From vision to vision in Ravenna

I first came here on my second Interrail trip in the summer of 1982. Having met up with friends Jo and Simon at Florence station, travelled on with them to Arezzo, Cortona and Rome and continued with Simon to Ravenna, I left him there and embarked on my first independent travel (if you except the journey down to Florence). I remember meeting a French student in the youth hostel who was crazy about John Cowper Powys; I was reading Wolf Solent and didn't really 'get it'. What I decisively did get was Bertrand Russell's The Pursuit of Happiness, and applied it to myself wonderingly alone in a big and beautiful world. If I were to dig out my diary from that time I'd probably find the word 'epiphany'.

Oddly, there don't seem to be any photos of what I saw there - the album goes from Horace's Sabine farm straight on to Padua and Venice - but old postcards were able to confirm that I 'did' the big three Byzantine gems - Sant'Apollinare Nuovo (pictured below), San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (above). I remembered that they were miraculous and looked forward to returning, but wasn't prepared for the overall impact this time, there as a guest of the Ravenna Festival - about which I've written for The Arts Desk - before flying on to Riga.

The Festival included in our greetings bag the best guide you could possibly have to the eight early Byzantine monuments in and just outside Ravenna which were included in UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1996. Three aren't included in the special ticket which admits you to the best-known, but they should have equal status and have to be seen too, along with the archaeological museum and the Zona Dantesca which includes another church with a special wonder. Glad I had two and a half days in which to cover them all, as well as four concerts, a play and a trip to strange and fascinating Comacchio on the lagoon heading towards the Po delta, which merits another entry.

I've always found it worthwhile taking the guided tour our wonderful Lucy Maxwell-Stewart always organises on festival trips, even if I think I know the place, since you invariably get a personal perspective - and that was certainly true of our passionate cicerona this time, Silvia Togni. SPOILER ALERT: if you want the pleasure of discovery and the proper visual shock, read no further.

She took us first to Sant'Apollinare Nuovo - the round tower is typical of the Ravenna style, and a similar one was the first thing I saw when I opened my shutters on the first morning - which like much else we shared with only a very few tourists. This is the great work of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, whose rule in Ravenna from 475 to 526 AC saw a religious harmony not subsequently preserved when Justinian, who never even came here, initiated slaughter and the suppression of Theodoric's Arian Christian faith (the difference that made the Arians heretical? That they believed in Christ as God's Son but a being separate from him. Yes, folks, that's it - kill the lot of them!)

Eyes tend to rest on the procession of men and women (NOT virgins - two are wives of the figures opposite) that make up the beautifully coloured and flowered friezes either side of the nave. At the west ends of either frieze are the Palatium - destroyed, inevitably -

 

and the harbour of Ravenna at Classe (now inland, with impressive remains).

The post-Theodoric purification of the mosaics from Arian concepts during Catholic reconsecration means that there are only traces of the Arian figures originally within the Palatium, like this stray hand.

What's not so easily visible is the sequence of New Testament scenes above on both sides. The Last Supper is very different from later representations, and curiously there is no crucifixion scene on the south side - the narrative jumps from Christ carrying the cross to the women at the tomb. You can see the placement if not the details in these views of the two east ends to the friezes, which culminate respectively in the three kings and Christ on one side

and the Virgin on the other.

The gem I nearly missed was the Arian Baptistery tucked away down a nearby side street (I rather liked the cafes in this area). There was no-one except the attendant there when I arrived, feeding my one euro into the machine at the entrance.

Its mother church now belongs to Orthodoxy and though it was locked seems to serve the eastern Europeans living in Ravenna,

Maybe it was the special nature of having the place to myself, or the fact that the beautifully restored dome is in such sophisticated contrast to the bare brickwork beneath, with the remains of a few later paintings on the lower arches,

but this is the building that haunts me the most. The beardless naked Christ and the personification of the river Jordan hark back to antiquity.

Curiously, the similar essence of the earlier centrepiece to the Neonian Baptistery

is more sophisticated in its artistry, though earlier (c. 450-475).

Again, the unusual depiction of Christ and the river god, though this time the other way round.

