Original subtitles

(MUSIC) HANDEL: Concerto Grosso Op.3

The German-speaking countries have once more become articulate.

For over a century, the disorderly aftermath of the Reformation,

followed by the dreary, interminable horrors of the Thirty Years War,

had kept them from playing a part in the history of civilisation.

Then peace, stability, the natural strength of the land,

and a peculiar social organisation,

allowed them to add to the sum of European experience

two shining achievements:

one in music, the other in architecture.

Of course, the music is far more important to us.

The writing and painting of the 18th century make one think

that the emotional life had somehow dried up.

Well, of course, it hadn't. It had been transferred to music.

From Bach to Mozart, music expressed the deepest thoughts and feelings of the time,

just as painting had done in the early 16th century.

This programme is primarily about music, and some of the qualities of 18th-century music -

its melodious flow, its complex symmetry, its decorative invention -

are reflected in its architecture.

It's only quite recently that people have noticed

what a brilliant, inventive and altogether enchanting style of architecture

flourished for almost 50 years in 18th-century Germany and Austria.

Serious-minded historians used to call it "shallow" or "corrupt".

Well, the founders of the American Constitution who were far from frivolous

thought fit to mention "the pursuit of happiness" as a proper aim for mankind,

and if ever this aim has been given visible form, it's in rococo architecture -

the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love.

But before we plunge into the buoyant sea of rococo,

I must say a word about the austere ideal that preceded it -

classicism.

For 60 years, France had dominated Europe,

and this had meant a rigidly centralised, authoritarian government,

and a classic style.

French classicism produced magnificent architecture.

This is the architecture of a great metropolitan culture.

And it is expressive of an ideal.

Not an ideal that appeals to me, but an ideal, nonetheless.

Grandeur achieved through the authoritarian state.

I find that this French classical architecture has a certain inhumanity.

It was the work not of craftsmen but of wonderfully gifted civil servants.

But, because it reflects so clearly a grand, comprehensive system,

it is done with superb conviction.

French classicism was eminently not exportable.

But the high baroque of Rome, especially that of Borromini,

was exactly what the north of Europe needed, for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, it was elastic and adaptable.

So, the architectural language in which northern Europe became articulate in the 18th century

was that of Borromini the second great master of Italian baroque.

Borromini came from a land of stone-carvers -

the Italian lakes that form a boundary with Switzerland -

and his style could fit into the craftsman tradition of the Germanic north

a tradition serving a social order that was absolutely the reverse

of the centralised bureaucracy of France.

It's true that many of the German princes thought they would like to imitate Versailles,

but the formative element in German art and German music didn't lie there

but in the multiplicity of regions and towns and abbeys,

all competing for their architects and choirmasters

but also relying on the talents of their local organists and plasterers.

The creators of the German baroque - the Assams and the Zimmermanns -

were families of craftsmen.

Zimmermann is the German for a carpenter.

The finest buildings we shall look at are not palaces,

but local pilgrimage churches deep in the country,

like the Vierzehnheiligen behind me - "the Fourteen Saints".

And, come to think of it

the Bachs were a family of local musical craftsmen,

out of which there suddenly emerged one of the great geniuses of western Europe,

Johann Sebastian.

(MUSIC) JS BACH: St Matthew Passion

(MUSIC) Da sie ihn aber gekreuziget hatten

(MUSIC) Teilten sie seine Kleider

(MUSIC) Und warfen das Los darum

(MUSIC) Auf da� erf�llet w�rde

(MUSIC) Das gesagt ist durch den Propheten

(MUSIC) Sie haben meine Kleider unter sich geteilet

(MUSIC) Und �ber mein Gewand haben sie das Los geworfen

(MUSIC) Und sie sa�en allda, und h�teten sein

The sound of Bach's music reminds me of a curious fact

that people don't always remember when they talk about the 18th century -

that the great art of the time was religious art.

The thought was anti-religious, the way of life ostentatiously profane.

We are right to call the first half of the 18th century the Age of Reason,

but in the arts what did this emancipated rationalism produce?

One adorable painter, Watteau,

some nice domestic architecture some pretty furniture,

but nothing to set beside the Matthew Passion

or the pilgrimage churches and abbeys of Bavaria and Franconia.

