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.

Fontaine de Vaucluse

           

            The River Sorgue flows green and glassy through Fontaine de Vaucluse. The green is extraordinary, a malachite composition of underwater meadows of emerald weeds, reflection of the deep greens on the steep valley above, and the ice-blue purity of the mysterious source that boils up from a pool beneath the cliffs, a pool so deep they say it has never been accurately measured.

                                                                 from The Lantern



The village is a dead end, a beautiful place where the river rises from a wall of rock. Held captive on three sides by fractured precipices that climb steeply into the sky, Fontaine de Vaucluse is the place that gave this part of Provence its name, from the Latin Vallis Clausa, the closed valley.

      

The stones breathe a tangible sense of antiquity. People have been drawn here since Neolithic times; a ruined castle perches high above. The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74) lived here and wrote love sonnets to his Laura. An unrequited love, it was, that brought "a rain of tears”. Though a hundred years later, when the poet was being recognised as the Father of the Renaissance, his worship of Laura from afar was already being romanticised. And I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible that the water coming down from the mountain in this image could well represent the river at Fontaine de Vaucluse.

        Petrarch, Laura, and Cupid c. 1444 (from the Bibliotheca Nazionale Centrale di Roma)

But there are mischievous Provencal fables, tales told for centuries by the shepherds as they walked their flocks between the summer and winter pastures, that take a different view of Petrarch’s doomed love. A rather macabre slant, as it happens, involving the switching of plague-victims’ bodies in Avignon, and much more besides for the storytellers to relish on their interminable journeys. The tale of The Shepherd of Fontaine can be found in the collection The Provencal Tales by Michael de Larrabeiti.

Nowadays the paper mill driven by the Sorgue prints Petrarch’s words on single hand-blocked sheets, embedded with tiny dried petals, among many other tourist offerings. Along the side of the mill, a path leads from shops and restaurants up to the source of the river: the great bowl of spring water that is the only exit for the vast caverns of water in the subterranean basin that stretches from Mont Ventoux to the Lure in the east.

Looking deep into the greens and blues in the pool is like a meditation; you can get lost in the shifting dreamscape of colour, cold-clear and almost iridescent. This photograph was snapped with our basic little camera and simply cropped. I’ve done nothing to the colour.

Trying to describe the river here, as it rushes and then stills close to the weirs, I often feel inadequate to the task of capturing it in words, tasting the bitterness of inarticulacy, perhaps trying too hard. Better perhaps simply to sit and absorb the scene at one of the café terraces, where you can sip a glass of rosé while the timeless flow of extravagant sea-greens gurgles and rushes past your table. Then the pictures form, half-real, half-imaginary, and the words come too.