This recording by him is of Marc-André Dalbavie's Sonnets by Louise Labé. It is very beautiful. Dalbavie, my exact contemporary, composes in a thoroughly modern idiom, one close to Arvo Paart and Gorecki, more radical then either, but neither dull nor obscure. Radio France carried his piano concerto recently: it was really quite good.
Louise Labé was a French Renaissance poetess, a commoner, possibly a cross-dresser or a courtesan, or both: an interesting and mysterious figure in her own right. But then in 2006 Mireille Huchon, a French scholar, proposed that Louise had never really existed; that she had been merely an literary creation of a group of Lyonnais poets, an invention capitalizing on the period's literary fascination with the classical poet Sappho and on a publication, in 1533, of poems attributed to Petrarch's "Laura" (Laura de Sade; the poems were in fact the work of a descendant of Laura). In 1542 Clément Marot, she says, seeking a French equivalent of Petrarch's praise of "Laura", proposed to the Lyonnais circle that they "louer Louise" (praise Louise).
Here is how he praised her:
Estreines, à dame Louïze Labé
- Louïze est tant gracieuse et tant belle,
- Louïze à tout est tant bien avenante,
- Louïze ha l'oeil de si vive estincelle,
- Louïze ha face au corps tant convenante,
- De si beau port, si belle et si luisante,
- Louïze ha voix que la Musique avoue,
- Louïze ha main qui tant bien au lut joue,
- Louïze ha tant ce qu'en toutes on prise,
- Que je ne puis que Louïze ne loue,
- Et si ne puis assez louer Louïze.
Sonnet VIII
Je vis, je meurs; je me brûle et me noie ;
J'ai chaud extrême en endurant froidure :
La vie m'est et trop molle et trop dure.
J'ai grands ennuis entremêlés de joie.Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoie,
Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j'endure ;
Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure ;
Tout en un coup je sèche et je verdoie.Ainsi Amour inconstamment me mène ;
Et, quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,
Sans y penser je me trouve hors de peine.Puis, quand je crois ma joie être certaine,
Et être au haut de mon désiré heur,
Il me remet en mon premier malheur.
*
What a wonderful life this is. One discovery leads to another; there is no end in sight; there are too many facts for anyone to master in his lifetime. While this means that synthesis is impossible; which is to say that we will never be able to say anything definitive or final; yet it also means -- endless pleasure. History of culture is like a gigantic cake in which we can wallow day and night till our dying day without tiring, or boring, or exhausting the sustenance.
Look, barely have I done with this morning's adventure of tracking down Louise Labé, and, lo!, up pops this article on Qianlong's French etchings. Qianlong, says Melikian, was a cultural tourist: an expert connoisseur of Chinese art an culture, he was also a quintessential Manchu: proud of his hunting and military skills; and his intellectual and artistic interests extended to xiyangxue, which is to say us, Europeans. (He was altogether more broad-minded, it would seem, that Umberto Eco).
Here is to cultural tourism.
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