Now if we cast a glance at purely instrumental music, a symphony of Beethoven presents us with the greatest confusion which yet has the most perfect order as its foundation, with the most vehement conflict which is transformed the next moment into the most beautiful harmony. It is rerum concordia discourse, a true and complete picture of the nature of the world which rolls on in the boundless confusion of innumerable forms and maintains itself by constant destruction. But at the same time, all the human passions and emotions speak from this symphony. Joy, grief, love, hatred, terror, hope, and so on, in innumerable shades, yet all, as it were, only in the abstract and without any particularization. It is their mere form, without the material, like a mere spirit world, without matter.

We certainly have an inclination to realize it while we listen, to close it in the imagination with flesh and bone, and to see in it all the different scenes of life and nature. On the whole, however, this does not promote an understanding or enjoyment of it, but rather gives it a strange and arbitrary addition. It is therefore better to interpret it purely and in its immediacy. And this is from Schopenhauer, I just read for you, from On the Metaphysics of Music, from his great book, The World as Will and Representation, the second volume, Vilkem Caribbean Rhythms, episode 77, a special music show, the third one, I think. I have episode four on music, a later one on Christmas musics with Bach, I think.

But now I want to discuss a rather peculiar development and not so much music's history, as a species of intellectual history ultimately can only interest the academic and the frivolous, but in the turn of mood or in the turn of spirit, and how it happens that Langer repose an erotic self-regard of the spirit, which is often identified with decadence, how this can turn about, how it springboards to something of pure action, of vitality and energy. This is something I want to show you, rather than explain with words, to show with musics of certain composers how they change through the states of the spirit from this, from decadent repose to, on the other hand, vitalism. And I began with Schopenhauer words on Beethoven because he show what means pure musics.

In music of Beethoven you feel not only the vehemence and thirds of the spirit in all all its transfigurations, but therefore also, for example, the feeling of gravity. And I mean that literally, as in you have a reproduction of unnatural forces and phenomena of nature in his music. Listen to this famous beginning, you all know it. You heard this fresh, you've heard it before for sure, but maybe now you hear fresh, because He's a famous conductor performing it, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, of course, a wartime performance. And you listen to Fort Wagner play wartime Beethoven, and you hear this, what I talk about, this insane energy, a source of all life, source of being exploding at you. There is also a recording of Fort Wagner also conduct Ninth Symphony, which again, Fort

Wengler conduct like no other. Why not play it? Here is opening. Titanic have actually divine wartime performances, not just a German, but if you listen to Golovanov, a famous Russian conductor, he has a rendition of Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2, and I think is one of best recordings of any musics ever, and of such overwhelming emotion. I think he does it either 1945 or 43, but it's so intense. I cannot listen to it without sunglasses on if people are around, you know, but I won't play it now because very different in mood to, I don't want to break music theme on this show, but I repeat to you what you hear from Beethoven is return to nature in a brutal and overwhelming sense, where you hear titanic volcano crash and a needful crash of waves on rock, other sublime

phenomena like a vehemence of waterfall is reflected in spirit if you are able to absorb it and to reflect it in listening and Schopenhauer say something very profound on this but one moment here listen to this this is not Beethoven but maybe you guess a nationality of composer speaking of water forms okay so this is Grieg opening of his piano concerto and the first First time I heard it, I immediately knew this is Scandinavia, I think maybe I was 15, I heard it on radio, and in keeping with artistic effort of a romantic nationalist, Grig captures this feeling of the north, of his own homeland. He captures so purely that you can hear it's the north man even without knowing it. I did not know what Grig was at that age.

I play it for you because you hear in the bass the descending bass line, and excuse me but I am a simple dilettante. I do it for my own diletto or delight. I am not a music theorist, so you will excuse if on this show I often do not know the technical language for various musical devices. But in those descending bass-fast chords, you can feel maybe crisp Scandinavian mountain waterfall is the device though that he copied from Beethoven. bit of unchanged musics during time of Napoleon, end of 18th century, beginning 19th, he straddles classical and romantic eras, you already know this maybe, but the real meaning of this is attempt to return from classical artifice and formalism, to return from that to nature,

both in mirroring natural phenomena and their supposed innocence and raw sublimity. But think difference between highly manicured and ordered French garden, like you see Versailles versus a wild-type English-style garden. But also to return indirect and naïve appeal to, of course, just frank emotions. So the composers who follow Beethoven, who I will show a little bit in a moment, I'll show two examples, but they, you could say Beethoven opened the door, maybe not to purer music, but a type of musical emotionalism that shows the inner meaning of music more clearly and directly is easier to perceive for a beginner. Because the meaning of music is to represent how you put this, the meaning of music in the spirit, the passions, or even the ground of the passions, which is the will.

