Loera de la Llave, M. A. “A Modernista's Mode of Amamnesis: Kunstlied, Painting, Opera, and Literature in Manuel Gutiérrez-Nájera.” Iberoromania 53 (2001): 25-44.

[In the following essay, Loera de la Llave discusses Nájera's allusions to contemporary and historical works—including Shakespeare's Hamlet and Schubert's Lied—and how they reflect on Nájera and the modernista movement.]

The varied writings of the modernista Manuel Gutiérrez-Nájera (Mexico, 1859-1895) constitute a highly literary literature that, unassuming and apparently simple, his poetry often dissembles. This comparative study focuses on his creative anamnesis of a cultural and artistic manifold from various national traditions and languages. Gutiérrez-Nájera refers almost invariably to the classics of the Renaissance and to the canonical literary and artistic production of nineteenth-century Europe, before Baudelaire. La serenata de Schubert (1888), one of his major lyrical poems, exemplifies his allusive craft. Written at the height of his powers, this well-wrought composition on Romantic topoi now integrates, now sets in resonance, passages from German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and American literature. It recalls, furthermore, Opera and the plastic arts. In La serenata, Gutiérrez-Nájera subordinates all his evocations under two main sources of inspiration that serve as models: Lucie (1835), a poem by Alfred de Musset (France, 1810-1859), and Ständchen (1827-1828), a classical song from the collection Schwanengesang by Franz Schubert (Austria, 1797-1828).

The title's allusion to Schubert's well-known Lied introduces La serenata as commentary, and defines the lyrical task of recreating Ständchen's aesthetic property by transposing it, if not to an estancia, a form unfrequented during Modernismo, to a silva, then highly common and varied (Navarro-Tomás 388). With an exclamation of awe, “¡Oh, qué dulce canción! Límpida brota / esparciendo sus blandas armonías,”¹ Gutiérrez-Nájera begins to trace the artistic and affective range subscribing to the principle that sentiment underlies all lyrical verse (Obras 2: 55-56). It is a notion that Musset had advanced in the early eighteen-thirties, “L'art, c'est le sentiment” (Oeuvres 882), and equates with the essentially affective quality of Schubert's songs (Fischer-Dieskau, Hablan 68; Töne 72). Lied has rendered a major contribution to the language of sentiment, observes Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, for in Lied, particularly Schubert's, there forms a natural system of correspondence between emotional states of being, sentimental impressions, and visual and acoustical evocations (Hablan 63; Töne 66). Assuming a confessional mode, the poetic voice in La serenata exalts music over the verbal medium: “¡Así hablara mi alma … si pudiera!” An issue debated in the nineteenth century, music's preeminence had received its classical justification from Arthur Schopenhauer: unencumbered by materiality and not subject to language's deforming limitations, music, more directly than any other art, refers to the innermost being of the world and of ourselves (1: 356-357, 368). Gutiérrez-Nájera personalises, as uniquely intimated, music's preeminence. At play is a stylistic trait of the poet: the dextrous reworking of notions, topics, and motifs until they gain lyrical viability.

The Mexican poem and the German song in minor mode, conceived as if for mandolin accompaniment (Fischer-Dieskau, Auf den Spuren, 311), unfold almost simultaneously. Consonantly rhymed, the dense silva pattern of mainly hendecasyllables that Gutiérrez-Nájera employs slows the verse flow and has been a characteristic form for reflective or philosophic poetry (Navarro-Tomás 336). La serenata's twenty-four stanzas, most of them in quatrains, mimic in their pace Ständchen's plaintive andante, propitious for the nostalgic tenor of the poetic voice. “Le regret,” remarks Valdimir Jankélévitch, “est toute lenteur” (210). La serenata begins shortly after the first broken chords of Schubert's score in D minor that provoke commentary. Four measures into the music, probably between the second and third stanza of Gutiérrez-Nájera's poem, the vocalist starts to sing. In the third stanza, the poetic voice becomes aware of him: “¿De quién es esa voz?” The musical composition ends at the beginning of the twenty-second stanza, with the phrase, “Calló el piano.“Though it is impossible to pinpoint when, the vocal part concludes before this verse phrase. The piano continues seven measures beyond the Lied's lyrics.

Throughout Schubert's composition, the piano often echoes, at times with vocal caesura, the melodic phrase, or a portion of it (Capell 50-51).² This characteristic of the musical syntax, the interweaving of accompaniment and vocalist by the partial duplication of melodic segments, translates in La serenata as repeated evocations of the moonlit nocturnal setting, of the phrase hasta mañana, and, throughout, of mood-conveying adjectives: triste, tristeza, dolor, sereno, ternura, tierno. Anaphora actualises the ecstasy of discovery and recollection: “¡Qué olor de rosas frescas!”; “¡Cuántos sueños en mi alma y en tu alma! / ¡Cuántos hermosos versos! ¡cuántas flores! [sic]”. Ständchen stands between the strophic and a freer, more innovative, developmental form of song writing that Schubert introduced and fully established. In both modes of Lied composition, he excelled (Fischer-Dieskau, Hablan 66; Töne 69). Ständchen's measures five through thirty-two repeat, to allow the vocalisation of the lyric's second stanza. La serenata approximates this structural feature of the Lied by twice mentioning Schubert, Musset, and the French poem; the first time, shortly after reaching the middle of the composition, in the fourteenth stanza: “Schubert en tu piano sollozando, / Y en mi libro, Musset con su Lucía.” The second time, in the last stanza:

¡Ya nunca volveréis, noches de plata!
ni unirán en mi alma su armonía,
Schubert con su doliente serenata
Y el pálido Musset con su Lucía.

The minor differences between the passages also mimic Schubert's slight variance of melodic phrasing, measures twenty-five to twenty-eight; they are duplicated in measures forty-six through forty-nine. The verse, “Un volumen de versos en mi mano,” anticipating the first mention of Musset two stanzas afterwards, and underscored in the sequential, sixteenth stanza immediately after recalling Musset and Schubert, “¡Cuántos sueños en mi alma y en tu alma! / ¡Cuántos hermosos versos!”, further suggests La serenata's derivative nature. The verse, “Schubert en tu piano sollozando,” looks back to the concluding line, “[¡]Y Schubert sollozando en el piano!”, of an 1879 poem by Gutiérrez-Nájera, Cuadro de hogar, which prefigures the enumerating patterns, the interior décor, and some motifs in La serenata's idealised domestic space (Poesías 1: 184).

