Category Archives: Music

Frye on Verdi

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Verdi

Further to Saturday Night at the Opera.  We previously posted the finale of Verdi’s Falstaff here.

Scott was a source for the 19th c. opera—Donizetti’s Lucia & Bellini’s Puritani, the latter very loosely adapted from Old Mortality. I think not Verdi, though Verdi drew from a Romantic tradition that Scott did a lot to solidify: Hugo, Dumas, Schiller, etc. Nobody could imagine an opera of that period based on Jane Austen. If I try to rehabilitate Scott as a romancer, I should also try to rehabilitate melodrama. That term is usually used with contempt, & I’ve used it so myself, because of the way it approximates lynching-mob mentality in its hiss-the-villain setup. But there’s a legitimate type of melodrama where characters and plot outrage “probability,” yet seem to live in a logical world. I find Scott very hard to read now, but there are a lot of important critical principles extractable from him. (Late Notebooks, CW 5, 245–6)

Since the closing of the theatres in 1642, [Shakespearean comedy] has survived chiefly in opera. As long as we have Mozart or Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales: we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds. But the main tradition of Shakespearean fantasy seems to have drifted from the stage into lyric poetry, an oddly bookish fate for the warbler of native woodnotes. (“Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humours,” CW 10, 142). [This passage was incorporated into both “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” and A Natural Perspective.]

I did not, as I have indicated, see Fantasia, but I gather that the treatment of the Pastoral Symphony was a bit heavy handed compared to the delicate reference to it at the opening of the superb Farmyard Symphony, just before all the animals got to work on the Verdi Miserere. (“Music in the Movies,” CW 11, 110)

ALEXANDER: I’ve been most interested in some of the things you’ve had to say about music this evening. This last operatic excerpt, though, is of a very different sort. It’s the Finale to act 3 of Verdi’s Falstaff. Tell me why this is an appropriate way for us to end.
FRYE: Well, if I were asked who my favourite composer was, the answer would have to be Johann Sebastian Bach. So I suppose I have a particular affection for somebody who can display the acrobatic skill that Bach does in things like The Art of the Fugue. It’s partly for that reason that the greatest single moment in opera for me outside of Mozart is that Finale of Verdi’s Falstaff, the great fugue at the end. (CW 24, 742)

BOGDAN: You subscribed to Étude magazine as a teenager. Was that a Canadian publication?
FRYE: No, it was published in Philadelphia. The editors were all epigones of [Edward] Macdowell, who had been trained in Germany. So I picked up the notion that the only serious music was German music, and that Verdi and Puccini and so forth were just a bunch of organ-grinders. It took me a long time to get over that. (CW 24, 798)

Vivaldi: Spring

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4kTei0XrCs

Today is Vivaldi‘s 332nd birthday.  Yes, it may be one of the most overplayed pieces of music ever (most especially in independently operated bookstores!), but there’s a reason for that.  This version is delightful and full of surprises, even for those who think they’ve heard the thing one time too many.

Katabasis and Popular Culture

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa3bHKWZoJg

The movie that haunted Frye as a child: Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925.

I am reading Bob Denham’s wonderful book, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World.  It is divided into two main parts, “Exoterica” and “Esoterica”, the first of which I am making my leisurely way through. I have always called myself an exoteric Frye scholar, which means that I try to approach him as a general reader would through the published work and with the assured assumption that it possesses total coherence.  This approach has never failed me.  But what Bob manages to demonstrate is how the esoteric element of Frye’s critical vision illuminates the exoteric: and, appropriately enough, illuminates it from within.  I’m not even bothering to annotate or highlight the book — that can come with subsequent readings.  This first time round I simply enjoy being startled by the clarity of Bob’s insights while tucking away little bits of miscellaneous information here and there, like a chipmunk filling its cheeks.

Here are a couple of observations that stand out for me at this point, and I hope are at least tangentially related to the posts that have been going up the last few days.

The first has to do with Frye’s notebooks, which Bob characterizes as the “imaginative free play” where Frye’s mind displays its tendency to dianoia or the gestalt perception of pattern rather than the narrative continuity of mythos.  Here Frye is associative, oracular, synchronicitous.  Bob mines a number of excellent quotes from the notebooks to illustrate the tendency, but this one stands out:

[I]n beginning to plan a major work like the third book, don’t eliminate anything. Never assume that some area of your speculation can’t be included & has to be left over for another book. Things may get eliminated in the very last stage . . . but never, never exclude anything when thinking about the book. It was strenuous having to cut down FS [Fearful Symmetry] from an encyclopedia, but . . . major works are encyclopedic & anatomic: everything I know must go into them — eye of bat & tongue of dog. (25)

The second observation relates to the emphasis on katabasis or descent in Frye’s later work, which Bob astutely notes “appears to be even more important” than the theme of ascent.  Once again, he comes up with a superb quote from one of Frye’s 1960s notebooks to make the point:

Everybody has a fixation.  Mine has to do with meander-and-descent patterns. For years in my childhood I wanted to dig a cave & be the head of a society in it — this was before I read Tom Sawyer. All the things in literature that haunt me most have to do with katabasis. The movie that hit me hardest as a child was the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera. My main points of reference in literature are such things as The Tempest, P.R. [Paradise Regained], [Blake’s Milton], the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, the Waste Land– every damn one a meander-&-katabasis work. (29)

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