La Caféothèque

The state of coffee in France today is like that of the phone system a quarter of a century ago: one of the worst in Europe. So a place like La Caféothèque, near the Hôtel de Ville, is a relief as well as a pleasure. It’s an artisan café, much like the artisan boulangeries you see everywhere in Paris, but with a mission to educate people about real coffee. They talk about terroir; could I describe it better than by saying that?  It’s a connoisseur’s café, where you get a glass of water to cleanse the palate before the coffee and a chocolate to sweeten it afterwards, and the only food on the menu is croissants and some other viennoiserie. This morning the café de jour was Plantation Chitul-Tirol from Guatemala, full-bodied, sweet, a little acidy. The barista gave me a second espresso because the first wasn’t quite right – the second had the same flavours, only more intensely. Nom.

Monet’s Nymphéas, Musée de l’Orangerie.

When we visited the Orangerie last year it was a rainy Sunday. When we visited it this year it was a rainy Sunday. Not planned that way, it’s just what happened.

If you are at the Orangerie it’s most likely that your goal is Monet’s huge Nymphéas (Water Lilies) paintings. You’ve seen the little ones, they’re in lots of museums and sometimes come out to Australia in touring exhibitions. But these are the granddaddies, two metres high and up to seventeen metres long. Monet painted these as a gift to the French state, who specially built two galleries to display them.

The rooms are oval, with seats in the middle, and if you go first thing on a Sunday morning (which we always seem to do) there aren’t many people around to make noise and interrupt your view. You sit in the middle of the room, look at one of these pictures and let it do its magic. The pictures are large enough for you to mentally block all the incidentals of the physical environment. It’s just you, looking at a lake below. Don’t look at the details, just absorb the whole picture, feeling it, not thinking about it, not analysing. You experience these pictures, you don’t ‘appreciate’ them. I was tired enough to almost go into a trance looking at them, to feel like I was being drawn into them and I could and would have stayed there for literally hours.

You almost see the water and the reflections moving. This is your mind doing what it thinks works, but a sense of dynamism also comes from the composition. There are two main elements to the paintings, the water lilies and the reflections, and it is the relationships between these that give the paintings their energy and movement. Usually the two complement each other, but sometimes the lilies surprise you by appearing in the midst of the reflections. The trees put more air and space into the pictures, adding a depth that lets you place yourself in relation to the view.

Try to work out the time of day from the shadows on the water and the light on the clouds. Is a breeze rippling the surface? Is that rain chopping up the reflections? The willow fronds are waving, and the lily pads move gently back and forth at their moorings.

PS No pictures for this entry. The Orangerie has banned photos since our last visit. But better than any photo I can take is the museum’s website. It allows you to make a ‘virtual visit’ to the rooms and to enlarge and examine the paintings. The text is in French, but that doesn’t matter because the paintings aren’t.

http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/homes/home_id24799_u1l2.htm

Arabella (Strauss), Opéra Bastille, Wednesday 20 June 2012

When the Opéra Bastille opened in 1989 it caused almost as much dissent as a certain building in the same placedid 200 years earlier. It was thought to be expensive, ugly, elitist, and people were more inclined for La Marseillaise than La Traviata.

Well, it was expensive. It’s ugly. I wouldn’t say it’s elitist; it has about the same proportion of black tie/smart casual/tourists in runners as Sydney. It’s awkward. To enter the foyer you must walk up a ‘grand staircase’ from the outside of the building; there is an internal staircase for when it’s raining, but it’s tricky to find. The foyer is huge, and good for socializing and seeing people. The auditorium is cavernous, the décor reminiscent of the stations on the Chatswood-Epping line. The toilets are ridiculously scarce; almost twice the audience of the Opera Theatre in Sydney with one-eighth of the toilets! French audiences must have incredible powers of concentration. (You think about these things when the production doesn’t grab your attention.) So: expensive, ugly, awkward, dated, cavernous. But it’s not the Deutsche Oper Berlin, our ‘awful opera house’ benchmark.

The curtain is up when the audience enters the theatre. Servants and bellboys are removing furniture and other objects. It is the hotel room of Count Waldner (Kurt Rydl). He has lost all the family money through investments and gambling, and has come to Vienna to marry off his elder daughter, Arabella, to the wealthiest option. But he still plays cards, and can’t pay his bills, so piece by piece the stage empties.

As the action starts, the walls of the set move. They are flats that pivot to allow furniture and people to enter and move offstage again on a revolve. We see Waldner’s wife Adelaide (Doris Soffel), as airheaded as her husband but far more venal. The younger daughter Zdenka (Julia Kleiter) is dressed as a young man, because the family can’t afford to send two daughters into society. She desperately loves Matteo (Joseph Kaiser), a melancholic, impetuous soldier who is in love with Arabella (Renee Fleming). Both Kleiter and Kaiser have strong voices, but they cannot compete with the orchestra. To make themselves heard they have to sacrifice subtlety for volume, so while they can be heard there isn’t the sense of intimacy this music needs.

Renee Fleming also has to fight the orchestra; her lower register is almost submerged by it, which ruined the beginning of her Act I duet with Zdenka. But only the beginning; if there was anything Strauss loved more than the sound of the soprano voice, it was the sound of two soprano voices, and together Fleming and Kleiter were beautiful.

Arabella’s fate (and that of her father’s fortunes) lies in the hands of Mandryka (Michale Volle), a proud and slightly bogan Wallachian nobleman. Volle can pull off the naïveté and dignity and is quite believable.

Act II, the cab drivers’ ball, doesn’t really work. Not just because it takes place on the same set as Act I, but because there are very few chorus involved. A ball needs a crowd, or it looks like a club early in the night when all the sad people are there. Mandryka meets Arabella. In one of the best scenes Strauss ever wrote, Mandryka proposes and Arabella says yes – the sort of music I could listen to for hours. Arabella asks for an hour to say goodbye to her many suitors and to enjoy the last hours of her girlhood. But it gets complicated. Zdenka gives Matteo the key to a hotel room and tells him that Arabella will be waiting for him there in fifteen minutes. Of course it won’t be Arabella; but Mandryka doesn’t know that, and when he overhears the conversation he thinks the worst and behaves very badly, getting drunk, picking fights and flirting with the Fiakermilli (Iride Martinez), the Queen of the Ball, who really has no other purpose in the opera than to sing some great coloratura.

Act III sees us in the foyer of the hotel. Same set, with a stair case added. All the characters enter, much confusion, threats of duels, etc, until all is resolved, Zdenka and Matteo are engaged, Mandryka apologises, and Arabella forgives him and accepts him. Fleming was perfect in the ‘glass of water’ scene (don’t ask – one of many problems with the libretto which may have been fixed if the author hadn’t died before completing it). Again, the finale is some of Strauss’ most beautiful music, slow and dignified with long phrases that are ravishing with a creamy voice like Fleming’s.

An awkward production, but gorgeous music, played well under the baton of Philippe Jordan. (Did you know that the French for baton is baguette? The comic possibilities…) It was a great opportunity to see exactly why Renee is one of the superstars of opera today. Mind you, I wish she would stop singing Handel – she’s rubbish at it.

 



(Above, in blue gown, Renee Fleming, whose Strauss and Massenet sounds like cream and her baroque coloratura like mud.)

Musée Maillol (existentialism goes better with chocolate)

Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) was a sculptor, and his works are all over Paris, several of his nudes gracing the Tuileries at the Louvre end. The Musée Maillol in the 7ème is dedicated to him but also mounts other exhibitions. I was happy to see the Maillols, but we went today to see the exhibition on Artemisia Gentileschi. Who?

