Blogical Conclusion

THE MYSTERIES OF MUSIC

SEPT 6, 2008 - FOR THE FIRST SIX MINUTES OF Alain Corneau’s All the Mornings of the World, the camera does not leave Gérard Depardieu’s thickset, ghostly, age-ravaged face, powdered and bewigged as per the customs of the king’s court in seventeenth century France. Depardieu plays Marin Marais, the baroque violist who learnt his art from the reclusive Monsieur de Sainte Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle), and as the film opens, he’s nodding off while a rehearsal is in progress. He’s roused by the conductor’s instructions to the players. “Open up the sound, like a mouth. Your fingers are like sticks. I cannot follow you. You do not listen. You rush. Resume, marking the first times.” And then the background action ceases as a movement flits across Marais’ face. “Stop,” someone says, “the master made a sign. The master wishes to speak.”

And the master speaks. “All notes must finish… like dying.” This is the first of several cryptic philosophies about music in the film, which begins by appearing to echo the Mozart-Salieri dynamic – a successful but mediocre composer (Marais) is haunted by the heights of achievement of an artist from whom the art emanates as effortlessly as life’s breath. After pausing to take note of Marais’ direction, the rehearsal continues, and the conductor continues to bark out instructions. “The aim of music is to transport the soul. To make you lose [the] senses. Emotion. The aim is sweetness.” And Marais can hold himself back no longer. “No, no,” he shouts, and asks for his viola. There’s a flurry of excitement. A voice utters, breathlessly, “The master is going to play!”

And the master plays. The music appears to stir something inside him, something deep inside, and after he finishes, Marais begins to speak of Sainte Colombe in the passionate language of artists. “Austerity! He was only austerity and wrath. He was as mute as a fish. I am an impostor…” A student cries out, “No, master!” But Marais will not be interrupted. “… and I am worthless,” he insists, bringing to mind Salieri’s self-loathing upon confronting the towering genius of Mozart. “I ambitioned nothingness. I reaped nothingness – sugar, gold and shame. Him, he was music. He observed the whole world with the bright flame of the torch that we light for the dying. I have not fulfilled his desire. I had a master, and the shadows have taken him.”

With this confession, the film leaves Depardieu’s face and enters the flashback that tells us about these men, about their meeting and their music – and, eventually, about what prompted Marais to interrupt the rehearsal with this reminiscence. When we first set eyes on Sainte Colombe, he’s playing at the bedside of a friend drawing his last breaths – Mr. Vauquelin, who had expressed his desire to die with a little wine of Puisey and some music. Sainte Colombe honours his friend’s final request, only to discover that his compassion came at a price. He returns home and finds his wife dead, and he never recovers from the shock. He composes, in her memory, The Tomb of Sorrows – and that title would, just as well, describe an account of his mournful life thereafter.

“Little by little,” Marais remembers, “he battened down his door… and withdrew into music.” When an emissary from the king invites Sainte Colombe to play at the court, he refuses, pleading, “I have trusted my life to grey wood boards lost in an orchard. To the sound of the seven strings of a viola. My court is made of willows, running streams, whitebait, elderflowers. Tell His Majesty his court does not need a wild man.” Later, a second emissary argues, “You bury in dust and proud misery a talent God bestowed on you. It is time to burn your coarse clothes and accept [His Majesty’s] kind deeds.” And Sainte Colombe stubbornly replies, “You’ll thank His Majesty. To the gold he offers me I prefer the light of sunset on my hands.”

The only outsider who manages to clear these formidable defenses is Marais, a shoemaker’s son who, at nineteen, becomes Sainte Colombe’s pupil – but not for long. After listening to Marais perform, the master announces his verdict. “You make music, [but] you’re not a musician.” Sainte Colombe banishes Marais from his house – and the latter, subsequently, trains by subterfuge, first learning from Sainte Colombe’s elder daughter, then by crawling under the cabin where the master retreats and hearing him play. And with these skills gained by stealth, he goes on to become a well-appointed fixture at the king’s court.

Many years pass, and success, inevitably, gives way to self-examination. Marais finally realises that his master’s assessment of him was correct. “Your ornaments are clever, often charming. But I heard no music. You will help the dancers, or play for singers on stage. What you’ll write will please, and will never offend anyone. You will earn a living. You will live surrounded by music, but you won’t be a musician,” declares Sainte Colombe, before posing the question that will alter Marais’ life and music forever. “Do you have any idea what sounds are meant for when it is no longer about dancing or pleasing the king’s ears?” And, in an extraordinary exchange with Sainte Colombe towards the film’s end, Marais figures out the answer.

“I’ve found out [music is] for God,” Marais says. That’s not it, he’s told, and he ventures other possibilities. For the ear? For gold? For glory? For silence? For rival musicians? Love? The sorrows of love? Abandon? For a wafer given to the invisible? Eventually, frustrated that he’s nowhere close to unlocking the mysteries of music’s purpose, Marais gives up with a non sequitur, “One must leave a drink for the dead.” And that brings about a spark in Saint Colombe. “You’re getting warmer,” he encourages the man struggling before him. And Marais concludes, “A refreshment for those who’ve run out of words. For the shadow of children. To muffle the hammering of shoemakers. For the state in which we are before we’re born, before we breathed or saw light.” That’s what sounds are for – and having finally understood this, how could Marais not have interrupted the rehearsal at the beginning, when the conductor insisted that music is merely a vehicle for emotion and sweetness?

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