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The Composer's Secret
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20524 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
1,673 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O'Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and other
national publications. |
Where, indeed, is beauty bred--in the heart or in the head?--William Shakespeare once posed rhetorically. In Alain Corneau's magnificent new film, Tous les Matins du Monde (All the mornings of the world), which opens in mid-November, the answer is a resounding yes for the heart.
The film, which played in France last year and won seven Cesars--or French Oscars--including Best Picture, is a first of its kind. In chronicling the relationship between seven-teenth-century French composer Marin Marais (Gerard Depardieu) and his emotionally remote and exacting teacher, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle), Tous les Matins delves deeply into the mysterious recesses of musical creation. It does not romanticize the subject, as so many other films have done, by insisting that great and sad melodies derive from instant or serendipitous inspiration. No. Instead, it shows how those great and sad melodies come from a process that is long, slow, and painful.
To understand how director Corneau and his coscenarist Pascal Quignard have imagined this process (imagined, since very little historical fact is known about Sainte Colombe--not even his first name), some background is necessary.
The music of Marin Marais (1656-1728) has just recently come to attention with the revival of interest in French baroque led by conductor William Christie and his performing ensemble, Les Arts Florissants. On these shores, it was Christie's performances of Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera, Atys, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989 and again in 1992 that sparked this renewed interest.
Marais, known as one of the greatest violists of his era, was performing in Lully's of his era, was performing in Lully's orchestra at the court of Louis XIV by the time he was twenty and soon became the "time beater" at the opera. His operas include Alcide, Semele, Ariane at Bacchus and, most widely known, Alcyone. He composed five books of pieces for viols as well. It is at Versailles that the elderly Marais, conducting a rehearsal, looks back at his apprenticeship under Sainte Colombe.
"He was all austerity and rage," he reflects, his eyes welling with tears. This highly cinematic technique--the flashback--takes us into Marais' confidence as he pictures himself as a young, brash, but eager-tolearn prodigy (played by Depardieu's own son, Guillaume). The film is narrated throughout by the elder, remembering marais. We, the audience, feel we are always taken into
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