- Good afternoon and good
evening to our audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. And I'm delighted to welcome
you to the second lecture of the Randy L and Melvin R
Berlin family lectures for 2021. As always, we are deeply grateful to Randy and the late Melvin
Berlin for their vision in creating this exceptional forum which allows us to bring to
the University of Chicago individuals who are making
fundamental contributions in the arts, humanities and
humanistic social sciences. In times, such as these
when we most need the wisdom that the humanities
provide, the Berlin lecture, spotlight the powerful
role of the humanities in the world today as well
as the distinctive position of the University of Chicago
in articulating that role. Through the study and practice
of the arts, literature, music philosophy and more,
the humanities explore the ideas that define us and ultimately determine the
direction humanity takes. Interpretation lies at the
core of this conception of the humanities, whether that
interpretation be developed through scholarly articles or monographs or through musical performances, stage plays or other artworks. The Berlin Give supports
this work in all its forms here at U Chicago and
insurers in perpetuity the mutual interplay of
scholarship and creative practice. The theme of our three lectures this year is musical identities. Now there could hardly exist
a person better positioned to talk about this topic than
our distinguished speaker, the renowned English tenor Ian Bostridge. In his lecture today
entitled "Hidden Histories", Ian will urge us to hear
in the sounds of music things that can be expressed
only imperfectly in words. As you listen to Ian, you
all immediately recognize the voice of an intuitive scholar, as well as a remarkable performer. And there is a good reason for this. Before Ian began his singing career, he obtained a doctorate philosophy degree from Oxford University, where
he wrote and later published a dissertation on witchcraft. That same scholarly news has
continued to speak through him as he has written about
music over the years, producing a highly regarded book on Schubert's Winterreise
along with a collection of short essays and reviews
entitled "A Singer's Notebook" in which he reflects on his career. The heart of Ian's brilliant career is of course his live
performances as recitalist and singer of opera, retorial and more in major concert halls and opera houses throughout the world. Ian is also leaving us
a legacy of this work in the form of so far
some two dozen recordings of four centuries of music
ranging from Monteverdi, the father of opera to Benjamin Britten, the central figure of British
music of the 20th century to contemporary composer Bradford Mehldau. Ian's landmark performances of
Schubert's great song cycles-- Die Schone Mullerin,
Winterreise, and Schwanengesang-- are so commanding, that one
reviewer was led to ask, is it possible to
outbostridge, Ian Bostridge? And embedded in that
question is the realization that every time Ian sings
anew, one of these work from the cannon of classical
music live or in recording, he offers us deeper
levels of interpretation filled with richer and
more provocative insights. Small wonder given all his accomplishments that his blindingly impressive
list of prizes and awards includes 15 Grammy nominations, the Pol Roger Duff Cooper
Prize for non-fiction writing and the high honor of
Commander of the Order of the British empire in 2004. What is unique then about
Ian, as we are witnessing in these lectures, is
his insatiable desire, both to understand the context
of the music he performs and to illustrate how
a musical performance illuminates the culture
out of which it originates. And it is his pursuit of
this reciprocal interaction that gives his performances
and his recordings the sense that what you have just heard is in fact the ultimate
performance of a song or an operatic role and
the quintessential reading of the music's texts. Today we are fortunate beneficiaries of Ian's extraordinary
interpretive skills. Please join me in welcoming Ian Bostridge as he presents today's lecture
entitled, "Hidden Histories." I've called this lecture series
Musical Identities, because as a singer,
my practice has inescapably involved questions of
identity and performativity in the roles I've played on the stage and indeed in singing chamber works such as the leader of
Schubert and Schumann. When you perform as a
singer, you take on a voice, but to what extent is that voice your own or the composers or of
the poet or librettist. And to what extent does the
piece of music you perform bring with it a silent sometimes
unacknowledged history, which might pose questions
that are rarely nodded to in the concert hall. As Antonia Gramsci famously
puts it in his prison notebooks, the starting point of critical elaboration is to have a consciousness
of what one really is, with self knowledge as a
product of a historical process that has deposited up until
now and infinity of traces without the benefit of an inventory. This is the point of my excavations here, looking at different facets
of pieces of classical music undertaking a critical elaboration and building an inventory. In this second lecture, I
shall be focusing in depth on the work for voice by
the 20th century composer, Maurice Ravel, his Chansons
Madecasses, Songs of Madagascar or Malagasy songs. In fact, I'm going to be
focusing very narrowly for most of the lecture on one
song from that piece alone, one piece four minutes long. Written in 1925 and 1926,
the Chansons Madecasses is a cycle which has
become a canonical feature of the classical repertoire. It consists of three songs scored for the unusual
combination of voice, cello, flute and piano, technically and musically
demanding for the singer and for the players, it's
often performed in concert. I recently found a film of a
New York performance online dating from January, 2020 just
before normal concert live was suspended by the COVID 19 pandemic. It has been recorded
many, many times starting with the 1931 recording by Ravel himself with the matzoh soprano, Madeleine Grey, some of the greatest
singers of the 20th century, Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau,
Jesse Norman, Janet Baker, and Gerald Souzay performed and recorded it. Yet the concert program
record sleeve and CD booklet attitude toward the piece
over the last century has been almost entirely an aesthetic one, which doesn't engage with
the ambivalent texture or extraordinary origins of the piece. Recent movements towards interrogating, broadening and decolonizing
the curriculum and canon are relevant here. Decolonizing is not only
a matter of bringing new and previously unheard
music into the canon, it's also a matter of interrogating works within the preexisting cannon,
building that inventory which Gramsci talks about. These songs of Ravel's
were composed by a Parisian who had never been to Madagascar about what can only have
been an imagined Madagascar as far as he was concerned. Surely we need to ask as
performers what is the history of the relationship between
French culture and Madagascar rather than simply accepting Madagascar as an abstract and exotic
location or sort of fairy tale. As I shall show what's
hidden beneath the surface is a highly complex political geography, a story of power relations, violence and European attitudes to the other. The texts of the three songs that make up the Chansons Madecasses are
taken from a longer work of prose poems by the
late 18th century writer, Evariste Parny all written
in the ventriloquist voices of indigenous inhabitants of the Island. As we shall see and unlike Maurice Ravel, Evariste Parny had a close personal and historical connection
to the island of Madagascar which had had at the
time Parny was writing a succession of attempts at
colonization by European powers. It was only in the 1890s
when Ravel came of age that the island succumbed
to French conquest. Madagascar was and is unique
as the fourth largest island in the world with an ecologically
distinct flora and fauna, as a melting pot of cultural
influences and populations. Austronesian, Arab, East
African and as a matrix of highly complex and
differentiated social and political systems. It was nevertheless in
