Not only did Speer take great care to erect buildings bursting with fortitude and glory, but he also took into account details that would escape many analyses. The one that prompted this piece is recalled in his memoirs, Erinnerungen, published in 1969, when he wrote the following about a certain idea:

To illustrate my ideas, I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outline still clearly recognizable. In Hitler’s entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler’s closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important building of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principle of this “law of ruins.”1

This mentioned ‘law of ruins’ led to the genesis of his Theorie vom Ruinenwert, or the Theory of Ruin Value, which, essentially, was Speer’s proposal to build with stone rather than steel and “respect certain principles of statics” so that buildings would naturally decay after a thousand years into a landscape that, in hindsight, would have resembled modern-day Ancient Greek, Egyptian, or Roman ruins.2 Hence, this theory can be understood as an attempt by a branch of the National Socialist ideology to endure over time and become an indelible empire in history.

I felt it was compelling to consider the philosophy behind it, as developing architecture that anticipates its own demise, just as Hitler’s internal circle assumed, has an entropic connotation that is hard not to view as melancholic, never mind blatantly autodestructive. Either the ruins are there because they have been consciously left to fall into disrepair, or there is no one to mend them. That said, I believe this line of reasoning might be overlooking the simple aesthetic desire to emulate the classical, which is only to be expected given Speer’s fascination with the neoclassical style and its congruence with Nazi aesthetics. Furthermore, a caveat that reformulates the theory is expressed in a conditional modal: ‘if, by any chance, the Reich were to fall, let the buildings be constructed of stone and nothing else, and thus they would continue to exist as beautiful ruins in the future…’ This revision also presupposes that the Reich’s opposing forces will consciously allow the structures to survive and decay organically, which, looking back from so far in the future, sounds a little naïve.

That seems to be all there is to this. However, the historiography of this theory, I found, has been extensively debated, and dare I say this only further enriched the story: had Speer introduced this idea for the first time in his memoirs in order to immortalise himself, or had the Führer willingly accepted his romantic theory in illo tempore for its aesthetic ends?

As reviewed, Speer describes it with its distinctive name for the first time in his memoirs. Parting from here, scholars such as Wolfgang Benz, Hans-Ernst Mittig, Christian Fuhrmeister, Angela Schönberger and other historians have come to the point that, in fact, it was a retrospective attribution. Or, to put it more simply, the idea occurred to him much later, for reasons we shall look at below.

Schönberger’s argument, for instance, has two components. First, as stated, no contemporary testimony relative to the Third Reich exists; and second—which I thought to be the most noteworthy one—is that the theory is a theoretischer Überbau problem, or an ideological superstructure erected after the fact over a mundane material constraint.3 Indeed: it sounds rather disappointing that the idea of building with stone was due to a shortage of iron. Consider that Germany started rationing iron as early as 19374, and the shortage deepened rather than eased as the decade went on.

In fact, Speer, who appeared conveniently inspired by these constraints, authored a 1937 essay named Stein statt Eisen, “Stone Instead of Iron”, published in Göring’s Der Vierjahresplan journal. As you can imagine, here Speer defines this proposal, which also raises the question: why did he not properly introduce his Theorie vom Ruinenwert right there, when he had the opportunity to do so? He chooses, instead, these words:

While few iron bridges or halls are expected to survive more than forty years, thousand-year-old Egyptian and Roman buildings still stand there as powerful witnesses to the past of the great nations. Those buildings often exist as ruins because of the human enthusiasm for destruction.5

Moving on to the next critic, scholar Hans-Ernst Mittig treats Speer’s theory as part of postwar apologetics and a way of coming back to Nazi art and aestheticism in a more moderate tone.6 Given that Speer maintained a public image as a cultured professional rather than an ideological fanatic long after the war, he may have realised that the spread of his ideas would be met with a more intellectually curious response rather than dismissive foolishness. Much like Mittig, Wolfgang Benz, adopting an even more critical stance, attested to the artificial nature of the theory and, in a tone brimming with conviction, described it as a “patriotic project”: “the reconstruction of a major Nazi war criminal, cleansed of all guilt, truly penitent and reborn.”7

One of the papers that would have further established the sceptical stance towards the theory was authored by Christian Fuhrmeister and the aforementioned Mittig. According to Nazi architectural study, many of the values discussed reiterated permanence, durability and prevalence—concepts that are by default alien to Speer’s proposal.8 There would be, accordingly, no mention of decay. With this in mind, one starts to reflect on the plans to rebuild Berlin as Germania, which focused precisely on endurance, and the recurring references to the Tausendjähriges Reich.

Perhaps the most empirical evidence pointing to, at the very least, a failure to take action, is the materials used in a significant number of buildings themselves. The Zeppelin tribune, the Kongresshalle, the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, and other buildings disobeyed the most defining aspect of Speer’s Stein statt Eisen philosophy and were also, sometimes as the dominant material, built out of limestone, reinforced concrete, and bricks. I think it would be fairer to acknowledge that his ideas, in any case, were not easily attainable in the circumstances he found himself in, so he either had to get on with the job and delight the audiences or face dismissal.

Limestone, the material from which the pyramids of Giza are made, deteriorates more rapidly when exposed to constant damp, and also in cold climates. Certainly, the soils of Germania and Egypt are rather contrasting. A similar case may be considered with Roman ruins, made also mostly from limestone—although the Romans processed the stone differently.

Und abermals nach fünfhundert Jahren kam ich desselbigen Wegs gefahren.

— Felix Alexander Dargel (1896–1963).

Dargel was a German art historian, author, and cultural writer who gave an overlooked lecture delivered in Berlin, 1933, on Wilhelm Kreis’ Reichsehrenmal Tannenberg design—a German war memorial in East Prussia honouring soldiers from the Great War—that opens a case for an earlier dating of Speer’s Theorie vom Ruinenwert. Dargel adopts the standpoint of a future observer, under the motto just cited, whose meaning is “And once again, five hundred years later, I travelled along the same route.” He writes:

A monument is meant to last for eternity. […] And even if a pillar were to be damaged here and there, and the stone crossbeam were to break here and there, as a whole it could never be completely destroyed. […] A new ‘Stonehenge’ could be built here, one that would still stand even after three or four thousand years. […] And even then, the stranger would stand in awe before its ruins and pay tribute to the people who created it.9

This curiously corresponds, and in great philosophical substance, to what Albert Speer was to describe later in his Erinnerungen.10

Moreover, there are circumstantial links: Dargel spoke in Berlin around the time Speer was reported to be there (May 1933)11; Die Baugilde, where Dargel’s lecture was printed, was an organ of the Bund Deutscher Architekten; and Kreis was the BDA president and a figure Speer courted, later appointing him Generalbaurat for German war cemeteries in 1941 and eulogising him in 1943 as one of the “pioneers and trailblazers of the new architecture of our time.”12

Critically, this is not a find that rescues Speer. Instead, it shows the idea was in circulation in 1933; it does nothing to show Speer held it in those years. Be it as it may, I, at least, find it fascinating that the architectural philosophy which would later become so closely associated with the Third Reich had this nature, and whether the idea had perhaps already been developed before Speer and Hitler discussed it together.

And just before I lost momentum, having reached this point, I came across a dictum by Auguste Perret—whose name, I recalled, appeared while I studied Boullée as he had shared architectural opinions with him—that I instantly linked with Speer’s theory: ‘L’architecture, c’est qui fait les belles ruines’, ‘Architecture is what makes beautiful ruins.’13 According to German architect Julius Posener, Perret carried this notion since around 1930.14 Perret, in a 1935 essay adapted from a lecture he conducted at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie in Paris on May 3, 1933, comments the following:

The palace of Versailles is badly built; the vault above the Hall of Mirrors is made of a thin layer of rubble, attached to an inferior framework, and in the course of time, what will remain of the palace will not be a ruin, but an anonymous heap of debris.15

And then he goes on to mention the dictum. Not surprisingly, in June of 1938, Perret was invited to a Baden-Baden congress by the Comité France-Allemagne and the Deutsch-Französische Gesellschaft, repeated the lecture, and had it printed in German in Die Deutsche Bauzeitung, the oldest technical architecture magazine in Germany.16 There is this link, and not to mention, Speer knew about Perret, recalling having seen the construction of the Musée des Travaux Publics, a Perret project, in his memoirs, and it “surprised [him] that France also favoured neoclassicism for her public buildings.”17

One might even feel inclined to say that the topos had already been there, as though there has always been this tendency of us architects to find beauty in ruins. I would even go so far as to say that, amongst architects, once Neoclassicism has been embraced and ingrained in the way we observe and evaluate structures, it takes on a definitive, hugely influential role. Could it be, perhaps, our affinity for the ancient? Professor Christian Freigang, from whom I too obtained information for the Speer subject, reflects on this idea as well, saying that the topos ran through Boffrand (1745), Quatremère de Quincy (1788), Rondelet (1802), Reynaud (1850) and, above all, Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des Arts du Dessin (1867/1870), which shaped Le Corbusier—who thought of Boullée as his spiritual and geometric predecessor—and demonstrably Perret.18

And so, once again, I find myself in the position of reiterating that Speer’s ideas should not be the exclusive preserve of the National Socialist movement. And yet, as I discussed at the time, we are obliged to develop something on which to build. But not just any romantic, sporadic trend; and this is why the promise of the Tausendjähriges Reich holds such powerful value that it may precede another discourse, one capable of inspiring architects into imagining something beyond modern, capitalist villas or urban building complexes that express nothing great.

On occasions such as these, I always make a point of highlighting the greatest enemy of architecture: that hunger that makes one build for profit. Whilst architects must make their own way in the world, they are fully capable of creating or joining an intellectual theory, let alone a collective, that may, once and for all, dispel the notion that their occupation, which is so exquisitely artistic, is required to be pragmatic and mercantilist—devoid of ambition, one that does not obey a brand but virtue!

Share

Only Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926) could have spent a life writing in such a mellow, oceanic voice, leaving behind a defining influence in all of literature and poetry, making us forget for a moment a poignant message.

The belief in the convalescent artist has been a recurring theme, ever since artists have been elevated for their talent, and it is one that is likely to upset many for its cliché connotations. It is wise, they say, to equally blame both tragedies and delights of producing good art, for, in the end, it is human cunning that channels art and shapes it to the tune of what beauty ultimately commands. But then, Rilke leaves us with a somewhat more unsettling message on this subject.

In his Duino Elegies, written in 1912 and finished one decade later, he announces its true allegiances within its opening lines, as I have previously analysed, albeit through another lens, in this previous post about the beauty of the German language. The opening line of the first elegy is arranged in this way:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of angels?

Readers have this as a supplication or a prayer, and for a moment they expect the answering comfort that the lyric tradition has trained us to await. But what arrives instead is this:

Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Every angel is terrible.

In this context, Rilke’s angels are not the intermediaries of popular theology, nor the mild celestial figures of iconography. They are beings of such concentrated intensity, such absolute existence, that a human who approached one would be annihilated in the encounter. This line is also the thematic starter for the Second Elegy.

Beauty, for Rilke, begins here, at the threshold of what cannot be borne. He states just before that:

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.

To read this aesthetic thought as consolation requires, at the very least, an enthusiastic misreading. While Rilke has certainly written solace, what he is offering in this work is something far more unexpected and more demanding than his oceanic voice: the insistence that a true encounter with beauty, grief, and the sheer, unreasonable intensity of the world is an experience from which the self does not emerge unchanged or always intact. Essentially, Rilke encourages the reader to stay inside the wound. And as a reward, the artist may find a case to discover true, lasting beauty.

Consequently, it may be important that we “avoid angels” if our primary goal is to find it.

Subscribe now

To refuse the cure

Between late 1911 and early 1912, around the months in which the first intimations of the Duino Elegies were reaching him, Rilke found himself under sustained pressure to seek psychoanalytic treatment for what seemed to be bad mental health. The source would apparently be the completion of his first novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge—there would be in him a prolonged exhaustion from radical introspection, in addition to his natural disposition towards existential isolation.

In 1911, he confesses in a letter the following about this latest work:

Can you understand that after this book I have been left behind just like a survivor, helpless in my inmost soul, no longer to be used? The nearer I came to the end of writing it, the more strongly did I feel that it would be an indescribable division, a high watershed, as I kept telling myself; but now it turns out that all the water has flowed off toward the old side and I am going down into an aridity that will not change.

The pressure to undergo psychoanalysis came from two directions: Clara Westhoff, the sculptor who had been his wife and who remained, notwithstanding a bitter estrangement, the person most directly exposed to the wreckage of his inner life. She urged him, understandably, toward analysis. Alongside her, Baron Viktor von Gebsattel, philosopher, psychoanalyst, and one of Rilke’s trusted friends, added professional counsel to what had become, from the outside, an apparently unanswerable case. The poet, indeed, was in crisis: intellectually paralysed, displaced, unable to sustain the conditions his work required, and unequal to the demands of ordinary life.

However, Rilke refused analysis.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, the psychoanalyst and philosopher who famously declined Nietzsche’s proposal of marriage and who would in time become one of the most penetrating analytic intelligences in Freud’s circle—as well as the first female psychoanalyst—was among the first to patiently explain psychoanalysis to Rilke in their famous correspondence, normally labelled under the name Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. It is for these kinds of events, that Andreas-Salomé’s role in Rilke’s life proved philosophically indispensable.

Their relationship had begun in Munich in 1897—he was twenty-one; she, thirty-six, already renowned for her Nietzsche study, for works like Ruth or Fenitschka, and for owning a notorious intellectual authority that would rather unsettle rooms—and across the three decades that followed, it had evolved from passion into something more durable and more stable: a bond in which she had functioned as a sort of a therapist of Rilke’s psychology before she even discovered psychoanalysis through her relationship with Freud. It is with this history that she deductively found a much more valuable analysis of his persona: the wound and the work were dependent on each other.

Rilke’s refusal is the lens through which everything clarifies. He had come to understand that his writings are not merely coloured by his psychology; they are constructed upon it, or rather, upon a premise that his psychology made unavoidable: suffering is not pathology but the source. The wound is not what the poem overcomes but what it is made from, and it is precisely because it hurts that it thrives. In the same letter from before, directed to Andreas-Salomé on December 28, 1911, he explicitly expresses his stance against psychoanalysis:

I am thinking less than before of a doctor. Psychoanalysis is too basic a help for me, it helps once and for all, it clears out, and to find myself cleared out one day would perhaps be even more hopeless than this disorder.

Psychoanalysis, as Rilke intuitively grasped, and whatever the limits of his formal acquaintance with its methods, works perhaps too safely. It shores up the self, reinforcing the membrane between inside and outside, making interiority utterly manageable, and, ideally, returning the patient to a functioning ego capable of living in the world without being overwhelmed by it. Is this not the way many artists die? His refusal must be seen not as that of a man frightened of confronting himself; no one who had pressed his imagination into the dying wards of the Salpêtrière, or who had lived inside the Malte Notebooks and their pitiless inventory of dissolution, could ever be accused of self-evasion. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he understood what his suffering was for.

For instance, the Sonnets to Orpheus, written in an extraordinarily concentrated burst at Muzot in the same February that completed the Elegies, in 1922, were occasioned by the death of Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young dancer Rilke had known once in Munich before her career days, who had been forced to abandon dancing by a blood disease that transformed her body against its nature and who passed away at around 19. Her mother sent Rilke her diary and drawings. Stunningly, out of this slender legacy, Rilke wrote fifty-five sonnets.

Orpheus is the figure whose art is predicated not on possession but on loss, who descends into the underworld and fails to bring Eurydice back, and whose failure is the condition of the music. Eurydice, in Rilke’s earlier poem on the myth, is already so fully dead that she barely registers Orpheus’ presence; she does not wish to return. In the Sonnets, this logic is carried to its conclusion: what survives the failure to retrieve what one loves is praise—the same Rühmen, or ‘extol’ of the Elegies, here put forth in a more compressed and musical form. Rilke transformed both the loss of Wera and of the art she embodied into a buoyant, precise, and unexpectedly uplifting work.

What is there to learn then?

Perhaps first, the convalescent artist, as our age imagines him, is a dangerous fiction. He is supposed to be an ego that briefly descends into crisis only to rise again into a reinvigorated reality, ready to roam in the traffic of the world. In truth, Rilke actually withdraws his name from that story.

He intuits that for him, being “cleared out” would mean something more devastating than disorder: it would mean losing the medium in which his work becomes possible. From here, a first consequence follows: suffering is not an accidental stain on the work, but one of its conditions. To treat this wound as something to be removed is to accept in advance that whatever art depended on it was dispensable from the start. This, of course, is built upon the belief that art, or more broadly beauty, is necessary for our lives. Whatever the case, Rilke’s decision not to submit his to a definitive cure is thus less the caprice of a disordered patient than a wager about what beauty requires: that some forms of instability are the price of a certain kind of diligence.

Befriending sadness, as I always prefer to put it, is not a sentimental posture toward gloom; after some honing, it becomes discipline. It means granting these tensions their time, refusing to translate them prematurely into solutions, diagnoses, or narratives of recovery. One would let the organism be sick for as long as it needs to be sick, observing the illness do its work and channelling whatever needs to be taken out of it. John Keats, with his own testimony described in his well-studied theory of the negative capability, would be in much accord with this.

If the Elegies insist that beauty begins where terror begins, and if every angel is terrible, then “avoiding angels” grows into a paradox. To avoid angels is not to seek comfort nor to retreat into a painless life, but to decline what would seal us off from them once and for all. Between the annihilating angel and the therapeutic ego there is a narrow space which one may choose to inhabit: a zone in which “we are still just able to endure” what we encounter and in which the self remains open enough to be changed but not so shattered that it cannot speak. The convalescent artist, in this Rilkean revision, is a client who keeps walking this space without begging for an exit.

In this framework, the problem of the artist is largely solved, though not by dismissing the analytic tradition that sought to analyse it. Andreas-Salomé’s advice to Rilke was issued from inside that tradition, stating not that psychoanalysis was wrong, but that the goal of homeostasis is tragic when applied to those whose genius brights more on the preservation of those tensions from which sublimation proceeds. Adam Phillips, a modern British psychoanalyst and essayist, frequently makes the adjacent argument: “Psychoanalysis is not in the business of producing happiness or normality but of enlarging the range of experience available to a person.” This is a variant of the analytic imagination that Rilke could perhaps have inhabited. However, what the contemporary wellness culture continues to offer, and with enormous confidence and commercial energy, is the less appealing version: the self as a problem to be solved, and suffering as a deviation from the optimum.

Our broader relationship with melancholy is transformed by this. Modern cultures of mood management often treat any sustained sadness as something that must be corrected so that productivity and sociability can resume. One might even feel alienated for not being able to adapt to someone else’s lifestyle, and therefore avoid their own nature. On this topic, one account by humorist Leo Rosten is one I always hold dear:

There was a time when men were permitted the dignity of depression or suffering, when we were allowed moods, when we were permitted to be preoccupied; but under the vulgarized diffusion of psychiatric insights, we are not permitted to be de-pressed. You can no longer have a mood; it is a symptom. You can’t even be ill. Oh, no. You are “sick.” And if you ask for help, you don’t mean the ancient and noble thing called aid; you mean cure. Worst of all, you are made to feel guilty about feeling sad.

Rilke suggests, accordingly, that what is most dangerous in our sadness is not its duration but our impatience with it. Unlived sadness becomes unlived, rejected, lost life, of which one could die; lived sadness becomes the place from which language, images, and, finally, Rühmen arise. So the convalescent artist, in these works, is not necessarily someone who is recovering. He is, against all sense, someone who voluntarily experiments with his sadness, his sense of futility, his misery. Consider artists such as Van Gogh or Munch, writers such as Kierkegaard, Burton, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, and the vast majority of musicians you know.

Beautifully written in Letters to a Young Poet, again in the eighth, Rilke shares what I consider his most important insight on sadness.

Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys

The key to maintaining oneself inside a certain melancholy is to allow it to ripen into a style of focus in which terror and beauty are not opposed, but come to collaborate in order to deliver a product of higher order. That sublime object, we must make our legacy.

To have beauty, it may indeed be important that we avoid angels, but only in the sense that we refuse both the annihilating encounter that would leave nothing of us and the cure that would leave nothing for us. Between these two absolutisms lies the argument: we ought to take our sadnesses seriously enough to be changed by them, and embrace our melancholy until it becomes articulate. No one, of course, survives out of sadness, but also no one with a problem-free, exuberant life has ever transcended time precisely for that.

Share

At the heart of In the Mood for Love (2000), there lies a strange discipline that plunges the hearts of those interested enough to go beyond the evident symbolism in the film. In Wong Kar-wai’s film, a painful ache is recognised as the major plot: In 1962 Hong Kong, Mr. Chow has just become the next-door neighbour of Mrs. Chan, residing in a Shanghainese quarter of the city. It is discovered that each one of them is, by chance, nightly abandoned by an unfaithful spouse. As they gradually fall in love, they vow not to become like their spouses and keep their relationship non‑physical. There seems to be an invisible barrier between them, thought to be caused by societal norms, fidelity, and tradition.

That makes, at least, an entertaining programme. However, the restraint of feeling, I perceive, is but the superficial layer. More abstractly, there is a restraint of form.

According to Wong, the governing idea behind the film came from Dui Dao, a 1972 novella by a Shanghai-born Hong Kong writer named Liu Yichang, whose title is the Chinese rendering of tête-bêche, the philatelic term for a pair of stamps printed head to head, one inverted against the other, sharing a border yet facing in opposite directions.

Liu’s novella interweaves the parallel, non-intersecting days of an old man and a young woman who never physically meet. Their lives, nevertheless, are intersected through having gone to the same places or being caught in similar problems, all this happening, of course, in different timelines. Wong took a fair bit of vanity and designed In the Mood for Love so steadfastly, that the stills book he later published was privately titled tête-bêche: A Wong Kar-wai Project.

The two marriages in the film are effectively a matched pair, one the mirror negative of the other. Not in terms of character: they live synchronised lives, but each points in a notably different direction. Each infidelity, too, seems to be printed the wrong way up against its counterpart. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are rarely permitted to share a frame without a doorway, a stair rail, or a mirror dividing them, as if the camera refused to let the two halves of the stamp come right side up together. At some point in the film, they decide to sit together to rehearse an accusation of infidelity, but when the time comes, neither can bring themselves to conclude it; they instinctively perform as themselves rather than each other’s spouse, which is an inversion within an inversion—the tête-bêche folds a second time.

They are bound by a symmetry they did not choose and cannot escape, yet the film insists on the impossibility of true convergence. This represents, dare I say, one of the most elegant human complexities brought to screen. It is by no means short of philosophical depth—as we will see—and develops under very original circumstances. The tragedy is translucent yet unsettlingly familiar.

This reading still is, however, a tragedy of repression: two people whom convention prevents from consummating a purported unambiguous love. The deferral of union is not yet a restraint of form. Now, Wong seems to be dramatising, whether by natural inclination or deliberately, something closer to the account of the Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas of the ethical relation than to a classic Platonic myth of severed halves seeking restoration. This insight fits this film gracefully.

For Levinas, proximity to the Other is not a prelude to fusion; it is constituted by an irreducible distance that fusion would destroy. The face of the Other commands precisely because it cannot be absorbed into the self's economy of need. Most of what we call relation is in fact appropriation: we know things, we possess them, we fold them into categories the mind already contains. The Other resists this. To face another consciousness is to meet something the self did not generate and cannot digest. This is why he has insisted that the ethical relation precedes ontology: before I can say what the Other is, I am already answerable to it. A solid principle.

