The Last Breath of Happiness in Europe

The Last Breath of Happiness in Europe | norient.com                 8 Nov 2021 17:37:40

    The Last Breath of Happiness
    in Europe
    by Federico Campagna, Francesco Fusaro

    In a conversation with Francesco Fusaro broadcast on NTS
    Radio in March 2020, philosopher and scholar Federico
    Campagna reflected on the cultural and anthropological
    context of late Baroque music in 1700s Europe and Italy. The
    following contribution is a reviewed, shortened version of
    that conversation, and offers an account of some of the
    intersections between art, philosophy, and religion in the

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The Last Breath of Happiness in Europe | norient.com                            8 Nov 2021 17:37:40

    time of Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his son,
    Giovanni Domenico. As the author sees it, late Baroque music
    by Italian composers broke free from earlier formalism, and
    may still offer an existential possibility in a society that has
    lost any hope for the possibility of true happiness.

    Introitus
    At the time of the publication of my blog post « Rosa, the world of Baroque
    and Galante Italian music», I was studying in parallel the works of Giovanni
    Battista Tiepolo and his son, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and also keeping an
    ear on the music of that era.

    The paintings of Tiepolo are, as Roberto Calasso says in his masterful essay
    «Tiepolo’s Pink» (Calasso 2010), dominated by pink and azure. These are the
    colors of, as he calls it, the last breath of happiness in Europe. It really struck
    me that this pristine, pure feeling of happiness, the one that you find in that
    kind of music and in those kinds of skies – not only in Tiepolo, but also in
    François Boucher, in Jean-Honoré Fragonard, or in Antoine Watteau, if a bit
    more melancholic – you don’t seem to find ever again: Not in the music of –
    say – happy hardcore, not in Cindy Lauper, not in the music of The Spice
    Girls.

    The defining aspect of the later Baroque style is that it breaks free from the
    formalism of early Baroque music, and it opens more towards the idea of
    music as painting and painting as music. Pure emotion is the raw material of
    both forms of art.

    Regressum aeternum dona nobis
    Like many forms of art and styles, the so-called «stile galante» 1 is not
    entirely connected to a historical age, but it is an existential possibility, which
    can be reignited at any time. The recurrent comeback of Baroque is a good
    example: French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote about it in the 1980s, and
    more recently Italian media theorist Franco Bifo Berardi and Ecuador-born
    philosopher Bolivar Echeverría have written about it. Aside from theoretical
    reinterpretations, however, I must say that every new return of the Baroque
    and galante attitude within society has been less graceful than the original. It
    is not enough to mimic a certain style, but it is necessary to follow the
    trajectory of the desire that ignited that kind of imagination.

    In the case of stile galante, for example, I believe that its imaginal ground was
    a wildly optimistic desire for happiness, mixed with a pessimistic
    understanding of the fleetingness of life. Conversely, if we look at our
    contemporary society, these two terms seem to have been inverted: We wish
    for an infinite, unbreakable life, precisely because we have lost any hope for

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The Last Breath of Happiness in Europe | norient.com                            8 Nov 2021 17:37:40

    the possibility of true happiness. This might, perhaps, also be due to the
    disappearance of that sphere of the sacred, and of transcendence, whose
    color is the pink and azure painted by Tiepolo.

    Today, we try to paint in pink and azure the material surface of the world, but
    the world is too unstable a material to truly absorb the pigment of happiness.
    The fantastical quality of galante music reveals the deep-seated belief that
    the world is too fragile to impose on it our desire for absoluteness. We need
    an idealized elsewhere – not to escape the world, but to be able to inhabit it.

    Cuius regio, eius religio (medici)
    Sir Thomas Brown, an English erudite, alchemist, and interpreter of
    hieroglyphs is most famous for his book Religio Medici (1643). In that work
    he argues that the very nature of the world is not to be natural, but artificial,
    because it is created by God. So, he continues, if the nature of the world is to
    be artificial and not natural, then art itself is more natural than nature.

    Understanding the world as a theater is what you find when you go into any
    Baroque church and especially any Rococò palace, like the palace in Würzburg
    painted by Tiepolo. But it’s also what you find in the context of opera, in
    which the creation is a creation of a landscape and of figures in that
    landscape that can be produced by the concerted effort of many (opera
    proper), or by an individual (program music by Vivaldi and others). So this
    seems to be just a stylistic element and a stylistic choice. However, if you
    start from the belief that the world is essentially artificial, it is a metaphysical
    statement, not a stylistic statement.

    All the World’s a Stage
    Musicians during the time of Baroque and stile galante used to move a lot,
    and for most of them the experience of moving around wasn’t entirely
    without trauma, as some of them were basically considered (and treated as)
    servants. I’m thinking, for example, of Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco (1675–1742),
    who moved together with the court, to which he belonged. If the King was
    defeated in a battle and they had to flee, he would flee, if they won, he would
    move back with the court. Think of musicians like Nicola Porpora (1686–1768)
    who used to speak French, German, English, Latin, simply because he had to
    move around Europe during his career.

