The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxonomy

Author(s): RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBE

Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 158, No. 1938 (SPRING 2017), pp. 27-43
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44862801
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i. Percy Scholes: The Oxford
companion to music , ed. John
Owen Ward (1938; rev.
London, 1974), p. 766.
2. ibid., p. 767.
3. 'Pastiche' in The Oxford
dictionary of music , www.
oxfordmusiconline.com/
subscriber/ article/ opr/
t237/ e7725?q=pastiche&
search=quick&pos=2&_
start=i#firsthit (accessed,
26 November 2014).
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RODNEY STENNING EDGECOMBE
The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxo
of pastiche, ťa medley, especially an operatic medley in which the
The of favourite favourite
pastiche,airsOxford
from airs
manycompanion
operas [.. ] areťa taken
fromandmedley,
workedmany
into atonewespecially operas music [.. ] distinguishes an are operatic taken and medley between worked in two into which a kinds new the
scheme',1 better evoked by the Italian pasticcio ('pie'); while in 'its French
form', it represents a 'work in which the creator has imitated the style of
another writer or artist'.2 Either Percy Scholes drew too firm a boundary
between the usages, or it's faded over time, for a survey of the pastiche-
related entries in RILM shows that while the notion of a derivative medley
still obtains, the mimetic idea of pastiche has found sturdy purchase
in musical studies. This should come as no surprise, for a principle of
conjuncture is common to both. Although the quodlibet strives for variety,
it must still do so coherently, and impose harmonic and structural logic
on its disparate sources. And a union of disparate elements also occurs in
'imitative' pastiche, which turns on a blend of personalities - the nonce
integration in The sleeping beauty of Tchaikovsky's with Rameau's), and
(corollaries of the same process) the temporal fusion of the i8th and 19th
centuries and the spatial equation of France and Russia. Pastiche and
pasticcio are closely interinvolved, therefore, and are like the woof and warp
of a cangiante fabric, which changes colour as our vantage shifts.
The Oxford dictionary of music defines pastiche by reversing Scholes's
definiens, and even as it tries to banish the spectre of pasticcio , it fails:
Imitation. Not the same as pasticcio, being a work deliberately written in the style of
another period or manner, e.g. Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and Stravinsky's Pulcinella.
Although pastiche has a meaning as 'medley,' it is invariably applied musically in the sense
outlined above.3
Prokofiev's symphony, at first glance 'deliberately written in the style of
another period', proves on inspection to have violated that style at every
turn. The hoydenish clump of its gavotte would have scandalised rococo
ballrooms, and so too would the incult veering of its modulations, more
swinger than Zwinger. And if those disconnections create the sense of a
medley, Pulcinella happens to be one. Its score isn't properly an imitation
at all, but rather a pasticcio in Scholes's sense of the term, notwithstanding
the fact that Stravinsky 'misapplies' to Pergolesi and pseudo-Pergolesi 20th-
century harmonies and orchestration. We also witness the interbleeding of
pasticcio and pastiche in Silvia Camerini's essay on the Leoncavallo Bohème ,
the first part of which, 'può sembrare a volte un po' leziosa disseminata
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 201J 27
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28 The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxonomy
4. Silvia Camerini: ' "La
giovinezza no ha che una
stagione": La bohème di
Leoncavallo', libretto booklet
for Nuova Era recording
(Turin, 1990), p.7.
5. ibid., p.8.
6. quoted in Stephan
Etcharry: 'Intertextualité
et dramaturgie dans Le
Toréador (1849) d'Adolphe
Adam (1803-1856)', in Jean-
Christophe Branger, Vincent
Giroud & Daniel Bizeray,
edd.: Présence du X Ville
siècle dans V opera français
du XIXe siècle d'Adam à
Massenet (Saint-Étienne,
2011), p.161.
7. ibid., p.161.
8. Constant Lambert: Music
ho ! A study of music in decline
(1934; rpt. Harmondsworth,
1948), P-53-
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com'è du preziosismi e di arcaismi compiaciuti'4 - pastiche of the imitative
kind - while 'secondo [...] con l'intromissione parodistica di celebri modelli
di melodramma, finisce per diventare un bizzaro pastiche stilistico'5 - which,
in spite of the French spelling, reinstates the pasticcio/ galimatias. And when
the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX1 siècle pronounces Adam's Toréador
to be a pasticcio - 'plutôt un pot-pourri qu'une oeuvre originale '6 - Stephan
Etcharry responds in terms befitting of 'pastiche': 'Quelle signification,
enfin, faut-il donner à ces "souvenirs musicaux"? Représent-ils des hom-
mages à des esthétiques ou à des compositeurs particuliers?'7
Pastiche also looms large in Constant Lambert's Music ho /, where he
forces the complex overlap of its Venn circles into a false congruity, equating
pastiche with neo-classicism and neo-classicism with bricolage. This
has the effect of homogenising Scholes's two takes on pastiche: 'Poulenc
does not write in any particular style that he fancies to be fashionable at
the moment, but in every style of the past and present that is not actually
frowned on as pompous and outmoded.'8 In other words, he purveys pasticci
of broken-up pastiches. But that claim disregards the esemplastic (whole-
forming) purpose that we find in even the most rudimentary pasticci . A mere
divertissement of fragments - Hummel's Serenade no.i - has a governing
purpose (a proto-hit parade), and a functioning form (a new tonal centre
that allows the fragments to cohere). Poulenc, though Lambert denies him
both moral and formal integrity, is a more sophisticated and resourceful
composer than Hummel, and Les biches a better work than the Serenade.
The bricoleur and the pasticheur might be cousins, but they're not cousins
german. Bower birds, after all, set up a bricolage of glittering art trouvé
around their nests, but it's governed both by a principle of selection
and by a decorative purpose. Moreover, the bowers that concentre their
accumulations are wholly of their own making. Poulenc is a bower bird,
and Lambert unwittingly offers the key to those bowers, namely, the
exclusion of 'the pompous and outmoded'. It goes without saying that the
academic seriousness of the 19th century is conspicuously absent from Les
biches (no gobbets of Mendelssohn's 'Reformation' Symphony), and so is
the messianic self-importance of Romanticism (no glimpses of Parsifal ).
Instead, by exscinding the evolutionary middle ground, it yolks (fertilises)
and yokes (binds) with gentleness the classical and modern periods - to
do a Poulenc on Dr Johnson, who deplored the Metaphysicals for yoking
heterogeneous ideas by violence together!
This fact highlights a crucial differentia of pastiche, namely, temporal
disjunction - a property that distinguishes it from allusiveness. Whereas
allusions assume a formal context of continuity, cross-referencing to
enrich and reinforce, pastiche comes into existence only when there is
emphatic divide in time and space and, with that, a divide in style. Whereas
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9. Charles Dickens: Our
mutual friend, intro. Marcus
Stone (London, 1952), p.39.
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the pasticheur attempts to revive the forms au-delà Vábíme , the bricoleur
doesn't seek to bridge, but rather to engineer a clash - to splice Mozart with
Moskovsky and Haydn with Halévy. The kitsch of the 19th century was in
fact eminently useful to Poulenc, and a wag's remark made apropos of the
Saint-Saëns Second Piano Concerto (Bach ending in Offenbach) applies a
fortiori to Les biches . It issues in the incongruity of collage, the very essence
of musical neo-classicism, but plays no part in the neo-classicism as we
encounter it in literature. Milton's Paradise lost is a pastiche epic, but one that
