organization’s activities, a part of the top floor of
which is now known as the Salons Georges Auric.
Auric’s eightieth birthday in 1979 was cele-
brated by a grouping of 400 of his closest friends
and associates. Roust cites a review of the event
by Claude Samuel that points to one of the ironic
realities of Auric’s career: ‘It is true that as a per-
sonality of the Tout-Paris, frequenting the power-
ful and intimately knowing all those who pull the
strings of musical life, Georges Auric never lifted
his little finger in order to have his music per-
formed’ (pp. 192–3). Roust does not speculate on
why this may have been the case, and indeed his
biography is rather free from speculation tout court.
Readers will be disappointed if they come here
looking for psychological insights or an interpre-
tation of Auric’s life grounded in any number of
theoretical frameworks. Staying very close to his
sources, Roust offers, rather, a careful and infor-
mative portrait whose primary strength is that it
provides welcome insight into the extraordinary
breadth of Auric’s artistic and social networks,
while situating, as the title suggests, Auric’s activi-
ties within some of the political contexts in which
he was most implicated.
What is lacking, however, and seems to this
reader to be a bit of a missed opportunity, is a seri-
ous engagement with Auric’s music. Roust con-
textualizes commissions and performances and
draws on contemporaneous press accounts for
reactions to Auric’s work, but there is no real
attempt to describe the particularities of his musi-
cal language, to explain how or if it evolved, or
to position it in dialogue with that of his many
illustrious colleagues. Of the book’s thirty-eight
figures, just two contain music: the first provides
a glimpse at the opening of the song ‘Ennui’,
one of Auric’s earliest compositions (from 1911),
remarkable for a 12-year-old for its 5/4 metre
and generous use of ninths in service of a text
by Maurice Maeterlinck. The second compares
two bars of Auric’s ‘song from Moulin Rouge’ to
Sidney Hirshon’s ‘London Bells Will Ring Again’,
the source of a plagiarism dispute that played out
in the American courts. What we do learn of the
fabric of Auric’s music is largely left to be deci-
phered in the general assessments provided by
Auric’s critics such as Henri Collet (p. 48), Émile
Vuillermoz (p. 82–83), Stan Golestan (p. 108),
André Schaeffner (p. 125), or Antoine Goléa
(p. 141), who naturally could not benefit from
decades of historical perspective that would allow
for a more accurate and complete positioning of
Auric’s works against the musical backdrop of his
period. For ‘a life in music’ clearly designed to
foster interest in Auric the person, Colin Roust
is disinclined to offer musical descriptions or
861
insights that might inspire the reader to engage
with the scores or to imagine how they might be
effectively programmed in a concert. In the end,
we are left with only a limited sense of what made
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the man tick musically. And this underplaying of
the strictly musical, much like Auric’s own under-
played autobiography, means that there is still
important work to be done.
The volume is attractively presented. Some
of the photographic images are related to the
author’s visits to places with associations for
Georges Auric’s life and career, included the
house at Hyères, other buildings in the south
of France, and the ‘new’ SACEM headquar-
ters in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The book draws on
a very rich body of sources, drawn from over
thirty different libraries and archives on both
sides of the Atlantic, a testament to the care
and curiosity with which this narrative has been
crafted. Translations by the author are all excel-
lent. In short, this is an admirable study of a
key figure in twentieth-century French musical
life. It opens many avenues for further research
and will certainly be a must read for anybody
interested in twentieth-century French musical
culture.
Christopher Moore
University of Ottawa
doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcab084
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions@oup.com
Desire in Chromatic Harmony: A Psychodynamic
Exploration of Fin de Siècle Tonality. By
Kenneth M. Smith. Pp. xv + 340. (Oxford
University Press, New York, 2020. ISBN 978-
0-19-092342-6, £13.75.)
In the mid-1990s, the renowned theorist Patrick
McCreless asked me to list some of my inter-
ests outside the topic of my dissertation. When
I answered ‘chromatic harmony’, he replied
with a chuckle, ‘yes, like everybody else’.
