Conference on the Air de Cour at Versailles (Part 4 of 4)

This is the conclusion of my report on the international colloquium on the air de cour of the late 16th and early 17th centuries (L'air de cour au temps d'Henry IV et de Louis XIII), hosted by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. (Here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Today was the final day of the colloquium, which began with a Round Table on the use of the air de cour in royal court ballet. The organizer of the colloquium, Mme. Georgie Durosoir, led a panel of specialists, only one of whom has a background in music, Pierre-Alain Clerc. The other panelists were Christine Bayle, a choreographer and scholar of Baroque dance; Jocelyne Chaptal, a specialist in symbols of Baroque ballet; Sophie Landy, a singer of Baroque music, especially the air de cour; and Anne Surgers, a scholar of Baroque costumes and stage decoration. This mixture of research interests created an intense interchange of views and opinions, some of which I had never heard applied to the ballet de cour. Some of the questions that came up in the discussion included the problem of who sang airs de cour in these ballets; how were lutes and other instruments incorporated into the ballet; and what do the costumes mean and what are their antecedents? The purpose of a Round Table like this is not necessarily to answer such questions but to open up discussion to new ideas. Philippe Vendrix then gave a short address to conclude the colloquium before we adjourned for lunch.

In the afternoon, there was a broadcast of the radio program Cordes Sensibles (France Musiques) at the CMBV. Host Jean-Michel Damian talked with Georgie Durosoir, Thomas Leconte, and Gérard Geay from the CMBV. This introduced the major event sponsored by the CMBV this fall, the annual concert series known as the Grandes Journées, this year on the theme Louis XIII musicien et les musiciens de Louis XIII. (The image at left is a detail from Simon Vouet's portrait of Louis XIII.) The show also featured Denis Raisin-Dadre, director of the performing group Ensemble Doulce Mémoire (see this list of their recordings), as well as performances from singer Sophie Landy and lutists Pascale Boquet and Charles-Édouard Fantin, from Ensemble Doulce Mémoire, one of the groups who inaugurated the Automne Musical du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles later in the evening.

Conference on the Air de Cour at Versailles (Part 3 of 4)

We continue today with a report on the second day of an international colloquium on the air de cour of the late 16th and early 17th centuries (L'air de cour au temps d'Henry IV et de Louis XIII), hosted by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. (Here are Part 1 and Part 2.)

There were two morning sessions today, the first on the manuscript sources of the air de cour. Presided over by M. Gérard Geay of the CMBV, the two papers dealt with how the air de cour filtered throughout French society in other forms. François-Pierre Goy spoke about the transcriptions and arrangements of the air de cour for lute and mandolin. Laurent Guillo presented his findings concerning illustrated collections of airs de cour which were copied by hand. The second morning session was titled "Théorie que me veux-tu?" [What do you want from me, Theory?] and was presided over by the organizer of the colloquium, Mme. Georgie Durosoir. In this session, Gérard Geay spoke about counterpoint and its role in the air de cour, and Marie Demeilliez did the same for the theoretical concept of the basse continue (or figured bass) and how it was adapted to this genre. Théodora Psychoyou also presented a summary of how the air de cour was discussed in contemporary theory treatises.

The afternoon session was the most interesting for me, because it dealt with the presence of the air de cour in other social areas. Thomas Leconte of the CMBV spoke about the unusual play known as the Comédie des Chansons, from 1640. This play in five acts has no music published with its text, but the entire text is apparently taken verbatim from pre-existing airs de cour and other types of songs. If the play was indeed sung with the tunes of the corresponding source songs, which M. Leconte was not at all willing to admit was certain, the Comédie des Chansons would be the first complete French play to be put to music and sung throughout. M. Leconte has accomplished the Herculean task of identifying a large portion of the source songs, which he shared with us this afternoon. He hopes to identify all the lines of the play and thereby to confirm whether every line is indeed taken from a pre-existing song. As for why the Comédie des Chansons was created or who created it, M. Leconte would offer only theories. Although Charles de Bey has been considered as the possible author, M. Leconte states that there is no real evidence to support that claim. That it may be associated with the opera parodies of the foires or the Italian Comedians may be more plausible, since one of the characters is named Jodelet, the stage name of an actor with one of those troupes.

