Or maybe the privileged one. Or even the aristocrat for an evening. I felt like that. It was dark, the rain had stopped, it had emptied the streets, the air was fresh, clear of humidity. I crossed the Seine by the Carrousel bridge. At 7 rue de Lille, in this place which was a paper warehouse, at the time when the district was full of printing presses and the workers who went with them, and publishers, and writers, artists, and which more recently was the very contemporary art gallery of Claude Berri, then the photography studio of Karl Lagerfeld who made it his monumental library, books up to the glass ceiling of his enormous, library-living room in which we access today through the bookstore he created, exclusively devoted to fine art books; it now belongs to the house of Chanel, which thus maintains the memory of the erudite, whimsical couturier. A myth during his lifetime, he spent his death in the company of image readers, page turners and other anachronistic lazy people who came to listen to the conversation-concert having as its theme, that evening, the crossing by Arnold Schönberg and Vassily Kandinsky, of the threshold of tonality in music and painting, at the beginning of the 20th century, in Vienna.
In a very long silver dress, Mimi Durand Kurihara presents the two speakers: the young conductor Arnaud Arbet who will talk about counterpoint, tonal and atonal, and dodecaphony while occasionally playing the piano to to make people understand better, while Alexandre Devals will talk about painting by tapping on a remote control to scroll through a few images on a screen.
Such a major, shattering, scandalous upheaval, told in such a peaceful, measured tone, in a hushed, comfortable, reassuring atmosphere, it was intoxicating. You can’t live in luxury, even in Luxembourg, it quickly becomes vulgar, but to taste it, in passing, during tea, a conversation, a concert, that’s the honey. Alexandre Devals leaves the floor to Arbet who presents the life and work of Schönberg. The luxury is also to understand what you are being told about these complex things such as the different structures of music, for example, and that of Schönberg that we are going to hear, the Schönberg before the atonal impossible ? To create is to go further, where the danger is, at the risk of obsession, of madness, but we will talk about it later, he summarizes, getting up to call the musicians, Fabien Roussel on the violin. , Anthony Kondo on cello, Eric Lamb on flute, Michel Raison on clarinet, and Kyoko Nojima on piano. With Arnaud Arbet conducting, they form the ensemble called Le Seuil Musical.
Music that knocks on the door
And here goes my kiki for the first symphony of Schönberg (transcription for quintet by Webern). Twenty-five minutes during which we feel where we need to be. In the fullness of a rare moment, as they say when you have forgotten to take notes, to plug in your cell phone and you say so much the better, nothing will be remembered except the gentle shiver on the skin, and the revelation that the books, lining all the walls, offer a probably ideal sound. It is a music which knocks on the door of another, which wants to enter somewhere where, in fact, once crossed this threshold, it will be lost, as Mahler was while listening to it, despite all the respect and affection he felt for his young admirer and disciple: “I can no longer hear your music, it goes too far, but continue, you are the future.”
The conversation that followed was pleasant, enriching, it prepared well for this return walk, the Carrousel bridge, Paris even more deserted than earlier, igniting the feeling of being Parisian, the city once again at the center of the world, and almost deserted, so much beauty and history all to myself, crossing the Louvre. A chance that obliges us to say it. Parisian, I make no apologies for being one.
Christophe Donner, writer
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