I just published Franz Liszt and Sel Love / Franz Liszt et l’Amour de Soi. Three concerts and all the years of pilgrimage, when Liszt is looking for himself, for his national base, and for love that does not betray the lover. But there might be some hope in loving your own self and retiring to some solitude with yourself, and you can add God on the table for entertainment. But it is so easy and superficial to point at this God on the table as the mark of some religious impasse at the dead end of a blind alley that is nothing but a cul de sac for the good old traditional anti-religious French who can only see religion as sectarian bigotry that has to be tolerated but neglected as insignificant.
This CD has just come out and to miss it would be a crime, a divine crime maèybe, but a crime anyway. The two artists, the guitarist and the countertenor are singing love in many forms, but always leading to separation, an end, death even when the Erlkönig interferes with life. No love can stop that lethal deadly companion carried by the wind. It is a tremendous pleasure to hear that Lied again after so many years gone by since my high school time when I learned how to speak it out, in its original German of course. I was 15 or 16, the ripe age to fall in love with the bitter-sweet pleasure of all the senses experiencing blissful ecstasy.
After Dreams, and the Bach Cello Suites, two recordings that enjoyed both critical and public acclaim, Ophélie Gaillard turns here to Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto and the complete music for cello and piano of Franz Liszt. The result of this juxtaposition of two worlds, those of two composers of great sensitivity, is a programme captivatingly combining passion with an expression of the mysteries of life. Once again we see the eclecticism that Ophélie Gaillard has always shown. For the Schumann Concerto, this brilliant young cellist is accompanied by the National Radio Orchestra of Romania (which has played with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Martha Argerich and Mstislav Rostropovich), under the young conductor Tiberiu Soare (a favourite of the singer Angela Gheorghiu).
Schumann, who took up the cello at one time, attains an expressive maturity in his Concerto that enables him to bring out all the warmth and sensuality of the instrument, which he presents in an orchestral setting of admirable depth. For the second part of the programme, Ophélie Gaillard is joined by the fine pianist Delphine Bardin (winner of the coveted Clara Haskil Prize). These pieces show the soberness and bold language that characterise Liszt’s late works. He had tamed his virtuosity considerably by then and his harmony shows him breaking away more and more from tonality (Liszt declared to an astonished Vincent d’Indy that ‘he aspired to do away with tonality’). They also immerse us in surprising environments, sometimes haunting, sometimes very bleak – a world of subtle emotions just waiting to be discovered!
http://flac.st/ophelie-gaillard-schumann-liszt-201224bit-flac/
“Le Tristan de Wagner. Un «relais» musical et créateur dans la "Recherche" de Proust”, Marcel Proust: écriture, réécritures. Dynamiques de l’échange esthétique, Lourdes Carriedo y M.ª Luisa Guerrero (eds.), Bruselas (Bélgica), Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 413-421. ISBN: 978-90-5201-640-5.
vous pouvez télécharger mes présentations sur
https://ma-planete.com/olga_oes
https://ma-planete.com/pps/websiteview/catid_26/id_574851/title_Le-Concert-dans-la-peinture/
http://www.chez-cath.fr/annee-2021-2.html
No prediction is possible. After all, the French did not get the Soccer World Cup. So the vast unity of the Slav people seems difficult to predict but to predict it will not happen with some exceptions is just as vain. But even if the one or the other do not happen Russian culture and music are there to stay and prosper because they are the voice of some very orthodox God. It is also deeply inhabited by suffering, deprivation, and loss, and that makes this culture universal and it pushes its roots deep into some of the most important migrations of Homo Sapiens out of Black Africa a long time ago. So the dramatic events in Ukraine are just the latest cycle of violence between the Ukrainians and the Russians that has occurred for at the very least one millennium. You may think today such cycles should be dead but they are not just like the cycle of climate change, and such cycles are a lot more pregnant about the future than all the rhetorical blah blah in various parliaments and congresses.
I just published LA SOIF DE LA FIN This summer is not the end of the pandemic or apocalypse. It is only the beginning. And we are dying g of thirst for the end of this period, even if it means the end of the planet and humanity. To be a Jewish woman in a world of segregation is blocking everything original, even a passionate relationship with a Black man. Nothing has changed really. Mass shootings every other day if not two a day. The police is shooting young black males every week if not twice a week. And the victims of the worst segregation and repulsive racism become even worse than their torture masters when finally liberated if they have survived. What is the latest war, and what is the next desired war? Both are being manipulated by the West into a war by proxy in Europe, and they hope for an even grander one in Asia.
Josef Mysliveček was from Prag, and he went to Venice and Italy to learn about opera, THE opera that was being born in Italy, the country of Bel Canto. Though you have all sorts of Soprani and Countertenors in the few scenes on opera stages, and the voice of Philippe Jaroussky for these Castrati of the time, the composer is so narrowly promiscuous with women, to the point of considering he has to love them physically to make them sing, even once with a slap across the face, that he ruined the best soprano he had under his conductor’s baton who ended up in a convent and died in the bed of her Mother Superior. When did he even consider that she was a lesbian? And the absence of real references to the Castrati is also surprising on the Italian opera stage, notwithstanding the rivalry on the stage between the soprani and the castrati.
That’s the short coming of the film that is announced as a biopic of the composer. Much is missing about what was that opera being delivered in Italy and that was going to be transformed into what it has been since by Handel, a German Composer in England, and Mozart an Austria composer who supposedly admired our Josef Mysliveček. The scene with Mozart, age 12 or so, with his gout-ridden father slumped in an armchair with his gouty leg on a tea table, is not exploited as it should have been. Mozart asks the Maestro for a small piece. The Maestro obliges and performs on the harpsichord a small, pleasant piece, though rather simple if not maybe cold. Then Mozart captures the harpsichord and improvises a variation on this piece he has only heard once, and this time it is quite longer, lighter, fiery even, with of course too many notes, but brilliantly so. The Maestro simply thanks Mozart instead of entering the game and pushing it further.
But the production is brilliant, colorful and the end is miserable and so pitiful. Syphilis was a real epidemic in those days, always lethal and highly contagious. Great creators were not very careful about their “promiscuity” and they ended up in the cemetery not to play some death march,; Masonic or not, but to go down or rather be lowered down into their graves. We do remember AIDS.
This CD has just come out and to miss it would be a crime, a divine crime maèybe, but a crime anyway. The two artists, the guitarist and the countertenor are singing love in many forms, but always leading to separation, an end, death even when the Erlkönig interferes with life. No love can stop that lethal deadly companion carried by the wind. It is a tremendous pleasure to hear that Lied again after so many years gone by since my high school time when I learned how to speak it out, in its original German of course. I was 15 or 16, the ripe age to fall in love with the bitter-sweet pleasure of all the senses experiencing blissful ecstasy.
After Dreams, and the Bach Cello Suites, two recordings that enjoyed both critical and public acclaim, Ophélie Gaillard turns here to Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto and the complete music for cello and piano of Franz Liszt. The result of this juxtaposition of two worlds, those of two composers of great sensitivity, is a programme captivatingly combining passion with an expression of the mysteries of life. Once again we see the eclecticism that Ophélie Gaillard has always shown. For the Schumann Concerto, this brilliant young cellist is accompanied by the National Radio Orchestra of Romania (which has played with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Martha Argerich and Mstislav Rostropovich), under the young conductor Tiberiu Soare (a favourite of the singer Angela Gheorghiu).
Schumann, who took up the cello at one time, attains an expressive maturity in his Concerto that enables him to bring out all the warmth and sensuality of the instrument, which he presents in an orchestral setting of admirable depth. For the second part of the programme, Ophélie Gaillard is joined by the fine pianist Delphine Bardin (winner of the coveted Clara Haskil Prize). These pieces show the soberness and bold language that characterise Liszt’s late works. He had tamed his virtuosity considerably by then and his harmony shows him breaking away more and more from tonality (Liszt declared to an astonished Vincent d’Indy that ‘he aspired to do away with tonality’). They also immerse us in surprising environments, sometimes haunting, sometimes very bleak – a world of subtle emotions just waiting to be discovered!
http://flac.st/ophelie-gaillard-schumann-liszt-201224bit-flac/
“Le Tristan de Wagner. Un «relais» musical et créateur dans la "Recherche" de Proust”, Marcel Proust: écriture, réécritures. Dynamiques de l’échange esthétique, Lourdes Carriedo y M.ª Luisa Guerrero (eds.), Bruselas (Bélgica), Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 413-421. ISBN: 978-90-5201-640-5.
vous pouvez télécharger mes présentations sur
https://ma-planete.com/olga_oes
https://ma-planete.com/pps/websiteview/catid_26/id_574851/title_Le-Concert-dans-la-peinture/
http://www.chez-cath.fr/annee-2021-2.html
No prediction is possible. After all, the French did not get the Soccer World Cup. So the vast unity of the Slav people seems difficult to predict but to predict it will not happen with some exceptions is just as vain. But even if the one or the other do not happen Russian culture and music are there to stay and prosper because they are the voice of some very orthodox God. It is also deeply inhabited by suffering, deprivation, and loss, and that makes this culture universal and it pushes its roots deep into some of the most important migrations of Homo Sapiens out of Black Africa a long time ago. So the dramatic events in Ukraine are just the latest cycle of violence between the Ukrainians and the Russians that has occurred for at the very least one millennium. You may think today such cycles should be dead but they are not just like the cycle of climate change, and such cycles are a lot more pregnant about the future than all the rhetorical blah blah in various parliaments and congresses.
I just published LA SOIF DE LA FIN This summer is not the end of the pandemic or apocalypse. It is only the beginning. And we are dying g of thirst for the end of this period, even if it means the end of the planet and humanity. To be a Jewish woman in a world of segregation is blocking everything original, even a passionate relationship with a Black man. Nothing has changed really. Mass shootings every other day if not two a day. The police is shooting young black males every week if not twice a week. And the victims of the worst segregation and repulsive racism become even worse than their torture masters when finally liberated if they have survived. What is the latest war, and what is the next desired war? Both are being manipulated by the West into a war by proxy in Europe, and they hope for an even grander one in Asia.
Josef Mysliveček was from Prag, and he went to Venice and Italy to learn about opera, THE opera that was being born in Italy, the country of Bel Canto. Though you have all sorts of Soprani and Countertenors in the few scenes on opera stages, and the voice of Philippe Jaroussky for these Castrati of the time, the composer is so narrowly promiscuous with women, to the point of considering he has to love them physically to make them sing, even once with a slap across the face, that he ruined the best soprano he had under his conductor’s baton who ended up in a convent and died in the bed of her Mother Superior. When did he even consider that she was a lesbian? And the absence of real references to the Castrati is also surprising on the Italian opera stage, notwithstanding the rivalry on the stage between the soprani and the castrati.
That’s the short coming of the film that is announced as a biopic of the composer. Much is missing about what was that opera being delivered in Italy and that was going to be transformed into what it has been since by Handel, a German Composer in England, and Mozart an Austria composer who supposedly admired our Josef Mysliveček. The scene with Mozart, age 12 or so, with his gout-ridden father slumped in an armchair with his gouty leg on a tea table, is not exploited as it should have been. Mozart asks the Maestro for a small piece. The Maestro obliges and performs on the harpsichord a small, pleasant piece, though rather simple if not maybe cold. Then Mozart captures the harpsichord and improvises a variation on this piece he has only heard once, and this time it is quite longer, lighter, fiery even, with of course too many notes, but brilliantly so. The Maestro simply thanks Mozart instead of entering the game and pushing it further.
But the production is brilliant, colorful and the end is miserable and so pitiful. Syphilis was a real epidemic in those days, always lethal and highly contagious. Great creators were not very careful about their “promiscuity” and they ended up in the cemetery not to play some death march,; Masonic or not, but to go down or rather be lowered down into their graves. We do remember AIDS.
De Caroline Rainette d'après l’œuvre de Louise Ackermann
Plongez dans l'univers de l'un des personnages les plus romantiques du 19ème siècle
Jeune femme à la sensibilité extrême, Louise Choquet aspire à l'indépendance, mais aussi à l'amour, qu'elle trouve avec Paul Ackermann. Après deux années de bonheur, déchirée et révoltée par la perte de celui qui sera le seul amour de sa vie, elle prend vigoureusement la plume et écrit ses plus beaux textes, qu'elle signe de son nom d'épouse : Louise Ackermann.
Si l'amour ne devait être qu'une parenthèse dans sa vie, Louise aura cependant acquis cette indépendance à laquelle elle aspirait tant, au risque de choquer nombre de ses contemporains : " le sort m'a accordé ce que je lui demandais avant tout : du loisir et de la liberté ! ". Remarquée par Victor Hugo, admirée de Tolstoï, elle força même le respect de Barbey d'Aurevilly.
De Paris à Nice, en passant par Berlin, retour sur la vie de cette femme libre et malicieuse, à l'écriture délicate et pure, touchante dans ses contradictions, et qui compta parmi les plus grands écrivains du 19ème.
L’Olimpiade is an opera on a libretto that was extremely popular in the 18th century in Italy and Europe. The plot is in many ways repulsive: cheating in the Olympic Games. Stealing the woman your friend loves and who loves your friend. Getting rid of the first lover you had for a woman you desire but who will never love you since she loves your friend. She knows you are a cheater, a monster in many ways.
But her father, the king of Sicione is even worse. He had had in the past his son exposed to the sea, in other words, thrown into the sea when a newborn for him to drown. Then he turned his daughter into the prize of a sports event, a fight of some type between several champions: the winner can marry the daughter. Obnoxious.
And he discovers the cheater he has just condemned to be sacrificed on the main altar of the city is his son. He does not even beg for pity and forgiveness. He just accepts the situation and decides – like the king he pretends to be – the son will marry the woman he abandoned in Crete and his friend will marry his daughter, I mean the king’s daughter of course.
How can you save such a pathetic plot? In the 18th century, it was already difficult. Think of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart or Le Marriage de Figaro by Beaumarchais. The main nobleman, a count if I remember well these useless but meaningful details, sees his authority, his privileges rejected and contained by his wife and the servants of the house, Figaro of course first of all. How can we today find it funny to celebrate a cheater, a liar, a vindicative violent person, and it all has to, ought to, and must be excused because of his drastic fate dictated by his own father and a disobedient servant who is the only humane and modern character: A servant does not have to obey an order if it goes against his own ethics.
