The Art of Art
The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “One cannot escape the world more certainly than through art, and one cannot bind oneself to it more certainly than through art.”
I was six when I experienced art for the first time. I sat there, huddled around a raised platform at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, a puppet performance of Mozart’s opera, Die Zauberflöte, unfolding before me. Though I didn’t speak German, the music–those achingly high arpeggios and heart-breaking arias–transmitted the universal values of love, fear, and joy, making me cry and laugh without really understanding why. And that’s the beauty of art. It transcends trivialities like language or age and captures something much more raw; it’s a solace and a transport for us when reality becomes too much, and yet, art is the clearest reflection of that reality, enshrining our human passions and sorrows in the swell of a melody or the flick of a paintbrush.
Last month, my mom and I attended a performance of Man of la Mancha, a musical based on Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, that tells the tale of Cervantes, a failing playwright, who’s been accused by the Spanish Inquisition and incarcerated while awaiting his trial. His fellow prisoners take advantage of him, seizing his unfinished manuscript of Don Quixote. Desperate to retrieve his beloved manuscript, Cervantes strikes a deal to hold a mock trial, with his defense given in the form of a play; he and his manservant quickly transform into the characters of Alonso Quijano and Sancho Panza.
In the defense, Quijano is an aging, deranged man who’s convinced himself that he’s really a chivalrous, honourable knight named Don Quixote, destined to fight for what’s right. Despite his madness, people humour him, allowing Quijano to lose himself in his wild reveries of castles (an inn), his Lady Dulcinea (a prostitute), and evil giants (a windmill). When criticized for his lunacy, Quijano sings his quintessential response: “to dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe….no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.” In the end, Quijano’s unwavering idealism transforms an inn full of jaded people scorned by a life of poverty into one willing to look at the world with a little more hope. Cervantes’ defense equally convinces his fellow prisoners, who return his manuscript and sing “The Impossible Dream” as he is called to face his real trial–but this time, with his chin held high.
What struck me about this performance was its perennial relevance. This is a musical that debuted in the sixties, a time of political turmoil and global uncertainty, based on a book from the seventeenth-century, an era of Spanish decline and military defeat, that was revived this year in Mexico, during an equally uncertain time of international conflict and corrupt leadership. Yet, Cervantes’ story remains unfalteringly applicable as it is a paean to hope, to the never-ending fight for a better world where greed and inequity don’t exist. The characters stand for all those who have set out to conquer their own “windmills” and strive for the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice in a time of unrest. The musical asks, through its minimal set and props, for the audience to use their own imagination and participate in the storytelling–to lose themselves in a show that, while exposing the artifice of the theatre it’s creating during every scene, enthralls the audience with its palpable human emotion.
As Don Quixote literally “escaped the world” through his idealism, and Cervantes found himself transported from his issues by pouring himself into his literary creations, Man of la Mancha is a momentary escape for us as an audience from the worries and troubles of our present lives, while simultaneously embracing those sentiments and preserving them. And that is the art of art.
