One night, Nietzsche steps out into the darkness of a Venice nightscape. Surrounded by the sound of water echoing across the canals-- the moonlight madly shimmering off the water-- a mood overcomes him like a song:
Venice-- At the bridge of late I stood in the brown night. From afar came a song: as a golden drop it welled over the quivering surface. Gondolas, lights, and music-- drunken it swam out into the twilight.
My soul, a stringed instrument, sang to itself, invisibly touched, a secret gondola song, quivering with iridescent happiness. --Did anyone listen to it?
Durrell was born and spent an early childhood in India and though never religious, he declared that he had “a Tibetan mind,” attuned to Buddhism. Using scientific metaphor, he said that our view of the universe had changed when we discovered that the ultimate tiny atomic particle was not something hard, but a wave. “Our solid world may be real, but is also illusory and infinite. The spirit of place moves over the land like the spirit of God upon the face of the waters in Genesis,” he said in an interview.
Pneuma was the ancient Greek word for breath and also a metaphor for spirit or soul. Durrell often referred to a breeze rustling the Greek landscape as its pneuma, its spirit. An aware person drawing their breath in the landscape was merging their own spirit with that of the place.
Heidegger famously wrote that, "Mood is a form of attunement between nature and spirit; between habitat and inhabitant." Pointing out that a minimally meaningful life requires sensitivity to the power of shared moods that give mattering to our world and unity and meaning to events, according to Heidegger, moods are not something inside a person but rather are something that a person can be in. That is, moods come over us; overcoming us. The German word famously reflects this, as philosophers like to remind us that die Stimmung means mood in terms of atmosphere ("ambiance"). Often likened to music or to weather, Heideggerean mood wraps itself around our bodies. It is something that we unconsciously attune ourselves too.
Indeed, it is one way we have to grasp the way the world discloses itself to us.
The concept of atmosphere was condemned to remain weak in European thought, given that, unlike the activity of cognition, "atmosphere" could not be conceived in terms of the opposition between the objective and the subjective. It is an influence that emerges from beings and things and is valid only by virtue of the impression it produces in us: it e-manates or im-parts and hence circulates inseperably between what is neither "that" nor 'us" anymore... indeed, an atmosphere is diffuse, disseminated, dispersed, elusive....
And hence, through one's in-haling and ex-haling, one breathes in landscape, atmosphere and social context and breathes out character, heart and correct behavior. It is not unlike a Confucian scholar whose meticulous actions-- perfectly attuned to the situation-- are guided by a Confucian sensibility, or sensitive negotiating of shared mood. Like the sound of jade reverberating off the walls of the great hall, the Confucian scholar just feels it-- this thing called virtue or proper conduct is something to which he attunes himself as embodied know-how. In the same way that a violin will internally reverberate when bowed, this mood is internalized in the sense that it becomes almost impossible to really differentiate between outer environment and inner self as they are indeed inter-dependent.
In Japan, I knew a gentleman who ran a 200 year old miso shop. K san was also a bon vivant par excellance! Studying Samurai-style (Enshu school) tea ceremony, he wore stylish kimono by day and organized French film festivals for our town on the weekends. He also spent a fortune on tea bowls and art, which he often would show to his friends.
Everyone in town knew him and his miso shop was a gathering place of local luminaries.
Of all the interesting things he was involved in, my favorite was his gramophone club. Once a month like-minded collectors would show up with a favorite record (or not) and sit around listening to old records while drinking sake. Need I say more? The man had endless curiosity and tremendous style. He was my kinda guy!
Speaking of which, I recently finished the most unusual book by Normon Cantor, called Inventing the Middle Ages. The book is about twenty prominent 20th century Medievalists and their impact on the study of the history of the Middle Ages. When I first heard that this book was not just a best seller but was so popular it was even available on Audible, I could hardly believe it! Really? I love anything related to the Middle Ages and so would have read the book no matter what, but I must admit that I was utterly fascinated by the popularity-- as well as the controversy surrounding this book, which after all was on such an obscure topic.