sustainedly and consistently subordinates itself to conventions extrapolated
from its Homeric model. It is as much about recovery as renovation, and
its musical analogue of would be something like Mendelssohn's St PauĻ
product of the composer's life-changing encounter with the Bach Passions.
Mendelssohn translates the high seriousness of his model in toto , as Milton
translated the loftiness of Homer in its entirety. By contrast, Les biches
functions mock-heroically. Like The rape of the lock. , it concedes that epic
in its pure form has become impossible in the modern world and, to mask
one's incapacity for heroics, one must approach it in a spirit of bifocal
mockery. Les biches offers, instead of Milton's thewed Samson Agonistes, a
Eugene Sandow muscleman with a yen for the pageboys. And that - in its
deliberately trivialising, spirited essence - is neo-classicism as it came to be
practised in 20th-century music.
to set up a typology of pastiche modalities. Let me begin, for the sake
So to of much, ofsetcompleteness,
completeness,withup bald-faced,
a then, typology
deviousbytheft.
wayThese
with gana
of ofladrapastiche bald-faced, preamble modalities. to devious the project Let theft. me of begin, These this essay, for gana which the ladra sake is
moments can be dismissed with despatch, and relate primarily to indolence
or overwork, as when the infinitely gifted Handel stole from those less
endowed (and denounced Bononcini for doing the same). Here there is no
duality, no characteristic pastiche conjuncture, for the 'borrower's' identity
displaces that of the borrowed. A parallel of sorts might be found in the
readiness of a prolific painter to 'authenticate' as his own the journeyman
work of his studio, knowing it to be substandard, but eager none the less
to meet an insatiable demand that his genius has created. The Rubenesque
could therefore be compared to the Handelesque, those occasions when we
encounter 'what is conventionally called a doubtful, which means not at all
doubtful Old Master' (as Dickens puts it in Our mutual friend)?
Kinned to, but distinct from, impudent larceny would be those venial
thefts of aura, those passings-off of material, not always undistinguished
in itself, that pretends to be something it isn't. Literary instances would
include Macpherson's Ossian and Chatterton's Rowley poems, and their
musical counterparts the soi-disant Albinoni Adagio and oddments in the
Kochel catalogue (for publishers themselves were sometimes guilty of fraud,
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 20 1 J 29
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30 The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxonomy
10. Dorothea Link: 'The
fandango scene in Mozart's
Le none di Figaro' , in
Journal of the Royal Musical
Association vol. 1 3 3 no. 1
(2008), p.84.
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passing off, for the sake of gain, 'doubtful, which means not at all doubtful
Mozart'). That is how Pergolesi came to father a crop of children on the
wrong side of the blanket, some of them finding lodgement in the orphanage
of Pulcinella. Borrowings don't always require acknowledgement, however,
especially when sourced from the domaine publique of racial memory.
Composers in need of a folk song could labour unconvincingly to fake one,
or they could help themselves to the vast, impersonal treasury of the real
thing. This is the pastiche of idoneity, and we find it passim in Western art
music, whether in the Beethoven who imposes his Viennese craft on the
craggy Highlands, or in Tchaikovsky, who annexes a Georgian berceuse for
The nutcracker s 'Danse arabe'. The Overture on Russian themes by Rimsky-
Korsakov, Balakirev's Grande fantaisie on Russian folksongs and the Fantasia
on Polish airs cobbled up by Chopin are all of them pasticci and pastiches.
They delight alike the audiences for whom those themes, folk songs and
airs are second nature, and those who approach them as exotic potpourris.
English concert-goers would have known that Clementi wasn't stealing but
rather appealing to them when he incorporated 'God save the king' into
a symphony, and Dutch audiences likewise have realised that the patriotic
ditty that Litolff included in a Concerto symphonique was a public vote of
thanks. Folk material, indeed, has a purpose similar to the foretold plots
of the Greek dramatists: it enables the auditors the better to appreciate the
changes being rung upon it.
Urban popolaresco (folk music manqué) also found its way on to the lyric
stage on the understanding that it was legitimately second-hand, invoked to
clarify situations that balletic mime despaired of explaining (l'air parlante ),
or to suggest genres and nationalisms that composers would have struggled
to forge ex parte. The French chansons with which Tchaikovsky laced The
nutcracker were well enough known enough to Francophile St Petersburg,
even if lost (as borrowings) on modern audiences outside France. They
were simply useful props for a Biedermeier tableau. Likewise, because
fandangos weren't easy to come by in 18th-century Vienna, Mozart didn't
hesitate to incorporate into Le none di Figaro the same (echt Spanish) tune
that Gluck had deployed in his Don Juan ballet of 1761. How else to meet
Beaumarchais's demand that the dance should figure in act 4? Dorothea Link
claims that in the play it 'merely provided local colour' but in the opera, it
'had a dramatic function',10 turning a blended both/ and into an oppositional
either/ or. Since Beaumarchais's comedy postdated the ballet, he must have
known that the fandango (precursor of the bolero) was a sensual dance, and
used it to crystallise Almaviva's rampant sexuality - not least because of its
meridional location, the Keatsian 'warm south' always more sensual than its
implied cold north. Mozart thus carried both signifiés - characteristic eros
and couleur locale - into his opera.
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ii. David Brown:
Tchaikovsky: a biographical
and critical study , 4 vols
(London, 1978-91), vol.2,
p.192.
12. Winton Dean: Bi^et
(London, 1948), p. 196.
13. Elizabeth Poston,
ed.: The Penguin book
of Christmas carols
(Harmondsworth, 1965),
P*3 1 •
14. ibid., p.25.
15. Donald Attwater: The
Penguin dictionary of saints
(Harmondsworth, 1965),
p. 340.
16. Poston: Christmas carols ,
p.25.
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Monsieur Triquet's birthday ode in Yevgeny Onegin represents a similar
sort of borrowing, one made for both thematic and national reasons. For the
St Petersburg audience of 1876, Amédée de Beauplan's romance 'Dormez,
mes chères amours!' probably had the same currency as 'Bon voyage, cher
Dumoleť and 'Cadet Rousselle a trois maisons', the songs 'silently' taken
up into The nutcracker . Now, however, it's forgotten, and even a leading
Tchaikovsky scholar misses the fact when he refers to 'Triquet's rococo-
styled couplets'.11 As I read the situation, Tchaikovsky, not quite knowing
how to write a chanson populaire of the 1820s (just as Mozart hadn't known
how to write a fandango), sought out a pedestrian specimen (for comic
purposes, as the pedestrian ode in Zar und Zimmermann is comic) and then
contrafacted Shilovsky's Triquet text, taking care to botch the Slavic stress
pattern in 'belle Tat-ee-an-aa'. Triquet, a Frenchman of ordinary gifts, is,
even so, acclaimed by the rustic Russians for ineptly turning a berceuse
into a genethliacon. This is subtler than mere pedantry, which Tchaikovsky
could have suggested through a pastiche gavotte. However, rococo style
was no more on his mind when he turned to Beauplan than any specifically
Caribbean colour was on Bizet's when he assigned a habanera to Carmen -
as recherché a dance form in the Paris of the 1870s as the fandango had been
in Vienna a century before. Having stumbled on Yradier's 'Arreglito', he
recognised it as a perfect vehicle for the gypsy's drawling insouciance. Only
one or two tweaks were required, those of 'prolonging the chromaticism and
adding the triplet in the fourth bar, and above all by varying the threefold
repetition in the refrain'.12 Thus did the pastiche of idoneity adopt minor
productions and invest them with the majority of the musical mainstream.
