Testaments Betrayed
By Milan Kundera
Translated by Linda Asher
HarperCollins, 280 pages, $24
Milan Kundera begins his indictment of the betrayal of the writer by the well-meaning but misguided disciple or custodian, and of the composer by the performer, with an examination of the relations between Kafka and Max Brod. Since it is no longer news that Kafka did not ask Brod to destroy all of his work after his death–Kafka on his deathbed was correcting the galley proofs of “A Hunger Artist” for publication–an account of their friendship, fanatic veneration on Brod’s side, need not be retold here. But Kundera goes on to reveal some of the damage that Brod wrought on Kafka’s work, including deletions, re-paragraphing and added punctuation. Kundera also dissects three French translations of an excerpt from “The Trial” as an example of the distortions of and losses to Kafka’s art in its rendering in another language.
Kundera’s analysis of “The Trial” is categorical. K. is guilty “not because he’s committed a crime but because he’s been accused.” K.’s guilt is not doubted because “Society has adopted the accusation.” Since the tribunal refuses to declare the charge against him, K. “ends up looking for the crime himself.”
Comparing “The Trial” to Orwell’s “1984,” Kundera remarks that whereas Kafka’s power is in reshaping the world by an immense poetic imagination, “the Englishman’s novel is firmly closed to poetry.” Moreover, it is merely “political thought disguised as a novel.” Its pernicious influence resides in its “implacable reduction of a reality to its political dimension alone. . . I refuse to forgive this reduction on the grounds that it is useful as propaganda in the struggle against totalitarian evil. For that evil is precisely the reduction of life to politics, and of politics to propaganda.”
Kundera’s preoccupations with the novel as art form emerge in his comparison of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities.” Whereas Mann fills long passages “with data on the characters, on their pasts, their way of dressing, their way of speaking, the social customs of the time,” and whereas his “intellectuality shows mainly in the dialogues about ideas carried on before the backdrop of a descriptive novel,” in Musil “the intellectuality is manifest at every instant.”
Against Mann’s descriptive novel, Musil’s is a “thinking” one. The events are set in a concrete milieu and in a concrete moment, the same as in “The Magic Mountain,” just before the 1914 war. But while Mann’s Davos is described in detail, Musil’s Vienna is barely identified. Mann “makes use of every means offered by the various branches of knowledge–sociology, political science, medicine, history, physics, chemistry–to illuminate this or that theme,” but in Musil “the novelist doesn’t set up as a scholar, a doctor, a sociologist, a historian, he analyzes human situations that are not part of some scientific field but are simply part of life. This is how Broch and Musil saw the historical task for the novel after the era of psychological realism . . . in Musil everything becomes theme (existential questioning). If everything becomes theme, the background disappears and . . . there is nothing but foreground. It is this abolition of the background that I consider to be the structural revolution Musil brought about.”
Kundera’s humanism speaks out on every page. In an illuminating discussion of Nietzsche, for example, he remarks that the philosopher’s “refusal of systematic thought has another consequence: an immense broadening of theme; barriers between the various philosophical disciplines, which have kept the real world from being seen in its full range, are fallen, and from then on everything human can become the object of a philosopher’s thought. That too brings philosophy nearer the novel: for the first time philosophy is pondering not epistemology, not aesthetics or ethics, the phenomenology of mind or the critique of reason, etc., but everything human.”
The greatest surprise for most readers of “Testaments Betrayed” will be the discovery of Kundera’s deep musicality and musical knowledge. His father was a musician who encouraged his son’s talents with piano lessons and instruction in harmony, counterpoint and composition. The son’s musical perceptions are acute, highly original and on a more sophisticated level than those of all but a few musicologists. If some of Kundera’s descriptions of Beethoven’s and Chopin’s “strategies,” as he calls them, irritate academics, they can only agree with his comments on the modern composers, which are both remarkably apt and remote from the going views. In a discussion of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, he dares to laugh a little at the behemoth:
“(T)he most important, most dramatic, longest movement is the first: the sequence of movements is thus a devolution: from the gravest to the lightest. . . Imagine all the great symphonists, including Haydn and Mozart, Schumann and Brahms, weeping in their adagios and then turning into little children when the last movement starts, darting into the schoolyard to dance, hop, and holler that all’s well that ends well.”
A third or more of the book is devoted to Janacek and Stravinsky. The chapter on Janacek, with Kafka the other “great Czech artist of the century,” is the best introduction to the composer that this reviewer has read, immeasurably superior to the one by Max Brod, who, in thrall to the composer to almost the same extent as he was to Kafka, published the first monograph on him. Like his biography of Kafka, it confines Janacek to a provincial role, keeping him in the company of other Czech musicians only; Berg is mentioned in passing but Bartok not at all. Failing to grasp Janacek’s true stature and place in the international scene, Brod classifies him in relation to Smetana, that mediocrity who was and still is the national idol.