Everybody else indeed. At the time, Daniel
Harrison’s Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music
(Chicago and London, 1994) was that rarest of
books: the instant classic. Contemporaneously
and drawing from David Lewin’s work, Richard
Cohn, Bryan Hyer, Henry Klumpenhouwer,
and others began developing a neo-Riemannian
approach to the puzzling chromatic passages
in nineteenth-century music. Since the 2000s,
various perspectives on chromatic harmony have
coalesced into hundreds of articles and several
book-length studies that treat the subject in whole
or in part, including (in alphabetical order by
author) Richard Cohn’s Audacious Euphony: Chro-
maticism and the Consonant Triad’s Second Nature (New
York, 2012); David Kopp’s Chromatic Transforma-
tions in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002);
Steven Rings’s Tonality and Transformation (New
York and Oxford, 2011); and Dmitri Tymoczko’s
A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the
Extended Common Practice (New York, 2011).
Kenneth Smith has added his voice to this
extended dialogue with a major accomplishment,
Desire in Chromatic Harmony. This book is inte-
grative, since Smith has considered the various
approaches to chromatic music with an ecumeni-
cal attitude, including what he finds useful from
just about every source. An attractive addition
is that he broadens the usual scope of these
kinds of studies to consider music outside the
German tradition, including works by Copland,
Ives, Szymanowski, and Skryabin. Most impor-
tantly, though, Smith’s book includes a Lacanian
perspective that models the psychodynamics of
the listener who feels that chromatic music is
always on the way without ever arriving. His criti-
cal acumen lends every analysis in this book a wel-
come hermeneutic perspective. Up front, Smith’s
Desire in Chromatic Harmony brings to fruition many
of the promises of the scholarly inquiry around
chromatic harmony.
Although the history of chromatic theory goes
back to Rameau, Smith acknowledges that most
of the recent work is ‘fueled [by] the “neo-
Riemannian” school and theorists of tonal trans-
formation, located mainly in North America’
(p. ix). In this American tradition, Smith synthe-
sizes what he calls a ‘neo-Schenkerian’ view that
understands all chromaticism as deriving from a
basic diatonic framework (p. x). Finally, instead
of the roving nature of much neo-Riemannian
models, Smith opts to maintain a theory of tonal
functions, in which chromatic chords fall into
tonic (T), subdominant (S), and dominant (D) cat-
egories (ibid.). These perspectives need to unfold
together before we can think about the Lacanian
framework that ultimately gives Smith’s book a
critical depth worthy of our careful consideration.
Before proceeding to the contents of the book,
there are already some terms to unpack for those
not steeped in the American tradition. Transforma-
tion. Given a triad (or other musical object), what
must I do to turn it into a different triad? If I am
at C–E–G, for example, what must I do to trans-
form it into F–A♭–C? What if I think of C–E–G as
C moving up a major third to E and up a perfect
fifth to G? Then, I can invert the process: C moves
862
down a major third to A♭ and down a perfect fifth
to F. The results are the same as if I had simply
moved E up to F and G up to A♭. In both cases
I have transformed one chord into another. The
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reader may realize that voice-leading is a form of
transformation. We think of voices moving, and
as they do, new harmonies appear.
Neo-Riemannian. Riemannian theory involves a
special collection of transformations: Parallel (P),
Relative (R), and Leading tone (L). The paral-
lel transformation turns a triad into its modal
opposite: C major becomes C minor, D minor
becomes D major, etc. This P transformation
involves moving the third of the triad up or
down by half step. The relative transformation
comes from the notion of relative keys, turning
a major triad into its relative minor, or a minor
triad into its relative major: C major becomes A
minor, D minor becomes F major, etc. This R
transformation involves moving the root or the
fifth by a whole step. Given C–E–G, I move
G up by a whole step to achieve the pitches
C–E–A (A–C–E). Given D–F–A, I move D down
by a whole step to achieve the pitches C–F–A
(F–A–C). Finally, the leading-tone transforma-
tion involves moving the root of a major triad
down by a half step or moving the fifth of a
minor triad up by half step. Given C–E–G, I
move C down to B (its leading tone) to arrive at
B–E–G (E–G–B). Given D–F–A, I move A up to
B♭ (its upper leading tone) to arrive at D–F–B♭
(B♭–D–F). You may wonder why B♭ is the leading
note to A. The reason is that Hugo Riemann con-
ceived of minor as the dual, the inverse of major.