There is nothing new about such interpolations, for the practice dates back
to the sacred music of Palestrina and, before him, to the mediaeval bishops
who sought to deny the devil all the good tunes. And it continued into the
19th century, whether in Gounod's Marification of a C Major Prelude from
Das wohltemperiertes Klavier or in Wood and Woodward's crafting of 'Ding
dong! Merrily on High' from a branle - 'a lively and exhilarating dance with
two heavy beats for "joined feet and a high jump".'13 The spondaic mimims
in its 'ringing' and 'singing' are therefore literally the vestigia of those
vanished soubresauts. Ditto the pastiche of 'Good King Wenceslas', which
Elizabeth Poston deplores for its 'unnatural marriage between Victorian
whimsy and the thirteenth-century dance carol'.14 But what could be more in
the spirit of the Golden legend than J M Neale 's shamelessly spurious anecdote
('The theme of the Christmas song [...] is imaginary'15) and the even more
impudent recrafting of pagan reverdie into wintry Christian idyll. Poston
complains that '"Ste-phen" and "cru-el" [...] are bathos on the accented
stamp notes',16 but surely 'cru-el', thus pounded, becomes a rhythmic bruise,
and the accentual parison of 'e- ven' the very picture of evenness?
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32 The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxonomy
17. Gorm Busk: 'The
composer: his work and
style ', libretto booklet for
the Kontrapunkt recording
of Friedrich Kuhlau's Lulu
(Copenhagen, 1986), p. 16.
18. Harold Rosenthal & John
Warrack: The concise Oxford
dictionary of opera (London,
1964), p.390.
19. Eric Blom: Mozart
(London, 1935), p.273.
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Moving away from borrowings suspect and legitimate, we encounter
the phenomenon of petits maîtres who, capable only of lowly flight, half-
imp their wings with borrowed feathers to get melody-borne. Gorm Busk
claims that a 'special aspect of Kuhlau's opera style [...] is his musical
borrowing or model technique, namely "borrowed" melodies, or complete
movements form the basis for his own music'.17 Only one of the various
instances he adduces - 'Kun for Kjerlighed' - seems, in my view, to resemble
its putative model - 'Himmel, nimm des Dannes Zähren' ( Der Freischütz ),
but if Kuhlau isn't the very model of a modern Modeltechniker , Sullivan
certainly is. John Warrack remarks that the latter 'fastens on a composer
(e.g. Handel) or form (e.g. madrigal) and absorbs as much of it as is needed
to get his own invention going',18 and indeed some of the best things in the
Savoy operas can be traced to recognisable sources. Their auxiliar patter (as
opposed to the melismatic gabble of the Rossini/Donizetti tradition) bears
a striking resemblance to the fifth ballet in Le Dieu et la bayadere (Auber),
which also conducts itself like the Modern Major-General, and an equally
marked similarity obtains between the Major's currens calamus and the act
3 Introduction of Semeie - if not the Glinka acorn that fathered the oak of
Russian music, then certainly the Handel poppy seed that produced a field
of nodding patter songs. By the same token, the unsatisfactory moments
of the operettas can be traced to another palpable model, namely, the eye-
averted, simpering Mendelssohn of crinolines and 'unmentionables'. It's all
too easy to join the dots between 'Ah, leave me not to pine alone' ( The
pirates of Penzance) and the E Major Lied ohne Worte op. 30.
But if Sullivan got melodically underway by cranking himself up with
Auber, Handel and Mendelssohn, greater composers achieved something
more profound through life-changing encounters with figures as great as, or
even greater than, themselves. On such occasions the mechanical externality
of Modeltechnik turns into a vivid, uncontrollable catalysis. Mozart's Gigue
K.574, written 'under the influence [...] of the impressions received from
Bach's music in Leipzig',19 is a sui generis spumante miracle that looks ahead
to the young Mendelssohn, himself the subject of a Bach epiphany. But long
before that exposure, Mozart, through the instruction of his father, and by
studying the work by intermediate composers, had acquired an academic
'diction' not unlike the verbal code by which Augustan poets turned sheep
into fleecy care, and birds into feathered people. This diction, into which a
good deal of Bach had already been digested, constituted a pastiche species
in its own right. Homophony was all very well for secular composition
(and indeed for selected passages of sacred), but to be properly devotional
one had to thicken up the texture with a (by then faintly archaic) many-
voicedness. A rococo serenade or cassation could pass with a single voice-
line, but a liturgical piece that didn't make some use of counterpoint, that
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20. quoted in George
Painter: Marcel Proust : a
biography , 2 vols (London,
1965), vol.2, pp.99- 100.
21. Paul Merrick: Revolution
and religion in the music of
Lisņ (Cambridge, 1987),
P-I33-
22. ibid., p. 134.
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unfailing guarantor of dignity, would have seemed deficient in the way
that Schubert's 'German' Mass seems deficient, breathing all the tedium
of a Protestant 'hymn sandwich'. When therefore Proust propounded 'the
purgative, exorcising virtue of parody',20 he was recommending what music
academies and music masters before them have always recommended: the
unoriginal, apprenticeship execution of music rooted in an earlier period.
These days it's viewed as a rule-set soon to be broken, but until the late
19th century at least, it was considered rather as a rule-set to be invoked
for moments of solemnity. Ecclesiastical 'pastiche' academicism, nodded at
from time to time, could serve to 'expiate' and chasten the enormities that
had entered by the back door. Rossini was careful to end his Stabat Mater
with a fugue, nominal penance for the delicious barrel-organry of its 'Cuius
animam'.
And of course, within the matrix of church music, there also persisted
traditions much older than that of the baroque fugue. In the 18th century
a priest would often precent the first clause of the 'Credo' in plainchant
only to have the rest of the text rush upon him in a landslide of unmonastic
rocaille; or in the 19th he would intone the ancient 'Sursum corda' only
to have a Gounodesque 'Sanctus' burst polychromatically about his ears!
Liszt's 'Coronation' Mass presents an interesting case study in this regard,
being something of a pastiche babushka doll. Its 'Credo' was taken from the
'Messe royale of Henri Dumont, [...] composed in the style of plainchant',21
and while this might look the sort of theft we glimpsed at the start, there
is a crucial difference: it can't pass itself off as genuine Liszt, whereas the
borrowings of Handel and Bononcini blend into their own styles. There is
still an element of dishonesty, however, for it offers itself as the work of
a master pasticheur, which Liszt certainly wasn't; and even the embedded
material is a fake of sorts - a cinquecento 'reconstruction' of mediaeval
music. Borodin was wrong, therefore, to claim that Liszt himself had
placed upon it the 'stamp of the old Catholic liturgy'.22 Rather, one could
compare it to a competent copy of a Perugino reredos behind an altar in
Grahamstown, a provincial city in South Africa. As a copy it is relatively
worthless but, by virtue of its competence, it borrows excellence from
its original. And some might even argue that it pleases in a way that an
original ancona by a Holman Hunt epigone (the probable commissionee in
the circumstances) would have been incapable of pleasing. Whatever that
hypothetical painter had on offer would have owed nothing to the Italian,
but it would have been garish in the way that Gounod's St Cecilia 'Credo' is
garish (but original). There is something to be said for quiet derivativeness
in such contexts.
Protestantism also had its own traditionary forms, centred on the con-
gregational hymn, and these fell by default within the shadow of the
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 201J 33
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34 The varieties of musical pastiche : a taxonomy

