The Enlightenment isn’t exactly remembered for its flights of fancy. If the odd novel embraced a fantastic tone, it was frequently in the service of satire, an entertaining means to send-up contemporary mores and pursuits or to poke fun at authority figures and good old reliable human frailty. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll explore a few of these fantastic adventures of the 18th century.
“The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1785) pokes fun at a real-life German nobleman and veteran of the Russo-Turkish War, one Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, whose reputation for telling outrageous tall tales was lampooned by Rudolf Erich Raspe. Raspe, fearing a libel suit, published the work anonymously, with the result that it was commonly believed that the Baron had actually dictated the tales himself. Naturally, Munchausen was upset by the unwanted attention. The name “Munchausen” has come down through the centuries to describe feigned illness and pathological lying.
The book has been adapted to film several times, beginning with a silent version by Georges Méliès, all the way back in 1911. We’ll be hearing music from two subsequent adaptations. The first, titled simply “Münchhausen” (1943), is undeniably entertaining and exceptionally well-made. However, underlying a sense of enjoyment is a kind of unease in the knowledge that the film was a pet project of Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UFA film studio by producing a lavish spectacle worthy to stand toe-to-toe with foreign efforts like “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Thief of Bagdad.”
Considering the source, one would have to look awfully hard to come up with anything resembling Nazi propaganda. The entire exercise comes across as a pastoral escape from the horrors of totalitarianism, total war and the Final Solution. The elegant music, by Georg Haentzschel, would not be out of place in the concert hall. Haentzschel is regarded as perhaps the last representative of a generation of Middle European light music composers.
More than 40 years later, director Terry Gilliam undertook another production design-driven adaptation that resembled a series of Doré illustrations brought to life. Contrary to received wisdom, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1988) managed to pull in a respectable amount of per-screen capital. Ultimately, the film was a casualty of a management turnover at Columbia Pictures, with the new regime eager to bury the projects of the old. Therefore, it was never seen theatrically beyond a very limited release. The score, by Michael Kamen, while in a romantic heroic style, wittily contains abundant allusions to music of the 18th century.
“The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (1805) is a transitional work, with its ecstatically lurid opening chapter – replete with gypsy storytellers, highwaymen, dueling skeletons, lesbian vampires and a couple of corpses dangling in a gibbet – dragging the Enlightenment kicking and screaming into the Romantic age. It starts out as a masterpiece of surrealism by way of Gothic convention, with the spell eventually broken, sadly, by a large cold bucket of Enlightenment water in the form of a perfectly rational explanation at the end. But until then, the author, Jan Potocki, gets an A for effort. The interlocking structure, with stories inside stories inside stories looks ahead to postmodern experiments by writers like Italo Calvino and John Barth, to say nothing of Jorge Luis Borges.
The book was made into an acclaimed Polish film, “The Saragossa Manuscript,” in 1965. Its cult status led to a restoration financed by Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola that was released on VHS and DVD in 2001.
Who else could provide the perfect soundtrack to such a hallucinogenic experience but Krzysztof Penderecki? Penderecki intersperses spooky passages with neo-classical and baroque interludes.
Finally, we’ll have music from one of the many adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726). “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” (1960) simplifies the book’s narrative and dispenses with a great deal of the misanthropic humor in favor of children’s fantasy. You won’t catch Gulliver extinguishing a fire in the Lilliputian Emperor’s palace with his urine in this version. What you will find is a good deal of technical wizardry and a delightful score by Bernard Herrmann.
I hope you’ll join me for music from fantastic 18th century adventures this week, on “Picture Perfect” – music from the movies – this Friday evening at 6 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Munchausen hitches a ride on a cannonball
