Class 2: Mystic Twilight

A. What’s in a Title?

1. Title Slide 1 (closing slide from last week) 2. Title transformation video 3. Title Slide 2 (Redon: Reflection)

Using my file of slides for last week as a template for this one, I found an amusing thing. The last slide I showed before, a painting of Nôtre Dame at Sunset by Albert Lebourg (1849–1928), could serve equally well for this one, although I chose a different painting to go on the website.

4. Comparison of Lebourg and Redon

An amusing coincidence—but it also provides a “teachable moment.” Let’s compare the Lebourg with the picture I actually chose: Reflection (1910) by Odilon Redon (1840–1916). Both are twilight pictures, both have a similar color palette and mood, both have roughly the same composition—but Lebourg is recording a real view, while Redon is depicting ideas in the mind. Lebourg, a relatively minor painter from Rouen, was not an Impressionist, but he certainly follows their example in painting an actual view in summary form, concerned not with detail but with the effect of light at a particular time of day. Redon, who was one of the major painters of the Symbolist movement, my main theme today, is also unconcerned with spelling out particulars. Is this a real place? Probably not. What is causing those sparks in the water? We don’t know. Who is the woman? We don’t know that either. What is she thinking? Ah, that’s the point: we don’t know; the picture invites us to guess, but it is not going to give us an answer. All the elements in the picture—sky, mountains, water, sparling highlights, and pensive woman—are there because of their emotive associations. The picture is not complete without the viewer’s mind to bring it all together. I came upon the comparison quite by accident, but I could not think of a better way to explain the difference between the two main aesthetics in France at the end of the century, Impressionism and Symbolism.

5. Redon quotation

As Redon said: “My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” This aesthetic, Symbolism, is the subject of today’s class. I shall devote the first hour mainly to its poets, whose field of action was basically secular. The second hour will look at how often that “ambiguous realm of the undetermined” would expand into the spiritual.

6. Frédéric Bazille: Paul Verlaine at 23 (1867)

Another coincidence. Almost as soon as I started preparing this class, and weeks after I had decided its title, “Mystic Twilight,” I came upon a poem by this man Paul Verlaine (1844–96) called “Twilight of a Mystical Evening.” It was included in the collection Poèmes Saturniens (Poems under Saturn), that made

— 1 — him famous when he published it at the age of 22. Sometime in the year after that, Verlaine would meet the equally young painter Frédéric Bazille (1841–70), who was so excited by his friendship that he picked up on of his own still-lifes and dashed off this painting in tribute. Here is the poem, read by Nathalie Mussard shown with a translation by A. S. Kline.

7. Verlaine: Crépuscule du soir mystique, read by Nathalie Mussard 8. — still from the above

Let’s look more closely. First, the linking of twilight with memory, the external moment triggering internal thoughts. Second, the shape of a poem, which looks like a sonnet, but it not sectionalized like one; indeed there is no heavy punctuation to impede its flow from beginning to end. Third, the fact that although each group of two or three lines makes its own sense, it is very difficult to resolve the whole into a coherent sentence; Velaine piles image upon image—and if they connect, it is not as a chain of meaning, but as a cloud.

9. Odilon Redon: Woman with Flowers (1910)

And what about those flowers—dahlias, lilies, tulips, and (in the French) buttercups? They don’t fit into context either time they appear; they don’t grow on trellises, and they do not have a strong perfume. But they do have intense color; if appealing to one or two senses is good, appealing to three or four is even better. Symbolist painters such as Redon often used flowers in a similar way, as an intensification of sensation. And Verlaine is intense; look at the three words I have highlighted here: maladive means sickly, or even morbid; poison is exactly that, not merely a heady scent, but an actual poison; and pâmoison means fainting, something strong enough to make you lose consciousness.

10. Poldowski portrait

Normally, I use the visual arts as the main element in my presentations, because they are right there in front of you, there is no language barrier, and they take no time to show. But I can’t talk about Symbolism without talking about poetry, since that is where the movement started. And I can’t rely solely on translations, partly because no one translator can capture all the nuances of the Symbolists’ verbal imagery, and also because you at least need to sample the sound of the French, whether spoken or, as here, sung. But I am including this setting too because its composer was hitherto unknown to me—most probably ignored as a woman, but now sought out to right the balance. Régine Wieniawski (1879–1932) was the daughter of the celebrated Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski. It is not entirely clear where she trained, but when her father died she moved with her mother to London, where she met and in 1901 married Sir Aubrey Dean Paul, becoming Lady Dean Paul herself—which would make her a distant cousin by marriage of Winston Churchill! She continued to study and compose, however, and had great success with her Verlaine songs, composed around 1910, under the pseudoym she was using at the time, Poldowski. She is later, but she catches the spirit, I think.

