The view from the Balcony in Carnegie Hall, always confusing: the orchestra (here the great Cleveland under Franz Welser-Möst, celebrating their centenary) and an even more massive choir seem miniatures. They look and sound so close your senses tell you they're tiny rather than distant. We were there to hear Haydn's "Seasons," a strange period piece though marvelously musical - a vision in overlapping tableaux in every register of the agricultural order of the Enlightenment, though there were rumbles of thunder and threats of drought and freezing to death in winter snow, too, all leading to an unexpectedly moving and satisfying vision of the heavenly mountain, offering eternal Spring to those who live with virtue, effort and charity.This picture makes it look like a snow globe, and for this particular piece of music, that is fitting. Haydn's "Jahreszeiten" purports to depict an entire world, with all its changes, pleasures and dangers, the whole life cycle of nature, and of humans, destined for more. The world depicted is a specific one, though, and a reminder that as recently as two centuries ago, western society was still mainly agricultural. The city sophisticates who would have gone to hear a piece depicting rustics still knew of the cycle of food production (and wine).
It was interesting to hear this after reading the texts I've assigned for tomorrow's meeting of "Religion & Ecology." In one Robin Wall Kimmerer tries to reacquaint us with an awareness of an interconnected animate world, not the world of lifeless things modern philosophy describes. In the other, David Abram laments the way writing has - since the Greeks fatefully created letters for vowels - effaced even the memory of the great spirit/wind/air/breath that traditional oral societies know flows through and connects all things. But hear this (from "Spring"):
Come, companions, let us wander in the fragrant air.
Come, good fellows, let us wander through the greenwood fair.
See the lilies, see the roses, see the mingled flowers.
See the valleys, see the meadows, see the verdant bowers.
See the woodland, see the waters, see the azure sky!
All is living, all is stirring, while the landscape laughs around!
See the lambs that frisk and gambol; see the fish that swim and tumble.
See the bees that swarm together; see the birds that soar and flutter.
What enchantment, what enjoyment, swells within our hearts!
Sweetest longings, softest passions, stir within our breasts!
Every feeling, every rapture, is the mighty, the mighty Creator's breath.
Or, in the German version (Haydn had it published in both languages):
MÄDCHEN Welche Freude,
Welche Wonne
Schwellet unser Herz!
BURSCHE
Süsse Triebe,
Sanfte Reize
Heben unsre Brust.
SIMON
Was ihr fühlet,
Was euch reizet
Ist des Schöpfers Hauch.
Folks weren't breathlessly despoiling the natural world yet. The recentness of our turning on the living world makes the extent of the despoliation that much more awful.
