Catalog of lost works

This reflection can be summed up by the difference in Latin between opus - the finished work - and opera - the activity that leads to the work, the plurality of actions and therefore the multiplicity of intermediate works, abandoned along the way. Attention to theopera lies at the heart of genetic criticism, of which Valéry can be considered the initiator. His poems " Féerie " and " Même Féerie " offer two " phénotextes " stemming from the same " génotexte ", the same creative movement for which the poet gives two possible directions. So, should we speak of " variants " or of finished products ? Schubert's music extends this reflection, as in his penultimate sonata, in A major (D 959), he reused a theme that had already appeared in an early sonata. He thus gives voice to the transformation of a melody into a memory, thematizing the disappearance of music itself.

The Romantic oeuvre is built on the feeling of loss, and with Schubert, this feeling is not simply a theme of the work : it is transposed into the very structure of the work, a work that fragments at the end, as if to mimic the effect of the ruin of things, the general effect of time on the existence of works. However, there is a paradox and a desired effect - and obtained : mimicking the fragmentation of the work in the skein of memory is also a way of warding off loss, of warding it off formally, the better to remain in memory. The fragments are given from the outset by the work, which has itself been reduced to its simplest elements. Nothing can happen to these fragments, i.e. to the work itself. To mimic loss and estrangement is to turn this loss and estrangement into a positive presence, a way of exorcising the terror of loss. And perhaps this is how we can prevent the work from being lost. And that's why the rondo theme of Schubert's penultimate sonata haunts us so much, remains so intensely in the ear : it's because it reproduces the very structure of our memory, because it reproduces the very mechanism of the disintegration of memories.

It's a sweet consolation to think that existing works are the offspring of works that have disappeared. This is indeed true of some works. So we mourn less for works that have disappeared. But to think that all the vanished works have metamorphosed into the existing and present ones, can only be the object of a philosophical faith or conviction, that of a Hegelian philosophy of history, postulating that the present is the result of a dialectical, i.e. organic, development of the past : from this point of view, the past is included in the present.