Charles Baudelaire
Tag Archives: Baudelaire
Baudelaire premiere
“Correspondences,” my song cycle on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, will premiere at the Thursday Musical series in Saint Paul. Brad Bradshaw, tenor and Tom Bartsch, piano. They’re both great musicians. It’ll be fun!
new works
I’m struggling away trying to write a Litany of Satan for Brad Bradshaw to sing. I’ve taken three or four cracks at making a translation/lyric adaptation and I don’t want to start on the music until I have words I really like. Right now what I have is serviceable and somewhat beautiful but I don’t think I have gotten to the bottom of what Baudelaire means in his poem. So I am waiting, picking up the poem every few days, and seeing what is there for me.
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.
forgive me, Baudelaire!
My new set of songs, Correspondences, Songs on Baudelaire will be performed by tenor Brad Bradshaw with pianist Tom Bartsch at the Rough Cuts series on January 18th and 19th. The first evening’s location will not be the Nautilus’s studio as usual, but Zeitgeist’s Studio Z, a block away (275 East 4th Street). That building is locked up tight as a drum evenings, so it’d be a good idea to arrive on time. Tuesday’s performance will be in the Foss Center at Augsburg College. 7:30 both nights. Brad will be performing the songs in recital in February, and I hope to get them performed a couple other places as well this winter and spring.
When I started this project I had a general feeling about Baudelaire, and I liked the poetry. Having read a lot more of him, thought about it hard and struggled to get it into song I have some more definite ideas. Today, with the project finished, I am pleased to have found an essay by Kenneth Rexroth that echoes my thoughts and gives me more to think about. It’s short, but packed full. I encourage you to read it.
The first thing I discovered was how utterly unsatisfying almost all the English translations were. I like what James Wright did with “The Voyage” and Roy Campbell hit the mark from time to time–neither Wright nor Campbell sounds like Baudelaire, but they produce vigorous and exciting poems. Most of the others leave too much to be desired. I agree with Rexroth: the poems are best in French.
In any case, after digging into a few, I realized that not only could no accurate translation be made but even if there were one, it’d make a lousy lyric. This is the case for most poetry: it’s too dense–too many words–and its logic defies musical setting. A poem carries its own music, and real music would get in the way.
So…forgive me Mr. Baudelaire. I pruned mercilessly. I abandoned your forms. I made whatever kind of lyric I thought would carry some of your meaning, and I made music to carry some more of it, and I made my own meaning out of your poems. I did what we do when we read them; I interpreted.
I feel an obligation to be faithful to something about the poems, to their ideas and images, and to Baudelaire’s mind. Baudelaire’s experiences, philosophies and attitudes were important to my understanding of the poems. I wanted to make the songs a journey with him through time; his day, his city.
Seven songs are not enough to give a listener all of Baudelaire. I picked poems about things I thought most important, and ones I thought would make good songs. If I add more later, I would like to set some poems to his mistresses, more Parisian poems, and maybe tackle the Litanies of Satan. Although Diamanda Galas kinda has lock on that one.
she opens soon!
It hit me today that I hadn’t really um described Beaverdance. Briefly, it’s a Marxist analysis of the fur trade in Central Minnesota featuring disco dancing beavers, a love story that almost ends tragically featuring a rapacious capitalist named Mr. Blaine and a city boy named Loring Park, a manly voyageur named Jacques Brainerd and his beautiful Ojibway love interest, Bemidji. That’s all clear, right? It opens tomorrow. The cast is looking and sounding great.
Got a little writeup in the Onion AV Club this week, in TC Daily Planet, and in Minnesota Monthly, and MPR will air a drivetime spot Tuesday. For some reason in all these writeups you have to scroll to the bottom to find my show. I wonder why that is…
I’ll be in DC on BD’s opening weekend, performing Fidgety Fairy Tales with a group of six young actors and Matt for a national convention.
One Baudelaire song written, and two more in the works. I actually made myself cry improvising some ideas for one on piano. Now we shall see how it turns out. What I have discovered about setting Baudelaire is that I have to cut, cut, cut. The language is too thick in all the translations I have. Too many adjectives. The song cycle will be performed in February and I hope to have all the writing done by the end of December. The first song I wrote I junked. The second I’m not so sure about but I sent it off anyway.
In any case, it is very promising, and I will have more to say about this project in the coming month. For now, I will only say that Baudelaire is much deeper and cooler than the popular ideas about him.