An instance of rhythmical verse modulation and a nuanced shift in tenor exemplify La serenata's link with Ständchen's tonal topography. It takes place when the poetic voice, after striking a simile between affectivity and the texture of Schubert's music, “Hay ternura y dolor en ese canto,” asks: “¿Qué tienen esas notas? ¿Por qué lloran?” This instance parallels the introduction, seventeen measures into the musical score, of a new melodic phrase consisting of a dotted A quarter note rising to a dotted F half note through an eighth C sharp. The new melodic phrase corresponds to the beginning of the second stanza of Ständchen's lyrics by Ludwig Rellstab: “Flüsternd schlanke Wipfel rauschen.”³

From a comparative reading of Ständchen's lyrics and of La serenata may be inferred that Gutiérrez-Nájera knew enough German to imaginatively transpose and recreate in Spanish property of Rellstab's poem. In his teens, Gutiérrez-Nájera acquired familiarity with German literature and culture from an exiled Westphalian nobleman in Mexico, Graf Otto E. von Brackel-Welda (1830-1903) (cf. Heydenreich) who in the late 1870's corresponded with the poet and established in 1876 a newspaper, El Correo Germánico in Mexico City. Not yet twenty, at the start of his career, Gutiérrez-Nájera contributed articles to it, one of them, El arte y el materialismo (1876), a major statement on his poetics.⁴ Gutiérrez-Nájera aligns Rellstab's lyrics and La serenata by transforming topoi from the source poem into mood-abetting leitmotifs, or by elaborating on them. The “arboleda” in the twentieth stanza, recalls the German bosket: “in den stillen Hain hernieder.” It is stillness, “in des Mondes Licht,” appropriate for nature's sympathetic rustling, “Flüsternd schlanke Wipfel rauschen,” and for an emotional flow conveyed with the evocation of moonlight and tranquillity: “En el sereno ambiente, ¡cuánta luna!” “¡Qué claridad de luna! ¡Qué reflejos!”; “En tu hogar apacible, ¡cuánta calma!”; “Noche de luna y de silencio afuera … [sic].” The fifth through eighth measures of Schubert's score set to music Rellstab's initial two verses: “Leise flehen meine Lieder / Durch die Nacht zu dir.” To depict the Lied, Gutiérrez-Nájera plays on these verses in the third stanza of his own poem:

¿De quién es esa voz? Parece alzarse
Junto del lago azul, en noche quieta,
Subir por el espacio, desgranarse
Al tocar el cristal de la ventana
Que entreabre la novia del poeta.

Commenting on Gutiérrez-Nájera's skill in fashioning literature from literature, Alfonso Reyes (Mexico, 1888-1958) observes that the author of La serenata always improves on his European models: “los mejora, los ordena, los sintetiza” (12: 264). Transposed to the Mexican text, Rellstab's poetic idea in the two initial verses of the German text gains the contours of a sensorial image. Topoi of nocturnal romantic poetry, a blue lake and a woman by a window, have been added. The song flying to her in the German lyric now evanesces as it reaches and touches the glass pane of her window. Felicitous enjambement conveys the tenor and underlies the verse's melodious line: “… alzarse / Junto del lago azul,”, “… desgranarse / Al tocar el cristal de la ventana / Que entreabre la novia …” It is as if the third stanza of La serenata fulfilled Rellstab's ardent request, “Leise flehen … zu dir,” and the German and Mexican poems were sequential moments of one poetic conception.

The love song's touch of the glass pane of the beloved lady's window parallels the touch of each receptive heart by the silvertones of nightingales singing, “rühren mit den Silbertönen / Jedes weiche Herz.” When vocalised, repetition stresses the second verse from the twenty-fifth through the twenty-seventh measures. The nightingales' silvertones, appropriately conveyed by the timbre of tenor voice in Schubert's Lied, contribute, in the seventh stanza of the Mexican poem, to the poetic phrase, “En las ondas de plata / de la atmósfera tibia y transparente.” These verses, in turn, introduce the comparison of the flow of Schubert's serenade to Shakespeare's Ophelia, “náufraga y doliente,” in her watery deathbed. At the end of La serenata, Gutiérrez-Nájera again recalls Rellstab's “Silbertöne,” now almost synesthetic with the luminosity of the moon more than once evoked: “Ya nunca volveréis noches de plata / Ni unirán en mi alma su armonía.”

In a musical score that ranges from pianissimo to forte, crescendi mark Rellstab's verses of impassioned desire: “In den stillen Hain hernieder, / Liebchen, komm zu mir!”;

Laß auch dir die Brust bewegen,
Liebchen, höre mich,
Bebend harr' ich dir entgegen!
Komm, beglücke mich!

Gutiérrez-Nájera also avails himself of the topos of youthful ardor: “y en mi pecho ¡qué inmensa sed de amores!” It culminates four stanzas afterwards in the recollection of a lovers' embrace under an erotically suggestive tree: “Bajo el cedro robusto y arrogante / … / Por la primera vez y palpitante / ¡Estreché con mis brazos, su cintura!” Schubert invariably translates the lyrical word into musical structure, according to Thrasybulos Georgiades (Schubert Musik und Lyrik, Göttingen 1967), whom Fischer-Dieskau quotes: “Bei Schubert wird das Gedicht gleichsam getilgt und als musikalische Struktur neu geschaffen; die Musik erhält Verbindlichkeit dadurch, daß das Wesentliche nun[G]/nur [F-D] als Musik realisiert wird” (Fischer-Dieskau, Hablan 69; Töne 73; Georgiades 34). Schubert highlights Rellstab's “Fürchte, Holde, nicht,” by briefly modulating, in measures twenty-four through twenty-eighth, from harmonic D minor to D major; back in D minor, he stresses, repeating in forte, the verse. Though the tenor of Rellstab's verse phrase is seduction, the final term, “nicht,” resounds, repeated and stressed. It underlies La serenata's refrain, “hasta mañana,” which increasingly becomes foreboding and ironic.

