Europe: A History (108 page)
ALCHEMIA
I
N
1606, the Emperor Rudolph II was the subject of a formal complaint drawn up by the Habsburg Archdukes. ‘His Majesty’, they wrote in their Proposition, ‘Is only interested in wizards, alchemists, cabbalists and the like.’ Rudolph’s court at Prague did indeed house Europe’s most distinguished research centre for the occult arts.
1
In that same year a Hungarian alchemist, Janos Bánffy-Hunyadi (1576–1641), set out from his native Transylvania. He stopped over at the Court of Maurice of Hesse at Cassel, the principal Protestant centre of occultism, before moving on to London.
2
His arrival coincided with the death of the learned Welshman, Dr John Dee (1527–1608), sometime astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, who once invented the term ‘Great Britain’ to please his queen and who had spent several years both in Prague and in Poland. Such ‘cosmopolitans’, as they were called, ‘made their careers on the international circuit of alchemy, the true predecessor of the later scientific community.
Europe was experiencing a veritable ‘occult revival’, in which alchemy was the most important of several related ‘secret arts’. ‘Alchemy’, writes the historian of Rudolph’s world, ‘was the greatest passion of the age In Central Europe.’
3
It combined the search for the philosopher’s stone, which would transmute base metals into gold, with the parallel search for the spiritual rebirth of mankind. ‘What is below is like what is above.’
Alchemists required expertise across a very wide range of knowledge. To conduct their experiments with metals and other substances, they needed to be familiar with the latest technology. To interpret their results, they needed a sound grasp of astrology, of cabbalistic number theory, of lapidarism, of herbalism, and of the ‘iatrochemlstry’ developed by Paracelsus
[HOLISM]
.
Most importantly, in a religious age, they sought to present their findings In the language of mystical Christian symbolism. It was no accident that at this time the secret Rosicrucian Society, the adepts of ‘Rose’ and ‘Cross’, chose to come into the open, at Kassel, or that the principal systematizer of Rosicrucian theosophy, Robert Fludd, was also a respectable alchemist,
[CONSPIRO]
In later scientific times, the alchemists were seen as an aberrant breed which long delayed the growth of true knowledge. Indeed, in the so-called ‘Age of the Scientific Revolution’ they have sometimes been seen as ‘the opposition’. The most charitable historian of science calls them practitioners of ‘technology without science’.
4
Yet in their own eyes, and in the eyes of powerful patrons, there was no such distinction. They were ‘white wizards’ fighting for the Good; they were reformers; they were engaged in a quest to unlock the secret forces of mind and matter. They would not be overtaken by scientists of the modern persuasion until the end of the following century; and chemistry did not establish itself until still later.
[ELDLUFT]
5
The Emperor Rudolph’s cosmopolitan alchemists often held responsible positions. Several, like Michael Maier, who also worked in London, or the Huguenot sympathizer, Nicholas Barnard, held the office of
Leibarzt
or court physician. Others, such as Sebald Schwaertzer, served as imperial controller of mines at Rudolfov and Joachimsthal.
[DOLLAR]
Heinrich Kuhnrath (1560–1605), author of the grandiose
Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Christiano-kabalisticum
, came from Leipzig. Michał Sędziwój or ‘Sendivogius’ (1566–1636), whose
Novum Lumen Chymicum
(1604) ran into 54 editions and would be thoroughly studied by Isaac Newton, came from Warsaw. He was connected to the powerful faction of pro-Habsburg magnates in Poland, who had contacts with Oxford and who brought John Dee to Cracow. John Dee’s dubious assistant, Edward Kelley, classed as
Cacochimicus
, probably died in prison in Prague. Their company included the ill-fated Giordano Bruno
[SYROP]
,
the astronomers Kepler and Brahe, and an English poetess called Elizabeth Jane Weston.
There was also a prominent Jewish element. The Chief Rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel (d. 1609), patronized a revival of the
[CABALA]
.
It was fed by the works of Sephardi writers such as Isaac Luria or Moses Cordovero, whose
Pardes Rimmonim
was published in Cracow in 1591. One of the Emperor’s closest associates, Mardochaeus the Jew, was a specialist in elixirs of fertility.
