Power of Denial: Chopin's Preludes in Autumn Sonata

There’s one scene in Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, exactly 27 minutes in, exactly 10 minutes and a lifetime long, which totally redefines the relationship between cinema and music, exposing our shared humanity through sound. Bergman, the hero of my post-adolescent heart, has already done the dirty on existential confusion, lack of self-identity, family trauma. It was he who first proved to me you don’t have to leave your bedroom to make an interesting piece of drama.

Eva is a shy pastor’s wife played by Liv Ullmann. Her mother Charlotte, played by Ingrid Bergman, is a world-famous Pianist with a bad back. She has come to visit her daughter following the death of her lover Leonard. There are three other characters worth mentioning: the husband Viktor, who watches over his wife like an owl, Helena, Eva’s severely disabled sister, and Bergman himself, a cinematic god, Scandinavian Dues ex Machina, swooping down to render every character very unhappy.

Now, in the Chopin scene, you can feel his lazar vision piercing through mother and daughter, cutting to the heart of life itself. In many ways, they are star-crossed lovers, attempting to force fate into a new shape, to repair their broken bond. Music is the surgeon’s table upon which they lay their love.

Eva is encouraged by Viktor to show Charlotte her piano playing. Her Chopin rendition, as she tells us, her mother and, mostly herself, is a sham, she has no technique, has not learned the fingering. When she plays, it’s sort of sweet, melancholy, clearly never approaching the borderline of genius; but almost enjoyable in its attempt to do so, naïve but with all the charms of being so, a lot like Eva. As she plays, tears come to Charlotte’s eyes. When she’s done, Eva quietly demands affection: “Did you like it?” She asks. Charlotte, played by Ingrid Bergman replies, “I liked you.”

What is more important to Charlotte though: the music or her daughter?

As Eva plays the camera lingers on the nape of her neck, her hair plaits, her rounded shoulders. Then we cut too Charlotte’s face three times. Eva’s moment is trapped in her Mother’s POV shot. Her music is not her own. Its highly efficient, minimalist, economic film-making, for a scene almost bent under the weight of its own psychological complexity. The power of denial.

Charlotte seems first touched, then moved and miserable, finally, subtly critical and falsely polite. In the cold light of Swedish day, tears are held back behind Charlotte’s eye shadow, words trapped between painted lips, her entire emotional-self kept prisoner in her highly controlled features. Both are not acknowledging the chasm of unexpressed love and contempt Eva and Charlotte feel towards each other. Chopin becomes a poor excuse for what is not being said.

Now Charlotte plays, years of experience, achievement, and admirers, just itching at the end of her fingertips, spilling themselves out in a matriarchal control of the piano keys. There is no love in her playing, only authority. Cold professionalism translates itself into musical beauty. She is clearly superior to Eva in technique, but as viewers, we do not care. This scene does not belong to Charlotte. The harsh beauty of the Preludes is Eva’s alone; his genius is expressed in the vulnerability of her face; the spirit of Chopin lives behind her eyes.

With Bergman, the entire cosmic power of the film, the cumulation of shots, scenes, acts, and story, is uniquely concentrated within the elegant and understated power of the face. When Charlotte is playing, wonderful as she is, all we can see is Eva, who is looking at Charlotte. When Eva plays, the camera traps her in the gaze of her Mother. Both are solitary and detached from their music, held prisoner by the Other. And both are in denial about this.

During Charlotte’s turn, we see Eva’s total self-abandon and lack of poise: she stares at her mother, lips slightly parted, departing from any sense of the appropriate, magically glued to someone who is totally absorbed in herself. Eva’s face is soft, round, childish. Her glasses are overly large, evoking Woody Allen or Mickey Mouse, a sadness so pervasive it almost risks comedy.

But not quite.

Her mother explains Chopin should sound wrong: ''feeling is very far from sentimentality.'' Well, the fundamental ring of truth is there, but isn’t this somewhat offensive, when Charlotte seems incapable of feeling…like at all? She may be in her element with Chopin, but her words are false and disinterested when it comes to affairs of the heart.

