Fourteen Variations on a Minor Passion, Duncan McGibbon [read novel full TXT] 📗

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