4 - Grotesquerie

Summary

Ich wandle still, bin wenig froh,

Und immer fragt der Seufzer – wo? –

Im Geisterhauch tönt's mir zurück.

‘Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück!’

I wander, silent and joyless,

And my sighs forever ask: Where?

In a ghostly whisper the answer comes:

‘There, where you are not, is happiness!’

The Adagio of Schubert's ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in C major, D 760 (1822), forms a bridge between the previous chapter and the sound(s) of the grotesque traced in what follows. Its thematic material takes the disjuncture embodied in his setting of ‘Der Wanderer’, D 489 (1816), on which the movement is based, to extremes. The music shown in Example 4.1 throws into stark relief the fusion of the silent and joyless (stanza 1) with the vision of dead ones rising (stanza 4). Ghostly whispers in the final stanza, quoted in the epigraph above, serve as a threshold between the passagework that skims the texture in bars 227–30 and the distortions that follow in its pathway. Traces of dreamt-of joy in the song source are shattered by the profusion of harsh sonorities, chromatic warping, and textural density unleashed in bars 231–35. The lack of articulation here between the diaphanous and the distorted, the one flowing seamlessly from the other, renders this process of distortion all the more disturbing. The extremity of such writing tilts the pendulum from the fusion of pain and pleasure at the heart of the sublime discussed in the previous chapter, to the prising open of boundaries that defines the grotesque. Tropes explored throughout the book – nocturnal imagery, doubles, and distortions – coincide with the disjuncture studied in this chapter. Stylistic references are destabilized, their soundworlds subject to rupture or conflation vis-a-vis the permeable nature of the gothic imagination.

Definitions of the grotesque from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries foreground themes that are central to gothic necropoetics. Pertinent here is the art historian Johann Fiorillo's attention to its ‘horror-inducing’ aspects, epitomized in his view by the fusion of incongruous elements in Henry Fuseli's ‘The Nightmare’ (Figure 4.1).