A city is a perpetual creation…everything in it is “poetry” in the strictest sense of the term.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire
It has been nearly three years since a hectic, enchanting three-day stay in Venice and the fascination I felt upon departing has only grown. Recently, while reading Henry James’s impressions of the city and parts of his Italian Hours, while delighting in Sargent’s oils and watercolors, I found myself betaken with images and feelings about my experience in Venice floating and plashing against each other like the canal waters against the steps and doorways of the ancient buildings. How to express them in words?
Franz Kafka said something to the effect that if you keep to your room long enough, the world will come to you on its own – perhaps that would now be the case with Venice. As usually is my wont, I began by reading. Embarking on a literary journey, having already begun with James, might provide inspiration. James suitably forewarned me with his cautionary words regarding any attempt to write about my impressions of Venice, “I am not sure there is a certain impudence in pretending to add anything…originality of attitude is utterly impossible.”
My next literary port of call, as it so often is, was Proust, recalling the importance of the uneven paving stones in front of St. Mark’s Cathedral and his visit with his mother, as he tried to forget his tortured relationship with Albertine. One of my most vivid recollections of Venice was walking the labyrinthine, serpentine alleyways wending, seemingly haphazardly, across the city. But, how could I hope to describe them better than Proust? “Calle after calle …refused to give me the smallest piece of information, except such as would further lead me astray.” He goes on to suggest that “Some evil genie which had assumed the form of a new calle made me unwittingly retrace my steps.”
I enjoy writing about art and one of the highlights of my visit was seeing Tintoretto’s magnificent, breathtaking series of more than thirty paintings in the Scuola di San Rocco, completed over nearly a quarter of a century. However, having read Henry James discussing Tintoretto, his favorite of all Venetian painters including Titian, anything I might add would be supernumerary.
Rereading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is an annual literary rite, and I recalled Marco Polo’s claim to the Kublai Khan that “every time I say something about a city I am saying something about Venice.” Revisiting these cities, I found many of my thoughts of Venice expressed. Like Tamara, the first city of signs, I realize I had left Venice “without having discovered it” and as with the city of memory Zora, Venice “cannot be expunged from the mind’. Phyllis, a city which “at every point offers surprises to your view,” mirrored my feelings as I boarded the boat departing for the airport, “You regret at having to leave the city when you can barely graze it with your glance.”
Good fortune supervened when I read about a CD entitled Venice, by renowned young cellist Anastasia Kobekina. After viewing a video of her discussing her inspiration, the thought occurred that perhaps music would help bring some coherence to my swirling thoughts. In the liner notes she said she longed to produce something new and personal, and wasn’t something personal precisely what I was after? The record is an evocative, artistically ambitious collection of works, both baroque and more modern, beautifully and expressively played, bringing vitality to the spirit and mystery of Venice, soundscape merging with landscape. The liner notes open with a quote from Calvino and I recalled that the cellist has a namesake invisible city. “When you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your emotions and feelings waken all at once and surround you.”
For Kobekina, Venice is “not just a city, but an idea, a character.” (In discussing Proust’s masterpiece, Julia Kristeva, in her illuminating Time and Sense, discusses Venice as one of the key “characters” in the novel). Venice has a timeless quality and the intercalation of past and present seems essential for beginning to grasp its essence. Becoming immersed in Kobekina’s love affair with the city gave hope to unlocking the secrets of Venice’s allure for me.
Proust has written beautifully and movingly about music in describing his fictional composer Vinteuil’s septet in The Prisoner. Listening to Venice in the dark predawn hours became a Proustian experience, hearing musical phrases “wrapped, caparisoned in silver, streaming with brilliant sonorities light and soft as scarves,” enveloping me with intimations of “the mystic hope of the scarlet angel of morning.”
