Music to My Ears

I was thinking I’d share the treats I enjoyed on this trip with my friends, as soon as it’s my turn to host dinner. By the time I completed the tour I have the whole evening planned. The house will glow in candle light and smell of lavender from the hills of San Sebastian. I will await their arrival with Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, and greet them with his Jeux D’eau. I’d switch to Debussy’s d’ Images during cocktails, and I’ll pour my prunelle and pomme liqueur aperitifs from Navarre, and serve hors d’oeuvres of aged goat cheese, and shaved monk’s head cheese from the Basque region, and of course foie gras with sauterne will be on the cocktail table too. Perhaps duck will be the main entrée and dessert will be the easy confection described by my new gourmand friend from Indiana, puff pastry filled with fresh raspberry marinated in Grand Marnier and a sprinkle of sugar, topped with real whipped cream. Uummm! That would be lovely and will go down well with another Basque liqueur, armagnac with honey and herbs, then finish the meal off with coffee and nibble on chocolates from Foucher’s of Paris.
For the meal I’ll pick some good Bordeaux from my favorite sommelier, the Dekalb Farmer’s Market. Under the influence of these distilled nectars of the grape, my guests will be a captive audience and will indulge me as I recall the pleasures of this last trip.
“ What is more beautiful than a road?” ,
asked George Sand, AKA Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, baronne Dudevant, 19th century French novelist and feminist who among others was Chopin’s mistress. She and others are some of the exciting personalities I’ve discovered as I embarked on this Spanish-French odyssey to follow the lives and music of Ravel and Debussy.
My concert pianist friend from Baltimore, Linda had been asking me to come with her on this musical tours she’d been participating in for the past 5 years. Most of the participants I’ve learned have been coming for the last 7-9 years and had come to know each other like old friends. Of the 34 participants, 20 are music professionals, either as pianists or teachers, or serious piano students. My own musical background consisted of inventing clever ways of avoiding piano practice or dodging piano lessons from the stick-wielding and stern Sister Cecilia, of the Colegio de Sta. Isabel, where I was a boarding student throughout high school. I remember being in a piano recital, and I‘ve forgotten what piece I played, but I messed up, and felt so embarrassed I wanted to disappear. So I marvel and am so in awe at the skill and artistry that I witnessed from the young concert pianists presented on this tour, Marie-Laure Boulanger, Martin Surot, and Jean Dube.
This trip started to shape like a misadventure with a 2 ½ hour weather delay in Atlanta which caused us to miss our Bilbao connection in Madrid-Barajas, which caused us to miss joining the rest of the group coming in from Charles de Gaulle-Paris, for the hour bus trip to San Sebastian. We had to find our own way in a taxi to the Bilbao bus depot then in a public bus to San Sebastian. We had 5 minutes to spare after purchasing our E8.65 bus ticket, and made it to dinner with the group at our hotel. Voila!
Madrid-Barajas BTW has a spanking new terminal, a marble and steel work of art rising up from the semi-arid Barajas landscape with a roof undulating like a wave and its grid supports fanning out of a center spine like fish bones. Inside was chaos. Long lines at the economy ticketing counters and check-in stations, while the business class counters were empty and manned by several staff just standing around. Service was nowhere to be had. We could have made our flight connection if we were allowed priority check-in, but we were brusquely denied and sent back to the end of the line. The next flight would be 4 hours later.
But why are we in San Sebastian? It’s to appreciate the Basque influence in Ravel’s music for his mother was Basque, and women who helped raise him sang to him Basque lullabyes and folk songs, and these rhythms found expression in his Alborada del Gracioso and the opera "L'Heure Espagnole" , La Valse, Rhapsodie, and the famous Bolero. He was going to write a Basque Concerto Zazpiak Bat, but he never finished it. Truth to tell I was only familiar with Bolero, because of the movie 10 and Bo Derek, but that piece written in his later years was an embarrassment to Ravel. He considered it trivial, and wondered why “a piece for orchestra without music” would be so popular.
We’re also in San Sebastian to understand Ravel, the man. He never married, he lived with his mother, and when she died, it sent him to despair, and he was a meticulous dandy and in his house in Montfort L’Amaury, Le Belvedere, just outside Paris, where he worked until his death of some say Pick’s disease, he decorated it himself and filled it with collections of first editions, Japanese prints, tiny mechanical toys, and many small beautiful, fragile objects like a woman’s house. His sexual orientation is still a mystery, but there is no doubt about his place as a big figure in French music. He was quoted to say that a Basque is full of passion but only reveals it to a few intimates, to counter critics who viewed him as aloof and reticent.
