Category: Online course

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Why talk about the Silkroad in China?

Birgitta Hoffmann

This autumn our Silkroad course is going to visit a slightly unusual element within the Silkroad studies – the transport within China.
Why would this be so interesting? We all know, that the land route enters China at the Gansu Corridor by passing through a gate in the Great Wall. From there it moved on to Xi’an/Changan, the ancient capital of China. We also know that Guangzhou on the Pearl River is the oldest of the China Sea harbours that carried the Maritime trade on the Silk Route to and from the Harbours. Guangzhou is even far enough in the South that it acts as China’s Monsoon Trade harbour.

So far this is very easy and hardly surprising. The question is what happens then?
Xi’an/Chang’an ceases to be the capital of China in the late Tang period, when the capital moves East beyond the passes first to Luoyang, then to Kaifeng. Very soon afterwards you hear of other capitals, with Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou being probably the most famous sites.
If we assume that the high luxury items of the Silkroad trade were destined particularly for the court, these changes of capitals and the creation of multiple capitals, when China disintegrates over centuries means that a trade route ending in Xi’an is of little use to anybody.

Other problems are the imperial monopolies: Silk, salt and tea are legally only available through the imperial government. But the place where tea is grown and the place where the harbours are, are in the Tang period at the opposite ends of the Pearl River and a long way from Chang’an.

We also have to consider the massive distances involved: From Guangzhou to Kaifeng is 1500km with another 700km to reach Beijing. Shanghai is 900 km away, Dunhuang another 2000 km. None of these routes is easy, often crossing mountains, sometimes deserts and several huge rivers. Creating a viable road network was a century-long project which started with the Qin emperors and was added and adjusted as time and money permitted or demanded. Heavy, bulky or fragile goods were always at risk on the roads, whether transported by horses or by carts and thus not really useful to the Silkroad trader of fragile luxury items.

In response the Chinese developed a very efficient use of waterways. With long rivers like the Wei, the Pearl River and the Yangtse East-West transport was possible, if the various hazards to navigations could be mastered, but what if you needed to travel North-South or needed to cross between river systems, for example, to take the pottery from Jingdezhen or Changsha to Guangzhou?

In this course we will take a look on how these transport problems were mastered during the different dynasties and what this meant for long-distance traders who wanted to obtain goods from the interior of China but weren’t necessarily interested in travelling there themselves or even not permitted to do so.

The Silkroad course on China starts on Thursday 3 October.
Places for the course or for individual lectures can be booked from this webpage here or via Eventbrite here.

 

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Mornings with a Masterpiece: Comparing Notes

Rosemary Broadbent

Tracing the relationship between two composers through their compositions is an
interesting study. Sometimes it is a sign of respect and gratitude, such as Britten’s tribute to his
teacher, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. In the case of William Byrd and his teacher, the
tribute was posthumous: the beautiful song Mourn all ye Muses ends with the words Tallis is dead,
and Music dies. Brahms made a practice of sending his compositions for comment to his life-long
friend Clara Schumann, although he did not necessarily accept her advice! Other suggestions were
more interventionist, such as the violinist Joseph Joachim’s restructuring of Bruch’s Violin Concerto,
and Rimsky-Korsakov’s radical changes to Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain, which he
judged, perhaps mistakenly, to be unfinished at the composer’s death.