Barbara Nestola of the CMBV next presented her findings on airs de cour with Italian texts and the literary sources from which they were taken. One of the most fascinating social trends in 17th- and 18th-century France was the spiritual parody, the subject of Marc Desmet's paper on the collection known as La pieuse alouette. Catholic leaders, especially among the Jesuits, favored the coopting of air de cour melodies, as long as they were published with new sacred texts. The lamento model of the air de cour, in these spiritual parodies, transformed the sighs of the abandoned or unhappy lover into the cries of woe of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, for example; the ecstasy of the lover whose love is returned into the joy of the penitent delivered from the devil; and the lustful longing of the unsatisfied lover into the yearning of the soul for union with God. This harnessed some of the power of the air de cour as social theater to create, as Desmet put it, "une machine à convertir" [a proselytization machine]. John Powell (University of Tulsa) spoke about some examples of songs that were performed as part of Latin plays presented by students in Jesuit schools in the 17th century. Prof. Powell presented them as airs de cour because of the tone of their texts, although music has not survived for most of them. Jean Duron, director of the CMBV, disagreed in no uncertain terms, and this provoked a very lively discussion to end the scholarly part of the day.

The day officially ended with an unusual performance of a play by Pierre-Alain Clerc and Lisandro Abadie, given in the same room in the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles. It is called L'Impromptu de l'Evêché: Dialogue pour un chanteur et son claveciniste, and it cleverly weaves together scenes and songs from works by La Fontaine, Molière and Lully, Chabanceau de la Barre, and Lambert. The play tells the story of two actors who learn that the rest of their troupe will not arrive in time to present a play to their patron, an archbishop. At the last minute, they throw together scenes that the two of them along can perform.

Conference on the Air de Cour at Versailles (Part 2 of 4)

This is the conclusion of yesterday's posting about the first day of an international colloquium on the air de cour of the late 16th and early 17th centuries (L'air de cour au temps d'Henry IV et de Louis XIII), hosted by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. (Here is Part 1.)

The first afternoon session presented three young French scholars, none of whom are working in musicology. Tarek Barrada spoke about some of the salons and other places where music was played regularly in and around the French capital at this time. Stephane Macé discussed the literary and rhetorical notion of the style simple, in order to ask many questions about how the concept might be applied to the air de cour. Guillaume Peureux presented some lines of poetry by Pierre Motin, which appear to have intentional errors, and glossed them as a criticism of the literary theories of François de Malherbe (1555-1628). In the final session, Frank Dobbins spoke on the airs of Charles Tessier. Isabelle His, one of the best scholars on the music set to the type of poetry known as the vers mesuré à l'antique, spoke on the relationship, often confused, between that music and the air de cour. She concluded that the two repertories have enough in common that musique mesurée can be considered a historically specific subset of the air de cour and that in general the air de cour preserved those qualities of musique mesurée that made sense to present to a wider audience and lost its more theoretical abstractions. Finally, Jeanice Brooks (University of Southampton) gave a superb paper on the French embellishments that can be found as traces in the published versions of airs de cour, with a comparison of French ornaments to those known in Italy at the same time. Not surprisingly, there is great similarity between the two traditions.

The colloquium's first day concluded with a concert that was to be a program of airs de cour. However, because the singer, Claudine Ansermet, was ill, the lutist Paolo Cherici put together a program of solo lute pieces instead, which was quite enjoyable. The concert's first half featured Italian pieces from the 16th century, of which I especially liked pieces by Pietro Paulo Borrono da Milano, Francesco da Milano, and Pietro Paolo Raimondo. (If you want to hear these performers, you can find information on their recordings by the Web sites I have linked to above.) Playing on an archlute, Cherici also performed a second half of 17th-century French music for the lute, the best of which was by Pierre Ballard. The affectation of country songs and dances in Baroque music is amusing, one example of how many foods, music, literary styles now considered delicacies or luxuries began as imitations of simple peasant life. There were brief moments in these country pieces by Ballard (Bransle "La Cornemuse" and Bransle de Village) that sounded to me surprisingly akin to American country music. The concert concluded with a Pavana and Canario by Gasper Sanz, played upon a small Spanish Baroque guitar.

