Notes
Ribeira Palace in its mid-18th century Mannerist and Baroque form, only years before its destruction in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.
1. The rowboat was pulling up to the wharf located adjacent to the River Palace along the Terreiro do Paço, the large palace square. And, as the boat approached the landing, Cristóvão was horrified to see crowds of onlookers waiting for the auto-da-fé to begin. A hundred years later, Voltaire would describe a similar scene when poor Candide found himself on the wrong side of the Inquisition just eight days after the destruction the destruction of the city. Cristóvão looked back one last time at the great Nau da Índia, which was anchored in the deeper waters of the Tagus River. This was the ship that had brought him here. Its medieval crusader Order of the Cross banners now flapping madly in the wind.
2. As Cristóvão left the morbid spectacle behind and headed up the hill where Baltazar’s family lived, he was grateful that his friend had warned him to duck whenever someone cried “Agua,vai!” Otherwise he would have had the contents of a chamber pot dumped on his head from a second story window. This had happened to poor Candide as well!
3) Duarte Lobo - 450 Years
The second half of the sixteenth century in Portugal was a period of deepening crisis at all levels of life. ... One of the consequences of this change in the cultural life of the country was a growing atmosphere of deep mysticism and disapproval of all kinds of secular entertainment. ... Portuguese sacred polyphony, on the other hand, found its golden age between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries. A network of major ecclesiastical institutions not only established large and richly endowed polyphonic chapels, but often also attached to them permanent music schools of high artistic and pedagogic standards. (See this site on Duarte Lobo)
Listen: Duarte Lobo's Audivi Vocem De Caelo
4).
I love Voltaire. And, like a favorite landscape, Candide is a book that I seem to return to again and again. Maybe like a lot of people after Japan's deadly earthquake in 2011, I found myself thinking about the book's opening chapters, when the luck-less Candide– along with the syphilitic Pangloss and the sailor from the boat– were shipwrecked; washing up on Lisbon's shores just moments before the city was struck by the infamous mega-quake of 1755.
As if the earthquake wasn't enough, the mega-quake was followed by fires and then a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so terrible that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time afterward; Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous.
In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage– but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophisizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been, for: “How could Leibnitz have been wrong?”
How indeed?
5. The Viol
Perhaps contributing more than anything in turning boy into legend, was his supreme skill at the viola da gamba. How his father managed to procure an instrument of that quality still remains a mystery but somehow the boy’s Papa had brought to Macao the finest instrument seen east of Goa. Held upright between the legs and played like a cello, the viola da gamba had taken the Iberian Peninsula by storm and was all the rage back in Renaissance Lisbon. Carved out of the highest quality beech wood, the instrument was lavishly decorated with rosettes and small inlaid mosaics utilizing a richly dark shade of jujube wood and white bone. Most noteworthy of all was the fingerboard which was adorned with a lavish marquetry decoration of several contrasting shades of wood along with white and green-stained bone.
"If one were to judge musical instruments according to their ability to imitate the human voice, and if one were to esteem naturalness as the highest accomplishment, so I believe that one cannot deny the viol the first prize, because it can imitate the human voice in all its modulations, even in its most intimate nuances: that of grief and joy"
Thus praised the French theoretician Marin Mersenne in 1636 the viola da gamba*, this most noble of all string instruments, which graced during its flowering - from 1480 to 1780, i.e. from the Renaissance to the Classical Period - court, church and chamber with its presence. Because of its delicate sound, rich in harmonics and in subtle inflections, the viol was considered the most perfect imitator of the human voice, which, in the currents of Humanist Thinking , had been elevated to be the measure of all things musical; it became a paramount medium for sophisticated music.
Music
Palestrina | Westminster Cathedral Choir - Sicut cervus
Portuguese polyphony - Duarte Lobo
MY FAVORITE--bringing back the playfulness and playing around of the Baroque: Ciaccona del Paradiso e del Inferno' P Jaroussky + Arpeggiata - Pluhar, life
++
Books
Dante's Journey to Polyphony, Francesco Ciabattoni
Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres (The MIT Press)
by Peter Pesic
Saramago's Baltazar and Blimunda
Heather Webb: The Medieval Heart
Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris: Baroque Science
Dana Stewart: The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry
My old essay:
Why Candide is the best book ever written?
It’s like Candide, if he hadn't been kicked out of his homeland, if he hadn't met with a shipwreck and washed unto Lisbon shores only there to be almost killed in a mega-earthquake; if he gone up against the Inquisition, if he hadn't traveled across America on foot, if he hadn't killed a baron, if he hadn't lost all his sheep in Eldorado, well, then he wouldn't have ended up sitting there in Constantinople eating some nice candied citron and pistachios where he would dream of spending his days cultivating his garden…
As the deer longs for streams of water,a
so my soul longs for you, O God.
3
My soul thirsts for God, the living God.
When can I enter and see the face of God?*b
4
My tears have been my bread day and night,c
as they ask me every day, “Where is your God?”d
5
Those times I recall
as I pour out my soul,e
When I would cross over to the shrine of the Mighty One,*
to the house of God,
Amid loud cries of thanksgiving,
with the multitude keeping festival.f
6
Why are you downcast, my soul;
why do you groan within me?
Wait for God, for I shall again praise him,
my savior and my God.
II
7
My soul is downcast within me;
therefore I remember you
From the land of the Jordan* and Hermon,
from Mount Mizar,g
8
*Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your torrents,
and all your waves and breakers
sweep over me.h
9
By day may the LORD send his mercy,
and by night may his righteousness be with me!
I will pray* to the God of my life,
10
I will say to God, my rock:
“Why do you forget me?i
Why must I go about mourning
with the enemy oppressing me?”
11
It shatters my bones, when my adversaries reproach me,
when they say to me every day: “Where is your God?”
12
Why are you downcast, my soul,
why do you groan within me?
Wait for God, for I shall again praise him,
my savior and my God.
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