"Might be what you like, till you hear the words": Joyce in Zurich and the Contrapuntal Language of Ulysses

Abstract

When the young American music student Otto Luening arrived in Zurich in early 1917, he had just barely avoided arrest by the German authorities. The Luenings had spent the first years of World War I in Bavaria, but now that Otto was of military age and had no passport, he had become subject to internment. Once in Zurich, he found himself in the cultural hub of Western Europe. Not only diplomats, war profiteers, spies, deserters, refugees, and political agitators had found a comparatively safe haven in neutral Switzerland: strolling down the Niederdorfstrasse after hearing C. G. Jung guest-lecture at the University, one could easily encounter Tristan Tzara in the Restaurant Tivoli, Igor Stravinsky at the Cafe Pfauen, and then Hermann Hesse at the Bar Odeon. Luening was enthralled by the city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere; he enrolled at the conservatory, where he became the student of another expatriate, Philip Jarnach. Jarnach, born in Nice of Spanish and German parentage, taught composition and counterpoint, and the two men quickly became friends. Luening, in his memoir The Odyssey of an American Composer, remembers how he first heard of another fellow exile: “Apropos of nothing in particular, Jarnach said in a music composition class, ‘And then, of course, there