dangerous blonde sunday

Sunday, I spent nearly the whole day in bed reading the biography of Caroline Blackwood (Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger). Blackwood was born in London in 1931, grew up in Ireland and lived sporadically in America until her death in1996. She is famous for her beauty, her eccentricity, her writings and her husbands (the painter, Lucian Freud and the poet, Robert Lowell). What struck me about her was her slovenliness, her alcoholism and her morbidity. Nevertheless, it makes for a magnetic read. I wondered if she had not been beautiful and titled, would she have become a writer and would she have even been famous at all? I am quite enchanted by muses, how little they are acknowledged and valued and the creatively inspired havoc they can unleash on their lovers/artists.

I came across this book while browsing the late Theresa Duncan's blog; she quotes in her post, a little from this review of the biography. I was immediately intrigued and went out to check out the book from my library. The pictures above are: Lucian Freud's portrait of Lady Blackwood and the cover of the book, which is a photo taken by Walker Evans.

Here is an excerpt of an article written about Lowell and his last minutes of life- it gives insight into the ill-fated marriage between Lowell and Blackwood:

On this day [September 12] in 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud's paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void.

nocturnes

I encountered a strange and sad story yesterday, which fits the overall uncanniness of this week, another and another.

Curious blog exchange with the deceased.

Things I've been thinking about:

1. The intellectual history of books.

2. Western history, especially how the events that caused WWI which led us to our current state. I started reading Jacques Barzun's Dawn to Decadence to hopefully enlighten me. I have to say, his writing style is quite peculiar and it has taken time for me to adjust to it.

3. The taxonomy of friendships and that very fluid nature of intimacy

4. The subjective appreciation and naming conventions of colors-example: When is mauve a mauve?

5. Nocturnes- an excerpt from Grove Music:

"A piece suggesting night, usually quiet and meditative in character, but not invariably so. The Italian term Notturno occurs frequently as a title in 18th-century music, but the French form of the word was not used until John Field applied it to some lyrical piano pieces written between about 1812 and 1836 Field’s nocturnes are historically important as antecedents of Chopin’s. The writing is clearly idiomatic, exploiting the sounds available on the newer pianos; the sustaining pedal, in particular, enabled Field to expand the range of the harmonic accompanying patterns beyond those of the Alberti bass, which of necessity lay under the hand. The melodies of his nocturnes transferred to the keyboard the cantilena of Italian opera, to which he had been exposed in Russia in the early 1800s (see ex.1). According to Liszt, who wrote a preface to the first collected edition of Field’s nocturnes (Leipzig, 1859), they ‘opened the way for all the productions which have since appeared under the various titles of Songs without Words, Impromptus, Ballades, etc., and to him we may trace the origin of pieces designed to portray subjective and profound emotion’.
Although the emotional range of most of Field’s nocturnes is not wide, and the phrase structure sometimes tediously predictable, the restrained elegance of his musical language and imaginative keyboard figuration made a great impression on subsequent Romantic composers, especially Chopin, who admired both Field’s playing and his compositions. Nocturnes were composed by most pianist-composers of the time, including Liszt (whose famous Liebesträume song transcriptions were subtitled ‘nocturnes’), Schumann (Nachtstücke op.23), J.B. Cramer, Czerny, Kalkbrenner, Thalberg, Henri Bertini and Theodor Döhler among them. Chopin’s 21 nocturnes, however, hold a pre-eminent place in the history of the genre. The celebrated Nocturne in E♭ op.9 no.2 is perhaps the most similar to Field’s nocturnes, showing the influence of two of his nocturnes in the same key in both melody and accompaniment patterns. It was, however, Field’s Nocturne no.4 in A major, with its agitated, harmonically more complex, central section, that proved more inspirational for Chopin’s expansion of the form in his op.9 no.3 and later pieces.
Chopin’s nocturnes (especially op.48 no.1) display an intensity well beyond the range of Field and a high degree of melodic invention (ex.2). His remarkable harmonic sophistication, too, is often couched in keyboard textures of a contrapuntal complexity that never seems redundant or forced. Moreover, several diverge from Field’s basic ABA formal outline. The otherwise suave op.32 no.1 in B major ends unexpectedly in B minor with an abrupt, recitative-like coda that appears in emotional terms to contradict all that has gone before, while op.15 no.3 in G minor is in a highly unusual AB form with no recapitulation of the initial material.
Although the apogee of the pianistic nocturne was reached with Chopin, it continued to be a popular genre. French composers were particularly attracted to the form: Fauré wrote 13 nocturnes, and Satie, d’Indy and Poulenc contributed to the repertory. Liszt’s late works include the nocturne En rêve (1885) and celebrated nocturnes were also composed by Glinka, Balakirev, Tchaikovsky (op.10 no.1 in F major and op.19 no.4 in C♯ minor), Rimsky-Korsakov (Nocturne in D minor), Skryabin and Grieg (Notturno in C major op.54 no.4). Nocturnes were also written for orchestra; a well-known example is in Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the tone-colour of the horn is used, as in the 18th-century notturno, to evoke the image of night. Bizet wrote an unpublished nocturne for orchestra, and Debussy’s Trois nocturnes (Nuages, Fêtes and Sirènes, the last with a female wordless chorus) are among the finest achievements of French impressionist music; Fêtes, a vigorously rhythmic and extrovert piece, considerably expands the usual associations of the term ‘nocturne’ to portray nocturnal festivities."