Fourteen Variations on a Minor Passion by Duncan McGibbon (ap literature book list .txt) 📕
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Duncan McGibbon evokes the character music and personality of the early Twentieth Century Composer, Gabriel Faure. He shows how Faure's sensuality has its origins in his family background in the Ariege.
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- Author: Duncan McGibbon
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in Vladivostock occasioned rage.
A liberal, he sought to sway
the operatic establishment
of La Belle Epoque,
élite leisure unforced by law,
while massa damnata poor were pitied.
An unknown loss,
felt only in the pain
of nameless want
made him a collector of pleasures,
symbols of an unknown desire.
In a balance of sequences,
strings intone devotion,
which the keyboard
punctuates in dense sixths,
grasping a distant harmony
into a bundle of tragic retrievals.
9. Cygne sur L’Eau
The slight tracery of the chordal
piano part, then a suspension.
In Saint-Evremond, love of pleasure
is the avoidance of pain.
Absence mirrors its opposite.
“Art has every reason to be voluptuous,”
he says to the young Reynaldo Hahn.
Modal plainchant; that rational
dissection of desire, leaped with horizons
of austere progression, hidden behind
meandering modulations.
A true Cartesianism, the illusion
of pleasure dangles rationality
on the Ignatian strings,
rigging the Baroque barque,
and yet no strange Americas
delay the fated, Schumannesque end.
10. L’Hiver a Cessé
In the Franco-Prussian war he took
uniform for a year and always felt
a longing for that paternal inner
pity of the tuba and the bugle.
The élégie is intoned, andante,
pleading with the crowd as
the Emperor Bonapart's remains
are interred at Les Invalides.
Rennes, St Lunaire, the Pension
Sternwarte de Zurich,
or hotel rooms in Bad Ems,
Lugano, even in St-Raphäel,
composing a music
in intimate rooms
to the echo of the front-line guns.
Even as late as 1921,
he stayed on at Nice;
solitary, despite his family ties,
the pen scratching a clear manuscript.
The untuned piano straining
at his complex chords.
Within a room, Fauré’s
invention, Marie, perhaps,
stiff-legged in a pose,
concerned with her toilette,
paces in profile for the man to
catch that elegance of limb,
a deep-boned sensuality.
Always patient, always noting
his infidelities, she loved him.
Or Misia's voice,
sounding in the corridors
of the Conservatoire.
against the silent
fury with Marguerite.
Verlaine’s flame circles Brunnhilde’s:
his songs always more reserved
than his other work.
11.Andante Moderato
Sidaner-dawn over
the Third Republic,
a winter afternoon.
Heavy reparations hang
like this mist over Europe.
The whispering crowd gathers
in the Rue Royale,
without an incident
to protest, or a politics
to demonstrate,
the Ruhr invasion having failed,
sabotage and passive resistance have
brought the economy to its collapse.
The Republic was lining up for its fall,
accepting the Dawes Plan,
as Marxists spread fear among Radicals.
A petition for rest on the strings
and male voices chanted low.
The doomed Geneva Protocol
let poison proliferate.
Ramsey McDonald
opened negotiations with Lenin.
The sky-blue Republic under
a leaden sky surplices
ecclesiastics, hurling anti-semitic
venom in printing ink.
The 'Cartel des Gauches' had collapsed.
The secular Jansenism
and its quest for beauty
torn apart in the lives of its infants:
Alfrèd Cortot, Charles Panzéra,
Marguèrite Long, Pablo Casals, Maggie Tayte,
Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel,
Enriquos Granados, Manuel de Falla,
Isaac Albéniz, Georges Enesco;
the School of Europe, as heard by Copland.
In the nave of the Madeleine,
Président Doumergue, followed
by red and blue soldiery,
gave a salute to the Director
before the Pietà on the high altar.
The white choir launched
the theme in D minor.
It takes fire in E Flat to form
the plea of the orphan sixth for his parents
to listen and to have him back:
to go through the gate and see their
eyes on him and his mother moving
into the open, rustic doorway.
The choir gathered round the angels,
in a tug of war over
una poenitentia,
intones the consolamentum,
under the gilt, mosaic Christ.
The tonal blocks return in plangent
D minor, then optimistic major,
modulate grandly to F.
Beyond the Molto Adagio
for Mélisande-Marianne
the soldiers begin to move out,
as the boy soprano sings
and the richly-decorated coffin
is born into the Parisian
afternoon and horse-drawn to
the family tomb at Passy.
Later the ashes of Jaurès, would be
transported to the Panthéon by Doumergue.
For a Socialist Paris, the past of Verdi
or Auber could not be summoned now.
With Breton's Surrealism,Les Six, the era
of commanded art began.
To the fine sound of
the distant, Neopolitan Sixth,
the Second Quintet argues a prayer
of joy,voicing his worst fears
of “another ending always
on the major theme:”
a little boy running home from church,
looking for warmth and his mother's smile.
