FREDDIE AS AN ARTIST


Persian FARROKH BULSARA, whom the whole world knows as Freddie Mercury, was a born artist. His voice bewitches in the same way today as it had during his life, when he used to fascinate millions with his image, voice and performance.

He was an extraordinary musician like the mythical Orpheus who was capable, when playing on his lira or guitar, of settling the furious elements of storm, of bewitching the plants, animals, people and gods. Due to magic of his music something truly impossible became possible to him - the gods of death set his dead wife Eurydice free and gave him the permission to take her back to life. There was only one condition - he wasn't allowed to look back untill they reached the upperworld. Orpheus couldn't bare it and he turned his head in halfway. That was how he lost Eurydice, this time for good. After that, there was no consolation for him on this world any more. His life ended when Thraciac women (maenads) torn him to peaces, because he rejected their love.



Orpheus is a symbol of a fighter, who is only able to bring the wrong to sleep, but not to destroy it - he himself dies as a victim of his own imperfection. Orpheus is a person, who didn't obey the rule and who dared to look at the invisible. He is also a symbol of a great artist, since only artists can look at the invisible, only they are prepared to pay the greatest price for that courage.
But, what is art after all? What human activity can we declare as art?

Leo N. Tolstoy, the truly greatest authority, has given us the most beautiful and at the same time the most precise definition of that term. In his essay "About Art", Tolstoy writes:
"Art deals with a whole range of feelings - with very strong and very weak ones, very important and very shallow ones, very beautiful and very ugly ones, as long as people get infected by them. When spectators or listeners get infected by the same impression the author had, that is what we can call art.
Duty of an artist is to hold a feeling and then to express it through movements, lines, colors, sounds or pictures described by words in such a way, so the others would feel the same sensation as the artist had. Art is a human activity in which one person, with the help of certain external signs, consciously passes on other people the feelings he/she had experienced, and then the others get infected by them and experience them as well.

Art is not an expression of some mysterious idea, beauty or God, as metaphysics claim. It is not a game, in which a person loses the accumulated energy, as aesthetics of physiology would say. It is not mere expressing feelings through some outer signs, nor producing nice objects, and in no way is it all about obtaining aesthetical pleasure. Not at all, art is a necessity for life and for directing every single person and the whole mankind towards happiness, it is an instrument of understanding between people, an emotional band, which brings them together."

These words written by the greatest teacher of mankind are a precise description of what had been going on on the concerts of Queen. Feeling safety inside the band, Freddie Mercury was able due to the magic of the music and his magnificent artistic personality to communicate with huge masses of people (communicate is the word he used to describe it). In Germany in 1986 Freddie used a sceptre as a baton and was giving ritm to the mass of 70 000 German people in singing the british national anthem. It is very hard even to imagine something like this happen outside the world of art. And during his 20 minutes long performance at the Live Aid concert, he had over 2 miliard people in control over TVs, and at the Wembley stadion, 70 000 people sang as one with him. This Live Aid concert is a very nice example of how art unites people, and Freddie had a unique opportunity here to demostrate all of his artistic strenght. He could experience the fact that the real art always outgrows its creator in Rio in 1985, when 325 000 people forced him to sing the song "I Want To Break Free" in the way they wanted it and needed it - as an hymn to freedom. As long as he was wearing a wig and false breasts that was impossible, so he had to throw away those items.



These few examples taken from the large number of others, can draw nearer to us what had Tolstoy in mind, when he said that "ART MUST CLEAN THE WORLD OF VIOLENCE, BECAUSE ONLY ART IS CAPABLE OF DOING IT."

Music of Queen is a true art, because it was never destructive. It is loud and full of life. A lot of their songs disapeared as victims of time, fashion or a style, but the majority stays for the future, because their true value is still not recognized. Here I have to mention Freddie's life work - songs, he realized with the help of Montserrat Caballe. These songs are a true inheritance for the future.