So, I picked up the book immediately.
I wasn't disappointed either.
The book is absolutely wonderful in conjuring up the genius and style of these men. Of the twenty prominent "giants" of Medieval scholarship, Cantor is perhaps best on Johan Huizinga (whose wonderful book on "play" I recently wrote about in these every pages). He is also really engaging on the topic of the inklings--JRR Tokien and CS Lewis, in particular. They all show up as such interesting characters--sharing (dare I say it) something in common with my old friend K san (not to mention with Mi Fu (of whom I wrote about in May). Something all these "characters" share could be summed up in this quote by CS Lewis (discussed at length by Cantor ), describing the way the inklings were engaged in an active resistance to the times:
“In talking to me you must beware because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable.”
That is how Mi Fu was. And so too K san, who believed that the golden age was in the past and it was there that one could find the most exemplary models for how to live. I think the inklings were like that, as described in Cantor's book:
Both men were deeply affected by a nostalgia and a love for a rapidly disappearing England graced by the middle-class, highly literate Christian culture into which they had been born. They saw a continuity of this culture stretching back into the Middle Ages, when, in their perception, it originated. For them, these vibrant, imaginative, complex Middle Ages were in many essentials still activated in the donnish world of mid-twentieth-century Oxbridge and the English countryside, if not so much in London. Lewis and Tolkien wanted not only to preserve but to revitalize through their writing and teaching this Anglo-Edwardian retromedieval culture.
Theirs was a reaction against the mechanistic, capitalistic, aggressive age inherited by Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher, he would suggest. It really was not all that unlike the last Northern Song dynasty emperor, who turning away from the barbarians at the gate, continued to focus on the ancient bronzes of a thousand years earlier, since that was where virtue was to be found, he believed. (He lost his empire accordingly). Like Mi Fu and Emperor Huizong, this kind of cultural nostalgia (and a love of unicorns) could also be seen in Catholic converts like Graham Greene and Chesterton.... and my favorite Catholic convert of all, Evelyn Waugh. Like Lewis or Tolkien, Roman Catholicism for Waugh becomes a means to escape the relentless utilitarianism of our times. As Jenny Hendrix wrote about Waugh here:
By attaching himself to something ancient, Waugh was able to remain conservative even as Modernism, as he saw it, led the rest of history astray. (Joyce “ends up a lunatic,” he once said; he abhorred Picasso, plastics, and jazz.) A man committed to the defense of a nonexistent world, he loved nothing so much as a unicorn.
My astronomer and I are getting ready to head back to Europe to look at more pictures. We became so taken by the donor portraits we saw by van Eyck and Memling in the Louvre, in Ghent and then in Bruges --and, as I wrote here, I was struck over and over again by the way time was conflated in the paintings. Like a wormhole connecting discrete and distant points in time, these late Medieval and early Renaissance pictures were stunningly transportive in terms of time and space so that, for example, Mary and the baby or the Christ were depicted side-by-side with contemporary figures. Contemporary donors appeared in the paintings accompanied by their patron saints, who thereby formed a link between these two worlds.
At that time, I wondered if this was not the ultimate selfie. I was wrong. For what I should have said was that these donor paintings must be the ultimate anti-selfie!
The tremendous transportive power of these donor portraits reminds me a lot of the Southern Song dynasty landscapes from China. Highly contemplative, both styles of art aim to spiritually elevate by juxtaposing a the realism of physical landscape or interior with that of human imagination...
Dream Journey over Xiao Xiang 瀟湘臥遊図巻 is one of my favorite paintings in the world (see below) A Song dynasty masterpiece, it is now a National Treasure of Japan. Without a doubt, it is within this landscape that I travel more than anywhere. Maybe many of you will feel the same when I say that very rarely do I meet a person who is so agreeable; who engages me so fully on the level of the heart that I am quite certain that a lifetime with that person would never be enough. That is also how I feel about this painting. And, for 10 years it has been my computer desktop wallpaper. Some of you will, I suppose, be thinking: Wow, 10 years-- that's a long time to look at the same painting. But believe it or not, I never grow tired of looking at it; as it continues to fascinate and draw me in.
