![]() ![]() By the time the performance began, it was nearly one in the morning. They then drove around Paris collecting the other quartet members. ![]() Some days later, Proust made a surprise visit to the first violinist’s apartment around 11:00 P.M., consumed by the desire to hear a string quartet of César Franck that very night! The violinist followed Proust to a waiting car where he was offered a bowl of mashed potatoes. The musicians agreed in principle, though no specific plans were made. During a post-concert conversation, Proust proposed a private performance in his home. Proust attended concerts by the celebrated Parisian string quartet, Quatuor Poulet, and became acquainted with their violist, Amable Massis. ![]() It was listening to the music of Franck and Beethoven, as well as Schumann, Wagner, and Mozart, that stimulated Proust’s thinking about the creative process and informed the narrator’s musical meditations late in his novel. “For some years Beethoven’s last quartets and the music of Franck has been my principal spiritual nourishment,” wrote Proust in 1916. To open our program, we will intersperse readings of Proust’s poems between his friend’s Premières valses pour piano. He also produced a large body of salon music for solo piano, which displays his characteristic wit and sophisticated charm. His songs are exquisite, and he often sang them at parties accompanying himself at the piano. Though Hahn wrote music in every genre including, opera and ballet, his gifts shine brightest in smaller forms. (Oscar Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency” began in 1895.) Their romance lasted several years, but the two artists remained life-long friends. Considering the time in which they lived, Proust and Hahn conducted their relationship with uncommon conspicuousness. With sympathetic tastes and dispositions, the two quickly fell in love. By 1893, the year the two young men met, Hahn had already distinguished himself as a composer and performer. To escape growing political unrest, the family left South America for Paris in 1877. One of twelve children, Hahn was born in Venezuela to a Catholic mother and a Jewish businessman. They were written in the mid-1890s, shortly after Proust met the composer, Reynaldo Hahn. The poems he showed me were lyrical portraits of individual painters and composers and fit Helicon’s program perfectly. So, I paid a visit to his book-lined apartment near NYU. He was making new translations of little known Proust poems for an upcoming book, and had recently finished several he thought might be of interest. When I contacted Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Richard Howard about participating in Helicon’s Proust concert, he was not only delighted at the prospect, but said he had some new material to offer. ![]()
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