Proust's Songbook: Songs and Their Uses

By Jennifer Rushworth

In Proust’s Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Instead of focusing on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, as is common in Proust musical studies, Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust’s opus. Her work analyzes the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Rushworth presents detailed readings of five moments of song in À la recherche du temps perdu, highlighting the songs’ significance by paying close attention to their lyrics, music, composers, and histories.

Rushworth interprets these episodes through theoretical reflections on song and voice, drawing particularly from the works of Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes. She argues that songs in Proust’s novel are connected and resonate with one another across the different volumes yet also shows how song for Proust is a solo, amateur, and intimate affair. In addition, she points to Proust’s juxtapositions of songs with meditations on the notion of “mauvaise musique” (bad music) to demonstrate the existence of a blurred boundary between songs that are popular and songs that are art.

According to Rushworth, a song for Proust has a special relation to repetition and memory due to its typical brevity and that song itself becomes a mode of resistance in À la Recherche—especially on the part of characters in the face of family and familial expectations. She also defines the songs in Proust’s novel as songs of farewell—noting that to sing farewell is a means to resist the very parting that is being expressed—and demonstrates how songs, in formal terms, resist the forward impetus of narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781512825978

Jennifer Rushworth

Jennifer Rushworth is Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at UCL.

Book preview

Proust’s Songbook

SOUND IN HISTORY

Emma Dillon, Series Editor

Proust’s Songbook

Songs and Their Uses

Jennifer Rushworth

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Extracts from Marcel Proust, Letters to the Lady Upstairs, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2017 Lydia Davis.

Extracts from Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days, reprinted by permission of Hesperus Press © 2004 Andrew Brown.

Extracts from Marcel Proust, Selected Letters, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1983–2000 Ralph Manheim, Terence Kilmartin, and Joanna Kilmartin.

Extract from Richard Stokes, The Book of Lieder, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd © 2005 Richard Stokes.

Extracts from Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast, reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House UK: The Way by Swann’s © 2002 Lydia Davis; In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower © 2002 James Grieve; The Guermantes Way © 2002 Mark Treharne; The Prisoner and The Fugitive © 2002 Carol Clark and Peter Collier; Finding Time Again © 2002 Ian Patterson.

Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. Notification of any additions or corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book would be greatly appreciated.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Hardback ISBN 9781512825961

eBook ISBN 9781512825978

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Schubertian Adieu to the Duchesse de Guermantes

Chapter 2. Singing in the Bath: Albertine and Bad Music

Chapter 3. Noisy Neighbors: Overhearing Massenet’s Manon

Chapter 4. Song in Venice: A Gondolier Sings ’O Sole Mio

Chapter 5. Saint-Loup’s Schumannian Swansong

Epilogue: Song as Metaphor

Appendix 1. Texts and Translations of the Pseudo-Schubertian Adieu

Appendix 2. Weyrauch’s Defense of His Authorship of Nach Osten! (1846)

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What is song? Here is Stendhal’s response to this question, from his life of Haydn first published in 1814:

Comment définir, d’une manière raisonnable, quelque chose qu’aucune règle ne peut apprendre à produire? J’ai sous les yeux cinq ou six définitions que j’ai notées dans mon carnet: en vérité, si quelque chose était capable de me faire perdre l’idée bien nette que j’ai de ce que c’est que le chant, ce serait la lecture de ces définitions. Ce sont des mots assez bien arrangés, mais qui, au fond, ne présentent qu’un sens vague. Par exemple, qu’est-ce que la douleur? Nous avons tous, hélas! assez d’expérience pour sentir la réponse à cette question: et cependant, quoi que nous puissions dire, nous avons obscurci ce sujet. Je croirai donc, monsieur, être à l’abri de vos reproches, en me dispensant de vous définir le chant: c’est, par exemple, ce qu’un amateur sensible et peu instruit a retenu en sortant d’un opéra. Qui est-ce qui a entendu le Figaro de Mozart, et qui ne chante pas en sortant, souvent avec la voix la plus fausse du monde:

Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso,

Delle donne turbando il riposo, etc.?

