Felicity, pleasure, happiness, luxe, calme et volupté.
Felicity, pleasure, happiness, luxe, calme et volupté. Perfection: the blissful rightness of every note; a peach, or a rose, caught at the exact moment of poise between not-quite and slightly-past. Such thoughts are set off by a recent chance re-encounter with Debussy’s cantata setting a French translation of D-G. Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’. It’s one of two complementary gems poised upon the edge of maturity while retaining the flush of youth. The Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is played every day; La Damoiselle élue is sadly neglected.
Both are saturated in poetry; the purely orchestral Prélude assimilates the fluctuations of Mallarmé’s original in a miraculous rendition of one medium in terms of another — acknowledged thus by the grateful poet himself. One can’t imagine surly Rossetti being pleased by any attempt upon his words, let alone one that in its sweet chastity puts their blowsy diction to shame.
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