(MUSIC) Die aber vor�bergingen, l�sterten ihn

(MUSIC) Und sch�ttelten ihre K�pfe, und sprachen:

CHORUS: (MUSIC) Der du den Tempel Gottes zerbrichst

(Polyphony) (MUSIC) Und bauest ihn in dreien Tagen

(MUSIC) Hilf dir selber

(MUSIC) Bist du Gottes Sohn

(MUSIC) So steig herab vom Kreuz

SOLO: (MUSIC) Desgleichen auch die Hohenpriester spotteten sein

(MUSIC) Samt den Schriftgelehrten und �ltesten

(MUSIC) Und sprachen:

CHORUS: (MUSIC) Andern hat er geholfen, und kann sich selber nicht helfen

(Polyphony) (MUSIC) Ist er der K�nig Israels

(MUSIC) So steige er nun vom Kreuz

(MUSIC) So wollen wir ihm glauben

(MUSIC) Er hat Gott vertrauet

(MUSIC) Der erl�se ihn nun

(MUSIC) L�stet's ihn

(MUSIC) Denn er hat gesagt:

(MUSIC) "lch bin Gottes Sohn"

But there was another musical tradition in Germany that went back to the Reformation.

Luther had been a fine musician.

He wrote music and sang with, surprisingly enough, a sweet tenor voice.

And although the Lutheran reform prohibited many of the arts that civilise our impulses,

it encouraged church music.

In small Dutch and German towns the choir and the organ became the only means

through which men could enter the world of spiritualised emotion.

This organ, in the great church at Haarlem,

was played on by Handel, and by Mozart at the age often.

When the Calvinists, in their still more resolute purification of the Christian rite,

prohibited organs, and destroyed them,

they caused more distress than had ever been caused by the destruction of images.

Organs have played a variable role in European civilisation.

In the 19th century they were symbols of newly won affluence, like billiard tables,

but in the 17th and 18th centuries

they were expressions of municipal pride and independence.

They were the work of the best local craftsmen,

and organists were respected members of the community.

(MUSIC) BUXTEHUDE: Toccata and Fugue in F

Bourgeois democracy,

which had provided a background to Dutch painting in the 17th century,

became partly responsible for German music,

and it was a society more earnest and more participating

than the Dutch connoisseurs had been.

This provincial society was the background of Bach.

His universal genius rose out of the high plateau of competitive musical life

in the Protestant cities of northern Germany.

One could even say that it rose out of a family,

that had been professional musicians for a hundred years,

so that, in certain districts the very word Bach meant a musician.

And his life was that of a conscientious somewhat obstinate

provincial organist and choirmaster.

But he was universal.

A great musical critic said of him,

"He is a spectator of all musical time and existence

to whom it is not of the smallest importance whether a thing be new or old,

so long as it is true."

And we once more find that we can illustrate Bach's music by contemporary building.

This church behind me the pilgrimage church of the Vierzehnheiligen,

was built by an architect who was only two years younger than Bach.

He was called Balthasar Neumann

and although his name isn't well known in the English-speaking world,

I think he was certainly one of the greatest architects of the 18th century.

Unlike the other builders of German baroque, he was not primarily a carver or plasterer,

but an engineer.

He made his name as a master of town planning and fortifications,

and inside his buildings, just as when we're listening to Bach,

we are conscious of a complex plan,

worked out like the most intricate mathematical problem.

And when occasion demanded it

he made use of ornaments as lavish and fanciful as that of the most ebullient Bavarian plasterer.

(MUSIC) JS BACH: Christmas Oratorio

(MUSIC) Jauchzet, frohlocket

(MUSIC) Auf, preiset die Tage

(MUSIC) Jauchzet

(MUSIC) Frohlocket

(MUSIC) Jauchzet, frohlocket

(MUSIC) Auf, preiset die Tage

(MUSIC) R�hmet, was heute der H�chste getan!

(Polyphony) (MUSIC) Lasset das Zagen

(MUSIC) Verbannet die Klage...

The sheer happiness, the almost childlike joy of Bach's Christmas Oratorio

is made visible by all these happy cherubs and benevolent saints.

(MUSIC) Jauchzet, frohlocket

(MUSIC) Auf, preiset die Tage

(MUSIC) Jauchzet, frohlocket

(MUSIC) Jauchzet, frohlocket

(MUSIC) Auf, preiset die Tage

(MUSIC) R�hmet, was heute der H�chste getan!

(Polyphony) (MUSIC) Lasset das Zagen

(MUSIC) Verbannet die Klage

(MUSIC) Lasset das Zagen

(MUSIC) Verbannet die Klage

(MUSIC) Lasset das Zagen

(MUSIC) Verbannet die Klage

(MUSIC) Stimmet voll Jauchzen und Fr�hlichkeit an

Balthasar Neumann was fortunate

in that the painted decorations of his finest interiors

are not the work of amiable, local ceiling painters,

but of the greatest decorator of the age, the Venetian Giambattizta Tiepolo.

