Holmès: La nuit et l’amour — Spartanburg Philharmonic

by Chris Vaneman

If – as is, I’m afraid, not very likely – there are a bunch of movie producers attending tonight’s concert: listen up, guys. Have I got a pitch for you.

Our movie begins in Paris in 1841, when a girl is born to Irish expatriates and possessors of a mysterious fortune; rumors will persist throughout her life that her natural father is a well-known poet who was long her mother’s lover.

The girl will fight her mother for the right to music lessons, and as her talents unfold, she comes into her parents’ fortune when they die. She becomes renowned as a composer even as she becomes a leading light in Paris’ cultural scene. Among her best friends and suitors are figures like the famous poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the famous musician Camille Saint-Saëns, and (perhaps following her mother’s example?) she bears several children out of wedlock to another famous poet, both indifferent and impervious to the attendant scandal. At the same time she is deeply politically active, committed to democracy and the independence of small nations like Ireland and Poland then subject to larger empires. Among her best friends is the Irish freedom fighter and exile Maud Gonne, and her home is a frequent refuge for the young W. B. Yeats.

The girl becomes a composer of vast ambition, inspired by the “total artwork” of Richard Wagner to write huge pieces for large orchestra, chorus, vocal soloists or narrators, for which she supplies all her own texts and stage directions. Because of their very hugeness and the skepticism she faces as a female composer, she struggles to get them staged, but she still manages to become the first woman to have an opera performed at the Paris Opera.

Clever readers might have guessed that this movie will be a biopic of the composer Augusta Holmès, who was, clearly, an utterly unique and original figure. “La nuit et l’amour” is an excerpt from her huge 1888 cantata for choir, orchestra, and narrator, Ludus pro patria. “La nuit et l’amour” is a lush but brief interlude, preceded by a sexy text about angels, virgins, and lovers worthy of a 19th Century Gallic Duran Duran lyric. Full of rich and impassioned melody driven by the low strings, it’s a perfect date-night piece: succinct, romantic, and instantly appealing.

So: producers? Have your people call my people. We’ll do lunch.