Merry May

Our garden is bursting with blooms. Here are some of them. No further words required. Enjoy!

Puccini times Five

2024 is a year to remember for lovers of opera throughout the world. One hundred years ago one of the most popular composers of this often lavish and exotic art form died from an unsuccessful operation for his throat cancer (he was a fifty-a-day person for most of his life) at a Brussels clinic.

Lucca, Puccini’s birthplace, is celebrating its enviable cultural export with a panoply of events.

Our town of Bagni di Lucca is also commemorating this universal composer whose music speaks to all feeling hearts.

This beautiful place nestling in the Tuscan Apennines, has ever been a haunt for those in quest of its miraculous waters. From mediaeval countesses to illuminist philosophers to romantic poets guests have included Matilda di Canossa, Montagne, Byron, Shelley, Heine and Elisa Bonaparte.

Giacomo Puccini was also a guest here. As a penniless student he came to earn a crust of bread playing the piano for dances at the casino. Indeed Puccini’s first commission and his debut as a composer came thanks to our local chemist.
To celebrate this Bagni di Lucca is presenting a series of three concerts, one each for Puccini’s choral, organ and piano music respectively.

Yesterday afternoon our local cultural association, the Michel De Montaigne Foundation held the first one.

The concert opened with ‘Beata Viscera’, for two female voices, which Giacomo composed in 1875, dedicating it to his sister Iginia who had become a nun that year. The very short composition was only found last year in the Lucca archives by Aldo Berti and ascribed to Giacomo Puccini. Yesterday was its first modern performance. ‘Beata Viscera’ is a slight piece but its simple lyricism foretells what is to come.

The motet ‘Vexilla Regis Prodeunt’ followed. Dating from1878 it was commissioned by local chemist Adelson Betti who was also organist of our parish church of San Pietro of Corsena. The young Puccini received a supper with the Betti chemist’s family, his train fare and a slice of chestnut cake for his efforts. We have sung this piece with our local choir in the church at Corsena for which it was destined. The second part of the motet’s ternary form appealed to me but otherwise I was unimpressed by its often cheesy harmonies.

The third piece was the ‘Salve Regina’, for soprano and organ, composed in 1883 on a text by Antonio Ghislanzoni, Verdi’s librettist and bohemian poet. It cannot be defined as a piece of sacred music since the text is not liturgical but described as a sacred poem. The composition was also considered by its composer to be suitable for inclusion in his first opera, the one acter ‘Le Villi’.

The Mass for strings, four solos, choir and orchestra, written in 1735 by Giacomo Puccini senior, founder of the Puccini musical family line, formed the largest piece in the concert. Its performance here was intended as a tribute to a dynasty of musicians active in Lucca for five generations. Indeed starting with Giacomo Puccini Senior and rather like other musical families, in particular Bach’s, music remained the principal career for Puccini’s family until 1924.

In this Vivaldian-style composition, a Missa Brevis consisting of only Kyrie and Gloria, the great-great-grandfather of opera composer Giacomo, demonstrates in my opinion, amazing mastery of baroque musical language with lively arias, impressive choral fugues and creative instrumental accompaniments. Indeed Giacomo Senior can now be certainly recognized as among the best Italian composers of the late baroque period just as it was merging into the classic Mozart-Haydn period. Kapellmeister of the Serenissima Republic of Lucca, and known throughout Italy, Giacomo Senior made use of the services of excellent local musicians who were joined, on special occasions, by professionals from other regions and duchies of an Italy prior to its unification.

(The Giacomo Puccini Senior Mass – second half)

It was just as well that the programme was rearranged to include the Mass as the next-to-last piece. To have performed it at the start, though chronologically apt, would have unduly brought out the jejunesse of opera-Puccini’s early church compositions.

The concert closed with the Requiem, for choir, organ and solo viola, which Giacomo Puccini, operatic composer, wrote in 1905 at the request of the publisher Ricordi on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s death. I found it a very heartfelt, moving piece, a true masterpiece with a touching viola solo played by Caterina Mancini..