11. Poldowski: Crépuscule du soir mystique (Ensemble 1904)

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B. Accursed Poets

12. Four Symbolist Poets

In 1884, Verlaine published an anthology of six contemporary French poets that he called Poètes maudits, or “Accursed Poets.” Wikipedia explains it: “A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit.” Three of the six are shown here: Verlaine himself (under the anagrammatic pseudonym “Pauvre Lelian”), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98). The man at the top right, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), belongs to an older generation and is not included, but he was one of the first of whom the term was used, and can be considered the godfather of the Symbolist Movement. For the rest of this hour, I am going to concentrate only on these poets; I shall range more widely after the break.

13. Paul Verlaine: Ars Poetica

And what was Symbolist poetry? Verlaine wrote a youthful poem about it, Art poetique; here are four of its verses, translated by Norman Shapiro. You see he values spontaneity, free association, and irregularity unconstrained by rigid rules. He also says—and this is important—that a poem should be like music. Again and again we shall find, as we venture into Modernism, that the arts in other media— poetry, prose, painting, and even sculpture—aspire to the condition of music.

14. Baudelaire: Harmonie du soir (1866)

In a previous course, I showed this poem from Baudelaire’s 1857 collection, Harmonie du soir or Evening Harmony. Just look at it for a moment, whether you read French or not. I will give you a translation in a moment. Note its intricate structure, lines from one stanza carried through to the next in mesmeric incantation. This is an exception to Verlaine’s distaste for structure, but it is music! Just listen to the effect of the sonorous repetitions when read aloud by the excellent Denis Lavant. There is so much sonority in the words that the music in the background is spurious; it is a violin arrangement of a song from The Merry Widow.

15. Baudelaire: Harmonie du soir, read by Denis Lavant 16. Baudelaire: Evening Harmony, translated by Roy Campbell

There is a site on the web that gives five different translations of each of several Baudelaire poems. All have different qualities; none is perfect. Looking at this one by Roy Campbell, I want you to notice the Catholic imagery of “censer,” “altar,” and “monstrance.” And especially the synesthesia, the combination of sights, sounds, scents, and colors. It is a poem entirely devoted to the senses—all the senses—which suffuse the reader as with the smoke of opium.

17. Baudelaire and Les fleurs du mal

I would not want you to think that Baudelaire spent his days swooning in the scent of incense. He was very much a poet of the here and now, and could be quite direct in his sexual frankness. When he

— 3 — published Fleurs du mal (Fowers of Evil) in 1857, he was prosecuted for indecency, and several of his poems were excised—those dealing with lesbianism or sado-masochism, for instance. But, as he said in his introduction to the collection, the poet must be open to everything. When with some friends discussing the greatest pleasure love can give, he maintained that the true pleasure of love was “the certainly of doing evil. […] Both men and women know, from birth that nowhere but in evil do they find gratification.” His mission, he said, was total honesty in describing his feelings—mon coeur mis à nu—my heart stripped bare. And some of those feelings could be dark indeed, as this section from his poem Le Spleen de Paris shows.

18. Baudelaire: excerpt from Le Spleen de Paris

The drawing in the background, incidentally, was by Victor Hugo (1802–85), the author of Les Miserables, and an artist whose imagination was decidedly in the Symbolist vein.

C. Rimbaud’s Wild Parade

19. Rimbaud: “Phrase” from Les Illuminations (1874)

The poet who most excites me among the four we have been discussing is Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), who burst on the scene as a teenager with some of the most extraordinary poetry of his time, then stopped writing altogether at age 20, and spent the rest of his life as an explorer and trader in Africa and elsewhere, before dying of cancer at age 37. With Rimbaud, the dark side of Symbolism comes out in force—not the depressive aspect we have seen in Baudelaire, but its manic opposite, a wild kind of brilliance. But before getting on to that, look at this very short poem called simply “Phrase” from Rimbaud’s last collection, Les Illuminations. Anyone who could write that is a creature of Light.