Conference on the Air de Cour at Versailles (Part 1 of 4)

I am here in France because I was invited to observe an international colloquium on the air de cour of the late 16th and early 17th centuries (L'air de cour au temps d'Henry IV et de Louis XIII), hosted by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. This conference was officially opened yesterday by its organizer, Mme. Georgie Durosoir. The setting was magnificent, the stacks area of the ancien fonds of the Bibliothèque municipale de Versailles, an institution created in 1803 by the revolutionaries to house the great numbers of old and valuable books seized from the collections of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Madame du Barry, and others. The building, on what is now the Rue de l'Indépendance américaine, was constructed by Jean-Baptiste Berthier under Louis XV in 1762, as the Hôtel des Affaires Etrangères (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Other rooms have been redesigned in this library for readers and the public, but normally only the librarians go into the rooms where we were, to retrieve books. It is a series of large rooms connected by archways (see photo above at right), with shelves of beautiful old books from floor to ceiling, at a height of 15 feet or so. The decoration is typically Baroque, with gold and white trim and large paintings of Louis XV and other prominent court figures.

We heard 30-minute papers (interventions or communications in French) from panels of three or four speakers each session, one each morning before enjoying a delicious and convivial lunch together. (As there were only about 40 people in attendence, this was possible.) Then there were two sessions in the afternoon, with a break for coffee, and a concert in the evening, either before or after dinner.

The air de cour (court aria or song) is a type of French song that was developed in the late Renaissance and reached its apogee in the first half of the 17th century. With the rise of French opera under Jean-Baptiste Lully in the later 17th century, the air de cour declined and eventually disappeared. (The decline of the air de cour is documented through the career of Michel Lambert in the biography by Catherine Massip, L'art de bien chanter: Michel Lambert (1610-1696), which I reviewed in Music & Letters 83 [2002]: 449-453.) The air de cour is typically sung by a solo voice to the accompaniment of a lute, that most quintessential of French court instruments. However, as it was also used in the ballet de cour, which is my area of interest, airs de cour may also be found with multiple vocal parts that could be sung by a small ensemble or a large chorus, with or without the accompaniment of lutes or other instruments. Since this is music for the royal court or for private homes, the poetry is usually secular, often about love either desired or experienced, and with the general desire to be witty and charming, even when sad. The music of the best airs de cour meets the same criteria, generally preferring grace of line and clarity of declamation to the vocal pyrotechnics more typical of Italian music of the same period. This is not to say that the singers of airs de cour were not as skilled as their Italian counterparts, because they had their own tradition of ornamentation. When used in the context of a ballet de cour, where the king and queen and their noble friends shared the stage with professional dancers, professional singers and composers had the chance to perform and compose more dramatic examples of the air de cour, at dramatic moments in the ballet's action.

At the first session, historian Jean-François Dubost presented his findings about the musical patronage of Marie de Médicis and her entourage. She had no great taste for music but kept a modest group of instrumentalists and singers in her employ, to provide music for herself at meals, Mass, and occasions like births. Interestingly, although she could have brought some musicians with her from Italy, she chose not to do so. In any given year, the queen's annual music expenditures comprised, at maximum, 2% of her annual budget. The singers were both adults and boys (known as pages), trained and educated in the royal household, a model of schooling now being imitated by the École Maîtrisienne de Versailles, associated with the CMBV. Marie did have instructors for her son, the future Louis XIII, who enjoyed playing both the lute and the épinette, an early type of keyboard instrument, for his mother in her apartments. Louis became not only an important patron of music, much greater than his parents, but also a composer.

Françoise Bayard, a historian of economics, gave a paper on the lives of financiers in the early 17th century. As men who lent on credit to just about everyone in this period, their own personal wealth meant that they could live in the style of nobility. Using information from archival documents known as inventaires après décès, inventories of a house's entire contents made room by room after the death of the head of family, Mme. Bayard gave some idea of the role music had and sometimes did not have in the lives of these men and their families. Most had several instruments, especially lutes and épinettes, in prominent rooms. If they were noted in closets, you may draw your own conclusions. Giuliano Ferretti gave an interesting paper on the use of political airs de cour against the interests of Richelieu. He played a recording of some of these songs, which I believe may soon be released on CD. The cardinal spent even less on music than Marie de Médicis, preferring to support literary work instead. It is most fitting that the political air de cour, simple enough for servants and other common workers to sing them, should be used so effectively against him.

