Literary Horizons Blog 2

Research in Paris Mozart's Mother 1777-78 Moliere and Mozart 19thrt century writers My memory lane of 1957 - au pair, the war in Algiers Living next to' Voltaire Thorkild Hansen 1947                                    Edith Piaf 1949

Is there anything more Parisian than Edith Piaff?  Paris October 1st 2011 Charles de Gaulle Airport, a bit of an anthill, and Europe’s second largest airport after Heathrow, revealed its worst sides in the stifling heat. I swore at the useless wheels on my suitcase as well as the heavy winter clothes, including trekking boots that I had brought... It was cold in Copenhagen … How stupid was I! The tiny iPod hardly weighed a thing and it is like caviar to your ears, for a number of reasons: The actor Klaus Maria Brandauer’s recording of 365 ingenious letters to and from Mozart. Granted, over the years, I have worked my way through Mozart’s letters more than once, but his words keep providing me with new associations whenever I hear them. And the actor Senta Berger’s recording of Martin Gecks ‘Mozart, a Biography’. The former Bond-girl has developed into a great character actor over the years. I so enjoy her lovely voice and her sensitive reading. I make plenty of little notes in my notebook. As I am currently also in the process of recording my own books, I can hardly find a better teacher than Senta Berger. Well, perhaps the Danish actors Vigga Bro or Githa Nørby. I love the sound of elderly ladies’ voices. The experience and passion … they are simply more daring. I have also downloaded, as we say, lots of music onto my little iPod. Mozart, of course, and much else, which I shall elaborate on in some of the later blogs.

The copies of old copperplates from Paris in the 1770s weighed a lot more, but they were necessary if I wanted to retrace Mozart and his mother’s steps. I had also added a few travel books, not in the sense of how to get from A to B, because for that we can just access Google Earth, but more in terms of the memories of the people from the same era, not least the circle around Mozart.

What connects Molière and Mozart?

Don Juan… or Don Giovanni in Italian, which is the language Mozart used for his opera.

We know that Fridolin Weber, Constanze’s father gave Mozart his edition of Moliére’s collected works, a valuable gift at the time, and Don Juan is after all one of Molière’s plays.

Whether it was Lorenzo da Ponte who came up with the idea for Mozart’s opera … da Ponte had been a friend of the notorious seducer Giacomo Gasanova in his youth … or whether it was Mozart who got interested in the theme from reading Molière’s play, we do not know. But Mozart did spend much time thinking about and looking for suitable themes for his operas, and he read numerous librettos, which he might or might not have wanted to write the music for, so it is not all together unlikely that he was inspired by Molière.

Molière, 1622-73 was baptized in the church Saint-Eustache, from where Mozart’s mother was buried. Paris was only a small town in those days.

The character ‘Don Giovanni’ dates all the way back to the 1300s. 

Pont Royal

However, the most important books I’d brought were Thorkild Hansen’s two-volume ‘A Studio in Paris’- his journals from 1947-52.

Thorkild Hansen arrived in Paris in August 1947, on the North Express, which arrived at Gare du Nord at 4 pm each day. In one hand, he carried a midwifery bag with underwear, and in the other, he carried a secondhand typewriter. He had a grant that would last him six months and an agreement with the Danish Newspaper Ekstrabladet about sending them articles, which was how he would make his living there. He was twenty years old. 

It was quite natural for me to be sent to do housework in Paris at the age of eighteen, granted as an au pair, while Thorkild Hansen, at the age of 20, was already a fully fledged writer, he had at least published his first book about Jacob Paludan. And if you want to read a gender difference into that, I certainly would not oppose.

Thorkild Hansen’s journal ‘A Studio in Paris’ opens with three quotes:

Als Artist hat man keine Heimat

in Europa ausser Paris.

                                        Nietzsche

Paris - a fine place to be 

young in, a necessary part of a man's education.

                 Hemmingway

                                                         

 Held den, som før hans Hu var  tung

   med rene øjne saa Paris.

