Areopagus Volume XVIII

Welcome one and all to the eighteenth volume of Areopagus. Many of you have expressed an interest in previous instalments of this newsletter. Should you wish to read them, you'll find Volumes I-XVII here. Enjoy.

And now, as Autumn puts a certain end to summer and strews the streets with conkers, here are seven short lessons to make your week a little more interesting, useful, and beautiful...

I - Classical Music

String Quartets, Op. 76 No. 3 in C Major (The Emperor Quartet)

Joseph Haydn (1797)

Why this piece?

It is light, regal, sophisticated, and joyous. The same is true of much 18th century music, but few pieces possess these qualities in such abundance as Haydn's Emperor Quartet. It was composed in 1797, when Haydn had returned to Vienna from London, and was dedicated to the Hungarian Count Joseph Georg von Erdődy. Haydn was sixty-five at the time, an international musical superstar, and at the peak of his powers.

If you're a fan of the gentle grace of string quarters then you'll need no convincing of this piece's excellence. But if, like me, you prefer the more emotional and dramatic music of the Baroque or Romantic Eras, then this sort of thing can seem a little harder to appreciate. Nonetheless, this is the statement of a technical master: just let Haydn's Emperor Quartet work its magic and you'll find yourself walking on air...

The German National Anthem, originally written in 1822 and formally adopted by the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, is based on an old Austrian tune of which Haydn was rather fond. You can hear it incorporated into the second movement of the Emperor Quartet.

What style is it?

This can be confusing at first, but within what we call "Classical Music" there is a period referred to as... Classical. It lasted from about 1750 to 1820, a short span between the Baroque and Romantic Eras. And it is highly distinctive. This was the age of Mozart, Salieri, Gluck, Beethoven (in his early days), and Haydn himself. They were largely based in Vienna, the heart of the Habsburg Empire and a bustling cosmopolis of culture and high society. It was here that chamber music - composed for performance in a small room, i.e. chamber, with a small audience - took on its now recognisable form.

The Classical Era was an age of supreme musical technicality. The frills and ornamentation of the preceding Baroque Era were cast off and replaced with a sort of clean, highly-skilled simplicity. Everything was light and airy; nothing too heavy or sombre. The piano replaced the harpsichord and violins took centre stage. These are the trademarks of Classical Era Music.

In the early decades of the 19th century some of the foremost Classical composers, such as Schubert and Beethoven, would break away from the rigorous rules and harmonious simplicity of Haydn's Classical style, giving rise to the Romantic Age in all its vigour and melodrama.

What was Joseph Haydn?

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was the one of the most important figures of the Classical Era. He, just like his pupils Mozart and Beethoven, was based largely in Vienna. Has any city ever, in such a short space of time, produced such a wealth both of talent and artistic progress? And, like his protégés, Haydn was prolific: he wrote at least 104 symphonies! Hence his deserved sobriquet Father of the Symphony. Even more important was Haydn's contribution to the idea of a "string quartet", which is now so familiar to us that we can hardly imagine it ever having to be invented. Haydn didn't create the string quartet, but he certainly mastered it.

II - Historical Figure

Pindar

A Window to the Past

Who was Pindar?

Pindar (518-438 B.C.) was an Ancient Greek poet born in Thebes, the capital of a region called Boetia, which isn't too far from Athens. He achieved great fame in his own lifetime - and some notoriety too. See, poetry was vitally important in Ancient Greece. It was how man became myth and how people remembered their past. As Pindar himself wrote:

Pindar's foremost duty was the writing epinikia, meaning "victory odes". These were poems composed to celebrate winners in the Panhellic Games. There were four of these: the Olympics, the Pythian, the Nemean, and the Isthmian. They were held all around Greece every two or four years, both during war and peacetime. And, just like modern sport can sometimes take on religious significance, the Panhellenic Games were the pinnacle, cultural and spiritual, of Ancient Greek society. You can tell as much from their sculptures:

Pindar's victory odes are like the written form of these great statues. By reading his work you will understand why these athletes were depicted with such idealised, superhuman beauty. But the epinikia weren't just poetic appraisals of the victor; they were a chance to consider his heritage and the history of his city, to recount the tales of the gods and heroes of ages past, and offer wisdom about the life of mankind:

Why is he interesting?