the end swallowed whole by the French state as
one of the last acts of the so-called scramble for Africa. By the time Ravel composed
his songs to Parny texts, the meaning of Madagascar had changed in the French imagination. The colonial projects of
the 17th and 18th century differed vastly from those
of the age of imperialism around 1900. And by the 1920s colonialism
had become a site of political controversy
between the left and right in France itself. Chansons Madecasses was
written at a free brawl moment in French colonial history
and at its first performance, it was in fact greeted as a
provocative political statement, something often forgotten in
concert performances today. The Chansons Madecasses are
often described as beautiful and exotic with even
that notion of the exotic to redeploy Gramsci on inventory
in terms of its history in relation to European fantasies
of non-European cultures. As I've said, the piece
consists of three songs, the first and third indeed deploy some of the exoticizing gestures that Ravel had previously
used and perhaps satirized in his famous orchestral
song cycle Sheherazade inspired by the world
of the Arabian nights. That texts popularity in Europe encoded the undifferentiated othering
of non-European cultures. The musical motifs Orientalism engendered in European classical music were divorced from many of the actual musical
practices of those cultures yet defined in the west
by fetishized inflections of the western harmonic
tradition definitively explored in the work of the
musicologist Ralph Lock. It's a huge and complex
field, suffice it to say that in the first and third
Song of the Madecasses cycle, Ravel with breathtaking
originality blends together a sound world clearly influenced
by the early 20th century Vogue for alien textures
and alien harmonic sounds with an overall effect,
which remains exoticizing in its lazy sensuality
and intense neuroticism. But the second Song of the Madecasses with which I shall be
concerned in this lecture is very different. Harsh and hard hitting,
it uses its bass scoring to reject the sensorial
bath of standard exoticizing musical tropes. Could you play the song please. (opera music) The words here are far from
offering a comfortable fantasy to European listeners. Spoken or sung in the
imagined voice of a Malagasy, the text begins (foreign language) beware of the white people,
but it ends by announcing that European invaders are
not welcome in Madagascar and stating that they have
been roundly repelled. The text is an anti
colonialist cry of liberty. So it's complex because it was
written not by our Malagasy, but by a French colonial
born on the nearby Isle Bourbon now Reunion, brought up by domestic slaves
largely of Malagasy origin and a man whose fortune was
founded on a commodity economy worked on by slaves traded
mostly from Madagascar. So, where did this cry come from in 1787 and what could it have meant
when Ravel created his setting in the mid-1920s? I want to start by taking
a look at Madagascar at failed French attempts to colonize it. And at the poet Evariste Parny's
relationship to Madagascar and its people Map please. Situated 400 kilometers off the east coast of Southern Africa,
Madagascar is a vast island, 1600 kilometers long and
up to 570 kilometers wide. Ecologically isolated for
tens of millions of years, it was first settled by
voyages from East Asia as early as the fifth century BCE. It subsequently became a crucible
for a complex interaction between African, Arabian
and Austronesian cultures. By the 17th century, it already
had a long history of trade with both the African mainland
and the Arabian peninsula, especially in slaves captured
during raids on each other by the different kingdoms into which the islands
population segmented. However, it was the opening
up of European markets in that period that allowed
the various kingdoms of Madagascar to consolidate
their wealth and power. As a recent historian puts
it, during the 17th century, monarchies with quite extensive
control were to emerge in several areas of the Island, particularly in places
where kings were able to combine a higher ideology of monarchy with an enhanced commercial
role that was partly the result of the growth in trade with the Europeans. The rise of the powerful
kingdoms makes the 17th century a turning point in Madagascar's history. The island of Madagascar was
the object of European desire and the subject of European fantasy from the very outset of the
European colonial enterprise in the late 15th century,
starting with the Portuguese. It was coveted both as a staging post on the way to the East Indies
and also as a possible site for lucrative settlement. The English were certainly keen. Sir Thomas Herbert in
1658 called Madagascar the empress among islands while
admiral sir William Monsoon in 1650 had imagined it becoming a rival to the English plantation in
Virginia in North America. Prince Rupert of the Rhine
had human mind in the 1630s for conquering the
Island, which is mother, the exiled queen of
Bohemia, the winter queen fondly described as his
romance of Madagascar like one of Don Quixote's conquests. Picture, please. And here is a picture
of the Earl of Arundel by Anthony van Dyck. Arundel with his wife looking at a globe in the center of which is the island of
Madagascar because Arundel too in the 1630s had plans
to settle Madagascar. It came to nothing, but
it shows you the intense imaginative power of
the idea of Madagascar. And it's a wonderful picture, I think. None of the English
plans got off the ground, but in the 1640s, the
French forged the plan to "take possession of the island,
to dwell the and to trade." Under the sponsorship
of Cardinal Richelieu, the Societe Francoise de l'Orient sent Jacques
Pronis in pursuit of this objective. On route, he succeeded in claiming one of the Mascarine islands,
which he called Isle Bourbon now known as the Reunion, the small island where we shall see the poet
of the Chansons Madecasses Parny was born a century or so later. Pronis went on to build a settlement in the south of Madagascar, which he called Fort Dauphin. If we could have the map
again, you'll see Madagascar and then these two smaller
islands, the Mascarine islands, Isle Bourbon, Reunion, and
Isle des France, which became, well, which swung between being Mauritius and the Isle des France. Pronis's project was driven by conflict among the settlers
themselves who were endlessly afflicted by fevers and
between the settlers and the indigenous Malagasy
who were especially enraged when Pronis treacherously
sold some 63 friendly indigènes as slaves to the Dutch
governor of nearby Mauritius. An attempted revolt against
Pronis led him to exile a dozen or so of the
mutineers to the Isle Bourbon an unpropitious beginning
to the French settlement of that island. Back in Paris, the shareholders
of the Societe became concerned and
sent one of their number Entienne de Flacourt to sort things out, to establish the glory of the French name and that of Christian piety-- that religious motivation,
not an inconsiderable one in these efforts to subdue Madagascar. Flacourt's mission at Fort Dauphin
was a failure distinguished for the
intensity of the violence, which he rained down upon the population and for the ultimately
successful resistance of the inhabitants despite the superiority of French weaponry. In two years, Flacourt and
his men pillaged and burned over 50 villages, but the
reality for the French settlers was hunger, fever, and endless conflict. For the Societe back in
Paris, returns of poultry and the prospect of future
returns ever receding, the settlement was eventually
ignominiously abandoned by the French in 1674. One lasting result was
that Flacourt penned two important books of
history and natural history about the island. He also, as we shall see left
an inscribed marble monument as a record of his misadventures
and as a warning to others. Despite this disaster, French fascination with the great isle of Madagascar continued through the 17th
century and into the 18th in more or less fantastical forms. Trade continued with the island's kingdoms and so did visionary schemes
of conquest or settlement. Between 1768 and 1771
correspondent of Voltaire's, the Comte de Maudave
launched a supposedly enlightened venture,
