—ARRANGEMENT. Transformation of a text to make possible its performance for another category of instruments than those for which it had been written. … Our era is fertile in sacrileges committed for the radio, the cinema, and the ballet (cf. Chopin’s “Tristesse”). Here again, a stricter vocabulary should be used: the erudite high style of what Bach wrote should be called arrangement, while adaptation (since this word has a more common flavor than the other) should be used for the misappropriation of property practiced by so many philistines.
Encyclopédie de la musique (Paris: Fasquelle, 1958)
I love them more than all the others, the arrangers. The ones who sign their names inside the work, and don’t hesitate to set their name down next to the author’s. Bluntly adding their surname by means of a hyphen: Beethoven-Liszt (for a piano version of the nine symphonies), Bach-Webern (for an orchestration of the ricercar in the Musical Offering), Brahms-Schoenberg, Schu-bert-Berio, who else—in short, a whole mass of double-barrel signatures.
Now, it seems to me that what arrangers are signing is above all a listening. Their hearing of a work. They may even be the only listeners in the history of music to write down their listenings, rather than describe them (as critics do). And that is why I love them, I who so love to listen to someone listening. I love hearing them hear.
One of my most fascinating listening experiences is listening to an orchestration or transcription of a work that I think I know well. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, for instance. To say that I know it is an understatement. I could, like many others, whistle or sing pages and pages of it. And yet what a surprise, the day I listened to it in Stokowski’s orchestration! You can say what you like about it: that it is kitsch, that it turns Bach’s organ into music for costume dramas … Perhaps. But what fascinates me is the unique experience of listening to such an arrangement: my ear is continually pricked up, torn between the actual orchestra and the imaginary organ that keeps superimposing itself like the shadow of a memory. I hear, inseparably, both the organ screened by the orchestra and the orchestra screened by a phantom organ. That, I think, is the strength of every arrangement: we are hearing double. In this oscillating, divided listening, in this listening that lets itself be hollowed out by the endlessly traversed gap between the original version and its deformation in the mirror of the orchestra, what I hear in some way is that the originality of the original receives its own place from its being put to the test of plasticity.
For what happens to it, what happens to Bach in the hands of Stokowski, is truly a plastic experience. The notes that had been destined for the organ are here stretched or compressed, they are endowed with a new weight: the orchestra draws them toward registers where they are counterbalanced, where they gain more heaviness or lightness: they become weightier by passing through the grainy filter of the basses, they are diffracted in the subtle blending of flutes and harps … In short, I am experiencing the test of elasticity, of the plasticity of a Toccata that I thought I knew. Not only am I continuously listening to Bach from the auditory perspective that Stokowski gives me of it (in the distance from which he lets me desire the original), but also, conversely, I cannot hear Stokowski without being struck by Bach’s organ that pulls me by the ear. There is, if not a reciprocity (for the relationship is not symmetrical), at least a fascinating form of oscillation.
In comparison to what I so like in him when he arranges and deforms, however, Stokowski’s spoken discourse is disappointing. Let us listen to him, interviewed in 1962, explain the motivations of his orchestration:
I had … the feeling that music lovers should hear this music. Of course, they sometimes hear it at church; but the thousands of people who go to symphony concerts should hear it too. So I orchestrated it, trying to give the same impression of music, to transmit the same message, the same inspiration, through the modern orchestra.1
It is strange that, in 1962, during the era of mass recording, Stokowski can declare that, in order to spread Bach’s organ work, we have to pass it through a transcription for orchestra. Strange, too, for our ears paralyzed by authenticity, that he can think he has transmitted, with such a swollen orchestration, the “same impression” as the original. One is reminded more of Hollywood, or of Disney (in fact, it is this orchestration that Stokowski directed for the soundtrack of the famous Fantasia). 2 In any case, no one today would go so far as to argue that it is the “same message,” the “same inspiration” as in Bach.
Whatever the case, Stokowski the arranger hides behind respect. He crosses out his own signature by erasing himself, pretending that he is only rendering a service. In this, he joins the chorus of all those who, in arrangement, see above all a function in the service of the original, which he is often summoned temporarily to replace.
Such a concept goes along with and justifies what we will have to call the decline of arrangement, a practice that Berlioz already regarded as a sometimes inevitable last resort and that, after him, sound recording would make even more unjustifiable: why orchestrate the organ, why reduce the orchestra to the piano, when the phonograph is capable of transporting and spreading everywhere what is in effect the original?
Thus, according to the article on “arrangement” by Malcolm Boyd in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), the decline of arrangement is due especially to two so-called external factors: on one hand, copyright, which forbids the adaptation and arrangement of protected musical works without prior permission from the author; on the other hand, radio and the gramophone, which “have largely replaced the piano transcription as a disseminator of the chamber, orchestral and operatic repertory.” I will not go back over the first of these “factors,” the legal one, which I am surprised at being so quickly described as “external.” As for the second one, it testifies to a concept of arrangement as a means of transmission, as a method of communication of the original, for which it is substituted from then on.
I will try to demonstrate to what extent such a (practical) concept of arrangement is the result of a wrong reading of its golden age, that is, the Romantic era. We will see on the contrary that, in Schumann or Liszt especially, the original and the arrangement are complementary, contiguous in their incompleteness and their distance from the essence of the work. And that this essence (the Idea, if you like), far from being given in advance, must remain always yet to come, at the (endless) end of the different adaptations. In other words: the essence of the work (in a certain sense: the original) is at the (endless) end rather than at the beginning. That also means that this essence or idea must, in order to remain yet to come, be able not to be assured, not to be proven; it must let itself be haunted by the threat of its disappearance. If there is a work (which must remain an hypothesis), it exists at the risk of arrangement.
It is from this Romantic moment that I will try to extract the critical (and not practical) necessity of arrangement. For although Romantic arrangement corresponds to a hyperbolic concept of the work, we must never lose sight of the fact that this is understood as an experience, or better: as a never completed test, always begun again. For the arrangers that Liszt and Schumann are, for these remarkable listeners who sign and write down their listenings, the Work is never already given: infinitely deferred, it oscillates between appropriation (translation) and disappropriation (criticism). That is why they have so much to tell us about the forces that are sleeping in our organs, covered over by the values of authenticity or respect. If we are to believe Liszt and Schumann, we might begin to envisage our listenings as writing, or even as rewriting.