Not only is this all of a piece, with details extending down to floor level,

but the faces of the Apostles above the beautiful frieze of flowers and libraries

have that same individuality you see in the Fayum encaustic coffin portraits from early Christian Egypt. Couldn't find out which one this is, '

though the full lettering and the central position with the coronet labels Peter.

But I jump forward to the following day's self-steered itinerary. Silvia took us to the other main site via San Francesco, which will have to wait until the Dante-in-Ravenna post, and Piazza del Popolo, Ravenna's busiest square,

in a town that's mostly pedestrianised (it was one of the first in Italy to get the special treatment - not for idealistic reasons, but practical ones; like Venice, the town is sinking, and cars were putting too much pressure on the fundaments).

The two Venetian columns with statues of SS Apollinaris and Vitalis mark where one island eventually joined another. I'd noticed the zodiacal signs on the base of one, decorated by Pietro Lombardo in 1483. Silvia pointed out the thirteenth sign, which I hadn't noticed - Ophiucus, the 'serpent-bearer'.

Much more to read up about Italians and astrology - it plays a huge part in Dante (who, it's gratifying to see him declare, was a Gemini, and a typical one at that. Mind you, so are the American Horror Clown and his miniMe BoJob).

Our walk down the main shopping streets led Silvia to point out that many former ecclesiastical buildings were now temples of commerce.

Ravenna had enough to spare; Boccaccio pointed out that there were as many churches in the city as days in the year.

Amen, anyway, that the main ones, and their mosaics, were preserved. It's quite possible that if Napoleon had not arrived and thrown out the zealous monks, they would have Catholicised each one in decoration as they had already almost succeeded in doing in grand San Vitale.

The zone which also includes the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

is pleasantly planted and fringed with umbrella pines lining the way from San Vitale

 
to the so-called mausoleum.

and it also has a parish church on the other side of the street with another of those round towers, Santa Maria Maggiore, very busy for mass when I peered in.

I'm sure busloads of tourists must make this over-busy at peak times, but early July didn't seem to be one of them. The girl on guard at the entrance to the Mausoleum told Silvia that she was dismayed because John Malkovich - whom we later heard give a stunning and surprisingly big declamation in Copland's Lincoln Portrait - had been there and she'd been off on her lunch break. 'And he came without a guide, can you imagine?' Yes, of course I can, and had Silvia not been so good I'd have preferred to contemplate this little gem on my own. But the five of us were still happy to have the interior to ourselves, and it was even more magical than I'd remembered.

Like the Neonian Baptistery, the Mausoleum with its figures on the beautiful blue background of the Hellenistic tradition seems in advance artistically of the later mosaics in Ravenna for the individual expressivity of its figures. The Empress after whom its' named originally had it built not, it's thought, as a mausoleum for herself but as an adjunct to the Church of Santa Croce in the second quarter of the fifth century. Over the doorway is a beardless Christ as the Good Shepherd who looks more like an Apollo,

and the saint opposite 

would seem to be St. Lawrence, possible dedicatee of the chapel, with his gridiron.

There's even a cupboard with the Gospels, as in the Neonian baptistery.

The rest, apart from the Apostles, celebrates the natural world. I guess these two harts are biblically desiring the waterbrook,

There are besides the famous doves at a drinking bowl

and floral cornucopias

as well as flowers and stars, with the four symbols of the evangelists flanking the cross in the central dome.

There's one more small gem it's worth considering here, all the more surprising for being lodged within the Archiepiscopal Museum (main treasure: the glorious sixth century ivory throne of Maximian). You have to turn at the end of the passageway to what's known as St Andrew's Chapel to see the bizarre spectacle of Christ as Roman warrior.

The vault is a rich mix of flowers and naively depicted birds, from ducks to peacocks,

while the chapel itself, like Sant'Apollinare and the Arian Baptistery from the golden age of Theodoric, has portraits more in line with the realism of the Neonian Baptistery.

Again I had this room and its entrance way entirely to myself, and sat on the ledge in quiet contemplation for a good ten minutes.

Back to San Vitale, the famous presbytery of which I had two opportunities to contemplate - one with Silvia and the group, the other from a distant perspective listening to a guitar recital which packed them in since the festival was only charging one euro for admission. Nothing quite prepares you for the lofty spectacle, other than perhaps Aya Sophia in Istanbul, from where many of the impressive columns with facings in mottled marble are believed to have been imported.

