Hi all! Belated
Hannukah, Merry Christmas, Ramadan Kereem, and a Great Millennium!
Recent threads about Beethoven tickled a memory neuron, and
I thought I might pass along something -- admittedly a worrisome and
troublesome something -- from Bernard Berenson's "Rumor and
Reflection."
Berenson (1865 - 1959) was perhaps the best-known and most
influential art historian, scholar and critic of his time, specializing in
the Italian Renaissance. In 1900 he settled in his beloved Italy, outside
Florence. It is difficult to understand how so brilliant, educated,
well-connected and informed a person could have failed to see the
handwriting on the wall as Italy and then Germany turned fascist,
totalitarian and antisemitic, but Berenson, an American Jew, and by then a
very old man, found himself trapped in Italy during World War II, hidden
from the authorities by aristocratic friends. Though in no doubt about which
side needed to win for humanity's sake, victory for the Allies was for him a
bittersweet thing as he watched Allied bombers destroy much of the art and
civilization he so cherished. "Rumor and Reflection" is his
wartime diary from 1941 to 1944.
With nothing but time and dread on his hands, he turned his
brilliant old mind to the puzzle of how so rich, beautiful and humanistic a
culture as Germany could have transformed itself into such a nightmarish and
destructive thing. By coincidence -- or not -- it is a Christmas
posting.
Bob Merkin
**********************
from "Rumor and Reflection" by Bernard
Berenson
Simon and Schuster, 1952
25 December 1943
I referred yesterday to the way abstraction can dehumanize
one. I recall that in the last war I was wondering whether that was not the
reason why Germans for the great part, as individuals so kindhearted and so
ready to feel with others, can turn into mechanized executioners, as
impersonal as a guillotine, the moment the Fatherland, the state, the army
orders them to go against abstractions labeled French, English, Russian,
etc., etc.
I have been tempted at times to ask whether this unusual
readiness of Germans to submit to abstractions in every field, not of action
alone but of thought as well, was not in part at least due to their
indulging too much in symphonic, relatively timeless, music. Such music
easily puts one into moods whence the concrete disappears almost entirely,
where the mind is filled with exhalations that cannot be condensed into
verbally statable concepts. It cannot remain unsatisfied; yet the vaguest
abstractions suffice.
Wagner must have felt something of this danger, for he
furnishes a verbal basis for the symphonic and undramatic intervals of his
operas that keep the listeners tied town to the words of the libretto. Pious
Wagnerians attend to it as closely as to the score. There is nothing of the
sort to keep one from opiatic vagueness in the symphonies of a Beethoven, a
Brahms, a Bruckner, and their foreign followers César Franck and
Sibelius.