Tea at Trianon: The Piano as Paintbrush

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

The Piano as Paintbrush

The wondrous colors of Debussy.

Debussy once said that if he had not been a musician he would have been a painter. His favorite painter was not an Impressionist, a term he abhorred, but J.M.W. Turner, whom he thought the greatest of all colorists. And it is as a colorist that Debussy is the most wondrous tone-painter of music, exploring unknown regions of sonority and timbres. In 1905 he completed "La Mer," one of the miracles of orchestral music. To perform it well, the composition needs musicians who are painters. "There should be only sirens in the sea," Debussy said.

The piano was his most important paintbrush, always close at hand. His body of piano music is the most original since Franz Liszt's. His biographer Edward Lockspeiser wrote of "Debussy's mysterious conception of tactile properties." He was a man of the widest culture. But above all he was a nature worshipper, and nearly half of his art was inspired by the natural world, which he best reflected in his piano music. A pupil, the pianist E. Robert Schmitz, speaks of "Clouds, moonlight, passing breezes—sunken churches, the wind at sea or in the plains, sunrise on a golden roof, shimmering gold fish inspired by a Japanese lacquer," and so much else. (Read entire post.)