If something happens up in major, it happens
down in minor, and vice versa. In the L trans-
formation, then, if we can find the leading note of
a major triad by going down a half step from the
root, then we can find the leading note of a minor
triad by going up a half step from the fifth.
While Smith does use the P and L transfor-
mations, especially later in the book, he focuses
at first on the R(elative) transformation because
he is developing a theory of functions, in which
the classic motion from tonic to subdominant to
dominant to tonic will serve as the edifice for chro-
matic harmony. With some clever maneuvering,
Smith argues that the relative minor of a major
chord can substitute for the tonic. In C major,
for example, the dominant might resolve to an
A minor chord. If this is so (and it is), then E♭
can stand in for the tonic C minor as its rela-
tive. Thinking of keys as moving in and out of
modal pairs, major and minor, Smith argues that
C, then, has a lower relative, A, and an upper
relative, E♭, both of which can substitute for C
with its tonic function. Now, he is close to closing
a circle of minor thirds: A–C–E♭. All he needs
is F # to complete the circle, and he finds that
chord in Ernö Lendvai’s theory of tritone substi-
tution, an idea that Lendvai developed primarily
for the music of Bartók. The result is a com-
plete set of tonics (more properly, a tonic and its
substitutions): C–E♭–F # –A. Applying the same
process to the subdominant (F), and the dominant
(G) creates a system that exhausts the chromatic
scale. In C: tonic (C–E♭–F # –A), subdominant
(F–A♭–B–D), and dominant (G–B♭–D♭–E). Smith
later calls this way of organizing functions the
‘neo-Lendvaian substitution system’ (p. 69).
That was a long way to go in this review
to set the foundation of Smith’s theory of chro-
maticism, yet I have left out so much: Eytan
Agmon’s model of chord functions, Cohn Cycles,
Weitzmann Cycles, Phrygian Injections, Chro-
matic Uppercuts (I’m not making these up), and
much more that I cannot list, all from chapter 1 of
Desire in Chromatic Harmony. Because the opening
chapter covers so many prior theories of chro-
maticism, it is both a strength and weakness of the
book. Smith surely knows his chromatic theory,
touching on virtually every important contribu-
tion to this ever-growing body of research. But
after nearly fifty pages of literature review, one
wonders where everything is headed. As one who
has read most of the literature Smith reviews,
I found myself nodding in agreement with his
descriptions of the various theories, but I also
found myself wondering if I would have under-
stood anything without having read much of the
surveyed material before approaching the first
chapter of Desire in Chromatic Harmony. The prob-
lem is a classic one not easily solved: how much
of what a writer knows should he or she reveal to
the reader? What can the writer assume that the
reader already knows, and how can the writer get
through the necessary foundations of knowledge
without overburdening the arguments to come?
With these problems in mind, I suggest that
readers of Smith’s book skip chapter 1 at first and
move directly to the analyses that open chapter
2 (‘Romantic Provenance’). The first one care-
fully unpacks nine bars in the second movement
of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C major, Op. 53
(Waldstein). The gist of this analysis is that the har-
mony cycles through T–S–D–T cycles that Smith
understands as such only because F, the key of
the passage, heads for B (a tritone substitute), and
D (a relative substitute) before landing back on
F (pp. 54–5). Along the way, chords begin with
one function but retrospectively take on another,
because we hear music both forwards and back-
wards. The analysis is brief, compact, and log-
ical. The second analysis involves two passages
by Schubert: one from his Quartet in A minor
(Rosamunde) and one from his Piano Sonata in G
863
major, D. 894. Smith emphasizes that because of
substitutions, in the most chromatic music, ‘the T
function itself is often invested with an immedi-
ate D-functioned mobility’ (p. 57). We are always
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on the way, and the moment we think that the
music has come to a close, a substitution opens
up the harmonic pathway again ‘to project us
continually along the metonymic chain of desire’
(ibid.).
