[Blatt 1r]

PETERS [at a restaurant or coffee house (possibly Zur Stadt Triest) with Bernard; possibly Friday, January 7, 1820]: Bernard resents me that I have a wife and want to go home; I believe that he is jealous. //

BERNARD [continuing]: He concerns himself too little about his wife. She says that I am her vice-husband, and I always say that if Peters dies, I shall inherit her. [//] [Blatt 1v]

Today he [Schickh] spoke very sorrowfully with me, and wants to clear everything up with me tomorrow. I cannot escape, but I shall obtain my freedom, though. [//] [Blatt 2r] He has no position if I abandon him, so he doesn't know what to do. // <Who was ….> //

I want to copy out a song by Lessing for you that you ought to compose. [//]

BEETHOVEN [figuring the bill for refreshments, maybe in hopes of escape]: 1 [fl.] 30 [kr.]

[Blatt 2v]

BERNARD [copying the poem]:

[Blatt 3v]

BEETHOVEN [left alone after the above exchange, or at his apartment; possibly Friday, January 7]:

25 Scottish Songs, among them a duet and 4 with choruses. [//]

NB: Can't one also garnish her pension? And doesn't compensation for damages, as much as possible, have to be made to me, [Blatt 4r] in addition to the half of the [princes’] pension, which is now outstanding for more than a full year? NB: Since I have pension sheets in hand, can you, for instance, raise the money from the guardian? If she dies, he has nothing; and [if] I do not take care, [Blatt 4v] not only does he lose everything from me, [but] moral corruption also hangs over him. The simple question is whether the Magistrat is empowered to overrule that which the Landrecht has done? And whether I can't bring action against it?

IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, polyphonic motets and monophonic songs were connected in a number of different ways, many of which are explored by Gaël Saint-Cricq in the previous chapter of this Companion. This chapter focuses on three concrete examples of one particular type of interaction: when a motet voice has been created by quoting the entire first stanza of a monophonic song. Each of these motets demonstrates a different manner in which a motet can fashion itself around the characteristics of a quoted song. In presenting a variety of approaches to building a motet around a song, I not only catalogue different modes of song-motet interaction, but also provide a foundation from which to consider the workings of quotation within the thirteenth-century motet.

In approaching song and motet interaction, it can often be profitable to examine the chronological relationships between motets and songs that borrow significant musical and/or textual material from each other. If, for example, a particular motet can be shown to have quoted from a song, the specifics of this intergeneric borrowing can be examined in much more detail than if that relationship remained unestablished. The three examples addressed in this chapter are part of a corpus of twenty-one motets that include an entire voice part that is also found as the first stanza of a monophonic song.1 The networks of songs and motets in this corpus exhibit different chronologies. In all three cases examined in this chapter, it seems most likely that an earlier monophonic song was quoted in a later motet, moving it from a monophonic to a polyphonic context. In total, this seems the most probable chronology for twelve of the twenty-one cases. In five cases, the reverse seems to have happened: a motet voice was changed into a monophonic song by stripping it of its polyphonic context and adding further stanzas. In the remaining four cases, the extant evidence does not allow for a conclusion to be drawn.

Looking at the interaction between song and motet from the vantage point of the chronology of specific motets and songs is complemented by the more general category of stylistic influence.

Writing on music was a special part of the creative activity of nineteenthcentury composers, as demonstrated by the achievements of Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and particularly Richard Wagner, and it became particularly intensive in the twentieth century, when many representatives of the new music felt an overwhelming need to articulate their theoretical, technical and aesthetic standpoints. This tendency can be seen in Poland through the writings of Karol Szymanowski, yet – as far as Polish musical culture of the second half of the twentieth century is concerned – it was Witold Lutosławski who, along with Bogusław Schaeffer, emerged prominently as a writer on music. Lutosławski's texts are divided (one has to admit – quite disproportionately) into multi-thematically official (although not always published) writings, and those personal writings amongst which pride of place can be given to his ‘Notebook of Ideas’.

As I have written elsewhere:

In the rich collection of Witold Lutosławski's manuscripts housed in the archive of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel there is a document of special, personal meaning. It is a kind of artistic diary that Lutosławski, who himself called it a ‘Notebook of Ideas’, kept more or less systematically from 1959 to 1984.