But in so doing, it represents not just the human spirit, but the world itself, of which the human spirit is only the microcosm. So I will quote for you another passage from Schopenhauer, from Metaphysics of Musics, to end this segment, where he talks about Rossini. He talks about Rossini, his favorite composer, okay, is unusual, he's a very light composer, but for Schopenhauer very important, so now I'm reading from world as will and representation again. It is just this universality that belongs uniquely to music, together with the most precise distinctness that gives it that high value as the panacea of all our sorrows. Therefore, if music tries to stick too closely to the words and to mold itself according to the events, he's talking about operatic music here,

But it is endeavoring to speak a language not its own. No one has kept so free from this mistake as Rossini, hence his music speaks its own language so distinctly and purely that it requires no words at all, and therefore produces its full effect even when rendered by instruments alone. As a result of all this, we can regard the phenomenal world or nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing, and this thing itself is therefore the only medium of their analogy, a knowledge of which is required if we are to understand that analogy. Accordingly, music, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language that is related to the universality of concepts much as these are related to the particular things.

Yet its universality is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but is of a quite different kind. It is united with thorough and unmistakable direct distinctness. In this respect it is like geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience, and are a priori applicable to them all, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly definite. All possible efforts, stirrings, and manifestations of the will, all the events that occur within man himself and are included by the reasoning faculty in the wide negative concept of feeling can be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form without the material, always according to the in-itself, not to the phenomenon

as it were the innermost soul of the phenomenon without the body. This close relation that music has to the true nature of all things can also explain the fact that when music suitable to any scene, action, event or environment is played, it seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning and appears to be the most accurate and distinct commentary on it. Moreover, to the man who gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony, it is as if he saw all the possible events of life and of the world passing by within himself. Yet if he reflects, he cannot assert any likeness between that piece of music and the things that passed through his mind. For as we have said, music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not

a copy of the phenomenon, or more exactly of the will's adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing in itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. This is the reason why music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and from the world, at once appear in enhanced significance, and this is, of course, all the greater, the more analogous its melody is to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon. He has many other good things to say, but I end a quote right there. I will go now to commercial break. I will be right back. What you just heard was the beginning of Beethoven, Waldstein, Sonata.

Schopenhauer, Beethoven, many relations. They were both men of Dutch Flemish background, and they look similar with the wild hair, the look in the eye, the wild temperament also. And they were squat, quite muscular, short men, and Schopenhauer has many theories. You read his essay on genius. I think that's what he said, that geniuses often are this shape, squat and short, powerful body because the genius has need of impulse and passion, a passionate explosion of conception, and is quite different from, let's say, Lanklet, tall, skinny man, which he believed the blood moved too slowly, and the tall, skinny man often have phlegmatic aspect, too calm, does not have a requisite, explosive passion that a genius like Schopenhauer and Beethoven need.

But anyway, if you want to read more on such a subject as I read from last segment, I direct you Schopenhauer essay, of course on metaphysics of music, and there is also a Wagner essay on Beethoven, where he very much follows Schopenhauer in many things, and where Nietzsche in his great book, Birth of Tragedy, he explained much about the spirit of this Wagner essay in Beethoven and how German music as it progresses from Bach, then Beethoven, then Wagner, is something very special, something quite outside the rest of Western civilization. It's something that the ruling worldview of the West, the Alexandrian Socratic civilization, is something that it could never accept German music. It could never domesticate or tame it. It couldn't include it in itself.

You know, the Trads, when they look backward, they think everything come together, Western culture. It doesn't, they don't all fit together. Some of them are mutually warring, and this Nietzsche say German music doesn't fit. And he explained how it is in German music that the Dionysian spirit of a chthonic power of nature is reborn in the same way as German philosophy and Kant and Schopenhauer demolished the Socratic-Platonic project intellectually. It destroyed all the assumptions of the Western scientific so-called Alexandrian civilization, which Nietzsche doesn't say it in this way, but it's utterly just, you know, gay and Jewish. And the Pelasgian corruptor Socrates founded this worldview, but to do so, the Dionysian

reality of existence had to be suppressed, had to be smothered and denied. And it was being reborn from the depths of German spirit, from the depths of the forest. It was being reborn as German music and German philosophy, which was the same thing, until it was violently repressed by an Anglo-Jewish-Russian communist alliance in the 20th century. But they have trouble keeping it down, I think, so these views sometimes resurface, for example, on internet in last decade, when they are not looking and not policing. And although I myself am just Slavoid mutt from the periphery of Europe, I try in some form to keep the flame of Dionysian promise alive for its rebirth and reconstitution one day. But enough, I will, you know, this different, this talk about musics, and I won't tell you

