59. Salvage: Tiepolo-Fellini-Trifonov, by Pippa Hammet
Master Raro took our leader, Louise Ebersdorf, to a YourMed one block north of the Tower to receive her first Covid vaccine shot (it was also her first street outing in months), and happily the dear behaved herself, although there was one tense moment when Louise realized she would have to wait weeks for the booster. Master patiently explained the situation, and she was mollified by a nurse who whispered that Louise was the oldest recipient in Manhattan so far. A distinction! Back home, she took a Tylenol and napped contentedly in her wheelchair. Master Raro joined me for our twentieth viewing of the Luke Mogelson footage of the Capitol riot now on the Internet. Master was deeply moved by the scene in which the mob smashed the media equipment of journalists and cameramen and tried to find some means of setting fire to the wreckage. Master commented, “In Europe, they smash windows and burn books. We will have our Cybernacht?”
Of what did all those MAGA and Confederate flags in the video remind me? Of course: the inutile banners and standards in the nomic etchings which Tiepolo created for connoisseurs of his art, the two series called the Capricci and Scherzi. In them, the artist envisions an alternate reality with scourged landscapes and windswept shorelines populated by the few survivors of some unspecified calamity. There are gypsies, soldiers, traveling commedia players, satyr families, mysterious Asiatic wise men in robes, wilding children and militant harridans. It is as though the world of powerful subvention that allowed Tiepolo and his two sons to decorate the ceilings of palaces has come to an end, and a blasted heath is the result. Some figures are shown near docked ships, but whether the vessels have just arrived or hope to depart is uncertain. Landscapes are dotted with broken columns and toppled masonry. Benighted denizens congregate around cultural shards, heads aligned like some theatrical chorus sighting alien bonfires in the distance. In one etching, a group of elders is rapt before a commedia Pulchinello, who is giving them advice. Perhaps he informs them about salvage: what might be rescued from the general ruin. Throughout the tableaux, there are glimpses of childrens’ faces which project a panicked hopelessness. Many etchings show hallowed flags allowed to drape on the ground, their standards indicating an uncharted horizon. An abandoned caduceus lies nearby. As Edmund Burke would put it, the second nature achieved through common habit is stunted, the social veil rent.
In his wonderful book Tiepolo Pink, Roberto Colasso attempted to decode the artist’s private vision in these etchings, perhaps with only partial success. The description I have offered above is a personal interpretation. You should turn to the Internet and call up a selection of the works before settling on any one response. Tiepolo may have wanted a subjective report from each viewer, individual “takes” as unique as possible. I persist in thinking we encounter an element of something like a post-apocalyptic milieu, rather Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy. It also reminded me of lines by a British mourner following the cataclysm of World War I:
Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o’erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone!
The ambiguity and light touch of the etchings make them all the more haunting. The viewer is allowed to imagine the worst cause for the depicted scouring, on his or her own. Tiepolo’s imagined victims are caught in a miasma of doubt and uncertainty. Primal impotence has seldom been rendered so eloquently, this side of Goya. Those clueless Wise Men make me think of the Republican Party elders today. And the general disarray is not only our Republican Congress-men and -women but the remains of the Trumpean day. Whither government? In one of Tiepolo’s etchings, the human population has been replaced utterly by owls. Who?
And the Scherzo and Capricci made me think of Federico Fellini, who studied Tiepolo for many of the visual coordinates of his Casanova, which has just been released on a Blu-ray disc that allows the film’s color and lighting to register as never before at home. Certain of its sequences have the unique magic that the Master could summon up in his mise-en-scène. In Casanova, Fellini follows his protagonist (played by a multi-skilled Donald Sutherland) all over Europe as he plies his amorous virtuosities not only for immediate reward but to advance himself in the eyes of social leaders and the learned men of the eighteenth century. He encounters diplomats, necromancers, aristocrats, circus performers, ambassadors, kitchen slatterns, and even the Pope! His story represents a great levelling of its own. In almost every case, Casanova feels short-changed in the end, his talents beyond the boudoir unappreciated. This is Edmund Wilson’s Casanova, freighted with moral squalor. Wilson mused: “There was something about him, one supposes, that in the long run made people find him intolerable.” Fellini’s gloss on the famed memoirs is lengthy, episodic, and unsparing. It is also almost always beautiful to watch, thanks to the cinematography of Giuseppe Rotunno and the costumes designed by Danilo Donati. The screenplay was written by Fellini and Bernadino Zapponi.