which aimed to cooperate with the Malagasy people and
to suppress the slave trade. It ended in tensions
between French and Malagasy, money problems, fever, and ultimately in the hypocritical
spectacle of Maudave himself siphoning off a hundred slaves
to man his own plantations on the Isle des France, now Mauritius, the adjoining islands to the Isle Bourbon. Further schemes to conquer Madagascar by the Munchausenesque
self-styled baron de Benyovski, a fantasy
spinning Polish Hungarian adventurer started with
French support in 1773, support which was withdrawn
as the old story of fever and conflict with the
locals predictably ended any prospect of a successful colony. Two government inspectors
concluded that it would be best and I quote "to give up all
idea of founding a colony" on an island which at all
times had been the grave "of so many freshmen." The trading post was shocked in 1779. And when de Benyovski tried
to revive his venture in 1784 as European
plenipotentiary for Madagascar with the supposed support
of the emperor of Austria and the actual support of
two Baltimore slave traders, French troops arrived to
put a stop to the chaos. They ambushed and shot
dead the unfortunate count in May 1786, just a year
before the publication of Evariste Parny's Chansons Madecasses with its powerful advocation
of the inhabitants resistance to European incursion. “Méfiez vous des blancs,” beware
of the white people. As I've said, the island of
Madagascar remained resolutely uncolonized until the very
end of the 19th century. Many of the French would be colonists from the failed Fort
Dauphin settlement or Madagascar evacuated in 1674, went on to settle on the Isle Bourbon, one
of the Mascarine islands 800 kilometers from Madagascar. By the beginning of the 18th century, it still had only 1,100 inhabitants and remained largely undeveloped. An influx of retired
pirates changed all this. They constituted as much as
48% of the population by 1710. Many were wealthy and
started bringing in slaves from Madagascar and East
Africa to Isle Bourbon clearing the land for agriculture. The French East India
company revived its interest transplanting coffee plants and achieving up to two and a half million
pounds production annually by the mid 1700s. Nothing is more beautiful. Governor Duma declared to
the directors of the company in 1728, than the coffee plantations stretching out to infinity. Slavery was formally licensed in 1723 in an Indian ocean version
of the West Indian codes. The population of the Island
grew by leaps and bounds reaching 20,000 by 1764. As the economist, Thomas
Piketty has recently underlined in his massive study capital and ideology, the French social system
adopted on an island like the Isle Bourbon was uniquely tilted towards slavery and the
economics of commodity production for the international market. The Indian ocean slave trade
predated European engagement in the area, had always been slave trading but the capitalist dynamics
of the 18th century drove it to a level of
unprecedented intensity and unprecedented cruelty. There was a historically
unprecedented proportion of slaves in the population of the Isle Bourbon. 80% or 15,800 slaves versus
only 4,200 Freeman in 1764, when Evariste Parny, the author
of the Chansons Madecasses was 11 years old. The largest concentration of slaves in the Euro-American world on the eve of the French revolution of 1789 was on French island
colonies east and west. By the 1780s, they numbered
in total sum 100,000. Settlers made their
way to the Isle Bourbon to make their fortune. One notary estimated the return on capital as 10% per annum in 1756,
compared to a relatively poultry 5% in metropolitan France itself. The governor sent to the Island in 1727 Benoit Dumas made fabulous
games doubling his fortune in less than eight years. So it was on this island,
paradise and prison as he put it that the poet of the Chansons
Madecasses, Evarist Parny was born on the 6th of February, 1753. His birth coincided with
the beginning of a decline in the fortunes of the
island caused by a fall in the price of coffee
as French Caribbean, and Dutch Javan beans began to enter the global marketplace. Land fragmentation due to
French inheritance customs and a series of natural
disasters, cyclones, and the plague of aphids only intensified
the economic pressure. The Parny family had
been the beneficiaries of the swift rising
fortunes that the slave dominated economy could offer
at a time when naked commerce was driving the globalization of the day. His grandfather, Pierre Parny, a baker arrived on the Island in
1698 as part of the entourage of the new governor. He, Pierre, the Baker, married Barb, daughter of one François Mussard, a wealthy landed proprietor
who was notorious as a hunter of escaped slaves. Pierre himself was a judged
cruel to the point of barbarism towards his black slaves,
his wife even more so. Their youngest son,
Paul, Evariste's father, was born in 1717, educated in France, fought against the British in India and died back on Bourbon. A lieutenant Colonel and
Chevallier of Sandlois, his estates grew rice, wheat,
corn, coffee, and cotton and were labored on by
slaves, a large proportion of whom came from Madagascar. Evariste, born on Bourbon,
was also educated in France, was commissioned into the French army, traveled the world returning home in 1773 and 1783 his two returns
to the Isle Bourbon. He finally settled in France
where he died in 1814. The Chansons Madecasses
were written in Pondicherry, French India in 1785-7, where he was serving as an aide de camp to the governor general just
after his final trip home to the Isle Bourbon. The assertive cry of liberty
that Parny put into the mouth of an indigenous Malagasy
is not straightforward in its context. Evariste Parny's own
attitudes towards slavery and colonial settlement
were complex and refracted through his upbringing on Bourbon, his travels as a young man
to South America, India and the Cape, and his long
association with and residents in the metropolitan France
of the enlightenment only a few years before the outbreak of the French revolution in
which he played virtually no parts and he managed
to sit it out and survive. Writing in verse from
Pondicherry in 1785 to his great friend and
fellow Bourbonnais poet, Antoine de Bertin, he spoke blisteringly of “ce monde toujours désolé/Par
l’Européen sanguinaire.” This world still desolated
may still may desolate by the bloody European. His instincts were anti-colonial,
antislavery his instincts. While at the same time, he
remained deeply implicated like so many other progressive voices in a world dependent on colonial
voices and the slave trade. A colonial officer after all and a man who had inherited
18 slaves from his mother when she died and stood
to inherit yet more on the death of his father. Evariste's mother had died when
he was only five years old. So he would have been educated
initially by house slaves of Malagasy origin absorbing as Parny wrote to his friend Bertin, the tastes and manners
of those he lived with. Tales of Madagascar were part
of his childhood imaginarium, his bedtime stories, even if the bulk of his formal education was completed in metropolitan France. He remained for the rest of his life fascinated by the Malagasy language. On his return visits to
Bourbon in 1773 and 1783, he had liaison with two
enslaved women, Lada and Zeth, both of Malagasy origin. A French edict forbidding
interracial marriage was unsuccessful in
preventing intimate relations, unsurprisingly, given
that there were few women of European descent on the island. The first of Parny's affairs
with a Malagasy woman was not a casual encounter, it
resulted in a daughter Valere who took his name and was
brought up by his sister. Moreover, the Parny family
was involved in her baptism, her education and her marriage in 1789. Yet despite this story of
ambivalent assimilation, Parny in the very year of the publication of the Chassons Madecasses
1787 wrote to his sister Javotte regarding an enslaved woman
he owned called August asking for her to be sold. We can set this against
words, Parny had written to his old friend Bertin in 1775, "Every day we trade a man for a horse. "I find it impossible to
get used to such a revolting "and bizarre situation." The cognitive dissonance,
the compartmentalization, the sheer hypocrisy is
astounding, but surely not unusual for the era. Despite his and his family's entrenchment in the slave economy on the Isle Bourbon, Parny, like some slave holding grantees in the American States
such as Thomas Jefferson maintained in his writings,
a theoretical enlightenment opposition to the barbarity
of the institution. If his grandfather had been
a notorious hunter of escaped slaves, Parny
himself expressed disgust at the practice. As he wrote to Bertin in
1775, they go hunting for men as merrily as they would for blackbirds, adding that a few make a
successful escape from Isle Bourbon back to Madagascar, but their
country men massacred them saying that they had come back
from being among white people and that they were too clever by half. Parny declares in words that
anticipate the opening cry of that poem
from the Chansons Madecasses “Méfiez vous des blancs”: He himself declared in this
letter, unfortunate people. It's rather these very whites
that you should be pushing from your peaceful shores. Parny could see the economic
inefficiency of the system and also its moral bankruptcy, repeating the tale of a
dying slave who coming too, as he receives an involuntary baptism declares that he doesn't want
another life, immortal life as even there he might
perhaps still be the slave of the person baptizing him. In his letter to Bertin,
Parny refused the convenient fiction that enslaved men and
women were not human beings, but his attitude was contradictory. He remained embedded in a social
system founded on slavery. The Chansons Madecasses can be seen as Parny's imaginative
reaction to this moral morass and attempt to engage with what he saw as both the humanity and the
otherness of the house slaves, Malagasy by origin, among whom he lived such as the nurse who brought him up or the women with whom he
had intimate relations. But intriguingly the
voices he ventriloquises in the Chansons are not
those of Malagasy slaves on the Isle Bourbon, but free Malagasy on the as yet uncolonized
island of Madagascar. The Chansons Madecasses are prose poems, poetic in nature, but
not written in verse. As perhaps the first
prose poems in French, they were to have great literary influence as the first in a long and
distinguished tradition. And they made their mark
on a whole generation of 19th century poets,
most notably Charles Baudelaire and Alexander Pushkin. Published in 1787 in
France, they were printed with a frontispiece which
fictitiously claimed they had been published on
the Isle Bourbon itself. The poems are presented
as being translations of Malagasy originals, but it's
clear that they were written by Parny himself. They've been shown nevertheless to be full of linguistic
markers of documentary accuracy, for example, in the use of names. Parny would have picked up
some Malagasy as a child and he retained a lifelong interest in the fascinating Austronesian language. The indigenous words for
the power of the sun, Zanha, and for a bad spirit, ny angatra. For example are reflected
in the deities Parny invokes in one of the
songs, not set by Ravel, Zanahang and Niang. The name of the woman in Ravel's first, erotically charged song,
the beautiful Nahandove for whom the speaker is
waiting with whom he makes love and to whom on her departure he languishes is derived from the
indigenous word Nahandova. He who will inherit, echoes how
of the rich tradition of Malagasy oral storytelling will interact with European traditions. And Parny's Chansons Madecasses
also include depictions of identifiable local social practices. But in terms of external
documentary evidence, the most striking example is to be found in that second song set by
Ravel, actually song five of Parny's set of poems,
Méfiez vous des blancs. I'll read the first part
of the poem in English. Beware of the white people,
inhabitants of the shore in the time of our
fathers, some white people descended on this island. They said to them, here's some land, let your women cultivate it. Be just be good and become our friends. The white people promised and all the while they
were making fortifications. A menacing fort was raised up, thunder was encased in brass mouths. Their priests wanted to give
us a god we didn't know. At last they spoke of obedience
and slavery, rather death. The carnage was long and terrible, but despite the lightning
that they vomited and which wiped out whole armies, they were all exterminated. This account clearly
reflects French attempts at colonization in the mid-17th century, the efforts to deal with
the indigenous Malagasy, the erection of Fort Dauphin,
the violence inflicted on the Malagasy, and the promulgation of the Christian religion. The poem celebrates a
notorious French defeat. When governor Etienne de
Flacourt prepared leave Fort Dauphin in the 1650s, some 20 years before the final evacuation of the French settlement,
he left behind a monument recording his ignominious
stay on the island. Repurposing a piece of marble left by earlier Portuguese settlers, he had inscribed on it three fleur de lise as a symbol of the French monarchy and this warning in Latin. ADVENA
MONITA NOSTRA
TIBI TUIS VITAE
TUAE PROFUTURA
CAVE AB INCOLIS. VALE Stranger take heed of my warnings. It will be profitable to you,
beware of the inhabitants. Farewell. In a powerful exercise
of enlightenment irony and a sure sign that as well as knowing Madagascar's
language and customs, he knew the history of its
relationship to French power, Parny inverted Flacourt's
partying admonition. Beware of the inhabitants became
beware of the white people. Distilling oral history picked
up from nurses and lovers, enlightenment opposition
to the colonial project and a working knowledge
of Flacourt's vast book, Histoire de la Grande Isle Madagascar,
Parny created a unique protest against the aggressive
designs of European settlers on the island of Madagascar. The final part of the poem makes it clear that Parny was not just writing history in condemnation of the
17th century expedition under Flacourt, but also
contemporary commentary. We do up well to remember
that Mefiez vous des blancs was published just a year or
less after the fatal shooting of the Baron Benyovski finally put an end to his crackpot harebrained schemes for conquering Madagascar. This is clear from the following lines. We've seen new tyrants,
stronger and more numerous plant their flag on the shore. The sky fought for us, it
made rains fall on them storms and poisoned winds. They are no longer and we live free. Parny's ventriloquism and his adoption of an indigenous point of view were by no means unprecedented
among French writers of the 18th century. The abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes was first published in 1770, revised and expanded for a 1780 edition and appeared in no less than 48 additions up to Ranal's death in 1796. The great Diderot collaborated
with him on the book and contributed passages
full of what the historian Jean-Michel Racault has
called the sanguinary lyricism of redeemed betrayal. What makes Parny's work
and Méfiez vous des blancs in particular so special
is his deep engagement with Malagasy culture and
a fierce rhetorical stance which might almost seem
to be fed by the guilt which must have reflected
Parny as a slave holder and as a colonialist. On one level Parny's
language might bring to mind that of the political
philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon born on Martinique and who spoke out against
French colonial rule in Algeria in the 1960s. Here is Fanon at his most powerful. Their first encounter
was marked by violence and their existence
together, that is to say the exploitation of the
native by the settler was carried on by didn't
have a great array of bayonets and canon. For the native, life can only spring up out of the rotting corpse of the settler, illuminated by violence, the
consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification. Beneath the superficial similarities between Fanon's discussive
practice and that of Parny, We need to locate pioneer
within his own historical moment in order to recognize
both his precocious power and his lurking intellectual discomfort. If Parny's Chansons Madecasses
in general are based on the poets intimate yet
compromised interactions with the island and its