Here's his masterpiece -

the ceiling of the staircase of the Bishop's Palace at W�rzburg,

known as the Residenz.

And there, in fact, in the corner

is Tiepolo's self-portrait - the man with the yellow scarf,

with his son, Giandomenico also a very good painter,

looking over his shoulder.

Then, as you move along to the middle,

here, this very grand, military-looking man

is the architect himself, Balthasar Neumann Looking the great master of fortifications.

The Residenz doesn't seem quite our idea of a Bishop's residence,

being about three times the size of Buckingham Palace

and incomparably more splendid.

And one can't help speculating on the tithes and taxes

that the peasants of Franconia had to pay,

in order that their episcopal master should do himself so well.

But one must admit that many of these rulers of small German principalities -

dukes, electors, bishops, or whatever -

were in fact remarkably cultivated and intelligent men.

Their competitive ambitions benefited architecture and music

in a way that the democratic obscurity of the Hanoverians in England did not.

The Sch�nborn family, one of whom was responsible for the Residenz at W�rzburg,

were really great patrons,

whose names should be remembered with the Medici.

I felt some scruples in comparing the music of Bach with the baroque interiors.

No such hesitations prevent me from invoking, on this splendid staircase,

the name of George Frederick Handel.

You know, great men have a curious way of appearing in complementary pairs.

This has happened so often in history,

that I don't think it can have been invented by some symmetrically minded historian,

but must represent some need to keep human faculties in balance.

However that may be,

there's no doubt that the two great musicians of the early 18th century -

Bach and Handel -

fall into this pattern of contrasting and complementary personalities.

They were born in the same year, 1685;

they both went blind from copying musical scores;

and both were operated on, unsuccessfully, by the same surgeon.

But otherwise, they were opposites.

In contrast to Bach's timeless universality, Handel was completely of his age.

Instead of Bach's frugal, industrious career as an organist,

with numerous children

Handel made and lost several fortunes as an impresario.

This amiable statue of him

was erected by the grateful proprietors of an amusement park, Vauxhall,

in which his music had been one of the attractions.

There he sits, in unbuttoned moo, d one shoe off and one shoe on

not caring how much he snitched other people's music,

as long as he produced something effective.

In his youth he must have been charming,

because when he went to Rome as an unknown young virtuoso,

he was immediately taken up by society,

and Cardinals wrote libretti for him to set to music.

And there are remains of remarkable good looks in this head.

Later in life when Handel had settled' in England,

and entered the world of operatic production,

he became less anxious to please,

and is, traditionally, said to have held one of his leading ladies out of the window

and threatened to drop her if she didn't sing in tune.

He remained faithful throughout his life to the Italian baroque style.

In consequence, his music goes well with the decorations of Tiepolo,

which even have the pseudo-romantic subjects of his operas.

One can look with pleasure at the marvellous Tiepolo ceiling

on the staircase at W�rzburg, with Handel's music in one's ears.

(Thunder)

(MUSIC) HANDEL: Alcina

(MUSIC) Questo e il cielo di contenti

(MUSIC) Questo e il centro del goder

(MUSIC) Del goder

(MUSIC) Del goder

(MUSIC) Qui e I'Eliso de viventi

(MUSIC) Qui I'eroi forma il piacer

(MUSIC) Qui I'eroi forma il piacer

(MUSIC) Il piacer

(MUSIC) Il piacer

(MUSIC) Questo e il centro del goder

(MUSIC) Questo e il cielo di contenti

(MUSIC) Questo e il cielo di contenti

(MUSIC) Questo e il centro del goder

(MUSIC) Del goder

(MUSIC) Del goder

The extraordinary thing is that this composer of flowing, florid airs and rousing choruses,

when he turned from opera to oratorio, which was a kind of sacred opera,

wrote great religious music.

Saul, Samson, Israel In Egypt...

not only contain wonderful melodic and polyphonic inventions,

but show an understanding of the depth of the human spirit.

As for the Messiah it's like Michelangelo's creation of Adam -

one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone.

And yet it is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order.