Even if the clerics had not been interrupted by Napooleon in their task of baroque-ising the whole octagonal building in Catholic rococo, the building itself would remain impressive. As my UNESCO building puts it, 'the internal architecture...creates a space that expands in all directions; it stretches out around us in the exedrae and upward to the high cupola'.

The presbytery is what gleams and glows, though. It has the two most famous mosaical portraits in groups facing each other, rotten old Justinian who never bothered to visit in one group

and his wife, the former dancer Theodora. with her ladies on the other, fashion plates still for imaginative designers.

I've already remarked in a previous post that the cross-vaulting must have been chief among many wonders to inspire Dante to his ravishing descriptions of the Empyrean in Paradiso.

It divides into four triangles festooned with leaves and centred on angels, all praising the Lamb in the centre.

Moving downwards, two angels in flight hold a disc with a cross

while the vault below celebrates theophany in all its splendour; Christ is offering Vitale the triumphal crown.

As in the Mausoleum and the Ecclesiastical Chapels, decoration is ravishing

and this time we get a full depiction of a peacock in display.

The Biblical scenes on the other walls are wonderful, too, but I pass on. So many floor levels in Ravenna's buildings have had to be raised, and in many cases the original mosaic pavements were lost. There are fragments here - one just inside the south door

and another on the wall.

What a feast these must have made in themselves. Another church outside UNESCO's brief, San Giovanni Evangelista, suffered in the Second World War but has been lovingly rebuilt.

Beyond the preserved 14th century gateway (NB: the church is twinned with a counterpart in Brazil),

the walls within display mosaics from the floor like a picture gallery,

and we realise what fun the workmen had with pagan designs. My favourites are a mermaid

and a unicorn.

I realise this chronicle has already rambled on too long and so it's time to conclude for now with the two great buildings outside the city walls. We arrived at Sant'Apollinare in Classe at sunset in time for a very rich concert of music by the Ukrainian composer Silvestrov.

Chronologically this is the most recent of the eight UNESCO buildings, though consecrated as long ago as 549 to be the last resting place for the bones of St Apollinaris, the first bishop.

There he stands in the presbytery apse, against a beautiful and (I think) unique green background with twelve lambs as his followers and in a verdant landscape of rocks, flowers, birds and pines which could be local.

More sheep symbolising the Apostles are seen in the band above, emerging from Jerusalem and Bethlehem towards Christ.

The rest of the church is relatively sombre, at least after dark, throwing all emphasis on to the apse (especially as it was lit for the evening concert),

though the flowing acanthus leaves on the capitals of 12 columns of Greek marble from the Sea Of Marmara are lovely, and close inspection reveals plenty of detail, including more fragments of the original mosaic pavement and some of the sarcophagi which are to be found all over Ravenna.

My last homage, on the morning before I left to take the flight from Bologna to Riga, was to Theodoric, and namely his mausoleum on the fringes of town (hardly far; distances are nothing in what seems like a friendly village). I approached it via the Venetian fortress, part of which is used as an open-air cinema,

where reading the paper in the gardens' cafe within the wall shook me out of the Ravenna dream and into Salvini's xenophobic nightmare (it should be pointed out that most people here are to the left, with communist Bologna just down the road).

Crossing an interestingly graffiti-ed footbridge over the railway lines,

I eventually made my way into the mausoleum's well-kept grounds, within an equally pristine park and running track.

This is the least adorned and most austere of the UNESCO monuments. It was constructed in the Goths' graveyard while Theodoric was still alive. Its special interest to historians is that it was made from Istrian stone cut into large blocks laid in a dry technique without mortar and connected by iron cramps.

There are two levels, both decagonal, the lower with a cross vault,

the upper slightly smaller,

circular beyond the entrance door, probably to place the monolithic cupola.

It's not clear to me from the guide whether the porphyry sarcophagus is the one used to house Theodoric's remains, which was moved around the city many times.

Later, in the Middle Ages, popes were buried here and a Benedictine monastery built alongside.

Ave atque vale...we'll return to the Zona Dantesca in a later post.