Janacek must be distinguished from the other great modernists, Kundera writes, in that his style is without influence from any of them, and his roots and genesis are radically different. Kundera begins in a Paris record shop, where he fails to find even adequate performances of Janacek’s concert music. Nearly all renditions of the piano pieces are “wrong in both spirit and structure,” Kundera asserts, and he sensibly attaches part of the blame for this on the solo medium itself, “undefended against rubato” as it is.
No less importantly, Kundera calls attention to the characteristic absence in Janacek of “transitions, developments, the mechanics of contrapuntal filler, routine orchestration.” And he contrasts Janacek’s expressionism, “an enormously rich emotional range, a dizzyingly tight transitionless juxtaposition of tenderness and brutality, fury and peace,” with German Expressionism, which is characterized by “a predilection for excessive states–delirium, madness.”
Turning to Janacek’s operas, Kundera understandably ranks “From the House of the Dead” with “Wozzeck” as one of the two greatest operas “of our dark century.” The most absorbing part of the essay deals with Janacek’s “self-imposed accumulation of obstacles,” foremost among them the centrality of the Czech language in his work, but also the “psychological meaning of the (verbal) melodic phrase,” which is more important than the melody itself.
Kundera acknowledges the impossibility of translation, while conceding that the operas could be known internationally at first only in their German versions. French, Kundera notes, cannot accommodate the first-syllable stress of Czech words, and the French language is hopelessly unable to convey any of the psychological nuances of the original.
Among the other obstructions in Janacek’s decision to concentrate his “inner power” on opera is that the medium exposes him to “the mercy of the most conservative bourgeois audience imaginable.” Added to this is the fierce hostility that the composer faced as the citizen of a small nation. He never left home, the province of Brno, and unlike Schoenberg in Vienna, was not supported there by disciples or truly dedicated performers. For 14 years, the conductor of the National Theater of Prague blocked the presentation of “Jenufa,” Janacek’s first great opera–Mahler wanted it for Vienna in 1904, but no German version was available–finally presenting it in 1916, in a version of his own, mutilated by cuts and countless changes but a triumph nevertheless, for which Janacek was expected to show gratitude.
Kundera’s insights into Stravinsky are worth more than most book-length studies of the composer. Partly from his experiences as a refugee himself, Kundera could see that “Without a doubt Stravinsky . . . bore within him the wound of his immigration. . . The start of his journey through the history of music coincides roughly with the moment when his native country ceases to exist for him. . . He finds his only homeland in music . . . his only compatriots . . . from Perotin to Webern. . . (H)e did all he could to feel at home there: he lingered in each room of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every piece of the furniture (from) Monteverdi to Hugo Wolf . . . to the twelve-tone system . . .in which, eventually, after Schoenberg’s death, he recognized yet another room in his home.”
Kundera remarks elsewhere that “the term `neo-classicism,’ commonly pinned on Stravinsky, is misleading, for his most decisive excursions into the past reach into eras earlier than the Classic.” He goes on to say that the inclination to re-evaluate the entire history of music is common to all the great modernists, “the mark that distinguishes great modern art from modernist trumpery.” Still, it is Stravinsky “who expresses it more clearly than anyone else.”
Kundera then proceeds to demolish the composer’s chief detractors, first, Ernst Ansermet, who argued that Stravinsky’s “diversity of style amounts to the absence of style.” Discussing the famous quarrel between the conductor and the composer, Kundera perceives, as no one else did, that Ansermet’s anger can only be seen as that of “the performer who cannot tolerate the author’s proud behavior and tries to limit his power.”
Theodor Adorno, the other major detractor, with his “fearsome facility” in linking “works of art to political (sociological) causes,” contended that Stravinsky’s music is “music about music.” Kundera refutes this by pointing out that “like no other composer before or after him, Stravinsky turned for inspiration to the whole span of music, which in no way lessens the originality of his art. . . It is precisely his vagabondage through musical history–his conscious, purposeful `eclecticism,’ gigantic and unmatched–that is his total and incomparable originality.” Expanding on the delight in Stravinsky’s music, Kundera notes that it “bears the mark of humor” and wonders if “a fatal lack of humor makes Adorno so unreceptive to Stravinsky’s music?”
Kundera tells us that when he was younger, “Stravinsky was one of those figures who would open doors onto distances I saw as boundless.” At the time, Kundera thought of modern art as an “infinite journey.” He now thinks that it was a short one, which implies that the great musical explosion in the early part of the century has fizzled out in the latter part. As for rock music, he presents his opinion piquantly: “Now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes.”
