Books |
Venice
By
Published: Jan 15, 2024
Category:
Travel
It was so long ago our daughter was an idea for the future. We arrived the day after Christmas. It was cold; at evening concerts held in churches, the musicians wore coats and fingerless gloves. And wet; there were raised wooden walks in the piazza. The expensive restaurants were closed for the holidays. But there were few tourists and fewer cruise ships. There is almost no travel experience as pleasurable as walking home from dinner on a street out of a movie when the only footsteps echoing are your own.
One reason we had such a rich, poetic experience of Venice was the gift of a book. The wise donor: our friend Pavia Rosati, who launched Fathom, a terrific travel site. The book: “Watermark,” by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky. There are great Venice guidebooks and evocative music — scroll down for them — but “Watermark” is the book you want to read if you’re going to Venice. Or if you’re an armchair traveler. Or if you just want to be barraged by images and ideas.
Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. That December, he made his first visit to Venice. For the rest of his life — “With one or two exceptions, due to heart attacks and related emergencies, mine or someone else’s” — that was his annual Christmas trip. (“I would never come here in summer, not even at gunpoint,” he said.) When he wrote “Watermark” in 1989, he’d made 17 visits. He is buried in the Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice.
“Watermark” is a mosaic of impressions. 48 short chapters. Smart readers will have a pencil in hand, the better to mark — or steal — the indelible lines. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here.]
These are just a handful of the reasons to read this book:
“Beauty can’t be targeted…it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary pursuits.”
“What makes a narrative good is not the story itself but what follows what.”
“And the city lingers in it [winter light], savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”
“No matter what you set out for as you leave the house here, you are bound to get lost in these long, coiling lanes and passageways that beguile you to see them through, to follow them to their elusive end, which usually hits water, so that you can’t even call it a cul-de-sac. On the map this city looks like two grilled fish sharing a plate, or perhaps like two nearly overlapping lobster claws… but it has no north, south, east, or west; the only direction it has is sideways. It surrounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you get lost.”
“Every surface craves dust, for dust is the flesh of time.”
“(The water) really looks like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innumerable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to mention the violin necks of gondolas. In fact, the whole city, especially at night, resembles a gigantic orchestra, with dimly lit music stands of palazzi, with a restless chorus of waves, with the falsetto of a star in the winter sky. The music is, of course, greater than the band, and no hand can turn the page.”
“Part water, we serve beauty … That’s what the role of this city in the universe is. Because the city is static while we are moving. The tear is proof of that. Because we go and beauty stays.”
In my mind, I’m off to the airport…
—-
Death in Venice
Gustav Von Aschenbach is, like Thomas Mann, a successful writer who lives and works on a precise, unchanging schedule — and who has varied his routine to take a vacation in Venice. And there he sees Tadzio, a young boy on holiday with his family….
Secret Venice
The charm of this book is everything that’s not in its pages: hotel, restaurants, museums, shops. You can get those books anywhere. This is the one that reveals the secrets that are in plain sight as well as the ones locked behind the city’s heavy doors. This narrow paperback won the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in the Travel Guidebooks category.
Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers of the Blessed Virgin (Vespro Della Beata Vergine)
Monteverdi engineered a revolution in music. Starting with his 1607 opera, “L’Orfeo,” he abandoned the conventions of Renaissance polyphony — which had all the voices projecting equally, in a kind of Phil Spector wall of sound — and moved individual singers to the foreground. Suddenly a singer was a character, and the words he sang described emotions unique to him. Choral music became drama. The instruments became the backup band; the chorus became backup singers. Listen…
A Venetian Coronation, 1595
In 1595, there was a new Doge — Marino Grimani — and on the morning of April 27, there was a Coronation Mass in his honor at San Marco. It was quite the event. Giovanni Gabrieli, an organist at San Marco, composed a festival piece that featured trumpets, sackbutts, a dulcian, violin, viola, drums and two organs. To that he added sixteen singers. And then he did something novel — he positioned the singers and players in as many as eight locations in San Marco. The effect was like — okay, bad example, but you get the idea — hearing Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” played at midnight at a planetarium’s light show. Or a musical tennis match, with people turning their heads to follow the music. Memorable, even in Venice.
Vivaldi: Sacred Music
Vivaldi wrote most of his choral music for women. With good reason — for 35 years, he was in the employ of La Pieta, a home for Venetian foundlings. Don’t get all weepy about those poor little girls; this isn’t “Annie.” Remember that we are talking about Venice, one of the richest cities in the world. And remember, too, that we are dealing with upper-class morality — most of the girls at the Ospedale della Pietà weren’t orphans, but the illegitimate daughters of married noblemen and their mistresses. The quarters were luxurious; musical standards were high. Listen….
Willie Ruff: Gregorian chant, plain chant, and spirituals recorded in Saint Mark’s Cathedral, Venice
Willie Ruff, the great French horn player, made this recording in the Venice cathedral that has been home to almost a thousand years of legendary music. This was an ideal marriage of musician and setting: the sweetest of all brass instruments in one of Europe’s most sacred spaces.