Arrangement, then, will essentially be for us the paradigm of a critical, active relationship with works. Which, at least in music, do not exist as such before the eighteenth century.
True, the Latin word for work, opus, seems to embed this notion firmly in distant eras. But this word, before the meaning it ended up taking on in modern musical publishing (“Opus” number X of composer Y), did not signify simply or solely our “oeuvre.” The Latin opus is both the work and its result. So it is indeed the work in the sense of the work of art, but it is also the activity (the work underway in the sense of to be at work) that leads to the work. In a passage in the Musica that the Kapellmeister Nikolaus Listenius published in 1549 in Nuremberg,3 we find these two competing definitions: “practical music” [praktike], he writes, is expressed in an opus (in the sense of action, performance, work), although no opus (this time in the sense of work of art) remains after the performance; while “poetic music” [poietike], not content with practice [exercitio] alone, delivers after the work a “complete and finished” [consummatum et effectum] opus, that is, even after the death of the “maker” [artifice mortuo], a “perfect and absolute opus” [opus perfectum et absolutum]. Although this text (and especially this final expression) has often been interpreted as indicating the existence of a notion of a work independent of its performance and subsisting in itself, we must, however, wait until the end of the eighteenth century not only for this notion to be translated into musical life, but also for it to become little by little, over the course of the nineteenth century, a kind of regulating idea.4 And the consolidation of the notion of musical work went through faster or slower sedimentation depending on the country and on musical genres.
If we are to believe the testimony of Charles Burney, an English musicographer who traveled to Germany and the Netherlands in 1772, musical performance in Berlin was subject to surveillance on the part of the King of Prussia that foreshadows Berlioz’s attitude fifty years later:
In the opera house, as in the field, his majesty is such a rigid disciplinarian, that … if any of his Italian troops dare to deviate from strict discipline, by adding, altering, or diminishing a single passage in the parts they have to perform, an order is sent, de par le Roi, for them to adhere strictly to the notes written by the composer, at their peril.5
Now, for the English observer that Burney is, this attitude is not in the least self-evident: “That is why,” he writes, “music has not changed one iota in this country, since H.M. tolerates freedom in art no more than he does in matters of government.” We can understand the surprise and reservations felt by Burney—who had traveled through France and Italy two years before—if we measure how long it was before this law of fidelity to the work was imposed elsewhere, even in other parts of Germany. It is this kind of policing of performance that Berlioz, in The Art of Music and Other Essays, demands for Paris, under the guise of a discussion of the exotic and romanticized “musical customs” of China:
The Chinese lawmakers impose severe penalties, rightly, I think, not only on theater directors who stage K’ung Fu-tze’s operas badly, but also on singers who give unworthy performances of excerpts at concerts. … If a singer is judged guilty of the offense of desecration I have just mentioned, she is given a first warning by having her left ear cut off. If she repeats the mistake, she loses her right ear as a second warning.6
Berlioz himself admits that “Chinese law” in this case “seems too severe,” since “a perfect performance could hardly be expected from a singer who has no ears.” But, beyond the slightly facile humor grafted onto bogus exoticism, we can hear in these lines to what point surveillance of musical performance is a matter of ears. And above all, we can deduce from this that such a “law,” even in less drastic forms, did not exist in Paris or elsewhere. Berlioz’s Memoirs abound in remarks on such-or-such Parisian flutist who, so that he “could be heard,” transposed his part “to a higher octave, thus destroying the result the author had hoped for”; or else on the “first oboe” in the Dresden orchestra who, despite his “beautiful sound,” was reproached for his “old style,” that is to say, his “craze for doing trills and mordents,” which “outraged” Berlioz as an author directing his work.7
Italian musical life seems to have been the most resistant to the modern ideal of the work. As Liszt writes, testifying to his experience of the Italian public in his Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique:
We enjoy music and performance, the abstraction made from the poetic given: we never lose the singer into the character he represents: we always know perfectly that it is … Mr. Petrazzi and not Othello that we’re dealing with. Thus the Italians find it quite simple to applaud the actors after a thrust of the sword or during the most tragic scenes.8
In other words, the actor-singer does not so much play a role following the indications of the work; he is the character, especially since the role is thought up in the first place for a certain actor. That is why Gaetano Donizetti, in 1845, can write: “As for the subject [of an upcoming opera], I will do Onore vince Amore. Lablache [bass] is an old, respectable man of about sixty years. La Persiani [soprano] is a young woman under guardianship [etc.].”9
Even before the opera in question is written, it is already such or such a singer who is the character, instead of the role existing absolutely, as we would tend to think of it today, simply to be played as well as possible by the interpreter who embodies it. As soon as roles are thus destined for an actual singer before they even exist, as soon as they are indissolubly linked with interpreters (who are, moreover, by the same token, not yet simple intermediaries), we can see why every new performance of the opera, in another theater and with another company, is, if not a new creation, at least a labor of adjustments (aggiustamenti) sometimes leading to a considerable reorganization of the original material.10
The composer himself often entrusted these aggiustamenti to someone in whom he had confidence, a kind of authorial proxy. Thus a letter dated December 1843 bears witness to the way Donizetti felt he could entrust Mercadante with preparing a version of his opera Caterina Cornaro for Naples; he asks his on-site substitute purely and simply to appropriate the work: “Correct all the mistakes in my score, keep a watchful eye on my opera, do anything you deem useful with it—in the strongest sense of the word: add to the instrumentation, rewrite the instrumentation, lighten it, shorten, lengthen, transpose, in short: make it your own work.”11
Such an operative practice (since we cannot speak of a “work” here in the sense we understand the word today) was upheld longer in Italian opera than in other fields of European musical life. With the consequence that Berlioz describes ironically in The Art of Music and Other Essays: “Common sense would say that … the singers are there for the operas; the fact is just the other way around—the operas are there for the singers. A score must continually be fitted, recast, patched up, lengthened, or shortened” (58).