(How is one to define in a rational manner a thing that no rule in the world can teach one how to produce? I have before my eyes some five or six definitions that I have jotted down in my notebook: and on my honor, if there were anything that might prove capable of destroying that clear notion that I hold touching the nature of song, it would be the perusal of these definitions. They are just words: presentably arranged, yet offering only the haziest outline of sense. For instance, what is pain? We all of us, alas, possess enough experience to apprehend the answer to this question; and yet, however we formulated our definition, we should merely have obscured the issue. I shall therefore, my dear Sir, in absolving myself from furnishing you with a precise definition of song, consider myself sufficiently secure from your reproaches. Song is that, for instance, which a sensitive yet untrained music-lover retains in his mind after he has come home from the opera. Who has ever listened to Mozart’s Figaro, without singing to himself as he leaves the building, in a voice as tuneless as any in the world:

Non più andrai, farfallone amoroso,

Delle donne turbando il riposo. . . etc.)¹

In many respects, this passage is an arch refusal of definitions. Yet in this act of refusal some assumptions about song do, nonetheless, emerge. First, that song is instinctual rather than taught; no rules can adequately contain it. As a consequence, song is learned about primarily through experience. Indeed, this experience is suggested to be common to Nous [. . .] tous (We all of us), although the specific points of reference in this letter—writer, addressee (monsieur), even the amateur imitating a bass aria—also situate song in a markedly homosocial space.² Second, in its communality, song is compared to douleur (pain, suffering, grief, sorrow), a comparison that is far from gratuitous, given that douleur is, as we will see, one of the favorite topics confronted in song. Both song and douleur are familiar, shared experiences, though difficult to define precisely. Third, song is accessible to the amateur sensible (sensitive music-lover).³ Circling back to the first point, song cannot be taught, and therefore being peu instruit (untrained) is no barrier to its understanding. In essence, song is what is heard at the opera, remembered involuntarily, and clumsily imitated thereafter by amateur audience members. Song is what remains with you beyond the opera house or concert hall; it is perpetuated by the continued involvement of the listener.

This emphasis on experience and emotion over learning is typical of Romantic views of music.⁴ Yet many of Stendhal’s implicit assumptions still hold true for Marcel Proust, writing approximately one century later. What changes is that, for Proust, song is a much broader category, involving not only opera but also art song and even popular song. Most notably, the nineteenth century sees the birth of German Romantic lieder, a genre of song that became increasingly prevalent and professionalized throughout the period and spread to other European countries through singing translations.⁵ Nineteenth-century lieder were often performed in smaller, more informal settings, whether at home or in private salons, but also, toward the end of the period, in concert halls.⁶ While for Stendhal song most naturally implies opera in Italian, by Proust’s day song was also associated with German, especially the lieder of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, as well as, of course, the operas of Richard Wagner.⁷ French also became increasingly popular as a language for song, thanks not only to singing translations of works originally in German or indeed to the success of nineteenth-century French opera, but also as a result of France’s answer to the lied: mélodies, penned by well-known composers such as Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré.⁸ Like other phenomena of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, song was and is both national and transnational, often thriving on the tension between these two impulses.⁹

I start my investigation of song in Proust with Stendhal’s definition, despite its apparent anachronism and despite these changes in assumptions, both because of its resistance to any single, neat description and its emphasis on experience, douleur, memory, and the role of the amateur, aspects that will recur in the examples that follow. Stendhal’s comments are deliberately provocative and without any serious claims to the status of general truths, but for these very reasons they elicit a reaction from the reader. What are our own assumptions about song, based on our individual experiences and memories? What alternative characteristics of song can be deduced from a consideration of the presence of songs and singing in Proust’s novel? And what is the special and consistent connection between song, memory, and the amateur that we find in both Stendhal and Proust?

In contrast to the public arena of opera, song is presented by Proust primarily in domestic, private settings, often sung by oneself, for oneself, either without any other audience or with an audience of only one. As in Stendhal’s definition, in Proust, too, the amateur is a performer—however inaccurate—as well as a listener. What is performed is, moreover, often a private douleur, mediated by the particular words and music of a specific song. Song is a meeting ground between present and past, the present of the performer and the past of the song and its composer. Yet song also looks askance at the future in the sense that, in Proust’s novel, it typically appears at a moment of reckoning that results in a decision or change. Song enters the novel at specific turning points, at moments of heightened tension when a change is either nigh or only recently experienced and still prompting a response. Song creates a moment of suspension in which emotions are explored or dissipated and expectations perhaps reluctantly realigned. Song is an interloper in the novel, weighing up different possibilities for the narrative and resisting its forward impulse if but for a moment. These statements will become clearer when married to specific examples, and I set them forth here merely to provide an early glimpse of the multiple uses of song in Proust’s novel.¹⁰