Artemisia is like many artistic women primarily known for her life rather than her works. Her accomplishments are obscured by male domination and the public’s delight in car-crash stories, so if you want her biography, look it up. She worked all over Europe in the seventeenth century, running her own studio and painting works for clients on the standard subjects of bible and legend: Judith and Holofernes, Susanna and the elders, Cleopatra, Bathsheba, and so on. Her subjects express emotion and relate to each other, rather than being static objects. I doubt if she thought of herself as a victim, but she identified with victimized women. Several versions of Bathsheba bathing are on display; the first depicts the bath as something she does with friends, as something normal and natural. Later versions are progressively darker. In one, Bathsheba and her attendants are fearful, and David watches from his palace; in another David is joined by a dozen or so members of the palace guard, all craning their necks to get a glimpse. There must have been a vicarious pleasure for her in returning to the subject of Judith decapitating Holofernes.

We amused ourselves by creating our own captions:

Cleopatra, as she clasps the asp to her breast: ‘There’s got to be an easier way of getting a piercing.’ (Megan)

Judith’s servant, holding the head of Holofernes: ‘Jeez! That was a bit… curt.’ (Kim)

Another exhibition focused on two naïve artists championed by the collector Wilhelm Uhde. Seraphine Louis was a deeply religious woman who worked as a housekeeper by day and painted extravagant floral arrangements by night. Technically she was a gifted amateur (she seems to have had problems centering the subject on the canvas), but her vision was vivid and powerful. Camille Bombois was her opposite; he worked by night and painted by day, was technically very good, and created highly erotic nudes in naïve style. Think Henri Rousseau with an erection. Funny, carnal, a joy to look at.

We wandered up the Boulevard Saint Germain in the sunshine and had lunch at the Café de Flore, legendary haunt of Sartre, Beauvoir and just about everyone who was anyone since the Second Empire. You are served by the traditional French waiter: black tie and waistcoat, full length white apron and napkin draped over the arm. The menus are booklets in cream covers with red and black text, the house style of the legendary French publisher Gallimard.

While we enjoyed our croque-monsieurs we made existential declarations, such as ‘J’ai un ennui corrosive… Il mange mon âme!’, and ‘God? Ah speet on your God!’

The chocolate is fabulous.

Venus, rude pictures and Oscar Wilde (and some music)

6.30 this morning I went for a walk down to the Ile de la Cité and the Pont Neuf, the Style Council playing on the earphones. Very pleasant – legendary tourist attractions with nobody around. They become a private space that no one can take from you.

After breakfast we took the Metro down to the Musée d’Orsay. Only a one hour wait for opening, fifty or so from the start of the queue. This is one place you have to go to at opening time, or you’ll spend more time getting in than looking at the paintings.  Notre Dame is also great first thing – when we went there yesterday morning just before 9am I had to push the door open myself – no queue, no crowd.

If you are ever faced with the problem ‘What can we do with this old railway station?’ look at the Musée d’Orsay. It was renovated in the 1980s to consolidate the state’s collections of painting, sculpture and fine arts from mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. (So if you want to do the art museums chronologically, start with the Musee de Cluny, then the Louvre, the Orsay, and the Pompidou. Then you can specialise with the respective Musées Picsasso, Rodin, Maillol, Dali, etc.)

The majority of the tourists head for the Impressionists up on level five, in the new gallery that was still under construction when we were here last (I love saying that). So we had the lower level almost to ourselves, and enjoyed looking at the Ingres and Delacroix and early Degas and Cezanne and Gaugin without being elbowed. We looked up a few old friends, like Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World – a beautiful painting (but definitely NSFW). We also saw my old girlfriend, Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus, who you might recognise from a mineral water bottle. Just as we did in Cologne last year we sneaked a photo when the attendants weren’t around – they just don’t understand what we have between us. (I'm not sure I do.)

I needn’t say anything about the impressionist gallery, just look it up on the Orsay website – more Manets, Monets, Morisots, Degas and Renoirs than you can shake a paintbrush at. The advantage of putting so many works together is that you can see the relationships, how painters influenced and learned from each other and how they developed. This is especially true of the temporary exhibition downstairs on Degas and the nude, collecting paintings, pastels, sketches and sculptures across his whole career, and showing how his portrayal of the nude changed from ‘the body as an object of violation’ in the war pictures of his early career to the warm, human studies of bathing prostitutes that we know better. In these works you don’t see the slightly pervy eroticism of some of Degas’ contemporaries. He shows them performing the most quotidian, literally workaday tasks, with sensuality but also respect.

