Music: If all art aspires to the condition of music, one of the reasons is that music cannot be, and does not require to be, translated. It is the purest of the arts. John Banville reviews Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said and Said's Freud and the Non-European.
In music, form and content are one; indeed, there are some, most notoriously Stravinsky, who would insist that music has no content, and that any emotional charge derived from, say, The Rite of Spring, or the "Moonlight" Sonata, has been put there not by the composer but by the listener. The conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim's favourite definition of his chosen art form, which he cites more than once in Parallels and Paradoxes, is that propounded by Ferruccio Busoni: "Music is sonorous air."
Though he tends to keep to his tent, Barenboim is of the Stravinsky camp. Having quoted Busoni, he goes on: "Everything else that is said about music refers to the different reactions that music evokes in people: it is felt to be poetic, or sensual, or spiritual, or emotional, or formally fascinating; the possibilities are countless." In other words, the essence of music is ambiguity, as Adrian Leverkühn, the composer- protagonist of Thomas Mann's masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, recognised, to his devastating cost. This quality of ambiguity leads in turn to a kind of promiscuousness. "Since music is everything and nothing at the same time," Barenboim writes, "it therefore can be easily abused, as it was by the Nazis."
These quotations are from an essay, 'Germans, Jews and Music', included in Parallels and Paradoxes, that Barenboim first published in the New York Review of Books in March 2001, written partly in response to a remark by Klaus Landowsky, leader of the Christian Democratic Union in the Berlin Senate, on the difficulty of finding the right leader for the Berliner Staatsoper: its then, and present, director, "the Jew Barenboim", or a possible alternative, "the young Karajan, Christian Thielemann". Barenboim's response was mild: he interpreted Landowsky's statement not as a sign of xenophobia, but of his misunderstanding of Judaism.
The attitudes of many Germans who are hostile to foreigners seem to me to derive from the fact that the last two or three generations of Germans have not adequately learned what immigration means. They fail to understand that it is possible to have more than one identity at the same time [compare the Good Friday Agreement] and to accept that people of foreign origin, with foreign customs and a foreign culture, can become part of one's own land without threatening one's identity as a German.
It is an irony that, a few months after this essay appeared, Barenboim, leading the Berliner Staatsoper on a concert tour of Israel, caused a furore by proposing to include an extract from Wagner's Die Walküre in one of the concerts, in Jerusalem. Wagner's music, wholly discredited for many Jews because of the way it had been taken over by the Nazis - and because of the composer's virulent anti-Semitic non- musical writings - had not been played in Israel since the war. At the request of the director of the Israel Festival, Barenboim dropped the piece from the programme. However, on the night of the concert, July 7th, 2001, Barenboim at the end of the evening proposed to the audience that the orchestra would play an extract from Tristan und Isolde as an encore, and invited those who might take offence to leave the hall. Some did walk out, but the rest of the nearly 3,000-strong audience remained and gave Barenboim and his players an enthusiastic ovation. A taboo had been broken.
Barenboim is a remarkable representative of the Jewish diaspora. He was born in Argentina to Russian parents, and grew up in Israel; he began his conducting career with the New Philharmonic in London in the 1960s - and married the cellist, Jacqueline Du Pré - was musical director of the Orchestre de Paris, and is now director of the Chicago Symphony and the Deutsche Staatsoper; he speaks seven languages fluently; he lives mainly in Germany. His political commitments are firm but refreshingly unemphatic. In Weimar in 1999, to mark the 250th anniversary of Goethe's death, he and his friend, the Palestinian academic and writer, Edward Said, brought together a group of young Israeli, Arab and German musicians to take part in a workshop and play together as an orchestra, led by Barenboim and the Chinese cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. There were inevitable tensions and stand-offs, but successes, too. Said, himself a talented amateur pianist with a deep knowledge of music, watched with fascination as the workshop developed.
"There was an Israeli group, and a Russian group and a Syrian group, a Lebanese group, a Palestinian group and a group of Palestinian Israelis. All of them suddenly became cellists and violinists playing the same piece in the same orchestra under the same conductor," he says.
Parallels and Paradoxes - a title vague to the point of meaninglessness - is a record of six conversations, two of them held before an audience, between Barenboim and Said on various occasions between 1995 and 2000. The book's editor is Ara Guzelimian, director of Carnegie Hall, who interpolates a number of provocative questions into the dialogue between the two men. In the opening pages, the reader's heart may sink a little at the seemingly likely possibility that these conversations will consist of plenty of not very original politico-musical parallels, with few enlivening discordant paradoxes. However, as the talk deepens, music dominates and politics fades into the background. These are two highly articulate intellectuals, and their exchanges on art in general and music in particular are a heartening antidote to most of what passes for cultural debate in these low times. As Barenboim drily observes: "There is a contradiction in the fact that we live in an age that considers itself extremely critical but does not require of the individual to have the means to criticise."
