Fourteen Variations on a Motive from a Minor Passion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.Lydia

The instruments argue their prayer

in the stance of their players,

in the body’s adopted shape,

intended music, printing upon air

the immanent hue of sound.

Midsummer in stony Ariège,

the drone of flies has dried the sound

of the schoolmaster's harmonium,

as surely as pious Empire portraits

have faded behind a mist of silt.


After baptismal drops that pluck

the taut meniscus of the font

at Notre Dame du Camp,

a small boy, fostered out,

grows up to sit, unsmiling

in a church of dust and bones,

catechised on sin and sickness,

in a family of six,

fearing temptation and death.

Lydian voices chanting in canon,

moisten the Cathar spite of the stones

with the power of personal grace.


2. Le Secret

In rough Montgauzy

the schoolmaster's son

sounded the organ,

vibrant in the musty air.

To comfort, or relate,

human hands attend

a cradle, or the dying, perhaps.

A blind woman hears him

knead the distant sixth

from the dusty keyboard

back to the foyer, craving unity,

asserting an accidental self,

silent, awestruck and dull.

Illumined by the violin’s

soft, burning lamp,

the piano, a table spread

with twilit, linen emptiness

and unwanted hunger

shared out among those

of mountain faith,

of the ostal,and

the roaming father,

among the credentes.

His was always

a music of the blind

heard by interlopers,

a secret kept behind at dawn.

3. Une Sainte en son Aureole.

Hands curled in awe of black and white,

under a Swiss aesthete’s frugal eyes.

Arpeggios, contrapuntal toil,

aching fingers, voices worn with charm,

Gabriel learns the music of orphans,

board and lodging,

part-paid by an unsighted hand.

His ears bent to the allure

of the Capital's sensuality,

the slow traffic of the city

distracts the little boy’s attention

from Monsieur’s spidery rallentandos,

as paraffin lamps are blazed upon night air.

With a hook-nosed, mischievious eye

his teacher insists upon the notes.

Later Fauré writes home, “I've written three

letters with no reply. I do not know why.”

Under the spell of Saint Saëns’

bullying sweetness, a plagal cadence

concludes an antique dance

after the allure of gaieté.

Stone dreams of a classicist

are taught to walk with the sureness

of celibate polyphony.

While ornate ghost-intervals

claw back the body to haunt

a century's textbook chords.

A melody begins to stretch

on the dwarfing Erard,

its maternal bulk blurred

beneath tarrying modulation.

Slackening again to a chilled surface

the curve reclaims its shape.

The word becomes human grace

then grows anxious,distant and hurried,

a river-yole, broken from its moorings,

drifting elsewhere, into mists, or a sunlit glare.

The departures are undramatic,

only a vanishing into elsewhere country,

above fading Delphiniums and Phlox


4. Puisque L’Aube Grandit

Lips pucker to a flute’s cold metal;

a kiss, a street-urchin’s whistle,

an act of adoration before

the Good Friday crucifix.

Gabriel's faith lay in his body,

elected by natural talent.

Yet the sound, painted upon air, was his alone.

Alone by the fountain, Miss Garden poses,

her hands held in that wishful gesture

of dancing fingers while the conveyed

waters puke, á la Japonais, from the

fountain's source. Marianne Viardot,

from Fauré’s other family,

pace the Garcia line, enters,

like a sylphe, to an antique dance,

while a bearded young bohemian bounced out

Wagnerian themes in crazy rhythms,

and strings crowded in fortissimo

to applause from Renan and Turgenev.

Marianne had seen enough to see him off,

leaving her hat behind, as his hands

beseeched the cold keys. Meanwhile, against

the text, Golaud, takes Mélisande,

while only cold flutes sustain the note.

A change of scene at the Opéra

and Pénélopé, daughter of Dédale Frémiet,

embraced her impassive hero.

Malebranches' plucked harmonies

are only thought and cannot be heard,

as with Fauré’s marital chords,

chosen from Marianne’s hat.

In silent rooms, he drew away

from Saint-Saëns’ supple hand.

De Vauvenargues’ art ‘is always erotic,’

the heart’s occasionalism.

A string sounds and then another,


asserting the ear's reality.

A cheek holds its allure.

Miss Garden’s breasts,

assert their corseted witness

against a teacher’s dominant.

Immorality ceases to exist, where art

and hypocrisy alone, are sacred.

The charge of General Gallifet,

or Ozanam’s orders to the Civil Guards

made César Franck scramble

the barricades to wed his bride.

