Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe
He is an incomparable phenomenon in Early Music.
Myth and legend are billowing around his figure. There is no
portrait of him, although there are some paintings considered to be taken of
him, but without any proof – by the way, most incomprehensibly we don’t even
know his first name, and know hardly anything about his life.
He lived in a period, when baroque music was reaching its
summit, in theorists’ terminology it was ripe or high; the opera as a genre
became an absolute favourite, and at every corner immense, spectacular shows
were arranged. The keyboard instruments were very much favoured, too, and from
almost every noble house music was filtering through the air.
In France the power of le Roi-Soleil, the Sun King was on
its zenith, the music of the time had become more and more complicated and
over-ornamented, and its notions were beginning to be void of meaning; forms
were enlarged, which actually means restricted; and virtuosity became a
requisite without limitation. And this had been gone on and on, until, only a
few decades after Sainte Colombe, Scarlatti (I mean Domenico, of course) came
forward with much complicated keyboard sonatas I find simply unbearable, being
impossible-to-listen-to thrashings, mere claptraps.
Sainte Colombe, however, was going against the stream so to
speak: his unusually fine melodies are never empty – well, he always kept his
standards very high indeed –, and his strange, somewhat unfamiliar harmonies
are slowly eating their way into our insides, they are sober and beautiful, and
sometimes very strange, often lacking any definable construction, but they are
so melodic they remind me of Vivaldi, who decades later became another great
master of beautiful melody-lines...
Sainte Colombe refused firmly to be a court-musician,
instead he organised concerts at his home, playing excludingly with his two
daughters, and these occasions soon became widely known and spoken of. The
concerts were said to be very high in quality, and were even named “academic”.
The master had a few pupils time to time, but he never kept them too long.
And there is that famous legend of the young Marin Marais,
who, after having been thrown out on his ear by the old master, he cunningly
used it to listen to the secret melodies, while lying under the shed in the
garden where the Monsieur invented his beautiful lines, and made with them a
glamorous carrier for himself, and for the viol, too, which instrument he
helped to its summit in whole Europe.
Sainte Colombe was the one, by the way, who put a seventh
string, a low A on the six-chords viola da gamba, and by doing so he did not
simply made it possible to raise the number of new chords and fingerings
considerably, but somehow enlarged the inner range or space of the sound as
well.
Every great performers of the viol honour his memory with a
disc, the cult having been started by Jordi Savall and the music he used for
the film Tous les matins du monde .
The film had exactly the same effect on students of music
academies, as Top Gun on students of aviation – in the US everyone wanted to be
an army pilot, in Europe they changed department and applied to become a viol
player...
From then on this wonderful instrument has secured a safe
place among both musicians and audience; and the cello fans are slowly
overshadowed by the growing number of viol-admirers...
Savall did record this music with Astrée already in 1976,
that time to LP, which became such a great success, it is now measured in gold
at the jeweller’s scale. Later on, in 1992, a second disc was made, in this
case in CD format, then in 2001 Alia Vox remastered and re-released both
records on double SACD, in a nice boxed set and with a thick booklet.
What a
pleasure, even to touch it!
The music is simply awesome. Below is the first link... the
whole disc begins with these brilliantly chasing sounds, and around the 30th
seconds, in case you have a really very good system, you start sweating from
exitement...
Now, a completely new generation of viol players have been
raised since then, coming forth with smashingly good CD-s, and very soon even
their children would take their first exams at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis
or some other early music department, but Savall, who successfully kept his
place among the greatest gurus all the while, has set the bar so high, this is
almost impossible to jump it over. Now, these pieces were written for two
viols, and the other player is Wieland Kuijken, a Fleming from Belgium (Savall
is a Catalan, remember?), but back then, in the 80’s, no one could have the
remotest idea that these two guys would make a history, and not with their
elegant jumpers...
When a piece of music is written for two parts, there is
always hard to decide, who would play the first – and even if in Sainte
Colombe’s music the parts are said to be equal, they are not really. One is
always a bit higher than the other, or just comes first. It is quite difficult
to persuade a great performer to play the second part, therefore there are a
lot of recordings and live performances where equality between the two parts,
even in a philosophical sense, is simply out of question.
Here, however, that time still absolutely equal aces sat
down next to each other, and in order to avoid any debate, they constantly
shifted between the two parts.
The music is not to be compared to any of its
contemporaries; it’s melodic and sober, perhaps the most sober viol music ever,
with a rather rigorous structure and strict rules, but at the same time with
much inner freedom, that would only be seen centuries later in another system –
or should we name it an anti-system? – which piteously must do without an
audience, because they all ran away long ago... Here there are beautiful,
richly resonant, low sounds; the seventh string bringing not only more chord-alternatives,
but also a sort of “restructuring” of the musical playfield, transforming it to
a multidimensional space.
The movements bear titles referring to certain dances – it
turns out soon, however, that sometimes even the time signature does not
correspond with the actual titles; the dances follow each other in a rather
unusual, almost inconsequential way, but instead of the ice-cold, deadly
reasonability of the later sonata form, here one can feel the irresistible
strength of wide, rolling waves of freedom, melodies coming forth like buds,
opening in the morning breeze, and we are standing stunned, with half-opened
eyelids, wondering how could such a rare beauty be born out of nowhere.
The timber is that of the Voix humaines, so very typical to
the viol, and because there are now two viols playing, what we get here is a
perfect musical dialogue, the range of which covers exactly the same spectrum
as the human voice does, only the language is different, but it can be quite
easily understood, so after a few listening we will have the feeling as if it
had always belonged to us...
Both instruments were built long ago, one basse de viol at
the beginning of the 18th century (Kuijken), the other around 1650 (Savall);
both are equipped naturally with gut strings, and are possessing such a
sonorous sound, we hardly even have the heart to listen to a baroque cello for
weeks...
The quality of the sound is extraordinary. The first disc
gives a little strange, knurly-raspy, old-tasting sound, but it is accompanied
with such intensity and presence, that all those typical hifi-yammerings are
immediately forgotten. The second is simply brilliant, so there is hardly
anything to complain about.
The remasterings are exceptionally good, I couldn’t hear any
difference between the layers of the old and the new release. If you
accidentally have an access to a high-definition SACD-player and a HighEnd
system, do not hesitate to listen to the SACD, because it is going to be an
unforgettable experience!
The music might seem to be somewhat sad... maybe it is...
but sometimes the sadness turns into a flooding melancholy, which only raise
the level of beauty, and we remember, don’t we, what the great Sufi,
Ibn-al-Faradi from Cordoba said long ago:
Music is the sadness humans feel for their long lost home in
heaven.
After the Reconquista both Cordoba and Granada became part
of the Christian world again, but it seems this wonderful thought was still
lingering there for a while, and then was absorbed by the woods used to build
viols, gently and beautifully, and forever...
* * *
Translated by Kallai Nóra
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Thank you for the images.