20. “Phrase” variant 1 (Monet) 21. “Phrase” variant 2 (Léger) 22. “Phrase” variant 1 (wire dancer)

I had trouble looking for an illustration to put with this, but the trouble is instructive. For, just as we were saying at the beginning, you can’t tether the floating images of Symbolist poetry to everyday objects. You need to find some parallel work of art that also denies solidity, even from a much later period. Perhaps one of the Rouen Cathedral paintings by Claude Monet (1840–1926), such as this one from 1894. Or in 1949, Fernand Léger (1881–1955) produced a series of prints illustrating selected poems from the collection; in one sense, they are very literal, though Léger’s playful style keeps them from being weighed down. But I was most pleased by one that came up when I entered the first line of the poem into an online search—a little wire sculpture by an unknown artist that seems to match by not being literal at all. In illustrating Symbolist poetry, what is important is not that an artist or composer should come from the same time—that would give you very slim pickings—but that they should preserve the spirit of the originals in whatever period or medium. Hence my justification for illustrating Les Illuminations with two settings composed by the young Benjamin Britten (1913–76) in 1939.

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23. Georges Seurat: Circus Parade (1888, NY Met)

Britten opens his cycle, written for soprano and string orchestra, with a fanfare, at the peak of which the singer declaims this phrase, Rimbaud’s preface to his wild parade (the word in French is sauvage); it is one of the most exciting musical openings I know. The singer here is Roxana Constantinescu at the 2014 Lockenhaus Chamber Festival in Austria. I cut directly from there to the penultimate song, in which the singer—here the tenor Ian Bostridge, singing as though demon-posessed—describes the wierd procession of freaks, moving to the thrust of Britten’s nightmare march. And at the climax, he repeats the opening phrase again.

24. Britten: Les Illuminations, Fanfare 25. Britten: Les Illuminations, Parade 26. Leonardo di Caprio as Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse (1995)

I’m giving you a break from all this high art to show a compilation of clips from a film about Rimbaud and Verlaine, Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieska Holland in 1995, based on a play by Christopher Hampton. It seemed a compact way to tell a rather sordid story that is actually true. In 1871, still only 16, Rimbaud sent some of his poems to Verlaine, who sent him a one-way ticket to Paris. He made such an impression on the older poet that he left his pregnant wife and began a two-year torrid affair with the brilliant boy; the two are seen together in this 1872 painting by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904).

27. Henri Fantin-Latour: A Corner of the Table (1872, Orsay)

It seems clear that Rimbaud was the seducer here; Verlaine was the weaker of the two, and quite unable to sand up to him. Besides, wasn’t living outside the normal rules of society what being a poète maudit was all about? Anyway, they lived a life of absinthe drinking and drug taking, spending their way through Verlaine’s money, until one night, drunk and exasperated, Verlaine pulled a gun and shot Rimbaud in the hand. He received two years’ imprisonment, and never fully recovered his original balance, though he continued to write. Rimbaud, meanwhile, gave up writing altogether, and ended up as a gun-runner in Ethiopia. I don’t know who put together these silent clips from the film, but they tell the story well. The song, “La bohème” by Charles Aznavour, does not belong, but I like it anyway.

28. Scenes from Total Eclipse (1995, Agnieska Holland)

D. Mallarmé’s Faun

29. Stéphane Mallarmé: notes for the layout of Un coupe des dés (1897)

I have little time to deal with the fourth poet in the group, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), and then mainly with his most famous poem, L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1876). But I do want to mention one other thing in passing: by the end of Mallarmé’s career, we are fully in the fold of Modernism. Here is a page from his notebook showing a sketch for his last major work, A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897). Not only does the idea itself seem more appropriate to someone like

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Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco, not only is the language extraordinarily difficult (Mallarmé is reputed to be the most difficult poet to translate), but the layout of the words of the page are themselves a work of art, one of the first examples of Concrete Poetry. The significance of this is not merely that the typography imposes a certain rhythm on the text, but that it also allows you to read it in non-linear ways, jumping from capitals to capitals, for example, and passing over the smaller text. This is not far from a verbal equivalent of Cubism, a decade or more before Picasso!

