Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

In Hugo’s Les Misérables, when Valjean is destitute, he steals from a priest who had given him food and lodging. After being apprehended and returned to the monastery, Valjean faces arrest, but instead of telling the police the truth, the priest lies for Valjean, telling them that he had given Valjean the stolen items. Years later, when Valjean first encounters Cosette, she has lost fifteen sous that her abusive caretakers have given her to buy bread for the inn. In this scene, we see Valjean applying the life-changing lesson he had learned from the priest. The situations are not the same: unlike his earlier self, the child has done nothing wrong. Yet Valjean extends and applies the priest’s lesson from years earlier:

All at once, the Thénardier exclaimed:--  "By the way, where's that bread?"  Cosette, according to her custom whenever the Thénardier uplifted her voice, emerged with great haste from beneath the table.  She had completely forgotten the bread. She had recourse to the expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear. She lied.  "Madame, the baker's shop was shut."  "You should have knocked."  "I did knock, Madame."  "Well?"  "He did not open the door."  "I'll find out to-morrow whether that is true," said the Thénardier; "and if you are telling me a lie, I'll lead you a pretty dance. In the meantime, give me back my fifteen-sou piece."  Cosette plunged her hand into the pocket of her apron, and turned green. The fifteen-sou piece was not there.  "Ah, come now," said Madame Thénardier, "did you hear me?"  Cosette turned her pocket inside out; there was nothing in it. What could have become of that money? The unhappy little creature could not find a word to say. She was petrified.  "Have you lost that fifteen-sou piece?" screamed the Thénardier, hoarsely, "or do you want to rob me of it?"  At the same time, she stretched out her arm towards the cat-o'-nine-tails which hung on a nail in the chimney-corner.  This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to shriek:--  "Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!"  The Thénardier took down the whip.  In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the fob of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements. Besides, the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were not paying attention to anything.  Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude limbs. The Thénardier raised her arm.  "Pardon me, Madame," said the man, "but just now I caught sight of something which had fallen from this little one's apron pocket, and rolled aside. Perhaps this is it."  At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor for a moment.  "Exactly; here it is," he went on, straightening himself up.  And he held out a silver coin to the Thénardier.  "Yes, that's it," said she.  It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thénardier found it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the remark, "Don't let this ever happen again!"  Cosette returned to what the Thénardier called "her kennel," and her large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with it. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume II – Cosette; Book Third – Accomplishment of a Promise Made To a Dead Woman, Chapter VIII, “The Unpleasantness of receiving into One's House a Poor Man who may be a Rich Man”.]

. . . these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make one feel to what a degree architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation’s effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human society,—in a word, species of formations. Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive. Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, - pendent opera interrupta_- ; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,—following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Third, Chapter I, “Notre-Dame”.]

Novels and books about novels:

• Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (Random House, 2011), “is a novel about the discovery of what is reputed to be a lost Shakespeare play . . .”
• Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein: A Novel (Nan A. Talese, 2009): “This earnest young Frankenstein has attended lectures by the eminent scientist and man of letters Humphry Davy, and has learned from them that electricity is ‘the spark of life, the Promethean flame and the light of the world.’ He has also heard, from one of the most powerful thinkers of the age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that 'man creates the world in which he lives,' and that even the great scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton 'were created by his mind and imagination.'”
• Jo Nesbo, Macbeth: A Novel (Hogarth, 2018): “Jo Nesbo Sculpts ‘Macbeth’ Into Shadowy Crime Noir”

Poetry

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

[Pablo Neruda, “Canto XII” from “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”]

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Toumani Diabaté, “New Ancient Strings” album (1998) (53’): Kenyan musician Toumani Diabaté applied contemporary themes, moods and rhythms to an ancient stringed instrument, the Kora. The result is a desert-island disc that brings an ancient tradition into the 20th and now the 21st century. In a similar vein are:

• Ballaké Sissoko, “Djourou” (2021) (47’)
• Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper, “Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper” (2024) (40’)
• Boubacar "Badian" Diabaté, “African Guitar Series, Volume 1: Mande Guitar” (2021) (60’)
• Ballaké Sissoko & Vincent Segal, “Chamber Music” (2009) (55’): “Together, they play almost as if by intuition, as kora and cello switch between providing lead and rhythmic backing, constantly changing direction within the same piece. The music is low-key but quietly thrilling, with improvisation that involves virtuoso kora solos, or passages where the cello is strummed like a guitar.”

