So will this Cassandra, resurrect with her foresight? Will she draw the others back from the shadows of fate around them? A potentially deadly fate, in emotional terms. Will she with love, with anger, or determined anticipation lift the fog that has misted around the quartet’s destiny? If she cannot, the one who took the wrong path will be lost to her and the others will follow. Fate can be kind. She might succeed, or fate might remove our Cassandra and take her to a new continent of emotion, leaving perhaps two in the teeth of that one questionable decision. The truth that lies within this is that the heart is a very noisy place and to shut out its noise is to be constrained on that familiar, safe path and never to know the true value of love. But a single act of emotional suppression by one will affect others, more deeply than any of them will ever know.

This is just a story but it could be true. It happens all the time, all over the world. You might be in such a quartet, or trio or even quintet , the binding thing being that each ‘player’ is linked by synchronicity. I suspect there is always a Cassandra among them, weeping for them all, trying to pull the others from a Lethean swell.

Some time ago I wrote on the eschatology of art – the coda of an artist’s life that often produces works that reach far out into the future with a mighty sweep of providential foresight, like the incandescent light on the last minutes of a butterfly’s flight. The last works of Schubert bear this significance particularly deeply, and no more so than in Schubert’s achingly plangent Quintet, written only months before the composer’s death in 1828. This work, now regarded as an epitome of the majesty of the chamber music canon, was disregarded by Schubert’s publishers, who preferred to see him as a simple penner of songs and piano music.

I heard it in an exquisite performance at the Proms last night by the Belcea Quartet, augmented by the wonderful Valentin Erben, cellist of the great Alban Berg Quartet. The vast classical vaults of the Royal Albert Hall hung an eerie shroud over a rapt audience on a cool, damp weekday night while the ensemble of players on a stage that only days before had hosted an orchestra and choruses of Cecil B de Mille proportions for Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony, looked refined and delicate, humbled by space – the juxtapostion of the archly overstuffed to the filigree sound world of pure chamber music. Even with the crimson flash of Corina Belcea-Fisher’s gown, they seemed spectral and removed as if they were locked away in a snowglobe waiting to be tilted. Until the sublime but somewhat questioning final notes, the Neapolitan chord, it were as if we were waiting for the world to end, so that another might be born.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,

Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,

And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,

Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;

Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,

The C major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

From ‘Abt Vogler’ ~ Robert Browning

Schubert Quintet in C – Adagio. The Emerson Quartet with Mstislav Rostropovich

i leave you with the emperor of lower case. i know it makes sense to me. an honest expression of love belongs to every day, not just one day of the year…

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

“Life is the game that must be played, this truth at least, good friends, we know; so live and laugh, nor be dismayed as one by one the phantoms go.” Arthur Rubenstein

I used one of those Facebook apps today to compile my year in a sum of statuses (stati?) – a stream of wisdom, irrelevance,  sometimes frustration, sometimes delight and just plain fun. This macro nostalgia made me think of the very real surprises, joys and disappointments of my life in the year past, which actually awoke a deep contentment in my spirit. For the year that is now burning out has been singularly replete with a joy I can barely describe, just as the year that preceded it was a year of shadow, doubt and sadness. In the first weeks of 2010 my spirit began to slowly resume its former poise and I was lifted through circumstances into the light again. I think I must have been karmically rewarded as I have no other explanation for such a contrast. As Rumi said – ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you’ and so the hollowness and loss I felt in January and February turned to enlightenment and joy.

Music and love did indeed return to my life and sit with me here as I write, and I thank love itself ultimately, for music can only shine most brilliantly through it.   But I must also thank  those special friends of old and the wonderful people new to my life who have been such a gift for me in learning to ‘keep the faith’. One especially…

Also today and very much related to this, Jess Duchen reminded me of the great romantic pianist Arthur Rubenstein, who upon a similar contrast of fate set upon a life of loving the world he created, for nothing brings about a miracle in time as much as unconditional love. His philosophy, as he attests above, was to live, laugh and play the game.

So I wish you all a new year of light and joy – but above all love life, for as AR promises, it will love you back!

Here is the man himself playing the exquisite Grieg concerto 2nd movement – a rare diamond in the snow.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Kahlil Gilbran

This perfect song was featured in a wonderful film called ‘The Music Master’ which I watched again recently.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. 

