1. Napoleon Symphony (1974): a Third of Beethoven

The offshoot of an abortive collaboration between Burgess and Stanley Kubrick (the novel's dedicatee) to produce a workable screenplay for an epic movie on Bonaparte's life, the one thing everyone knows about Napoleon Symphony is that it adopts or adapts the 'form' of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony to a novelisation of its subject's life. Reading Burgess in Penguin paperbacks, as I did growing up, one was repeatedly confronted in the inside-cover bio with this sentence:

Anthony Burgess believes that in the fusion of musical and literary form lies a possible future for the novel. His Napoleon Symphony attempts to impose the shape of Beethoven's Eroica on the career of the Corsican conqueror.

Did he truly believe that? He attempted the experiment in 1974—having, he claimed, 'elephantine fun' in the process—but didn't really try it again (Mozart and the Wolf Gang apart). It makes good Burgess flap-copy, of course (by which I mean: it strikes the right provocative-pretentious tone) and said flap-copy was presumably written by AB himself. But I find myself wondering if anybody has really checked how deep the 'imposition', or fusion of musical and verbal, actually goes.

The Eroica is in one sense the obvious symphony to choose, since Beethoven wrote it with Napoleon in mind (originally he dedicated it 'to Napoleon Bonaparte' for his 'heroic' qualities in championing the anti-monarchical ideals of the Revolution; later, famously, he tore the title page in half on hearing the Napoleon had betrayed those ideals by declaring himself emperor). But in another, more pressing sense the Eroica is exactly the wrong symphony to choose. That symphony may indeed be Beethoven's musical 'portrait' of Bonaparte; but it's a portrait of him at his height, in 1804. Accordingly it ends on a high. The first movement expresses optimism and new beginnings; the second movement ('slow and dirge-like') encompasses the reversals; the third movement's scherzo expresses (quoting J. W. N. Sullivan), an 'indomitable uprising of creative energy'. and the fourth movement is an exuberant climax to the whole. But this is no good for a writer who wants to novelise not Napoleon from 1795 to 1804, but Napoleon from the 1790s right through the débâcle in Russia, thence to Waterloo and to the final ignominious exile and death in 1821. The last two movements are, ineradicably, quite wrong for that shape, the trajectory of Bonaparte's whole life.

How can Burgess possibly reconcile musical form and novelistic requirement, given that mismatch?

At any rate, I thought I'd have a closer look at the musical analogue in this novel. It's a drawn-out process, and perhaps not wholly edifying to read about, so I'll hive off actual critical comments upon the novel to a separate post, and this one can be skipped over. But I will say this: whilst re-reading Napoleon Symphony reinforced my sense that this is one of Burgess's very finest novels, I come out of this process less convinced by the 'musical fusion' argument than I was, thoughtlessly, before, indoctrinated as I was by reading that blurb-sentence over and over.

I'm treading well-researched ground. In the first iteration of this post I foolishly said that critics had neglected it, and was courteously corrected on this point in the comments by Paul Phillips [below], whose A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess discusses the matter in detail. And he's not alone; we could also mention two general studies of music and fiction that cover Burgess in some detail: Werner Wolf's slightly stolid The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Rodopi 1999) and Alan Frederick Shockley's wide-ranging Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth Century Novel (Ashgate 2009). More to the point, Napoleon Symphony was written during the first flush of Burgess's stint as Explainderby; and his collection of essays This Man and Music (2001) includes a lengthy piece laying out the specific shifts and touches to which Burgess was driven that is almost Explainderby Unbound. I'll come back to this a little below. [As of 16/4/15 I've amended and expanded this blogpost as a whole to take account of some of this work].

:1:

The first part of Burgess's novel (110 pages or so) is divided into four unequal sections: 15-39 concentrates on Napoleon's early Italian Campaign; 40-77 (the longest) on Napoleon in Egypt; 78-102 on Napoleon becoming First Consol and defeating the Austrians in the War of the Second Coalition, and 103-124 on him becoming Emperor. The first movement of the Eroica (Allegro con brio, lasting about a quarter of an hour in performance) is divided in the score into 22 sections, the main theme and 21 variants A - V (no J, presumably to avoid confusion with I). My sense is that Burgess divides this for his own purposes into four bundles of five each. although since the length of the four portions of this first part of the novel are unequal (24, 37, 24 and 21 pages respectively) I'm thinking that the Egypt interlude is based on seven (F-M).