Lacking a fixed perspective, the southern Song landscapes are pictures that are not only viewed but are paintings that one can "walk around in." This is the Dream Journey implied by the painting's title. It is the potentially rich empty space in the painting-- the hallmark of Southern Song landscapes-- that in effect carries the viewer far beyond the painted images into a pure and natural realm beyond the "dust of the everyday world.
Obviously, it isn't easy to brush off the dust when one is living down on the flatlands-- where the air is foul and stifling-- so one needs props. "Gayu" is the Japanese pronunciation of the characters 臥遊 "dream journey." Like the ability to imagine mountains even when you are down on the plains, for a literati scholar it was paramount to always be able to access this world of cultivated mind and spirit-- even from within the dusty and oftentimes unbearable confines of ordinary life in the city.
The donor paintings functioned like that. They served as part of the person's spiritual practice. Both pictures also function as a kind of time slip.... in the case of the Chinese landscapes connecting the viewer to the pure and spiritually uplifted world of a golden age natural world and in the case of the Renaissance pictures connecting the imperfect participants to the heavenly world of saints and gods. Both are, in effect, a kind of nostalgia. Like for that of a unicorn.
Despite is snobbery and classist politics, I have always been a big fan of Evelyn Waugh. Like the other characters in this post, they are fascinating, clinging to fantasies of the past at the expense of their actual real life realities (Mad Ludwig being my own personal favorite). What is it about them that makes for such great story-telling? And what of the similar charisma of works of the kinds of art with which they were so enthralled (not to mention of quests and relics, phonographs and the tea ceremony of the samurai)? Cantor describes his medievalists as being unable to imaginatively and intellectually withdraw and accept defeat in the face of the decline they saw in the world. They resisted the levelling power of global capitalism and resisted in the only way they knew how--through a culturally-rooted pursuit of art, beauty and truth....Emperor Huizong and Mad King Luwig; the inklings and the Catholic converts...yes, Brideshead Revisted!-- For whatever reason you can name, as characters, these lovers of unicorns remain tremendously enigmatic (as is the art they loved!)
They didn’t know that, and in any case – with its stance, its arched neck and easy grace, the light of its limpid gaze – they could not resist
but loved it though, indeed, it was not. Yet since they always gave it room, the pure beast persisted. And in that loving space, clear and unfenced, reared its head freely and hardly needed
to exist. They fed it not with grain nor chaff but fortified and nourished it solely with the notion that it might yet come to pass,
so that, at length, it grew a single shaft upon its brow and to a virgin came and dwelled in her and in her silvered glass.
And oh, that was the miracle of those two spires of Chartres Cathedral! Separated in time by some four hundred years, the spires can still be glimpsed past fields of wheat, rising up over the low town; a town which itself has somehow retained its old medieval quality. Very much like the legendary first view of Mont Saint-Michel one gets from a distance, it is the unexpected vision of those cathedral spires arising out of the clear blue sky that makes arriving at Chartres so emotionally stirring an experience.
We were following in the footsteps of Henry Adams.
The son of Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to London, it wasn't just his father who was a great man; for Henry Adams' grandfather and great-grandfather were US presidents. A historian and man of letters, I had never realized until I stumbled on his book about Chartres that Henry Adams was a Harvard-trained medievalist. And an excellent one at that. His book, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres is written in the finest 19th century classical essay style. Engaging and filled with all manner of playful and dazzlingly-told medievalisms, the book became the blueprint for our own journey in Northern France this past summer.
So, since Adams begins his travelogue with Mont Saint-Michel--so did we.