Furthermore, the existence of the Other often becomes a highly intricate canvas in literature, or in this case, the creation of a character. When the artist—that is, the writer—constructs the relationships between individuals, it often gives rise to a kind of function through which they pass, and, suddenly, their interactions own an essence, or a motif. In the film, the matched pair develop a vividly coordinated, absorbing and tense essence, expressed so artfully that it almost seems unreal. It is, of course, unreal, but the connection between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan exerts enough force to deceive our perception.

The essence between them is beautifully portrayed, for instance, in the stairwell scenes. Wong films the characters ascending and descending, close enough to touch, each aware of the other’s rhythm, yet the geometry of the frame keeps them on separate planes. Or the noodle stall scenes, where the film seems to track not just their polite conversations but also the clock above them, so that proximity is measured in minutes rather than intimacy. The accusation rehearsals in Mrs. Chan’s room, where Mr. Chow coaches her through the confrontation she cannot stage with her own husband, are other notable examples, for each rehearsal is an attempt to occupy the other’s position and, given their proclaimed conditions, each ends up failing, returning both of them, somewhat more exposed, to their own skins.

This very fine kino is, I believe, a supreme portrait of an existential, theatrical struggle between two persons who are bound to share a transient episode in their lives—given its silent and saddening nature, there is no wonder why it has become a modern classic. The setting, too, deserves recognition for emerging from an Asian culture that susceptibly permits this kind of tragic beauty to happen. The Hong-Kong pair are, as it could be expected, very modest and courteous. They seem not able to overcome their fates, so they instead let time separate them through different means. I will not analyse the nature of the result of their relation, as I would rather encourage the reader to witness it by themself.

I would highly recommend this film to anyone interested in a purposeful display of elegant figures mourning each other’s plight as they resist separation. The production is full of scenic frames and nostalgic shots, and I would consider it to be one of those experiences you seek once and rarely again. The imagery and plot have an effect of persistence, and it may haunt you occasionally.

He called it, eventually, On Shakespeare and on Drama, published in 1906, and at first glance it seemed like the result of years of accumulated irritation finally granted permission to speak at length. Tolstoy confesses, almost proudly, that he has reread the entire Shakespearean canon across his life, whether in Russian, English, or German, hoping the discomfort would eventually resolve into appreciation, the way a stubborn dish sometimes starts to taste like something on the fourth attempt.

Regrettably, for Tolstoy it never did. In this study, he ended up concluding that the fault was never his palate, but everyone else’s. He chose King Lear as the central target of analysis and criticism, it seemed, not because he thought it was Shakespeare’s worst play but because the critics he was about to demolish considered it among the best. That would naturally make the most efficient kill.

Subscribe now

His actual verdict is not that Shakespeare was overrated. It is that no honest reader, freed from two centuries of inherited delusion, could finish Lear, or any of Shakespeare’s plays, with any feeling beyond “aversion and weariness.”

The diagnosis, when Tolstoy generalises it, is total. Shakespeare, Tolstoy says, has no power to delineate character. His language is uniformly exaggerated, flowery, and unnatural. He cannot resist putting his own idle thoughts into the mouth of whichever character happens to be standing nearby, and his moral compass, insofar as one can be inferred from the testimony of two critics he happens to trust, often corresponds to the Machiavellic belief that the end justifies the means. Lear is, it follows, a plagiarism. A clumsy theft and ruination of an earlier, superior play by an author nobody remembers.

One naturally questions, if all of this is so obviously true, why has the entire civilised world spent three hundred years insisting otherwise? Tolstoy’s answer: mass hypnosis. The same mechanism, he explains, that produced the Crusades, the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, the Dutch tulip mania and, in the context in which it was written, the global hysteria surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. Whole civilisations, in his view, are perfectly capable of working themselves into permanent, unquestionable conviction about something false. It does not occur to him, writing this from inside a movement of personal disciples who had begun arranging their lives around his pronouncements on sex, property, and God, that he might know something about epidemic suggestion from the inside.

Must we linger on the specific charges? Yes, because they reveal something about Tolstoy’s method as much as about Shakespeare. Rather than building his moral case from Shakespeare’s own words, Tolstoy borrowed it second-hand from two critics he otherwise had no specific use for: Georg Gottfried Gervinus, recruited to prove that Shakespeare’s great teaching leads to the discovery that a man “may be too good”, and (another) Georg, the Danish Georg Brandes, quoted approvingly for the claim that Shakespeare’s fundamental principle is that the end justifies the means. On top of this borrowing, Tolstoy adds a charge of his own making: that Shakespeare was a jingoistic patriot of the worst kind. This is an odd accusation to make against a dramatist four centuries removed from the nationalism the term was coined to describe, and it is a fairly rich one coming from someone who had spent the preceding ten years establishing an international reputation based on the notion that Russia’s spiritual destiny was uniquely qualified to redeem mankind.

In support of a decision he made prior to opening the case, Tolstoy uses witnesses he does not truly trust to convict Shakespeare of vices he is not entirely innocent of. If it were just careless, none of this would really matter. The intriguing thing about it is how different this is from the Tolstoy you probably knew: he, known for meticulous documentary accuracy, is suddenly satisfied with hearsay and circular reasoning when the defendant is someone he needs convicted rather than comprehended.

For four decades the case did almost nothing. It is, by George (Yes, another one!) Orwell’s own account, one of the least-read things Tolstoy ever wrote, barely available in English; understandably, largely ignored today.

But what does Orwell have to do with all this? In 1947, with the world recovering from a war that had given everyone a fresh appetite for thinking about how convictions curdle into brutality, he observed this criticism, sat down and wrote a long, careful response to Tolstoy’s obscure essay. The obvious question, the one Orwell asks before he answers it, is “Why bother?” You do not spend serious critical energy refuting a pamphlet nobody reads, written by a man who has been dead for decades, about a play whose reputation has not so much as flickered under any attack. Unless the interesting object was never really Tolstoy’s critique. The interesting object being the size of the gun Tolstoy felt he needed.

In his essay, Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947), Orwell, characteristically, refuses to fight on Tolstoy’s chosen ground. He immediately concedes that there is no real way to refute the examination point by point, because a poem is not the sort of thing that can be rescued by counter-argument; it survives by surviving, or it does not survive at all. By 1947 Shakespeare had already won intellectual battles several times without needing anyone’s assistance against people whose existence never perturbed him. So rather than mount a defence of Lear’s quality, which he performed anyway, though on a relative surface level, Orwell asks: what does a hatred this disproportionate cost to produce, and what does its author get back in exchange for paying it?

This is Orwell’s great answer: his point is that Tolstoy’s hatred of Lear is too precise, sustained, and excessive to be ordinary literary disagreement. He diagnoses that the plot of King Lear is, when you strip away the verse, an absurdly accurate staging of Tolstoy’s later life. Lear opens with a king giving away his dominions, expecting that the renunciation of power will purchase him love, peace, and a comfortable retirement among people who owe him everything. Instead, it offers him the storm; misery; betrayal; the company of a fool and a counterfeit madman; and the slow disintegration of his own mind on a heath in the dark. Renunciation, according to Shakespeare, does not equate to serenity.

Share

As strange as it seems, clear parallelisms can be drawn with Tolstoy. By the time he composed his attack on Shakespeare, Tolstoy had spent the better part of two decades giving away his fortune, attempting to renounce his copyrights in times where his family most needed the income from them, dressing as a peasant and labouring in the fields of an estate he no longer wished to own, preaching celibacy as a domestic policy inside an actual marriage with thirteen children behind it, and demanding that the people closest to him treat his renunciation of the world as a gift rather than a provocation. It gave him, as it gave Lear, almost no peace whatsoever. His wife Sofia fought him for control of his estate and his royalties, much like Lear’s daughters fought for their own causes—Tolstoy’s household split into warring factions. His own temper, by account of his own diaries, remained as violent in his seventies as it had ever been. He died in 1910, having fled his own home in the middle of the night to escape the very family his renunciation was supposed to redeem, and expired a few days later from pneumonia at the provincial railway station of Astapovo, with his wife kept from his bedside by the disciples managing his final exit.

The renunciation of his copyrights, the gesture meant to prove he had finally escaped worldly attachment, was planned in near-total secrecy by his disciple Vladimir Chertkov behind Sofia’s back, through a will Tolstoy signed in a forest because no room in his own house was safe enough to use without the wife finding out. When Tolstoy died at Astapovo, his wife was not permitted inside the stationmaster’s house, and he spent his last days pacing the platform and peering through the window. Chertkov, managing the room, did not trouble himself to inform Tolstoy that she was there. She was let in once he had lost consciousness. If Shakespeare had scripted this, a decent editor would have cut it for being too on the nose.

A further humiliation is buried in the original essay, one that Tolstoy actually walks past without noticing: Lear contains a great deal of sharp social criticism, such as observations about flattery, property, and the hollowness of inherited authority, exactly the kind of material a moralist of Tolstoy’s temperament should have prized. But Shakespeare, never one to risk his own neck, distributes almost all of it to characters who are licensed to be unreliable: the Fool, who is paid to talk nonsense; Edgar, only once he is pretending to be a madman named Poor Tom, at which point he is suddenly free to say sharp things about poverty, exposure, and the indifference of the powerful that no sane nobleman in the play could risk saying in his own voice; and Lear himself, only once grief has tipped him into genuine derangement. The sane, powerful characters in the play almost never say anything true, for truth, in Lear, is something Shakespeare can only afford to put in the mouths of people nobody in power has to take seriously. Tolstoy, reading with his verdict already reached, misses this. He is too busy proving Shakespeare incapable of moral seriousness to notice that the play’s argument for an ethical background. A more patient enemy would have made better use of the material.

None of this makes Tolstoy unique, only legible. He is, mostly, an extravagantly documented case of a pattern that recurs whenever a serious mind goes after an apparently safe target with unwarranted force. For instance, Nietzsche spent some of his last sane years compiling an equally forensic accusation of Wagner, the composer he had once treated as something close to a second self, for crimes that would appear, on close inspection, to have shown Nietzsche exactly what worshipping him eventually cost. The targets vary; the structure does not. The lesson? You do not write years of grievances against something that, at best, bores you. You might write after realising that a particular work of art has aggressively taken over an aspect of your life that you had hoped, perhaps, nobody would take the time or the precision to write about.

Think of Voltaire against (again) Shakespeare. Voltaire spent years translating and championing Shakespeare to a French public that had never heard of him, and by the end of his life he had reversed course entirely. He called Hamlet a “vulgar and barbarous play” and Shakespeare’s work in general “an enormous dunghill.” Of course, what changed was not Shakespeare, but rather English drama, which surely outperformed Voltaire’s own neoclassical tragedies for European prestige, the tragedies he had built his reputation as France’s great dramatic reformer upon. The grievance was never purely aesthetic, and instead it was succession anxiety dressed as taste.

Then we have the classical composers Tchaikovsky and Brahms. In his diaries, Tchaikovsky describes Brahms as untalented, boring, and uninspired, also calling him a “giftless bastard”—hatred that transcends professional rivalry. This came from a composer who secretly questioned whether his talent for melody, emotion, and spectacle made him a lightweight in comparison to the more architecturally serious Germans, and particularly Brahms, who was hailed as Beethoven’s true heir by Schumann and the critical establishment, while Tchaikovsky was often written off by some as merely tuneful, merely Russian, and merely felt rather than built. In his darkest moments, Tchaikovsky felt that Brahms embodied the seriousness he lacked. Hating Brahms’s music meant, in part, a way of refusing to hate his own.

Apparently, the truly harshest verdicts in criticism are rarely about the object’s failures. They are pre-emptive strikes against witnesses. Find the book a clever person cannot forgive (not dislike or not find overrated as isolated criticisms), and you have usually found the one document that already knows how their story ends. In Tolstoy’s case, Shakespeare survived the verdict nearly unbothered, and the critic itself would likely have vanished completely were it not attached to the same name that gave us Anna Karenina. This is a final, fairly grim irony, since the only reason anyone may still read Tolstoy’s attempt to destroy Shakespeare’s reputation could be that Tolstoy never quite managed to leave the world enough peace to destroy his own.

It is important to keep the most impassioned criticisms that come to mind secreted below the front page of a diary, to let a little time slip away, and then to reread that fury with fresh eyes. Words blaze brightly at first, only to reveal the deepest anguishes of the heart at the very moment when art unwittingly traces our tragedies. When novels turn into a living ordeal, our eyes grow weary quickly, and that is when vitriolic words spring to mind for things we are not yet ready for.

At a time when Austria is in danger of perishing from acute boredom even before the solution sought by the radicals can be achieved, in days that have brought this country political and social turmoil of every kind, facing a public that finds its way through life—whether with unwavering determination or apathy—using either flowery rhetoric or utter thoughtlessness, the editor of these pages, who has hitherto stood aloof in a little-noticed corner offering commentary, now raises a battle cry.

Where other periodicals promised their readers “what we bring” (was wir bringen), this one promised “what we destroy” (was wir umbringen). A single syllable has changed, and it contains the whole argument its author would spend the next 37 years and 922 issues elaborating. The magazine, Die Fackel (“The Torch”), made its founder, by the time of his death in 1936, among the most fearsome and isolated figures in the German‑speaking literary world. He was a journalist whose life’s work was an arduous prosecution of journalism conducted in journalism’s own form, in its own house, and with its own weapons.

Subscribe now

It would be easy to file this away as an elaborate mockery, or as the productive self-loathing of a man who simply could not leave the industry he despised. But Kraus’ quarrel with the press was never really about the press; or rather, it was about the press only in the way that a symptom is about the organ on which it appears. What Kraus diagnosed in the language of the Viennese newspapers was something closer to the operating system of modernity itself: a public sphere increasingly run on phrases that nobody had to think in order to use and that nobody, having used them, would ever be called upon to defend. His real subject was not bad writing; it was what bad writing makes possible.

Kraus did not begin with this insight, but rather arrived at it. His first targets were the ordinary ones: the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s great liberal newspaper of record, and its entanglements with the financial and political establishment it was supposed to be reporting on. Fin-de-siècle Vienna had no shortage of material: speculative bubbles, conflicts of interest, the cosy traffic between editors’ desks and ministers’ offices. For a while, Kraus did what critics of corrupt journalism have always done, which is trying to expose the corruption directly by naming names, tracing payments, and embarrassing the implicated. He gave this up, and the reason he did is the key to everything that followed. Direct exposure, he came to believe, treated the problem as an aberration or a few bad actors who could, in principle, be removed, after which the system would presumably return to health. What he wanted instead was, in his own phrase, a Trockenlegung (“drainage”) des Phrasensumpfes (“of the great swamp of clichés”). The shift from “corruption” to “cliché” as the object of attack is the move that turns a press critic into a critic of the conditions under which a press, and a public, become capable of being corrupted in the first place. In that move, journalism ceases to be a profession with some bad actors and becomes the privileged site where a society learns not to think in its own words.

Consider the kinds of phrases Kraus spent thousands of pages on: “deutsche Bildung” (German cultivation), “christliche Zivilisation” (Christian civilisation), and dozens of others like them. None of these phrases is, on its face, a lie, but that is the point. Each functions as a compact, portable unit of ideology that has already done its thinking for you. To use the phrase is to invoke everything it stands for, such as a tradition, a set of values, or a claim to superiority, without having to state, defend, or even consciously hold any of it. The phrase does the believing, so the speaker does not have to. Kraus’ method, issue after issue, was to take such a phrase out of its newspaper column, hold it up to the light, and show the reader the entire unexamined world that had been smuggled inside it. The same instinct led him, for example, in a series of pieces from 1905 and 1906, to the conduct book, the genre that tells readers how to behave in polite society, and pushed its rules of correct speech to a point of absurdity, until the entire social code revealed itself as a machine for not communicating; a structure of approved phrases whose real function was to ensure that nothing unexpected, and therefore nothing true, could ever be said. Cliché, for Kraus, was a social technology and never just a literary defect, whether it was for journalism, for etiquette or, eventually, for politics, whose purpose was to make thought optional.

It is one thing to say that a cliché conceals an ideology, but it is a further claim to say that the cliché is itself the precondition for what that ideology will eventually do. In 1921, Kraus affirmed the further claim. For the first time in Die Fackel, he gave it such a form comparable to a theorem: Wenn die Menschheit keine Phrasen hätte, brauchte sie keine Waffen—if mankind had no clichés, it would need no weapons.

Here, Kraus is not saying that clichés are like weapons or that they sometimes lead to weapons. Essentially, he is saying that the cliché does the work that would otherwise have to be done by force or by conscience. Before a population can be sent to war, persuaded to accept a persecution, or talked into looking away from an atrocity, it has to be supplied with a way of describing that war, that persecution, or that atrocity, which makes the description bearable. Precisely, the cliché is that description. It arrives pre-cleared of the moral weight the bare facts would carry, so that by the time the action takes place, no decision seems to have been made. Everything has already been said and said in the only words anyone was ever given. This is the sense in which Kraus’ Sprachkritik, his language criticism, was always Ideologiekritik by other means: not a separate, gentler project running alongside the political one but its precondition.

The same logic, transposed from journalism to literature, produced his essay Heine and the Consequences (1910), an attack on Heinrich Heine that scandalised admirers of one of Germany’s most beloved poets. The target was not Heine’s talent, which Kraus did not deny, but what he called Heine’s invention of feuilletonism, a style fusing the charm and musicality of lyric poetry with the immediacy and superficiality of journalism, producing prose that was dazzling, quotable, and essentially weightless. Kraus traced a line from Heine’s feuilletons, through decades of imitators, to the newspaper prose of his own day, which had inherited all of Heine’s charm and none of his genius and which had, in the process, taught generations of readers that the highest compliment one could pay a sentence was that it was effective and produced a pleasing impression quickly, just to immediately move on.

To continue proving his point, he wrote The Last Days of Mankind. This was a vast drama written after the First World War, and it was curiously built out of quotations: newspaper editorials, military communiqués, war-bond advertisements, the boasts of profiteers, the small talk of Viennese cafés, the slogans on banners, and sensationalism in general. Kraus’ preface warns that the play, which would take roughly ten evenings to perform, is intended for “a theatre on Mars”, because no human audience could be expected to sit through the full record of what its own civilisation had said to itself on the way to catastrophe without dying of indignation or boredom. Returning to the 1921 aphorism, the play offers his evidence that language, once detached from the events it supposedly reports, becomes self‑confirming. For everyone inside it, it no longer reports what happens but rather becomes it. By the time the war “began”, in the sense of armies moving, it had already been going on for years in the headlines, the toasts, and the editorials about the enemy’s barbarism and one's own civilisation’s inevitable triumph.

For context, Kraus did not arrive at this insight alone, and one of the most unusual things about it is how precisely it was shared, independently and in different media by the circle of Viennese modernists around him. His closest friend was the architect Adolf Loos, whose 1910 lecture Ornament and Crime argued that decorative excess in architecture and design was not a harmless matter of taste but a form of cultural regression: a way of disguising what a building or an object actually was beneath an accumulation of surfaces that had nothing to do with its function. The same circle included a young Ludwig Wittgenstein, who counted both Loos and Kraus among the handful of figures he later named as decisive influences. The Tractatus’ famous insistence that one should say only what can be said clearly and remain silent about the rest is not a separate intellectual event from Kraus’ war on the phrase. It is the same diagnosis transposed into logic. What connects these three figures’ thoughts is that ornamentation or imprecision is the place where a culture’s dishonesty about itself goes to live, because it is the one place that everyone has agreed, by unspoken consent, not to examine. In this sense, the line between the aesthetic and hypocrisy becomes very, very thin.

None of this should be allowed to flatten Kraus into a prophet, as he was, by every account, a difficult and often vindictive man, and Die Fackel’s pages are full of feuds that read, from a century’s distance, as more personal than principled—against the critic Alfred Kerr, against the writer Hermann Bahr, and most famously against Maximilian Harden, the journalist whose magazine Die Zukunft had exposed an alleged homosexual circle around Kaiser Wilhelm II in the scandal that came to be known as the Harden–Eulenburg affair. Kraus, who had initially admired Harden’s willingness to take on the establishment, turned on him with a ferocity that owed at least as much to rivalry as to principle. Nor is Kraus’ own prose the model of clarity his theory might lead one to expect. It is dense—as quoted at the beginning—allusive, and frequently exhausting. This was a style built for readers willing to do a great deal of work, which is to say, for almost no readers at all, as noted by his contemporary Elias Canetti. There is a particular tragedy in the fact that the great enemy of verbal inflation produced, across Die Fackel, an often excruciating body of prose.

And what, then, survives of all this once the rivalries and the faults are set to one side?

Kraus’ central wager that the smallest units of public language are not neutral containers for information, but active instruments that determine what a society can think, feel, and ultimately do, does not depend on his having been a likeable or even a consistent man, any more than a diagnostic method depends on the temperament of the doctor who first proposed it. It is, if anything, easier to see the wager’s force today than it was in his own time, because we now live permanently inside the condition he described as an emergency—a permanent emergency of phrases—and an environment in which the phrase, the slogan, and the headline circulate at a speed and volume that make Kraus’ swamp look like a garden pond. One need not reach for an exotic example to see the mechanism at work and can comfortably call out “fake news”, which began its public life as a description of a real phenomenon: fabricated stories engineered for shares, and within a few years, it had become, across the political spectrum, a free-floating accusation that any actor could deploy against any unwelcome reporting, regardless of its accuracy. The accusation now does the doubting, so the accuser does not have to. The phrase had detached from its referent and become a weapon that no longer required the user to specify what, exactly, was false. Kraus would have recognised the trajectory immediately, because it is the trajectory of every phrase he ever anatomised: born as a description, it survives by ceasing to describe anything at all.

But the career of “fake news” is the loud half of Kraus’ inheritance. The “softer” half, and arguably the more effectual, is the cliché that never has to turn into anything. To read Kraus now is less to acquire a set of opinions about the press than to be trained in a certain refusal about letting those small, apparently harmless phrases, carry out large political and moral operations and remain unobserved. The discipline he practised on deutsche Bildung and christliche Zivilisation transfers, with very little adjustment, to the phrases performing the same function now. “National security” can convert surveillance programmes, a closed-door negotiation or a line item in a budget into a certain idea that has, by the act of naming it, already been justified. “Hate speech”, now, has as many interpretations as a Rothko. “Community standards” presents a set of commercial and editorial choices, made by a handful of people for reasons they, many times, decline to specify, as though they were a fact of nature and as impersonal as weather. “Innovation” has by now absorbed so much unearned approval that to object to anything travelling under the word is, by the word’s own logic, to object to the future itself. Again, none of these might be a lie by themselves, any more than deutsche Bildung was a lie, but it is recognisable how each phrase arrives with its verdict already attached and asking only to be repeated, never to be argued for.

The moment a society takes the time to define its language is perhaps the moment most feared by those groups that survive, among other things, on the ambiguity and vagueness surrounding their narratives. If their ideas were to be scrutinised and considered by those who, consciously or not, have retained a less developed or more personal understanding of these ideas, the world would see a radical shift in how the nature of many modern narratives, and even ideologies, is accepted. This is, in the end, what makes Kraus worth analysing. Not because Die Fackel offers a programme, since Kraus was, in his time, constitutionally incapable of offering one, but because it offers a refusal to let the most innocent and familiar pieces of public language pass without inspection, on the grounds that they are exactly the pieces that have stopped needing to justify themselves. The magazine’s founding remark promised readers what it would umbringen. What it actually destroyed, for as long as anyone was willing to keep reading, is the possibility of not noticing.

