Symphony of Seduction Read online

  SYMPHONY

  OF SEDUCTION

  Christopher Lawrence is one of Australia’s favourite radio personalities through his work on ABC Classic FM. As a recording producer, Christopher has received an International Emmy for Performing Arts, three ARIAs and the Editors’ Choice Award at the Cannes Classical Awards. He has conducted most of Australia’s capital city symphony orchestras and is the author of three previous books.

  Thank you to Bradley Trevor Greive for suggesting the book’s title.

  Published by Nero,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Christopher Lawrence 2018

  Christopher Lawrence asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

  9781863958400 (paperback)

  9781925435597 (ebook)

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Cover design by Peter Long and Marilyn de Castro

  Text design and typesetting by Marilyn de Castro

  Cover painting: ‘Mars and Venus, Allegory of Peace’

  by Louis Jean François Lagrenée

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  A PEAR-SHAPED AFFAIR

  LOVE MAKES WAR

  THE RETURN TO LIFE

  DARK LOVE

  LOVED TO DEATH

  SCANDAL GOES WEST

  MAZURKA IN A TEASPOON

  BUSTLE WITH THE BÄSLE

  PLEASURE IS THE LAW

  IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME

  THE UNKNOWN ISLAND

  INTRODUCTION

  Classical music might not have claimed much of your attention in the past. You’d know if it had, because that’s what it tries to do. There’s a lot of organised thinking in there, reaching out with its notes, trying to hook you, draw you in, take you for a ride. Very elegantly, of course. Not a blunt proposition – more a wink across a crowded room. You must make your way through a host of misrepresentation, blind ignorance and bad publicity to reach this attractive stranger. Then the chat-up really begins.

  It’s not unreasonable to presume that those who thought up these intricate masterpieces of seduction would be just as good at the real thing. But, as I pointed out in my earlier book Swooning, the great composers were as inept at the business of what used to be called ‘making love’ as the rest of us. (‘Inept’ is too harsh a word, perhaps. Make that ‘human’.)

  This book examines that humanity in eleven stories about fabulously gifted people who venture out from their interior lives to find love. It might be the first time (Mozart), the final time (Berlioz), an inappropriate time (Debussy), a necessary time (Wagner), the only time (Satie), or the third time that week (Stradella). It might be something they want but can’t have (Berlioz again), or something they could have but decide they don’t want (Brahms). A couple of the stories are famous, but most of them are little more than vignettes. That’s because almost every love story herein is unsuccessful; the two in this collection that carried through to a postscript did so for a comparatively short period, cut off by insanity, illness or death. ‘Happily ever after’ is not the take-away from these affairs of the heart. No oil sheik or tennis instructor in romantic fiction would be allowed such a failure rate. Truth is sometimes too disappointing, for all its strangeness.

  And these are true stories – at least, in their timelines, people, locations, decisions. Many of the phrases are direct quotes from the composers themselves (my favourite is Puccini’s ‘I hate pavements’). On the other hand, coming up with the pillow talk that drives all of this was an entirely speculative endeavour, ever so much fun for this writer. In my own pleasant experience, while one’s head is on the pillow, one’s mind is often somewhere else.

  When it came to primary sources, best of all was the music. The works of the great composers are the real engine of this book, featuring in and propelling the narrative, burbling away through every thought and every line of prose in a silent soundtrack. Individual works are the starting point of the stories in several cases; the Mozart and Stradella chapters even begin with a description of the act of composition. While writing, I used these works to colour in my outlines of their creators, and it’s my most fervent hope that reading this book will inspire you to do the same. Every piece referred to in these pages can be easily sourced. If that seems like too specialised a task, a Symphony of Seduction soundtrack is available on CD or to download. Listen as you read; you’ll find the sounds of these composers to be a poignant counterpoint to the tales of their stuttering dreams. Therein lie the real truths of these lives – and ours. For when it comes to putting a little love into your day, classical music does the best job of all.

  – Christopher Lawrence

  A PEAR-SHAPED AFFAIR

  A classic story of love among the bohemians in the Montmartre area of Paris: he, the eccentric café pianist who became one of music’s greatest originals; she, a former artist’s model who featured in the paintings of Renoir. The flame burned bright for only a short time in such a milieu – but could he have been jealous enough to murder her?

  ‘When I was young, people used to say to me “Wait until you’re fifty, you’ll see”. I am fifty. I haven’t seen anything.’

  Erik Satie (1866–1925)

  In his squalid apartment in 1916, Erik Satie peers at the mirror through pince-nez to inspect his attire for the morning’s journey into Paris, as if noticing something for the first time.

  ‘This strikes me as entirely familiar,’ he says to himself. ‘Could it be that I was wearing the same thing yesterday?’

  Then, chuckling at his regular private joke, he responds, ‘Of course I was.’

  He looks exactly the same every day, for his wardrobe contains only six identical suits. In this current phase of his fashion life he presents as a civil servant: bowler hat, dark jacket, a stiff shirt collar (he has 144 ready to wear) and, always, an umbrella. He also carries a hammer – just in case.