Through this reference to the ‘metonymic
chain of desire’, Smith at last comes to the point
and a strength of his book: a consideration of
how chromatic music channels and fuels desire.
Assuming that readers do begin with chapter
2, they now can back up to the opening of
chapter 1 (‘A Linguistic Theory of Chromatic
Harmonic Substitution and Progression in the
Diatonic Unconscious’), where Smith refocuses
part of Lacanian thought towards music. Smith
explains (correctly) that Lacan’s theory of the
subject is a linguistic one (pp. 1–4). Even our
unconscious is formed by language, which power-
fully directs both thought and desire. Like Freud
before him, Lacan recognized that what the sub-
ject desires is always something other than what
first appears in the mind. In short, words are
slippery, capable of substituting for one another
in a series of what Lacan called ‘metaphors’. I
dream of a cracked window, but the window is
really a face, and the face is really my own aspect,
which is really my fragmented mind, which is
really the culture that made me, which is … and
on and on. These substitutions drive the subject’s
desire for people or objects, because even if we
find the object we seek, it is always already a
metaphor for something else. As Smith explains,
this axis of ‘metaphor’ works with a ‘combinato-
rial axis that Lacan dubbed “metonymy”’, which
finds its musical twin in chord progressions (p. 3).
When Smith writes that we are driven along a
metonymic chain of desire in music, he is argu-
ing that the subject expects a certain ordering
of events (T–S–D–T) and that each harmony
the subject hopes to hear may be substituted for
another, driving the subject’s desire for the lost
chord, the other chord, the one that did not arrive
as expected.
Smith develops this two-part theory, Lacanian
and transformational, in the remaining chap-
ters of the book. Chapter 3 (‘Transcending Root
Motion’) turns to Copland and Ives, beginning
with a beautiful analysis of Copland’s Twelve Poems
of Emily Dickinson. Smith expands the Lacanian
portion of the theory with a discussion of what he
calls ‘the cybernetic death drive’, which combines
Freud’s thinking from Beyond the Pleasure Principle
with Lacan’s fascination with cybernetics, ‘self-
regulatory systems that respond to circular and
repeated feedback loops’ (p. 93). The question for
Freud was why the subject endlessly repeats self-
destructive behaviour. Lacan’s response is that
cycles of repetition and feedback can be posi-
tive, leading to growth and change, or negative,
driving the subject to death. Smith reads these
two parts of the cybernetic death drive in Cop-
land (positive) and his musical setting of poetry
by Dickinson (negative), which is often obsessed
with images of death. When Smith combines his
theory of chromaticism with critical theory to
develop a hermeneutic reading, this book is at its
best. Regarding Copland’s setting of Dickinson’s
‘Why Do They Shut Me Out of Heaven?’, for
example, Smith finds a correspondence between
the protagonist finding the door to heaven shut
and the failure of the music to complete a cycle
through a circle of fifths. In the end, though, a
small harmonic shift ‘allows us to proceed along
the circle of fifths, which was earlier inaccessible
… the subject here gets as close as possible to the
door’ (p. 102).
Chapter 4 (‘Karol Szymanowski’s Dominant
Drive Model and the Excess of the Cycle’) centres
on the music of Szymanowski, where the prob-
lem is that ‘the rich excess of potential energy in
the immanent moment compared to the amount
discharged is such that our ears despair in forg-
ing full grammatical expectations (and therefore
metonymic desires)’ (p. 141). In short, the har-
mony is so multivalent in Szymanowski’s music
that no amount of resolution is going to lend the
listener a sense of satisfactory closure. The prob-
lem leads Smith first to consider the Deleuzian
idea that desire is a multiplicity and not merely
an Oedipal structure (p. 143). Ultimately, though,
he returns to Lacan, for whom desire is both
structured and frustrated by language, which is
another way of saying that desire develops in a
culture (which tells us what we can and cannot
desire) and meets roadblocks in language (which
always misses the mark in expressing the object
of desire). Musically, the idea is that the West-
ern listener is immersed in a musical culture of
tension and release, but in late chromatic music
‘the drives work multi-vocally and vicariously in
pure multiplicity’ (p. 152). The harmonic com-
ponent of the theory is that Szymanowski focuses
on harmonies that can function as dominants.