The distance is great between such a practice and our modern concept of the score, for which Liszt still had to fight in 1835 when he called for the foundation of a kind of Museum of Musical Works. These words of Liszt’s seem to say in advance what our vision, today, would be, about a “musical heritage”:
In the name of all musicians, in the name of art and social progress, we request … the foundation of a competition once every five years for religious, dramatic, and symphonic music. The best compositions in these three genres should be solemnly performed for a month at the Louvre, and then acquired and published at government expense. In other words—the foundation of a new MUSEUM.12
Respect for musical works, their preservation, their inclusion in a national heritage, subventions for the creation of musical works, competitions for composition: all these demands, whose novelty and pertinence in 1835 we can have some sense of, are now ours (even if they are periodically called into question). In fact, the eighth point that Liszt proposes describes very precisely the contemporary regime of our musical life:
Eighthly, the publication at low cost of the most remarkable works of all ancient and modern composers, from the Renaissance of music to the present day … could have the title MUSICAL PANTHEON. The biographies, essays, commentaries, and explanatory notes which should accompany it will make up a veritable ENCYCLOPEDIA of music.
Even if the notion of a musical work (the opus perfectum in the sense of Listenius) has existed for a long time, its implementation, or mise en oeuvre, if I may put it this way, was the result of a construction, of a museum edification that played out between 1770 (for Prussia) and 1850 (for Italy). We are its heirs, we who hear works today, who listen to “the” Magnificat by Bach, “the” Don Giovanni of Mozart (more or less well embodied on stage by one singer or another) …
So it is these works that direct, attract, or flesh out my desire for listening and my desire to make you hear them, that is to say to hear you hear. In a sense, there are nothing but works for us. Which are not necessarily written, notated, and signed by one single person (I listen to recordings, sounds, improvisations, sonorous pillagings …), but which are always works, to the precise extent that I want to rehear them and make you re-listen to them. Even (or especially) partially. My idea of a beautiful passage or a chosen excerpt can only be understood starting from the work itself.
When I get to speak to you again, soon, about arrangements as I dream of them for us, ever since the horizon opened by Liszt and Schumann, it will be in the sense of the arrangement of a work. But without enclosing them in a functionalist horizon.
We could attempt a systematic analysis of the various functions that arrangement is supposed to fulfill (I will do so only schematically, the better to forget them, in a way). Which would come down to sketching out a “systematics of deformation” of musical works, as Antoine Berman did for the translation of literary works.13 (The recurrent analogy between arrangement and translation still awaits us: I will return to it, with Liszt.)
Beyond its social or public functions of communication and diffusion (the work for orchestra is supposed to circulate more easily in a piano reduction), we should analyze other functions of arrangement, such as those we might call clarifying and corrective.
The extreme example of clarification is that of the “setting words to the music” to which a number of works by Mozart or Beethoven were subject. Thus the musical theoretician Jérôme-Joseph Momigny proposed, in his Cours complet d’harmonie et de composition published between 1803 and 1806, an “analysis” of the String Quartet in D Minor by Mozart (K. 421), which consisted notably in grafting words (here, a dialogue between Dido and Aeneas) onto the instrumental phrases, in order to explain their metric structure, but also their “true expression.”14 There is in this a kind of modern equivalent of the medieval trope, as when they grafted words to certain long melismata (like those in the Alleluia), in order to make them easier to memorize, or to make them clearer.15 From a strictly legal point of view, we might speak rather of adaptations.
The most famous example of deformation of a work, one related by Berlioz, is undoubtedly that of Castil-Blaze wreaking havoc on Weber’s Freischütz. In his Memoirs (chapter 16), Berlioz speaks of a Freischütz that was “mutilated, vulgarized, tortured and insulted in a thousand ways by an arranger,” by a “veterinary musician.” As Mozart’s Magic Flute had been, several years previously, when a certain Ludwig Wenceslas Lachnith had produced a French version of it under the title Les Mystères d’Isis (1801). Berlioz, despite his indignation, gives a rather exact description of the deformations wrought by Lachnith:
He stuck a few bars on to the end of the overture …, turned the soprano part of a chorus into a bass aria, adding a few bars of his own; transplanted the wind instruments from one scene to another; changed the air and altered the instrumental accompaniment in Sarastro’s glorious aria; manufactured a song out of the slaves’ chorus, O cara armonia; and converted a duet into a trio. (Memoirs, 61)
Lengthening, remix, trope, vocal redistribution …: all these interventions of the arranger aim at facilitating the communication, that is to say the circulation, of the work in a foreign country, in French opera houses. Berlioz places these deformations on the same level as those performed on theatrical works by translators-adaptors, using an analogy that Liszt, a few years later, would take up and give an entirely different import:
Mozart was assassinated by Lachnith; Weber, by Castil-Blaze …; Molière and Corneille were cut by unknowns, familiars of the Théâtre-Français; Shakespeare, finally, is still performed in England, in versions by Cibber and some others.16
After having been adaptation, parolisation, translation (in the weakest sense of a French version), after making a past or foreign work conform to the taste of the day in a supposed national culture (like the musical counterpart of what Antoine Berman calls “ethnocentric translation”), arrangement for Berlioz would serve the function of preservation: for him it would be a matter, when he becomes an arranger in turn, of avoiding the worst. Arrangement ensures a philological and normative function, as testified by this episode of the Memoirs, which we have already read in part, where Berlioz tells why he accepted work on the Freischütz (chapter 62):
The feeling which had urged me to insist on the preservation of Weber’s work in its integrity, a feeling which many would call fetishism, removed all pretext for the manipulations, derangements, suppressions, and corrections, which otherwise would have been eagerly made (345; emphasis mine).
However, the restorative function of Berlioz’s type of arrangement would soon be outflanked, by clashing with the logic it was trying to counter. For, despite all his precautions, Berlioz could not avoid getting caught up in the deforming tendencies in which he had dipped his fingers, though he did so with the best intentions in the world. So we can understand why Berlioz did not want “to be named as author of these recitatives.” By refusing to sign, by conferring on his arrangement an essential museum function, Berlioz anticipated the decline of this practice, which would accelerate at the end of the nineteenth century. What’s more, with phonography, all the so-called communicational functions of arrangement would become moot: no more need to transcribe a symphony for piano so it can be listened to at home …
You will remember that what we had grasped, when listening to Bach-Stokowski, was something else, which didn’t have anything to do with the motivations of Stokowski himself when he claimed to be making a practical contribution to the diffusion of Bach, that is to say, to make a replacement for Bach for those who had no access to the organ. This other thing, this strength unique to arrangement that remains when we forget its functions, Liszt found a name for, at least by analogy: he calls it translation. But in an entirely different sense, as you will see, from that of adaptations and other French-version castilblazades. This word, this fine word “translation,” if we read it and listen to it with the attention it deserves, here has quite different resonances from those it had in Berlioz’s text. Liszt wrote, in his preface to his transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies (Rome, 1835): “I will be satisfied if I have accomplished the task of an intelligent engraver, the conscientious translator, who grasps the spirit of a work along with the letter.” And again, this time speaking about his piano version of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique: “I scrupulously tried, as if it were a matter of translating a sacred text, to carry over to the piano, not only the musical framework of the symphony, but also the effects and the details.”17
Indeed, Liszt seems sometimes also to take refuge behind the public usefulness of his work, thus denying arrangements all the value peculiar to them: “Arrangements for Piano … are not without some advantage, although regarded intrinsically, they are for the most part of mediocre value,” he writes in the same preface. And elsewhere (but this is at bottom the flip side of the same idea), he asserts that a bad transcription—a kind of defective copy—while blurring the clean-cut outlines of the original, still fulfills a certain function: “The worst lithography,” he writes, “the most incorrect translation, still gives a vague idea of the genius of the Michelangelos and Shakespeares.”