about different turning musics, and rather than talk I will show you. So now after Beethoven and before Wagner, there is period, you know, the so-called romantic period you all know it, which is a hopeful, optimistic, naive encounter with nature, and the feel of the music is very similar to feel of romantic poets like Keats and Wordsworth. And I play on show before, but here is opening of Schumann piano concerto, so you get the idea of one moment. Any of you like it when I play before, I think it's pure feeling, romantic longing, and in any case it's perfect example of pure romantic era music, post-Beethoven. And here a very special moment also from Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2. One of the most special moments in all musics, I think, is from Brahms. Do you like this? How make you feel?

Even people who don't like Brahms, for example, their small frog poster, who's very friendly, he doesn't like Brahms, he says, this is one of the all-time great moments in music. When the main theme comes back in, everything is going to be okay. So in theory, I should have an entire show to explain to you how this turn of the spirit toward nature, how it evolved through course of 19th century to that of decadence, that end of 19th century, decadence so-called. And maybe I will in future, as also shown just on Beethoven, who knows, there are so many things I want to say but never enough time on just one show. But this point I just made is, others make this as well, it's central actually to Camille Paglia book, Sexual Personae, how romanticism and turn toward nature very quickly actually

become a decadence, it becomes a darkness of violent night, to all kinds of deviant sexual and even cannibalistic things. How opening the door to nature in the hopeful way, you see, in Rousseau or Wordsworth, it actually brings back tonic archetypes that had been repressed by civilization and not anticipated by artists or thinkers, who thought engagement with nature would remain innocent and hopeful. And I believe she was much affected by hippie history movement, when again these hippies with their Rousseauan ideology of the innocence of return to nature and basic living and so forth. But it ends in the age of 1970s in what she called the return of nature, a red in tooth and murder claw. Although her examples are just a few hippies who were offed at Woodstock or this, but the

The story she tells is interesting, and to explain how that development happened, but I leave it to her. I will add that it's an easier story to tell through visual art and literature, where you see, for example, Wordsworth and Keats, and their view of nature, and then you compare this to Baudelaire and Heussmann's, and people like Mallarmé, who had complete contempt for the early romantics, and who had these dark, deathly visions of night and such. But for musics, this is harder for a few reasons. First of all, not many are trained to listen, so that for many people classical musics of all periods actually sound the same, even to many who maybe listen semi-regularly. And second, as Nietzsche says, the eroticism of an artist often begins where the eroticism of the people ends.

So a musician expressing eroticism in musics is very different. It's harder to sense than a poet or a painter. In music, actually, you know, it's not like pornography or it turns you on. Not this kind of music. It sounds to most people as actually it's insanely ethereal or spiritualized, you know. To give just one example, I've played frequently on this show Scriabin, who among others I show soon. He's a big example of, let's say, dick dancing music, to the point where he was bad actually in England, by the squares in England, right? The Tipper Gore. Is that Tipper Gore? She tried to ban rap music or whatever. These people in England, they tried to ban music of Scriabin in the 1930s. They actually call it evil musics. They call it erotic and egotistic

to the point of mania. And indeed, he very much parallels to decadent poetry or art, for example, with many pieces, with names of Langer or eroticism, of strangeness, with a sonata called The Black Mass. So I guess the story of 19th century is how that hopeful, romantic, sentimental musics I just played at the beginning, you know, Schumann and Brahms, how that can turn into something like this. Let's play some Scriabin, like, yeah, bada bing, put on the Scriabin. Okay, so that's called Dark Flame. You understand dark flame, very dark flame around bonfire, what it reminds you of, a demonic dance. And then this next one is a languid dance. It's literally called dance languid, a languid dance. Now, this sound erotic in some sense, and to Scriabin surely was, but to peasant like you or me,

it just perhaps sound otherworldly and strange, right? And he has also some pieces called literally strangeness and so forth, but for whatever reason, by end of 19th century, you get this. You get musics, and also art and literature turned this into Scriabin doing black mass sonata. Black mass sonata, let me show you excerpt from that. This is Sophronitsky, this Scriabin son-in-law, he play a black mass sonata. It is a music of a demonic power. You must be careful, Scriabin was frightened after he composed the sonata. he refused to play it in public, and then after he composed a white mass sonata to offset its entry into the world. So now, what I mean, we are here, end of 19th century, beginning 20th, where decadent music and art is blooming, flowers of darkness are blooming,

and I will be back on next segment with more examples from different composers. This may be not easy musics to like. If I had done show on just Beethoven, maybe, Beethoven, easy to listen, and now a naysayer can come along and say things like, you see Schopenhauer talk about how Beethoven and his symphonies make you feel everything, not just one thing, but at one moment joy, another sadness, terror, power, many things, even languor, and the point that any great composer will be able to access a variety of emotional moods, not just one. She can only access one or two moods, he's not a great composer. Most of the names that have come down to us are great because, let me take a moment, how is this done? How is the so-called canon built and many lies about this?