The concert performers included the Santa Felicita di Lucca String Quintet (Alberto Bologni and Valeria Barsanti, violins; Caterina Mancini, viola; Francesca Gaddi, cello; Gabriele Ragghianti, double bass). Daniele Boccaccio played the organ. The choir was the Nova Harmonia vocal ensemble under choir master Paola Vincenti. Soloists were Nunzia Fazzi soprano, Michela Mazzanti contralto, Adriano Gulino tenor, Nicola Farnesi bass. The conductor was Giorgio Fazzi. The artistic director was Silvano Pieruccini.

All-in-all the performers were well up to the task of letting the audience hear this rarely music to a high standard. (This in spite of a dramatic moment during the Puccini Senior Mass when a choir member fainted with a resounding thud on the platform and the performance had to be paused. Fortunately he was all right and the Mass was able to continue.) All soloists were excellent, the female ones particularly so and the strings were good.

Swiss Paint and Sound

What was it like to be a woman painter in the eighteenth century? Perhaps the image of a decorator comes up in the mind of some males as if women were only good at formulating colour schemes for a new apartment. Here, however, we are dealing with one of the finest professional portrait and history painters who also happened to be a founder member of the Royal Academy. Moreover she was not even British but Swiss. Angelica Kauffman was born in Chur in 1741 and died in Rome in 1807 and came from a relatively poor family. Her father was a good muralist and his travels for work in central Europe enabled Angelica to pick up not only his skills but also four languages.

Not only in the visual arts but also in music Angelica started to excel: she was a good musician and singer but gave up opera when a priest told her it was a ‘seedy’ profession. Later in life Kauffman depicted this difficult choice in her life in the following allegorical painting:

When Angelica was sixteen her mother died and she and her father moved to Italy where she became a member of Florence’s Accademia delle Belle Arti. In Rome Angelica met the British community there and her portraits of them became popular. So popular in fact that she decided to come to the United Kingdom accompanied by the wife of the British ambassador. In London Angelica became friends with Sir Joshua Reynolds and through him was one of the founder members of the Royal Academy, the only woman member, apart from the celebrated painter Mary Moser, to be a Royal Academician until the twentieth century.

Although Angelica’s portraits of friends and notables were (and continue to be highly prized) with their incisive, harmonious and vivid colours combined with a multi-layered application of paint she regarded herself primarily as a painter of historical subjects such as the ones shown here:

Disappointed at the apparent lack of interest in these Kauffman moved to Rome. Her move was also prompted by two incidents. First was a satirical painting referring to her relationship with Reynolds which she managed to have withdrawn from a Royal Academy exhibition. Second was her short marriage to an impostor who tried to grab her money. (Later in life Kauffman remarried, this time happily.)

In Rome Angelica continued her professional career as a painter and befriended many cultivated persons including Goethe and Winkelman some of whose portraits she painted.

Angelica Kauffman’s funeral was a grand affair arranged by neoclassical sculptor Canova, recently the subject of a fine exhibition at Lucca’s Cavallerizza. Indeed, Angelica can herself be regarded as a neoclassical artist especially with regard to her historical canvases and the poses of the figures in her paintings which are inspired by ancient sculptures.

I was able to make up my own mind regarding Angela Kauffman’s artistry at the current Royal Academy’s exhibition on her. Visiting the two rooms containing both her portraits and history paintings and including engraved prints of her work which proved very popular during her lifetime I was suitably seduced by Angelica’s skills in portraying her sitters whether they be the nobility or Lady Hamilton or that great classical scholar Winkelmann, murdered in Rome aged fifty in 1768 by his gay lover.

Angelica Kauffman’s historical pictures showed her virtuosity in depicting anatomy (how could she as a woman have attended life classes at the R.A. in the eighteenth century?) and composing complex groups of personages. However, lacking deeper knowledge of the subjects presented, I found Angelica’s portraits much more interesting. Already I could envisage the transition from the Baroque to a lighter Rococo style and even the hints of an impeding proto romanticism in the more fluid brush-strokes.