In Venice, with its thematic and stylistic diversity, Kobekina serves as a cicerone guiding the listener on a tour of Venice with her capacious understanding of its musical history. Many adjectives have been used to describe the more elusive aspects of the city: evanescent, ethereal, ephemeral, and elegiac, all of which emerge from her musical fresco conjuring gilded palazzos and gondolas swaying on canals. Her graceful beauty captured in the liner note photos – one might imagine her transported back in time to a resplendent Venetian interior, posing for a portrait by Sargent – provides the listening experience with dreamlike imagery. During Vivaldi’s Largo, from his Cello Concerto in E-flat major, I could envision her playing under a watchful Venetian moon on a deserted bridge in the velvet twilight above the ink-dark waters.
Listening to Barbara Strozzi’s, Che is può fare? with its medieval theorbo, tinkling clavecin, and the romantic strains of the cello, takes one back centuries to musical performance in a salon with Venetian nobility seated in rococo furniture under a candlelit Murano girondola. Vivaldi, the quintessential Venetian composer, is in strong evidence in a third of the pieces; his allegro movements have the liveliness and sparkle of Sargent’s watercolors. Closing my eyes listening to Gabriel Fauré’s Les Berceux (The Cradles), I am sitting at an outdoor café by a canal, with moored boats rocking gently. Emerald and Stone, co-written by Brian Eno, is imbued with a peaceful, languorous serenity, an early morning aubade conjuring the sun faintly struggling to break through the famous nebbia fog. I regret having taken neither an early morning stroll nor a nocturnal perambulation during my visit.
The overall mood of many of the pieces is one of melancholy, an aspect of the city unobserved in the whirlwind of excitement and the crush of the tourists. Henry James described Venice as “the most melancholy of cities… a refuge of endless strange secrets, broken futures, and wounded hearts.” A trail of wounded hearts was undoubtedly left by the city’s most notorious son, Casanova, captured by the wistful brief melody from Fellini’s eponymous movie. Melancholy reminds us of the fragility of existence, in evidence in the dilapidated state of some of the old buildings.
The CD is bookended by versions of Ariadne’s Lament, opening with Monteverdi’s original version from his lost opera L’Arianna in the early 1600’s, its mournful strains suggesting despondency and an irreparable sense of loss. In the concluding version of variations by Kobekina’s father, the cellist, accompanied by a Greek chorus of viola da gambas, plays with an intensity of emotion, passion and soulfulness accompanying every movement of the bow. Invoking Proust, “Each timbre is underlined by a color which all the rules in the world could not imitate.” The cellist says that playing this piece she has “a feeling of flirting with the edge of tragedy and madness.”
Not only does the listener feel Ariadne mourning her abandonment by Theseus but also, since selections from Sartorio’s L’Orfeo precede the lament, it might express Orpheus’s torment seeing Eurydice forever lost amidst the shades. The music might serve as a soundtrack to the death in Venice of Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach staying in the plague-ridden city to be near the young boy, Tadzio. In building a musical cathedral to her favorite city, she has helped unveil what Whistler called, “the Venice in Venice”.
As silence and serenity descend after the music strikes its final notes, this recitative of the soul that is Venice has captured the “poetry” of the city alluded to in the epigraph. I recall reading that art is the ability to imply more than reality can provide, and in this work of art there is the nobility and solemnity of something everlasting, expressing the magic of Venice. After the literary and musical journeys undertaken in the solitude of my room, La Serenissima did come to me on its own and I feel closer to grasping its enduring appeal.
References and Notes
I was inspired by listening to the CD Venice by Anastasia Kobekina, (Sony Classical, 2024).
Quotations are taken from the following:
Hugh Honor and John Fleming, The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler, and Sargent, (Little, Brown and Company, 1991).
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, (Harcout, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974).
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, (Penguin Classics, 2002).
The epigraph, from Baudelaire (New Directions, 1950), describes Paris, another magical city.
Kimmo Rosenthal, after a long career of teaching and publishing mathematics, turned his attention to writing. He has forty literary publications and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Recent work has appeared in Tiny Molecules (Observations), Sage Cigarettes, The Fib Review, After the Art, The RavensPerch, and BigCityLit.
