Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 9 - The Pursuit of Happiness - full transcript
The Age of Classical Music (18th Century of Northern Europe).
(# HANDEL: Concerti Grossi, Op 3)
The German-speaking countries
have once more become articulate.
For over a century, the disorderly
aftermath of the Reformation,
followed by the dreary,
interminable horrors of the 30 Years' War,
had kept them from playing a part
in the history of civilisation.
Then peace, stability,
the natural strength of the land,
and a peculiar social organisation
allowed them to add
to the sum of European experience
two shining achievements,
one in music,
the other in architecture.
Of course, the music is
far more important to us.
The writing and painting
of the 18th century
make one think that the emotional life
had somehow dried up.
Of course, it hadn't.
It had been transferred to music.
From Bach to Mozart,
music expressed
the deepest thoughts
and feelings of the time,
just as painting had done
in the early 16th century.
This programme
is primarily about music.
And some of the qualities
of 18th-century music -
its melodious flow,
its complex symmetry,
its decorative invention -
are reflected in its architecture.
It's only quite recently
that people have noticed
what a brilliant, inventive and altogether
enchanting style of architecture
flourished for almost 50 years
in 18th-century Germany and Austria.
Serious-minded historians
used to call it shallow or corrupt.
Well, the founders of
the American Constitution,
who were far from frivolous,
thought fit to mention
the pursuit of happiness
as a proper aim for mankind.
And if ever this aim
has been given visible form,
it's in Rococo architecture -
the pursuit of happiness
and the pursuit of love.
But before we plunge into
the buoyant sea of Rococo,
I must say a word about
the austere ideal that preceded it -
classicism.
For 60 years,
France had dominated Europe,
and this had meant a rigidly centralised
authoritarian government
and a classic style.
French classicism
produced magnificent architecture.
This is the architecture of
a great metropolitan culture,
and it is expressive of an ideal.
Not an ideal that appeals to me,
but an ideal nonetheless -
grandeur achieved
through the authoritarian state.
I find that this
French classical architecture
has a certain inhumanity.
It was the work, not of craftsmen,
but of wonderfully gifted civil servants.
But because it reflects so clearly
a grand, comprehensive system,
it is done with superb conviction.
French classicism
was eminently not exportable,
but the high Baroque of Rome,
especially that of Borromini,
was exactly what
the north of Europe needed,
for a variety of reasons.
For one thing,
it was elastic and adaptable.
So the architectural language
with which northern Europe
became articulate in the 18th century
was that of Borromini, the second
great master of Italian Baroque.
Borromini came from
a land of stone-carvers,
the Italian lakes that form
a boundary with Switzerland.
His style could fit into the craftsman
tradition of the Germanic north,
a tradition serving a social order
that was absolutely the reverse
of the centralised bureaucracy
of France.
It's true, of course,
many of the German princes thought
they'd like to imitate Versailles,
but the formative element
in German art and music didn't lie there,
but in the multiplicity of regions
and towns and abbeys,
all competing for their architects
and choirmasters,
but also relying on the talents of
their local organists and plasterers.
The creators of the German Baroque -
the Assams, the Zimmermanns -
were families of craftsmen -
Zimmermann is the German
for carpenter.
The finest buildings we shall look at
are not palaces,
but local pilgrimage churches
deep in the country,
like the Vierzehnheiligen
behind me - the "14 saints".
And, come to think of it, the Bachs
were a family of local musical craftsmen,
out of which there suddenly emerged
one of the great geniuses of
Western Europe, Johann Sebastian.
- (# JS BACH: St Matthew Passion)
- # Da sie ihn aber gekreuziget hatten,
# Teilten sie seine Kleider
und wurfen das Los darum,
# Auf daß erfiillet würde,
das gesagt ist durch den Propheten:
# Sie haben meine Kleider
unter sich geteilet,
# Und über mein Gewand haben sie
das Los geworfen
# Und sie saßen allda und hüteten sein. #
The sound of Bach's music reminds me
of a curious fact
that people don't always remember
when they talk about the 18th century -
that the great art of the time
was religious art.
The thought was anti-religious,
the way of life ostentatiously profane.
We are right to call the first half of
the 18th century "the Age of Reason".
But in the arts, what did this
emancipated rationalism produce?
One adorable painter - Watteau.
Some nice domestic architecture.
Some pretty furniture.
But nothing to set beside
the Matthew Passion
or the pilgrimage churches and abbeys
of Bavaria and Franconia.
(# JS BACH: St Matthew Passion)
- # Die aber vorübergingen, lästerten ihn
# Und schüttelten ihre Köpfe
und sprachen:
CHORUS:
# Der du den Tempel Gottes zerbrichst... #
(VOICES MERGE
AS THEY HARMONISE IN THE ROUND)
MALE SOLOIST: # Desgleichen auch die
Hohenpriester spotteten sein
# Samt den Schriftgelehrten
und Ältesten und sprachen:
CHORUS: # Andern hat er geholfen
und kann sich selber nicht helfen.
# Ist er der König Israel,
IN ROUND: # So steige er nun vom Kreuz,
so wollen wir ihm glauben.
# Er hat Gott vertrauet
# Der erlöse ihn nun, lüstet's ihn;
denn er hat gesagt:
# Ich bin Gottes Sohn. #
But there was another
musical tradition in Germany
that went back to the Reformation.
Luther had been a fine musician.
He wrote music and sang with,
surprisingly enough, a sweet tenor voice.
And although the Lutheran reform
prohibited many of the arts
that civilised our impulses,
it encouraged church music.
In small Dutch and German towns,
the choir and the organ
became the only means
through which men could enter
the world of spiritualised emotion.
This organ
in the great church at Haarlem
was played on by Handel,
and by Mozart at the age of ten.
When the Calvinists,
in their still more resolute purification
of the Christian rite,
prohibited organs, and destroyed them,
they caused more distress
than had ever been caused
by the destruction of images.
Organs have played a variable role
in European civilisation -
in the 19th century, they were symbols of
newly won affluence, like billiard tables.
But in the 17th and 18th centuries,
they were expressions of municipal pride
and independence.
They were the work
of the best local craftsmen,
and organists were respected
members of the community.
