Musical Recordings as Mediators of Experiences: Situating 'Der Leiermann' in Ingmar Bergman’s In the Presence of a Clown

Abstract

Ingmar Bergman’s In the Presence of a Clown (Larmar och gör sig till, 1997) opens with the representation of an intense musical listening experience. A man alone in an empty room of a hospital repeatedly plays the incipit of “Der Leiermann,” the last Lied of Schubert’s Die Winterreise, from a gramophone. His deep breaths and focused attention to the music coming from the phonograph record reveal the listener’s anxious state. He is engaged in an impossible recollection, that of Schubert’s feelings after discovering that he had syphilis. The man’s use of a musical recording to do that emphasizes the mediated nature and mediating role of music at once, a significant blend that perfectly encapsulates the etymology of the term recording. In Western culture, the verbs “to remember” and “to record” were closely related before the Cartesian mind/body dualism. The Latin term recordare—to remember—literally meant “to pass again through the heart,” since memory was supposed to be located there. Thus, the act of remembering aroused not only an image from one’s mind, but also the feelings associated with it. This experiential dimension of recording—which is “played up” in Bergman’s film—lessened when remembering was reduced to a cognitive capacity by which one retains information and reconstructs the past, and the term recording to a material object that congealed previous live events. Memory needs records, technologies of mediation, to remember. Yet, as recent and more nuanced approaches to memory and recordings show, these are not reproductions but representations, and the focus should be on the process of mediation they prompt. The emphasis is thus back on experience, although from a different perspective: instead of the actual event (the past in the case of memory, or the live artistic performance in relation to its recorded version), the focus is on the present reality created by the act of remembering and the audience’s active listening experience, respectively. In this paper I draw on this new experiential approach to put forward a new take on the aesthetics of recordings understood not as objects, but as mediators of experiences. I focus on Bergman’s In the Presence of a Clown as an illustration of how a musical recording becomes both the representation of an experience—made intersubectively available through its impression in a poem and its mimetic depiction by means of music in the form of a Lied; and the mediator of a process of introspection through which the listener tries to make sense of his own personal experience of impending death. “Der Leiermann”—one of the best instances of music’s dual articulation of chaos and meaning in relation to death—triggers him to transform those abstract sounds into musical renditions embedded in the social act of dramatic performance, both cinematic and theatrical. Death will sound very different for the listener in the new dramatic context.