The impossibility of translation…French has a lot of prepositional phrases. When you translate those directly into English you begin to sound as though you are circling around what you mean. Baudelaire writes real French and it’s real poetry. So there’s that obstacle, and in addition the problem of making it into a lyric which means I must eviscerate the poetry.
Terry Eagleton, in his book On Evil quotes Henry James to the effect that Baudelaire’s Evil doesn’t really come up to snuff–too much shock factor, James would say. I say James didn’t get it. The opposing concepts of Evil and Good, like the concepts of Death and Life or Sacred and Secular, don’t really matter in Baudelaire’s philosophical universe. Baudelaire’s Satan is one who consoles, has pity, adopts mankind, shields and protects us, conceives hope in union with Death. This may be shocking in these hyper-religious times, but it is worth thinking about.
"Pornocrates" by Félicien Rops
The song cycle will be performed next on the morning of Thursday, December 2nd, at MacPhail.
Next weekend, I am going to a party and concert celebrating the 40th wedding anniversary of my piano tuner, Shirley Kysilko and her husband Tom. She plays cello and Tom plays viola, and they have commissioned several new pieces and arrangements for the occasion. I wrote a five-minute duet based on a two short melodic fragments. It begins with a lyrical call and response section which evolves into some gnarly counterpoint, and concludes with a very long slow quiet section con sordino in which the cello is accompanied by double stop viola. I’ve been over to their place twice to listen to them play it and give them my thoughts about it. My thoughts are that the piece is about their communication. They’re making something of it.
After not knowing what to call the duet, I finally decided to title it Hephaestus and Aphrodite, out of my great admiration for Shirley’s craftsmanship. The blacksmith god was noted for his lameness and ugliness. Shirley is neither lame nor ugly; she is beautiful. But every woman who chooses an autonomous and independent career–especially one who works with her muscles and her hands as Shirley does–is challenging traditional notions of feminine beauty and in the process, making beauty new. As Tom noted tonight, he is Aphrodite.
A rendition of the Shield of Achilles
Finally, Southwest State Theatre Department held auditions for Pine Creek Parish at the end of August and is commencing rehearsals this week. I’m going to travel down to Marshall in a week to see what they have made of the music. I’ll have more to say about this later. It looks promising.