people, its fifth song, Ravel's second is grounded in
identifiable historical events and recent attempts at conquest. After Parny's day,
Madagascar remained resistant to European settlement
for another century. In many ways, an icon of
anti-colonial resistance in a world which was
increasingly being divided up between the European powers. Informal colonial ventures were morphing into the formal colonial system negotiated after the Congress of
Berlin, which was completed by these so-called scramble for Africa into which Madagascar
was anomalously drawn. In the second and third
decades of the 19th century, the highland kingdom of
Imerina, a relatively weak force on the island, which had
hitherto been challenged by more powerful coastal communities came to dominate most of
the Island of Madagascar under the rule of Radama the Great. Radama was recognized
as King of Madagascar by the British, but this
recognition initiated a paradoxical process in which
the unification of Madagascar under indigenous rule and
efforts to create a nation state on the European model
were crucial in creating the conditions for a violent
and to the long-term Malagasy resistance to European encroachment. Seesawing under succeeding monarchs between commercial entanglement
with the European powers and an attempt to hold them and their Christianizing mission at bay, the kingdom of Madagascar was
drawn into the Anglo-French division of the colonial spoils. The Lambert charter
secretly concluded in 1855 gave the French exclusive
rights to exploit land, natural resources and projects
and it was as a result of attempts to revoke it,
that France eventually claimed Madagascar as a protectorate and ultimately in 1896 and
with British acquiescence, as a colony. Two Wars were followed by a
campaign of brutal pacification launched by general General Joseph Gallieni. Leading Malagasy officials
were shot by firing squad after show trials and
the Queen of Madagascar, Ranavalona III,
was sent into Algerian exile dying in 1917. Madagascar was henceforth to be part of La plus grande France. Eight years after the death of
the last queen of Madagascar in May, 1925, at a soiree
to which the cream of the French musical
establishment had been invited, a French Metso soprano
named Jane Bathori stood up and to the dissonant brittle
accompaniment of the pianist, a cellist and a flute
player shrieked twice the mysterious acclamation Aoua, A-O-U-A before launching into
Evariste Parny's words in the fiercest of sun
accents, “Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitans du rivage.” That first performance of Ravel's song was part of an evening of chamber music commissioned by the American pianist and distinguished patron
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Coolidge commissioned a
host of extraordinary pieces from the greatest composers. Britten, Copeland, Prokofiev,
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wabern, Bartok, Respighi. But on that spring evening
at the grand majestic hotel, it was Ravel's single sliver of a song that made the greatest impact. Of the three Chansons Madecasses that he promised Coolidge
earlier in the year, Ravel had only finished this one. It was a provocative promissory
note for the entire cycle which would make it
somewhat to delayed debut the following year in Rome. Aoua as I'll call the
song, an exclamation added to Parny's poem by Ravel
right at the beginning was the occasion of disturbance, if not quite on the level of
the legendary Parisian riot which had attended the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of spring
more than a decade earlier. As the song ended, the
Breton composer Léon Moreau got up and declared Monsieur
Leon Moreau is leaving. He does not wish to
listen again to such words while our country is fighting in Morocco. France was indeed pursuing a colonial war in North Africa at the time. Voices arose agreeing with
Moreau's political objections while others were quick to
deploy the lack of politesse that this select event filled
with distinguished invitees. Moreau and his supporters withdrew and the song was repeated and
enthusiastically received. The nascent public relations industry could not have conceived of an event more likely to wet the appetite
for the Chansons Madecasses or to confirm Maurice Ravel's profile as a singularly radical
force in French music. The critic Arthur Hoerée
reviewed Ravel's song in the October edition of the
Revue Musicale and again, in 1938 in a longer account of Ravel's lyrical output. He was intent upon the
severity of the work as opposed to much of
Ravel's earlier exoticism in a work-like the song cycle
we've mentioned Sheherazad. Here with Aoua, the second
song of Chansons Madecasses, was a clean and direct
violence of expression which went hand in hand with an intense and shocking engagement
with the bloody reality of the confrontation between
the European and the Malagasy in a failed attempt to colonization. He recounts to us,
Hoerée wrote in 1926, the struggles of indigenous
peoples against the white to win their freedom. In 1938, writing again about the song, he recalled it as a hymn
to liberty against slavery and colonization. Ravel had received the
commission for this piece at his house at Montfort outside Paris. A house replete with the
dandyish and ironically exoticizing elements
which had up until then inform much of Ravel's music
as well as his personal style. As one visitor puts it,
we feel as if we are in a Chinese Curio shop in which a century of playful exoticism has been exposed. Ravel's close friend Roland-Manuel described the arrival of the commission. Being a confirmed admirer of Biblo dating back to the revolution,
the rectieur empire and restoration, Ravel bought
between an 1820 Gothic clock and an Etruscan teapot, a first
edition of Everiste Parny. As he was looking through the poem Fleures, he had a cable ground from America from the cellist Kindler asking
him to compose a song cycle for Mrs. Elizabeth S
Coolidge with accompaniment, if possible for flute, cello and piano. Always happy and in true
Mozartian fashion to adjust himself to another's will, the composer tenaciously
went on reading Parny. He was delighted by a
peculiar, exotic quality which entirely suited
his tastes as local color was virtually excluded. The image Ravel projects
through the account of his friend here is detached, that of the Baudelairean flaneur,
the ironist, detached, amused. The Ravel we see in the
dandyish man of the photographs of the 1920s. He sits in his charming
salon reading the poems of Evariste Parny, but the
poem he chooses to single out, the one he was reading just as
the crucial telegram arrived. It was not the one he said,
it was a million miles from the aggressive protest of Aoua. It was the ultra aesthetic poem, Fleures, the bold prefers a thick, luxurious soil. A light soil is sufficient
for the seed and trust to it your tender hopes and dove your flowers the delicate buds. Ravel was laconic about his own music and the Chansons Madecasse no exception. He said not much more than
this about them in public. I think that the three Chansons Madecasse bring into being a new
dramatic, almost erotic element resulting from the subject
matter of Parny's poems. This is teasing, I think. The closest that Ravel
comes to acknowledging the singular violence of
Aoua which we notice an early at the time notice that
the closest he comes is that word dramatic. He prefers instead to
dwell on the atmosphere at the first and third poems of the set, which are surely not
almost erotic as Ravel says but deeply charged with a heady eroticism. The first, Nahandova is
nothing less than an advocation of anticipation, sexual
fulfillment and post-coital rest. Also eroticism is not something
new to Ravel's output. Maybe it's more intense in
the Chansons Madecasses, but if we look at earlier works like the song cycle Sheherazade, the first song has a
orgasmic musical climax with a post-coital nicotine
haze towards the end. That's the first song, Asie. And the third is a
matter of barely closeted homoerotic tension, I think. It's the political violence
Aoua that is shockingly new. So under this mask of quasi detachment, what were Ravel's politics? There's nothing systematic to go on, but what can be
reconstructed from comments, allegiances and occasional
