(1999-2001)
Underlying the whole nature of Romanticism are three major enterprises. First is the abandonment of Reason as the guiding principle of our existence: as the I 8th century took stock of its failure to control war, poverty, disease and injustice its dream of a rationally controllable world finally exploded. The second is the rediscovery of nature both inside us and in the outer world: he impulse to replace failed reason with the violence of emotion and feeling.,Finally artists turned to the old myths of Greece and
Rome and discovered those of their own Northern world, reinventing them as a way of exploring the frightening and thrilling powers that were released into this new world.
Following these ideas we will explore a wide range of artists painters, composers, poets and musicians political and social events, philosophies and key historical moments. We will be listening to music and opera as well as poetry, and looking at paintings and theatre designs and sets to establish as full a picture as possible of this extraordinary period that still continues to fire our imagination.
GIUSEPPE VERDI - TRADITION,
REFORM AND INNOVATION
(1999-2000)
2001 saw the centenary of Verdi's death and the fulfilment of Covent Garden's cycle of his complete works. Despite being labelled "HurdyVerdi" for much of this century by the musical establishment he is now recognised as one of the masters of the operatic form and a cornerstone of the serious repertoire. This series of five lectures is designed to let us look behind the operas, to see how the political and artistic world of 19th century Italy helped shape them and their composer's development. What emerges is a highly sophisticated process but one that always confirms and supports the broad popular nature of Verdi's art.
To study his work in this way is to enhance our admiration for the man and to enrich our enjoyment of the operas as music, drama and life.
Verdi's development is, in many ways, a mirror of the century inwhich he lived and which his own life span virtually covered. Over the course of his large output, he moved from the naive but vigorous Romanticism of Nabucco and Ernani to the musical and dramatic sophistication of Don Carl6s, Otello and Falstaff. Significantly in these late works he meets the great European dramatists, Schiller and Shakespeare on their own terms and forges new, individual works of the greatest artistic significance. In the process he far outstripped his early rivals Bellini and Donizetti creating a musicodramatic world that placed his newly established homeland, Italy, back at the forefront of European culture. That political achievement, in which he played his own part, was both the background and, in many ways, spur that enabled this extraordinary achievement. To understand what Verdi accomplished in music, drama, staging and performance requires a knowledge of the fascinating world of European, and in particular Italian opera as a theatrical form. We too easily think of Wigner as the great innovator and reformer of opera in the 19th century. His own position and achievement is not to be questioned. But Verdi's is all too often overlooked in favour of his German counterpart largely because where Wagner enshrined his ideas in theoretical writings and hugely visible accomplishments such as Bayreuth, Verdi's work was done more quietly, perhaps in a
more professional, more businesslike way.
MYTHS, MONSTER AND THE MEDICI
(1999-2001)
In the Pitti Palace in Florence there is a fresco of 1635 by the painter/decoratorVannini showing Lorenzo the Magnificent surrounded by a group of painters. They are more or less
concentrating on the object to which Lorenzo is pointing it is the head of a satyr. Why, out of all the wonderful sculptures and paintings that came before him, should Lorenzo be depicted admiring this piece of grotesque whimsy?
There are so many aspects of the Renaissance, so many ways of approaching it no one of which can possibly tell the whole story. But one theme that runs through almost everything is the use playful, profound, moral or egotistical of myth. In this course we shall be studying a wide range of aspects of this intriguing and always delightful process. It will involve some of the major painters Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian music, in particular the birth of opera itself, poets, Renaissance garden designers and town planners, bankers try'ng to save their souls and architects, with more than a glance at the myths of Greece and Rome, Christian legends and North European fantasy.
A rich mix that will give you a rather different way of exploring this celebrated period.
RENAISSANCE & REFORMATION
(2007-2008)
THE ARTS OF NORTHERN EUROPE 1300-1600
We are used to thinking of the Renaissance as something defined by the Italian experience: above all its stream of great painters, sculptors and architects. We look at the North and, leaving aside such household names as Breughel, Dürer and Holbein, what we look for are the signs of growing Italian/classical influence: the tondos on the entrance of Hampton Court, the great staircase at Blois, the Mauritshuis in the Hague.
But Northern Europe was, of course, far more than a backwater waiting for the illumination of Italy. It had strong, marvellous traditions of its own in all the arts. Part of the reason for the superficiality of the initial applications of the Italian Renaissance in architecture or painting is precisely because it was a confrontation that needed not adoption but assimilation into a strong, vibrant culture. In the great works of Dürer we see not a German become a decent Italian painter, but a forger of a magnificent new style.
In the other arts the relationship is even more complex. In music, for example, France, then England and above all the Netherlands, provided the basis for European composition and practice. In the drama, there is nothing more Renaissance in artistry or spirit than Shakespeare; while the whole enterprise of the Renaissance as a broad influence was only possible because of the Northern invention of printing.
Finally, just as ‘Renaissance’ was something that both North and South developed, so too ‘Reformation’ was a central concern across Europe.
The word is usually applied to the North (as Counter-Reformation is to the South), but both are part of the same enterprise. What we shall see is that the spirit that forged a particular kind of Reform in the North grew out of both a religious impulse and a humanistic vision as profound as anything that existed in Florence. ‘Reformation’ was more than a theological movement: like ‘Renaissance’ it was a redefinition of the human spirit and understanding of the world.
This course is a journey into the arts, history and politics of an era we all know well - it is the beginning of modern Europe - but often from indirect national or artistic points of view. It does so in a way that uncovers and makes sense of a wide range of artists, musicians, writers, thinkers and scientists who did not sit on the side-lines of European cultural history - but forged their own.
ALL THE RUSSIAS
THE ARTS AND HISTORY FROM 862 TO THE PRESENT
(2009-2010)
862 AD was the date recognised by the Tsars as the beginning of Russia. Of course much had happened before then and this course, which will explore the development and inter-relationship of Russian history and its amazingly rich flowering of all the arts, starts in the mists of time. The shadowy Chiemerians, the pagan rites and beautiful artefacts of the Scythians - and then the coming of the Norsemen, the Varangians or, as they became known, the Sons of Rurik. Corsing down the rivers of deepest hinterland Russia on their way to Byzantium, these merchant warriors built staging posts that in time became the first cities of a new state: Novgorod and, above all, Kiev.
The story of Russia traces an extraordinary territorial growth from this thin riverine trading route out to the edge of the Pacific ocean, south to meet the Orient, north to Baltic and Arctic oceans -
and west to press against Europe. It is a story of what has been called a “self-colonisation”, parallel with the expansion of the New World. As it grew, so more and new peoples were incorporated, bringing with them new cultures, new arts - and new problems. The problem, above all, of how to control such a vast, sprawling mass of languages, customs, ways of life and expectations. Was this a Western, European country or a part of Asia? Was it a country, in any normal sense, at all?
The history of Russia is the shifting series of answers to that still-unresolved question. Reflecting it, like a giant kaleidoscope, is the ever changing, multi-faceted world of the Russian arts: music, painting, architecture, sculpture; poetry and prose; drama, ballet, theatre and film; music, opera and song. Art of the peoples, art imported from Europe and beyond, art slowly developing its unique flavour to reveal the suffering, hopes and ideals of this extraordinary land and its people.
Almost from the start we shall find that the superficial notion of Russian art as a mixture of icons and Tchaikovsky is as untrue as to think of Europe as defined by Gothic stained glass and Beethoven. There is as much variety, richness and individuality in the arts of Russia as, perhaps, Europe itself. To enter the history and arts of Russia is really to find a whole world of experience and enrichment.
Please note that at present it is unlikely that there will be gallery visits for this course.
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