      Her blir den gamle Mester ung, 

        den unge Mester ser sig vis.

                                                                Sophus Claussen

I too arrived in Paris … sitting down all the way … on the North Express, only it was ten years after Thorkild Hansen, and I was eighteen years old. Paris had not changed much since the war, which still felt very recent, and there was absolutely no money to be spent on modernizations. 

Which was lucky for me, because if we disregard Baron Haussmann’s rigorous changes to streets and facades somewhere between 1853 and 1870, the remaining buildings looked pretty much as they would have, when Mozart and his mother, Maria Anna, arrived in 1777… on what was to be her last journey.

On the other hand, France had been at war since 1954 and this time the enemy was practically within - in the shape of the French colony, Algiers. The rebel movement ALN, had taken the cloves off, as had France, and that made an impact on everyday life in Paris. There were heavily armed soldiers in front of all public buildings, and there were sacks with decapitated Algerians. They had been on ALN’s ‘list of traitors’.

Not really an invitation to take a romantic stroll along the Seine in the moonlight. On the contrary, I went absolutely nowhere after dark, until I met Uschi (Ursula) in the Tuileries, where all au pairs as well as the professional nounou’s (in pale blue uniforms with bright white aprons) would take the children in their care for walks

 Ma Mère

❤

We were both daughters of single mothers, which gave us a sort of shared identity. Unmarried or divorced mothers were rare at that time, and they were undoubtedly no good! My mother was divorced ... and rather modern for her time. And she was a member of the Danish resistance. I have outlined her in the novel ‘Somersault’, the second volume in my trilogy ‘The Labyrinth of Evil’. She was a passionate woman who lived a life filled with sadness.

Uschi’s mother was a war-widow and deeply religious. She is included in the third volume of abovementioned trilogy, which I plan to publish in 2014.

We quickly realised that we also shared the same sense of humour; the most important foundation of any friendship. Furthermore, we both loved reading and we were both eager to master the great French writers. And when we partly succeeded in doing so, we practically drowned ourselves in books. Books we borrowed from ‘my’ family’s extensive bookshelves. It was a long time before Mac, iPod and iPad became our new reading devises. In fact, it was even before ‘everyman’ had access to a television.

Uschi also worked for a family. However, she never went beyond the children’s rooms and the kitchen, where she ate with the youngest children. They were not allowed to sit at the dining table until they were able to ‘eat properly, using a knife and a fork’!

Ushi attended French classes at Alliance Francaise, something I was very envious of, but Madame’s husband, ‘Monsieur’, called Alliance Francaise a ‘brothel’! There were always hordes of young men waiting outside the entrance once school had finished, and it was his duty to look after me while I was in his care. According to him. 

I was sent to École Polytechnique instead, where I attended evening classes with students who had not yet passed their A-levels, or who needed to improve their grades in order to go to university. I only had to attend the French lessons, which I was far from qualified for, but Monsieur asked me to leave the office at the time of enrolment, and he was already flirting away with the woman who had to stamp the papers in all the proper places. He was a natural Don Juan, and his had his way.

It proved less successful for both me and my professors, so I ended up leaving after only six months. I actually learnt more from being at home with Madame.

Monsieur drove me back and forth in his really old 2CV. It was so ‘bouncy’ that if his chosen parking space was on the tiny side, he would place me on the bonnet and tell me to bounce up and down, which allowed him to park the shock absorber under the car parked in front! And then it was just a question of getting out of there fast. 

The weekly shopping in "Les Halles" was something special. More in a later blog including Saint Eustache and "Madam Mutter".

To all intents and purposes, Uschi and I came from such different backgrounds that a genuine friendship was not really on the horizon; however, we decided that we were the new post-war generation; in other words, we would be leading the way. That made us laugh; after all we knew that were nobodies, relying on our families for nylon stockings and new bras. That made us laugh even harder, in the way that you can only laugh when you are eighteen years of age and excited about everything that lies ahead of you, no matter what that may be.