This book is structured through a focus on specific moments of song in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time).¹¹ I argue for a reading of Proust’s novel as a songbook—not just a book about song but a book containing a specially selected and ordered set of songs—by drawing attention to its inclusion of an idiosyncratic sequence of songs across pivotal moments in the narrative. The term songbook has been much discussed in medieval studies in terms of a shift from the predominantly oral transmission of poetry, recorded mostly retrospectively in anonymous edited lyric anthologies (one kind of songbook), to the emergence of the genre of a book of poems created and ordered by a single author (a different kind of songbook, such as Petrarch’s Canzoniere).¹² Closer to Proust’s context, I understand the songbook as a compilation of favored existing songs by an author-editor. Jane Austen’s songbooks, for example, are a real case in point, while I use the term for À la recherche more loosely, as the narrative account of a specific selection of songs with various uses within the novel.¹³

Proust and Music

This study builds on the well-established field of Proust and music, which has amply assessed important topics such as Proust’s favorite composers and their role in À la recherche,¹⁴ the language Proust uses to describe music,¹⁵ Proust’s understanding of the relationship between music and literature,¹⁶ and the philosophical sources of his aesthetic views.¹⁷ Yet song as a smaller, traditionally amateur form remains neglected amid all this work. Indeed, the conjunction of Proust and song may even cause some surprise, given that the author is better known as a lover of instrumental music, whether on a large scale (such as that of the symphony) or in the form of chamber music (especially string quartets and violin sonatas). Likewise, when the subject of Proust and song has been addressed in criticism, such consideration has typically been directed toward large-scale, orchestrated works, with a focus on Proust’s love of Wagner and possible parallels between À la recherche and Wagnerian opera, or on Proust’s obsessive listening to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande via the théâtrophone.¹⁸

In a famous letter to Suzette Lemaire, written in late May 1895, Proust is very clear about his love of wordless, instrumental music, epitomized for him by Beethoven’s symphonies:

je crois que l’essence de la musique est de réveiller en nous ce fond mystérieux (et inexprimable à la littérature et en général à tous les modes d’expression finis, qui se servent ou de mots et par conséquent d’idées, choses déterminées, ou d’objets déterminés—peinture, sculpture—) de notre âme, qui commence là où le fini et tous les arts qui ont pour objet le fini s’arrêtent, là où la science s’arrête aussi, et qu’on peut appeler pour cela religieux.

(I believe that the essence of music is to arouse the mysterious depths [which literature and generally speaking all finite modes of expression that make use either of words and consequently of ideas, which are determinate things, or of objects—painting, sculpture—cannot express] of our souls, which begin where all the arts aimed at the finite stop and where science as well stops, and which for that reason can be termed religious.)¹⁹

Within this scheme, song evidently fares less well, since it relies on words and belongs to those more limited modes d’expression finis (finite modes of expression), along with literature, painting, and sculpture, which Proust considers inferior to wordless, orchestral music.²⁰

Notwithstanding, this letter represents only one, highly contingent expression of its author’s aesthetic views. In contrast, in one of his earliest surviving letters, written when he was only fifteen or sixteen, Proust addresses his grandmother as toi qui sais toutes les émotions que le chant me procure (you, who know what feelings singing arouses in me).²¹ Following this early attestation of his appreciation of song, Proust continued to enjoy a wide range of forms of song throughout his life, not only the operas of Wagner, Debussy, and others, but also art song and popular song. The moments of song in À la recherche analyzed in this book show that Proust continued to be interested in exploring the power of song through literature, despite his characterization of the imaginary composer Vinteuil as the author of instrumental works (including a sonata for piano and violin and a septet).

