architecture, painting, and film as can be squeezed into a single semester. We realize that each and every one of these meanings has been contested; but we find the cross-currents generated by this melee of contending definitions educationally worthwhile. For us, then, the descriptive adjective broad-gothic applies to any work in any medium or from any historical era, that encodes both the traumatic and the transcendental dimensions of living.

2

These include (but are not limited to) the violent, the horrific, and the grotesque as well as to the beatific, the visionary, and the ecstatic. When viewed in this way, the gothic imagination encompasses a trans-historical perspective, one that both complements and

challenges the Newtonian world view and its principal spin-offs - materialism, empiricism,

and logical positivism. Although modern quantum science has begun to move us beyond Newtonian formulations, that older paradigm has arguably shaped and misshaped Western cultural discourse through four centuries. In our view, then, the gothic imagination is an on-going counter-culture premised on an orientation that is at once provocative and potentially transformative.

Romanticism and Classicism:

As many cultural historians have pointed out, R(r)omanticism and C(c)lassicism are dialectical rather than mutually exclusive. What that means is that they represent broad divisions of thought and feeling that complement one another rather than rigid and exact historical or psychological classifications. Any individual who was wholly one or the other would be a likely candidate for an asylum. It therefore stands to reason that no era of history could possibly be characterized as completely governed by classical reason and discipline or romantic imagination and spontaneity. As Robert K. Wallace affirms in his interdisciplinary study, Jane Austen and Mozart: Classical Equilibrium in Fiction and Music, "As soon as the terms classical and Romantic are seen as tendencies on a continuum rather than either/or alternatives, much of the confusion in their use disappears."

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the root values of Classical art were ultimately informed by the Newtonian revolution in science (and the Puritan social/ and political ethics of Protestant Christianity). But by the end of the eighteenth-century, Newton’s revolution on behalf of total rationality had itself given raise to stirrings of a counter-revolution on behalf of human freedom, emotion, and imagination. That counter-revolution found literary expression in the loosely structured picaresque and epistolary novels of the age, such as Richarson’s Tristram Shandy and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as in Gothic tales of the supernatural, such as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. These served as an emotional and psychological safety-valve against the tendency of that era towards excessive rationalism. This same impulse found expression musically in the Empfindsamer stil (i.e., the sensitive style) of composers such as C.P.E. Bach, whose "Hamlet" Fantasia for clavichord or piano approximates the loose structure and emotionalism of the literary Gothic. Still later, romantic elements in Mozart and Beethoven gave further emphasis to

a nascent gothic counter-culture. Finally, that counter-culture came into full flower with the advent of nineteenth-century Romanticism.

Historian Jacques Barzun speaks of a seminal phase of Romanticism, from 1790-1850, during which all of the great artists, philosophers, painters, and composers pursued a common agenda (see "Romanticism: Definition of An Age’ from Critical Questions: On Music and Letters Culture and Biography, 1940-1980 ). What was that agenda? Essentially it was to restore to art that which had been excluded as inappropriatre during the Classical era: mystical religion, myth, history (Medieval), and wild nature. Romantic music, of course, sought to express the emotions appropriate to these discarded areas of human experience. Romantic composers of the seminal phase, however, were divided in their attitudes towards the immediate past. Some, such as Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner, wanted to create entirely new forms through which to express their Romantic/gothic messages, while others, such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, sought to either revive Beethoven’s synthesis of Newtonian form with gothic content, or else adapt the older Classical blueprints to their own revolutionary purposes. Chopin, the only other musical giant of this

3

period, took a stance apart from both camps in that he created new Romantic forms but saw no prospect of rivaling Bach and Mozart.

Since we have defined Beethoven’s greatness in terms of his ability to reconcile Newtonian rationality with the gothic imagination, I will devote the remainder of this discussion to a comparison of two Romantic artists who used different means and different art mediums to achieve a similar result, namely Charlotte Bronte and Robert Schumann.