I've already written about our stay on the Mont in my July post Benedictine Dreams. Even now, I cannot get the sound of the seagulls and church bells out of my mind: or of walking across the bridge of dreams toward that fairy palace shimmering in the summertime air. It was utterly otherworldly. Its infamous mudflats and quicksand, which pilgrims of old had to cross in order to reach the Mont, were known in the Middle Ages as the "path to paradise." And it's true. The Mont is, as they say, one of the great wonders of the western world. Everyone should try and go see it someday. Henry Adams was also much beguiled by the vision of the great fortress abbey, perched on top of a granite rock in the middle of the strongest tidal currents in Europe. He describes it as a monument to the masculine. And in his book, he sets up Mont Saint-Michel as a kind of "yin" to Chartres' "yang."
He has a point; for if the massively fortified Mont was dedicated to the archangel Michael, commander of the army of God and weigher of human souls; Chartres, by contrast, has always been dedicated to the Virgin Queen.
Indeed, even before there was a cathedral at Chartres, this place had already been known as a holy place in the Druid cult of the divine feminine.
But how did this cathedral survive intact for so long?
Only think of what happened to Notre Dame in Paris during the French Revolution. Or the way the people in Chartres dismantled all those thousands of pieces of original 12th and 13th century glass to hide them away during WWII--only to have to somehow reassemble them again after the War! To this day, the cathedral of Chartres stands as one of the best preserved 13th century Gothic churches in France--if not in all the world. There was, of course, the great fire in 1194, when everything but the Western facade (pictured above) was destroyed. The people were in great dismay since Chartres is home to one of the most important relics in all of Christendom. The Sancta Camisa, believed to be the tunic worn by the Virgin Mary at the time of the Christ's birth, was said to have been brought back from Jerusalem by Charlemagne (never mind that Charlemagne had never actually stepped foot in the Holy Land). It was then later donated to Chartres by his son, Charles the Bald. It was this relic that put Medieval Chartres on the major pilgrimage map.
That so, it was a source of great wealth to the town. Seeing the cathedral burning down in front of their eyes, the people became panicked over the fate of the revered relic. Waiting till the fire died down, people probably didn't dare to hope that a piece of cloth could emerge unscathed. So, imagine how their anguish turned to delight when the priests brought out the cloth unscathed from the smoldering ruins of the cathedral! Not surprisingly, this was thought of a sign from the goddess that she was not done with the people of Chartres quite yet. And so they embarked in great enthusiasm to build her a new temple.
In one of my favorite descriptions of the cathedral, Adams describes Chartres as, "A toy house to please the Queen of Heaven--to please her so much that she would be happy in it,--to charm her till she smiled." I suppose some will find his fanciful description of the Virgin Mary offensive. What? Because she is a woman, he assumes she loves dolls and finery? Well, Henry Adams died a long time ago. So, we will perhaps have to cut him some slack. Also, one might admit that there is something really appealing about seeing this great cathedral, which has always stood as a shrine to the Virgin, as a castle fit for a queen:
The Queen Mother was as majestic as you like; she was also absolute; she could be stern; she was not above being angry; but she was still a woman, who loved grace and beauty, ornament--her toilette, robes, jewels; who considered the arrangements of her palace with attention, and liked both light and color, who kept a keen eye on her Court, and exacted prompt and willing obedience from the King and Archbishops as well as from beggars and drunken priests.
A castle indeed. And even castles sometimes need to be cleaned right? Well, I suppose by now everyone has heard of the kerfuffle over the recent renovations of the interior at Chartres?
The "debate" began making international news in 2014 when the painting was just under way. And, the renovations are still in the news today. Yes, that's right. We are not talking about comparatively uncontroversial window cleaning or even of the cleaning of walls and pillars but rather the renovation project is seeking to bring the cathedral back to its glory days by painting the interior a light beige with other accent colors--since, well, that's actually how it used to be.