(MUSIC) HANDEL: I Know That My Redeemer Liveth (from the Messiah)

(MUSIC) I know that my redeemer liveth

(MUSIC) And though worms destroy this body

(MUSIC) Yet in my flesh shall I see God

(MUSIC) Yet in my flesh shall I see God

(MUSIC) Shall I see God

(MUSIC) I know that my redeemer liveth

Yes, however often I hear it it brings tears to my eyes.

In passages like that, Handel is beyond classification.

Still, one may reasonably call him a baroque composer.

Now, baroque first came into being as religious architecture,

and expressed the emotional aspirations of the Catholic Church.

Rococo was to some extent a Parisian invention

and provocatively secular.

It was, superficially, at any rate,

a reaction against the heavy classicism of Versailles.

Instead of the static orders of antiquity, it drew inspiration from natural objects,

in which the line wandered freely without symmetry -

shells, flowers, seaweed, vines -

especially if they wandered in a double curve.

Rococo was a reaction against the academic style, but it wasn't negative.

It represented a real gain in sensibility.

It achieved a new freedom of association

and captured new and more delicate shades of feeling.

All this is expressed through the work of one exquisite artist - Watteau.

He was born in 1684 the year before Bach and Handel,

in the Flemish town of Valenciennes

and he derived his technique from Rubens.

But, instead of a hearty Flemish acceptance of life,

Watteau, who was a consumptive,

discovered something in himself that had hardly ever been seen in art before -

a feeling of the transitoriness, and thus the seriousness, of pleasure.

He had brilliant gifts - he could draw with the style and precision of a Renaissance artist -

and he used his skill to record his rapture at the sight of beautiful girls.

What dreams of beauty they are.

(MUSIC) ANTOINE FRANCISQUE: Harp music

How happy all these exquisite people should be.

But "in the very temple of Delight, Veil'd Melancholy hath her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine."

No-one had a finer palette than Watteau.

He can taste every delicate flavour at this open-air dance,

where glances suddenly meet.

And he's depicted himself, not as one of the dancers

but as the bagpipe-player,

animating the scene with his humble, melancholy instrument.

He was, his friend Caylus said,

"Tender and perhaps something of a shepherd."

And in this elegant company that he watched so discerningly,

he remained the odd man out.

And Gilles, the simpleton,

whose tall, white figure rises in isolation from his fellow comedians

is a sort of idealised self-portrait -

tender, simple, and yet capable of love and of delicate intuitions.

Watteau came on the scene at an incredibly early date in the 18th century.

His masterpiece, The Departure From Cythera, was painted in 1712,

when Louis XIV was still alive

and yet it has the lightness and sharpness of a Mozart opera;

also the sense of human drama.

(MUSIC) ANTOINE FRANCISQUE: Harp music

The new sensibility, of which Watteau was the prophet,

showed itself most of all in a more delicate understanding

of the relations between men and women.

Sentiment.

The word's got into trouble, as words do, but it was, in its day, a civilising word.

Sterne, in his Sentimental Journey, that somewhat discredited work of rococo prose,

tells a fable about a town of Abdera...

"..which was the vilest town in all Thrace.

What with poisons, conspiracies and assassinations,

libels, pasquinades and tumults,

there was no going there by day - 'twas worse by night."

Till, hearing a play of Euripides, the people were struck by a speech of Perseus:

"'Oh, Cupid! Prince of gods and men.'

Every man almost spoke pure iambics next day,

and talk'd of nothing but Perseus his pathetic address.

'Oh, Cupid! Prince of gods and men.'

In every street of Abdera, in every house: 'Oh, Cupid! Cupid!'

In every mouth, like the natural notes of some sweet melody,

which drop from it, whether it will or no,

nothing but 'Cupid, Cupid, prince of gods and men.'

But the fire caught, and the whole city, like the heart of one man

opened itself to love.

No pharmacologist could sell one grain of hellebore -

not a single armourer had a heart to forge one instrument of death.

Friendship and virtue met together and kissed each other in the street.

The golden age return'd, and hung over the town of Abdera."

Next to love, Watteau cared most about music

for which, his friends tell us he had a most delicate ear.

Nearly all his scenes are enacted to the sound of music.

In this he shows himself as part of a tradition going back to the Venetians,

of whom Pater said that "they painted, the musical intervals of our existence

when life itself is conceived as a kind of listening."

In a Watteau, we're in the world of poetry,

not only on account of the grace of the figures,

but because the facts have been translated into the most exquisite paint.

Watteau's colour has a shimmering, iridescent quality,

which makes one think immediately of musical analogies.

Watteau died in 1721 at the same age as Raphael - 37 -

and by that date, the rococo style was just beginning to affect decoration and architecture.