Music is an adventure. It can choke your life out of touch with the world. It can build around you and in your mind a world that is so real you may even forget to breathe. And music is at its best when voices tell a story haunted by the music itself. I even think that ballet is even more powerful since it offers the audience the bodies of the dancers for this audience to admire them, dream of them, desire them within the shrine of the dramatic story told by the voices and wrapped up in the music itself.
And a silence comes in this sound world. The voices just suspend their gliding in the air and the dancers freeze in suspended movement. In such an instant of total suspension the mind, the soul, the senses, all are thrilled into admiration and ecstasy. And the silence comes to an end. Bliss comes back. Blessed be the music that never ends and only suspends its flight for one beat or half a beat.
In the following numerous pages, whose number grows every quarter or so and will go on growing forever, or at least till death us parts, the newer pages are often at the top and open the collection. And this time it is John Adams and his operas that give the first opening salvo. More will come later. I am on Stravinsky right now. That will come later and I guess I could many older episodes. And enjoy the numerous pictures of this Musical Heaven.
I can’t resist and give the reference to the book Ivan Eve and I have published together on Handel’s Agrippina and countertenors in opera. That should be the appetizer. Just enjoy it intensely.
Olliergues March 1, 2018
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
The piano is a 19th-century evolution of an older pianoforte that Beethoven tolerated or suffered from but probably hearing in his deafness the modern piano. Technically it was a revolution after the harpsichord and of course, all the organs going back to medieval times. For us in the West, the modern piano is Pleyel first in Aulteribe for George Onslow and the three days festival in September every year. The auditorium Salle Pleyel in Paris is connected to this brand of piano and is extremely vertical since this Pleyel piano was still sort of weak when compared to the present concert pianos we use. Then other brands will come, and playing on a Pleyel or a more recent brand name may be very different. Every year the pianists who take part in the Aulteribe Festival say it abundantly. It takes them one or two months to just learn how to use a Pleyel piano from the 1820-1830s. But the piano has become the most famous star of all concert halls and other large audience musical events.
In this piano revolution, salon music, music for the few well-off families and aristocrats plus their friends and relatives in their private but grandiose homes became a habit and this enabled women, I mean girls, to practice early with a piano teacher and quite a few could have become interesting performers or composers, but only very few did achieve anything in their life and yet after their death, they went back to the memorized oblivion of non-existence. When their scores had been kept by their families or some friends, we can today start rediscovering their music and we can also wonder what freedom and creativity they were allowed to develop and demonstrate in their very limited experience and performing life.
Bernard Marr just published Generative AI in Practice (1), which brings together the matter he has been dealing with on his blogs: Artificial Intelligence from the simple practical point of view of a user along with a systematic question about what can the consequences be for the various jobs these users have? But the book is always schematic when it shows the negative consequences will not compare with the positive consequences, though bad or good, they will require a lot of changes in the way we work, the jobs available, and the mindset of the users.
Bernard Marr does not insist so much on the negative sides of GenAI, but he does list them, particularly all sorts of cheating by using GenAI to replace one’s own writing work, all types of misuse of the intellectual property of such mechanical production of text, images, videos or any other copyrightable product that the user presents as his/her own.
But he does not enter the details, and thus he remains superficial. The problems of misinformation, hallucination, and bias are a lot less important, even with deep fakes, though Bernard Marr remains superficial on such dangers. He considers these GenAI products more like patentable or trademark problems, which they are but that’s the only side or point of view of the businesses using this technology.
At the present moment, lawsuits are emerging on the Intellectual Property front with people getting ready to go to court for unauthorized use of protected data and items within LLMs, or the use of voices, slightly synthesized (hence plagiarism and plain theft) as commercial products sold with an unshared profit. I will concentrate, in the second part, on chapter 10 on education to enter some details I know from the practice of self-learning at many levels of the educational system. (2)
Les Arts en Balade in Clermont-Ferrand this month of May 2024 were a success because they expanded to two cities outside Clermont conurbation, Thiers and Vic-Le-Comte, there were many people everywhere, there were 240+ artists or groups in about the same number of places: public spaces dedicated for such events, supportive professional institutions like the Order of Lawyers and the Order of Architects, many stores of all sorts opening their businesses to one or two artists, and also many apartments in the city transformed into workshops where artists could present their work. They were also a success because they lasted four days and were just as dense on Friday, May 17 as on the three following days up to Monday, May 20. Note the case of Michelin who opened their conference rooms and galleries in their Headquarters to three artists with a very good service guiding the visitors and making feel, equally at ease, the audience and the works of art, even from some green challenge declared to be ecological. Thank God we are not in the Orsay Museum of Le Louvre
This complete covering of the event I was able to work on, plus some suggestions for further development and opening to other arts than only plastic arts inside exhibition rooms or halls and on portable media. The opinions and tips are just mine of course, not those of an Artificial Intelligence requested to caress the wild artistic animals of this event smoothly and avoid ruffling their hairs. I apologize if some find it slightly rough at times. Arts are often harsh, and thus critics have to be harsh too. To critically cover an art exhibition is a love affair, and as they say in French, we could pretend that good lovers are also good at chastising those they love.
Les Arts en Balade à Clermont-Ferrand ce mois de mai 2024 ont été un succès car ils se sont étendus à deux villes hors agglomération clermontoise, Thiers et Vic-Le-Comte, il y avait beaucoup de monde partout, il y avait plus de 240 artistes ou groupes dans environ le même nombre de lieux : des espaces publics dédiés à de tels événements, des institutions professionnelles exprimant ainsi leur soutien comme l'Ordre des Avocats et l'Ordre des Architectes, de nombreux magasins en tout genre ouvrant leurs commerces à un ou deux artistes, mais aussi de nombreux appartements en ville transformés en ateliers. où les artistes pouvaient présenter leur travail. Ils furent également une réussite car ils durèrent quatre jours et furent tout aussi denses le vendredi 17 mai que les trois jours suivants jusqu'au lundi 20 mai. A noter le cas de Michelin qui a ouvert ses salles de conférence et d’exposition à son siège social à trois artistes avec un très bon service guidant les visiteurs et faisant sentir, également à l'aise, le public et les œuvres d'art, même de quelque défi vert déclaré écologique. Dieu merci, nous ne sommes pas au Musée d'Orsay ou du Louvre
Ce reportage complet de l'événement sur lequel j'ai pu travailler, ainsi que ...
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Semelhante a Franz Liszt and Self Love / Franz Liszt et l’Amour de Soi
De Caroline Rainette d'après l’œuvre de Louise Ackermann
Plongez dans l'univers de l'un des personnages les plus romantiques du 19ème siècle
Jeune femme à la sensibilité extrême, Louise Choquet aspire à l'indépendance, mais aussi à l'amour, qu'elle trouve avec Paul Ackermann. Après deux années de bonheur, déchirée et révoltée par la perte de celui qui sera le seul amour de sa vie, elle prend vigoureusement la plume et écrit ses plus beaux textes, qu'elle signe de son nom d'épouse : Louise Ackermann.
Si l'amour ne devait être qu'une parenthèse dans sa vie, Louise aura cependant acquis cette indépendance à laquelle elle aspirait tant, au risque de choquer nombre de ses contemporains : " le sort m'a accordé ce que je lui demandais avant tout : du loisir et de la liberté ! ". Remarquée par Victor Hugo, admirée de Tolstoï, elle força même le respect de Barbey d'Aurevilly.
De Paris à Nice, en passant par Berlin, retour sur la vie de cette femme libre et malicieuse, à l'écriture délicate et pure, touchante dans ses contradictions, et qui compta parmi les plus grands écrivains du 19ème.
L’Olimpiade is an opera on a libretto that was extremely popular in the 18th century in Italy and Europe. The plot is in many ways repulsive: cheating in the Olympic Games. Stealing the woman your friend loves and who loves your friend. Getting rid of the first lover you had for a woman you desire but who will never love you since she loves your friend. She knows you are a cheater, a monster in many ways.
But her father, the king of Sicione is even worse. He had had in the past his son exposed to the sea, in other words, thrown into the sea when a newborn for him to drown. Then he turned his daughter into the prize of a sports event, a fight of some type between several champions: the winner can marry the daughter. Obnoxious.
And he discovers the cheater he has just condemned to be sacrificed on the main altar of the city is his son. He does not even beg for pity and forgiveness. He just accepts the situation and decides – like the king he pretends to be – the son will marry the woman he abandoned in Crete and his friend will marry his daughter, I mean the king’s daughter of course.
How can you save such a pathetic plot? In the 18th century, it was already difficult. Think of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart or Le Marriage de Figaro by Beaumarchais. The main nobleman, a count if I remember well these useless but meaningful details, sees his authority, his privileges rejected and contained by his wife and the servants of the house, Figaro of course first of all. How can we today find it funny to celebrate a cheater, a liar, a vindicative violent person, and it all has to, ought to, and must be excused because of his drastic fate dictated by his own father and a disobedient servant who is the only humane and modern character: A servant does not have to obey an order if it goes against his own ethics.
Music is an adventure. It can choke your life out of touch with the world. It can build around you and in your mind a world that is so real you may even forget to breathe. And music is at its best when voices tell a story haunted by the music itself. I even think that ballet is even more powerful since it offers the audience the bodies of the dancers for this audience to admire them, dream of them, desire them within the shrine of the dramatic story told by the voices and wrapped up in the music itself.
And a silence comes in this sound world. The voices just suspend their gliding in the air and the dancers freeze in suspended movement. In such an instant of total suspension the mind, the soul, the senses, all are thrilled into admiration and ecstasy. And the silence comes to an end. Bliss comes back. Blessed be the music that never ends and only suspends its flight for one beat or half a beat.
In the following numerous pages, whose number grows every quarter or so and will go on growing forever, or at least till death us parts, the newer pages are often at the top and open the collection. And this time it is John Adams and his operas that give the first opening salvo. More will come later. I am on Stravinsky right now. That will come later and I guess I could many older episodes. And enjoy the numerous pictures of this Musical Heaven.
I can’t resist and give the reference to the book Ivan Eve and I have published together on Handel’s Agrippina and countertenors in opera. That should be the appetizer. Just enjoy it intensely.
Olliergues March 1, 2018
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
The piano is a 19th-century evolution of an older pianoforte that Beethoven tolerated or suffered from but probably hearing in his deafness the modern piano. Technically it was a revolution after the harpsichord and of course, all the organs going back to medieval times. For us in the West, the modern piano is Pleyel first in Aulteribe for George Onslow and the three days festival in September every year. The auditorium Salle Pleyel in Paris is connected to this brand of piano and is extremely vertical since this Pleyel piano was still sort of weak when compared to the present concert pianos we use. Then other brands will come, and playing on a Pleyel or a more recent brand name may be very different. Every year the pianists who take part in the Aulteribe Festival say it abundantly. It takes them one or two months to just learn how to use a Pleyel piano from the 1820-1830s. But the piano has become the most famous star of all concert halls and other large audience musical events.
In this piano revolution, salon music, music for the few well-off families and aristocrats plus their friends and relatives in their private but grandiose homes became a habit and this enabled women, I mean girls, to practice early with a piano teacher and quite a few could have become interesting performers or composers, but only very few did achieve anything in their life and yet after their death, they went back to the memorized oblivion of non-existence. When their scores had been kept by their families or some friends, we can today start rediscovering their music and we can also wonder what freedom and creativity they were allowed to develop and demonstrate in their very limited experience and performing life.
Bernard Marr just published Generative AI in Practice (1), which brings together the matter he has been dealing with on his blogs: Artificial Intelligence from the simple practical point of view of a user along with a systematic question about what can the consequences be for the various jobs these users have? But the book is always schematic when it shows the negative consequences will not compare with the positive consequences, though bad or good, they will require a lot of changes in the way we work, the jobs available, and the mindset of the users.
Bernard Marr does not insist so much on the negative sides of GenAI, but he does list them, particularly all sorts of cheating by using GenAI to replace one’s own writing work, all types of misuse of the intellectual property of such mechanical production of text, images, videos or any other copyrightable product that the user presents as his/her own.
But he does not enter the details, and thus he remains superficial. The problems of misinformation, hallucination, and bias are a lot less important, even with deep fakes, though Bernard Marr remains superficial on such dangers. He considers these GenAI products more like patentable or trademark problems, which they are but that’s the only side or point of view of the businesses using this technology.
At the present moment, lawsuits are emerging on the Intellectual Property front with people getting ready to go to court for unauthorized use of protected data and items within LLMs, or the use of voices, slightly synthesized (hence plagiarism and plain theft) as commercial products sold with an unshared profit. I will concentrate, in the second part, on chapter 10 on education to enter some details I know from the practice of self-learning at many levels of the educational system. (2)
Les Arts en Balade in Clermont-Ferrand this month of May 2024 were a success because they expanded to two cities outside Clermont conurbation, Thiers and Vic-Le-Comte, there were many people everywhere, there were 240+ artists or groups in about the same number of places: public spaces dedicated for such events, supportive professional institutions like the Order of Lawyers and the Order of Architects, many stores of all sorts opening their businesses to one or two artists, and also many apartments in the city transformed into workshops where artists could present their work. They were also a success because they lasted four days and were just as dense on Friday, May 17 as on the three following days up to Monday, May 20. Note the case of Michelin who opened their conference rooms and galleries in their Headquarters to three artists with a very good service guiding the visitors and making feel, equally at ease, the audience and the works of art, even from some green challenge declared to be ecological. Thank God we are not in the Orsay Museum of Le Louvre
This complete covering of the event I was able to work on, plus some suggestions for further development and opening to other arts than only plastic arts inside exhibition rooms or halls and on portable media. The opinions and tips are just mine of course, not those of an Artificial Intelligence requested to caress the wild artistic animals of this event smoothly and avoid ruffling their hairs. I apologize if some find it slightly rough at times. Arts are often harsh, and thus critics have to be harsh too. To critically cover an art exhibition is a love affair, and as they say in French, we could pretend that good lovers are also good at chastising those they love.