Lutheran chorale. These square-set Teste Burgs', buttressed by solid four-

part harmony functioned so efficiently as professions of faith that they even
entered the operatic repertoire in disguise. Meyerbeer often uses churchy
harmonies and squared-off phrases for moments of affirmation, as when
Vasco defies the Inquisition in L'Africaine ('D'impie et de rebelle en vain je
suis traité') but, more importantly, he allowed 'Ein' feste Burg' to feature
in propria musica throughout Les Huguenots (1836). By contrast, Balfe's
Siege of Rochelle (1835) had given no inkling of its characters' Calvinism
and when they prayed (ťOh, Thou, who look'st upon the battle') had
them anticipate the accents of John Bacchus Dykes. Avoiding the default
pastiche of the Protestant hymn, and recurring instead to its fons et origo,
Meyerbeer ushered in a new musico-historical consciousness on the lyric
stage. Compare Donizetti's efforts to suggest Tudor England through
Henry Bishop - of all people! - in Anna Bolena , and through 'God save
the king' in Roberto Devereux - a more venial error, since that is at least a
galliard, even if drawled in this context as its 1745 avatar. We can measure
the progress of this consciousness by setting the pastiche dances of il duca
di Mantua ( recte il re di Francia) in Rigoletto against those of his original
(François premier in Le roi s'amuse) in Delibes's incidental music. The first
comprises an anachronistic minuet - feeble parody of Don Giovanni's -
and a perigodino that reads like a tarantella; the second, inter alia, an echt-
sounding galliard and passepied.
If Liszt pioneered a revival of mediaeval forms within 19th-century
liturgical music, he had been anticipated in this field by the Italian opera.
Censors forbade the enactment of church rites, but had no objection to the
chanting of nuns and monks. While those in La favorite sing the religiose
doodles that suburban organists call voluntaries, those in II trovatore and Don
Carlos manage a serviceable faux-bourdonese. In Otello , furthermore, as if
in anticipation of Pio Decimo's Motu proprio , even Desdemona plainchants
part of her 'Ave Maria' in a way more accordant with 16th-century practice
than the swaying periods by which Meyerbeer had rendered the Marian
cortège in Les Huguenots ; and Boito follows Verdi's example in the 'Pater
noster' from Nerone . Eastern Orthodox chant exerted a similar sort of
hegemony in the Russian opera house and concert hall. It finds its way into
Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and into his Album for the youth, 'In church'
being a Lied ohne Worte fathered upon the drone of Russian monks ('In
church'). Indeed his setting of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom seems so
orthodoxly Orthodox, so antiquarian in spirit that, to a non-specialist in the
field, it passes for the real thing the same way that Liszt's sleight-of-hand
'Credo' does. Tchaikovsky's musical personality, as we know it from his
other works, gains next to no admission.