IN EARLY March 1918, mid-way through Act I of a matinée performance of Jacques Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann at the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique, a distant humming mingles with the singing on stage. Progressively louder, the noise ominously announces the arrival of an enemy Gotha. A plane flies over Paris and a loud explosion reverberates in the rue Favart, just metres from the theatre. The Salle is silent: audience and performers wait together in anticipation of more explosions. Then, in the half-dark, the audience is shepherded calmly down to the cellar that serves as an air-raid shelter. After an interruption of some minutes – during which members of the audience might have passed comment on the audacity of the enemy for interrupting yet another performance – the orchestra strikes up a rousing ‘Marseillaise’ and the performance resumes to an electrified audience, as though nothing out of the ordinary has occurred. For the Parisian theatregoer of 1914–1918, such unscheduled intermissions were common: the above anecdote is an example of just one of many disruptions to musical life on the home front. Having desperately fought to keep his theatre open throughout the period, director Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi would have known only too well the administrative and practical obstacles that had to be overcome to stage a successful performance in an environment where warfare constantly threatened to spill onto the home front. Air raids such as those experienced by the audience at the Opéra-Comique were just one of many ways in which daily life in the capital city would be rudely interrupted by events unfolding on the world stage.

Just under four years earlier, the people of Paris had once again found themselves at war with Germany. With the government declaring a state of siege reminiscent of the previous conflict between the two countries in 1870, by 31 August 1914 the German army had crossed the Belgian border and was at the doors of Paris. Two days later, enemy planes dropped their first Parisian bombs, causing the government to exit under cover of night to seek sanctuary in Bordeaux, and precipitating a mass exodus of civilians to the provinces. With another large segment of the population mobilised at the fighting fronts, the deserted capital had the air of a morgue. Paris, the ‘City of Light’, had become a city of darkness, as everyday existence appeared suspended.

Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land aspire to see the places of Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. The many round churches erected in Western Christendom during the Middle Ages stress the prominent role that visual signs played in evoking the experience of Jerusalem and of pilgrimage. Seeing, however, is only one facet of pilgrimage. Round churches in the West were not just symbols of Jerusalem; they were also settings for the re-enactment of the spiritual drama that pilgrimage to the East made possible. Ritual was an integral component of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and its performance made accessible the spiritual target of redemption; only after experiencing the anamnesis of Mass were indulgences obtainable for those pilgrims who reached the shrines of the Holy Land. Participation in the transformative powers of liturgical ceremony articulated medieval experiences of Jerusalem. From the very act of taking up the cross, the crusades called for performance. No less than pilgrims, crusaders physically enacted their faith. While scholars have for many decades discussed the meanings that conspicuously circular churches communicated in the West, their ritual functions remain poorly understood; and these functions were as integral to the buildings as their form. In London the Hospitallers were based at Clerkenwell, the Templars first in Holborn and then at the New Temple between the river and Fleet Street. All three sites were distinguished by their round churches. Taking these churches as a point of departure, this chapter adumbrates the performative role that these distinctive rotundas might have played in bringing the ritual experience of Jerusalem to the West.

Liturgy In The Temple Church

All Hospitaller commanderies uniformly celebrated the medieval Latin rite of the Holy Sepulchre. The brothers at Clerkenwell will every day have recreated the services concurrently held in Jerusalem. It is probable that the Templar priests in London were celebrating the same; from the moment of the Templars’ official recognition in 1129, brothers were instructed to observe in their churches the liturgy of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. (In Jerusalem the links between the Sepulchre and the Templars were very close: the earliest extant ordinal of the Latin patriarchate was made c. 1175 for the Templars’ central convent.) In practice, we must for the Templars qualify this general rule.