The famous main theme rocks up and down, and speaks to beginnings, to spring and the conflicted energies of becoming:

It wouldn't be too fanciful to suggest that the upward ambition of this theme weighs a little more than the balancing downward drift encapsulating the obstacles to that ambition (in the sense that there's more upward movement in the phrase than down); and that the shift to C♯ at the end there marks a developing step to a new mode. Burgess takes this to be the shift from actual power, and its reverses, to the imperial crown: the status of 'Emperor' (AB's final section is written with much reference to gold, and bees) being the chromatic note that copestones the harmonic tension of the composition. Since the first movement has a sonata form, this theme and variations upon it occur and reoccur. Burgess matches this with a set of repeated themes and references, up to and including (quite bold, this) actual repeated passages of identical prose. The two grand opening E-flat major chords get their own 6-page prelude, mimicked and reduced into the chiming of Tallien's 'old royal watch'. Then the novel gets properly going:

Germinal in the Year Four, but in this opening of our own Year One the seed throbs and frets in frustration. Ah how I should love to believe that what you have already of mine is at work deep within you. Albenga is on the coast halfway between Nice or Nizza and Genoa or Genova, and I am busy with maps and protractor and chief of staff, Looking up that volume on Piedmont and its topography I swear I caught the scent of your body from it. It is strange and magical that about those dull tomes with which I encumbered our so short honeymoon your glow and odour should hover. Oh, how I slaver at the thought of you, hunger to chew your very toes, to munch your delta of silk in the valley of bliss—now but a delirious memory and a long promise. Oh, to fill you again with myself as I am now overflowing with your sweetness. The bees, I swear, will buzz around me when we reach the honeylands. It is cold here and the troops grumble still. Kiss after kiss after kiss begins to abrade the crystal of your portrait. [15]

This is the music to which this prose appends itself:



Click to embiggen, as they say. A couple of things: one is that the prose of this opening paragraph is quite sexed-up, as is the novel as a whole. This gave the 1970s publishers a saucy marketing hook, something they exploited by having Napoleon's famous profile composed of an orgyful of naked women on the first edition front cover:

A strategy other publishers have followed:

Sex! Sex sex sex. The opening paragraph is, of course, the expression of Napoleon's desire for his Josephine, mingled in with his planning for the Battle of Arcola (15–17 November 1796). Sex is on Napoleon's mind a lot in Burgess's version of him, and he sees battles as a fundamentally erotic encounter ('it is in some way, my own heart's darling, an emblem of love, this engaging of armies' [20]), with flanks encountering flanks, thrusts and stabs and charges all leading to victory which is like, well, 'like that delirious flying moment when you spend into her thighs' [23]. There may be an in-plain-sight at work pun here, Eroica/Erotica. But we can at least agree that 'reading' Beethoven's gorgeous, flowing theme as an expression of erotic delight and possibility does no violence to the music.

Then there are the specific touches: as the cellos bring out the first iteration of the theme (spring, desire, sex), the second violins saw out some more nervy semi-quavers on G ('throbs and frets in frustration'). The brass section comes back in at bar 22, which here speaks to martial affairs ('busy with maps and protractor and chief of staff'), but the whole score rises to the first, full-orchestra recapitulation of the main theme, and its the anticipation of bliss. up and down the lover's body: 'I slaver at the thought of you, hunger to chew your very toes, to munch your delta of silk in the valley of bliss'. I'm thinking that pages 15-19, in which Napoleon's staff officers grumble about his plans, and his passion for this one woman, is a prose elaboration of section A's series of descending triplets shared amongst the woodwind:

This grouching ('this bread tastes of very stale chesnuts'; 'I saw a rotten potato yesterday'; or the smallness of stature of their general -- '"He looks bigger with his hat on," Augereau said. "He doesn't sit a horse too well"' [17]) articulates this dying fall. Then Burgess cuts to the footsoldiers, in a chunk of prose that gets reused word for word several times in the novel:

Citizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux, Hubert, Fossard, Teisseire, Carrère (Jacques). Carrère (Alexandre), Trauner, Barsacq, Gabutti, Mayo, Bonin, Borderie, Verne, Chaillot, Barrault, Brasseur, Dupont, Salou, sixteen thousand others, went forward in their washed-out blue rags and old revolutionary caps or rotting shakos, but boots, mark that, boots most of them, to engage. [19].

