Music as a Plot Device: Marcel Proust’s elusive “Vinteuil Sonata”

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust took me years to finish, but it’s a book I hope to read many more times in this lifetime. Reading through a passage from “Swann’s Way” can feel exhausting, as each passage seems to endlessly meander on, but I put down the book amazed at Proust’s detailed analysis of the human senses and their relationship to memory. Of course, as a musician, my favorite passages in the book are those in which Proust describes music as a trigger for involuntary memory and details the effect that certain musical phrases leave on his characters. For example, here is an excerpt from the book in which one of his main characters attends a violin performance. I love Proust’s ability to write about music in such a captivating way: 

There are in the music of the violin – if one does not see the instrument itself, and so cannot relate what one hears to its form, closely akin to those of certain contralto voices, that one has the illusion that a singer has taken her place amid the orchestra. One raises one’s eyes; one sees only the wooden case, magical as a Chinese box; but, at moments, one is still tricked by the deceiving appeal of the Siren; at times, too, one believes that one is listening to a captive spirit, struggling in the darkness of its masterful box, a box quivering with enchantment, like a devil immersed in a stoup of holy water; sometimes, again, it is in the air, at large, like a pure and supernatural creature that reveals to the ear, as it passes, its invisible message.)[1]

Marcel Proust’s elusive “Vinteuill Sonata,” introduced in the second section of Swann’s Way, has continued to inspire musicologists, composers, performers, and literary scholars alike. There has been much debate amongst musicologists over the real sonata that must have inspired Proust, and which he modeled his fictional sonata upon. For me personally, the first time I read about the “Vinteuill Sonata,” I just happened to be working on and listening to many compositions by Cesar Franck, and I thought that it was uncanny how he seemed to be describing the Franck violin sonata. For example, doesn’t this below passage remind you of the transition from the first to second movement in the violin sonata? 

With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly, having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it born him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown.[2]

Over the years, Proust’s writing has reminded musicians of qualities of French composers living during his time: the dreaminess of Faure’s harmonic world and the depth of the human subconscious that Proust penetrates into, the charming qualities of Saint Saen’s melodies with Proust’s light hearted scenes of French salons…There are so many interesting avenues to go down in exploring the relationship between the works of Proust’s contemporary composers and Proust’s works – Franck’s extensive use of cyclical form and Proust’s close examination of the recurrence of memories, the incredible density of Proust’s syntax and the unique harmonic world created in Franck’s extensive use of chromatism…In this post, I would love to introduce the Vinteuill Sonata, and how beautifully Proust uses music as a plot device in the second section of Swann’s Way, “Swann in Love.” 

Throughout Swann’s Way, Proust often uses music as a metaphor for human emotion. In the second section of Swann’s Way, the fictional “Vinteuill Sonata” is used as a symbol of the torrent and unstable love affair between the two main characters, Swann and Odette. When Swann and Odette first meet at one of the routine salons hosted by the Verdurins, a pianist happens to be playing an arrangement of the sonata, and Swann is immediately drawn to the music. Odette notices Swann’s fondness for the sonata; in an effort to win over Swann’s love, Odette arranges for the pianist to play the sonata for them every time they are together at the Verdurins – it becomes the “national anthem of their love.”[3] Proust believes in music’s ability to conjure love because at the end of the day, love is simply the association of ideas, just like memories result from the association of objects. The network of ideas that Swann associates with the “Vinteuil Sonata” makes him believe in his love for Odette. 

As the story goes on, readers realize that Swann’s love for Odette is entirely composed of illusions and associations. When he looks at her, he imagines the women of Boticelli’s paintings, placing in his imagination their features onto her face whenever they are together. Similarly, he uses the Vinteuill sonata for the same purpose. “Where Odette’s affection might seem ever so little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would come to supplement it, to amalgamate with it its own mysterious essence.” [4] At the end of the day, music provides an outlet for Swann to live in his own version of reality – an “objective reality superior to that of other concrete things.” [5] Therefore, you can interpret that there is no true love between him and Odette, but that he is just living in a fantasy bolstered on by the Vinteuill Sonata. The sonata has such an effect upon Swann that it can comfort him and make him believe that all is well in his relationship with Odette even when she blatantly flirts with another man (Forcheville) in front of Swann: 

Then they were silenced; heralded by the waving tremolo of the violin-part, which formed a bristling bodyguard of sound two octaves above it – and as in a mountainous country, against the seeming immobility of a vertically falling torrent, one may distinguish, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley – the little phrase had just appeared, distant but graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant, and sonorous curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it, spoke to it as to a confidant in the secret of his love, as to a friend of Odette who would assure him that he need pay no attention to this Forcheville. [6]

By the end of the story, not only does Swann realize that the relationship between him and Odette is unsustainable, but he also realizes that Odette has been lying to him the whole time. Odette is not the pure woman with the Botecelli-esque features Swann had ascribed to her, but she has indeed been with several different men over the course of their relationship, and lacks the intelligence, class, and beauty that Swann had attributed to her. All along, Swann had doubts and insecurities about the relationship, but instead of trusting the clues that were right in front of him, he turned to the Vinteuill Sonata and Botecelli paintings to assure him that his fantasies were in line with reality. At the end of the story, Swann cannot believe that he has been dragged along for so long, and Proust ends the story with a statement that I’m sure most of us can relate to, even a century after these words were written: 

“’To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!’” [7]

[1] Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 365. 

[2] Proust, Swann’s Way, 221. 

[3] Proust, Swann’s Way, 230. 

[4] Proust, Swann’s Way, 251. 

[5] Ibid.

[6] Proust, Swann’s Way, 279-280.

[7] Proust, Swann’s Way, 401.