As you can see in the picture just left, the change is quite dramatic. That is because the cathedral had accumulated on its walls and pillars a very thick coating of soot and grime. And it simply has to be added that Chartres had become in modern times appreciated precisely for the romantic and mysterious quality of its filthy walls-- recalling to modern minds an exquisite patina or fine bottle of very old wine.
But despite great public outrage, the scholars in charge of the restoration continued to insist that this was the color that the cathedral used to be. In fact, on the day we were there, we were so lucky to get to participate in one of world-expert Malcolm Miller's tours of the cathedral. Miller is a legend in his own right ---and some claim he knows more about the cathedral than anyone in the world. Well, Miller reminded us of the media row and declared the naysayers to be ridiculous as not only is the whitewashing authentic to the 13th century but now, at last --in the new brighter interior-- you can see the windows in all their clarity.
And, it is true, for the windows shine very brightly in the lighter interior. As Miller pointed out the stained glass windows were meant to be read and that is something that is now possible thanks to the cleaning. Watching videos of the restoration process, you can see for yourself how the restorers in removing the layers and layers of grime, literally pealed back time to show the whitewashed color that used to be there--as well as the marbled effect that was created on some of the pillars.
But, as American architecture critic Martin Filler lamented in the New York Review of Books blog, what are they going to do next re-attach arms to the Venus de Milo?
Even the cathedral’s iconic Black Madonna had been repainted white. We know that ancient Greek temples and sculpture were all likewise painted in bright colors, so are we to bring back everything to its original polychrome state? Should all the ancient marble statues in the Louvre, for example, be likewise repainted?
Speaking for myself, I felt very much as if seeing the Venus de Milo painted and with arms or Winged Victory painted and with a new head. For me, all I can say is that I was not prepared for the white-washed interior. I found it garish and ugly. But, of course, I can claim ignorance to what things were like back then in the era that was being highlighted (13th century). And that is a point to be considered since the cathedral has looked differently during various periods in its history; so that in prioritizing the 13th century colors, they were neglecting some beautiful Renaissance painting that once also graced the cathedral--not to mention our modern dark but mysterious much-admired patina.They were trying to bring back a certain period of time in a very long stretch of history.
This 2015 Apollo article is excellent. It pits the Chartres restoration project yeasayers against the naysayers in the voices of two scholars, Jeffry F. Hamburger (Yea) and Adam Nathaniel Furman (Nay). It is a wonderfully engaging discussion, and I highly recommend it. I am sure its true, as Hamburgers declares, that people complained when the Sistine Chapel painting was restored and that no matter what, the corrosive particulates simply had to be removed. But there is also a question of limits. I was pleased that one of the scholars (Furman) brought up the work of Svetlana Boym, about whom I wrote in these pages last year. Boym, who sadly passed away in 2015, wrote a brilliant book on the concept of nostalgia--and her unpacking of the notion is quite pertinent to the question of Chartres.
According to Boym there are two kind of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. While restorative "stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately."
Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, meaning home or the return home, with algos, meaning pain, so that its literal meaning is a pain associated with the return home. Part of this inquiry will involve a rethinking of the mood of nostalgia and what that mood encompasses. Rather than understand the nostalgic as characterized solely by the desire to return to a halcyon past, it is explored through the connotations suggested by its Greek etymology as precisely a longing for the return home—a return that cannot be achieved—a form of homesickness, and so as unsettling rather than comfortable, as bringing with it a sense of the essential questionability of our own being in the world.
Indeed, we know from how the word is used in other cultures that the concept of nostalgia involves not just a longing for home or a longing for something from the past, but rather it is a longing and deep sadness for something that is actually gone forever--and implies a kind of homelessness or groundlessness.
This is without a doubt perfectly embodied in Andrei Tarkovsky's film, Nostalghia.
Anyone who has lived abroad for a significant period of time will probably understand Tarkovsky longing to go home; for like Tarkovsky they too will almost surely discover that the home they are longing for no longer exists. And it is in that moment, I would argue, that the real pain begins. Reconstructed versions of some lost golden age will simply bring more pain. And this is precisely the point Furman tries to make about Chartres. That in the end, the imposing of an idealized version of a particular time in history in the name of restoration is an act of absolutism.