Eva explains Chopin: “was proud, sarcastic, manly. He was no sentimental old woman.” Suddenly the camara flicks, almost flirtatiously, to the mild-mannered, and kindly husband sucking his pipe, and in one-line, Eva’s entire life is explained.

Running from her mother, Eva chose to live with emotional but unimpressive Viktor, who she likes but cannot love. Freudian psychoanalytical clichés are rooted in truth, immortalized in fiction, and played out in the movies and mythologies of our own lives. Suddenly, the music dies, the camera pulls back, and emotion shrinks itself into humble sipping of cups of tea. We feel sort of cheated, left wanting more.

I could have gone to my grave never having listened to Chopin’s Preludes. Sometimes the sheer normality of my own Spotify playlists, makes me want to leave my seat and crawl behind the screen, crawl inside a Bergman movie, where I could be the kind of person who played Chopin, went to Church and yet felt existentially alone. The sheer heaviness of his films, the music, the drama, the poetry, places my own life, all its unbearable lightness and Taylor Swift songs, into rather a harsh perspective.

Although no one doubts Charlotte’s genius at playing the piano, it is Eva who is the true artist. And this isn’t some deliberately paradoxical, attention-seeking statement. Compare the lives of these two women. Charlotte is selfish, narcissistic to a fault, yet she refuses to admit her own helplessness. Eva’s lazy, undisciplined, bad but beautiful playing of Chopin is, therefore, a reflection of how, unlike Charlotte, she does have a something resembling a human heart. Eva has learned how to play the chords of her own life, like a piece of music. She plays badly, but she knows herself.

Suddenly, I feel tremendous sympathy (mixed with mild contempt) for Charlotte, who barely exists. Her theatricality, her attention-seeking dress and wonderfully painted features, her cold aura, her slightly hostile smile, designed to keep her daughter at a distance, these all tumble down, drop to the floor, collect dust, and perish…all that is left for the camera to see is the face of a suffering human being. She stands face to face with the greatest enemy to afflict all women, though I am a long way off: ageing. Bergman, therefore, sells us a contradiction, those who play best, know themselves the least.

There is a lot of music but not a lot of sound in Autumn Sonata, almost a silent electricity in the air, an entire emotional force behind things, so powerful it is almost destructive. The key sound throughout the film is that of clock’s ticking, creating a mood of metaphysical dread. Eva yearns for time gone, trapped in a world without reality: mourning the death of her son who drowned at four. Meanwhile, Charlotte, rubbing her back, reading tacky detective novels, spending her millions, and adjusting to the death of her lover Leonard, faces the dark void with frivolity and boxes of chocolate.

One dives too wholeheartedly down the metaphysical rabbit hole; the other sets up her camp on the very edge of the precipice. Both avoid life as best they can.

The conversations between Eva and Charlotte tread with the caution of someone diffusing a bomb. Strangled emotion, second-guessing, pre-emptive and self-reflexive analysis, a mixture of repression and melodrama, all these translate into verbs, adjectives, broken poetry, a set of musical chords trying to form itself, but floundering hopelessly. It sounds all wrong, full of pain and brief reprise, a lot like Chopin.

There are two domineering narratives surrounding the meaning behind our music. Kant, a classical, analytical thinker, the patriarch of philosophy, whose name carries all the weight of solid rock, appreciated harmony, form, genius, grandeur, power. A lot like Charlotte, he saw music as an end in itself, the pursuit of perfection. The other is that great pessimist Schopenhauer. He argued that in a cold and ruthless universe the only escape was compassion, asceticism, and music. Paying less attention to genius than Kant, he saw music as the only the only way to attain any kind of truth and happiness.

In many ways, Bergman’s films wear the bones of Kant, rules and structure, a meticulous obsession with perfection, but have the pulsing heart of Schopenhauer, discipline needing to escape itself, to break open the iron bars of analytical film-making, and find again the heart of (wo)man.

