ANIMA
e CORPO anni 1600 - 2000
Anima
e Corpo can be experienced in many different ways.
- At
one level it can be a delightful multi-media show with songs, dances,
instrumental pieces, a bit of drama, perhaps costume and scenery,
an interesting use of space, all-round sound, and so on.
- A
social historian can be fascinated at the way traditional religious
and moral values were presented like a renaissance Disneyland, in
the counter-reformatory Catholic world at a time when inquisition
was as firmly established as in any modern totalitarian regime: and
in Rome, at the very power-centre.
- A
modern liberal thinker, perhaps someone who has studied more recent
developments in psychological understanding, may be saddened to be
faced again with a morality which peaches that pleasure is bad, that
self-denial is to be valued, when otherwise he is occupied with the
great task of showing how we function better is our basic needs are
met.
And
so on ...
But
perhaps we can find a synthesis of all this for today's listener - and
today's musician. Cavalieri's melodic and harmonic dialects are thoroughly
charming variants of a language we recognise and fell comfortable wwith:
the Italian poetry has a captivating music of its own, and we need not
understand all the details, nor feel ourselves repressed by any obsolete
formulations.
As it
stands, the message of the author, Agostino Manni, is of course a conformist
Renaissance Catholic one: but today we can take it in a universal way,
letting 'god' stand for creative power, 'worldly life' stand for materialism,
'pleasure' for short-term gain; 'hell' can represent the pain we suffer
from unresolved conflicts, 'heaven' can be our own personal idea of
balance, health, long-term satisfaction: the Rappresentatione di
Anima, et di Corpo can quite simply be the dialogue between rational
and irrational, maleness and femaleness, yin and yang, things and ideas:
and in their happy interaction we express the basic principle which
unites our modern or new age with that earlier Renaissance - MUSICA
HUMANA, the search for human harmony.
David
Kettlewell
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