Intro | The Text | Reading Rilke as Music | Interaction | Reading Rilke as Performer

Rilke’s faces: The Drama in the Text

Drawn from diaries Rilke kept while he was living in Paris in 1904, the little story "Gesichter" ("Faces") reads in many ways like a prose poem. The text amounts to a brief meditation on the nature of seeing, told in five paragraphs and from just about as many points of view. The poet begins unexpectedly with a question, as if addressing himself to an absent interlocutor, or perhaps to no one at all: "Habe ich es schon gesacht?" (Have I said it before?). The question seems to interrupt the flow of a prior contemplation to make way for a more significant confession, for Rilke immediately tells us, "Ich lerne sehen" (I am learning to see). We do not yet know what such learning entails, but we are told that it too is a beginning, and, like all beginnings, it is "still going badly." It is tempting to think that the poet, long accustomed to looking at the world through the art of metaphor, had suddenly embarked on an entirely new visual education when he became the personal secretary to one of France’s most prominent sculptors. Indeed, it seems that one thing the writer had never noticed is the depth of expression hidden in the human face.

"It never occurred to me before how many faces there are, " he writes, with more than a touch of irony. And that observation launches a brief, and mockingly philosophical discussion of the malleability of expression. Although people have many faces, he says, one can still find some thrifty types who would prefer to save their inheritance. They wear the same face year after year, so that it becomes threadbare, stretched out like old leather gloves. Yet even while putting the others away for posterity, the unthinkable can happen. The dogs could get to them first, Rilke concludes. His little joke is obvious, suggesting a curious rationale for the uncanny resemblances we’ve all noticed between people and their pets. The humor soon turns darker, however, as Rilke contemplates the opposite phenomenon: the wasteful, overly expressive person who changes his face too often. Easy come, easy go, the poet seems to say. "Why, he’s barely forty years old before he’s gone through the whole supply!" And when that happens, the poor soul will have no choice but to go around—unimaginably—with nothing on at all: wearing, as Rilke calls it, the "non-face" (das Nichtgesicht).

The next moment in the meditation, however, puts a stop to the philosophizing, and to all the irony, as the poet focuses on something far more real. The text makes a sudden shift from the present tense to the past; from humor to horror; fiction to history. The change of perspective seems to come without any preparation at all, introduced by nothing more than a conjunction. "But the woman," he says, as if beginning all over again. "The woman." ("Aber die Frau" . . . "die Frau.") Whom does he mean? We don’t yet know. Rilke himself does not actually know her. But it is clear that she has been there all along in his story, as the ostensible source of his visual education. He met her "on the corner of rue Notre-Dame des Champs." A blind corner, it seems, for neither one has seen the other. She was poor. She was lost in thought. His footstep startled her. It was then, however, that he had his own startling moment of insight. The woman looked up suddenly—so suddenly, in fact, that he sees something he has never seen before: he glimpses, in effect, the face of the faceless poor, and the vision is monstrous. For the frightened woman, now left with her face in her hands, presents a sight far more alarming than anything the poet has ever experienced. To look her in the eye was to see the horrible, naked truth: a person without any face at all, ohne Gesicht.

In five dense paragraphs Rilke has presented us, then, with a tiny drama of seeing, a drama that turns around a haunting—and hauntingly absent—character, one who happens to have been seen only by the poet. This story of perception is also a story about change, and the difference one fleeting vision can make in a human life. The "I"/eye who has seen is now different, although it still has (we are told) a lot to learn. It was ultimately this uncertain drama of the self—a drama built around this vision of absent presence—that we hoped to capture by collaborating on Vis-à-vis, collectively exploring the question, and the burden, of insight through the musical and visual tableaux, through the interactive technology, and ultimately through performance. We shall continue with a few remarks from the composer about translating Rilke’s text into music. (next page)