Gutiérrez-Nájera never acknowledged Edgar Allan Poe as a source of inspiration (Englekirk 240); on the contrary, whenever he mentions him in his crónicas and essays, always briefly, and only discussing other topics or writers, he insinuates disapproval (Obras 1: 62, 103). Nevertheless, La serenata could be read in the light of Poe's The Philosophy of Composition (1846), which, after the fact, the American bard advanced as heuristic to The Raven's creation. The incremental role of the refrain, “hasta mañana,” parallels the function of The Raven's refrain, “nevermore.” Like The Raven, La serenata is a brief lyrical poem concerned with Beauty, and overcast by the dark sun of melancholy due to irreparable loss recollected. For there is nothing more poetical, according to Poe, than the death of a beautiful woman and the eloquent bereavement of her lover (19).

Besides Schubert's score, Rellstab's lyrics, and, perhaps, Poe, there is in La serenata the presence of Musset's Lucie. This lyric poem summarises the French poet's effort to salvage and reconstitute, as a brief elegy of some seventy verses, fragments of Le saule (1831), an unfinished, long, verse narrative.⁵ Like La serenata, Lucie also comprises lyrical discovery and an exaltation of artistic sentiment in the manner of a lost love remembered. The setting of Lucie, like the setting of the Mexican poem, is nocturnal. Both poems are bathed by clear and full moonlight: “La lune, se levant dans un ciel sans nuage / D'un long réseau d'argent tout à coup l'inonda.”⁶ In both poems a keyboard instrument forms one of the props to an idealised bourgeois interior. The trees in Lucie are melancholy tokens: “Les marroniers du parc et les chênes antiques / Se berçaient doucement sous leurs rameaux en pleurs.” In particular, a weeping willow in the initial, six-verse stanza establishes the elegiac tone. The sextet is repeated at the end of the poem. Carved as an epitaph on Musset's tomb in Père Lachaise, it fulfils the request: “Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai, / Plantez un saule au cimetière. / J'aime son feuillage éploré.”.

As in La serenata, a spring flower aroma, favourable for an erotic interlude, permeates Lucie's setting, an exterior and interior linked by an open window: “la croisée entr'ouverte / Laissait venir à nous les parfums du printemps”; “Y en el aire ¡y en todo! ¡primavera! / ¡Qué olor de rosas frescas!” As in La serenata, the lovers are young, “Jeunesse de visage et jeunesse de coeur.” Lucie, fair like Gutiérrez-Nájera's “rubia soñadora,” sings accompanying herself at the “clavecin.” Her song inspires verses, transposed from Le saule, exalting music, just as Ständchen inspires La serenata and the exaltation of music. The dramatisation of a musical incident in both French poems, in particular, Lucie's exaltation of music, which begins, “Fille de la douleur, harmonie! harmonie!,” though based on Voltaire's neo-classic panegyric of Rameau, “Fille du ciel, ô charmante harmonie,” bears a subtextual trace from Jean Paul (Germany, 1763-1825), who propagated a conceit dear to the Romantics: the belief in the peculiar and close affinity between poetry and music (Pichois 236-238; Brunet 129). The author of Siebenkäs had some ascendancy over Musset (Pichois 81-87), also, as we shall see later, over Gutiérrez-Nájera.

As in La serenata, the lover's tête-à-tête in Lucie culminates in a kiss, “sur ta bouche adorée / Tu laissas tristement mes lèvres se poser”;

¡Todo presente en mi memoria queda!
La casa blanca, y el follaje espeso …
El lago azul … el huerto … la arboleda
Donde nos dimos, sin pensarle, un beso! [sic]

Details require time, and the particulars of time past are nostalgia's exquisite delight (Jankélévitch 213). It is as if the Gutiérrez-Nájera passage complemented with specifics Johann Mayrhofer's (1787-1836) analogous verses, “Da der Garten, dort das Haus, / Wo wir oft so traulich kosten! / Seh' ich recht … ?”, from Schubert's 1816 song, Alte Liebe rostet nie (Fischer-Dieskau, Texte 42). In Musset's composition, one of Lucie's hands is visible when she plays the clavichord, “sur son clavecin / Laissait, tout en rêvant, flotter sa blanche main”; it is again recalled at the end of the poem when the poetic voice takes leave of her memory: “Adieu, ta blanche main sur le clavier d'ivoire / Durant les nuits d'été, ne voltigera plus.” This second instance underlies the closing of the piano at the end of La serenata, and the hand motif that follows the sequential closing of a window: “Cerraste, virgencita, la ventana / Y oprimiendo mi mano con tu mano / me dijiste también hasta mañana.” The hand motif is classical, associated with a spot of memory in unrequited love: “d'una bianca mano anco mi doglio,” writes Petrarch remembering Laura in the thirty-eighth sonnet of his Rime (61). The whiteness of Lucie's hand in Musset's poem correlates with the whiteness of the moon and of a dressing table in the Mexican poem: “¡Un peinador muy blanco y un piano! / Noche de luna y de silencio afuera …”; “¡Qué claridad de luna!” It also corresponds to the fairness of the woman nostalgically recalled by the ubi sunt motif, reduced to an ubi est: “¿En dónde está la rubia soñadora?” In this one verse, worthy of a Monteverdi madrigal, echoes Garcilaso de la Vega's, “¿Dó está la blanca mano delicada, / … / Los cabellos que vían / con gran desprecio el oro[?]” (35). Hardly favouring the development of a national literature by the cultivation of couleur locale (Obras 85), Gutiérrez-Nájera, so consciously a Eurocentric modernista, almost invariably evokes the blond, literary ideal of feminine beauty: “La rubia poesía de ojos azules” (Espectáculos 38). He never exalts in his poetry the brown-skinned and black-haired Mexican mestiza, or an india brava, as does his compatriot Manuel José Othón (1858-1906), a Parnassian Modernista whose style sublates into expressionism in the sonnet cycle En el desierto. Idilio salvaje [sic] (1904), an intense Ichdämmerung before German Expressionism (Loera de la Llave 499).

