Fourteen Variations on a Minor Passion by Duncan McGibbon (large screen ebook reader txt) 📖
- Author: Duncan McGibbon
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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
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