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Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) Music of His Time As styles change, so art history needs labels to describe them. The desire to sort things and group them is...

Paul Cezanne


(1839-1906)


Music of His Time

As styles change, so art history needs labels to describe them. The desire to sort things and group them is irresistible, and no sooner do we look at a painting than we start deciding whether to call it Baroque or Rococo, Romantic or Realist, Cubist or Futurist. The labels are convenient and helpful - except when they become confusing. It seems obvious, for instance, that Post-Impressionism must have come later than Impressionism, and so in a sense it did. The ideas of Van Gogh and Gauguin certainly arose as a reaction to what Monet, Pissarro and others had achieved in the 1870s. But if we look at the dates of Cezanne, the man generally regarded as the central Post-Impressionist, we find that he was an exact contemporary of Monet and Renoir. He even presented his works in Impressionist exhibitions - where they came in for some of the most cruel criticism ever directed at that group of painters.

So would it be right to say that Cezanne was also an Impressionist, at least before he became a Post-Impressionist? At this point a discreet refusal to come out with a straight answer is probably the best option. Yes, Cezanne kept a loose connection to some members of a group that used to meet in the Cafe Guerbois in Paris, including Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Manet and Degas; yes, he did paint landscapes in the open air using an avant-garde technique. But no, he was never really one of their number and he did not share their ideals.

Two things in particular mark Cezanne out as very different. First, his interest in permanence, the underlying structure of things: Cezanne was concerned to convey form and solidity, whereas the Impressionists were fascinated by the fleeting moment - the way light could be seen to play on a certain scene. Second, modernity. The Impressionists were thoroughly inclusive when it came to subject matter, and they had a particular liking for the symbols of social change. Railways, boating, daytrippers, cafe life, entertainment generally were favoured subjects. Cezanne, by contrast, blotted the modern world out of his canvases. Everything is traditional, secure, untainted. His landscapes are unpopulated; if there is a viaduct, there is no train. Monumentality, not topicality, is the aim.

But by a nice irony, it was not the modern-minded Impressionists who provided the essential pathway to Modernism. When Matisse referred to 'the father of us all', and Picasso to 'the mother who protects her children', they both had in mind the same man: Paul Cezanne.

Cezanne

Cezanne was one of those frequent and unenviable figures in the history of the arts, the son who turns out to be a disappointment to a powerful father. The father in this case was an importer of felt hats who in 1839, the year of Paul's birth, established himself in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France. Later he raised his station in life by transforming himself into a successful banker. The son of such a man, he decided, would do well to train for the law. Paul, however, wrote poetry and had very different ideas. So too did a close friend from school, one Emile Zola, who dreamed of a literary career. It was Zola who dragged the shy and reserved Cezanne to Paris in 1861 to broaden his artistic outlook by studying at the Academie Suisse. Despite the occasional loss of nerve, followed by flight towards home, Cezanne persevered with the life drawing that formed the basis of his instruction - a minor torment for a man who was never at ease in the presence of nude models.

Zola was inclined to be exasperated by the hesitancy and general slowness that characterised Cezanne. He knew his friend had great talent, but bringing it to the surface was another matter. Nor did Cezanne shine in company. He would sometimes join the group, originally centred around Manet, that tended to congregate in the Cafe Guerbois to debate the purpose of art, life and anything else that took their fancy. Cezanne had been very well educated, and he certainly knew more about literature than those around him. But he remained obstinately rough and uncouth in company, almost wilfully so. On one occasion he made a point of not shaking the hand of the impeccably dressed Manet, explaining that he had not washed his own. The airs and refinements of Parisian society were not for him.

Cezanne was still fighting the world as he searched for his own style. The works of the 1860s include some with violent and erotic undercurrents, remarkably at odds with his later paintings. His ambitions at this time mirrored those of almost every French artist: to have his paintings accepted by the Paris Salon, which had appointed itself as the sole arbiter of artistic taste and decorum. Cezanne's works were regularly turned down, along with those of Monet, Manet and any other painter who failed to satisfy the Salon's increasingly wearisome and academic formulae. It was Camille Pissarro who eventually pointed him in the right direction, persuading him that he should immerse himself in nature and learn the recently developed art of painting in the open air. From 1872 onwards, when Cezanne went to live in Auvers, near Pissarro's home, the two men made regular expeditions into the surrounding countryside, often working on their landscapes side by side.

As Cezanne doggedly pursued his own path, so he gradually fell out of sympathy with Impressionism. Some friendships endured, and as late as the 1890s he was still glad of the chance to meet up again with Monet and Renoir. But their paintings, to his eye, were fluffy and insubstantial, too far removed from the ideals of composition that he found in the great artists of the past, many of whom he had himself devotedly copied over many years of study in the Louvre. His own art spoke of something timeless and unchanging, and the best place for him to create it was back in Provence. There by the Mediterranean he could find the brightest light and the most intense colours.

Recognition came very late. His supporters had always been few and he was reliant on a small allowance from his father for financial security. Every year until 1885 he submitted a painting to the Salon, and every year, almost without exception, it was turned down. Even Zola had lost faith, and the friendship was finally destroyed in 1886 when Cezanne read L'OEuvre, a novel by Zola in which the hero, a painter of genius, becomes increasingly embittered with the world and kills himself. But the real Cezanne did not despair. He simply kept on painting, until the world finally caught up with his ideas and his peaceful existence in Aix was disturbed by an unwelcome stream of young painters eager for instruction.