Share

Opera is, in fact, a life-consuming passion. It is when art slips from our lips, wafts delicately through the air, delights the eye, nourishes the mind, and stirs the soul. Not by chance, it is the wildest, most ambitious art form the Western imagination has ever devised: the simultaneous mobilisation of music, drama, poetry, architecture, painting, and the human voice at its most impossibly extended. It is excess in the service of truth. And truth, as it turns out, is something anyone can use.

No other form places you at the intersection of so many aesthetic forces at once, all pulling in the same direction: towards feeling something larger than yourself.

To watch a great opera is to undergo a particular process, as Maria Callas, sobriquet La Divina, once described: “An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.” The truth is, you need not to have the voice of a tenor or a soprano to experience this phenomenon; you simply have to let the work take hold of you.

Rather than being merely another pastime for music lovers, this art form has continued to reveal to us both the adventures of humankind and the limits of our imagination. I must point out that this attempt to pay tribute to it is not an effort to summarise the history of opera, nor tick off the obligatory canon. I have chosen artistically overwhelming and intellectually insatiable works, and for each one I will suggest specific recordings that respect your time, your ears, and your curiosity. Think of what follows not as five “must‑see” monuments, but as five invitations.

Let yourself be swept away, too, by the splendour of these works.

Share

Subscribe now

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805)

Beethoven’s only opera. He spent the better part of a decade wrestling it into existence across three successive versions (1805, 1806, 1814), revising, cutting, raging, abandoning, returning, and finally declaring it finished. He wrote that, although it was “the work that brought me the most sorrow, for that reason it is the one most dear to me.” One hears in that sentence the particular pride of someone who has bled for something.

The original source was a play by the French Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, allegedly inspired by a real-life revolutionary prison rescue that took place in the city of Tours, France. Beethoven, who admired the ideals of the French Revolution while growing increasingly disillusioned with what those ideals had ultimately produced—a dictator, then emperor in 1804—found in the story an image of what the Revolution was supposed to be. Fidelio is, in this sense, a work of extraordinary political grief dressed up as a work of political hope.

The libretto follows Leonore, a woman whose husband, Florestan, has vanished into a political dungeon run by his bitter enemy, Don Pizarro. Refusing to accept his death, Leonore decides to rescue him: she disguises as a prison guard, takes the name ‘Fidelio’, and infiltrates inside the fortress where she suspects her husband is being starved to death. Thematically, the opera is freedom and conjugal love, though the more interesting answer is that it is about the violence required to sustain both. The “heroic soprano” of opera tradition has many exemplars, but none quite so grimly suited as this one. This unique lyric work celebrates the victory of an exceptional woman who embodies courage and moral strength in the face of arbitrary despotism.

Florestan, when we finally meet him alone in his dungeon at the opening of Act II, in the scene set by eerie F minor chords and shadowy string sounds, painting the total darkness of the dungeon, is reduced almost to nothing: starving, hallucinating, and sustained only by the vision of Leonore appearing to him as an angel. Because of this, his aria, Gott! Welch’ Dunkel hier! (“God! What darkness here!”) is one astoundingly harrowing opening that starkly shocks the spectator.

Moreover, few operas have been claimed more urgently by political circumstance than Fidelio. On 4 September 1945, the Deutsche Oper staged it as the first opera performed in Berlin after the end of the Second World War as the only performance deemed adequate to inaugurate the resuscitation of regular civilian life. Then, forty-four years later, came an event almost too neat for fiction: the first night of Fidelio at the Semperoper in Dresden on 7 October 1989, marking the 40th anniversary of the DDR, was coincidentally accompanied by riots at the city’s main train station. The applause after the Prisoners’ Chorus interrupted the performance for considerable time, and Christine Mielitz’s production had the chorus appear in normal street clothes at the end, signifying their role as representatives of the audience. Four weeks later, on 9 November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of East Germany’s regime. The prisoners, it turned out, were the audience. They always had been.

What to listen for

The quartet Mir ist so wunderbar (“How wondrous it is”), usually the sixth piece in Act I, is the video placed at the beginning of this entry. Four characters simultaneously singing of entirely different emotional states—hope, unease, satisfaction, and jealousy—in a texture of such Mozartian perfection (as in the ensembles in Mozart’s Don Giovanni) that Beethoven, who knew it, kept it intact through all three revisions. It is almost impossible to breathe while listening to it, for one fears missing a musical nuance.

Leonore’s great aria, Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin? (“Monster! Whither dost thou rush?”) is the opera’s emotional centrepiece: a recitative of cold fury, then an aria of sustained, soaring hope, accompanied by a solo horn. It then melts into the gorgeous Adagio section, “Komm, Hoffnung” (“Come, Hope”), where she prays for the strength to rescue her husband.

And the Prisoners’ Chorus, O welche Lust (“O what joy”): sixty men, barely upright, stepping into daylight and singing, though very quietly at first, of what it feels like to breathe open air. Beethoven marked it piano (‘of soft execution’), indicating that freedom, when it arrives at last, does not shout.

Featured records

Otto Klemperer’s 1962 version on Warner Classics is the gold standard. He conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra alongside a legendary cast that includes Christa Ludwig as Leonore and Jon Vickers as Floristan. Captured in London’s Kingsway Hall, the intricate counterpoint and interplay between the instruments are very audible. Alternatively, Leonard Bernstein’s recording, live at the Vienna Musikverein in early 1978 for Deutsche Grammophon, earns its high recognition for its theatrically paced and emotionally charged conduction.

Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865)

In Wagner’s music, which is a world unto itself, there is immense grandeur. Whether in Ring or Tannhäuser—and never forgetting Parsifal—Wagner’s repertoire is directed toward that cosmological human being. In this endeavour, and as a second invitation, here is the operatic project of Tristan und Isolde.

Wagner did not call Tristan und Isolde an opera itself. He called it a Handlung: an ‘action’, a ‘drama’, something that happens. And typically, he sustained that the conventional operatic terminology was too small a container for what he created, and thus, this is why we see the label “music dramas”. Indeed, Tristan und Isolde is less a classic opera than a prolonged philosophical act, a work that uses music to go where argument cannot and returns with news of a country most art cannot reach at all.

The work follows, in summary, the doomed romance between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Isolde, who accidentally drink a fatal love potion intended for Isolde’s future husband, King Marke. Bound by an unstoppable celestial passion, the lovers ultimately wish to find peace by escaping the deception of the physical world.

The genesis of this work was legendary. By 1857, Wagner had become infatuated with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the merchant Otto Wesendonck, who was at that moment generously housing and financing the composer on his Zurich estate. The situation inspired Wagner to set aside his sprawling, decade-long Ring project, which would not be resumed for another twelve years, and turn instead to the story of a knight escorting another man’s bride across the sea and falling, catastrophically, in love with her. Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck about the opus:

“This Tristan is turning into something terrible! This final act!!!—I fear the opera will be banned... only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad.”

The premiere, when it finally came, was itself a theatrical scandal. Planned performances in Vienna were abandoned after 77 rehearsals when the tenor, Alois Ander, gave up trying to learn the role of Tristan—a role described, without hyperbole, as one of the most demanding in all music. The premiere on 10 June 1865 in Munich was conducted by Hans von Bülow, with whose wife, Cosima, Wagner was carrying on an affair. The parts of Tristan and Isolde were sung by the real-life husband and wife team of Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Having sung the role of Tristan four times, Ludwig dropped dead at the age of 29 on 21 July 1865, prompting the rumour that his death was due to the superhuman vocal and physical demands of his Tristan role. It might have not been the case, but the claim was not entirely unreasonable.

Wagner’s source was Gottfried von Strassburg’s mediaeval epic, itself one of the masterpieces of Middle High German literature, and a work Gottfried left unfinished in the early thirteenth century, as if even he could not bring himself to write the ending. Wagner was not constrained by such preconceptions, but he seemed to have understood what Gottfried had grasped.

The premise of this story in its barest form, shorn of incident, follows two people who are overwhelmed by a love they cannot act upon and cannot escape. In this way, the inspiration drawn from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer becomes clear. One of the core tenets of Schopenhauer’s thinking is his inherent pessimism that the Will (Wille) always pushes us toward needs and desires that can never be fully resolved. Even when we obtain the object of those desires, we are immediately left unsatisfied, finding something else on which to fixate. Hence, we are forced to suffer interminably. Wagner had read The World as Will and Representation in 1854 and described its author as “the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose ideas, as he himself expresses it, he is the first person to think through to their logical conclusion... His chief idea, the final negation of the desire of life, is terribly serious, but it shows the only salvation possible.” Tristan und Isolde is the musical execution of this idea.

Wagner structured the opera with great clarity. Its three acts are organised symmetrically, the first assigned to Isolde, the third to Tristan, and the second to the union of the two. Act I is all forward momentum and suppressed fury: Isolde is the motor of the drama, the one who names what is happening while Tristan refuses to. Act III is one of the most prolonged explorations of suffering in all opera: Tristan alone, wounded, waiting, and delirious. Between these two poles, Act II burns with the intensity of something that is not bound to last.

The piece caused immediate artistic division. Clara Schumann described it as “the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life”, while Giuseppe Verdi, who had a complex relationship with Wagner, “stood in wonder and terror” before the opera. Friedrich Nietzsche was, at least in the beginning, deeply enamoured by Wagner’s oeuvre, including, of course, Tristan und Isolde. A young Bruno Walter stated, “Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss.”

What to listen for

The first Prelude is the essential introduction, not merely to the opera but to late Romanticism as a whole. It often lasts around ten minutes and contains the entire emotional and harmonic argument that the opera will spend five hours making explicit. Listen to it alone before you commit to the full work. If it does not do something to you, the opera may not be for you. If it does, clear your evening.

The Act II love duet, O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe (“O descend now, night of love”), is the heart of the opera. Listen for how Wagner erases the boundary between the two voices: they finish each other’s phrases, adopt each other’s melodic contours, and gradually become, musically, a single entity.

And the closing scene, or what Wagner himself originally called not the Liebestod (“love-death”) but the Verklärung (“transfiguration”), resolves, at last, the harmonic tension that has been accumulating since the first four bars of the Prelude. Wagner equated the final bars, at the moment of union, with what he called “untroubled, pure harmony.” Without a doubt, the most perfect example of nirvana in the musical language. Depending on your philosophical persuasion, it may be either one of the most beautiful sounds or a very expensive argument for pessimism. Do not worry—it can be both.

Featured records

The overwhelmingly acclaimed recording of Karl Böhm conducting the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra in 1966 is the choice. In it, Birgit Nilsson as Isolde and Wolfgang Windgassen as Tristan are truly unparalleled, as they are in their nearly ideal form: incandescent singing and classical pacing, but still dramatically urgent. For a more modern version, listen to Daniel Barenboim and the Berliner Philharmoniker 1995 performance.

Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881)

Jacques Offenbach spent his career producing, with extraordinary facility and wit, over a hundred comedic, burlesque, and satiric operettas that made him the most popular composer in Paris and the presiding spirit of the Second Empire. He was so good at being entertaining that no one quite believed he could be anything else. Much like the great British composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, Offenbach was so successful at mass-producing his fleet of operettas that he eventually longed for respectability as a so-called “serious” composer. The work he chose to make his case was Les Contes d'Hoffmann, The Tales of Hoffman.

Left unfinished when he died during rehearsals in October 1880, his last work combines fantasy, gravity, and humour in an unexpectedly innovative synthesis of opera buffa, Romantic opera, and grand opera. A common comparison is with Mozart’s Requiem, with Mozart and Offenbach having left unfinished masterpieces on their deathbeds. What is more, Les Contes d’Hoffmann opens with a performance of Don Giovanni taking place in the theatre next door. Mozart’s greatest confrontation between pleasure and damnation, audible just offstage while Hoffmann drinks and tells his stories. Simply genial!

The opera places Hoffmann himself at its centre, not biographically but in an artistic manner: a portrait as both a victim and a magician. In the prologue, we learn that the Muse of Poetry has decided Hoffmann must be hers. Her rival for his attention is love: romantic, earthly, and disastrous love, and to win him, she disguises herself as his closest friend, Nicklausse, so she can shadow him through every catastrophe without being recognised. The opera is, therefore, structured as a wager: what happens to a poet when he pursues love instead of art? The answer, which three acts are committed to demonstrating in progressively darker scales, is: nothing good.

Offenbach’s literary source, chosen some thirty years before he finally set it, was a stage play based on the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Aged only forty-six when he died of syphilis in 1822, Hoffmann was remembered on his tombstone as a distinguished polymath: jurist, poet, composer, music critic, and painter. He had renamed himself “Amadeus” out of devotion to Mozart. He wrote Der Sandmann and the Nutcracker story, providing the source for Delibes’ ballet Coppélia and Schumann’s Kreisleriana; and his fiction was so densely concerned with the uncanny, the figure of the double, the anxiety of the automaton, and the blurred boundary between the animate and the mechanical, that Freud chose Der Sandmann as the paradigm case for his foundational essay Das Unheimliche (“The Uncanny”) in 1919. In short: to understand Hoffmann is to understand a notable portion of nineteenth-century European culture.

Returning to the work, each act of the opera presents a different incarnation of the beloved and, crucially, a different incarnation of the same villain. Offenbach intended for the four women of Hoffmann’s life, as well as the four incarnations of Evil, to be performed by two singers. The four villains, Lindorf, Coppelius, Doctor Miracle, and Dapertutto, are played by a single bass-baritone, which is not much of a practical economic decision but rather a philosophical statement: evil, in this opera, is singular and many-faced simultaneously, a shape-shifting force that takes whatever form is most likely to destroy the artist.

The three loves are equally distinct in kind, each representing a different failure of perception. The first, Olympia, is the uncanny automaton from Hoffmann’s own Der Sandmann: a ravishingly beautiful mechanical doll whom the hapless hero believes to be human. The second, Antonia, is a young singer with a mysterious illness: her father has forbidden her to perform, because singing will kill her. The third, Giulietta, is a Venetian courtesan who, at the behest of the sorcerer Dapertutto, sets out to steal not Hoffmann’s heart but something more unsettling: his reflection. She is the love that empties a man of himself.

What to listen for

The Doll Aria, Les oiseaux dans la charmille (“The birds in the bower”), is the Act I set piece and a very demanding colouratura showpiece. This piece perfectly characterises a mechanical doll, with a pretty melody sung to a waltz rhythm and delicate harp and flute accompaniment reminiscent of musical boxes. However, Olympia’s melody line becomes progressively more ornate, and during both refrains her mechanics run down, causing her to collapse until someone comes and activates her again. Original!

The Antonia act is the emotional heart of the opera and its centrepiece, Tu ne chanteras plus? (“Will you not sing again?”) is when Antonia, the ill one, is tempted to sing by voices she can barely resist and is among the most tragic scenes that Offenbach ever wrote.

At the beginning of this entry lies a live performance of Va pour Kleinzach!, “This one goes for Kleinzach!”, a witty piece that shows off Offenbach’s comedic and artistic talents. Hoffmann, drunk, is asked to tell the story of the little gnome Kleinzach, a creature of grotesque charm. Hoffmann obliges, the orchestra capers, and everything is going splendidly until, roughly halfway through, he drifts off. The gnome music evaporates, a tender melody takes its place, and Hoffmann begins describing, in a daze, a pair of eyes, a face, a woman, at which point his companions drag him back: “Et Kleinzach?” He blinks, collects himself, and resumes the gnome.

And then there is the Barcarolle, Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, described in the Grove Book of Operas as “one of the world's most popular melodies.” It opens the Venetian act in a wash of lilting 6/8 rhythm, evoking gondolas on still water, night air, and desire. What is easy to miss and worth knowing is who is singing it: it is a duet between Giulietta, the courtesan, and Nicklausse, the poet’s disguised muse. Seduction and art, singing together in perfect thirds. Below, a lovely interpretation by Jessye Norman and Katherine Ciesinski in 1989.

Recordings to listen

A favourite recording is Richard Bonynge conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in 1972. It features Joan Sutherland taking on all the heroines with spectacular vocal ease. Plácido Domingo delivers a beautifully youthful, passionate Hoffmann. Moreover, another classic studio benchmark is André Cluytens conducting the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (1965, EMI / Warner). Among the ensemble, we find Nicolai Gedda, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Victoria de los Ángeles. This version is often singled out for its idiomatic French style and finely balanced cast.

Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1842)

On the second of January, 1843, Dresden witnessed the world premiere of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer: dark, Nordic, storm-lashed, wrestling with redemption and damnation on the high seas. On the third of January, 1843, Paris witnessed the premiere of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale—our fourth invitation—a comedy in which a pompous old bachelor is comprehensively outwitted by everyone around him, including, eventually, himself. In the same week, same Europe, same century, two more different artistic visions are difficult to imagine. This is one of those accidents of history that tells you almost everything about the period in which it occurred: the operatic world of the mid-nineteenth century was not a single conversation but several, conducted simultaneously in different languages, at different temperatures, with different subjects.

Don Pasquale premiered with a cast of four of the most celebrated singers of the day, including Luigi Lablache in the title role, and was an immediate success that soon sold out across the opera houses of Europe. Since then, it has become one of Donizetti’s comic masterpieces. It is also, depending on one’s estimation of the facts, either a work of miraculous facility or a lesson about the perils of benchmarking genius against speed. Donizetti produced the score in about two weeks. His librettist, Giovanni Ruffini, was so thoroughly overridden by the composer in the process that he refused to allow his name to be put on the score. The published libretto credits a mysterious “M.A.”, an arrangement that has the distinct flavour of a professional relationship ending in mutual irritation, which is to say, the usual.

The premise is the following: the elderly and wealthy Don Pasquale resolves to marry in order to disinherit his rebellious nephew, Ernesto, who refuses an arranged match out of devotion to the penniless widow, Norina. Seeking to protect the young lovers, the clever Doctor Malatesta devises a deceptive scheme, introducing Norina to the old gent as his own demure, convent-raised sister, “Sofronia”, in a mock marriage ceremony. Immediately after the contract is signed, Norina transforms into a tyrannical, extravagant nightmare, driving Don Pasquale crazy. This is the Commedia dell’Arte skeleton upon which a great deal of European comedy has been draped for several centuries. If you happen to lack context, Commedia dell’Arte is an early form of Italian professional theatre defined by vibrant physical comedy, unscripted improvisation, and recognisable masked stock characters playing archetypes. Pasquale is recognisable as the flamboyant Pantalone, Ernesto as the lovesick Pierrot, Malatesta as the plotting Scapino, and Norina as the shrewd Columbina. The machinery is familiar, the outcome is never really in doubt, and this is precisely the point: comedy, unlike tragedy, derives much of its pleasure from inevitability. You watch not to find out what happens but to savour how.

Where Donizetti departs from the tradition is in what he does to the old man. Breaking from the standard buffa form perfected by Rossini, Donizetti treated what were essentially commedia characters in a much more human and sensitive manner than ever before seen in Italian comic opera. By lending emotional weight and humanism to the melodic outpourings of its characters, Don Pasquale is closer, in some ways, to the Mozart-Da Ponte comedies (i.e., The Marriage of Figaro) than to Rossini’s romps. There is, of course, no better example of this humanism than in the character of Don Pasquale himself: the silly, duped old bachelor from Commedia dell'Arte who is no longer just laughable, but also a three-dimensional figure whose dignity is constantly wounded.

Don Pasquale is clueless but generally likeable, and in marrying a veritable dragon, clearly gets worse than he deserves for earlier indiscretions. Productions that play the moment purely for laughs tend to miss the point; those that play it purely for cruelty overstate it. Finding the more correct stance, I believe, is part of what makes the opera genuinely difficult to bring off.

While the premiere was considered a crowning triumph of opera buffa, as we have seen, simultaneously it was its swan song, marking the beginning of the end of the genre. The world Verdi was about to build had no particular use for old men in powdered wigs being fooled by their own pretensions. Comedy, in the second half of the nineteenth century, would either become darker (Falstaff, written fifty years later, is the proof) or nearly disappear from the operatic stage. Don Pasquale is, then, an ending as well as an achievement: perhaps the last great Italian comic opera.

What to Listen For

Norina’s opening aria, Quel guardo il cavaliere, “That look subdued the knight”, is one of the great self-introductions in comic opera. She reads aloud from a trashy romance novel, then breaks off to reflect, with considerable amusement, on her own rather formidable talent for getting what she wants.

The Act I aria Bella siccome un angelo, “Beautiful as an angel”, sung by the scheming Dottore Malatesta (literally, ‘ill-head’) in praise of his fictitious sister, whom he is about to introduce to Pasquale as a potential wife, is one of opera’s great exercises in sustained dramatic irony.

And the patter duet between Pasquale and Malatesta in Act III, Cheti cheti immantinente, is the opera’s showcase of pure bel canto comedy: two voices in rapid, precisely coordinated syllabic fire, requiring a dexterity from the singers that has nothing to do with power and everything to do with nerve. It is the operatic equivalent of a very well-executed conjuring trick. When it goes wrong, as it occasionally does, because it is very, very difficult, it goes wrong spectacularly. See an example below.

Recordings to listen

Conductor István Kertész drives the score with great rhythmic bounce in his 1964 recording with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. Fernando Corena is the gold standard for the title role, delivering a funny, sympathetic, and perfectly sung Pasquale without resorting to excessive barking or shouting. Graziella Sciutti is a sharp, charming Norina, and Juan Oncina sings Ernesto with a beautiful, sweet lyric tone. An equally great alternative is Riccardo Muti and the Philharmonia Orchestra’s recording of 1993.

Honourable mention: Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (Пиковая дама)

An additional, yet necessary entry. This is the final invitation: Pikovaya Dama.

Tchaikovsky had already said no. When his brother Modest first proposed a collaboration on an opera based on Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, Pyotr replied with unusual directness: “Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write ‘The Queen of Spades.’ I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up.” The subject found him anyway. By early 1890, under commission from the Imperial Theatres, he had warmed up so thoroughly that he went to Florence to compose undisturbed, completing the vocal score in forty-four days, between 30 January and 14 March 1890. Two months in, he wrote back to Modest: “Either I am horribly mistaken, Modya, or this opera is a masterpiece.”

Set in 18th-century St Petersburg, the opera follows Hermann, a penniless and brooding soldier who becomes desperately infatuated with a young woman, Lisa. However, Lisa is wealthy and already betrothed to the aristocratic Prince Yeletsky. Hermann’s romantic passion curdles into a dark, consuming obsession when he learns a legendary rumour about Lisa’s grandmother, the elderly Countess: she possesses a supernatural, unbeatable secret combination of three winning cards at gambling. Driven by the belief that this secret wealth will secure his future and win him Lisa’s hand, Hermann crosses the threshold from social climber to stalker and, finally, to destroyer. As Pushkin once observed regarding the nature of such fixation: “Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.” So, in Tchaikovsky’s hands, this collision of love and greed becomes an inevitable trigger of demise.

The source is Pushkin’s 1834 novella: cold, sardonic, and ruthlessly brief, one of those works that completes in thirty pages what lesser writers cannot achieve in three hundred. In Pushkin’s version, the love story is secondary; Herman is driven primarily by his obsession with discovering the secret of the cards. Tchaikovsky and Modest brought the love story forward, and in doing so made the opera considerably darker than its source: where Pushkin ends with Herman consigned to an asylum, Tchaikovsky ends… more tragically. Fate, the menacing theme that overshadows his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, is here too, but this time with human faces.

