Messiaen's Alpine Retreat

Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992, was buried near his vacation house on the Lac de Laffrey in the Isère, where he composed most of his major works. In his will, Messiaen asked that this residence be made into a place in honor of his music, and now it will serve as a "little Villa Médicis in the Alps," with space for five artists to stay there. An article in Le Figaro (La maison de Messiaen deviendra une «petite villa Médicis des Alpes», June 29) has the details (my translation):

The three small white buildings with blue shutters will be inaugurated on July 1, 2, and 3 with a series of concerts. The residence "will be able to receive a string quartet who might come to prepare for a concert, or a composer, or an ornithologist, because Messiaen was a bird lover, going so far as inventing a system to transcribe their songs, which still remains a secret," explains Bruno Messina, general director of the Isère artistic agency that will manage the establishment.

Far from being anything like the sumptuous Renaissance palace of the Académie de France in Rome, the Messiaen house is "the anti-villa Médicis," says Messina. Significant work, costing 1.2 million euros and financed by the composer's estate, was carried out to solidify the foundations, to decorate the ceiling with images of bird, and to create three rehearsal studios. Very modern and well lit, the rooms have been cleared out of the kitschy bric-à-brac and religious objects beloved by the composer.

This sanitizing of Messiaen's Catholicism is wrong-headed, as the faith is inextricable from Messiaen's music, but critics do it all the time, too. The plan is to leave the property, where Messiaen sat every morning to make his birdsong recordings, otherwise as natural as possible, with the proximity to the Lac de Laffrey, tall trees and other plants, and views of the Taillefer and Chartreuse massifs. The opening concerts will include 14 short performances of Messiaen's music, all free, recalling the Stations of the Cross, followed by a concert in the Basilica of Notre Dame de la Salette, with Roger Muraro on piano and Nathalie Forget on Ondes Martenot, coinciding with the 170th anniversary of the Marian apparition there.

Briefly Noted: Grimaud's 'Water'

Water, H. Grimaud (released on January 29, 2016) DG 0289 4793426-4 | 57'03"

Hélène Grimaud was last in Washington in 2008, to play Beethoven's fourth piano concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra. This recent release is partially a live recital program on the theme of water in music, which she played in several places, captured here at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2014. In between these tracks -- by Berio, Takemitsu, Fauré, Albéniz, Ravel, Liszt, Janáček, and Debussy -- are ethereal "transition" pieces, recorded last summer by Nitin Sawhney. In these brief, mostly electronic pieces, Sawhney creates soundscapes on keyboard, guitar, and computer, including some pre-recorded sounds of water.

The live version of this recital, reviewed in the New York Times, sounds much more interesting than the result on disc. A collaboration with artist Douglas Gordon and lighting designer Brian Scott, the concert was staged in a pool that slowly filled with water over the course of 20 minutes: "Then, the lights darkened until the hall was almost completely dark. You heard the subdued sloshing of someone walking on the flooded space: Ms. Grimaud, of course." Some of the repertoire choices are perhaps too obvious (Ravel's Jeux d'eau, Liszt's Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este, Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie), making Grimaud's renditions of Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch II and Berio's Wasserklavier stand out from the crowd. A Fauré barcarolle and Janáček's In the Mists seem like stretches thematically, especially when there are choices like Ravel's Ondine, Scriabin's second sonata, and Debussy's Poissons d'Or. That last one was reportedly Grimaud's encore at some performances.

À mon chevet: 'Dante: il romanzo della sua vita'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Leonardo Bruni wrote that Dante "enjoyed music and sounds" and was the only early biographer to add: "and he drew excellently by hand." It is no surprise that Dante was a competent musician. The writings of thirteenth-century Italian lyric poets circulated almost always by being read or recited and not, as the Provencal troubadours did, through sung performances with musical accompaniment, but there was still a practice of "clothing" poetry with notes. Dante makes several references to his lyric compositions having musical accompaniments, and there is a scene in Purgatorio where the musician Casella (about whom we know nothing, except that he was a friend) sings his canzone Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona (Love that discourses on my mind).

The act of drawing is quite another matter. Bruni doesn't say that Dante was a connoisseur or a cultivator of the fine arts but that he himself practiced it. He could have taken the information that Dante painted, or rather drew, from the paragraph of the Vita Nova in which he describes the day of the first anniversary of Beatrice's death, June 8, 1291, when thinking of the lady's blessed soul, he sat in an unspecified place drawing "an angel on certain tablets." He was concentrating so much on this task that he didn't realize certain distinguished gentlemen had approached and were observing him. When he noticed their presence, he stood up and greeted them but then, once they had left, returned to "drawing figures of angels." At first sight it might seem no more than an invention, but even if this were not the case, it certainly can't be assumed that these things happened at the time and in the way that Dante describes.

