I was kept up last night by an excellent C4 documentary by a composer called Howard Goodall. His documentary centred on Mozart and his role in the enlightenment, and in particular the year 1791. Any of you who have read the Da Vinci Code etc will be interested to hear that Mozart was one of the many men (I'm sure there were women as well) who brought the renaissance into the enlightenment, and created something very different. 1791 saw the publication of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, the writing of the first Declaration of Human Rights, the beheading of Louis 16th, the US Congress adopted the Bill of Rights and the Constitution; and the ideas of Rousseau and the Enlightenment were all-pervasive. It was also the year in which Mozart wrote his enigmatic Magic Flute and the renowned Requiem, and then died tragically at the age of 35.
With respect to the Da Vinci code and enigmatic art threads here, it is interesting to learn (for me it was anyway) that the Magic Flute is centred round Hermetic and Egyptian ideas, and that Mozart visited Paris, several times I think, during this period of great change. Goodall implied these ideas were Rosicrucian in origin, and it is worth noting that the coffee houses of Paris were of course the great centres of Masonic and Enlightenment discussion at that time. The core idea, that goes back thousands of years, is that humans are natural
and reasonable people, and that there must be a balance between the two. This is the ying and yang, the male and female, the circle and the square in harmony, as one. The political theory was built up on this basic idea.
Mozart's music is apparently designed round heavy musical, and social, theory, and Goodall's series shows that the great composers wrote music that was a product of their eras, and not just the product of isolated genius.
Dave L
Some of the big names from the enlightenment:
Almost all of them visited Paris at some point.
Mozart, Hobbes, Locke, Paine, Newton, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Washington, Franklin, L'enfant, Kant, Hegel.
The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture JAEA:
[
egyptian-architecture.com]
[
glasgow.academia.edu]
[
egyptology-scotland.squarespace.com]
Dave's Archaeology Homepage:
[
arkysite.wordpress.com]
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2005 01:00PM by Dave L.