By thus inscribing arrangement in a series of analogies that confirm in return its devalued status as simple intermediary, Liszt summons up a long tradition, a whole procession of discourses that, from Du Bellay to Montesquieu and beyond (to mention only the French versions), condemns translation as a derivative activity without its own originality. Thus Du Bellay wrote, in the first book of his Deffense et illustration de la langue françoyse of 1549: “So he who wishes to produce valuable work in his own vernacular, let him give over this labor of translating, principally the poets, to those who rightly win more modesty than glory from such a laborious and unprofitable, I would even dare to say useless, thing, one even harmful to the development of their language.”
Translation, then, has long been contrasted with making a work [faire oeuvre]. Longer, in any case, than arrangement, which didn’t experience a similar devaluation until much later on: we can find hardly any traces of it before the nineteenth century (which can probably be explained by the history of the notion of the musical work and by the history of copyright, where literature has long preceded music in the construction of authorial values of originality).
Then how should we understand this parallel between arrangement and translation? Is it a simple figure of speech? One that seems just as paradoxical here, placed as it is as an inscription to the wonderful transcriptions by Liszt, as that of the selfeffacement found in so many translators’ prefaces …
We could think, in any case, that this parallel lacks the specificity of music, that it does not take into account its difference from the arts of languages, and that it thus hardly deserves prolonged attention. It might at the very most interest lawyers, who, even today, classify arrangements, adaptations, and translations in the category of derivative works—that is to say, derived from the original. But what does it have to say to us today? Didn’t Hanslick write, in his famous essay On the Beautiful in Music, that music “is a language that we understand and speak, but that is impossible for us to translate”?18 And if, according to Hanslick, the “ideal element” of music is only “sonorous order,” if it is never “a notion that is then translated by sounds,”19 what can Liszt’s analysis signify, then? The very possibility of translation seems to suppose a distinction between the letter and a meaning that goes beyond it: it is the meaning one translates, the letter remaining forever untranslatable. From then on, supposing that this distinction is lacking in music (especially in so-called “pure” or “absolute” instrumental music), Liszt has produced only a purely superficial comparison.
But that is not the case. And Liszt, despite the quotation from his preface I have just given you to read, makes a definite exception for arrangers, when they set out to talk about their “labor.” That is why this musician of musicians, as much by his discourse as by his work on the music of others, will lead us to understand our listenings differently. For, even if we grant Hanslick his formalistic presuppositions before the term was invented (his essay was written in 1854), even if we think that the “meaning” of music is musical through and through—thus that it cannot be separated from its letter—the fact is that thinking about arrangement by way of the mirror of translation opens up beautiful perspectives to us listeners. That is what I would like to convince you of.
I have said that I love arrangers; and it’s probably for the same reasons that I love translators. I always have the impression, in fact, of reading them in the process of reading, of reading their reading of a work. They sign their reading just as arrangers sign their listening. And that is why every reflection on reading—on what it is to read a text—should include the question of translation.20 That is also why arrangers have so many things to tell us about our listening to a work. About what listening means; and about what we can understand by the work. Literally.
Before I return to Liszt—before we continue reading his preface and listening to him at his trade, in the process of writing down his hearing of the Beethoven symphonies—a few words, then on translators. And on their long history as a story of suspense.
After Du Bellay, it is still the same process that is seemingly depicted by Montesquieu in 1721, in this dialogue in the Persian Letters between a geometrician and a translator;21 the latter says to the former:
“I have a great piece of news to tell you: I have just presented my Horace to the public.” “What!” the geometrician said, “he lived two thousand years ago.” “You don’t understand me,” the other continued: “It is a translation of that ancient author that I have just given birth to; I have spent twenty years on the translations.” “What! Sir,” the geometrician said, “it’s been twenty years since you last thought anything? You speak for others, and they think for you? … I have as much respect as anyone else for the sublime geniuses that you have within you. But you don’t resemble them in the least: for, if you always translate, others will never translate you. … You want, you say, to make these illustrious dead live again among us, and I confess that you do indeed give them a body; but you do not give them back their life: a spirit to animate them is always lacking.”
If I briefly evoke a few of these attacks on translators, if I amplify the implicit resonances with which Liszt composes when he inscribes arrangement next to translation, it is in order to outline the progression of the line, the connecting thread that will accompany us when I question the practice of arrangement. This thread—which we have to follow, I think, to understand something about our listenings—is stretched, so to speak, between two opposite polarizations of one single idea, which is expressed in a way by the geometrician in the Persian Letters: if you always translate, others will never translate you. It is in fact this same saying that we find, with a change of polarity, in the discourse on translation that has perhaps given rise to the most commentaries: that of Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator.” This is a major text that completely revolutionizes our thinking about translation, if at least we understand it in a certain way.
Benjamin writes:
The higher the level of a work, the more does it remain translatable even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly. This, of course, applies to originals only. Translations, on the other hand, prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty, but because of the looseness with which meaning attaches to them.22 (emphasis mine)
Here we find Montesquieu’s geometrician’s formula, but strangely shifted: translation is in effect untranslatable (people do not translate translators), but now this is no longer so, as in The Persian Letters, because it lacks “spirit”; on the contrary, one could say, paraphrasing Benjamin, it is untranslatable because at bottom, in relation to an original that is full of meaning, it reveals that, already in this original, the “meaning” or the “spirit” is not the essential thing. Translation, then, is nothing more than “body,” almost. Because it has only a particularly fleeting relationship with “meaning” (with the “spirit”). And, precisely, that is not its weakness, but rather its own strength.
