Entries from April 2008 ↓

I view art of all sorts as having a temperature. Whether painting, sculpture, literature, theater, cinema, or music, art can be coolly cerebral or hotly passionate.

Consider, for example, the Mona Lisa.

The most famous painting in the world, she is cool and comforting, her beauty lying in the subtle blend of colors and  mysterious smile. Something to contemplate in serenity matching the subject.

Contrast that with the statue of Cupid and Psyche, a neighbor of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre:

There’s nothing cool or subtle about that sculpture. It’s hot and passionate, and one glimpse can set your heart racing, even as the hearts of the depicted lovers do.

In general, I much prefer hot art.  (And, in fact, Cupid and Psyche was my favorites of the pieces that I saw in the Louvre.)  I prefer romantic symphonies to chamber music, hot rock to cool jazz, the ragings of King Lear to the musings of Hamlet.  I want art that reaches deep into my soul and calls on me to bay passionately at the moon.

A case in point: Friday evening, I went to the National Symphony’s performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony.  This has been one of my favorite pieces of music since the first time I heard it, back when I was in college.  Back then, Julie and I decided on the spur of the moment to go listen to the Symphony.  Mahler was playing, and I had heard good things about Mahler.  (Yeah, I know, a wonderful combination of arrogance and ignorance.  What can I say, I was an undergraduate at the time.)  We stood in line waiting to buy tickets when an older man came up to us and asked in a disgruntled voice, “Are you buying tickets to tonight’s symphony?”  When we said yes, he said, “Don’t bother,” and thrust into my hands two excellent tickets.  I can only assume that someone had stood him up, leaving him with two tickets and a bad attitude.  But whatever the back story, it added a bit of magic to our evening.

As it did this past Friday, on my first listening the music overwhelmed me.  The symphony is big - between orchestra, chorus, and soloists, it takes something like 250 musicians to perform.  It goes from a dramatic and stormy first movement to a transcendent chorale finale that is the music I imagine sung by the angels as one ascends into heaven.

Which makes it, perhaps, my favorite piece of music to listen to when I am in a bad mood.  Because as the stormy first movement plays, I find myself wrapped up in the music as it expresses the gloom in my soul.  But then, the music climbs out of the depths and reaches for the heavens, and I find my spirit reaching with it.

Mahler called it his Resurrection Symphony.  For me, the symphony lives up to its name.

I finished off the Sharpe’s Rifles series.  Nothing much to add to the previous notes on them - all good, quick reads without a whole lot of depth.

I’ve moved on to read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford.  This is a biography of Genghis Khan, that continue past Genghis’s death to cover the subsequent history of the Mongol empire.  A fascinating read, but it does stray a bit into hagiography.  It makes a big deal about the more enlightened aspects of Genghis Khan’s rule (forbidding torture, allowing religious freedom to his subjects) while glossing over some of his harsher policies (mostly, the tendency towards widespread slaughter of the ruling elite of any nation that he conquered, and the enslavement of the common people in such nations).  It mentions those things, but tends to excuse them by comparing them favorably with the practices of the Europeans at the time.

Still, it’s a fascinating portrait of a fascinating person.  And one whose rise to power is stunning.

I always find it interesting to consider the difference between someone’s life from the low point to the high.  Up until this time, the broadest range of low-to-high in my knowledge was Adolph Hitler, who went from being homeless in Austria to ruling all of Europe.  (And this should not in any way be considered praise of Hitler, who was, of course, astonishingly evil in his methods and policies and not at all worthy of admiration.)

But Genghis Khan’s range was even greater.  In his youth, after his father was killed by enemies, the young Temujin (Genghis’s name before he became ruler of the Mongolians) and his family scrambled to achieve a bare subsistence.  At one point Temujin was captured by enemies and enslaved for a period.  From that low, he grew to conquer and rule one of the largest empires that the world has known, an empire that eventually stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.

I’m not quite finished with the book yet - while Genghis is long dead, the Mongol empire has yet to collapse.  But the book is an excellent read about a period of history that I little knew.