Composer Eugène Ysaÿe drew heavily on Bach in composing his six violin sonatas (Op. 27) (1923) (approx. 66-72’), acknowledging his intent to represent the evolution of musical techniques and expressions of his time. In addition to drawing on Bach, he named each of the six sonatas after an influential musical figure. Here are links to performances of all six sonatas by Gidon Kremer in 1976, Leonidas Kavakos in 1999, Thomas Zehetmair in 2004, Sharon Park in 2017, Keija He in 2021, Jack Liebeck in 2021, James Ehnes in 2021, Daniel Matejča in 2023, Hilary Hahn in 2023, and Sergey Khachatryan in 2024.

• Sonata No. 1 in G minor, “Joseph Szigeti” (approx. 13-17’)
• Sonata No. 2 in A minor, “Jacques Thibaud” (approx. 13-14’)
• Sonata No. 3 in D minor, “Georges Enescu” (approx. 6-7’) (here it is in the hands of Maxim Vengerov, a strong candidate for the greatest violinist of the 20th century, despite his all-too-brief career)
• Sonata No. 4 in E minor, “Fritz Kreisler” (approx. 11-13’)
• Sonata No. 5 in G Major, “Mathieu Crickboom” (approx. 7-9’)
• Sonata No. 6 in G Major, “Manuel Quiroga” (approx. 7’)

In his first series of string quartets, Op. 18 (1800) (approx. 140-180’), Ludwig von Beethoven drew heavily on Haydn and Mozart, who had recently developed the string quartet into a staple of classical music. Top recordings of the entire opus are by Budapest String Quartet, 1943-1962; Amadeus Quartet in 1962; Quartetto Italiano in 1972; Lindsay Quartet (1 & 2, 1979) (3 & 4, 1979) (5 & 6, 1979); Alban Berg Quartet in 1981; Takács Quartet in 2004; Tokyo String Quartet in 2007; Quartetto di Cremona (1, 2018) (2 & 3, 2017) (4, 2018) (5, 2018) (6, 2018); Dover Quartet in 2021. Here are links to each of the quartets individually.

• String Quartet No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18/1;
• String Quartet No. 2 in G major, Op. 18/2, "Compliments";
• String Quartet No. 3 in D Major, Op. 18/3;
• String Quartet No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 18/4;
• String Quartet No. 5 in A Major, Op. 18/5; and
• String Quartet No. 6 in B-flat Major, Op. 18/6. 

Ernst Krenek’s string quartets:

• String Quartet No. 1, Op. 6 (1921) (approx. 34’), is modeled after Beethoven’s Op. 131.
• String Quartet No. 2, Op. 8 (1921) (approx. 35’), is an extension of the first quartet, with influences from Bartók.
• String Quartet No. 3, Op. 20 (1923) (approx. 30’)
• String Quartet No. 4, Op. 24 (1923) (approx. 30’), is inspired by jazz.
• String Quartet No. 5, Op. 65 (1930) (approx. 41’), is a relatively traditional quartet, for Krenek, in an atmosphere reminiscent of Schubert.
• String Quartet No. 6, Op. 78 (1936) (approx. 32’), employs Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techniques.
• String Quartet No. 7, Op. 96 (1944) (approx. 19’), draws on Barber’s famous Adagio.
• String Quartet No. 8, Op. 233 (1980) (approx. 26’) 

In several of his works, modern Spanish composer Ernesto Halffter drew upon various influences:

• Rapsodia Portuguesa, for piano & orchestra (1938) (approx. 116-17’) is influenced by Ravel, and incorporates Portuguese folk songs.
• Deux Esquisses Symphoniques, (approx. 9’) is influenced by Debussy and documents “Halffter’s efforts to move beyond the confines of tonality” [Josef Oehrlein].
• Sinfonietta in D Major (1925) (approx. 35’) follows the classical four-movement structure and draws on the disparate influences of Scarlatti (1700s, Baroque era and style) and Stravinsky (1900s, modern era and style). 

