Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come, dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you. You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured by passion. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume III – Marius; Book Sixth – The Conjunction of Two Stars, Chapter VI, “Taken Prisoner”.]

Novels and stories:

• Nicole Krauss, Great House: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010) (emotional intensity).
• William Kennedy, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (Viking, 2011): “a polyrhythmic contemplation of time and its effects on passion set in three different eras . . .”
• Martin Walser, A Man in Love: A Novel (Arcade, 2019): “. . .  a version of the story that made Goethe famous . . . of the sorrowful young artist Werther’s unrequited infatuation with a young woman called Lotte.”
• Akil Kumarasamy, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “Following a cohort of young female medical students in the late 1990s, this narrative-within-a-narrative becomes our secret hatch door into the vortex of girlhood, its 'walls held together by the spit of longing.'”
• Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024): “Rooney’s writing about love hits as hard as it does because she is especially adept at evoking loneliness, for which love is a salve. There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea.”

Poetry

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

[Pablo Neruda, “If You Forget Me”]

Other poems:

• Pablo Neruda, “I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You”
• Pablo Neruda, “In the wave-strike over unquiet stones”
• Pablo Neruda, “Absence”
• Pablo Neruda, “Drunk as Drunk”
• Pablo Neruda, “In my sky at twilight”
• Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”
• James Joyce, “Of That So Sweet Imprisonment”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Vladimir Howowitz was a classical pianist who played with perhaps unequaled romantic passion. Fellow pianist Rudolf Serkin said of him: “The white heat of his playing, the fire and passion were incredible, and my hair stood on end.” Of his playing, conductor David Michael Wolff wrote: “From the first crashing, cascading arpeggio followed by electric, deeply penetrating chords full of passion and sheer color, I knew that I was hearing absolute mastery and artistry.  Others have said it before – The first time I heard Horowitz, it’s as if I were hearing the piano for the first time, as if my ears never had never known what the piano was capable of…” One reviewer writes: “His coolness and implacability onstage masked a bone-deep passion and sensitivity.” Here is a link to his playlists.

Violinist Bronisław Huberman was known for his passionate playing. Edmondo De Amicis wrote: “I watched you intensely when you played. I saw when your eyes sparkled and when they grew moist, and I saw the shiver running through the muscles of your pale face. Sometimes, when you pressed the violin, you seemed to press a living and adored thing, which inebriated and tormented you; and when you took it from the shoulder, you made a movement as if you were tearing off a vampire sugging [sic.] your blood; and then you took it back to your breast and re-embraced it with even more passionate love and pressed it under your chin with the tenderness of a mother who presses her face against the face of her creature.” His passion extended beyond music, of course: “Having witnessed the First World War, Huberman was a passionate ‘Pan-European' believing a united Europe as the solution to avoid future catastrophes. He even wrote a book about his ideas.” Károly Flesch wrote: “His personality is self-willed, sensitive, nervous and excitable, passionate and self-assured. It does not tolerate contradiction and demands subordination, even of the music.” A biography is titled: “Bronislaw Huberman, or the Passions and Emotions of the Forgotten Genius”. Here is a link to his playlists.

Yevgeny Mravinsky was a conductor known for his intensity and passion. “He was . . . a very exciting conductor, frequently changing tempo in order to heighten the musical effect for which he was striving, often making prominent use of brass instrumentation.” His performances were “technically precise, finely detailed, subtly colored, and highly dramatic -- and this not always because he was in the habit of whipping fast finales into a frenzy. His readings had an intensity, concentration, and -- despite the arduous rehearsal -- spontaneity . . .” This is true of his highly respected recordings of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which are “of the utmost intensity; no one else has had the nerve, or ability, to play the music this way. The treatment is very Russian: the passions more feverish, the melancholy darker, the climaxes louder.” Here is a link to his playlists, a documentary film, and a video of him conducting Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. His wooden appearance hides the intensity that the orchestra members and keen listeners knew well.

Conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos was also known for his intense passion. “His conducting style was passionate, highly-charged and demonstrative; he had a phenomenal memory and rarely used a baton. The American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson once described him as 'oversensitive, overweening, over brutal, over intelligent, underconfident and wholly without ease....His personal excitement borders on hysteria and he distorted music with nervous passion.'” Here are links to his playlists, and of him conducting live.

Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) (approx. 130-136’) is the quintessential opera of hot-blooded romance. The male protagonist’s mother advises him to choose a nice girl from the village but of course, he plunges headlong into the abyss with the hot-headed seductress. “Bizet’s Carmen has everything you want from an opera: high drama, passionate characters, a love story.” “Carmen musically portrays gypsy life with its exotic depictions and chromatic elements. The plot line, tonality, and character representation reflect the power struggle and political tension of nineteenth-century France. The opera also highlights the struggle between the dominant male figure and the femme fatale.” “The vehicle for Bizet's realization of his ideals turned out to be a 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée,  Prosper Merimee Prosper Mérimée narrated by a French archeologist in Andalusia to whom Don José Navarro, a notorious brigand awaiting his execution, relates the tale of his fatal encounter with the gypsy Carmencita.” Video-recorded performances include those featuring Parlov & Agulló (Casero); and Migenes-Johnson & Domingo. Top audio-only-recorded performances feature Michel & Jobin (Cluytens) in 1950; de Los Angeles & Gedda (Beecham) in 1957; Price & Corelli (Karajan) in 1963; Verrett & Lance (Prêtre) in 1967; Troyanos & Domingo (Solti) in 1975; Berganza & Domingo (Abbado) in 1978 (Part 1; Part 2); and Gheorghiu & Alagna (Plasson) in 2003.

Along similar lines as Carmen is Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Zingari (Gypsies) (1912) (approx. 64’), an opera “of passion, jealousy and crime”, based on a poem by Alexander Pushkin. Carlo Rizzi conducted a recorded performance.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata” (1805) (approx. 24-26’), “is filled with volatile mood shifts, turbulent drama, and revolutionary fire.”

Manuel de Falla, El Amor Brujo (Love the Magician, or the Bewitched Love) (1915) (approx. 34-40’), “is a ballet-pantomime in one act based on a story concerned with love, death, exorcism, and release. The story concerns two gypsies, the sensual Candela and the handsome Carmelo.” “The plot is disarmingly simple – a gypsy is possessed by the ghost of her faithless former lover until her new suitor enlists a beautiful friend to entice it away. Every one of the thirteen scenes evokes a diverse mood that is seamlessly integrated into a moving tapestry of enthralling but restrained human feeling.” “Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, or Love, the Magician, is a ballet but not in the traditional sense. It uses flamenco steps instead of classical ballet, contains songs for a mezzo-soprano soloist, and the original version included dialogue which was later removed.” Top performances of the ballet version (approx. 98-99’) feature dancers Antonio Gades in 1967; and Antonio Gades and Christine Hoyos in 1986. Top recorded performances of the orchestral version are conducted by Reiner in 1946, Ansermet in 1955, Argenta in 1957, Stokowski in 1960, Stokowski in 1964, Dutoit in 1981, and Heras-Casado in 2019. Heisser performed the work arranged for piano.

Two works by de Falla are on amore and jealousy, one light-hearted [El Sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) (1919) (approx. 39-43’)], the other darker [Noches en los Jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) for piano & orchestra, G 49 (1916) (approx. 25’)].

Heinrich Schütz, Dafne (1627) (approx. 75’): “In a prologue set in the Elysian Fields, Ovid proclaims the cruelty and intensity of love. The ensuing drama presents Venus and Cupid (described as the ‘little archer’, a pun on ‘Schütze’) punishing the boastful Apollo so that he becomes enamoured with the uninterested nymph Daphne, who escapes the god’s rapacious clutches by metamorphosing into a laurel.” “. . . so obvious and compelling is the sense of empathy in the music that one might almost be tempted to wonder how well the tensions and transformations of Ovid’s myth suited what was presumably the happy occasion of the wedding at all.”

Other compositions:

• Gabriel Fauré, La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61 (1894) (approx. 22’), “was composed between 1892 and 1894, while Fauré was having an affair with an amateur singer, Emma Bardac”, “who would later marry Claude Debussy . . .”
• Antonín Dvořák, Othello Overture, Op. 93, B. 174 (1892) (approx. 13-15’)
• William Henry Fry, The Breaking Heart (approx. 11’)
• Arnold Bax, Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1918) (approx. 46’): “Few musical works brood so intensively over so little material, and its moments of vision emerge out of an almost obsessive uniformity of mood which can make it as exhausting an experience for the listener as for the soloist, scarcely rested during the work’s fifty minutes’ course. The matter, of course, is romantic love—or, depending on the armour-plating of your sympathies, sexual infatuation. Reflexive, subjective and personal, it is at the very least a remarkably public declaration of a private passion.”
• George Frideric Händel, Aminta e Fillide (Amyntas and Phyllis), HWV 83 (1708) (approx. 51’) (libretto): “The line of argument by which Amyntas wins his suit is rather esoteric, but we are dealing in the conventions of an ideal world where constancy and fidelity eventually melt the ‘cruel heart’ of the lady.”
• Friedrich Gernsheim, Introduction & Allegro appassionato, Op. 38 (1879) (approx. 11’)
• Pēteris Vasks, Musica Appassionata, for string orchestra (2002) (approx. 18’)
• André Messager, Passionnément (1926) (approx. 77’) is an operetta involving passions for alcohol and amore. Stefan Blunier has conducted an excellent performance.
• Enric Casals, Cello Concerto in F Major, “In Romantic Serious Style” (1946) (approx. 32’).