A young man with no experience of death

shared a flat in the defeated city:

as the shot archbishop fell

to the cheer of communards-

no other paradise now.


5. La Lune Blanche Luit dans les Bois

Self-portrait, the composer by night,

alone, the door shut on Tchaikovsky's

flattery, away from Marie Frémiet

and the boy, tuition finished

and the last train caught to Gare St Lazare.

Then the Orient Express

from the Gare de L’Est draws out at last

only to the silence of empty rooms

in the Palazzo Wolkoff, or

aimless chatter at Florian’s.

If such feelings are not illusions,

what do they inform us of

‘the two parts of the mind?’

A sombre, modal theme, a secular

hymn evokes the facades

filled with moonlight,

hollowed at exact intervals

by window frames

while under the pollarded trees,

people come in to light and go

darkened while crossing shadows loom,

gigantic, on the cobbles.

Above the square, the night

moves its weight against the roof tiles:

a turbulence from the wind.

Something from within a room

is remembered, a breath, Emma Bardac’s?

Working through these changes, pagan by choice,

on the sacred pipes, his harmonies sound


less chromatic than Franck,

fading to a wordless solo voice.


6. J’Allais par des Chantiers Perfides


That rocking rhythm, a fashion taken

from Offenbach and Venetian concerts,

seeking the girl with sough -after hands

beyond the place, where you walk,

a phantom twosome.

In the rue Bergère, five times-refused

the Prix de Rome, Ravel’s lush success

spelled the end for Dubois and

Fauré's arrival at his desk

as the 'Robespierre’ of French music.

He disliked the style of La Bohème,

that crass operatic, a slack lyricism,

that suited the national prestige

of colonial powers. A new access

‘clear, honest music’ began to count

and the peasant of the Ariège found himself

first the doyenne of the Sociétés,

then a casual face at the Polignac’s.

Everything delicate, the Fantin-Latour

of the sound- offerings to the Albigensien God

and for the fallen voluptuaries of pleasure.

Misia Godebska had a perfect

smile and would not listen, distained

the bourgeois ease. She had a cat-like face

from Bonnard’s Natanson portrait.

Such passions fade, though vivid,

why shouldn’t they be fleeting?

7. Ne Tremble pas Promethée

Passion informs him of unframeable loss.

‘L'Ariègois', wearing Bézier shoes, élégantes

Gabriel Fauré; he stands speechless before

the splendour of Ysaye's great home.

He plays informally before Queen Victoria,

the Prince of Wales and the Tsarina.

Glasgow and Manchester applaud him.

He dines with diplomats and forgets

their names. In Bayreuth and the Wahnfried

he charms Cosima and Madame de

Mendelssohn promotes him in Berlin,

while Brussels is alerted by the Rothschilds.

The simple medodies grow complex,

his heart broken by Marianne Viardot,

even Miss Palliser's Kundry will not appease.

He is intoxicated by big opera shows

he can only fail in.Yet each

song is a miniature opera, re-living

the sense of anxious love

and sleazy ambition.

Silent seductions followed,

all of whom had to be worshippers.

The Salon culture admitted

industrious, talented sensualists

and their prey, rich women

seeking material immortality.

The Océanides, Marie Trélat,

Madame Henri Cochin,

Madame Leroux-Rybeire,

La Baronne de Montagnac.

Others placed their homes

at his disposal for private concerts;

Mrs Adéla Maddison, Mrs Patrick Campbell.

Soon the circles spread on the surface

of Parisien chiffonières,

and finally, the Queen of the Belgians.

Bonnard’s "Nu Debout" was too open.

Female talent existed to express

the Paternal genius of the Oustalet,

pianists, actresses, singers,

but never to be original.

His breach with Marguerite Long

suspended life for a day

at the Conservatoire.

He would not change his daily routine

to attend Sarah Bernhardt

nearby in the Rue de Madrid.

The crescendo at Béziers quietens to

a piano roll that tinkles gently with

the solemn lyricism of a practiced hand

with which he put his lost soul into

the dry conservatism of Saint-Saëns.


8. Maitre à qui J’ai Donné les Tresors de ma Grace


The choir master of La Madeleine

writes of his political affiliations

to Marie, his lottery wife,

He mourns the loss of Waldeck-Rousseau,

followed the careers of Briand and Poincaré.

He wryly chronicles the life of music

from the columns of Le Figaro.

Deaths in Vladivostock occasioned rage.

A liberal, he sought to sway

the operatic establishment

of La Belle Epoque,

élite leisure unforced by law,

while massa damnata poor were pitied.