Yet the use of the technical words "tablets" (tavolette) is striking. Toward the end of the 1300s, the painter Cennino Cennini, a pupil of Agnolo Gaddi, wrote a practical treatise on the various techniques of drawing and painting in which, having established that "the basis of art ... is drawing and coloring," he exhorts a prospective pupil to begin by drawing, and says that this practice begins with drawing in tavolette. This consists of drawing using a "stylus" of "silver or brass" on wooden boards properly "plastered" with a layer of "well-ground bone." Here it seems as though Dante is describing himself carrying out this preliminary exercise -- an exercise which we should not imagine, in modern fashion, as being done in the open air. It would be more reasonable to think of him sitting in a closed, or semi-closed, surrounding which may have been a workshop (of a painter or apothecary). But since medieval workshops opened onto the street, the distinguished gentlemen could have easily observed him. Besides, if even respectable city figures could see him at this work without finding it unusual, this means that Dante regarded it as more than a simple impromptu leisure activity: would he have portrayed himself as a "sketcher" if he wasn't known for such activity or practice?

-- Marco Santagata, Dante: The Story of His Life (trans. Richard Dixon), pp. 77-78

We have a bit of a Dante obsession here at Ionarts. Marco Santagata, who recently posited the identity of Elena Ferrante as Naples university professor Marcella Marmo, is a professor of Italian literature at the Università di Pisa. His recent biography of the author of the Commedia draws together the archival evidence about Dante's life, wrapping it around a close reading of all of his works to glean the biographical details. While there are many things about Dante's life we just cannot know for certain, he brings to bear much about the lives of the people who figure in his works, like Guido da Montefeltro, Pope Boniface VIII, Beatrice Portinari, Guido Cavalcanti, Brunetto Latini, the nephew of Farinata degli Uberti, and the father and lover of Francesca da Rimini. There is also more information about the Guelf-Ghibelline politics of the city of Florence than most people probably need to know, but the portrait of Dante that is revealed -- his familiarity with music and drawing, for example -- is a rich one.

Who Is Elena Ferrante?

Elena Ferrante's books have been high in our estimation at Ionarts. While the Italian author, whoever she is, has become extremely popular reading in the United States, she has met with less enthusiasm in France, where her Neapolitan novels have not been fully translated into French yet. Suspicions about Ferrante's real identity are running high in France, where the idea that she is the pseudonym of a male writer has taken root. The latest example is an article by Delphine Peras (Elena Ferrante, énigme littéraire fascinante, June 26) in L'Express (my translation):

In the era of unbridled narcissism, where the quest for celebrity has become a universal truth, here is a case completely counter-cultural: Elena Ferrante is at once a writer beloved throughout the world (more than 2.5 million copies sold, with translations in 42 countries) and the nom de plume of a writer about whom we know nothing. Or almost nothing. No photos, no media interviews, no signing sessions, no participation in a festival somewhere. She has never shown herself. She or he? For some suspect a man is hiding behind this pseudonym. [...]

Other indications have filtered through: originally from Naples and born at the start of the 1940s, like her narrator, a college graduate, she supposedly lived abroad, especially in Greece. But the mystery endures, and as her success grows, journalists are proposing other trails: in Italy, some believe the author is none other than Domenico Starnone, writer and screenwriter, also Neapolitan, born in 1943, well well... Winner of the Strega Prize, the equivalent of the Goncourt, he is notably the author of Lacci, which supposedly has strange similarities, in style and story, with Ferrante's I giorni dell'abbandono.

Unless it is his wife, Anita Raja, a translator of German, a discrete person, and even on the editorial staff at E/O [Ferrante's publisher]. The managers of the company have denied it in vain, the hypotheses are multiplying: a long article by Marco Santagata, published in March in Corriere della Sera, suggests that behind Elena Ferrante hides one Marcella Marmo, a university professor in Naples, a student at the prestigious Scuola Normale in Pisa in the 1960s, like Elena Greco. Denied again, by both the writer in question and the editors, the only ones to know the identity of the unknown author.

How long before someone tries to hack into the publishers' computers to uncover the identity of Elena Ferrante? Whoever she is, we are looking forward to reading her Frantumaglia: An Author's Journey Told Through Letters, Interviews, and Occasional Writings, which will be published in the United States this November.

Perchance to Stream: End of June Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio and online video from the week gone by. After clicking to an audio or video stream, you may need to press the "Play" button to start the broadcast. Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• From St John's Smith Square, Paul McCreesh leads a performance of Haydn's The Seasons, in a new English translation, with the Gabrieli Consort and Players and soloists led by soprano Carolyn Sampson. [BBC3]


• From the Lyon Piano Festival, music for two pianos by Mozart, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Ravell with Martha Argerich and friends. [France Musique]


• A performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, starring Véronique Gens and Nicolas Rivenq, with Jean-Claude Malgoire conducting La Grande Ecurie and la Chambre du Roy at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. [France Musique]


• The Jerusalem Quartet begins its 20th anniversary series at Wigmore Hall with music by Beethoven, Bartók, and Brahms. [BBC3]