If you want to understand the Ancient Greeks then their poetry is a good place to start. Imagine if somebody from the future wanted to understand life in the 21st century. A history book might give them facts, but by listening to our music and watching our films they might better grasp what we were like and what we liked, what we thought of ourselves and what we found important.

And so Pindar, regarded by Quintilian as the greatest of Greek lyric poets, is a window into the mindset of Ancient Greece. Admittedly, Pindar was something of a conservative. While Athens - with its shiny new democracy, its philosophers and political theorists - was full steam ahead creating a new vision of Greek society, Pindar harked back to the older, simpler days when men worshipped gods, each city kept more or less to itself, and the great games gave men the chance to achieve glory.

He revered the Gods very deeply, and attributed to them the ups and downs of life. Yet Pindar believed a single man could, if Fate smiled on him, do some great and glorious deed to remembered for all time:

Pindar was also an inventive, playful, and open-minded poet. Parting from popular mythology, he famously reiminaged Hercules a short and rather squat little man, while often making wry comments about his fellow poets and their questionable methods. To end, however, I think it appropriate to let Pindar speak for himself:

III - Painting

At the Dressing Table (Self-Portrait)

Zinaida Serebriakova (1909)

Why this painting?

This painting was part of a Twitter thread I wrote on Wednesday which featured one painting from every year of the 20th century. Serebriakova's Self-Portrait proved very popular. Many remarked at how modern it seems. All that really stands it out as a century-old painting is the presence of candles and hat pins on her dressing table. Otherwise you'd be hard-pressed to believe this wasn't a figurative work of art about modern vanity and our obsession with selfies.

And yet there is nothing vain about Zinaida's Self-Portrait. It is refreshingly honest, deeply alive, and profoundly happy. What we see is ostensibly the most mundane of moments - a young woman combing her hair in the mirror - and yet by its simple composition and delightfully delicate colours we are charmed. It is Serebriakova's eyes that speak the loudest. Her painting reminded me of this line from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, describing Fantine:

It also proof of the old truth that women paint themselves (or other women) very differently to men. The brilliance of Serebriakova's Self-Portrait leaves no need for me elaborate further.

Who was Zinaida Serebriakova?

Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967) was born into a family of famous, successful, and sophisticated painters in Kharkiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. She was given an excellent education, including a period of tutorship under the Russian master Ilya Repin, and even went Rome and Paris as part of her study. Self-Portrait was painted in her so-called "Happy Years", when she and her family flourished. The October Revolution of 1917 changed everything, however, and her life took a downwards turn. Her style of art didn't fit with the hyper-modern Futurism and Constructivism favoured by the Soviets at the time; her husband had died, too. Eventually she went to France in 1924 and stayed there for the rest of her life. In the 1960s Serebriakova's art underwent a resurgence and she became, by a strange twist of fate, one of the most popular artists in the Soviet Union. And, before the end of her days, Serebriakova was reunited with her daughter (who had been forced to stay in the USSR) in 1960, whom she hadn't seen for thirty six years.

What style is it?

The art of the 20th century can be hard to classify. It was a time of such rapid evolution and frequent turmoil that no sooner had a "movement" been established than it was either left behind or splintered into a hundred new sub-movements. At best you might call Self-Portrait a Post-Impressionist painting; there's certainly more turn-of-the-century Paris in here than any of Ilya Repin's Realism. But perhaps we shouldn't try too hard to categorise Zinaida Serebriakova's wonderful Self-Portrait, and instead just let it be, with all its striking modernity and refreshing, striking honesty.