Time filters out a lot of productions in anything, art, philosophy, science, music. Time filters out what is merely of its own time and therefore not very good or is not very interesting, things that are limited to their own time horizon of tastes and views, to their own culture, that cannot access human nature outside of that, they tend not to survive very long. And this is the reason why you cannot go wrong reading books accepted as classics from say before 1900 or even before. But of course there are Maroons who say the canon is constructed by power and for the sake of power that is made to support some kind of ruling ideology and is in turn promoted by this ideology or some later ruling class for its own interests, and they say it is

academics and academies, it is men drinking whiskey and cigars in back rooms, so you know they decide the canon, and of course they decide to exclude women and minorities and all this, and that's why it's only white men in history. So this, of course, is nonsense. The canon is built often against the wishes of the establishment, most often. The establishment of its own time, and even later, does not approve of what come to us down as work of canonical work. Take Schopenhauer. The establishment of his time was Hegelian, and, well, Hegelian or not, they kept a conspiracy of silence against Schopenhauer for decades. And even now he is much hated by official authorities, despite they have to grudgingly accept him as an important part of intellectual history.

But much like Nietzsche, he is only allowed to be read in highly edited form, and he was never promoted certainly during his own time by the state, by academies, any such thing. his philosophy deeply hostile to all such things anyway. So how did he become famous then? It's because artists started to read him. They found him the way Nietzsche did, in a used bookshop, for example, and Nietzsche, when he found him, he was 21 or 22, and he'd stay up three nights to read The World as Will and Representation, because it feels, when you read it, like true nature of world is being revealed to you, which it is. and many others, Wagner, but many French writers and poets and artists in Paris and later Tolstoy and many others, they read him in the same way, so over time Schopenhauer became canonical

although in spirit he's always an outsider. In other words, it's the accumulated vote of artists and other great minds over time who recognize genius and who they preserve the flame of genius in history and it's almost never some establishment that does it for social utility and such. These are more lies, always, and of course much of French pseudo-philosophy is based on these lies, which are fundamentally egalitarian lie. Any resentful idiot loves these lies because they explain to them why they are not inferior, let's say, to somebody like Lichtenberg or Schopenhauer or Beethoven, you know. So some genius, they go out of style for a while, sometimes they are briefly forgotten, but never completely, by the way.

But it's always another artist who resurrects their flame, yes, their flame, I suppose, but I mean to say their fame and influence. It's always resurrected by some other artist, not by an academy, and this other artist does so out of love and excitement, not out of political or identity concerns. So when Liszt or Chopin and other resurrected Bach, this was not done because they felt kinship with a Lutheran pastor from two centuries before, basically, but now in music academies this is what they do. They try to dig up all kind of random womans or minority supposedly composers who no one ever heard of, which is complete waste, because you can't force people to enjoy something. But of course, if you go among art world today, mostly and certainly art professors, the painters

they promote, the paintings, whether old or new, they never actually enjoy them. It's all done for status. So this is nothing new for them. For such people it is indeed all political. So anyways, this is my brief rant about how so-called canon gets made in the arts and so forth. So it's not really at all a canon. But to return to what I say, every great composer can access a variety of mental and spiritual states. Beethoven has some very touching slow movement, not just fast or majestic power movement. But for example, here is passage of slow movement from the Imperial concerto, very moving. This is a side I make, it's fair to say that one feeling or set of closely related states, emotional state, predominate over another in the work of a master. They do some things better than others.

They focus, one will focus on certain emotional state better than some other emotional state. So Beethoven or classical period, let's say Mozart or Haydn, they actually do not do feeling of languor at all very well. Beethoven does also, he does not do slow movement too well, in my opinion. I showed you an exception, but he's best at energetic feelings of demonic energy and minor key and that majesty feeling of heroism, revolutionary feelings, Napoleon feelings evoking also elemental sublime powers of nature. And I know many musics aficionado will not agree, but the German composers do not in general do slow movements very well. They do sometimes, but not, or at least not as well as the Russians. So it's just a matter of how often you do it well.

Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, the Russian school composing in the Western style, the so-called Moscow school of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, they never strike out on a slow movement, I think. It's always amazing. They never get a slow movement wrong. Whereas with German composer, whether early or late romantic, it often does not work. Look, I'm sorry, I know many music aficionados will be mad at me for saying this, but it's true. What I mean to say is that a composer, Although they can access many things, one thing generally predominates one idea, which includes a bundle of related moods. And in the decadent phase, composers, the feeling of languor, of suspension, suspension into nothingness, a kind of erotic self-absorption, these things predominate, and they do these things well.

So I show you on last segment some from Scriabin, but maybe even better known is Debussy, the French composer of around the same time, who is often called impressionist composer, he died 1918, he is a major decadent. Consider this, consider this following, how you feel. Good afternoon of fun, there is a recent delicious taco. Pussyhound, he likes this music, his same feeling as in Scriabin, I think, but lighter. Someone say, the French always able to access, same feeling as composer of other nations or German or Russian, but with French touch of light frivolity that make life bearable. Here is another example of same philic suspended erotic languor from Debussy. I see this in a Scriabin sample, this pure feeling of decadent musics which comes off

entirely self-absorbed, otherworldly, maybe opulent. And as for the erotic, I think you can sense it if you take into account that sensuality of such artists, very different from that of common men. But there is other slightly different decadent music that has, besides this, it has also some more special emotional import, other than this otherworldly dreaminess and self-containment. I mean, there is this other kind of decadent era music that has some emotional charge too, but is decadent in style because it carries over all these same fundamental moods where Where the ego, you know, and being in such a state of self-absorption and self-regard, it encompasses the world and the reality, so actually it bleeds over into everything. The boundaries of the self then, I mean, are erased.

They are replaced with the primal oneness of life, which in some ways is the definition of the Dionysiac, right, the dissolution of the boundaries of the self. And Wagner is very much of this. He is, as Nietzsche says, he's a decadent composer. Before Wagner, all music is based on overt rhythm with the dance as the archetype of music and the dance beat, even in Bach, very much dance beat. But in Wagner, this replace, the dance is replaced with endless ocean. Dancing is replaced with swimming or floating, maybe even drowning in an endless directionless ocean of indefinite feeling. For example, listen to this. This is interesting because Nietzsche considers Wagner misunderstood and as someone who misunderstood himself.

So now if you think Wagner, generally you think right of the Valkyrie's music or very bombastic musics, heroic musics to invade Poland too and such thing, theme music for invasion of Poland, but Nietzsche say Wagner misunderstood himself when he focused on that, because actually his strengths were very different. His strengths were those of a miniaturist, even an emotional miniaturist, focusing on special nooks and crannies of spirit, on unusual soul states, and not on a bombastic this and so forth. So here might be an example, here from Siegfried's funeral march. Now I think Wagner actually does the bombastic part here quite well, or maybe not bombastic but genuinely heroic illogy for prehistoric hero.

So listen this phrase, okay this typical Wagner, similar to Ride of Valkyries or to energetic outputs from Flying Dutchman, that is another favorite moment, listen to the explosion of Flying Dutchman. If you listen a little bit earlier, and this might not be maybe best example of what Nietzsche talk about when he mean a miniaturist of soul states, but it's good example because he's from St. Pice's Funeral March of Siegfried, and if you listen a bit earlier in Siegfried's Funeral March, there is this very quiet, small, intimate moment that's very moving. Listen to this. And there are many such moments of miniature quiet in Wagner, the quiet moments, the pauses where he is best, I think, and maybe this is what Nietzsche meant, because in fact Wagner,

He has this reputation now as a bombastic man and a nationalist composer, whatever this means, but Nietzsche is right that in the beginning it was actually in Paris that Wagner was most spiritually at home, that among artist coteries of Paris is where he had his true home, that he's a decadent and should have embraced this, I mean stylistically or artistically, instead of pretending to be something else, that he would have excelled most in the states of the spirit similar to what I played from Scriabin and Debussy and so on. Wagner is modernist, decadent composer, which is why if you read some biographies of older pianists, for example, an Art of Rubinstein biography, I think he says his music teacher who was some very strict old German guy, and he absolutely forbade him to play anything

after Brahms, and especially to play Wagner. You know, the red-blooded German actually at first rejected Wagner. Okay, later he became cultural phenomenon, but he was actually a French decadent composing these, you know, but in that moment I played for you from Siegfried, you hear very strong spirit of nostalgia, right? So you probably heard some of this dreamy nostalgic longing also in what I played from Debussy and Scriabin, but it is the defining feeling in Rachmaninoff as well. So you know, despite Rachmaninoff, he composed a high romantic style well into the 20th century, and he refused to give any way to modernism, mostly, or very rarely, but he dabbled in some modern devices. But in feel, he's very much a master of this same kind of nostalgia, nostalgic self-absorption.