Let’s try to understand this singular strength of translation, so that later on, we can approach the strength of arrangement.
Benjamin writes:
No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change. Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process. (73)
In other words, translation is possible only because the original needs to be transformed in order to survive. In an “afterlife” worthy of that name. And Benjamin stresses that this transformation or deformation, this plasticity of the original, is not due to the arbitrary nature or “subjectivity” of one translator or another; it is not the skill or awkwardness of translators that causes the original to be distorted, but rather “the very life of language and its works” (73). The original is plastic because it is made of language. And because this language lives. From then on, translation is not a “sterile equation of two dead languages”; on the contrary, it is the sign of “the maturing process of the original language.”
If, in fact, the original survives in a language that continues to live, by that very fact it becomes foreign to its own language: think of a text written in “Old French” … But this becoming-foreign of the original does not wait for centuries: it affects its language from the beginning. Benjamin does not indeed express it that way, but his text calls for this reading: namely, that the original, in order to survive and by surviving, demands to be translated into its “own” language become “alien.” And, after that, translation only reveals an essential instability of the original, notably in what it “intends” (76).
Benjamin seems to say that the “intention”—that is to say, if you like, the “meaning” or the “spirit”—is not already there in the original: it is rather somewhere on the horizon, at the (endless) end of its afterlife in languages. At the endless end of its translations:
In the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found in relative independence …; rather, it is in a constant state of flux—until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention. Until then, it remains hidden in the languages. (74)
Translation does not aim for meaning, then, since meaning is waiting, in suspense [en souffrance], endlessly deferred; it cannot aim for what it must, on the contrary, leave to be desired. In a translation, unlike in the original, the letter does not in essence refer to a meaning; it is rather a relationship of language to language. And it is here that Benjamin radically shifts the notion of translation; for if, for him as well as for so many others, the translator has nothing of his own to say, that is precisely his strength, the originality of his “labor.” He is not uttering something, he is not moved by a meaning-to-say [vouloir-dire]; he speaks about languages [il parle des langues, also meaning “he speaks various languages”], he is conveying something of the relationship among several languages. And in that, positively, he leaves something to be desired. Because, for Benjamin, translation “is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages” (75).
That is why, moreover, good translation, according to Benjamin, must not erase the resistance of the letter to make way for meaning; it should not substitute for the original, but on the contrary let it be desired in the strangeness of its language:
The greatest praise one can make of a translation is not that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. Rather, the significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that, from the work [aus dem Werke], the great longing [Sehnsucht] for linguistic complementation [Sprachergänzung] can speak. A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original. (79 [translation modified])
Transparency, according to Benjamin, has nothing to do, then, with the “readability” of a translation, with its ease of reading. It is rather what, in it, leaves to be desired by making the reader pause.
What is to be desired?
Incompleteness, fragmentation: that of translation, but also that of the original, inasmuch as both summon the complementarity of the other language. Benjamin in fact says that “in all language and linguistic creations,” there remains “something that cannot be communicated” (79). The incommunicable that is at issue here is obviously not meaning. In the case of the original, this incommunicable is the “symbolizing” (79). That is, in another vocabulary, the signifier, the letter. The literality of the original is thus its incommunicable. Now, “in the evolving of languages,” that is, in the movement of translation, this incommunicable becomes the “symbolized.” In other words, what translation signifies or represents, what it makes a sign toward in any case, is this literality of the original. Which can be read or understood only from its translation. It is this translation that lets the original be desired as “pure language,” that is to say, as pure literality. Translation is not the restoration of the original; it expresses on the contrary its literal pending nature [la souffrance à la lettre], by tearing it away from its fastening or mooring, from the weightiness of its meaning. It is up to translation, according to Benjamin, to “extract” this literal “ultimate essence” from meaning to express it:
To turn the symbolizing into the symbolized … is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. In this pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything …—all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished. (80)
By making a kind of sacred text that is no longer intent on communicating something, translation, and it alone, “symbolizes” the letter of the original. It signifies it, represents it, or says it literally. That is why, faced with the original, translation is the letter of its letter.
In the remarkable reading he gave of “The Task of the Translator,” Paul de Man—especially when he comments on the passage about which I emphasized a change of polarity of the phrasing in the Persian Letters—says almost the same thing:
In a strange way, translation canonizes its own version, making it more canonical than the original was. That the original was not purely canonical is obvious from the fact that it requires translation: it could not be definitive since it can be translated. But, says Benjamin, you cannot translate a translation. … You can translate only an original. Translation canonizes, fixes an original, while demonstrating a mobility in it, an instability that one had not immediately noticed.23
Thus, the original would not have been the original (in the canonical or sacred sense of the word) without translation, which it summons. The original, in order to be what it literally is, is in need of translation. But, on the other hand, it is mobilized, forced to let this instability that was its own become understood. The original gives itself to the letter only through the translation that opens it up and carries it away.
Benjamin doesn’t say a word about music—that is not his intention—although certain metaphors in his text seem to evoke it.24 However, our reading continues to be magnetized, subliminally, by musical listening. And by this writing down of listening that is arrangement. So it is time to take Liszt’s analogy seriously; to take it at its word, literally, rather than as a simple metaphor.
Let us listen to Liszt, let us listen to his arrangements from the immense perspective opened up by Benjamin.
With one hand, I open the orchestral score of the fourth movement (“The Tempest” [of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony]). And, with the other, I open the piano transcription of it written by Liszt.
In Liszt, I come first of all, without even looking at the notes, upon a mass of instrumental indications: Tutti, “bassoon,” “clarinet” … In these names of instruments destined for the pianist alone, the absent orchestra is noted everywhere.
We could think that these words are put there as dynamic or articulatory indications; they might in a way be synonyms, intended for the pianist, for piano, staccato, dolce, and so on … Tutti might mean fortissimo, “clarinet” might mean legato; in one case, you would have to play with the cumulative power of the entire orchestra and, in the other, link the notes together as a wind instrument would do in one single breath. But the usual notations (fortissimo, slurs …) are also present. They are, so to speak, redoubled by the names of the absent instruments. If they specify a nuance or a phrasing, if they give shape (and we will see what kind of shape) to more abstract indications, that would not be the only reason for these inscriptions.
