Monthly Archives: January 2024

Literature

Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)

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People are apt, these days, to consider modern life rubbish and that we’re living in a quasi-dystopian society run by fools and cowards and spiralling towards disaster. Fair enough; it would be pollyannish of me to disabuse them of that notion, given the realities of the world, but let me quickly provide a crumb of comfort by pointing out that at least we’re still able to enjoy life’s little pleasures like this blog. And we can at least dream of how it might have been, how we might have been led by philosopher-kings in a just and ideal society enjoying a golden age. A utopia, if you will…

I don’t know if there ever has been a real-life utopia, but it’s perhaps unlikely, given that there have been so many imaginings of one, dating back to 370BC when Plato described the attributes of a perfect state in The Republic (and from where we get the term and idea of the “philosopher-king”). I suppose bright sparks have been lecturing their comrades on how things should be done for as long as humans have lived together, but the written form – utopian literature – gets properly kicked off with Sir Thomas More’s word-coining book Utopia published in 1516.

Thomas More (1478-1535) was the noted Renaissance humanist who was at various times lawyer, judge, statesman, philosopher, author, and Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. Quite the achiever, and he is even a saint now, since being canonised in 1935 as a martyr (having been executed as a result of failing to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church of England).

“Utopia” is derived from the Greek prefix ou-, meaning “not”, and topos, “place” – so, “no place” or “nowhere”. Interestingly, More had initially toyed with naming his fictional state by the Latin equivalent of “no place” – Nusquama – so we might today have been talking about Orwell’s 1984, for example, as a dysnusquamian novel!

In any event, More’s vision inspired many others to describe their own versions of an ideal utopian society, including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) (see what he did there?), H G Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), and Aldous Huxley’s utopian counterpart to his decidedly dystopian Brave New World, namely Island (1962). Well, we can keep imagining…

Sir Thomas More
Music

Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales Of Hoffman (1880)

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German author E T A Hoffmann (1776–1822) was one of the major writers of the Romantic movement and his stories of fantasy and Gothic horror highly influenced 19th-century literature. For example, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is based on Hoffman’s novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, while Delibes’ 1870 ballet Coppélia is based on the short story, The Sandman. Incidentally, this excerpt from the latter story, describing that folkloric character the Sandman, amply illustrates that the term ‘Gothic horror’ is no exaggeration (in bygone ages we didn’t half spin some horrific tales for our young, eh?):

“Most curious to know more of this Sandman and his particular connection with children, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sister what sort of man he was. “Eh, Natty,” said she, “don’t you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

The Sandman (and two other of Hoffman’s tales, Councillor Krespel and The Lost Reflection) also inspired the subject of today’s blog, the opéra fantastique by French composer Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffman. Offenbach (1819-1880) was already a famous composer of around 100 operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) and La Belle Hélène (1864), when he collaborated with Jules Barbier to bring The Tales of Hoffman to the stage. It proved to be his final work: knowing he was dying, he wrote to impresario Léon Carvalho:

“Hâtez-vous de monter mon opéra. Il ne me reste plus longtemps à vivre et mon seul désir est d’assister à la première” (“Hurry up and stage my opera. I have not much time left, and my only wish is to attend the opening night“)

But it wasn’t to be: Offenbach died in October 1880, four months before the opera’s premiere…nevertheless, his work entered the standard repertory and is a popular piece to this day. Here, listen to Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča sing the soprano and mezzo-soprano duet, the Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) from Act III. You either know it or you think you don’t know it…but you’ll know it!

Jacques Offenbach