Prologue

‘My’ modernism operates in large part through two ways of relating to the past: call them continuity and historicism.

– Steven Stucky, ‘Searching for the Mainstream’

Over the last dozen years of his life, composer and Lutosławski expert Steven Stucky gave a series of public lectures exploring his recent thinking about Lutosławski in the context of Steve's developing ideas about modernism and compositional practice in the early twenty-first century. These lectures included the three papers from which the essay below has been assembled: ‘Searching for the Mainstream’ (the first of his three Ernest Bloch Lectures, given at the University of California, Berkeley on 15 September 2003), ‘Lutosławski and the Continuing Story of Harmony’ (paper given at the Symposium of the International Musicological Society, Melbourne, 14 July 2004), and ‘Heart and Brain, Tradition and Modernism: A Key Moment in Lutosławski's Fourth Symphony’ (paper given at the conference ‘Muzyka Witolda Lutosławskiego u progu XXI wieku. Dookreślenia – oceny – perspektywy’, Narodowego Instytutu Fryderyka Chopina, Warsaw (26 September 2013).

The last of these three papers – which drew content from the other two and added new material on Lutosławski's Symphony No. 4 – was Steve's intended contribution to the Lutosławski's Worlds collection. He sent it for discussion at the workshop held at Keele in 2015, after which Lisa Jakelski and I invited him to develop it further by combining it with aspects of the paper I remembered hearing him give in Melbourne about Lutosławski and harmony – because in truth, like ‘Heart and Brain’, that paper was about Lutosławski's connections to composers past and present, not least Steve himself, and how such connections might be suggestive of an alternative narrative of musical modernism. Although work on compositional projects looked set to scupper Steve's plans to develop the essay along these lines, he remained keen to do so – and then, as many readers of Lutosławski's Worlds will know, Steve died on 14 February 2016.

In late 2016, partly as a tribute to Steve – but primarily because the ideas and means of expression in these three papers bore all the hallmarks of his ground-breaking, consistently excellent, vitally important published work on Lutosławski – I approached his wife, Kristen Frey Stucky, with the idea of creating an essay along the lines Steve had planned for the collection.

The German-Soviet occupation of Poland touched Witold Lutosławski and his family in a considerable way. Lutosławski was twenty-six years old when the war began; instead of pursuing his musical studies in Paris as planned, he was enlisted into the Polish army and worked as a radio operator with the ‘Kraków’ Army Headquarters. Taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht on 20 September 1939, he managed to escape and returned to Warsaw near the end of October. There he joined his mother, Maria Lutosławska, and his elder brother Jerzy. His second brother, Henryk, had been arrested by the Soviets while attempting to cross the border; deported to work camps in the Soviet Union, Henryk died of exhaustion and typhoid fever in Kolyma in October 1940. He thus became the third member of the Lutosławski family to fall victim to the Soviet system in the span of just over twenty years: Witold's father and uncle had been executed near Moscow on 5 September 1918 on ‘contra-revolutionary’ charges.

These facts of Lutosławski's biography and family history are now well known. Many of these details, however, had to be kept secret immediately after the war ended and Poland came under Soviet control. Whereas Poland's postwar communist regime generally accepted acts of mourning in remembrance of the losses inflicted by Nazi Germany, it was dangerous – if not impossible – to speak openly of the victims of the Soviet Union, which denied that it had persecuted Polish civilians and executed Polish officers in Katyń. Furthermore, the Polish security forces (Służba Bezpieczeństwa, SB) persecuted those who had been involved with the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) or other clandestine organisations. Wartime survivors therefore typically minimised or hid their involvement with these organisations. In a private letter to her brother on 20 October 1975, Eugenia Umińska, a friend of Lutosławski and an outstanding violinist, expressed her regret that this silence had been necessary: ’It is a pity that 30 or 25 years ago we had neither the possibility nor the time to preserve some memories – facts, names. But, one still lived then in partial conspiracy, which was accompanied by the fear of endangering someone by writing his name down next to someone else's, etc.

Given over to Death by Sin; rescued from Death by Love: these are the complementary polarities of Britten's Donne settings.

The Holy Sonnets of John Donne is a cycle of nine songs composed between 2 and 19 August 1945. Although Britten composed the songs quickly, he had apparently been contemplating setting the Holy Sonnets for some time. Peter Pears first mentions reading the poems with him in February 1943; he raised the possibility of Britten setting them in August 1944. The songs were written immediately after Britten returned from a concert tour of Nazi concentration camps with Yehudi Menuhin. Britten deliberately chose to put himself in the way of this experience, which was evidently likely to be traumatic: he replaced the pianist originally engaged for the tour at his own request. For obvious reasons of sexuality and ethnicity, he must have reflected that, in other circumstances, he and Menuhin might both have been in the camps. After Britten's death, Pears reported how shocking the experience had been to Britten, and that it coloured everything he wrote subsequently.

