Proust's Songbook

"This book analyzes and theorize the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust's novel AáI p0 s la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). While Proust and music is a well-established area, much of this work has tended to focus on large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, on instrumental music, and on imaginary music presented in the novel. In Proust's Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust's opus, analyzing the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Through close readings of five moments of song in AáI p0 s la recherche du temps perdu, Rushworth both highlights the songs in Proust's novel through attention to their lyrics, music, composers, and histories. She also interprets these episodes through theoretical reflections on the voice and on songs that draw particularly from the work of Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes. Rushworth argues that songs in Proust's novel are connected and resonate with one another across the different volumes; that song for Proust is a solo, amateur, intimate affair; and that there is a blurred boundary between popular and art song through Proust's juxtapositions of songs and meditation on the notion of "mauvaise musique" (bad music). Song, for Proust, has a special relation to repetition and memory thanks to its typical brevity, and that song itself becomes a mode of resistance in la Recherche, on the part of characters to family and familial expectations, and, in formal terms, to the forward impetus of narrative. Rushworth also defines the songs in Proust's novel as songs of farewell, noting that to sing farewell is also a means to resist the very parting that is being expressed"--