Ten years later, it had spread all over Europe,

producing a style as international as the early 15th-century Gothic.

Rococo even spread to England,

although the native good sense of a fox-hunting society

prevented its more extravagant flights.

I suppose that most of the plasterwork, like most of the opera singing,

was done by foreigners,

but a group of English craftsmen designed and executed the decorations

in this music room from Norfolk House

which is only a little less elegant than its Parisian counterpart.

It's extraordinary how a true international style controls the shape of everything.

It's an absolute compulsion which overrides convenience

or what we used to call functionalism.

It makes everything dance to the same tune.

(MUSIC) HAYDN: Allegro Moderato Op. 77

Walter Pater said that all art aspired to the condition of music.

I don't suppose he thought of extending this famous dictum to applied art,

but it is true of the finest rococo design.

The rhythms, the assonances, the, texture, have the effect of music

and are echoed in the music of the next 50 years.

(Music continues)

ls that Haydn or Mozart?

Well, I happen to know that it's Haydn, but one can't always be sure.

And yet the two great musicians of the second half of the 18th century

were very different characters.

And the difference comes through in their music.

Haydn, who was 20 years older than Mozart, was born in Croatia, the son of a wheelwright,

and was fundamentally a peaceful, spacious, soil-conscious man.

He said that he wrote his music

in order that the weary and worn, or the men burdened with affairs

might enjoy a few minutes of solace and refreshment.

And I think of this saying as I approach the Bavarian pilgrimage church of the Wies.

It belongs to the countryside.

In fact, from a distance it might almost be the hall of a rustic manor.

But enter it, and the most incredible richness appears before your eyes.

(MUSIC) HAYDN: Creation

In these rococo churches the faithful are persuaded not by fear', but by joy.

They are a foretaste of paradise -

sometimes, I admit, rather more like the Mohammedan paradise of the senses

than the disembodied paradise of Christianity.

"Oh, Cupid! Cupid! Prince of gods and men."

Well, it's always been difficult, even for the saints

to represent spiritual love without having recourse to the symbols of physical love.

Creation is the most mysterious of all God's acts.

And it is Haydn's Creation that comes to my mind,

as I contemplate the rustic delights of the brothers Zimmermann.

(MUSIC) Die Welt

(MUSIC) So gro�

(MUSIC) So wunderbar

(MUSIC) Ist deiner H�nde Werk

(MUSIC) Von deiner G�t

(MUSIC) O Herr und Gott

(MUSIC) Ist Erd und Himmel voll

(MUSIC) Die Welt

(MUSIC) So gro�

(MUSIC) So wunderbar

(MUSIC) Ist deiner...

It's curious that in the present day we should have made such a cult of rococo music

when the rococo style as a whole runs so strongly counter to our convictions.

You see, many of the most beautiful rococo buildings of the 18th century

were built simply to give pleasure,

by people who believed that pleasure was important,

and worth taking trouble about, and could be given some of the quality of art.

And we... we've managed to destroy a good many of them during the war,

including the palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam and the Zwinger at Dresden.

As I've said it may be difficult to define civilisation,

but it isn't so difficult to recognise barbarism.

But by chance, we didn't hit the pleasure pavilions at Nymphenburg,

which is a suburb of Munich.

Munich itself we pretty well laid flat.

They were built for the Elector Max Emmanuel by his court dwarf,

named Cuvilli�s who happened to be an architect of genius.

Despite his French name, he came from Flanders.

This behind me is the most famous of them I suppose - the Amalienburg.

The exterior is quite simple,

the interior a riot, or rather a ballet of beautifully designed ornament.

(MUSIC) MOZART: Quartet in G Minor

These rooms are the ultimate in rococo decoration

and one might say that they bridge the gap between Watteau and Mozart.

And yet to pronounce the name of Mozart in the Amalienburg is dangerous,

because it gives colour - a very pretty colour -

to the notion that Mozart was merely a rococo composer.

50 years ago, this was what most people thought about him.

The notion was supported by horrible little plaster busts,

which made him look a perfect 18th-century dummy.

I bought one of these busts when I was at school

but when I first heard the G Minor Quartet,

I realised that it couldn't possibly have been written

by the smooth, white character on my mantelpiece,

and I threw the bust into the waste-paper basket.

I afterwards discovered the portrait by Lange,

which, although no masterpiece, does convey the single-mindedness of genius.

Of course, a lot of Mozart's music is in the current 18th-century style.

