Antoni Pizà, Director of the Foundation for Iberian Music, presented a paper at the 23rd International Conference of the Association Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) in collaboration with the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (mdw) [Vienna, 29-31 Aug 2024].

The conference was entitled Laughing your staves off: irony, satire, and parody in visual representations and narratives of music

Antoni Pizà’s paper, “Mocking Gambara: Balzac’s use of musical instruments as attributes of madness” examines Balzac’s novella Gambara (1837). The book recounts the story of a young aristocrat who, while trying to pursue a woman, meets her husband, a composer and instrument maker “suspect of being insane.” Paolo Gambara is by all accounts either a genius the world might one day acknowledge or, conversely, a wacky, failed artist. The text presents instances that could support both interpretations. As the story advances, however, it becomes clear that Gambara is, by far, a ludicrous charlatan, who in addition to his “mastery” (possibly ironical) of intricate music theory terminology, has also invented a preposterous musical instrument, the panharmonicon. In Balzac’s narrative, instruments, and especially the panharmonicon, are attributes that help characterize the madness, absurdity, and derangement of Gambara. Instruments are also signifiers of failure, demise, and social descent. Gambara, indeed, ends up impoverished and working as a busker on the streets of Paris playing a modest guitar.

Balzac’s choice of instrument to create a parody of a mad and failed genius, the panharmonicon, is rather baffling. The real Panharmonikon was a mechanical instrument, which included a broad palette of orchestral timbers, and it was intended for serious, even “scientific,” purposes, not as a ludicrous contraption, as Balzac presents it in Gambara. Invented by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772–1838), Beethoven wrote for it the original Wellington’s Victory, op. 91 (1813). Paralleling Gambara’s ironic deployment of music theory verbiage, Balzac’s panharmonicon is a satirical version of Mälzel’s original Panharmonikon. An early engraving illustrating Gambara depicts it as a comical keyboard instrument, which at times doubles as a bed and perhaps a coffin. Both instruments, the real and the fictional, Mälzel’s and Gambara’s, however, have in common their celebratory attitude of parody and satire through cacophony, loudness, madness, and nonsense.