What a woman! I thought. Beauty and brains combined in Angelica. Her character was apparently full of charm but also ambitious. She needed to be in an age when women had to be at least twice, if not three times, as good as men in carrying out their profession. It was a truly worthwhile visit to this Swiss painter’s oeuvre especially since so many of her paintings are in private collections and, therefore, not normally accessible to the general public.

It was a happy coincidence that Switzerland had already appeared on our cultural horizon a couple of days previously at an organ concert given in the church of Saint Margaret Lothbury by Marc Fitze, titular organist at the HeiliggeistKirche in Berne. On one of the finest classical organs in London, built by George Pike England in 1801, Fitze performed a very attractive repertoire ranging from Biber and Galuppi to Lefebure-Wely and Liszt. The concluding piece by romantic composer Jacques Vogt was a Fantasie-orage ‘Scène champetre’ depicting a storm over lake Lucerne. For this piece some stops, by means only known to organists, had their wind-intake modified to imitate the sound of mountain goats. It was all quite charming and realistic! Meanwhile, we are promised more thunderstorms over London today in what promises to be another disappointing Bank holiday.

By Way of Kensal Green

Until the Victorian age burials of the dead in London took place in local churchyards; there were no provision for inhumation in dedicated cemeteries. Meanwhile, overcrowding of corpses in limited spaces created excellent opportunities for diseases and epidemics. Water supplies became polluted and the rat population prospered on the increased opportunities for feeding on churchyard decompositions. Moreover, because of increasing demand for dissection samples to be used in the city’s hospitals, the digging up and stealing of human remains provided an excellent means of employment for a nifty criminal fraternity known wittily as the ‘resurrectionists’.

Clearly something had to change, particularly in an age when London’s population was rapidly expanding. A parliamentary commission was sent to Paris and visited the new Père Lachaise cemetery, which has since become one of the French capital’s most evocative sites. Pleasantly surprised by the mortuary hygiene and posthumous elegance provided by a purpose-built burial ground the committee decided on a similar one for London.

The result was the Burial Act of 1832 which required new burial grounds in a list of urban parishes of London to be approved by the Secretary of State and enabled the closure of metropolitan churchyards to new interments making regulations regarding correct burial. This legislation led to the metropolis’ first modern cemetery: Kensal Green. Others followed in the capital. Between 1833 and 1841 West Norwood Cemetery, Highgate Cemetery, Abney Park Cemetery, Brompton Cemetery, Nunhead Cemetery, and Tower Hamlets Cemetery were established. They are now collectively known as the ‘Magnificent Seven’, both because they are indeed wonderful in their extent and faded grandeur and also because for me they remind one of the now sadly deceased cast of that fine western (modelled after a Japanese original) starring Yul Brynner.

We were privileged last Sunday to join a visit to Kensal Green cemetery, a visit organised by the Friends of this Grade One listed monument.

We saw the tombs of the great and the good whether they be writers like Thackeray or musicians like Cipriani Potter (named after an ancestor of my wife) or engineers like the Brunels father and son.

What particularly attracted me were the graves of James Hogg, friend of Shelley and co-author with him of the pamphlet for Atheism which got both of them sent down from Oxford, and his lovely wife Jane Hogg to whom Shelley dedicated several poems including the one addressed ‘To a Lady with a Guitar.’

Unlike the manicured layout and the highly restored tombs of our local Bagni di Lucca ‘English’. cemetery Kendal Green displays the archetypal decayed, moss covered , ivy, hanging burial ground. I felt this was the true atmosphere a cemetery containing the putrefaction of human flesh should have.

We passed fine statuary, monuments and chapels built in a variety of styles ranging from ancient Egyptian to Hellenic to Gothic to Neo-Platonism classical.