War and disquiet with Grossman and Lipke

Two remarkable men, a Russian and a Latvian, share equal honours here for respective perfection of the work and of the life. Above is Vasily Grossman in the thick of it in 1945, and below is Žanis Lipke in 1977 holding the 'Righteous Among the Nations' medal which bears the inscription 'He who saves one life saves the world'. You'll have to read some way on to find out how Lipke did it.

First time round with Grossman's long-concealed Life and Fate, I stopped around the page-180 mark. Who were all these people zooming into sight around Stalingrad with very little in the way of introduction? When I read in translator Robert Chandler's introduction that many of them had already featured in a previous novel dealing with the earlier stages of the German invasion, For a Just Cause, published in 1952, which to this day remains untranslated into English, I felt we were being cheated, presented with Life and Fate as a self-contained entity rather than part of a diptych.

It's complicated. For a Just Cause, according to Chandler, doesn't stick its neck out against the Soviet regime in the way that Life and Fate so startlingly does. Grossman thought the latter might be published during the Khrushchev thaw. He was wrong. In February 1961 KGB officers came to his apartment to confiscate the manuscript and anything related to it. But Grossman had left two other copies with friends, one of which was smuggled out on microfilm to the west with the help of Andrey Sakharov, among others, in 1974, a decade after Grossman's death; the novel was finally published in 1980.

Though Grossman wrote Life and Fate with the benefit of hindsight, and compressed into 1941-2 a timescale which actually extends up to Stalin's big drive against Russian Jews with the 'Doctors' Plot' a decade later, he lived through the events it describes as a reporter (his war journalism will be my next reading once I've finished Elena Ferrante's tetralogy).

The most lacerating transferal of his own experience into that of the man who becomes the novel's main character, Jewish physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum, is of the loss of his mother, who was sent to her death in Treblinka from Berdichev, which he reached too late. This is why the last letter of Viktor's mother in Chapter 18 of Life and Fate's first part is one of the most powerful of all literary testimonies to the horrors of the Holocaust; no wonder it has been adapted for the stage both as a monologue and within Lev Dodin's very selective Maly Theatre adaptation, which led me back to the novel.

The other sequence that I found almost unbearable is the strand following unmarried teacher Sofya Osipovna Levinton's journey to Auschwitz, and her poignant adoption of a Jewish boy who dies in her arms. Later stages deal with the tragicomic compromises of Shtrum, who finds himself suddenly of use to Stalin again when Russia needs to develop a nuclear bomb. The book, unlike (as I am led to believe by one who's read it) its predecessor, makes it clear that Stalin's horrors, not least the indelible mark of the 1937 Terror, scar people as much as Hitler's. As with the even-handed condemnation of Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, this is what made Life and Fate unpublishable in Soviet Russia.

Shafts of light are often extinguished, despite the profound Tolstoyan humanity throughout. Another seminal chapter is devoted to the manuscript of Ikonnikov, a so-called 'Holy Fool' in another German camp. He decries the inevitable corruption of the 'common good' principle and contrasts it with

a kindness outside any system of social or religious good...Even at the most terrible times...this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium...This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! 

Later, the army driver Semyonov is taken in by an old peasant woman who tells him she has seen good and bad on both sides. Khristya Chunyak is the embodiment of Ikonnikov's 'stupid kindness'.

There is a memorial in Rīga to another, real person who epitomises the personal good, Žanis Lipke. Not exactly an ordinary Latvian - stevedore, dockworker and smuggler, he had always been a stalwart left wing activist. But when he was working at a warehouse under German command and heard that Riga's Jews were being massacred in the woods near the city, he devised an elaborate rescue scheme to make sure that many of the Jewish workers did not return to the ghetto and certain eventual death at the end of the day - unnoticed, miraculously - but to various shelters around the city. His reason? That it was simply the duty of a human being. When circumstances became too dangerous for the escapees there he transported them across the broad Daugava river to his home in semi-rural Ķīpsala. 

There eight to 12 people at any one time were housed in a three-by-three-metre hole in the ground. All the family were involved in the task, including his wife Johanna, whose words and eloquent visage (such eyes!) are so movingly captured in an interview you view on a screen at the bottom of the new building's central well, 

and young son Zigfrids who stood guard above. As the numbers grew, Lipke arranged with a distant parish to shelter people in three farmsteads. He saved around 50 lives. None of the 25 people who helped him was ever betrayed. Later, when he was interrogated by the NKVD, he told his questioners that the Communists were even worse than the Nazis - the latter shot you while looking you in the eye, the other shot you in the back. Astonishingly, he wasn't carted off to Siberia for that. Pictured below, Johanna and Žanis in 1946, seated to the right with some of the Jews they rescued.