In turning my attention to Proust and song, inspired by this early letter, I am indebted to a number of recent critical trends. First, the fruitfulness of renewed consideration of Proust’s participation in a vibrant culture of music criticism and music journalism has been amply demonstrated by Cécile Leblanc’s Proust écrivain de la musique (2017). Second, the richness of the intellectual exchange between Proust and Reynaldo Hahn has been explored by Philippe Blay, Jean-Christophe Branger, and Luc Fraisse, in their coauthored book from 2018.²² This focus on Hahn is excellent encouragement to consider Proust and song, given Hahn’s importance as a composer of song, as a singer, and as a theorist of song, as I introduce below. Third, a greater sense of the plurality of Proust’s musical interests is beginning to emerge thanks to the edited volume Musiques de Proust (2020), which includes, for example, an important chapter on Proust’s appreciation of popular song.²³ Finally, work on voice in Proust, while it has tended to focus on the spoken rather than on the singing voice, provides an essential contextual and theoretical background to my own study of song.²⁴

In anglophone scholarship, meanwhile, an awareness that music in Proust is mediated by the subjectivity of particular characters who listen has led to a shift in focus from music in Proust’s novel (whether real or imagined) to the act of listening itself. Listening in Proust is the focus of two separate studies by Joseph Acquisto and Igor Reyner, the first largely in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, and the second embracing a panoply of different critical approaches from sound studies to psychoanalysis.²⁵ In shifting the focus from music to listening, Reyner, in particular, demonstrates the range of scenes of listening that can be found in À la recherche, and therefore suggests that an obsession with music in Proust has largely obscured the equally interesting and broader category of sound in the novel.²⁶ The topic of this book remains staunchly attached to music in its focus on song. What I hope to do, nonetheless, is to combine a historical, contextual approach with more theoretical perspectives.

Beyond the field of Proust and music, my work has benefited from recent research in French studies in particular, where there has been increasing attention to song across periods, from the medieval (including Sarah Kay) and the early modern (books by Nicholas Hammond and Melinda Latour respectively) to the nineteenth century, with the work of Helen Abbott and her Baudelaire Song Project, as well as Hannah Scott’s exploration of French popular song toward the end of the century.²⁷ My work on Proust and song is in some respects an extension of these studies into the early twentieth century, although I consider song in a very different context, that of the novel. My interest is in how the art of song—an art that is already both musical and literary—is transposed into the textual space of the novel, and the narrative uses of this art in this new context.²⁸

Given this focus on song in the novel, especially useful has been Terence Cave’s Mignon’s Afterlives (2011), which investigates the transnational afterlives of a songful minor character from Goethe’s second novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship). In the chapter Mignon’s Songs: Making Music out of Fiction, Cave suggests a useful distinction—which he stresses is not ontological but pragmatic—between real and fictional songs in novels, and he also reflects more generally on the challenges of creating what he calls a working typology of song in fiction.²⁹ Cave explains that fictional songs are those which "the reader cannot hear [. . .], or sing [. . .] for herself.³⁰ Such songs can become real, if they are later set to music by composers (as is famously the case with the Mignon songs), but their existence within the novel is fictional insofar as while the narrative might describe the song performance or even provide the lyrics, the music remains nonexistent in and beyond the text. In Cave’s words, a fictional song, where the text is provided, is a lyric poem accompanied by a narrative of performance, with no available score.³¹ In contrast, real songs are fictional in that they exist within fiction, but real in that the songs in question already existed at the time the fictional narrative in which they are embedded was first written.³² In these cases, the reader can (if she has the appropriate competence) conjure up the sound of the song in her mind, play and sing it herself, ask someone to sing it for her, or (in modern times) play a recorded version.³³ In short, fictional songs are (originally) inaudible and purely textual, whereas real songs can potentially be tracked down and made audible, through memory, performance, or recording. Ultimately, whether the song can be sung or not" is the deciding factor.³⁴ Cave’s question matters for a number of reasons: first, for what the answer tells us about the character through their choice of song;³⁵ second, for what the type of song also reveals about the author and the author’s interest in music, real or fictional; third, for the reader’s consequent relationship to and involvement in the text and the soundscape it conjures up.

In À la recherche, we most often encounter real songs, and these songs are the focus of the chapters that follow: Schubert’s Adieu in Chapter 1; Émile Durand’s Le Biniou and Jules Massenet’s Pensée d’automne in Chapter 2; extracts from Massenet’s Manon in Chapter 3; the Neapolitan song ’O sole mio in Chapter 4. The case of Saint-Loup’s song in Le Temps retrouvé, discussed in Chapter 5, is somewhat different, since he sings un lied de Schumann (a Schumann song), in other words, the unspecified song of a real composer.³⁶ Overall, though, this emphasis on real songs is striking in a novel otherwise committed to celebrating the imaginary music of an imaginary composer, Vinteuil. Song in Proust is therefore the exception to the rule not only in its wordiness (in contrast to Proust’s celebration of instrumental, symphonic music as the essence of music, as noted above), but also in its reality (in contrast to the imaginary music of Vinteuil). Of course, these scenes of song are purely fictional, performed by fictional characters, and mediated by silent narrative. Nonetheless, they do point outside the novel by mentioning real composers and real songs that the reader may either recognize or investigate. Consequently, thinking about song in Proust also means thinking about intertextuality and about editions and translations.

