Foreword, by Ananda Sukarlan
"It’s as if, We had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter,
And during that time the living room had changed places
With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace ; ....
... That the world of space where events re-occur is still there,
Only now it’s no longer real ; the real one is nowhere
Where time never moves and nothing can ever happen ;..."
(Wystan H. Auden : "For the Time Being" (1944)
That hyper-pessimistic masterpiece by one of the greatest 20th century poet has inspired me to translate the unexplored dark world of dreams and nightmares for my program. A world of fantasies, born out of inquietude, fear, loneliness and painful void. A fascination for death, for the unknown & forbidden regions of the devil inside us. A wish to escape from the truth, just to wake up every morning to face it again.
The twentieth century has left us with great masterpieces, all inspired by tragedies of war, conflicts, and the triumph of evil. Gone are those glorious joy of brotherhood, of love & of peace. Instead, the century witnessed the birth of Pablo Picasso’s "Guernica", Sir Michael Tippett’s "A Child of Our Time", W.H. Auden’s "The Age of Anxiety" ... and even the satirical verses of Oscar Wilde were born out of this bleak view of the century. The world never seems to recover from the trauma of the Nazi holocaust, the assassination of JFK by his own countrymen or the massacre of the innocents all over the world by a handful of men whose power has gone beyond never before achieved in the previous centuries.
Tonight we will listen how our sense of beauty has changed throughout the passing of the century. We will experience the wild passions of Beethoven up to the satanic obsessions of György Ligeti. Each of the three eerie pieces of Ravel’s "Gaspard de la Nuit" concerns with death. Debussy wrote his Etudes in his last suffering years, maintaining a positive look at life which he had to give up very soon. Beauty, wit, horror and dark passions have gotten along very well, and have arrived to the point of no return.
"Art has to be forgotten
Beauty must be realized" (Piet Mondriaan).