provocative acts. In his friend Manuel Rosenthal’s
formulation, Ravel nether offered the
slightest commentary on politics, none at all. He was what today would be
called un homme de gauche a man of the left, but he
never expressed his opinions. At the outset of war in August, 1914, Ravel wrote a letter to
his friend Cipa Godebski proclaiming long life to
the international and peace. He went on to serve as
a driver on the front, but in 1916 aligned himself with those who saw the French
nation and French culture as guarantors of universal values refusing to join the nationalist
league (foreign language). Ravel subscribed to one
newspaper, a left-wing one, Ligue pour la Défense de la Musique Française,
reading it according to Rosenthal, attentively every day. In July, 1925, Andre Gide set
off to travel in the Congo and it was in the Populier,
the newspaper that Ravel read that Leon Blum, a friend of Ravel's and socialist prime minister in 1936 broadcast Gide's
denunciations of the Congo concessionary companies and
their human rights abuses. In 1927, denunciations that
the first been published in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1926, and which ultimately formed
part of Gide's journal voyage au Congo published in '27. Ravel would've met Gide at the
salon of his close friends, the Godebski family. He also attended the
progressive Clemenceau salon as did Albert Einstein and Stefan Zweig in a period notorious for
its intense anti-semitism on the French right and in an
era in which the allegiances of the Dreyfus affair were persistent. Ravel had many Jewish friends and composed his Mélodies hébraïques in 1914
orchestrating them in 1920, the model of a cultural
political statement in oblique musical form,
political gestures through style as the historian Jane Fulcher calls them. Ravel stood clearly apart from authority and the establishment. His dandyism was a declaration
of intellectual independence but one with a refusal
common in the period after the propaganda accesses
of the First World War to resort to using art as an avert form of political engagement. Hence he refused the legend honor in 1920. Was he somewhat embarrassed to be co-opted into a state apparatus
of which he disapproved or was he simply asserting
his autonomy as an artist? The one does not exclude the other. What was the political and
cultural climate in the Paris, which saw and heard that
first shocking performance of the second of Ravel's
Chansons Madecasses. The composer Leon Moreau's
referenced to the Moroccan war at that first performance
deserves attention. Morocco under its governing Sultan Yusef had become a French protectorate in 1912 while the treaty signed in
Madrid later the same year divided the country into four. A French administrative zone
comprising 90% of the country with its capital at Rabat,
a small Spanish protectorate centered on Tetouan, a
Southern Saharan protectorate administered by the Spanish
and an international zone around Tangier. In June, 1921, a rebellion
in the Rif region in the mountainous Northeast
defeated a Spanish army of 24,000 and proclaimed
an independent state. French forces moved forwards
to defend their interests and in April, 1925 the Rif forces mounted an offensive against them. By July the newly
appointed Marshall Petain, victor of Verdun in the First World War and later the notorious figurehead of the collaborating Vichy regime in the Second World War. Petain made an agreement with the Spanish to pursue a unified strategy. The final stage of the Rif
war lasted from autumn 1925 until spring 1926 and
ended with the deportation of the Rif leader, Abd-el-Krim
to the island of reunion, where of course, Everiste
Parny had been born some two centuries earlier. The Rif war was the political cause seller of 1925 in Paris, taken
up by the surrealists as a renewing focus for political action, as a way of discarding the
trivializing Dadaist tendencies of the past, also taken
up by the newly formed French communist party as a way
of distinguishing themselves from the anti-Bolshevik section. Sorry, anti-Bolshevik
française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) led by Leon Blum, which
had joined the government and remained committed to the notion of France's civilizing
mission as a colonial power. As Blum himself puts it in July, 1925. "We acknowledge the
rights and even the duty "of superior races to attract
those who have not arrived "at the same degree of culture. "And to call them to
the progress realized, "thanks to the efforts
of sciences and industry. "We have too much love for our country "to disavow the expansion of its thought "under French civilization." The SFIO ministers in the government were convinced that France had a duty to remain in Morocco to
protect its inhabitants and prevent what they
saw as an ominous descent into barbarism and Islamic fanaticism. Despite Blum's support for Gide's assault on the excesses of the colonial
concessions in the Congo, the position of both men, Blum and Gide, was that these were indeed accesses and that a distinction
had to be maintained between criticizing colonial abuse and criticizing what they
saw as the noble mission of colonialism and the
post-war mandate system itself. Ironically enough, it was Ravel's friend, the prime minister Paul
Painlevé who escalated the war in Morocco in April, 1925. In May, the months of
that first performance of Aoua
at the Hotel Majestic in May, the first of hundreds of
anti-war demonstrations organized by the French communist party drew 15,000 protesters
onto the presumed streets. And on the 12th of October the
month in which weeks after that performance at the Hotel Majestic
published his review of Ravel's song, the French communist party
called a general strike. It's not difficult to see why
Ravel's four minute long song with Parny's extraordinary
anti-colonial message and a musical language of Supreme
laconic dissonant violence was like an agitprop bomb dropped into a febrile atmosphere. Ravel cannot have been
unaware of the effect his song would have, but
his subsequent comments about the cycle and the
ultimate sandwiching of the violence of the
second song between two songs which depicted the more
traditionally exoticist attitude “attitudes de Plaisir et
… abandon de la volupté,” the poses of pleasure and
abandonment to the luxuriousness, that comes in one of the other songs. This sandwiching of the violence
between two exotic songs suggests a retreat back into
his aecetisizing shell. The Chansons Madecasses
was certainly a new venture for Ravel aesthetically, and
the violence of the second song is a brilliant musical foil for the langour of the first and third. But the shocking political context should not be allowed to disappear. According to the historian Jane Fulcher, writing in how influential the composer as intellectual music and
ideology in France, 1914 to 1940, Ravel's ideological practice was a matter of "subversion,
which was always subtle "taking place on the level
of symbols and gestures, "which as he well knew
could be even more powerful "than conventional
discursive confrontation." If the second song of
the Chansons Madecasses is not a political manifesto and layered with as many ideological
complexities as Parny's poems, it's subversion is
surely more than subtle, an exercise of imaginative
identification with the other which problematizes or
questions as art surely can and should the orthodoxies of the political and social order. Nevertheless, as a work of
ventriloquism like Parny's poems, it remains problematic. As part of French cultures engagement with the colonial other,
Parny and Ravel's vision of Madagascar and act of
ventriloquism may be troubling, but it's undeniable
that Mefiez vous des blancs a song opera's poem is a radical
anti-colonial intervention. Poulenc’s Rapsodie Nègre
shows us how very different a 20th century French composers engagement with the idea of Madagascar could be. During the war itself in 1917
Ravel himself was present at the premiere. The piece was Poulenc
later disingenuously wrote, "A reflection of the taste for African art "that has flourished since 1912 "under the impetus of Apollinaire, "the baritone shed to sing
at the first performance "withdrew at the last moment." Poulenc explained, "Saying
it was all too stupid. "So I had to sing this interlude myself, "partly obscured by a huge music stand. "As I had already been mobilized, "one can imagine the unexpected effect "of this soldier balling
in pseudo Malagasy." This poem was in fact part of
an offensive racist imposture “Les Poésies de Makoko Kangourou.” This collection of poems by
a fictitious Liberian author had been published in 1910. Most were written in ungrammatical and syntactically challenged French, but a nonsense poem or Honolulu, supposedly in the poet's
own language was included. And this is what Poulenc
set as the third movement of the Rhapsody and referred
to as being in pseudo-Malagasy. The poems were ostensibly
edited with a spirits operators Marcel Prouille and Charles Moulié (pseudonyms of Marcel Ormoy and Thierry Sandre). The fictitious Kangourou
is supposedly fated in his own country, or
the book is tricked out with a nasty frontispiece showing the poet as a stereotypical African
Savage comically adorned with a laurel wreath and wearing a Toga. Ravel's typically laconic yet
possibly sarcastic comment on Rhapsody Nagler was
it Poulenc had created his own folklore. Poulenc's work shows
the most offensive side of what at the time in Paris
was known as necrophilia. As Petrine Archer Shaw,
the historian and author of an influential study
of the phenomenon puts it, blacks were packaged
exotically for the marketplace at the same time that race theories defended them as lesser beings. Josephine Baker, star of
the Revue Nègre and later a civil rights activist deathly encapsulated the problem. The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks. Mid-1920s Parisian culture
at one in the same time patronized and celebrated black artists. The crucial contradiction
lay in an attitude, which in continuity with
the pre-war avant-garde questions the self satisfied conviction of white Europe's material
and the moral progress, but did so by asserting the
alternative value system of a so-called primitive
or uncivilized blackness of the imagination. It's important to recognize
that this is the cultural moment from which Ravel's song emerged. Ravel was undoubtedly
participating in the Vogue that was necrophilia
while at the same time, issuing a powerful and unmistakable cry against the horrors of colonialism. Layer upon layer of
progressive intentions, bad faith and inconvenience,
not to say corrupting material and political entanglements underlie Parny's original prose poems. And the context of Ravel's
masterpiece is just as complex. Britten 30 years after the
conquest of Madagascar, Chanson Madecasses of
Ravel is a difficult work whose resonances and historical ironies deserve to be unpicked and engaged with. In 1945 another composer Graymar Lucia wrote a piece for the 50th anniversary of the French takeover. A self-satisfied
four-part symphonic suite, a celebration far removed
from the bear protest of Ravel's masterpiece. Musicians, boatmen, sorceress warriors. These are the movements with which Lucia with lush orchestral
assurance summons up a picture of a distant land finally
reconciled to European rule. Two years later, a rebellion
broke out in Madagascar suppressed with the utmost ferocity by the French authorities. There ensued mass executions,
torture, burning the villages and the death of more than
50,000 Malagasy civilians and competence as against
590 French soldiers. Méfiez vous des blancs habitans du rivage. - And now we are live with Ian Bostridge for our question and answer section. Welcome back, Ian and thank you so much for a second superb lecture. I'll be serving as the moderator today asking Ian questions
that have come from you during his lecture on "Hidden Histories." Please push those send buttons
and send us your questions, we already have a few. But please keep them coming. This has been a very interesting and provocative lecture, I feel. So let me just start with something and it kind of zooms out a little bit, and then I think we will be
zooming back in just as quickly. but you have sung in your
career, leiden recitals, opera, oratorial and many others genres. So for you, is there a clear distinction between theatrical performance
and concert or recital? - I don't think there
is a clear distinction. And it was one of the great
discoveries of my life as a performer and the
sort of creation of my, what I could call my performative
practice was to discover that there was less gap than I thought, because I think I mean to rather boringly go into the history of it. When I was at school, I
felt rather embarrassed being on stage and acting and
I got into directing instead. And I did directing at school of Chekhov and directing of Strindberg
at Bracht University. And I never thought of myself as an actor. Plus I did sing leiden
recitals and they were quite, I think they were quite
emotionally engaged. And it was only when I met a couple of interesting state directors that they pointed out
that I just needed to feel that there was more
overlap than I realized that I didn't need to
feel awkward upbringing the same thing to the theatrical stage as I did to the recital stage. But it's a question of finding a space that you feel comfortable in
to bring that alive, I think. - Yes, sure. This is an interesting idea. Beginning with the 20th
century, of course we have the advantage of having
recordings of composers' works. And sometimes with the composers actually performing in those recordings. Four of the Chansons Madecasses of Ravel, there's the 1931 recording
of Ravel himself. I think he's conducting and
performing from the piano. So maybe he's conducting from the piano and this is the the performance
with Katherine Grey. Could you talk a little
bit about the effect of our having recordings
that feature the composers of the works as compared with say, the lack of contemporaneous recordings of one of the works you
discussed last week, Schumann's Frauenliebe und-Leben? So in other words, is working
out a composer's intention an important part of
performing a piece to you? - I think working out
a composer's intention is a useful constraint
because I think as performers, we need to as it were
boxing our egotistical self-centered intentions. And in fact, as audiences
and performers in general, one of the great things about
performing music of the past is to step into the past. So to address the way that
music was performed in the past and the intentions of the composer, these are both very important things. But at the same time, even
when we have recordings, I don't think we're that
clear about how works should be performed for
real because the recording is a very different thing. And I think in terms of
the composer's intentions, with the greatest works of art, the composer's intentions
are in a sense left behind, we're left with the texts as a recipe for producing a great performance. And I mean, I think music does exist. I mean, this is the new
trend of musicology I know, particularly Nicholas Cook
has written a lot about it, and he's looked a lot at recordings and all sorts of performance
practices in that way. I think to recognize that
music is really performance is a very important thing. - Yes, yes, right. One member of our audience is asking if you would kindly restate the definition or your definition of exoticism, which you mentioned briefly at
the beginning of the lecture. - Gosh, it's a huge area. I suppose it's using cliched
gestures that are recognizable to the audience in order to
create a sense of distance and otherness. And I mean, it's present
in 19th century music in all sorts of ways. I mean, it's present in... The Spanish is obviously Spanish style, which is pretty much
invented by French composers is the primary of exoticism. I mean, you see earlier
in the 18th century with Turkish music
that's used most famously by Mozart in the Rondo Alla Turca. and in Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail. But I think it's using a rather telescoped cliched musical gesture in order to create this otherness rather than
either creating a new style or engaging with music
of other traditions, which I think is something that somebody like Benjamin Britten does. And I mean, one area
I didn't really go into in discussing Chansons Madecasses is the extent to which he was influenced by having heard Malagasy
music in the late 19th and early 20th century at some
