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It is really as if Tchaikovsky produced here a symptom in the early Lacanian (or Benjaminian) sense of a message that is coming from the future, of something for which the time when it was written was lacking the proper means to hear/understand it properly. (This is how modernism works: what were originally fragments of an organic Whole gets autonomized. The same thing occurs in Juan Miro’s paintings.) No wonder that this is the music used for the ballet sequence at the end of Torn Curtain—a kind of revenge of Herrmann whose score Hitchcock discarded, a scene in which the ‘repressed returns.’ (Did he chose this piece?)

The question which immediately pops up here is, of course, how (seriously) are we to take these claims—surely not too seriously, since, in this case, we would have to enter the New Age topic of synchronicity and mystical communion between spirits from different epochs who are able to converse with each other in an eternal present. Nonetheless, the idea of a ‘plagiarism by anticipation’ is not to be dismissed as a mere provocation; even less does it imply any kind of a hidden teleology in which the present points towards a future determined in advance. On the contrary, this idea is profoundly anti-teleological and materialist—all we have to do is to introduce the key concept of retroactivity.

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