  Fifteen years earlier he dressed exclusively in velvet, and before that, when he was the founder and only member of his own church, he strolled around Paris in something resembling a cassock.

  The long, lank hair of his youth is now combed onto the back of his head from a line near the crown, and a goatee bristles from his chin like a tongue of flame. Even if his eyes don’t carbonise the object of their gaze like those of his friend Picasso, they have a sufficiently quizzical expression to cause the more observant passer-by to doubt the complacency of this apparent paragon of the bourgeoisie.

  Erik wants his appearance to deceive. He wants to portray himself as worldly, even though there has never been a composer so resolutely extraterrestrial. Beneath the surface of modest affluence there is only poverty, his most constant companion, ‘a sad little girl with large green eyes’ who dictates his moods, his work and his choice of residence away from even the cheapest Parisian garret. For him, poverty is a more poetic state than destitution, which he describes as ‘that woman with the huge breasts’.

  The sad little girl has brought him to a backwater called Arcueil, where he has taken lodgings in what is known locally as ‘The House of Four Chimneys’, a structure compressed into a wedge by the acute confluence of two streets. He eventually lives in that same room for twenty-seven years. In all that time, nobody else ever sets foot in it.

  Erik is a recluse, perhaps, but only when his door is closed. Once he arr
ives in Paris, he becomes a man about town, with meetings in bars and cafés over an apéritif – or ten. ‘It’s odd,’ he says. ‘You find people in every bar willing to offer you a drink. No one ever dreams of presenting you with a sandwich.’

  It is time for his morning pilgrimage: the ten kilometres from his room into town. Well after midnight, he will walk all the way home again, stopping on occasion under a streetlamp to retrieve his notebook and scribble down a musical idea.

  Prior to leaving, Erik receives the first mail from the concierge, one of six that will arrive that day. It includes what is obviously a bill from yet another mercenary utilities provider. Without bothering to check the contents, he places the offending document inside the topmost of two grand pianos stacked upside down upon the other, where it will vanish under a patina of dust like its unopened predecessors.

  Emerging onto the street, he walks slowly, taking small steps, stopping at regular haunts along the way to fortify himself for the next stage of the journey. At Chez Tulard he is greeted like the town councillor he once aspired to be.

  ‘Something extra in your café, monsieur?’ says the owner, indicating the cognac.

  ‘D’accord,’ says Satie.

  Two kilometres further on, he feels a rush of inspiration and pauses at the bar of Monsieur Aknine to anticipate the notes that may come forth.

  ‘An absinthe, Monsieur Satie?’ comes the ritual question.

  In another favourite stop, now with Paris in sight, a curious regular asks Satie if his profession is truly that of a composer. ‘Everyone will tell you that I am not a musician,’ says Satie. ‘That is true. Don’t imagine that my work is music. That’s not my line.’

  ‘Another kir, monsieur?’ ventures the waiter.

  ‘Such is inevitable,’ says the alleged non-musician, dabbing at his lips with one of ninety-nine freshly laundered handkerchiefs.

  While the streetscape along the way has altered considerably over the decades (shop windows displaying the new haute couture, Metro stops sprouting from the ground, horse-drawn carriages giving way to automobiles) it has happened in such tiny increments as to be unnoticeable to the daily walker. Blind to his surroundings, even with quizzical eyes, the now flushed civil servant is instead preoccupied this morning by music – and the memories that come with it.

  His implacable walk is just like the stride of the left hand pivoting up and down the piano keyboard in his Gnossienne No. 5, one of those pieces he wrote more than twenty years ago, just before he fell in love. Above these musical footsteps, the right hand meanders through a tune that never develops or resolves, requoting itself in an attempt to loop back to the beginning; tipsy, yet maintaining its elegance. Like Erik, really.

  What did that title mean? Something old and Greek, he recalled, a description casting the work out of time, beyond bar lines and time signatures and all the bondage that institutional music came to demand of her creators when she turned into a dominatrix.

  That was the trouble with memory; it kept reintroducing one to people it would have been far better to avoid. Erik pauses at his reflection in a window to make sure the brim of his hat is exactly level above his eyes. If the fifth Gnossienne is just like him, it has to be admitted that the others in the set are very much like her. They are cat music: the first Gnossienne brushes your ankles as it passes by, and the fourth purrs in your lap while the kneading of extended claws reminds you who is in charge.

  Suzanne was a cat – or a sphinx. She always landed on her feet, even when pushed from a third-floor window, due in no small part to her early training as a trapeze artist. The similarity of the music and the person was of course a coincidence, because the first Gnossienne had been composed before Erik and Suzanne ever met. But she was already somewhere nearby – just next door, in fact – when those notes went on the page back in the last century. Somehow, without yet knowing her, he must have been aware that a storm was coming. Artists are like ants when it comes to anticipating bad weather, pointing their antennae in its direction and rushing for the nearest hole.