Guzelimian opens the proceedings by asking of these two inveterate cosmopolitans if and where they feel at home. The answers he gets are predictably unpredictable. Barenboim the Israeli feels at home "in the idea of Jerusalem", but he lives most happily "in the company of a very few close friends". Said the Palestinian, perhaps unexpectedly, questions the very notion of home.
"There's a lot of sentimentality about 'homelands' that I don't really care for," he declares. "And wandering around is really what I like to do most." Further on in the discussion, however, in a technical deconstruction of the "search for tonality" in Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, Barenboim shows how, having established B-flat as the "home of the music" in the main allegro, the composer makes a harmonic change, and
we suddenly get into totally foreign territory . . . And this is what I would call the psychology of tonality. This is creating a sense of home, going to an unknown territory, and then returning. This is a process of courage and inevitability . . . Isn't that a sort of parallel of the process that every human being has to go through in his inner life in order to first achieve the affirmation of what one is, then have the courage to let that identity go in order to find the way back?
In response to this description of a musical odyssey, Said develops the Homeric parallel, and ruminates on the fact that Odysseus could just have come home to his Penelope but chose instead to return through a series of adventures that were not only attractive to him, but threatening as well. This is the essence of life, Said implies, this willingness, this eagerness, to venture out into the world and encounter challenges and menaces, in order finally, authentically, to return home. The going out and the coming back may be by the same route, but the journey is entirely different. Or, as Barenboim has it, in relation to sonata form: "The recapitulation is not the same as the exposition, although the notes are the same."
Questions of exile and homecoming are at the heart of Freud and the Non-European, the main text of which is a lecture delivered by Edward Said at the Freud Museum in London in December 2001. The lecture was originally commissioned by the Freud Institute in Vienna, the board of which, taking fright at the idea of allowing a prominent Palestinian into its hallowed halls, withdrew the invitation on the grounds of heightened sensitivities due to "the political conflict in the Middle East". We only know of this through what is almost an afterthought to a response to the Said lecture by Jacqueline Rose, novelist, Lacanian psychologist, and professor of English at the University of London, which closes the book.
The Said lecture is based on a close reading of Freud's last, difficult and highly eccentric work, Moses and Monotheism, in which the dying writer strikes at the very foundations of Judaism. Said draws a parallel between this book and the music of Beethoven's late period, the "intellectual trajectory" of which Said identifies, in a splendid formulation, as "intransigence and a sort of irascible transgressiveness". Freud's wilful transgression is to insist that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian, who led a band of captive Semites to the Promised Land, for which good deed he was turned on by the freedmen and murdered. From this peculiar and decidedly shaky, some might say dotty, premise - part of Freud's original title for the book identified it as 'A Historical Novel' - Said moves on to a consideration of how the modern state of Israel has resolutely buried the diverse origins of the Jewish people - or, rather, has set out to excavate a unitary past for the Jews that will authenticate their claim to be the sole inhabitants of a land that should rightfully accommodate a diversity of peoples. Thus, Said argues, archaeology, "the privileged Israeli science par excellence",
becomes the royal road to Jewish-Israeli identity, one in which the claim is repeatedly made that in the present-day land of Israel the Bible is materially realised thanks to archaeology, history is given flesh and bones, the past is recovered and put in dynastic order.
As Jacqueline Rose observes, in her pointed but subtle response, Said's claim is that "Israel represses Freud". Thus the Jews, whose origins according to Freud are not European but Egyptian, could return to Israel after 1948 as Europeans with a special, and exclusive, claim to the land of Palestine.
Said's engagement with and close reading of Freud's text makes for an address that is at once a literary investigation and a political act that vaults the walls of academe. Whether one accepts or rejects his argument - and there will be many Jews who will respond to it with far more violence than does the mannerly Rose - one cannot but admire the ingenuity of the way in which Said works up from such unpromising material an enlightening meditation on a people's conflicted attitudes to its origins, whether that people be Israeli, Palestinian, or, indeed, Irish.
John Banville's most recent novel, Shroud, was published last year
Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. By Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Bloomsbury, 186pp, £16.99
Freud and the Non-European. By Edward W. Said, Verso, 84 pp, £13