Ķīpsala is still a beautiful part of town with many wooden houses and much greenery, but the main reason for visiting is to see the stunningly-constructed memorial, created by architect Zaiga Gaile at the end of an alley with an almost hidden entrance (you only grasp the building properly on exiting at the other end).  Māris Gailis, businessman and former Latvian Prime Minister, and film director Augusts Sukuts wanted to make the tribute because what we usually hear is how Latvians welcomed in the Germans all too readily (as in Estonia, it was complicated; life under Soviet rule had been so harsh that many citizens thought at first the Germans would be more 'civilized'. They soon found out how wrong they were). The Žanis Lipke Memorial was opened in 2013, and it's a model in its restraint and simple artistry. In the opening ceremony, Shimon Peres echoed Grossman when he said:

I don't think I've ever seen a museum like this one anywhere in the world. It's special, it's different, it's deep, it's moving....I'm not sure that the majority of people are saints. But I'm sure there is a minority of people who are brave, who are right, who are just. And I do believe that this minority saves lives.

Bach and Dante: hellish trials, heavenly light

So while I reached the Empyrean with Dr Scafi and Professor Took at the Warburg, and got to the end of reading Paradiso shortly afterwards, serendipitously just prior to visiting the Ravenna Festival, the one-Bach-cantata-per-Sunday scheme bit the dust again, this time on the first Sunday after Trinity. I'd already accumulated a backlog, which just got too much with so many summer weekends away.

It does seem good, though, to end on a very rich masterpiece which I also got to hear in John Eliot Gardiner's second Bach cantatas concert in the Barbican's rich Barbican weekend (alas, the only one I could make). BWV 20, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort', had to be a big statement - it launched Bach's second Leipzig cycle on 11 June 1724 (thus another image of the Thomaskirche from my first acquaintance with it last December). 

No-one could write about this thunderbolt of invention better or with more inside knowledge than Gardiner, and he does so in Music in the Castle of Heaven, pages 313 to 317 (I recommend you read it all, of course).

It is an astonishing piece, one that sets the tone for the whole cycle and sums up so many of the original features we will encounter - a new range of expression, the use of operatic technique to enliven the doctrinal message and wild contrasts of mood....We seem to be already in the death-throes of the Trinity season, not at its start - but then Bach's was an age that had a taste for apocalypse and the theme crops up regularly and unexpectedly.

What, in  briefer terms, does Bach serve up? First a choral fantasia in the form of a French overture, starting with an astonishingly original idea and freezing us in our tracks on a diminished seventh, followed by heart-quaking fragments in a slower middle sequence. What an effect the three stammering oboes have at this point. No idea whose performance this is, but good to have the score accompanying the opening chorus on YouTube.

A tenor aria with a turbulent bass line and sorrowing strings 'piles on the agony' (Gardiner). The bass seems to shift into an almost comical light for the over-assertions of 'Gott ist gerecht', but we are back with pain and grief with the alto's tragic chromatic number. The coda, piano, for strings alone reprising what's been sung, is a subtle dramatic coup.

After this, prefaced by a hymn stanza, the preacher would have given his sermon. His the prerogative to make the transition to a very different mood, striking with the huge range of bass backed up by trumpet and strings. To my ears it outdoes Handel's 'The trumpet shall sound', but maybe familiarity has bred a certain taking-for-granted of that magnificent aria. There's a very expressive 'repent ye' alto solo, and then what struck in the Barbican concert, almost whispered throughout, as one of the most extraordinary, dramatic inventions in all the cantatas.