It is also futile--as the past can never be brought back.
Would Henry Adams agree with Furman? He would have to, I think. For Adams, was in exile. Deeply alienated from his own time period, he sought refuge in the medieval riches of his own imagination. The Chartres of his experience (like the Chartres of my experience) existed at that precise intersection between the physical reality and human imagination. His vision of Chartres was no more "real" than his understanding of the 13th century Catholicism as a moment of great unity--in contrast to the chaos of everything he felt was happening in the world of his own time (19th century Boston). While he never converted to Roman Catholicism, he instead found solace in the ambiguity of Chartres; for in its murky and open-ended "patina" he found, as Furman so eloquently suggested, a perfect place to "think about the passing of time and of things." And this was possible precisely because no one particular vision of "the past" was being imposed upon us.
The restoration at Chartres is none of my business. I only wish I had had a chance to see Chartres prior to 2017-- for all these reasons I am sure my experience there would have been quite different.
Video below of some pictures from the trip. (My brooding teenager is seen crossing the mudflats--if only the quality of the video was better, you could see all the pathos of the teenage "pilgrim" in his dark expression....woe is he who is forced on a family trip to Europe with their parents at 16...)
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed at his own speed. Each is the product of his spirit's refraction, of the inflection of that mind. It is the pace of our living that makes the world available. Regardless of the body's lion-wrath or forest waiting, despite the mind's splendid appetite or the sad power in our soul's separation from God and women, it is always our gait of being that decides how much is seen, what the mystery of us knows, and what the heart will smell of the landscape as the Mexican train continues at a dog-trot each day going north. The grand Italian churches are covered with detail which is visible at the pace people walk by. The great modern buildings are blank because there is no time to see from the car. A thousand years ago when they built the gardens of Kyoto, the stones were set in the streams askew. Whoever went quickly would fall in. When we slow, the garden can choose what we notice. Can change our heart.
Awesome photo by super talented Mouser William. He called it "Like Something Victorian science fiction" but it is FIREBALL 2018 Flight # 690N (My husband is PI).
“Someday, I'd like to visit Salzburg when the Summer Festival's not going on. That way, I can see if the place is real; for I just can’t help wondering if Salzburg is not some kind of enchanted fairy world, which only comes into being when the music is playing…”
"Nonsense" said our guide matter-of-factly."In Salzburg, the music never stops playing!" She paused and then added more circumspectly: "But of course, the Summer Festival is the pièce de résistance. And we Salzburgers wait for it all year long.”
Salzburgers are not the only ones who look forward to the festival all year long; for year after year—like some gigantic magnet—it draws artists and music lovers from all over the world. To call it larger than life would only be an understatement; for the festival exists outside of regular time; beyond ordinary life. Super-charged and surprisingly playful, artists, who don't often work together, perform works that are cutting-edge and often quite risky, because –well, it's the festival! And if you aren’t taking chances then you run the risk of being Disneylandified, a previous festival director once said. Along with the artists, music lovers also arrive to this city like pilgrims. For unlike during the regular season, when music is more of a diversion from our everyday lives, during festival season attendees are able to immerse themselves completely into an enchanted world that begins and ends with art.
Opera as resistance? Music as re-enchantment?
If you don't like the "high brow" arts --or disapprove of the opera (you know who you are)—beware! Because Salzburg is the belly of the beast! We upped our game by booking a room at the Hotel Goldener Hirsch. I had read in an opera magazine that this was “the place” to stay for opera goers. I hadn't, however, really thought things through; as we were not quite prepared for the jet-set atmosphere of the place --not to mention being severely under-dressed! Our own inadequacies aside, again and again during those four days I kept thinking about the Japanese expression ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会).
Have you heard of that term from Zen Buddhism? It basically means something like “One time, one encounter.”