  It was New Year’s Eve at the Auberge du Clou in Montmartre and another round of drinks had been served as the assembled bohemians waited in the small room for 1893 to begin. The cellar was dark except for the lamps at the bar, the glowing tips of cigarettes, and the rectangle of light on the wall where a shadow-puppet play had just been performed with piano interludes from a young man wearing a top hat, Windsor tie and long frock coat, a black ribbon dangling from his pince-nez.

  His duties as house musician over for a while, Erik was nursing an absinthe in the corner when a woman from a table of what sounded like painter types approached him. This was an almost unprecedented occurrence, as he was renowned for having no money. Her presence made him nervous. He wondered if there was a hole nearby darker than the one they were in.

  ‘Thank you for the music tonight, monsieur,’ she said. ‘My friends and I especially liked that slow one; the one like a waltz.’

  ‘And merci to you, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘You must be referring to my third Gymnopédie. Your friends are perceptive. It is a work that has been publicly acclaimed as a marvel.’

  ‘Gymnopédie?’ she asked. ‘I’ve not heard the word. What does it mean?’

  ‘Something old and Greek. The word is my own invention.’

  ‘Whatever it’s called, it’s beautiful.’

  So are you, thought Erik, even though in the dim light he could see little more than feline eyes and the centre parting in a thick helmet of hair. ‘Beautiful as it is, the music’s real value is therapeutic,’ he said. ‘It has cured a man who suffered for eight years with a liver disorder, rheumatic pains and polyps on the nose.’

  Her eyes narrowed and her tone became more playful. ‘That is indeed formidable. How do you know this to be true?’

  ‘It was in our cabaret magazine, The Japanese Divan,’ he said. ‘I read this claim in print only days after I wrote it. These days, artists cannot merely create their work; they must make a place where their work can flourish. Exotic fruit needs a conservatory in this Parisian weather.’ He wondered if she lived in a conservatory.

  ‘If that was your third Gymnopédie, there must be at least a couple of others,’ she said. ‘If I come back another time, might you play them for me?’

  ‘I will play them until all of your polyps have disappeared,’ he said with a flourish he hoped displayed more wit than accusation. As she turned away to give him a momentary glimpse of her profile he could see from the smooth line of her nose that no musical therapy was necessary, while the curve of her lower back near the hip indicated a flexibility that could only exist without a trace of rheumatism. The empty bottles on the table at which she rejoined her companions were a reminder that Erik could not presume anything about her liver.

  ‘Erik with a k?’ she asked a few nights later, peering at his hand-drawn card. This time she had come alone and was waiting at his table when he had finished applying musical therapy around the room.

  ‘I was born with a c, but changed it as soon as I could,’ he explained. ‘Those of us from Normandy consider ourselves little Vikings. A k is more Scandinavian.’

  ‘Which side of your family is Scandinavian?’

  This was harder for Erik to answer, because his mother had been half-Scot. Not only was he more authentically an Eric, he should probably have been playing the piano in a kilt.

  It was only their second conversation, yet already Erik’s stream of invention was beginning to run dry, probably because in his twenty-six years he had never had two successive conversations with any woman except his paternal grandmother. At this rate he was going to have to resort to the truth about himself, and that had always been calamitous for him in the past, for there was nothing about which he could boast. Derided and expelled from the Paris Conservatoire, sharing clothes with friends through mutual lack of funds, and already fretting about his thinning hair, he could not provide an assurance of becoming prosperous or attractive at any point durin
g the next six months. The rest of his life looked equally dubious.

  But still they talked, and Erik began to realise that such shortcomings were of no concern to her, for Suzanne Valadon was not of the bourgeoisie. He also learned the reason for the exquisite shape of her back.

  ‘A trapeze artist!’ he repeated, his imagination leaping from Gymnopédies to gymnastics.

  ‘A long time ago,’ she said. ‘But eventually I was drawn away from the highwire towards High Art.’

  Being a toned and supple seventeen-year-old girl had meant that entrée into the milieu of painters entailed taking her clothes off. Suzanne modelled for people like Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. Another painter and creator of shadow-puppet plays, Miguel Utrillo, was considered the most likely in a wide field to have fathered her now ten-year-old son, Maurice. Clearly, modelling was a risky business.

  Those days were over, and Suzanne was now an artist in her own right with an atelier next to Erik’s on the rue Cortot. He remembered that he had seen her before, always in a retinue of painters, some of them mutual friends. All the poor artists lived in Montmartre until the bourgeoisie, who came to believe it would be fashionable to live near poor artists, ousted them.

  ‘And since I have had the honour to hear some of your work, perhaps you would like to come and see some of mine?’ she said. ‘Unless, of course, you would prefer we go to your place.’

  Satie’s throat suddenly tightened so much that his next gulp of vin de table was stopped in its tracks. Even though Montmartre was a small world, his world was even smaller.

  ‘My place presents a slight problem,’ he said. ‘A problem of dimension.’

  ‘I have been in small rooms before,’ she purred.

  ‘This is very small,’ he continued, not bothering to conceal his embarrassment. ‘I call it The Cupboard. There is no room for anything but a bed, so it also has to serve as my work table, my wardrobe and my filing cabinet.’