Let us consider how the conductor’s baton appeared and we shall see that it arrived neither too late nor too soon, but exactly when it should have, as a new, original mode of activity, creating in the air its own new domain.
Let us hear about the birth or, rather, the hatching of the modern conductor’s baton from the orchestra.
1732: Time (tempo or beat)—once beaten with the foot, now usually with the hand. Conductor—conducteur—der Anführer (Walther, Musical Dictionary).
1753: Baron Grimm calls the conductor of the Paris Opera a woodchopper because of his habit of beating time aloud, a habit which has reigned in French opera since the day of Lully (Schünemann, Geschichte des Dirigierens, 1913).
1810: At the Frankenhausen music festival, Spohr conducted with a baton rolled up out of paper, without any noise, without any grimacing (Spohr, Selbstbiographie).*
The birth of the conductor’s baton was considerably delayed—the chemically reactive orchestra had preceded it. The usefulness of a conductor’s baton is far from being its whole justification. The chemical nature of orchestral sonorities finds its expression in the dance of the conductor, who has his back to the audience. And this baton is far from being an external, administrative accessory or a sui generis symphonic police which could be abolished in an ideal state. It is nothing other than a dancing chemical formula that integrates reactions comprehensible to the ear. I also ask that it not be regarded a supplementary, mute instrument invented for greater clarity and to provide additional pleasure. In a sense, this invulnerable baton contains within itself qualitatively all the elements of the orchestra. But how does it contain them? It is not redolent of them, nor could it be. It is not redolent in the same way the chemical symbol of chlorine is not redolent of chlorine or the formula of ammonia or ammonium chloride is not redolent of ammonium chloride or of ammonia.
Dante was chosen as the theme of this talk not because I intended to concentrate on him as a means of learning from the classics and to seat him together with Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy at a kind of table d’hôte in Kirpotin’s manner, but because he is the greatest, the incontestible proprietor of convertible and currently circulating poetic material, the earliest and at the same time most powerful chemical conductor of a poetic composition that exists only in swells and waves, in upsurges and maneuverings.
VII.
Dante’s cantos are scores for a special chemical orchestra in which, for the external ear, the most easily discernible comparisons are those identical with the outbursts, and the solo roles, that is, the arias and ariosos, are varieties of self-confessions, self-flagellations or autobiographies, sometimes brief and compact, sometimes lapidary, like a tombstone inscription; sometimes extended like a testimonial from a medieval university; sometimes powerfully developed, articulated, and reaching a dramatic operatic maturity, such as, for example, Francesca’s famous cantilena.
Canto XXXIII of the Inferno, which contains Ugolino’s account of how he and his three sons were starved to death in a prison tower by Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa, is encased in a cello timbre, dense and heavy, like rancid, poisoned honey.
The density of the cello timbre is best suited to convey a sense of expectation and of agonizing impatience. There exists no power on earth which could hasten the movement of honey flowing from a tilted glass jar. Therefore the cello could come about and be given form only when the European analysis of time had made sufficient progress, when the thoughtless sundial had been transcended and the one-time observer of the shade stick moving across Roman numerals on the sand had been transformed into a passionate participant of a differential torture and into a martyr of the infinitesimal. A cello delays sound, hurry how it may. Ask Brahms—he knows it. Ask Dante—he has heard it.
Ugolino’s narrative is one of Dante’s most significant arias, one of those instances when a man, who has been given a unique, never-to-be-repeated chance to be heard out, is completely transformed under the eyes of his audience, plays like a virtuoso on his unhappiness, draws out of his misfortune a timbre never before heard and unknown even to himself.
It must be remembered that timbre is a structural principle, like the alkalinity or the acidity of this or that chemical compound. The retort is not the space in which the chemical reaction occurs. This would be much too simple.
The cello voice of Ugolino, overgrown with a prison beard, starving and confined with his three fledgling sons, one of whom bears a sharp, violin name, Anselmuccio, pours out of the narrow slit:
Breve pertugio dentro dalla muda,30
(Inferno, XXXIII, 22)
—it ripens in the box of the prison resonator—here the cello’s fraternization with the prison is no joking matter.
Il carcere—the prison supplements and acoustically conditions the verbalizing work of the autobiographic cello.
Prison has played an outstanding role in the subconscious of the Italian people. Nightmares of prison were imbibed with the mother’s milk. The trecento threw men into prison with an amazing unconcern. Common prisons were open to the public, like churches or our museums. The interest in prisons was exploited by the jailers themselves as well as by the fear-instilling apparatus of the small states. Between the prison and the free world outside there existed a lively intercourse, resembling diffusion—the process of osmosis.
Hence the story of Ugolino is one of the migratory anecdotes, a bugaboo with which mothers frighten children—one of those amusing horrors which are pleasurably mumbled through the night as a remedy for insomnia, as one tosses and turns in bed. By way of ballad it is a well-known type, like Bürger’s Lenore, the Lorelei, or the Erlkönig.
In such a guise, it corresponds to the glass retort, so accessible and comprehensible irrespective of the quality of the chemical process taking place within.
But the largo for cello, proffered by Dante on behalf of Ugolino, has its own space and its own structure, which are revealed in the timbre. The ballad-retort, along with the general knowledge of it, is smashed to bits. Chemistry takes over with its architectonic drama.
“Io non so chi tu se’, nè per che modo
venuto se ‘qua giù; ma fiorentino
mi sembri veramente quand’ io t’odo.
Tu dei saper ch’i ’fui conte Ugolino.”
(Inferno, XXXIII, 10–13)
“I do not know who you are or how you came down here, but by your speech you seem to me a real Florentine. You ought to know that I was Ugolino.”
“You ought to know”—tu dei saper—the first stroke on the cello, the first out-thrusting of the theme.
The second stroke: “If you do not burst out weeping now, I know not what can wring tears from your eyes.”
Here are opened up the truly limitless horizons of compassion. What is more, the compassionate one is invited in as a new partner, and already his vibrating voice is heard from the distant future.
However, it wasn’t by chance I mentioned the ballad: Ugolino’s narrative is precisely a ballad in its chemical make-up, even though it is confined in a prison retort. Present are the following elements of the ballad: the conversation between father and sons (recall the Erlkönig), the pursuit of a swiftness that slips away, that is—continuing the parallel with the Erlkönig—in one instance a mad dash with his trembling son in arms, in the other, the situation in prison, that is, the counting of trickling tempi, which bring the father and his three sons closer to the threshold of death by starvation, mathematically imaginable, but to the father’s mind unthinkable. It is the same rhythm of the race in disguise—in the dampened wailing of the cello, which is struggling with all its might to break out of the situation and which presents an auditory picture of a still more terrible, slow pursuit, decomposing the swiftness into the most delicate fibers.