By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004; Page C01

The word "unique" has been so debased by overuse that some publications have all but forbidden it from their pages. Unique means nothing more nor less than "one of a kind" -- a description that either encompasses so much as to be virtually meaningless (every person, each snowflake is unique on some level) or narrows the spectrum to a point where it becomes impossible to use the word with any assurance (how do you know there has never been a composition for 72 tubas, barking dog and soprano before?).

Still, here are 10 works of art that have a pretty good claim on the dread epithet. They don't have much more than that in common. Some are complex and vastly ambitious, others stark, simple, almost primal. A few have had an influence, usually baleful, on later artists; most, in their sheer, flinty strangeness, have remained monoliths, as mysterious in their way as Stonehenge.

If there is any tie that binds, it is their un-repeatability. It is impossible to imagine a sequel to any of them; they create new forms, live out their lives and then break their own molds. (The same cannot be said of some of the most hallowed masterpieces -- Shakespeare's plays, Bach's choral music, Mozart's symphonies, Chaplin's comedies -- all of which fit gloriously into one continuum or another.) Indeed, it has been argued that the very uniqueness of some of the works on this list is a sign of sterility, that the avenues of expression they seemed to open have usually proven to be cul-de-sacs. Still, if you want these particular goods, there's only one place to get them.

Robert Burton: "The Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621). If you were to cross the essays of Montaigne with the case studies of Sigmund Freud, you might come up with something like "The Anatomy of Melancholy." What is this crazy book, exactly? Not a novel, certainly, or a history, or quite an autobiography (although one can certainly say, along with Whitman, that "who touches this, touches a man"). Burton himself called the "Anatomy" a "rhapsody of rags gathered from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out," which is both colorful and characteristic.

"The Anatomy of Melancholy" began as a compendium of quotations, observations and speculations on what we now call depression. But, as the critic Nicholas Lezard has observed, the book ended up including "not just Burton's thoughts on the subject of melancholy, but the thoughts of everyone who had ever thought about it or about other things, whether that be goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, drink, kissing, jealousy or scholarship."

In truth, "The Anatomy of Melancholy" is about whatever crossed Burton's mind, which -- since it was an obsessive, capacious and remarkably erudite mind -- was just about everything. The first edition had about 350,000 words, but the author kept adding to it throughout his life and it finally came in at just about half a million. Don't try to read the "Anatomy" straight through: Instead, take the time to make friends with it -- with its passions, prejudices and wildly ornate style -- and then return to it again and again, as people have for centuries.

Ludwig van Beethoven: "Grosse Fuge" (1826). Beethoven originally composed this wild, unfettered and unprecedented creation as the finale for his String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130. But his publisher objected: He thought it too difficult and overwhelming to conclude what was already an unusually long composition. And so, after some additional financial compensation and an agreement that the "Grosse Fuge" would be published separately, Beethoven complied and wrote a more traditional finale, which would turn out to be the last work he completed.

The wisdom of that decision continues to be the subject of debate. Maynard Solomon, one of Beethoven's best biographers, states the argument succinctly: "The Grosse Fuge has struck many sensitive musicians, including its first hearers, as an unsatisfactory close to the quartet. So it is possible that Beethoven too came to feel that the Fugue was too powerful, too strange to bring the Quartet to an appropriate close. . . . Many have felt that it overshadows -- even annihilates -- the earlier movements."

And so, although Beethoven's revised finale still concludes most performances of the B-flat Quartet, its unruly predecessor has been recognized for its own merits. Perhaps Igor Stravinsky put it best when he called the work "this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever." Almost two centuries after it was composed, it remains as grating, grueling, aggressive and magnificent a statement as the romantic repertory has to offer. You will never grow used to it.

Alessandro Moreschi: "The Last Castrato" (1902-1904). For some 300 years, beginning in the mid-16th century and continuing right up until Italy's conquest of the Papal States in 1870, boys on the verge of puberty were routinely castrated to keep their soprano voices intact for future use. Because women had been formally banned from the stage by the order of Pope Sixtus V, composers such as Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck and Mozart all wrote prominent roles for castrati. The best-known of these singers were celebrated indeed. "It is estimated that up to 4,000 boys were mutilated annually by the wishes of poverty-stricken parents, who thought they had a sweet singer in the family who could make the family fortunes," according to a study by Elsa Scammell.

By the time Alessandro Moreschi was born in 1858, the practice was dying out quickly. And yet he had a full and varied career, entering the Sistine Chapel Choir in 1883, becoming its conductor in 1898, singing in universities, drawing rooms and clubs and -- in 1902 and 1904 -- making the sole recordings bequeathed to us by any castrato.

