La Mystère Tisné VI

There are fish that live at the bottom of the ocean.  These fish live under so much pressure that they explode if you bring them to the surface of the Earth. In many respects,  Antoine was like one of these fish.   I wonder if I wasn't responsible for this state, for this liberation which lead to release...but also to death. Antoine, with his brown suit and his tie, was completely uptight.  And Jean-Thierry and I, we tried to provide a space in which Antoine could feel comfortable.  We always had a great variety of people at our table:  singers, musicians, composers, others...The point was: everyone could be who they were, without judgement.  Without any sort of analysis after the fact.

I think that Antoine understood that he didn't need to prove anything to us.  And yet, I have nothing to say about his "personal life".  Okay, there was the Russian pianist who wanted to become "Madame Tisné".  And any number of other stories.   But, even though Antoine knew that he had nothing to hide from either me or Jean-Thierry, there is nothing to say here.   I believe that Antoine never had a physical relationship in his entire life.  This is not to say that he didn't want to have a physical relationship.  But, I'm convinced that he couldn't.  Maybe it was because he had TB when he was young.  Maybe it was for other reasons.  I don't know.  All that I know that is that while he was alive, I don't think that this kind of relationship was possible.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But I believe that this is true.

During 1997, Antoine did a huge favor to me.   Jean Françaix had died.  Françaix was a musical grandfather to me.  Françaix was not only someone who explained to me what music was, he was someone who explained to me who I was as a musician.   And when he died, it left a huge hole in my life, one which has never really ever been filled.  I still mourn him, and I still have work that I have to do for him, which includes releasing to the World the recording of "L'Horloge de Flore" we made together in 1992, the only time Françaix ever conducted this work.  I still can't really talk about him, although I do frequently.  My work with him was a great pleasure from beginning to end.  And during our numerous phone conversations, I told him about my work with Tisné.   

I had managed to introduce Françaix and Antoine at a reception organized by "Musiques Nouvelles en Liberté" sometime around 1995;  Both of them were reluctant to talk, thinking that the other composer was against their way of thinking.  I convinced both of them that they needed to talk, to at least shake hands, as a symbolic way of putting aside this "tonal verses atonal" feud that had be going on too long.  Their music wasn't fundamentally THAT different.  They both know Madeleine Milhaud very  well and they had the same sort of dry French wit.  They humored me and went along with it, probably just to be nice.  They actually seemed to like each other.  I spoke of Tisné to Français and of Françaix to Tisné after that.  I felt as if I had done something to heal this very profound rift.  I might have been humoring myself, but my friends played along.  So, when Françaix died, Tisné went to his funeral and stood between Jean-Thierry and I.  He knew Françaix's daughter Claude quite well and he asked me to pass on his condolences to her.  I was very grateful that he did this for me.

So, as 1998 started, it looked like we were going towards a very good year:  The première of "Offertorium pour Chartres" was scheduled for November-in Chartres Cathedral itself!-- and the rehearsals were to start in April.  In late July, Françoise and I were to go to Poitiers to record "Musiques pour des Espaces Sacrés" for a friend who was a producer with Sony records.  In the Spring of 1999 the four of us (Jean-Thierry, Françoise, Antoine and I) were to go to Azerbaijan for a masterclass and concerts organized by the French Embassy there.  And then in the Summer of 1999, "La Nuit de L'Altenburg" was to be produced in Weimar as part of the European Cultural  Capital project there.  We thought that we were going in exactly the right direction. 

1998 was also the beginning of Antoine's long-awaited retirement.  Finally he was going to be able to just compose and not have to waste time with administrative work or inspecting conservatory staff.  So, in January of 1998, we had to lot of celebrate and decided to mark the occasion.  Jean-Thierry and I met Antoine for lunch:  not on the left bank but near Les Halles, in OUR territory.  We didn't know exactly where we were going to eat, but we were going to walk around the Marais and choose a place.  Although Antoine had worked in this area for years, he had never actually visited there, only gone to his office and back.  So, the idea was to just explore and stop when we found something interesting.   For those of you who appreciate this word, we were flaneurs before it became so stylish.

We met Antoine in front of the BHV and I immediately saw that something was seriously wrong.  He was completely yellow and looked very drawn.  I asked him if he felt okay.  And he said that I shouldn't talk about it, that I was scaring him, not to mention it;  So, we pretended as if nothing was the matter.  We happened to walk past the Banana Café, a famous gay nightclub which features Gogo boys.  I'm sure that Antoine had no idea what it was, but he suggested that we go there for lunch.  I told him that it wasn't really a lunch place, but we could go some night if he wanted.  I'm sorry that I never got the chance to take him back there.  He might have liked it...or maybe not.  But the Banana Café for Lunch became a kind of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" joke in our household.  Antoine was just so naive about certain things.  In many respects, he was still the young man from Lourdes who was venturing for the first time in the Capital. 

Finally we settled into a nice restaurant and talked about the future:  what he was writing, what things were happening, our mutual friends and concerts that were going on, the progress on the libretto for the new opera.  It was a bright, joyous moment, especially since there was no talk about running back to the office or having to go inspect somebody.  As we walked him back to his metro at Chatelet, he stopped and looked at Jean-Thierry and myself and told us that we were the sons that he had never had;  As someone else who was alone in the World and as someone who will never have a son, I understood what he was saying.  This wasn't just something he said without thinking about it:  it had a specific sense, as did everything he did. 

I remembered my teacher, the great French soprano Renée Mazella who told me to always look for the flame that was passed from generation to generation.  She said that I would be given information to pass on and that I shouldn't take this lightly.  When you're 25, you don't know what this means.  When you're 35 you think that you understand what this means, but you really don't.  This information comes at a price.  You pay with your Soul and part of you never recovers.  But the part that receives and transmits the information is made stronger by the mission conferred by the transmission.  But you have to be prepared to look within the depths of who you are at the core; There is no way around this.  And if you have any flaws, these will come to the surface.  We all have flaws.  And we don't really understand what this means until we go through it.

That day, Antoine decided to give part of his message to me and  another part to Jean-Thierry.   Everything he did after this day was geared towards giving us information to pass on:  about his work, about his view of the World as a musician.....and because there was nothing else in his life, of what his Life meant.

For he was dying.  I think that he already knew this;  And he wanted to die on his own terms, independantly without having to ask for help for others;  And there was something else, something hidden that he didn't want to mix with our own relationship.  I think that he wanted to enjoy this new-found freedom to be free to think, to compose and to say whatever the Hell he wanted to say.   He liked having the freedom to finally, after all of those years of being a suit-wearing functionary to say "Fuck you.  I am not a beginner and I do not need you";   And through our work together, I think that he thought that this was possible.  At the beginning of 1998, it certainly seemed that way. 

And so we made an appointment to continue work on the opera.  And so, Life went on.