The relationship between Haydn and Mozart is particularly fascinating as it was reciprocal,
and it can best be exemplified in their string quartets: a selection of Haydn’s quartets is the subject
of my ‘Mornings with a Masterpiece’ course later this term. At first glance theirs was an unlikely
friendship. Haydn, a generation older, came of country stock and was neither a prodigy nor a
virtuoso. He learned his trade laboriously. An inadequate training as a choirboy was followed by
eight years of poverty and self-study before he gained a settled appointment. Mozart was a child
genius, raised at an archbishop’s court and celebrated all over Europe as a composer and performer.
On the other hand, both combined a deep personal faith with a wicked sense of humour. It
was Haydn who presented his orchestra with a puzzling Minuet, which could only be completed by
being played backwards. It was Mozart who took over the off-stage glockenspiel when his friend
Schikaneder was playing ‘magic bells’ on stage – with unexpected and embarrassing results for the
actor. Both experienced the life of a liveried servant at the beck and call of an aristocrat. Typically,
Haydn gained the respect of a sympathetic Prince and remained with the same family for the rest of
his life. Mozart walked out after an explosive interview with his master’s steward, and left to seek
his fortune at the age of twenty-five.
In the forthcoming course on Haydn’s string quartets, we shall begin with the six works
published as Opus 20 in 1772. They are remarkable (among other things) for venturing more than
usual into the minor mode, and for the fugues which conclude three of them. A year later came
Mozart’s first set of six quartets among which K173 in D minor ends with a fugue: a clear response to
Haydn’s Opus 20 from the seventeen-year-old composer.
It was ten years before Mozart returned to the string quartet. By then he was resident in
Vienna, newly married, and was welcoming Haydn into his house as a guest whenever the older man
was allowed to spend time in the city. This set of quartets, published as Opus 10, was explicitly
dedicated to Haydn and there are documents describing two occasions when they were played
through with the composer on the viola and the dedicatee taking a violin part. One can only imagine
the lively conversation and the delight enjoyed on those evenings.

The minor key quartet in this set (K421) is again in D minor, and this key seems to have had a
deeply expressive meaning for Mozart. It is the key of a stormy piano concerto (1785), of the opera
Don Giovanni (1787) and of the Requiem which the composer left unfinished at his death in 1791.
Haydn was deeply affected by his young friend’s death. He was visiting London at the time
and was reluctant to believe the news until he returned to Vienna and found it to be all too true. It is
impossible to escape the inference that when Haydn resumed string quartet composition later in the
1790s he had Mozart’s tribute to him in mind. The D minor quartet of Opus 76, which we shall study
in our second session, has particularly close connections with Mozart’s K421, and it seems that the
older master was taking up the challenge of Mozart’s depth of emotion and driving it further.
It says much for Haydn’s generosity of spirit that he continued to learn from other
composers throughout his life. His meeting with Handel’s music in London spurred him to write two
great oratorios, and his very personal friendship with Mozart gave us Opus 76 – perhaps the
crowning glory of his quartet compositions.
Haydn also left a work unfinished at his death: we have just two movements of another
string quartet – in D minor.

If you are interested in learning more about Haydn and his string Quartets, you can book your place on Rosemary Broadbent’s courses by following this link. 

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What has a German writer to do with the Grand Tour

Birgitta Hoffmann

On Saturday, 18th of July, I will be offering a dayschool on Goethe and the Grand Tour.
Isn’t that a contradiction? The Grand Tour is in origin a deeply English and later British Institution. Established in the mid 17th century as a way for nobility to extricate itself from political problems in England, it became in the 18th century a finishing school for the young men/late teenagers of the British nobility who were sent with their ‘bear-keepers’/teachers to familiarise themselves with the cultural highlights and high society in Europe, especially in Italy and return laden with statues,  architectural plans and paintings 3 years later.

So how does a successful German writer and court official in his early forties fit into this? The answer lies in his age and in the time of the publication of his memoirs. When he travelled in 1786-1788 the grand tour was at the height of fashion. The idea had spread to all over Europe, The King of Sweden was travelling, so was the Tsar of Russia and everybody who could afford it. There were travel guides, there were picture books, there were diary, it was the ‘in’ thing to do.  Hardly, surprising to find Goethe joining in.