The 17 selections include pieces by Mozart, Rossini, Palestrina and Tosti, as well as works by less distinguished "house" composers for the Vatican, and Moreschi is heard both in solo performance and with the Sistine Chapel Choir (in which he sticks out like a sore something-or-other). He sings with a plaintive, eerily haunting bleat, with some brilliant high notes and an occasional sob. The sound, by the way, is not at all feminine. Rather, Moreschi sounds like what he was -- a damaged, middle-aged boy soprano, one of the saddest things in the world.

D.W. Griffith: "Intolerance" (1916). "Intolerance" must be ranked among those admirable, original creations that, in the final analysis, simply don't work very well. Longer and more expensive than any preceding film, "Intolerance" attempted to tell simultaneously four stories -- the fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the Huguenots in France in 1572, and a gritty fiction of crime and punishment in an early-20th-century American city. Director Griffith crosscuts from story to story, century to century (the late curator and historian Iris Barry dubbed this "the only film fugue") in an attempt to trace a vague notion of intolerance through the ages. The sole link among the four is a dim, mysterious, recurring shot of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, an apparent reference to the director's beloved Walt Whitman and his poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."

It is a moot question whether Griffith would have been able to make such narrative disjunction work even if the four stories were equally developed. In any event, they are not. The Crucifixion story, by far the shortest of the four, is presented in a series of polite, distanced tableaux. The French massacre is little more than blood 'n' guts, with the sketchiest of love interests tacked on. This leaves the Babylonian and the modern stories, the one a spectacle of legendary proportions, the other a claustrophobic, Dreiser-like study of human beings trapped by social and economic forces. But the moment one gets interested, the scene shifts; any purely emotional argument these stories might have made is lost in a flashing shuffle.

The effect is arresting but exhausting, and ultimately impossible for most viewers to assimilate. "Intolerance" lost a fortune; nobody tried to make a film like it again, probably for good reason. But there are more than enough magnificent sequences to make a viewing worthwhile.

James Joyce: "Ulysses" (1922). Joyce's second novel is the determinedly subjective summary of a single day in Dublin (June 16, 1904). A motley of townspeople talk, eat, drink, quarrel, sing songs, reminisce, invent private jokes, go to the bathroom and make love, not necessarily in that -- or any -- order. There is not much of a plot and, by design, very little "happens" to the characters; the novel embraces and exalts the messiness of life itself.

In the past, authors had aspired to use ordinary language to say extraordinary things; Joyce ingeniously turned that maxim on its head. "Ulysses" is filled with glorious wordplay, and although deeply rooted in the classics (particularly "The Odyssey"), it is the definitive modernist novel, as Joyce invents words, explodes paragraphs, explores new manners of narrative and concludes with a rapt, 40-page erotic reverie couched in a single open-ended sentence.

"Ulysses" was recognized immediately as a masterpiece and has been extraordinarily influential from the time it was published. But it resists imitation. The author himself spent much of the rest of his life working on what would have seemed a natural "follow-up." This was "Finnegans Wake" (1939), a timeless exploration of sleep and dreams that took many of the techniques evolved in "Ulysses" several steps further and remains impenetrable to all but the most fervent Joycean.

John Cage: "4' 33" " (1952). Cage (1912-1992) was one of the most whimsical and venturesome of American composers. He wrote pieces for everything from toy piano to computer, and he was the inventor of the "prepared piano" -- a standard-issue piano that was completely transformed by the introduction of nuts, bolts, screws, erasers, rubber bands and other material between its strings, until it sounded like a percussion orchestra. But Cage's most famous composition -- "4' 33" " -- required no instruments whatsoever. The performer was simply instructed to sit silently onstage for the duration of the piece -- 4 minutes and 33 seconds -- while the audience listened to whatever was taking place around it.

Some thought this a big joke (17 years later, when John Lennon included two minutes of silence on one of his experimental records, one critic called the Cage work "a much better piece"). But Cage was making a number of points with "4' 33." " Among other things, he was (a) suggesting that a work of music could be anything at all, even nothing; (b) paying homage to silence, an element usually taken for granted in the musical hierarchy; (c) offering an oblique comment on the highly organized, fantastically complicated music then fashionable in Europe; and (d) indulging his own puckish sense of humor and having fun with his shocked audience.

But what actually happens in the piece? Well, nothing, of course -- nothing and everything.