Listening for the colouration of that experience in the music Britten wrote immediately, we might hear it as sympathy with the victims and horror of the wickedness of those who inflict suffering, repudiated as alien to oneself. Or we might hear it as a new and shocking sense of the possibilities of wickedness that bears on who oneself might be, unknown to oneself and in other circumstances. Insofar as we hear Britten's experience of the camps in these songs, Donne's poems, largely concerned with the poet's own sinful nature and the need for penitence, are more congruent with the second reflection. So too is the exclamation Britten placed at the opening as a keynote for the sequence: ‘Oh my blacke Soule!’. Both Britten and Pears described the subject of the cycle as death, Britten connecting this with his experience of the camps. Clearly death is a subject. Even more important in the cycle overall – as suggested by the cover illustration of the first publication, El Greco's ‘Saint Peter Penitent’ – is this general effect of sin: separating the sinner from God. Complementary to this, given a central position in the cycle by the placing and treatment of a sonnet on the death of Donne's wife, Anne, is the effect of love: bringing the sinner to God.

We take up here an issue that is becoming increasingly urgent for New Formalist studies: how verse is lineated or set out in surviving medieval manuscripts, and how the decisive moment of arranging a text on the page reveals an authorial or scribal awareness of transitions in form. In such moments, we argue, authors or scribes looked both backward toward their forebears for inspiration and also outward toward new multicultural influences as English poetry developed. As the work of Ardis Butterfield and many other scholars of manuscript studies over three decades has shown, contextualizing poetic form in its manuscript presentation illuminates the “poetically engaging” moment when the pre-written, notional sense of a poem “is negotiated into written form by medieval poets.” In the (re)turn to formalism, the urgency of this contextualization lies in our collective interest in preserving the benefits that decades of historical and historicist scholarship have given to the field, in no small way thanks to interest in manuscripts. New Criticism operated in a world largely innocent of manuscript studies: manuscripts were considered important only to editors, whose job was to mediate between the inconvenient, often obscure manuscript page and the comforts of modern print. While mid-twentieth-century scholars usually had enough old-school philology to know that editors had regularized Middle English orthography, they had little interest in how their editors had regulated form, creating metrically tidy lyrics even where a scribe had emphasized fluidity or its playful possibilities. And even New Criticism's editors regarded paleography as the purview of a handful of temporarily useful specialists, who, they imagined, had little to contribute beyond transcription and dating. Paleography for vernacular texts was also slow to develop: in his memoirs, for instance, George Kane records the great difficulty he had even finding a paleographer willing to deal with Middle English when he was first editing the A-text of Piers Plowman. All that began to change only when innovative paleographers such as Malcolm Parkes and Ian Doyle began to excavate medieval terminology for book organization (e.g., the term ordinatio, stemming from the Oxford requirement that medieval lecturers discuss the organization and structure of a prescribed text), and when editors such as Derek Pearsall began to realize that manuscripts did not just transmit stories, but could also tell them.

Portio nature/Ida capillorum/Contratenor/Ante thronum trinitatis presents modern scholars with a conundrum. Many aspects of the motet's advanced style and structure are at odds with the early date suggested by its text and attribution. Consequently, the work raises basic methodological questions: are we to trust extrinsic factors like source dating and compositional function even when they appear to contradict stylistic evidence? As with many fourteenth-century motets, the text of Portio/Ida contains an apparent clue to its origins. The motet is dedicated to St Ida of Lorraine (c.1040–1113), who, through her marriage to Eustace II, became Countess of Boulogne. The motetus text ends with a prayer for the soul of a certain ‘Henricus’, who names himself as the author of ‘this song and collection of words’. While the earliest sources lack an attribution outside the motetus poetry, one late source for Portio/Ida names two authors: ‘Magister Heinricus’ and ‘Egidius de Pusiex’. This has led scholars to suggest that Henricus was responsible only for the texts and Egidius for the music. The sources therefore seem full of identifying clues, especially when compared with anonymous pieces or those that have generic texts.