Ludwig Van Beethoven

My earliest musical memory: the room was green and I danced on the table to Mozart, I think it was the Jupiter symphony, and in those sounds I heard the world around me took shape, all its curiousness and bewildering angles were suddenly rounded, polished and brilliant and I understood that I existed and why. It was for music like this. I was about four or five years old and this is the age of’ “why?’ – “Why am I here? What happens when you die? Why do you get old? Why is an apple green and sometimes red?” Furthermore, I was still coping with a new forming memory – time has a strange relativity when you haven’t been long on the earth. I saw photographs of myself taken the summer before and yet I thought my parents had a secret other daughter they never told me about,  I could not recognise myself, but when I asked for music and my father answered my whim and played the Mozart symphony for me, I saw myself reflected back to me fully for the first time.

It sounds clichéd, pompous, even tautological, (for musicians are innately ‘musical’ of course) to be prosaic on why musicians make music but it’s more than that  – we are born and not made. The enjoyment of great classical music (in the generic sense) is a gift many receive but its idiosyncratic imprint on a musician is gifted before birth – in the womb. I have often wondered if there is a sensor, a kink on the labyrinthine configurations of DNA that grafts it onto us and that all those recently fashionable theories about playing Bach and Mozart to the unborn have reasonable merit. We absorb the vibrations, sounds fall into voids and replace an impenetrable silence with energy and form; music chooses us and sets an unbroken seal upon the heart. Don’t ever ask if I would choose my strange life and the turns and detours of my fate line – this life, chose me.

To make things further complicated, I was granted an auxilary gift so that great music and the empty plains of the imagination it builds upon, resound with patterns of colour, texture and sensitivity so vibrant that sometimes I am left entirely breathless. This ‘gift’ is called synaesthesia, but I digress, for although many musicians have ‘syn’ (we are not unfamiliar with the other kind too!), the fuel of it is sound – sounds that change us every minute we live them. Every black dot on a stave would be a riculous anachronism  were we not to pull it from the page and attempt to make sense of it – musical notation, such strange runes, centuries old, is something out of which we can attempt to create an eternity.

For the power to negate time is with us in every performance – music comes and goes and we fight with just enough will to win – almost, but the hunger to receive more of its secrets lends every day of a musician’s life the illusive hope of a voice on water  rippling through to eternity. I tap the meniscus of this hope every day and would not exist bereft of it. I just would not exist at all.

Nice, a good while ago, on an orchestra/choir tour, abandoned in an abrupt and vicious manner by my boyfriend, a violinist friend comforting me, though he was a little tipsy (as was I, as well as incredibly tearful) said some unforgettable words which have marked me since.  I paraphrase slightly: “Barbara – when you give out so much love, one day, if not now, it will come back to you.” AB’s philosophy has come to my mind in the intervening years many times. It is the idea of ‘love karma’. But the memory also elicits the fact that we musicians are strange lot – wayward and romantic all of us, whether we think we are or not (I am a Leo so this is certain! ). Because there is not one note that moves the soul that was not written with a heart of fire, the music we issue drawing out all our desire and passion, stirring us sometimes into very unexpected journeys.

In the years since Nice (a particularly raucous ECYO tour with the Britten War Requiem), my life has spun and turned in this fashion all sorts of ways – the ‘love karma’ floating in, and sadly out. No stronger an example could I give than the past year. I don’t want to bore you with it, but it is almost exactly a year on since my life took on shades of explosive drama and intense emotional pain. I am bound to consider where I was then, and where I am now. In my earlier post in May  http://pellegrina4.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/gathering-stardust-%e2%80%93-living-with-spirit/ I spoke of my rebirth into hope -  my ‘love karma’ rewarding me with joy and perspective again. I also knew that my innate creativity, ostensibly musical - the sense of profound inner joy I receive from music was pulling me out of the listless loneliness I felt. I know that love and music are completely intertwined for me. Both are powerful forces of destiny, both give immutable pleasure and a reassurance that colours all of life.