• From the Wiener Festwochen, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker in music by Webern and Bruckner. [Ö1]


• Watch Daniele Gatti direct music of Verdi in Parma, for the 200th anniversary of the composer's death, recorded in 2013. [ARTE]


• Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in music of Prokofiev and Beethoven, plus Scriabin's Prometheus, the Poem of Fire with pianist Kirill Gerstein, recorded last December. [CSO]


• Dance music and arias from Rameau's Dardanus and Pigmalion, with Michi Gaigg leading L'Orfeo Barockorchester, soprano Dorothee Mields, and tenor Anders J. Dahlin, recorded last month at the Barocktage Stift Melk. [Ö1]


• The New York Philharmonic performs Mozart's last three symphonies, with Alan Gilbert at the podium. [NY Phil]

Read more »

Saturday Opera: 'La Bohème' from Liège

Puccini, La Bohème
Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège (Paolo Arrivabeni, conductor)
Production directed by Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera

Patrizia Ciofi (Mimi)
Gianluca Terranova (Rodolfo)
Ionut Pascu (Marcello)
Alessandro Spina (Colline)
Laurent Kubla (Schaunard)
Patrick Delcour (Benoît)

Christo's 'Floating Piers'

As his first solo work after the death of his wife, Jeanne-Claude, Christo has installed The Floating Piers, a floating dock covered with yellow fabric in Lake Iseo, which is about 100 kilometers east of Milan. As Wired reports, it is something of an engineering marvel. Through July 3, visitors can view it from the mountains surrounding the lake, and they can walk on the work from Sulzano to Monte Isola and to the island of San Paolo. In less than a week since its opening, the work has received 275,000 visitors, which is causing some concern about the stability of the floating material, as Philippe Ridet reports (On se bouscule (trop) sur les pontons de Christo, June 23) for Le Monde (my translation):

The expectation of 500,000 visitors through July 3, when the work will be taken down, will be easily surpassed. As a result, the pontoons -- 200,000 polyethylene cubes held together by 200,000 giant screws -- are wearing down much faster than Christo had thought, even if they are limited to supporting no more than 11,000 people at the same time. The security of people walking on them is maintained by 150 people on the passwalks at all times, as well as 30 master swimmers floating in the water. [...]

Access to the work will now be closed to the public from midnight until 6 am, to allow the little villages serving as departure and arrival points for the piers to clean up after the hordes of visitors, as well as to reset and rearrange the pontoons.

The surrounding areas are also feeling the effects of the success of the art work with visitors. The town of Brescia, from which the trains to Sulzana depart, saw a pile-up of 3,000 people on Wednesday because there were not enough train cars to move them. Some 400 of these stranded people took ill due to the extreme heat that has settled over northern Italy. The regional prefect has decided to halt train service to limit the crowding around the lake.

Briefly Noted: Weingartner's 'Die Dorfschule'

Felix Weingartner, Die Dorfschule, C. Bieber, F. McCarthy, Deutsche Oper Berlin, J. Lacombe (released on March 11, 2016) cpo 777813-2 | 43'03"

Last week I wrote about Carl Orff's early opera Gisei, an adaptation of the Japanese play Terakoya (The Temple School). That live recording from the Deutsche Oper Berlin was made at concert where the Orff one-act was featured on a double-bill with this one-act opera by Austrian composer Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) on the same Japanese source work, created in 1920. Weingartner studied composition with Liszt in Weimar, and he had a successful career as a conductor, succeeding Mahler as director of the Vienna State Opera. The CPO label has been resuscitating his works on disc, including the symphonies and chamber music, and on the basis of this world premiere recording of Die Dorfschule, his operas will be worth the same effort.

Tenor Clemens Bieber brings gravitas and authority to the role of Matsuo, the servant of the murdered chancellor who sacrifices his own son to save the son of his lord. Weingartner writes beautiful, tense music to accompany Matsuo's examination of the box containing his own child's severed head, as he solemnly identifies it as the head of his murdered lord's son. American bass-baritone Stephen Bronk is slightly covered but still effective as Genzo, the schoolteacher, surprassed by the excellent mezzo-soprano Elena Zhidkova as Tonami, the schoolmaster's wife. Soprano Fionnuala McCarthy is equally strong as Schio, the mother who willingly offers her son to take the place of the chancellor's son, and baritone Simon Pauly is incisive and blustering as Gemba, the evil representative of the court.

Weingartner's libretto hews more closely to the Japanese source than Orff's, which uses a clumsy prelude to set the action, including keeping one of the students with a stutter. Weingartner's use of planing harmonic structures gives the score some exotic flavor, but the harmonic style will be easy to take by anyone who enjoys the operas of Wagner and Strauss. The orchestration has none of the eccentricities of Orff's score, but the more experienced Weingartner evokes a range of sounds with greater expertise. Jacques Lacombe leads another fine performance from the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.