On beauty: from Renaissance music to the music of our day

Analogous to Franz Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante, Paul Van Nevel conceived this programme after reading Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Dream of Poliphilus) by Francesco Colonna (1432 – 1527). In this book, Colonna describes Poliphilus’s imaginary search for his beloved Polia. This dream describes in great detail and at length, and down to the smallest detail, everything to do with the aesthetics of Poliphilus’s life at that time: architecture, nature (right down to the smells), flowers, jewellery, literature and music, dance, ancient culture, physical elegance, ancient rituals, and above all – of course – love, and all the pleasures and disappointments that Cupid sprinkles in this setting.

Paul Van Nevel on the programme:

“After reading The Dream of Poliphilus, I realised that the ideals of beauty in the Renaissance period are like a bridge connecting all stylistic epochs: from the Middle Ages (Petrarch) to the Renaissance (the madrigalists and polyphonists), and to the nineteenth century, which was crazy about ancient cultures (Liszt). This programme is not about the Renaissance but about beauty, inspired by the definition in the first edition of the Van Dale dictionary (1872, p. 936) : Romanticism: taste of the Middle Ages.”

As part of this recital, the conference O belo em som – viagem através dos séculos [Beauty in sound – a journey through the centuries] by Manuel Pedro Ferreira will take place in the Lopes-Graça Room, also on May 22nd, at 6:30 pm. The conference will be spoken in Portuguese without translation.