I have to quote JEG on this, since he clearly thinks so too:

It is not very often that Bach resorts to lurid pictorialism of the Hieronymus Bosch kind; yet, in the ensuing duet delivered to the errant programme as though by Bunyanesque angels (alto and tenor), he treats us to a ghoulish cameo of 'howling and chattering teeth', of the ominous approach of the hand-drawn hearse as it clatters across the cobbled street. Successions of first inversion chords over a disjointed bass line in quavers with parallel thirds and sixths in the voice parts give way first to imitative and answering phrases, then to an anguished chromaticism evoking the bubbling stream and the drop of water denied to the parched rich man. The voices join for a final flourish. We hear the gurgling of the forbidden water and the continuo playing a last furtive snatch of the ritornello. Then, dissolve...fade out...silence. Extraordinary.

This performance isn't a patch on Gardiner's, and I've got so used to hearing top mezzos and contraltos on the Rilling set that the countertenor doesn't please me much, but it's helpful to see what Bach is doing in the score.

There is light at the end of the concluding chorale, but the overall impression is one of disruption - and total, timeless genius. I may have given up this year, but I'll be thrilled to pick up where I left off in June 2019, sticking to the 1724 sequence.

In my last post yoking Bach and Dante, I was worried that our Warburg discussions about selected cantos of Paradiso were more interesting than the poetry in question. All that changed when Dr Scafi read, and Professor took reflected upon, Canto 17. We are in the heaven of Mars, moving upwards through concentric circles of planets, where we meet Cacciaguida, who died before Florence turned, in Dante's view, to the bad. This is the chance for our poet to lament the moral decline of his beloved city and to make the third, last and most explicit reference in the Divina Commedia to his own exile.

Cacciaguida, 'gazing at the point to which all times are present', makes this prophecy to Dante:

Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
   più caramente; e questo è quello strale
   che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale 
   lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
   lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale. 

E quel che più ti graverà le spalle, 
   sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempia
   con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle; 

che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed empia 
   si farà contr' a te; ma, poco appresso,
   ella, non tu, n'avrà rossa la tempia. 

Di sua bestialitate il suo processo 
  farà la prova; sì ch'a te fia bello
  averti fatta parte per te stesso. 

You will leave behind everything loved most dearly, and this is the arrow that the bow of exile first lets fly. You will learn how salty tastes the bread of another, and what a hard path it is to descend and mount by another's stairs. And what will most weigh upon your shoulders will be the wicked, dimwitted company with whom you will fall into this valley, who will become utterly ungrateful, mad and cruel against you, but shortly after they, not you, will blush. Of their stupidity the outcome will provide the proof, so that for you it will be well to have become a party unto yourself.

The literal translation, as in previous blog instalments, is by Robert Durling, though I haven't scanned it as he does. Shall find it impossible to read more 'literary' versions, having once seen the unreproducable beauty of the Italian.

Dante, as ever, is sure of his place in history, perhaps in all eternity. Caccaguida advises him to 'make manifest your whole vision', however galling that may be at first to those with a guilty conscience. And in fact he didn't suffer in his wanderings for long, coming under the wing of the Lombards and then finding his final haven in Ravenna.

His destination as the pilgrim of Paradiso, though, is the Empyrean, and a brief vision of God in the final Canto, 33, which must have had some impact on Cardinal Newman in The Dream of Gerontius. As we move towards the greatest luminosity, Dante coins ever more neologisms - 'trasumanar', 'transhumanizing', the most famous of all, was actually introduced in 1.70 and begins to be properly realised in Canto 30 - and finds ever more poetic ways of saying 'I lack the words to describe what I saw' (the last two are in 33, lines 54-7 and 120-2).

Finally, within 'three circles, of three colours and one circumference' - the Trinity - he sees 'what seemed to me painted with our effigy'. Does this mean that man/mankind is the last vision - that, as Professor Took put it, 'central to the Godhead is the human project', that neither God nor man should be alone? I love, as usual, his summation of Dante heading 'into a plenitude of proportionate understanding and ultimate love'.

My end is going to be another beginning, which I've described on the musical front on The Arts Desk: Ravenna, where Dante could not have been unaffected by the dazzling domes of light, whether in the blue-and-gold intimacy of Galla Placidia's Mausoleum - pictured at the top of the post - or the lofty heights of San Vitale.

On this visit, my second since leaving my last Interrailing pal in the city's youth hostel and making my first independent travel in 1982, I fell in love with Dante's final resting place. On, then, eventually, to those most heavenly of mosaics.

