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Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Université de Montréal, specializes in the relationship between music and literature, Wagner, and Inuit music. He is the author of Proust Musicien, published in 1984 and reissued in 1999 (Christian Bourgois éditeur, Paris), and translated into six languages.

The “little phrase” from Vinteuil’s sonata for violin and piano is somewhat of a “national ode” to Swann and Odette’s love story; a part of our French literary heritage, tucked away in schoolbooks between the madeleine and the pink hawthorns. To quote the relevant passage: “And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, [Swann] had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. (…) he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire”.¹

But Swann goes about it badly, believing he can achieve his goal by asking, “for some information about this Vinteuil; what else he had done, and at what period in his life he had composed the sonata;—what meaning the little phrase could have had for him, that was what Swann wanted most to know.”² Thus does he embark on a false trail: following the example of Sainte-Beuve, who claimed to explain literary works by the meticulous reconstitution of their authors’ biographies – the criticism of which constitutes the starting point of Proust’s great novelistic project – Swann questions the sources of the little phrase.

By the time he hears the little phrase again, later at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s, Odette has deceived him, his love for it has gradually withered away, and it can no longer conjure happiness. Rather, the little phrase becomes connected with the pain of remembering happy moments forever gone. As if still trying to pierce its secret, Proust then describes it in frankly mystical and religious terms. But Swann will never understand the promise this little phrase contained. What the music shows him, “is not ‘Free Will’ or ‘The Synthesis of the Infinite,’" says Swann himself, " but, for example, old Verdurin in his frock coat in the palmarium at the Jardin d’acclimatation.”³

But the story of Vinteuil’s imaginary works does not end there: Swann and Odette’s love also foreshadows the love for Albertine of the central character of In Search of Lost Time: the narrator;⁴ the meeting of Swann and Vinteuil is only a first step in the artistic quest undertaken by the narrator throughout the novel.

For the narrator, music is the model of literature: “I asked myself if music were not the unique example of what might have been—if there had not been the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas—the means of communication between one spirit and another. It is like a possibility which has ended in nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language.”⁷ Proust, as well, wants to appropriate music’s good, envying its capacity to say the essential, beyond words. By divining, in the septet, a beckoning motif still mysterious to him, the narrator understands that it is creation that calls him. Swann had wasted his life in dilettantism: he ended up marrying Odette to preserve the illusory memory of a former love and began a critical study of Vermeer which he did not complete. On the other hand, thanks to music’s intercession, the narrator understands that literature is “our true life at last revealed and illumined, the only life which is really lived.”⁸

It is always possible to look for the sources of the “little phrase”, the sonatas and the septet in real existing works such as the violin sonatas by Saint-Saëns, Franck or Fauré, and in Franck’s quintet: scholars have written abundantly on the subject. But guided by Proust himself, other names arise; for example, in the dedication of a copy of Swann’s Way to Jacques de Lacretelle, he wrote: “Insofar as reality has served me, a very weak measure indeed, the little phrase of this Sonata, and I have never told this to anyone, is (to begin with the end), in the Saint-Euverte evening, the charming but mediocre phrase of a sonata for piano and violin by Saint-Saëns, a musician whom I do not like.

At this same evening, when the piano and the violin moan like two birds answering each other, I thought of Franck’s Sonata *(mostly played by Enesco), a composer whose quartet appears in one of the following volumes.⁹ The tremolos that cover the little phrase heard in the Verdurins’ house were suggested to me by a prelude from *Lohengrin, but itself at that moment, also by something by Schubert. It appears in the same Verdurin evening: a delightful piece by Fauré.”¹⁰ Contrary to what one might have thought, Proust does not mock his interlocutor here. Whether it is a question of imaginary works of art or of the characters in his novel, he is not inspired by a single model but by several of which he synthesizes, as Painter’s biography of him clearly shows.¹¹

We must, therefore, read and understand the successive passages on music in Proust’s Bildungsroman as stages of a true quest for the Grail. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to provide all the details, we then discover that the writer has practised a subtle syntax of allusion that leads us from Debussy to Wagner and then to Beethoven: in other words, from a descriptive, relatively vague musical discourse (La Mer) to a quasi-language (the Wagnerian leitmotif), to musical essence in its pure state: the last Beethoven’s string quartets.

If there is a “Vinteuil mystery,” it is the mystery by virtue of which Proust is able to conquer pure music: by going back, or rather, by destroying time.