When we ask what lies beyond form, what do we mean by form? Modern and postmodern readers might understand form as a set of attributes that originate in a text's language and features and that play a substantial role in defining that text as literary. The Middle Ages, however, sustain a more expansive sense of what form is and what formal operations entail in a literary text. For as I will show, form as related to medieval literary culture is not solely a component of, or category for, a text; in its fullest sense, form is an experiential occurrence for the medieval text's audience. This experiential encounter involves movement and perspectival shift that may be effectively understood as terpsichorean – dance-based – in nature. This chapter will employ Chaucer's Franklin's Tale as a case study that elucidates this experiential mode of poetic form through the tale's frequent references to dance. In his telling, the Franklin contrasts linear narrative form with an alternative experience born from the perceptual habits that dance conditions. While linear progression might be the most logical means to understand the tale, it inevitably enables the oppressive compulsion of causal relation. The medieval reader's familiarity with perspectival practices connected to dance, in contrast, produces an experience of form that liberates the tale from the serialized shackles of causality. In its exposure of form's dance-based experiential capacity, The Franklin's Tale allows readers in the present not only to identify a hitherto elusive formal freedom in the tale itself, but also to see beyond the contemporary discourses of narrative form that have always been an ill fit for premodernity.

PROGRESSION AS OPPRESSION

Throughout much of its telling, The Franklin's Tale manufactures a sense of oppression for some of its characters by construing the forward movement of time as an engine for causal relation. It is certainly the case, as many critics have suggested, that elements of The Franklin's Tale provocatively manipulate temporal passage. The tale's situations can generate recursive, disordered, and hypothetical modes of time, as well as what J. Allan Mitchell calls the “exigent moment,” the present from which nothing can be anticipated. In his storytelling strategies, however, the Franklin seems largely to rely upon a substructure of a constraining seriality, the oppressive progression of cause and effect.

AFTER DAYS spent trawling through the catalogues in a Parisian archive, searching vainly for documents relating to music during the First World War, I was excited one morning to come across the following entry: Concerts: 1914– 1918. It seemed promising. I duly filled in a request slip and returned to my desk, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the file which might hold the vital information for which I was hunting. Two hours later, the documents had not arrived. Instead, my request slip was returned, with a note from one of the archive's staff: ‘pas de concerts – période de guerre’. I was confused: even the most cursory flick through the pages of the music periodical, Le courrier musical, for 1916 and 1917 provided evidence that the archivist's assumption was not entirely accurate. And so, at the risk of infuriating the staff, I returned regularly to the archive over the ensuing weeks to try and get hold of the documents. After persistent attempts, and on the verge of capitulating to the archivist's dogmatism, I was rewarded: not only did the catalogued file exist, but it included a bundle of concert programmes which testified to an infinitely bigger number and breadth of musical performances during the war than I – and certainly the archive staff – had imagined.

The initial response from the archivist assumed that the fact of a war taking place necessarily resulted in an absence of musical activity. Yet it was precisely because of the war that I was interested in this period of music history. The assumption was not altogether surprising: from traditional narratives of music history, it is all too easy to emerge with a view of France's capital city during the First World War in which many of its most enjoyable activities such as music and entertainment ground to a halt, or continued in diminished form. The First World War has provided scholars with a convenient and seductive ready-made period of transition or period boundary, clearly evident in the large numbers of volumes on French music in which the start or end of the First World War are utilised as convenient points of termination or departure; this encourages the idea of the war as a moment of change, but also provides a reason not to dwell on the war period itself.

The Poet Speaks

Whenever Lutosławski speaks about his music, he exhibits a Freudian ambivalence of the variety that expresses one idea while being at pains to hide a conflicting one. As Freud explains, an ambivalent attitude involves the desire to perform an act that the subject considers consciously to be taboo while feels unconsciously to be enjoyable. In Lutosławski's case, he refuses to acknowledge any extra-musical content to his music, as if to do so would break the taboo of the absolute. Yet, his words about music belie an unconscious acknowledgement of its power of expression, drama and even narrative. As I have discussed elsewhere, this ambivalence is particularly evident in Tadeusz Kaczyński's published conversations with Lutosławski, especially in an outburst of dismay concerning Kaczyński's interpretation of the Cello Concerto.

