Literature and Music - session two - Mozart and Beethoven

Rise of the Enlightenment after the Baroque: shared rule of the Bourgeoisie and the Aristocracy. For example, in England, Parliament (including the class of industrialists, business owners, professionals) and Monarchy.

What language can help to unify and streamline communication among these contending parties? The Classical era, partly homophonic music: melodies now within simpler harmonic structures.

Invention of Sonata form: themes in tonic & dominant, midpoint development, recapitulation. Invention of the new Opera as drama opening up conflict between individuals and society.

The new Classical Forms emphasize cohesion and integration of the whole as a communality: coherent, harmoniously ordered, testing and connecting the individual’s relationship to society.

Music – though supported by both the aristocratic court and the owning class – is by its wordless nature freed from the prosaic & didactic, from explicit aristocratic or bourgeois social representation.

Mozart (1756-1791)– Don Giovanni (c 1789)

Overture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemAKvtXL8w

Act 1/15 ‘Fin ch'han dal vino’ (Hvorostovski)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTT2RkrBsAs

 

 

Mozart’s gift is to cast a light of harmonious and beneficent acceptance on all he composes, no matter how dark or disordered.

 

Don Juan as a product of the Renaissance:

Tirso da Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla -the trickster of Seville and the stone statue

-a 1630 quasi-tragedy about the exploits & punishment of a Renaissance libertine.

Moliere’s play of Don Juan (1665) exposed the hypocrisy of the aristocracy.

Don Juan became the subject of a 1680 novel about a picaresque rogue.

Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte drew on many sources for his tragi-comic drama: collision between the vulnerable but finally triumphant “normal” world of couples, family, both aristocratic and middle-class mores about women and money

versus the figure of the unique individual sensibility, which can model and define the emotions and spirits of the community, investing them with new power and energy, inviting others to enter a new life, and yet which like Don Quixote can seem foolish and grotesque: this is the figure of the Romantic Genius, an intense force of energy and imagination, beyond good and evil, yet capable of inspiring.

 

Act 1, #10 Renee Fleming as Donna Anna, prelude to “Or sai chi l’onore”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp8UTemmlq8

At 2:10 – “Silently he approached me and tried to embrace me. I tried to free myself but he seized me all the harder. I screamed, but no one came! With one hand he tried to quiet me, and with the other he seized me so hard that I already thought myself lost….Finally my despair, my horror of the deed so strengthened me that by dint of twisting, turning and bending I freed myself of him.”

 

 

Act 2/2 ‘Ah taci, ingiusto core’ – Donna Elvira (Carlos Alvarez, Anna Antonacci)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IwaqfepCgc

Act 2/14Finale: Commendatore (Samuel Ramey, Kurt Moll)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHSPT6LRDx4

Ending of complete opera (Furtwanger, Salzburg, 1953) at 2:50:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPYjqz7nToY

Requiem – (Peter Schreier - Staatskapelle Dresden)

“Requiem Aeternam” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsyPhvrEzPU

           “Dies Irae” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARO7ZjsXSkE

           “Lacrimosa” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE2muDZksP4

Beethoven  (1770-1827) –

Music focused on developing the basic elements of the classical vocabulary - and also focused on projecting the power of the individual - in large upwelling passages displaying emotional force and zeroing in on play with elemental motifs.

Appassionata sonata – Barenboim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ak_7tTxZrk

Last sonata op. 111 – Trifonov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcFFxvG8pWg&t=6s

Symphony No. 9, finale (1824) – [text 1785: Ode to Joy, by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)]

Anja Harteros, Waltraud Meier, Peter Seiffert, René Pape, National Youth Choir of Great Britain, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim (Royal Albert Hall, July 2012) [7:30-12:00]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChygZLpJDNE&t=2s

Note on teaching intellectual backgrounds

Currently I am teaching a first semester course for seventeen first-year college students, and in a couple of weeks the students will be presenting their choices from a series of essays in a somewhat limited anthology Past to Present, essays which will be arranged chronologically. Many were written in the twentieth century and serve to present facets of the modern and postmodern periods in science, the social sciences, and the arts. However, the first half (or third) of the essay presentations will focus on works written in the previous twenty-five hundred years (actually, I start the course with the students discussing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" - to initiate our discussion of critical thinking and the nature of creativity). For the essay presentations in the middle section of the course, students can choose from a range of works: selections start with Herodotus, the Old Testament, and Hindu and Buddhist texts and move to passages from the New Testament and the Koran and then late medieval texts about Satan and Joan of Arc. Their choices can involve some Renaissance texts (Vasari’s Leonardo, Michelangelo, or some Pascal) and finally include some Enlightenment and nineteenth-century selections (Chesterfield, Paine, Malthus, Keats, Stendhal, Twain, Douglass, Whitman, and Darwin). The twentieth century essays' engagements of critical thinking and creativity range from work by Freud to the physicist Fred Hoyle or to Simone de Beauvoir, from Orwell to Thiong'o and Baldwin.

Establishing a chronological order for our readings and presentations seems to strengthen students’ intellectual background, and it can also clarify issues significant to the present. It’s a bit old-fashioned as an approach, but my hope is that it will not seem so, for the readings fill gaps, stimulate much critical thinking, and are self-selected.

The initial reading experience is to encounter some of the first human texts, some of the first written efforts to sustain thinking and imagining. These initial writings present Hebraic ideas about community and the godhead in the Old Testament and the Hellenic, classically humanistic values of reasoned inquiry and historical analysis in Herodotus. Then contrasting yet connected visions of religion and human culture are evident in "cross-cultural texts" - Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan. After the late Medieval period (with its religious orientation), there is the reemergence of classical humanism in the Renaissance, with its influential examples of creativity across the arts and sciences. In the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the Romanticism which followed in the early nineteenth century, there is the contention between reason and emotion in European culture, and out of this oscillation between objectivity and subjectivity emerged a range of achievements – from the assertion of individual rights to the growth of imperial power, from the transformative discoveries in the physical sciences to the revelations about the nature of human subjectivity from Wordsworth to Dostoyevsky.

Certain themes inevitably become clear in the students’ self-conducted survey. There is the power of text itself, of changing written modes of human thought and feeling (of course, it is said that we exist at the moment when a new digital mode is arriving). There are the recurrent patterns of difference among ways of seeing the world – objective and subjective, human-centered and religion-centered, individual and corporate or imperial – and blood continues to be shed over such conflicts. Finally, there is Vico’s insight, which one increasingly appreciates, into both the cycles of devastation which emerge from these conflicts as well as the on-going creative process producing human culture.