Les Arts en Balade à Clermont-Ferrand ce mois de mai 2024 ont été un succès car ils se sont étendus à deux villes hors agglomération clermontoise, Thiers et Vic-Le-Comte, il y avait beaucoup de monde partout, il y avait plus de 240 artistes ou groupes dans environ le même nombre de lieux : des espaces publics dédiés à de tels événements, des institutions professionnelles exprimant ainsi leur soutien comme l'Ordre des Avocats et l'Ordre des Architectes, de nombreux magasins en tout genre ouvrant leurs commerces à un ou deux artistes, mais aussi de nombreux appartements en ville transformés en ateliers. où les artistes pouvaient présenter leur travail. Ils furent également une réussite car ils durèrent quatre jours et furent tout aussi denses le vendredi 17 mai que les trois jours suivants jusqu'au lundi 20 mai. A noter le cas de Michelin qui a ouvert ses salles de conférence et d’exposition à son siège social à trois artistes avec un très bon service guidant les visiteurs et faisant sentir, également à l'aise, le public et les œuvres d'art, même de quelque défi vert déclaré écologique. Dieu merci, nous ne sommes pas au Musée d'Orsay ou du Louvre
Ce reportage complet de l'événement sur lequel j'ai pu travailler, ainsi que ...
A novel of political fiction that does not reach science-fiction but wants to tell us a lot about the modern world and what the choices are for us in this decaying future. The pattern, the Gestalt of this book seems to be that no matter what humans try to do, good or bad, progressive or reactionary, democratic or dictatorial, there is no hope and no future for those initiatives. Any attempt at changing the decaying world we live in is doomed to be a failure.
What is history? The production of what happens in our world, in fact, in the cosmos, and no human individual, no human crowd, no human anything can control or change the course of such events. If by any chance we want to understand what makes history, we have to consider billions, maybe trillions of parameters in the cosmos and we, the human dwarves we are, do not even control half a dozen of them and our vanity makes us believe we can command the cosmos because we want to be gods. In the old days and in other civilizations than the Western denied Bible, they were humble enough to give this power to a God that was not of the human species.
Here Salman Rushdie follows a witch bewitched by a goddess who pretends she can create a whole empire from a bag, or rather a sack of seeds, and this leads to a total and pitiful defeat and absolute termination of the attempt, but it means Salman Rushdie is predicting that all the positive elements his witch tries, religious tolerance, education for boys and girls equally, women’s rights, gender-friendly policies, peace and coexistence, and finally freedom of expression are all doomed to fail and crumble as soon as they reach some height. In other words, his novel and his vision are the rewriting of the Babel Tower myth.
Sorry boys and girls, no future for any progressive dream, just as much as for any regressive nightmare. Life and history are neither a dream nor a nightmare. They are nothing but cosmic determinism governed by the cosmos itself, and we can be happy with the fact our world is not in a black hole. But after all, maybe that’s the destiny and fate of humanity, to end up in a bottomless black hole.
This series is very well done, suspenseful, at least as much as possible, twisted and distorted like any crime series should be but unluckily it is biased. It states to anyone who wants to listen that crime has roots in only one thing: family dysfunctioning and nothing else. The fact that society leads some people who do not fit in the standard mold to rebellion, frustration and violence by being biased against them and bullying them all the time and if they want to have contacts with people, they have to go down on their knees and beg for a favor.
That’s too bad because the cases in this rural north Wales area deserve a lot better, and probably, a more open vision of crime in this community.
LA CHAISE-DIEU MÉDIÉVALE & LA RÉVOLUTION BÉNÉDICTINE--MEDIEVAL LA CHAISE-DIEU...Editions La Dondaine
On July 13, 2024, at La Chaise-Dieu, the European Network of Casadean Sites will present a public conference on the topic of the Benedictine Revolution in Livradois-Forez, led by the La Chaise-Dieu Abbaye, starting a bit earlier with the religious reform brought up by Charlemagne in the 9th century. The Abbaye was founded less than 200 years later. The conference will focus the discussion – and it has to be a discussion – on the consequences of the Carolingian religious reform, the agricultural revolution with the invention of the horse collar and the management of the land, the rotation of crops, cultivation, and fertilization. Then the proto-industrial revolution that will bring five types of watermills for grain, oil, tan, hemp (fiber and cloth), and slightly later paper. This will make Livradois-Forez an essential region producing hemp cables and hemp cloth for ships. The first result was 75 days without any work in the year, no work before and after morning and evening angelus, and a pause with midday angelus. The second result was better food and demographical expansion, up to the end of the 13th century.
Then things became darker. Overpopulation brought unrest and all sorts of contests and conflicts at the religious level itself (Crusades in the Middle East, but also against the Cathars in France. Then in 1346, the Black Death, a pandemic in Europe of the bubonic plague, caused a tremendous level of deaths. Then, the One Hundred Years War started in 1337. The resilience of the population enabled Europe in general to go through, and around 1450 the printing press was developed by Gutenberg enabling the printing of books for the highly-needed university training of great numbers of people to bring Europe back on its feet. The Renaissance was the result of this period, a tremendously positive and creative period, and at the same time, a highly-disturbed era with The Reformation, and the religious wars that concerned all countries at a time when nationalism was emerging.
Two speakers-debaters will present the five or six centuries concerned as fast as possible to let the audience debate questions like:
1- The influence and impact of Charlemagne’s religious reform.
2- The feudal system: land ownership and serfdom.
3- The role of technology to produce energy, replace human work, and develop new products.
4- Religious tensions with Avignon and Rome conformist Popes.
5- The role of The Inquisition and religious justice.
6- The fate of the cable industry when Omerin In Ambert is number one in Europe or the world for various high-security and high-technicity cables.
7- The culture: architecture, music, painting, carving, theater, oratorio and opera, literature.
It will take place at LA CHAISE-DIEU – AUDITORIUM GEORGES CZIFFRA
SAMEDI 13 JUILLET 2024 – 14-17 HEURES 30.
The two main speakers so far are Dr Jacques COULARDEAU (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and PhD Graduate Student Clément GOMY (Université Clermont Auvergne
Xavier Rouard searches and researches the linguistic world, scientific research of course, for the origin, the cradle, the homeland, or the motherland, of Indo-European. He is not the only one in the world, but he goes against practically all the others by positioning this linguistic nursery in Central Asia based on a Eurasian or trans-Eurasian language or languages. But precisely Eurasian languages only came into existence from the moment when syntactic-analytic Indo-Iranian languages left the Iranian plateau where they had stationed themselves when they arrived from Black Africa, some 40,000 years ago, or BCE, not much difference here. They had to go through the Ice Age first and finally get on the move after this climate event probably around 15,000 BCE, some east to the southern Asian continent, with Pakistan and India, others west down into Mesopotamia and from there to Europe. These people, on both side, encountered people who spoke other languages, Turkic agglutinative languages, and isolating Sino-Tibetan languages, mostly. These languages had integrated the Denisovans and their own language(s). Thes encountered people were hybrid Homo Sapiens with a varying proportion of Denisovan DNA in Central Asia, and the same in Mesopotamia with a varying proportion od Neanderthalensis DNA. When they reached Europe, the population was essentially of Turkic language and origin with a varying level of hybridization with European Homo Neanderthalensis. It is such encounters that generated or engendered the various Indo-European or Indo-Aryan languages
My approach is phylogenetic and thus it is absolutely impossible for me not to take into consideration the migrations and geographic, hence social, cultural and linguistic movements of these populations. That’s the basic principle of Joseph Greenberg who considered that all these migrations had only one matrix or melting pot that produced the emergence of human articulated language on the basis of what these emerging Homo Sapiens inherited from the other Hominins from which they were descending.
But Joseph Greenberg and his disciples encountered a problem: in all language you should find a certain number of words whose “roots” are universal and stable in meaning. These are the roots coming from Black Africa before any migration out of Black Africa. The problem is then that it does not enable any topology of languages. So, they, Greenberg and his disciples, tried to introduce “grammatical” or “syntactic” words, but even so it does go that far.
To get somewhere you have to ask the question about the phylogeny of articulated language(s), and there you only find three articulations in a precise order: root-languages (by the way vastly ignored by Xavier Rouard), Isolating character languages, and agglutinative as well as synthetic-analytic languages according to the migrations out of Black Africa. If you do not consider this phylogeny, then you put all sorts of languages together in the melting pot [...}
Three crime series in one entry.
First, The Brokenwood Mysteries; seasons 1 to 3.
Second, The Coroner, Complete Series.
Third, The Unforgotten, Series 1 to 4, Complete Series.
Police series, detective stories, criminal mysteries, and many other options in the field of crime and delinquency have been explored by the English from the first moment they started existing, a very long time ago.
Shakespeare and he was not the first author in the field, loved those stories of crimes and criminals, having people assassinated, or mutilated, or tortured on the stage from Titus Andronicus to Romeo and Juliet.
Dickens was a good one too in that field, but Shakespeare looked at crime from the outside, from some ethical point of view. Dickens looked at it from inside, from the point of view of the criminals themselves forced to commit crimes in order to simply survive.
Then you had Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein and then later on Dracula came into the picture, and many others trill we came across Conan Doyle who edicted the proper form of a crime story or detective story, hence an investigation of a crime we can only see from outside, and the investigation is to get into it to see how it got developed and who was the criminal.
Since then, with the radio at first, the cinema next, and finally television leading directly to streaming and the Internet, those police adventures have just become adventures, and the extreme form is what they call action films where violence is no longer criminal since it has been transformed into the ultimate survival if not the final renascence before the apocalypse.
Enjoy these series.
The Mayas are more a cultural and historical mystery than a vast field of knowledge. We know less than we can even imagine about them. Where did they come from? What language did they speak before coming to Mesoamerica? What were their beliefs before arriving in Yucatan? They brought with them cacao, chocolate, writing, mathematics, extremely advanced calendars, phenomenal knowledge about stars, planets and the cosmos. They even brought with them a vigesimal counting system with the mathematics going along with it, including the equivalent of our zero (that we borrowed from the Arabs in the 17th century) that enabled them to count up to the infinite.
The most remarkable achievement is that they managed to merge phenomenal art with the glyphic writing system of theirs. We know the glyphs were works of art, for one, and a syllabary phonetic writing system, for two. For a very long time the second aspect was rejected, particularly by Sir Eric Thompson. Luckily this untruth was rejected after his death, with a little bit of disregard before his death. The glyphs were not flat symbolic of items and purely artistic, like some kind of secondary if not superfluous decoration. The colonizing Spaniards considered that decoration as diabolical and they burned and destroyed all the books and artifacts that carried such artistic representations of Maya reality and such glyphs that could only be the language of the devil.
Imagine how surprised I was when I discovered this catalogue of an exhibition at the MET Museum of Art in New York. They provide some images of the glyphs, and even some sentences written with them. But they systematically ignore the glyphs, transliterate the sentences and words into Latin-transliterated Maya, and simply work and speculate on these transliterations and their translations into English. They lose all the richness of meaning and beauty of the glyphs. In other words, they terminate, bring to a final end the destructive work of the Spaniards, the culturicide of the Mayas and the Maya culture and civilization. My full study (about 15,000 words, only in English) is available
The 3 Literacies of Modern Age, the Trikirion of CommunicationEditions La Dondaine
Review of the Trikirion of Communication:
Symboleracy, Numeracy and Techneracy
The starting point is the phylogeny of communication because the educational topic I am going to address cannot even exist if there is no communication. We have to understand that all Hominins were communicating. Probably all Hominins after Homo Erectus included had some command of some articulated language, but only Homo Sapiens reached the comprehensive and sustainable command of the fully-articulated language, probably around 200,000 BCE.
The next great stage Is the development of representational and symbolic Inscriptions and paintings or engravings on all durable media available, rockface in caves, stone, bone, ivory, and tusks. This symbolic transcription of stories and experience, maybe some spiritual language accompanying some rituals, is the first form of writing seen as symbolic transcription and going back to 300,000 BCE with Homo Naledi, 100,000 BCE with Homo Neanderthalensis, and 50,000 with Homo Sapiens.
Syllabic and alphabetical writing only came around 3,500 BCE for Homo Sapiens. There might have been older cases, but archaeology has not yet covered the whole world for all types of symbolic inscriptions that could have led to symbolic phonetic writing. The next stage was the printing press which enabled mass education and mass communication.
ENTRE IA & LES ÉCRANS LE THÉÄTRE EST EN QUESTION
The Journal “Théâtres du Monde” has just published its 34th issue. I have two articles published in that journal. So here is first of all the table of contents of the 2024 issue, and I added to these three pages all the preparatory work I have done to write the two articles that deal with the series HUNTERS and the author Lorraine HANSBERRY. These reviews and critiques are all bilingual, English for some and French for the others.
I do feel like a raisin the sun. I also added some documents on the recent question brought up about race in the USA where some states are restricting the teaching of slavery and Black history in the USA because it may, might, would, and I think SHOULD traumatize the poor white darlings who really need some traumatization about their imperialistic ideological terrorism.
Four films or series.
1- John Woo’s Silent Night (2023),
2- Doug Liman’s Road House (2024),
3- Albert Hughes’s The Continental (2023),
4- Marcela Saïd and Julien Despaux’s Ourika (2024),
all seen on Amazon’s Prime Video, hence distributed by Amazon Prime Video, all dealing with violence in our societies and all claiming that violence is justified top answer and respond to a violent society, a violence coming from outside our community, and that outside can introduce anti-immigrant accusations or plainly racist claims, both anti-white and anti-any-ethnicity.
Does it help us understand this violence ? Does these films enable us to devise a proper response to prevent and solve such violence? Both times, a resounding NO. But in both cases, it plays in the hands of the most extreme forces on the nationalist side of life, the side that refuses to consider those who are not pure according to their definitions as the cause of all our problems, and not only those people but also all products that may come from the countries concerned by these ethnic groups. This is true in the USA, in Canada, with Mexico playing the wide-open gate to the previous two, and all over Europe.
What game are these streaming services playing? Preparing coming elections! But it might go the wrong way for them. Now what is the wrong way? Good question. No answer because the ballot boxes will be the only valid answer. First stop, the European Elections in June 2024.
Mo Xiang’s third volume of the saga on The Blessing of a Heaven Official is there in front of me and this saga is emanating with so much force that no one can resist the tanha that tells them “Go For It! There is pleasure in it all!” I am sure you want to discover the pleasure there is in these volumes, but remember the authoress is a woman and as such she develops a sweet, soft, and catching psychology that will turn you completely berserk if you do not keep your feet well anchored in the earth.