We get Napoleon's inspirational speech, full of swearing; and we get the line 'drizzle fell coldly ... then thickened into proper rain' [20]: this whole chunk, including the drizzle/rain sentence, is reused word-for-word on pp.82-3, with only the place-names and battle specifics altered. It's clearly Burgess gesturing towards the main problem he has in this exercise: viz that verbal repetition palls very quickly, where repeated musical phrases add depth and delight. And gestures are all we get, by way of addressing this core mismatch of modes.

On we go: Napoleon overcomes all the odds to beat the Austrians and seize Mantua [pages 34-36], and the woodwind and brass rouse themselves to some triumphal chords, whilst the strings work away beneath:

OK, now obviously this sort of 'reading' could go on at length, by which I mean at even more tedious length than it already has here. But there are problems, too. One is a fundamental imprecision in following book and music. The score, for instance, repeats the whole of sections A-E da capo. Burgess cannot do this without literally reprinting verbatim pages 15 to 39 of his text, so I take it he simply omits this (in part 2 he has a go of repeating the same musical section by focussing the first on Napoleon and the second on Josephine, but despite structural paralleling the differences between the two sections are thrown into greater relief by the very fact of the exact sameness of the musical prototype).

Again, it's hard to link specific images and themes, let alone specific phrases, to groups of musical notation. I started thinking that AB was mapping strings to sexual desire and brass to martial episodes, but working with score and word side by side it becomes clear that he doesn't do this with any consistency. The music has fairly clear successions of passages, some uplifting and others more thoughtful; and that is also the way Burgess's novel proceeds. But it does not transfer very precisely from one to the other. This, I think, is more than AB giving himself a bit of elbow room. I'd go so far as to suggest, as per the title of this post, that the novel can be pegged to the music about 30% of the time. Is that hit rate high enough to enable us to speak of a fusion of literary and musical?

If I'm right (and part of my point here is that there's no way I can be sure I am), Burgess's second section, detailing Napoleon's ill-fated expedition to Egypt and Syria, corresponds to section F, immediately after the da capo repeat: a doomy set of minor-key variations in which the downward cascading triplets reoccur.

The nagging voice of doubt enters in to my analysis. This whole section of the novel does interesting things with the clash between Western and Eastern mores, with the encounter with Islam and Napoleon's attempt to install himself as a kind of imam. It is different in several key ways to the other three scenes from portion 1 of Napoleon Symphony (and the other three portions too). Yet there's nothing in the music to reflect this. Nothing conventionally 'oriental' about the themes, nothing to mark any great difference of location or focus.

We've hit a fundamental difficulty, I think. It's not that there is any unbridgeable chasm separating music and words. Not at all. Peter Kivy argues in his monograph Antithetical Arts: On The Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music (Oxford 2009) that there are two schools on thought on this issue. On the one hand there are 'those who want to put narrative words to absolute music' and then those 'who want only to put structural, syntactic and expressive words to it' [26]. Kivy belongs to the latter camp, and thinks music ultimately transcends the verbal into an essentially religious sphere, or at least to what he calls 'the religious analogy'. But for myself I'm quite happy to stand with the first group. I have no difficulty 'reading' Beethoven's Sixth as a little story about some countryside folk caught in a storm and then enjoying the sunshine, or Kraftwerk's Autobahn as a journey down a German motorway. If you say 'but the idea that major keys are happy and minor keys sad is a mere arbitrary convention!' I would of course agree; but I might also point out that all signification operates this way. We arbitrarily agree that green means go and red means stop, that these words mean this and those that. It's not the arbitrariness but the effectiveness of the convention that matters.

