»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« audio-video music serie 3.6

The audio-video music series will continue at the Palazzo Cini at San
Vio from October to December, when it will come to a close. The
remaining two short series, entitled after the forward and stop
buttons on video players, are intended to convey a powerful impression
of the plurality of passions, of the “forward” and “stop” in artistic
research, which may be represented by Virgil’s sprawling beech tree (sub tegmine fagi): an uncontrollable manifestation of the hypertrophy of the sense organs trained on beauty.

Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
7 November 2009, 5.00pm

Sisth session: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte



First
Movement – 1968

Julliard
Quartet
(Robert
Mann, violin;
Isidore
Cohen, violin;
Raphael
Hillyer, viola;
Claus
Adam, cello)

John
Horton, narrator

Glenn
Gould, piano

Second
Movement – 1998

Pierre
Boulez with the soloists of the Ensemble Intercontemporain
David
Pittman-Jennings, narrator

Schoenberg

How
I came to compose the Ode to Napoleon – 1944 [?]

“The League of Composers had asked me (1942) to write a piece of
chamber music for their concert season. It should employ only a limited number
of instruments. I had at once the idea that this piece must not ignore the
agitation aroused in mankind against the crimes that provoked this war. I
remembered Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, supporting repeal of the jus prime noctis, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Goethe’s Egmont, Beethoven’s Eroica and Wellington’s Victory, and I knew it was the moral duty of
intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.

But this was only my secondary motive. I had long speculated about the
more profound meaning of the Nazi philosophy. There was one element that
puzzled me extremely: the resemblance of the valueless individual being’s life
in respect to the totality of the community or its representative: the Queen or
the Führer. I could not see why a whole generation of bees or of Germans should
live only in order to produce another generation of the same sort, which on
their part should also fulfil the same task: to keep the race alive. I even
surmised that bees (or ants) instinctively believe their destiny was to be
successors of mankind, when this had destroyed itself in the same manner in
which our predecessors, the Giants, Magicians, Dragons, Dinosaurs and others
had destroyed themselves and their world, so that the first men knew only a few
isolated specimens. Their and the ants’ capacity of forming states and living
according to laws – senseless and primitive, as they might look to us
– this capacity, unique among animals, had an attractive similarity to
our own life; and in our imagination we could muse a story, seeing them growing
to dominating power, size and shape and creating a world of their own
resembling very little the original beehive… Before I started to write this
text, I consulted Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bees. I hoped to find there motives supporting my
attitude. But the contrary happened: Maeterlinck’s poetic philosophy gilds
everything which was not gold itself. And so wonderful are his explanations
that one might decline refuting them, even if one knew they were mere poetry. I
had to abandon this plan. I had to find another subject fitting my purpose.”

It
was George Byron’s Ode to Napoleon.