It is in this regard that reception studies devoted to songs and their composers have been especially helpful for this book. I have learned much from the many articles and essays on the specifically French reception of Schubert, Schumann, and others.³⁷ I have also followed with interest the turn to the transnational that is characteristic of much recent work on lieder.³⁸ Finally, more theoretical musicological studies have also been invaluable in shaping my understanding of song. I draw in particular on the work of Lawrence Kramer, from his methodological concept of the breaking point (introduced below) and his own brief but insightful comments on the ’O sole mio episode in Albertine disparue, to his essay on songfulness.³⁹

That said, I understand interdisciplinary work not as the near impossible achievement of equal mastery in two disciplines by one person, but rather as an ongoing conversation between researchers rooted in different disciplines, and so from my literary perspective I acknowledge at the outset that a musicologist, especially one preoccupied with the formal and harmonic analysis of works, would—indeed, should—write a very different book about Proust and song. While there is some discussion of musical matters (especially in the first three chapters), readers should not expect extensive musical analysis of songs that typically appear in Proust’s novel only in a fragmentary, incomplete manner—whether without piano accompaniment (the pseudo-Schubertian Adieu discussed in Chapter 1), without words (Albertine’s whistling of Le Biniou explored in Chapter 2), without orchestra (the extracts from Massenet’s Manon examined in Chapter 3), or without naming a particular song at all (as is the case of Saint-Loup’s singing of a Schumann song, the subject of Chapter 5). Inspired by its materials, my investigation of Proust and song takes a predominantly literary approach, through close reading, contextualization, and literary theoretical considerations.

In addition to critical writings on song stemming from literary and musicological spheres (and indeed from the broader, interdisciplinary field of word and music studies), an even more extensive body of work has recently been dedicated to understanding voice, particularly in literature and philosophy.⁴⁰ There is a difference between the speaking and the singing voice, as well as between both forms of voice and their representation in poetry and fiction. In the examples from Proust, moreover, many of the singers are men rather than women, unsettling the otherwise frequent discussion of the seductive power of the female voice in particular.⁴¹ For this reason, I also tend to avoid the interpretive framework of what has been called nostalgia for the maternal voice, partly because it would seem inevitably to reiterate Oedipal readings of À la recherche that have been productive but also, at times, blinkered.⁴² The mother’s voice is clearly crucial in Proust’s novel, as is evident from the much commented drame du coucher scene when the mother reads aloud to the child protagonist from George Sand’s François le Champi.⁴³ Yet other voices become more significant as the novel progresses, and in several of the moments of song—both the Schubertian Adieu and ’O sole mio—song is even explicitly a form of resistance to the mother and her voice.

Song shares with voice its dual status as both a sonic and material phenomenon and a powerful metaphor.⁴⁴ Yet studies of voice have tended to be puzzled by singing and even tempted by an idealization of the singing voice that necessitates its exclusion from their principal focus. Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More (2006) excludes song for two reasons: first, since, in his view, singing, by focusing on the voice, actually runs the risk of losing the very thing it tries to worship and revere: it turns it into a fetish object; second, because he considers singing to be at the expense of meaning and bad communication.⁴⁵ The first point is a generalization and an overexaggeration; singing does not necessarily entail or provoke worship of the voice. Moreover, the second point is a product of Dolar’s examples of song—opera and polyphony—which he considers to obscure or obliterate the text. These remarks are emphatically not true for art song, of course, and especially not where song lyrics are cited explicitly, as in the case of several moments in Proust’s novel. Far from being bad communication (in Dolar’s words), song, in Proust’s novel, is intensely intimate and communicative, both between characters and as part of the heightened self-reflection of one character alone.

