“Dans Venise la Rouge…” by A. de Musset – Ch. Gounod: the “Venetian text” in French chamber vocal music

Abstract

Introduction. The attitude to Venice as one of the most poetic and picturesque cities in the world is firmly established in artistic practice. The city appears multifaceted and contradictory in numerous literary works. It appears as a space of eternal carnival and an education center (C. Gozzi, C. Goldoni), a place of secret conspiracies, gloomy massacres (“Angelo, Tyrant of Padua” by V. Hugo), a dream, an earthly paradise (I. Kozlov, “Eugene Onegin” by A. Pushkin). But always Venice is a special place where antiquity is closely intertwined with youth (G. Byron, J. W. von Goethe, A. Chénier, A. de Musset, A. Apukhtin, A. Maykov, F. Tyutchev, J. Brodsky, and others). Literary and poetic Venetian cultural stratum was supplemented by artistic journalism – essays, sketches, travel notes of prominent representatives of Romanticism. Such a variety of material contributed to the formation of the image, the topos of Venice, myth of the city in artistic and creative practice. Numerous interpretations of the chosen theme in works of art form the “Venetian text” of art. This topic has not been fully embodied in the form of independent musicological research, despite the large number of works in European music that glorify Venice and need to be included in scientific and performing practice. Theoretical and methodology background. The theme of the city, urban text, urbanism in general is a very developed concept in various fields of modern science. The concept of “St. Petersburg text” has been affirmed in literary studies since the 1980s (V. Toporov, 1995). Such an artistic text (Y. Lotman, 1998) is not just a mirror of a real city, but a device that realizes the transition from visible reality to the inner meaning of things. Real objects, such as squares, waters, islands, gardens, buildings, monuments, people, history, ideas, are the “language” of the city. They act in the form of toponymical, landscape, historical and cultural, personal and biographical elements of urban space. On the one hand, they create the text of the city, on the other hand, they become a well-known code of the city, and generate artistic images. By analogy with the “St. Petersburg text” on the basis of the proposed methodology, in literary studies there were a number of works on “local” texts, including Venetian (N. Mednis, 1999, O. Soboleva, 2010, K. Sivkov, 2015, N. Ilchenko & I. Marinina, 2015 and others). The concept of the image of the city (V. Li, 1914, N. Antsiferov, 1991) is inextricably linked with the text in its semiotic meaning as a structured sign system. Due to the universality and comprehensiveness, concept “topos” in music can be used instead of “image”, “sphere”, and other musicological concepts (L. Kirillina, 2007). In modern musicology, there are very few systematic studies in this area. Apart from research on the topic of musical urbanism (L. Serebryakov, 1994. I. Barsova, 2000, L. Gakkel, 2006, I. Yakovleva, 2014, T. Bilalova, 2005, G. Zharova, 2009), there are almost no works on the topic of Venetia in music. Therefore, this area of research is relevant. Objective of the researching is to determine the features of the “Venetian text” in the chamber-vocal music by Ch. Gounod on the example of his romance “Venice” (on the poem by A. de Musset). Research results and conclusions. Ch. F. Gounod (1818–1893) became one of the first French composers to draw attention to the theme of the city of Venice in his chamber and vocal music. The romance “Venice” (1842) was written by him at the age of 24. At that time, the young author had been in Italy for two years as a scholarship holder of the prestigious Prix de Rome. Ch. Gounod documented his impressions of the trip in an autobiographical book – “Mémoires d’un Artiste” (1896). The romance is based on the poem by A. de Musset “Dans Venise la Rouge…” (1828). The artistic space of Venice is constructed due to a number of constant images, such as sea lagoon, gondola, bronze lion, old doge, mask, carnival, ladies, mirror, night date. Clearly read signs of the city are metaphors for certain emotional states, often binary, which are strongly associated in most art sources with Venice: anxiety, loneliness, senility, death and sensuality, eroticism, youth, carnival of life. A. de Musset’s text is transferred to the conditions of the chamber-vocal genre and undergoes radical changes. When comparing the two options – the poetic original and the text of the romance, it becomes clear their inconsistency from about the middle of the poem. The composer’s simplification of the textual side of the romance was caused by the refusal to mention the sculptural and architectural dominants of the city, color and chronological contrasts that are inherent in the topos of Venice. This softened the overall emotional mood, virtually freeing the text from the dominance of loneliness, emptiness, anxiety. In the text of “Venice” by Ch. Gounod’s, the topos of the city is revealed as a space of mystery and dreams, a fusion of divine nature and man-made beauty, the triumph of earthly love. The representative of the contrast is the music side of this romance. It brings that note of excitement, anxiety, which seems to clear the musical image of Venice from the excessive gloss of the poetic text. It makes him alive, trembling, proving, on the one hand, the inseparable connection of words and music in chamber-vocal genres; on the other hand, characterizing Ch. Gounod as the greatest master who possessed not only an exceptional melodic gift, but also a rare sense of musical harmony. The composer seems to be going from the opposite: wrapping the text, “major” in mood, in the frame of the minor key; using capricious harmonic juxtapositions, he makes the intonation of the romance take on different colors, like the playing of moon reflections on the water. And in this balancing on the verge of “majorminor”, “enlightenment-sadness”, the precariousness, fragility and paradoxicality of the Venetia city image are revealed. Thus, the music of the Ch. Gounod’s romance that appeals to the barcarole genre attributes, in the same time, is lyrical and disturbing. It perfectly reproduces the melancholy state that was familiar to young authors, both, the poet and the composer.