Heinrich Heine once said, “Where words leave off, music begins.” Yet in The Unanswered Question, Maestro Bernstein uses words to open music anew—through a linguistic lens extended into aesthetic and philosophical spheres. I was stunned to realize that these lectures are already over half a century old.
...Köthen, 1722.
Bach begins the golden age with his miracle of tempering, diligently balancing the opposing forces of chromaticism and diatonicism—two forces equally powerful and, at first glance, contradictory. The summit he reached did not collapse into decline but extended forward as a plateau: level, lofty, enduring—stretching into Beethoven. “Juliet is the sun,” I murmured, listening to Mozart’s G-minor Symphony. It radiates classical beauty in its ambiguity—chromatic wanderings above, but firmly grounded by an inverted tonic-dominant structure beneath.
Paris, 1830.
Berlioz heralded Romanticism by liberating music from the clarity of “C major” and into the sheer sensuality of sound itself—toward ever-greater ambiguities. His idée fixe, that haunting image of the beloved, lingers “everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside” in the Symphonie Fantastique. In Romeo and Juliet, the contrapuntal tension between the chromatic tones of a lovesick song and the diatonic rhythm of the Capulet ball evokes more than narrative—it enacts metaphor in music. I could hear Romeo’s sighs as clearly as my own heartbeat.
Munich, 1865.
In the Tristan Prelude, Wagner unleashes F, B, D♯, and G♯—forming the most enigmatic diminished seventh chord of the century. Here, unfulfilled sensual desire can no longer be contained within tonal boundaries. This unresolved ambiguity is love’s misery: in its shadow, power, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship scatter like dreams. “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.” I shook my head, trying to shake off the vision of the fallen Isolde, when Liebestod becomes the only destiny.
Paris, 1894.
“These nymphs I would make last”—so sings the flute solo in Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, opening with a tritone, G to C♯. Debussy’s whole-tone scale—a self-limited myth, denying tonic-dominant relations or the circle of fifths—glides like a harp-drawn mist. Syntax dissolves into a semantic vacuum. And yet, as Mallarmé resolves his dream in perfect Alexandrine couplets, Debussy ends his dream-within-a-dream with a cadence in B major. “Farewell, I wait the shade that you became.” Music's metaphor finally touches its linguistic counterpart, not on the surface—but at the level of aesthetic essence. “The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity,” I repeated. The Faun, and the danger he embodies, still lurks by the fountain.
Vienna, 1913.
Mahler, in his long and anguished farewell to tonality, confronts the ultimate ambiguity of the human spirit: our acceptance of mortality, and our yearning for immortality. To live for you, and to die for you—that is the final love Mahler gives us. He stands at the endpoint of the great symphonic arc that began with Haydn and Mozart. “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea,” writes Dylan Thomas. I heard those lines again and again in Mahler’s nine symphonies.
Hamburg, 1923.
Schoenberg tries to impose order upon the chaos of modernism with his twelve-tone method—a radical break from tonality and symmetrical syntax. To music, he is a master; to me, a tragic figure. He meticulously engineered his own exile from tonality, yet found few true listeners. Only then did I realize the eerie closeness between comedy and tragedy in our age—the absurdity that echoes in his Waltz Opus 23, on an existential plane.
Paris, 1927.
And then there is Stravinsky. Through neoclassical form and polytonality, he revives that “O alter Duft aus Märchenzeit”. The primal impulse, refracted through modern dissonance, lives on in the puppet of Petrushka, the death-dance of The Rite of Spring, the fatal pronouncement in Oedipus Rex. “In the end is my beginning,” murmurs T.S. Eliot. “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again.” In the din of modern success—its speed, its noise—I nearly forget the feeling of home and love. Yet neoclassicism tries to reach through that cosmopolitan mask, to touch what remains.
...There is no winner. All these struggles—between chromaticism and diatonicism, phonology and syntax, stability and ambiguity—cannot escape the innate sonic responses of the human being, nor can they break through the tonal-harmonic implications that inevitably reside within our terrestrial existence.
It is this spirit that Strauss echoes in Also Sprach Zarathustra. No matter how high the oboes and strings stretch, earnest and melancholy, in the Nachtwandlerlied, the C–G–C tonic-dominant axis grounds us. It is the Earth. It is Nature. It is Life.
In the end, it is the same Faustian struggle: the restless intellect willing to bargain with the Devil in pursuit of boundless desire. “To be or not to be?” Perhaps it is not a dichotomy at all. This is my response to Maestro Bernstein—and my way of extending his affirmation: Aesthetic beauty arises from the metaphorical reconciliation—between the Apollonian and Dionysian, between pain and boredom. From that tension comes a kind of transcendental stillness: a Zen-like contemplation, a pseudo-unity glimpsed at the edge of Kant’s Ding-an-sich, under the halo of Platonic Being.
And so, as a tribute to Maestro himself, I once turned to Mahler’s Fifth—struck by the trumpet solo in the Trauermarsch, as if we were all marching, inexorably, toward death. But this time, I will return with Oedipus Rex: “In the heroic effort toward universality made by the individual,” wrote Nietzsche, “in his attempt to penetrate beyond the bounds of individuation and become himself the one world-being, he experiences in himself the primordial contradiction concealed in the essence of things—he trespasses, and he suffers.”
“The inexpressible depth of all music,” said Schopenhauer, “by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise, is due to the fact that it restores to us all the emotions of our inmost being—but entirely without reality, and far removed from its pain.”
Perhaps that is what music ultimately offers: not resolution, but redemption. Not clarity, but transcendence.
