People don't cry at just any music. They cry chiefly at Romantic music. People are moved by Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms, and sometimes Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Chopin. It's usually the old warhorses, and it's hardly ever classical, Renaissance, or modern music. Similarly, Romantic operas make people cry—works by Massenet, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and Gounod—but not Baroque operas or modern ones. I know some people cry at Monteverdi, Handel, and Josquin des Prez, but who cries at Schönberg, Webern, Nancarrow, Carter, or Stockhausen? And who cries at early-music concerts? There are the brilliant exceptions: a musicologist told me he cries at the St. Matthew Passion, even though he knows the work inside out. But that's the kind of exception that proves the rule. The music that elicits tears is mainly Romantic to begin with.
The same could be said of romantic novels, whether they were written at the end of the eightenth century or the twentieth. People don't cry over fiction that is clearly modernist or postmodernist--Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Pessoa; nor do they cry at modern and postmodern films—Gance, Robbe-Grillet, Bresson, Buñuel, Deren. People weep at romantic novels, especially when they're not exactly the best literature. Harlequin romances are romantic, both in the sense that they are stories about love, and in the sense that they belong in a genealogy that goes back to Romanticism.
It would be possible to go around and around about what makes a work modern or postmodern, but the overwhelming majority of successful, mass-market movies and novels draw on ideas, symbols, narrative shapes, purposes, and even notions of sentiment and psychology that were originally set out by the early-nineteenth-century Romantics. Fiction and filmmaking are arguably more closely indebted to Romanticism than much of twentieth-century painting. So perhaps (just perhaps; this is an especially broad generalization) another reason fewer people cry at paintings than over novels, films, and orchestral music is that most popular novels, films, and orchestral music are still Romantic. Twentieth-century painting belongs more with modern classical music than with Brahms, more with the late Joyce than with the Brontës. Romantic thoughts are the ones that make us cry when we’re reading sentimental novels, when we’re at the opera or the symphony, and especially when we’re watching Hollywood movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment