Observations rhônalpines

It was wonderful to go away to France again the other week.  It had been two years since my previous trip, and I had been missing it!  A friend from school and I cooked up a plan to split a week between Grenoble and Lyon, and to take the new Eurostar service which runs directly from St Pancras station in London to Lyon Part-Dieu (Or did we go to Lyon just in order to use the new Eurostar service?).

Grenoble depuis la Bastille

We looked down on Grenoble from the Bastille fortress to see how the city is set among the Alps ; in Lyon we saw the cathedral, took the funicular up to the basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière (an old devotion re-invigorated after Lyon was spared violence in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870), wandered at will around the Roman ruins and met a friend who is just beginning a year teaching at the ENS.  We also made a day trip to Pérouges, a remarkable medieval village perched neatly on a hill-top like a board-game.  (It even sounds like a board-game — ‘who fancies a game of Pérouges?’).

Your turn… up the stairs or down the street?

As well as great monuments there were also smaller things to see: lesser elements of ordinary French life which struck me as being (sadly) absent from Britain.  There was the quite calm, quite relaxed, quite sensible, quite self-unconscious group of young Grenoblois, about twelve or thirteen years old, on their way somewhere on a warm afternoon; there was the six- or seven-year-old boy perched on a climbing-frame in the Jardin Public, reading a bande déssinée (comic book).  There was the game of boules in progress in the same garden.  There was the man carrying six baguettes home on the funicular from Vieux-Lyon.  There was the children’s library in Grenoble which, though adjacent to the main library, is advertised as a distinct bibliothèque de jeunesse with its own clientèle.   

Another aspect of French life unavailable in Britain…

This reverie might have been brought to an abrupt halt by the concession to pragmatism of new automatic checkouts in the local Monoprix, but then I saw an assistant directing the customers to the nearest free machine, steadfastly observing the old custom by which about shopkeepers and “chers clients” greet each other in shops with a “Bonjour, Monsieur” and – more significantly still – part with a “Merci, Monsieur, bonne soirée, au revoir.”  I went on to see quiet but sincere patriotism in the Musée des Troupes de montagne (Museum of French Alpine troops), where the explanatory notes refer to these troops’ defence of ‘notre patrie’ (‘our homeland’).  And sincere faith, too: I found out about the ‘pari sur une confiance totale’ made by the bishop of Grenoble, Guy de Kerimel, who has put a great effort into revamping his diocesan youth service.  Isèreanybody (a pun on Isère, Grenoble’s département, and a slightly literal English translation of the French ‘il y a quelqu’un?’, ‘is anybody there?’), provides students and young professionals with their own chaplain and parish church, and maintains a vibrant presence on the new media, exactly as Benedict XVI asked.

There was the language too, of course: though they miss out on hearty Anglo-Saxon words like ‘stealthier’, ‘brought’ or ‘haven’, it is almost music.  Here are the beginnings of a list of some of my favourite French words:

1. gourmandise (f) – greed, gluttony, a plump and well-fed word.
2. orgueilleux – proud (in the sinful sense), a word that is puffed out like the chest!
3. fierté (f) – pride (not sinful!), a dignified, defiant word.
4. grenouille (f) – a frog.
5. plouf – splash (a different sound, but you end up just as wet)
6. pamplemousse – grapefruit… a luscious, juicy word.  Letters will run down your chin if you are not careful!
7. moelleux – no translation!  Soft, gooey, dark, molten, mellifluous.  The best definition is the moelleux au chocolat (not to be clicked on during Lent).
8. mie (f) – no translation here either!   Bread’s doughier interior, which in France contrasts with the crumbling golden crust…
9. veiller – to keep watch.  A lovely, quiet, unobtrusive but steady word.  There is a beautiful concision to the reply given by Frédéric Langlais, the hero of Paul Berna’s Le Carrefour de la Pie (‘Magpie Junction’), to his father when asked what he is doing up in the middle of the night: ‘Je veillais, chuchota Frédéric’ (“I was keeping watch,” whispered Frédéric).  That is more poetry than prose.  Paul Berna, a French children’s author who wove befriendable characters into realistic and beautifully-written books, ought to be much better known.
10. lugubre – bleak, dim, gloomy, dismal.
11. s’introduire (dans) – simply ‘to enter’, ‘to let oneself into’, but the French has a deliciously surreptitious and stealthy undertone.  The subject of the sentence is definitely up to no good… ‘S’introduire dans les lieux’… to let oneself into the premises…

Do any French or Francophile readers have favourite French words of their own?  You are welcome, as always, to comment…

Un individu s’est introduit dans les lieux…

‘Queen indeed over a Kingdom worthy, the World's wonder.’

