When words run out

Che si puo fare? Che si puo dire?

© prof. Kazem Chelipa

It was sometime right before the pandemic, and I was at the Splendor in Amsterdam, listening to yet another odd HIP-lite concoction with the newest hot mediterranean singer. It was some sort tango-Monteverdi mashup, I distinctly remember an attempt at Piazzolla’s Yo soy Maria and then, in dizzying succession, Lamento d’Arianna. If I remember correctly, it was during this disaster of a concert that I heard Barbara Strozzi’s famous “Che si puo fare?”

Despite the performance of this little aria being beyond awful, and the singer beyond disturbing in her overplayed grimacing and affectations (no expert here, but bleating does not a trillo make), it interested me enough to go and search for it. And find less offensive versions (an extremely difficult endeavor, and somewhat futile!).

On the surface of it, it is really as simple as it gets. You get the simplest continuo in existence. A bassline descending from the tonic to the dominant in d, and then repeating that on a loop, ad infinitum. Tonic minor, sixth degree sixth chord, sixth chord on the fourth degree with the standard 7-6 schema before setting in on the dominant. Boring passacaglia, a lament seen a million times.

But the melody and the words are far from boring.

Let me start with something pertinent: I love Monteverdi with a burning passion that is incomparable to any other affection I’ve ever held to any foreign artistic output. I love Monteverdi’s Madrigals as much as I love an exquisite Hafez ghazal in the original, or Sepehri’s gentlest verse. I am utterly, completely and incurably in love with almost everything that man ever composed. When I see the name Monteverdi on a poster, I buy tickets. I do not care. There is a hunger in me for a madrigal I haven’t heard that will never be sated.

I’m not sure how this came to be. If anything I was raised in a totally different musical tradition, one of dastgahs and radifs, one of what Westerners consider microtones and homophony. And I truly do love Iranian classical music, make no mistake, I worship ostad Lotfi with a truly passionate veneration. But as far as the invisible strings inside a person are concerned… they vibrate in resonance with L’incoronazione di Poppea.

This is hard for me to understand at times. I have searched myself for the answer and came up empty handed. Why? And why Monteverdi? I can appreciate the standard Pantheon. If you haven’t been exalted when listening to the Matthew Passion, or the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, or Isolde’s Liebestod… you have missed out on life. But at the same time, give me anything, any masterwork, and I’ll choose the fourth book of madrigals in its stead.

Sometimes, when the conditions are right, my closest ones, loved ones and friends, have tried to make sense of this. Perhaps it is that I like dissonance, but only framed in such a way that it makes sense to my mind? Perhaps that is why I like Gesualdo too, but significantly less? Perhaps it is the unconscious training of my native musical tradition, where dissonance is often harsher, and there is no equal temperament, and tritones live freely?

We don’t have an answer.

As with many things in life, our preferences are mysteries. I love nomadic rugs of nearly all types, but I’d never submit the floor of my house to the terror of a silky Isfahan or a precious Naein. Perhaps it is that I’m an odd person, perhaps just one from a different sphere. Until very recently, my philosophy was simple. The barriers between our worlds need to become more porous, we need exchange, we need true transfer, not despicable native informants engaging in propagandistic warfare-by-art. When I started this project, the tagline of the publication was, and still is, “Womanhood, empire, resistance.” And I stand by that. So this musing is about all three, and being indebted to a world and tradition that has deformed itself and now wants to expel you as a foreign body.

And within this philosophy, there was Barbara Strozzi, a student of a student of Monteverdi’s, illegitimate child, abused woman, most productive and published musician of her time, the forgotten 17^th century composer lifted from obscurity by the sheer force of her melodies, and the texts that sear themselves into your soul.

Così va rio destin sorte tiranna,
Gl’innocenti condanna:
Così l’oro più fido
Di costanza e di fè, lasso conviene,
lo raffini d’ogn’hor fuoco di pene.

That’s how it is with cruel destiny
the tyranny of fate condemns the innocent:
thus the purest gold
of constancy and faithfulness, alas,
is continually refined in the fire of pain.

I connected with this. It was instant. Musically, she never reached my Monteverdi obsession but there were traces. There is the opening of Lagrime mie that gives me a full body shiver every time, when done right. When the singer leans into the dissonance, unafraid. When it is sufficiently ugly. If I could, I’d take Strozzi to Tehran. Perhaps one day, the time will come for that. But for now, the porosity, the transfer seems insulting. The philosophy of colorful exchange is no more.

What happened to it?

Three Tomahawk missiles killed it.

Once I may have bought the silly maxim that beauty will save the world, incidentally taken out of context and practically misquoted ad nauseam. Now I have no such belief. Beauty is what makes life worth living, but it doesn’t prevent heaps of charred children’s flesh on the ground of what was once the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab.

Among the decent people who dedicated their lives to beauty, not one – not one!- stood up to say that the wanton murder of children is wrong. They can’t, naturally. These contracts, these systems of glances and envelopes and good words put in and “my agent knows your agent” depend on the very prosaic reality of the terror of the Dutch “doe normaal” philosophy. And that means – you do not rock the boat. Privately, you may express to me that it is a travesty, it is a crime, it is grotesque and awful, but in public? You will say no such thing.

The Iranian in Western cultural space can only exist as a monarchist inflicted with the incurable pain of nostalgia, which is actually only bourgeois comprador grief, or as a faux-rebel of sorts. Especially as a woman. That sells, that can get you in rooms, that can suspend the viscerally negative reaction to a curly black head for a while, enough to get your business done. You are then useful. But when not, you are an active impediment to that mirage. And you must be eliminated from view.

None of that is conducive to real artistic work that requires an excavation of the self, and transcending the self. Real work is apotheosis, not digging into compost made of lies, projections and misinterpretations. But it seems the rot is no longer only confined to us; the West itself has lost the compass. Instead of venerating the absolute, we see constant competitions in its deformation. A recent staging of Rusalka, where Rusalka shoots up heroin on stage. Rusalka, for God’s sake! The newest set design that defies all laws of logic and scenography. The baroque musicians hiding their poor technique behind meantone-comma-god-knows temperament, and when confronted with criticism spitting out: “But have you read Zarlino?” Or worse, the abominations of Holland Baroque and such efforts to resuscitate a scene that has been clinically dead for ages. It is not dying, it has already died. There is nothing to save.

A beautiful woman on stage strained to expel “Le stelle rubelle non hanno pieta…” some years ago. This vomitous rendition has made a home in my brain, unfortunately. Now, when I find myself in situations where words utterly fail, when there is nothing left to say, when I am empty, wrung out of all sense and meaning, in my head I hear that abominable barking.

Because this is what has remained of the West. Of the shining universe on the hill, the aspirational paradise (a Persian word, by the way!) all us, “backwards”, oriental and occidentalized people were supposed to aspire to. Bleating, deformation, geste and grimace, and missiles.

So, so many missiles.

So, what is there to say? What is there to say in a world that doesn’t even extend you the mirage of shared humanity? If this art belongs to such a world then I have no use for it. But we know that’s not the truth. And Barbara knew this too; in moments when there is nothing more to say all that is left is to scream and wail.

But in such a way that the wailing remains art. Unfortunately, art and artifice are never far away.