La Mystère Tisné IX

When a French composer dies, his works enter what is called "Purgatory".  This is a ten to twenty year period in which his music is largely forgotten until somebody notices that something is good and isn't being played.  Then it starts to re-enter the repertoire.  This is generally a grace period of a few months after someone's death, where concerts that were planned before their death are going on or memorial concerts are presented. 

Antoine's entrance into purgatory was immediate, abrupt and completely clear.  I remember watching the televised "Victoires de La Musique Classique" awards show in 1998, during which they read the names of the composers and other musicians who had died that year.  Antoine wasn't mentioned.  This shocked me, but he didn't have only friends in the Music World and it would seem that his passing and the act of throwing his music into the trash-bin of history was something that was perhaps convenient for certain people. 

That Fall, I met Niemann for coffee.  We met at a small café near Châtelet.  I hadn't seen him since the funeral.  We were two, very different people and the only real connection we had was Antoine.  I think that I was hoping that maybe he could explain certain parts of who Antoine was to me.  But I understood by his questions that he was as puzzled as I was.  I told him what I could, but I didn't have the answers he needed.  He couldn't answer my questions either.  And there we were with this huge hole of grief between us, with nothing to say.  I knew that we wouldn't become friends.  It just wasn't possible.  I've seen him four or five times since.  I wish him well.  I think that he was the person who was the most hurt by this whole business.  I hope that he has found a way of living with that.

Niemann gave me a  manuscript of a work for piano (not one of the neatly copied manuscripts which were the final product, but a working manuscript with things crossed out, modifications etc) and a black sac.  In it were Antoine's decorations, which he had wanted me to have  When I got the sac home, I took them out and in the bottom of the sac was Antoine's Prix de Rome medal.  It was the one thing that he had prized the most.  It sits on my piano now.

In November, 1998, we played the première of "Offertorium pour Chartres"  It was on a very dark night with mist rising among the spires of the Cathedral.  I have always loved Chartres, feeling a kind of telluric force coming out of those old stones.  There were two premières that night, "Troppi per Chartres" by Gian Paolo Chiti and Antoine's piece. I played with the Chartres Quartet.  The movements were all titled for aspects of Chartres:  Sculputral with it's huge monumental chordal passages in the string quartet and more melodic material in the saxophone.  La Porte des Mystères, which illustrates one of the doors leading into the Church.  The Central "Offertorium" movement which ended with a long unison song in the strings.  The "Temptation" movement altered highly structures histrionics with some beautiful choral writing. And the final "Tree of Jesse", based o the famous stained-glass window which traces the ancestors of Christ from an opening unison in the quartet which opens to a lyrical, yet violent outburst.  It is a gigantic, sprawling work in the image of the Cathedral itself. 

This is not easy music, even for musicians.  As with everything Antoine did, it is entirely without concessions and you have to take it at its own terms.    But the journey, for those who take the entire voyage, is well worth the trip.  I don't think that one can speak of '"success or failure" with a work like this  it simply is.  I'm not sure if we, the musicians completely understood the depths of this piece.  I don't know what the audience thought.  There was warm, but polite applause at the end of the concert.  But i'm not certain if that was more a memorial to Antoine himself rather than a reaction to the piece itself.   I believe a recording was made, but I've never heard it.

The next month, I found myself in another Cathedral.  This time Notre Dame in Paris.  Françoise was to play the complete "Altamira" for organ, a piece which describes the cave paintings in Spain.  This was a unique performance, since Françoise was the person who knew the work the best in the World (I believe that this is probably still the case today!).  And the Great Organ at Notre Dame, rebuilt by Jean-Thierry's father and then by his brother, was one of the few instruments in the World that could do this music justice.  For example, the piece requires that the pedals be split into two registrations and Notre Dame was one of a few organs where this was possible.  It's always been formally forbidden to record the organ at Notre Dame without the permission of the Titular organists.  But we knew that we would never have this kind of chance again, so we bent the rules a bit.  Jean-Thierry had run the Sunday Concert series and knew where the plug for the built-in mics was located.  We plugged our portable TASCAM into this and recorded the whole thing.  We knew that it could never be used, but we wanted to keep a trace of this work.  I still have this recording on CD.

And Jean-Thierry went to Françoise's right on the Great Tribune, helping with the registration.  I was on her left and turned the pages.  It felt like the right thing to do.  When the last final cluster with the  Great Organ with the Chamades roaring, I thought that I had never in my life heard anything so absolutely violent and yet so perfectly suited to the subject matter.  I do hope that someone decides to play the Concerto for organ and strings that Antoine wrote for Cochereau, the late Titular Organist of Notre Dame.  I would love to conduct this...

Without Antoine, the opera project fell through.  We tried to replace him with Joseph-François Kremer, but the organizers lost interest.  The project evaporated, leaving only Pierre Dubranquez's libretto, which I have on my work desk.  It's something that I need to write.

We took Joseph-François with us to Baku, with Françoise and myself.  I think that Antoine, with his obsession with fire in his titles would have felt right at home in the "Land of Fire".  We spoke of him often.  During the final concert at the German Church there, Françoise and I played "Psalmodies" for Saxophone and Organ, our Warhouse.  We were there in late March, during Novruz, the Kurdish New Year Festival.  During this time, people light bonfires and try to jump over them three times for good luck.  So, what happened next was completely surprising, but it also made some sort of sense.  When we began the piece, a fire was lit right outside the Church's windows   As the piece unfolded, the fire burned brightly outside the windows....and as the echo of the piece's final violent outburst disappeared in the shadows of the Apse, the fire went out.  This is the recording that you can hear on the recording that I put out a few weeks ago.  The organ isn't a great instrument by any means, but I think that some of that atmosphere is present. 

And then, Life took it's course.  There is a huge amount of work to be done in French music, work which only a crazy person such as myself would think of doing, because there is no money really to be made.  Well, maybe if you have a lot of it....but promoting New Music is a thankless task and the composers who are alive and need to eat are competing for those same concerts with people who are no longer around to insist on their due.  So, my attention was drawn elsewhere:  Tailleferre, including a year spent reconstructing her Opera "Il était un Petit Navire", Thérèse Brenet, Richard Faith, my younger composers (Carson Cooman, Philip Goddard, David Soomons)....not to mention my own music, finally having decided to stop telling myself stories about not being able to write music and start doing what I had always knew that I should be doing.  I did some of the Monodies in Concert, but it didn't have the same urgency. And quite frankly, it hurt to go to the place where I needed to go to play this music.  I did it less and less.

Before you know it, years pass and you're light years away.  I kept the Prix de Rome medal on my piano.  I kept the letter with my important papers.  I didn't think too much about Antoine, because it was still an open wound.

And then one day I got an email...