BLACK RENAISSANCE

Renaissance and baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi, architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi, and a tutor to the young Elizabeth Tudor. From Monteverdi’s impassioned search for an opera subject in the works of Tacitus to his meditations on divinities, to Brunelleschi’s diving into the works of Herodotus so as to illustrate Greek history, Szentkuthy veers through the Renaissance, sounding a pessimistic ‘basso continuo’ on psychology, sin, metaphysics, truth and relativism. Through Orpheus’ final mask, that of the tutor of Elizabeth, it is eros and theology, two of Szentkuthy’s fundamental concerns, that receive yet another complex and engrossing dramatization. Metaphysics, Rationalism, and existentialist despair all spin through the author-narrator’s kaleidoscope as he closes his Black Renaissance by discoursing on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. A thousand attempts at defining physical and spiritual, heavenly and earthly love all fail.