“The Paduan creates; he is a creator. He tears a thousand souls from out of a thousand bodies and molds them into a single soul with the flames of his speech! There they stand, children, women and men—each separate—ridiculous and pathetic creatures! And the Paduan grasps them and kneads them into a great whole, into a single strong mass in the guise of a mad and mighty beast.”
Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1910
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“The passages [in Pelleas and Melisande] I love the most are the ones without text. When Pelleas emerges from the underground vaults, there are a few lines that are truly permeated by the freshness of the sea and the scents of the roses that the breeze wafts to him. Of course, there’s nothing ‘human’ about it, but it’s exquisitely poetic.”
Marcel Proust, 1911
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“Claude Debussy became the head of a new religion, and there was, in the Opera-Comique at each performance of his Pelléas and Melisande, a sanctuary atmosphere, greetings of initiates in the corridors, fingers on lips, strange handshakes hastily exchanged in the half-light of boxes, crucified expressions and faraway looks.”
Jean Lorrain, 1910
“When [the composer Manuel de] Falla went to Debussy’s house without forewarning him of his visit, he was told by a servant the composer was out for a walk. He had to wait in a room which was quite dark and full of Japanese and Chinese masks. One of the doors opened into the dining room. Eventually Falla heard people entering the dining room and recognised the voices of Debussy, Emma and Erik Satie. Whilst no one came to see him, he overheard talk of clarinets. ‘Debussy’s wife began to say something, but Debussy interrupted her: “You know nothing about it,” he said.’ Falla did not reveal his presence and became overcome with nerves, the masks with their gaping mouths inducing hallucinations. When it seemed dinner was over, he peeped through the door into the passage, but still no one came to see him. ‘Finally he heard footsteps. It was Debussy’s wife, who, alarmed at meeting an unexpected man, screamed.’ Apparently the servant had forgotten to tell anyone that a gentleman was waiting. Emma invited him to have some belated lunch, but all Falla wanted was to leave. He did, however, manage to explain to Debussy why he had come and Debussy agreed to orchestrate El Abaicìn by Albeniz, a task he never did carry out.”
Gillian Opstad, 2022
“The cries that Doctor Colombat transcribed are of several species and systematically classified.
“There is first the cry determined by the application of fire (PI. I, series A, no. 1), a serious and deep cry running through the interval of a third, followed by the interjection 'ah!'
“There is then the cry determined by the action of a sharp instrument, a very rapid first sound and a very high of the falsetto register on which it extends.
“Nothing is more moving, more terrible than the cry produced by throbbing pain (no. 5). The voice in the high-pitched tremolo is one that the most indifferent man cannot hear without emotion.
“Twice in our life cries of distress of the most heartbreaking effect have struck our ears. The first by a man who voluntarily killed himself, a few years ago, in Versailles, by falling through a window the height of a third floor.
“We passed near the place where he had just come to fall, his fall had been horrible; his limbs were broken: he uttered in a clear and shrill voice a sinister tremolo (no. 6).”
Georges Kastner, The Voices of Paris, 1857
Charles de Sivry, 1873
“Harmony is awakening for all of us. Wagner anticipated it in his enormous choirs. Soon will come sequences of notes as intimate as the breath of the wind, and others, on a larger scale; and when, after glissandos that will no longer be audible to our ears, they cover larger distances, this will be an enormous source of musical richness. We have experienced it down here when, after the quarter-tones sounded by the cyclone to the Canaques in one of our distant colonies, a frisson caused the nerves to quiver as if they were the strings of a harp.”
Louise Michel, 1887
“You know that hashish always invokes the magnificence of light, glorious splendors, cascades of liquid gold; all light favors it: that which flows in sheets, that which hangs like straw on points and asperities, the candelabra of salons, the candles of Mary’s month, the rosy avalanches of sunset.”
Charles Baudelaire, 1860
“Debussy spoke enthusiastically of a rather vague project for which he even asked me to provide an outline. His idea was for a cosmogonic drama, without words or plot, in which invisible singers, soloists and chorus would deliver onomonopoetic syllables, to the accompaniment of lighting effects onstage. The orchestra, which would be hidden beneath the scenery, would symbolically represent clouds, the wind, and the sea.”
Jaques Emile Blanche, 1932
A voice from outside: "Ap-raman!"
At these words, a funereal silence fell upon the room, and the door opened by itself.