Fearful Symmetries and Circular Journeys:

The structural metaphors of the Newtonian or rationalistic paradigm are geometric symmetry, linear progression, and unbroken continuity. These formal characteristics define the well-ordered teleology of the Newtonian universe as expressed in art. Whether we are considering the bi-lateral symmetry of Palladian architecture, the rhetorical periodicity of late eighteenth-century Ciceronian prose, or the episodic structure of a rondo by Mozart, certain formal procedures embody a conception of the cosmos that is fundamentally mechanistic, predictable, and closed off from any influence outside the unbreakable chain of cause and effect. Conversely, the gothic paradigm is characterized by an intentional disruption or masking of repetitious forms and patterns. These structural procedures, in turn, symbolize a perception of the cosmos that is dynamic rather than predictable, cyclic

rather than linear, and open-ended in that it allows for the possibility (and value) of transcendent revelation or intervention.

The title of this presentation obviously references "The Tyger," by English Romantic poet and visionary William Blake:

These familiar lines give expression to a gothic cosmology that is both cyclic and open-ended. Here Blake prefigures a return to the lost synthesis of innocence and experience fractured by the mythic Fall of humankind. According to his understanding, this synthesis had, in one sense, already been accomplished through the salvific work of Christ, the Omega Man whose redemptive incarnation prefigured the archetypal journey of the gothic hero. Blake’s multi-dimensional model of reality is open-ended in that both his idiosyncratic Christianity and his Romantic ideology interpreted this event as a cosmic penetration of the natural order by a transcendent or alternate reality. At the same time, Blake’s binary opposition of tiger/lamb (with its implicit potential for violence as well as transcendence) suggests a fearfully unpredictable process of transformation, one that intentionally undermines the Aristotelian stasis and poise conjured by such a formal pairing. The result is a new, dynamic equilibrium, a "fearful symmetry" that Blake postulates as a gothic alternative to the Neo-classical symmetries of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science and aesthetic practice.

Blake’s pointed rejection of the Newtonian order is well documented. For example, Mark Schorer, in William Blake: The Politics of Vision writes:

Blake needed to construct a picture of the world that was in some sense, a counterpart of his experience of life; and the Newtonian order, in its mathematical denial of that dynamic expansiveness and fluidity which energy connotes, was almost literally ‘death.’...Blake’s experience -

4

his temperament - demanded a universe that was above all ‘open,’ a universe that was not indifferent to man but an extension of man, a universe in which all things were in organic and active relationship with all others, and which was constantly interpenetrated by these relationships.

If the world was to awaken from what Blake called "Newton’s sleep," it would have to acknowledge what it had become under Newton’s influence. To quote from Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down :

Blake may have been right to see Locke and Newton as symbols of repression. Sir Issac’s twisted, buttoned-up personality may help us to grasp what was wrong with the society which deified him...This society, which on the surface, appeared so rational, so relaxed, might perhaps have been healthier if it had not been so tidy, if it had not pushed all its contradictions underground: out of sight, out of conscious mind.... What went on underground we can only guess. A few poets had romantic ideas out of tune with their world; but no one needed to take them too seriously. Self-censored meant self-verifying.

As two of the three gothic artists we will be examining belong to the Romantic era in literature and music, it’s important to realize that the structural procedures of the romantic imagination can be traced to the cosmology of pagan and Christian Neoplatonism. This connection forms the basis of M. H. Abrams’ landmark study entitled Natural Supernaturalism. Both currents of thought, i.e. Neoplatonic and Romantic, conceptualize life as a circuitous journey from innocence to experience and back again to a more enlightened innocence. This is the antique pattern outlined by Plotinus (A.D. 204-70), the founder of Neoplatonism. It is also the pattern of Judeo-Christian Heilsgeschischte (i.e., Holy History) as interpreted by Alexandrian Church Fathers such as Clement and Origen as well as the pattern favored by later Anglo-Germanic writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, Novalis, and Goethe. In each of these literary canons, life is seen as a pedagogical passage whereby the soul’s Bildung, i.e., its progress en route to spiritual enlightenment, is measured against periodic recurrence. It is in the German Romantic Bildungsroman, or novel of education, such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, that this pattern finds its fullest expression in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature.

