The First Page: Proust’s Songbook

THE FIRST PAGE

Proust’s Songbook:
Songs and their Uses

by Jennifer Rushworth

1 October 2024

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 8 October 2024, Jennifer Rushworth launches her monograph, Proust’s Songbook that looks at the presence and the role of songs – and not, as is common, on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and operas – in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu.

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 des es 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.”)

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JENNIFER RUSHWORTH is Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at Ucl. Her research interests include mourning, medievalism, and music. Proust’s Songbook is her third monograph.

The book launch will take place on 8 October 2024 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: Manuel via Unsplash.