Botticelli Exhibit (Part 2 of 2)

Here is the conclusion of my remarks on the Botticelli exhibit (Botticelli, de Laurent le Magnifique à Savonarole) at the Musée du Luxembourg, which I saw in Paris on October 8. (Part 1 was posted on October 8.)

The concept of framing was out there in the blogosphere a while back (for example, see Modern Art Notes on August 11), and a number of visitors around me questioned the presentation of some of these works. At the end of the first hallway is the pair of Judith paintings (Discovery of the Cadaver of Holofernes and Judith Returns to Bethulia, both from the Galleria degli Uffizi, 1470), behind glass in a case made of plain weathered wood that almost looks like it was taken from an old barn. In spite of the weird framing, these are remarkable miniature wood panels, the second of which shows the other side of that distant serenity of the Madonnas, the cold cruelty of woman. Here Judith, light as a feather, carries an olive branch in one hand and the bloody murder weapon in the other, while her lady-in-waiting bears the severed head of her enemy on her head like a trophy. Judith is a heroine, bringing peace to her people through her courageous seduction and murder of Holofernes, but her face reveals no trace of human emotion. In the first panel, the Assyrian soldiers recoil in darkened horror at the discovery of the naked body of their general, decapitated and bloody in his bed. The dark tone and tortuous composition of this panel make a striking contrast with its counterpart.

In the middle part of his career, Botticelli worked mainly on secular themes for his greatest patron, Lorenzo de Medici. This is the period of the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, neither of which is at the Luxembourg. There are three portraits in the main room of the exhibit, one of a man holding a medal of Cosimo the Elder (Uffizi, 1475) and two of young women, one quite homely (sometimes known as La bella Simonetta, from the Galleria Palatina in Florence, c. 1485) and the other elegant and pleasing (Portrait of a Young Woman, from a private collection in New York, 1481-82) which offers a plain view of one of the Florentine women who could have been a model for one of the Madonnas. It is also the period for the mythological paintings like Pallas and the Centaur (Uffizi, c. 1482, shown at right), which shows another of the cruel Botticelli women, Athena this time holding an enormous halberd and wearing dominatrix-like vines that wrap bindingly around her breasts, and the Judgment of Paris (Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, 1485-88). A fascinating sketch of Pallas (Uffizi, 1491) shows the goddess with two different facial expressions.

In the darkened room with the drawings is one of Botticelli's illustrations of Dante's Inferno, the so-called Map of Hell on parchment (Vatican Library, 1480-90). I wanted to have a magnifying glass to examine the tiny details of each circle and bolgia of hell, depicted faithfully, including the legs of the simonists in Canto 19, protruding from the burning rock. Other high points of the show for me include the enormous and extensively restored fresco of the Annunciation (from the church of San Martino della Scala, now removed to the Uffizi, 1481) which measures about 8 feet high by 16 feet wide. I don't want to think about the dangers of having transported it to Paris from Florence, but I was blown away by the choice of colors and the daring composition. The angel and Mary do not even seem to meet each other's gaze across the empty space, but otherworldly rays sweep Gabriel through the arch at the left and connect him to the Virgin. Finally, a group of older, conservatively dressed French ladies spent a lot of time looking at the sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, The Incarnate Angel (private collection in Los Angeles, 1513-15), in which an angel's apparent delight in being given a body includes displaying his erect penis. As Daniel Arasse writes in the Guide officiel, "This is a private drawing which was never meant to be shown. It is the painter's image of the desirable androgyne, his fantasy. This disturbing image crosses a forbidden border, descending past the era's limit, the navel."

If you can get to Paris before February 22, I encourage you to see this exhibit. It brings together a number of works that create a thought-provoking assessment of Botticelli's work and includes several pieces from private collections that are almost impossible to view any other way.