Though formally equivalent, these recursive cycles are disguised by time and circumstance in such a way as to challenge the hero’s intellectual and emotional development. The reward for having successfully navigated life’s experiential maelstroms is heightened consciousness and an enhanced sense of self-mastery. Thus, the linear psychological progressions, formulaic repetitions, and logical patterns of response appropriate to a Newtonian universe are reconfigured by the cosmology of the gothic multi-verse as an ascending and ever-widening spiral. This pattern, according to Abrams, "fuses the idea of circular return with the idea of linear progress." Often the spiritual crises (an uncertain and unpredictable juncture at which the hero must choose to either recycle previous mistakes or move above and beyond them) is marked by a visionary experience. Such epiphanies may be construed as either psychological or ontalogical events. According to the former interpretation, they signify an archetypal moment of self-recognition. According to the latter, they represent an encounter with what gothic tradition terms "the supernatural" and contemporary physics refers to as "an implicate order of reality." Of course, not every gothic invocation of the paranormal leads to an epiphany. But as we shall see, such transformative moments figure significantly in Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Schumann’s Arabesque.

5

Cyclic Structure in Jane Eyre and Schumann’s Arabesque, Op. 18:

While there is no question of a direct influence between Victorian novelist Charlotte Bronte (1816-1857) and German Romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856), there are nevertheless striking parallels in imagery, affect, and structural procedure to be found in their works. Perhaps these can be traced to obvious similarities of background. Bothwere permanently traumatized by devastating personal losses sustained in youth or early adulthood (Bronte lost her mother and three of her five siblings while Schumann lost a sister to suicide, a beloved father and two close friends and colleagues, Ludwig Schunke and Felix Mendelssohn). Both exhibited a marked literary bent at an early age (Schumann was torn between a career as a writer or a composer). Both identified strongly with the Byronic persona while still in their mid-teens. Indeed, both were thoroughly conversant with the Anglo-German flowering of literary Romanticism (Bronte through the pages of the Edinburgh Review and Schumann through exposure to his father’s successful publishing firm).

In later life, both sought to overcome a paralyzing sense of artistic and personal alienation through reliance upon affinity groups (in Bronte’s case it was her own ever-dwindling family circle, while Schumann conceived the quasi-imaginary Society of Davidites (Davidsbund). Both were responsible for the creation of a Romantic cult of childhood in their respective mediums and each produced the first masterpiece in this distinctively nineteenth-century genre (Jane Eyre and Kinderscenen, Op. 15). Both took the masquerade and related themes such as doppelgangers, fragmented personalities, madness, and mirror imagery, as a central metaphor (Schumann, of course ended his days in an asylum). Finally, both favored cyclic and open-ended forms that resulted in a style often described as "kaleidoscopic" by critics and biographers. It is to their affinities in structural procedure and the philosophical orientation that shaped them, that I will focus your attention during the remainder of this presentation. As we shall see, both artists replace the Classical symmetry and periodicity of eighteenth-century musical structures derived from Newton with new cyclic forms that are related to memory and traceable to the gothic model of the cosmos outlined originally by Old Testament Jewish prophets, third century Neoplatonists, and early Christian theologians.

Bronte begins Chapter 10 of Jane Eyre with the following disclaimer: "Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography: I am only bound to invoke memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence." This abrupt narrative and structural hiatus has long been a source of annoyance to critics of a Newtonian mental cast. David Cecil, whose biography of Melbourne is sympathetic to the Newtonian aesthetic of late eighteenth-century Whig aristocracy, is comparatively dismissive of Bronte’s gothic ethos, as the following critical broadside will attest:

Charlotte Bronte will embark on a dramatic action and then, when it is half finished abandon it for another, equally dramatic but without bearing on what has come before or will follow after. The first quarter of Jane Eyre is about Jane’s life as a child; the next half is devoted to her relationship with Rochester, in the last quarter of the book St. John Rivers appears, and the rest of the book, except for the final chapters, is concerned with her relationship with him. However, Jane Eyre does maintain a continuous interest in one central character. Villette and Shirley do not even possess this frail principle of unity.

