"You Complete Me"

After "show me the money" and "you had me at hello" that is probably the most well-known quote from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire. It gives me a title for a post about one of the concepts behind Romantic music. Way back in 1794 Friedrich Schiller wrote about the need for the audience (or reader, or viewer) to complete the work of art. He said, "the real and express content that the poet puts in his work remains always finite; the possible content that he allows us to contribute is an infinite quality." This is a fascinating idea, but like many Romantic ideas, it can be easily misunderstood and abused. Earlier composers, while they did expect the player to bring the music alive, did not really expect the listener to 'complete' it in any substantial way (with some exceptions that I will get to later) --just to enjoy it. But the Romantics, and especially ones in the first generation like Robert Schumann, were fascinated by the incompleteness of the work and how it might be completed by the listener. The idea was to leave important things unsaid (or unplayed) just as in a novel, the reader must imagine to himself many details about the setting and the characters, especially the visual aspect.

In close listening to the counterpoint of, say, Bach, we imagine voices continuing even after they have died away because of the logic of the voice-leading--in that sense the listener 'completes' the music. Sometimes you can only 'hear' the full texture by looking at the score! But the Romantics went further. In one part of his Humoresque, op 20, Schumann writes a separate melody on a third stave that is meant to be unplayed!
The top stave is the right hand, the bottom stave is the left hand and the middle is, unheard, inaudible, to be imagined. He writes in the score, "inner voice", in the sense of 'interior'. Here is a bit of the score:

Click to enlarge

The written out top voice is a kind of echo of the 'interior' voice, which is not played. Here is a performance by Horowitz. The "Hastig" section starts right at 5:55:

Now I know what you are going to say: "But I don't hear that inner voice!" Well, yes. Thinking about this can get a bit tricky. Here we have an unplayed melody that is presumably thought or imagined by the pianist while he is playing that perhaps influences the way he plays and thereby the way we hear it. But we are really free to hear music any way we want to. Call this an experiment in Romanticism.

I have another, quite different example. Here is the Quebec group Beau Dommage performing their song "La complainte du phoque en Alaska" in concert. The audience joins in from the beginning and by the four minute mark, take over singing the song. At the 4:43 mark, the band stops completely and only comes back to end it. Nice.

UPDATE: Beau Dommage (the name means "beautiful damage") was a hugely popular rock band in Quebec in the 1970s. This clip comes from a reunion concert in 1995. A "phoque" is a seal.