Beatrice Venezi’s BLOG. «Knowledge sets you free; ignorance enslaves you.».
Today we’re talking about freedom, and I’d like to begin with this emblematic quote from Socrates.
Freedom is the cornerstone of our lives; it is the ability to act without constraints and to make independent choices. It is the ability to determine one’s own course and to move forward, even in the face of the mental obstacles posed by political correctness, conformist thinking, and what we now call cancel culture — the banning of ideas, works and even authors from the past, when they fail to stand up to scrutiny by a present that claims to judge history by its own standards.
A free person makes choices; otherwise, they live in the purgatory of non-choice, limiting beliefs and unconscious decisions. Therefore, the first fundamental step towards freedom is to free oneself from the social preconceptions that confine our thinking within walls erected by someone else.
In the West, no legal system has ever guaranteed as many freedoms as it does today; yet we have never been less free than we are today. How can this paradox be explained?
«Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains»
Rousseau had already written this, at the beginning of his Social Contract. Two centuries later, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin would simply provide us with the vocabulary to distinguish between visible chains and those that are not: on the one hand, negative freedom – the absence of external obstacles, of prohibitions set out in black and white; on the other, positive freedom – the real capacity to be masters of one’s own life, to govern oneself from within. Our age has won almost every battle concerning the former. As for the latter, I fear we are losing ground.
We live in a society that values and takes to extremes the material aspect of freedom, whilst devaluing its mental aspect: how much freedom is there in a world inundated with all manner of relentless messages which, like an ever-present Inception, do they instil in us thoughts, needs and preconceptions that do not belong to us? We delude ourselves into thinking we are free, but we fail to realise that our choices have already been pre-determined by others so effectively that they seem normal and necessary to us. This “pre-packaging” is the hallmark of our times, permeating every aspect of our daily lives: we consume pre-packaged food, we wear disposable fast fashion, and we adopt ideas that have been pre-digested by others without subjecting them to the ‘gastric juices’ of our critical thinking.
Today, the greatest act of heroism in the quest for true freedom is to learn to ask ourselves whether what is being foisted upon us reflects our own thoughts and will. How can we equip ourselves with such awareness?
Culture is the decisive factor; only knowledge and learning enable individuals to acquire the skills and tools needed to make informed choices, guided by their own free will.
Why does culture set us free? Because it teaches us to reflect, to make sense of reality and, therefore, to question. It is a way of asserting our critical faculties and of shaping our individuality, free from conformity. Culture lies at the heart of society; it defines a people’s identity and shapes us as individuals. The steady decline in education, which calls merit into question, deliberately creates fragile, easily manipulated citizens, thereby fostering a society that sets aside universal values such as respect and dignity, replacing them with a motley assortment of false values. By stripping culture of its guiding role – including its moral role – and by ruining the school system by dragging it down to a lower standard, a serious blow has also been dealt to the State, the democratic system and individual freedom.
Freedom is a fundamental principle which, throughout history, has also been explored by artists and musicians, and the history of opera, in particular, is also a history of circumvented censorship, rewritten librettos, and settings shifted to safer times and places, all in order to continue telling, in disguise, the same story: the human desire not to be subjects.
No work expresses this more clearly than Fidelio, the only opera that Beethoven he has ever written. Florestano is unjustly imprisoned in an underground cell, the victim of a regime that seeks to make him disappear without trial; his wife Leonora, disguised as a man under the name of Fidelio, sneaks into the prison to rescue him. Significantly, the opera’s most famous moment is not a love duet: it is the chorus of the political prisoners, who are brought out for a moment into the sunlight Oh, what a delight!. It begins in a very low voice, almost a whisper, because even raising their voices at that moment could cost them their lives. Then it gradually grows louder until it bursts into a strong fullness, a symbol of dignity and freedom rediscovered in a collective ecstasy. Beethoven depicts freedom as physical relief, even before he depicts it as an idea: in his Fidelio, freedom sounds exactly like someone who, for the first time in a long while, is starting to breathe again.