30. Edouard Manet: Stéphane Mallarmé (1876) and L’après-midi d’un faune

You can see from the small illustration at top right that Mallarmé was interested in tyopgraphical layout as early as 1876, when he published L’après-midi d’un faune. I’ll show you a larger version at the moment. It is clearly an example of the kind of book-as-art that the French still love: the words laid out with plenty of space around them, and illustrations by no less than Édouard Manet (1832–83), who also painted the poet’s portrait at around the same time. The poem is about a classical Faun reflecting on his encounter with some Nymphs. It is a sort of interior dialogue, not making much sense as a coherent argument, but absolutely working as the equivalent of the play of emotions in the mind, and as verbal music. Listen to a few lines, as read by Pierre Jean Jouve:

31. Stéphane Mallarmé: L’après-midi d’un faune, opening read by Pierre Jean Jouve 32. Claude Debussy

And as verbal music, Mallarmé’s poem achieved immortality in inspiring actual music, the famous Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) who, though often called an Impressionist, was a Symbolist through and through. The work was criticized at its first performance as being formless, but in fact what Debussy does—taking evocative musical phrases, like this opening for solo flute, and suspending them in a shimmer of sound—is the exact equivalent of what Mallarmé was doing in his poetry.

33. Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, opening 34. Léon Bakst: program and backcloth for L’après-midi d’un faune (1912)

And although it is seldom seen today, Debussy’s work in turn aspired Vaslav Nijinsky (1909–50), the great principal dancer of the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), to turn it into a ballet. Nijinsky’s bare-footed dance style and deliberate imitation of a classical frieze mark a sharp departure from traditional ballet, and make the work a landmark of modern dance. The décor is by Leon Bakst (1866–1924), who married the Symbolist aesthetic to Russian exoticism and theatrical flair. Unfortunately, although the choreography has been notated and there are numerous still photographs, and many ecstatic descriptions, there is no film footage of Nijinsky dancing. We shall watch a section from a modern revival, starting with the entrance of the Nymphs.

35. Vaslav Nijinsky: L’après-midi d’un faune, excerpt 36. Class title 2 (still from the above)

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E. The Prophets and their Icon

37. Odilon Redon: Buddha (1906)

You remember the picture I used to illustrate his Redon’s point about ambiguity? I did not title it then, but wil do so now: like the rather clearer pastel on the left, its subject is the Buddha. I can’t find any evidence that Redon actually became a Buddhist, but there was a strong strain of spiritual mysticism underlying much of the art of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not only in France. This is the subject of my second hour, a mysticism that includes intense Catholicism, a passing interest in other religions, and a variety of philosophies that are pretty much on the fringe.

38. Paul Ranson: Christ and Buddha (1890, The Hague)

You get all of these in this slide. The larger painting is Christ and Buddha by the relatively minor artist Paul Ranson (1864–1909); it represents a kind of pan-spirituality including both Christianity and Buddhism. The picture on the left seems to show Ranson in the robes of a priest—but not of any existing religion. He is merely presiding over the weekly meeting of a group of painters brought together by the rather more talented Paul Sérusier (1864–1927), calling themselves the Nabis, Hebrew for Prophets.

39. Sérusier: The Talisman (1888)

You may see something of the influence of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) in Ranson’s Christ. And you would not be far wrong. In 1888, Sérusier traveled to the village of Pont-Aven in Brittany, where Gauguin was working. He only had one lesson from the master, but it resulted of this little sketch of a local beauty spot, the bois d’amour or Woods of Love. Sérusier brought the painting back to Paris like Moses with the tablets, calling it “The Talisman.” And with this little painting in their midst as a kind of icon, the Nabis were founded.

40. Sérusier’s Wagner quotation

And from the start, they felt they had a divine mission. On the wall of his studio, Sérusier painted a quotation which ends: “…On the other hand, I believe that the faithful disciples of great art will be glorified and—surrounded by a heavenly amalgam of rays, perfumes, and melodious sounds—will return to lose themselves for all eternity in the bosom of the divine source of harmony.” And the author? Richard Wagner.

41. Paul Gauguin: The Yellow Christ (1888, Buffalo)

I will get back to Wagner later, and also to the most overtly religious of the Nabis, Maurice Denis. But for now, I want to take a brief look at the Nabis’ muse-in-absentia, Gauguin himself. Gauguin is a giant in late-19th-century art, and by merely glimpsing him in one particular context, I risk slighting his range, but I will include him in more than one class. More than any other artist, he seemed to require frequent changes of scenery: Provence, Brittany, Martinique, Tahiti (twice), and the Marquesas Islands. Obviously, he was looking for fresh visual stimulation, probably for ways to think outside the box, and also I believe to encounter the spiritual aspect of different cultures. He painted a few conventional

— 7 — religious subjects, such as this Crucifixion of 1888 commonly called the Yellow Christ. But he has depicted it through the minds of the Breton peasant women kneeling beneath; were not the Christ figure as realistic as anything else, this might be a carved Calvary statue beside which they stop for a few moments to pray. The visual simplification, reducing everything to well-defined areas of clear color is a step on the road to abstraction—but the main intent, I think, is to shift away from literal representation; Gauguin may be classified with the Post-Impressionists, but this is a Symbolist picture.

42. Paul Gauguin: The Vision After the Sermon (1888, Edinburgh)

Though not so much as the remarkable Vision After the Sermon from the same year. We are to imagine Breton peasants coming out of church, where they have heard a sermon about Jacob wrestling with the Angel, when they are struck with a vision of it with the eyes of their own piety. Gauguin makes it almost as though they were watching a bullfight! Again, this is a Symbolist picture, and a huge step towards abstraction.

43. Paul Gauguin: Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? (1897, Boston)

When Gauguin moved to Tahiti, he moved out of the Christian sphere, but he did not lose his interest in the big spiritual questions. The subject of his Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going? Is nothing if not existential, and the painting, which is shaped by ideas rather than by reality, is the most Symbolist work we have seen yet.

F. Grail and Ideal

44. Annunciations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1950) and Edward Burne-Jones (1879)

Something changed in the portrayal of religious subjects in the later part of the century. Look at these two Annunciations by English artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—another group of artists with a divine mission. Both works are Symbolist of a kind, portraying an idea in deliberately non- realistic styles. But while Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), one of the founders of the movement, stays true to the original aim of returning to the freshness of quattrocento (1400s) painting, Edward Burne- Jones (1833–98) creates his mysteries through strange architecture and elaborate draperies; I know of no Annunication where the Angel is so far off the ground.

45. Burne-Jones: Damsel of the Holy Grail and Grail Tapestries (1890s, Birmingham)

For the later 19th century was fascinated by legends, among them the Quest for the Holy Grail (the cup supposedly used by Christ at the Last Supper). Here is a tapestry by Burne-Jones showing the achievement of that quest by Sir Galahad, accompanied at a distance by Perceval and Bors. And with this, we leave the straight depiction of stories from the Bible and move into the religious penumbra— subjects that maintain a vague mystic association with religion, but belong to no specific creed or dogma. So we return, as promised, to Richard Wagner (1813–83).

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46. Wagner: Parsifal, Hall of the Grail (1882)

Wagner’s 1861 foray to Paris with Tannhäuser may have been a notorious failure, but by the last quarter of the century most of the French musical world was fully in the grip of le Wagnerisme. Their taste ran less to the Germanic epic of the Ring than to Tristan and especially his last opera Parsifal, which at least were based on shared legends. And whether through genuine religious feeling or a personal Messianic complex, Wagner treated his final work as a sacred ritual. It was presented at Bayreuth in 1882, not as an opera, but a “stage consecration ritual.” Audiences had to attend with due reverence and were forbidden to applaud—a prohibition that was still in force when I saw it there in 1958

47. Paul von Joukowski set designs for Parsifal

The story is simple enough. Although in Arthurian legend Percival is the one to achieve the Grail, in this variant he becomes the holy innocent who restores it after the Grail Temple has been corrupted by the loss of the accompanying Holy Spear. In the first act, Parsifal strays into the Grail preserves, and is permitted to attend a ceremony. But he doesn’t understand what he is seeing, and it is only after resisting the Flower Maidens in the magic garden guarding the Spear that he is able to recover it and— after many years of wandering in the wilderness—return to take his proper role as Grail King. Here is the final scene in the old Met production by Otto Schenk. It is an old video, but there are almost no traditional productions out there any more.