Those human faces include Tchaikovsky’s own. Writing to Modest in March 1890, he confessed, “Wept terribly yesterday when Hermann gave up the ghost.” He had identified with Herman as a fellow outsider: a man trapped by his obsession, alienating those around him. In the same likeness, Tchaikovsky was trapped by his homosexuality, even marrying briefly and disastrously to deflect social gossip. His inability to escape fate, a destiny that imprisoned him, found its voice in Hermann. The opera was finished three years before the Pathétique (his Sixth Symphony), but the same shadow falls across both works. He wrote to his close friend and conductor Eduard Nápravník: “I am firmly convinced that The Queen of Spades is a very fine and, most importantly, a very original work—and I say this not only in respect to its music but in general.” Self-belief, for him, was never quite separate from self-examination.

What to Listen For

Tomsky’s Act I ballad, Odnazhdy v Versalye, “Once in Versailles”, is the opera’s narrative fulcrum: the story of the three cards told for the first time, in public, with the orchestra beginning in easy sociability and growing, phrase by phrase, strange. It is the moment everything changes, and the music knows it before the characters do.

Prince Yeletsky’s aria Ya vas lyublyu, “I love you”, is a notably beautiful aria given to a supporting role. Yeletsky, in reality, does not even appear in Pushkin’s original story, and his arc arrives in irony: he is a decent man, offering honest love, placed in an opera that has no use for either quality. The aria arrives like a window briefly opened onto a gentler work.

And the Countess’ bedroom scene in Act II is one of the great theatrical ambushes in all opera. Before the darkness descends, the old woman sits alone, drifts into reverie, and sings, in French, from memory, an aria from Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-Lion, Je crains de lui parler la nuit (“I am afraid to talk to him at night”): a relic of Versailles. It is a few minutes of music almost unbearable in its delicacy. Then, Hermann steps out of the shadows.

Recordings to listen

Fortunately, for this Russian opera, there is the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus’ The Queen of Spades, conducted by Valery Gergiev in 1992 at the Mariinsky Theatre. Featuring Gegam Grigorian as the obsessed Herman and Maria Guleghina as Liza, Gergiev’s grip on the pacing is unrivalled, while Guleghina’s voice is enticing. Another excellent version is Boris Khaikin’s recording at the Bolshoi Theatre with its orchestra and chorus, dating from 1967. Because it captures the dramatic intensity of the Bolshoi tradition, this performance is a top-tier standard.

Final words,

Five operas, four languages, one obsession, though it goes by different names depending on which composer you ask. Beethoven called it justice; Wagner called it desire, then called it compassion, and never quite forgave himself for the difference. Offenbach called it art, and died proving the point. Donizetti called it dignity, and let an old fool keep most of his.

What amazes me, looking back over this list, is how little any of these works actually agree with one another, and how completely each one believes itself to be right. That, I think, is the real argument for opera: not that it offers consensus, but that it refuses to.

I make no claim that this list is complete, or even correct. Only that it has been assembled from an unreasonable number of evenings spent doing little except listening. If even one of these five sends you down the same path, with a similar devotion, then the list has done its job. The rest, as they say, is just the overture.

What is, or will be, your favourite opera?

Share

Subscribe now

If a painter is ahead of his time, his canvases may simply fail to sell; if an architect is ahead of his time, his buildings may never exist at all. Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799) is that architect: a visionary of late eighteenth-century Paris whose most extraordinary projects remained on paper, earning him a reputation as both megalomaniac and seer that has only strengthened over time. Boullée is chiefly remembered for having developed impressive theories on architecture, which are scattered throughout various works and essays he wrote, mostly towards the end of his life. His principal work, Architecture, essai sur l'art1, is particularly charming and will be the main focus of this essay. Despite being written near the end of the eighteenth century, it was only published in 1953, when the British scholar Helen Rosenau translated the work into English. It was then that Boullée’s drawings finally reached a wide audience.

His work is characterised, crucially, by the removal of all unnecessary ornamentation, the inflation of geometric forms to a vast scale, and the repetition of elements such as columns in extensive ranges. The effect is astoundingly cosmological: his figures are specks at the base of structures that dwarf most human institutions, dare I mention, not because Boullée disregarded the human, but because he was interested in something larger. His theoretical designs sought to inspire lofty sentiments in the viewer through architectural forms suggesting the sublimity, immensity and awesomeness of the natural world, as well as the divine intelligence underlying its creation. This was architecture understood as a force of nature and as the discipline that would elevate the physical authority of mankind.

We may begin by saying that Boullée rejected the conventional definition of his own discipline. He rejected the classic Vitruvian notion of architecture as the ‘art of building’, writing: “In order to execute, it is first necessary to conceive… It is this product of the mind, this process of creation, that constitutes architecture.” The building, in other words, is optional, while the idea is not. Consider an analogy to filmmaking: a screenwriter creates a brilliant story, but due to a lack of funding, the movie is never filmed. Is the script still a work of art? Boullée would say absolutely yes. In his eyes, architecture is fundamentally an intellectual and imaginative act. The true essence of architecture happens entirely within the mind of the designer: the moment an emotional, spatial and artistic concept is born.

What gave his innovation its particular charge was its civic ambition. He had sensed change, which is to say, the French Revolution, while it was still bubbling beneath the surface, undetectable to public perception. His was a vision rather than a political view: a standalone matter of taste with plans laid before the tremor of unrest set the context for a revolution of style that would inevitably accompany, engulf and ultimately outlast the political one. In his desire to create a unique architecture appropriate to an ideal new social order, Boullée anticipated similar concerns in twentieth‑century architecture, including stripped neoclassicism and rationalism, as well as broader tendencies such as brutalism, monumentalism, modernism and some types of postmodernism.

But his designs carry the unmistakable quality of continuing to belong to the future, at times falling wrongly into the category of utopianism. His work finds itself at a peculiar intersection where the archaic and the futuristic collapse into a single point: bringing together the emotional effects of romanticism, the severe rationality of neoclassicism and the grandeur of antiquity, Boullée’s vision is both emblematic of a particular historical precipice and an artistic feat that keeps nurturing the minds of architects that have not yet come—but surely will. Therefore, his oeuvre can be read as an unresolved civilisational proposal. If architecture is the art form which, beyond sheltering, satisfying or surprising, seeks to elevate humanity and its work to new heights, then the question posed by Boullée, never resolved during his lifetime, is whether we can ultimately envisage the realisation of projects employing his techniques in the pursuit of an architecturally expressive, worthy and naturally beautiful future.

Subscribe now

Of course, the logic behind this architect’s mind must be unpacked in order to discuss his ideas properly.

Étienne-Louis Boullée was born in Paris on 12 February 1728, into a family deeply involved in the building trades. His father, Claude-Louis Boullée, served as an expert-juré des bâtiments du roi2, a sworn appraiser and contractor overseeing royal construction projects, which exposed a young Boullée to architectural sites and practices from an early age. He responded to this early education with ambivalence. He originally wished to become a painter and turned to architecture only under his father’s pressure, a capitulation that evidently never entirely settled. Architecture, he writes in the Essai, is not just about building: Vitruvius “speaks like a labourer, not an artist”, a remark that carries the acute sting of someone who had to put down his brushes.

His realised work consists of a number of Parisian hôtels particuliers dating from 1762 to 1778, to which he partly applied his innovations. Most of these no longer exist; the sole survivor is the Hôtel Alexandre on the rue de la Ville-l'Évêque (1763–66), built for the financier André-Claude-Nicolas Alexandre. In its cour d'honneur, four Corinthian columns embedded against a recess in the wall plane create an entry; flanking doors have isolated architraves set into plain openings, and oval bull’s-eye windows above are draped with swags of husks, a motif that would become a standard feature of the neoclassical manner. It is a regal building: competent, refined, and recognisably of its moment, but, of course, it does not reflect the scope of his imagination. The more celebrated Hôtel de Brunoy, with its giant Ionic colonnade flanked by arcaded wings forming a three-sided cour d'honneur, fared no better: it was demolished in 1930.

Through his atelier passed such masters as Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and Louis-Michel Thibault; in all, he taught for more than fifty years. The reach of this is difficult to overstate: Chalgrin went on to design the Arc de Triomphe; Durand, having trained in Boullée's office, became professor of architecture at the École Polytechnique in 1795—his lectures, published as the Précis des leçons d'architecture (1802–5), proved widely influential, notably in Prussia, and his Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre (1800) was the first book to reproduce historical architecture organised by building type and drawn to a consistent scale.

It was between 1778 and 1788, while teaching at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, that Boullée produced the visionary designs and theoretical writings that made his posthumous reputation. His Essai opens with an appeal “to men who cultivate the arts”:

“… What little attention has been paid in the past to the poetry of architecture, which is a sure means of adding to man’s enjoyment and of bestowing on artists the fame they deserve! That is my belief. Our buildings—and our public buildings in particular—should be to some extent poems.”

The philosophy of geometry

La Théorie des corps (the theory of bodies) is a foundational architectural principle developed by Boullée and, in fact, the philosophical framework for the Essai. The argument Boullée makes is quite simple: certain geometric forms act directly and inevitably upon the senses. He investigated the properties of geometric forms and their effects on the senses, attributing innate symbolic qualities to these three‑dimensional shapes

Take, for example, the sphere: for Boullée, it is associated with infinity, the cosmos, and supreme perfection. “Every point on its surface is equidistant from its centre. The result of this unique advantage is that from whatever angle we look at it, no optical effect can ever spoil the magnificent beauty of its shape which, to our eyes, will always be perfect,” he writes. Meanwhile, the cube was associated with stability, permanence, and unchanging truth: the figure’s flat surfaces, perpendicular 90-degree lines, and immutable proportions represent total immobility. Boullée viewed it as a shape of structural integrity and predictability, making it an anchor for the mind. The pyramid represents immortality, time, and the threshold of death; the cylinder, monotony, vastness, and existential emptiness; and so on.

While Renaissance predecessors used musical harmonies to determine room ratios, Boullée’s generation abstracted geometry into a series of primary data points. He absorbed the era’s growing fascination with antiquity, for instance, the solemnity of Egyptian monuments, and diligently stripped these ancient precedents of their decorative and cultural context.

Moreover, rather than copying the stylistic or proportional mannerisms of Classical antiquity or Renaissance masters like Andrea Palladio, Boullée fostered the idea of utilising little to no contemporary architectural ornamentation. He isolated the underlying volumes and treated them as autonomous, elemental forms.

The result was what one might call ‘emotional algebra’, or what Boullée himself called architecture parlante, or talking architecture. He claimed that geometric forms, at a sufficient scale and in the right light, could produce specific and reliable emotional states, such as sorrow, awe, exaltation, and reverence, without recourse to traditional ornament, inscriptions, or historical references whatsoever. In other words, the building would not illustrate its purpose; it would produce the feelings appropriate to it. As he wrote in the Essai: “To give a building character is to make judicial use of every means of producing no other sensation than those related to the subject.” The adoption of undisguised Platonic forms represented a rejection of frivolous excess and an attempt to revive a classical ideal: these forms were believed to stem ultimately from nature and, as such, to possess a unique mystical power.

Subscribe now

This comes with a notable caveat. In practice, the ornamentation Boullée criticised was limited to certain categories inconsistent with his thesis. He firmly opposed the aesthetic remnants of the Rococo, such as swirls, floral friezes, and delicate mouldings, which, in his view, distracted the observer from psychological and architectural magnificence. Statues (the proper aesthetic inheritance from antiquity) and nature (trees, foliage), on the other hand, belonged to a different, more acceptable ornamental family because of their status as extensions of architecture. Furthermore, in many of his designs, the repetition of columns and textures suggests that, under certain conditions, small elements can contribute to the grandeur of the whole.

The Vertigo of Scale

Between the theory of forms and its practical application, however, the largest problem is perhaps the actual scale of his sketches, and this is the second point of the theorie des corps.

Only when one realises that the tiny specks near the bottom of the frame are people does one understand the enormity of the buildings. As mentioned earlier, this enormousness was intentional, meaning to transmit sublimity and safety. The forms appear rational when apprehended by the mind, but as one mentally places oneself within them, the vertigo of immensity begins to press down: a dissonance between the purity of the form and the inhumanity of its size that is entirely deliberate.

At this point, Boullée is in a direct conversation with Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) had distinguished sharply between the beautiful, which is small, smooth, and reassuring, and the sublime, which is vast, immense, and overwhelming—a passion that robs the mind of all its powers, being so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other. The French architect understood that the pure geometric solid could produce both sensations at once and that the tension between them was where the real effect resided. Boullée’s architectural drawings present a collage of these aesthetic concepts. He was fond of employing elementary geometries, yet the notion of the beautiful was simultaneously contradicted by the scale at which those surfaces confronted the viewer.

His response to anyone who found this double quality disturbing was characteristically uncompromising. He took particular issue with those who admired St Peter’s Basilica in Rome on the grounds that its architects had cleverly disguised its immense scale. For Boullée, this was a fundamental error: he held that the impression of greatness has such a grip on our senses that, rather than finding it horrible, it always excites in us a sense of admiration. “A volcano breathing fire and death,” he writes in the Essai, “has a repulsive beauty!” Grandeur, even catastrophic grandeur, shall not repel but compel. The task of architecture is not to soften that compulsion but to harness it in the service of meaning.

The light play

Geometry and scale were Boullée’s raw material, but light was his medium of delivery. Without it, a sphere is merely a shape; in the right illumination, it shapes into an event, or something else.

Light, in Boullée’s work, functions as a metaphor for enlightenment, as darkness does for ignorance. This reading operated at both the symbolic and the sensory levels. He laid particular claim to the striking effect produced by bold forms in sunlight: “This type of architecture based on shadows is my own artistic discovery. It is a new road that I have opened, and, if I am not mistaken, artists will not refrain from following it.”

The origin of this discovery was a walk. One night, Boullée walked in the forest during a full moon and suddenly noticed his own shadow moving among those of the trees. “What did I see there?” he writes. “The mass of objects stood out in black against the extreme wanness of the light. Nature offered itself to my gaze in mourning. I was struck by the sensations I was experiencing and immediately began to wonder how to apply this, especially to architecture.”

This evocative passage completes the logical arc of the entire theory. Geometry gives form; scale produces the sublime shock of immensity; and light determines which emotional register is activated, whether the building speaks of reason and aspiration or of grief and the void. The same sphere can produce opposite effects depending on whether light enters through perforations in the ceiling, creating a shower of points that mimic a night sky, or whether the surface absorbs rather than reflects, sinking the whole mass into mourning.

The argument that Boullée is Neoclassical and Futuristic at once

As it has been presented, Boullée starts from recognisably neoclassical premises: Greek and Roman orders, clear geometry, a rhetoric of reason, and an ideal of calm, legible form. At the same time, Boullée inflates and purifies those classical elements so radically that they begin to read as twentieth‑century problems in disguise. The Cenotaph’s naked sphere, the library’s endless hall and the buried “temples of darkness” of his tombs are not variations on classicism but precursors to modernist megastructures and even Brutalist architecture, with their love of bare envelopes, huge scale and repetitive structure.

This double allegiance, which is classical in vocabulary and futuristic in abstraction and scale, is what makes the effect so vivid. The eye recognises the pyramid, the colonnade, and the coffered vault; the body, however, registers their inhuman enlargement and their reduction to almost diagrammatic clarity. Boullée’s work feels like a hinge in architectural history: the last expression of a severe Enlightenment classicism and, simultaneously, an early experiment in architecture as a pure system rather than as a historical style.

He is futuristic in another sense too: in his belief that architecture should be designed from the psychology of the viewer inward. In his treatise, Boullée treats form, light and mass as instruments for inducing precise emotions, as we have already seen. This concern with the ‘character’ of a building as a total atmospheric script prefigures later modern attempts, from avant-garde theatres to totalitarian stadia, to use spatial experience itself as a medium of politics and culture.

Subscribe now

Characteristics of what the twentieth century would call “stripped classicism”, the de facto standard for monumental governmental buildings between the two World Wars, are clearly embodied in the progressive late eighteenth‑century neoclassicism of Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Friedrich Gilly and Sir John Soane. The lineage is direct and traceable: for example, to Albert Speer’s imposing stone buildings drawing on traditional Prussian neoclassicism, the wild drawings of revolutionary‑era French architects and the emerging archaeological evidence of the ancient Greek world. The same formal vocabulary that Boullée designed to instil in citizens the rational emotions appropriate to a just nation was pressed into the service of far less comfortable ideals. This stripped classicism was understandably adopted by totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or the Stalinist Soviet Union, and even by democratic governments such as New Deal America, to convey stability, progress and modernity. Hannes Meyer, the communist second director of the Bauhaus, lauded Ledoux and, by extension, the tradition Boullée established as the precursor of the social architect, while not long afterwards Speer reviewed the Volkshalle in the Third Reich. The Russian architect Boris Iofan, for his part, designed the Palace of the Soviets in the 1930s, a colossal congress hall and administrative centre planned for Moscow near the Kremlin.

This appropriation shall not be a blemish on Boullée’s legacy, nor shall it be dismissed as a coincidence. It is, thus, the most searching critique of architecture parlante imaginable. While Boullée explicitly spelt out the intentions of his method, the twentieth century demonstrated that these forms could speak whatever their commissioners required them to say. In a more metaphorical way, it is in aesthetics that one can see the totalitarian seeds concealed within the revolutionary flower. The same pursuit of pristine, unornamented geometry that Boullée associated with reason and liberation could be recruited to represent authority. Or whatever: the architect becomes a writer in Boullée’s framework.

Then, why does the future deserve this architecture?

If much of the twentieth century treated monumentality with suspicion, Boullée reminds us that some functions still call for architecture that is unembarrassed about scale, clarity and symbolic charge. In an age of digital abstraction and disembodied power, there is a strong case for a renewed, carefully critical monumentality, and it is one that borrows Boullée’s tools without repeating their blind spots.

The idea that a drawing is a legitimate form of autonomous architecture, not dependent on the building, is something we have now taken for granted. And, as you may expect, it has not always been the case. Parametric design and computational fabrication have, in the past two decades, closed much of the gap between his visions and structural possibilities; a sphere of 150 metres, buried in the earth and able to incorporate visual technology for performance—yes, The Sphere in Las Vegas—is no longer the provocation it could have been in the 1790s. The question is no longer whether it can be built, but whether anyone has the resources and the conviction to commission it. If we are past that stage, then it must be a task of ours to present this as convincing as we can be.

First, there are several building types where spatial awe can be their greatest feature: planetary-scale research institutes, global archives, interfaith or secular temples of reflection, memorials, and perhaps even certain infrastructural landmarks such as spaceports, climate-defence works, and planetary observatories. For these, Boullée’s fusion of classical composure and futuristic abstraction is particularly apt: it acknowledges continuity with a long humanist tradition while making visible the unprecedented scale and stakes of our present. A Cenotaph‑like sphere for a future space agency, for example, would literalise the finitude of our planet and our cosmic ambitions in one legible, overwhelming gesture.

Second, Boullée teaches how to make monumental architecture readable without sliding into kitsch. His architecture parlante does its work through massing, symmetry, light and the disposition of voids, and that rigour is crucial for the future: in weary democratic societies wary of propaganda, we may still want buildings that speak, but they should do so through disciplined form rather than didactic imagery. Boullée has offered us a grammar for such speech.

Finally, his work is a reminder that the sublime can be repurposed rather than grudgingly neglected for its past fame. Boullée’s stripped neoclassicism, as it could have been intuited, sits close to the later monumental language that totalitarian regimes exploited, yet his original intent was to align grandeur with enlightenment, knowledge and an ideal new social order, not with mindless domination. The task for the future is to reclaim that ambition consciously: to design a selection of truly monumental buildings that use scale and abstraction to honour human dignity, collective memory and global responsibility. In that narrow but important register, Boullée’s neoclassical‑futuristic imagination is an unused resource that begs to be incorporated by a society enlightened enough.

The reasons the future deserves this architecture are not that Boullée’s forms are just beautiful—though they absolutely are—nor that his theories are intellectually elegant—though they are also that. It is that his entire project rested on a premise that contemporary culture has largely abandoned: that public space has a moral function that rewards the aestheticist’s eye. The twenty-first century, so far, has shown little appetite for Boullée’s underlying conviction. We build efficiently and profitably. We build for spectacle and for brand. We seldom build for greatness and magnificence in any sustained or philosophical sense. We are losing so much beauty.

And so, the tragedy is not that his buildings were never realised but that the question they posed, which is what a society owes its citizens in terms of the spaces it builds for them, has been so thoroughly deferred. As public ambition shrinks and architecture is increasingly subordinated to the logic of the private and the profitable, Boullée’s paper monuments are what may keep architects imaginative, inspired, never ashamed of what their minds can propose.

Imagine a Palace of Justice in which the courthouse sits directly above the prison, the weight of law made literally visible in stone. Imagine a library that is also a temple and a tomb that is also a universe. Buildings should mean something commensurate with what human life means: the spaces in which citizens gather, mourn, celebrate and reason together should rise to the occasion of those acts more than what they ever have.

Before this section turns into a critique of the lack of spirit in modern architecture, let it be an invitation. I urge you, readers, to appreciate Boullée’s ideas and reflect on the power of architecture that elicits a deeper response, stimulates the mind, and uplifts the rationale of the people.

Subscribe now

How is it possible that a single language has served as the vessel for works as immensely profound, complex, and revolutionary as those written in German?

A brief but highly intense overview is enough to see that the literature of Goethe or Rilke, the philosophical architectures of Nietzsche or Hegel, the operatic splendour of Wagner or Strauss, the novels of Kafka or Hesse, and the scientific contributions associated with Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg have all left an enduring mark on their respective disciplines. We should therefore ask ourselves, every time we gain something from it, what would we do in its absence? Although we are not obligated to answer this rhetorical question, it is simply rational to say that no amount of praise will ever be enough to do justice to the fascinating works and writings that have been bequeathed to us in this language.

To speak of German is, in part, to invoke the spirit of the Dichter und Denker: the poets and thinkers, a description used to reference Germany. ‘In part’, because a relevant size of the cultural richness stems from the contributions of German dialects from Switzerland, Austria and other regions; it would be disrespectful not to recognise and celebrate the Silesian, Alemannic, or Bavarian dialects as instruments for great literature and cultural manifestation.

German is a tongue that possesses an uncanny dual nature: it is at once fiercely precise, capable of cutting through complex scientific and philosophical realities, and expressive, remarkably capable of capturing the finest nuances of the human emotional landscape. Too often, modern perceptions of German are reduced to caricatures of rigid bureaucracy or harsh phonetics. To a native speaker, this should come across as comical, but then some fundamental characteristics, say, fine elasticity or rhythmic beauty, are overlooked. By examining its distinct complexity, artistic relevance, and unparalleled contribution to the global intellect, we can begin to see German for what it truly is: a masterwork of human expression.

Subscribe now

No one has ever heard Proto-Indo-European spoken. It has left nothing but its descendants, which is to say, nearly half the world’s languages. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages alone, in an act of linguistic archaeology that is one of the great achievements of modern scholarship. Scholars first noted in the late 18th century the striking similarities among the far-flung languages of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and the implications were staggering: that a Roman soldier, a Vedic priest, and a Germanic tribesman were, in some ancestral sense, linguistic relatives. Take the word “father”: Latin said pater, Sanskrit said pitár, and ancient Greek said patḗr. And down the Germanic branch, our topic of interest, that ancient p, softened by centuries of mouths in northern Europe, turned into the f of Vater in German, and father in English. This curious pattern is known as Grimm’s Law: the discovery, formalised by Jacob Grimm, whom I will pick up later, in the 19th century, that the Indo-European sound p had consistently changed to f as the Germanic languages developed their own branch on the linguistic tree. This was a fair demonstration that languages do not drift arbitrarily, but transform according to hidden laws as regular as mathematics.