Nonetheless, working through the Napoleon Symphony trying to trace exactly how the 'fusion' has worked makes me think that the music is the barest formal scaffold, and little else, to the novel. But then again, could it be anything other? I think Peter Porter was closer to the truth of it in his 'The Lying Art' (from The Cost of Seriousness, 1978). 'Music gets the better of it, since music is all lies./Lies which fill the octave.' I take him to mean it is a specie of lying by omission, rather than intent (he goes on: 'chromatic space/In verse turns out to be the ego's refractions,/Truth always stained by observation'). It's not that music cannot communicate on a semantic level; it's that it's just not as good at communicating on a semantic level as are words; and the things that words can't do—the transcendental, inspiring, dignified stuff—have little relevance to the writing of history. One need not subscribe to a naive 'history = truth' credo to feel that a mode of art that is a Porterish all lies is going to have a hard time melding effectively with a mode that is based on stuff that actually happened in the real world, like the life of Napoleon.

:2:

To avoid making this already desperately overlong post even longer, I'll compress my notes of the remaining three sections of the novel. It would be possible to mill analysis as fine as I do for the first few pages, but to do so would lead not only to tedium but fatal imprecision. The second movement of the Eroica (Marcia Funebre–Adagio assai) is a lengthy funeral march in C minor with a trio in C major. To this Burgess matches his (often very brilliant) account of the retreat from Moscow and the destruction of the Grande Armée. That's funereal enough, we might think; but Beethoven's text opens with the stately, sad-faced slowness of this:

To get to the death marching, Burgess fast-forwards from Imperial Coronation, straight past Austerlitz and Borodino, to occupied Moscow. But the funeral march surely speaks to the retreat; and though part two begins on p.127 we don't start retreating until p.173. The interlude is made up of Napoleon dreaming odd dreams, and remembering happier times, amongst them a strangely homerotic attempt to court Czar Alexander prior to the invasion, and various other sexual exploits. The sheer liveliness and variety of this section ill-matches the sombre procession of Beethoven's second movement.

Part two (written, according to a note at the end of the novel, after part three) goes further by way of pegging the words to the music. It starts with Napoleon dreaming a time when his enemies crow at his death:

There he lies
Ensanguinated tyrant
O bloody bloody tyrant
See
How the sin within
Doth incarnadine
His skin
From the shin to the chin [127]

This Man and Music makes clear that we are to, in effect, sing these words to the main theme of the Eroica's adagio:

It's repeated several times, mangled about ('Hee the seen witheen/Deeth eenc' 128); then we shift scene from N. dreaming uneasily in Moscow to Josephine dreaming Cleopaterotically in Paris. Again with the adagio theme:

See the re-
Incarnate Cleopatra
Barge burning on the water.
Bare
Rowers row in rows.
Posied roses interpose
Twist the rows and the rose [142]

This is also repeated and mangled about. These punny 'ee's (in the first) and 'oh's (in the second) sacrifice verbal elegance to a kind of meta-onomatopoeia, mimicking sheer musicality. Not good verse, these posied roses and incarnadined scarlet (although arguably Burgess is aiming precisely for a kind of kitsch excess). More of a problem, I think, is that he is doing this at all; I mean, that he has been driven to the exigency of in effect adding lyrics to Beethoven's music, a strategy reminiscent of that celebrated screen credit from the 1929 Taming of the Shrew movie: 'by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor'. To be clear, my objection here is that such a move is aesthetically levelling: sonic and rhythmic qualities inevitably steampress semantic elegance and expressiveness flatter than Flat Stanley. An equivalence is the old song I remember from my childhood in which my 10-year old friends and I ingeniously added lyrics to the Batman theme-tune—

Dinner dinner dinner dinner
Dinner dinner dinner dinner
BATMAN!

—according to the pleasant conceit whereby Batman's mother is calling him in for his supper. Mentioning this may look like facetiousness on my part, but the parallel seems to me quite precise.