6

In essence, Cecil’s complaint is that Bronte fails to conform to the Newtonian paradigm. Jane Eyre is neither symmetrical (divided as it is into five unequal episodes ), linear (no episode bears on what came before or what follows after), nor continuous (she abandons one dramatic action for another). However, the minute we place Bronte’s conception within the context of the gothic paradigm, these apparent failings acquire a very different meaning. The opening chapters of Jane Eyre are thereby transformed into a novelistic gloss on childhood as "the seedtime of the soul." This is an idea that Bronte borrowed from Wordsworth, who, in turn, borrowed it from German Romantic writers such as Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel. The connection, missed by Cecil, between the first nine chapters of Jane Eyre and later episodes is that the books opening chapters provide the starting point or Ur-Cycle in Jane’s ascending spiral towards growth of consciousness and ultimate self-mastery. They chronicle the seedtime of Jane’s soul, and become, therefore, the reference point against which subsequent events in her life will be evaluated and her gothic ascent measured. Through them, we learn of Jane’s precocity, of her alienated social status, and above all, of her craving for justice, equality, and human affection. Lacking this profile of her essential self and the formative events of her early life, Jane’s later reaction to the Reeds, Edward Rochester, and the Rivers family would be meaningless. In other words, the seemingly unrelated pieces in the mosaic of Bronte’s plot structure are analogous to one another. Unity is achieved sequentially through repetition marked by dramatic discontinuities and gothic interventions rather than logically through a series of events related as antecedent to consequent.

The gothic plot structure of Jane Eyre involves three recursive cycles. Each is an epistrophe, or return to the source, in that each is a disguised repetition of key elements that comprise the Ur-cycle: 1) Jane’s escape from Lowood to Thornfield, 2) Jane’s return to the Reed household, 3) Jane’s residence at Moor House, and her subsequent return to Thornfield. It is in the course of the third cycle, the flight to Moor House, that Charlotte Bronte herself dons the protective mask of authorial anonymity in order to indulge an autobiographical recursion. Many incidents in Jane Eyre are clearly taken from the author’s life; but this one is particulary touching in light of events that would soon deprive Charlotte of her two remaining sisters, Anne and Emily. Moor House is, in reality, the Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, the home to which Charlotte Bronte returned for sisterly solace and consolation following her emotionally devastating sojourn in Belgium. It was there that she fell in love with her married professor, M. Heger. He subsequently broke off all communication, leaving his gifted pupil to nurse her wounds as best she might.

My point is that the "happy ending" for which Bronte provides her fictionalized self in Jane Eyre bears little relation to the outcome of her own unhappy Bildungsreise, or educational journey. If Diana and Mary are idealized versions of Charlotte’s cherished and long-deceased older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth (with echoes of both Anne and Emily who would also soon be dead), and St. John Rivers is an idealized synthesis of her deceased brother Branwell and her unapproachable father Patrick, this powerful evocation of hearth and home, in effect, places the reader outside the frame of the story itself to become a literary arabesque.

The arabesque is a German romantic genre identified initially by Goethe in 1797 as "an arbitrary but tasteful painterly combination of the most varied objects, so disposed as to decorate the inner walls of a building." Appropriating this term to his own, rather different, literary purposes, Friedrich Schlegel, in 1803, compares it to that moment in Classical Greek tragedy at which the chorus interrupts the orderly progress of the dramatic narrative to address the audience directly in the name of the author. This notion of the arabesque as an intentional disruption of a linear narrative (one in which the barrier that separates life from fiction is often breached) was in turn appropriated by Robert Schumann in cyclic

7

compositions such as the C Major Fantasy, Op. 17, Kreisleriana, Op. 16, and the Arabesque, Op. 18, or so I would maintain. Curiously, Schumann scholar John Deverio, who devotes a brilliant chapter of his Nineteenth Century Music and German Romantic Ideology to a discussion of the musico-literary arabesque in Schumann’s corpus, pointedly excludes the only piece explicitly identified as such by Schumann saying, "Schumann’s own Arabesque, Opus 18, is a delightful but slight work whose simple ABACA rondo form knows nothing of the asymmetry of the Schlegelian Arabesque." On the contrary, Schumann’s Op. 18 is a true arabesque as Schlegel uses the term. Admittedly, this Romantic vignette is "slight" when compared with Schumann’s lengthy sonatas and piano cycles, but, in my view, it is for precisely this reason that its anomalous structure is easily overlooked. Its overt familiarity and assessibility, as so often with Schumann, hide a more challenging and covert agenda.