Along with Rellstab's Silbertönen, the phrasing of the hand motif at the end of Lucie, “Adieu, ta blanche main sur le clavier d'ivoir / Durant les nuits d'été ne voltigera plus,” inspires the concluding moments of La serenata. However, playing on the initial phonetic similarity between volver and voltiger, Gutiérrez-Nájera refers, not to a woman's hand, rather, to the poetic night: “¡Ya nunca volveréis, noches de plata!” It is an instance of transpositional invention within an evocative range beyond semantic equivalence.

In both poems, the beloved woman dies. Musset closely associates thanatos and eros as he describes the lover's embrace:

Telle je t'embrassai, froide et décolorée,
Telle, deux mois après, tu fus mise au tombeau,
Telle, ô ma chaste fleur! tu t'es évanouie.
Ta mort fut un sourire aussi doux que ta vie.

Gutiérrez-Nájera avoids associating death with a passionate love embrace. He depicts, instead, the lovers touching hands. Like Musset, he muses philosophically:

Y oprimiendo mi mano con tu mano,
Me dijiste también: ‘¡hasta mañana!’
¡Hasta mañana! … Y el amor risueño
No pudo en tu camino detenerte! …
Y lo que tú pensaste que era el sueño,
Fué sueño, ¡pero inmenso! ¡el de la muerte!

The “sourire” has been transposed to the “el amor risueño.” Gutiérrez-Nájera frequently portrays an innamorata dead, or in the stillness of death-like sleep, on a bed or sofa. A passage in Blanco. Pálido. Negro, written the same year of La serenata, reads: “Entré en la alcoba con planta incierta, / Ella espiraba junto al sofá, / Pálida y blanca como una muerta” (Poesías 2: 111). Ostensibly, the thanatic motif, the death or near death of a beautiful woman, particularly common in the Pre-Raphaelites and in fin de siècle Jugendstil (Dijkstra 25 and ff.), appeals to Gutiérrez-Nájera no less than it did, earlier in the century, to Musset. The thanatic motif allows the evocation in Lucie and in La serenata of literary feminine characters associated with love and death: Shakespeare's Desdemona in the French poem, “Sentais-tu dans ton coeur Desdémona gémir, / Pauvre enfant?”; in the Mexican poem, Ophelia.

A theological mode, the definition of divine attributes by analogy, proceeds as if creation and God could be encompassed within one uniform pattern of discourse. Simile functions likewise in poetry, allowing the poet to verbalise beauty beyond words. To render the ineffable beauty of Schubert's song, Gutiérrez-Nájera avails himself of comparison:

En las ondas de plata
De la atmósfera tibia y transparente,
Como una Ofelia náufraga y doliente,
¡Va flotando la tierna serenata! …

In Benedetto Croce's sense of the nature of poetic intuition as “unica espressione … sintesi del vario, o molteplice, nell'uno” (23), Gutiérrez-Nájera's depiction of Ophelia as simile for the Lied intimates the nature of art. By verbal affinity, the direct source of inspiration is not Shakespeare, rather, Shakespeare alluded to by Musset. There is a passage in Le saule that describes the singing of Georgina Smolen, the pathetic heroine, as a hazardous venture into sonorous waters:

Ainsi la jeune fille, écoutant sa pensée,
Sans crainte, sans effort, et par sa voix bercée,
Sur les flots enchantés du fleuve harmonieux
S'éloignait du rivage en regardant les cieux.

(Poésies 133).

The evocation in the Mexican text of the pathetic, mad daughter of Polonius singing as she drowns also has other points of reference. Prior to La serenata, in an article on an opera diva, Constanza Brini, Gutiérrez-Nájera compares in verse her fairness with the pallid fairness of Ophelia dead: “y recuerda su blancura / el cuerpo exangüe de Ofelia” (Obras 4: 380). Writing a crónica on the composer Ambroise Thomas (France, 1811-1896), Gutiérrez-Nájera recalls the soprano Cristina Nilsson (Sweden, 1843-1921), in the role of Ophelia in Thomas' opera Hamlet (1868): “va al hueco seno de las ondas / desgajando las hojas de sus flores” (Obras 4: 20).

If the musical stage contributes to Gutiérrez-Nájera's image of Ophelia, then there is a gradation of at least seven vocal lines, some audible, others implicit, which La serenata synthesizes:

1. In the fourth stanza, the song of the “venturoso amante,” culled, as we shall note, from the remembrance of wandering lovers in many a Schubert song.
2. Ständchen, in particular, Schubert's rendition of a Rellstab lyric.
3. The nightingales' song in Ständchen.
4. Lucie's air in Lucie, a lyric elegy.
5. From Le saule, Georgina Smolen's song on Shakespeare's Desdemona, a passage that prefigures Lucie's song and Gutiérrez-Nájera's felicitous image of Ophelia.
6. Ophelia's foreboding song, a ballade with pianissimo orchestration and marked andantino con moto, “Pâle et blonde dort sous l'eau profonde,” in Thomas' opera Hamlet (acte IV: deuxième tableau) (293), performed in Mexico City and recalled by Gutiérrez-Nájera, since he renders his impression of Nilsson at the role of Hamlet's beloved (Obras 4: 20).
7. Ophelia's actual song, “snatches of old tunes,” as she drowns according to Queen Gertrude's account to Laertes and to Claudius in the tragedy by Shakespeare [768; IV: vii], whom Gutiérrez-Nájera held in high esteem (Obras 3: 207; 6: 250-259).

The Mexican poet's fascination with Ophelia accords with the times. She held high artistic and decorative value from mid-century on and through fin de siècle innovative movements in the plastic arts. Gutiérrez-Nájera's one verse depiction of the hapless maiden, “como una Ofelia náufraga y doliente,” may be associated with an 1851 evocation of the motif by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais (England, 1829-1890); it is titled with her name. Gutiérrez-Nájera was perhaps unacquainted with Millais, but painting, no less than nineteenth-century literature and opera, definitely contributes to the subliminal gestation of Ophelia as a comparative image for Schubert's Lied.