It was the year that Albert Camus was given the Nobel Prize in literature and his picture was on the front page of all the newspapers. Uschi and I loved him. Both his writings and his looks. The young boys outside Alliance Francaise were not competition at all. Today we would say that he was cool. Camus had been a member of the resistance during the war, he was born in Algiers and he wrote similarly to Kafka, as Madame informed me when we got around to Albert Camus in her education - of me! I was so lucky.

Both Uschi and I still suffered nightmares on account of the war – we were so young during the war, however, the things I had been through paled considerably when compared to Uschi and her mother’s flight from the Russians. We talked a lot about that. Perhaps that was why Camus’ texts made such an impression on us. The symbolism of The Plague sent shivers down my spine: fascism, the persecution of the Jews along with everything else.

//As Rieux stood listening to the cheering city, 

he remembered that this expression of jubilation was constantly at risk, because he knew what the exultant crowd of people did not, even if you could read about it in books, namely that the germ of the plague never dies and never disappears completely; it can slumber for decades in furniture and linen; patiently biding its time in living rooms, basements, suitcases, handkerchiefs and old papers, and then the day may arise, when you least expect it, and the plague will once again awaken its rats and send them off to die in a happy city.//

Algiers gained its independence in 1962, but by that time, Uschi and I had both long since returned home. We wrote to one another until the Berlin Wall put a stop to that. Or at least I no longer received replies to my letters.

However, we were still in Paris:

Walking home together at night did not prevent a mugging on our way back from Champs Élysées and a trip to the cinema or a frightening experience in Louvciennes, a small town approx. 11 miles outside of Paris, where I spent the following summer on my own with the family’s three children. Madame had given birth to little ‘Corontin’, the much longed for son during the winter. 

I survived ... both children and Arabs, and I’ll get back to that in another blog.

However, that was nothing like how Mozart and his mother perceived Paris in 1777. Mozart despised the French and their affected mannerisms ... this is after all the rococo era ... he did not like the arrogance of the nobility, and he did not like their food ... neither did his mother. He hated the dirty streets that he had to walk along, as he could not afford a carriage, when he occasionally had to teach a wealthy aristocrat’s ugly daughter.

And although he was offered a position as organist and composer at Versailles, he would rather break an arm than not follow his dream and plan: to compose operas! He was finally free of his two tormentors from Salzburg; papa Leopold and his employer Prince and Bishop Hieronimus Colloredo, and he did not want to tie himself down to yet another aristocrat, let alone the French King.

Mozart did not think that making a living as an independent composer would pose any problems ... his independent streak was already in full bloom.

Madame Mutter tried to persuade her son to accept the position at Versailles, keeping their financial situation in mind, which Mozart was well aware of. He gladly sold off everything that he could do without.

Anna Maria fretted, but she had no way of controlling her freedom-seeking son, even if that was the real purpose of her accompanying him on this journey.

She would highly likely have argued that there was a far from insignificant theatre at Versailles, Opéra Royal, where Marie Antoinette would joyfully perform whenever she felt like it.

When the Queen read Beaumarchais’ play, The Marriage of Figaro, which Louis XVI had denied all theatres the right to  perform, she was so excited that she put on the play regardless, with herself in one of the leading roles, and it is claimed that the king enjoyed himself immensely.

Opéra Royal, which was situated within the castle itself, could seat 1000 spectators and was built quite modestly from wood, stucco and papier mâché. In 1777 it would have been a revelation.

In 2009, the opera was opened after a complete renovation and as is visible in the video below, modern audiences could experience the wild ‘Spectacles’ exactly as the spoilt nobles did hundreds of years ago. Except for Mozart ... or he would most certainly have mentioned it in his letters to Papa Leopold. And if he hadn’t, his mother surely would have.

Enjoy!

   

                                                      SPECTACLES À VERSAILLES 

           Realisateur Monteur: Peterson Almeida:


          To be continued in Blog 3