Music of the time

When Cezanne was a young man the greatest composer in France was Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). That, however, was not how the French saw it. In 1838 the opera Benvenuto Cellini had been a failure at the Paris Opera, since when Berlioz had found it almost impossible to get his works performed in his own country. He was not even considered worthy of a teaching position at the Conservatoire, and so was reduced to earning his bread through musical journalism, a task that he despised even while fulfilling it brilliantly. Outside France, however, there were many admirers of his highly dramatic and impassioned music, and he spent much of his time touring Germany, Russia, England and other places to conduct performances of his own works.

The masterwork of his later years was The Trojans, a vast epic opera based on the second and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid (track 1). Berlioz wrote the work - including the libretto - from pure love of the original poem and its subject, knowing that his chances of ever getting it satisfactorily staged were very slim. Producers were shy of becoming involved with a project that made such enormous demands, both musically and theatrically. Finally the proprietor of the Theatre-Lyrique agreed to take it on, but only on condition that the opera was split into two halves and the first half (the taking of the city of Troy) was omitted. This truncated version (the Trojans at Carthage, with its tale of Queen Dido and Aeneas) was first performed in 1863; though Berlioz declared the production a 'contemptible parody' of what was intended he was surprised to find it warmly praised in the press: for him this was a most rare pleasure.

Parisian audiences at this time, the era of the Emperor Napoleon III, wanted to be pleased rather than challenged. Music, like painting, was stultifying in the hands of a reactionary minority and change was inevitable. The first signs of a musical revival came early in 1871 with the foundation of the Societe Nationale de Musique, which took as its motto Ars gallica. Shortly after this Georges Bizet (1838-1875) abandoned many of the conventions of the opera comique to produce his single masterpiece Carmen, in which real characters took over the stage for the first time and sentimentality gave way to genuine emotions.

Bizet's acute sense of characterisation had already been demonstrated in the music for Alphonse Daudet's L'Arlesienne. Martin Cooper has explained its appeal:
There is no escaping the Provence of the Arlesienne music; the landscape is not merely a background to the work, it is the main character, always present and perpetually active, and Bizet's music catches exactly the vigour and simplicity, the emotional torridity and the tragic fatality which underlie the uncompromising contours of the countryside.

Disc 1

Les Troyens a Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage): Prelude (more info)
Performed by: San Diego Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Hector Berlioz
Conducted by: Yoav Talmi


1.   Les Troyens a Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage): Prelude - 5:01


L'Arlesienne, Suite No. 2: I. Pastorale (more info)
Performed by: Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Georges Bizet
Conducted by: Anthony Bramall


2.   L'Arlesienne, Suite No. 2: I. Pastorale - 5:47


10 Pieces pittoresques (excerpts) (more info)
Composed by: Emmanuel Chabrier
Georges Rabol, piano


3.   Melancolie - 2:09
4.   Improvisation - 4:47


Chanson triste (more info)
Composed by: Henri Duparc
Paul Groves, tenor
Roger Vignoles, piano


5.   Chanson triste - 3:25


Le Manoir de Rosemonde (more info)
Composed by: Henri Duparc
Paul Groves, tenor
Roger Vignoles, piano


6.   Le Manoir de Rosemonde - 2:37


Elegie (more info)
Composed by: Henri Duparc
Paul Groves, tenor
Roger Vignoles, piano


7.   Elegie - 3:07


Masques et Bergamasques, Op. 112 (excerpts) (more info)
Performed by: RTE Sinfonietta
Composed by: Gabriel Faure
Conducted by: John Georgiadis


8.   Gavotte - 3:44
9.   Pastorale - 4:22


Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 10: IV. Finale: Allegro (more info)
Composed by: Leon Boellmann
Janos Fehervari, viola
Ilona Prunyi, piano
Karoly Botvay, cello
Bela Banfalvi, violin


10.   Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 10: IV. Finale: Allegro - 7:50


Gymnopedie No. 1: Lent et douloureux (more info)
Composed by: Erik Satie
Klara Kormendi, piano


11.   Gymnopedie No. 1: Lent et douloureux - 2:41


Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune (more info)
Performed by: Belgian Radio and Television Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Claude Debussy
Conducted by: Alexander Rahbari
Jan van Reeth, flute


12.   Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune - 10:33


24 Pieces en style libre, Op. 31: Epitaphe (more info)
Composed by: Louis Vierne
Simon Lindley, organ


13.   24 Pieces en style libre, Op. 31: Epitaphe - 3:58


Nocturnes: I. Nuages (more info)
Performed by: Belgian Radio and Television Philharmonic Orchestra
Composed by: Claude Debussy
Conducted by: Alexander Rahbari


14.   Nocturnes: I. Nuages - 7:34


Miroirs (excerpts) (more info)
Composed by: Maurice Ravel
Francois-Joel Thiollier, piano


15.   Noctuelles - 4:18
16.   Oiseaux tristes - 3:47

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