Bergman’s heroines, his muses, lovers, and often his victims, were moulded under the weight of his own psycho-sexual drama; while his films are ruthlessly organized and deceptively simple, his love life was a sophisticated catastrophe, placing him curiously in line with the #MeToo Movement. Perhaps like Charlotte, his movies, his ability to play his audience like a piano (to over-extend that metaphor,) disguised a real emotional poverty and inability to form stable and lasting relationships in his own life. Was his pessimistic film-making his own avoidance of reality, just as Charlotte’s is her music? Does he yearn for the love and imperfect playing of a character like Eva? Is music, as film, as much the language of emotion, or an excuse not to feel?

In his memoir The Magic Lantern Bergman wrote of the behind-the-scenes backstabbing and solidarity. Ingrid Bergman’s response when she learned about the Chopin’s Preludes scene was one of credulity: 'God in heaven, is that dull bit of music to be played twice? Ingmar, you're crazy. The audience will fall asleep.’ The filming was complete with bickering, criticism, and occasional laughter. Ingrid, suffered from cancer and was living on borrowed time.

Knowledge like this breathes a new sense of fatalism into the Chopin scene: when Life’s back is against the wall, is threatened, overwhelmed, scared, it fights back, often in ruthless criticism and petty insults. Ingrid’s suffering translates into Charlotte’s dramatic reality: her fear of a life unlived, without love, fundamentally alone.

Loneliness was an inexorable feature of 2020, in many ways the world just stopped turning. Yet a recent BBC survey revealed that music listening soared during Lockdown. More than 155m albums were bought or streamed during 2020. As a music journalist, I am very aware of how music can both create and imprison people’s identities. Especially for young people, Spotify playlist can become more important to you than living. During the Chopin scene, it is the performance which brought out particular features of the piece and revealed elements of the characters. For listeners today, music never varies itself, in our electronic, download, instant gratification culture. People learn to express themselves only as listeners, in a passive, self-referential, depreciating, personality-driven way. Radiohead fans might be seen as entirely different to those who like The Beatles.

Despite this, as a listener, I attempt to achieve the same thing as Eva and Charlotte do with Chopin. In these uncertain times, when I do not know where my future friends, dates, career, food, home, and hope will come from, I use music to tug me back into a better version of myself: more hopeful, sensitive, resilient, and responsible. Music is a comforting parent to return us to ourselves, while the political and social world drowns in a tragedy of indecision. While I’m interested in heritage, pop is my true obsession, especially ‘bad’ pop. This music infiltrates a lot of young listeners emotional realities, derivative and repetitive as they might seem. Drake, Harry, Taylor, and Ariana Grande. These are the Mozarts and Chopins of the 21st century, artists through which we measure our own cultural malaise.

Listening to Eva, it becomes apparent she is not so much playing the piano, as the piano, symbolic of her childhood, her mother, her history and relative misery, are playing her. There is a kind of self-sabotage, learned helplessness, infinite abandonment in her Chopin rendition; one which calls for Mother’s criticism, guilt, and occasional affection. I fancy on some level… Charlotte knows this. They are playing too and through one another, conversing through the piano keys, keeping each other in check, and being kept in check by the other.

And behind Charlotte’s structured, disciplined, highly controlled musical machinations, all I can see is the helplessness of a child, a depressing level of perfection, symptomatic of a woman who has grown old without ever truly growing up. And Chopin, awesome as it is, has become the enemy of her reality. Music is the reason she walked out on Eva, why Helena and suggestibly Leonard both got ill. There is the old cliché that music is the language of emotions, and no offence to Nietzsche or whichever Ivory tower philosopher said this first, but watching Autumn Sonata, and living in the century of Spotify, the opposite is apparent: music is the language of repression.

The question then becomes: Which comes first, the music or the misery? Did Charlotte and Eva play music because they were miserable? Or were they miserable because of the music they played? Why do young men who can’t get girlfriends listen to raging sexist Eminem? Some questions are near impossible to answer.