Smith offers a large list of such sonorities. The
music roves over the dominant function so long
that no discharge can possibly satisfy the built-up
drive of desire. The chapter examines a number
of Szymanowski’s songs before concluding with
an analysis of his Symphony No. 3 (The Song of the
Night). Throughout, Smith offers a hermeneutics
of desire that makes for some of his best writ-
ing: ‘[Skryabin’s] symphonies ended in the light
864
of knowledge; this one [Szymanoski’s] ends in
the dark shadow of knowledge, a much deeper
prospect, with a hushed, subdued pianissimo …’
(p. 179).
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Chapter 5 (‘Tragedy and the Gaze of the Liv-
ing Dead’), which turns to Strauss’s Elektra, offers
the most extensive and complex analysis of the
book. The main harmonic problem involves the
interaction of octatonic collections with func-
tional ones, something that Smith nicely theo-
rizes. But the real strength of the chapter, as
throughout the book, is Smith’s ability to juggle
various critical concepts from Lacanian thought.
Most important in the chapter are the concepts
of the gaze and of the two deaths (an idea Smith
first introduced in chapter 3). The gaze may be
familiar from feminist theory, whose discourse
often involves how women become objects of the
male gaze. For Lacan, the concept is more diffi-
cult to grasp: we are all objectified by the gaze of
the Other, which can present itself (more prop-
erly, we present it to ourselves) in objects, absent
people, sounds, or language itself. We can feel
as if we are being observed even when we are
alone in a room. For Smith this idea will aid an
argument in which Elektra herself has a power
of the gaze that defines those around her. This
effect goes further: ‘even in absentia, Elektra is
the manipulating agent of the tonal driving circuit
throughout the opera’ (p. 196). Smith’s argument
about the two deaths is more nuanced than I
can possibly describe here. In short, for Lacan
there are two deaths: a symbolic death (the subject
becomes dead to the world) and a physical death.
In Elektra, Smith finds that the characters occupy
a space between the two deaths, a limbo wait-
ing for closure by the second death. The whole
chapter is a tour de force.
Chapter 6 (‘The Thanatotic and the Ton-
netz’) returns to neo-Riemannian theory and the
Tonnetz, a representation of pitches/keys/chords
in relations by fifths (horizontally) and thirds
(vertically on diagonals). Smith rightly claims that
modern theorists have used the Tonnetz as if chro-
matic music has no tonal force; harmonies simply
rove around it. Smith’s stance, though, is that the
Tonnetz is ‘primed with energy’ (p. 235), with the
minor-third diagonals producing the least drive,
the major-third diagonals producing more drive,
and the fifths along the horizontal axis lending
the most driving force. As the chapter focuses pri-
marily on the music of Josef Suk, Smith claims
that tethering pitches, pedal points, which allow
for the discharging of harmonic tension, are a
‘particularly Czech trope’ (p. 242). The critical
theory accompanying Smith’s analyses involves
repetition, first in the form of Freud’s famous
essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and later in
the form of Gilles Deleuze’s mind-bending Dif-
ference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton (London,
2011)). For Freud, repetition was a normal process
in both mourning and melancholia, except that
mourning leads to a cure as the subject eventu-
ally separates the ego from the person lost, while
melancholia becomes a pathology as the sub-
ject simply relives the trauma of loss without the
ego letting go. For Deleuze, repetition even of
the death drive ultimately leads to renewal and
change. Smith artfully uses the two theories to
develop interpretations of Suk’s Asrael Symphony
and several songs composed after the death of the
composer’s wife.
