It was the time of the witch-burning craze in Germany the Devil was thought to be everywhere and
Posted in General on 24. Jul, 2010
It was the time of the witch-burning craze in Germany; the Devil was thought to be everywhere, and Faust’s damnation was great sermonising material with which to frighten congregations and bind them to religion.But it was also a wonderfully entertaining story. However, the father of modern medicine was not practising antiseptic procedures three centuries before their general acceptance: he put the bird droppings not on the wound but on the knife or implement that had caused it for magical reasons. The Enlightenment had murky roots, as Goethe shows us in Faust.But whether the good doctor was a man who was, for his time, progressive, we shall never know, since his name was both saved for posterity and irredeemably besmirched by no less a figure than Martin Luther, who denounced him in his volume of Table-talk for being “the Devil’s brother-in-law”.It was from this spark that the legend of Faust and his pact with the Devil flared. He was probably educated at Heidelberg University; like his near-contemporary Paracelsus, he may have been a travelling doctor, talking gobbledegook and magic but developing treatments from experience rather than from the old Latin medical textbooks of Galen.Paracelsus was famous for stopping the use of bird droppings as a poultice for open wounds; unsurprisingly, his success rate rocketed. I’ve been mountaineering on Goethe’s huge edifice, writing an English version of both parts for the RSC, roped to the daring director Michael Bogdanov and an adventurous group of actors, and we can report that Goethe’s masterpiece is nothing like its received reputation.
There really was a Doctor Faust He was born in Knittlingen and died in 1542.
Nobody is sure where, though there is a story that he was found dead in a small village in Wurttemberg, with his head twisted back to front – the traditional fate of those who sell their souls to the Devil. Part 1, which has the famous story of Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles and the seduction of Gretchen, is reasonably well known in the German theatre, but Part 2, apart from a famous line about “the eternally feminine”, is hardly ever read and held to be unstageable, a sublime but oxygen-less peak
This is wholly false. Goethe’s Faust has a formidable reputation for lofty, granite- like seriousness: it’s seen as the Everest of European literature, which even German readers and theatre companies rarely climb. Now we talk about repetitive music as if it were something new, and I feel as if I’m witnessing a lapse in history and knowledge.” Amid the pluralistic inconsequentialities of our post-modern scene, one can only view with something like awe the continuing, purposeful progress of this last of the modern masters.Andrew Davis conducts the world premiere of Carter’s ‘Adagio tenebroso’ at the Proms: Wednesday 7pm, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London SW7 (0171-589 8212), and live on BBC Radio 3. There was a widespread repetitive-music trend associated with the cinema, dating back to Satie. When he composed his kaleidoscopic Partita for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1993, he revealed that it was the first panel of a projected triptych The Adagio, commissioned by the BBC, is the central panel.
Carter, like most composers, is reluctant to talk about works in progress, but the third panel is already underway, begun the very next morning after the completion of the Fifth Quartet. When finished, the triptych will comprise a span of over 50 minutes – the longest structure in Carter’s entire output.From the immensely long perspective of his career, Elliott Carter is wry about the tendency of fashion to go round in circles: “I remember George Antheil, who created a great sensation in the late Twenties with his repetitive music. Yet by June he was back on the international circuit, travelling to the Aldeburgh Festival to hear the first performance of a major new song-cycle on words by his compatriot John Hollander. And before flying to Belgium for the Fifth Quartet, he will be at the Proms on Wednesday for the world premiere of his latest orchestral score, Adagio tenebroso – all this, in the 87th year of a composer who persists in looking and carrying on like a man 20 years younger.The Adagio – a darkly upwelling processional of slowly evolving lines and chords composed, uniquely in Carter’s mature music, against an unvarying beat – is part of his most daring creative wager of all. Last winter, Carter was seriously ill with a form of pneumonia that put him on oxygen for five weeks.
Carter also concedes: “In the past few years I’ve eliminated some of the circumstances that were taking a lot of time away from composition. I no longer teach, I don’t give lectures, and many of the pieces I write now are shorter.” But the main impression is of an artist who has spent decades arduously mastering the means to realise his visions suddenly finding he can work with a new immediacy: an Indian Summer comparable only with such late-flowering masters as Rameau and Janacek.No doubt there is also an element of racing against time. Maybe he even thought of himself that way at the time, for in 1980 he abandoned his long-term publisher and, when asked how his future works would be promoted, was heard to shrug, “Well, I’ve probably only got half a dozen things left to write anyway.”How to explain, then, that the last 15 years have brought forth a flood of some 30 new scores, including a number of elaborate orchestral works, two full-scale concertos, two string quartets and a skein of delectably volatile shorter pieces for small groups or single instruments? Doubtless finding a willing new publisher is part of it. But when they do come off, Carter’s works of the 1950s and 1960s exert an expressive power, a physical punch like few others of the period.If Carter had retired from composing around the age of 70, he would continue to be thought of as a late developer whose fame rested upon a relatively small number of large-scale scores. But Carter remained truer to the empirical spirit of earlier modernism. He was never prepared to trap himself in the rigid schemes of serialism, for instance; on the other hand, the younger Europeans never achieved remotely the swirling momentum of Carter’s middle-period pieces, in which he found ways of evolving entire movements from the interplay of constantly fluctuating tempi.Between the appearance of the massive, multi-layered First String Quartet (1951), which established Carter’s international reputation, and the tumultuous Concerto for Orchestra (1969) inspired by a vision of America swept by great winds of change, Carter strove to combine the utmost differentiation of his individual players with the utmost integration of his overall forms.”I do not want to write the kind of music that just marches on and marches off,” he would say.