If you listen to Beethoven’s well known Fur Elise, you will experience an example of a rondo that truly does know nothing of the asymmetry of the Schelegian arabesque. I explain rondo form to my music appreciation classes by likening it to a club sandwich: The principal theme, which appears at least three times, is like the layers of bread - A1, A2, and A3. In between these come the fillers (roast beef or ham and cheese). These are musically equivalent to the two episodes, B and C. This "delightful but slight" work by Beethoven is a perfect club sandwhich in sound. It also furnishes a clear example of how the Newtonian paradigm influenced Classical era music. The Euclidean geometry of its ABACA structure is readily audible.

Each of its five sections are isomorphic, being of approximately the same duration and aesthetic weight. The expected returns of the A section are undisguised and unvaried. The opening and concluding sections (A1 and A3) serve as structural brackets, and the three identical A sections taken together suggest the symmetrical proportions of an isosceles triangle. At the same time, the almost mechanical regularity with which its opening section returns make the unfolding musical narrative highly predictable. Moreover, its two contrasting episodes (B and C) suggest a linear progression that is infinitely extensible (AB-AC-AD-AE-AF etc.). The Classical rondo is therefore a musical structure that combines symmetrical repetition, which differs from cyclic repetition, with linear development. Finally, this music affords a perfect example of continuity that is unbroken within the episodes or between them.

Now let’s turn to Schumann’s deceptively "simple" rondo. Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate his gothic intent is to imagine this work as it might have sounded had Schumann chosen to follow Beethoven’s Classical/Newtonian model. Had he done so, there are two sections that would have been omitted from the piece as it now stands.

With these omissions, it is structurally identical to Fur Elise (ABACA). In this version, the observations I’ve just made concerning Beethoven’s character piece apply equally to Schumann, who was certainly familiar with the conventions of Classical rondo form. Considering how easily he could have fulfilled them, the fact that he chose not to do so would seem to imply that his intensions were subversive.

The first omitted passage comprises sixteen measures (meas. 99-106). In terms of its changeful tempo rubato, its sequential shifts in harmony, and its asymmetrical phrase lengths, this passage does not fit neatly into the Newtonian scheme of the Classical rondo format. Above all, the dreamlike, visionary, indefinite mood of this passage sets it apart from what came before and what comes after. Far from being a continuous extension of the music that comprises the B episode, with its almost monotonously repetitious two bar phrase structure and unvarying eighth-note motion, this music represents an interpolation, a discontinuation, a narrative interruption. In short, it offers a structural arabesque! In this

8

respect, it is not unlike the troubling narrative hiatus alluded to earlier in Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

For those who do not read music, I will preface what I’m about to say by offering a brief primer on harmonic theory, as promised in my discussion of musical Classicism and Newton. Unfortunately, it is the most fundamental concepts of this science that are the most difficult to explain simply. Take key signature for example: The key of a musical composition is the central harmony to which all others relate. Perhaps the easiest way to present this concept is by analogy with a planetary system. Each key signature is based on an seven note scale and the series of triadic chords that can be built from them. The chord built on the root, or first note of the scale is called the tonic chord. It functions like the sun in our harmonic solar system. The other six chords in the system orbit around it and are attracted to it in varying degrees. The planetary chord that is most strongly attracted to the tonic is the triad built on the fifth note of the scale. It is known as the dominant. Because of its strong attraction to the tonic, this chord is frequently used by composers as a directional marker, especially if the composer provides an additional note known as a 7th - thereby creating a dominant 7th chord.

