The poem, apparently famous, was new to me and I was immediately drawn to its theme of the, now dead, beautiful love-lorn maiden leaning over the balcony of Heaven hoping that her lover will join her up there where they could continue their very physical relationship. It is a headily exotic piece of mystical eroticism, one of the Pre-Raphaelites classic themes. The young Rossetti is the bereaved young man witnessing what seems like an erotic and slightly irreligious dream of his lost love. This young man’s fantasy drew the piece to the testosterone-charged Claude Debussy who was in his mid-twenties when he wrote his music.   Here are two excepts from the poem to give you some idea of what I mean.

The Blessed Damozel

by Dante Gabriel RossettiThe blessed damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,The Blessed
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.

*

Around her, lovers, newly met
‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remember’d names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bow’d herself and stoop’d
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she lean’d on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

 

I was, of course,  pursuing my slightly obsessive journey through the history of classical music in chronological order from the year 1100 onwards (begun fifteen years ago) and now reaching the year 1887.  Listening to Debussy’s first musical masterpiece, La Damoiselle élue (1887/88), opened my ears to a new era and, maybe for the first time on this project, showed me the dawning of the 20th Century. I have tried over the years to block out memories of any music written after the date currently studied but now that I’m nearing the end of the line (I’m finishing in 1897 with the death of Johannes Brahms), I can’t help but hear how Debussy would flower into one of the early geniuses of ‘modern’ music. It was also a thrilling return to one of my favourite composers, long missed over the 15 years. If you want to see what I mean, you can hear an except from the piece at the bottom of this page,taken from the inspiring CD with Esa Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I can’t stop playing it. It’s true that you can hear the influence of Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883)  and, one of Debussy’s teachers, Cesar Franck (1822 – 1890), as well as sweetly sensuous echoes of music of Jules Massenet (1842 – 1912), especially his opera, Manon (1884), but the intangibly physical mysticism, and the pure sexiness of Debussy’s later work is already here. No wonder his conservatoire teachers warned him “He should be beware of this vague Impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies of artistic truth.” How right they were without realising it.

Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) as a young man

So I have reached the year 1887 and I can feel the earth shift beneath my feet. There are new kids on the block and there’s no denying that this new generation of composers, learning from the past, would change the future of music. Until now, I hadn’t realised that three composers, in particular, all born within a couple of years of each other, formed, almost single-handedly, the voice of the next great period of classical music. They were, of course, Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918), Gustav Mahler (1860  – 1911) and Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949). My listening list for 1887 – 1888 included not only Debussy’s first masterpiece but also Strauss’ first symphonic poem, the wonderfully confident Aus Italien, and Mahler’s exciting Symphony No. 1. Hang onto your seats, music lovers, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

 

Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911) as a young man

 

 

Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) as a young man

So one young man’s poem led me to the work of three more young men but from a very different era – thank you Dante Gabriel Rossetti for your own work but also for inspiring this young French maverick to invent his own way forward. When still a student, he was rebuked for disregarding time honoured compositional traditions. ‘What rule do you follow?’ asked the bemused conservatoire Registrar. ‘My pleasure,’ young Claude replied. It has become our pleasure too. Here is the opening of La Damoiselle élue. Something for the weekend, I suggest.

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My seat near the front of the stalls last night in London’s Royal Festival Hall meant that i could hear every note that was played in the Philharmonia Orchestra’s concert under their principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. The notes were worth hearing too. Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune sounded truly exquisite reviving my love for this piece and reinstating for anyone here for the Stravinsky that Claude Debussy (1862-1918)was behind the great Russian’s inspiration in The Rite Of Spring which also received an inspiringly musical performance under Esa-Pekka Salonen who made the piece as exciting as usual but also mellifluously beautiful. The third piece, sitting between Debussy and Stravinsky was Edgard Varèse’s gigantic Amériques in his 1927 revised (and smaller) version where the orchestra expanded to include 10 percussion players and as many horns, trumpets and trombones and, of course, those famous sirens.  It was a thrilling experience to hear it all up-close. The rest of the audience seemed to agree by the way everyone was grinning and cheering at the end. It was proof, if any was needed, that 20th Century classical music is a sensation in the concert hall.

The French composer Edgard Varèse was one of my heroes when I first listened to ‘modern’ music. He was one of those excitingly Bohemian artists who ploughed his own furrow but, unusually, also had a good sense of humour. Just as 20th Century composers owed a giant debt to Debussy, so too do the many composers who followed the trail first blazed by Monsieur Varèse.

I shall remember last night’s concert for a long time. Merveilleux.

Listen to this if you don’t believe me:

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When certain great people die, it is tempting for other people to claim that the deceased changed their lives – I resist these claims but in the case of that most charismatic, under-estimated, over-publicised, cruelly-under-funded and brutally ridiculed and patronised British film director, Ken Russell, I feel that I have to say that the man did make a difference to my life.