Gutiérrez-Nájera reads dialectically a dual painting of Hamlet and Ophelia by an Ingres disciple, Karl Ernst Rudolf Heinrich (‘Henri’) Lehmann (Germany/France, 1812-1882), like his master, an academic portraitist (Thieme 22: 581). A study in black of Franz Liszt, painted circa 1845, may be Lehmann's most famous piece. The Mexican poet sees in Lehmann's presentation of the hapless Ophelia “la más bella encarnación del amor puro” conveyed in a vessel of innocence: “No ha aprendido [ella] todavía esa triste ciencia que escudriña las sentinas del alma y que descubre la hediondez asquerosa del harapo” (Obras 4: 127). He also discerns in the dual portrait spiritual misery: “Por eso cuando [Ofelia] se asoma al borde de ese abismo que se llama corazón, pierde el juicio, se vuelve loca” (Obras 4: 127). Gutiérrez-Nájera judges Ophelia's fragility comparable to Antonia's, a woman forbidden from singing that would kill her, in Jacques Offenbach's (1819-1880) opera, Les contes d'Hoffmann (1881) (acte iii, scène C, pp. 112), on a libretto by Jules Barbier (1825-1901). With allusions to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's “Del salón en un ángulo oscuro,” Gutiérrez-Nájera depicts her: “Es el arpa que nadie toca porque sus cuerdas se revientan. … Esa es la mujer que debe amarse. Pero ésa se muere. Es el ánfora de niebla que encierra una preciosa esencia. Y el ánfora se quiebra al menor contacto, al menor soplo, y la esencia, el amor, el alma, vuela al cielo” (Obras 4: 400-416). Whether Antonia or Ophelia, the image of a fragile woman of beauty and song expresses, in the guise of alterity, the sense that, almost at the point of being overwhelmed by an imperilling and temporal flow, art issues forth. It furthermore suggests that in the innocence of its disinterested, pure expression, and in its fragility, art nevertheless abides, because awe-inspiring beauty is properly its own repository.

Since his youth, Gutiérrez-Nájera had been enchanted by Shakespeare's conjunction of the pathetic and of the heroic, Ophelia and Hamlet. From 1880, eight years before La serenata, dates a lyric poem Hamlet y Ofelia, an early attempt of Gutiérrez-Nájera to define them (Poesías 1: 169-173). In the last lines of a preface to a memorial edition of Gutiérrez-Nájera's poetry, Justo Sierra (Mexico, 1848-1921) senses the prince of Denmark in the author of La serenata. Addressing the dead poet, Sierra paraphrases in Spanish Horatio's final words to his own master: “Buenas noches, dulcísimo príncipe mío; que los ángeles arrullen tu sueño con sus cantos.”⁷ Gutiérrez-Nájera's Ophelia contrasts with the existential self represented by a re-evaluated, nihilistic Hamlet. The Mexican poet describes him in an essay as an introspective sceptic who has gazed far too long and too deeply into the abyss: “Conversa consigo mismo. Su retina es bastante poderosa para ver frente a frente lo infinito. Cuando la ironía brota de sus labios, parece que ha conocido a Voltaire. Es un soñador, esto es, un abismo” (Obras 4: 124). He suffers mal-de-siècle: “Si Hamlet es un loco también lo es nuestro siglo. La misma duda, el mismo descreimiento, el mismo deseo impaciente del suicidio. Nos hemos divorciado de nuestra Ofelia: el sentimiento” (Obras 4: 128).

Besides Ophelia, another major evocation in La serenata consists of a woman by a window. After a verse inquiring into the brevity of happiness, “¿Por qué es preciso que la dicha acabe?” The poetic voice, questioning, introduces her in the fifth stanza: “¿Por qué la novia queda en la ventana?” The interrogative signals a turn of mind toward life's mystifications. For the poetic voice, ever sensitive to Schubert's score, then declares, “Y a la nota que dice: ‘¡hasta mañana!’ / El corazón responde, ‘¿quién lo sabe?’.”

In the pictorial arts and literature of nineteenth-century Europe, the motif of a woman by a window often integrates a lover wandering somewhere beyond. “Jetzt wandr'ich erst gern!” reads one of Joseph von Eichendorff's poems from his Wanderlieder (1837). It continues, “Am Fenster nun lauschen / Die Mädchen, es rauschen / Die Brunnen von fern” (37). In another poem, Sehnsucht (1834), from the same collection, Eichendorff writes of “Palästen im Mondenschein, / Wo die Mädchen am Fenster lauschen” (31). Heinrich Heine, in Die Fensterschau from his Junge Leiden: Romanzen, portrays Hedwig “mit Liebesharm / lauernd am Fenster” (57); Alfred Lord Tennyson describes Mariana, “when thickest dark did trance the sky,” endlessly waiting by a window for her lover in an eponymous poem (1: 207); she is modelled on her namesake in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.⁸ Millais, who illustrated some of Tennyson's poems (Thieme 24: 560), depicts Mariana standing by a window in an eponymous painting of 1851 (Korwin, 1: 539). From 1822 dates the no less famous topical rendition of a woman at a window by the Romantic Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). It is simply titled Frau am Fenster (Sommerhage 90). Both painters render the back, full figure of a woman, though Millais positions her standing slightly askance, which reveals the profile.