48. Wagner: Parsifal, excerpt from final scene 49. Jean Delville: Parsifale (1890)

Both the colored painting of the young Parsifal that I showed you before and this monochrome watercolor are by an artist whom I did not know before researching this class, the Belgian Symbolist Jean Delville (1867–1953). He seems now to have quite a New Age following, but he is both accomplished and interesting, not least because he flirted with several of the philosophical cults that seemed to reign in the art world of the late Nineteenth Century, such as Rosicrucianism, Idealism, and Theosophy. Alas, I have only time for one. Delville was an Idealist. He believed that physical reality was only a symbol, and that the only significant existence was on the astral or divine planes. So this drawing of Parsifal does not show him literally in priestly robes, but symbolically as having risen to perfect clairvoyance (the antennae on his head) and clairaudience (the astral extension of his ears).

50. Jean Delville: Sathan’s Treasures (1895, Brussels)

So when Delville paints Sathan’s Treasures (1895), it is not a conventional vision of Hell. These are people so mesmerized by their own sensual and material desires that they are held in a trance, unaware of their higher potential. I have put together a short video of other Delville pictures. I don’t understand all of them, but the general theme should be the release of human souls from their benighted state to spiritual life and love—a kind of mystic resurrection. The music is the Violin Sonata by fellow-Belgian, César Franck (1822–90). Its lush chromatic harmonies and constant modulation are characteristic of French music in the wake of Wagner. I have a much less fraught piece of his saved up to end the class.

51. Jean Delville montage (to opening of the Franck Violin Sonata)

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H. Decadence and Purity

52. Jean Delville: Medusa

One final Delville, his Medusa, with the Angel from that Last Judgment piece above it. Just as a reminder that, as we saw with Baudelaire, Symbolism has its dark side too. I want to end the class with two pieces of music, which represent the extremes between them, and to introduce each by a picture or two.

53. Gustave Moreau: Salome Before Herod

When I was a teenager at boarding school, my classmates joked that I was mixed up between sex and religion. And in truth, they are easy to confuse. That at least would explain the obsession of the great Symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau (1826–98) with the story of Salome, who is obsessed in turn with the hideous beauty of John the Baptist. Most of his exhibited paintings of the subject take place inside an elaborate building that is half-palace, half-temple. Whereas Odilon Redon turned the charged images of Symbolist poetry into patches of vibrant color, Gustave Moreau piles on layer upon layer of clotted detail, like the jewels adorning Salome’s otherwise naked body. Critics came to use the term Decadent to distinguish works like these from less morbid aspects of Symbolism.

54. Oscar Wilde: Salomé (1893)

The Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was probably more at home in Paris than in Dublin or London. He was friends with many of the Symbolist artists and was a welcome guest at literary salons. So he may have been thinking of Moreau when he dashed off his one-act play Salomé in 1893; he was certainly totally immersed in the Decadent style. He wrote it in French, and it is hard to see it performed. But it has been eclipsed by the operatic setting by Richard Strauss (1864–1949) which premiered in Dresden in 1905. I shall play a four-minute scene, which comes at the climax of Salome’s attempt to seduce the prophet—so extreme in its sexuality that the Captain of the Guard, who is in love with her, kills himself rathe than bear it, and she doesn’t even notice. But even more, I am playing it for its religious music, where Jokanaan (which is what Wilde calls John), urges Salome to go to Galilee and seek out Jesus.

55. Strauss: Salome. Salome and Jokanaan 56. Maurice Denis: Le mystère Catholique and Self-Portrait at 19 (both 1889)

I think we need to cleanse the palate after that! So I shall end with a picture by the one Nabi who did specialize in sacred art, Maurice Denis (1870–1943). Like the Self-Portrait, The Catholic Mystery was painted when he was just 19; it is an interesting variant on the traditional Annunication, with the Angel replaced by a priest with the sacrement, but I love its radiant simplicity. I shall pair it with an similarly radiant work by our Belgian composer César Franck, his Panis Angelicus. Also referring to the sacrament of the Mass, it says “Thus the bread of angels becomes the bread of man.” Franck wrote it back in 1872; the singer in this performance from Dresden is Elina Garanca.

57. Franck: Panis Angelicus 58. Class title 3 (Maurice Denis: Solitude)

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