![]() ![]() The ensuing story of Jean-Baptiste’s life and career as a viol-player is not without adventures and trials. After Jean-Baptiste has come by a few more times, the old man offers to make him a new viol. We now learn that when Jean-Baptiste played in the forest he was heard by an ancient luthier living in its depths the old man’s deep and intimate knowledge of every tree – maple, sycamore, pear-wood, ebony, cherry-wood, spruce – ensures his unerring ability to select the wood best suited to a specified instrument. Within her silence she harbours “the lost truth of all their lives” and she continues to play the harpsichord for her own personal pleasure.Īlongside this painful histoire runs the story introduced in the quote. Behind the curtains of the window-seat, people confide to her the things they cannot say to anyone else, not even to themselves. When she is let out, she chooses never to speak again.įriday essay: what is it about Versailles?įorever mute (but NOT deaf-mute, as the book’s front flap nonsensically claims) she is nevertheless far from isolated. Instead, Charlotte-Elisabeth makes a thrilling discovery: silence is her friend and consolation. When she is seven, he inflicts on her a particularly savage beating, yanking a clump of her hair out, striking her with his bow until it breaks, and shutting her in her room for several days “to be starved into music”. Her creative life will be her own choice, not her father’s. ![]() To this end he tries to thrash her into learning, as he’d successfully done with his son but in contrast to her brother, Charlotte-Elisabeth rebels. When she was a child and learning to play the harpsichord, her father was determined to turn her into a prodigy as famous as her brother: one day, she too must play at court. Their fictionalised story is written down by the above-mentioned Charlotte-Elisabeth, who does not speak but whose role is in every way central. Jean-Martial Frédou, Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1737). Forqueray père and, later, Jean-Baptiste, began their careers as child prodigies during the 70-year reign of Louis XIV, and in time overlapped as official court musicians.įornication, fluids and faeces: the intimate life of the French court The prose may be unapologetically poetic, but the narrative itself is vivid and lively, sometimes even quirky, though its origins are firmly based in the history of French music. He draws from the frozen river a music that was there before him, a music that was there long before his father, before the first growth of his instrument, the woods through which he plays. He drums his fingers on the belly, tracing the hiding harmonies, the matching rhythms of water, wind and trees. Seeking a motion to bind the drip, drip, drip of melting snow, to catch the fractured melodies that run through the chill boughs above. Chasing the rhythm, not quite yet a rhythm. He listens closely, blending his music with all he hears around him. Not a music to be played indoors, to be played within his father’s hearing. The first sounds moan and clash, as though in sorrow, but then reach out, testing the silver spaces of the frozen river, the keening of the breeze that troubles the highest branches, the muffled sound of the waters that move deep below the ice. He draws the viol from the canvas and opens its music to the air. He steals down to a clearing by the bank, to a seat on a toppled sycamore. Of how he steps through the drifts that lead down to the river, his footsteps first to break the newest fall of snow. ![]() … I can tell of how the boy creeps from the house in the first light of dawn, his viol swathed in thick canvas. I invite you to look at, listen to and enjoy this extract from the first chapter of this book, written by Charlotte-Elisabeth, purportedly Jean-Baptiste’s younger sister: By which I mean that it works contrapuntally, careering ahead but also looking back and catching itself up, complicating and enhancing itself via reversals and repetitions and new motifs, never short of a theme to be introduced and played on. The same words could be applied to this novel, a brilliant read inventively devised by Adelaide’s Michael Meehan, but somewhat devilish to review.Īn Ungrateful Instrument – Michael Meehan (Transit Lounge)īecause, although music often tells stories, this story tells music. This is how 15-year old Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699-1742) describes the music that his father Antoine (1672-1745) draws from the viol, aka viola da gamba. ![]()
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