(# BUXTEHUDE: Toccata and Fugue in F)
Bourgeois democracy,
which had provided a background
to Dutch painting of the 17th century,
became partly responsible
for German music.
And it was a society
more earnest and more participating
than the Dutch connoisseurs had been.
This provincial society
was the background of Bach.
His universal genius
rose out of the high plateau
of competitive musical life
in the Protestant cities
of northern Germany.
One could even say
that it rose out of a family
that had been professional musicians
for 100 years,
so that in certain districts
the very word "Bach” meant a musician.
And his life was that of a conscientious,
somewhat obstinate,
provincial organist and choirmaster.
But he was universal.
A great musical critic said of him,
"He is the spectator of
all musical time and existence,
"to whom it is not
of the smallest importance
"whether a thing be new or old,
so long as it is true.”
And we once more find
that we can illustrate Bach's music
by contemporary building.
This church behind me, the pilgrimage
church of the Vierzehnheiligen,
was built by an architect who was
only two years younger than Bach.
He was called Balthasar Neumann,
and although his name isn't well known
in the English-speaking world,
I think he was certainly one of the
greatest architects of the 18th century.
Unlike the other builders
of German Baroque,
he was not primarily a carver
or plasterer, but an engineer.
He made his name as a master of
town planning and fortifications.
And inside his buildings,
just as when we are listening to Bach,
we are conscious of a complex plan
worked out like the most intricate
mathematical problem.
And, when occasion demanded it, he made
use of ornaments as lavish and fanciful
as that of the most ebullient
Bavarian plasterer.
(# )JS BACH: Christmas Oratorio)
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Rühmet was heute der Höchste getan!
# Lasset das Zagen
# Lasset das Zagen. .. #
(VOICES MERGE
AS THEY HARMONISE IN THE ROUND)
The sheer happiness,
the almost childlike joy
of Bach's "Christmas Oratorio"
is made visible by all these happy cherubs
and benevolent saints.
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Rühmet was heute der Höchste getan!
# Lasset das Zagen... #
(VOICES MERGE
AS THEY HARMONISE IN THE ROUND)
Balthasar Neumann was fortunate
in that the painted decorations
of his finest interiors
are not the work of amiable
local ceiling painters
but of the greatest decorator of the age,
the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo.
Here's his masterpiece,
the ceiling of the staircase
in the Bishop's Palace at Wurzburg,
known as the Residenz.
And there, in fact, in the corner,
is Tiepolo's self-portrait -
the man with the yellow scarf -
with his son, Giandomenico,
also a very good painter,
looking over his shoulder.
Then, as you move along to the middle,
here, this very grand
military-looking man
is the architect himself,
Balthasar Neumann,
looking the great master
of fortifications.
The Residenz doesn't seem quite
our idea of a bishop's residence,
being about three times the size
of Buckingham Palace,
and incomparably more splendid.
And one can't help speculating
on the tithes and taxes
that the peasants of Franconia had to pay
in order that their episcopal master
should do himself so well.
But one must admit that many of these
rulers of small German principalities -
dukes, electors, bishops, or whatever -
were, in fact, remarkably cultivated
and intelligent men.
Their competitive ambitions
benefited architecture and music
in a way that the democratic obscurity
of the Hanoverians in England did not.
The Schönborn family, one of whom was
responsible for the Residenz at Würzburg,
were really great patrons,
whose names should be remembered
with the Medici.
I felt some scruples in comparing
the music of Bach with Baroque interiors.
No such hesitations prevent me
from invoking, on this splendid staircase,
the name of George Frideric Handel.
You know, great men have a curious way
of appearing in complementary pairs.
This has happened so often in history,
but I don't think
it can have been invented
by some symmetrically-minded historian,
but must represent some need
to keep human faculties in balance.
However that may be, there's no doubt
that the two great musicians
of the early 18th century,
Bach and Handel,
fall into this pattern of contrasting
and complementary personalities.
They were born in the same year, 1685,
they both went blind
from copying musical scores,
and both were operated on,
unsuccessfully, by the same surgeon.
But otherwise, they were opposites.
In contrast to Bach's
timeless universality,
Handel was completely of his age.
Instead of Bach's frugal,
industrious career
as an organist, with numerous children,
Handel made and lost several fortunes
as an impresario.
This amiable statue of him was erected
by the grateful proprietors
of an amusement park, Vauxhall,
in which his music
had been one of the attractions.
There he sits in unbuttoned mood,
one shoe off and one shoe on,
not caring how much
he snitched other people's music
as long as he produced
something effective.
In his youth he must have been charming,
because when he went to Rome
as an unknown young virtuoso,
he was immediately taken up by society,
and cardinals wrote libretti
for him to set to music.
And there are remains
of remarkable good looks in this head.
Later in life,
when Handel had settled in England,
and entered the world
of operatic production,
he became less anxious to please,
and is traditionally said to have held
one of his leading ladies
out of the window
and threatened to drop her
if she didn't sing in tune.
He remained faithful throughout his life
to the Italian Baroque style.
In consequence, his music goes well
with the decorations of Tiepolo,
which even have the pseudo-romantic
subjects of his operas.
One can look with pleasure
at the marvellous Tiepolo ceiling
on the staircase at Würzburg
with Handel's music in one's ears.
(# HANDEL: Alcina)
# Questo è il cielo di contenti
# Questo è lil centro del goder
# Del goder
# Del goder
# Qui è I'Eliso dè viventi
# Qui I 'eroi forma il placer
# Qui l'eroi forma il placer
# Il piacer
# Il piacer
# Il piacer, il piacer
# Questo è il cielo di contenti
# Questo è il cielo di contenti
# Questo è il centro del goder
# Del goder
# Del goder... #
The extraordinary thing is
that this composer
of flowing, florid airs
and rousing choruses,
when he turned from opera to oratorio -
which was a kind of sacred opera -
wrote great religious music.
Saul, Samson,
Israel In Egypt
not only contain wonderful melodic
and polyphonic inventions,
but show an understanding of
the depths of the human spirit.
As for the Messiah, it's like
Michelangelo's Creation Of Adam,
one of those rare works
that appeal immediately to everyone,
and yet it is, indisputably,
a masterpiece of the highest order.