Since I wrote that post, I have realised that not all is perfect but that I am still receiving my ‘love karma’ – what I have given and what I give now to the things and people that move me is refining my destiny. And my voice, well, my voice feels like it has arrived in a very good place indeed. I am brimming full of ideas and energy and I have hope that, though all is not as I would wish, I am going to find a happy place to be and share that with some special people and a special someone. I know I am. To celebrate this, and another birthday, I am getting a small, pretty tattoo – of a butterfly. The butterfly represents reinvention, reincarnation, the metamorphosis of dark to light. No other symbol so defines my journey to this place. Like the aria I quote in my earlier post  perhaps I should live by the mantra – Io sono l’amore! For as brim full of music I am, love is never far away. It always returns. My butterfly celebrates this hope. Let’s hope it doesn’t hurt too much – what a metaphor for love is that!

Alles Vergängliche

Ist nur ein Gleichnis;

Das Unzulängliche,

Hier wirds Ereignis;

Das Unbeschreibliche,

Hier ist es getan;

Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan.”

‘Chorus Mysticus’ from the final scene of  ’Faust’  ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Many moons ago I sang in two performances of Mahler 8 at the Royal Festival Hall conducted by the quiet, nervous and uniquely gifted Klaus Tennstedt, a conductor on whom Mahler had made an indelible mark.  Those few days changed my life forever.  This is not hyberbole - I was very young and I had just started singing after years as a frustrated pianist, and life was clearly revealing the direction I would take.  In the years that followed Mahler’s music and life was to etch a mystical pattern on my journey that is nothing less than extraordinary. I will spare you all the details, but it is just so.

Mahler 8 is not my personal favourite of the symphonies but the spirit of it levels the most banal of feeling and in moments from Part Two – a setting of the final scenes of Goethe’s ‘Faust’, the gnawing and beguiling essence of the Ewig-Weibliche/eternal feminine is as spellbinding as the hymn that intones it – the elemental Chorus Mysticus. It was clear that Mahler’s life had itself guided him towards this idea of the intense femininity of creation and hope and when his marriage lapsed into difficulties and Alma’s infidelity, he dedicated this symphony to her in a passionate plea for her return to him, a plea which moves the symphony into the ecstasy of those final moments.

That moment years ago, singing the Chorus Mysticus,  seeded the creation of the novel I was ‘born’ to write (a novel distinctly tinged with Mahler) and so over the years, Mahler has flowed into and out of my life, firmly echoing the traces of choices I made, good and bad, guiding me to where I should be. In recent years, completing my book, a book which has certainly changed me and my life for it seems I had written in it my own future, it was the Third symphony with its last movement ‘What Love Tells Me’ and the transfiguring opening Adagio of the Tenth, that coloured my writing and provided the ostinato for my narrative.

The idea of redemption and the absolution of emotion underpins Mahler’s music along with his unerring sense of the spiritual yearnings of humanity and where they take us. It is emotionally unnerving, there is no doubt, but as Jung said – “There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.”  It is no wonder then that we hear our own voices stir within Mahler’s sound universe.  For me above all, I can never escape, nor would wish to, that Mahler is always present in my life and the themes return over and over like a karmic incantation much as they did for Mahler himself and for that matter, Alma too. Like the words of the Chorus Mysticus, Mahler is for us the undescribable captured. Bach,  Mozart, Beethoven are all about music. Mahler is about us.  There is no music in the world that so effectively describes us and reminds us that all our emotions – tender, extravagant and passionate, matter and make us. Emotion is self, and self is destiny.

In a perfect confluence of words and music, here is Mahler’s setting of Friedrich Rückert’s ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’. Nothing comes close, in only a few minutes, to describing the prescient emotional  truth of Mahler. Ignore the sentimental overplay of photography – the translation is good and well, as is the magic of Mahler  – you’ll get it. Sung by my lied hero – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

I have found when challenged by fate, I only open my arms wider to the world. I have no need after the first pains to sit in loss, I only look it at from ‘both sides now’ as Joni Mitchell sang, and take a measure of what has been thrown at me, learn to see it as it really is – outside of me, certainly not a part of me but of something else, and redress it in possibility. Yes, it probably sounds like a cliché but I look at this ‘imposter just the same’ as if I had been given a great gift.

For what pain should I feel when I have lived in my own truth and once knew the love that climbs into your soul and never leaves, that changes everything?  When I have breathed through every blow and learnt to draw full breath again and love life for its panoply of POSSIBILITY.

There are no rules but possibility – nothing dies to us, it is only reborn in a new form. The energy of life is the old idea of the law of attraction – you draw it to yourself, you magnetise it, not by the confinement of hope to one thing or one idea, the labelling of desire. Open it out and see what else you can see in the folds that are hidden for an action disguises so many things.