He was so much at home in this golden age of music,

so completely master of its forms,

that he didn't feel it necessary to destroy them.

Indeed, he loved the clarity, the precision and the mathematical perfections

of the late 18th-century style.

I love the story of Mozart, sitting at table,

absent-mindedly folding and refolding and refolding his napkin

into more and more elaborate patterns,

as fresh musical ideas passed through his mind.

But of course, this formal perfection was used to express two characteristics

which were very far from the rococo style.

One of them was that peculiar kind of melancholy,

a melancholy amounting almost to panic, which so often haunts the isolation of genius,

and Mozart felt it quite young.

And the other characteristic was almost the opposite -

a passionate interest in human beings and in the drama of human relationships.

How often, in Mozart's orchestral pieces - concertos, quartets, symphonies -

we find ourselves participating in a drama or dialogue.

And of course this feeling reaches its natural conclusion in opera.

(MUSIC) MOZART: Don Giovanni

(MUSIC) Per chi nulla sa gradir

(MUSIC) Piova e vento sopportar

(MUSIC) Mangiar male e mal dormir...

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the oddest inventions of Western man.

It couldn't have been foreseen by any logical process.

Dr Johnson's much-quoted saying, which, as far as I can make out, he never said

"An extravagant and irrational entertainment,"

is perfectly correct,

and at first it seems surprising that it was brought to perfection in the Age of Reason.

But, just as the greatest art of the early 18th century was religious art,

so the greatest artistic creation of the rococo is completely irrational.

(MUSIC)..voglio far il gentiluomo

(MUSIC) E non voglio piu servir

(MUSIC) E non voglio piu servir

(MUSIC) No, no, no

(MUSIC) Non voglio piu servir

(MUSIC) Ma mi par che venga gente

(MUSIC) Ma mi par che venga gente, Non mi voglio far sentir

(MUSIC) Non mi voglio far sentir, no, no, no...

Of course opera had been invented in the 17th century,

and made into a form of art by the prophetic genius of Monteverdi.

It came to the north from Catholic Italy, and it flourished in the Catholic capitals -

Vienna, Munich, Prague.

Indignant Protestants used to say that rococo churches were like opera houses.

Quite true, only it was the other way round.

As you can see, this enchanting opera house in Munich,

built by the dwarf architect Cuvilli�s,

is exactly like a rococo church.

One can almost say that opera houses came in when churches went out.

And they expressed so completely the views of this new, profane religion,

that for a hundred years all opera houses continued to be built in rococo style,

long after that style had gone out of fashion;

and in Catholic countries not only in Europe, but in South America,

they were often the best and largest buildings in the town.

(MUSIC) Sconsigliata!

(MUSIC) Gente! Servi!

(MUSIC) Come furia disperata

(MUSIC) Come furia disperata

(MUSIC) Come furia disperata

(MUSIC) Ti sapro perseguitar!

As Don Giovanni assaults Donna Anna

her father, the Commendatore comes down the stairs.

What on earth has given opera its prestige in Western civilisation?

A prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought.

Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours,

listening to a performance of which they don't understand a word?

Why do quite small towns, all over Germany and Italy,

still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment?

Well, partly, of course, because it's a display of skill, like a football match.

But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational.

What is too silly to be said may be sung.

Well, yes, but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt,

or too revealing, or too mysterious -

these things can also be sung, and only be sung.

(MUSIC) Ah, soccorso!

(MUSIC) Ah, son tradito!

(MUSIC) L'assassino m'ha ferito

(MUSIC) E dal seno palpitante

(MUSIC) Sento I'anima partir

(MUSIC) Sento I'anima partir

(MUSIC) E dal seno palpitante

(MUSIC) Sento I'anima partir

It's no wonder that the music's rather complicated,

because even today our feelings about Don Giovanni are far from simple.

He's the most ambiguous of hero-villains.

The pursuit of happiness, and the pursuit of love,

which had once seemed so simple and life-giving,

have become complex and destructive.

And his refusal to repent - which makes him heroic -

belongs to another phase of civilisation.

(Finale of Don Giovanni)

(MUSIC) Alla vita e sempre ugual

(MUSIC) E sempre ugual

(MUSIC) Alla vita e sempre

(MUSIC) E sempre, sempre

(MUSIC) Ugual

(MUSIC) Alla vita e sempre ugual

(MUSIC) Alla vita e sempre ugual

(MUSIC) E sempre ugual, e sempre ugual

(MUSIC) Sempre ugual