“In all cultures, music is essentially one of the languages of madness”says Laurent Muraro, head of the music and live performance program at the Louvre auditorium, where, from October 23 to February 7, 2025, a series of concerts related to the exhibition “Figures du fou. From the Middle Ages to the Romantics”, which is next door in the museum.
Of the sacred terror of Dies irae from the Middle Ages to the psycho-atonal experiments of the Second Vienna School, crazy songs from the 17the The English century to the spells of the Italian baroque opera, from the rummages of the romantic psyche to the psychoanalytic totality of modern times, the character of the madman inspires the composers, reinforcing or stigmatizing the problem of normality in a double process of overturning and subversion.
The fool is immediately associated with wind instruments, especially bagpipes, whose animal skin shape evokes a belly, even a testicle, mimics borborygmies and other flatulences. In the history of the opera, it is the flute, mediator of irrationality, that supports, for example, the heroine’s ramblings in his famous “scene of madness”. Lucia of Lammermoorby Gaetano Donizetti. Breathtaking voices, stratospheric highs, tonal breaks or, on the contrary, melodic wandering and unsettling calm: the stigmata of mental disorder carried by vocality are, again, reversible. The consequences of unhappy love alienate women (Ophélie in Hamletby Ambroise Thomas); guilty consequences of crime lead men astray: spectral visions of regicide in Macbethby Giuseppe Verdi, of the child-killing tsar in Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky.
“Our specifications resonate directly with the exhibition”says Laurent Muraro. The six concertos are essentially part of the period that runs from the Gothic Middle Ages to the Renaissance, before playing the extensions in a “coda” reaching the neurotic shores of the 20th century.e century.
Divine or demonic manifestation
The opening of the Ball of Unreason, on October 23, was entrusted to the Italian flautist and conductor Giovanni Antonini, leading his musical ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, with a concert entitled La Morte della ragione (“the death of reason”), according to an anonymous pavan of 16e century, which had already given its title to the multi-award-winning album released by Alpha Classics in 2019. An instrumental fresco that invites the beautiful European flower of the late Renaissance, from Josquin Desprez to Giovanni Gabrieli, including Alexander Agricola and John Dunstable, referring to the Janusian face evoked in celebrity The praise of stupidityit’s by Erasmus. Two forms are opposed. The one who “It occurs whenever a sweet illusion of the mind frees the soul from its painful cares and plunges it into multiplied pleasures” and that, eminently destructive, “that the avenging furies bring forth from Hell whenever, unleashing their serpents, they instill in the hearts of mortals the ardor of war” (The praise of madnessXXXVIII).
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