We entered into the sequestered gloom of the catacombs with the hope that none there might have been prematurely buried and that all measures would have been taken to prevent this horrible way to die from ever occurring. Would there have been any consumptive maidens unwrapped from yellowed winding sheets presumed expired before their day had really come, their broken nails dug into the dark wood of a sepulchral door with scratches blotched in blood? For if in Space no-one can hear you scream it is the same story if you are buried deep within the cold marble of a sepulchre!

Finally we encountered, for us,the most moving of all sights in Kensal Green Cemetery. We saw the cremation plaque to my wife’s beloved parents, my indulgent in-laws without whom I would have been unable to hold the soft hand by my side or to kiss those sweetest of lips. Requiescant in Pacem!

It is, indeed, a sobering thought to wander through a cemetery. Arising from cosmic dust through love we must all return to earthly dust through the pathway of death. More than ever before, listening to the profusion of birds singing their soul out and the scampering of foxes in the grass of the wilder parts of the cemetery, my senses awakened to the joy of being still alive, the bliss of at last walking in the first sunlit day London has had for some time, of being with a loved one by my side, of tasting the gift a greater one than I has given and that one just on loan until the final day on this planet arrives to find – one no one knows where, no one knows when – the moment where we go we know not where except that we know we shall never return to Kensal Green to walk it as we did today.

—

Not such a Flaming May

“She lies there curled up asleep like a comfortable feline, radiant in the golden light of a late summer afternoon. Luscious drapery enfolds her perfect body, so delicate that the sinews of her curves can almost be touched. Behind her an incandescent Mediterranean Sea glistens under the torrid sun’s rays. To the right an oleander flower teases with both beauty and death for in its blossom is a deadly poison.”

So began my post on this most alluring of all Victorian ‘academic’ paintings: ‘Flaming June’ by Lord Leighton when it returned in 2016 for a visit to the studio where he painted one year before his death in 1895.

Flaming June is now back on loan to the Royal Academy from her home in Puerto Rico’s art gallery while it is being rebuilt after the island’s disastrous 2020 earthquake.

In the same room on the opposite wall there’s another painting which relates to Flaming June in two ways. It’s a tondo, or composition in a rounded format, by one of the greatest of all artists, Michelangelo.

Firstly. Leighton’s painting is also a ‘tondo’ in the way its subject’s design is in a rounded format.

Secondly, Leighton was inspired by the pose of Michelangelo’s statue of Night on Lorenzo de’Medici’s new sacristy tomb at San Lorenzo church in Florence – a statue we viewed only last month on our visit to Michaelangelo’s secret room which we described in our post at https://longoio3.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/michaelangelos-secret-room/

On this somewhat murky Mayday it was wonderful to see these two masterpieces facing each other and relating to their respective historical ages: The Renaissance with its high aspirations and the Victorian with its equally high ambitions.

To see both in one room was an absolute treat.

Going Home

So here we are back at Mauritius International airport to start our return flight to blighty after two weeks splendid vacation in the (first time for us) southern hemisphere. During this time we did the following.

Organized tours

1 Went on a tour of the south part of the island

2 Went on a catamaran cruise.

3 Turtle watching boat trip

Our own exploration

1 To Port Louis waterfront

2 To Port Louis town

3 To Poudre d’Or

4 To Pamplemousses

5 To Souillac.

6 To Choisy

7 To Triolet

We visited the following museums:

1 International Slavery museum

2 Aapanasi Ghat

3 Postal museum

4 Blue Penny museum

5 Photographic museum

6 Robert Edward Hart Museum

We ate at the following places

1 Casuarina

2 Choisy (Kingfisher)

3 Souillac (Bonne Bouffe)

4 Poudre d’Or

This is, of course, in addition to relaxing in the sea, sun and sand for which the island is famous.

What do we wish we had done but didn’t?

1 More star-gazing, considering that it was the first time we’d seen the night-sky of the southern hemisphere

2 A closer look at the former capital of the island Mahebourg.

3 More time for hiking up the weird volcanic mountains of the Moka range.

Ah well we can’t do everything on one short holiday. But will we come back? Returning to the airport we met a couple who’d already stayed here five times! Not really for us though. Life is too short to keep on returning to the same places. No ‘boarding house at Bognor’ mentality here.