However, Goethe decided to give this tour his very own flair. He set out alone with a backpack on the post chaises –  the first backpacker in Europe and stayed not in fashionable hotels but with artist friends and wayside inns, always accompanied by his book box. Well read he reflects on what it means to look at art (ancient and otherwise) and thus joining the discussion started by Winkelmann, what it means to travel and what it does to you. In between, visits and discussions he falls out with his girlfriend and tries to get back into her good graces. A forty year old in the grips of a midlife crisis, a very literate man in a mid-life crisis and the first one to describe it in all its glory.

But I am not a literature critic or a philosopher/psychologist, so why is this so interesting for an archaeologist and historian? The answer lies in the publication date. Goethe returned from Italy in June 1788, France was already in turmoil, a year later the French Revolution would start and until June 1815 Europe was increasingly a theatre of war, making travel more and more hazardous until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815.

25 years is a long time, time enough for a fashion of the nobility to die.  But this is, where Goethe comes in. He published his memoirs of his time in Italy in 1815, twenty five years after the event. He was now an arbiter of taste in Europe, a polymath, a writer, a thinker. And his memoirs restarted the Grand Tour as a European phenomenon, not just for the nobility but also for the middle classes. Not just as an educational chore/opportunity, but very much as an emotional experience in the age of the Romantics. Thanks to him, travelling to Italy became the romantic dream of half a continent: off to the country where the oranges and lemons blossom to become more human, to experience the Italian way of life as well as the cultures of the past.

Without him, Thomas Cook and his tourists would have felt more than a little bit lost.

If you want to know more, there are still places on the course, you can find all the details here.  

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.

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Handel the dramatist – two oratorios

Rosemary Broadbent

Handel’s Messiah is so widely known and loved that it is easy to forget that it is just one of a
long series of dramatic oratorios, composed at the height of the composer’s powers.
We owe this great series of oratorios to increasing problems with Handel’s opera
enterprises, which had been the talk of London for many years. The establishment of a second opera
company in London – one supported by the King and one by the Prince of Wales, who were at
loggerheads – resulted within a few years in bankruptcy for both. Handel was also exercised by the
problem of securing work and income for his company during Lent, when dramatic performances
were forbidden. His inspired solution was to create works based on Biblical stories, performed in the
theatre but without acting or costume. How could the church object to that?

Naturally, the composer sought out the most dramatic stories from the Old Testament, so
we find battles and plagues and dramatic confrontations equal to anything in the Greek and Roman
history favoured by opera librettists. In place of acting and costume, the drama transfers into the
music, not only in solo arias but in magnificent choruses on a scale never attempted in opera at this
period. We have to look ahead at least fifty years to find such choruses on the stage.

We shall consider one early and one late oratorio, giving us the chance to appreciate the
development of Handel’s style over more than thirty years. Acis and Galatea (1718) is variously
described as a serenata, a ‘little opera’ and an oratorio, and it went through various revisions. It
became one of Handel’s most frequently performed works in his lifetime, although it is less often
heard today. In some ways it is a simple pastoral story derived from Dryden’s translation of Ovid, but
it is made extraordinary by the dramatic rôle of the chorus and the passion they convey. It is hard to
listen to the chorus Mourn, all ye Muses without catching your breath.

Jephtha was Handel’s last oratorio and dates from 1752. Here there is a whole family of
individual characters and the range of emotion depicted is wide and extraordinarily vivid. The
choruses and ensembles have a depth and complexity which strain at the limits of accepted Baroque
style. Throughout our discussions it will be interesting to reflect on the comparison of these works
with Messiah, and this all-too-familiar work will no doubt merge freshly illuminated.

One final sobering thought. Last Autumn the Cambridge University Opera Society cancelled a
planned production of a Handel’s oratorio Saul because its narrative of war, victory and celebration
was out-of-tune with the contemporary world situation. Should we then step back from Jephtha,
which also celebrates a victory in battle? No! because that is only half the story. The apparent victor
is emotionally destroyed by what he has done, his family is torn apart, and the greatest suffering is
visited upon the innocent. It bears a moral for our troubled times.

To sign up to the course please go to: https://mancent.org.uk/?page_id=5517