Proust on music

 It's hard to write, or even to blog, about literature, but at least this type of criticism or analysis (Criticize is, I think, from the Greek for "to separate") is composed from the same signage/materials as the work under examination: Literary criticism uses language to examine art composed in language. It's much harder, I believe, to write criticism of art or music, to use language to examine and appreciate works of art composed of other signage: sound, light, texture. For that reason, Proust's account of the chamber performance of the Vinteuil septet is one of the greatest passages in In Search of Lost Time (in volume 5, The Prisoner). Especially amazing: Vinteuil, the late composer whose work was almost entirely lost but saved be a few devotees who carefully reconstructed several pieces based on V's cryptic notations, is a fictional character, though several have attempted to ID him as one of the late-19th/early20th French composers (I think of Saint-Saens).  Proust's comments on the septet apply to all music, perhaps to all of the arts - and the comments are made even stranger in the context of this volume, as he sits enraptured by the music and surrounded by all the vectors of a pretentious, competitive artists' salon, with the champion of the music - M. de Charlus - in essence using the performance to advance the reputation of his much young male lover (Morel), and in his annoying aristocratic way judging all of the other attendees and ordering everyone around. I could quote many passages to illustrate the complexity and insight of Proust's comments, but here are one or two: "This song, so different from everyone else's, so similar in all his own works, where had Vinteuil learned it? Each great artist seems to be the citizen of an unknown homeland which even he has forgotten, different from the land from which another great artists will soon set sail for the earth." Or: "The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not toward new landscapes but with new eyes so see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see or can be - and we can do that w/ the help of an [ artist, novelist ] or a Venteuil - with them and their like we can truly fly from star to star. "