Botticelli Exhibit (Part 1 of 2)

The Guide officiel de l'exposition for the Botticelli exhibit (Botticelli, de Laurent le Magnifique à Savonarole) at the Musée du Luxembourg, published by sponsor Paris Match, has an introduction by Christian Poncelet, President of the French Senate. When I get that exhibition installed in the U.S. Capitol (see my post on October 1, Botticelli at the Palais du Luxembourg), perhaps Bill Frist will agree to write the introduction. The Botticelli introduction presents a historical review of the Musée du Luxembourg, one of the first European museums of painting. From its establishment in 1750, the public could view great works of art, especially of the Renaissance. It may also be considered the first modern art museum, since it hosted the work of artists like David, Gros, Ingres, and Delacroix in the 19th century. This year the work to improve public access to the museum was completed, and a series of excellent exhibitions has celebrated its rebirth.

No matter how many times I go to France, I am always surprised by how cool the weather can be, even in the summer. When going to Paris in the fall, one should expect rain, which I did, but I did not pack a warm enough jacket. Many of the coats and sweaters that I left home in my closet I purchased while on trips to France because I was so cold. In spite of the chilly, rainy weather, there was a fairly long line for the Botticelli exhibit. After about a half hour in that line, I was able to enter the museum's new main exhibition hall, which is in a pavilion separate from the area of the palace used by the Senate. It is not an extremely large space, so it has been divided up into smaller areas by temporary walls.

You enter first a sort of long hallway where several of the Madonnas are displayed: Virgin with Child and Angel (Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, 1465), Virgin with Child and St. John ("Madonna of the Rosary," Louvre, 1470; on this painting, see also Botticelli's Madonna in the Louvre, a poem by Edith Wharton), Virgin with Child and Two Angels (Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples, 1468-69), and Virgin and St. John in Adoration of the Child (Musei civici di Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza, 1480-81). The woman and child figures in these paintings have a striking similarity in many cases that made me go from painting to painting to try to determine if they were in some cases based on the same models. Four later Madonnas are in the final, smaller room of the exhibit: Flight into Egypt (Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, 1495-1500), Virgin and Child Adored by St. John (private collection in New York, 1491-93), Virgin with Child and St. John (Galleria Palatina in Florence, 1495-1500), and Virgin and Child with Three Angels ("Madonna del Padiglione," Pinacotheca Ambrosiana in Milan, 1493). One sketch of the Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (Vatican Library, 1480-1490) is displayed in the third room, where the light is at a lower level.

The Botticelli Madonnas are the subject of the first essay ("Ses jeunes filles florentines rendent la Bible voluptueuse" [His young Florentine girls make the Bible sexy]) in the Guide officiel. The early examples date from the period of Botticelli's apprenticeship with Filippo Lippi, where he was a student from the age of 19. After Lippi's death in 1469, he started his own workshop in 1470, and his style became more his own. While these Madonnas are certainly beautiful, their distant serenity and, what I had never noticed until today, their sometimes shocking pallor, even in some cases nauseated complexion, give them a sense of separation. I would not apply the word voluptueuse, which has the connotation of sexual attraction in French more than curviness, to them. To conclude as the Guide does that "graceful and pained, the Botticelli Madonna keeps, behind her sublime reserve, all the sensuous melancholy of the eternal Eve" seems to me wide of the mark. In Proust's novel, Swann's connection of his despicable wife, Odette, with one of the Botticelli Madonnas (see my post on October 7, Your Weekly Proust 2) seems also to speak to this paradox. In a way Swann baptizes a real woman, who is manifestly impure, with the image of purity itself. I see the Botticelli Madonna more as Edith Wharton wrote of the example in the Louvre (see above) as the "Sad Lady," in whom we see "On thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips, / Forefeeling the Light's terrible eclipse / On Calvary, as if love made thee wise."

