10 - Laborious Homecomings: The “Ongoing Reprise” from Clementi to Brahms

Summary

The idea of “homecoming” is a traditional metaphor for the recapitulation section in sonata form, one that is deeply rooted in the society and culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Europe. Both Nicholas Marston and Janet Schmalfeldt associate the idea with the political and cultural climate of post-1815 Vienna, when the oppression of Metternich's restoration made many citizens think that “home” was the only place safe from spies and police. Chadwick Jenkins goes back to Homer as a possible source for the homecoming metaphor. Homer's poetry was rediscovered in European culture during the eighteenth century, and in particular influenced the culture of Britain and Germany.

While the title of the second of Homer's epics, the Odyssey, has become a synonym for a long and eventful journey, it is sometimes overlooked that Ulysses's return to Ithaca is anything but triumphal. He returns by night, while still asleep, delivered by the Phaeacians to a hidden shore. He is disguised, dressed as a beggar, and only his decrepit hound Argus is able to recognize him without the help of a sign. His true identity is disclosed only gradually: first to his son Telemachus, then to Eumaeus the swineherd, to Eurycleia the nurse (who discovers his scar), and finally—but only after he has slaughtered the Suitors—to his wife, Penelope. So, one might say that the exact moment of Ulysses's return is when he, asleep and unconscious, touches the shore of Ithaca, but this is hardly a moment to be underscored with clashing cymbals. His homecoming is an ongoing process that develops over time and that, as Jenkins put it, is “necessarily anticlimactic.”

There is another aspect that distinguishes Ulysses's return from the reestablishment of a pristine condition. Not only is home different after the journey (there were no Suitors before Ulysses's departure), but also the hero himself has changed. Dante powerfully captures these changes in his “sequel” to the Odyssey in Canto 26 of the Inferno:

Quando mi diparti’ da Circe, che sottrasse

me più d’un anno là presso a Gaeta,

prima che sì Enëa la nomasse,

né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta

del vecchio padre, né ‘l debito amore

lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,

vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore

ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto

e de li vizi umani e del valore;