(HANDEL: Messiah)
# I know that my Redeemer liveth
# And though worms destroy this body
# Yet in my flesh
# Shall I see God
# Yet in my flesh
# Shall I see God
# Shall I see God
# I know that
# My Redeemer liveth... #
Yes, however often I hear it,
it brings tears to my eyes.
In passages like that,
Handel is beyond classification.
Still, one may reasonably
call him a Baroque composer.
Now, Baroque first came into being
as religious architecture,
and expressed the emotional aspirations
of the Catholic Church.
Rococo was to some extent
a Parisian invention
and provocatively secular.
It was, superficially at any rate,
a reaction against
the heavy classicism of Versailles.
Instead of the static orders of antiquity,
it drew inspiration
from natural objects in which the line
wandered freely, without symmetry -
shells, flowers, seaweed, vines,
especially if they wandered
in a double curve.
Rococo was a reaction
against the academic style,
but it wasn't negative.
It represented a real gain in sensibility.
It achieved a new freedom of association
and captured new
and more delicate shades of feeling.
All this is expressed through
the work of one exquisite artist,
Watteau.
He was born in 1684,
the year before Bach and Handel,
in the Flemish town of Valenciennes,
and he derived his technique from Rubens.
But, instead of a hearty
Flemish acceptance of life,
Watteau, who was a consumptive,
discovered something in himself
that had hardly ever seen in art before -
a feeling of the transitoriness
and thus the seriousness of pleasure.
He had brilliant gifts.
He could draw with the style and precision
of a Renaissance artist,
and he used his skill
to record his rapture
at the sight of beautiful girls.
What dreams of beauty they are!
How happy all these
exquisite people should be!
But..."In the very temple of Delight
"Veil'd Melancholy hath her sovran shrine
"Though seen of none
save him whose strenuous tongue
"Can burst Joy's grape
against his palate fine."
No-one had a finer palate than Watteau.
He can taste every delicate flavour
in this open-air dance,
where glances suddenly meet.
And he's depicted himself
not as one of the dancers,
but as the bagpipe player,
animating the scene with his humble,
melancholy instrument.
He was, his friend Caylus said,
"Tender, and perhaps
something of a shepherd.”
And in this elegant company
that he watched so discerningly,
he remained the odd man out -
and Grilles, the simpleton
whose tall, white figure
rises in isolation
from his fellow comedians,
is a sort of idealised self-portrait -
tender, simple
and yet capable of love
and of delicate intuitions.
Watteau came on the scene at an incredibly
early date in the 18th century.
His masterpiece The Departure from Cythera
was painted in 1712,
when Louis XIV was still alive,
and yet it has the lightness
and sharpness of a Mozart opera.
Also, the sense of human drama.
The new sensibility,
of which Watteau was the prophet,
showed itself most of all
in a more delicate understanding
of the relations between
men and women - sentiment.
The word's got into trouble, as words do,
but it was, in its day, a civilising word.
Sterne, in his Sentimental Journey,
that somewhat discredited work
of Rococo prose,
tells a fable about a town of Abdera,
which was the vilest town in all Thrace.
"What with poisons,
conspiracies and assassinations -
"libels, pasquinades and tumults,
"there was no going there by day -
'twas worse by night.”
Till, hearing a play of Euripides,
the people were struck
by a speech of Perseus -
"'0 Cupid, prince of gods and men.
"Every man almost spoke
pure iambics next day
"and talked of nothing but Perseus
his pathetic address -
"'0 Cupid, prince of Gods and men!
"Every street in Abdera, in every house -
'O Cupid! Cupid!
"In every mouth, like the natural notes
of some sweet melody
"which drop from it
whether it will or no -
"nothing but 'Cupid! Cupid!
Prince of Gods and men.
"The fire caught, and the whole city,
like the heart of one man,
"opened itself to Love.
"No pharmacologist
could sell one grain of hellebore -
"not a single armourer had a heart
to forge one instrument of death.
"Friendship and Virtue met together
and kissed each other in the street.
"The golden age returned
and hung o'er the town of Abdera."
Next to love, Watteau
cared most about music,
for which, his friends tell us,
he had a most delicate ear.
Nearly all his scenes
are enacted to the sound of music.
In this he shows himself as part of
a tradition going back to the Venetians,
of whom Pater said, they painted,
"The musical intervals of our existence
"when life itself is conceived
as a kind of listening."
In a Watteau,
we are in the world of poetry,
not only no account of
the grace of the figures,
but because the facts have been translated
into the most exquisite paint.
Watteau's colour
has a shimmering, iridescent quality,
which makes one think immediately
of musical analogies.
Watteau died in 1721,
the same age as Raphael - 37.
And by that date, the Rococo style
was just beginning to affect
decoration and architecture.
Ten years later,
it had spread all over Europe,
producing a style as international
as the early 15th-century Gothic.
Rococo even spread to England,
although the native good sense
of a fox-hunting society
prevented its more extravagant flights.
I suppose that most of the plaster work,
like most of the opera singing,
was done by foreigners,
but a group of English craftsmen
designed and executed
the decorations in this music room
from Norfolk House,
which is only a little less elegant
than its Parisian counterpart.
It's extraordinary
how a true international style
controls the shape of everything.
It's an absolute compulsion
which overrides convenience
or what we used to call functionalism.
It makes everything
dance to the same tune.
(# HAYDN: Allegro Moderato, Op 77)
Walter Pater said that all art
aspired to the condition of music.
I don't suppose he thought of extending
this famous dictum to applied art.
But it is true of
the finest Rococo design.
The rhythms, the assonances,
the texture, have the effect of music,
and are echoed in the music
of the next 50 years.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
Is that Haydn or Mozart?
Well, I happen to know that it's Haydn,
but one can't always be sure.
And yet, the two great musicians
of the second half of the 18th century
were very different characters,
and the difference
comes through in their music.
Haydn, who was 20 years older than Mozart,
was born in Croatia,
the son of a wheelwright,
and was fundamentally a peaceful,
spacious, soil-conscious man.
He said that he wrote his music
in order that, "The weary and worn,
or the men burdened with affairs,
"might enjoy a few minutes
of solace and refreshment."”