So listen to this. He start off this following prelude. This is Rachmaninoff now. He started off very majestic and strong, so to speak, but listen to where his true feeling lies in the more quiet moment. So you hear this, and this is what I mean, is another element in 1900 era decadence. This kind of, it's not just a sense of lost suspension in nothingness, but it's this kind of nostalgic type self-absorption. So you see it, of course, in literature of the time. in Joseph Conrad, which I think are beautiful adventure stories for men, so much so that many women will tell you they don't understand Lord Jim at all. But you look at Lord Jim and the narrative device he uses, this kind of interlocking storytelling where one story, one legend is nested within another, and it seemed at first

sight ancient tales of the sea, as if he's copying Herodotus' tangent style. But the effect it has on me is a bit different, is the same dreamy feeling of self-absorbed nostalgia of a man taken by reveries, of a lost past, and in some way is the beauty of that loss and of regret. But the best-known literature of this feeling, of course, is Marcel Proust, with his mega-novel Remembrances of Things Past, or is also the real title, I guess, In Search of Lost Time, which is better than what's-his-name, James Joyce's mega-novel, Proust is Better, I think, but it's a story of a modern decadent, and it's all based on this pretext of nostalgia, of a man's self-absorption, masturbatory, even in memories of his own life.

Which you can think of as the impulse of a decadent, and you realize this when I say is without any moral condemnation, but it's a decadent age impulse for two reasons. First of all, that as dominant ideologies of an age, beginning of course with religion I know is not an ideology, but the religious explanation of history and of man's place in the universe as this is fractured, indeed as all ideologies and narrative are fractured as faith is lost in any overarching theory or feeling of providence. The artist then most easily he has recourse to his own very personal memories and very personal memory and feelings to make sense of experience. So art becomes this kind of self-referential based around nostalgia of this kind, pouring over memory of this type.

Very self-referential, but beyond this, the second and more important reason, nostalgia of this type, despite its mildness, because nostalgia like this is not the fiery explosive feeling that leads to violence or action or to energy, but rather to repose. But this kind of nostalgia, I believe, is very much a self-expression of the Dionysiac state, in the sense that the boundaries between self and outside are erased, very often boundaries between memory and dream are erased, and this is a feeling of at once total self-absorption and also universal selflessness, that this kind of literature and the musics I've just been playing it, lead to this feeling, almost, you can say, sitar-like, Ravi Shankar feeling, suspension in nothingness, right?

And now Huysmans, a famous decadent writer, he wrote similar book, Arabour, often translated against nature, against a story of man's utter self-absorption in aesthetic contemplation, you can say, desire to escape this trash world in his own reveries and dreams. And Proust, the same feeling, it's not coincidence that both, by the way, deal in some way with inversion or homosexuality, and I should mention here, since my last show was on this subject, but because of course homosexuality of this kind, at least, is something very much you can say symptom of self-absorption, right, is old charge, it's a symptom of narcissism and self-regard. But that does not mean these writers, by the way, celebrate homosexuality, I think is the opposite.

Proust's book is probably the most devastating portrait of homosexuality ever made. You could not find LGBTQ activists or such who's aware of this, or who has even read the book, of course, but Proust's mega-novel is really the story of a man who looks for father figures, but is repeatedly betrayed and let down by them. So you know the book about the utter futility of the gay desire and the gay search and so on, which Oscar Wilde, another decadent of course, he inherits the same sensibility probably in part from Hoysman's, but associated with this is this nostalgia that speak of total self-referential almost catatonia, one that tries to bleed over and encompass the world. So here is another example of music with these feelings. So that is Satie, who often, by music historian and so forth,

is not classified at all as a decadent era composer, but even someone who reacts against that. But I think he, if you listen to the mood, is the same I've been talking about. So whether fully tonal, lost in an ocean of atonal drift, whether it has rhythm or without, the music of this period always does this feeling of lostness very well. You know, the novel of Yusuf has the same feeling, the man without qualities. It is, you can say this, is a logical outcome of romantic turn, that it leads to this. This being maybe its light or mild and sentimental side. music like the Black Mass of Scriabin or the Isle of the Dead by Rachmaninoff is the side of decay, of literal decadence. Music of decadence that has its counterpart in Baudelaire poetry or in some of the symbolist