Whatever the particular recollection of the topos that Gutiérrez-Nájera may have had in mind when recreating it in La serenata—Heine and Eichendorff's, possibly, because of elements in common with his composition, such as moonlight, wandering lover, and song—his image of a woman at a window, telos in feminine form for the unfolding of aesthetic consciousness singing in the distance, by nature of its presentation as a puzzling motif, integrates any of its prefigurations. With the portrayal of her wandering lover, it is almost archetypal: “¡Hasta mañana, amor! El bosque espeso / Cruza, cantando, el venturoso amante.” Enjambment, “… El bosque espeso / Cruza …,” and an inner minor pause, “… cantando,” suggest slow, intricate movement through thick woodland. “Durch das Labyrinth der Brust / Wandelt in der Nacht,” read the lyrics of an 1815 Schubert Lied on Goethe's An den Mond; they could well serve to depict the overarching mood to poetic discovery in La serenata, like the German lyric, a moonlit poem “zwischen Freud und Schmerz / In der Einsamkeit” (Fischer-Dieskau, Texte 46). Gutiérrez-Nájera invariably follows the pathway of cultural-aesthetic anamnesis. Kunstlied, subtly evoked, suffuses the texture of La serenata; it is ever present. His “venturoso amante” is an emblematic avatar of many a wanderer in Schubert's songs such as Das Lied im Grünen with lyrics by Friedrich Reil (1773-1843; Schubert op. 115, no. 1, 1827); Goethe's Der Musensohn, (Schubert op. 92, no. 1, 1822); Der Wanderer, by Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck (1766-1849?; Schubert op. 4, no. 1, 1816); and Johann Gabriel Seidl's (1804-1875) Der Wanderer an den Mond (Schubert op. 80. no. 1, 1826; Fischer-Dieskau, Texte 86, 125, 137, 138). With lyrics by Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (Schubert op. 25, nos. 1-20, 1823) consists in a series of confessional vignettes from a vagabond: “Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, / das Wandern!” (Fischer-Dieskau, Texte 171), Schubert innovated Kunstlied transforming it into a medium adequate to subjective conscience, “whose experience takes shape as a series of conflicts and reconciliations between inner and outer reality” (Kramer, 201-202). His wanderers are the poetic voices in his songs. In La serenata, however, the wanderer's consciousness is barely implicit. He is the iconic, quintessential ‘lover yonder,’ traveling in a Märchen-like setting.

He eternally makes his way through a poetic forest worthy of the Quattrocento landscape artist, Benozzo di Lese di Sandro Gozzoli (1420-1497), who, depicting spatial recession through central-point perspective in his frescoes at Florence's Medici-Riccardi Palazzo, ably transforms “actuality into fairy tale” (Shell 6: 666). As in a fairy tale where forever and never seal the end, Gutiérrez-Nájera's “venturoso amante” sings. Irreversibility conditions his song and all others, explicit and tacit, in La serenata. For music is the most paradoxical of artistic forms. In its perfection, on the one hand, in the seamless coincidence and lack of distinctive points between form and content, music, unlike the word, can be the perfect window into infinity, as Jean Paul and Schopenhauer believed (Ayrault 203); on the other hand, due to the pervasiveness of an adagio, legato, or an andante passage, as in the first movement of Beethoven's Mondscheinsonate or in Schubert's Ständchen, an irreversible chain of spots of sound duration, in spite of recapitulations, form a flow of musical becoming (Jankélévitch 375).

Irreversibility and the eternal, being in becoming, the infinite in the finite sonorously conveyed. Echoing through the woods, the wandering lover's song in La serenata seems to bespeak an avowal:

¡Hasta mañana, amor! El bosque espeso
Cruza, cantando, el venturoso amante,
Y el eco vago de su voz distante
Decir parece: ‘¡hasta mañana, beso!’

Complaisance in duplications betrays a nostalgic consciousness: “¡hasta mañana, amor! … ¡hasta mañana, beso!” Retroactivity is one of its hallmarks (Jankélévitch 214). In poetry's timelessness, the avowal of La serenata's wandering lover is as perennial and unfulfilled as a lover's embrace in Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / … / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (Keats 3: 154). It has been suggested that John Keats is a poet of the “pathetic condition” (Ende 53). This could also be said of Gutiérrez-Nájera. As in the English poem, logos, the pattern of the poem, and telos, the final cause of La serenata's formal properties, require the image of alterity for lyrical consciousness. In the Ode, the cause and finality for the discovery of Truth is empathic sensibility. It allows the poetic voice to ironically appreciate the futility of the Bold Lover's pursuit, which sublates into beauty only through Kantian disinterested interest. The Lover shall never overcome otherness because he will never reach the fair maiden. In La serenata, the distance between self and thou also is never fully overcome; through the pathway of recollection, it serves as an aesthetic pretext conjoining anecdote and a fairy-tale-like vignette. In Märchen's realm, the cause and finality of the wandering lover's song is beloved lady A awaiting by a window. In the third stanza, she opens it invitingly. At the end of the poem, her avatar in the realm of anecdote, beloved lady B, closes a window. After the conclusive repetition of the refrain, “Hasta mañana” first associated with the wandering lover of lady A, beloved lady B dear to the poetic voice, lover B, retires for the night and unexpectedly dies. Thus the sentimental anecdote of lover B and lady B ends and so does the poem.

Yet forever lady A remains by a window. The two poetic dimensions mirror each other asymmetrically. Dimension A summarizes a poetic fable that is subject, in the abstract, to the vagaries of chance as the refrain “hasta mañana” and the sequential interrogative, “¿quién lo sabe?” suggest. Dimension B with lover B and lady B, corresponds to the summary, dimension A, as if reflecting it with variance. There is more body, more of a phenomenal manifold to dimension B, which the poetic voice describes and comments upon as it recollects, muses on, and complains about mutability and human suffering. Above all, poignantly recalled in dimension B is the unexpected death of lady B.

Ladies A and B, the wandering lover, and Ophelia are hardly mere Lladró or Hummel figurines. Gutiérrez-Nájera's vocation for cultural anamnesis does not limit him to the task of elaborating anything more than metaphors of sentimental prettiness, laden with evocations of European Opera, painting, literature, and Kunstlied. Reyes writes of “las hendeduras trágicas, negras,” in Gutiérrez-Nájera: “recorren de pronto sus bien cortadas estrofas” (12: 264). When in a public letter in terza rima Sierra urges Joaquín Arcadio Pagaza (Mexico, 1839-1917) author of the book of poems, Murmurios de la selva (1887), to venture forth bravely and poetise on the real and problematic world (1: 419), Gutiérrez-Nájera hastens to Pagaza's defence and in 1888, the same year when he wrote La serenata, he addresses to Sierra a public letter, also in terza rima. In this versified epistle, conceding the broken world, he argues for escapist art such as Pagaza's, a form of literature attentive to the recreation of classical canons and patterns since Greco-Roman antiquity. However, in the conclusive quartet, Gutiérrez-Nájera affirms for himself and for Sierra a more trying task:

Déjale pues, en su Tibur fragante,
Mientras pensando en el problema eterno
Nosotros vemos al obscuro Dante
Inclinado en la cima del infierno

(Poesías 2: 139).