Parts one and two of the novel are both a bit over a hundred pages long; and the corresponding sections of the Eroica are a quarter of an hour, or a little more, each. Part three is much shorter: 25 pages, a smaller proportion of the whole than the Eroica's short Third movement: Allegro vivace (which runs to about six minutes). Burgess loads his rifts with ore to capture the scherzo's liveliness: 'Dance dance dance! The orchestra struck up another waltz ... The buffet was sumptuous. Truffled pigling, Arcis-sur-Aube. Beef ribs Arcole. Spiced lamb Bassano. Duck pie Castiglione. Pâté château Thierry. Garlic sausage Durrenstein ...' [243]. Napoleon watches a theatrical performance of Prometheus, complete with Burgessedly-concocted blank verse excerpts. The 'scherzo' is split in two: a first part, celebrating the anniversary of Napoleon's coronation in 1814 [214-60]; then we cut straight to the Hundred Days, leaving Elba out of it altogether, and rattle through Waterloo [261-69].

And so to the fourth section: Allegro molto, and a set of lively variations on a vigorous little theme that Beethoven here reuses from his earlier work. But this is post-exile Napoleon: a portion of his existence neither lively nor varied. So?

Earlier I asked how can Burgess possibly reconcile musical form and novelistic requirement, given that mismatch of jolly fourth movement to the historically gloomy reality of exile to the South Atlantic. The obvious retort, or at least to someone who has read Burgess's detailed account of this novel in You've Had Your Time, would be to say: he de-emphasises mood, tone and affect in favour of purely formal qualities. So, the fourth movement is a series of variations on a theme Beethoven originally used elsewhere, in the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus: so Burgess writes his fourth section as a series of stylistic variations, from Jane Austen through Hopkins to Henry James, and works in many allusions to the myth of Prometheus. But we may choose to disagree that this does enough to 'fuse' musical and literary form.

Reviewers at the time were, as You've Had Your Time notes, mixed. Some critics thought Napoleon Symphony the book of the year, and it was very well received when it appeared in French translation. At the same time, other critics savaged it. For instance, AB quotes the New Yorker, who reviewed the novel to the effect that 'the substance and tone of this book and the Eroica Symphony are worlds apart. The music is noble and grand; the book, for the most part, embarrassingly base' [YHYT, 295]. This seems to me a fundamentally unfair, misrepresentative of the work. Its true that there's a lot of obscenity and cursing in the book, and Burgess is, as ever, excellent on the flavour of soldierly speech ('when do we get some fucking leave, how about our back pay, I've got this pain in the balls citizen sergeant' and so on). Plus there's the repeated trope that fucking and fighting are cognate activities: after Moscow, Napoleon overhears a Parisian saying 'the conduct of war was for him a highly extravagant mode of self-stimulation. It is conceivable that Austerlitz contrived for him a modest ejaculation, but the massive slaughter and suffering of the Russian campaign must, one hopes, have procured a truly satisfying orgasm' [223]. But the novel as a whole is full of such force and energy, an almost remorseless verve and inventiveness and ambition, that 'base' is quite the wrong word for it.

Nevertheless, there's a kernel of truth in the critique. In his Maxims and Reflections, Goethe noted that 'in music the dignity of art seems to find its supreme expression'. But the whole weight of the aphorism is on the seems; for he goes on 'there is no subject matter to be discounted'. It is subject matter as such that is undignified; and the lack of baseness and obscenity in Beethoven's art, like the lack of flavour and nutrition in a Fabergé egg, are indices of the limitations of a great artist's art. Burgess does many things of which Beethoven is simply incapable, not because he is a greater artist but because his mode is vastly more capacious of human nuance and range. God knows I love me some music, but whatever Peter Kivy says it's words that actualise the fullest transcendent and religious dimension in human life: St John's Gospel begins with the Logos, after all: not the Mousikē.

You've Had Your Time calls Napoleon Symphony a failure (though Burgess then squanders the moment by insisting that he only means failure in the sense that 'Finnegans Wake is a failure'. As if to say: my grand failures succeed on a titanic level of which your petty successes can only dream! What was it Simon and Garfunkel sang? Hello hubris my old friend ...?) I don't think it does fail, actually; as a novel. But it marks the disconnection of that ambition, recorded in cover copy of all those old Penguin paperbacks of Burgess's novels, as to the future of music/novel hybridity. It's as a novel that the work calls to be judged, I think; and that's what I'll try and do in the next blog post.