In my thirties, I studied tea ceremony in Japan. Attending lessons for many years, I can with great embarrassment tell you that I never did learn to make a bowl of tea properly. It is very complicated: every time I felt myself --at last-- to be on the cusp of memorizing the ritualized procedures, the season would change. I had to put aside all that I had learned to absorb the new rituals of the new season... So many seasons, so many ways of making tea! But the one thing that I managed to learn by heart was this concept of "One time, one encounter."
Life is, after all, constantly shuffling the deck, and each and every tea gathering was precious and unique; a once in a life time combination of people, utensils and experiences. Never again would the same exact group come together to drink tea in a room with just that particular combination of hanging scroll, blend of tea, fragrance of incense; with that particular arrangement of flowers (appearing in the vessel as if growing in a field…)-- the tea bowl and the brazier; the colors of my friends' kimono and the quality of our laughter that day--it was all a unique moment. A heightened moment. A perfect unfolding of "now."
When I first began lessons, my teacher wondered how the others would take to an American friend in the tearoom. This was in the conservative countryside of Japan. Instead of having us tell each other our life's resumes, before even giving them my name, she opened up a huge book of textiles that looked to be a hundred years old and asked us to tell each other what we liked. And so we gathered around the heavy book (they in their mothers' kimonos and me in a skirt) and talked about the particular shades of blue that appealed to us or about how these textiles had arrived in Japan (By way of China? Or was this one from Kansai? I loved the sarasa from India, as did Nobuko, the woman I became closest with). Every week, those lessons were not just highlighted in my mind, but it truly felt as if every moment in the tearoom was larger than the rest of my life. More poignant, more memorable, more treasured –even now. And every so often the scroll hanging in the alcove would be a piece of calligraphy written vertically, ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会).
The miracle of that stretched out and inflated moment--outside time; outside daily life came back to me vividly in Salzburg, as I thought about how alive I felt.
There is a famous poem by Yosano Akiko:
清水へ祇園をよぎる桜月夜こよひ逢ふひとみなうつくしき (みだれ髪/与謝野晶子)
There is the woman walking in Kyoto. She is going to go cherry blossom viewing by moonlight in Kiyomizu. Her heart so full from this perfect moment, she declares that all the people she sees walking in the Gion are beautiful.
I have always loved that poem. And, it was true, everyone did look so beautiful that first night in Salzburg, as we all walked slowly out of the hall and made our way back toward the Goldener Hirsch along the long stretch of festival hall, lined with flags with the mountains pressing close. Dressed and bejeweled like movie stars and lit up with light as they spoke excitedly about the music, I felt like I was in a dream. Real life seemed a million miles away.
And so, I was not surprised to read that the possibility for opening up alternative ways of being was one of the stated objectives of the Salzburg Music Festival when it was first conceived in the early years of the 20th century. Founding fathers of the festival--the Holy Trinity of stage director Max Reinhardt, writer Hugo von Hofmannthal, and composer Richard Strauss-- purposively set out to create a festival that would exist far away from the relentless busyness and stress of the big cities. They chose Baroque Salzburg as a place that had remained impervious to more modern priorities and predilections. And I do think the festival harkens back to more medieval days when daily work was punctuated by communal days of pageantry-- including games, music, morality plays and church bells. But the founders in trying to resist our modern rat race of endless production and consumption were categorically not trying to harken back to some fossilized point in the past. Not at all. For they called their project an "anti-modern product of modernity." The festival has always dwelled in the ambiguous realm between "culture" and "modernity”, combining continuity with radical and shocking reinterpretations of beloved cultural artifacts.
Things continue but nothing stays the same.