Indian and Pakistani ghazals:

• Sung by Jagjit Singh
• Jagjit Singh live at Sydney Opera House
• Sung by Gulam Ali
• Sung by Mirza Ghalib
• Sung by Mehdi Hassan
• Sung by Chitra Singh
• Sung by Iqbal Bano

Albums:

• John-Henry Crawford, “Corazón” (2022) (63’): Crawford’s cello pairs mainly with guitar and piano.
• Geoff Eales, “Love Sacred & Profane” (2022) (57’), is “a genre-busting tour-de-force that reflects on the enigma of love with all its complications and contradictions.” “You have to love Geoff Eales, not simply for his fabulous keys and compositional skills but the utter passion of his vision. Love Sacred and Profane is his masterwork, referencing every thing from Debussy to Purim-era Return to Forever, showtime balladry to the works of another musical visionary, Hildegard von Bingen, the Sybil of the Rhine.”
• Ziya Tabassian, Hossein Omoumi & Kiya Tabassian (Iranian tombak, ney & setar), “Ateş-i Aşk” (Fire of Love) (2016) (45’)
• Electrocutango & Sverre Indris Joner, “Contrastes” (2021) (52’) highlights the sensual-sexual tension at the heart of the tango. These tracks sharpen the innate edge of the tango.
• Chaz Knapp & Mariel Roberts, “Setting Fire to These Dark Times” (2023) (38’) is “a new album of devastating, crushing beauty that marries dread-filled intensity with breathtaking bliss.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Eurythmics, “Here Comes the Rain Again” (lyrics)
• Roberta Flack, “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (lyrics)
• Hugo Wolf, “Liebe mir im Busen zündet’ einen Brand” (Love in My Breast Kindled a Fire), from Spanisches Liederbruch (No. 17) (1890) (lyrics)
• Franz Schubert (composer), Sehnsucht (Longing), D. 123 (1814) (lyrics)
• Lynne Arriale Trio, “Passion”

Visual Arts

• Salvador Dali, Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love (1940)
• Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love) (1927)
• Konstantin Simov, A Youth on His Knees in Front of a Lady (1916)
• Gustav Klimt, Love (1895)
• Paul Cezanne, Bacchanalia. The Battle of Love (1880)

Film and Stage

Bizet’s Carmen is the face of unbridled passion. 

• Carmen Jones, a film adaptation
• Carmen with Elena Garanca
• Carmen with Anna Caterina Antonacci
• Carmen with Agnes Baltsa
• Carmen with Julia Migenes
• Carmen with Nadia Krasteva
• Carmen with Béatrice Uria-Monzon
• Carmen with Anita Rachvelishvili
• Carmen with Marija Jokovic

Other films about passion:

• Red: a young woman and a despondent retired judge encounter each other through unhappy chance but then the young woman’s compassion produces “spiritual kinship and mutual redemption” as the stage is set for the young woman to achieve the passion that eluded the older man
• Children of Paradise(Les Enfants du Paradis), about a woman and a man who cannot forget each other.
• Gate of Hell: “the story of a thirteenth century warrior—a handsome and proud samurai—who falls in love with a dainty Japanese lady whom he aids and saves during a palace revolt and later requests in marriage, only to learn that she already is wed. Burning with a mad desire for her, he besieges her in her happy married state and causes her such shame and sorrow that she commits suicide” – the film illustrates the difference between Love and passion
• Notorious: not love, merely the passion of amore
• The Passion of Anna: Anna wears her passion most obviously of the characters but this is a film about the passions of many: “the ability to live with the contradictions of life and bear them without resignation”
• Swept Away: a man and a woman escalate a potentially lethal power struggle
• Woman of the Year: the attraction between the characters overpowers their differences, as did the mutual attraction of the film’s co-stars Tracy and Hepburn