Nymphenburg Palace, Munich
Handel: Concerto Grosso 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.
Well, 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 in 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 many 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 and Zimmermanns, were families of craftsmen.
Zimmermann is the German for a 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 Fourteen Saints".
And, come to think of it, the Bachs
were a family of local musical craftsmen,
out of which suddenly emerged one of the
great geniuses of western Europe, Johan Sebastian.
J. S. Bach: St Matthew Passion
# But after they had crucified him,
# they divided his garments
# by casting lots for them,
# that it might be accomplished
# what had been said by the prophet:
# "They have divided all my garments among them
# "and over mine own vesture did they cast lots."
# And they sat all around and guarded him there. #
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
nor the pilgrimage churches and abbeys of Bavaria and Franconia.
# But those who there passed by derided him
# both wagging their heads before him and said:
# (Chorus) Thou that destroyest the temple of God,
# (Polyphony) and buildest it in three days
# save thyself.
# If thou art the Son of God,
# come down now from the cross.
# (Solo) Likewise also the chief priests mocked him
# together with the scribes and elders and said:
# (Chorus) He saved others, and cannot save himself.
# (Polyphony) If he be King of Israel,
# let him come down now from the cross,
# then we will believe in him.
# He hath trusted in God;
# let him deliver him now,
# if he wants him;
# for he hath said:
# "I am God's Son". #
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.
Although the Lutheran reform prohibited many of the arts
that civilise our impulses, it encouraged church music.
In small Dutch and German towns, the choir and 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 in 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 a hundred 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 a 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're 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.
J. S. Bach: Christmas Oratorio
# Shout for joy, exult,
# rise up, glorify the day,
# Shout for joy, exult,
rise up, glorify the day,
# praise what today the highest has done!
# (Polyphony) Abandon hesitation,
# banish lamentation... #
The sheer happiness, the almost childlike joy
of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, is made visible
by all these happy cherubs and benevolent saints.
# Shout for joy, exult,
# rise up, glorify the day,
# Shout for joy, exult,
rise up, glorify the day,
# praise what today the highest has done!
# (Polyphony) Abandon hesitation,
# banish lamentation,
# Abandon hesitation, banish lamentation,
# begin to sing with rejoicing and exaltation! #
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, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Here's his masterpiece; the ceiling of the staircase in the
Bishop's Palace at Würzburg, known as the Residenz.
And there in the corner, is Tiepolo's self-portrait,
the man with the yellow scarf, with his son, Giovanni Domenico,
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 the Baroque interiors.
No such hesitations prevent me from invoking, on this splendid staircase,
the name of George Frederick Handel.
Great men have a curious way of appearing in complementary pairs.
This has happened so often in history, that 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 marvelous Tiepolo ceiling
on the staircase at Würzburg, with Handel's music in one's ears.
Handel: Alcina
# This is the pinnacle of delight,
# the fulcrum of enjoyment;
# of enjoyment
# Here is Elysium for the living,
# where pleasure fashions heroes.
# the heroes
# the fulcrum of enjoyment.
# This is the pinnacle of delight,
# the fulcrum of enjoyment;
# of enjoyment
# of enjoyment #
The extraordinary thing is that this composer of
flowing, florid airs, and rousing choruses
when he turned from opera to oratorio,
which was in fact 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 depth 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
# 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.
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 been 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.
Antoine Francisque: Harp music
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 palette 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 Gilles, 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.
Antoine Francisque: Harp music
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 has 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:
"Oh, Cupid! Prince of gods and men."
Every man almost spoke pure iambics next day,
and talked of nothing but Perseus his pathetic address.
"Oh, Cupid! Prince of gods and men."
In every street of Abdera, in every house: "Oh, 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 over 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're in the world of poetry,
not only on 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 plasterwork,
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.
Haydn: Allegro Moderato Op. 77
Is that Haydn or Mozart?
Well, I happen to know that it's Haydn.
One can't always be sure.
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 Die 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.
Haydn: "Creation"
In these Rococo churches, the faithful are persuaded,
not by fear, but by joy.
They are a foretaste of paradise.
Sometimes, rather more like the Mohammedan paradise of the senses
than the disembodied paradise of Christianity.
"Oh, 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.
# Die Welt
# So groß
# So wunderbar
# Ist deiner Hände Werk
# Von deiner Güt' (By Thine goodness)
# O Herr und Gott (O Lord and God)
# Ist Erd' und Himmel voll (Is Earth and Heaven full)
# Die Welt
# So groß
# So wunderbar
# Ist deiner... #
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've managed to destroy a good many of them during the war,
including the palace of Sans Souci 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 Emmanuel 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: Quartet in G Minor
These rooms are the ultimate in Rococo decoration.
One might say that they bridge the gap between Watteau and Mozart.
Yet to pronounce the name of Mozart
in the Amalienburg is dangerous.
Because it gives colour, ... ... a 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 was 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 waste-paper 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, 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
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.
And of course this feeling reaches its natural conclusion in opera.
# I slave night and day,
# for one who nothing pleases.
# Rain and wind I must bear,
# poor food and little sleep. #
Opera, next to Gothic architecture,
is 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. 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.
# I want to be a gentleman,
# and I no longer want to be a servant
# No, no, no
# no longer a servant
# But it seems someone is coming;
# But it seems someone is coming; I don't want to be seen here.
# I don't want to be seen here. no, no, no... #
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 can almost say 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, they were often the best
and largest buildings in the town.
# Imprudent woman!
# People! Servants!
# I'm desperate to know
who this pursuer is. #
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 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.
# Oh, help!
# Oh, I've been betrayed!
# The assassin has wounded me,
# and I feel that I am dying.
# I feel my soul leaving me.
# I feel my soul leaving me,
# and I feel that I am dying.
# I feel my soul leaving me. #
No wonder 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.
(Finale of Don Giovanni)
# Alla vita è sempre ugual (All the wicked die as they have lived)
# È sempre ugual
# Alla vita è sempre
# È sempre, sempre ... ugual
# Alla vita è sempre ugual
# È sempre ugual, è sempre ugual
# Sempre ugual #