Around 500 BC, Germanic tribes began to form a distinct linguistic identity in what is now northern Europe, laying the foundation for today's German, English, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages. These were peoples of the forests, archaeologically associated with the Jastorf culture, and coastlines whose descendants—the Franks, Saxons, Goths, and Alemanni—would later diverge as they spread, separated, and encountered different neighbours. Then, sometime between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD, something began to happen to the consonants spoken in the southern uplands of what is now Germany. The shift involved systematic changes such as turning p into pf or f, t into ts or s, and k into ch—small mutations that accumulated over generations to shape the form of the language. Intriguingly, the peoples of the north, closer to the sea, did not make these changes. And so the Germanic world divided: High German in the mountains and Low German in the flatlands, with the border between them still audible today.

The effects are vivid once you learn to see them. Because English bypassed this shift, it preserved the older Germanic consonants, while German forged a new path. Thus, Old English slǣpan became Old High German slāfan (modern German schlafen), while English kept the ‘p’ in sleep. Old English strǣt became Old High German strāzza (modern Straße), while English kept street. We see it still in English make and German machen, English water and German Wasser, English pound and German Pfund.

When Roman legions pushed into the Germanic territories from the 1st century BC onwards, they brought with them not only roads and fortifications but vocabulary. Numerous Latin concepts from trade, war, and infrastructure expanded the Germanic vocabulary. This early contact gave the language terms like Kaiser, borrowed directly from the imperial title Caesar, as well as mūra (from Latin murus, later Mauer, meaning ‘wall’), or strāzza (Straße, meaning ‘street’, from the Latin via strata). The Germanic tribes were never fully absorbed into Rome, but the contact was deep enough to leave permanent marks. Some of these are recognisable with a degree of effort: words like Pforte, Tafel, Mauer, and Käse derive from Latin porta, tabula, murus, and caseus, respectively. Then came Christianity, bringing a massive shift in the spiritual and intellectual landscape. While many religious terms were borrowed directly from Latin, others revealed deeper, unexpected pathways, such as Kirche (church), which bypassed Latin entirely, travelling from the Greek kyriake via early Gothic contact with the East. In German-speaking regions, runic writing was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet as Christianity spread, which meant that the very act of writing German became, in a sense, an act of translation, a borrowing from Rome in form even as the content remained thoroughly Germanic. The oldest surviving texts in Old High German, composed in monastery scriptoria from around the 8th century, are almost entirely religious: prayers, glosses, and hymns.

Between roughly 1350 and 1650, German passed through the formative stage known as Early New High German, a period in which written usage gradually became more stable and more widely intelligible across regions.

The growth of cities and trade, the founding of universities, and, above all, the arrival of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century revolutionised the spread of written material in a way that is almost impossible to overstate. Before it, a book was a luxury object, hand-copied by a monk over months, accessible only to the clergy, the nobility, or the very rich. That is why we are taught about Gutenberg at school: his contributions fundamentally redefined who had access to knowledge, and by extension, who held power in society. With the invention of printing, certain variants of written German started to be used more widely than in their region of origin, and the slow, grinding work of standardisation had begun.

Martin Luther played a key role in popularising the written German language. What made his translation of Das Newe Testament Deutzsch in 1522 so consequential was not only its theological content but also its language. He controversially wrote about his method in the famous 1530 treatise, Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen:

One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in the home, the children on the streets, the common man in the marketplace and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly.

The result was a German that was neither the stiff chancery language of official documents nor the narrow dialect of any single region, but something drawn from the living speech of ordinary people and shaped into a clarity that all could share. For the first time, German speakers across different regions had access to a common text in a relatively uniform dialect. All preachers, educators and printers preferred it because it successfully reached the peoples. Over time, what people began to call Lutherdeutsch became the backbone of what we now know as modern standard German.

The mid-17th century saw the loss of status for regional forms of language and set in motion the triumph of German over Latin as the dominant language for public discourse. Until the early 17th century, Latin was the language of the literary and educated elites; inspired by the rise of the vernacular in the Netherlands, German thinkers began to argue for the value of their own language for poetic expression. A very good example is Martin Opitz, a Silesian poet who, in 1618, wrote an early essay called Aristarchus, presenting the German language as suitable for serious poetry, a claim that, a generation earlier, would have struck many learned readers as absurd. He followed it in 1624 with his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey, a Book of German Poetics, which established long-standing rules for the purity of language, style, verse, and rhyme and insisted upon word stress rather than syllable-counting as the basis of German verse. It was a manifesto for the dignity of the language. The century also saw a flourishing of literary societies dedicated to fostering German in literature, such as the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the Fruitbearing Society, founded in 1617 by members of the court at Weimar. Noblemen and scholars were sitting together, thinking over the German word for a concept previously expressed only in Latin or French, and this was something actually new.

The Reformation and the humanist movement also expanded the reach of German into theology, civic life, and philosophy. They supplied linguistic skills, techniques of textual criticism, and a critique of scholastic theology, and then, since many of the reformers had been Renaissance humanists in their youth, they ensured the continuity of humanist values by incorporating them into reformed schooling. Languages, rhetoric, poetry, and history all found their place in the Lutheran educational curriculum. The consequence was profound: a generation of students emerged who had been educated in German as well as in Latin, who wrote and thought in their own tongue rather than in a borrowed one.

In that shift, German began to be portrayed as a language capable of intellectual seriousness, public authority, and literary power. The stage was set for Kant, for Goethe, for Schiller. All they had to do was step onto it.

From this point onwards, German also came to be a language of introspection, art, and philosophical depth through its writers. The remarkable thing about German literature is not exactly that it produced great writers, for every major language has those, but that it produced, within a relatively short period of time, a collection of figures so different from one another in temperament and method, yet all working to reinvent the world in different ways. To read Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, von Kleist, Grillparzer, Schopenhauer, Heine or the Grimm brothers is to watch a language discover successive rooms within itself. These and many other authors soon realised the greatness that could be achieved through literature, whether it was to convey revolutionary ideas, describe extraordinary characters, or uncover the soaring and the moral, and seized it without hesitating.

Goethe and Schiller stand at the centre of this tradition.

The meeting of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar and Jena in 1794 began not only a friendship but also a dialogue that proved mutually productive and creative; Weimar Classicism is considered the culmination of German literature. The two men were temperamentally unlike. Goethe was vast, patient, and empirical, a poet who was also a scientist who wrote about plants and colour and light and who lived to be eighty-two years of age and never stopped learning, and whose work was alternatively lushly emotional, rigorously formal, brief and epigrammatic, and epic. Schiller, by contrast, burnt. He wrote the Ode to Joy at twenty-five and died at forty-five, having spent the intervening years in a sustained argument with history, mortality, and the nature of human freedom.

George Eliot called Goethe “Germany’s greatest man of letters and the last true polymath to walk the earth.” Not in vain: Faust was the work in which German arguably achieved its fullest breadth. Goethe began it in his twenties and completed the second part in the final year of his life, having carried it across more than six decades of revision and thought. It is simultaneously a morality play, a love story, a philosophical argument, a classical masque, and a meditation on what it means to strive without rest. German has itself been altered by Faust: the phrase des Pudels Kern, the hidden core of the matter, the real thing beneath appearances, entered the language from the play and remains in common use. Succeeding generations of great German musicians were convinced that a Faust composition would be the finest thing for art; Beethoven dreamed of turning it into an opera, while Liszt, Schumann, and Mahler created monumental pieces inspired in whole or in part by the work. In this way, the play became a cultural gravitational field because Goethe’s German pulled composers, painters, and thinkers into its orbit for generations. His poetry was set to music by almost every major German composer—think of Beethoven’s Egmont or Schubert’s Erlkönig.

Schiller offers a different kind of beauty: not breadth but elevation. His thinking centred on beauty not merely as an abstract aesthetic concept but as a morally forceful one, where the good is the beautiful, and he linked this to human freedom. The Ode to Joy, written in 1785, is the most famous expression of this. The poem deifies joy as a metaphysical force animating all of creation, and arrives at the rallying cry that all mankind are brothers, a spirit of unity and jubilation reflective of the late 18th-century German Enlightenment at its most hopeful. It is a poem so large in its ambition that, less than four decades later, Beethoven judged it sufficient to close a symphony. And in December 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down, Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of that symphony in which he changed a single word in Schiller’s text: Freiheit, freedom, in place of Freude, joy. The change worked because, in the poet’s thinking, the two words were always nearly the same thing.

The Lied, or when German became music

In the 19th century, the German Lied became one of the most important genres through which poetry and music were brought together in intimate performance settings. Although Italian bel canto long remained the dominant ideal in elite vocal culture, composers such as Franz Schubert, Robert and Clara Schumann, and later Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf demonstrated that German diction, with its stresses, consonants, and tonal inflections, could serve as a powerful expressive resource rather than a limitation.

This repertory also helped establish serious poetry in the salon and the domestic sphere, where art song became central to private music-making and cultivated sociability. Setting the verses of Heinrich Heine, Joseph von Eichendorff, and various folk and folk-like texts, many composers created works in which voice and piano often function as closely balanced partners. A good example is Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill), by Franz Schubert, a famous song cycle inspired by Wilhelm Müller’s poem; the piano suggests animosity, irony, grief, or psychological depth that the text can only imply.

The Grimm brothers cover the picture from another angle

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are often remembered for Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the collection of fairy tales, first published in 1812, that preserved the oral traditions of German-speaking Europe and gave the world Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White in their canonical forms. But this familiar reputation can obscure something equally important: the Grimms were among the most rigorous scholars of their age. Together they were among the most important German scholars of their time, and Jacob in particular did crucial work in historical linguistics and Germanic philology.

Jacob’s Deutsche Grammatik, published in successive volumes between 1819 and 1837, was not a grammar in the ordinary sense. The word deutsch in the title does not mean strictly “German”; rather, it means “common” in its etymological sense, and the work traces for the first time the historical development of all the Germanic languages together. Jacob described his own purpose with a modest grandeur:

“Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest endeavour.”

The Deutsche Grammatik was recognised as the greatest philological work of its age, the foundation upon which modern historical linguistics was built. Its subject, the author wrote, was the history which lies hidden in the words of the German language: the oldest natural history of the Germanic tribes, determined by means of language itself. There is something deeply fitting about the Grimms appearing in a meditation on the beauty of German. They were, in their different ways, guardians: Wilhelm gathering the stories that common people told by firelight, and Jacob uncovering the ancient laws of sound that connect a German word to its Latin and Sanskrit cousins, as it was presented in the beginning. Both understood that a language is not only what it says in the present tense; it is everything it has carried and survived. German was not only a literary medium but an object of rigorous intellectual inquiry. A mystery worth spending a lifetime on.

Rainer Maria Rilke belongs to a later generation, yet he extends this tradition in a more intimate and haunting direction

In the autumn of 1902, a young Rainer Maria Rilke, the Bohemian-Austrian poet, arrived in Paris with the premise of writing a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke approached Rodin as a biographer and critic, probing his worldview and his works, and what he absorbed changed the way he saw the world entirely. The key lesson was not technical but perceptual. Rodin worked by looking, by fixing his attention on a thing so completely, for so long, that its inner life became visible. Under this influence, Rilke pioneered the Dinggedicht, the thing-poem, shifting German poetry away from personal romanticism toward an almost sculptural, impersonal precision.

His masterwork of this period, Der Panther (1903), demonstrates how quietly German grammar can execute immense philosophical weight. After repeated visits to the Ménagerie within the Jardin des Plantes, where a caged panther paced in its enclosure, he stood and watched until the poem arrived. It opens like this:

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

“His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.”1 Here, the verb halten, to hold, is put in an intransitive, almost abstract sense; the gaze itself can no longer retain reality. The second stanza turns from the eyes to the body: the soft gait of supple, strong paces, turning in the smallest of circles, is described as wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte / in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht: “is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.” By stacking these inflected adjectives without punctuation, the German syntax fuses two opposing physical qualities into a single, seamless impression. The poem ends with a sensory image entering the panther’s eye, travelling to the heart, and choosing aufzuhören zu sein, “to stop being”, though the presented translation uses “… and is gone”. Aufzuhören zu sein is a phrasing quite unique to the elasticity of German, making death feel not like a violent event but a quiet, absolute cessation.

The poem is twelve lines long, and to read it in German is to understand what the language can do when the poet searches for the exact wording, in a language that prizes exactness.

Where Der Panther found power in structural compression, Rilke’s later masterpiece and widely considered his best, the Duino Elegies (1923), pushes the reader into the stratosphere of existential longing. Written after a decade-long battle with depression and the trauma of the First World War, the elegies open with a devastating question:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” Beautifully, by choosing the archaic, extended subjunctive schriee over the standard schrie, Rilke forces the grammar itself to simulate cosmic uncertainty, holding the hypothetical cry at an agonising distance. All ten elegies move through longing, loss, the transience of beauty, and the strange task of being alive and conscious in a world in which you create the meaning. They are among the most philosophically searching poems in any language, and they required German not because these feelings could not exist in another tongue, but because the language gave Rilke the tools to hold the idea and the grief simultaneously, in the same word, without resolving one into the other.

German has long been one of the great languages of philosophy.

This is not simply a matter of reputation; in the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, German did something that relatively few languages have been called on to do: it became the primary architectural medium for thought itself. Not only a vehicle for conveying ideas worked out in advance, but the structure within which those ideas were discovered, tested, and extended. To read these philosophers in German, fascinatingly so, is to understand how the language was thinking alongside them.

This tongue builds its conceptual vocabulary from within. Rather than borrowing a Latin or Greek word when a new idea needs a name, as English or other languages typically do, German fuses existing words together into a compound that carries its meaning in transparent, audible parts. The result, as it has been shown, is a philosophical lexicon that explains itself as it speaks. Selbstbewusstsein: Selbst (self) + Bewusstsein (consciousness, from bewusst, aware, + sein, being), would be something like “the self folded back on its own being.” Or Weltanschauung: Welt (world) + Anschauung (intuition, beholding), which Kant coined in the Critique of the Power of Judgement in 1790, using it once, almost in passing, to name a sensible intuition of the world held up against a rational idea. Not surprisingly, the word far outlived its single usage. It came into wider circulation through German Romanticism and philosophy in the mid-19th century, eventually denoting the total image through which a person or a culture orders the universe: its values, its sense of beginning, and its supreme end.

However, it is not only compound nouns that give German its philosophical power. The syntax permits sentences of enormous nested complexity, in which subordinate clauses and qualifications accumulate before the main verb appears and resolves everything. Philosophers adored this and used it to further elaborate their ideas. Witty people used it to create curiously long and often unhelpful words such as Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft (or, Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services). Words or sentences hold their meaning in suspension, asking the reader to maintain multiple distinctions in mind simultaneously, then release them at the end. It is rather clever linguistic architecture than difficulty for its own sake.

The relationship, of course, runs both ways

The language shaped the philosophers, but the philosophers did not simply use German but expanded it, sometimes violently, sometimes with extraordinary care. Hegel is one of the supreme examples with his famous term Aufhebung, rendered in English as “sublation,” a word so technical it is a deliberate exploitation of an ambiguity already present in ordinary German. Aufheben simultaneously means “to cancel,” “to preserve,” and “to lift up”; and Hegel seized on that triple meaning because it described fully what he believed dialectical thought does: it negates a position, preserves what was true in it, and raises both to a higher unity. Hegel thematises this explicitly in the Science of Logic, drawing attention to the word’s multiple meanings: “To sublate has a twofold meaning in the language: it means at the same time to preserve and to cause to cease.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, came at the language not often as a builder but more as an anatomist. In his 1873 essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, he asked what philosophical language actually is and answered, “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” In other words, the philosopher who claims to speak truth is merely spending old coins, no longer noticing that the face is gone. But notice what the critique presupposes: a language rich and flexible enough to construct the metaphor that undoes all metaphysics. German gave Nietzsche the tools to saw off the branch he was sitting on, and he did it with clear delight.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, similarly, became one of the most important German anatomists by making language itself the object of philosophy rather than its instrument and developing a theory that, although put together with his later Philosophical Investigations, added many layers to the standard philosophical thought process, particularly in German. Austrian, not German, he produced in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921 a handful of stunning propositions, from which two stand out the most: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein believed that most philosophical confusion arose not from difficult ideas but from language used carelessly and that the task of thought was to map the boundary between what can be meaningfully said and what cannot. On the other hand, the second quote is a sharp observation about how language and consciousness are built together. Both are very German-language-coded ideas, if it makes sense to go back to how German reminds us that it is important that language should not be allowed to approximate or diminish what lies beyond it.

And then there is Heidegger, for whom German was not simply a medium but a destiny. He believed, and said so directly, that only Greek and German were capable of genuine philosophical thought, and that other European languages had compromised themselves by relying too heavily on Latin abstractions. He described the German language’s relationship to philosophical inquiry in this well-known passage:

“Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”

In short, language is not a tool we pick up and put down; it is the structure we inhabit. This is a claim that could only have been made by someone thinking in German, in a tradition that had spent a long time building philosophical structures of almost cathedral complexity comfortably within its realm and without needing further contributions from other languages.

German, then, became not just a vessel for thought but one of the places where thought seemed to find its most exacting verbal form. And the single words that the tradition coined, such as Weltanschauung, Aufhebung, Dasein, and Angst, passed into other languages untranslated because the receiving languages had no equivalent architecture to house them. These German migrants were kept in their original form because to change them would be to lose their adequate meaning.

If you have reached this far, you cannot possibly leave without learning some of these concepts. Carefully note the characteristics described so far, performing:

Waldeinsamkeit — Wald (forest) + Einsamkeit (solitude). The feeling of wandering alone in the woods and sensing a deep, almost spiritual connection with nature. Not loneliness, which implies something missing; rather a full and deliberate solitude, the kind that restores. It originated with the early German Romantic poet Ludwig Tieck in his 1797 short story Der blonde Eckbert (The Fair Eckbert).

Zweisamkeit — a word built as the mirror image of Einsamkeit (loneliness), replacing ein (one) with zwei (two). The feeling of perfect contentment that comes from being alone with another person. Shared solitude, intimate and complete. Something similar to “twoness” or “togetherness.”

Torschlusspanik — Tor (gate) + Schluss (closing) + Panik (panic). Evoking the stark imagery of rushing to get inside city walls before the gates slam shut at dusk, this term captures the dread that time is closing in on an opportunity, a decade, or a life’s possibility. In August 1961, Time magazine famously imported the word to describe the frantic exodus of East Germans flooding west just before the Berlin Wall sealed the border.

Fingerspitzengefühl — literally “fingertip feeling.” An intuitive sensitivity or instinct in delicate situations, or the capacity to sense what is required without needing it explained. It is the word for a diplomat who reads a room, a surgeon who knows by touch, and a musician who needs no metronome.

Verschlimmbessern — A brilliant blend of verschlimmern (to worsen) and verbessern (to improve), popularised by the 18th-century satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. To make something worse while attempting to improve it. A word that is, on its surface, comic, but contains within it a quiet philosophical warning: the road to ruin is often paved with good intentions and excessive intervention.

Treppenwitz — Treppen (stairs) + Witz (wit). The perfect reply you think of only after you have already left, while descending the staircase. The French call this l'esprit de l'escalier, but the German version is blunter, more physical, and definitively funnier.

Language is, in essence, a record of what a people has noticed, what it has suffered, and what it has been moved to name, and the speakers of German have noticed a great deal. It has named grief in all its weights and textures, built words of cathedral complexity for the most interior of experiences, given some of the greatest thinkers tools that allowed them to articulate thoughts no earlier vocabulary could have held, and given poets a medium so precisely attuned to the sounds and rhythms that it became irreplaceable, timeless, and exceptional.

To learn even a small part of it is to understand what language can be when a tradition insists on it. Not just adequate, not just clear, but generous, surprising, and inexhaustibly alive.

Share

Subscribe now

It is arguably fair to say that Franz Liszt (1811-1886) invented the modern idea of the musical genius. He, the Hungarian-born piano virtuoso who once conquered European concert halls through the 1840s, sparked what Heinrich Heine called ‘Lisztomania’ (the intense fan frenzy and hysterical adoration directed at him during his recitals) and then renounced his touring performer career at its peak to compose majestic, boundary-breaking works like the revised Campanella, Mazeppa, Orpheus, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, or the renowned symphonies of Faust and Dante. Liszt lived, to say the least, an interesting life. From brilliant prodigy to theatrical virtuoso, and from accomplished, mature composer to redemptive, though equally enlightened, man of faith. Similarly, the music he composed aligned with the various stages of his life, offering an extensive, innovative and outstanding repertoire that became the inspiration for figures like Wagner, Saint-Saëns, Grieg and Rosenthal.

This is why he is such an irresistible Faustian figure. This restless arc, from devilish showman to abbé in Rome, is a succulent plot that lends itself naturally to incorporating Goethe’s Faust, not without adding touches of Lisztian uniqueness, and with him channelling this tragedy into exquisite music where doubt or ache meets triumphant yet shadowed glory, each harmonic breakthrough still carrying the bruise of temptation. This invites us to rethink his genius less as just blessed talent and more as a long-standing myth of self-creation, in which Liszt performs, composes, and re-enchants his own conflicted identity in dialogue with the most famous bargain in modern literature.

Subscribe now

The history and relationship between the play and that of its intriguing Hungarian projection is a connection that extends to various aspects of the latter’s life. The way his life unfolded is only the first aspect of the interpretation.

For instance, the story of Liszt and devils has been a captivating retelling, full of surprising details. In 1823, when he was 11 years old, he had met Beethoven after his musical mentor, Austrian composer Carl Czerny, arranged this encounter. Beethoven praised Liszt, gave him the Weihekuss (a ‘kiss of consecration’ on the forehead) and famously called him a “devil of a fellow” after seeing his exceptional skills on the piano. Years later, in what we might call the ‘pact’, Liszt had decided to devote his career to creating a brilliant, virtuosic project, drawing an initial inspiration from Niccolò Paganini, a devil-like figure himself, whom he thought very highly of: “What wonderful things might be done with the piano if its technical possibilities were developed as those of the violin have been by [him],” Liszt said after seeing him perform at the beginning of the 1830s. After this, the young man who had once considered priesthood started practising up to fourteen hours a day and went on to embody the ‘Mephistophelian virtuoso’. The image he had created was a sensation: the central character in the ‘Lisztomania’ effect, a Don Juan who stirred up frenzy and passion wherever he went, yet was also the owner of a prodigious and tireless technique, at times idyllic.

In the late 1830s and early ‘40s, Liszt shared a scandalous union with the French writer Marie d’Agoult, who left her husband to follow him across Italy and Switzerland, bore him three children, and then later recast their story in her novel Nélida. Curiously, much like Gretchen in Faust Part I, d'Agoult sacrificed her social standing and domestic security for a man possessed by a restless, transcendental drive. Goethe’s Gretchen inhabits what the drama implicitly calls the ‘kleine Welt’, a small, bounded world of faith, family, and propriety, and it is precisely this world that Faust’s ungovernable ambition enters and destroys, not out of malice but out of an inability to be contained by anything human-scaled. Following a similar logic, d’Agoult staked everything on a man for whom no single love, place, or life—at least at the time—could ever be sufficient. The couple would separate in 1844.

