On Titles and Inscriptions

The words that composers inscribed in scores of instrumental music, as title, genre, expressive marking, or label, carry a kind of talismanic force. Yet their meanings are passionately argued, and their endless ambiguities have led philosopher Arnold Berleant to insist that “instead of titles telling us what the music means, the music tells us what the titles mean.” Charles Burney is recorded as remarking, around 1791, that Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, sometimes known in London as an “instrumental Passion,” is “perhaps, the most sublime composition without words to point out its meaning that has ever been composed.” One asks: what other words are needed to point out the meaning of seven slow movements, each headed by one of Christ's last words or phrases, concluding with a titled earthquake? Within the first fifteen years after its composition, Haydn's Seven Last Words was called “characteristic,” a series of “character pieces or, if one prefers, musical paintings,” and even a “symphonie a programme,” in Koch's Musikalisches Lexikon (1802). One listener's program is another listener's question mark.

On the other hand, the presence of clarifying words, the inscriptions that may “produce all of the effects of the finest and most perfect imitation,” as Adam Smith put it, can also create mysteries, but perhaps of another kind. In the autograph manuscript of the “Pastoral” Symphony, Beethoven's note to his copyist demands that the words “nightingale,” “quail,” and “cuckoo” be printed over the wind solos that appear shortly before the conclusion of “Scene by the Brook,” the second movement. These and other musical figures associated with birds had appeared throughout the movement, yet only here did Beethoven require a verbal inscription. And these are the only inscriptions in the entire work outside the title of the symphony and the title for each movement. Written during the decade of greatest controversy over the representations of nature in Haydn's oratorios, The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), the bird-labels seemed eerily to recall cutting remarks made by Diderot and Rousseau forty-odd years earlier. Pondering obscure subjects in a painting called “The Village Soothsayer” exhibited in the Salon of 1765, Diderot wrote, “They say that a well-meaning painter who’d put a bird in his picture and wanted that bird to be a cock, wrote below it: “‘this is a cock.’”