A specter entered, and what a specter! A gloomy bronze face, a somber, sinister, colossal figure that struck the resonant slabs with its bronze heels. Unlike the other ghosts, it had the advantage of being neither a chimera nor an apparition but a real, solid, and tangible horror that seized you harshly at the core. Its shadow passed slowly and coldly over the foreheads of the guests. It stopped in the middle of the table, cast livid looks over the guests, poured itself a drink into a leaden goblet, which it emptied in one gulp, and blew on the entire banquet as if to extinguish its joy. At this breath, the lights dimmed, the roses wilted in the women's hair, the masks fell, and the faces turned mournful. Indeed, it was the magician's artificial man.
Alphonse Esquiros, 1836
“I receive endless requests to write out lines of music along with my autograph. I don't often give them out. I rather fancy writing out false ones and distributing them. The other day I received a letter from Buenos Aires, in which an American lady made such a request and put 500 francs in the envelope for my reply. I kept the 500 francs and the reply.”
Claude Debussy, 1907
“I could dispense with explaining myself on the actual musicality of my reconstruction, my title of composer covering, at my risk and peril, the result obtained. If I don't stick to this easy attitude, it's because my ideas on the very nature of inspiration are quite different from those generally held. That the artist is, in the proper sense of the word, a creator, I do not believe. It is easier for me to admit the existence of some immense reservoir where, always and forever, by a volitional phenomenon which exceptionally puts in power certain mysterious springs of consciousness, it is given to draw sometimes unto the perfection, in proportion to the quality of the aesthetic sense of the perceiver.”
Edmond Bailly, The Song of the Vowels in Invocation to the Planetary Gods, 1912
My thanks to Phil Legard/Larkfall for the MIDI creation
“From the celestial vault hangs a gigantic spindle, which carries in its eternal course eight orbs of varied colors. On each of these circles sits a Siren 'uttering a single note of her voice, always in the same tone.' It is through the movement of this voice that the movement of the various celestial spheres is accomplished. The sound made by the golden axle of the world, turning on itself, accompanies their hymns.
“This concert forms the triple voice of time, which tells of the past, the present and the future, and which wise men have sometimes heard on earth by approaching a tomb during the silence of the night.
“From the side of the moon rises a sweet concert; the sounds of the sun are admirable; a voice of thunder comes from Mars, a sweet nightingale song from Jupiter.
“The song of the Siren-birds, souls of the stars, stars themselves, belongs to this class of cosmic harmonies. We can define it even less easily than we can define the voice of the speaking statue, that is to say the sound of the rising sun and the setting sun, the sound of the moon whistling its light through space, the moan of nature shivering in contact with the morning breeze, and the music of the rain falling rhythmically on the ground.”
Jean-Georges Kastner, 1858
“In Wagner's operas, the singers never appear without being accompanied by their damned leitmotif; sometimes they even sing it! This is about as crazy as if someone, in handing you his visiting card, were at the same time to sing what was written on it.
“Can you imagine that in a composition the same emotion can be expressed twice? Either one has never thought about it, or else it is just laziness.
“And four evenings for a play! Does that even seem to you admissible? Don't forget that during those four evenings you will be hearing always the same things. The characters on stage and the orchestra go on exchanging the same themes, and then you arrive at the Twilight of the Gods, which is once again a résumé of everything you have been hearing.
“This is inadmissible for those who like clarity and concision.
“I would like to see, and I will succeed myself in producing, music which is entirely free from 'motifs', or rather consisting of one continuous 'motif' which nothing interrupts and which never turns back on itself. Then we shall have a logical development, concise and deductive; there will be no hasty and superfluous padding in between two repetitions of the same 'motif ' which will be a characteristic and essential part of the work. The development will no longer be a purely material amplification, a rhetorical exercise performed by a well-taught professional, but will have a wider and indeed psychic significance.”
Claude Debussy, 1903
“For years and years, amidst all the problems I have been concerned with, this one has kept me brooding over its mystery. Today a radiant intelligence, Pythagoras, has held out his hand to me across the twenty-five centuries that separate us...”
Edmond Bailly, The Song of the Vowels as Invocation to the Planetary Gods, 1912
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“[Victor-Émile] Michelet says Paul Adam was one of the three or four minds of the Symbolist generation who really grasped what a symbol was and could thereby vivify his work with that perception; the others apparently only acceded to the 'threshold of allegory.' Adam swam deep into 'the oceans of gnostic intellectuality' and knew how to penetrate beyond appearances.