poets who I may do later show on. So Huysmans, in his novel L'Abba about Satanism, he also attends the Black Mass. There is this stern, this obsession as Debussy I played for you earlier, the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," this actually is the musical setting of a poem by the same name by the symbolist poet Mallarme. So the relationships between decadent music and decadent and symbolist literature of this time is very direct. I end the segment with Rachmaninoff's Isle of Dead, so you listen, it's long composition, but maybe a few minutes I play, and this, too, he made this after he saw a painting of Arnold Botlin painting of the same name, Isle of the Dead, you can Google and find this painting. Like that, very moody, played maybe in some movies, a computer game, but when it is used

that way, it gives music very different associations if you hear it that way the first time, so you have to listen and hear it in itself. And I hear the same languor of self-regard in the best sense of nostalgia. But the decadent style begins, very quickly turns into a kind of austere, energetic musics full of vitality. So after this decadent phase of, let's say, 1890 to 1910 or 1880 to 1920, artists themselves may be underweight of this feeling of glamorous decay, of languor and eroticism. They get tired of this too much, so they try to go for the opposite. This is simplest explanation. sociology of artist explanation. Not just in the sense that artists want to make a name for themselves in a new direction

from current style, but also growing up under that, they become wary of it, they react against it. In much the same way at the very end of Baroque period in music, you start to hear extreme decadence in Baroque style, again from French, speaking maybe the same sentiments as the later decadence of 1900. Here you have Dusli, a famous harpsichord piece. I will play for you just a segment, so this Baroque music, but decadent phase of Baroque music. And then you hear how this, the classical style, it reacts completely against this spirit. It goes to opposite spirit, and here is famous Mozart cadenza from Concerto 21. There is this difference, okay? So now remember the decadent style of the turn of the century of 1900, so let me refresh your memory.

Here is a quick sample again from Skryabin at his most obscenely self-referential, The Poem of Ecstasy. Here is the reaction from Prokofiev. You hear how the decadent style is replaced by energy, energy of technology even, and vitalism. This is a bit of a joke I play because Prokofiev literally named this the classical symphony. So, he was doing a kind of mimic of Mozart classical style, but it still makes my point because men like Prokofiev and Stravinsky in Russia, they try to restore, in a sense, classicism or at least, you know, the spirit of quickness, of fresh and energetic sound, of simplicity, the sound of speed to replace decadent and opulent or mystical languor. But it's not really, I think, analogous to return to classical form and such because

it's driven by very different worldview and spirit from, say, Mozart or Haydn. It is not here the spirit of balance and reason or even cheerfulness, you can say, but rather a spirit of speed, of violence and energy, which can come both from worship of technology and futurism, and from energetic primitivism, from a return to prehistoric vitalism. So Stravinsky, I think this in 1910 or 1911 caused a riot with the Rite of Spring. He plays this dance, symphony dance, you could say, Rite of Spring, and it caused the audience to riot. Here it is. So now maybe from a conservative point of view, this is just another expression of decadence. And surely I think a traditionalist would say, but regardless of this, it's a totally different direction of mood.

And if you forgive me, I play for you some Karl Orff again, although I did on last two shows but so you see, it's not purely a Russian phenomenon in other words, it's something that happened throughout all the arts in West Europe. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny. We are living in destiny, and we are living in our own destiny.

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Bibi, trenos, bibi, trenos Bibi, trenos, bibi, trenos Bibi, trenos, bibi, trenos Bibi, trenos, bibi, trenos Bibi, trenos, bibi, trenos The chorus in Orf is almost screaming or pocking the notes, by the way. He was a Nazi, they're barking. So now they try to change this and pretend that Karl Orf was not Nazi, but he was a big Nazi. He marched with the Nazis in the beginning. And this development in music is reflected in other arts, again. For example, Hugo Hoppner, or Feides, as he nicknamed Feides, he started making primitivist pagan paintings around turn of century. It's no surprise that he, very much like Orff, joined Nazi, although Hugo Hoppner, he later became inspiration for psychedelic hippie art in California.

But German primitivist nudism from 1890, and this just migrated to America, California. And in a different way, same spirit of energy and simplicity and violence and primitivism is reproduced in the futurists, of course, futurist paintings and sculpture, and in futurist literature in Marinetti and such. And there was, of course, by the way, futurist music, too, that used the sounds of engines and technology, but I don't want to cover it, because it is too, you know, it's too on the nose for the point I'm trying to make here. somewhat outside the classical tradition and I want to emphasize on this show still well-known classical composers who nevertheless evoke these feelings and to briefly explain why

this change happened, and not to give you, for example, a lecture or something on futurist music that nobody listens to anymore, but in the paintings of De Chirico, Giorgio De Chirico, you see some of these same turns of the spirit. So not just in futurist paintings, but also even in pre-surrealist painting in Giorgio de Chirico, who similarly he begins as a copier of Arnold Bucklin. Giorgio de Chirico begins his artistic career as a symbolist, but then he turned to some very different—he become his own thing, he become some say father of surrealism and so forth. If you look at his, let's say, paintings 1910 to 1920, his metaphysical so-called era paintings, you see some of these same turns of the spirit, which is why Mussolini built park outside Rome,