Nor are these inscriptions a function similar to the one they could have in the piano reduction of an opera. A reduction is in effect mainly destined for a practical use, for example to help singers rehearse without using the entire orchestra every time; and so we can understand why, for the very reason of its function, it must include the exact identification of one solo instrument or another preparing the way for the singing voice, or the voice conversing with it. There is nothing like that here, in what we should rather describe as a transcription (a word that, as we will see, Liszt implicitly contrasts with arrangement or reduction). What’s more, in a letter to a certain Adolphe Pictet25—which foreshadows the very words of the preface that we have begun to read—Liszt goes even further; speaking of his very first transcription, that of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, he writes, “I gave my work the title of Piano Score [Partition de piano] in order to make more obvious the intention to follow the orchestra step by step.”
By baptizing his transcription “piano score” (instead of score for piano), Liszt implicitly removes it from any kind of utilitarian perspective; moreover, his title, whose importance he himself stresses, obviously evokes what we currently call an orchestral score [une partition d’orchestre]. His “partition de piano” is thus a kind of orchestral score on the piano. That is why, in the Pastoral Symphony as well as in the Fantastique that preceded it, the names are signs of absence; they imply the inscription of the absence of or desire for the original in the hollow of the transcription. They literally create longing (Sehnsucht, “yearning,” Benjamin would say) for its many instruments.
But they also say something about the subject of the pianist himself who is about to interpret them. They are like a question aimed at him. Alfred Brendel, in a text devoted to Liszt’s arrangements and paraphrases,26 wondered: “How can one reproduce the timbre of other instruments on the piano?” That is indeed what the names of the absent instruments seem to ask here.
Brendel’s answer says a lot about the plasticity of a body summoned to interpret the lack: “I get the sound of the oboe”—the sound that Liszt seems to ask for by indicating Ob. at measure 19—“by rounding out and curling up my fingers (which almost makes the bones stick out) and by playing poco legato.” The instrumental and interpretative body lets itself be shaped here by the wish to be these absent sonorous bodies.
The body that shapes transcription is thus plastic. As is also (I had suggested this about Bach-Stokowski) our listening to an arrangement, torn between two parallel lines, one present and the other ghostly or spectral: our listening is stretched, stretched to breaking point like a rubber band, between the transcription and the original. That is to say, here, in Liszt, between the piano score and the orchestral score.
This tension is present in every arrangement, even the most simplistic or the kitschiest. But the remarkable thing about Liszt’s transcription, what makes it unique in the vast corpus of arrangements in general, is that it continually notes, in its very wording, this state of lability or instability. Thus, in certain measures of his transcription of the Pastoral Symphony,27 Liszt gives, one over the other, two possible versions for the corresponding orchestral passage. Ossia, we read on the score: an Italian term (“also”) that, in Liszt’s time, usually designated the existence of a less difficult instrumental way to perform the piece (the term is used often in pedagogical works). But Liszt’s ossia is inexplicable here in exclusively technical terms, just on the level of interpretation and its difficulties. The second version is technically more difficult; and moreover, when the same orchestral passage returns later on identically, Liszt no longer uses the ossia and keeps only the most difficult of the two versions.28
So we must look for the reason for these variations elsewhere than in pianistic technique: once again, as for the dynamic and instrumental indications, the coexistence of two competing versions cannot be explained in terms of function. Ossia, taken literally, is useless.
It would seem rather that, faced with an orchestral complexity that is materially irreducible to the piano and to two hands,29 faced with a physical or surgical limit, Liszt has in a way compensated for the impossible by multiplying the possibilities. The symphonic original being here more distant or more absent than ever, Liszt tries to let it be heard (or let it be desired) between the lines of his versions. I do not know of any other example of a transcriber knowingly giving several simultaneous versions of his original: by this writing down of a plural listening, Liszt becomes an exception among arrangers.
As to his discourse (his preface and his letters), he indeed often engages in the classic process of functionalization and devaluation, in the lineage of traditional concepts of arrangement or translation. However, the preface, at second glance, reverses the previous process. And it does so by seemingly changing the subject, by no longer talking about arrangement itself, but about the arranger’s instrument, namely the piano: “But,” writes Liszt, “the extension acquired by the Piano in recent times, due to progress in performance and the perfecting of the mechanism, allows us to do more, better than had been done before now.” In other words, it is indeed a mutation of bodies—of the instrumental body as well as the interpretative body—that opens new possibilities to translate music to the letter:
By the unlimited development of its harmonic power, the Piano tends more and more to assimilate to itself all orchestral compositions. In the space of its seven octaves, it can produce, with few exceptions, all the features, all the combinations … and leaves to the orchestra no other superiorities (although these are, it is true, immense) than those of the diversity of timbres and the effects of the massed forces.
With the progress of organology, Liszt has thus been able to translate the Pastoral. Or rather to incorporate it, to appropriate it into its own body, while still giving it a tension, an elasticity that it had never had before. Liszt, to use Paul de Man’s phrase, did indeed “canonize” the Pastoral, but he did this by revealing in it, with his ossia, an unsuspected mobility. It is this instability of the work that I would like to preserve always by having you listen to my listenings: in order to let you desire the pure language of a symphony that, before us, before both of us, was never heard literally.
But this strict appropriation is possible only from the transcription conceived as the transfer and reinscription of the music in another body. The experience or ordeal of the work’s tension (an entirely different thing from its simple presence) is at play here in this coming-and-going: between a letter and the body that it becomes via a foreign body. This can be, as it is here, the knowing and virtuoso body of the pianist; but this can also be, as you will see, our body, as soon as it is fitted out with the instruments of listening that are our phonographic prostheses.
By following Liszt at work, have we broken away from a substitutive (because functional) concept of arrangement? Have we broken our face-to-face confrontation with the work? I think that we have triangulated it. Between Beethoven and me there is Liszt the listener, reinscribing his listenings for the piano. And I listen to him listening.
Similarly, between my selected extracts and you, I am there. With my machines, with my listener’s instruments prolonging my ears, with my body equipped. And, from you to me, we begin now to turn the work and its listening into an experience. To hear hearing: it is from this reduplication that something like a critical moment of listening arises.
Schumann, to whom I turn now, seems to have perceived this, in his own way.