Other works:

• Lukas Foss, Symphony No. 2, "Symphony of Chorales" (1958) (approx. 37-38’), draws on four Bach cantatas, ## 90, 77-78, 139 and 133.
• Qigang Chen, Reflet un temps disparu, for erhu & orchestra (2002) (approx. 34’), is drawn from an ancient Chinese melody, “Three Variations on the Plum Blossom”.
• Paul Reale, Piano Sonata No. 10, “Sonata Piazzollana” (2010/2019) (approx. 16’), draws on the work of Astor Piazzolla.
• Leopold Godowsky, 52 Studies on Chopin's Études, Op. 10 (approx. 76’); Op. 25 (approx. 77’) (1894-1914)
• György Kurtág, Kurtág's Ghosts (approx. 48’)
• Pierre Boulez, Anthèmes 2 for violin and live electronics (1997) (approx. 20-21’): Boulez drew on church music he had heard in his youth.
• Ludwig van Beethoven, 12 Variations on 'Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen', Op. 66 (1796) (approx. 9-10’)
• Beethoven, 12 Variations on 'See the conqu'ring hero comes', WoO 45 (1796) (approx. 12-13’) 

Albums:

• Jimmy Owens applied his musicianship to standard Monk tunes in creating “The Monk Project” album (2017) (65’).
• Franz Koglmann, “About Yesterday’s Ezzthetics” (1994) (62’)
• Stéphane Spira and Giovanni Mirabassi, “Improkofiev” (2020) (43’) is a take-off on Prokofiev.
• Noam Weisenberg, “Roads Diverge” (2018) (48’): “(Weisenberg) takes the strong foundation of Art Blakey’s groups, the fiery exchanges and swirling overtones of John Zorn and Dave Douglas in Masada, and the gorgeous compositions and soloing of the last Tony Williams quintet and puts his own stamp on it.” [Mark Klafter, Cadence magazine 2019 Annual edition, p. 241.]
• “Modern Art Orchestra Plays Béla Bartók: 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs” (2018) (69’) (Here are the 15 songs on piano.)
• Párniczky Quartet, “Bartók Electrified” (2019) (48’)
• Brad Mehldau Trio, “Seymour Reads the Constitution” (2018) (64’) consists of seven tracks based on compositions from several musical genres.
• RIAS Kammerchor & Capella de la Torre, “Praetorius & Italy” (2021) (76’): “The importance of Monteverdi and his Italian contemporaries as models for Praetorius is explored . . .”
• Francisco Fullana, “Bach’s Long Shadow” (2021) (58’): “Verdi once observed that all post-Baroque composers were to some extent ‘sons of Bach’. Solo violin music since Bach almost invariably has a tendency to pay homage to his Sonatas and Partitas. As a creative springboard for the remainder of this recital, Francisco Fullana includes the E major Partita, employing gut strings, Baroque bow and authentic ornamentation.”
• Quartet Ajaton, “Early Music in the Latest Way” (2021) (37’): “. . . the inclusion of 4 songs by John Dowland, one by Henry Purcell and one by John Blow sets a compelling melancholy tone. Two other tracks are also by 16th and 17th century composers while the final piece is a traditional tune from Finland, where the band are based and the album was cut.”
• Bria Skonberg, “What It Means” (2024) (55’): “As a whole, What It Means is a record that celebrates the timelessness of jazz while acknowledging Skonberg’s love letter to New Orleans. Here, she balances tradition with contemporary insight, her arrangements breathing new life into familiar standards and delivering original works with finesse.”
• Sarah Hanahan, “Among Giants” (2024) (53’): “Sarah Hanahan evidently draws her inspiration from both classical and folk music. This album is also a passionate declaration of her commitment to advancing music while honoring the past.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

Visual Arts

Yves Klein, People Begin to Fly (1961)

 

• Hieronymus Bosch, The Cure of Folly (Extraction of the Stone of Madness) (1475-80)
• Diego Velázquez, Arachne (1644-48) (dark side)

Film and Stage