The whole world of pain

Atles Farnese

Greek mythology, as we’ve mentioned more than once, is full of horrifying stories. The best-known ones belong to the Olympian period of the gods led by Zeus, but there was an earlier age, that of the Titans, and a war between the two factions.

It all began when Zeus rebelled against Cronus. And although he’s not among my favourites, I must admit that the god of thunder had his reasons for confronting his father, who had tried to swallow him at birth just as he had swallowed his siblings. As is well known, after ten years (measured on the scale of the gods, not on our miserable human scale) and aided by other enemies of the Titans, such as the Cyclopes, Zeus won the war, settled on Olympus, and took appropriate revenge on his rivals. Most of them, including Cronus himself, he sent to Tartarus to be tortured for eternity — Schiller and Schubert describe it for us in Gruppe aus dem Tartarus–, and with others he was even more cruelly meticulous.

Such is the case of Atlas, the most powerful Titan after Cronus, and surely the bravest, the boldest, the most intelligent, and the one who most irritated Zeus, who condemned him to bear forever on his shoulders the weight of the vault of heaven. This exemplary punishment has been depicted countless times in art, and the figure of the atlas has even become an architectural ornamental element. But the most precious representation is surely the Farnese Atlas that illustrates this article; believe me, I would go to Naples, where it is kept, just to see it (and while there, I would of course enjoy many other works of art). It is a Roman second century AD copy of a Greek sculpture; the unfortunate Atlas is crushed by the weight of the celestial sphere, which forces him to rest one knee on the ground. What first captures our attention is the gesture and the body tensed by effort, but then our gaze moves to the beautiful celestial globe that contains practically all the constellations described by Ptolemy.

At some point in our history, representations of Atlas shifted from carrying the weight of the heavens to carrying the weight of the Earth. Perhaps because, once it was accepted that the Earth was a sphere, it became the most immediate association. Or because the cruelty of the punishment was easier to grasp if one imagined that enormous, solid, heavy ball rather than that mass of shining dots that the night brings us. Or because there were other legends linking Atlas to earthly elements, such as the mountains of North Africa; or because, whether cause or consequence, an atlas is a book that gathers maps of seas and continents, not of planets and stars.

And then, in the early nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine used Atlas as a metaphor. We often say of the poet that he was fond of using hyperbole as a poetic device to speak of the immensity of his pain; think, for example, of the enormous coffinthat ends the Dichterliebe cycle. But in the 24th poem of his collection Heimkehr, which would become one of the Heine settings in Schubert’s Schwanengesang, he went further and transformed the world borne by Atlas into a world made of pain, his pain, making the image of Atlas even more terrible. All the sorrows of the world borne by a single person. And I must confess that every time I come across an Atlas, whether an imposing one like the one at the Punta della Dogana in Venice (which, in fact, consists of two figures — balancing on just one must have been too unstable) or a discreet atlas adorning a façade and supporting perhaps a simple cornice, I think of Heine’s image and of the piercing lament that closes Schubert’s lied: Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen muß ich tragen.

I am sure that many readers have listened to Der Atlas countless times and that little further explanation is needed. But I would still suggest, as I often do when the song I’m proposing is so well known, that you make the effort to listen to it as if it were new. Follow it word by word, and, for example, pay close attention to the repetitions Schubert introduces into the text, to the expressions he emphasises. Or to the change in the accompaniment, not only in the vocal line, that arrives with the second stanza. Or to how he breaks the poem’s penultimate verse. Or how he repeats the first two. And since a magnificent song deserves a magnificent performance, the version I’ve chosen to share with you is that of Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau.

Der Atlas

Ich unglücksel'ger Atlas! eine Welt,
Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen muß ich tragen,
Ich trage Unerträgliches, und brechen
Will mir das Herz im Leibe.

Du stolzes Herz! du hast es ja gewollt,
Du wolltest glücklich seyn, unendlich glücklich
Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz,
Und jetzo bist du elend.

I am miserable Atlas! a world,
I have to bear the whole world of pain,
I bear the unbearable, and my heart wants to break –
My heart wants to break in my body.

You proud heart! actually it is what you wanted,
You wanted to be happy, endlessly happy
Or endlessly suffering, proud heart,
And now you are suffering.

(translation by Malcolm Wren)