And I think of this saying
as I approach the Bavarian
Pilgrimage Church of Wies.
It belongs to the countryside.
In fact, from a distance it might
almost be the hall of a rustic manor.
But enter it
and the most incredible richness
appears before your eyes.
In these Rococo churches,
the faithful are persuaded
not by fear, but by joy.
They are a foretaste of paradise,
sometimes, I admit, rather more like
the Mohammedan paradise of the senses
than the disembodied
paradise of Christianity.
"0 Cupid! Cupid!
Prince of gods and men."
Well, it's always been difficult,
even for the saints,
to represent spiritual love
without having recourse to
the symbols of physical love.
Creation is the most mysterious
of all God's acts.
And it is Haydn's Creation
that comes to my mind
as I contemplate the rustic delights
of the Brothers Zimmermann.
(# HAYDN: Von deiner Güt
from The Creation)
It's curious that in the present day
we should have made
such a cult of Rococo music
when the Rococo style as a whole
runs so strongly counter
to our convictions.
You see, many of the most beautiful
Rococo buildings of the 18th century
were built simply to give pleasure
by people who believed
that pleasure was important
and worth taking trouble about
and could be given
some of the quality of art.
And we? We managed to destroy
a good many of them during the war,
including the palace
of Sanssouci at Potsdam,
and the Zwinger at Dresden.
As I've said, it may be difficult
to define civilisation,
but it isn't so difficult
to recognise barbarism.
But by chance,
we didn't hit the pleasure pavilions
at Nymphenburg,
which is a suburb of Munich.
Munich itself we pretty well laid flat.
They were built for
the Elector Max Emanuel
by his court dwarf named Cuvilliés,
who happened to be an architect of genius.
Despite his French name,
he came from Flanders.
This, behind me, is the most famous
of them, I suppose - the Amalienburg.
The exterior is quite simple,
the interior a riot, or rather a ballet,
of beautifully designed ornament.
(# MOZART: String Quartet in G Minor)
These rooms are the ultimate
in Rococo decoration,
and one might say
that they bridge the gap
between Watteau and Mozart.
And yet, to pronounce the name
of Mozart in the Amalienburg
is dangerous, because it gives
colour - very pretty colour -
to the notion that Mozart
was merely a Rococo composer.
50 years ago, this was what
most people thought about him,
the notion supported by
horrible little plaster busts,
which made him look
a perfect 18th-century dummy.
I bought one of these busts
when I was at school,
but when I first heard
the G Minor Quartet,
I realised that it couldn't possibly
have been written
by the smooth, white character
on my mantelpiece
and I threw the bust
into the wastepaper basket.
I afterwards discovered
the portrait by Lange,
which, although no masterpiece, does
convey the single-mindedness of genius.
Of course, a lot of Mozart's music
is in the current 18th-century style.
He was so much at home
in this golden age of music,
so completely master of its forms
that he didn't feel it necessary
to destroy them.
Indeed, he loved the clarity and the
precision and the mathematical perfections
of the late 18th-century style.
I love the story of Mozart
sitting at table,
absent-mindedly folding and refolding
and refolding his napkin
into more and more elaborate patterns
as fresh musical ideas
passed through his mind.
But of course, this formal perfection
was used to express two characteristics
which were very far
from the Rococo style.
One of them was that peculiar
kind of melancholy,
a melancholy amounting almost to panic,
which so often haunts
the isolation of genius.
And Mozart felt it quite young.
And the other characteristic
was almost the opposite -
a passionate interest in human beings
and in the drama of human relationships.
How often, in Mozart's orchestral pieces,
concertos, quartets, symphonies,
we find ourselves participating
in a drama or dialogue.
Of course, this feeling reaches
its natural conclusion in opera.
# Notte e giorno faticar
# Per chi outta sa gradir
# Piova e vento sopportar
# Mangiar male e mal dormir... #
Opera, next to Gothic architecture,
ls one of the oddest inventions
of Western man.
It couldn't have been foreseen
by any logical process.
Dr Johnson's much-quoted saying, which
as far as I can make out. he never said -
"an extravagant and irrational
entertainment” - is perfectly correct,
and at first it seems surprising
that it should have been brought
to perfection in the Age of Reason.
But just as the greatest art of
the early 18th century was religious art,
so the greatest artistic creation
of the Rococo is completely irrational.
(# MOZART: Don Giovanni)
Of course, opera had been invented
in the 17th century
and made into a form of art by
the prophetic genius of Monteverdi.
It came to the North from Catholic Italy
and it flourished in the Catholic
capitals - Vienna, Munich, Prague.
Indignant Protestants used to say that
Rococo churches were like opera houses.
Quite true,
only it was the other way round.
As you can see,
this enchanting opera house in Munich,
built by the dwarf architect Cuvilliés,
is exactly like a Rococo church.
One could almost say that opera houses
came in when churches went out.
And they expressed so completely
the views of this new, profane religion
that for 100 years
all opera houses continued to be built
in Rococo style long after that style
had gone out of fashion.
And in Catholic countries,
not only in Europe, but in South America,
were often the best
and largest buildings in the town.
(# MOZART: Don Giovanni)
As Don Giovanni assaults Donna Anna,
her father, the Commendatore,
comes down the stairs.
What on earth has given opera its prestige
in Western civilisation?
A prestige that has outlasted so many
different fashions and ways of thought.
Why are people prepared
to sit silently for three hours
listening to a performance
of which they don't understand a word?
Why do quite small towns
all over Germany and Italy still devote
a large portion of their budgets
to this "irrational entertainment"?
Well, partly, of course, because it's
a display of skill, like a football match.
But chiefly, I think,
because it is irrational.
What is too silly to be said
may be sung? Well, yes...
but what is too subtle to be said,
or too deeply felt,
or too revealing, or too mysterious -
these things can also be sung,
and only be sung.
(THEY SING AN INTRICATE DUET)
No wonder that the music's
rather complicated,
because even today,
our feelings about Don Giovanni
are far from simple.
He's the most ambiguous of hero-villains.
The pursuit of happiness
and the pursuit of love,
which had once seemed
so simple and life-giving,
have become complex and destructive,
and his refusal to repent,
which makes him heroic,
belongs to another phase of civilisation.