The connection between ‘Egidius de Pusiex’ and Portio/Ida is found only in Coussemaker's 1866 transcription of a now lost source, Str: ‘Magister Heinricus’ appears in the center head of the page, in the same space Coussemaker indicated the composer of other pieces, and ‘Egidius de Pusiex’ is written slightly smaller and off to the right. In trying to identify this Egidius, Suzanne Clercx and Richard Hoppin propose ‘Egidius de Puiseus’, chaplain for Hughes Roger de Beaufort, Pope Clement VI's nephew. This identification would place the motet's origin at the Avignonese papal court. St Ida was never a widely venerated saint, certainly not beyond Boulogne and Calais, so how did she become the subject of a motet written more than two hundred years after her death? Surely she would have had special significance for the motet's commissioner. Her most prominent descendant in the Avignonese retinue was Cardinal Guy of Boulogne – Ida's great grandson seven times over.

It is not every day that a music historian is allowed to root around a composer's house, and not every day that such an exploration unearths something that recalibrates our perspectives on a composer's creative preparations. This was my good fortune in September 2002, during the 45th ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival. Thanks to Nicholas Reyland, who had obtained permission from Lutosławski's stepson, Marcin Bogusławski, we were given free rein for three days to look at, photograph and make a record of any books, scores or other materials that pertained to his compositional life. At the end of this privileged access to his house at Śmiała 39, we put together a pile of materials, including loose sketches and the materials described in this chapter, that we recommended should be added to the already extensive Lutosławski holdings at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel.

Lutosławski's house had changed little in the eight years since his death. The downstairs reception area still had its L-shaped sofa and whisky chest, and the upstairs study was much as photographs depicted it in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, with the exception of the grand piano, which had been moved out by Lutosławski's widow in 1994 and replaced by their bed so that she could sleep where he had composed. The house has since been somewhat remodelled downstairs, the contents of his study filleted to accommodate other books, new furniture and modern technology, and the carpet that he ordered in London at the time of the premiere of the Cello Concerto in 1970 – and over which he paced between desk and piano for the rest of his life – has been replaced. But the desk remains as it was, its contents including batons and twenty hand-drawn cardboard rulers, some doubleedged, with different gauges.

The bookshelves contained a wide range of scores, books on music, fiction and philosophy. Of particular interest to me were his conducting scores, many heavily thumbed, and his collection of poetry. This included Jean- Louis Bedouin's anthology La poésie Surréaliste (1964, reprinted 1970) which sadly had disappeared by 2013, so possibly the only record of Lutosławski's annotation of Desnos's Les espaces du sommeil, which I photographed in 2002, is to be found in the article ‘One Last Meeting: Lutosławski, Szymanowski and the Fantasia’.

CHOICE OF TENOR

THE MUSICAL FOUNDATION of a motet is a tenor that underpins the structure with a melody usually taken from chant. Egidius de Murino prescribes that the tenor should first be taken from an antiphon, responsory or other chant, and that the words should concord with the materia about which the motet is to be made. While the tenor is the musical foundation, it is not the only building block; Egidius at least implies that the verbal content of the upper parts has already been decided, whether or not the texts, or indeed any musical features, have been worked out in detail. This substance (materia) precedes and determines the choice of tenor. In nearly all of Machaut's motets (and in many by other composers) the words and chant excerpt of the tenor are not those of the beginning of the chant, often pointing up a deliberate choice to isolate a word or phrase especially suited to the – perhaps already planned – upper-part texts. This has often made it harder (and sometimes impossible) to identify the source chant, especially if it is unlabeled.

But it is not only in the disposition of the tenor as a skeleton or ground-plan for the motet that the tenor shapes its musical material. Machaut clearly also chose his chant excerpt for its musical qualities, important among them its potential to serve as the grammatical foundation for counterpoint; not only would the composer assess the number of tenor notes for its divisibility into talea units, but also its cadencing potential at tenor rests or talea divisions, especially at the end, at least in the three-part motets. Nearly all of Machaut's three-part motets end with a stepwise descent in the tenor, which serves the final cadence. The exceptions are the three whose tenors are secular melodies (M11, M16, and M20), and whose final ascents would once have formed counterpoint against the songs’ own tenors.

The four four-part motets are also exceptions to final stepwise tenor descent; they all share the tenor role with an essential contratenor (and would thus have been candidates for composition with the aid of a solus tenor). M5 and M23 are the only motets with (interlocking) coloration in tenor and contratenor. The tenor of M21 does make a stepwise cadence, but in M22 and M23 the final stepwise descents are made not by the tenor, but by the contratenor.

In August 1868, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet William Bell Scott decided to propose an edition of the first Scottish dream-poem, the Kingis Quair, for publication. For several years, he had been decorating Penkill Castle in Ayrshire with a series of murals that depict key scenes from the poem. Each summer, beginning in June 1865, Scott visited the house, the home of the Boyd family, and continued this grand undertaking. The murals still survive today, but, as Scott was to discover, fresco painting in the Scottish climate presents a number of difficulties. Each summer when he returned to continue his work, he discovered that damp had permeated the thick walls of the castle, causing the murals to crumble away. After numerous attempts to remedy the pernicious effects of the climate, Scott was eventually forced to conclude that he was fighting a losing battle. He lamented, “I think the advantage of fresco is pretty much given up. I fancy we shall never take to fresco again in this country, unless it be on carefully prepared interior walls.”