Brandon LaBelle shares with Dolar this sense of the singing voice as transcendental; he writes about song in political and religious contexts as a grand, collective endeavor.⁴⁶ Against Dolar and LaBelle, I argue that song is part of the mundane, intimate, daily life of Proust’s characters. Song, in other words, is ordinary and domestic rather than fetishized or collective.⁴⁷ Nonetheless, Dolar’s argument about the uncanniness of the voice—subsequently developed by David Toop—proves apt for several of the moments of song in À la recherche.⁴⁸ In addition, Dolar’s definition of the voice as excess, a remainder resistant to the signifying operations, a leftover heterogeneous to structural logic is a useful way of thinking about the relationship between song and narrative in Proust’s text.⁴⁹

Other fruitful aspects of Dolar’s book derive ultimately from Adriana Cavarero’s work on voice, in particular the idea of voice as relational and unique (in Dolar’s terms, a fingerprint).⁵⁰ As noted above, the examples of song in Proust do not always follow the historical association between voice and woman highlighted by Cavarero. However, Cavarero’s book remains useful for song in Proust because of its emphasis on voice as both unique to a particular character and as a mode of intimate relationality between characters. Concomitantly, reading Cavarero with Proust—and with literature more broadly—upholds Cavarero’s comments on the need to make space for individual voices within any theory of voice.⁵¹

Song thus proves to be a rich, interdisciplinary topic, with a chorus of critical voices dedicated to it. Yet perhaps the most important figures for Proust and song are two further individuals, both of whom loved Proust in different ways: Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes.⁵²

Hahn on Song

To understand Proust on song requires, above all, consideration of a central figure in his life, the composer, singer, writer, and conductor Reynaldo Hahn.⁵³ Proust and Hahn met at the salon of Madeleine Lemaire in May 1894. Madeleine Lemaire was a hostess and patron of the arts; one of the first performances of Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson (1892–94) was, for instance, in her salon. She was also a painter, and it was humorously said of her work as an artist that no one, except God, has created more roses.⁵⁴ Lemaire supported young musicians and writers and also indulged in a little matchmaking. It was thanks to Lemaire that the young Proust and Hahn met, fell in love, and embarked on a passionate affair. Their early encounters were often musical evenings, where Hahn would sing and play. Around this time, Proust wrote that Hahn had la plus enchanteresse voix que j’aie jamais entendue (the most enchanting voice I have ever heard), la plus belle, la plus triste et la plus chaude qui fut jamais (the most beautiful, sad and warm voice that ever there was).⁵⁵ When Proust and Hahn met, Hahn was the famous one. He had been something of a child prodigy, with illustrious teachers: Massenet and Charles Gounod for composition, Camille Saint-Saëns for piano. The beautiful song Si mes vers avaient des ailes (If my verses had wings), a setting of a poem by Victor Hugo, was composed by Hahn when he was only thirteen.⁵⁶

We think that Proust and Hahn were lovers for more or less two years, and we know that they also collaborated artistically during this time. Hahn, for instance, wrote music to accompany the spoken (not sung) declamation of Proust’s Portraits de peintres (Portraits of Painters), four poems on different painters: Albert Cuyp, Paulus Potter, Antoine Watteau, and Anthony Van Dyck. Published first in Le Gaulois on June 21, 1895, these Portraits—described by Proust as quelques-uns de mes plus mauvais vers (some of my worst poems)⁵⁷—were also included in Proust’s first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896; Pleasures and Days), alongside Hahn’s music and watercolors by Madeleine Lemaire.⁵⁸ A less successful joint project was the plan to write a biography of Chopin together, an idea that is surprising given Proust’s later rejection of the biographical method of Sainte-Beuve.⁵⁹ The Chopin biography never came to fruition, but Chopin remained one of the few composers—along with Fauré and Schumann—to be appreciated by both Proust and Hahn.⁶⁰ Chopin is the first of four Portraits de musiciens (Portraits of Musicians) also included in Les Plaisirs et les jours (the others are Gluck, Schumann, and Mozart), and this musical selection is testimony to the shared tastes of Hahn and Proust at this point.⁶¹

After the initial romance, Proust and Hahn continued to have a very close friendship up until Proust’s death. The constancy of their affection for each other is suggested by the incipit of a letter from Proust to Hahn, from December 1912 (that is, more than eighteen years after they first met):

Mon bon Genstil

Je t’envoie un petit bonsjour. Tu es tellement mélangé maintenant avec ma pensée, mon sommeil, mes lectures que t’écrire me paraît presque aussi faschant que de m’écrire à moi-même.