The German-speaking countries
have once more become articulate.
For over a century, the disorderly
aftermath of the Reformation,
followed by the dreary,
interminable horrors of the 30 Years' War,
had kept them from playing a part
in the history of civilisation.
Then peace, stability,
the natural strength of the land,
and a peculiar social organisation
allowed them to add
to the sum of European experience
two shining achievements,
one in music,
the other in architecture.
Of course, the music is
far more important to us.
The writing and painting
of the 18th century
make one think that the emotional life
had somehow dried up.
Of course, it hadn't.
It had been transferred to music.
From Bach to Mozart,
music expressed
the deepest thoughts
and feelings of the time,
just as painting had done
in the early 16th century.
This programme
is primarily about music.
And some of the qualities
of 18th-century music -
its melodious flow,
its complex symmetry,
its decorative invention -
are reflected in its architecture.
It's only quite recently
that people have noticed
what a brilliant, inventive and altogether
enchanting style of architecture
flourished for almost 50 years
in 18th-century Germany and Austria.
Serious-minded historians
used to call it shallow or corrupt.
Well, the founders of
the American Constitution,
who were far from frivolous,
thought fit to mention
the pursuit of happiness
as a proper aim for mankind.
And if ever this aim
has been given visible form,
it's in Rococo architecture -
the pursuit of happiness
and the pursuit of love.
But before we plunge into
the buoyant sea of Rococo,
I must say a word about
the austere ideal that preceded it -
classicism.
For 60 years,
France had dominated Europe,
and this had meant a rigidly centralised
authoritarian government
and a classic style.
French classicism
produced magnificent architecture.
This is the architecture of
a great metropolitan culture,
and it is expressive of an ideal.
Not an ideal that appeals to me,
but an ideal nonetheless -
grandeur achieved
through the authoritarian state.
I find that this
French classical architecture
has a certain inhumanity.
It was the work, not of craftsmen,
but of wonderfully gifted civil servants.
But because it reflects so clearly
a grand, comprehensive system,
it is done with superb conviction.
French classicism
was eminently not exportable,
but the high Baroque of Rome,
especially that of Borromini,
was exactly what
the north of Europe needed,
for a variety of reasons.
For one thing,
it was elastic and adaptable.
So the architectural language
with which northern Europe
became articulate in the 18th century
was that of Borromini, the second
great master of Italian Baroque.
Borromini came from
a land of stone-carvers,
the Italian lakes that form
a boundary with Switzerland.
His style could fit into the craftsman
tradition of the Germanic north,
a tradition serving a social order
that was absolutely the reverse
of the centralised bureaucracy
of France.
It's true, of course,
many of the German princes thought
they'd like to imitate Versailles,
but the formative element
in German art and music didn't lie there,
but in the multiplicity of regions
and towns and abbeys,
all competing for their architects
and choirmasters,
but also relying on the talents of
their local organists and plasterers.
The creators of the German Baroque -
the Assams, the Zimmermanns -
were families of craftsmen -
Zimmermann is the German
for carpenter.
The finest buildings we shall look at
are not palaces,
but local pilgrimage churches
deep in the country,
like the Vierzehnheiligen
behind me - the "14 saints".
And, come to think of it, the Bachs
were a family of local musical craftsmen,
out of which there suddenly emerged
one of the great geniuses of
Western Europe, Johann Sebastian.
- (# JS BACH: St Matthew Passion)
- # Da sie ihn aber gekreuziget hatten,
# Teilten sie seine Kleider
und wurfen das Los darum,
# Auf daß erfiillet würde,
das gesagt ist durch den Propheten:
# Sie haben meine Kleider
unter sich geteilet,
# Und über mein Gewand haben sie
das Los geworfen
# Und sie saßen allda und hüteten sein. #
The sound of Bach's music reminds me
of a curious fact
that people don't always remember
when they talk about the 18th century -
that the great art of the time
was religious art.
The thought was anti-religious,
the way of life ostentatiously profane.
We are right to call the first half of
the 18th century "the Age of Reason".
But in the arts, what did this
emancipated rationalism produce?
One adorable painter - Watteau.
Some nice domestic architecture.
Some pretty furniture.
But nothing to set beside
the Matthew Passion
or the pilgrimage churches and abbeys
of Bavaria and Franconia.
(# JS BACH: St Matthew Passion)
- # Die aber vorübergingen, lästerten ihn
# Und schüttelten ihre Köpfe
und sprachen:
CHORUS:
# Der du den Tempel Gottes zerbrichst... #
(VOICES MERGE
AS THEY HARMONISE IN THE ROUND)
MALE SOLOIST: # Desgleichen auch die
Hohenpriester spotteten sein
# Samt den Schriftgelehrten
und Ältesten und sprachen:
CHORUS: # Andern hat er geholfen
und kann sich selber nicht helfen.
# Ist er der König Israel,
IN ROUND: # So steige er nun vom Kreuz,
so wollen wir ihm glauben.
# Er hat Gott vertrauet
# Der erlöse ihn nun, lüstet's ihn;
denn er hat gesagt:
# Ich bin Gottes Sohn. #
But there was another
musical tradition in Germany
that went back to the Reformation.
Luther had been a fine musician.
He wrote music and sang with,
surprisingly enough, a sweet tenor voice.
And although the Lutheran reform
prohibited many of the arts
that civilised our impulses,
it encouraged church music.
In small Dutch and German towns,
the choir and the organ
became the only means
through which men could enter
the world of spiritualised emotion.
This organ
in the great church at Haarlem
was played on by Handel,
and by Mozart at the age of ten.
When the Calvinists,
in their still more resolute purification
of the Christian rite,
prohibited organs, and destroyed them,
they caused more distress
than had ever been caused
by the destruction of images.
Organs have played a variable role
in European civilisation -
in the 19th century, they were symbols of
newly won affluence, like billiard tables.
But in the 17th and 18th centuries,
they were expressions of municipal pride
and independence.
They were the work
of the best local craftsmen,
and organists were respected
members of the community.
(# BUXTEHUDE: Toccata and Fugue in F)
Bourgeois democracy,
which had provided a background
to Dutch painting of the 17th century,
became partly responsible
for German music.