Schumann was also a music critic (he founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, of which he became the sole editor and owner in 1835). In December 1833, an article he published in the literary journal Kommet explicitly linked music criticism to the idea of the perfectibility of works: “The critic should hide nothing!” he wrote; “all artistic attempts are approximate; there is no work of art that is not capable of being improved.”30
Schumann seems to suggest thus that a work is not given immediately in all its completeness: but that on the contrary it awaits, it summons, criticism (and I will add: arrangement). In this he may go even further than Liszt, to whom he always paid the warmest tribute by lauding the piano version of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique: “Liszt worked on this reduction with so much ardor and enthusiasm that it should be considered an original work. … In these conditions, the reduction for piano can be heard boldly alongside the orchestral performance itself.”31
Arrangement here becomes an “original work,” which still does not impose itself in place of the original, but can be heard alongside it. The status of arrangement that is thus outlined is difficult to label: it is that of a work, indeed, but one that seems destined to run alongside the other, its model. To follow it without being subordinate to it, but also without being completely detached from it: a kind of alliance, like a shadow that, while still remaining linked to the body whose silhouette it is, has acquired a certain autonomy in its movements.
It is this strange shadow that interests me: it is this that can lead us toward a certain Romantic concept of arrangement, in the strong sense of music criticism in music.
That arrangement (transcribing, writing based on …) disturbs and questions the work (of the arranged as well as of the arranger) is what Schumann could suggest better than any other on the subject of his “own” Six Concert Etudes After Paganini Caprices (op. 10); he writes, in 1836: “I am giving an opus number [eine Opuszahl] to these etudes, because the publisher told me they would make their way better that way … a reason that made all my objections fall away.” 32 Schumann did not want to regard his Six Etudes as a work “composed after.” He objected, he says, to seeing them counted as an opus, but ended up deferring to his publisher’s arguments. But, while crediting it to his work, this editorial comment notes, discreetly and almost secretly (like a cipher or a code), the undecidability of its status. We don’t really know how to attribute the operation to which Schumann gives himself over here “based on” Paganini; we can only attribute it to an “unknown greatness”: “But in silence,” Schumann continues, “I looked at the X [the opus number 10 that has now become a Roman numeral and a capital letter] as the sign of the unknown greatness (the x) and the composition … as authentically Paganinian [eine echte Paganinische].”
Everything is at stake here in the capital letter, in the shift to capital, in capitalization. When the number 10 is changed into the letter X, it gains in greatness (majesty of the majuscule) as well as in its indeterminacy, in a particularly dense context rich in implicit allusions. What is at stake here?
Schumann, in a parenthesis we should reread, had written precisely this: “But in silence I looked at the number X (for I am not yet at the ninth muse) as the sign of unknown greatness (the x).” This parenthesis is complex, in its allusive overdetermination. It is of capital importance for the way it implies a Romantic concept of arrangement; so we should linger over it a little.
The Muses, daughters of Zeus, are, we know, nine in number: they traditionally represent the division of the “liberal arts” into nine figures, under the protection of Apollo (called “Musagetes,” Leader of the Muses). Now Schumann has projected this division and difference in the arts (and he is not alone in doing so; Wagner will do it also) onto the nine symphonies of Beethoven. This he has done in 1836, the very year of the publication of the article on the Six Etudes, op. X, in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. In this “Monument to the Glory of Beethoven,” Schumann writes:
If I were a prince, I would build him a temple in the style of Palladio: there would be ten statues there. … I want nine statues along with his own, the number of the Muses, since that is also the number of his symphonies: Cleo would represent the Heroica, Thalia the Fourth, Euterpe the Pastorale, and so on, and he himself would be the divine Musagetes.
If, according to a process that Schumann only outlines here (and that Wagner would later systematize in The Art-Work of the Future), each of Beethoven’s symphonies can be associated with one of the arts, the number X is charged with resonances that, for readers of Schumann, could not not be heard. How can we not see in it, in fact, the echo of an unknown, dreamt-of post-Ninth? How can we not see lurking, between these discreet lines of Schumann’s on his arrangement “based on” Paganini, the ghost of an impossible Tenth, as if forbidden in advance (and made all the more desirable) by the famous Ninth that, by opening the instrumental symphony to language and to the singing voice, also opened up musical Romanticism as such?
The post-Ninth (IX + I) was the impossible and endlessly unfinished task of this musical Romanticism. (Think of, among so many others, Mahler, who would leave his Tenth in a fragmented state …). By making the words of Schiller’s language enter the sphere of so-called “pure” music, Beethoven’s Ninth and its final ode to joy undermined a certain difference in the arts and a certain distinction of genres. What would come afterwards was the unknown: the x, small or great.
For Wagner, this would be the monumental work uniting all the arts; it would be the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art-work” (as the accepted translation expresses it) that would come to replace the seemingly unsurpassable compositional summit of the “last symphony.”33 But for Schumann—the musician who, more than any other, grasped a certain fragmentary requirement stemming from the first literary Romanticism (that of Jena and the Athenaeum)—this x seems to signify something entirely different from a monumental replacement. For Schumann, who was also a music critic, the post-Ninth unknown could be a new relationship with works and with time: a relationship based on. A “minor” relationship, a relationship of arrangement. For Schumann (at least in this context, all of whose consequences he surely did not grasp), arrangement is the “unknown greatness” coming to rest in the space between the work and the Work: an essentially critical space, if it is true that it is the task of criticism to try to complete the movement of the work toward its Idea.