In this late film, there is especially evident Fellini’s skill involving the movement of his actors, his camera, and his editing. Like Ophuls and Antonioni, Fellini gives the impression that he is already forming his film’s choreography as he immediately shoots his footage, so that effects of blocking and mime are directly supported by the camera (whether in static composition or mobile), and then extended further through editing rhythms. The result is a dance-like mise-en-scène in sequence after sequence.
One way that Fellini accomplishes this in his Casanova is through his reliance on social ritual. Almost every scene is analyzed by the director in terms of the depicted rite which his characters enact. The first scene of the movie is the marriage of Venice with the sea, here shown as the Doge cuts a ribbon and signals the raising of a giant statue of Venus from the water of the canals. It’s a city celebration. The enormous head of the goddess rises only part-way from the surface when cables break, and she re-descends into the depths. (So, indeed, will Casanova’s ambitions for advancement be regularly thwarted.)
The second scene of the film takes place on the island of San Bartoldo where our hero meets the lover of a Venetian official whose voyeurism requires Casanova to make love to the compliant mistress while observed. The sequence takes place in an abandoned religious chapel which has been redecorated as a Temple of Love, complete with erotic wall decorations that look Cretan or Japanese. The rites of physical desire have replaced the rituals of the Church. Fellini’s compositions, camera movements, and editing underline the mechanical aspect of the resultant performance by mistress and libertine. There is also a mechanical bird that accompanies the amatory action with its song and wingspread. The scene is sacrilegious and funny.
My favorite sequences take place in England, where Casanova contemplates suicide at his rejection by an aristocratic mother-daughter team, only to be re-inspired to life by the sight of a nine-foot-tall Giantess from a local carnival. He passes through the Frost Fair where an embalmed whale swallows lines of gawkers and then is bested by the Giantess herself during an arm-wrestling contest in a riotous inn. The sequence that follows – Casanova led by two of the woman’s dwarf assistants to her tent – offers some of the most poetic imagery in late Fellini, up there with his short film Toby Dammit. Fellini turns the discontinuity of Casanova’s glimpses of the magical Giantess, accompanied by her mysterious song, into a ritual of erotic illusion, both evoked and denied. Somewhere in the tension between the dream and its evanescence, we sense infatuation’s very source. That obscure object of desire, indeed.
In an alchemical soirée in Paris, Casanova is party to a necromantic rite of rebirth, utterly bogus but strangely touching in its pretensions. The decadent party’s diners are joined by our lovehound, who aims to exploit the group’s credulity. In the center of the festive dining table is a large carved Tiepolo owl, observing all. (This avian motif somehow reminds me of the way Dickens often used rooks in his fictions.) The Parisian sequence asks the question: who is making use of whom amid the social dupery?
Fellini obviously has his doubts about the claims of the Enlightenment to bring about a new Golden Age. The theme allows him to use more mime and dance than usual in his movies. There is a cannibalistic ballet at a hunchback’s court. A dancing master conducts a minuet for Casanova and one of his Venetian love objects. And eventually Casanova falls in love with a mechanical doll-woman out of E.T.A Hoffman or Heinrich von Kleist. The libertine joins her in a dance. I won’t tell you how that liaison ends. I’ll only say that the eyes of La Serenissima’s Venus are watching Casanova and his animated mannequin even in the dreams of his dotage. Who is watching whom?