And it was a society
more earnest and more participating
than the Dutch connoisseurs had been.
This provincial society
was the background of Bach.
His universal genius
rose out of the high plateau
of competitive musical life
in the Protestant cities
of northern Germany.
One could even say
that it rose out of a family
that had been professional musicians
for 100 years,
so that in certain districts
the very word "Bach” meant a musician.
And his life was that of a conscientious,
somewhat obstinate,
provincial organist and choirmaster.
But he was universal.
A great musical critic said of him,
"He is the spectator of
all musical time and existence,
"to whom it is not
of the smallest importance
"whether a thing be new or old,
so long as it is true.”
And we once more find
that we can illustrate Bach's music
by contemporary building.
This church behind me, the pilgrimage
church of the Vierzehnheiligen,
was built by an architect who was
only two years younger than Bach.
He was called Balthasar Neumann,
and although his name isn't well known
in the English-speaking world,
I think he was certainly one of the
greatest architects of the 18th century.
Unlike the other builders
of German Baroque,
he was not primarily a carver
or plasterer, but an engineer.
He made his name as a master of
town planning and fortifications.
And inside his buildings,
just as when we are listening to Bach,
we are conscious of a complex plan
worked out like the most intricate
mathematical problem.
And, when occasion demanded it, he made
use of ornaments as lavish and fanciful
as that of the most ebullient
Bavarian plasterer.
(# )JS BACH: Christmas Oratorio)
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Rühmet was heute der Höchste getan!
# Lasset das Zagen
# Lasset das Zagen. .. #
(VOICES MERGE
AS THEY HARMONISE IN THE ROUND)
The sheer happiness,
the almost childlike joy
of Bach's "Christmas Oratorio"
is made visible by all these happy cherubs
and benevolent saints.
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Jauchzet, frohlocket!
# Auf, preiset die Tage
# Rühmet was heute der Höchste getan!
# Lasset das Zagen... #
(VOICES MERGE
AS THEY HARMONISE IN THE ROUND)
Balthasar Neumann was fortunate
in that the painted decorations
of his finest interiors
are not the work of amiable
local ceiling painters
but of the greatest decorator of the age,
the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo.
Here's his masterpiece,
the ceiling of the staircase
in the Bishop's Palace at Wurzburg,
known as the Residenz.
And there, in fact, in the corner,
is Tiepolo's self-portrait -
the man with the yellow scarf -
with his son, Giandomenico,
also a very good painter,
looking over his shoulder.
Then, as you move along to the middle,
here, this very grand
military-looking man
is the architect himself,
Balthasar Neumann,
looking the great master
of fortifications.
The Residenz doesn't seem quite
our idea of a bishop's residence,
being about three times the size
of Buckingham Palace,
and incomparably more splendid.
And one can't help speculating
on the tithes and taxes
that the peasants of Franconia had to pay
in order that their episcopal master
should do himself so well.
But one must admit that many of these
rulers of small German principalities -
dukes, electors, bishops, or whatever -
were, in fact, remarkably cultivated
and intelligent men.
Their competitive ambitions
benefited architecture and music
in a way that the democratic obscurity
of the Hanoverians in England did not.
The Schönborn family, one of whom was
responsible for the Residenz at Würzburg,
were really great patrons,
whose names should be remembered
with the Medici.
I felt some scruples in comparing
the music of Bach with Baroque interiors.
No such hesitations prevent me
from invoking, on this splendid staircase,
the name of George Frideric Handel.
You know, great men have a curious way
of appearing in complementary pairs.
This has happened so often in history,
but I don't think
it can have been invented
by some symmetrically-minded historian,
but must represent some need
to keep human faculties in balance.
However that may be, there's no doubt
that the two great musicians
of the early 18th century,
Bach and Handel,
fall into this pattern of contrasting
and complementary personalities.
They were born in the same year, 1685,
they both went blind
from copying musical scores,
and both were operated on,
unsuccessfully, by the same surgeon.
But otherwise, they were opposites.
In contrast to Bach's
timeless universality,
Handel was completely of his age.
Instead of Bach's frugal,
industrious career
as an organist, with numerous children,
Handel made and lost several fortunes
as an impresario.
This amiable statue of him was erected
by the grateful proprietors
of an amusement park, Vauxhall,
in which his music
had been one of the attractions.
There he sits in unbuttoned mood,
one shoe off and one shoe on,
not caring how much
he snitched other people's music
as long as he produced
something effective.
In his youth he must have been charming,
because when he went to Rome
as an unknown young virtuoso,
he was immediately taken up by society,
and cardinals wrote libretti
for him to set to music.
And there are remains
of remarkable good looks in this head.
Later in life,
when Handel had settled in England,
and entered the world
of operatic production,
he became less anxious to please,
and is traditionally said to have held
one of his leading ladies
out of the window
and threatened to drop her
if she didn't sing in tune.
He remained faithful throughout his life
to the Italian Baroque style.
In consequence, his music goes well
with the decorations of Tiepolo,
which even have the pseudo-romantic
subjects of his operas.
One can look with pleasure
at the marvellous Tiepolo ceiling
on the staircase at Würzburg
with Handel's music in one's ears.
(# HANDEL: Alcina)
# Questo è il cielo di contenti
# Questo è lil centro del goder
# Del goder
# Del goder
# Qui è I'Eliso dè viventi
# Qui I 'eroi forma il placer
# Qui l'eroi forma il placer
# Il piacer
# Il piacer
# Il piacer, il piacer
# Questo è il cielo di contenti
# Questo è il cielo di contenti
# Questo è il centro del goder
# Del goder
# Del goder... #
The extraordinary thing is
that this composer
of flowing, florid airs
and rousing choruses,
when he turned from opera to oratorio -
which was a kind of sacred opera -
wrote great religious music.
Saul, Samson,
Israel In Egypt
not only contain wonderful melodic
and polyphonic inventions,
but show an understanding of
the depths of the human spirit.
As for the Messiah, it's like
Michelangelo's Creation Of Adam,
one of those rare works
that appeal immediately to everyone,
and yet it is, indisputably,
a masterpiece of the highest order.