What Schumann registers here, in these paragraphs devoted to a minor work (as arrangement always is, faced with uppercase Music), is the strong Romantic sense of arrangement: the sense that sets arrangement alongside the ideal work and the impossible (the Work). Remote from its (too obvious) function of dissemination (before the days of recording), a certain Romantic arrangement can be heard only from the abyss between the work and the Work. By noting the distance that always keeps the work just short of the Work, arrangement posits the Work as an ideal that remains still to be unveiled or developed beyond the work. As its Idea. That is how Schumann can explain that, in his op. X, he sought something completely different from his previous op. 3 (which also gathered together Etudes for the Piano Based on Paganini’s Violin Caprices):
I had, perhaps to its detriment, copied the original almost note for note, and limited myself to completing it from the harmonic standpoint, except that this time I set aside the pedantry of a textual transcription, and wanted the present transcription [the op. X] to give the impression of an autonomous piano composition, which would make one forget its violin origin, without the work losing any of its poetic Idea. (234; emphasis mine)
In other words, by this strange operation of “Schumann” (whose nature as a work remains and must remain unknown, despite all the editorial remarks that try to attest to it), the arranger this time intends opus X to be able to extract, from all its original contingencies, something like the Work and its Idea. By aiming for the Idea behind the letter, Schumann continues, tries to complete the movement of the work toward the Work that Paganini had only outlined:
Paganini himself must make his talent as a composer ring out louder than his eminent genius as virtuoso. Although one can also, at least in the present day, not be wholly in agreement with him on this, there appears, in his compositions, especially in the violin caprices … so many diamonds that the richest ornamentation demanded by the piano could only strengthen them, far from making them fade away. (234)
Arrangement, according to (or after Schumann), is thus a critique of music in music. In the precise sense that Friedrich Schlegel had in mind when he wrote in the Athenaeum, “Poetry can be critiqued only by poetry. A judgment about art that is not itself a work of art … has no validity in the realm of art.” Like literary criticism, like translation too, as they were thought of in early Jena romanticism,34 arrangement according to Schumann aims for the completion of the work toward (in) the Work, according to an infinite process that is that of the Idea. And it is essential that this criticism not only remain undecidable in its “own” status as work (as opus), but that it also disturb the established distinction of artistic genres (especially the border between music and language).
It is starting from this heritage of Romanticism that we can begin to think about such a thing as active, critical listening. It is in this space, so opened, that I dream of hearing us listen.
But a certain historical paradox has willed it that, at the very moment when this heritage was explicitly recognized, at the very moment when the practice of arrangement had elevated status conferred on it, its outlines were confused to the point of blurring, dissolving, erasing its identity and its “own” strength. Ferruccio Busoni, composer and virtuoso pianist, (self-)proclaimed heir of Liszt, is both one of the great craftsmen and the symptom of this transformation in which the decline of arrangement began in the very moment of its glory.
In a text symbolically entitled “The Value of Arrangement,”35 published in Berlin in November 1910, Busoni seems in fact to recognize arrangement as having an important and legitimate status; but he does so only by driving it back to composition, that is to say by minimizing, even by denying its tension vis-à-vis an actual work:
I came to think that every notation is already the transcription of an abstract invention. From the instant the pen takes hold of it, the idea loses its original feature. … The invention [Einfall] becomes a sonata, or a concerto: it is already an arrangement of the original. From this first transcription to the second, the step is, by comparison, minimal and insignificant. In general, however, it is only to the second that great importance is attached. And we lose sight, after that, of the fact that a transcription does not destroy the original version, thus that there is no degradation. … For the musical work of art exists before having sounded and after it has resounded, it is there complete and intact. It is both in time and outside of time.
By making the musical work into something timeless, an Idea that is somehow embodied in time, as if only intermittently, Busoni forbids in advance the gesture that constituted the “unique” strength of arrangement. For the Idea, here, precedes the work; and from then on, if arrangement seems to raise itself to the rank of composition, this is simply because it shares its imperfection, its original sin. This perspective is entirely different from the one we can imagine after Schumann and a certain Liszt. The difference, seemingly minimal and yet abyssal, goes from the original defect to the defect of origin. On one hand, in Busoni, the Idea is a prerequisite that notation (composing or arranging) can grasp only imperfectly. And, on the other, it remains forever yet to come, receding to the horizon, at the endless end of arrangements and rewritings that reserve the possibility of its survival. Nachleben [literally, “to live after”], said Benjamin—a German word whose active sense the English “survive” conveys poorly.
Paradoxically, there is in Busoni, in this text that is probably the greatest hymn ever written to the glory of arrangers, a foreshadowing of the decline of this activity, one that would become more and more secondary, if not impossible. At least in the framework of a Western tradition that has been called “scholarly.” It is this movement of decline, this atrophy, that continues in Schoenberg, who countered with the firmest rejection possible of the arrangement Busoni offered him of his piece for piano, op. 11, no. 2.36
As Adorno wrote:
When Busoni … eagerly seized on a piece for piano by Schoenberg (op. 11, no. 2), he ended up with a virtuoso caricature; not only, as a common argument that is too easily pleased with progress would have it, because “we are still too close to Schoenberg,” not only because the “concertante interpretation” by Busoni in fact considerably lacks fidelity to the text; but because this piece for the piano fully preserves only what Schoenberg himself wanted to say; because it thus confirms in such a suitable way that it does not tolerate, out of principle, interpretative liberty, not to mention the arbitrariness of an arranger. Neither today, nor later on.37
As soon as arrangement is no longer the equation by which the work = X, either it offers itself in respect for the original, or it is on the side of composition pure and simple. In both cases, its critical force is lost; we are alone, in a confrontation with works that fulfill the other great Romantic impulse that musical modernity has inherited (precisely by blocking out the former, by closing up the space of an operative plasticity): we touch the ultimate point of an affirmation of the values of authenticity and authorship. And it is at that exact moment that Music, endowed with a capital letter that has nothing uncertain about it, becomes “hard to understand.”
“Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Hard to Understand?” is the title of an article published by Alban Berg in 1924.38 As for the diagnosis that this title pronounces (and that the article explains by justifying it), at bottom nothing has changed (or so little has). We have only to read the recent statements of a musician like Steve Reich: “The mailman will never whistle Schoenberg. … His music (and all music that resembles his) will always inhabit a kind of ‘dark little corner,’ isolated from the history of all the music in the World.”39
But it is perhaps not so much a question of “understanding” Schoenberg (which would come down, as a prejudice still widely held today has it, to deciding whether or not his music has a “meaning”); it is a question of whether or not one is able to appropriate it. We have, then, to translate Schoenberg: not in the sense of making him legible, of acclimating his language to a supposedly more familiar language; but in Benjamin’s sense of translation, that of opening up a space of complementarity (better: of tension) among several languages. And perhaps we even have to take listening to his music (to the music) away from any horizon ruled by an analogy with language, in order to think of it rather, along with a certain Liszt, as the plastic play of several bodies.
In other words, it is a question of sending it, from me to you, in a movement that is not that of hermeneutic comprehension, or that of a virtuous offering; but that of a reinscription in bodies. Which supposes that we others, who do not play the piano (or who seldom play it), can learn, with our phonographic listening instruments, to be equal to the authentic task of translators. Better: transducers.