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 types: neo-classicism in the sense of reconstruction rather than
Which bricolage. types: brings
bricolage.neo-classicism Pastiche turns
Pastiche of necessity us to onof borrowed
a in further
plumes,necessity the sense gradation of turns reconstruction in on the borrowed scale rather of pastiche plumes, than
whether plucked and arranged in a pasticcio fan, or grafted on to the innate
character of the pasticheur. We have already noted how churchspeak and
academic formulae impose a faceless impersonality on their purveyors,
given the generic musical character of plainchant and faux-bourdon on
the one hand, and of classroom fugues on the other. Most fugai subjects,
constrained by the standard hoops through which they will have to pass,
bear a family resemblance to each other, a resemblance to which the length
and languor of 19th-century melopoeia must necessarily sacrifice itself.
There is therefore as much a whiff of Bachian mothballs about the fugue
in Giselle as about the fugue in Bizet's Symphony, simply by virtue of their
fuguedom. Both originate in the inculcated habits of the conservatoire,
the site of impersonal , quirk-subduing exercise rather than self-expression.
When, therefore, a fugue seeks originality by deploying a quirky, atypical
subject - that in Coppélia comes to mind - it seems to cock a snook at Bach
in the first instance and then, by extension, at the academic tradition founded
upon him. Alternatively, it may take a subject associated with chaos - the
quarrel of the factory girls in Carmen , which becomes a fugue at the end of
act i - or the Epicurean mockery of the world at the end of Falstaff. How
cunning of Bizet and Verdi thus to force a confrontation between centrifugal
violence/ triviality and fugue-centred order/ solemnity. In such instances,
temporal disjunction - the sine qua non of pastiche - finds itself enhanced
by a mismatch of form and content, reminding us that there is a great deal
of human experience - amongst it querelles and burle - that the fugue simply
cant encompass. Something of the same strategy underpins the gavotte into
which the 'Alles vergängliche ' motif configures itself before the chorus of
anchorites in Mahler's Eighth Symphony. For a fleeting while, the untamed
'Bergschluchten' are brought within the civilising (but inadequate) ambit
of an Enlightenment dance form, emblem of the improbably chastened
lions that 'schleichen stumm-/Freundlich'.23 Indeed, pastiche of this
kind resembles those sly, reticent, beneficent animals. It has a twinkle in
its eye, unlike the stodgy, dutiful, compelled academicism of some church
music.

23. Johann Wolfgang von Gounod cast his St Cecila 'Credo' as a marche populaire , perhaps as a
Goethe: Faust , intro. Max
von Boehn (Berlin, 1940), delayed response on the part of the Church Militant to the anti-clerical
pp.440-41. 'Marseillaise'. It proves too characterful by half in the context, and nothing
24. TS Eliot: 'Tradition could be further from the stern, faceless idiom in which Cherubini had
and the individual talent', couched his Masses, an idiom that embodies that austere desideratum of
in Selected prose , ed. John
Hayward (Harmondsworth, TS Eliot: 'The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual
1953), p.26. extinction of the personality'.24 Such self-evacuation is also characterised in

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3 6 The varieties of musical pastiche : a taxonomy

the classical music of Brahms, which, simply because it isn't «¿o-classical,

ought never to viewed in the light of pastiche. Instead of attempting the
restitution of, or the reconnection with, an eclipsed past, it asserts its place
in an unbroken, traditionary continuum, and draws nourishment from it.
The same consciousness also pulls the Tchaikovsky symphonies (otherwise
personal and idiosyncratic essays in the form) toward the European
mainstream, and distinguishes them from the centrifugal productions of
his compatriots. He chose to canalise his self-revelations through sonata
form, and managed thereby to impersonalise them, whereas Romanticism
at large had centred both on the flaunting of self and on an iconoclastic
search for original form. On the other hand, Brahms and, to a lesser extent,
Tchaikovsky saw themselves as part of an apostolic succession (divided,
in the latter's case, as the Eastern from the Western church, by the filioque
of Glinka). Brahms's sense of belonging was more forthright than the
Russian's, however. It claimed as its birthright the Mannheim school,
a birthright mediated by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Even so, it had
recently been challenged by a musical Luther, by Wagner, the purveyor of a
new, refounded faith. Brahms was accordingly indignant when his adversary
claimed Beethoven as the antecedent of the New Music, arguing that since
the art 'was of its nature incapable of defining the emotions it expressed',
Beethoven had included a Schiller ode in his Ninth for 'a new art work in

which music would be "fertilized by poetry".'25

25. Robert L. Jacobs: ÎVagner
(1935; rev. London, 1965),
pp.3 1-32.
26. Malcolm MacDonald:
Brahms (London, 1991),
p.247.
Brahms responded by embedding a faux-Schiller moment in the C minor
Symphony finale as an act of reappropriation , redirecting melody to its
linear, non-verbal ends. As in the rhetorical figure of anadiplosis, which
recapitulates the end of one sentence at the start of the next, he was resplicing
his symphony to the one that Wagner had claimed as his Baptist cry, and his
impatience 'with the "asses" who invoked Beethoven's Ninth'26 centred not
on their having spoken a hurtful truth, but rather on their having uttered
fatuous truism, a mere lapallisade. It is this conscious gesture of continuity
that neutralises any charge of plagiarism against the C minor Symphony,
and which at the same time nullifies the charge of pastiche, which, as
we have seen, centres on a disjunction - temporal and de facto stylistic -
between past and present. But whereas in the finale of the First Symphony,
Brahms worked within the compass of an extant form, in that of the Fourth
he didn't. Its passacaglia does indeed rank among the seminal pastiche
moments of the Western repertoire, reconciling scholarly conformation
with an indomitable personal voice in a way that the academic fugai writing
of Schubert's Ab and Eb Masses (beautiful though it be) simply doesn't. For
whereas the latter could pass at a pinch for the fugai writing of Haydn and
Mozart, that of the E minor passacaglia remains sui generis. At the same time,
though, it receives its life by resuscitation, unlike the 'Freude' element of

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 the First, which breathes autonomously from a functioning lung. Such first-
water pastiche is comparatively rare, for it has to be both convincing as an
historical exercise and musically interesting in itself. We have seen Mozart
bring it off in his Gigue; Brahms manages it in the E Minor; Beethoven
almost certainly would have done so in his projected modal symphony; and
some of Tchaikovsky's ballet music proves incomparable from this point of
view. Various parts of The sleeping beauty titrate the past and present against
each other, blending idioms in a beautiful tertium quid that is begotten, not
made, upon the distinct eras.
By contrast, the pastiche intermède in Pique dame , one-dimensional
rather than dualistic, prompted the composer to dismiss it as ťa slavish
imitation of the style of the past century', - not 'composition, but as
it were, borrowing'.27 That, of course, is a little wide of the mark, as
Tchaikovsky's self-flagellations tend often to be, but David Brown is right
to claim that it lacks 'that active fertilization by [his] own creativity which
had given the hybrid style of the Rococo Variations such genuine life'.28 It
should be pointed out, however, that those variations are no more rococo
than Monsieur Triquet's couplets had been, and can't therefore be viewed
as pastiche. The theme upon which they ring their changes might aspire
to gavottehood, but its affinities with the 'Danse russe' in Swan lake are
quite strong. What Tchaikovsky actually means by 'borrowing' is that if
composers have to extinguish their real selves in the production of pastiche,
they might as well borrow openly and be done with it, as Liszt had done
in his 'Credo.' Better that than to deploy 'the mechanics of conservatoire
construction'29 to fashion lifeless simulacra.