(HANDEL: Messiah)
# I know that my Redeemer liveth
# And though worms destroy this body
# Yet in my flesh
# Shall I see God
# Yet in my flesh
# Shall I see God
# Shall I see God
# I know that
# My Redeemer liveth... #
Yes, however often I hear it,
it brings tears to my eyes.
In passages like that,
Handel is beyond classification.
Still, one may reasonably
call him a Baroque composer.
Now, Baroque first came into being
as religious architecture,
and expressed the emotional aspirations
of the Catholic Church.
Rococo was to some extent
a Parisian invention
and provocatively secular.
It was, superficially at any rate,
a reaction against
the heavy classicism of Versailles.
Instead of the static orders of antiquity,
it drew inspiration
from natural objects in which the line
wandered freely, without symmetry -
shells, flowers, seaweed, vines,
especially if they wandered
in a double curve.
Rococo was a reaction
against the academic style,
but it wasn't negative.
It represented a real gain in sensibility.
It achieved a new freedom of association
and captured new
and more delicate shades of feeling.
All this is expressed through
the work of one exquisite artist,
Watteau.
He was born in 1684,
the year before Bach and Handel,
in the Flemish town of Valenciennes,
and he derived his technique from Rubens.
But, instead of a hearty
Flemish acceptance of life,
Watteau, who was a consumptive,
discovered something in himself
that had hardly ever seen in art before -
a feeling of the transitoriness
and thus the seriousness of pleasure.
He had brilliant gifts.
He could draw with the style and precision
of a Renaissance artist,
and he used his skill
to record his rapture
at the sight of beautiful girls.
What dreams of beauty they are!
How happy all these
exquisite people should be!
But..."In the very temple of Delight
"Veil'd Melancholy hath her sovran shrine
"Though seen of none
save him whose strenuous tongue
"Can burst Joy's grape
against his palate fine."
No-one had a finer palate than Watteau.
He can taste every delicate flavour
in this open-air dance,
where glances suddenly meet.
And he's depicted himself
not as one of the dancers,
but as the bagpipe player,
animating the scene with his humble,
melancholy instrument.
He was, his friend Caylus said,
"Tender, and perhaps
something of a shepherd.”
And in this elegant company
that he watched so discerningly,
he remained the odd man out -
and Grilles, the simpleton
whose tall, white figure
rises in isolation
from his fellow comedians,
is a sort of idealised self-portrait -
tender, simple
and yet capable of love
and of delicate intuitions.
Watteau came on the scene at an incredibly
early date in the 18th century.
His masterpiece The Departure from Cythera
was painted in 1712,
when Louis XIV was still alive,
and yet it has the lightness
and sharpness of a Mozart opera.
Also, the sense of human drama.
The new sensibility,
of which Watteau was the prophet,
showed itself most of all
in a more delicate understanding
of the relations between
men and women - sentiment.
The word's got into trouble, as words do,
but it was, in its day, a civilising word.
Sterne, in his Sentimental Journey,
that somewhat discredited work
of Rococo prose,
tells a fable about a town of Abdera,
which was the vilest town in all Thrace.
"What with poisons,
conspiracies and assassinations -
"libels, pasquinades and tumults,
"there was no going there by day -
'twas worse by night.”
Till, hearing a play of Euripides,
the people were struck
by a speech of Perseus -
"'0 Cupid, prince of gods and men.
"Every man almost spoke
pure iambics next day
"and talked of nothing but Perseus
his pathetic address -
"'0 Cupid, prince of Gods and men!
"Every street in Abdera, in every house -
'O Cupid! Cupid!
"In every mouth, like the natural notes
of some sweet melody
"which drop from it
whether it will or no -
"nothing but 'Cupid! Cupid!
Prince of Gods and men.
"The fire caught, and the whole city,
like the heart of one man,
"opened itself to Love.
"No pharmacologist
could sell one grain of hellebore -
"not a single armourer had a heart
to forge one instrument of death.
"Friendship and Virtue met together
and kissed each other in the street.
"The golden age returned
and hung o'er the town of Abdera."
Next to love, Watteau
cared most about music,
for which, his friends tell us,
he had a most delicate ear.
Nearly all his scenes
are enacted to the sound of music.
In this he shows himself as part of
a tradition going back to the Venetians,
of whom Pater said, they painted,
"The musical intervals of our existence
"when life itself is conceived
as a kind of listening."
In a Watteau,
we are in the world of poetry,
not only no account of
the grace of the figures,
but because the facts have been translated
into the most exquisite paint.
Watteau's colour
has a shimmering, iridescent quality,
which makes one think immediately
of musical analogies.
Watteau died in 1721,
the same age as Raphael - 37.
And by that date, the Rococo style
was just beginning to affect
decoration and architecture.
Ten years later,
it had spread all over Europe,
producing a style as international
as the early 15th-century Gothic.
Rococo even spread to England,
although the native good sense
of a fox-hunting society
prevented its more extravagant flights.
I suppose that most of the plaster work,
like most of the opera singing,
was done by foreigners,
but a group of English craftsmen
designed and executed
the decorations in this music room
from Norfolk House,
which is only a little less elegant
than its Parisian counterpart.
It's extraordinary
how a true international style
controls the shape of everything.
It's an absolute compulsion
which overrides convenience
or what we used to call functionalism.
It makes everything
dance to the same tune.
(# HAYDN: Allegro Moderato, Op 77)
Walter Pater said that all art
aspired to the condition of music.
I don't suppose he thought of extending
this famous dictum to applied art.
But it is true of
the finest Rococo design.
The rhythms, the assonances,
the texture, have the effect of music,
and are echoed in the music
of the next 50 years.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
Is that Haydn or Mozart?
Well, I happen to know that it's Haydn,
but one can't always be sure.
And yet, the two great musicians
of the second half of the 18th century
were very different characters,
and the difference
comes through in their music.
Haydn, who was 20 years older than Mozart,
was born in Croatia,
the son of a wheelwright,
and was fundamentally a peaceful,
spacious, soil-conscious man.
He said that he wrote his music
in order that, "The weary and worn,
or the men burdened with affairs,
"might enjoy a few minutes
of solace and refreshment."”