As an impressionable schoolboy looking for excitement in the wonderful world of the arts, Ken Russell crashed into my life with a BBC television movie about the French composer Claude Debussy (The Debussy Film, BBC 1965). For once, I can really say that I was never quite the same again after seeing this hypnotic, erotic, rhapsodic and visually thrilling film that for all its invention and film-maker’s flair, went straight to the heart of the composer’s neurotic and seductive music. This was, for a now horribly inspired kid, the coming together of two passions: classical music and film. I don’t think any other film director has ever matched Russell’s particular genius here. I remember sitting on a grassy bank with a friend talking non-stop for a very long time about the wonders of that programme and how I wanted to live my life on the same level of creative excitement. Well to be young is bliss as Wordsworth told us.  Of course, I was then hooked on his work and watched all the other composer films that he made for the BBC at that time – the glorious Elgar (1962) with its now iconic image of the young composer on his white pony, Song of Summer (1968) his muscular and often brutal portrait of Delius and Dance Of The Seven Veils (1970) about Richard Strauss, his wild and maybe best film attempt at depicting hysteria and obsession.

First loves are strong loves and The Debussy Film was the one for me. The young Oliver Reed was perfect in the role of Debussy switching in and out of character in the film as the trendy, cannabis-smoking, typical “sixties” actor preparing for his performance as the trendy and sexy composer from the perfumed world of French Art Nouveau. For me then, and maybe still, this was pure intoxication – art breaking the rules but celebrating art itself.

I was thrilled, of course, when the master hit the big screen with that string of movies that made him, for a period, one of the biggest names in cinema. Women In Love (1969) was maybe his best film in the sense that it allowed his imagination to fly whilst being constrained by D H Lawrence’s text. Of course everyone remembers the naked wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates but there was a lot more to the film than that and Glenda Jackson deserved her Oscar for best actress in a leading role. Russell got an Oscar nomination, it was the only time, and briefly, the film world was at one in singing his praises.

The schoolboy in me was even more thrilled though when his most scandalous film came out in 1971. The Devils (with Oliver Reed – again – and Vanessa Redgrave) did what I hoped cinema would always do from then on, it took the art of film-making by the scruff of the neck and shook it until we were all shaking with excitement in our seats. It was then that the great parting of the ways began between Russell and the worthy film critics. He was never to be forgiven. One day, people will come back to this film and ask why anyone who could love the art of film could not see this movie as a truly great and exciting example of its power.

After The Devils, we, his fans, all needed to take a deep breath and relax, Russell did just that with The Boyfriend (also 1971) starring, in a brilliantly original piece of casting, the most famous of all Sixties models, Twiggy. The film, patronised and dismissed by many, is sheer joy, fun and invention and it completes the quartet of my favourite Russell movies. After that there were great moments, enjoyable things, a lot of laughs and, yes, I suppose, disappointments. Did he go off the boil, was it his fault, was he a victim of his own wildness or was he destroyed by a narrow-minded movie industry? We all have different opinions here. There are plenty of other films to watch if you are an aficionado but I would like to stop here remembering the works that turned me on to the glories of film and maybe to the possibilities of art too. I truly hope that he will be remembered as one of cinema’s greats.

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I finished the first draft of my third sestina yesterday. I know, as with the first and second sestinas too, that I shall be doing some obsessive rewriting but it was a moment to mark in the silent days that that can hang over my study.

I am not complaining – far from it – it is a wonderful thing to be free enough to spend most of the day writing even if nothing of any lasting worth comes out of it. This doesn’t stop me wanting to put a few red  letters on my calendar which could, otherwise look monotonously grey.

For a couple of months now I have been revisiting traditional poetic forms filling in gaps or maybe grand canyons in my ignorance to find out if knowing what I am doing could make any difference to my poetry writing. Probably not some people would say. I don’t agree. I plan to carry on by writing at least three poems in most of the known forms until I can’t stand it any longer. So far, I have found it truly rewarding.

Since starting I have written three villanelles, three pantoums, a testina and three sestinas. I shall be moving on to the sonnet next but that is why today is a natural break. Studying the sonnet will mean at least one new one and a radical rewriting, I hope, of the two that I have already written.

All the above forms, before the sonnet, involve a highly controlled system of repeated lines or words and, obsessive that I am, I have discovered that I love repetition. Maybe I didn’t need to study form to work that one out but I have found a rich seam… I hope. Certainly, even if no one else likes the poems that I have been writing recently, they have given me real pleasure in their making.

I have some friends who mock me for my joy in repeated jokes and circular conversations but it is only now that I have come to see how deeply this stuff is embedded in me. I plan to look back over them all today so I will enjoy them for a few moments before I start to tear them apart.

Here is a pantoum, Harmonie du soir  from Les fleurs du mal (The flowers of evil) by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) who popularised this originally Malaysian form in the 19th. Century. The repetitions add to the heady, opium-fueled obsession – I just love it.

Evening Harmony

Now is the time when trembling on its stem
Each flower fades away like incense;
Sounds and scents turn in the evening air;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!
Each flower fades away like incense;
The violin thrills like a tortured heart;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place.
The violin thrills like a tortured heart,
A tender heart, hating the wide black void.
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place;
The sun drowns itself in its own clotting blood.
A tender heart, boring the wide black void,
Gathers all trace from the pellucid past.
The sun drowns itself in clotting blood.
Like the Host shines O your memory in me!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)

Harmonie du soir

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu’on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu’on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige…
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!
— Charles Baudelaire

And, if you haven’t already swooned away with the decadence, here is Debussy’s setting of the same poem performed by the soprano Barbara Hendricks and the pianist Michel Béroff:

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