More detective work leads to Fontaine de Vaucluse...

Yet again, the blogging world brings like minds together. My trail of curiosity and detection that went from finding Elizabeth David’s house in Ménerbes to the tragic suicide of artist Nicolas de Staël in Antibes (The concert and the final painting) piqued the interest of another Francophile, Evelyn Jackson at Melanged Magic.

What was it about the music in last concert de Staël listened to in Paris that had such a galvanising, creative and ultimately tragic effect on him? Intrigued, Evelyn listened to a recording of Schoenberg's Serenade Opus 24, and read in the accompanying commentary that the central portion of the work is a sonnet by Petrarch.

‘Which sonnet was it?’ writes Evelyn. ‘Could there be a clue to why this particular piece of music 'sang' to de Staël? I spent most of the morning doing the Google thing and found that the sonnet of Schoenberg's 'Serenade' is Sonnet 217, part of Petrarch's Cantoniziere to Laura, his life-long love and Muse. It took a bit of digging, but here is the sonnet in English:

Sonnetto 217

Once I hoped, lamenting so justly
making such fervent verses heard,
that pity's warmth might be felt
in that hard heart that freezes in mid-summer:

and that the cruel cloud, that chills
and veils it, might disperse with the breeze
of my ardent voice, or others might hate her
for hiding those eyes that destroy me.

Yet I seek no pity for myself, nor hatred
for her: I do not wish it, nor is it possible
(such are my stars, and my cruel fate):

but I sing her heavenly beauty, so
that, when I'm free of this flesh, the world
will know the sweetness of my death 

‘It's one of Petrarch's later sonnets that speaks more of unrequited love and the reality that hope is gone. Laura barely knows he exists and will never love him. I think the last stanza is very telling. The poet almost looks forward to the “sweetness of my death”. Is this what compelled de Staël to take his own life? Was he following Petrarch's advice? Certainly it was well-known that de Staël suffered from bouts of despair and depression, but could the music with its core of unrequited love and death have tipped him over the edge? We'll never know for sure, of course. All this is pure speculation driven by that endless curiosity to know more of the story. But isn't it intriguing how poetry, music and great paintings melange into a story of love, life and death?’

I don’t think I can add anything to Evelyn’s words, except to say thank you very much for the determined research and pushing the story on.

In yet another illustration of how creativity always seems interconnected, the medieval Italian poet Petrarch is forever associated with Fontaine de Vaucluse – a beautiful and (out of season) a rather eerie spot that ends in a wall of rock and cold green water. It happens to be one of my favourite places in Provence and I blogged about it here, giving some of the background to the story of Petrarch’s infatuation with Laura.

The concert and the final painting

The trouble with being endlessly curious is that there's always something else you'd like to know. Perhaps curiosity is a prerequisite of being a writer, or a storyteller at least: you are searching for a coherent narrative, striving to flesh it with detail.

So when I wrote yesterday about Nicolas de Staël listening to an orchestral concert in Paris and being so affected by the music that he rushed back to his painting studio in Antibes, I realised almost as soon as I had posted that I couldn't leave it at that. What was the music that had struck him so deeply? What was the last painting he worked on so feverishly and left incomplete?

When I found out, the answer was so poignant and made sense of an image I'd seen previously without understanding its significance, that I had to come back with a postscript.

To some extent this PS is also a correction of various details in the first post. It's a given that the more research you do, the more unreliable initial sources are proved to be, and so it is with this story. For example, I found a photograph of the building in Antibes where de Staël had his studio, which cannot possibly have been on the fourth floor:

There were also suggestions that a failed love affair - "un amour d'idiot" - had contributed to his despair, rather than the disparaging critic. As for the music, it seems the artist attended two concerts in Paris: the first featured pieces by one of his favourite avant garde composers, the Austrian Anton Webern, and the second - the crucial one - was a performance of Schoenberg's Serenade for Seven Instruments and Bass Voice (op. 24).

 

The Schoenberg concert was on March 6th, 1955, and it seems that the drama of de Staël's overnight flight south to begin painting followed almost immediately by his death was just that: a dramatic myth.

If he died on March 16th, then he painted feverishly for at least a week. But when you see what he produced in that time, it's certainly possible to believe that he hardly stopped for food or rest.

His penultimate canvas was The Piano (reproduced above) which was more than two metres by one and a half metres in size. And the artist's last, unfinished work, was The Concert, a truly massive six metres by three and a half.