And the future of the island? Considering its smallish size and beauty we happily noted that in most of the places we visited the dreaded tourist was hardly encountered. In almost all cases we were the only ‘westerners’ on the local buses and the lovely places we encountered seemed to belong to us alone.

Hyper-tourism is becoming an increasing threat in many parts of the world and authorities there are attempting to combat it. Venice, for example, is now charging admission to tourists. The city of Vivaldi and Palladio is ever being reduced to a Disneyland theme park, it seems.

Will Mauritius become such a theme park? A friend tells me that her husband was brought up at Cure-pipe on the island where his father, after service in the King’s Rifles in Africa found employment managing a sugar plantation. She referred to the very bad roads on which carts trundled with their loads and the calm and clarity of the lagoon waters surrounding the beaches protected by coral reefs.

Today the island is traversed by six-lane highways, and there’s a metro system from Port Louis to Cure-pipe. The waters look still clear but increasingly plastic is being identified in the fish which swim in them. Moreover, areas which once were clearly country are bring built on. At least two major shopping centres have sprung up and a ‘cyber-city’ is being developed. However, picturesque fishing villages such as the ones at Poudre d’Or and Souillac still survive and much of the plateau region is a well protected national park.

So who knows? One thing is certain: the multicultural milieu of Mauritius where Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists continue to respect each others’ beliefs serves as an excellent example of the tolerance and co-existence prevalent in Mauritius, increasingly rare in a world ever being divided by bloody factionalism and extremism.

Our last Mauritian sunset?

Poetical Seascapes

Today we bussed, in a three hour journey, from one end of the island to the other to visit the house of the great Mauritian poet Edward Robert Hart at Souillac. Built with coral and volcanic rock it’s an idyllic place surrounded by the sound of Indian Ocean breakers and woodland birds.

We have to admit that we did not know of Hart, who died in 1954, before finding out about his place in the sweet fishing village of Souillac in the south of the island. Without even a school education the poet said that, like Wordsworth, he learned everything from nature. And what an area to learn than this!

Edward Robert Hart, also known as Edouard Hart, was born in 1936 and is considered one of the island’s most important poets. His work often explores themes of identity, colonialism, and the cultural landscape of Mauritius. Hart wrote in both English and French, reflecting the linguistic diversity of Mauritius. His poetry is celebrated for its lyrical beauty and its profound reflections on the human condition.

Hart also did various translations including the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit into French.

Edward Robert Hart had many friends, both within and outside the literary and artistic community. As a poet and writer, he associated with fellow writers, poets, and intellectuals who shared his interests and passions. Additionally, he had friends from various social circles, including those involved in activism, cultural movements, or academia. He formed connections with a diverse range of people throughout his life among which were Rabrindranath Tagore.

Among the poet’s possessions in his house I noted a large unstringed violin. It looked more like a viola. Behind it was a sheet of popular songs. I wonder what else Hart might have played and with whom.

The very personable curator of the house regretted that there were none of Hart’s books remaining there. I wonder who has his library now? I also wonder who, apart from French speakers, reads him today.

Here is one of Hart’s finest poem which is also placed on the front door of his house.

Old-Fashioned Photo Shop

Regarding our visit to Port Louis’ photographic museum on a day when we returned to Port Louis and found that the floods had closed the town’s Natural History Museum so no chance of seeing any Dodo exhibits But we met Madame Breville, who curates her recently deceased husband’s amazing Photographic Museum, and enjoyed visiting the market and Chinatown.

Regarding the photographic museum.Sandra comments:

“A most welcoming lady with a genuine enthusiasm for photography and her, sadly recently deceased, husband’ s (Tristan Breville) creation of this amazing museum packed with cameras of all types, lenses, light meters, coloured filters. Huge film projectors, film cameras, printing presses to but the top exhibit is the daguerreotype collection on copper for wealthy people, on tin for less wealthy people. It seems these were the first in Mauritius 1836 circa!”