The restaurant on level two is fabulous – chandeliers and ceiling murals in a huge dining room, a leftover from one of the museum’s incarnations as a hotel. I had the best meal I’ve had since we got here, filet mignon cooked perfectly with gnocchi in a tomato sauce with basil. The waiter said it was one of the cook’s specialties, and it was great. Service very, very good, of a standard you usually only see in more upmarket places.

We walked up to Saint-Germain and went to L’Hotel in the Rue des Beaux Arts, the place where Oscar Wilde breathed his last bon mots. We sat in the bar and drank a gin and tonic for Oscar and our friend Julie-Ann, a noted Wilde scholar who told me about the place. I think Oscar would have enjoyed the irony in us proposing his health in the building where he died.

After dinner we went to a piano concert at the small gothic church behind our building, St Julien le Pauvre. Herbert du Plessis played to an audience of about 100 or so, in a ninety minute program of pieces by Chopin and Liszt. The latter two were virtuoso performers, so popular that they can be regarded as the first musician superstars (Ken Russell riffs on that idea in Lisztomania, the film that inspired me to buy a metronome). Because their virtuosity and showmanship was valued more highly than their composing skills (gross simplification here), they wrote to entertain; so while their music is complex and sophisticated, it is also either foot tapping or moving in other ways. You don’t have to be musically literate to enjoy this stuff.

For me the highlights of the Chopin half were the Waltz in D flat major, which I think Daffy Duck once performed, and the Grand Valse Brillant, another piece most people recognize but wouldn’t know the name of. I enjoyed most of the Liszt pieces, especially the two excerpts from Years of Pilgrimage (Switzerland), Consolation No 3, and Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, once memorably massacred by Bugs Bunny in Rhapsody Rabbit. Our concert wasn’t quite so chaotic, or violent, but a lot of fun.

On the fifth in the fifth

Back in Paris with a new camera, a new laptop, and a heart in much better working order than last time. The country’s leadership has changed from blue to red since last time, so hopefully France also has a heart in much better working order. (After the weekend’s elections the Parti Socialiste now controls the Senate, the National Assembly and the Presidency. It’s nice to know there’s a place on earth where you can tell people you’re leftwing without a little embarrassment.)

When we arrived it didn’t feel like we were in an alien land where they speak a strange tongue. We are and they do, but it didn’t feel like that. Concorde is still parked at Charles de Gaulle airport, and they’re still building the housing development behind Montmartre. We were back in familiar surroundings, driving in a cab down the Champs-Elysées and saying things like, ‘I didn’t realize Laduree was so far down the hill’, ticking off the landmarks (the Orangerie, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Pont Neuf, etc).

We were to meet the apartment manager at 10am, but arrived at Rue du Fouarre at 9.25, so we wheeled our bags into the park next door. There was a soft breeze, shadows and sunlight dappled the paths, and it was just the right temperature. Very pleasant.

Our flat is on the fifth floor in the fifth arrondissement. It is in the Rue du Fouarre, one of the oldest streets in Paris. Abelard started the Sorbonne in this street in the 11th century; the town fathers thought he was teaching heresy, so he removed himself from the Ile de la Cité across the river because he didn’t want to enjoy their attentions a second time. (Not that he had anything to lose, boom tish.) Our garret overlooks the oldest church in Paris, St Julien le Pauvre, is next to a park with the oldest tree in Paris (a 300 year old locust tree in Square Rene Viviani), and a couple of minutes stroll from the narrowest street in Paris (Rue du Chat qui Pêche, literally Street of the Cat who fishes, 29m long and 1.8m wide.) Lots of superlatives around here.