And I think of this saying
as I approach the Bavarian
Pilgrimage Church of Wies.
It belongs to the countryside.
In fact, from a distance it might
almost be the hall of a rustic manor.
But enter it
and the most incredible richness
appears before your eyes.
In these Rococo churches,
the faithful are persuaded
not by fear, but by joy.
They are a foretaste of paradise,
sometimes, I admit, rather more like
the Mohammedan paradise of the senses
than the disembodied
paradise of Christianity.
"0 Cupid! Cupid!
Prince of gods and men."
Well, it's always been difficult,
even for the saints,
to represent spiritual love
without having recourse to
the symbols of physical love.
Creation is the most mysterious
of all God's acts.
And it is Haydn's Creation
that comes to my mind
as I contemplate the rustic delights
of the Brothers Zimmermann.
(# HAYDN: Von deiner Güt
from The Creation)
It's curious that in the present day
we should have made
such a cult of Rococo music
when the Rococo style as a whole
runs so strongly counter
to our convictions.
You see, many of the most beautiful
Rococo buildings of the 18th century
were built simply to give pleasure
by people who believed
that pleasure was important
and worth taking trouble about
and could be given
some of the quality of art.
And we? We managed to destroy
a good many of them during the war,
including the palace
of Sanssouci at Potsdam,
and the Zwinger at Dresden.
As I've said, it may be difficult
to define civilisation,
but it isn't so difficult
to recognise barbarism.
But by chance,
we didn't hit the pleasure pavilions
at Nymphenburg,
which is a suburb of Munich.
Munich itself we pretty well laid flat.
They were built for
the Elector Max Emanuel
by his court dwarf named Cuvilliés,
who happened to be an architect of genius.
Despite his French name,
he came from Flanders.
This, behind me, is the most famous
of them, I suppose - the Amalienburg.
The exterior is quite simple,
the interior a riot, or rather a ballet,
of beautifully designed ornament.
(# MOZART: String Quartet in G Minor)
These rooms are the ultimate
in Rococo decoration,
and one might say
that they bridge the gap
between Watteau and Mozart.
And yet, to pronounce the name
of Mozart in the Amalienburg
is dangerous, because it gives
colour - very pretty colour -
to the notion that Mozart
was merely a Rococo composer.
50 years ago, this was what
most people thought about him,
the notion supported by
horrible little plaster busts,
which made him look
a perfect 18th-century dummy.
I bought one of these busts
when I was at school,
but when I first heard
the G Minor Quartet,
I realised that it couldn't possibly
have been written
by the smooth, white character
on my mantelpiece
and I threw the bust
into the wastepaper basket.
I afterwards discovered
the portrait by Lange,
which, although no masterpiece, does
convey the single-mindedness of genius.
Of course, a lot of Mozart's music
is in the current 18th-century style.
He was so much at home
in this golden age of music,
so completely master of its forms
that he didn't feel it necessary
to destroy them.
Indeed, he loved the clarity and the
precision and the mathematical perfections
of the late 18th-century style.
I love the story of Mozart
sitting at table,
absent-mindedly folding and refolding
and refolding his napkin
into more and more elaborate patterns
as fresh musical ideas
passed through his mind.
But of course, this formal perfection
was used to express two characteristics
which were very far
from the Rococo style.
One of them was that peculiar
kind of melancholy,
a melancholy amounting almost to panic,
which so often haunts
the isolation of genius.
And Mozart felt it quite young.
And the other characteristic
was almost the opposite -
a passionate interest in human beings
and in the drama of human relationships.
How often, in Mozart's orchestral pieces,
concertos, quartets, symphonies,
we find ourselves participating
in a drama or dialogue.
Of course, this feeling reaches
its natural conclusion in opera.
# Notte e giorno faticar
# Per chi outta sa gradir
# Piova e vento sopportar
# Mangiar male e mal dormir... #
Opera, next to Gothic architecture,
ls one of the oddest inventions
of Western man.
It couldn't have been foreseen
by any logical process.
Dr Johnson's much-quoted saying, which
as far as I can make out. he never said -
"an extravagant and irrational
entertainment” - is perfectly correct,
and at first it seems surprising
that it should have been brought
to perfection in the Age of Reason.
But just as the greatest art of
the early 18th century was religious art,
so the greatest artistic creation
of the Rococo is completely irrational.
(# MOZART: Don Giovanni)
Of course, opera had been invented
in the 17th century
and made into a form of art by
the prophetic genius of Monteverdi.
It came to the North from Catholic Italy
and it flourished in the Catholic
capitals - Vienna, Munich, Prague.
Indignant Protestants used to say that
Rococo churches were like opera houses.
Quite true,
only it was the other way round.
As you can see,
this enchanting opera house in Munich,
built by the dwarf architect Cuvilliés,
is exactly like a Rococo church.
One could almost say that opera houses
came in when churches went out.
And they expressed so completely
the views of this new, profane religion
that for 100 years
all opera houses continued to be built
in Rococo style long after that style
had gone out of fashion.
And in Catholic countries,
not only in Europe, but in South America,
were often the best
and largest buildings in the town.
(# MOZART: Don Giovanni)
As Don Giovanni assaults Donna Anna,
her father, the Commendatore,
comes down the stairs.
What on earth has given opera its prestige
in Western civilisation?
A prestige that has outlasted so many
different fashions and ways of thought.
Why are people prepared
to sit silently for three hours
listening to a performance
of which they don't understand a word?
Why do quite small towns
all over Germany and Italy still devote
a large portion of their budgets
to this "irrational entertainment"?
Well, partly, of course, because it's
a display of skill, like a football match.
But chiefly, I think,
because it is irrational.
What is too silly to be said
may be sung? Well, yes...
but what is too subtle to be said,
or too deeply felt,
or too revealing, or too mysterious -
these things can also be sung,
and only be sung.
(THEY SING AN INTRICATE DUET)
No wonder that the music's
rather complicated,
because even today,
our feelings about Don Giovanni
are far from simple.
He's the most ambiguous of hero-villains.
The pursuit of happiness
and the pursuit of love,
which had once seemed
so simple and life-giving,
have become complex and destructive,
and his refusal to repent,
which makes him heroic,
belongs to another phase of civilisation.