For example, every year the festival is kicked off with a performance of the same play, the Everyman (Jedermann). Can you imagine for almost a hundred years, every year the same play is performed? And what a play it is. Written by festival founding father Hugo von Hofmannthal, the Everyman is based on a one-act English medieval morality play about the perils of greed. Performed outside of Salzburg's main cathedral, the play is timed to end as the sun sinks down behind the cathedral’s famous dome to the sound of church bells. Here, the theme of greed and extreme wealth are acted out for concert-goers. (Tickets for the play range from $12-$205).
It is as if the entire city has been transformed into a giant stage. In addition to the cathedral square, performances take place in churches and theaters around town with the main venue being the festivals halls located in the four-hundred-year-old summer and winter riding schools of the old Prince-Archbishops. Interesting to remember that Salzburg was not part of the Habsburg Empire, instead having been ruled as an independent church state for eleven centuries. The city has indeed long stood as a world apart.
My own favorite venue is the once summer riding school (the Felsenreitschule). The hall started off as the place where the prince-archdukes would watch their stallions performing in great Baroque pageantry from one of the ninety loggias that had been cut directly into the mountain to create this "riding school in the rock." The loggias are now used as a backdrop to the stage, where beloved operas, as well as avant-garde and cutting-edge new works are performed. During our tour of the festival halls, technicians were preparing for the evening's performance of Hans Werner Henze's The Bassarids (another kind of one-act morality play that was commissioned by the festival and first performed there in 1966). We were not planning to see the performance, but my husband became so enraptured by the sight of the ultra-modern stage setting against the antique loggias, that on an impulse he bought two tickets. He said that tickets ranged somewhere between $14-$400! Bravo Austria for supporting the arts!
We bought very reasonably priced tickets for what were fantastic seats and delighted as the enormous spectacle unfolded in front of our eyes--there was a massive orchestra and chorale, each with a conductor, with the percussion section in a completely different part of the hall. I would wager there were two hundred artists performing that night. This was our first performance of the festival, and I could not help but notice how international the audience was. And that the hall was packed (with cheaper seats and expensive seats sold out). An extremely serious and attentive audience--it was nice to see how the terrible corporatization of music has not taken over the Salzburg festival. Artistic choices were made by artists, not corporate sponsors or politicians. Looking around, I thought of poor Princess Wittgenstein who once lamented how things have gone downhill since the heyday of van Karajan, when Salzburg was jet-set ground zero. “Now, you are lucky if the person sitting next to you is not in blue jeans…”
The next evening was also exciting with many Chinese attendees there to see Yuja Wang performing with the Berlin Philharmonic with their new chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko. Held in the newer Large Festival Hall (Großes Festspielhaus) located adjacent to the summer riding school, I couldn’t help but notice someone in a red baseball cap during the intermission. Could it be? Again, my mind turned to poor Princess Wittgenstein! And finally, you might be wondering if there was a winter riding school (since there is a summer riding school). Yes, and it has been renovated and turned into the House for Mozart (“Haus für Mozart”). And this is where we saw the show that I had flown all that way from LA to see: Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” My favorite opera of all time, American mezzo Kate Lindsay played Nero. Her last duet with soprano Sonya Yoncheva (see below) had me in tears. It was a moment I could easily dwell in for eternity.
And I am still shivering from delight!!
Madeleine l'Engle once said that, "A book, too, can be a star, 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,' a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe." The founders of the Salzburg Festival had wanted that explosive quality--that same magical something-- to light up the darkness of the world; for they believed that culture had the power to bring people together in times of darkness. Maybe the founders were naive to put such faith in art and culture. But traveling to Salzburg, I realized that culture does have the power to gather people and allow them to step outside of ordinary time (like the festivals of old) and experience something bigger than themselves. Remembering cherry blossom viewing parties and tea gatherings; festivals and moon-viewings, for me, Salzburg was an unforgettable and unrepeatable moment that “stirs up fresh life.” To inhabit the thrilling space where creative experimentation and freedom of thought reigns, and to join with people who travel from afar in order to submit to the shared, transforming power of great art…for me, it doesn’t get any better than this.
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~~ For Brooks, Thank you for being there every step of the way!