Our hotel in San Sebastian atop Monte Igueldo, offered a spectacular view of the city and the beach and the Cantabrian coast, reached by funicular from our perch. As you descend the view is picturesque with houses built against the hills following the terrain down into the sea, their windows spilling over with flowers, and the hills covered with lavender. The beach is dotted with cabanas and holiday visitors spread out on the sand, many women sunning with their bikini tops off. There’s a mile-long promenade lined by bistros and cafes and benches for watching the world go by. Across the beach is the pedestrian shopping area, festive with lots of people milling about the shops. We wandered into a Picasso exhibit of his bullfight watercolors, which I’ve never seen before. When I visited the Picasso museum in Barcelona 3 years ago, the last trip I took with Johnny, I brought home prints of his erotica drawings. Here I marveled at how this master never failed to emphasize the bull’s erectile parts in every frame!
On the way to Ciboure, the French Basque, Ravel’s birthplace, we listened to his Alborada and Rhapsodie on the bus. I learned the significance of the numbers you see around these parts, 4+3=1. The Basque people is fiercely independent and has a unique language and culture and had been involved in separatist struggles for generations. There are 4 Spanish Basque provinces, Alava, Guipuzcoa,Viscaya,Navarre, and 3 French provinces, Basse-Navarre, Labourd, and Soule. Bilbao and Guernica, are the famous cities. We stopped in Bilbao to visit the Guggenheim Museum. It is a soaring winged piece of art on the banks of the Nervion River, right smack in the center of the city, designed by the American Frank Gehry, magnificent, structurally complex, and its reputation well-deserved. The flower topiary puppy at its entrance gives one a homey, warm welcome. It was showing RUSSIA! an exhibition of art in the USSR during the cold war. There was an art installation there showing through mixed media of pictures, video, sounds, 3-dimensional compositions and participatory viewing, how psychiatry was used to control and repress, through electric shock treatments of dissidents. It was very disturbing for me and destabilized my stance of maintaining an arm’s length with the state hospital policies that I have to apply to the psychiatric patients I work with. I don’t know how I’d ever go back to work but I’ll think about it tomorrow. In Ciboure we stayed in the neighboring plush beach resort of St. Jean-de-Luz, across the river Nivelle, along the coast south of Biarritz and Bayonne. Ciboure is having the Raveliad festival, featuring winners of the Academie Ravel Music Competitions. The 3 nights of concerts we attended were held in the Eglise Saint Vincent, a 16th century church where Ravel was christened. Ciboure has a medieval background and old World charm dating back to the 13th & 14th centuries with a lot of historic monuments around the town. There was plenty of time during the day to explore and shop, lay out on the beach and savor fresh seafood from the Basque coast.
We stayed for a night in Amboise after a 7 hour drive from the coast through the reforested swamps of France and Bordeaux and the Loire Valley, and to stop briefly on the way to visit the chateau and gardens of Villandry. We are in the storied and ancient Loire Valley to visit Chenonceaux, and to discover its significance for Debussy. Marie Laur Barcat, a history professor at the University of Tours, and an expert on Chenonceaux didn’t know how Chenonceaux was important to Debussy, but she is curious and agreed to research the subject and she was taken on a road of exciting discovery and adventure. She was full of life and inspiring when breathlessly she couldn’t wait to share everything that she’s unearthed with us. She has this experience as part of her work. I was thinking how I dislike my work environment and how I long to feel energized and excited about my work and to have people around who are eager and creative and inspiring. I’m beginning to question whether it’s a reasonable trade off being a robot at work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 2 more years in exchange for Georgia state retirement benefits.
But Marie Laur had us spell-bound with the intricate connections of six degrees of separation relationships that she discovered about the protagonists at Chenonceaux and Debussy. It goes like, Aha! Enlightenment! Voila! We urged her to publish her lecture.