The contemplation of a hell on earth, particularly of a personal inferno, is the subject of Mis enlutadas, To be, Ondas muertas, and Almas huérfanas. The first dactylic dodecasyllable of De mis ‘viejos versos’ (1885), “¿Recuerdas de Richter, de Richter sombrío[?],” initiates the recollection of Jean Paul's Rede des toten Christus (1789), an oneiric vision of Jesus descending into Hades only to preach despair to the dead. The Rede was arguably Jean Paul's most famous work beyond Germany during the nineteenth century, certainly in France since Mme. de Staël translated and included it in De l'Allemagne's second edition of 1814 (Pichois 56, 489). Musset's Rolla bears traces of the German novelist's nightmare (Brunet 130-132). From France, the major European disseminator of the Continent's artistic and intellectual production throughout the nineteenth century, the scandalous Rede was exported to other Latin nations. Almost one hundred years after Jean Paul's intimation of protomodern godlessness at the closure of the rationalist Aufklärung, “Christus! ist kein Gott? Er antwortete: Es ist keiner” (2: 269), racked by uncertainty and beyond the sureties of the Catholic faith, el Duque Job coincides with him: “Y Dios, sollozando, responde: “—¡Mis muertos! / … / [¡]No puedo abrazaros … he muerto también!” (Poesías 2: 41). Gutiérrez-Nájera is worthy of his most famous pseudonym. For he was a duke, “with his leanings toward elegance, his innate aristocracy of feeling”; and he was another Job, though a despairing one, “with all the torments of a modern soul adrift on a sea of doubt” (Goldberg 21). Suffering and existential mysteries find their way into La serenata. The poem's sad tone suggests Gutiérrez-Nájera's notion of the essence of German classical song that he seeks to transpose to his poetry: “el Lied es la melancolía.”⁹ Now with direct, unadorned expression, “¿Por qué es preciso que la dicha acabe?”; now with arresting imagery,

¿Qué tienen esas notas, Por qué lloran?
Parecen ilusiones que se alejan …
Sueños amantes que piedad imploran
Y como niños huérfanos, ¡se quejan!;

now with confessional simplicity, “Así hablara mi alma … si pudiera! / … / Así, en mis luchas, de congoja lleno, / Digo a la vida: -¡Déjame ser bueno!”, Gutiérrez-Nájera would suspend any possible disbelief of La serenata's poetic validity. The notion that Gutiérrez-Nájera cultivates escapism (Pearsall 64), does not persuade. In the pitiless reality of fin de siècle Mexico, a quasi-feudal, neo-colonial appendage of European and American capitalism, Gutiérrez-Nájera's “Santa Poesía” (Poesía 2: 214) religiously censures. For religion, as Karl Marx incisively observes, is the sigh of the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless condition, the expression of distress, “der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes,” also the protest against real distress (1: 378). Mad Ophelia, singing, mindless of her peril, and Lady B, unaware of her impending doom at the hands of fate, assure the relevance of La serenata, beyond its formal properties, to the real world where lives are overwhelmed. If the elegiac tone is Gutiérrez-Nájera's dominant mode,¹⁰ pathos is the nearest and most frequently visited chord of progression.

Incontrovertible factuality, the substance of literary realism and naturalism, enters Gutiérrez-Nájera's poetry and prose only filtered through literary and artistic topoi and transmuted by motif evocations. Insofar as brute reality wounds, his Ophelia renders a semblance of his sensibility no less than Hamlet renders another: she, a harmonious, “analogical,” vision of the universe; an intimation impossible to sustain; he, a corrosive, demonic negating sense of world, cosmos, and man.¹¹ There is no naïveté to Gutiérrez-Nájera's poetry, no simplistic innocence of soul. Whatever effortless communion between nature and artist that characterises the naive poet according to Friedrich Schiller's Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung of 1795, “Die verwickeltsten Aufgaben muss das Genie in anspruchloser Simplizität und Leichtigkeit lösen” (8: 322), if applicable at all in Gutiérrez-Nájera's case, must be doubly qualified. Instead of nature, cultural and literary antecedents; instead of ease in composition, an unerring, intuitive sense of formal proportion. It brings to mind Baudelaire's dictum that everything noble and beautiful “est le résultat du calcul” (491). In composition Gutiérrez-Nájera generally excels Musset, from whom he manifestly borrows. Lucie and Le saule formally pale when compared to La serenata.

Gutiérrez-Nájera is a discreet, centripetal poet, even when playful, trying out novel rhymes—Bob/Job, amó/Micoló, Kock/o'clock, Marnat/va—in the polyrythmic decasyllables of La Duquesa Job (Poesías 2: 20-24), a metre supposedly borrowed from Musset (Conner 85); it has been native to Spanish poetry since Romanticism (Navarro-Tomás 435). Reyes observes that Gutiérrez-Nájera composes each poem with a select, limited palate of coherent metaphors (12: 264). In contrast, the essence of Musset's no less playful “esprit,” is centrifugal movement (Bishop, 51). Mixing outrageously genres and tones, passing with surprising ease from the serious to the flippant, Musset's poetry, according to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (France, 1804-1869), impresses as “la plus étrange chose, et la plus inouie assurément” (1: 298). Except for Les nuits and a few other compositions, it offers a dizzying kaleidoscope as metaphor of an unstable urban, middle-class world of individualistic caprice, ambition and appetite (Bishop 52), a world unmoored from tradition and Christianity. “Lorsqu'un siècle est mauvais,” Musset writes justifying his literary ways in Un mot sur l'art moderne (1833), “lorsqu'on vit dans un temps où il n'y a ni religion, ni morale, ni foi dans l'avenir, ni croyance au passé; lorsqu'on écrit pour ce siècle, on peut braver toutes les règles” (Œuvres 885). To Musset, life, experienced and emotionally measured, justifies art (Gamble, 78-80; van Tieghem, 113).