Any chord on which a composer dwells for too long will be heard as a dominant of some other harmony. Consequently, the easiest way to move from one harmonic solar system to another, is to fix on one of the six planetary chords until it is perceived as a V chord in the new key to which one is moving. Such a cord is technically known as a secondary dominant. It is largely through harmonic movement by means of secondary dominants that composers create the illusion of perspective and distance. Harmony, more than any of the other five elements of music (e.g., melody, rhythm, texture, color, and structure) enables us to experience sound structures as a journies through musical space. To move from one system to another without utilizing the secondary dominant is, in science fiction parlance, like moving through a worm hole. The intervening musical space through which one would normally travel is thereby negated.

In our Newtonian version, Schumann moves from the conclusion of the B episode back to the A section (A2) by means of a single transitional harmony, a dominant 7th of the central star in his C major solar system. In other words, he proceeds through musical space in a business-like manner according to established trade routes. But in the first structural arabesque, Schumann takes us on an extended harmonic excursion through far-flung solar systems. Some of them are quite distant from C major (our harmonic point of origin). Indeed, its a journey that involves the use of at least one harmonic worm whole. In terms of the essential ABACA format, this harmonic side-trip is strictly unscheduled, and seems to have little, if any, bearing on Schumann’s anticipated flight plan (i.e., the Classical rondo blueprint). As in the recursive cycles of Bronte’s Bildungsroman, however, the differences that seem to separate Schumann’s abberant episodes from their context are skillfully intermingled with unifying elements. On four separate occasions, for instance, Schumann offers a melodically disguised version of the head motif of A1. These motific cross-references link the structural arabesque to the A sections of Schumann’s rondo as surely as the underlying themes in Jane Eyre’s recursive cycles, such as Jane’s need for both independence and spiritual companionship, link episodes that are apparently unrelated in Bronte’s novel.

Schumann’s second arabesque appears in the form of a musical epilogue, marked Zum Schlus. It is structurally superfluous, for the conclusion of A3 would have provided a perfectly acceptable ending to the piece. If I may be permitted a gothic autobiographical digression of my own, one of my most vividly remembered experiences as an undergraduate concerns this very passage. It occurred during a freshman theory class in

9

which my professor, who was himself as immune to such things as anyone I have ever known, chose the Arabesque as an example of Romantic self-indulgence. Why? Because in his opinion, Schumann had incompetently spoiled its Classical proportions with what he termed "a poetic excresence." I realized instinctively (for at that time I lacked the necessary poise, vocabulary, and critical thinking skills to rationalize my position) that Schumann’s epilogue was an inspiration, not a folly. At the very least, it was no "excresence!" For matching the vehemence of my professor with an equal, but far less articulate, vehemence of my own, I was sent from the classroom in disgrace, another romantic casualty of Newtonian rationalism.

As in the first of Schumann’s two structural arabesques (to pick up the lost thread of my argument) the pleasant nonchalance and pedestrian character of the preceding passage (A3) unexpectedly leads to a dream-like musical epilogue. As a result, the Classical symmetry of the rondo scheme is once again compromised. But to what purpose? The answer, I believe, is stated in the final two measures. In those concluding measures, Schumann discretely suggests a return to the very beginning of the piece. That hauntingly wistful insinuation, for it is nothing more definite, is at once a reminiscence and a leave-taking, a poignant structural trope of "fearful symmetry." Indeed, the difference between the geometric symmetry of the Classical model supplied by A3 and the cyclic paraphrase of the opening theme at the conclusion of Schumann’s gothic epilogue can hardly be more pointed. Concurrent similarities of tempo, key-signature, and rhythmic figuration all reference back to the earlier arabesque that Schumann interposes between B and A2. If you listen to them back to back, you will readily hear this. Schumann thereby establishes a clear relationship that brackets these interpolated passages together and places them both outside the linear frame of his musical narrative. Just as the heroine in Jane Eyre (and by extension, the reader) is abstracted from linear time and continuity of setting by gothic themes and structural devices such as premonitory dreams, clairvoyant communications, and interrupted narratives, the listener’s experience of geometric symmetry, linear progression, and unbroken continuity (the defining characteristics of the Newtonian paradigm) is subverted by Schumann’s use of structural arabesques and reminiscence motifs.