“'Possessed of prophetic powers, Adam could read into the subterranean wefts beyond nature on 'which were embroidered the events of 1914 and the following years.' That is to say, he predicted World War I and subsequent events.
“Paul Adam constructed his stories, the lives of his characters, the twists and turns of his dramas that link them into logical sequence, on the tarot. His dramas are the eruptions of invisible reality, symbolized by any manner of combination of the tarot’s seventy-eight cards. And if this all sounds implausible, Michelet reproduced a letter in his Companions of the Hierophany in which, in the most charming French prose, Adam congratulated Michelet on having penetrated his secret: that yes, the tarot had been for him a constructive key, indispensable to a 'thousand intutitions': 'I remain a docile disciple having received the highest recompense of his zeal, that of your approbation. Paul Adam. June 1919.'”
Tobias Churton, 2016
PAUL ADAM
French novelist (1862-1920), important for his LETTERS FROM MALAYSIA (1898) and for having sprinkled his work with small utopian and anticipatory sketches. A dozen of his stories interest us in whole or in part.
In chapter XVI of CLARISSE (1907), a floating factory off the coast of Brest uses the perpetual movement of the sea to produce electricity, which is then stored in “liquid accumulators,” jugs of energy which are conveyed worldwide for all purposes.
In USEFUL HEART (1892), we find a communist utopia with phalanstery. Locomotives pull harrows, plows, etc. The workshops are decorated and “functional” music lightens the work.
THE FUTURE TALE (1893) presents in 55 pages a coming war in which, very soon after the start, the combatants fraternize and establish an era of perpetual peace.
Under the title “Future Grandeur de l'Avare” (in the collection CRITIQUE DES MOEURS (1893)), we read this: “[..] machines which will feed, clothe, heat, refresh and gladden the world by means of the tappings of index fingers on the ivory of motor buttons,” and this again, which surpasses everything, in terms of energy: “The muscular contractions aroused by the yawns of strolling pedestrians will suffice to produce the initial force immediately stored, condensed, multiplied in receivers established everywhere.”
“There are moments when human genius slumbers. There are others when it is exalted by the fever of creation. Chemistry, physics and biology evolve with a miraculous rapidity, translated before our eyes into such miracles as the ancient poets revered. Without harness, chariots run with a magical speed. Tritons plunge into the bosom of the sea with the submarines. Icariuses fly. Jupiters by the millions manipulate the lightning. Phaetons pass in a day through the spaces of the European sky. Swifter than Iris, the message-bearing thought, entrusted to the waves of an aerial vibration, spreads from Europe to Africa, Asia, America in a fraction of time.
“Did the nymphs of the waterfalls know that they would one day deliver up the force of their waves to the power of a dynamo, that would change them into electric lightning glowing over whole regions?”
Paul Adam, 1894
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“In the films I made with Liška there wasn’t much action as such. It was he who put all the main action into music. Rhythm was always very important for me, and he found rhythms in them I had no idea were there. It was fascinating. He’d pick out a whole lot of subtler rhythms I was quite unaware of. ‘Unconscious rhythms’ he called them.”
Jan Švankmajer, 2000
Link: The Fantastic Mr. Fox: a biographical essay by David Herter
“Debussy uses chords like Mallarmé uses words, as mirrors which concentrate the light from one hundred different angles upon the exact meaning, while remaining symbols of that meaning and not the meaning itself. These strange harmonies are not the end, but the point of departure of the composer's intentions. They are the loom upon which the imagination must weave its own fantasies.”
T.E. Clark, 1921
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Paul Adam, 1893
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Alfred Doblin 1924
“Where am I?”
“Very far from your tottering globe, which you will never see again, very far from your sad sun, which is dying slowly in the bosom of its cold planets. Your worlds have fallen into the gaping depths of the immensity, and you would search in vain for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. All those children of darkness have returned to eternal oblivion.”
Jane de La Vaudère, 1893
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“Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue brought us new tones, new sounds. They cast glimmers on the words that had not yet been seen; they used methods unknown to the poets their predecessors; they conceived the verses or the prose like musicians and, like musicians again, combined the images and their sound correspondence.”
Paul Dukas, 1921
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