The King Ghost Hua Cheng from Ghost City is behind every move the ascended Xie Lian is inspiring or is inspired by and for. His meeting this Xie Lian after 800 years of supernatural and surreal life in our vast cosmos was so mind-stirring, intelligence-moving, and body-inspiring that the pure ascetic Buddhist he is supposed to be, nearly fell into the cauldron of eroticism. He managed not to fall, but that was very close this time since he was unconscious and Hua Cheng took advantage of the situation and pretended that he had to save his “friend” before he drowned, though Hua Cheng knew perfectly well Xie Lian could not drown, hence cannot die. But, well, Hua Cheng kissed Xie Lian unconscious as he was, I mean in his unconscious mind, because Xie Lian was unconscious, and thus he could kiss him since he could not protest. What a twisted and I guess tortured mind he is. He should try Buddhist meditation to hypnotize himself into plain decent abstinence.
But sure enough, the encounter with the Venerable of Empty Words promises to be a fair adventure in which Xie Lian’s mind and body will be chastised, abused, and even probably raped. There will be quite a lot of repair work to do on the psyche and the conscious rightfulness of our Xie Lian. I guess Hua Cheng will take advantage of such situations to steal a couple more kisses. Never trust a ghost because they have no soul anymore and they have no honor either. So, lying, pretending, and even impersonating what they are not to seduce their gullible victims is some kind of sport for these fuzzy beings, if they can really BE.
Oppenheimer is an essential character in US history. He is the left-leaning Jew who provided the USA with the Atom Bomb that enabled the US to defeat Japan faster than the planned standard land and air attack by the Soviets and the Chinese Communists, officially endorsed in the Yalta Conference ( 4–11 February 1945) by Churchill, Truman, and Stalin. Truman did not have the atomic bomb yet and will only have it in July 1945. So, he bluffed and agreed with the Soviet plan because he had no alternative … yet. He reneged his agreement in July-August 1945, and he dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The victory over Germany was a joint effort. The victory over Japan was a self-centered and egotistic solitary procedure not even negotiated with the allies of the US. The United Kingdom might have been informed, maybe. But the USSR was not. The Americans were already and had been for nearly two centuries, on the “America First” and “Make America Great Forever” lines that we have known all along and directly since 1918.
And within 9 years Oppenheimer will be ostracized because he was leaning to the left and there were Communists around him. He submitted and disappeared in some sideline university job. He had nowhere to go, as opposed to Charlie Chaplin who went back to England. As a Jew, he could have gone to Israel, but that was not a real optimistic solution at the time. He might even have gone to the USSR with his communist wife. But he stayed put in the USA, in his closet-university-job. The film does not really explore this dilemma: hide away in the USA, go to the Jewish Israel, or go to the USSR. On one hand, it was his old depressive nature that came back. On the other hand, it would have been going back to his faith and his roots, even if it could have looked like treason. On the third hand, on yet another other hand, it would have been plain treason.
THE DESCENT TO HELL IN THREE STAGES – 2003-2015-2019
I brought together three films and series presented here both in English and French in anti-chronological order.
1- The film 7500, 2019.
2- The series Blindspot, 2015-2020.
3- The film The Dreamers, 2003
If you take them in this backward order, you may understand that today’s world is not at all different from the one in 1968 when the Vietnam War was going on full blast, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was in full swing and the West per se was living its first full sexual revolution with the arrival of the baby-boomers to the full unquenchable desire to hormonally and fully enjoy life. Have some interesting reading.
FIRST STAGE – AMAZON STUDIOS – 7500 – 2019
There is little to say about such a film. It is just artificial entertainment that shows nothing and proves nothing. It is all stressing detail to keep the audience glued to the screen.
SECOND STAGE – BLINDSPOT – FULL SERIES – FIVE SEASONS – 2015-2020
A very long series for very little apart from stressed and stressful situations that always end well anyway, meaning leading to a worse situation in the next episode.
THIRD STAGE – BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI – THE DREAMERS – 2003
Paris Spring 1968. We all know what happened then in France. The victory of the unions, the defeat of the left, and the impossibility for the left to understand that any “events” of that sort will always lead to the victory of the right in the next elections, and today we have to update the data and say the victory of the extreme right. It might be slightly more complex, but basically, that’s what it is and when the left wins this social-minded left will become conservative within at the most two years and it might even turn reactionary within these two years, at times even less. They like power so much.
Amazon Prime Video and Blumhouse Productions love dysfunctioning mothers who, in the name of their love for their children, are ready to kill anyone only on their gut feelings that this anyone is guilty of who knows what apart from the devil.
The film is tricky enough to lure and fool the audience, and the horror of the racist and dysfunctional situation can be believed till the end when the trick is revealed. Note this revelation implies that all daughters from divorced or motherless families are by definition, even by principle, liars.
You might also find the father falling in an ice-cold river under a blizzard of some sort funny, and with his winter coat on, and then he goes on parading around outside, in the unheated car, and even in some kind of social situation without changing his freezing clothes. Like at the Oscars yesterday the costume design Oscar was delivered to a costume designer wearing no clothes at all, except a small cardboard sign where sexually necessary for the picture, meaning that costume designers are so badly treated and paid that they cannot even afford to buy underwear.
A little bit more about the context, schools, religion, Islam and girls, divorced parents, single Muslim male parent, etc. would have maybe given some depth to the story and made it less artificial.
A film that wants to be science-fiction. So, learn the lessons that emerge from it.
1- Let black doctors or scientists get into a hospital “laboratory” and the most unimaginable horrors will take place.
2- Let black people be fully treated in a hospital and they will become guinea pigs, especially in the hands of black doctors.
3- Let a mother treat her son and the worst possible crime will take place under your own nose and in front of your own eyes.
4- Shall I go on?
If this is not pure racism laced with some sexism, I just wonder what would qualify. How can anyone imagine such man-made scientific schizophrenia to be possible in the hands and under the scalpel of a doctor, a scientist? I guess it is urgent to have clear regulations and controls on such activities. Because be sure that wild clandestine medical experiments are happening every day in the world.
Duration is all that plants and animals experience. They last as long as either possible or necessary. When the phylogenic target of bringing in the next generation of life is fulfilled, the plant or the animal can die or wither away. Homo Sapiens, and probably most Hominins developed from experience the need to measure this duration, at first in days and nights, and then in clusters of days and nights. Then they can coordinate their observations and notice some cosmic items go through regular existential cycles, first of all, the sun rising or lowering in the sky with shortening or lengthening days and nights. Second, the moon and its phases are numbered as two, four, or three, but systematically waxing and waning. You can easily measure all that in solar days and that is the beginning of time: a human invention quantifying the duration of anything in observable regular elements.
From what we know the Mayas were among the most advanced people for such time-quantification and they developed all sorts of calendars to do this. But they were neither the first one nor the last one. They were not the best either, though they were very good. I will even say that all the lines of dots or check marks or squares or other geometric forms we can find in all the caves in the world in which Hominins and Homo Sapiens lived and that they decorated in many ways are the quantification of various phenomena, though we don’t always know which ones.
This book by Hunbatz Men concentrates on Mayan calendars but in modern language and modern terms, not necessarily in the real Mayan terms at the time, up to 3,000 years ago. It assumes the Mayas were aware of the leap years, though we do not seem to have any real reason to believe so. The author does not work on any serious lunar hypothesis, maybe a calendar. It vaguely mentions but does not explore the Venus cycles as Morning Star and as Evening Star. To work on the Pleiades, why not, yet one question does not concern such a long cycle but the simple working of the ritualistic 260-day Tzolk’in Calendar that is out of sync with the solar calendar, the 365-day Haab Calendar, and even more so if we consider the 360-day Haab Calendar, and how the ritual activities dictated by the Tzolk’in Calendar can be prescribed and predicted and performed when their Tzolk’in dates can fall at any time, in any season in the Haab Calendar. It is hard enough to coordinate the 12-and-a-half moon cycles over a solar calendar, but many civilizations are dealing with it and managing it with cyclical corrections.
That’s why it would have been good to give us some elements on this very same problem with the Tzolk’in calendar when we can compare with the difficult adaptation of the Muslim Lunar ritualistic calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The floating Ramadan is the result of this necessary adaptation. In other words, the present book is slightly short.
To bring together South Africa in the days of apartheid and from the point of view of the white Afrikaners with the tremendous career of Queen with Freddie Mercury and after his death without him shows how ahead of their times this band was when they started as a boys’ band and then when they matured into a full-fledged career.
Apartheid and racism bring segregation and discrimination which systematically reject differences. No future for those who do not have the skin color, the religion, the language, the sexuality, the musical affiliation, even as a simple audience, as the dominant, selected, elected, chosen entity that only has god and science over their heads. And their God has chosen these people to be his chosen people, and these people chosen by God believe what God has explained to them that science justifies their elected-ness, selected-ness or chosen-ness. They are the acme of the creation, and all others are just plain rejects that no one has the heart to destroy.
But be sure God will do it some day. Which god since there are many if not even plenty? Who cares. Each God will recognize his own supporters when they are all dead.
But then you may have no supporters at all, dear God or Gods. It does not really matter. We don’t need these supporters to eat, drink and survive. We have all we need in heaven and the sky. In fact, it was a mistake of ours to have created humanity. The planet would be so much better with none of the human parasites.
Meet the Madman Prophet, who is most the time mixed up with the other God Profit who is universal and derails every so many years, not so many as you may think every ten years or so. But with this God there is always a small population that manages to store away what they need to take over when the crisis has come to an end and the dead victims have been buried or cremated.
An interesting experiment to bring a poetry workshop in a prison For us who have lived in the mythology of Johnny Cash and San Quentin, and all his songs and work about and in prisons there is nothing strange about that But what happens afterward? The inmates get some satisfaction in their work, writing poetry and singing, slam or whatever it may be, but what’s next after their prison term? No reason to reject the experiment but a follow-up action is necessary to know what these men – and it is only men – have become or will become when they get out of the railings, out of the cage. We are not all Johnny Cash, are we?
Since this operation was sponsored by Alliance Française, it would nice to know what kind of follow-up work this Alliance Française is going to perform. The responsibility cannot be the poet’s. But it is interesting to be confirmed one more time that there are many ways for prison inmates to reform. One element is not taken into account. 98% of the population is Sunni Muslims. What is the impact on such an experiment? What does Islam bring to the experiment that would otherwise not be there. Étienne Russias should try to show us this dimension, since, as far as I know, he is a standard young man educated in the Christian traditions, maybe not the religion, but the traditions definitely like being christened, being buried religiously, being married religiously. How did he deal with a 98 percent Muslim group? How many Muslims were taking part, among the inmates and among the workshop workers?
But that’s the beginning of the intelligent globalization we need, a globalization that is founded on differences and not some westernized homogenization.
(No French Translation) The Incas partly inherited and partly developed phenomenal agriculture in the very hard conditions of the Andes: desertic areas, difficult water resources, high altitude, no real draft animal, no wheel, and yet the Andes before and under the Incas produced miraculous results that the Spaniards destroyed in a few years with epidemics and mass killing.
It is easy to say the Incas were barbarians and that covers the genocide, the culturicide, the systematic uprooting and exposing of anything they could have believed or done, based on NO direct contact with them before the “conquest” that must have killed 50% of the population in two or three years with smallpox and other infantile and childhood diseases, plus a few sword killings when there was some resistance.
Unluckily, Gordon McEwan does not really come to a clear vision in his book because he only bases his work on what has been collected by others essentially on the only source of some Spanish colonizers trying to justify the massacre and apocalyptic colonization. The real barbarians were the colonizers, and it is their testimony that is nearly only taken into account. Archaeology is about one century behind what it is in other regions of the world.
Things have slightly changed over the last ten years, but we are still a long way behind what we should have done. That leaves the door open to some like Hunbatz Men pretending the Mayas, Incas and many other Indigenous Native Americans are the descendants of the humanoid people who were established in two continents that have disappeared without leaving any trace of their existence behind them, Mu and Atlantis. And then it is easy to bring in that the inhabitants of these two disappeared continents were extra-humans from some distant civilization who landed on earth and prospered and then found some humanoid animals there and civilized them. We are their descendants, I mean of these extra-humanly civilized humanoid animals from long ago.
Maybe we could simply ask some questions about the origins of the Incas, the Mayas, and many other native American peoples of South and Meso-America. We know the Native Americans of North America and Canada up to Greenland came from Siberia. But that solution is not, feasible for the Native Americans of South and Meso-America. But we are so mentally colonized by North American Protestant Puritans who believe they are the center of the world that research about South America and Mesoamerica has scandalously been neglected. Some mental colonization of this type is also a genocide since it excludes millions of people from what these North American WASPs call the “human race” which is of course white, etc.
ACADEMICALLY NEGLECTED, THE INCAS WERE PRODIGY AGRONOMISTS
Franz Liszt and Self Love / Franz Liszt et l’Amour de Soi
1.
2. FRANZ LISZT – ANNÉES DE PÈLERINAGE –
YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE –
CHÂTEAU D’AULTERIBE –
8-11 SEPTEMBER 2022 –
SUZANA BARTAL – 2018
The concert of the three years of pilgrimage presented in Aulteribe Château, in fact
originally, a medieval castle essential in the castle network of Auvergne protecting the plain and
the province, included Jerôme Granjon and Suzana Bartal with two younger pianists, Julien
Lespagnol and Shoma Oto. The originality of the three concerts over two days was that the piano
was Georges Onslow’s Pleyel piano built in 1846, that is to say, a piano on which Liszt could have
played, and the sound is different, the power is different, the harmonics are all different from a
modern piano. The CDs are recorded on modern pianos and the truthfulness of the heritage piano
is missing and we are slightly deprived of some authenticity. The three concerts integrated small
poems illustrating or supporting the music and several interventions of a lecturer trying to explain
what we should see in this music, and I say see voluntarily since the lecturer insisted, from
beginning to end, on the fact that Liszt was trying to bring painting and literature inside the music
and trying to be all-sensorial, synesthetic, though I am not entirely convinced.
