The Bach family, of whom Johann Sebastian is the most famous, may be the largest and most remarkable cultural dynasty in history. We know of sixty Bach performers and/or composers who held important musical posts between 1550 and 1850.
Naked Rage
In 1914, Velazquez’s painting of Venus (1657) was slashed in six places at the National Gallery by an angry Canadian suffragette. The painting was repaired.
Cross
Spanish painter and sculptor Alonso Cano (1601 – 1667) was a famously obstinate person. On his deathbed, he refused the offer of a crucifix because, he said, it was badly carved.
Kids These Days
As a parent of three teenagers, I appreciate the fact that every generation has its modes of dance that shock the older generation. When my mother was young it was Elvis’s hip gyrations. When I was a kid it was disco. Now it’s moshing and grinding and freaking and other terms I have probably not yet heard of. What was the shocking dance in the early 1800s?
The waltz.
Yeah, I guess I gave it away by posting the picture above, but the waltz alarmed people when it first arrived in England and France from Germany. Before that, people didn’t dance with one partner, and they certainly didn’t clasp one another around the waist. They line danced, more or less. A demure touching of palms was what they were used to.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained about it in 1798: “I am pestered every ball night to dance, which very modestly I refuse. They dance a most infamous dance called the Waltzen. There are perhaps twenty couples—the Man and his Partner embrace each other, arms and waists, and knees almost touching, and then whirl round and round .. . to lascivious music.”*
In “The Works of Lord Byron,” the introduction to Byron’s poem The Waltz quotes Thomas Raikes, who declared, “’No event . . . ever produced so great a sensation in English society as the introduction of the German waltz…. Old and young returned to school, and the mornings were now absorbed at home in practising the figures of a French quadrille or whirling a chair round the room to learn the step and measure of the German waltz. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, cried it down; mothers forbad it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention.’”
*As quoted in Durant, The Age of Napoleon, page 170.
Detail from frontispiece to Thomas Wilson’s Correct Method of German and French Waltzing (1816) via Wikimedia
Occupational Hazard
According to some accounts, Spanish painter Bartolome Murillo (1617 – 1682) died while painting, after a fall from his scaffolding.
Cover Up
A full sized copy of Michelangelo’s David was presented to Queen Victoria in 1857. She immediately gave it to a museum (now the Victoria and Albert). A plaster fig leaf, half a meter high, was attached to the statue to spare the delicate sensibilities of female visitors.
source: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/d/davids-fig-leaf/
Border Crossings
After the Catholic king Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Huguenots (French Protestants) fled for their lives. Many countries sheltered the refugees. The city of Geneva, with a population of 16,000 people, welcomed 4,000 Huguenots.
Poison Protection
“Poison cups” were used in antiquity to detect the presence of poison in wine or food. They were made of electrum (a gold and silver alloy). The goblet was said to have revealed the presence of poison by emitting a crackling sound (an apparent chemical reaction) and by displaying iridescent colors.
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King, page 246
Sighting
In 565 AD, Irish monk Columba reported seeing an unknown creature in a Scottish lake. It was the first sighting of the Loch Ness monster.
Rite of Spring is One Hundred Today
Today marks the hundredth anniversary of the debut of Russian composer Igor Stravinky’s ballet and orchestral work, The Rite of Spring. It was performed in Paris on May 29, 1913, with dancers of the Ballets Russes, and choreographed by the controversial Vaslav Nijinksy.
At the time of the premiere, Stravinsky was already famous for his acclaimed ballets Firebird (1909-10) and Petrushka (1910-11).
The storyline basically involves a maiden who must act as a human sacrifice in order to renew the fertility of the soil. She is doomed to dance herself to death.
There was great anticipation about the performance, especially as the subtitle promised “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts.” It didn’t go over well. Members of the audience degraded into pagans themselves. Stuff was chucked, walking canes were used to bash heads, and there was so much hissing and booing from the audience that the performers could barely hear the music.
It’s hard for us living in modern times to imagine people rioting at a classical music performance. We associate that behavior with Justin Bieber showing up late, or a mosh pit at a Metallica concert.
The polyphonic melodies and dissonant notes outraged some (not all) of the listeners. But as they were yelling so loudly, it’s hard to believe they could even hear the music. More likely, it was the flat-footed, tribal dancing that caused most of the commotion.
Right from the get-go, the piece opens with a bassoon playing way too high for its normal range:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWotpIy0uTg
Here’s a portion of the ballet, showing dancers bashing up and down to the funky syncopated drum beats.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0xNo2894Fw
Not everyone in the audience hated the performance. According to this source, one enraptured audience member so loved the syncopated beats that he drummed their rhythms on the bald head of the guy in front of him.
Five days after the premiere, Stravinsky was hospitalized with typhoid fever. He was sick for more than five weeks, so he missed out on the rest of the kerfuffle. Today The Rite of Spring is considered one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century—and yet, it continues to shock and exhilarate.