The final chapter (‘When Octatonic and Hex-
atonic Collide’) focuses on a composer whose
music Smith knows well: Skryabin. Smith’s first
book, Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire
(Farnham and Burlington, Vt., 2013), also had
a heavy dose of Lacanian thought to support
many wonderful ideas. It is no surprise, then,
that this chapter is one of the strongest in the
book. The main idea here is accelerationism, the
impulse to speed into capitalism’s many catastro-
phes, rather than forestall revolution by shoring
up institutions that hope to slow down capitalism.
The economic theory is that as catastrophes pile
up, capitalism finally will collapse under its own
contradictions. What happens after the collapse
is anyone’s guess. Smith tells us, though, that
given the choice between goal-oriented teleology
and ‘teleonomy’ (short jumps into the unknown),
Skryabin was certainly on the side of the latter
(p. 273). Everything is change for Skryabin, mak-
ing a pinning down of the tonic function nearly
impossible. The main work under consideration
is Skryabin’s Piano Sonata No. 10, and the har-
monic idea at play is ‘octatonics store diatonic func-
tional energy, and hexatonics release it’ (p. 287, italics
in original). The chapter is another tour de force,
whose many ideas deserve a closer reading than I
have offered here.
Typical of work in the American tradition,
to which Smith is making an appeal, this book
is loaded with charts, graphs, symbols (in and
out of the text proper) and lists of harmonic
motions. There is nearly a whole page, for exam-
ple, devoted to a list of harmonic progressions
and their functions in the Liebestod from Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde (p. 77). There are the familiar
Tonnetz graphs with arrows pointing to harmonic
directions. There is an appendix consisting of
seventeen pages of graphs with keys, functions,
triangles, dots, and other shapes to represent
harmonic motion in three of Skryabin’s compo-
sitions (pp. 302–18). One wonders whether these
many graphs are Smith’s own kind of accelera-
tionism, aiming to push modern American theory
865
into collapse for its investment in the visual. The
trick, of course, is that the non-visual thinker
does not need these support systems to under-
stand what is going on. Listening is always the
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best antidote. Reading is another one. Smith’s
magnificent book repays reading and reread-
ing. His thoughts about chromatic music, Lacan,
and interpretation deserve our attention and our
thanks.
Michael L. Klein
Temple University
doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcab083
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions@oup.com
Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas. By Paul
Wink. Pp. 304. Inner Lives. (Oxford University
Press, New York and Oxford, 2021. ISBN 978-
0-19-085773-8, £22.99).
In Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Catherine
Clément raged against posthumous accounts of
Maria Callas, decrying them as necrophiliac and
insufficient: ‘When she died, discreetly, lost to a
heart attack when no one was looking at her any-
more, when she died her real death, the sad phe-
nomenon of posthumous adulation began for her.
A few months later, time to dictate and publish a
few hurried words, there appeared some pathetic
love songs glorifying Maria Callas. They were all
men, these eulogist clowns’ (Paris, 1979; trans.
Betsy Wing with foreword by Margaret Reynolds,
London, 1997, p. 28). Clément’s fury is rooted
in what she described as Callas’s double death:
her actual death on 16 September 1977 and the
death that, Clément implies, was far worse for
the diva—when Callas retired from the stage in
1965, fading thereafter from public view and
adulation.
Since Clément penned this scathing passage
in 1979, there have been far more than just a
‘few hurried words’ dedicated to Callas; indeed,
no opera singer in the history of the genre has
received as much attention in print as she has,
much of it in the form of biography. Among
the myriad books dedicated to outlining her life
and career are a trio by Callas’s family members:
her mother (in collaboration with Lawrence G.
Blochman, My Daughter Maria Callas (New York,
1960)), husband, Giovanni Battista Menegh-
ini (with Renzo Allegri, trans. Henry Wisneski,
My Wife Maria Callas (New York, 1982)), and