Music is by definition synesthetic since it is a language that only uses sonorous elements,
the notes, their intervals, and the rhythm, and the three elements here all make the human body
react in many different ways, along many different sensuous and sensitive lanes and paths,
especially when the imagination enters the court like a tennis ball falling from the sky. But I felt
frustrated with some marvelous pieces of poetry from various countries and in various languages
being given to us exclusively in French, translated then, hence betrayed, instead of being
performed in a bilingual performance, in the original language, and in French. Lord Byron lost his
iambic music for some stiff syllabic French meter with rhymes that are of course too heavy for
English. Translating Lord Byron, Alighieri Dante, Francesco Petrarca, and some others, side by
side with Baudelaire, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Verlaine,
Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine is a total betrayal of the beauty of the foreigners that
cannot even be read in their original languages, with a translation for those who are not
multilingual. I presented a reading of excerpts from Dante’s Inferno some years back in La Chaise-
Dieu, and it had to be in French. I took a standard translation in a bilingual edition, and I was
obliged to rewrite the whole translation to make it recapture the music of the Italian language.
To illustrate this point let us go to the concluding sentence of the second intervention of the
lecturer during the third concert, a quotation reduced to “Le temps s’arrête pour celui qui admire.”
But let us read Denis Diderot's commentary on the Great Gallery Lit From The Back by Hubert
Robert represented in the concert with a painting by the same painter of the 18th
century retrieved
from the stores of the Château d’Aulteribe itself, a good choice indeed bringing up Diderot in the
most justified way possible. "One does not tire of looking. Time stops for the one who admires.
How little I have lived! How little my youth has lasted!" (Denis Diderot, Salons of 1767, Ruins and
landscapes, page 337). And something ethereal and extra-sensorial is missing when compared to
the real quotation in French.
The negation in “point” is simply absent, betrayed. “On” translated as “one” is cold and non-
inclusive despite the fact “on” includes here “I, and you, and everyone else.” The translation of
“celui” by “one” is even colder than cold. It sounds like a biologist speaking of a lab rat he is in the
process of dissecting. “On ne se lasse point de regarder. Le temps s’arrête pour celui qui admire.
Que j’ai peu vécu ! que ma jeunesse a peu duré !” The reference of the quotation of Lord Byron’s
3. poem being reduced to the title, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, it is difficult to check, but I am sure the
twelve-syllable rhymed lines have lost the iambic flowing beauty of Byron’s poetry, and the
standard French C-V-C rhymes are heavily aggressive when compared to the smoothly gliding
English V-C rhymes.
What’s more, all the poems were read in a quasi-neutral voice, “voix blanche” as they say
on French radio, with the reasoning that any expressivity would lead the audience to hear only one
meaning and not the meaningful multiplicity contained in such a neutral rendering, especially for
example Hugo and Lamartine in their tenebrous poems are regretting their inability to change the
course of history when it was needed in 1851 when Louis Napoleon, the duly elected president of
the Second French Republic decided to seize power and reinstate the Empire of Napoleon the first,
and thus becoming Napoleon III for nineteen years. The furious romantic “Sturm und Drang”
passion of all these poets was lost in a reading that comforted the audience in its blind admiration.
These poems are pamphlets against the emerging inhuman capitalistic society of the 19th
century
with children working in factories at 6 or 7 in the 1830s, and as soon as 11 or 12 in French mines in
the 1860s. And I will not mention George Sand and her dark depiction of the reality of human
slavery in the knife industry in the “vallée des usines” next door in Thiers. That’s what I regret
slightly: the presentation of the music, too long now and then, was not showing the tormented
world in which Liszt was living, and not only the love affairs he was going through, but the real
world, among other things the failure of the attempted independence of Hungary, a suffering that
will lead him towards his inner life and eventually some kind of religion, a sort of refuge against the
inhumanity of his modern world.
Of course, that does not in any way erase the beauty of the music, the skill of the four
pianists, the charm of their interpretations of that music, and the furor of the composer that was so
often present in the compositions that turned the piano with two hands into a whole orchestra with
a good dozen hands. You can easily get lost in this music and the pianists are the magicians who
take us under the bed when the vampire is entering the room, and you can choose the vampire
from Romania or the industrial vampire that sucks the blood of all workers, young or old, male or
female, and even extraterrestrials if any dared to come to our planet, till they cannot work anymore.
The pianists, all of them, rendered this violence with the charm of ten fingers caressing our minds
or torturing our basic impulses into a spiritual rebellion against our corruption.
But I have said enough about these three concerts. Let me now consider the music, and
this time the three CDs by Suzana Bartal.
First Year Switzerland
“Wilhelm Tell’s Chapel” is slightly heavy, and the notes are like not-linked together in the
strong parts with some mellower parts alternating and overlapping. Martial in many ways and yet
with maybe some higher motivation. The attempt to translate Wilhelm Tell’s fear under the apple
and his martial joy when the arrow hit the apple and missed his head is quite mesmerizing.
“At the Lake of Walenstadt” is kind of soft and romantic. The left hand tries to play its
slightly haphazard melodious string of notes with a right hand behind that does not seem to be able
to follow with a rather pale performance.
“Pastorale” is too charming and at times childish like the song of a young girl or a young
shepherd trying to nicely talk to each other, to court and flirt naively in the meadow or on the village
green. Charming but so blind of what can come after this pleasure of cooing and whispering
secrets, though now and then the music is nearly serious, trying to tell what they know, that they
should be prudent.
“Besides a Spring” is the music of a mountain rivulet and both hands just ripple down the
valleys like the water that jumps out of its dark hole and then follows the slope of its bed without
even resisting the fall, the run, the race, enjoying each note and each droplet of its dance dripping
down into the vast world.
4. “Storm” is an exercise in power, brutality, maybe majestuous or majestic forbidding anger
trying to impress us into awe, because the music is furious, tempestuous, destructive even, at least
bringing everyone down to attention and respect.
“Obermann’s Valley” is like a slow and sort of emotional walk in the nature of a valley and
the bubble of grander energy seems to be reflecting Liszt’s emotions, so that the music does not
have two moments, two instants identical, jumping from one soft extreme to some other denser
period. The music is like going with no aim or target and just letting every coloration of any instant
penetrate its notes and its rhythm. It is nearly adolescent in receptivity, how to receive and
experience nature, what you see, what you hear, what you imagine between the trees and in the
shadowy recesses, and getting out of the valley is a strong and emotional experience.
“Eclogue” brings a certain softness and charm alternating with the force of some
intermittent passion. These alternating melodious soft sections with strong powerful other parts
within the same piece are quite characteristic of these Years of Pilgrimage. This music would be
perfect for some ballet by Angelin Preljocaj, or some other Maurice Béjart, or Maryse Delente. This
music is greenly multicolored, and it dances sweetly in its furor at times bringing to birth the
mellowness of a summer fruit full of juice and taste, a peach or a melon, into which you can just
dive teeth first.
“Homesickness” The right hand alone is like lost in its powerful desire, but then an echo
comes with both hands, the echo being like the real thing, the real home, the real over-there where
I used to be and am not anymore, nostalgia from a past memory that only survives as a naked line
of notes played by the right hand alone. Homesickness is always a simple esquisse, a sketch of
what the real experience used to be. Time erodes our senses and memory. Time does not stop at
5. all. Time is the great destroyer, not the great suspending judge who creates suspense by
postponing his sentencing as long and as far as possible. Bad boy.
“The Bells of Geneva: Nocturne” brings the feeling I have always experienced in Geneva
and apparently Liszt felt the same, a feeling of full satisfaction and contentment around me, not
necessarily in me, but Geneva is the city of wellbeing and comfort, probably the city with the
highest GDP per capita in the world based on some constant work and effort and yet all this
richness and riches come from the exploitation of the diplomacy and finances of the world by
providing slightly expensive services, but they are only for states, governments, and rich people,
most of them business people and bankers. This atmosphere pervades Geneva and makes
Geneva sort of a little bit unpalatable for someone who would like to have some adventure or
diversity. The floor has been waxed for so many years, with beeswax of course, that we seem to
be gliding on velvet and perambulating in satin and silk. So, the bells are only a small supplement
to the soul, certainly not in the heart or the mind, the Calvinist soul that considers the rich are
predestined to be rich and to end up in heaven, no matter what they do, even if it is getting rich
from the loot of war. Never mind, only the chosen ones can do this.
Second Year Italy
“Sposalizio” brings a rather heavy opening, and later it becomes a very heavy destiny in
something that should be light, joyful, and gay, but it is tragically poignant and sad. Marriage from
the point of view of the spouse, but which one of the two can take this event as such a dramatic
event that comes close to tears and crying? Liszt is not getting married and that’s probably why he
is that divided on such an event or is it because there is always a raping dimension in a marriage
since for both spouses, getting married is losing something that is far more important than virginity
that has often today been long lost before the wedding. But they both will have to come downstairs
back to earth from the high voltage loft they had escaped to, solitarily or together for some solitary
or together discovery and adventure. And then it will be, it is, and later, it was or has all been soft
routine.
6. “Il penseroso” is entirely turned inside like the consequence of one’s own organic existence
that the inner-concentrating subject is morbidly contemplating in his own mental desert haunted by
absence and emptiness. After that what is left? Nothing at all.
“Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa” is playing the student or a whole bunch of them, like
Faust’s students in the brawling inn, going to a party where they will sing songs, drink wine and of
course play some private bow and arrow, or bow and violin, or bow and curtsey, or in-and-out
pumping exercises. “Let me suck your major finger, and then I’ll let you suck my minor one.” And
when one round is finished, better start a second. Just enjoy the insouciance and the light-
headedness of such youthful crazy fools.
“Sonetto 47 del Petrarca” That’s slightly more complex than the students’ songs for an
orgiastic wine party. But the love we are talking of here is submissive; You have to accept to be the
joyful toy of the joy of the other and have to hope the other feels the same, and then the other, no
matter what and who it is, may abandon themselves to your gay and joyful search for mindless
pleasure. It will come like a set of seven stars, those of the Pleiades telling you life is destiny on a
road you ignore but that is blazed right to the end, its end, your end. Do I hear a stifled rebellion in
this submission?
“Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” tells us you can only be the victim of love, no freedom in this life,
is there? Impossible rebellion against the utmost annihilation of pleasure, love, and even life in the
single and unique law of love which is dissatisfaction within the “blissful” instant of the explosion or
expansion and spreading – like butter on a cracker – of pleasure that is, in fact, nothing but the
other side of the deep schizophrenic dementia that haunts the lover who knows he is being used
and his organic orgasm will be nothing but a sword buried deep into the emptiness of thin air and
rare atmosphere on some airless planet. Poor Liszt, the young twink – just between teenage and
adulthood – picked by some married lady for her to enjoy her pleasure that is not even really
shared
“Sonetto 123 del Petrarca” lets us know, if we want to learn about it, that love is nothing but
a vague recollection of something that is nothing but a dream, a shadow, some smoke dissolving in
the thin air that does not even enable me to breathe enough, maybe not even at all. Love is
nothing but something you can’t experience anymore. It is a haunting phantasm, and yet this
phantasm is becoming a fetishist chain around your neck, around your mind, around your soul.
Soul, you say? I don’t believe it. How can you have a soul when you have only dreamed of being in
love, abandoning your own judgment and freedom in this total submission to servitude for the sake
of a final minute that crowns the whole thing with nothing at all, nothing but an evanescent electric
shock that leaves you vanquished, annihilated, drained out, and scattered all over with the
impossibility that is yours to recollect your small pieces and beads and rebuild something like a
personality, or a being.
“Fantasia quasi sonata” is a long voyage in hell, and don’t expect anything else. That’s what
life is: the hell that will crown itself in death. And there is no coming back from the land of the dead.
There is no bringing anyone back from the land of the dead. Profound, dark, brutal, discordant.
Ranting and raving on the keys and the notes with now and then the eruption of a maelstrom
upside out of incoherent and never assured repentance. Sin is the bliss of life and the exquisite
suffering of death. Salvation is in perdition. Get lost in the deepest and thickest mud in some
quicksand marshes and when you reach rock bottom, if you reach it ever, be sure salvation will be
found in your final extinction, the erasing and extinguishing of any light in your being, in your mind
or elsewhere; That’s what Dante is doing in his voyage in Hell till he is defecated by the devil
himself back into the outside world. We are nothing but the manure of the devil, duly ruminated by
him, duly transiting in his gut and colon, to finally reach the exit point, the exhaust pipe, the sewage
drain that will take what’s left of you to the processing station where some clear water might be
saved from all the poisonous heavy metallic sins you have committed. In this perspective the merit
of the good old Christians is only negative because man and woman have been predestined to be
sinners, to the point that they even have to commit the basic sin of impure concupiscence to
guarantee the survival of the species, its expansion too, and the more we are, the more joyous the
7. sinning orgy is. And don’t believe the tears of the sinners. They are the tools, each one of them, of
their pleasure. They get to blissful orgasm by crying crocodile tears, in one word they are
SINNERS. But Ô God, what can I do? Only one thing my son. Castrate your mind of any organic
and physical and mental desire and learn how to live in total submission to the nothingness that
your life should be like all lives in this world of sinners, and the pleasure of such sins. Sins are the
Turkish delight of the bourgeois society of Paris and elsewhere in the 19th
century when millions of
people are enslaved to machines and are starving early in their life that does not go beyond three
dozen years, if ever that many.
In “Gondoliera” Venice is not yet the city of death it will become in a few decades. It is the
city of freewheel enjoyment in the canals with one man behind who is pushing the gondola forward
for your pleasure. You are supposed to forget the world and just concentrate on your own
exhilaration in your instant of hectic pleasure, maybe pleasure, after all, it might be despair, but
well the merry-go-round of the melody will come back and you will go back on your desired dream
of some satisfied desire but be careful some of these desires might become impulses and you will
plunge into the canal, headfirst into the mud. If you have ears on your feet you might go on hearing
the merry-go-round music of the Venetian wooden horses who are dragons and other monsters
from fairy tales that are the disguise of all human dramas, wars included.
“Canzone” is like a Tenebrae that takes us to the other side of life. Shoma Oto in the
concert in Aulteribe transcended this requiem-like music, this somber descent into Hades, just
thrown over the Styx and falling in the despair and desolation of what is in no way a song, just a
couple of echoing songlike notes, but it is mostly the most horrible monstrous death parade, death
march, death cat’s walk for dying exhibitionists. Listen to them trying to get their yarn straight.