Alain Resnais: "Last Year at Marienbad" (1962). The early criticism of this staggeringly original work makes for amusing reading. Nobody got it: Viewers seemed to be expecting some tidy, Hitchcock-like resolution of perceived suspense (he did shoot at her, didn't he?) or searching for wrenching spiritual revelations à la Ingmar Bergman. And these are qualities that this smart, cold, exsanguinated exercise in cinematic logic will never offer up, not if you watch it a thousand times.

Instead, Resnais gave us film as music -- formal, reiterative and forever abstract. Follow it as you would a string quartet, a ballet or a mysteriously animated painting that changes ever so slightly as you watch; attempts to discern a plot or make an emotional connection with the characters are doomed to failure. By design, the characters have no more "humanity" than figures on a chessboard, variables in an equation or dummies in a store window (the last of which they often resemble -- half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt to "Marienbad"). Sentences, motifs and whole scenes are repeated obsessively, rather in the same way Liszt and Grieg bring back their best tunes in their finales.

Many viewers hate "Marienbad" (it is regularly named both one of the best and one of the worst films ever made) and even some admirers describe it as pretentious. But is it really pretentious or just different? Must every film tell a story and thrill the heart? Or is there room for one weird masterpiece that is concerned with little more than moment-to-moment visual sumptuousness, the intrinsic beauty of French phonemes lovingly caressed, and the seductive stasis of a dream?

Alvin Lucier: "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1970). One afternoon, composer Lucier sat in his Connecticut living room, read a halting speech into one tape recorder, then played that recording back into another tape recorder, then played that dub back into yet another tape recorder, and repeated the process until there were 32 versions of the speech. You know what happens when you make a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy? Well, imagine continuing the process until all semblance of the original was distorted beyond recognition.

That's pretty much the process of "I Am Sitting in a Room": Eventually, natural overtones obscure the words, and the speech turns into a sort of shadow music. What will initially seem dull and arty evolves into an eerie and arrestingly beautiful experience. Words become music, sound becomes shimmer, and a natural process of acoustics is demonstrated in the most haunting and elegant manner, as Lucier, on tape, describes exactly what is happening.

Thomas Pynchon: "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973). On one level, the "story" of this vast novel can be told in a single sentence: a missile -- a genuine, verifiable WMD -- is fired on the first page and comes down on the last. True enough, but one might as well call "Moby-Dick" a fish story. At 760 pages, "Gravity's Rainbow" is both grim and hilarious, with myriad tangled plots and subplots that all conclude in mid-sentence as the Doomsday missile falls and the convoluted little lives, dreams and industries of its 300-odd characters and (not so incidentally) the lives of the narrator and the reader as well are obliterated.

Although the action is mostly set in the days immediately after World War II, Pynchon's sensibilities are rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s, with an ingrained anti-authoritarianism that spills over into his approach to language. The characters are likely to blithely abandon fictional "reality" and suddenly break into saccharine foxtrots or bizarre operatic duets. "Gravity's Rainbow" includes, among other incongruities, characters with names like Geli Tripping, Major Marvy, Pirate Prentice and Jessica Swanlake; an anthropomorphized light bulb that refuses to burn out; a fat little boy desperately searching for his lost lemming, Ursula; a cameo appearance by Mickey Rooney; and the tale of a lengthy dive through the sewers of Boston by the novel's ostensible "hero," Tyrone Slothrop, set on recovering his mouth harp, which was lost in the toilet of a Roxbury jazz club.

Maya Lin: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982). There it is, set off to one side of the Lincoln Memorial, the darkest shadow on the Mall. As you descend into the memorial and come face to face with the names of more than 58,000 men and women who either died in the Vietnam conflict or are officially listed as missing in action, the enormity of the loss becomes overpowering. The effect is only heightened by the reactions of fellow spectators -- whether middle-aged buddies looking for an absent friend or shushed and puzzled children who have never before seen grown-ups cry.

Designed by a young woman who was then a senior at Yale University, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was controversial from the start. It has next to nothing to do with most war memorials of the past. It is made from black granite, instead of white marble. It does not rise from the earth but descends into it. It offers no comfortable religious sentiments, no exaltations of honor and duty and sacrifice, nothing but names and names and names.

Almost alone among public statuary, it does not try to tell us what to think about its subject: Instead, we are permitted to reflect at liberty. This corner of the Mall is among the most solemn spots on the planet and, unlike the few other places that evoke a similar horror and poignancy, it is half a world away from that which it commemorates.