    There was this idea of the musician like a theater actor: The show remains
    somehow the same and the magic of the theater is always the same, but the
    company travels around. The world is a theater where pleasure is possible,
    death is the curtain surrounding the stage, but underneath the stage there are
    titanic forces that keep moving, like madness, or follia.

    O Fortuna

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The Last Breath of Happiness in Europe | norient.com                        8 Nov 2021 17:37:40

    In the Baroque period, we see a return of the fascination with the zodiac that
    is also prominent, for instance, in the Renaissance times, and with that a
    renewed interest in the figure of Fortuna: Fortune, or luck, but not just luck,
    rather a mix of luck and destiny. Fortuna was usually depicted as a ship that
    instead of a mast had a woman with some sort of flag draped over her by the
    wind.

    Fortuna was a pagan divinity, but this divinity came back very much in early
    modernity to reinforce this idea that the world and life is governed by
    overpowering forces that don’t have a moral stand or a moral justification,
    like the forces of God, but they are completely beyond any possible logical
    representation. A bit like the force that the ancient Greeks used to call
    Ananke, divine necessity, the force that governs the Iliad, that bends
    everything. Against this force, the only thing you can do of course is to dance.

    No Future

    In the Baroque era, it would have been easier than you suspect to bump into
    the punks of the time. What do I mean by this? Let’s go back to a few ideas
    we have collected so far: The Baroque mindset sees the world as built by God
    as an artifice, as a theater where everything is a mask inhabited by a breath
    of life, where death is very, very present, but somehow this is not the subject
    of any particular phobia, as much as it is today. So how can you be a punk in
    this situation? Well, we know what it was like because we have many letters
    left by the young punks of the age (Roscioni 2001).

    They were adolescents and teenagers who wrote to their favorite institutions,
    applying to become part of them, and in these letters the young people say
    that they want to break free of society. They want to explore new lands, they
    want to die. They want to renounce worldly goods. They want to give
    meaning to their lives. That is beyond all the stupid formalities of their age.
    Now, you might think that I’m probably talking about mercenary soldiers, but
    not quite. These are young missionaries and, specifically, Jesuit missionaries.
    Of course, Jesuit missions had a strong and problematic political impact on
    the countries that were being colonized at the time, but we shouldn’t
    discount the libidinal energy that was animating a lot of the rank and file
    people that would join these missions.

    Ars longa, vita brevis

    One thing that I always keep in mind when I go to museums and galleries that
    have exhibitions on recent music trends, is that usually contemporary cultural
    consumers wish to get the newest and youngest stuff. Often, however,
    curators scout around and end up, sadly, with dinosaurs, from – say – The
    Rolling Stones to Madonna: Very old people still making this music, still
    pretending to be the youngsters they were at the time they made a name for

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The Last Breath of Happiness in Europe | norient.com                                      8 Nov 2021 17:37:40

    themselves. So if you’re looking for the expression of youthful art, look no
    further than Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art and music. If anything,
    because people used to die at a very young age back then.

    So when you listen to, for example, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736),
    you’re listening to a young man who died at the age of twenty six of
    tuberculosis, who became a superstar in just that brief span of time, and that
    somehow ticks all the boxes of imagination for this talented and dear to the
    gods (as in «die young») artist.

    → Footnotes
    1.  Compared to early Baroque music, galant music is – in short – defined by a
        restrained use of polyphony and a clearer, simpler use of melody. See Heartz
        2003.

    → List of References
    Calasso, Roberto. 2010. Tiepolo’s Pink. London: The Bodley Head.
    Heartz, Daniel. 2003. Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780. New York:
       W.W. Norton.
    Roscioni, Gian Carlo. 2001. Il desiderio delle Indie. Storie, sogni e fughe di giovani gesuiti
       italiani. Torino: Einaudi.

    This article is part of Norient’s publication «Sonic Traces: From Italy», curated
    by Francesco Fusaro and funded by Italia Music Export, with the kind support
    of Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Londra and the Festival of Italian Literature in
    London.

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    Sonic Traces: From Italy
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    The Norient Special «Sonic Traces: From Italy» is a multi-layered, multimedia approach to
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    → Published on April 22, 2021

    → Last updated on June 30, 2021

    Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His latest books are
    «Prophetic Culture» (Bloomsbury 2021) and «Technic and Magic» (Bloomsbury
    2018). He works as a philosophy lecturer at KABK, and as part of the publishing
    house Verso Books. He is the host of the philosophy podcast «Overmorrow’s
    Library», for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

    Francesco Fusaro, Italian NTS Radio resident DJ, music producer, and musicologist
    is based in London. He has written about music for Italian and international media
    outlets and released music under his real name and other monikers on several
    independent labels. He is also the co-curator of the «anti-classical» recording series
    19’40”.

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