Later in the same interview, Lutosławski maintains that he views ‘any discourse about the so-called content of a composition with some scepticism’, because to him ‘this content is absent’. Still, in an interview with Irina Nikolska, Lutosławski admits that the term ‘form’ is inadequate to describe his music because it lacks the ‘dramatic and literary implications’ that the Polish word akcja (action) or the English word ‘dramaturgy’ include. While at pains in his interview with Kaczyński to deny music's content, Lutosławski nevertheless lets slip that there are dramatic and literary implications in his music during his interview with Nikolska.

This ambivalence about music's content is also manifest in Kaczyński's interview with Lutosławski concerning the String Quartet of 1964. The composer affirms that his quartet had special significance in his oeuvre, although his reasoning relates to the impossibly fraught concept of the purely musical. Lutosławski mentions the two-movement form (‘the first one less important than the second’), the episodic opening, and the ‘advanced aleatory’, among other technical features, as important practices that he developed again in the Second Symphony and the Cello Concerto.

Lutosławski's writings and substantial interviews reveal that the author of Musique funebre was a composer who thought, spoke and wrote not only about his own music. On the other hand, Lutosławski was hardly renowned for loose talk, and he was rarely more circumspect than when he was invited publicly to express his opinions on the music of other living composers. Lutosławski specialists know the rumours about certain fallings out (e.g., Boulez), misgivings (e.g., Xenakis) and surprising admirations (e.g., Ferneyhough), but only rarely did Lutosławski speak openly, and especially negatively, about the output or artistic aims of his colleagues. He was always reserved, tactful and delicate. That is why his published texts do not express fully his reflections, opinions and evaluations of music by other contemporary composers. In private, however – as a correspondent with trusted friends, and especially in the notes he made for his own purposes when judging composer competitions – a different Lutosławski emerges: an incisive and sometimes caustic critic, plainly spoken of his admiration or distaste for different compositional styles.

This essay offers a glimpse at this less guarded Lutosławski and suggests the manner in which these little known documents add nuance to our understanding of his music and other activities. Proceeding from a general overview of the Lutosławski Correspondence Collection (LCC) housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, the essay focuses on letters and other texts (such as his notes from composing competitions) that reveal Lutosławski's sometimes highly critical and firm opinions on the work of other musicians. Comparing Lutosławski's remarks with the scores of the pieces in question permits a novel approach to reconstructing the composer's preferences and disinclinations. Assessing the documentary traces of these ‘microcosmoses’ of his musical activities (as a correspondent and competition juror) offers, in turn, a new perspective on his relationship to the ‘macrocosmos’ of mid-tolate twentieth-century compositional aesthetics.

The Lutosławski Correspondence Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation

After Witold Lutosławski's death in 1994, Lutosławski's family allowed the Archive of the Paul Sacher Foundation to take almost all of the writings, sketches, notes, letters and documents not yet taken by the composer to Basel from his house in Warsaw. Except for just a few items (for example several notebooks), all of the non-music material was gathered together, creating the Lutosławski Correspondence Collection (LCC).

Editors gladly and gratefully acknowledge many debts. Above all we are grateful to our contributors for their papers and for their patience during the book’s gestation. Further thanks quickly follow. Caroline Palmer and her colleagues at Boydell have taken all their characteristic care to make the book as handsome as its subject deserves; the J. C. Baker Trust and Lord Judge of Draycote have provided generous financial support. At the Temple in London Liz Clarke, Cath D’Alton, James Lloyd, Katrina Marchant and above all Catherine de Satgé have in various ways lightened our load.

The book is particularly timely. The aedicule in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was damaged in the earthquake of 1927; in 1947 a steel frame was built round it to prevent its collapse. In March 2017, after several months’ work of restoration, the aedicule was re-opened to pilgrims and visitors. The steel frame has been removed and the stone has been cleaned; what had seemed for decades to be a sad symptom of scarce resources and of division is now, once more, a fitting centrepiece to the rotunda. We add our own congratulations to all those who made possible the repair.

The rotunda of the Temple Church in London, modelled on the Holy Sepulchre, was in use by 1162. In 2010 Robin Griffith-Jones of the Temple Church and David Park of The Courtauld Institute of Art edited The Temple Church in London: History, Architecture, Art, published by Boydell. We are delighted to commit into our readers’ hands this sequel, produced with Boydell in a second happy collaboration between our two institutions, close neighbours in central London.