The Polish Rider by Rembrandt, that is about us

In the recent years the French author Yannick Haenel published in Paris a book entitled Jan Karski which in France proved to be a bestseller. Its first two chapters are of a documentary character. They present the history of the title character – a hero of the Polish resistance movement who as the first one informed F.D. Roosevelt about the cruelty of the Holocaust (Shoah). The third chapter is a literary fiction. In this chapter Karski finds out just after the war in the museum in New York, a picture by Rembrandt – The Polish Rider. This picture can be treated as an artistic image of an archetype of the Polish culture. Poland belongs to Europe. The Socrates’ thought underlies the base of the European culture. According to it the rules of the social life must be established based on “the essence of things”. And this means according to the Aristotle’s thought that the human community is the commonwealth. At the threshold of the modernity a change of this paradigm occurs. It is the thought of the Descartes; cogito. Here the starting point is I, an individual undertaking the economic activity (Th. Hobbes, J. Locke). The face of the rider expresses the conviction that the market is not everything. In the archetype of the Polish culture which accepts the European heritage, there is a need to take the “values” into account. And this is the imperative of every single individual; and at the same time of all. It is, as Lelewel put it into words, “the public spirit”; “crowd”… And it is our “code”. Poland is an “eternal sensitivity”.

The Eighteenth-Century Transformations of the Opera in an Aesthetic Perspective

The beginning of the 1980s brought a significant change in the perception of music of the Classical era, which was the aftermath of the ‘Baroque Revolution’. Charles Rosen suggested adopting a new perspective, noting that classical music, Mozart in particular, freed itself from the strict rules and followed a dramatic action in a sonata form. The author of The Classical Style points out that Mozart’s operatic style manifests revolutionary features and the music, though following closely the dramatic action, at the same time remains faithful to the greatest invention of the second half of the 18th century, i.e. the sonata form. Particularly noteworthy are the works of an American musicologist Peter Kivy who in his observations referred to The Passions of the Soul – an epochal work by Descartes, that strongly separated acts of will from other states of consciousness. Affect is an innate trait, suspended in the expressive space, which could only be changed by a cadence. Such a line of thought leads us directly to a dominating Baroque da capo aria with strongly contrasting parts A and B and the recurring parts A or A1. Hartley contrasted the motionless parts of the Baroque da capo aria with a diversified play of affects, which he transformed into the theory of association. Individual affects became a dynamic continuum in which polyphonic accumulations and dramatic conflicts took place. Kivy’s basic thesis is the conviction that it was Hartley’s concept that dominated the space of musical Classicism, with its most spectacular product, i.e. the sonata form. Kivy proves that the architecture of the sonata form with the thematic dualism of the exposition, the thematic work of the development with a variational basis and the tonal agreement of the reprise resembles Hartley’s stream of quickly following affects. The play of highly dramatized emotions influences the construction of the ensemble scenes, in which contrast and drama play a leading role. The world of the dualistic character of the Baroque da capo aria was abandoned by adopting the play of successive ensembles, the concept of which was derived from Hartley’s aesthetic views and their refinement in Kivy’s treatise. In Mozart’s mature operas, the ensemble is the main element constituting the dramatic course. Hence Kivy’s term ‘dramatic ensemble’, which has nothing to do with a drama understood in terms of expression and having a tremendous form-creating aspect for an 18th-century operatic work.