What musicologists call Liszt’s Weimar years (1848–1861) are what shift the arc from sheer ambition to ‘seeker’: after countless journeys, he finally settles in the German city of Weimar with the Polish princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein; he turns away from the itinerant ‘rock star’ life and reinvents himself as Kapellmeister, symphonic poet, and an advocate for other prominent musicians (he would eventually become the father-in-law of Wagner) while ultimately working on direct Faustian projects like the Faust Symphony. We owe this initial transition largely to Carolyne, who saved Liszt from the triviality of his early fame, as she felt his talent was being wasted on his theatrical reputation as a virtuoso, and that he was capable of much more, guiding him through a more mature and elevated path: that of the cutting-edge composer. The ‘Faustian zeal’ that drove him during those years led him to become one of the leading figures of the Neudeutsche Schule—the New German School of music—bringing a transformative and grandiose vision to music, just as Carolyne had envisioned.

“Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan” (The eternal feminine draws us upward) is the line that closes Faust, Part Two, symbolising that divine love, grace, and creativity, often represented as a feminine force, elevate humanity toward higher spiritual, intellectual, and moral realms. In essence, Carolyne can be seen as an attempt of a Mater Gloriosa whose intercession partially redeems Liszt, but in the end, just as in the play, it would be God’s wager that prevails, or, in this case, Liszt’s ultimate arrival at priesthood.

The abortive plan to marry Carolyne in Rome in 1861–65, blocked at the last minute by church politics and her family’s pressure, reads like a grotesque parody of Faust’s failures: after years of sacrifice, Liszt is left humiliated and abruptly alone in the Ewige Stadt, like the Earth Spirit mocked Faust. In the wake of this failure, the composer turned sharply toward the Church, receiving the tonsure and four minor orders in 1865, donning the cassock as “Abbé Liszt,” and explicitly framing Rome as a place where he hoped, in one biographer’s phrase, “to overcome his own self, the demon that dwelt within him.” In Goethe’s play, Faust famously laments, “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast!” and this is perhaps what Liszt had felt in this transition: lingering between his Mephistophelean past and his seraphic-seeker future.

Later in life Liszt would write about her when he heard about Sayn-Wittgenstein’s death in 1872:

She was one of the purest manifestations of God’s blessing on earth. Her long suffering, endured with so much Christian meekness and resignation, matured her for the heavens. There, she finally entered the joy of the Lord, where the world will not touch her and where infinity alone was worthy of her exalted soul.

The late “three-city” phase, dividing Liszt’s time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest, suggests a Faustian twilight rather than a simple conversion narrative. In Rome he wrote austere sacred works like Via Crucis, Christus, or, though less holy, Totentanz, while in Weimar and Budapest he still presided over masterclasses, cultivated younger composers, and continued to produce devil‑tinged pieces such as the later Mephisto Waltzes, as if oscillating between being a monk and a magician. The end of his biography comes to conclude with not a clean moral resolution, but with a soul shifting between negation and grace. Liszt curating the resignation from the concert stage, changing his life in Weimar, and ending in Roman ordination are small ‘death and resurrection’ scenes that make his life story yet again rhyme with Goethe’s work.

Share

This analysis would not be complete without Liszt’s mentioned Faustian composition: A Faust Symphony in Three Character Sketches after Goethe (1854, revised 1857).

Liszt became acquainted with the play earlier in life, notably being introduced to Gérard de Nerval’s translation of the play by the French composer Hector Berlioz. Liszt had returned to it repeatedly, but it would not be until years later that a musical project crystallised. It seems he had been undecided, as many accounts suggest he felt somewhat disheartened about carrying out the project. However, it is known that Liszt had something of a revelation, which led him to complete the first version in 1854 in only two months of all-consuming inspiration.

A pioneer of leitmotifs, he structured this composition in an unconventional way: a three-movement psychological and illustrative portrait of the main characters Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. Much can be said about the musical character of these movements. The opening Faust movement, built on five interrelated themes, begins with a famously chromatic idea that uses all twelve notes in succession, something unprecedented in music at the time. Across the movement, motifs are subjected to thematic transformation, turning from brooding to heroic, from inward to declamatory. This transmits an image of intellectual doubt and restless striving that anticipates later twelve‑tone experiments and portrays a recognisable part of his own life.

The central Gretchen movement shifts to a gentler sound world, with two simple, lyrical themes and transparent orchestration (clarinet, harp, and strings) suggesting an ideal of pure, tender love that gradually absorbs elements of Faust’s music. By contrast, in Mephistopheles, Liszt gives the devil no independent theme, instead letting him mock, distort, and tear apart four of the five Faust motifs with grotesque chromaticism and rhythmic agitation, while Gretchen’s music alone resists corruption and emerges intact. Leonard Bernstein, in his Young People’s Concert, observed in the symphony that in some curious way, judging only by the music, Liszt liked Mephistopheles, the Spirit of Negation, for it brought out the most imagination, the most invention, and the most orchestral brilliance in him. We can see this in later pieces, such as the Mephisto Waltzes (composed between 1859 and 1885), the Mephisto Polka (1883), or the Bagatelle sans tonalité (1885), which were not the only musical reference to this devil but, curiously, also the early Malediction (1833).

In the final choral “Chorus mysticus”, added in the later revision of the symphony, the work turns explicitly to a sort of redemption reminiscent of Goethe’s Eternal Feminine, but given that so much of the symphony’s energy resides in Faust’s virtuosity and Mephistopheles’ corrosive brilliance, the piece originally left a distinctly ambiguous aftertaste that Liszt needed to disambiguate. He would be, otherwise, “only” staging his own lingering negotiations between doubt, greatness, and grace, making the symphony appear like a self-portrait.

So, the Faust myth has found its way into the artist yet again. This myth describes something permanently true about a certain kind of ambition: unstoppable, inescapable, the kind that foresees its own torment whilst charging headlong towards success, the kind that gives rise, in the same person, to an insatiable, almost saintly seeker but also to a tragic self-mocker. In a sense, Liszt was destined to encounter a similar spiritual motif sooner or later, for during his life, he had strived towards everything at the same time: mastery, sanctity, scandal, originality, tradition, celebrity, and obscurity, as opposed to many Romantic artists of his era, who strived towards either the perfect poem, the redemptive opera, or the revolutionary symphony. Liszt was destined to become a Faust.

The virtuoso’s Faustian project, then, reads like a meditation on what it means to be a modern self torn between boundless striving and the limits of mortal life. In Faust, the pact with Mephistopheles serves as a dramatic representation of the urge to sacrifice spiritual integrity in exchange for knowledge, experience or power, which has proved to be a useful lens through which to analyse modern individualism and an era defined by relentless ambition, alongside a wealth of possibilities. Liszt translates that philosophical problem into, among many scenes, sound: experimental, ever‑transforming thematic variability and tearful artistry. It participates in what Czech philosopher Jan Patočka calls titanism: the drive of modern figures to push beyond inherited limits while still haunted by religious and ethical questions they cannot simply discard.

This comparison illuminates Liszt in a very special way. It would not be absurd to say that critics and musicologists were certainly not the first to see traces of Faust in Liszt’s persona, for the emergence of the Faustian condition in his life, as I had made clear, sometimes seemed to stem from his own introspection and symbolism. Thankfully, it must have been him, and he alone, who best expressed this mythology in something as complex and immortal as music, perhaps hoping to convey the idea to a future Faust figure. Regardless, it is we, the mortals, who will be able to gather these fragments, piece them together and draw inspiration from their essence, someday.

Share

Subscribe now

His proficient career, comprising more than two hundred works that include books, plays, essays, short stories, and even films, was marked by a discipline and introspection that astonished the national literary scene and, soon, the international one too. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he is yet an international icon of literary excellence, intense aestheticism, and kokutai, or the unique spiritual and constitutional essence of the Japanese nation.

His personal development, too, did anything but fall behind. He mastered martial arts, took up bodybuilding and, later in life, trained with Japan’s Self-Defence Forces, determined to forge his physical being into something as deliberate and formidable as his prose. He travelled through the world, was a film actor and director, and founded a private militia of one hundred university students called the Tatenokai, or the “Shield Society,” whom he drilled in bushidō and physical endurance, funded entirely from his own royalties.

However, his persona was far more complex and controversial than this. Labelled a misogynist, having had a complicated sexuality, and being a far-right nationalist amid an era characterised by distraught towards fascism, he revered men of action, those who had put their bodies where their beliefs were. For most of his life, he had felt an unbearable irony of being a man of action trapped inside a man of letters. Mishima, then, must be studied with notable scrutiny, but never without vigour.

Clearly, he is not a figure for everyone, but he is highly impactful and fascinating from nearly any angle you look at: through his unyielding fusion of beauty, violence, and fervour as a man whose life was lived in exaltation, contradiction, trauma, and grandiloquence. Likewise, and most excitingly, these conditions shaped his future development into a kind of distorted Übermensch, whose self‑creation actually culminates in aestheticised ruin, but does satisfy a riveting kind of transcendence.

Subscribe now

Perhaps the fairest question to start with is ‘What makes him so special?’

Mishima was born on 14 January 1925, in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo, into a household that was a theatre of extremes. His early childhood was dominated by the presence of his paternal grandmother, Natsuko, a woman of fierce aristocratic pretension descended from samurai lineage, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. At only fifty days old, she moved him from his parents’ room into her own dark room downstairs of the family home. Mishima’s mother, Shizue, was permitted to hold her son only at feeding time.

The bizarre, cloistered experience with his grandmother is a reasonable trigger to understand the person he became. Natsuko experienced violent, even morbid outbursts that bordered on madness, refused to let Mishima play outside with the other boys, and kept him inside, where he and his female cousins would play with dolls. She did not allow him to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport, or to mix freely with other children. Some have understandably traced Mishima’s lifelong fascination with the bizarre and the exorbitant directly to Natsuko. In spite of this, she was also the one who exposed him to the French and the Germans, as much as to the Kabuki or Noh theatres, substantially expanding his cultural worldview.

This beginning was a rich immersion into the classical Japanese aesthetic: a world of stylised beauty, ritual, and tragedy.

He began writing his first stories at the age of twelve, taking inspiration from myths such as the Kojiki or Greek mythology, and from the work of Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Baudelaire. After all, literature would be one of the few windows through which he could view the outside world and borrow thinking. His debut work, The Forest in Full Bloom, was serialised in the prestigious literary magazine Bungei Bunka in 1941 and later published in limited book form in 1944 due to wartime paper shortages. In this later publication, he was 19. Mishima had it published as a keepsake to remember him by, as he assumed he would die in the war—a thought many Japanese had at the time. His mentor, Zenmei Hasuda, wrote of him in the magazine’s editorial notes: “This youthful author is a heaven-sent child of eternal Japanese history.”

But the war, for him, would wound him in several ways from which he never fully recovered. When Mishima went for his military medical examination, he had a cold and, on the spur of the moment, lied to the army doctor about having symptoms of tuberculosis.

Why had I looked so frank as I lied to the army doctor? … I realised vividly that my future life would never attain heights of glory sufficient to justify my having escaped death in the army…

This left Mishima with a lingering regret that he should have died heroically for his country but had survived instead. And the guilt of staying behind would remain inside him for the rest of his life, becoming an obsession with physical strength, martial discipline, and, eventually, the idea of a beautiful death.

15 August, 1945. Mishima was deeply affected by Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast announcing the surrender of Japan. This, the Emperor’s subsequent repudiation of his own divinity in January 1946, the renunciation of war in the new constitution of 1947, and the gradual assimilation of American habits and culture, in Mishima’s eyes, testified to the bankruptcy of the Japanese soul. And out of that wreckage, he continued writing and forming his ideals. In July 1949, his first novel, Confessions of a Mask, was published, immediately causing him to be called one of the most promising writers of Japan. This semi-biographical work tells the story of a young man performing a version of himself for society, hiding desire and hiding identity, and it was a clever interplay of personal shame and social performance, a dynamic that many Japanese writers examined in various ways (for example, Dazai, Sōseki, or Ranpo). Beneath its personal anguish, it was also a diagnosis of postwar Japan itself: a nation performing normalcy over a wound that bled profusely, yet one to which not everyone dared to react, let alone respond.

Nevertheless, this political philosophy began to fully manifest from the late 50s and 60s onwards, but it could be said that the end of the war ultimately changed the course of his intellectual path.

This trajectory is what sets him apart from most of his contemporaries. It marked the first clear signs of his talent in the written tradition, and everything he did afterward was a reaction to what had happened to him and to his country, driven by a reckoning so personal that it sought to be universal. His genius, irrevocably shaped by the place and time in which he was born, found fertile ground in which to take root. Seen against that backdrop, Mishima’s character and psychology become much easier to grasp, quite like extreme and coherent responses to his circumstances.

Share

Understanding his thought and philosophy

This man thought, created, and championed so much that thousands of books and critical studies could be written about him.

His ideology is the first characteristic with which people immediately form a negative idea of his persona. Mishima was an ardent, unapologetic nationalist. However, to dismiss him on those grounds alone is to misunderstand what his nationalism actually meant for him and where it came from; it was not the nationalism of conquest or ethnic supremacy. It was something closer to grief, or what is often described as cultural and aesthetic. Mishima looked at postwar Japan: frail in spirit, pacified, increasingly Westernised, and saw a people who had traded the depth of their own civilisation for the comfort of another. He saw a country very different from the one he had grown up in, and heard so much about, and loved so much, too; a country pertinent to the bushidō, the veneration of the Emperor, the willingness to sacrifice, and the concept of dying with dignity rather than living without it. He did not even find satisfaction in the economic miracle that Japan experienced. Agree with his conclusions or not, it is impossible to engage honestly with Mishima and pretend that what drove him was simple or ugly, or nonsensical. For him, beauty and sacrifice were made of the same ether, etched in the same philosophy. This, of course, does not mean exonerating its political consequences.2

Alongside his nationalism, and perhaps just as misunderstood, was the question of his sexuality. He was, by nearly all credible biographical accounts, a man attracted to men, though he spent decades performing the opposite: marrying Yoko Sugiyama in 1958, fathering two children, and maintaining the public image of a virile, heterosexual patriot. Yet the evidence of who he truly was bled through the work constantly and with extraordinary candour. Confessions of a Mask, his breakthrough novel of 1949, is at its core a portrait of homosexual desire in a society that had no place for it. “It is a common failing of childhood,” he writes in Confessions of a Mask, “to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon, the demon will be satisfied.” It can be said that he never satisfied his. One of his biographers, John Nathan, who knew him very well personally, concluded that Mishima’s eroticism present in his oeuvre and the male body were inseparable, and that his eventual death was in part the culmination of a lifelong fantasy that was as much sensual as it was political. As examples, there is the eroticisation of male camaraderie, the use of imposing uniforms, and the enshrinement of disciplined bodies.

Hence, Mishima’s views on masculinity were inseparable from his views on death, beauty, and national identity, which is to say, they were never really about masculinity alone. For him, the male body was not only a physical fact but also an existential motive: the ultimate proof that a man had submitted himself to discipline, pain, and something larger than comfort. The correct work to understand these thoughts is Sun and Steel, which reads as an invincible testimony of a man who repurposed his life. In an era when many men traded wartime militarism for corporate salaryman stability, Mishima insisted that the body must display visible readiness to die. In addition, he is said to have been around 155 centimetres tall, a fact that contributed to his self-consciousness and motivated him to indulge in bodybuilding as a form of compensation. All of his efforts to ‘become masculine’ were, mostly, penance and philosophy made flesh. He wrote in Sun and Steel that he had come to believe words alone were a sanctuary for cowards:

And since my own, abnormal bodily existence was doubtless a product of the intellectual corrosion of words, the ideal body—the ideal existence—must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words.3

True selfhood required the body to be brought into alignment with the mind, even if that alignment could only be completed by destruction. His ideal man was not the intellectual but the warrior: someone for whom thought and action were the same gesture and for whom death, when it came, arrived not as a defeat but as a proof.

And to finish, there is his misogyny, which tended toward an explicit and theorised stance that influenced his essays and fiction. In 1954 he wrote an essay called “Discourse on Misogyny”, where he defended contempt for women as a kind of moral and aesthetic position, linking “manly virtue” to domination and world‑shaping power that he reserved for men. His work and philosophy, as I said before, exalted the masculine body and its traits, which, in a way, rejected anything coded as weak or feminine. This worldview surfaces in his fictional aphorisms about the ‘power’ of women lying in their capacity to inflict suffering when loving, suggesting that women’s agency is fundamentally manipulative and relational rather than autonomous.

Death as a man’s final work of art

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch describes a being who refuses the comfort of inherited values, who creates himself through sheer, relentless acts of will, and who transforms his own existence into something that transcends the merely human. Mishima was rather familiar with this concept, and with Nietzsche in general: when he undertook an iconic photoshoot in the early 1960s, he famously placed a hammer next to his head, alluding to Nietzsche’s idea of philosophising with a hammer, which also serves as the title for his work Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophise with a Hammer.

From the German philosopher, he understood that a superior individual fashions himself through will alone. From the ‘decadent’ Romantics such as Ryūnosuke, Baudelaire or Wilde, he learnt that a man should fashion his life as a work of art as well. He then spent the rest of his life doing that. The result can certainly be called a total human performance: the frail, sickly boy turned into first an intellectual, then a swordsman, a stalwart cadet, a militia commander, and finally, a martyr. It is impossible to deny the strangeness and the grandeur, and, for this, he becomes a distorted, sui generis Übermensch.

As explored in Sun and Steel, Mishima sought to fuse intellect with physicality by transforming himself into a living critique of the age he inhabited. Rejecting the introspective fragility of his earlier self, he moved toward an ideal of strength that became a philosophical shadow of what Nietzsche wrote. Unlike the German’s concept, however, Mishima’s self-creation was never purely individualist. It was always in service of something external: his nation, his allies, and a culture he felt slipping beneath the tide of the effects of the postwar. His Übermenschlichkeit4, if one can call it that, was Japanese in its essence: it sought, ultimately, to blend with something larger than the self.

Therefore, in my own work, I naturally consider any so-called “weariness of life”, or the idea that one can live for one’s own sake alone. Human life is mysterious that way. Human beings aren’t strong enough to live and die for themselves. That’s because we have ideals. We can only act for the sake of something. We soon tire of living only for ourselves. It necessarily follows that we also die for something.

Mishima in a 1966 interview for NHK Television.

Ever fearful of ageing and living a weak old age, he had taken his life at forty-five, when he was at his peak physically and creatively. His death continues to be the subject of debate, the focus of research, and a source of psychological, political and social analysis.

On 25 November of 1970, Mishima and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took its commandant hostage, and unsuccessfully tried to inspire the Japan Self-Defence Forces to rise up and overthrow Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution to safeguard autonomous national defence, among other restoring ends.

This event, later baptised as the Mishima incident, was characterised by a passionate speech that Mishima had prepared but could not finish, and which was met with boos and jeers, making him stop after seven minutes of a planned 30-minute oration. He gave up: “I don’t think they heard me,” he said after stepping back. Having then cried out “Long live the Emperor!” (Tenno-heika banzai) three times, he retreated into the commandant’s office, apologised to the general he had taken hostage, and committed seppuku, the well-known samurai suicide by disembowelment.

His patron, the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, a man older than him who had once championed his genius to the world, spoke on his long-time friend’s death: “I have come to realise that no matter how much one may disagree with another’s ideas, one cannot help but be moved by the sincerity of his actions.”5

Yukio was a writer of genuine and towering genius, and one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, blending the baroque, the sensual, the violent, and the philosophical. At the same time, he was also a deeply damaged man whose fervent nationalism romanticised a military culture responsible for catastrophic atrocities across Asia. During his lifetime, he was called a sensationalist, a contrarian, an irrationalist, an egomaniac, a fake, a buffoon, a nihilist, a genius, a fascist, and a madman; the trouble and the fascination are that several of those labels are, simultaneously and to a point, true.

The man who confronts the abyss honestly, without flinching, or without the consolation of inherited religion or borrowed meaning, performs something instructive for the rest of humanity by enduring it with resolve. Mishima arguably endured it for his entire life, and then, on his own terms, refused to outlast his own peak. In Nietzschean terms, this is the Übermensch’s most radical assertion: a life is not something that simply happens to anyone, but something one should author all the way to the final page. How tragic, then, was the dichotomy between this philosophy and the cause it served. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that he is, perhaps, the most accomplished self-made figure in modern Japanese letters, albeit being a cautionary monument to what happens when a magnificent mind falls in love with its own mythology. On the morning of the attempted coup, beside the final manuscript of The Decay of the Angel, lay a note: “If life is limited, I would like to live forever.” Nietzsche would have recognised the impulse, and might even have admired its ferocity. But he also would have known that the will to power without wisdom is not transcendence—only a very beautiful kind of ruin.

One cannot help but imagine the courage it must have taken to face the world with such tenacity. Who else would have gone so far and with such drive? This constitutes a special kind of freedom, and it is this particular quality that raises its strength to an exemplary level.

Share

The precision with which many passages are written carries an authentic quality, and the girl’s essence is overwhelmingly compelling, mostly because seeing the world from her perspective evokes acts of self-consciousness, introspection, and feelings of nostalgia or longing that we are, or have been familiarised with at some point of our lives. We are absorbed by lines that infuse ethereality, express anguish, radiate heaviness, and place us within a landscape that, even if unfamiliar, welcomes us immediately.

Moreover, it is clear that, from the beginning, Dazai was interested in elaborating a critique of the restrictive social rules and expectations of his time, particularly for women. At first glance, it is intriguing how he manages to capture the imaginary female self in such a familiar way. He was, after all, a very complex person. His writings were deeply affected by his tumultous life, marked by personal tragedies, psychological struggles and several suicide attempts.

Having read the pages, one question that immediately springs to mind is: Was Dazai a feminist? He plays with the portrayal of women in his era, perhaps with ‘too much intensity or detail’, revealing that the rhetorical questions our protagonist asks herself are, in part, genuine questions that Dazai longed to explore and answer. Credit must be given to Dazai, who, as a 30-year-old man who had endured numerous hardships up to that point, possesses the empathetic ability to speak through someone so different (or not in its entirety?) from himself.

Dazai often portrayed his female characters as more thoughtful, intelligent, and strong-willed than his male characters. Although it has been argued that he used these female voices as tools to explore his own existential anxieties, he nonetheless gifted them with profound agency in their observation of the world. Intuitively, I can assume that the power he bestows in his female characters stems from the perception of female inferiority that was rife in his society; portraying them as individuals with greater intellect, greater self-criticism and greater rebelliousness is a formula that, at the very least, challenged that preconceived notion.

However you choose to interpret it, the story never strays from its internal analysis, and the characters’ psychology is explored in one way or another. The novel details a lot of topics related to adolescence and young adulthood that made the narration imperfect, perhaps even sentient. As I read, I could not help but feel the need to take responsibility for the decisions she made. This is to say, there is a peculiar naturalness in the protagonist’s actions that manifests in the form of contradictions, judgements, self-loathing, comicality, and a very acute social awareness that one way or another stayed with me. And, quite remarkably, it is a reaction I have seen constantly replicating across other readers.

“We yearn for a good life. We have real hopes and ambitions. We feel impatient for an unshakeable faith that we can rely on. But it would require considerable effort to express such things in our typical life as a girl. Then there's also the way that our mothers and fathers think, and our brothers and sisters too.”

Engaging with descriptions also means employing a sort of vibrant language. When considering the diversity of literature, one must never overlook the language in which a work is written, nor the world it encompasses. In the case of Schoolgirl (Joseito in Japanese), it is written in shishōsetsu (the ‘I-novel’), which is characterised by a strong emphasis on sincerity in writing, with authors striving to convey their true feelings and experiences. There is no exact equivalent in Western literature, with vague approximations coming from what we would call confessional fiction with a modernist exploration of the self.

