The first four notes of the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven’s most famous motif, run through the whole piece, its treatment is most often frantic, as if it seemed to run desperately in a perpetually evolving labyrinth in look for an exit, a comfort, a glow. In the words of Marguerite Yourcenar, the Carceri evoke a “fictitious world, yet sinisterly real, claustrophobic, and yet megalomaniac (which) is reminiscent of that in which modern humanity is getting more and more locked up every day ». Nevertheless, it remains forever closed, inhuman, and therefore terribly frightening. This prison universe has a fantastic aspect due to its monumental type. This interior world, which I imagine to be the spirit of a Beethoven without auditory contact with the exterior, reminded me of the Piranesi’s engravings. Carcere Oscura, produced in 1743, is a kind of prelude to the cycle of the Carceri d’Invenzione, the artist’s masterpiece. An collossal prison, of Dantesque proportions, and at the same time oppressive. It was the vision of a Beethoven, prisoner of his own body that was the starting point for this piece. This is the question I tried to answer by composing this sextet, written in tribute to Beethoven. 38).« What can hearing loss mean for a composer ? Of course, the style of drawing in The Smoking Fire is radically different from that in the Carcere oscura, and Piranesi has also introduced a certain spatial ambiguity through the use of the characteristic smoke obscuring an architectural juncture which he developed in the Grotteschi.” (Early Architectural Fantasies, A catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings, 1986, p. Andrew Robison notes some significant differences between the two plates: “While many details are altered, the most interesting compositional change in The Smoking Fire is Piranesi’s inclusion of additional flights of stairs disappearing into far background space. The third print in this series, called Carcere oscura, has a composition that is very close to The Smoking Fire: some details are almost identical, like the two large ropes dangling from a pulley on the left, or the lantern hanging under the arch to the right. But this etching was itself a reworking: the source of the composition, according to Robison, was a plate in the very first series etched by Piranesi, the Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive, published 1743. That is the case of The Smoking Fire: Piranesi reworked the plate for the second edition of the Carceri in 1761. In the preface to his catalogue raisonné, Andrew Robison observes that Piranesi was keen to rework his plates at regular intervals. Some slight soiling and a few tiny repaired tears in the margins. Very fine impression printed on laid watermarked paper (fleur-de-lys in a single circle, hard to see, probably Robison 5, ca. Impression of the 1st state (of 7 according to Robison), the foreground floor empty except for human figures, before addition of some shading and numerous objects, including five round-topped stone pillars, and before the signature. Plate VI of Carceri d’Invenzione or Invenzioni capric. Robison 32, 1st state (of 7), 1st edition (of 6) Focillon 29 Hind 6 Etching, engraving, sulphur tint or open bite, burnishing, 540 x 400 mm.
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