A printed edition of the poem, then, accompanied by etchings produced in preparation for the frescoes, would provide a more lasting form of the images, placed alongside the context of the dream poem itself. Yet, in a twist of fate that will prove sadly familiar to many scholars, Scott found that he had been beaten to it. About to ask Walter Skeat for permission to view Skeat's revised version of the poem, Scott learned that the Scottish Texts Society was to publish it. Worse was to come. Scott's next idea was to produce a modernized version of the poem, believing that many potential readers of the poem were dissuaded by its linguistic and grammatical difficulty. Just as he had completed his task, a modernized version produced by William MacKean appeared in print (1886). Eventually, Scott resolved only to publish his etchings, alongside a brief, introductory essay. It is this privately printed volume that survives today. Scott's introductory essay to his etchings of the Kingis Quair conveys a sense of personal disappointment that his particular project failed to break new ground.

Calling attention to what he identifies as a dearth of theory in medievalism scholarship, Nickolas Haydock addresses the need for studies in “medievalistics,” his term for analyses and theorizations of modern constructions of the historical Middle Ages. These constructions form a set of “contingent representations” that predicates the relationship between past and present on synchronically or diachronically imagined historical continuities, on the one hand, or on alterities that conceptualize the Middle Ages in terms of otherness, on the other. Tension between these kinds of contingencies is part and parcel of historicism; it is a necessary state from which negotiations of a past that was or may have been and the present that conceives of it can emanate. This essay theorizes how scholars of medievalism might maintain the tensions between Haydock's contingent representations without sacrificing the notion of historical authenticity, a concept ever under duress that seems to elude the historicist and challenge discursivity itself. Following up on Richard Utz's recent clarion calls for religion-based scholarship in medievalism studies, this essay makes two claims: first, it posits religious medievalism as the discourse within medievalism that can most effectively accommodate constructs of historical authenticity, and second, it suggests that the literary landscape of the nineteenth century was particularly hospitable to the cultivation of religious medievalism.

The idea of a lost Middle Ages, whether regrettably misplaced or fortunately displaced, has preoccupied historically minded westerners since the Middle Ages themselves came to an end during the sixteenth century. Some exhumed a rotten medieval body only to accentuate the pure, classical contours of the modern body by contrast, while others, wrapped in the fold of a romantic idealism that necessarily looks forward insofar as it looks back, imagined a utopian medieval body whose harmonious balance might be an antidote to the maladies of modernity. Contemporary social, political, economic, and religious spheres constituted but a few benighted categories of experience that medievalists of all eras believed could benefit from a medieval model, if only the medieval could be properly understood.

Controversies over the authenticity of medievalism were probably most intense and formative in the late eighteenth century. The early Gothic novel emerges during this period, a substantially new genre that rivaled neoclassical tastes and prescriptions in provocative ways. In this essay I trace some of the ways the Gothic responded to its own questionable legitimacy as a new genre. The OED lists four definitions for authenticity, an abstract noun formed in the eighteenth century from the adjective authentic. All four definitions are relevant to my analysis of Gothic authenticities below: 1. True or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness; 2. Authoritative or duly authorized; authority (now rare); 3. With reference to a document, artifact, artwork, etc.: the fact or quality of being authentic; genuineness; 4. The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. My argument attempts to demonstrate the depth and breadth of Gothic engagements with authenticity through an analysis of mimesis, authority, and nationalist literary history. Early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer make profound investments in the literary authority of earlymodern writers. They also invest in iconophobic, anti-Catholic polemics that were a distinctive feature of John Foxe's Protestant martyrs to the Inquisition, Edmund Spenser's fairyland, and Christopher Marlowe's Faust. As we shall see, one of the darkest sides of this cultural inheritance – the Spanish Black Legend – also makes a deep impression on the Early Gothic.

Walpole, inventor of the Gothic novel in The Castle of Otranto (1764), exemplifies the first definition of authenticity (“true, in accordance with fact”) in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760): “The portrait was rather a work of command and imagination than of authenticity.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the authenticity of likenesses (in this sense) is crucial to the anamorphic portraits of Gothic fiction. The hero of Otranto, Theodore, bears an uncanny resemblance to the portrait of Alfonso the Good, a dead hero of the Crusades whose ghost steps through the frame to taunt and haunt the usurper, Manfred.