the EU art park, you can Google and look at this park. He built this in style of Giorgio de Chirico, in other words a vaguely futuristic return to Roman simplicity and and grandeur, this strange mix of futurism and traditionalism, which is what I believe in. So in this turn, like I say, a turn of spirit, because I don't want to use other words, but a turn to violence of action, to feeling of speed, whether generating from a futuristic technologism or from primitivism as a return to heroic stone age. It exists in art, in literature, in musics of different countries during this time. I think Prokofiev is best to capture this feeling. You listen to first piano concerto. It's very humorous musics, no? Okay, so it's very... You listen to seventh sonata.

Listen to the violent vehemence and energy of this and how it overcome decadent fagged languor. Prokofiev is even military musics. This is the kind of communism that I can approve, Despite, I despise tanky, BIPOC faggots on Twitter now, okay? My family in early 20th century were real communists, and they would have thrown most of you in a gulag. You hear, you faggots? They would have listened to this music while you are in gulag, that real tanky music. So now I could go on about many autistic developments in musical history. So for example, there is a whole movement called Neoclassicism, and classical music is very much influenced by Stravinsky, and if I wanted to, I could name any of these composers who desire a return to classical simplicity in some way, and I could press

my point, what I try to tell you now, I could press it in that way, but I will not, because this show is ultimately just an excuse to show you musics I like, and I don't like those composers who make the so-called neoclassicist schools from start maybe 1920 to 1950s, it's like Hindemith or Hanegger, excuse Hanegger, okay, and whatnot, although again they are in some sense the demonstrations of movements I'm saying, but I don't want to play them, I don't care because aside from musicians, very few listen to those. Right now classical music is dead. I'm sorry to say because I have great love for these musics, I consider it the real musics. But how can it be alive as a style? If you go to concert hall, it's just old people and they don't even know what they're listening to.

You can ask them which composer you like, or I like them all, it's all the same to many of them. They're just there for the experience of being in a concert hall. And aside from the old, you maybe see Orthodox Jews with their daughters trying, you know, hassides with the daughter, trying to enrich them culturally and this, or maybe not hassides but also they take their daughter to get culture, and you think this is what these musics were written for? To enrich the life experiences of people who want a cultural time, you know, who aspire to Western civilizations, you know? Maybe those things are harmless, but it's depressing because I refuse to go to concert hall for this. in private. You compare the high hopes Nietzsche had for a meaning of German musics.

You compare to Wagner and Scriabin and their messianic conception of a total work of art, in which finally the state, the political state itself, would be transfigured into a work of art. And this is what I believe in. So now, of course, if you have any artistic ambition, I think I can give a little bit of advice, just as somebody who enjoys just as a connoisseur, but that I can tell you that this mixture itself of feeling of suspension, of erotic languor, of dreaminess on one hand, and when you put this beside explosions of ecstatic energy, of sudden vitality and primitivism, is very powerful contrast, is very powerful device. It can be used in painting and music and literature of all kinds. Of course, you have to do it well, but you look at primitive paintings of Henri Rousseau's

very good, you see Langer in the jungle and also animal vitality. But I also believe that this turn of spirit I refer to on this show in which decadence turned to vitalism, it isn't just artists reacting against previous style. It isn't just an effective manipulation of audience emotions. It's effective rather because it reflects, I think, a deep truth that civilization, based on so-called some type classical form of various kinds, as it decays the spirit of the keen observer becomes indeed self-absorbed. Its decadence inside is not a moral failing. It's an honest reflection of nature, the conventional and moral boundaries being dissolved. Genius begins to look to its own memories. It becomes held in nostalgia, it becomes suspended in a kind of divine inaction that is self-sufficient.

It both observes and absorbs the world and becomes unsure of where it begins and where ends. But then, like a collapsing star leads to outbursts supernova energy, so in the languorous phase that is called decadent, the spirit of genius finds finally outside all civilization and culture it finds the source of all things, the source of all life, and this is eternal fire of Heraclitus. And I read for you now from a master himself, I read for you, the liar and hypocrite should beware of German music, for it alone, in the midst of our entire culture, is the uniquely unsullied, pure and purifying spirit of fire, which, as the great Heraclitus of Ephesus taught, is the point of origin and return for the double orbit of all things.

All those things which we now call culture, education, civilization must someday appear before the Judge Dionysus whom no man can deceive. Until next time, Bap out.