The same year as Autumn Sonata, 1978, the global smash hit musical Grease was released. If Charlotte described feeling as very far from sentimentality, then these two films are at war: they re-write our understanding of the difference between music and sound, meaning and noise.

To cut to the chase, Grease is cinematic noise which relies on contrived and derivative storylines, characters and the aesthetic of emotion, never the real thing. Of course, contrived isn’t so bad, contrived can be fun, contrived can be weirdly comforting in its shallowness and innocent pluck. But its songs, designed to teach us the obvious, ‘You’re the One I Want’ and ‘Hot Summer Night’ have less subtlety than the sexual innuendos through which this entire movie works. Contrived can keep us warm at night, but it can’t chase away the monsters, not in the same way Autumn Sonata can.

Just for the sake of being a feminist, here’s another reason why, as a woman with eyes, I’ve never liked Grease! Sandy ditches her blushing milk-maid outfits, donning hot leather pants, kitten heels, and poofy hair, to get Danny all hot and bothered. Lame! The girl sacrifices everything about herself, true high-school movie cliché style, in order to impress the guy who will probably wind up 20 years later with a beer belly working in a hardware store. In musicals, a lot like life, there are winners and there are losers. Feminism was Grease’s victim. So, who is the winner of Bergman’s musical drama?

Well, it’s not entirely obvious. The mother drives off with her friend Paul, asking him: “What would I do without you?” and then “What would you do without me?” Her sentimentality disguises a narcissism which has kept her prisoner her entire life. Eva walks through a graveyard speaking to her belated son: “We’ll never leave each other.”

Charlotte has led a life defined by selfishness, a flirtatiously cynical Call Me Irresponsible attitude. Eva is more obviously benevolent, but her experience of abandonment has mutated into aggressive helplessness and muted rage. When it comes to her mother, she is neither capable of love or indifference.

For all his pessimism, Bergman’s film imbues me with nothing but the strength of self-acceptance, and a positive mental attitude (PMA.) By virtue of being a tiny bit pedantic and incredibly pretentious, the only message Grease sold me was one rooted in self-denial: destroy who you are in order to get what you want, even when he wears terrible leather jackets. Bergman’s Eva, by the end of the psychologically arduous 1 hour & and 22 minutes, has completely reinvented herself Taylor Swift style; emerging with an independence, resilience, and strength of character, journeying from sorrow to hatred to mercy. Sandy’s only journey was to the Drive Through with Danny. It’s clear that, for a wise-woman like me, when it comes to film, feelings win over sentimentality, each and every time.

But when it comes to mothers, where do we do stand? It was said by some racist fortune cookie film, the 2003 version of Freaky Friday, that every girl’s worst nightmare is becoming her mother. It would be immature of me to discuss my own…Yet like every human once expelled from a uterus, we do tend to equate our parents with the problems of Climate Change and extortionate housing prices. Autumn Sonata feels so basically true in its exploration of the feud of young vs old, that at times, it strays close to being a female existential version of Disney’s The Lion King.

Our culture is almost obsessed with the mythic conception of Mother. From the recent resurrection in the press of Princess Diana, to women like the Queen, Meghan Markle, Kate Middleton, Michelle Obama, Oprah to the Kardashians, we both love and need strong women to take control of our world. But we labour under strangely polarised narratives: the devouring witch vs the fairy godmother. Mothers in the media are possibly the most hunted women of the 21st century. Imagine Autumn Sonata as a tabloid head-line: “Sicko Mummy smothers CRY BABY daughter!”

The past few years have seen us repeatedly let down by our nation’s fathers, incredibly disappointing men, suffocating under the weight of their own toxic masculinity. Trump, Boris Johnson, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. These men are players and producers of chaos, they run our lives like they are making a very bad movie, and have let us down time and time again. Fathers are no longer what this world needs. Perhaps, if Autumn Sonata can teach us anything in the same way Grease can’t, it is this: as people and as a nation it is finally time to learn to become our own mothers, to forgive ourselves and those around us, just as Eva and Charlotte must, because when the music goes silent, we are forced to play on.