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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 9
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By the year 1700 the German-speaking countries have once more become articulate. For over a century the disorderly aftermath of the Reformation ... 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...
This chapter is primarily about music; and some of the qualities of eighteenth-century music -- its melodious flow, its complex symmetry, its decorative invention -- are reflected in the architecture; but not its deeper appeal to the emotions. And yet the Rococo style has a place in civilisation.
Serious-minded people used to call it shallow and corrupt, chiefly because it was intended to give pleasure; 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 is in Rococo architecture -- the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love.
... I must say a word about the austere ideal that had preceded it. For sixty years France had dominated Europe, and this had meant a rigidly centralised, authoritarian government and a classic style... It was not the work of craftsmen, but of wonderfully gifted civil servants... when it has been attempted outside France it has usually looked lifeless and pretentious as the dullest nineteenth-century town hall. French Classicism was eminently not exportable.
But the High Baroque of Rome was exactly what the north of Europe needed... For one thing it was elastic and adaptable. Rules didn't exist for Borromini... All over Germany there are pieces of decorative architecture where at first one can hardly tell whether they are late fifteenth-century Gothic or mid-eighteenth-century Rococo.
So the architectural language in which northern Europe became articulate in the eighteenth century was Italian Baroque; and rather the same is true of music. Underlying much of the work of the German composers was the international style of the great Italians...
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process. Dr. Johnson's much quoted definition ... "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 eighteenth century was religious art, so the greatest artistic creation of the Rococo is completely irrational. Opera, of course, had been invented in the seventeenth century and made into a form of art by the prophetic genius of Monteverdi; it came to the north from Catholic Italy and flourished in Catholic capitals -- Vienna, Munich and Prague. Indignant Protestants used to say that Rococo churches were like opera houses -- quite true, only it was the other way on. The opera house in the Residenz at Munich ... is exactly like a Rococo church.
Opera houses came in when churches went out and they expressed so completely the views of this new profane religion that for one hundred years they continued to be built in Rococo style, long after that style had gone out f fashion. In Catholic countries, not only in Europe but in South America, the opera house is often the best and largest building in town.
Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? ...
Partly, of course, because it is 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.
When, at the beginning of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the Don kills the Commendatore, and in one burst of glorious music the murderer, his mistress, his servant and the dying man all express their feelings, opera provides a real extension of the human faculties. No wonder that the music is rather complicated, because even today our feelings about Don Giovanni are far from simple. He is the most ambiguous of hero-villains.
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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.
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