A liberal, he sought to sway
the operatic establishment
of La Belle Epoque,
élite leisure unforced by law,
while massa damnata poor were pitied.
An unknown loss,
felt only in the pain
of nameless want
made him a collector of pleasures,
symbols of an unknown desire.
In a balance of sequences,
strings intone devotion,
which the keyboard
punctuates in dense sixths,
grasping a distant harmony
into a bundle of tragic retrievals.
9. Cygne sur L’Eau
The slight tracery of the chordal
piano part, then a suspension.
In Saint-Evremond, love of pleasure
is the avoidance of pain.
Absence mirrors its opposite.
“Art has every reason to be voluptuous,”
he says to the young Reynaldo Hahn.
Modal plainchant; that rational
dissection of desire, leaped with horizons
of austere progression, hidden behind
meandering modulations.
A true Cartesianism, the illusion
of pleasure dangles rationality
on the Ignatian strings,
rigging the Baroque barque,
and yet no strange Americas
delay the fated, Schumannesque end.
10. L’Hiver a Cessé
In the Franco-Prussian war he took
uniform for a year and always felt
a longing for that paternal inner
pity of the tuba and the bugle.
The élégie is intoned, andante,
pleading with the crowd as
the Emperor Bonapart's remains
are interred at Les Invalides.
Rennes, St Lunaire, the Pension
Sternwarte de Zurich,
or hotel rooms in Bad Ems,
Lugano, even in St-Raphäel,
composing a music
in intimate rooms
to the echo of the front-line guns.
Even as late as 1921,
he stayed on at Nice;
solitary, despite his family ties,
the pen scratching a clear manuscript.
The untuned piano straining
at his complex chords.
Within a room, Fauré’s
invention, Marie, perhaps,
stiff-legged in a pose,
concerned with her toilette,
paces in profile for the man to
catch that elegance of limb,
a deep-boned sensuality.
Always patient, always noting
his infidelities, she loved him.
Or Misia's voice,
sounding in the corridors
of the Conservatoire.
against the silent
fury with Marguerite.
Verlaine’s flame circles Brunnhilde’s:
his songs always more reserved
than his other work.
11.Andante Moderato
Sidaner-dawn over
the Third Republic,
a winter afternoon.
Heavy reparations hang
like this mist over Europe.
The whispering crowd gathers
in the Rue Royale,
without an incident
to protest, or a politics
to demonstrate,
the Ruhr invasion having failed,
sabotage and passive resistance have
brought the economy to its collapse.
The Republic was lining up for its fall,
accepting the Dawes Plan,
as Marxists spread fear among Radicals.
A petition for rest on the strings
and male voices chanted low.
The doomed Geneva Protocol
let poison proliferate.
Ramsey McDonald
opened negotiations with Lenin.
The sky-blue Republic under
a leaden sky surplices
ecclesiastics, hurling anti-semitic
venom in printing ink.
The 'Cartel des Gauches' had collapsed.
The secular Jansenism
and its quest for beauty
torn apart in the lives of its infants:
Alfrèd Cortot, Charles Panzéra,
Marguèrite Long, Pablo Casals, Maggie Tayte,
Nadia Boulanger, Maurice Ravel,
Enriquos Granados, Manuel de Falla,
Isaac Albéniz, Georges Enesco;
the School of Europe, as heard by Copland.
In the nave of the Madeleine,
Président Doumergue, followed
by red and blue soldiery,
gave a salute to the Director
before the Pietà on the high altar.
The white choir launched
the theme in D minor.
It takes fire in E Flat to form
the plea of the orphan sixth for his parents
to listen and to have him back:
to go through the gate and see their
eyes on him and his mother moving
into the open, rustic doorway.
The choir gathered round the angels,
in a tug of war over
una poenitentia,
intones the consolamentum,
under the gilt, mosaic Christ.
The tonal blocks return in plangent
D minor, then optimistic major,
modulate grandly to F.
Beyond the Molto Adagio
for Mélisande-Marianne
the soldiers begin to move out,
as the boy soprano sings
and the richly-decorated coffin
is born into the Parisian
afternoon and horse-drawn to
the family tomb at Passy.
Later the ashes of Jaurès, would be
transported to the Panthéon by Doumergue.
For a Socialist Paris, the past of Verdi
or Auber could not be summoned now.
With Breton's Surrealism,Les Six, the era
of commanded art began.
To the fine sound of
the distant, Neopolitan Sixth,
the Second Quintet argues a prayer
of joy,voicing his worst fears
of “another ending always
on the major theme:”
a little boy running home from church,
looking for warmth and his mother's smile.
Imprint
Publication Date: 06-04-2012
All Rights Reserved
Dedication:
In Memory of Elsa Snell
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