For contemporaries, alchemy had the most positive connotations:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
6
Philip II must be the prototype of all monarchs who have tried to rule without rising from their desks (see Plate 43). Austere, penitential, tireless, ensconced in a solitary study in the gloomy Escorial on the barren plateau outside Madrid,
he strove to enforce a spiritual and administrative uniformity which the variety of his vast dominions would never permit. He ruled through two sets of parallel councils—one set devoted to the main areas of policy, the other to the government of six major territorial units. For, in addition to his father’s Castilian, Aragonese, Italian, Burgundian, and American legacies, in 1580 he seized his mother’s vast Portuguese inheritance. His disregard for the rights of the various Diets culminated in the hanging of the
Justizar
of Aragon. Yet the dream of ‘one monarch, one empire, one sword’ was relentlessly pursued under the pretext that
the King knew best how to
trabajar para el pueblo
, ‘work for his people’.
45
In the process, he drove his sick, imprisoned son to death; he drove the Inquisition to waves of
autos-da-fé;
and he drove the persecuted Moriscos of Granada to rebel in 1568–9, the offended Dutch to rebel in 1566, the humiliated Aragonese to rebel in 1591–2. His adversaries, like William the Silent, considered him simply ‘a murderer and a liar’. Never can an apparently sensitive man have so completely ignored the sensitivities of others. Absolute master of the Church in Spain, he sought to extirpate the Church’s enemies across Europe. He swore to avenge his second wife’s memory in England. He intervened against the Huguenots in France. He wrongly saw the Dutch Protestants as the source of all discontent in the Netherlands. But God, like Philip II, did not smile on Spain. By the 1590s a general crisis loomed. The Great Armada of 1588 had been dashed by storms. The Dutch held out. Plague swept the Spanish cities. The countryside, drained by taxes and hit by agricultural failures, was beginning to depopulate. The richest coffers in the world were empty. In 1596 Philip II was formally bankrupt for the fourth time. There was misery amidst splendour, and an overpowering sense of disillusionment. Philip, like Don Quixote, had been tilting at windmills. The supremacy of Castile was deeply resented by Spain’s other constituent kingdoms. ‘Castile has made Spain,’ the epitaph reads, ‘and Castile has destroyed it.’
46
[INQUISITIO]
OPERA
T
HE
composer called it a
favola in musica
, ‘a fable set to music’. It was intended as an imitation of ancient Greek drama, and was produced in February 1607 before the Accademia degli Invaghiti in Mantua, probably in the Gallery of the Rivers in the ducal palace of the Gonzagas. Its five acts consisted of a series of madrigal groups and dances linked by instrumental interludes and recitatives. The libretto was written by the poet Alessandro Striggio. The music of the infernal scenes was given to trombones, the pastorals to flutes and recorders. It culminated in the great tenor aria ‘Possente spirto’ at the end of Act III. It was Claudio Monteverdi’s
Orfeo
, ‘the first viable opera in the repertoire’.
1
Since its origins in the court entertainments of late Renaissance Italy, the operatic genre, which combines music, secular drama, and spectacle, has passed through many phases. The
opera seria
, whose most prolific proponent was Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), author of 800 libretti, was devoted to classical and historical themes. Alongside it, the
opera buffa
launched a long tradition of light-hearted entertainment leading through opéra comique to operetta and musical comedy. Grand Opera, which starts in the late eighteenth century, reached its peaks in the Viennese, Italian, French, German, and Russian schools. Romantic nationalism became a prominent ingredient. The supreme laurels are disputed between the lovers of Verdi and Puccini and the fanatical acolytes of Richard Wagner. Modernist opera began with Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande
(1902), the precursor of a rich category including Berg’s
Wozzeck
(1925), Britten’s
Peter Grimes
(1945), and Stravinsky’s
Rake’s Progress
(1951) (see Appendix III, p. 1278).
[SUSANIN] [TRISTAN]
The Orphean theme has provided recurrent inspiration. Jacopo Peri’s Florentine masque
Euridice
(1600) anticipated Monteverdi’s production in Mantua. Gluck’s
Orpheus and Eurydice
(1762) opened the classical repertoire. Offenbach’s
Orpheus in the Underworld
(1858) is one of the most joyous of the standard operettas. Luciano Berio’s
Opera
(1971) puts the traditional story to a serial score.
FLAMENCO
A
NDALUSIAN
gypsy music in the style now known as flamenco has been played and admired since the sixteenth century. The plaintive melodies of the
cante
or ‘singing’ blend to inimitable effect with the dramatic poses and rhythmic stamping of the
baile
or ‘dance’. The dissonances and quarter-tones, the exquisitely raucous vocal delivery, and the pulsating guitars and castanets contribute to a sound that has no counterpart in Europe’s musical folklore.