The authors of the Guide officiel also point out the changes in the later Madonnas, painted in the period dominated by the zealous Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, a time when Botticelli certainly no longer had to paint Madonnas but did. They do seem weightier and darker in tone. This is also the period of Botticelli's last secular painting, Calumny (Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, 1497), done in the same year that Savonarola ordered the burning of jewelry, fine clothing, secular art and books, which hangs in the large second room of the exhibition. In this period of informants and denouncements, Botticelli himself was accused of sodomy, so he probably identified himself with the young man accused by Calumny in the painting, with the assistance of Ignorance, Suspicion, Rancor, Envy, and Deceit, while Truth and Penitence look on helpless. The exhibit also includes a painting depicting Savonarola's violent end, Execution of Savonarola, attributed to Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli (from the Museo di San Marco in Florence, 1498), showing the pyre in front of the Palazzo Vecchio where he was killed. The two portraits of Saint Augustine seem to show the two contrasting characters of the Medici and Savonarola periods. The first (a fresco removed from the Church of the Ognissanti in Florence, 1480, image at left) shows Augustine as a typical man of the Renaissance, a secular bishop surrounded by books and scientific instruments, his miter laid down on his desk. The second (a wood panel from the Uffizi, 1494) presents Augustine as a tonsured monk in an austere cell, working with a quill on a small book. This is not, I emphasize, to repeat the now discredited claim that Botticelli became one of Savonarola's followers, only to underscore the exhibition's main point, that Botticelli seems to reflect in his work the different tones of the two periods in Florence's history.

—» Go to Part 2.

Your Weekly Proust 2

My apologies for the long lacuna in posting. Ionarts has been in Paris and unable to get observations onto the site. I will be publishing a backlog of posts over the next couple days, corresponding to the days on which they were written.

One of the delights (and sometimes annoyances) of reading Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is the little diversions into completely unrelated areas. In the book, the character Swann is a man immersed in the contemplation of art. He views art in a very personal way, a type of viewing that makes connections to life like no other. Proust seems to imply that one of the reasons Swann ends up marrying Odette, who is depicted basically as an aging prostitute, is her resemblance to a Botticelli painting. Here is an excerpt from Du côté de chez Swann:

As [Odette] stood there beside him, brushing his cheek with the loosened tresses of her hair, bending one knee in what was almost a dancer’s pose, so that she could lean without tiring herself over the picture, at which she was gazing, with bended head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so weary and so sullen when there was nothing to animate her, Swann was struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter [see image at right—ed.], which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. . . . He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to recpature, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered her more precious in his sight. . . . The words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him (gave him, as it were, a legal title) to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. . . . When he had sat for a long time gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette against his heart.

And from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur:

[Swann] still liked to recognise in his wife one of Botticelli’s figures. . . . Swann had a wonderful scarf of oriental silk, blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly that worn by Our Lady in the Magnificat. But Mme. Swann refused to wear it. Once only she allowed her husband to order her a dress covered all over with daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and campanulas, like that of the Primavera. And sometimes in the evening, when she was tired, he would quietly draw my attention to the way in which she was giving, quite unconsciously, to her pensive hands the uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot that the angel holds out to her, before writing upon the sacred page on which is already traced the word 'Magnificat'.

Exhibit at the Phillips

I will be posting more about this after I actually see the exhibit, but here is a taste of the new exhibit at the Phillips Collection: eight paintings from Surrealism and Modernism: Highlights from the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, which opened today and will run through January 18, 2004. The painting at the left, by Ernst Kirchner, is in the show. He is one of the artists I have been finding more and more interesting this past year, and not just because of the connection to Matisse.

Also, check out the reaction (More On The Millennium Wagner Project, October 4) to my interview with Carol Berger, founder of the Millenium Wagner Opera Company, by blogger a. c. douglas. It's a carefully thought out but largely negative reaction. One of the least believable points of Ms. Berger's plan, according to a. c. douglas: the mere thought of performing Wagner "absent the full complement of instrumentalists called for by the score." Here is how my question about instrumentalists was quoted:

Do you have instrumentalists contracted for Parsifal? Will the performance be accompanied [sic!] by an orchestra?

What a. c. means by that interjection of sic and an exclamation point (one or the other would probably have sufficed to indicate incredulity at my faux pas) is this idea that the orchestra in Wagner is supposedly not an "accompaniment" but equal in importance to, if not more important than, the singers. Personally, I think this is just semantic quibbling. The piano has a lot to say in a Schumann song cycle, too (think of the end of Dichterliebe, for example), but the fact is that it is still "accompanying" a singer. There would be no opera without the singers on the stage: they are primary in importance. In his later works, Wagner has his orchestra, often quite extensive, weave a complicated web around the singers, but Verdi's late operas are just as complicated orchestrally.