ALFRED BRENDEL
The Lady from Arezzo
My Musical Life and
Other Matters
Contents
Title Page
Introduction: A Mouth with two Ears
Daniil Kharms
translated by Alfred Brendel
There was a Man
Anecdotes from Pushkin’s Life
The Inventor Anton Pavlovič Šilov
Everything and Nothing: Dada 2016
Velimir Khlebnikov
Incantation by Laughter
translated by Paul Schmidt
Incantation by Laughter
translated by Vladimir Markov
The Lady from Arezzo
Charles Amberg
Ich reiß mir eine Wimper aus
Cabaret Song
translated by Alfred Brendel
Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words
Music: Light and Darkness
Schubert’s Winterreise
Hans Arp
translated by Jeremy Adler
From Constellations
Ernst Jandl
translated by Jeremy Adler
Mountain Goat
Sentence Mixture
Schumann’s Piano Concerto: Some Notes on Performance
Christian Morgenstern
The Knee
translated by Alfred Brendel
Das große Lalula
The Does’ Prayer
translated by Max Knight
My Musical Life
Brief Nonsense Bibliography
The Authors of Nonsense Texts
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Introduction: A Mouth with two Ears
‘Utter nonsense!’ is how some of us would react when the firm ground of common sense starts swaying under our feet. For many, nonsense is something plainly negative, bound to make us surrender even more willingly to the blessings of sense. I would like to proceed differently and propose that it is our habitual entanglement with sense, our dependence on sense, our enslavement by sense that makes the pleasures of nonsense truly evident.
Sense is restricted, tied to rules, and finite. Nonsense ignores such shackles. It tells us that sense, the normal, rational, real and ‘natural’, lives by its limitations. It is obligatory. Even when nonsense respects certain rules, it remains a game, opposed to conventions and the customary procedures of reason. We savour the temporary escape from the real and habitual. At the same time, our awareness of reality is sharpened.
The early German Romantics were fond of nonsense. Novalis dreamt of ‘poems without any sense and coherence’. Similarly, Ludwig Tieck, the author of Puss in Boots, envisaged a ‘book without coherence, full of contradictory nonsense’. (It was the Swabian writer Justinus Kerner who provided, with his Reiseschatten, one of the most enticing examples.) Later, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll became the quintessential nonsense poets for many. But in fact, nonsense poetry had already been alive and well in the Middle Ages, if not in ancient Egypt. Around 1200, the German minstrel Reinmar the Old, besides being a Minnesinger, was paying tribute to a ‘poetry of the impossible’ (‘mendacious poetry’, Lügendichtung). In a text from the fourteenth century, a fierce battle between a hedgehog and a flying earthworm is arbitrated by a floating grindstone.
Being liberated from rational restrictions, nonsense leads into the infinite. One enters, if so inclined, a religious sphere.
In this volume, a few nonsense texts translated from the Russian and German are interspersed between my own essays, which, if I can make such a claim, are doing their best to make some sense. As for the selection of nonsense, it is embraced here in the widest sense: there is the pure nonsense of ‘Impossibilia’ – a genre that exclusively handles the untrue and inconceivable – as well as that of phonetic poems consisting of words that are devoid of meaning. But there is also the ample territory where sense and nonsense become entangled. After all, reality doesn’t have to be excluded as long as it is altered, contradicted or compromised. Such texts tend to be comical unless they are written by the mentally ill. Sense and nonsense combined – does it not represent the true condition of man? We can also spell it out paradoxically in Paul Valéry’s words: ‘Two dangers threaten the world: sense and nonsense.’