Golden Dust

Thanks to an excellent privately developed local site at

https://www.mauritius-buses.com/

we have been able to make more sense of Mauritius’ dense bus network.

Yesterday we decided to visit a place near the aptly named Cape Malheureux commemorating a shipwreck which inspired enlightenment writer Bernardin De Saint Pierre to write his immortal ‘Paul et Virginie’.

The first part of our bus journey was on an express bus which meant that for over thirty minutes we were holding on for dear life as a somewhat clapped out Leyland rushed at break neck speed through a countryside of sugar cane plantations and papaya trees.

We reached the town of Goodlands, a very busy shopping centre with a colourful Hindu temple.

Transferring to a more leisurely vehicle we arrived at our destination, the quiet fishing village of Poudre d’Or.

At the end of a promontory stands the monument to one of the most famous shipwrecks in literature.

The ‘Saint Geran’, a ship belonging to the French East India company, was launched in 1736. Her first sailings were from Pondicherry under the command of captain Laurent Dupleyssis. In 1744 with a cargo of food for Mauritius, which was suffering from a terrible drought, she was shipwrecked off the island’s northern coast. Just nine out of her crew of 149 survived.

It was this event that inspired Jaques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, a French civil engineer and botanist living on the island, to write a novel which for many marked the new sensibilities of the romantic movement. In Bernardin’s story the heroine meets her fate by drowning when the ship she is returning on from France is wrecked on the lethal reefs of Mauritius. Could anyone have saved Virginie? The fact is that she could have saved herself if only she had taken off the cumbersome eighteenth century clothes she was wearing but which she kept on out of a sense of modesty. Ah well!

After our visit to the monument’s site, which also holds a much more recent memorial to another drowning, we walked to Poudre d’Or’s local eatery where we tucked into an appetising biryani, just one dish characteristic of an island which, true to its nature as an oceanic crossroad, invites cuisine from Africa, India, China and Europe into a deliciously assorted melting pot of flavours.

Leaving the beach at sunset

we concluded our evening by attending a rumbustious session of the island’s traditional music form, the Sega which incorporates elements from both Africa and India. For long despised by more prudish authorities this lively dance has encapsulated the spirit of the island in much the same way as reggae has done for the West Indies.

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A Blue Penny for One’s Thoughts?

Mauritius is not only famous for an animal it sadly (and the world) no longer has, the Dodo, but for being the first colony of the former British Empire to issue postage stamps. The ‘Penny Black’, the world’s first stamp was issued by the UK in 1840 thanks to the efforts of Sir Rowland Hill. In 1847 the wife of the governor of Mauritius planned a ball and thought that sending out invitations to her guests using a system like the one in the UK would be a good idea. Luckily there was an engraver on the island by name of Joseph Barnard able to print stamps. He employed the design used by Hill and produced a red-orange penny and a blue two penny stamp. These have since become some of the world’s most valuable ones. An international consortium recently successfully bid for two examples (offer of £10,000,000) and they have returned to the island which originated them.

We visited the old Mauritius Post Office on the seafront. However, among the historical exhibits we could only see their copies. The stamps are so fragile that they can only be exposed to light for a couple of days each year.

Perhaps Mauritius’ most interesting museum is the Blue Penny situated on the Caudan waterfront. It’s housed in a lovely old eighteenth century building.

The museum is divided into thematic sections.

These are:

The age of discovery

The island builders

Port Louis

The postal adventure

Engraved memory (but still no original stamp displayed)

Paul et Virginie:

This recounts that emotional tale of love and death by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre first published in 1788 and which continues to haunt the island, indeed the world. It was wonderful to see Prosper Epinay’s original statue of the two tempest-crossed young lovers showing Paul assisting Virginie in crossing a stream in the forest. This sweet sculpture has been recently returned to the island through generous donations

Port Louis waterfront has turned into a smart and lively promenade. We were glad to have gathered so much information about Mauritius from the museums strung along it and were prepared for another visit to the capital.