An unknown loss,

felt only in the pain

of nameless want

made him a collector of pleasures,

symbols of an unknown desire.

In a balance of sequences,

strings intone devotion,

which the keyboard

punctuates in dense sixths,

grasping a distant harmony

into a bundle of tragic retrievals.


9. Cygne sur L’Eau


The slight tracery of the chordal

piano part, then a suspension.

In Saint-Evremond, love of pleasure

is the avoidance of pain.

Absence mirrors its opposite.

“Art has every reason to be voluptuous,”

he says to the young Reynaldo Hahn.

Modal plainchant; that rational

dissection of desire, leaped with horizons

of austere progression, hidden behind

meandering modulations.

A true Cartesianism, the illusion

of pleasure dangles rationality

on the Ignatian strings,

rigging the Baroque barque,

and yet no strange Americas

delay the fated, Schumannesque end.


10. L’Hiver a Cessé


In the Franco-Prussian war he took

uniform for a year and always felt

a longing for that paternal inner

pity of the tuba and the bugle.

The élégie is intoned, andante,

pleading with the crowd as

the Emperor Bonapart's remains

are interred at Les Invalides.

Rennes, St Lunaire, the Pension

Sternwarte de Zurich,

or hotel rooms in Bad Ems,

Lugano, even in St-Raphäel,

composing a music

in intimate rooms

to the echo of the front-line guns.

Even as late as 1921,

he stayed on at Nice;

solitary, despite his family ties,

the pen scratching a clear manuscript.

The untuned piano straining

at his complex chords.

Within a room, Fauré’s

invention, Marie, perhaps,

stiff-legged in a pose,

concerned with her toilette,

paces in profile for the man to

catch that elegance of limb,

a deep-boned sensuality.

Always patient, always noting

his infidelities, she loved him.

Or Misia's voice,

sounding in the corridors

of the Conservatoire.

against the silent

fury with Marguerite.

Verlaine’s flame circles Brunnhilde’s:

his songs always more reserved

than his other work.


11.Andante Moderato


Sidaner-dawn over

the Third Republic,

a winter afternoon.

Heavy reparations hang

like this mist over Europe.

The whispering crowd gathers

in the Rue Royale,

without an incident

to protest, or a politics

to demonstrate,

the Ruhr invasion having failed,

sabotage and passive resistance have

brought the economy to its collapse.

The Republic was lining up for its fall,

accepting the Dawes Plan,

as Marxists spread fear among Radicals.

A petition for rest on the strings

and male voices chanted low.

The doomed Geneva Protocol

let poison proliferate.

Ramsey McDonald

opened negotiations with Lenin.

The sky-blue Republic under

a leaden sky surplices

ecclesiastics, hurling anti-semitic

venom in printing ink.

The 'Cartel des Gauches' had collapsed.

The secular Jansenism

and its quest for beauty

torn apart in the lives of its infants:

Alfrèd Cortot, Charles Panzéra,

Marguèrite Long, Pablo Casals, Maggie Tayte,

Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel,

Enriquos Granados, Manuel de Falla,

Isaac Albéniz, Georges Enesco;

the School of Europe, as heard by Copland.


In the nave of the Madeleine,

Président Doumergue, followed

by red and blue soldiery,

gave a salute to the Director

before the Pietà on the high altar.

The white choir launched

the theme in D minor.


It takes fire in E Flat to form

the plea of the orphan sixth for his parents

to listen and to have him back:

to go through the gate and see their

eyes on him and his mother moving

into the open, rustic doorway.

The choir gathered round the angels,

in a tug of war over

una poenitentia,

intones the consolamentum,

under the gilt, mosaic Christ.

The tonal blocks return in plangent

D minor, then optimistic major,

modulate grandly to F.

Beyond the Molto Adagio

for Mélisande-Marianne

the soldiers begin to move out,

as the boy soprano sings

and the richly-decorated coffin

is born into the Parisian

afternoon and horse-drawn to

the family tomb at Passy.


Later the ashes of Jaurès, would be

transported to the Panthéon by Doumergue.

For a Socialist Paris, the past of Verdi

or Auber could not be summoned now.

With Breton's Surrealism,Les Six, the era

of commanded art began.


To the fine sound of

the distant, Neopolitan Sixth,

the Second Quintet argues a prayer

of joy,voicing his worst fears

of “another ending always

on the major theme:”

a little boy running home from church,

looking for warmth and his mother's smile.

 

 

 

 

 

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.06.2012

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In Memory of Elsa Snell