For Immanuel Kant, both music and laughter belonged to the realm of nonsense. One doesn’t ‘think of anything’ yet remains able to be ‘vividly entertained’. (The possibility of thinking in purely musical terms seems to have eluded him.) Delightfully, he calls genius dependent on whim (Laune), for whim ‘has spirit’ (Geist) while order doesn’t.*
My selection of nonsense texts covers the whole gamut from ‘poetic’ to the ‘anti-poetic’. It makes do without Carroll and Lear who are sufficiently known, as well as without Hugo Ball’s Karawane or Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate, canonic texts that were amply resurrected during the Dada centenary of 2016. Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Das Knie’ remains the quintessential German nonsense poem. Charles Amberg’s ‘Tearing Out One of His Eyelashes’, on the other hand, is the Dada cabaret song par excellence. Let me start with Daniil Kharms.
* Kant, Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, 802 und 922.
Daniil Kharms
translated by Alfred Brendel
THERE WAS A MAN
There was a man.
He owned a nose.
So he owned a nose that looked like a mouth.
So he owned a nose that looked like a mouth with two ears.
ANECDOTES FROM PUSHKIN’S LIFE
VI
Pushkin loved to throw stones. Wherever he saw stones he’d start throwing them.
Sometimes he would warm to his task, standing there, crimson-faced, waving his arms, throwing stones – simply appalling.
VII
Pushkin had four sons, and all were idiots. One of them couldn’t even sit on a chair without constantly falling off. But even Pushkin himself had trouble sitting on a chair. As it frequently happened – what a hoot! – they were all sitting at the table. At one end, Pushkin fell off his chair, at the other end, his son. Quite intolerable.
THE INVENTOR ANTON PAVLOVIČ ŠILOV
The inventor Anton Pavlovič Šilov sat down on a little bench in the Summer Garden (there is, in St Petersburg, a garden that bears this name, and the incident that I shall now describe occurred in the winter of 1933.)
‘All right,’ said Anton Pavlovič. ‘Let’s assume the lever is correctly attached and propels the bomb upwards.’
Everything and Nothing: Dada 2016
As Switzerland was neutral during the First World War, Zurich became a refuge for artists, writers, intellectuals, pacifists, and young men of various nationalities avoiding conscription. In 1916 several of them decided to create a new kind of evening entertainment. They called it Cabaret Voltaire and established it at No. 1 Spiegelgasse, not far from the room occupied by an occasional visitor to the cabaret, Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
The group, which became known as Dadaists, consisted of two Germans (Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck), one Alsatian (Hans Arp) and two Romanians (Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara), and was complemented by two women, the German Emmy Hennings and the Swiss Sophie Taeuber. They were soon joined by the Czech national Walter Serner. The youngest, Tzara, was twenty; Hennings, the oldest, thirty-one. All were united in their loathing of the war.
The initiator of the group appears to have been Hugo Ball. He was, like the majority of Dadaists, a writer but he had also worked for theatre and cabaret. As a pacifist he had had to leave Germany. Pale, tall, gaunt and near-starving, he settled with Emmy Hennings in Zurich, and was regarded as a dangerous
foreigner. At the Voltaire, he declaimed his groundbreaking phonetic poem Karawane (Caravan) to the bemusement of the public. After a few intense months of Dada activity he parted company, turned to a gnostic Catholicism and died in the Swiss countryside, regarded as a kind of saint. His diary, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (The Flight from Time), remains one of the key accounts of Dadaism.
For Richard Huelsenbeck, noise, according to Hans Richter, seems to have been the most natural form of virility. Within Dada, he was the champion of provocation. A poet and journalist who subsequently travelled the world as a ship’s doctor and practised for a time in New York as a psychoanalyst, Huelsenbeck persevered with Dada and helped to establish its markedly different Berlin branch.
Among the artists of stature emerging from Dada, Hans Arp was perhaps the steadiest and most consistent. A friend of Max Ernst, Schwitters and Wassily Kandinsky, and a gifted poet, he was considered to be the most balanced member of the group, devoid of malice and envy, and endowed with a superior sense of humour. Sophie Taeuber, who was later to marry Arp, was a notable artist herself, teaching at the Applied Arts School in Zurich. She created marionettes, and was a member of Rudolf von Laban’s dancing school, which had established a new expressive style of dance. During her Dada appearances as a dancer, she had to wear a mask to disguise her identity.