(My dear Nicens,

I send you herewith a little hello. You are so mixed up now with my thoughts, my sleep, my reading that writing to you seems as irksome as writing to myself.)⁶²

In a letter to Proust written one month before his death, Hahn reiterates his affection for Proust, describing him as mon ami le plus cher, [. . .] une des personnes que j’aurais le plus aimées dans ma vie (my dearest friend, one of the people whom I have loved most in my life).⁶³ When Proust died, Hahn watched over his body until the funeral and also wrote to break the news to Proust’s friends.⁶⁴

Madeleine Lemaire, who introduced Proust and Hahn, was the mother of Suzette Lemaire, to whom Proust’s letter on the essence of music, cited earlier, was addressed. In fact, my presentation of the letter above withheld the crucial detail that Proust’s explanation of his views on music is expressed throughout with explicit comparison to Hahn’s opinions. Let us, then, return to that letter, acknowledging this time Hahn’s place therein. The letter was written one year after Proust and Hahn first met. In it, we learn a surprising fact: that while Proust and Hahn both love music, they do not entirely share a love of the same music (with the aforementioned Chopin, Fauré, and Schumann being notable exceptions). Instead, the two have contrasting musical tastes, and in particular disagree about Beethoven and Wagner, even as the letter begins with Proust defending his own love of Wagner and attempting to persuade his addressee that Hahn does not dislike Wagner’s music.⁶⁵

Beyond their opinions regarding specific composers, the letter to Suzette Lemaire delineates a more general, stark temperamental divide between Proust and Hahn as regards their views on music. Proust introduces the topic by writing of le point sur lequel nous sommes en désaccord (the point we disagree on), appropriately framing their disagreement in musical terms as a form of dissonance (given the polysemy of the word désaccord).⁶⁶ He then juxtaposes his understanding of the essence of music with Hahn’s:

Reynaldo au contraire, en considérant la musique comme dans une dépendance perpétuelle de la parole, la conçoit comme le mode d’expression de sentiments particuliers, au besoin de nuances de la conversation. Vous savez qu’une symphonie de Beethoven [. . .] l’ennuie beaucoup. Il est bien trop artiste pour ne pas l’admirer profondément, mais ce n’est pas cela qu’est pour lui la musique et cela au fond, ne l’intéresse pas.

(Reynaldo, on the contrary, believes that music is always subordinate to the word, he regards it as a way of expressing sentiments of a particular kind, nuances of conversation, if you will. You are aware that a Beethoven symphony [. . .] bores him dreadfully. He is far too much of an artist not to admire it profoundly, but that’s not what music is for him and basically it doesn’t interest him.)⁶⁷

While Proust professes a love of wordless music for its vagueness and abstraction, he credits Hahn with a love of music with words and with the belief that music should be subordinate to words, highlighting the incompatibility of their views on the ideal relationship between music and literature. As a result, in the same letter Proust ultimately describes Hahn as having a tempérament de musicien littéraire (temperament as a literary musician).⁶⁸ The implication is that, unexpectedly, Proust is the truly musical one of the two, because he loves what he presents as being proper music (that is, Beethoven and the symphony), whereas Hahn is the more literary in his attachment to vocal music.⁶⁹

This letter bears witness to Proust and Hahn’s immersion in the intimate pleasures of aesthetic debate, and the claims made on either side are, as a result, deliberately dramatic and provisional (especially given their presentation in a letter to a third party). Yet the letter is fruitful in destabilizing our assumptions about the respective positions of the two correspondents and certainly demonstrates that Proust found a close advocate of song in Hahn, with song being a subject of productive, amorous désaccord (disagreement or dissonance) between the two. This désaccord even becomes more evident since, despite some musical common ground, we often subsequently find Proust attacking the music of composers admired by Hahn, especially Hahn’s teachers Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and Massenet. Initially, these three were composers that Proust liked immensely. Reviewing a concert performance of a Mozart piano concerto played by the first of the three, Proust describes Saint-Saëns as celui qui a composé la plus belle des symphonies depuis les symphonies de Beethoven (he who has composed the most beautiful symphony since Beethoven’s symphonies), high praise indeed considering Proust’s love of the latter.⁷⁰ Proust also admired Saint-Saëns around the same time as a grand écrivain musical (great musical writer).⁷¹ Yet Proust’s admiration of Saint-Saëns in these two texts from December 1895 was to wane markedly, and Saint-Saëns’s Germanophobic wartime publications may not have helped matters.⁷² In later letters Proust describes Saint-Saëns as a musicien que je n’aime pas (composer I dislike) and states that jamais un musicien ne m’a autant emmerdé (he has always bored me sick).⁷³