“Tarantella” is what it is supposed to be, a tarantula that is getting crazy, and you who have
been bitten twice rather than once, you can only go on dancing this devilish dance and get up to
the trance of Satan that you are supposed to embrace and probably impregnate with your folly,
your dementia, your crazy fanciful unreasonable total craziness. For me the Tarantella will always
be the tarantella Maryse Delente brought to Roubaix when she was appointed the boss of the
Ballet de Roubaix, to save it from bankruptcy and from being disbanded by the crazy foolishness
and insanity of some local moralists who considered that such dances are nothing but, one more
time, obscene exhibitionism and that it should be draped in thick veils and maybe be even banned
forever from our guilty eyes that dare look at the bodies of the dancers, males and females alike,
for the sole pleasure of these shapes, round, curved, and fully developed where it brings pleasure
to the mind of the onlookers. For sure, time stops running wild in the world when one contemplates
the organic forms of these bodies that are more than strutting on the stage since they are dancing,
springing, alone, two by two, or even in triplets or bigger groups, so that the organic forms are
multiplied in proportion. Tarantella is the real savior of this world and Liszt understood it. But the
Saviors of this world in and with, by and via sin upon sin, to the full satisfaction of all our libidinous
impulses that make us … I guess I have finally understood what I intended to say, and you have
too. Put a tarantella in your pants or under your blouse in winter to keep you warm where it is
important to be hot all the time.
Third Year No Specific Title
The program of the concerts in Aulteribe (September 2022) in some kind of vanity,
forgetting that Vanitas Vanitatum et Omnia Vanitas, stuck the title “Les Sonorités de l’Âme” onto
this third year, thus pretending that the priest, the monk, the repenting sinner was the composer of
the music we were going to hear. That was an erring fantasy, an errant idea in music that is not
dedicated to ruins and death. It is, in fact, the triumph of love in Liszt. He has finally found a love
and a lover that respond in the same tone, in the same tune as his, and with some sort of
mesmerized fascination.
“Angelus! Prayer to the Guardian angels” is a hesitating vision of some beyondness of life.
It is a light call for you to descend into this living depth of life itself that is sensuously concentrating
on the day that is coming to a close and yet opens to some calm and slow-going rhythm that is like
a gliding caress on your mind, or maybe your soul, but we do not need that concept of soul, though
8. in French they do not have a word for “mind” so they overuse the word “soul” or its equivalent
“âme” that does not contain the real corporal life that the Italian word “anima” carries. Strange how
the French overuse a religious concept despite their antireligious stance because they miss a
simple word for the mind that governs us as human beings and not as some kind of created puppet
in the hands of some kind of god that they despise. So, let’s go to sleep.
“To the Cypresses of the Villa d’Este 1: Threnody” is dark on dark. To lose oneself in these
trees of death, or at least cemeteries, because they seem to be eternal. Maybe there exists some
hope to merge with them and become the eternal servant of death. But it is never reached though
it is a lot more than the soul, the confrontation with Thanatos at the very bottom of the composer’s
libido, which should provide him with the spiritual deepening he is longing for.
“To the Cypresses of the Villa d’Este 2: Threnody” brings that deepening in this libido, this
need and desire to love his trying to take control of Thanatos and yet striving to give that Thanatos
the freedom and power it longs for. Which is going to win? The love instinct or the death instinct?
And what about if there were nothing but – one more time – nothing but the vital vigor of the plants,
trees trying to survive in a garden that has no destiny, destination? Abandon yourself to organic
survival. The simple rhythm of the right hand and the search for a melody by the other hand, and
vice versa, who cares, the rhythm does not emerge as a lasting effect, and the melody does not
manage to survive a few measures. And it all ends in a penetration, a disappearing merger into the
immensity of silence and stillness, the absence of movement, just the crawling impression of
nothing at all.
“The Fountains of the Villa d’Este” bring a fluttering flock of sword-billed colibris and
hummingbirds in luxuriant nature. Light like the chirping fingers on the keynotes, light and bright
like some rays of sunshine through the foliage of the tall trees, light and enlightened with the
gleaming splendor of voluptuous velocity, and the fingers on the keys are like a vast assembly of
tropical exotic butterflies that shine fluorescent in the shadow and shade under the cypresses. And
you dare not move one foot or one hand not to trigger some butterfly effect that would take the
beauty away, the life away, the deepest communion with nature and its living creatures that have
survived millions of eons and millennia despite all the predators, meteors and cataclysms. It takes
9. more than one tsunami to erase life from this planet, though a couple of giant tsunamis would be
the welcome friends of the planet if they managed to get two or three billion people to the other
side of our dying life.
“Sunt Lacrymae Rerum, There are Tears for Things: in the Hungarian mode” is a shortening
of a line by Virgil, “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” and that shortening gets half
the meaning off, “There is crying over things, and deaths affect the mind” is the first translation I
will suggest. A second translation is “The world is a world of tears and the burdens of mortality
touch the heart.” And a third one could be “There are tears in things and mortality touches the
mind.” This being explained, the music also has tears, and its death may touch the mind as much
as the heart. But I feel something else in this music. What use are tears if not just to run with no
aim, to run with no destination except drying on your cheeks, to run with no real justification, and at
times just because of a joyful vision that turns sour as soon as you cast the dice of a tear of joy and
it turns into a deluge of tears bringing the end of a world, of a mind, of a heart, of a life? But there is
no soul in these things and their tears. There is no salvation in these tears and their repentance.
There is no solution in these tears and their obstinate desire to know what cannot be known, like
the mind of God or the mind of the cosmos, if it has a mind, but why should it not have one since
all things have tears and the mortality of these things touches the heart of any human being. Don’t
10. you cry when your car runs over a deer, or when you step – by accident, so you say – on an insect
that was only trying to survive to be a nice breakfast for its predator, and you made it into a
squished mess? Shame on you.
“Funeral March” comes in good time to wipe all these tears out of our eyes. The slow and
heavy steps of the horses of the hearse. Certitude, certainty, certainness, so many other words,
many not even to be found in any dictionary, to tell you, just march on because you cannot get off
this track that goes directly to Scarron’s boat because you cannot get off this trail that is blazed
forever with the fire of Hades that will creep up your legs and into your vitals till it finds the heart
and burns it dead, or rather dead enough to disappear from the earth, and alive enough o survive
for millennia in Hades, Hell, the Land of the dead who are, in fact, perfectly alive. And do not
believe some Orpheus will come to retrieve you. Life is not Orfeo Negro or Blanco, it is just
Eurydice, and it has to go there and stay there. This death march is a Tenebrae directly from the
17th
century of Charpentier or some other composer, of the brilliant sunny Golden Century of Louis
XIV. You can hear the rumbling stomach of life that needs your death to nurture its own libido with
your Thanatos, death instinct, death longing.
“Sursum Corda, Lift Up Your Hearts” is in the same continuing somberness. More somber
than I, you die, and you will die anyway, and once again the heart is supposed to respond to this
impulse to die, to this instinct to move on into the wings of the vital stage of the hellish theater of
loveless life, and the only love you can be sure of and you can control is the love that comes from
your real own heart for yourself, so lift it up because then you are loved and you can enjoy it and
be ready for the end of it – how dumb I am – that love of my heart for my heart I will take it along
and it will cross the Styx in my own pockets. Yes, your own love for yourself you can take to
paradise, or to hell if you prefer the dark side of things, and do not forget things bring tears
because all things are only alive when you cast tears on them.
When we reach the end of this voyage, what is left? A simple and evident fact that Liszt
believed in the mental dimension of man and woman, though it seems to be man, himself, rather
than woman or women who only went through his life but couldn’t stay, couldn’t tame him enough
to keep him on a leash, a soulless leash, and this time it is the soul since the leash negates it or
captures a man by expurgating him of his soul. But all along the composer is not referring to the
soul of anything, but to the heart of everything, and if religion we have to bring in, it is, the religion
of the Sacred Heart more than the religion of the sinning soul. The heart of any living entity is
sacred, and the soul of those who believe in it is nothing but a light supplement some evoke to be
able to sound spiritual, inspired, in fact, musical because the only soul I really know is soul music,
that Black Rock and Soul music I dance to once in North Carolina, some evening of a
Homecoming, alone, with all the students and the teachers in a big circle around me and the Black
band never stopping the music, their playing as long as I did not stop dancing. Yes, that was the
soul I know, the soul of music, the soul of music I discovered in Kinshasa, but the word “soul” used
and abused by the Christians is an escape from the Sacred Heart of Love and Love Above All,
even if it brings in mind the caricature of it that was built in the place of the vineyards of
Montmartre, a crime against the sacred heart of wine and Bacchus, of life and love, and sobriety in
inebriation.
2022 was a good year for Aulteribe, even if there is no recording of this music on a piano
Liszt himself could have used in his own days.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
11.
12. VERSION FRANÇAISE
Le concert des trois années de pèlerinage présenté au Château d'Aulteribe, en fait à
l'origine, un château médiéval essentiel dans le réseau des châteaux d'Auvergne protégeant la
plaine et la province, comprenait Jerôme Granjon et Suzana Bartal avec deux pianistes plus
jeunes, Julien Lespagnol et Shoma Oto. L'originalité de ces trois concerts sur deux jours était le
piano Pleyel de Georges Onslow construit en 1846, c'est-à-dire un piano sur lequel Liszt aurait pu
jouer, et le son est différent, la puissance est différente, les harmoniques sont toutes différentes
d'un piano moderne. Les CD sont enregistrés sur des pianos modernes et il manque la véracité du
piano patrimonial et nous sommes un peu privés d'une certaine authenticité. Les trois concerts ont
intégré des petits poèmes illustrant ou soutenant la musique et plusieurs interventions d'une
conférencière essayant d'expliquer ce que nous devrions voir dans cette musique, et je dis bien
voir volontairement puisque la conférencière a insisté, du début à la fin, sur le fait que Liszt
essayait de faire entrer la peinture et la littérature dans la musique et essayait d'être ressenti
simultanément par tous les sens, d’être synesthésique, bien que je ne sois pas entièrement
convaincu.
La musique est par définition synesthésique puisqu'il s'agit d'un langage qui n'utilise que
des éléments sonores, les notes, leurs intervalles et le rythme, et ces trois éléments font réagir le
corps humain de bien des manières différentes, le long de bien des voies et chemins sensoriels et
sensibles, surtout lorsque l'imagination entre sur le court comme une balle de tennis tombant du
ciel. Mais je me suis sentie frustrée par le fait que de merveilleuses pièces de poésie de divers
pays et en diverses langues nous fussent données exclusivement en français, traduites donc, et
donc trahies, au lieu d'être présentées en version bilingue, dans la langue originale et en français.
Lord Byron a perdu sa musique iambique pour un mètre français syllabique et rigide, avec des
rimes qui sont bien sûr trop lourdes pour l'anglais. Traduire Lord Byron, Dante Alighieri, Francesco
Petrarca, et quelques autres, à côté de Baudelaire, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Marceline
Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo, et Alphonse de Lamartine est une trahison totale
de la beauté des étrangers qui ne peuvent même pas être lus dans leur langue originale, avec une
traduction pour ceux qui ne sont pas multilingues. J'ai présenté une lecture d'extraits de l'Enfer de
Dante il y a quelques années à La Chaise-Dieu, et il fallait que ce soit en français. J'ai pris une
traduction standard dans une édition bilingue, et j'ai été obligé de réécrire toute la traduction pour
qu'elle retrouve la musique de la langue italienne.
Pour illustrer ce point, allons à la phrase de conclusion de la deuxième intervention de la
conférencière lors du troisième concert, une citation réduite à "Le temps s'arrête pour celui qui
admire." Mais lisons le commentaire de Denis Diderot sur la « Grande Galerie éclairée de
l'arrière » par Hubert Robert représenté dans le concert par un tableau de ce même peintre du
XVIIIe siècle récupéré dans les réserves du château d'Aulteribe lui-même, un bon choix en effet
permettant d’évoquer Diderot de la manière la plus justifiée qui soit. « On ne se lasse point de
regarder. Le temps s'arrête pour celui qui admire. Comme j'ai peu vécu ! Que ma jeunesse a peu
duré ! »(Denis Diderot, Salons de 1767, Ruines et paysages, page 337). Et la conférencière
manque quelque chose de spirituel et virtuel, quelque chose d'extra-sensoriel par rapport à la
citation complète en français.
Si on traduisait cette citation, on aurait : « One does not tire of looking. Time stops for the
one who admires. How little I have lived! How little my youth has lasted!" La négation « ne …
point » est tout simplement absente, trahie. « On » traduit par « one » est froid et non inclusif
malgré le fait que « on » inclut ici « moi, et toi, et tous les autres ». La traduction de « celui » par
« one » est encore plus froide que froide. On dirait un biologiste parlant d'un rat de laboratoire qu'il
est en train de disséquer. Et pire encore, la référence de la citation du poème de Lord Byron étant
réduite au titre, Le Pèlerinage de Childe Harold, il est difficile de vérifier, mais je suis sûr que les
dodécasyllabes rimés ont perdu la beauté fluide iambique de la poésie de Byron, et que les rimes
standard françaises C-V-C sont fortement agressives par rapport aux rimes anglaises V-C qui
glissent doucement.
13. De plus, tous les poèmes ont été lus d'une voix quasi-neutre, "voix blanche" comme on dit
à la radio française, avec le raisonnement que toute expressivité conduirait le public à n'entendre
qu'un seul sens et non la multiplicité significative contenue dans une telle restitution neutre, Hugo
et Lamartine, par exemple, dans leurs poèmes ténébreux, regrettent leur incapacité à changer le
cours de l'histoire quand il le fallait, en 1851, lorsque Louis Napoléon, président dûment élu de la
Seconde République française, décide de prendre le pouvoir et de rétablir l'Empire de Napoléon
Ier, devenant ainsi Napoléon III pour dix-neuf ans. La passion furieuse et romantique du "Sturm
und Drang" de tous ces poètes se perd dans une lecture qui conforte le public dans son admiration
aveugle. Ces poèmes sont des pamphlets contre la société capitaliste inhumaine naissante du
XIXe siècle, avec des enfants qui travaillent dans les usines à 6 ou 7 ans dans les années 1830, et
dès 11 ou 12 ans dans les mines françaises dans les années 1860. Et je ne parlerai pas de
George Sand et de sa sombre description de la réalité de l'esclavage humain dans l'industrie
coutelière dans la "vallée des usines" voisine de Thiers. C'est ce que je regrette un peu : la
présentation de la musique, trop longue de temps en temps, ne montrait pas le monde tourmenté
dans lequel Liszt vivait, et pas seulement les amours qu'il traversait, mais le monde réel, entre
autres l'échec de la tentative d'indépendance de la Hongrie, une souffrance qui le conduira vers sa
vie intérieure et finalement une sorte de religiosité, une sorte de refuge contre l'inhumanité de son
monde moderne.