And then let’s think about Giuseppe Verdi. As a composer who consciously assumed a political role in the noble sense of the term, his work is distinguished by its incorporation of themes relating to freedom and political oppression. In this regard, Verdi himself emphasised the importance of not separating art from human freedom. Through characters suffocated by the dictatorship of despotic rulers or by adherence to rigid social norms, Verdi illustrates how freedom can be achieved through individual struggle and rebellion. In operas such as Nabucco, for example, with the famous chorus Go, thought expressed by the Jewish slaves, which became a symbol of freedom and the struggle for Italian national independence during the Risorgimento.
Verdi, after all, was well aware of the real cost of these issues. A masked ball, which in the original story recounted the assassination of a king — Gustav III of Sweden, who was in fact killed in an assassination attempt in 1792 — had to be rewritten at the request of the Bourbon censors, who were alarmed at the idea of staging a regicide during the very years when attempts were being made on the life of Napoleon III. The monarch murdered on stage became a colonial governor in Boston, and the action was moved from Sweden to colonial America: a bureaucratic disguise that makes us smile today, but which at the time was the only way to bring that music to the theatre at all. Changing names, shifting locations, disguising the truth as fiction: this, too, is ultimately a way of fighting for the right to say something that those in power do not want to hear.
And furthermore, let’s consider Carmen by Georges Bizet. The heroine refuses to allow herself to be confined by the gender expectations and social conventions of her time: she chooses, she loves, and ultimately she dies, but always and only on her own terms, never on those that society would seek to impose upon her. Bizet makes her a symbol of such radical personal freedom, and so unsettling for the bourgeois audience of 1875 — accustomed to far more submissive heroines, certainly not to a cigarette-smoking woman who openly declares her right to love and to stop loving whenever she pleases — that the premiere was met with a veritable scandal. Bizet died three months later, convinced he had written a failure: he did not live to see Carmen to become, within a few years, one of the most beloved and frequently performed works in the world.
And furthermore, the opera Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano. Set during the French Revolution, the opera is inspired by the real-life story of the poet André Chénier, who was guillotined in 1794 at the age of just thirty-one, two days before the fall of Robespierre, which might have saved him. Chénier uses his art to express the ideals of liberty and equality, despite persecution and danger: his poetry becomes a powerful tool for inspiring others to join the cause of liberty. And the opera also contains its most bitter flipside, in the voice of Gérard, the revolutionary who, in his monologue, An enemy of the state? He realises, too late, that he himself has become the instrument of the very terror he thought he was fighting: freedom, Giordano seems to be telling us, can devour even those who first called for it.
And if we want to stay within the 20th century, which is closer to us, let’s think of Dmitri Shostakovich. In 1936, *Pravda* publicly attacked him for his work Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, with a title that is in itself a condemnation: “Chaos Instead of Music”. From that moment on, Shostakovich lived in genuine fear of being arrested in the dead of night, like so many others before him. His Fifth Symphony, written the following year, was officially presented as «a Soviet artist’s response to justified criticism»: a title signifying surrender, submission to the regime. Yet that seemingly triumphant finale, with its hammering chords repeated to the point of exhaustion, represents the exact opposite: a parody of that very regime which, beneath the ostentation of festive military parades, conceals the terror of the purges.
Giordano’s work, like that of Beethoven, Verdi, Bizet and Shostakovich, highlights the power of art to promote cultural freedom and the importance of free expression as a means of challenging authority and fostering social change. In this sense, all this can be seen as a tribute to the French Enlightenment and its idea of freedom as an inalienable right of the individual. These works of art, and many others besides, demonstrate how culture can promote and inspire freedom, in line with the Greek concept of “the beautiful, the good and the just” (which we referred to a few weeks ago). Art, in fact, can represent the “beautiful” and, at the same time, promote “good” and “just” ethical and moral values, emphasising that freedom is a value to be safeguarded and promoted.
I shall conclude by stating, with absolute certainty, that culture sets us free, that it broadens the boundaries of the world in which we live, enabling us to see it from a myriad of different perspectives. Promoting and broadening knowledge of our history, art and traditions, free from any form of bias, means elevating culture to a genuine civil and social right – an integral and essential part of a modern welfare system, in which culture plays a central role.
Culture and knowledge are the foundation of all freedom; this is a right that is fundamental to human dignity; there can be no personal freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of opinion, nor true democracy without culture and knowledge.
Beatrice Venezi