But Japanese makes this genre function quite differently, because of a structural quality unique to the language. The self in Japanese is relational, context-dependent, unstable, and defined by the situation. On the level of a sentence, the subject is usually omitted, and only the context, through grammatical composition, notifies the reader of the identity of the speaker.

I would particularly highlight the use of short sentences and reactionary statements that strike the reader as very natural thoughts, as if the words were pouring down in organic intervals. Read, for example:

“I sat down to eat breakfast by myself in the dining room. I had cucumbers for the first time this year. Summer seems to come from a cucumber’s greenness. The green of a May cucumber has a sadness like an empty heart, an aching, ticklish sadness.”

A challenge the first-time translator of Schoolgirl into English in 2011, Allison Markin Powell, faced, was that Japanese can sustain longer, more sinuous, unbroken thought chains than English, because of how clauses stack and defer resolution. In Japanese, every modifying clause acts like an adjective that sits in front of the noun. Because you can stack these indefinitely, the reader must bear the data in their head before the sentence finally resolves. The emotional effect of these traits is like watching someone think in real time, tumbling forward before they can stop themselves. In part, this is one of the reasons why I find the language so rich and distinctive.

“Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvellous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. Happiness…”

This is arguably my favourite passage. By framing happiness as something that arrives “one night too late”, it emphasises the misalignment between our internal psychological endurance and external reality. It suggests that human beings often lack the capacity to wait for the exact moment of fulfilment; we define our own suffering by the very act of abandoning our current circumstances or patience just before relief arrives. One can learn a lot from this lesson.

This is the cruelty of missed connections. Of missed chances. The concept of regret comes to mind almost immediately. Anyone with enough determination can see some of their own experiences reflected in her words without fear of being judged.

The ending, I find, is very fitting. Not only does it gently drape the blanket over the painting, but it does so with a rebellious spirit and a zest for life that ebbs and flows; and yet, as I just cited, it settles at the end of the day like a gentle hope.

But why read it?

This is quite a short novel, ideal for spending time with it for only a couple of days. However, the prose really gets under your skin; I would recommend a rereading after a while. Dazai’s words, just as in his masterpiece No Longer Human, have a contagious quality that compels you to think about things you might not normally ask yourself. I believe this quality is essential in any work that aims to be self-revelatory. The moment you begin to quietly examine every thought, you shed all vanity. You feel humble; there is no other way to describe it. No Longer Human also exhibits this phenomenally.

This work offers a less nihilistic portrayal of Dazai’s usual genius. There is no sense of feeling diminished or passively and indirectly attacked, as one might in certain passages of that other work I just mentioned, nor does it expect you to convey your utter sympathy. At most, a sweet melancholy will settle beside you, ready for you to engage with it, yet without preventing you from appreciating the vivid descriptions this fabulous story beholds.

Share

Share The Miraflorian

His name was Jorge Luis Borges, 85 years old, declining in health, and almost entirely blind due to a condition that had been growing on him since birth—the same hereditary darkness that had taken his father before him, and his paternal grandmother before that. He had watched it come for decades, the way one watches a slow tide.

It has continued since 1899 [the year of his birth] without dramatic moments, a slow nightfall that has lasted more than three quarters of a century. In 1955, the pathetic moment came when I knew I had lost my sight, my reader’s and writer’s sight.

Also in 1955, when he was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina, he would be in charge, he was told, of eight hundred thousand books. He found he could barely make out the title pages and the spines. He wrote a poem about it, laced with irony: “The Poem of the Gifts.” It began:

No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God, who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch.

This condition had a decisive impact on Borges’ life, just as deafness did on Beethoven’s. Like the English poet John Milton, Borges memorised long passages of literature and had companions whom he dictated to and who would read literature to him. Leonor Acevedo, his elderly mother, had been doing much of this work for years, just as she had done for his father.

And then, thirty years after losing his sight, the Argentine publisher Hyspamérica came to him with a proposition: to curate a personal library for mass publication. He would choose the books that mattered most to him, and write a prologue for each. The goal was a hundred titles, and the volumes would appear one per week with notable intervals. It would be a fantastic library built in real time, for anyone who cared to read along. And lucky were those who did.

Of course, he could not consult the texts, nor could he re-read a passage to verify his recollection; the most he could do would be to ask someone to read it for him, but he did not really need to. Everything he listed, from personal experiences, dialogues, and reviews to his quintessential profound reflections, came from what had survived inside him, which is to say, from what he had truly loved, because only love forms that kind of retention in a man. This project, now praised, also presented a perfect involuntary test of literary taste: after a life like his, what had remained that books could speak of?

Toward the end of 1985, Borges had to undergo a series of medical examinations in Buenos Aires. His health was decaying, but this did not stop him from going to Geneva for the holidays. He wanted to spend them in the city of his adolescence. In Geneva, he had grown up; he had first read Heine, De Quincey, and Schopenhauer; and he had first understood that reading would be his vocation. He returned to it now, just as a man returns to the place where something essential happened in his life. During his last months, he asked for Molière, the Poèmes barbares of Leconte de Lisle, and Michelet's La Mer. He said of Voltaire, “The best French prose, perhaps the best prose ever written.” He would send his last prologue from there.

Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. At his ecumenical funeral service in the Cathédrale de Saint Pierre, the pastor, Edouard de Montmollin, said that Borges had been a man who “unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things”. He was buried in the Cimetière des Rois, in the Plainpalais quarter, quite near the burial site of John Calvin.

“In which of my cities shall I die? In Geneva, where I received my revelation, not from Calvin, of course, but from Virgil and Tacitus?”

The Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos, then, remained incomplete. It runs to around 130 pages. It is one of the strangest, most revealing documents in the history of literary criticism and a record of a brilliant reader. Here is a comprehensible guide to the books that impacted him the most.

The Conversational Borges

The Borges everyone knows is magnificent and slightly unreal. He is the architect of labyrinths, the philosopher of the infinity—El Aleph—and one of the early precursors to postmodernist literature. He appears in the footnotes of Foucault, García Márquez or Sebald, and in the prefaces of Penguin Classics. He is invoked at the beginning of essays on hypertext, artificial intelligence, and the nature of consciousness.

However, in the prologues, Borges deviates from his fiction and takes sides: I prefer this and I find and this seems to me the finest thing of its kind. Whoever knows Borges will want to keep this difference in mind. In terms of writing style, the first person in the essays is a philosophical device, but the first person in the prologues is his true self. The fact that these reviews sound like a warm conversation is a key distinction that makes the Biblioteca Personal the truest written record of how Borges read.

The Selections

The list begins with his fellow countryman Julio Cortázar, Stories, probably referring to Cuentos Completos 1 & 2. The second and third entries are the Apocryphal Gospels. The fourth is Kafka’s Amerika. Fifth is The Blue Cross by G. K. Chesterton. The list then moves through Wilkie Collins, Maurice Maeterlinck, Dino Buzzati, Henrik Ibsen, and Eça de Queirós, a Portuguese writer almost no one outside Iberia knows today. By the time you reach this point of entry, you understand that no conventional logic is operating here, since the logic is purely personal. In other words, these are the books that stayed.

Borges does not bother to feel obliged to mention all of the “modern classics”, as he maybe takes it for granted that the influence of Homer, Cervantes or Dante forms the foundation of every modern writer. But then, authors like Chesterton, Stevenson, Wells, and Poe; Borges did not include them reluctantly. We know full well that he had no shortage of literature. Centrally and without qualification, he placed those choices alongside Herodotus and Virgil, as if the question of their legitimacy had never arisen, because for Borges it genuinely had not.

His relationship with Chesterton deserves particular attention. In interviews, he returned to him spontaneously: “I’m always citing Chesterton” and “Homer and Chesterton are really desirable goals. I wish I could. Really, I am unworthy. My writing is unworthy of my reading.” Praising his literature, he saw the London of Chesterton not as a real city but as “fairy London”, a place where the supernatural and the rational were not opposed but entangled, and he recognised in that entanglement the deepest ambition of serious fiction. In his prologue, he affirms, “It is fair to say that Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) could well have been Kafka.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, enters the list twice: once for the New Arabian Nights and Markheim. H. G. Wells appears with The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, not the social realism Wells also wrote, which Borges found uninteresting, but the scientific romances, the speculative fiction, and the thought experiments in narrative form. Borges had understood, most notably in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, the distinction that Wells’ books were not entertainment with ideas attached; they were the ideas, inseparable from their narrative parents. The invisibility of Griffin in The Invisible Man is not a premise to be forgotten once the plot begins, as it is the whole philosophical argument made experiential.

A characteristic by which his erudition may be recognised is the venerable age of the books he mentions in his entries. The Tales of Ise, number twenty in the list, is a Japanese literary masterwork from the ninth or tenth century, composed around the romantic verse of the aristocrat Ariwara no Narihira that appears beside Virgil’s Aeneid; notably, the Aeneid, and not the epics of Homer, which Borges admired but kept at a certain distance, perhaps because their scale resisted the compression he esteemed for the Biblioteca.

“The Aeneid is the loftiest example of what has been called, not without a touch of disdain, the artificial epic; that is, one undertaken deliberately by a single man, rather than one erected unknowingly by successive human generations. Virgil set out to create a masterpiece; intriguingly, he succeeded.”

Then, The Epic of Gilgamesh, paired with the Bhagavad Gita from the Indian tradition; and Egil’s Saga from the Icelandic one, by Snorri Sturluson—a book Borges learned Old Norse, in part, to read, and which he treated as one of the greatest character studies in any literature. “This mediaeval chronicle reads like a novel,” he writes in the end.

This accumulation of the ancient is not antiquarianism. In essence, Borges wished for us to read a little of everything and to cultivate ourselves in such a way that our literary experience might be guided toward resembling his own. This, far from being an act of arrogance, reinforced the simple idea that nourishing oneself with diverse cultures, these stemming from different eras, would make one a cultured individual; a necessity, from his perspective. In addition, to read the Tales of Ise and the Blue Cross in the same week, as Borges would suggest you might, is to discover that the eighth century and the early twentieth share a particular quality of attention to the concrete, the sudden, and the strange. Because, in the end, we have never ceased to be curious humans.

Several entries that appear to be philosophy might not be through a Borgian lens. Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is forty-ninth on the list, but Borges read it primarily as a parable about Abraham and Isaac, as a story with an impossible moral situation at its centre, rather than as a contribution to existentialist theology. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, a heavily cited essay written in 1899, argued that wealthy people often display status through wasteful leisure and conspicuous consumption rather than productive work. Borges was able to capture its value:

“Liebermann or Picasso set high prices, not out of greed, but so as not to disappoint buyers whose purpose was to demonstrate that they could afford a canvas bearing their signature.”

J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time appears late in the list; this is a largely forgotten text from 1927 by a British aeronautical engineer who believed he had discovered precognitive dreams by analysing his own dream diary. Borges read it obsessively, probably borrowed its model of time directly for stories like The Garden of Forking Paths (in addition to his admiration for Olaf Stapledon), and treated it with the seriousness he denied to Kant.

Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman, a 1940 popular science book that popularised the word ‘googol’ and explained Cantor’s infinities to non-mathematicians, is mentioned. Borges included it because it gave him the sensation of touching infinity without requiring him to do mathematics. He, a mere man of letters, had spent a life finding himself seduced by the aesthetics of mathematics, as we had seen in The Aleph and The Book of Sand.

William James takes two volumes with The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Borges read not as a theologian but as a phenomenologist.

“[James] believes that the visible world is but a part of a more varied and vast spiritual world, revealed through the senses. He studies particular cases of conversion, healing, and mystical experience. He advocates the efficacy of a prayer without a recipient.”

Finally, there come the Hispano-American selections. Borges pays homage to his literary neighbourhood by mentioning authors such as Cortázar, Groussac, or Lugones. In Spanish, more broadly, he chooses figures such as Juan Rulfo, Fray Luis de León, Quevedo, or Arreola. Many of these names may sound unfamiliar to readers not acquainted with literature in Spanish, yet each represents a richly endowed standard of letters and intellect.

Having opened with Cortázar is a tribute that cost something, given that by 1985 the two men had spent decades on opposite sides of a political argument, Cortázar having become a committed voice of the Latin American left while Borges remained conspicuously, controversially conservative, and preferred to keep politics out of his literature. Nevertheless, he thought very highly of him:

“No one can retell the plot of a Cortázar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarise them, we realise that something precious has been lost.”

In the prologue he wrote for Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo, after enumerating the various critical interpretations the novel had attracted, he concluded in barely two lines, matching the dístico closures he used to end his sonnets, with one of his most hyperbolic judgements (this, in his native Spanish): “Pedro Páramo is one of the best novels in Spanish-language literatures, and even in all of literature.”

Leopoldo Lugones appears twice in the Biblioteca Personal, first with The Jesuit Empire and later with a selection of his Poetic Works. This double inclusion was an act of profound literary reconciliation. Lugones had been the “Dictator of Letters”, the official poet of Argentina, whose ornate Modernismo a young Borges had spent the 1920s rebelling against. Lugones’ suicide in 1938 at the age of 63 left a lasting, melancholic mark on Borges, who was 39. Placing him twice in the Biblioteca, near the end of a life, was a settlement of old accounts and kneeling before a man who had taught him very much.

There is a silence regarding Gabriel García Márquez; though Borges famously acknowledged One Hundred Years of Solitude as a great work, he had little patience for the limitless genealogies of magical realism, preferring a narrative engine that ran on logic rather than lush description. Pablo Neruda is likewise absent: a victim of Borges’ lifelong allergy to political posturing and what he viewed as the “excessive” sentimentality of the verse of the Chilean poet. Peruvian Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa was not found either.

Consult the complete list of books here.

What We Can Learn

Given Borges’ unpredictability, we will never know with certainty who might have comprised the remaining 26 entries. We will never know, for instance, whether Borges thought of including a female writer (he admired many, such as Woolf or Ocampo), something more classical, or, conversely, some rough diamond that all of us failed to rescue.

Taken together, these volumes refer to a reader who trusted plot over psychology, brevity over amplitude, strangeness over comfort, and pleasure, his own, specifically, hard-won and irreplaceable, over any amateur principle. This is a natural description of a great writer.

The immaculate literary taste of Borges was immaculate not because it was perfect or exhaustive but because it was uncorrupted by fashion, institution, or the desire to seem serious. For, deep within, Borges knew that he was exploring alternate worlds, playing with intricate dilemmas, and doing his utmost to grasp the cosmos while racing against time with a theme that fascinated him profoundly: death.

Throughout history and across cultures, the dream of overcoming mortality has both haunted and inspired humanity. The ancient Egyptians sought eternal life through elaborate funerary rites and the preservation of the body; the Chinese alchemists of the Han dynasty dedicated centuries to brewing elixirs of immortality; and the Christian tradition promised resurrection of the flesh and communion with the divine in a world beyond suffering. Vastly different in form and doctrine, these traditions nevertheless converge on a single, restless intuition: that the human condition, as it stands, is incomplete. The persistent desire to long for an ultimate, redeemed state beyond suffering and limitation reveals an everlasting and even obstinate aspect of the human imagination: our solemn refusal to accept finitude as our destiny.

But in the twenty-first century, this age-old yearning has found a reintroduction in what is known as transhumanism: a global philosophical and technological movement that seeks to enhance and eventually transcend, the biological human condition through artificial intelligence, biotechnology, genetic engineering, robotics and related emerging technologies. It was first popularised by the English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley in his 1957 essay New Bottles for New Wine (later renamed Transhumanism), in which he wrote:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realising new possibilities of and for his human nature.

From those origins, transhumanism has evolved into a serious intellectual movement, with dedicated university departments, well-funded think tanks, and the considerable backing of Silicon Valley figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. The contemporary articulation of transhumanist principles was further developed by the British philosopher Max More, who began organising it as a futurist philosophy in 1990.

However, what began as an avowedly secular and rationalist project has, over the course of its development, gradually acquired the unmistakable shape of a metaphysical one. The disciplines that push towards transhumanist ends—artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cryonics, or genetic enhancement—function, on closer inspection, as instruments of salvation within a technoscientific theology. This is a remarkable irony, given the movement’s self-understanding. One of the movement’s leading philosophers, Nick Bostrom, described transhumanism as “an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment”, premised on the conviction that human nature can be improved through “applied science and other rational methods”, removing religious explanations from the equation altogether.

The parallels are difficult to ignore once one begins to trace them. The immortal soul to be saved is now recast as a “transcendent mind.” The resurrection of the body, or, at the very least, the escape from death, is proposed through mind-uploading initiatives or, alternatively, through cryonics. The coming of God is now what author, computer scientist and technological prophet Ray Kurzweil has called “the Singularity”: the point where non-biological intelligence becomes billions of times more powerful than all human intelligence combined. In other words, a God made of circuits and code.

This is not an original observation; many intellectuals have long noticed the relation. Philosopher Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has argued in a 2012 essay that transhumanism should be understood as a secularist faith, one that secularises traditional religious themes, concerns and goals, while endowing technology with religious significance. Before that, British philosopher Mary Midgley, in her 1992 book Science as Salvation, already traced the notion of achieving immortality through transcendence of the material body to a group of early-twentieth-century thinkers—figures such as J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal—characterising their visions as fantasies of escape from the body, dressed up in the respectable costume of science. Even Bostrom acknowledged that transhumanism may fulfil certain “functions that people have traditionally sought in religion”, including “a sense of purpose and direction” guided by visions of "a very long lifespan, unfading bliss, and godlike intelligence.”

Thus, this article sets out to examine precisely this phenomenon: how transhumanism operates as a fully structured form of secular eschatology, which is a vision of ultimate human destiny that reproduces the logic of religious narrative within the language of rationality and technological progress. Understanding it as such is not just an academic exercise. It is a necessary step towards grasping the cultural forces: the hungers, the anxieties, and the yearnings that are quietly shaping some of the most consequential technological developments of our time.

Defining the Terms

The Egyptians built their entire architectural legacy around the problem of death. The Aztecs fed their gods blood to keep the cosmos from collapsing. Dante Alighieri thoroughly mapped out the geography of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Buddhism, often mischaracterised in the West as a philosophy of detachment, is, at its core, a soteriology, where there is a systematic theory of how suffering ends and liberation is finally achieved—the nirvana. Even Marx, the most militantly secular of thinkers, smuggled eschatology into his own theory (“Religion is the opium of the people!”) by casting the proletariat as the universal redeemers and the revolution as a secular apocalypse. He then transformed the so-called “laws of motion” of capitalism into a narrative of ultimate salvation, whose final destination was, in essence, a communist paradise: an end to alienated labour, class conflict, and historical suffering alike.

In other words, the concept of eschatology has been reproduced across the full breadth of human history. Derived from the Greek words eschatos (‘last’) and logos (‘study’), eschatology is the branch of theology or philosophy concerned with the final events of history or the ultimate destiny of humanity. It explores end-times concepts such as the afterlife, the end of the world, and the transition into a new state of existence. We must not confound it with the similar but not synonymous concept soteriology (from Greek soterion, ‘salvation’), which is the branch of theology and philosophy specifically dedicated to the study of salvation and how it is achieved. It examines the processes, figures, and conditions such as divine grace, personal works, or even historical revolution through which humanity is exempted from suffering, sin, or other limitations. Where eschatology asks where are we going, soteriology asks how do we get there.

Beneath the wildly varying mythologies, a consistent pattern is discernable; every major salvific belief system can be broken down into three fundamental principles:

The first is diagnosing the present. The world as it is then must be broken, fallen, or incomplete. It may take the form of the Christian doctrine of original sin, the Buddhist concept of dukkha (the recognition of pervasive suffering and the impermanence of all things), cosmic disorder, or the Marxist idea of alienation from one’s own labour and essential humanity. It is necessary because you can only be saved from something you have first acknowledged as a problem.

The second is the redemptive agent: some force, being, process, or practice that makes transformation possible. That is, the grace of God mediated through the saviour Jesus Christ; the Maitreya, in Buddhism, who is the next Buddha to appear on Earth to bring peace, goodness, and ultimate enlightenment; or the Messiah (or Mashiach), who is awaited in the Jewish tradition as the future Davidic king and redeemer who will restore Israel. The agent is always, in some sense, external to the flawed world, and they often also require the active participation of those to be saved at some point.

The third one is the perfected end state. It is, in simple words, what awaits on the other side of transformation. Heaven, the nirvana, the Messianic Age, the Communist utopia, or New Jerusalem. These endings differ enormously in their texture and content, but they share a similarity, which is that they are characterised by the abolition of the conditions that made the ‘old world’ unbearable.

These are not foundations stuck in ancient religious thinking. In fact, when we lay these lenses on top of each other, they become powerful tools for analysing different types of phenomena.

Eschatological schemes have, over time, evolved and mutated, becoming progressively harder to identify as such once they began incorporating the vocabulary and prestige of science and secular intellectual movements. This process was theorised by philosophers Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin under the heading of secularisation theory, the observation that modernity did not abolish eschatological thinking so much as redistribute it across new domains. Auguste Comte, founder of positivism, replaced God with humanity and called it sociology. Hegel replaced Providence (God's plan for the unfolding of history) with the self-realisation of Absolute Spirit (Geist) and called it philosophy. The utopian socialists, among them Charles Fourier, replaced the Kingdom of Heaven with the ideal community and called it politics.

Transhumanism was no exception to these associations.

Theological Roots of Transhumanist Thought

To understand how transhumanism originally inherited theology, there is no need to visit Silicon Valley or review recent technological breakthroughs, but rather to begin with the ideas of a Jesuit priest. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was one of the most peculiar and consequential figures before transhumanism was a thing. Peculiar because he was a Roman Catholic priest, and consequential because many of his ideas, though unattributed, flowed through the bloodstream of contemporary techno-utopianism.

In his posthumous work, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard argued that the universe was not a meaningless collision of particles drifting toward entropy, but a directed process orientated towards what he called the Omega Point: a final state of maximum complexity and consciousness at which all human awareness would converge into a single, divine unity. The idea proved controversial on all fronts. The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar subjected it to a devastating scientific critique, and the Vatican issued a formal warning, the Monitum of 1962, cautioning readers against Teilhard’s speculative theology.

In any case, Teilhard connected the Omega Point with the Christian Parousia (the Second Coming of Christ), understanding it as the moment when human intelligence, amplified through technology and love, would ascend from “transhuman” to “posthuman”.

What is striking, in retrospective, is how accurately this maps onto transhumanist ambitions.

Curiously, Teilhard’s closest intellectual companion was Julian Huxley, the atheist biologist who would go on to coin the word “transhumanism.” The two men worked in close intellectual proximity from 1946 until Teilhard's death in 1955, and when The Phenomenon of Man was first published in English in 1959, it was Huxley who wrote its introduction, in which he praised the work as a serious and original attempt to synthesise science and spirituality, even as he distanced himself from its theological conclusions. That an outspoken atheist and a Jesuit mystic should arrive, from opposite directions, at so similar a vision of human destiny is not a coincidence to be dismissed. It is, at least, a clue. The transhumanist philosophical movement that followed unconsciously sought to become the non-religious equivalent of Teilhard's project: to preserve the eschatological destination whilst discarding the theological vehicle. The apple, in short, did not fall far from the theological tree.

But Teilhard was not the only philosophical tributary feeding into this current.