In Tristan Tzara, calm and self-assured yet endowed with a thunderous voice, Dadaism had its most passionate advocate and its most tireless propagandist. André Breton called him a charlatan hungry for fame but was reconciled with him in 1929. Tzara’s poems influenced Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and a few of them were translated by Samuel Beckett. Like Arp, he subsequently became a Surrealist. Tzara’s fellow Romanian Marcel Janco was described as a handsome melancholic, a ladies’ man who played the accordion and sang Romanian songs. He was a painter and sculptor who was to become a leading architect in Bucharest and Israel. He created masks for the Zurich Dadaists, and spoke, or rather shouted, simultaneous poems alongside Tzara and Huelsenbeck.
Emmy Hennings, before living with Hugo Ball, had been an alluring drifter. Diseuse, actress, barmaid and model, she became the femme fatale for more than a few German poets. She was a gifted cabaret artiste who sang ‘Hab keinen Charakter, hab nur Hunger’ (‘Devoid of character, I’m just hungry’). She was an important presence at the Dada events, and ‘her couplets’, according to Huelsenbeck, ‘saved our life’.
Soon, there was also Walter Serner, a Dada outsider, cynic and anarchist who, as a writer, would become notorious for his thrillers and scandalous novels. This was a time when dandies wore monocles. Serner did, and so did some of his Dadaist colleagues. He rebelled against society by being a high-class confidence trickster, producing a juridical thesis of which 80 per cent later turned out to be plagiarised. Under the name of his painter friend Christian Schad, he reviewed a collection of his own stories. He also enjoyed feeding the press false information. His essay ‘Letzte Lockerung’ (Ultimate Loosening) is, for some, a Dadaist classic.
From the near-improvisation of the initial events at the Cabaret Voltaire, one of the most influential avant-garde movements was to emerge. The word ‘Dada’ was first used only a couple of months later. There are several explanations for it: the babble of a child, the word for a toy, the double ‘yes’ in Slavic languages and Romanian, and a Dada lily-milk soap and hair tonic, which was first produced in 1912.
Dada was a joint achievement of the group. Its soirées were multimedia events: they combined words and literature, singing, music (with Ball at the piano), dance, art, farce, and a fair amount of noise. ‘Repelled by the butcheries of the 1914–18 World War, we surrendered to the arts,’ said Hans Arp. ‘We looked for an elemental art that would free the people from the insanity of the times, and for a new order that might establish a balance between heaven and hell.’ ‘What we were celebrating’, declared Hugo Ball, ‘was a buffonade and a requiem at the same time.’
In spite of many utterances to the contrary, the striving of most Dadaists seems to have been directed towards a new art that would have nothing to do with former styles and notions. In order to find it, every novel means of expression was absorbed, if not invented: abstraction, photomontage, collage, assemblage, frottage, typography, glossolalia; phonetic, concrete, visual and simultaneous poetry, conceptual art, the readymade, the drawing and painting of invented machines, happening, performance, and kinetic art, including film. No less crucial was the inspiration that came from three areas subsequently fundamental to most visual artists of the twentieth century: artefacts from Africa and Oceania that had been labelled ‘primitive’, the art of the insane, and the drawings of children.
There was an overwhelming need for the wild, the simple and the unreflective. While African masks and children’s art were included in exhibitions at the Galerie Dada, there was a personal connection to Hans Huber, the owner and director of a mental hospital. He befriended Arp, Richter, Serner and others, liberally guiding his guests through his establishment and even housing some of them for weeks. Hans Richter, who later became one of the most sensible chroniclers of Dada,* tells us that while he and the poet Albert Ehrenstein were staying at the house, the presence of another house guest, the actress Elisabeth Bergner, a leading star of early film then scarcely twenty years old, provided the kind of thrill without which even the most hospitable psychiatrist ‘wouldn’t have been able to keep us there’.