From the standpoint of the Newtonian model of the universe, the gothic anomalies introduced by Bronte and Schumann are deformative. But from the standpoint of the gothic imagination, they are transformative. Schumann’s Zum Schluss, for instance, opens the closed rondo form employed by Beethoven. It thereby becomes a structural trope of Blake’s open-ended universe. Bronte’s use of narrative discontinuity, recursive cycles, and autobiographical arabesques also suggests a universe of infinite possibility in which the ordering principle is not a symmetry that is obvious, predetermined, or mechanical, as in Newton’s model, but an acsending spiral punctuated by moments of uncertainty, mystery, and agonizing moral choice. The hidden symmetry of a life characterized by such a circuitous journey is indeed fearful. Just as Schumann’s Romantic imagination transforms the classical rondo into a gothic arabesque, Bronte’s Romantic imagination transforms the Victorian novel into a time-haunted Bildungsroman.

Moreover, Schumann’s cyclic return to the beginning in his superfluous musical epilogue is a powerful evocation of memory, the very medium through which Bronte’s cyclic narrative is filtered. In both Schumann and Bronte, memory, or consciousness of self in time, functions as a catalytic agent of personal growth. To remember is to be temporarily abstracted from the irreversible flow of events. It is also to occupy a timeless space of potential change that can break Newton’s iron chain of cause and effect. Motific recurrence (i.e. reminiscence motifs) and planned narrative disruption are therefore not just structural tropes of openness. They are the means whereby gothic artists such as Bronte and Schumann encode the crucial role played by memory and consciousness in human

10

development. In Newton’s schizophrenic universe, consciousness is reduced to the status of an ephemeral, inexplicable spectre - "the ghost in the machine." One of the recurring sub-texts of gothic arts is that the ghost is ultimately more real and essential than the machinery it supposedly inhabits.

In summary, then, Schumann complicates Beethoven’s ABACA format twice in the course of his own Op. 18 Arabesque. Both times, he lifts his musical discourse to a transcendental plane, thereby transforming the Newtonian requirements of eighteenth-century rondo form and Classical style into what has been termed the music of consciousness. Schumann’s gothic rondo, which can be schematized as A B(X1) A C

A(X2), is therefore a true musico-literary arabesque in the Schlegelian sense. Those who question this no doubt interpret X1 as a mere extension of the B episode and X2 as a traditional coda, in the manner of Mozart’s famous Rondo Alla Turca. As I have tried to

demonstrate, however, the music of X1 is discontinuous with that of the B episode, and the sense of closure that a coda is intended to impart is unnecessary to the Arabesque in that the conclusion of A3 provides a perfectly satisfactory ending. Moreover, Schumann’s Op.

18 incorporates elements of circularity, retrospection, discontinuity, and visionary experience that parallel Bronte’s gothic Bildungsroman, Jane Eyre. Clearly, these two

works differ in length, structural outline, and substance. Nevertheless, they are literally informed, i.e. formed from within, by their creators’adherence to a shared perspective. To quote one last time from Abrams:

It is not by chance nor by the influence of a mysteriously noncausal Zeitgeist but through participation in the same historical and intellectual milieu, through recourse to similar precedents in the religious and cultural tradition, that the works of philosophy and literature of this age [the Romantic age] manifest conspicuous parallels in idea, in design, and even in figurative detail.

This observation, in my view, applies equally to parallels between music and other nineteenth-century arts. Indeed, I would extend its application to parallels between gothic

arts and philosophies of all ages - as does Abrams himself, in practice. To perceive the Romantic/gothic alternative to Newton’s rigidly rational paradigm in a piece of music such as Schumann’s Arabesque reqires us to listen carefully with both heart and head fully engaged. This is no easy task, nor is it one that can be mastered overnight. But if you take away from these discussions nothing more definite than a sense that there may be something hidden within this music that is worth investigating, my time and effort will have been well spent.

copyright © Dr. Deborah Vess 1998-2001, Georgia College & State University and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. All rights reserved. Rights to chapters authored by contributing faculty members reserved to Georgia College & State University, to the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at GC&SU, and to the individual faculty authors.