Long before in the timeline, Orthodox Christianity declared Gnosticism, the ancient religious movement that flourished in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, a heresy with considerable urgency around those same years of spreading. The Gnostics held that the material world was fundamentally corrupt—the bungled creation of a lesser deity known as the Demiurge—and that the true nature of man was a divine spark of consciousness (a fragment of the true God, who they believed was the Christian one) imprisoned within a body of flesh. Within each human being, the Gnostics believed, a divine spark of pure consciousness lay imprisoned in flesh: a fragment of the true, transcendent God, trapped inside matter. Salvation, accordingly, meant escape — the liberation of the inner light from its material cage and its return to the Pleroma, the divine fullness from which it had fallen.

On this view, the body is not part of the self but an obstacle to it; it is a prison, not a home. This sensibility, ancient as it is, has surfaced with remarkable directness within transhumanist circles. Tim Cannon, a known ‘biohacker’, software developer, and transhumanism activist, complained in one interview, “I’m trapped in this body”, and when he was told he sounded like a Gnostic heresiarch from the second century, replied, “All bodies are the wrong body.” The transhumanist aspiration to upload consciousness onto a digital substrate, to shed biological embodiment entirely in favour of a non-organic form, is, at the level of its logic, the same tale retold in a new context: “neo-Gnosticism” in which the soul has been relabelled consciousness, the Demiurge has been relabelled evolution or biology, and the Pleroma has been relabelled the Singularity.

There are countless more reasons why it is logical to base transhumanism on gnosticism. An interesting summary of these ideas can be read here.

Finally, the Enlightenment acted as a bridge rather than being a full “theological root.” The movement is commonly referred to as a modern, technology-driven evolution of Enlightenment humanism. Surely the heirs of Voltaire and Locke are free of theological residue?

Not quite. The Enlightenment thinkers most lauded by transhumanists were in fact advocates of perfectibility, the doctrine that human nature is not fixed but indefinitely improvable, and that rational progress might one day dissolve all known limits on human flourishing. The Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind from 1792, written during the Reign of Terror, envisioned an “atheistic telos” moving through “ten epochs” of development toward a future when the growth of scientific knowledge would put an end to inequality and overcome the natural human constraints. Condorcet was basically describing a secular eschatology.

Francis Bacon, in his unfinished utopian fable New Atlantis (published posthumously in 1627), imagined a future society governed by a benevolent institution of scientists and inventors, dedicated to the mastery of nature for the benefit of humanity; an early vision of what we might today call technocratic salvation. This summary called If Scientists Were Angels covers this relation far more finely. And Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, written as far back as 1486, made perhaps the most radical claim of all: that unlike every other creature, which is born with a fixed nature, the human being alone was granted by God no determinate form, and therefore possessed the unique capacity to become whatever it chose. To ascend, through its own will and reason, to the highest reaches of existence.

On The Parallels

The parallels between transhumanism’s technological programme and the logic of religious salvation have, on examination, moved well beyond surface metaphor. They reveal a shared deep structure: the same diagnosis of the human condition, the same redemptive logic, the same imagined destination. What follows is a series of systematic comparisons, attentive to nuance where the analogies strain or diverge.

Mind Uploading ↔ Resurrection and Eternal Life

Ronald Cole-Turner, one of the foremost Christian scholars of transhumanism, goes so far as to claim that “transhumanism is a Christian concept”, tracing the word itself back to Dante, who coined trasumanar in Il Paradiso to describe the transformation of the human into something beyond itself as the soul ascends “by grace to glory”. The theological aspect of mind uploading is maybe the most direct comparison. Both the Christian resurrection and the transhumanist upload address the same intolerable fact: that the person you are will cease to exist. And both propose, against all purely biological logic, a way out.

However, there is an important nuance to mention that concerns both classic theological and transhumanist thinking. The ‘copy problem’, where whether a resurrected or uploaded being is truly the original person or just a convincing simulation. On the transhumanist side, the philosopher Susan Schneider has argued that digital uploading would almost certainly result in the death of the biological individual, leaving behind what she calls a “data twin,” or a copy that maintains the outward appearance of continuity while the original consciousness is extinguished. Her proposed alternative, “non-reductive physicalism”, is less a solution than a quiet abandonment of the standard transhumanist hope.

This secular worry mirrors debates by mediaeval theologians who questioned how a body “resurrected” from ash or decay could maintain its original identity. Most notably, St Thomas Aquinas proposed the “Cannibal Problem.”

Broken down:

1. Cannibal A eats Person B; B’s flesh becomes part of A’s body.

2. At the resurrection, both B and A are supposed to rise with their own bodies.

3. But if B’s flesh is now in A, it seems impossible for both to have “their own” flesh.

The problem sounds almost comic at first, but it is in fact a thorough treatment of the relationship between material substance and personal identity, to which Aquinas did develop a careful metaphysical response within his Aristotelian-Christian framework, distinguishing between the matter that is essential to a given person’s identity and that which is merely contingent and replaceable.

Cryonics ↔ Purgatory or Suspended Judgement

Cryonics, the practice of preserving legally dead bodies at ultralow temperatures in the hope of future reanimation by more advanced medicine, invites comparison with the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, and the intermediate state between death and final judgement that Catholic theology spent centuries elaborating. The cryonics patient and the soul in purgatory share a condition: they are suspended between a life that has ended and a perfected existence that has not yet arrived. The expectation is that it would arrive, be it through grace or technology.

A study in a medical journal discusses that cryonics rests on what one study frankly described as “naive faith rather than science”, performing what the scholar David Chidester calls “religious work” even when it operates in an explicitly secular register, offering, above all, the promise of transcendence over death. The cryonics patient cannot know that future medicine will revive them. That is a mystery, and they believe in it. This is, phenomenologically speaking, an act of faith: a wager on an outcome that cannot be verified in advance. The resemblance to Pascal’s famous wager, the argument in the Pensées that one ought to bet on God’s existence because the cost of the gamble is finite while the potential reward is infinite, fits quite perfectly in this image. The cryonics patient is running the same calculation: finite cost (the considerable expense of preservation), potentially infinite reward (an indefinitely extended life).

Genetic Enhancement and CRISPR ↔ The Purification of Original Sin

Across an otherwise extraordinary range of traditions, the persistent intuition that something is wrong with the human animal as it currently exists is nearly omnipresent. Christian anthropology names this condition ‘original sin’. The Gnostics called it embodiment. Enlightenment rationalists tended to relocate the fault from the body to society or ignorance, but rarely denied the fault entirely. The Enlightened rationalists either declined it (see Rousseau’s paraphrased ‘we are good by nature but corrupted by society’, although this is pointing at the psyche, not the body) or redescribed it as ignorance.

Based on transhumanism antecedents, there should be a bit of an overlap here, but the sense that something is constitutively wrong with the human animal as it currently exists persists across all these frameworks.

CRISPR gene editing and genetic enhancement technologies address these failures directly, eliminating hereditary disease, correcting biological errors, and, in more ambitious iterations, augmenting cognitive and physical capacities beyond anything evolution has managed, which is to say, a premise for eugenics. Whilst the elimination of disease need not carry theological weight in itself, the broader transhumanist vision of surpassing biological limits carries a distinctly soteriological tone. Genetic enhancement, in this frame, approaches amendment, or the correction of an imperfect design, the expurgation of a fallen inheritance.

Artificial Superintelligence ↔ The Omniscient Divine

The ASI of transhumanist imagination, a mind of unlimited cognitive power, capable of solving any problem, knowing any fact, and correcting any error in human judgement, seems to be indistinguishable from the classical attributes of many gods across religions. Omniscience, infinite processing capacity, transcendence of ordinary human limitation; this is perhaps transhumanism’s most theologically charged ambition.

Nick Bostrom has suggested that “because [artificial superintelligence] may exhibit superior ethical reasoning to humans, humans could potentially delegate certain long-term planning and policy decisions to it.” This sentence deserves to be read carefully. One of transhumanism’s most rigorous academic philosophers is here describing a system in which a being of superior intelligence and moral insight guides human choices towards their optimal outcomes. Describes a being that knows better than we do, not just in technical matters, but in ethical ones. The distance between this and the classical theological concept of God, whose superior wisdom orders human affairs towards their proper end, is difficult to measure.

The Posthuman ↔ The Glorified Soul

All of these threads converge on transhumanism’s ultimate vision: the posthuman. In Nick Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia (2008), the posthuman future is described as a state in which suffering is a distant memory, death can be indefinitely postponed, and pleasure no longer fades: a naturalistic heaven is earned not through grace but through technological effort and rational self-improvement.

Compare this with the Christian theological concept of the beatific vision—the state of the redeemed soul in perfect union with God, freed from suffering, mortality, and the distortions of sin, possessed of a glorified body fitted for eternal existence. Or, from a Buddhist perspective, the liberation from Samsara, the endless cycles of birth, suffering, and death, into a state beyond conditioned existence altogether. The textures differ considerably, and so do the metaphysical frameworks that surround them. The posthuman remains, at least in principle, a physical being operating within the natural universe; the glorified soul or the liberated consciousness moves beyond it. And yet, for all these differences, the longing that each vision is designed to satisfy is strikingly consistent: to be finally, permanently, and completely free of the conditions that make the present human existence feel insufficient.

Critical Responses: Theology, Philosophy, and Politics

No vision of salvation has ever escaped scrutiny, and transhumanism's secular eschatology is no exception. What follows is an account of the most serious and sustained objections levelled against the movement, each of which targets a different fault line in the transhumanist project.

The Theological Objection

Transhumanism can be understood as an expression of what Pope Francis, in his landmark 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, called the technocratic paradigm: “a pattern of human use of technology primarily aimed at asserting control over nature, with little regard for the intrinsic value of God-given creation, including human beings”. Francis’ objection is not to technology as such, but to the totalising vision that the paradigm imposes: the delusion that we might become powerful and wise enough to subject all of existence to our will, as though we were gods accountable to nothing beyond our own ambitions.

C. S. Lewis arrived at a closely related warning several decades earlier. The Abolition of Man (1943) was written at a moment when social engineering and eugenics (for instance, Nazi totalitarianism and eugenics) were being discussed as serious and respectable scientific tools for the improvement of the human race, and Lewis’ diagnosis of that moment retains its force. The drive to master and reshape human nature, he argued, does not lead to liberation but to the abolition of the very humanity it claims to elevate. Once we begin engineering the human according to chosen values, we are immediately confronted with the question ‘Chosen by whom, and on what grounds?’ The values doing the engineering are not themselves the product of science; they are prior to it and typically arbitrary, rationally unjustified, selected on the basis of whatever the architects of the new humanity happen to find desirable. The masters of human nature are not its liberators but its final conquerors.

The Philosophical Objection

A powerful philosophical case against the transhumanist programme comes from the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel in The Case Against Perfection (2004). Sandel’s argument turns on the concept of giftedness, the disposition to receive life, including its contingencies, frailties, and imperfections, as something not entirely of our own making and not entirely within our right to remake. Against the transhumanist drive towards enhancement and mastery, Sandel argues:

The problem with eugenics and genetic engineering is that they represent the one-sided triumph of willfulness over giftedness, of dominion over reverence, of molding over beholding.

Sandel identifies three cascading consequences of applied transhumanist ambitions. First, it erodes humility, the recognition that our talents and capacities are not wholly our own achievement and do not, by themselves, entitle us to the rewards they bring. Second, it inflates our burden of responsibility to unbearable proportions: if everything about a person can in principle be designed, then everything becomes a choice, and every imperfection becomes somebody’s fault. Third, it dissolves the solidarity that arises precisely from our shared vulnerability. When suffering and limitation are recast as engineering failures rather than common human inheritances, the bonds of mutual recognition that they sustain begin to fall apart.

The American biophysicist Leon Kass builds on Sandel by insisting on what he calls the givenness of species-specified natures’—the idea that the biological form of the human being is much more than a contingent arrangement to be optimised, for it carries a kind of moral weight that enhancement technologies cannot simply override without loss.

Meanwhile, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, writing in The Future of Human Nature (2003), approaches the question from a different angle. Germline genetic engineering, that is, modifications that would be passed to future generations, violates moral autonomy, he argues, by imposing the specifications of one generation onto the open future of another. The child engineered to parental design cannot negotiate the terms of their own existence from a position of equality; they arrive in the world already shaped by choices in which they had no say. For Habermas, this represents a violation of the universal “species ethic” that grounds our mutual recognition as persons.

The Political Objection

‘Whose salvation?’ Every eschatology has always had to answer this question, and the answers have invariably revealed whose interests the salvific vision serves. Transhumanism’s answer is not particularly reassuring.

The movement’s most prominent patrons (Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Altman, Ellison, among others) are not disinterested philosophers. They are among the wealthiest individuals in recorded history, funding longevity research, cryonics ventures, and artificial intelligence development as deeply committed and personally motivated stakeholders. The fantasy of indefinite life is considerably more attractive, and considerably more accessible, when one already possesses the resources to purchase the best available existence.

There is also a subtler political danger embedded in the transhumanist vision: an eschatology premised on the indefinite prolongation of individual life, concentrated among those who already hold disproportionate power, has obvious dynastic implications. Mortal elites are constrained, however imperfectly, by the knowledge that they will eventually leave the stage. Immortal ones need not be. Political theorist Francis Fukuyama warned as early as 2002. American author Bill McKibben, in his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), reached a similar conclusion from an environmentalist angle.

It is fitting, perhaps, that this endpoint has been most vividly dramatised not by political theory but by fiction. CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) imagines a world in which radical enhancement is ubiquitous and almost entirely inaccessible: immortality is a corporate product sold under the brand name Secure Your Soul, affordable only to the ultra-wealthy, whilst the streets are crowded with people whose cheaper cyberware degrades their neurological humanity over time. The game’s dystopia is not one of technology withheld but of transhumanist eschatology fully delivered through corporations, anarcho-capitalism, and the brutal logic of the market rather than through grace. It is a precise political critique: a vision of what secular salvation looks like when it arrives without justice.

Conclusions

Having traced transhumanism from its foundational texts, theological genealogy, salvific structure, and political blind spots, we are now in a position to view it more honestly as one of the most elaborated and revealing successors of religious belief. Transhumanism did not invent the longing for immortality, transcendence, or perfection but received it from our culture’s development of religiousness and rewrote it into the only language that the current apostate civilisation is interested in: empirical science, engineering, and technological exponential progress.

Where does this eschatological structure become dangerous? Salvation narratives have always organised entire civilisations around a deferred promise, demanding sacrifice in the present in exchange for glory later. The Crusader marching toward Jerusalem and the Soviet citizen enduring collectivisation were both asked to suffer now for the sake of a coming paradise, whether heavenly or classless. Transhumanism inherits this logic, but relocates it into laboratories, venture funds and engineering roadmaps, asking us to accept economic, ethical, even anthropological costs for the sake of a future in which death and limitation have supposedly been solved.

What transhumanism reveals, then, is less a new fact about technology than an old fact about us: the depth and persistence of our need for religion‑like frameworks of meaning. We are constantly seeking answers to ultimate questions, and many of us find it takes a leap of faith to construct a stable worldview out of ostensibly rational commitments. However, the search does not disappear when God is declared dead: they migrate and find new vessels. And it seems that the more mundane those answers get, the harder they become to examine critically, because to question them feels like questioning “reason” itself. Even when transhumanism assumes the structure of a religion, it lacks the humility and self‑limiting discipline that best describe traditional faith.

Transhumanism can be read as a kind of technological episode of St Augustine’s City of Man trying to buy its way into the City of God. In its more ambitious forms, it sees the correct “hole” in the human heart: the longing for the infinite, for immortality, and for transcendence. The difference is that it seeks to fill it not with the infinite itself but with more of the finite: upgraded brains, augmented bodies, and indefinite lifespan extensions.

As C.S. Lewis might suggest, the danger is not that we will fail to “conquer” death, but that in our pursuit of posthuman perfection we will allow technocratic elites to treat the human species itself as raw material for redesign, completing the abolition of man by eroding the stable human nature that made moral reasoning possible in the first place.

There are few jazzists—especially those who decided to turn the piano into their musical safe haven—who developed such a sensibility and connection with sound as deeply as him. He practised obsessively, building his harmonic language on Debussy and Ravel, and, when performing, he asked his trio to do so only with a previous understanding of the mood, the tone, and the volatility of the piece. Thus, rehearsals with the trio were almost nonexistent.

Behind the etheral touch of masterpieces like “Some Other Time”, “My Foolish Heart”, or “Waltz for Debby”, there is a life spent trying to balance vulnerability with rigour, lyricism with discipline, and transcendence with addiction.

So when someone asks, “Do you like Bill Evans?”, it is not quite the same as liking a playlist. It is about the kind of seriousness and fragility you are willing to acknowledge in the matter.

His life and musical development

Bill Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1929, to a devout Russian Orthodox mother and an alcoholic Welsh‑American father who managed a golf course. Even from here, we can see that his childhood was divided between a church that stressed order and a household that embodied the opposite. His first musical training came precisely in church, where harmony is not entertainment, but a way of philosophical adoration. The sense that sound could be a form of discipline rather than distraction never really left him, it seems.

At six he began formal piano lessons, soon adding the violin and flute, and by the time he finished his music education degree at Southeastern Louisiana College in 1950, he had logged thousands of hours of classical study. However, he never thought of himself as a natural genius; he compensated, as an interview has it, by “immersing himself wholeheartedly in the intricacies of his craft.” If his later improvisations sound like effortless speech, it is because of the effortlessness of a man who has realised that you practise essence, not patterns.

After a stint in the army, he moved to New York, studied composition at the Mannes College of Music, and even wrote settings of William Blake—another figure for whom spiritual seriousness coexisted with personal strangeness. In his own words,

“[Blake] is almost like a folk poet, but he reaches heights of art because of his simplicity. The simple things, the essences, are the great things, but our way of expressing them can be incredibly complex. It’s the same thing with technique in music. You try to express a simple emotion—love, excitement, sadness—and often your technique gets in the way.”

He also absorbed the classics Debussy, Ravel, and Bartók, asking himself how to reconcile impressionist hues and sketches with the demands of improvisation and swing. Even in student pieces, he worried about whether his composed materials would “work” in an improvising context, which is another way of asking whether what looks appealing on paper can survive in real time with other people.

By the end of the 1950s, he had joined Miles Davis, recorded Kind of Blue, a milestone worth noting, and begun trio experiments with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. This is the phase usually told as a story of innovation, but you can also read it as a story of trust: three musicians choose to abandon rigid roles and the “safe path” for a musician; accept mutual risk onstage, interrupt one another, leave space, and create music sobre la marcha. Evans’ whole notion of the trio, a conversation with shared responsibility, and an undeniable synergy, remembering his early life, seems to make sense. In an interview, he clarifies,

“But jazz is a ‘how’ to me. It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music.”

In a way, jazz carries a conspicuous imprint of existentialism, and, through the right interiorisation, we can find a piece of his philosophy inside us.

Running alongside this celebrated era is the countercurrent that Canadian jazz critic Gene Lees famously called “the longest suicide in history”: Evans’ decades‑long struggle with heroin, later cocaine, leading to cirrhosis, ulcers, and a tragic but foreseeable death in 1980. He watched his first long-term partner Ellaine Schultz die by suicide under a subway train; his brother Harry, a musical educator with schizophrenia, also took his life. This event is considered the final blow to his demise. By the end, he was taking several grams of cocaine a day, his body literally collapsing even as his playing remained lucid, as can be appreciated in the Keystone Korner recordings from 1980 in San Francisco. Truly remarkable, his swollen hands did not fail him when he devoted his last sparks of brilliance to music, the same that had accompanied him from the very beginning and perhaps the only thread that tied him to sanity at that time.

Thoughtfully designing sound over a diversified canvas, he built one of the most coherent harmonic languages that major “schools of jazz” adapted to the mainstream scene over time. Of course, his addictions shortened his life and coloured his work with suffering. The same, before any chord is struck, poses an ethical question his music keeps wrestling with: how much order can you wrest from your chaos, and at what cost?

What does he offer us today?

Bill Evans initially presents a distinct sound world, characterised by slow tempos, pastel harmonies, and a piano tone that the legendary Miles Davis compared to “crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from a clear waterfall.” His voicings, as previously mentioned, echo Debussy and Ravel; fourth‑based chords, added tones, and modal techniques, and mix into a unique language that lets melodies hover like particles bounding fluidly on something truly as fragile as the surface of a body of water. If I had to recommend some, they would be “Some Other Time” (at the Village Vanguard), “Flamenco Sketches” (originally by Davis, but features an amazing Evans), or “I Fall In Love Too Easily” (from his album Moon Beams). By his grace, they have the distinction of being private confessions rather than public spectacles. When musicians in very different idioms talk about Evans, they often remark on a refusal to confuse complexity with depth.​ This same language opens jazz to modal time in Kind of Blue, transforming the album into a substantial space to inhabit. Evans explored textural tools for anyone who wants to be lyrical without being sentimental and free without being vague. Not only that, but the democratic strategy in his trio, the one that reconfigures the dynamic of each performer, was quite the avant-garde for many modern interpretations of how we should play jazz.

Evans’ legacy is one silently acclaimed one. His harmonies have become so absorbed into the idiom that they now read as neutral vocabulary rather than signature style, echoed in players from Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea to Brad Mehldau. Critics and listeners return to him not for novelty but for depth: he is one of those artists who seems to grow with you, his introspective phrasing and public handling of feeling offering, over time, a durable grammar for seriousness in an increasingly distracted culture. Guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Lyle Mays titled one of their most intimate duo pieces “September Fifteenth”—the date on which Evans passed away—creating an extended, murmured dialogue rather than a guitar feature with piano accompaniment. The piece is explicitly described as carrying Evans’ spirit forward: harmonically rich but restrained out of respect; formally through-composed yet conversational; a grief tribute that definitely deserves a listen.

For most of us, the listeners, he offers greater than just relaxation music: an invitation to a different kind of seriousness: to sit with music that is mostly quiet, but exacting in the structure. Emotionally open, but never theatrical. Tender, akin to liquid silk, satisfying the attentive listener. To “like” Bill Evans in this sense is to accept his offer to value conversation over monologue, patience over climax, and the hard work of listening.

Reflections

Bill Evans liked to say that freedom in music comes only after you have accepted “firm musical facts” and that the ocean of possibilities opens up only when you have quietly built a shore to stand on. Everything that mattered, he thought, had to happen inside the sound itself: in the way three people listen, the way a voicing expresses itself, and the way a feeling of a ballad is made public without becoming overly sentimental. That is a surprisingly austere insight for someone who is now talked about under “chil jazz”, and it leaves us with the following question: how much of our own life is built on firm facts, and how much on pre-planned gestures do we want on our work?

He also believed that music “must say something” and that identity comes less from a stereotype than from “approach[ing] musical problems as an individual”, developing one’s musical personality “from the bottom up, piece by piece”. The painfully intimate quality of his work—what one critic called the “public life of feelings”—comes from that bottom‑up work: the body of the technique, stripped of its garments until what remains is closer to embarrassment, and yet this is the essence that makes it so sublime.

On the other hand, I would call the Evans trio a small ethical experiment: three people trying to let their individuality speak without drowning anyone else out. Nevertheless, the experiment fails to save its “leader”; it makes his addictions more tragic and his death more unnecessary, although it also shows that a certain kind of honesty is still possible under pressure. It is the kind of honesty that elevates a musician into a jazz legend.

If there is more to carry away from him, it is his determination and self-effacing nature: a patient, demanding, wary-of-spectacle, willing-to-be-fragile-in-public ethos. His life suggests that you can construct an inner order even as the outer one fails, but that nothing guarantees the two will finally align. An artistic biography at some point, however dulled by tragic events and mournable decisions.

Share

Share The Miraflorian