Bien sûr, cela n'efface en rien la beauté de la musique, l'habileté des quatre pianistes, le
charme de leurs interprétations de cette musique, et la fureur du compositeur si souvent présente
dans les compositions qui transformaient le piano à deux mains en un orchestre entier avec une
bonne douzaine de mains. On peut facilement se perdre dans cette musique et les pianistes sont
les magiciens qui nous emmènent et nous cachent, ou nous muchent, sous le lit quand le vampire
entre dans la pièce, et vous pouvez choisir le vampire de Roumanie ou le vampire industriel qui
suce le sang de tous les travailleurs, jeunes ou vieux, hommes ou femmes, et même des
extraterrestres s'ils osaient venir sur notre planète, jusqu'à ce qu'ils ne puissent plus travailler. Les
14. pianistes, tous, ont rendu cette violence avec le charme de dix doigts caressant nos esprits ou
torturant nos pulsions primaires pour en faire une rébellion spirituelle contre notre corruption.
Mais j'en ai assez dit sur ces trois concerts. Voyons maintenant la musique, et cette fois les
trois CD de Suzana Bartal.
Première année Suisse
« Chapelle de Guillaume Tell » est légèrement lourd, et les notes sont comme non liées
entre elles dans les parties fortes avec quelques parties plus douces qui alternent et se
chevauchent. Martial à bien des égards et pourtant avec peut-être une motivation plus élevée. La
tentative de traduire la peur de Wilhelm Tell sous la pomme, et sa joie martiale lorsque la flèche a
touché la pomme et manqué sa tête est assez envoûtante.
"Au lac de Walenstadt" est plutôt doux et romantique. La main gauche essaie de jouer sa
chaîne de notes mélodieuses légèrement désordonnées avec une main droite derrière qui ne
semble pas pouvoir suivre avec une performance plutôt pâle.
La « Pastorale » est trop charmante et parfois enfantine comme la chanson d'une jeune fille
ou d'un jeune berger essayant de se parler gentiment, de se courtiser et de flirter naïvement dans
la prairie ou sur la place du village. Charmant mais tellement aveugle de ce qui peut arriver après
ce plaisir de roucouler et de chuchoter des secrets, bien que de temps en temps la musique soit
presque sérieuse, essayant de dire ce qu'ils savent, qu'ils devraient être prudents.
« Au bord d’une source » est la musique d'un ruisseau de montagne et les deux mains ne
font qu'onduler dans les vallées comme l'eau qui saute de son trou sombre et suit ensuite la pente
de son lit sans même résister à la chute, à la course, à la folie, appréciant chaque note et chaque
gouttelette de sa danse qui déboule dans le vaste monde.
« Orage » est un exercice de puissance, de brutalité, peut-être de colère majestueuse ou
d'interdiction magistrale qui cherche à nous impressionner, car la musique est furieuse,
tempétueuse, destructrice même, mais elle ramène au moins tout le monde à l'attention et au
respect.
La « Vallée d'Obermann » est comme une promenade lente et émotive dans la nature
d'une vallée et la bulle d'énergie plus grande semble refléter les émotions de Liszt, de sorte que la
musique n'a pas deux moments, deux instants identiques, sautant d'un extrême doux à une autre
période plus dense. La musique ressemble à un parcours sans but ni cible, laissant simplement
chaque coloration de chaque instant pénétrer ses notes et son rythme. C'est presque adolescent
dans la réceptivité, la manière de recevoir et de vivre la nature, ce que l'on voit, ce que l'on entend,
ce que l'on imagine entre les arbres et dans les recoins d'ombre, et sortir de la vallée est une
expérience forte et émotionnelle.
« Églogue » apporte une certaine douceur et un certain charme alternant avec la force
d'une certaine passion intermittente. Cette alternance de sections douces et mélodieuses et de
parties puissantes au sein d'un même morceau est tout à fait caractéristique de ces Années de
Pèlerinage. Cette musique serait parfaite pour un ballet d'Angelin Preljocaj, ou un autre Maurice
Béjart, ou Maryse Delente. Cette musique est verte et multicolore, et elle danse avec douceur
dans sa fureur, faisant naître parfois la douceur d'un fruit d'été plein de jus et de goût, une pêche
ou un melon, dans lequel on ne peut que plonger les dents en avant.
Dans « Le mal du pays » la main droite seule est comme perdue dans son puissant désir,
mais alors un écho vient avec les deux mains, l'écho étant comme la vraie chose, la vraie maison,
le vrai là-bas où j'étais et ne suis plus, la nostalgie d'un souvenir passé qui ne survit que comme
une ligne nue de notes jouées par la main droite seule. Le mal du pays est toujours une simple
esquisse, un croquis de ce qu'était l'expérience réelle. Le temps érode nos sens et notre mémoire.
Le temps ne s'arrête pas du tout. Le temps est le grand destructeur, pas le grand juge suspenseur
15. qui crée du suspense en reportant sa sentence aussi longtemps et aussi loin que possible, avec
comme la menace d’un sursis. Mauvais garçon.
"Les cloches de Genève : Nocturne" apporte le sentiment que j'ai toujours éprouvé à
Genève et apparemment Liszt ressentait la même chose, un sentiment de pleine satisfaction et de
contentement autour de moi, pas nécessairement en moi, mais Genève est la ville du bien-être et
du confort, probablement la ville avec le PIB par habitant le plus élevé du monde basé sur un
travail et un effort constants et pourtant toute cette richesse et ces richesses proviennent de
l'exploitation de la diplomatie et des finances du monde en fournissant des services un peu chers,
mais ils sont seulement pour les États, les gouvernements et les gens riches, la plupart d'entre eux
des hommes d'affaires et des banquiers. Cette atmosphère imprègne Genève et rend la ville un
peu désagréable pour quelqu'un qui voudrait avoir un peu d'aventure ou de diversité. On peut
toujours s’égarer dans l’église orthodoxe grecque le dimanche pour la musique et les rituels. Les
sols sont cirés depuis tant d'années, avec de la cire d'abeille bien sûr, qu'on a l'impression de
glisser sur du velours et de déambuler dans du satin et de la soie. Les cloches ne sont donc qu'un
petit supplément d'âme, certainement pas dans le cœur ou l'esprit, l'âme calviniste qui considère
que les riches sont prédestinés à être riches et à finir au paradis, quoi qu'ils fassent, même si c'est
en s'enrichissant du butin de la guerre. Qu'à cela ne tienne, seuls les élus peuvent le faire.
16. Deuxième année Italie
« Sposalizio » apporte une ouverture plutôt lourde, et plus tard, cela devient un destin très
lourd dans quelque chose qui devrait être léger, joyeux et gai, mais qui est tragiquement poignant
et triste. Le mariage du point de vue des époux, mais lequel des deux peut prendre cet événement
comme un événement si dramatique qui se rapproche des larmes et des pleurs ? Liszt ne se marie
pas et c'est sans doute pour cela qu'il est si partagé sur un tel événement ou bien est-ce parce
qu'il y a toujours une dimension violente dans un mariage puisque pour les deux époux, se marier
c'est perdre quelque chose de bien plus important que la virginité qui a souvent été perdue
aujourd'hui bien avant le mariage. Mais ils devront tous les deux redescendre sur terre des
combles de leur intense embrasement de leurs émotions organiques où ils s'étaient évadés, seuls
ou ensemble pour quelques découvertes et aventures solitaires ou communes. Et puis ce sera,
c'est, et plus tard, c'était ou c'est devenu une douce routine.
« Il penseroso » est entièrement retourné à l'intérieur comme la conséquence de sa propre
existence hormonale que le sujet en concentration intérieure contemple morbidement dans son
propre désert mental hanté par l'absence et le vide. Après cela, que reste-t-il ? Rien du tout, rien
d’un tout qui, n’a jamais existé vraiment sinon dans la tête fantasmante du sujet en feu.
La « Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa », c'est jouer à l’étudiant ou à tout un groupe d'entre
eux, comme les potaches Carabineux de Faust dans l'auberge de la discorde, qui se rendent à
une fête où ils vont chanter des chansons de Carabin, boire du gros rouge qui tâche, et bien sûr
faire quelques exercices privés et privatifs de flèche sur arc, ou d'archet sur violon, ou de courbette
et de révérence, ou d'exercices de pompage en va-et-vient vertical à la Shadok, quand les parents
pompent, les enfants trinquent, et trop souvent du mauvais vin. « Puisque je suis en position
basse, laisse-moi sucer ton gros majeur, et ensuite je te laisserai sucer mon auriculaire. » Et
quand un tour est terminé, mieux vaut en commencer un deuxième. Il suffit de profiter de
l'insouciance et de la légèreté de ces jeunes fous.
Le « Sonetto 47 del Petrarca », c'est un peu plus complexe que les chansons des étudiants
pour une fête de vin orgiaque. Mais l'amour dont il s'agit ici est soumis : il faut accepter d'être le
jouet joyeux de la joie de l'autre et espérer que l'autre ressente la même chose, et alors l'autre,
peu importe ce qu'il est et qui il est, peut s'abandonner à votre recherche gaie et joyeuse du plaisir
gratuit sans nulle autre justification que lui-même. Cela viendra comme un ensemble de sept
étoiles, celles de la Pléiade qui vous disent que la vie est un destin sur une route que vous ignorez
mais qui est tracée jusqu'au bout, sa finalité, votre but. Est-ce que j'entends une rébellion étouffée
dans cette soumission ?
Le « Sonetto 104 del Petrarca » nous dit que vous ne pouvez être que la victime de
l'amour, aucune liberté dans cette vie, n'est-il point ? Rébellion impossible contre l'annihilation
totale du plaisir, de l'amour et même de la vie dans la seule et unique loi de cet amour qui est
l'insatisfaction dans l'instant "béat" de l'explosion ou de l'expansion et de l'étalement – comme du
beurre sur une biscote – du plaisir qui n'est, en fait, que l'autre face de la profonde démence
schizophrénique qui hante l'amant qui sait qu'il est utilisé et que son orgasme organique ne sera
qu'une épée enfouie dans le vide de l'air et de l'atmosphère rare d'une planète sans gaz. Pauvre
Liszt, le jeune beau gosse – juste entre l'adolescence trop jeune et l'âge adulte trop vieux – choisi
par une femme cougar ou panthère mariée pour jouir de son plaisir qui n'est même pas vraiment
partagé...
Le « Sonetto 123 del Petrarca » nous fait savoir, si nous voulons l'apprendre, que l'amour
n'est rien d'autre qu'un vague souvenir de quelque chose qui n'est rien d'autre qu'un rêve, une
ombre, une fumée qui se dissout dans l'air raréfié qui ne me permet même pas de respirer
suffisamment, peut-être même pas du tout. L'amour n'est rien d'autre que quelque chose que l'on
ne peut plus expérimenter. C'est un fantasme obsédant, et pourtant ce fantasme devient une
chaîne fétichiste autour de votre cou, autour de votre esprit, autour de votre âme. Votre âme, dites-
vous ? Je n'y crois pas. Comment peut-on avoir une âme quand on n'a rêvé que d'être amoureux,
d'abandonner son propre jugement et sa liberté dans cette soumission totale à la servitude pour
17. une minute finale qui couronne le tout sans rien du tout, rien qu'un choc électrique évanescent qui
vous laisse vaincu, anéanti, vidé et éparpillé dans l'impossibilité qui est la vôtre de rassembler vos
petits morceaux et autres boulettes et de reconstruire quelque chose comme une personnalité, ou
un être.
« Fantasia quasi sonata » est un long voyage en enfer, et n'en attendez rien d'autre. La vie,
c'est ça : l'enfer qui s’autocouronnera dans la mort. Et l'on ne revient pas du pays des morts. On
ne ramène personne du pays des morts. Profond, sombre, brutal, discordant. Cauchemars et
délires sur les touches du clavier et les notes de la gamme avec de temps en temps l'éruption d'un
maelström cul-dessus-tête qui jaillit de multiples repentirs incohérents et jamais assumés. Le
péché est la félicité de la vie et l'exquise souffrance de la mort. Le salut est dans la perdition.
Perdez-vous dans la boue la plus profonde et la plus épaisse de certains marais de sables
mouvants et quand vous atteindrez le fond, si vous l'atteignez jamais, soyez sûr que le salut sera
trouvé dans votre extinction finale, l'effacement et l'anéantissement de toute lumière dans votre
être, dans votre esprit ou où que ce soit d’autre ; c'est ce que fait Dante dans son voyage en enfer
jusqu'à ce qu'il soit déféqué par le diable lui-même et renvoyé dans le monde extérieur. Nous ne
sommes rien d'autre que le fumier du diable, dûment ruminés par lui, transitant dans son intestin et
son côlon, pour finalement atteindre le point de sortie, le tuyau d'échappement, l'égout qui
emmènera ce qui reste de vous ou nous tous vers la station de traitement où un peu d'eau claire
pourra être sauvée d’entre tous les péchés métalliques lourds et toxiques que vous avez commis.
Dans cette perspective, le mérite des bons vieux chrétiens n'est que négatif parce que l'homme et
la femme ont été prédestinés à être des pécheurs, au point qu'ils doivent même commettre le
péché fondamental de la concupiscence impure pour garantir la survie de l'espèce, son expansion
aussi, et plus nous sommes nombreux, plus l'orgie du péché est joyeuse. Et ne croyez pas les
larmes des pécheurs. Elles sont les outils, chacune d'entre elles, de leur plaisir. Ils atteignent
l'orgasme béat en pleurant des larmes de crocodile, en un mot ce sont des PÉCHEURS. Mais Ô
Dieu, que puis-je faire ? Une seule chose, mon fils. Castre ton esprit de tout désir organique et
physique et mental et apprends à vivre dans la soumission totale au néant que ta vie devrait être
comme toutes les vies dans ce monde de pécheurs, et au plaisir de ces péchés. Les péchés sont
le loukoum turc et arabe de la société bourgeoise de Paris et d'ailleurs au XIXe siècle, alors que
des millions de personnes sont asservies à des machines et meurent de faim lentement dès le tout
début de leur vie qui ne dépasse pas trois douzaines d'années, voire même jamais autant.
