This transcript appears in the October 7, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this transcript]
Moderator’s Introduction, Panel 4
The Art of Optimism: Using the Classical Principle to Change the World
This is the edited transcript of Jason Ross’s opening remarks introducing Panel 4 of the Schiller Institute’s Sept. 10-11, 2022, Conference, “Inspiring Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.” The full video of Panel 4 is available here.
As the science advisor to the Schiller Institute, I’m happy to be moderating this final panel, entitled, “The Art of Optimism: Using the Classical Principle To Change the World.”
We open with a musical demonstration of that Classical principle: Leonore’s gripping aria from Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio. In this story, based on the real-life imprisonment of the Marquis de Lafayette, and the heroic actions of his wife [Adrienne] to rescue him from prison, we hear Leonore, wife of the political prisoner Florestan, who dresses as a man to get a job in the prison where he is held. Under the assumed name of Fidelio, she gains the trust of the warden and plots how to use her access to save her husband.
Just before the aria we’re about to hear, Don Pizarro, the man who had imprisoned her husband, Florestan, for political reasons, demands that the prison warden kill a special prisoner, whom Leonore takes to be her husband. The warden refuses, and Don Pizarro announces that he will kill the prisoner himself. He commands the warden and Fidelio (Leonore) to enter the dungeon to dig the grave.
Hear, now, Beethoven’s aria, in which Leonore reflects on Pizarro’s evil and on the hope that sustains her. The aria, “Abscheulicher!... Komm Hoffnung,” (“Abominable One!... Come Hope”) is sung in Beethoven’s original German with English subtitles.
[musical performance]
Thank you to soprano Alyson Spina and David Maiullo on piano. Thanks also to Nancy Guice for organizing that performance of Leonore’s aria from Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.
Now, on that theme and on the role of LaRouche in that theme, LaRouche addressed the division between science and art, between the German Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft, between the techie and the fuzzy domains, between the “two cultures,” as C.P. Snow called it. What is the relationship between science and Classical art? Is science a realm of cold facts, without human passion, but in which truth can be found? While art is a realm of emotions, where truth and beauty are purely in the eye of the beholder? No! said LaRouche, there is a connection, and this connection has a bearing on the creation of the United States itself, and on physical economics.
