Chanson d'Orkenise
Through the gates of Orkenise
a carter wants to enter.
Through the gates of Orkenise
a tramp wants to leave.
And the sentries of the town
rush up to the tramp and ask:
"What are you taking out of the town?"
- "I'm leaving my whole heart behind."
And the sentries of the town
rush up to the carter and ask:
"What are you bringing into the town?"
- "My heart: I'm getting married."
What a lot of hearts in Orkenise!
The sentries laughed and laughed.
Oh tramp, the road is dreary;
oh carter, love is heady.
The handsome sentries of the town
knitted superbly;
Then the gates of the town
slowly swung shut.
-- Guillaume Apollinaire (pictured above in a painting by Maurice de Vlaminck; translated by Peter Low)
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25 comments:
I couldn't quite believe the "knitted superbly" so I went to a French page, and, sure enough, "tricotaient". Can you explain this to me? Was knitting a kill-time for people in low-grade, wait-around jobs?
Thank you, by the way, for your many beautiful music clips.
All the best for your move away from New York.
Otepoti
I always thought the toll-booth sentries' knitting was just Apollinaire being whimsical!
Do you know the musical setting of this poem by Francis Poulenc, from the song cycle Banalités?
The only art songs I know well are those in Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer." I will have to look up this one. (Poulenc's Sonata for Flute gave me some bad moments when I was younger, so I haven't explored his music very much.)
I know some Maori songs though! I wish I could sing you one - "Ka waiata ki a Maria." I think you might find it consoling.
Best,
Otepoti
Hmm, thinking about Madame Defarge and all, it stands to reason that knitting would be developed by and for poor folks. The better-off would be able to pay for woven cloth from weavers, who could themselves be relatively well-off (cf. Silas Marner) (but not the Silesian weavers, why was that, I wonder?)
So I wonder if this line is "de haut en bas" in tone, ie, "look at those poor folks! Isn't it wonderful what they can do with what they have? They may be poor, but look at their handcrafts!" The admiration could be sincere or rather sarcastic. Which do you think? I don't know anything about Apollinaire.
Otepoti
You may not know anything about Apollinaire, but you know lots and lots about lots of other things!
Apollinaire was a sort of proto-Surrealist poet who died in 1918 of complications from a WWI wound. He was associated with the Parisian art movements of the turn of the century, and most of his poems are light-hearted and whimsical in tone, so I don't know if he intended any social commentary there. Poulenc set a lot of his poems, and the poems and the songs they inspired are really charming (Poulenc's settings of some of Apollinaire's contemporaries, like Paul Eluard, are quite different).
My brother played that sonata, and I know how hard it is. I'm actually working on "Songs of a Wayfarer" right now, and I have to admit that I never really loved Mahler until I sang him myself.
Thank you for your kind wishes. I'd love to hear that Maori song.
It's on the web - you could paste the phrase into Google and try the first three hits. The first is an elaborate choral setting first performed by the New Zealand Youth Choir. The second one made me cry. The third one is a site which gives you the text and translation.
"Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht" - now there's a phrase I couldn't sing without breaking down!
Best,
Otepoti
Ay-ay-ay! I see I just added a Schumann song to the Mahler cycle. Where can I put my face?
(this is what comes of absorbing stuff from older and more able sibs!)
Otepoti
Wow, Otepoti, what a lovely song that is. Thank you so much for telling me about it.
I also have older and more able sibs, both of them extremely accomplished musicians, and I had a lot of explaining to do to one of them to rationalize my lukewarm feelings about Mahler. But singing him is really giving me a deeper understanding and appreciation of his work. I always felt that he spelled out his intentions too clearly, rather than just suggesting them, as I would say Brahms does (and Schumann too - except perhaps in "Ich grolle nicht"!). But I have a different sense now, approaching his music from the inside rather than the outside. I love the last song of "Wayfarer," and how it goes from the coldest sort of chill to a kind of otherworldly peace.
"I had a lot of explaining to do to one of them to rationalize my lukewarm feelings about Mahler."
Ah, yes, I remember those sorts of conversations! It's sad, isn't it, how avidly we want our loved ones to share our exact musical tastes.
Perhaps we see shared tastes as a shortcut to bonding, which can, in fact, be built on good-will alone. At least, so I found AFTER I made my future life-partner sit through a recording of "Die Meistersinger"!
If we took to heart "de gustibus non est disputandum" we could relax, but that's easier said than done. That's why I'm happy that you liked "Ka waiata ki a Maria"!
I didn't realize till I researched it, who wrote it, and that it dates only from 1988. It has embedded itself very deeply here.
Actually, I had another thought about "tricotaient" - here we say "tend one's knitting" to mean "mind one's own business." I couldn't find it as colloquial French though.
Best,
Otepoti
It seems like your life partner showed a lot of good will in sitting through Meistersinger! I suppose we want our loved ones to love what we love - especially music - because the music we love speaks for our soul in a language beyond words.
Yes, indeed, much goodwill!
The same day I cooked him cauliflower au gratin for lunch. (In the culinary arts I'd reached the heady heights of cheese sauce!)
With love and self-discipline he ate it, but cauliflower has scarcely darkened our door since.
Since then, we've learned to compromise through broccoli and Gilbert and Sullivan, but it's a good thing that back then I hadn't taken a shine to the Ring cycle, or six children might never have seen the light of day. Through such minutiae does God work His purposes!
I've often wondered what it would be like to have a different sort of music speak to my soul - Arabic eighth tones or Chinese opera. How would Western music seem then?
Best,
Otepoti
What a beautiful story, Otepoti! Thanks for sharing it. My husband and I have also learned to compromise through Gilbert and Sullivan, and through some of the "exotic" Italian vegetables I've introduced to his table (he used to ask about everything, "is this . . . cabbage?").
You raise some interesting questions about the effects of our culture's music on us. In Indian music, there are different ragas for different moods and for every hour of the day. I'm not an ethnomusicologist, and I wonder how people in other cultures respond to their own music. There have been complicated systems since the days of Pythagorus associating the notes of the western scales with different affects, moods, colors, etc. I wonder if those attributes are absolute, or culturally determined. I suppose that's a topic for a post someday.
I hoped I'd make you laugh - the earnest Wagner neophyte and the bewildered boyfriend, what a pair they were!
Yes, I'd like a post on the association of musical colour and the emotions. Do autistic people, for example, feel the same connection between minors and melancholy, and quick triplets and dancing? Don't see how you'd ever be able to find out though.
Was it Pythagoras who sorted out the Greek modes into Phrygian, Aeolian, Ionian and so on? And how authentic, do you think, are their representations on the modern scale? Surely not very - I'm sure the Greeks' incursions into Asia and the Persians' in the opposite direction would mean the music sounded much more like Indian music than anything we'd recognize as Western.
Didn't Plato want to ban some of the modes from his ideal republic, because of their deleterious effect? What sort of music, if any, would you ban from yours?
Otepoti
Some of the modes classified by the Greeks survived in the West in the form of liturgical chant, but, yes, many of them are unfamiliar to our ears now. I do recall that Plato wanted to ban some of them, because of the belief (which continued up until the 19th century) that music influences human temperament. Oh, what the heck, I'm sure it's true! But I don't know that I'd ban any. De gustibus, etc., and we do have free will . . .
Well, I finally found a tiny clip of the Chanson d'Orkenise ("vanilla" doesn't begin to describe our net access here) and it is lovely!
I liked the musical note at the top of the score - "roundly, in the style of a popular song." I wonder if Poulenc was thinking of Edith Piaf's style when he wrote it - I don't know how she would have coped with the vocal demands, but she would certainly have belted it out and made you see the characters. Just her sort of song, really - a pinch of low-life, a soupcon of heartbreak.
Best,
Otepoti
I don't know about Piaf, but Poulenc dedicated his lovely song "Les chemins de l'amour" to the French popular singer Yvonne Printemps. You can definitely find that one on youtube. It was the first song by Poulenc I heard as a teenager, when I would do things like sneak out of the house and walk for miles to attend recitals of French art songs . . . ah, youth.
"I would do things like sneak out of the house and walk for miles to attend recitals of French art songs . . ."
Ha, ha! Had a teenage flashback there. Yes, it's no good at all if your parents know, approve, SHARE your musical tastes. Takes all the fun out of it. Bad enough that your parents know about sex. Apparently.
Cheers,
Otepoti
I was just a freakishly music-nerdy teenager, but that side of me militated against my desperate desire to be cool . . . I wouldn't relive those days for anything.
"a freakishly music-nerdy teenager"
Oh, surely not freakish. But that reminds me -
(just one more story and then I'll go back to lurking, I promise, and let you get on with everything you have to do at the moment.)
When I was a shy fifteen, I got interested in the music of William Byrd, so I went to the local library to look at the scores. There was a title available by interloan, posted from Wellington PL. So I abbreviated the title to "Atalanta" and sent off for it. (The library was reluctant, because that was an expensive deal in those days.)
When the card notifying its arrival came, I was horrified. They'd scrupulously added the whole title to the card. There it was, glaring up: "Atalanta, or, The Maidenheade of Musick for the Virginal".
I was too embarrassed to go in and pick it up.
Best,
Otepoti
That is hilarious, Otepoti! You were just as freakishly nerdy as I was, though, at least judging from your story, a wee tad more virtuous.
One of my dissertation chapters is about the early music revival in late-nineteenth-century England as a counterbalance to the sweep of Wagnerism: early music was seen by some as the repository of virtue, and the "music of the future" as one of vice.
I truly hope you don't go back to lurking, as I've loved all your comments!
"a wee tad more virtuous"
Er, [small voice]...no. I passed as quickly as I could from embarrassment at virtue to embrace of vice.
I got into ordinarily tawdry stuff, and if I mourn my past less than others do theirs, it's because, even now, I understand its offensiveness to God less well than I should.
If only Dawn Eden had paid a visit to my high school. Someone give that girl a De Lorean.
Be that as it may, I stripped down to my granny bloomers and jumped into your comment pond to offer you a little ordinary chat after, well, after you-know-what. (Man, was that Old-Style Offer-It-Up, or what!) So maybe my work here is done!
Macaroni cheese is calling,
Best,
Otepoti
I've often wondered how an ordinarily innocent and freakishly nerdy girl like myself could have made the transition you describe so easily. I think it has something to do with the love of beauty and being mistaken about where it exists.
I'm extremely grateful for your thoughtful comments, which did much to cheer me, and I hope to see you around here again. In the meantime, God bless you and yours.
Knitting, I believe, refers to twiddling one's thumbs, like knitting needles. In other words, they asked their questions, did a whole lot of nothing else, then closed the gates to the city.
The guards are not knitting. Here "tricotaient" is being used with an old meaning: a "tricot" is a short heavy stick and "tricoter" can mean "to beat with a tricot". First the guards laugh at the carter and the tramp, then they beat them up.
Well, that gives a whole other meaning to the poem. Thank you for your correction!
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