18. Dans « Gondoliera », Venise n'est pas encore la ville de la mort qu'elle deviendra dans
quelques décennies. C'est la ville du plaisir en roue libre dans les canaux avec un homme derrière
qui pousse la gondole en avant pour votre plaisir. Vous êtes censé oublier le monde et vous
concentrer sur votre propre exaltation dans votre instant de plaisir trépidant, peut-être de
jouissance, après tout, ce pourrait être du désespoir, mais le manège vénitien de la mélodie
reviendra et vous repartirez vers votre rêve désiré d'un désir satisfait, mais attention, certains de
ces désirs pourraient devenir des impulsions et vous plongeriez dans le canal, la tête la première
dans la boue. Si vous avez des oreilles aux pieds, vous pourrez continuer à entendre la musique
du manège des chevaux de bois vénitiens qui sont des dragons et autres monstres de contes de
fées qui ne sont que le déguisement de tous les drames humains, guerres comprises, en orgies
festives pour enfants. Les adultes eux lisent entre les lignes.
La « Canzone » est comme un Tenebrae qui nous emmène de l'autre côté de la vie.
Shoma Oto, lors du concert d'Aulteribe, a transcendé cette musique semblable à un requiem, cette
descente sombre dans l'Hadès, vous tout juste jetés par-dessus le Styx et tombant dans le
désespoir et la désolation de ce qui n'est en aucun cas une chanson, juste quelques notes
chantantes en écho, mais c'est surtout la plus horrible parade de mort monstrueuse, la marche de
la mort, le défilé de mode à la passerelle pour félins mâles et femelles paradant, parodiant la mort
des exhibitionnistes mourants. Ecoutez-les essayer de démêler l’écheveau enchevêtré de leurs
vies et dévies.
« Tarantella » est ce qu'elle est censée être, une tarentule qui devient folle, et vous qui
avez été piqués deux fois plutôt qu'une, vous ne pouvez que continuer à danser cette danse
diabolique et vous élever jusqu'à la transe du Satan que vous êtes censés embrasser et
probablement inséminer de votre folie, de votre démence, de votre débilité totale et déraisonnable.
Pour moi, la tarentelle sera toujours la tarentelle que Maryse Delente a apportée à Roubaix
lorsqu'elle a été nommée patronne du Ballet du Nord, pour le sauver de la faillite et de sa
dissolution par le délirium pas très mince du tout et l'insanité de certains moralistes locaux qui
considéraient que ces danses n'étaient rien d'autre qu’une fois de plus de l'exhibitionnisme
obscène et qu'il fallait draper de voiles épais et peut-être même les bannir à jamais de nos yeux
coupables qui osent regarder les corps des danseurs, hommes et femmes confondus, pour le seul
plaisir que ces formes, rondes, courbes et épanouies où cela procure de la jouissance à l'esprit
des spectateurs développent en mouvements agiles. Pour sûr, le temps s'arrête de courir dans le
monde quand on contemple les formes organiques de ces corps qui font plus que se pavaner sur
la scène puisqu'ils dansent, s'élancent, seuls, deux par deux, ou même en trios ou en groupes plus
importants, de sorte que les formes organiques sont multipliées en proportion. La tarentelle est le
véritable sauveur de ce monde et Liszt l'a compris. Mais les sauveurs de ce monde dans et avec,
par et via péché sur péché, à la pleine satisfaction de toutes nos pulsions libidineuses qui nous
font ... Je pense que j'ai finalement compris ce que je voulais dire, et vous aussi. Mettez une
tarentelle dans votre pantalon ou sous votre chemisier en hiver pour vous tenir chaud là où il est
important d'avoir chaud tout le temps.
Troisième année Sans titre précis
Le programme des concerts d'Aulteribe (septembre 2022) dans une sorte de vanité,
oubliant que Vanitas Vanitatum et Omnia Vanitas, comme dirait Bossuet, a collé le titre "Les
Sonorités de l'Âme" à cette troisième année, prétendant ainsi que le prêtre, le moine, le pécheur
repenti était le compositeur de la musique que nous allions entendre. C'était une fantaisie errante,
une idée en errance de cette musique qui n'est nullement dédiée aux ruines et à la mort. C'est, en
fait, le triomphe de l'amour chez Liszt. Il a enfin trouvé un amour et un amant qui répondent sur le
même ton, sur le même air que le sien, et avec une sorte de fascination hypnotique.
« Angelus ! Prière aux anges gardiens » est une vision hésitante d'un au-delà de la vie.
C'est un appel léger à descendre dans cette profondeur vivante de la vie elle-même qui se
concentre sensuellement sur le jour qui s'achève et qui s'ouvre pourtant à un rythme calme et lent
qui est comme une caresse glissante sur votre esprit, ou peut-être votre âme, mais nous n'avons
pas besoin de ce concept d'âme, bien qu'en français ils n'aient pas de mot pour « mind », le
mental, et ils surutilisent le mot « âme » qui ne contient pas la vraie vie corporelle que le mot italien
19. "anima" porte. Il est étrange que les Français surutilisent un concept religieux malgré leur position
antireligieuse parce qu'il leur manque un mot simple pour désigner le mental qui nous gouverne en
tant qu'êtres humains et non en tant que marionnettes créées entre les mains d'une sorte de dieu
qu'ils méprisent. Alors, allons dormir, l’angélus du soir a sonné.
« Aux cyprès de la Villa d'Este 1 : Thrénodie » est sombre sur sombre. Se perdre dans ces
arbres de la mort, ou du moins des cimetières, car ils semblent être éternels. Peut-être existe-t-il
un espoir de fusionner avec eux et de devenir le serviteur éternel de la mort. Mais il n'est jamais
atteint alors que c'est bien plus que l'âme, la confrontation avec Thanatos au plus profond de la
libido du compositeur, qui devrait lui apporter l'approfondissement spirituel auquel il aspire.
« Aux cyprès de la Villa d'Este 1 : Thrénodie » apporte cet approfondissement dans cette
libido, ce besoin et ce désir d'aimer en essayant de prendre le contrôle de Thanatos tout en
s'efforçant de donner à ce Thanatos la liberté et le pouvoir auxquels il aspire. Qui va gagner ?
L'instinct d'amour ou l'instinct de mort ? Et s'il n'y avait rien d'autre – une fois de plus – que la
vigueur vitale des plantes, des arbres qui tentent de survivre dans un jardin qui n'a pas de destin,
de destination ? Abandonnez-vous à la survie organique. Le simple rythme de la main droite et la
recherche d'une mélodie par l'autre main, et vice-versa, on s'en moque, le rythme n'en sort pas
durablement, et la mélodie ne parvient à survivre que quelques mesures. Et tout cela se termine
par une pénétration, une fusion qui disparaît dans l'immensité du silence et de l'immobilité,
l'absence de mouvement, juste l'impression rampante de rien du tout.
« Les fontaines de la Villa d'Este » amènent une volée de colibris à bec d'épée et autres
colibris ordinaires dans une nature luxuriante. Léger comme les doigts gazouillants sur les claviers,
léger et lumineux comme quelques rayons de soleil à travers le feuillage des grands arbres, léger
et éclairé par la splendeur étincelante de la vélocité voluptueuse, et les doigts sur les claviers sont
comme une vaste assemblée de papillons exotiques tropicaux qui brillent de fluorescence dans
l'ombre et sous l'ombrage des cyprès. Et on n'ose pas bouger un pied ou une main pour ne pas
déclencher quelque effet papillon qui emporterait la beauté, la vie, la communion la plus profonde
avec la nature et ses êtres vivants qui ont survécu à des millions d'éons et de millénaires malgré
tous les prédateurs, les météores et les cataclysmes. Il faut plus qu'un tsunami pour effacer la vie
de cette planète, bien que quelques tsunamis géants seraient les amis bienvenus de la planète
s'ils parvenaient à faire passer deux ou trois milliards de personnes de l'autre côté de notre vie
mourante.
« Sunt Lacrymae Rerum, en mode hongrois » est un raccourci d'un vers de Virgile, « Sunt
lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt » et ce raccourci enlève la moitié du sens, « Il y a des
pleurs sur toute chose et leur mort affecte l’esprit » est la première traduction que je suggérerai.
Une deuxième traduction est « Le monde est un monde de larmes et les fardeaux de la mortalité
20. touchent le cœur. » Et une troisième pourrait être « Il y a des larmes dans les choses et leur
mortalité touche l'esprit. » Ceci étant expliqué, la musique a aussi des larmes, et sa mort peut
toucher l'esprit autant que le cœur. Mais je ressens quelque chose d'autre dans cette musique. A
quoi servent les larmes si ce n'est à couler sans but, à couler sans autre destinée que de sécher
sur vos joues, à couler sans réelle justification, et parfois juste à cause d'une vision joyeuse qui
tourne au vinaigre dès que vous lancez les dés d'une larme de joie et que celle-ci se transforme en
un déluge de larmes entraînant la fin d'un monde, d'un esprit, d'un cœur, d'une vie ? Mais il n'y a
pas d'âme dans ces choses et leurs larmes. Il n'y a pas de salut dans ces larmes et leur repentir. Il
n'y a pas de solution dans ces larmes et leur désir obstiné de connaître ce qui ne peut être connu,
comme l'esprit de Dieu ou l'esprit du cosmos, s'il a un esprit, mais pourquoi n'en aurait-il pas un
puisque toutes les choses ont des larmes et que la mortalité de ces choses touche le cœur de tout
être humain. Ne pleurez-vous pas lorsque votre voiture écrase un chevreuil, ou lorsque vous
marchez – par accident, si l'on peut dire – sur un insecte qui ne cherchait qu'à survivre pour être
un bon petit déjeuner pour son prédateur, et vous en avez fait une bouillie bouillabaisse ? Vous
devriez avoir honte.
« Marche funèbre » arrive à point nommé pour essuyer toutes ces larmes de nos yeux. Le
pas lent et lourd des chevaux du corbillard. Certitude, certification, certainement, certes, et tant
d'autres mots, dont beaucoup ne figurent dans aucun dictionnaire, pour vous dire, marchez, parce
que vous ne pouvez pas quitter cette piste qui mène directement au bateau de Scarron, parce que
vous ne pouvez pas quitter cette piste qui est balisée pour toujours par le feu de l'Hadès qui se
glissera dans vos jambes et dans vos organes vitaux jusqu'à ce qu'il trouve le cœur et le brûle, ou
plutôt assez mort pour disparaître de la terre, et assez vivant pour survivre pendant des millénaires
dans l'Hadès, l'Enfer, le pays des morts qui sont, en fait, parfaitement vivants. Et ne croyez pas
qu'un Orphée viendra vous récupérer. La vie n'est pas Orfeo Negro ou Blanco, elle est juste
Eurydice, et elle doit y aller et y rester. Cette marche de la mort est un Tenebrae directement issu
du 17ème siècle de Charpentier ou d'un autre compositeur, du brillant et ensoleillé Siècle d'Or de
Louis XIV. Vous pouvez entendre l'estomac grondant de la vie qui a besoin de votre mort pour
nourrir sa propre libido avec votre Thanatos, votre instinct de mort, votre désir de mort.
21. « Sursum Corda, Élevez votre Cœur » est dans la même sombritude continue. Plus sombre
que moi, tu meurs, et tu mourras de toute façon, et une fois encore le cœur est censé répondre à
cette impulsion de mourir, à cet instinct de passer dans les coulisses de la scène vitale du théâtre
infernal de la vie sans amour, et le seul amour dont tu peux être sûr et que tu peux contrôler est
l'amour qui vient de ton propre cœur pour toi-même, alors élève-le parce qu'alors tu es aimé et tu
peux en profiter et être prêt pour la fin – comme je suis bête – cet amour de mon cœur pour mon
cœur, je l'emporterai et il traversera le Styx dans mes propres poches. Oui, ton propre amour pour
toi-même, tu peux l'emmener en paradis, ou en enfer si tu préfères le côté sombre des choses, et
n'oublie pas que les choses apportent des larmes car toutes les choses ne sont vivantes que
lorsque tu les couvres de larmes.
Lorsque nous arrivons à la fin de ce voyage, que reste-t-il ? Un fait simple et évident : Liszt
croit en la dimension mentale de l'homme et de la femme, bien qu'il semble que ce soit l'homme,
lui-même, plutôt que la femme ou les femmes qui ont seulement traversé sa vie mais n'ont pas pu
y rester, n'ont pas pu l'apprivoiser suffisamment pour le tenir en laisse, une laisse sans âme, et
cette fois c'est l'âme puisque la laisse la nie ou capture un homme en l'expurgeant de son âme.
Mais depuis le début, le compositeur ne fait pas référence à l'âme de quoi que ce soit, mais au
cœur de tout, et s'il faut faire intervenir la religion, c'est bien la religion du Sacré-Cœur plus que
celle de l'âme pécheresse. Le cœur de toute entité vivante est sacré, et l'âme de ceux qui y croient
n'est rien d'autre qu'un supplément de lumière que certains évoquent pour pouvoir paraître
spirituels, inspirés, en fait, musicaux parce que la seule âme que je connaisse vraiment est la soul
music, cette musique Black Rock and Soul sur laquelle j'ai dansé une fois en Caroline du Nord, un
soir de Homecoming, seul, avec tous les étudiants et les professeurs en grand cercle autour de
moi et le groupe noir qui n'arrêta jamais la musique, leur jeu que lorsque j’ai eu arrêté de danser.
Oui, c'était l'âme que je connais, l'âme de la musique, l'âme de la musique que j'ai découverte à
Kinshasa, mais le mot "âme" dont usent et abusent les chrétiens est une fuite du Sacré Cœur de
l'Amour et de l'Amour au-dessus de tout, même s'il rappelle la caricature de celui-ci qui a été
construite à la place des vignobles de Montmartre, un crime contre le cœur sacré du vin et de
Bacchus, de la vie et de l'amour, et de la sobriété dans l'ivresse.
2022 fut une bonne année pour Aulteribe, même s'il n'existe aucun enregistrement de cette
musique sur un piano que Liszt lui-même aurait pu utiliser en son temps.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU