The Little Phrase...

"If Mme Verdurin is going to start fingering her bronzes," said the painter, "we shan't get any music tonight."

"Be quiet, you wretch! And yet we poor women." she went on, turning towards Swann, "are forbidden pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in the world to compare with it. None. When M. Verdurin did me the honour of being madly jealous . . ..Come, you might at least be polite-don't say that you've never been jealous!"

"But, my dear, I've said absolutely nothing. Look here, Doctor, I call you as a witness. Did I utter a word?"

Swann had begun, out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not like to stop.

"Come along; you can caress them later. Now it's you who are going to be caressed, caressed aurally. You'll like that, I think. Here's a young gentleman who will take charge of that."

After the pianist had played, Swann was even more affable towards him than towards any of the other guests, for the following reason:

The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony-he did not know which-that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one's nostrils.' ...

'But that night, at Mme Verdurin's, scarcely had the young pianist begun to play than suddenly, after a high note sustained through two whole bars (bars of music, ed.), Swann sensed its approach, stealing forth from beneath that long-drawn sonority," and blah blah blah.

Proust tells us that the little phrase is found in the andante of Vinteuil's sonata for piano and violin. A great deal of conjecture has been made ever since publication, what piece this Venteuil Sonata might actually be, as if Proust were trying to be quite literal. And as we all know (the rest of you have left the room by now, I hope), Proust's characters were pastiches, pasted together, a whole universe of Frankenstein monsters, gnashing their teeth, ripping bloody chunks of flesh from each other, but gifted with remarkable gab.

What were the pieces that contributed to Proust's idealized musical experience? The Cesar Franck violin sonata is a strong contender (if you can find it, the Wanda Wilkomirska, Antonio Barbosa recording on Connoisseur Society is the one to hear). The Sonata for flute, viola and harp is my personal favorite, in spite of the fact that Proust could not have heard it. This is a piece of music that gets many many obsession points (Boston Symphony chamber players on DGG). Some suggest Saint-Saens violin sonata #3. Saint-Saens wrote a few cool things, but I'm sorry, the violin sonatas are not. Nobody plays them, except maybe some lunatic with too much time on his hands, or someone who wants to take the world by storm, and introduce a little-heard masterpiece... Phooey.

Proust was very sly. This business of trying to figure out what piece the little phrase refers to is obsessional. This little phrase, as we are told becomes 'the national anthem' of Swann's obsession with Odette.

... He would rap on the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer, before going to meet him at the front door. He would find, lying open on the piano, some of her favourite music, the Valses des Roses, the Pauvre Fou of Tagliafico (which, according to the instructions embodied in her will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead, to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilled fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase continued to be associated in Swann's mind with his love for Odette. ...

Swann would continue to hear this little phrase, and each time the synaesthesia would recreate the original effect, however shaded by the current situation. Much later, in the chapter "Madame Swann at Home", young Marcel hears the little phrase played by Odette, and then listens to Swann explain it. Swann describes 'That what is expressed so well in that little phrase, the Bois de Boulogne plunged in a cataleptic trance...'. 'But what I understood from other remarks he made that this nocturnal foliage was simply that beneath whose shade, in many a restaurant on the outskirts of Paris, he had listened on so many evenings to the little phrase. In place of the profound meaning that he had so often sought in it, what it now recalled to Swann were the leafy boughs, ordered, wreathed, painted round about it (which it gave him the desire to see again because it seemed to him to be their inner, their hidden self as it were their soul), was the whole of one spring season which he had not been able to enjoy at the time, not having had-feverish and sad as he then was-the requisite physical and mental well-being, and which (as one puts by for an invalid as he dainties that he not been able to eat) it had kept for him. The charm that he had been made to feel by certain evenings in the Bois, a charm of which Vinteuil's sonata served to remind him, he could not have recaptured by questioning Odette, although she, as well as the little phrase, had been his companion there. But Odette had been merely by his side, not (as the phrase had been) within him, and so had seen nothing-nor would have, had she been a thousand times as comprehending-of that vision which for none of us (or at least I was long under the impression that this rule admitted of no exception) can be externalized.'