The fourteenth century has been dubbed the calamitous’. And in a political sense, this position is justifiable. Yet a focus on its calamities might blind the reader to some of its musical triumphs.
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Gustav Mahler, The Double Man
For some, he was a God, for others, a tyrant. He was loved and loathed in equal measure, and often for the same reasons. So who was Gustav Mahler? And can we get to the bottom of this double man?
Postmodernism: Triumph of the Absurd
Having identified as risible attempts to forcibly assert Truth by means of hard-lined aesthetic dogma, the Postmodernist reacted by withdrawing from the world, and then bursting into uncontrollable laughter over the hopeless mess of it.
High Modernism: Death of Beauty
Without necessarily knowing it, all major Modernist artists from Schönberg to Cage, from Picasso to Pollock, had systematically broken down Beauty. By the time the Fluxus artists rose to prominence in the ‘60s, Beauty as we’d known it for five hundred years was no more.
Enlightenment: 'Humanising' the Arts
As the eighteenth-century rolled on, god’s divine light grew dimmer and the light of man’s reason, brighter. It was the beginning of a self-referential, human-derived and human-validated moral order. It was the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Romanticism: The Artist Hero
After Beethoven, it would no longer be acceptable for any serious artist to speak the same stylistic language as his influences. ‘Originality’ quickly diffused itself and became the norm. All artists working subsequently have operated within this paradigm. This is the Romantic legacy.
Renaissance: Birth of Modern Man
In the mid to late fifteenth century, there began to be felt, in Europe, a shift in our way of seeing the world so far-reaching in its implications, that it has since been deemed as marking the dawn of modernity. It is known by the name Renaissance, or ‘rebirth’.
Middle Ages: Beauty and God
Beauty, as it was conceived by the Medieval artist, was to be put to use in the service of that one, supreme governing principle; that value of all values which itself legitimated Beauty, and rendered meaningful all attempts to pursue it: god .
David Helfgott
This article, published in Limelight Magazine’s August 2013 edition, examines the life and legacy of Australian pianist David Helfgott.