Brahms's 'Freude' theme functions as an allusion rather than borrowing

because it presents itself as an act of filiation. Such allusiveness must be
distinguished from pastiche (which depends on a temporal divorce), and
can always be identified by the purposiveness of the connections it makes.
The horn clarion that awakens Pan at the start of the Mahler Third is the

27. Brown: Tchaikovsky ,
vol.4, p.246.
28. ibid.
29. Lambert: Music ho!,
P-II5-
30. John Stuart Mill: The
autobiography of John Stuart
Mill , www.gutenberg.org/
cache / epub / 1 o 3 78 / pg i o 3 78 .
html (accessed 30 November
2014).
31. ibid.
seeming cousin of the 'Freude' theme, but nothing comes of its cousinship.
There is no apostolic succession behind the resemblance, but simply the
aleatorie fact that 'the octave consists only of five tones and two semitones,
which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which
but a small proportion are beautiful'.30 This was one of several distresses
that contributed to the breakdown of John Stuart Mill. In retrospect he
condescended to his anxiety, claiming that it 'may, perhaps, be thought to
resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should
be burnt out',31 but the fears of the Laputans and of Mill were very well
founded even if they weren't to know it. Brahms, having no meaningful
successors, brought the classical tradition to a close in a glorious sunset -
and that, I suppose, is red gianthood of a kind.

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38 The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxonomy
by sugaring it for contemporary taste. Mozart's adjustments to the score of
Messiah - very beautiful adjustments, be it noted - was an act of advocacy,
Manon Lescaut , the first pastiche ballet in the reconstructive sense (there
32. Lambert: Music ho!, p.43.
33. Nikolaus Pevsner:
An outline of European
architecture (1943; rev.
Harmondsworth, 1968),
p.378.
34. quoted in Ivor Guest:
The romantic ballet in Paris
(1966; rev. 1980), p.98.
35. ibid., p.98.
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Living pastiche approaches the past bearing the riches of the present,
and centres on values of self-renewal and energisation, not on nostalgia and
escapism. At its most rudimentary and controversial, it popularises that past
not of vandalism. And so too were the 19th-century bedizenings of earlier
composers by Tchaikovsky and Elgar. Such actions represent a first step
toward pastiche simply because they place the contemporary orchestra at
the feet of past masters (whom they perceive as having been deprived of
unconceived richness and sonority). The next step is to borrow back lost
forms, enriching them with un-thought-of harmonic procedures, and then,
finally, to hybridise standard past melodic formulae with personal habits
in this regard. Constant Lambert is wrong to suggest that pastiche is pri-
marily a 20th-century phenomenon and that in the 19th, while 'a number of
minor composers turned out their suites in olden style', they 'no more
affected the main course of music than an Olde Worlde Bunne Shoppe
affects the architectural experiments of Corbusier'.32 At least as far as
the lyric stage goes, nothing could be farther from the truth, for there the
construction of Olde Worlde Bunne Shoppes was very much the order of
the day, as indeed in the cities in which those stages were to be found: 'in the
early years of the nineteenth century, the fancy-dress ball of architecture
is in full swing: Classical, Gothic, Italianate, Old-English'.33 Grand opera
became a mixed stylistic repository, and in due course it resembled a London
pantechnicon or a Parisian magasin, with every conceivable musical artefact
in every conceivable style - temporal and geographic - placed on display.
It took a while for this historicism to assert itself, however. Halévy's
had been balletic pasticci in abundance), failed to meet with approval, for
the 'mid-eighteenth century was not remote enough for its styles to be
admired by the public'.34 But Meyerbeer, his antennae ever alert to things
to come, commented that its 'parodying of the music of the old France [...]
is excellently constructed'.35 He uses 'parody', as Proust does, to indicate a
pastiche so authentic as to displace the parodist's personality and, having
thus purged it of the past, to open it to the future. Parody, in fact, is what
Tchaikovsky meant when he called pastiche a species of borrowing. As its
etymons ('para' and 'oide') suggest, it follows the coastline of a chosen
piece by a kind of melodic cabotage, altering intervals and values here and
there, but allowing us a steady glimpse of the original beneath the changes.
Needing a minuet for Rigoletto , Verdi took the one from Don Giovanni ,
tweaked it here and there, and popped it into the score. This might look
like ModeltechniĶ but it was prompted not by weak invention but by limited
historical knowledge. Halévy's score, on the other hand, which Meyerbeer
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 deplored for its lack of 'real thematic invention', could for that very reason
pass muster as a rococo suite de danses.

audiences, moving further back in time proved more difficult still.

If audiences,Hérold'Hérold' s in(11830
s Zampa Zampaoutthein themoving
831) plays musiccentury,
early 16th (1831) butfurther
galliardsof plays the 18th back out century in in the time early seemed proved 16th rébarbative century, more difficult but to galliards Parisian still.
and canaries would have passed over the heads of the audience or struck too
harsh a note - if indeed he had known how to 'parody' them. So he chose
instead to narrate the story of the marble bride to a gavotte, the overture
setting its primness ( signifiant of vanished order and decency) against a
riotous chanson à boire ( signifiant of present piratical licence). But it also
contains another gavotte, now polkafied into an allegro by conductors with
no knowledge of the larger score. (Richard Bonynge provides an honourable
exception to this rule.) Proof of its real identity is supplied by the gavotte
in Thomas's Mignon - one of the most celebrated of the century - which,
give or take a few notes, parodies Hérold's tune by eversión. The A major
gavotte of the overture (the other is in B'>) comes in fact from Zampa's
credal aria, 'Il faut céder à mes lois', which, like the catalogue song in Don
Giovanni , falls into two sections, one ineluctable, the other blandishing with
charm. For the latter Mozart chose a minuet, whereas Herold favoured its
common-time cousin. Since Zampa's little black book begins in India, the
gavotte (still somewhat bizarre in 1831) serves to image the spatial other:
'Piquante bayadère/Par sa danse légère'. It forms part of an evolutionary
graph that tracks developing historical consciousness among composers of
the 19th century. In 1830, for want of anything more authentic, Auber's
bayadere had danced to a proto-patter aria; in 1831, the one in Zampa had
been othered by a gavotte and, come 1883, Delibes's in Lakmé would disport
to a creditably researched terâna and rektah.
The music of the 18th century, repulsive to Opéra audiences when
Halévy's Manon Lescaut premiered in 1830, gained glamour as it receded in
time, and Zampa helped get this process of recuperation underway. Indeed,
the artifice of la grand siècle embodied a self-control and self-possession
increasingly foreign to the French Romantic sensibility after Hernâni
(1832), and therefore, such is the nature of forbidden fruit, increasingly
attractive. Fin-de-siècle gavottes would eventually even achieve hit-parade
status, as witness the dreadful offerings of Czibulka ('Stefanie') and Lincke
('Glow worm idyll'). The dance also gained increasing traction for ballerina
variations. Tchaikovsky assigned it to Aurora in The sleeping beauty and to
the Sugar Plum Fairy in The nutcracker , its precieux quality offset in both pas
de deux by the tarantelle of the cavaliers. Pastiche indeed came increasingly
to act as a foil for the untrammelled musical violence of the times, as
witness the choric gavotte in Leoncavallo's La bohème when Schaunard

THE musical times Spring 201J 39

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4 o The varieties of musical pastiche : a taxonomy

promises the café owner a dignified dinner party. Its prim formality is made
to clash with the composer's own veristic idiom - a discrepancy similar
to, and discharging the same function as, the nonce gavotte in Mahler's
Eighth.
We can detect the beginnings of this 'condimentai' use of pastiche in
some Beethoven piano sonatas. At the time of their composition, the minuet,
though still a viable form, was beginning to show its age (if not quite the
moribondage that Minkus would imply when he gave it to Don Quixote in
the ballet by that name). We know from Goethe's Werther that it coexisted
in the 1770S with the waltz, the older form associated with an earth-bound
shuffle - 'Wir schlangen uns in Menuetts um einander herum'36 - and the
newer with Dionysiac ecstasy: 'und da wir nun gar ans Walzen kamen
und wie die Sphären um einander herumrollten'.37 Given this important
shift in ballroom manners, and given Beethoven's unpowdered hair and
indifference to etiquette, we often find him making crucial choices between
the old and the new. While his Eighth Symphony recurs unapologetically
to the Haydn model (notwithstanding the oceanic surge and recession of
its minuet), all the others dispense with the dance in favour of the more
progressive scherzo, though in the otherwise Bacchic Seventh, a mysterious
and beautiful gavotte torso, doing service as a slow movement, discharges
the same contrastive function that a scherzo-displaced minuet would have
done. By the same token, while the minuet in the G Major Sonata facile
accords perfectly with its pretty Diabelleries, that of the F minor First
Sonata offsets the diableries there, not least the tarantella infernale that
brings it to a close. Ditto the Db ( recte C(t) gigue in the 'Moonlight' Sonata,
its antique 'merry limp' (Scholes's phrase38) inset as a foil for Cjt minor
Sturm und Drang that rages when it's done. One likewise has a sense of
toggling between different musical worlds in the Pas de six of The sleeping
beauty , which juxtaposes the tarantella of la fée Candide with the gavotte
of la fée Miettes qui tombent, and the courante of la fée Canari qui chante
with the tarantella of la fée Violente (whose name says it all). There too the
older forms have a condimentai function, while at the same time acting as
temporal signifiants à la Hérold 's ballade in Zampa .

36. Johan Wolfgang von

Of course, pastiche can also be contrasted disadvantageous ly with the
Goethe: Goethes Werke , present, as when Don Giovanni conveys Donna Elvira's neurosis 'in the old-
ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols
fashioned pseudo-Handelian idiom of [...] Ah! fuggi il traditori'39 Mozart's
(Munich, 1981), vol.6, p.24.
tastefulness tempers the burlesque (Offenbach would have handled the
37. ibid., vol.6, pp.24-25.
situation more crudely and by direct quotation) and also enhances its
38. Scholes: Oxford
thematic value. If the aria be played slowly, it would stand revealed as a
companion , p.403.
sarabande much like 'I know that my redeemer liveth' {Messiah), and
39. Arthur Jacobs & Stanley
Sadie: The Pan hook of opera
with the same proemial rising fourth. But whereas there it conveys quiet
(London, 1964), p.66. exultation and redemptive hope, here it prophesies the certainty of doom.

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fantastique : 'La mort de la jeune fille'). His having begun therefore with a
40. Henri Bergson: Laughter
in comedy , intro. Wylie
Sypher (Baltimore, 1956),
p. 104.
41. Leoncavallo: libretto
booklet for Nuova Era La
bohème recording, p. 58.
42. Henri Murger: Scènes
de la vie de bohème (1869),
www.gutenberg.org/
files/ 18446/ 18446-h/
18446-h.htm (accessed 18
October 2014).
43. Alexander Pope: The
poems of Alexander Pope , ed.
John Butt (London, 1963),
P- 1 54-
44. Leoncavallo: libretto
booklet, p.58.
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That is because Mozart has increased the speed, and any drastic alteration
of tempo opens the door to travesty. Drag the time, and you arrive at Saint-
Saëns's cancanning tortoises; chivvy it, and the dotted rhythm of Lullyan
pomp and largesse evokes, as here, the jerkiness of marionette (Elvira
the will-less victim of her seducer). In the alienating way of comedy, this
jazzed-up sarabande reminds us that the 'attitudes, gestures and movements
of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds
us of a mere machine'.40
The satiric pastiche of Leoncavallo's Bohème is cruder, but not without
interest. When Schaunard's canzona 'Alza l'occhio celeste' imitates 'il
genere rossiniano, con comico sentimento',41 he would seem to be mocking
the great Italian, but he himself might be the target of Leoncavallo's
mockery. In Murger's novel Alexandre produces 'un album de melodies qui
fut chanté dans tous les concerts', which 'commença sa reputation'.42 These
might be respectable art songs, but they are more probably salon fodder,
bearing no relation to his earlier oeuvre à la Berlioz (so violent that 'Il y
eut deux cordes brisées', and with a programme like that of the Symphonie
Berlioz bang and ended with a Loïse Puget whimper clarifies the tone of the
pastiche canzona in the opera: it anticipates his own fate even as it satirises
the démodé. The Rossini of frigid fioriture had become passé by 1837, one
year after the premiere of Les Huguenots , which Leoncavallo twice quotes
notatim. Schaunard might be judging hel canto by a Meyerbeerian yardstick
(the canzona as an internal musikalischer Spass), but the joke might also be
at his own expense, destined as he seems to be to a career far less illustrious.
The chorus's pert phrase extensions have nothing to do with Rossini, for
there is nothing like them in the operas I've encountered. Nor can Rossini
be in the cross-hairs when they attack Schaunard's rhyming, as predictable
as that anatomised by Pope ('If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs
creep,/ The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep' 43):
E la montana...
Parte degli invitati
(interrompendo e contraffacendolo)
Azzura!44
But when they shut down the parody after it has outlived its welcome, it
is by means of the de rigeur I V- V- I cadence of Rossini and the rossiniani,
which would seem to spread the blame between parodist and parodee. An
additional interest of this pastiche centres on its 'diegetic' character. It
originates within the drama, as also in Pagliacci. There Leoncavallo similarly
furnishes the commedia dell'arte episode with outmoded music. On the one
hand he provides a minuet whose double-octave falls suggest a heavy satin-
and-silk landslide on to parquet, and whose skittering undecapulets and
THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 201J ĄI
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42 The varieties of musical pastiche: a taxonomy

