The idea of music: Oscar Wilde and the metaphysics of sound

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1080/08905495.2023.2161782
Kimberly J. Stern
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Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s friends and associates generally agreed: the famed aesthete knew practically nothing about music. A schoolfellow recalled that as a boy Wilde was a fast and voracious reader but “poor at music” (Harris 2007, 22). WhereasWilde’s brother was a gifted pianist who composed his own “improved” endings to Friedrich Chopin’s preludes, even devoted friend and literary executor Robert Ross declared that Wilde “never knew anything really of music” (Ellmann 1984, 127; as quoted in Harris 2007, 158). Bernard Shaw suggested that his performance of musical knowledge was so inadequate as to earn him “a reputation for shallowness and insincerity which he never retrieved until it was too late” (Shaw 1979, 404). Indeed, on one occasion Wilde reportedly became irate when a friend repeatedly invoked the phrase “a splendid scarlet thing by Dvorák,” misquoting a line from Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist.” According to Robert Sherard, Wilde suspected “his friends knew that his attempt to write about Dvorak or any other composer was a mere pretence, and that he cleverly veiled his ignorance by the use of sonorous and effective phrases” (Sherard 1906, 121–122). Contemporary scholars too have suggested that Wilde saw music largely as a cultural signifier, albeit one that he deployed with care and purpose. Some, like Joe Law (2004) and Oliver Lovesey (2020), have refined Sherard’s depiction of Wilde as poseur by treating his musical references as evocations of cultural and sexual identity. Others propose that Wilde valued music chiefly in relation to the art form with which he was most comfortable: the written word. In this spirit, Tanya Touwen remarks: “Wilde was not in the least musical,” though Salome “is almost incantatory, with a repetitive lyricism that is indeed not unlike a ballad” (1995, 22). David Wayne Thomas takes this idea further, demonstrating that Wilde aspired to a kind of “verbal musicality,” drawing upon his “highly unprofessional relation to music” to accentuate the aural effects of language (2000, 19). In short, even where music does emerge in Wilde’s work, scholars have suggested that it is not treated with the formal rigor that typifies his discussions of the literary and visual arts. Though Wilde’s language at times seems almost musical – and
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音乐的概念:奥斯卡·王尔德和声音的形而上学
奥斯卡·王尔德的朋友和同事普遍同意:这位著名的唯美主义者实际上对音乐一无所知。一位同学回忆说,王尔德小时候是一个快速而贪婪的读者,但“不擅长音乐”(Harris 2007,22)。王尔德的哥哥是一位天才的钢琴家,他为弗里德里希·肖邦的前奏曲创作了自己“改进”的结尾,即使是他忠实的朋友和文学执行人罗伯特·罗斯也宣称王尔德“对音乐一无所知”(Ellmann 1984, 127;引用自Harris 2007, 158)。萧伯纳认为他对音乐知识的表现是如此的不足,以至于为他赢得了“肤浅和不真诚的名声,直到为时已晚”(萧伯纳1979,404)。事实上,据报道,有一次王尔德非常生气,因为一个朋友反复引用“Dvorák的一个灿烂的猩红色的东西”这句话,错误地引用了王尔德《作为艺术家的批评家》中的一句话。根据Robert Sherard的说法,王尔德怀疑“他的朋友知道他试图写关于德沃夏克或任何其他作曲家的文章仅仅是一种伪装,他巧妙地通过使用响亮而有效的短语来掩盖他的无知”(Sherard 1906, 121-122)。当代学者也认为,王尔德在很大程度上将音乐视为一种文化符号,尽管他是用心而有目的地使用音乐的。有些人,如乔·劳(2004)和奥利弗·洛夫西(2020),通过将他的音乐参考作为文化和性别身份的唤起,将谢拉德对王尔德的描述提炼为装腔作势。另一些人则认为王尔德看重音乐主要是因为他最喜欢的艺术形式:文字。本着这种精神,Tanya Touwen评论道:“王尔德一点也不音乐剧”,尽管《莎乐美》“几乎是咒语,重复的歌词确实不像一首民谣”(1995,22)。大卫·韦恩·托马斯进一步阐述了这一观点,证明王尔德渴望一种“言语音乐性”,利用他“与音乐高度非专业的关系”来强调语言的听觉效果(2000,19)。简而言之,即使音乐确实出现在王尔德的作品中,学者们也认为,音乐并没有像他对文学和视觉艺术的讨论那样正式严谨。虽然王尔德的语言有时看起来几乎是音乐性的——而且
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
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0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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