Something momentous and ambiguous has ended in the Tiepolo etchings and in Fellini’s fantasia. A vision of stability? A dream of rational order? When artists are able to indulge retrospective assessments involving whole societies and historic periods, we may wonder what can yet be found to be useable from the past amid the wreckage.
The pianist Daniil Trifonov’s new double album, “Silver Age”, is misnamed, given that the musical works by Stravinsky and Prokofiev therein are not really well described as “Silver Age” compositions. Both those composers are too idiosyncratic to fit neatly into a received category. The album’s one work by Scriabin is also a bit too early to deserve such pigeon-holing, although later Scriabin might. But Trifonov’s overall musical choices do illustrate the quandary that all three composers faced following the Wagnerian revolution. What styles and forms were left following a titan? In Stravinsky’s case, the bitonalities of Petrushka could offer something ear-opening to its first auditors. Trifonov plays the “Petrushka’s Room” scene with a precise attention to the puppet’s shifts in mood. Here is a dansant interpretation. (We look forward to the day when the composer Trifonov will write a ballet score himself. He has an alert ear for dance rhythms.) And in the Stravinsky Serenade in A, each classical trope is held out for our inspection, pinched by surgical tongs. The scare quotes force the listener to locate something in the material beyond mere pastiche. The pianist finds inner voices where I have never noticed them before. I am familiar with one ballet to this music that honors its tribute to ardent rites: Matthew Brookoff’s Fragile Spring. Trifonov also gives us the Infernal Dance from The Firebird, an encore specialty that has brilliant figurations in the piano reduction by Guido Agosti.
When it comes to Prokofiev, tonality is not quite dead. It persists to be played with and kept alive through critique. The Sarcasms, op. 17 are included here, and I always find the fie-fi-fo-fum schoolyard taunts of the opening Tempestoso movement very entertaining. Trifonov is brilliant in his technique. The Second Piano Concerto in G Minor was this composer’s audition piece for Diaghilev. Perhaps Prokofiev assumed the impresario had a taste for sustained musical mockery. I have always found the work to be too lugubrious by half, but that may mean I fail to understand some soulful element of Russian whimsy. Trifonov also includes the 1940 Piano Sonata no. 8 in B-flat major (op. 84), another work I do not generally respond to, but I admit that this pianist makes my hair stand on end with the vivace rhythms of the third movement. Trifonov leads you to discovering these near-otherworldly effects as organic and musically logical. They are fairly irresistible beneath his fingers.
The final work on the album (second disc) is the Scriabin Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in F-sharp minor, op. 20. It is distinguished by a ravishing central movement, the theme-and-variations Andante. Its “official” theme reminds me somehow of Mendelsohn at that composer’s most plaintive. Here is music that would make a haunting ballet. In his album’s program notes, Trifonov has interesting things to say about Scriabin’s idea of musical form and style in performance: “Scriabin’s concept of motion is very free, full of extreme spontaneity. . . . But the way his music breathes is very similar to how the Russian language behaves in poetic setting. Unlike the Romanticized rubato of Chopin and Rachmaninov, timing in Scriabin functions not as an expression of melancholy but as a reflection on the caprice of Fate – like a wind that never blows the same speed.” This composer reacts to the need for a music beyond the Wagnerian with formal diffusion across his work’s facture and through an air of improvisation. When a musical theme with a tonal center is indulged for long, it suggests an authority that is absolute, almost ominous -- certainly formal. (I have always heard this element in Scriabin’s work as too conventional. Perhaps the composer intends some hint of the oppressive.) In the new album, Trifonov and his collaborators (Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra) are in close communion amid the challenges that Scriabin’s aesthetic presents to allying soloist and ensemble.
In his written notes, the pianist also refers to his three composers as offering the listener something like a musical “cocktail”, given that the influences upon their works are various, even as each work is calculated toward a modernist intensity of effect. The old musical worlds of Vienna and Germany may have come and gone, but something remains to say.
Against all odds, it must be said.
P.H.
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