Voluptuous Calm Before the Storm
The late romantic composer Henri Duparc's musical legacy consists of less than 20 songs. He destroyed everything else he wrote, and stopped composing at age 36, the victim of madness.
The songs are hugely important to singers, who perform them and assign them to their students. This week I am listening to Sarah Walker and Thomas Allen sing their interpretation. In particular, I think Allen should be even more famous than he is; he is present on some of my very favorite albums.
Duparc knew how to find and set a certain kind of exotic text. There's a scent of the narcotic present in every Duparc song. Consider La vie antérieure, the perfect ambassador of Duparc's alternative world:
Former LifeSomebody open a window, please! That's just a little too heavy on the incense. This was written in a time it was still possible for Frenchmen to view Algeria and much of the Muslim world as theirs; its close, yet separate situation made it handy for the occasional vacation for procuring doses of the exotic, or as the setting of another one of Hergé's improbable Tin Tin adventures. As France reaps the unwholesome harvest of its colonial past, the suspension of disbelief necessary for such fantasies becomes increasingly difficult.
I've lived beneath huge portals where marine
Suns coloured, with a myriad fires, the waves;
At eve majestic pillars made the scene
Resemble those of vast basaltic caves.
The breakers, rolling the reflected skies,
Mixed, in a solemn, enigmatic way,
The powerful symphonies they seem to play
With colours of the sunset in my eyes.
There did I live in a voluptuous calm
Where breezes, waves, and splendours roved as vagrants;
And naked slaves, impregnated with fragrance,
Would fan my forehead with their fronds of palm:
Their only charge was to increase the anguish
Of secret grief in which I loved to languish.
— Baudelaire; Translated by Roy Campbell
For some reason I cannot end without linking to Captain Euro.
UPDATE: This post has been corrected. See comments.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
2 Comments:
I actually wrote a short piano piece based on this poem for a final project in french class. "Les Houles ont roule les images des cieux." "the waves of the ocean roll the images of the sky" It was very Debussian, as you might imagine. I love this poem though, i had to memorize and recite it in french... which is difficult, as you might imagine.
The reference to "Baghdad-born Duparc" certainly piqued my curiosity so I started checking around for more details. That ever-reliable source of accurate information, Wikipedia, says he was born in "baghdad" [note the suspicious lower-case b]. Other sources give his birthplace as Paris, which certainly seems more likely. His involvement in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy is currently undocumented, though it will, I am sure, eventually make it to the Wikipedia article.
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