The history of flamenco turns on three separate features—the name, the gypsies, and the music. No scholarly consensus exists about any of them.
1
Flamenco
simply meant ‘Flemish’. In the vocabulary of art, it also gained the connotation of ‘exotic’ or ‘ornate’. One theory proposes that Jewish songs banned by the Inquisition found their way back to Spain from Flanders, where many Spanish Jews had taken refuge. Another suggests that
flamenco
derives from the Arabic
fellah-mangu
or ‘singing peasant’.
Gypsies reached Spain after the expulsions of the Jews and Moors. They were known as
gitanos
or
egipcianos
. The English traveller and writer George Borrow was the first to record in the 1840s that people were calling them
flamencos
.
[ROMANY]
Andalusia’s long tradition of Moorish music dated back to the eighth and ninth centuries. The Omeyas of Cordoba were entertained by oriental singers accompanied on the lute. One high point was reached in the reign of Abd-er-Rahman (r. 821–52) with the arrival of a singer from Baghdad known as Zoriab. Another occurred at the Sevillian court of the poet-king Al-Motamit (r. 1040–95), where orchestras of more than 100 lutes and flutes are known to have performed. In the twelfth century the philosopher Aver-roes said: ‘When a scholar dies in Seville, his books are sold in Cordoba; when a musician dies in Cordoba, his instruments are sold in Seville.’
It would be rash to speculate on Flamenco’s links with the earlier Moorish music of the region. Europe’s gypsies had a strong musical tradition of their own, and produced startling results elsewhere—notably in Romania and Hungary. How exactly the music and the musicians came together in Andalusia is a mystery. The psychological traumas of Andalusia undoubtedly set the scene. The ancient
flamenco jondo
or ‘deep flamenco’, especially the
tonas
or ‘unaccompanied melodies’, belong to the world of tears and lament. Like the blues of America’s deep South, they express the black moods of people in despair: they are the songs of the dispossessed. In this, they differ markedly from the flamboyant style of
flamenco chico
, ‘smart flamenco’, which swept Spain’s café life in the 1860s and which furthered the romantic ‘reinvention’ of Andalusia.
‘Flamenco Jondo’
, wrote Federico Garcia Lorca, ‘is a stammer, a marvellous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals.’
2
After Philip’s death the Spanish Habsburgs sought in vain to restore their fortunes. A concerted attempt was made to join forces with their Austrian relations. Gaspar de Guzman, Count of Oliverez and Duke of San Lucar, popularly known as
El Conde Duque
, the ‘Count-Duke’, who held the reins of policy from 1621 to 1643, applied the principles of earlier Castilian reformers. But his career came to grief amidst the shattering secession of Portugal (1640) and the revolt of Catalonia (1640–8). Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years War ended with the loss of the United Provinces—its richest single asset. The interrelated wars with France were protracted until the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). Overwhelmed by the spiralling costs of war, by the multiplicity of fronts, by the absence of any interval of respite, Spain could rescue neither itself nor its Austrian partner. Thanks to the extraordinary problems of ‘the Spanish Road’, the logistics of supporting an army in the Low Countries became insuperable.
Poner una pica en Flandres
(putting a pikeman into Flanders) became a Spanish idiom for ‘attempting the impossible’.
47
‘The Habsburg bloc’, writes the historian of political logistics, ‘provides one of the greatest examples of strategical overstretch in history.’
48
[PICARO] [VALTEL-LINA]
The Revolt of the Netherlands
, which began in 1566 and ended in 1648, constituted a long-running drama which spanned the transition from the supremacy of the Habsburgs to that of France. At the outset, the seventeen provinces of the imperial Burgundian Circle that were transferred to Spanish rule in 1551 presented a mosaic of local privileges and of social and cultural divisions. The feudal aristocracy of the countryside contrasted sharply with the wealthy burghers and
fishermen of the coastal towns. The francophone and predominantly Catholic Walloons of Hainault, Namur, and Liège contrasted with the Dutch-speaking and increasingly Calvinist population of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The central provinces of Flanders and Brabant lay across the main religious and linguistic divide. Over 200 cities controlled perhaps 50 per cent of Europe’s trade, bringing Spain seven times more in taxes than the bullion of the Indies. Certainly, in the initial stages of Spanish rule, the threat to provincial liberties and to the nobles’ control of Church benefices gave greater cause for popular offence than the threat of activating the Inquisition (see Appendix III, p. 1275).