The picture shows our building; actually what you see is the whole Rue du Fouarre, it’s not very long. You can’t see our windows, because they are set too far back from the parapet. The building is seventeenth-century, as you can tell from the roughly-hewn beams exposed throughout the flat, which hurt when you bump your head against them.

The view from our garret is spectacular. Looking northeast from our loungeroom you can see St Julien  (lower left); above it the spire of Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité. Through the tree in the middle (which if it isn’t the oldest tree is located very near it) you can see the Seine; last night at ten o’clock I watched the river glow gold in the last of the sunset. Above the tree is the Hôtel Dieu (a hospital) and on the right are the towers of Nôtre Dame de Paris.

Our main challenge, when we arrived on Sunday, was to stay awake as long as possible to beat the jetlag. We lunched in the restaurant at the bottom of our building, a salon du thé called La Fourmi Ailée (The Flying Ant), established in what was once a feminist bookshop. The food is French french, not tourist french, and the locals eat there. In an area that has more restaurants than Crows Nest you never have to eat in the same place twice, but we intend to go back.

After lunch we strolled through the laneways to the Boulevard Saint Michel, the stones of which were taken up and thrown at the gendarmes by the students in ’68, an event which hastened a major roadworks project throughout the city – they asphalted all the cobbled streets so there were no more stones to throw. Seriously! In the land of liberté, égalité and fraternité, de Gaulle had de gall (sorry) to use civic improvements to hamper the exercise of the right to dissent.

We emerged onto the Boul’Mich (what the locals call it) directly opposite a place I had planned to hunt down, but it found me instead. In the Place St André des Arts you can still see the house in which was born Charles Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal. The ground floor houses a restaurant that Jack Kerouac used to frequent, so obviously its power to inspire good writing has waned over the years. Incidentally, in our flat Béatrix Beck, the secretary of André Gide, wrote Leon Morin, prêtre (The Passionate Heart) which won the 1952 Prix Goncourt. This district reeks with literary history (if history could be said to stink, which as a PhD student in the discipline I can confirm, regularly).

A couple of hundred metres up the Boul’Mich (see, I’m a local) is the Musée de Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages. Wow. The complex takes in the ruins of the Roman baths (massive – and the Frigidarium is frigid) and the abbey of Cluny, at one time the largest ecclesiastical building north of the alps. The most famous objects in the museum are the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn, six tapestries created in Flanders in the fifteenth century, depicting a lady and a unicorn (and the odd lion and bunny rabbit) in actions representing the five senses. They are fragile and decaying – one of the six, Hearing, was away for restoration – and they are displayed in very, very low light, but you can still see the colours and the workmanship.

In one of the galleries a flute and viola da gamba duo was rehearsing for a concert of medieval music. Paris is like that – at St Julien’s in the afternoon a soprano gave a concert of Mozart and other sacred works, which we could hear through our window. There are concerts in churches all over the city. For a short time we considered going to a 6pm performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a church up near the Panthéon, but decided the temptation to fall asleep would be too dangerous, as much as I love the work. Instead we strolled through the park to another old haunt, the Café Nôtre Dame, for dinner, and afterwards were disappointed by the book barrows on the quais and Shakespeare & Co, which seems to have changed subtly but for the worse since the proprietor, George Whitman, died in December. Megan made it to 9.30, I couldn’t read any more after about ten. Was woken by a thunderstorm after 4am, and got up to close the windows and watch the rain fall on the street. It feels good to be back in Paris.

Here we go again

There has to be a name for the liminal zone between preparation and embarkation. You are doing things – you take the taxi, check in the luggage, grab lunch, go through Customs, and hang around in the transit lounge trying to connect to the wifi – but they’re just so you can go somewhere, you’re not actually in the going. It’s the closest thing to Purgatory on earth: you’re marking time, waiting for the good stuff to happen.

Except I can’t mark time, because the watchmaker couldn’t fix my watch, even though he had it for a week. So I will have the fun of duty free shopping at Changi in our transit stopover tonight. That’s the word! ‘Transit’. I could enjoy the liminality but will shop for a watch instead.