Proust and music: The anxiety of competence

Abstract

Propped up in his bed, for all the world the quintessential fin-de-siècle invalid, Marcel Proust listened to the perplexing sound of music far away. He heard it from beyond the walls of his room, through a connecting tube: the famous théâtrophone, a permanent subscription telephone line that could connect Proust's apartment in the boulevard Haussmann to a number of Parisian theatres, opera houses and concert halls. The operatic scenes that succeeded in penetrating those walls were not scenes at all: they were disembodied voices, issuing instructions for the visual imagination. Those moments that progressed further — onto the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu — were of course even less corporeal: both invisible and soundless. In the passage from opera house to author to novel, who can say how much was lost? All that remains are words, hundreds of thousands of them, pouring noiselessly into a space where the music has sunk without trace; the fevered patient added reams more supplementary material (inflations, substitutions, emendations) as fast as the opera came in through the wall, papering — soundproofing — the room with words.

‘It’s in the silence you feel you hear’

“…Dorothy Adelson studies the origins of the Vinteuil Sonata and the ‘little phrase’ through bibliographic material (1942). Cormac Newark and Ingrid Wassenaar take a more critical stand in ‘Proust and music: The anxiety of competence’ (1997). See also J. Ann Duncan’s ‘Imaginary artists in À la recherche du temps perdu ’ (1969), Lawrence R. Schehr’s ‘Proust’s musical inversions’ (1982), and Julian Johnson’s chapter ‘Music’ in Marcel Proust in Context (2013).…”