Summary
In La Prisonnière , the striking example of bottom-up construction given by the narrator is the "shepherd's chanter" aria from Tristan und Isolde. According to Proust, Wagner "drew a delightful piece from his drawers and used it as a retrospectively necessary theme in a work he had not thought of when he composed it, then having composed a first mythological opera, then a second, then others, and suddenly realizing that he had just made a Tetralogy" (III, 666). Without Wagner's opera (III, 1), the shepherd's chanter warns Tristan in agony of the arrival of Yseult's ship.
The narrator plays Vinteuil's sonata on the piano; a bar strikes him; he finds Tristan. This is followed by a digression on the great works of the 19th century, which were missed because their unity was retrospective, not preconceived, but "wonderfully incomplete" because they were more organic as a result. An example or proof of this retrospective and organic unity is "such a piece composed separately, born of inspiration, not required by the artificial development of a thesis, and which comes to integrate with the rest" (III, 667).
This melody, a famous English horn solo, was inspired to Wagner by a Venetian gondolier's song: "The sensations I experienced there were characteristic and did not fade during my entire stay in Venice; they remained with me until the completion of the second act of Tristan , and perhaps they suggested to me the plaintive, dragging sounds of the chalumeau, at the beginning of the third act [1]." This was already a memory episode in Wagner, but not quite a tune found in a drawer. For this one, Proust thinks of Parsifal 's "Enchantement du Vendredi-Saint" , which he often mentions, for example in Le Contre Sainte-Beuve, in connection with Balzac and already in connection with the after-the-fact unity of La Comédie humaine : "L'Enchantement du Vendredi-Saint is a piece that Wagner wrote before he thought of doing Parsifal , and which he introduced afterwards. But aren't the additions, the added beauties, the new relationships suddenly glimpsed by the genius between the separate parts of his work that come together, live and could no longer be separated, some of his most beautiful intuitions?" (CSB, 274). This idea about the genesis of Parsifal comes from Albert Lavignac's widely-read Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1897).
