Fourteen Variations on a Minor Passion - Duncan McGibbon (booksvooks .TXT) 📗

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Imprint

Publication Date: 06-04-2012

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
In Memory of Elsa Snell