quartet opus 132. Listen to the slow movement of Schubert’s two-cello quintet opus 163. Listen to Wagner’s liebestod (love death) from Tristan, or Mahler’s adagietto from his fifth symphony. This music plays for keeps.
The polar opposite to Mozart would be Verdi. Like Mozart, he is not in my pantheon but close. For Verdi, no passion is too much. He is the master of contrast. He shakes our emotions back and forth as a dog shakes a rat. Lull and storm are each given enough time to pack the most punch in the other. He wants only opposites and extremes. What would the fastidious Franz Joseph have thought? He would have
called the guard.
Somewhere between Apollo and Dionysus, between relativism and frenzy, lies the
true path. The five in my pantheon have found it.
I seldom call myself a poet, since that’s already a tad vainglorious. For better or verse, I’m a Jack of that trade too. The true poets in my pantheon begin with Keats and Masefield. I haven’t found a clear choice for third. There are awesome things in Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Tennyson, Emily, Houseman, Robinson, Dowson, Yeats and
others.
Shakespeare, like Mozart, doesn’t figure in the center of the picture. I take him as the greatest mind and soul yet known, the greatest playwright, the greatest writer in general, and all of these because he taps to the bottom of what poetry can be. “Who is this whose grief/ Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand/ Like wonder-wounded hearers? It is I, /Hamlet the Dane”. Holy mackerel! But these are touches in his plays. Poetry, in his time, meant something too coiffed and pretty and mannered for my taste. You can take Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece, and the sonnets. That includes the petulant dark lady sonnets, which break the model of preciousness but find nothing better. Shakespeare simply came along too early. |
credit Milton, in “Lycidas”, for discovering the true vein a few decades later.
Chapter 10: Three Pantheons 2/10/16 3
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011125