Swann in Love by Marcel Proust & Brian Nelson & Adam Watt

Author:Marcel Proust & Brian Nelson & Adam Watt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191062339
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Explanatory Notes

3 play Wagner as well as that . . . Potain: the music of the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) became particularly popular in France in the late 1870s. Francis Planté (1839–1934) was a French pianist and composer whose concerts drew significant audiences in the 1870s; Anton Grigorievitch Rubinstein (1825–94) was one of the finest pianists of the nineteenth century and founded the conservatories of St Petersburg and Moscow. Pierre-Charles-Edouard Potain (1825–1901) was a celebrated cardiologist elected to the French Academy of Medicine in 1882 and to the Institut de France in 1893. That Madame Verdurin should hold that her ‘young pianist’ and Dr Cottard are ‘streets ahead’ of these luminary figures in their respective fields is an early indication of the somewhat blinkered over-confidence of the hostess in her coterie.

Madame de Crécy: Odette, as the narrator learns much later, in The Captive, goes at this time by the name of Madame de Crécy as the result of an earlier marriage to Pierre de Verjus, Comte de Crécy, a man whose wealth, according to the narrator’s source, Odette drained to the last centime before separating from him.

4 ride of the Valkyrie . . . prelude to Tristan: the Ride of the Valkyries (the plural is now generally used) is one of Wagner’s best-known compositions: it features at the opening of the third act of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner’s four-part epic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, first performed as a cycle in 1876). ‘Tristan’ refers to Wagner’s earlier, hugely influential opera, Tristan and Isolde, first performed in 1865.

5 fishing for compliments: Odette is in the habit of dropping English words and phrases into conversation, an affectation which she believes brings an allure of culture and mystique. We have italicized these where they appear in the text.

6 naturalization papers: the mention here of official documents confirming Swann’s status as a naturalized French citizen is a reminder of his complex identity as Jewish, French, and as an unusual individual who moves back and forth between quite distinct social milieux.

8 when I began to take an interest: this is the first of a small number of intrusions of the first-person pronoun into the narration of Swann in Love, which is otherwise focalized exclusively on Charles Swann. The ‘I’ in question (as outlined in the Introduction) is the narrator-hero of In Search of Lost Time, the much longer novel of which Swann in Love is part. Since its events pre-date the birth of the narrator of Proust’s longer novel, Swann in Love is effectively a lengthy flashback, which fills in the backstory to the life of Charles Swann, who is an influential figure for Proust’s narrator.

9 Quel est donc ce mystère? | Je n’y puis rien comprendre: ‘What then is this mystery? | I can’t make head nor tail of it.’ The grandfather here is quoting lines from the end of the first act of La Dame Blanche (1825), a comic opera by François-Adrien Boieldieu, with a libretto by Eugène Scribe based on scenes from a variety of works by Sir Walter Scott.

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