Today our Queen Elizabeth becomes the British throne’s longest-reigning monarch,  surpassing her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s reign of sixty-three years and two hundred and sixteen days.  With John Masefield’s Laureate Coronation lines in my mind, I wonder whether we have deserved her, for all that this country might, as I still believe quietly, be in with a shout of being the ‘World’s wonder’.

May God save the Queen, and bring forth Masefield’s hoped-for 

‘…season of the springing seed

Of all a People one in an endeavour

To make our Sovereign lady Queen indeed

Over a Kingdom worthy, the World’s wonder.’

Lux aeterna

Today (6th September) is the eightieth anniversary of the death, at the age of nine, of Michael Kendrick Howells.  A form of polio or meningitis felled him in only three days; his father Herbert Howells, in the nearly fifty years by which he outlived his son, never overcame this loss.  

Herbert Howells had been, before the Great War, a promising young composer of mainly orchestral work; he was Stanford’s favourite at the Royal College of Music and shone among the brightest in that fascinating constellation, darkened forever by the 1914-1918 war, of Edwardian and Georgian composers and writers with some connection to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire or the Marches.  He was a close friend of Ivor Gurney and the poet F.W. Harvey; all three had Gloucester connections.  During the war he had narrowly avoided death not in the trenches but from Graves’ disease, and become the first person in the country to undergo radium treatment.  Afterwards his career had flagged rather, especially after the unfavourable reception of his (sublime!) second piano concerto, about which more here.  His son’s death in 1935 silenced him utterly.

Only his daughter Ursula was able to persuade him to compose again; she suggested that he ‘write something for Michael’.  The work that resulted remained untouched for thirty years, before Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams found out about it and persuaded him to allow it to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival.  Hymnus Paradisi is a monumental work, a Requiem with various additions from the Psalms and the Sarum Book of Hours.  It is performed rarely mainly because it calls for two soloists, an enormous orchestra, two choirs and organ, but these were mustered during the Proms in 2012, and I was very fortunate indeed to be there in the Royal Albert Hall to hear it.  I will never forget looking up from the arena to see a wall of singers rise up to sing, nor feeling the organ’s low bellow through my feet, nor indeed the thirty seconds of silence before Martyn Brabbins lowered the baton and unfettered the applause, during which he held the score aloft for us to applaud.

Howells is one of those composers whose work, listened to the first time, often seems to be thoroughly difficult and complex but for a few striking moments which demand a second listen, and then a third, and so on, until its beauty can be heard properly.  This might be said of Hymnus Paradisi, but even a first hearing cannot miss the crescendo of grief just before the three minute mark, nor the audible light which brightens and brightens until it fills the whole work from the Sanctus (22 min) onwards: 

The loss of his son is generally regarded as a clear rupture in Howells’ compositional career as well as in his life.  The music he wrote after 1935 was almost all intended for the Anglican choral tradition (in all he wrote twenty settings of the Evening Canticles), more melismatic and often more searing.  However, Howells did occasionally return to the past for material.  The Hymnus Paradisi itself draws heavily on the Requiem that he had already written.  And I have an idea that the final movement (Holy is the True Light, and passing wonderful…), which begins like this:

…might be a more magnificent, a heavier, yet also a more luminous version, in which wistfulness has hardened into grief, of the opening of the old Howells’ Piano Quartet of 1916 (itself perhaps a response to death, since Howells himself was gravely ill at this point)?

While I am on the subject, I wonder if the second theme of the Shropshire Lad rhapsody of George Butterworth (killed in action in 1916)…

… is quoted in the 1925 piano concerto, by the clarinet once only, at the point below?

To return to this post’s original subject, I would like to record another thought about Hymnus Paradisi: all the luminous chords, the massed choirs and the thundering organ were summoned all for the sake of a child of nine years.  It is too easy to forget, not least in a Britain which I find hardly heeds children, that this is entirely fitting; that is a lesson for us all.

Further reading and listening: 

• B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on Herbert Howells.
• An article by Simon Heffer about Hymnus Paradisi