Art, for Gutiérrez-Nájera, was more than life. In spite of his harried existence, involved in sundry editorial and journalistic tasks to earn a precarious living, he was a more bookish writer than Musset. His poetry is more retrospective and studied than the Frenchman's. A major or minor equivalent to French Parnassianism and Symbolisme (Paz 126), Spanish-American Modernismo, particularly the Modernismo of Gutiérrez-Nájera's generation that includes José Martí (Cuba, 1853-1895) and José Asunción Silva (Colombia, 1865-1896), could also be understood as recensionist Romanticism that has gone to finishing school, and learned its lessons well, though belatedly, in European Romanticism of more than a half-century before—typical Latin American asynchronicity. Like the Romantics, and unlike the Parnassians, Gutiérrez-Nájera is a sentimental artist. Subsuming Musset's, he incorporates Schiller's notion of the self-conscious, sentimental poet who deliberates upon reality: “Dieser reflektiert über den Eindruck, den die Gegenstände auf ihn machen” (8: 340). Emotion covers the painful subject of presentation with a mantle of compassion, or signals existential grotesquerie, or an object worthy of indignant consternation, with touches of irony; this is the mode of Gutiérrez-Nájera the short-story writer and cronista, who is more innovative than Gutiérrez-Nájera the poet (Schulman 242).

Culture as memory and poetry as religion account for the telos of Gutiérrez-Nájera's artistic enterprise: “¿qué cosa es el arte,” he rhetorically asks, “sino una revelación del amor? ¿Qué cosa es el arte sino la dirección de esa actividad incesante de nuestro espíritu, hacia un ideal misterioso que llamamos belleza?” (Obras 1: 56). A believer in the possibility of transmuting discourse into a vision of Truth (noesis), Gutiérrez-Nájera states the truths of his poetics by tapping its theophanous sources.¹² Since Cicero's classical definition, which St. Augustine apparently follows (3: 262-263; Civitate X. iii), religiosity consists in restituting to the gods their divine property by diligently actualising and rereading it: “qui … omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter retractarent et tamquam relegerent, hi sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo” (192; pt. 2, sec. 28). Piety requires the presence of attentive, creative memory. For the numen of pagan Greek antiquity, Mnemosyne, hardly represents the commonplace notion of interested, utilitarian memory. She does not bring back to mind this or that. Rather, by her divine nature and through her daughters, the Muses, she disinterestedly cultivates the vivid images of a lost reality, each laden with heartfelt value, each bearing the imprint of Spirit. Restitutory anamnesis, in brief, completes and perfects (Jankélévitch 372). Furthermore, insofar as pious memory artistically opens windows into infinity, it opens windows into non-being, the nameless ur-source, by intimating its dispensations. All poetic intimation is by grace of the ineffable that Heidegger calls Being (Mujica 103), and others call God. With the integrity of the poet qua poetic voice all along at stake, La serenata is an act of pious, restitutory, aesthetic anamnesis, a demanding spiritual exercise granted a unique, though brief, iluminatio induced by literature painting, opera, and Kunstlied. Gutiérrez-Nájera “creyó que el poeta no debía cantar como los pájaros del bosque, sino sabiamente, cultamente” (1: 1316), remarks his compatriot and fellow modernista Amado Nervo (1870-1917). Salvation for a Modernista such as Gutiérrez-Nájera, whose faith in Christianity had been weakened or lost, could only be pursued culturally, through refined artistic evocation of a heritage spanning generations and many European languages.

Since Mexico's independence, nationalism has meant for her cultured class a claim on secular universality, and an obligation to pursue it. “Nuestro ideal es ecuménico,” remarks Reyes, “recibir los condimentos indispensables de las mejores culturas del mundo. De estos hibridismos se hace la historia. De estos mestizajes brotó la civilización griega” (9: 417). In Fin-de-Siècle Mexico, a spiritual return to Europe was the path to universality (Ortega 125). The “centricity” or eccentricity of Spanish American literature and culture (Picón-Garfield 104), in particular, of Modernismo, hardly bears upon the formal appreciation of Gutiérrez-Nájera, especially of a poem so consciously cultured as La serenata de Schubert. In the realm of excellence, where all things are, in Spinoza's felicitous expression, “tam difficilia quam rara” (Ethica / Die Ethik 700), any point is center. Irrespective of its subject matter, “una literatura propia,” affirms Gutiérrez-Nájera, “no es, en resumen, más que la suma de muchas poderosas individualidades” (Obras 1: 86). In any case, as Jorge Cuesta (México, 1903-1942), of the Contemporáneos literary circle, aptly observes: Spanish American poetry, “descastada y desarraigada,” is derivative and fundamentally European (2: 153, 178, 184).

Notes

1. All references to La serenata are by Gutiérrez-Nájera, Poesías 2: 125-128.

2. All references to Ständchen are by Schubert 17: 148-150.

3. For a biographical sketch of Schubert's friend, Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), a music critic, minor poet, opera librettist, and founder of a musical journal, Iris im Gebiete der Tonkunst (1830-1841), see Heussner 11: 216-219.

4. Carter 26, 33-41; Marianne O. de Bopp, “prólogo,” Brackel-Welda 9-10; see also Martínez Peñaloza, número 100: 13-17, número 101: 11-15, número 102: 9-11.

5. Maurice Allem, “Notes et variantes,” Musset, Poésies 728.

6. All references to Lucie are by Musset, Poésies 302-304.

7. Justo Sierra, “Prólogo,” Gutiérrez-Nájera, Poesías 1: 17.

8. Christopher Ricks, “commentary,” Tennyson 1: 205.

9. Gutiérrez-Nájera, in Carter 34.

10. Sierra, “Prólogo”, Gutiérrez-Nájera, Poesías, 17.

11. For the conceit of a “visión analógica” and a “visión demoníaca” that create a field of tension in Modernista poetry, see Paz 80-81, 89-112; also Jiménez 64-65.

12. Noesis properly refers to mind, thought, and the power of mental perception and intelligence (Oxford 10: 461-462). Following Rosen (38, 49), we extend the notion to a participative understanding of the numinous. Poetic inspiration, according to Plato, is an ecstasy induced by the gods, theia mania (Phaidros 245a); see Pieper 7-9; 29-35.

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