Bergman on holiness, music and death

I originally posted this, which because of what the master says is one of the most important entries here to me - as is my Fårö report with respect to The Arts Desk - eight years ago, on 16 July 2010. The actual 100th anniversary, 14 July, almost passed me by yesterday- it was only because there seemed to be so many Ingmar clips up on LinkedIn that my memory was revived. Happy to reproduce this again, because I still find IB's words intensely moving.

Not a day passed when the master didn't think of all three [holiness, music and death]. So it was quite an experience after the visit (hopefully numinous images from which I reproduce throughout) to return to Bergman on Fårö, one of the five detailed films Marie Nyreröd made with him at the very end of his life, and find that he had whittled down his often unruly thoughts to essentials. No doubt his 'demon of control', as he put it, made sure what went alongside the interviews in terms of film clips, how he was filmed and where; and why not?

The first chunk is from when he takes Nyreröd into that wonderful little cinema at Dämba and shows her and us a very specific clip, from Private Confessions (1996). This is Max von Sydow's Bishop Jakob being asked by Pernilla Ostergren's character whether he believe in God. His answer:

Don't use the word 'God'. Say 'holiness'. There's holiness in everyone. Human holiness. Everything else is attributes, disguise - manifestation and trickery. You can never capture or figure out human holiness. At the same time, it's something to cling to. Something tangible, lasting unto death. [Bach's 'Jesu, joy of man's desiring' is heard] Whatever happens then is hidden from us. Only poets, musicians and saints may depict that which we can but discern: the inconceivable. They've seen, known, understood - not fully, but in fragments. For me, it's a comfort to think about human holiness.

The projectionist stops the film. Bergman turns to Nyreröd and adds his commentary:

We've been talking a lot about the religious aspects of my oeuvre. And really we should try to concentrate it, and instead of our sitting stammering through an explanation, I think the Bishop here has put it succinctly. He says exactly what I feel: that we shouldn't talk about God but about the holiness within man. And that through the musicians, the prophets and the saints, we've been enlightened about other worlds. Particularly through music, of course. We ask: 'where does music come from?' I've asked so many musicians, famous and less famous, why we have music, where it comes from. And the strange thing is that they've never had a proper answer.

The film cuts to Bergman putting a recording of the Sarabande from Bach's Fifth Cello Suite on the turntable at Hammars.

Let's cut ourselves to the final question.


I wrote a film about death...The Seventh Seal. It was excellent therapy. Sometimes the things you do, the things you write, can be therapeutic. And this was. [sighs] But then something curious happened. What happened was that I developed an abscess with early signs of blood poisoning and the swelling had to be cut away. That was done at the Sophiahemmet Hospital [in Stockholm, where he had lived as a child]. I felt a little prick and then nothing. Eight hours of my life, you see, were completely obliterated. I was hypersensitive to the anesthetic and they'd given me too much. This fascinated me because I thought, 'is this what death is like?'. You are a light that's lit, and then one day it's extinguished. There's nothing, no flame left. So death is nothing to be afraid of. It's something exceedingly merciful, something magnificent.


So having understood that, I lived a contented life. I noticed that my daily thoughts of death could be brushed aside. They always came, especially during my hour of the wolf just before dawn, but I could dismiss them by telling myself they were nothing. From being something, suddenly I'm nothing. I liked the idea. And then came [sighs, trembles] - the big problem. The devastating problem. That was when Ingrid [his last wife of 24 years] died almost exactly eight years ago.


And logically, I said to myself, I'll never see Ingrid again. She's gone for ever. But the strange thing is that I feel Ingrid's presence, especially here on Fårö. Acutely. And I think, I can't feel her presence if she doesn't exist, can I? [rubs his left eye nervously] So this operation was a chemical reaction. It wasn't a real death, but an artificial reaction. In actual death, maybe Ingrid is waiting for me and she exists. And she'll come to meet me [the film cuts to an essential monologue from Bergman's last film, Saraband] I accept that I'm going to meet Ingrid, and I've completely erased that other nightmare thought that I'll never again meet her. I acknowledge the fact that I'm going to meet Ingrid.

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala 92 years and two days ago*, and died on Fårö on 30 July 2007, four years after these films were made.

*100 years ago yesterday as far as the update is concerned.