IV - Architectural Masterpiece

Jerónimos Monastery, Lisbon

Manueline Marvel

Fact-File

The Jerónimos Monastery was built in the early 1500s for the monastic Order of Saint Jerome (hence the name) during the reign King Manuel I. The Portuguese kingdom had recently risen to great prominence, largely thanks to the wealth generated by its new trade in Africa and the Far East. It was this influx of riches that funded the vast and ornate Jerónimos Monastery. It was built near the spot from which Vasco da Gama, the famed Portuguese sailor and explorer, first set sail for India in 1497. He and his fellow sailors apparently stayed there the night before the expedition and prayed for safe passage at an older church which stood on the site.

Why is it a masterpiece?

This monastery is the best-preserved example of an unusual and utterly brilliant architectural style unique to Portugal. This style, called the Manueline after the king under whose patronage it flourished in the 16th century, is an extraordinary mixture of Gothic, Islamic, and Renaissance architecture.

Portugal had already developed a distinctive design philosophy of its own, called plateresque, meaning "silver filligree" after the fineness of the stonework with which its churches were decorated. You can see some of that distinctive plateresque design in the columns of the interior:

This worked well with the Flamboyant Gothic style, which was final era of Gothic architecture before its eclipse by the ideas of the Renaissance. This was dramatic, ornate, and elegant; Medieval stonemasons had become masters, unchallenged by structural problems, and could render stone as fine and light as air.

Now consider the main entrace to the Jerónimos Monastery. You can see it has rounded arches, indicative of a return to Greco-Roman architecture, and yet nothing else about this entrance is Classical. The overwhelming profusion of detailing and elegant stonework is all Flamboyant, while the delicate carvery is signature plateresque, and the geometric patterns are a reference to the Islamic architecture of the Moors, who had ruled in Iberia, Al-Andalus, for centuries.

What distinguishes the Manueline style it its synthesis of all these different influences, plus one major addition: the incorporation of maritime themes. As mentioned above, Portugal had recently become rich from its seafaring exploits, and signs and symbols of this new age were worked into their architecture. There were ocean creatures, ships, compasses, ropes, and seaweed carved on the walls, arches, and columns of their churches and castles. This didn't happen anywhere else in Europe; it was a brief, distinctive, and quite remarkable movement.

The Flamboyant, the High Gothic, the Manueline: all would soon be supplanted by the symmetry and clean elegance of Renaissance architecture. And so the Jerónimos Monastery represents, in some ways, one of the last great moments in the story of the Gothic style: ornate, dramatic, minutely detailed, deeply atmospheric, a feast for the eyes and heart. What more could the Gothic possibly do? It is also one of Portugal's great contributions to posterity.

V - Rhetoric

Paradiastole

I often use paradiastole. There are certain small cafes, called "greasy spoons" in the United Kingdom, where the food isn't particularly good. Yet the place feels so authentic you can't help be charmed. And you end up saying how the titular, greasy food is part of what makes it so special. That is paradiastole: when a vice is reinterpreted as a virtue. Perhaps the most famous example, originally from the world of programming, is:

If one of your favourite poems is particularly difficult to understand, you may cite this as one of its qualities. Or, say, if you support a sports team which is perpetually struggling, you might claim this endless suffering as part of what makes supporting your team so meaningful. One can think of many more examples; no doubt you, like I, have often used paradiastole.

This is how it was described by the 16th century scholar Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence, a sort of glossary of rhetorical devices:

Like many rhetorical devices, this is more than a mere gimmick. It touches on something fundamental about the human condition. As Henry Peacham said, we frequently use paradiastole when we wish to defend the vices of others. Have you ever done this? A family member or a friend, perhaps, who has some intrinsic personality flaw you have come to appreciate or wish to defend against accusation.

You might call them economical instead of miserly or passionate instead of hot-tempered. That's paradiastole at its brilliant best, a rhetorical manifestation of our deeply human inability to separate head from heart. And no bad thing, I dare say.

I should add that paradiastole and meisosis are not the same thing. Meiosis is the understatement of something bad, a sort of euphemism intended to coneal its iniquity. Paradiastole is where the problem is plainly reframed as a good thing.

VI - Writing

Go Into Yourself.