of the exhibitions in Paris. But we opened up now a whole area of complex debate about on
the one hand being influenced by other traditions,
which surely we all think is a good thing. And then this idea of
cultural appropriation which I didn't even
really want to get into because I think it's such a complex area. - Yes, well, building on
that question just a little, the the choice of
instrumentation of flute, cello, piano and voice is a little bit unusual, it's not the everyday scoring. And if I remember correctly, I think Elizabeth Sprague
Coolidge actually asked or used that instrumentation. But I wonder if there was something meant to be exotic sounding
about that instrumentation or about say the flute. Do you have a sense that
it works particularly well, let's say for this
particular setting of a poem. - Yeah, I mean, I suppose
the way it happened was that she asked for this combination. I imagine because she had
particular players in mind because I think the commission
was relayed to Ravel by the chalice who ended up playing. And then Ravel must have thought
about it and realized that, I mean, as with many early
20th-century composers, he was listening to music
from other traditions. And he must have realized that the flute, the cello and the piano
presented real possibilities for creating tambours
and harmonic structures that sort of related to
other musical traditions. And then the fact that he
was sitting and reading at the time he received a commission, he was sitting and reading poems by Parny Méfiez vous des blancs he must've suddenly
thought "Oh, Madecasses, "flute, cello, piano. "I can make some sort of
Malagasy sounds in this." Yeah. - Wonderful. You told us that the Chansons Madecasses, and especially Aoua were
greeted as a very provocative political statement at
the first performance. And if Aoua is an example
of what we might call artistic free speech or as you called it, an agitprop bomb, I think you said. when is art better at doing
than say, political writing? And does it take a
striking musical setting? One of the things I think I picked up from what you said is
that the Aoua was added by Ravel but that's not in
the point by the Songs of Madagascar. So does Ravel intensify that poem further by adding and it ends
up being what a refrain throughout the Aoua
beware of the white men. - Yeah, I think the word is another area I didn't have time to go into. It's a difficult one because
I think there's some evidence that he picked up the word from a French musical encyclopedia which was relaying the
sound that some supposedly quintessentially savage people were making at one of these exhibitions. So in fact, it has a slightly... It's slightly exoticizing in
a way that doesn't totally fit with the plainness of the address of the rest of the song, I think 'cause the rest of the song is so direct I mean, in the way that
the poem is direct. I'm not entirely happy with Aoua in a way. It's like, takes it takes away from that. But it's complicated. - Well, I guess a little
bit related to that, but stepping back a little bit,
one of our audience members asked if you could comment
on this deeper understanding of the song's layered history
and how that might illuminate a singer's performance of it. I mean, so speaking more
now about the performer, what should they be thinking
or doing in performing Aoua? - I think, I mean this
is always the problem when I'm asked about,
'cause I'm a singer who does a lot of research, not about
all the pieces I sing actually. And one of the reasons
I came to this piece and wanted to write about it
was because I had only once in my life performed this
piece and I don't think I'd really thought about it at all. And then it suddenly
occurred to me that actually as a responsible artist,
I need to think about, and particularly with a song
that's political like this. Whether, I think anyway,
it's actually going to affect the performance is going to be subliminal and it's going to feed the imagination and the imaginative space at
the performance takes place in. But I mean, I think the
issue for me in a way is should I be performing this song. I think I can perform
this song if I perform it with due sort of knowledge
of the origins of the song, but it's a complicated thing
because should it be sung by a black singer? The first time I ever heard it sung, it was sung by a black singer and as a result, it was
incredibly powerful. But actually it's a word
written by two White artists who were deeply implicated
in the colonial enterprise. So it's who should be singing
it, who should be doing... I think the thing is we should, in order to make these
works that we inherit from the past work, in
order to bring them to life, we need to explore them, that's the thing. - Yes, yes. Well, again, related to that,
you have discussed mostly the second song, the Aoua. I wonder if you could say just a few words about Nahandova and the third song. Our audience member is asking,
are any of them protest songs and how do they relate to one another? How did the three songs go together? - They're much more typically exoticizing. I mean, I don't think they're
not really full of mostly of the cliche gestures of exoticism, but they're about a sort of,
as are Parny's poems partly, they're about a sort
of European imagination of a sort of idol of an exotic
idol of langour and seduction. And that's why the work aesthetically is because Aoua is a great big
jolt in the middle of that. But I mean, the first song is remarkably sexually explicit really, unusually so, and that's something that
Ravel does remark upon. But I don't think the first
song and the third song in terms of their subject matter
are totally novel for Ravel in the way that he suggested. I think the thing that's really
novel is the second song. And the fact that he doesn't say that is in a way a measure of
the fact of how novel it was 'cause I think maybe he backed off. - And the third song is just
utterly bizarre at the end the way it just suddenly
out of nowhere says, "Hey, let's go make ..." - Go make a meal, yeah. - Go make dinner. - Yeah, it's got a sort of wonderful, I mean, it's extraordinarily laconic. It's just like go and prepare the meal. - That's exactly. One of our audience members
as how characteristic of Ravel's vocal writing
is the songs are the, well, the whole series,
let's say the whole cycle. - In my experience, Ravel's vocal styles are incredibly various. I mean, I've sung Sheherazad,
which is much earlier work full of exoticism and exotic gestures, but I think also ionizing them. I've sung the song Melodies
Populaires Grecques and there's always an
attempt to find a sort of, there's a different vocal
color in terms of the phrasing in all these cycles. They create different worlds
in an extraordinary way. As you mentioned that this song
series is both aesthetically and ideologically complex. From the perspective of the
performer, how do you reconcile these two types of complexity? Is there something that you have to... Are you constantly saying,
this is an aesthetic moment. This is now I need, and
this is a more ideologically expressive moment. Are you torn in this in any
way or does it flow freely? - If you're going to perform a piece, and I said, I haven't
attempted to perform this piece since I performed it sort of ignorantly probably five years ago. I think it has to be
presented aesthetically. You have to absorb as
much of the information as you think is useful to you to feed your imaginative stance and
then go with it, really. I mean, I look a lot at taking a completely different sorts of work. I've thought a lot about Winterreise. I've looked a lot at the
political context of Winterreise. I mean, I'm sure thinking
about the political context has informed my reading
of the of the piece, but when I perform it, I'm
not thinking intellectually. - Well, I think that we
have come to the end now of our question session and
I want thank Ian so much for joining us today. This has been an excellent discussion about "Hidden Histories". We hope that you can join us for the final of Ian's three
Berlin lectures next Saturday, April 24th at 1:00 p.m.
central daylight time, when Ian will discuss Meditations on Death in several musical works
by Benjamin Britten. Thank you once again and
enjoy the rest of your day.