Sir Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’: Part IX

Music moves to centre stage in this week’s installment, The Pursuit of Happiness,  examining a period when art and literature tended to stagnate. Beginning in France, we travel to the German lands of the 18^th Century as Sir Kenneth Clark explores the complex harmony and symmetry in the works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, and their relation to the art and architecture of the Baroque and the Rococo styles. These changes in fashion began as a reaction to the Classicism of Versailles, but ultimately signalled the epochal cultural shift towards Romanticism that implied a rejection of civilisation itself.

Stagnation … except for Music: Culturally, it was a time of stagnation:

when poetry was almost dead, when the visual arts were little more than a shadow of what they had been, when the emotional life seemed almost to have dried up… Only … music expressed the most serious thoughts and intuitions of the time.

Absolutism & the Sun King: Clark begins by stressing the…