In 1902 an officer cadet and would-be poet at the Austrian Military Academy called Franz Xaver Kappus wrote to the famous poet Rainer Maria Rilke, seven years his senior, who had also studied at the academy. Kappus sent Rilke a selection of his poetry and asked for some constructive criticism. They struck up a lovely correspondence, but this is how Rilke initially responded:

This reminds me of something Charles Bukowski later said (in a somewhat different fashion) with his ruthless poem "so you want to be a writer?"

I believe this is, in the end, writing's only real rule. For all the advice that I or any great number of people might wish to offer, the simple truth is that you cannot avoid the actual writing itself. That's the only way to get better and the only way to find your voice. You must ignore everyone and everything else for a time, all their views about what is good and worthwhile, and figure out what you think is good and worthwhile.

If you want to write... write!

VII - Recommendations

Poetry: Sappho

Given that Pindar was this week's historical figure and an exemplar of Greek lyric poetry, I thought Sappho would make an appropriate companion. She lived a century before Pindar, born and raised on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea, and is also one of the Nine Canonical Lyric Poets. Whereas Pindar's surviving work is largely comprised of epinikia which praise athletic heroes and rarely touch on love, Sappho offers a different, more romantic side to Greek poetry.

All we have left of her work are a few, tantalising fragments. And yet, incomplete as they are, Sappho's fractured poems are strangely captivating. Their very incompleteness is perhaps a part of this: they provoke, intrigue, mislead, confuse, and move. They, are in a word, rather magical. Sappho has also become a symbol of love and passion between women, hence the words lesbian and sapphic, whose etymologies are her native island and name, respectively.

Prose: Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

If you're seeking a good novel this Autumn, one to read during the cold evenings as the nights close in, then Joseph Conrad's Nostromo is my suggestion. I could spin you a tale about Conrad's literary genius, but I simply wish to convey the joy of reading Nostromo. It has a large and compelling cast of characters, an unpredictable and engaging plot, and all those universal themes of love and destiny and rebellion and adolescence, plus plenty of action and great lines. Nostromo is not just one of the greatest novels ever written, it is one of the most entertaining novels of all time, too. I read the novel years ago, but I can still remember the names of all the main characters. That's the sign, if anything, of a bloody good book.

Non-fiction: De Architectura by Vitruvius

Vitruvius, who lived in the 1st century B.C., is one of the most important architects in history. Not because of anything he built, but because of what he wrote. De Architectura is the only surviving architectural treatise from Antiquity, and it was the foundational document of Renaissance architecture. Brunelleschi and co took Vitruvius' principles of proportion and his explanation of the classical orders and ran with them. All the neoclassical architecture around you today stems directly from this relatively short work. Parts of it aren't so interesting for non-architects, but most of it is fascinating. A vital work.

Miscellaneous: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Aha! You will be glad to know that Rainer Maria Rilke's correspondence with Franz Kappus was collated and published under the title Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke's advice is poetry all of its own. But, more importantly, it is timeless, truthful, powerful, and apt. No writer (or artist of any kind) would fail to benefit from reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. We needn't necessarily agree with everything he said, but here was a great mind straining to discern the nature of art itself. It is only a brief read, and well worth your time.

Question of the Week

Last week's question to test your critical thinking was:

By what standards should we judge our ancestors?

Anthony A pointed out that, though we sometimes think moral standards have changed over time, this may not be the case:

While Federico C argued that, even if moral standards have changed, we can still delineate between those who stood for justice and those who did not:

Nate B, on the other hand, suggested that we should critique ourselves before pointing fingers at anyone else:

And, as ever, somebody questioned the question itself. There are presuppositions hidden in the most unassuming of statements. Thanks to Mike S for pointing this out:

Each week I also get some rather laconic answers. The best, this time, came from Cynthia E:

For this week's question to test your critical thinking:

Is there such a thing as fate?

And that's all

If I wasn't writing the Areopagus then I'd be thinking about all of these things anyway. And so to share them with you, to hear your views and feelings about all this art and history, is nothing short of majestic. I wish you all a splendidly autumnal weekend, in which the growing cold is perhaps a part of its charm, no? Paradiastole strikes again... ciao for now.

Yours,