After visiting Chenonceaux ,built spanning the river Cher,a tributary of the Loire, we stopped briefly for liqueur tasting at the Fraise D’or, then Vochek, our Polish bus driver efficiently took us through the streets of Paris to settle at our hotel near the Opera Garnier. The familiar sights went by, the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur, Place de la Concorde, Notre Dame and Isle de Cite, Champs Elysees, then we were on the left bank of the Seine, there’s Pont Neuf, Musee D’Orsay, the Tullieres gardens, the Louvre, then the shops along St. Honore, Avenue de Capucines, down Avenue d’opera, then our hotel on Rue D’Antin. Dinner that night was a 5-course wine paired affair at Le Train Bleu, an elaborate belle epoch restaurant in Gare de Lyon. On our 2nd day in Paris, Thursday, August 10 we woke up to the BBC news of foiled terroristic plot to board at Heathrow and blow up 10 planes in the sky on their way to the US. We wondered how it will affect our return trip, but we went on with our program without a hitch. We’ve been from the countryside and the Basque coast, the Loire Valley and these seemed like an unreal world. Picture perfect villages, flower boxes on every cottage window, giant planter baskets exuberant with blooms hanging on town square lampposts and lining the streets, bucolic rural scenery of farms and trees and cows, neat wine trellises planted in perfect grids, brilliant sun and cool weather, homogenous people of one race smiling and friendly. Now we’re back to reality, well, almost.
The big controversy in Paris was over the proposed city ruling to ban topless sunbathing and thong bikinis during Paris Plage. Now on its 3rd year, for a month in July to August the river banks of the Seine in Central Paris is transformed into a tropical beach with 2000 tons of fine sand trucked in and palm trees brought in and then beach chairs and umbrellas are layed out for sweltering Parisians to take in the sun as if they’re in Palm Beach or Mallorca. Only the French can dream up something like this, never mind the 2 million Euro tab. They have just dismantled this when we arrived, but I saw remnants of it as I jogged along the Seine every morning we were in Paris.
From Paris we visited Ravel’s house in Montfort L’Amaury. There on Ravel’s piano, our tour organizer from San Francisco Bill Wellborn and Parisian Marie-Laur Boulanger gave a concert of Ravel music.
The next day we visited Debussy’s house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where the noted French pianist Dominique Merlet gave a lecture on Debussy and a dissection and demonstration of the chords and scales he used in his compositions, and gave a recital of Ravel, Debussy and Liszt. A concert of four hand piano by Ravel and Debussy followed with Bill Wellborn and Marie Laur and a newly married couple who played Debussy together with such rapport and finesse, it breaks your heart.
On our way to the Channel Island of Jersey, we listened to Walter Gieseking play Claire de Lune, a recording so ephemereal and exquisite, you can caress the moonlight.
I didn’t know Guernsey and Jersey are part of the Channel Islands, I thought one was a cow, and the other was where New Jersey was named for. We crossed the channel from the medieval town of St Malo, where at one point was controlled by pirates, and from whose port Jacques Cartier sailed from to discover Canada. On the ferry during crossing there was a group of happy girls and one of them was wearing a makeshift tiara and a band across her chest saying Bride to Be. They were in St. Malo for a bachelorette party and she was getting married next Saturday in Jersey, where she and her fiancé lived. They were so cute I took their picture, and getting off the ferry later they squealed in glee to see me again and introduced themselves, the bride to be was Emma and her bridesmaid Sophie was her sister. Jersey was part of our tour because Debussy was a ladies man, and he ran off to Jersey to tryst with his mistress Emma Bardac, whom he later married, after she divorced her much older and rich husband, and after her affair with Faure. We’re now in British territory, and English is spoken here, though, they claim an independence from Great Britain, and circulates their own Jersey pound which is not negotiable in England or anywhere else so you have to spend it on the ferry before getting off on the St. Malo side when you return. It is a beautiful if rocky island resort. We had a private concert in the old church concert hall by Jean Dube, a Liszt piano competition winner. He was fantastic, a perfect finale for this musical tour which combined musical pleasures with history, gastronomy, eonology, culture, and a wonderful group of people. After a visit to Giverny to relax in Monet’s garden, we checked into an old Manor in Rolleboise, overlooking the Seine just outside of Paris. There we got dressed up for our gala dinner and said goodbye. My return trip was uneventful, despite the terroristic alert, the only telling sign was their confiscation of my red lipstick, classified as forbidden item on board.