Rilkes Musikalität by Thomas Martinec

Abstract

Austrian Studies 29 (2021), 166–207© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Reviews Rilkes Musikalität. Edited by Thomas Martinec. Palaestra: Untersuchungen zur europäischen Literatur, 348. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019. 174 pp. €35. ISBN 978–3-8471–1032–3. ‘Rilke’s musicality’ may seem an unpromising topic for a conference and subsequent edited collection, for Rilke was, as several of the contributors to this volume point out, notably unmusical in the everyday sense of the word: in a letter to the pianist Magda von Hattingberg he describes his inability to recall a tune, even one that had moved him, as ‘die dichteste Unfähigkeit selber’ [the most profound incapacity, p. 47]. Music was of a more conceptual than technical interest, whether in the notes of 1900 on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie (pp. 7, 39, 56), or the later poem ‘An die Musik’ (1918): ‘Du Sprache wo Sprachen | enden’ [You language where languages | end]; ‘Du uns entwachsener| Herzraum’ [You, grown out of us | heartspace, p. 133]. In letters to Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin he described music as ‘ein Jenseits’, ‘viel zu viel’ (p. 83), as an experience exceeding the senses, a threat and a temptation. This was, then, a productive kind of ‘Unfähigkeit’, as Thomas Martinec suggests in his contribution to this volume. Many of the — varied but cohesive — contributions are structured around ambivalence or paradox, whether Rüdiger Görner’s opening essay, which begins, ‘Musik eignet etwas beglückend Verstörendes: Preis ihres Erklingens ist ihr Verklingen’ [Music possesses something pleasingly unsettling: the price of its sounding out is its dying away, p. 15], or Robert Vilain’s discussion of Rilke’s many references to Beethoven which are characterized by ideas of simultaneous sterility and possibility — Rilke’s emphasis on his deafness, for instance, and particularly the passage in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge where the composer is imagined in the early Christian desert. Jacob-Ivan Eidt discusses Rilke’s ambivalence towards music within an intellectual-historical constellation (Goethe and Nietzsche), and Antonia Egel, making the case for music being of greater importance in the Neue Gedichte than is usually acknowledged in the collection’s tension between form and flowing force, addresses an ambivalence towards music in Rilke criticism. Lothar van Laak similarly presents music as a poetic principle, using the interplay between sound and silence in Malte as a case study for a definition of musicality in literature. In the final essay, Eva-Tabea Meineke looks at music in the reception of Rilke among the Surrealists (Aragon and Savinio) — writers far less afraid of the danger of an art form beyond all senses — using Rilke’s interactions with the composer and writer Ferruccio Busoni as a fulcrum. This follows a pair of essays on Rilke’s late poems, rather different examples of a ‘grenzüberschreitende Ästhetik’ [boundary-crossing aesthetic, Meineke, p. 171] to that of the Surrealists: Winfried Eckel’s on the Reviews 167 Quatrains Valaisans and the landscape as ‘soundscape’ between art and nature, and Charlie Louth’s on the metrical form of the bilingual ‘Gong’ poems, where the lyric, in dealing with that which lies beyond the reach of the senses, almost becomes it. As this brief summary shows, there is variety here in what music is given to mean and understood to include. This could be said too of Rilke’s own use of the term, and a number of contributors draw on Egel’s distinction, from her monograph, ‘Musik ist Schöpfung’: Rilkes musikalische Poetik (2014), between ‘MUSIK’, Rilke’s theoretical conception of music as the origin of all art, superordinate to individual art forms, and ‘musik’ as an art form made of sound. Martinec argues that it is precisely Rilke’s lack of technical skill in and connoisseurship of the second of these that allowed for the development of the former. But it is also the tendency to see music in such abstract terms that fuelled his wariness towards it, and he exaggerated this abstraction, for instance in an often-quoted letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé on Rodin, where music is opposed to art as a ‘Nicht-Ver-dichten’ [non-concentration], a ‘Versuchung zum Ausfließen’ [temptation to...