To be happy is to feel the bounty of life’s rhythms – fast, slow, moderato, inbetween the occassional interrupted cadence.  The surprise intake of breath – the unexpected oxygen of hope can lie in the most mordant of gestures. Nothing is as bad as it seems and sometimes it is better.  What you desire will come to you – byla ne byla – and it will be beautiful, kinder and more replete than you had hoped.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

For no reason at all but that she is wonderful, here is my namesake singing the ravishing ‘L’Aigle Noir’ -

Veronica Franco (1546–1591), was a 16th century Venetian courtesan and poet and in part inspiration for Pellegrina, a character in my Venetian set novel and for whom this blog is named. She lived an extraordinary life as a cortigiana onesta -  a high-class Venetian courtesan who was well- educated and versed in the art of poetic and courtly love as well as physical pleasures.  Veronica is named as one of the most celebrated of them in the Catalogo di tutte le principale et piu honorate cortigiane di Venezia, a sort of guidebook for wealthy men seeking to indulge in the ars amoris of Venice, which contained the names and addresses of the finest courtesans in the Serene Republic. Married as a teenager, when the marriage failed Veronica was left in precarious circumstances, not least in fear of destitution, so she decided to seek her fortune and destiny in order to support herself and her child as cortegiana onesti could do very well for themselves and were held in high esteem in Venetian society.

However, it was an ambivalent role and women as intelligent and beautiful as Veronica, holding court in the sovereign echelons of Venetian patrician society and with incredible access to those in power (indeed she was courted by and had a passionate liason with Henry III of France) were prone to be treated with suspicion by the authorities, and Veronica was defamed  by the notorious Venetian inquisition for witchcraft, for which, due in part to her patrician connections, she was eventually cleared.  Furthermore, Veronica not content with being just an adornment in high chopines, also wrote and published her own poems and letters, works as powerful and spirited as any of those by Petrarch or Boccaccio, as well as those of other writers and founded a charity to support courtesans and their children.  Veronica’s portrait was painted by several distinguished artists, such as Tintoretto and Veronese.

Capitolo 13

(a playful challenge to a lover:)

No more words! To deeds, to the battlefield, to arms!
For, resolved to die, I want to free myself
from such merciless mistreatment.
Should I call this a challenge? I do not know,
since I am responding to a provocation;
but why should we duel over words?
If you like, I will say that you challenged me;
if not, I challenge you; I’ll take any route,
and any opportunity suits me equally well.
Yours be the choice of place or of arms,
and I will make whatever choice remains;
rather, let both be your decision….

Come here, and, full of most wicked desire,
braced stiff for your sinister task,
bring with daring hand a piercing blade.
Whatever weapon you hand over to me,
I will gladly take, especially if it is sharp
and sturdy and also quick to wound.
Let all armor be stripped from your naked breast,
so that, unshielded and exposed to blows,
it may reveal the valor it harbours within.
Let no one else intervene in this match,
let it be limited to the two of use alone,
behind closed doors, with all seconds sent away….

To take revenge for your unfair attack,
I’d fall upon you, and in daring combat,
as you too caught fire defending yourself,
I would die with you, felled by the same blow.
O empty hopes, over which cruel fate
forces me to weep forever!
But hold firm, my strong, undaunted heart,
and with that felon’s final destruction,
avenge your thousand deaths with his one.
Then end your agony with the same blade…..

Capitolo 21

(on an absent lover…)

I said: “My heart, if my own weapons
do this to me, what will those do
with which cruel fortune pierces me?”
If I myself feel, having fled far from my love,
that pain closes in on me ever more,
that my leaving brings it closer to me,
I must surely have taken medicine opposed
to my languid state and to my heart’s raving,
which sends me down a miserable path…..

“Such,” I say, “is my love’s handsome face,
where heaven bestowed all of its gifts,
and nature most reveals her perfection.”
Then when I see through the dark night
so many stars light up in the sky,
Love, who is with me, assures me and swears
that those lights in the sky, fair and everlasting,
are not as numerous as the virtues of the man
who ruthlessly tears the soul from my breast.
And to make my days even sadder and darker,
far from my light, I always carry alive in my heart
the burning sun from which I once caught fire,
to whom, weeping and sighing, I write……..