To this last statement Proust adds the parenthetical comment "Gounod dans Faust encore plus" (Gounod, in Faust, even more so), and Gounod is another composer who, like Saint-Saëns, fell from grace in Proust’s eyes. The teenage Proust, writing to his grandmother in the same letter expressing his love of song cited earlier, declared that les divines mélodies de Massenet et de Gounod calmeront mes ennuis (the divine melodies of Massenet and Gounod will make up to me for my woes).⁷⁴ In the first society questionnaire with set questions about your favorite virtue, your favorite color and flower, and so on, and which he completed a year or so before this letter in praise of song, Proust had even listed Gounod, alongside Mozart, as his favorite composer.⁷⁵ Yet Proust ultimately rejected this opinion, with a subsequent questionnaire pointing toward the composers he would instead love throughout his adult life: Beethoven, Wagner, and Schumann.⁷⁶ A similar rejection of his youthful love of Massenet is also evident, as I explore in Chapter 3. All these examples confirm the musical désaccord between Hahn and Proust and even suggest that this désaccord became more marked over time.

Up until now, in discussing Proust and Hahn we have relied upon Proust’s interpretation of and response to his friend’s musical tastes. This one-sidedness is also one of the dangers of the collected, single-volume Lettres à Reynaldo Hahn, which makes Hahn the silent recipient of Proust’s attentions.⁷⁷ Yet in order to understand Hahn’s views, we are not obliged to rely upon Proust’s summary, biased interpretation to a third party, nor even upon Proust’s many letters to Hahn.⁷⁸ Rather, we can turn to Hahn’s own writings, which are plentiful and in the process of receiving greater attention, in particular thanks to the efforts of Philippe Blay.⁷⁹

Hahn has come to be acclaimed as one of the best of all writers about music and musicians, particularly in the field of vocal studies, and there is evidence that Proust shared this view.⁸⁰ Reynaldo Hahn n’est-il pas du reste aussi un écrivain de réel mérite? (Is Reynaldo Hahn not in any case a writer of real merit?), Proust once asked.⁸¹ Hahn frequently published articles in newspapers and journals, and in his letters Proust repeatedly mentions enjoying reading these texts.⁸² Hahn also published longer pieces: most important for our purposes, a book on singing, Du chant (1920), which collected lectures given at the Université des Annales in two cycles between November 22 and December 24, 1913, and between April 27 and May 19, 1914.⁸³ In an article published in 1971, Richard Bales drew attention to the importance of Hahn’s Du chant for Proust’s writing on music.⁸⁴ More recently, it is thanks to the work of Fraisse, writing alongside Blay and Branger, that Hahn’s lectures have been argued to be précieux (valuable) for Proustians.⁸⁵

Proust explicitly stated his admiration of Hahn’s lectures on song on several occasions. In a letter to Hahn (January 1914), Proust even compares the first lecture of Hahn’s Du chant, Pourquoi chante-t-on? (Why Do We Sing?), to his own Du côté de chez Swann, as well as to John Ruskin’s writings in terms of its stylistic qualities.⁸⁶ In another letter, from February 1914, Proust is equally laudatory of the second lecture of Du chant, Comment chante-t-on? (How Do We Sing?), writing to Hahn that having cherché quelle était la phrase française que j’admirais le plus en ce moment (sought which was the French sentence which I admired the most at this moment), he awards le prix à ceci (the prize to this one): En ne respirant pas, en n’interrompant pas [. . .] (pardon je crois qu’il y a ‘point’) le développement de la voûte musicale, on évoque dans sa quiétude sereine la nuit étoilée au milieu de laquelle monte le chant du rossignol (By not breathing, by not interrupting [. . .] [sorry I think it says point and not pas] the development of the musical vault, one evokes in its serene quietude the star-spangled night in the middle of which rises the song of the nightingale).⁸⁷ Proust’s citation from Hahn is fairly accurate, even down to the self-correction of pas to point, but he does strikingly omit verbale from cette voûte verbale et musicale (this verbal and musical vault).⁸⁸ This omission is fascinating in that it perhaps fortuitously encapsulates the difference between Proust and Hahn suggested already in