When Walter Benjamin came to publish the aphorism that, in its two forms, serves as the motto of this book, he drew back from the notion of the vollkommene work.1 All works, whether measurably perfect or not, partake of this axiomatic truth: that in their completion, they die. And he drew back as well from the sense of creation as, purely, intuition. Konzeption is the broader, the more common term. But the governing idea remains a breathtaking one. Stumbling upon it in a volume of Benjamin’s letters, I was struck all at once how its central paradox resonates in each of the essays that follow.
The motto itself articulates no simple thesis. Each of its substantives is riddling. The death mask conjures a fleeting moment: the face frozen in death yet warm with life. At death, the features are fixed in a certain way. In this final instant of perfect resolution, of timeless calm, the vicissitudes of a life are effaced. Benjamin’s stark image dares us to believe that a powerful undercurrent of meaning lies in what we can reconstruct of the complex, turbulent, rich processes antecedent to this moment in which a text is fixed. We have come to speak of this, in the old cliché, as a moment of birth. In the playing out of the creative process, a work is born. At the moment of its birth, something of essence in the work is muted. What happens subsequently is of little consequence, at least for an understanding of the work. If one must have a history of art, it will be a history of what lies beneath these masks. “The research of contemporary art history always amounts merely to a history of the subject matter or a history of form,” Benjamin wrote a month earlier, “for which the works of art provide only examples, and, as it were, models; there is no question of there being a history of the work of art as such.”2
For years during the writing of this book, improvisation—the improvisatory as an act of music—figured in its imagined title. It continues to figure in the text, whether implicitly or as a topic of inquiry in itself. In music, improvisation is cherished as the emblem of intuition. Ephemeral by nature, the improvisatory act vanishes, as texts do not. Much of this creative process that we are at pains to document is a quest for the evidence of the improvisatory. Indeed, the act of composition may be said to emulate the spontaneity of improvisation, to capture intuition. In the fixing of text, intuition is embalmed, masked over.
This moment at which text is “fixed” is itself an epistemological problem of some magnitude. At precisely what moment can the work be said to be completed, finished, vollendet? The composers whose works are studied here trouble this question each in a different way. Emanuel Bach’s obsession with the further Veränderung—alteration, variation of considerable substance—of works otherwise finished (and even published) now strongly implicates the act of performance as a text-defining moment, further complicating the very notion of Vollendung. For Haydn, the imagining of primal Chaos provokes the improvisatory urge to create. Beethoven’s compulsive sketching, drafting, rehearing of even the least ambitious of his works, concretizing the process of mind in its struggle toward the notion of the completed work, seems a model for what Benjamin is after. This idealizing of the moment of finish and the anxieties that it induces in the Romantic artist was not lost on Schubert. A considerable repertory has survived of important work left unfinished. Fragments, they are: works in eternal limbo, not quite born, nor, in Benjamin’s sense, yet dead. Fragments, like sketches, exist as texts. We have learned to construe them as early stages in a process. But they were not so construed at their conception. They, too, wear masks.
The final essay returns to Benjamin’s aphorism, exploring the contexts and circumstances that nourished its conception. In Benjamin’s interrogation of Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, in his pursuit of the idea of beauty, we are offered a dark and difficult prism through which to hear again the familiar music that is the subject of this book.
For Benjamin, the very condition of finish, of completion, signifies the end of a life. Whose life? Resisting an answer, the question yet forces us to think hard about the nature of artistic creation, to imagine the ephemeral moment during which the work is separated from its author. This moment is what Benjamin seems intent upon actualizing. The separation is now labored, troubled, difficult, now imperceptible. That there exists such a moment of separation, both in the aesthetic sense, at which the autonomy of the work is established, and in the psychological sense, triggering the convoluted anxieties of the author, is an assumption that underlies each of the studies that follow. They each seek to apprehend the moment as an event, impalpable though it may seem, at which something called the work is now “finished,” and all the disparate evidence of creation, of the author’s engagement with composition and context, is swept away, the author along with it. But it is a condition of art that the work, alive in its afterlife, is in some sense never “finished,” and that the evidence of its creation, and of its creator, is everywhere implicit in its text and constitutes a grain of its meaning.
Learning to live with the pleasurable discomforts of these paradoxes is the modest resolve of this book.