Immediately after the war, Dada branches in Berlin, Paris, Cologne and Amsterdam sprang up. But I should mention that, before the official christening of Dada, an important New York group of pre-Dadaists had already been active. Hardly any other Dada objects have ever been as fervently discussed as the ‘readymades’ produced by the great Marcel Duchamp, while Francis Picabia excelled in the elegant depiction of machines that had no obvious purpose. Man Ray later emerged as the unsurpassed portrait photographer of the Parisian arts scene. In New York, there was also the French-born Edgard Varèse, one of the few musicians of future importance among early Dadaists. Musically, the Zurich group leaned towards the bruitism of the Futurist Luigi Russolo, and Huelsenbeck produced as much pandemonium as possible on his kettledrum. (Exceptionally, a composer called Hans Heusser was involved in the soirées a couple of times. He later became a notable provider of Swiss military marches.)
In Paris, Tzara created a stir with his Manifeste Dada 1918 as well as with his subsequent electrifying presence. There, Erik Satie, another major composer, was a Dada sympathiser, and the literary ground had been prepared by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. From 1920 on, Breton and a number of writers and artists who later became Surrealists joined Tzara. In 1922, the Dadaists officially fell out with one another, according to Theo van Doesburg, over the question of whether a locomotive was more modern than a bowler hat.
The profound difference between Dada and Surrealism was that the Surrealists had a programme and a leader (Breton) while Dada was freewheeling and steeped in ambiguity. It was everything as well as nothing. Nevertheless, each of its branches had a different character. Berlin Dada, with Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader – an eccentric who invaded the National Assembly to distribute Dada leaflets – was the most aggressive and political. The virtuoso draughtsman George Grosz despised bourgeois culture as well as modern art.
Man Ray, Le Cadeau (The Gift), c. 1958. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Hausmann, a Dadaist with philosophical ambitions, and his companion Hannah Höch became champions of photomontage and collage, techniques central to Dadaism. In Hanover, the unsurpassed master of collage turned out to be Kurt Schwitters, an artist of genius with a very different temperament: apolitical, and totally devoted to ‘Merz’, his own brand of Dada. An amazingly tall figure, he used his booming voice to declaim, shout, hiss and scream his mighty poem Ursonate, to this day the most striking specimen of phonetic poetry. His recitations were said to be so impressive that audiences were seized first by laughter, then by awe. Schwitters was also p
art of the Amsterdam Dada scene connected to Theo van Doesburg and the Constructivist movement De Stijl.
In Cologne, Max Ernst produced some of the most exquisite Dada drawings and photomontages of the early 1920s. Together with the son of a banker who called himself Baargeld (cash), he shocked his father and the Rhinelanders with a Dada exhibition that was promptly closed by the police. A Dada sentence by Max Ernst highly suitable for guestbooks reads: ‘Nach uraltem, ängstlich behütetem Klostergeheimnis lernen selbst Greise mühelos Klavier spielen.’† Italian Dadaists included the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the painter Enrico Prampolini and the polymath Alberto Savinio. The fact that Dada soon enjoyed a nearglobal resonance was amply confirmed by the imposing Dada retrospective of 2005–6 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that assembled a thousand works by fifty artists.
In the decade before the war, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and, in England, Vorticism had rocked the boat of aesthetics. Simultaneously, tonality and functional harmony that had worn thin in music were abolished by the more enterprising of composers. What Dada did a few years later was more radical. It turned against anything aesthetic, moral or intellectual, or relating to culture, ideology, religion or national identity, in order to create something out of nothing. Impressed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, the Dadaists turned against the philosophy of Kant. Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach of 1920 quotes Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse:
We are prepared … as no time has ever been, for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual laughter and hijinks, for the transcendental heights of the highest nonsense (Blödsinn) and aristocratic derision of the world. Maybe what we shall discover right there is the empire of our invention, that empire where even we can still be originals, perhaps as parodists of world history and God’s harlequins. Possibly, if nothing else from our day warrants any future, it is precisely our laughter that has future.
The Lady from Arezzo Page 1