septulets evoke the dancer's clutching effort to right herself; and on the other
he trots out a gavotte with the performer instruction - con molta eleganza -
based on the dolce that Mozart once demanded of discordant horns. How on
earth to be elegant when there's a branle stamp in the V/V and dominant
bars that brings Schumann's 'Merry peasant' to mind? The music mocks
itself, but at the same time it heightens, by its self-consciousness and artifice,
the veristic storm raging outside its compass.

Various contemptuous satire, neutral historicism, and worshipful nostalgia

Various that contemptuous alchemises motives
that alchemises satire, thebyinform
the present the present
past. Itneutral the byashistoricism,
subsists, we have recourse
seen, the past. to It musical subsists, and worshipful pastiche as we have nostalgia - mildly seen,
outside such traditionary forms as the sonata and the symphony, being
predicated on severance rather than continuity. When Beethoven started
his First Piano Sonata with a Mannheim rocket and when Brahms used

anadiplosis to join his First Symphony to the 'Choral', they were anointing
themselves as members of the classical school, one that, if not based on
the extinction of personality - Eliot's idea of classicism is too extreme -
then certainly requiring its partial effacement. To submit to the demands
of sonata and fugai form is, after all, to surrender a measure of freedom.
But, at the same time, it is also to embrace those limitations with the express
purpose of developing them. It's when a tradition begins to ossify that it
takes on the lineaments of bad pastiche, of a dead, epigonie replication. It's
a danger that always besets music too carefully groomed by the academy, as
we see in the less successful works of Mendelssohn and Saint-Saëns. At the

same time, pastiche must never automatically be equated with increasingly

45. Robert Browning:
Browning , selected by WE
Williams (Harmondsworth,
I954), P-21-
pallid copies from a photocopy machine. The borrowed chorales of St
Paul and the 'Reformation' Symphony are all very well, and have a sound
precedent in Bach's own practice in the Passions. But consider instead the
vital, significant pastiche that Mendelssohn wrestled from the form in 'For
He the Lord Our God' ( Elijah ). Here, working with the chorale (rather
than duplicating it), he cliffs out his bleak C minor triads in a way that
perverts the form's affirmative function into one of despair. Not only does
the hopelessness register in the enjambement of the melody, unyieldingly
stretched over the phrase breaks we have been led to expect, but there is
also scorpion venom in the skipping tails of quavers that supervene on
the relentless minims. They promise a respite that doesn't materialise,
and remind us of the Calvinist deity who amuses himself by denying
heaven to those who thought themselves elect, and Browning's Spanish
monk, who hopes to catch Brother Lawrence in articulo mortis , and 'send
him flying/Off to hell, a Manichee'.45 What music could more perfectly
render its text - the bleak, merciless text of Exodus 20.5 in which the author
has obscurely intuited the doom built into our DNA? This is pastiche

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 at its meaningful best, a bridging that issues in enrichment rather than
depletion.
Music has always offered an ordered alternative to the chaos of life - 'eine
bess're Welt', as Schubert puts it in his incomparable song. But within that
'bess're Welt' are other sub-worlds in turn. Lambert points out that even
'the most austere among us [...] desire to escape our drab physical [...] and
spiritual surroundings into a more highly coloured world',46 and pastiche
is a point both of escape and entry. We can use those alternative worlds to
measure a too-prim past against our liberated present (the canon-motif of the
Coppélia doll placed in all its lifeless imitativeness against Swanilda's peasant
exuberance), or to savour a musical life less complicated, less raw and more
orderly than the one in which we find ourselves, as when the Sugar Plum
Fairy steps fastidiously away from the secondo ottocento , from all its verismo
bawling and brawling, from all the sprawling and crawling of overcharged
fin-de-siècle symphonism. But she also, at the same time, represents that
rare, transcendent pastiche of the tertium quid . I can think of no ballet music
more quintessential than hers, moving with the assurance and certitude
of a rococo danseuse, but with timbres that might have originated in the
chandelier lustres trembling above her (timbres untranscribable before the
advent of the celesta) and pointed by the dark yawns of a bass clarinet, also
an instrument of the future. Though the metre remains delicately insistent,
the melody is full of Mozartian quirks, the first sub-beat delegated to the
tonic bass just as, in its distant cousin, the F# minor sicilienne of K.488, the
E)t is delegated to the bass in the second bar. And, while we are adjusting to
that lacuna, the semiquaver fission, the second sub-beat creates an anacrusis
and directs the stress to the third - for all the world like a petit battement
shooting into a tendue, as so often in the dances of the 18th century. We are
in a 'bess're Welt', certainly, but one paradoxically 'verbessert' by the very

46. Lambert: Music hoi, 'Welt' out of which the yearning Tchaikovsky has stretched to effect his
P-139- embrace.

THE MUSICAL TIMES Spring 20 1 J 43

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