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• Title: Goethe, Brahms, And William Styron's Darkness Visible
• Author : Notes on Contemporary Literature
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 54 KB

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In Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (NY: Random, 1990), William Styron relates his descent into depression and eventual recovery from despair. The turning point in his condition takes place "late one bitterly cold night," when, on the verge of suicide, he watches the tape of a movie. "At one point in the film," he writes, "the characters moved down the hallway of a music conservatory, beyond the walls of which, from unseen musicians, came a contralto voice, a "sudden soaring passage from the Brahms Alto Rhapsody" (66). After the sound prompts him to recall "all the joys the house had known" (66), he wakes his wife, telephone calls are made, and the following day he enters a hospital to begin treatment for his illness (67; West, 440-41 [below] identifies the movie as The Bostonians and discusses it in detail). The Brahms piece plays a brief but critical role in Styron's memoir. While the Alto Rhapsody is sometimes mentioned in relation to Darkness Visible, its greater significance to the memoir has largely been overlooked. In citing the piece, Styron engages in an intertextual dialogue with Brahms and with Goethe, upon whose poem the Alto Rhapsody is based. Brahms had secretly loved Julie Schumann, and in response to her September 1869 marriage to Count Vittorio Radicati de Marmorito, the betrayed and devastated composer crafted his Alto Rhapsody, ostensibly as a bridal gift for her. He had reached a crucial turning point in his life, after which he apparently lost hope in the consolation of love and instead devoted himself to his music (Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography [NY: Knopf, 1997]: 348-53). In his Alto Rhapsody, Brahms draws upon a fragment of Goethe's "Harzreise im Winter" ("Winter Journey in the Harz Mountains") to tell the story of an alienated, depressed man lost in the woods. The alto voice of a woman questions who he is, this solitary figure being swallowed by the waste wilderness. "But off there to the side--who is it?" the woman asks. "The barren waste swallows him up." (Johannes Brahms, Alto Rhapsody; in Alto Rhapsody, Song of Destiny, Ndnie, and Song of the Fates, in Full Score, trans. Stanley Appelbaum [Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995]: p.1, lines 1 and 6). This initial recitative is followed by an aria asking who can heal the pain of the solitary man who finds only hatred of mankind in his heart:

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