In the move to include women composers in the historical landscape, we sometimes tend to obscure the many extraordinary women performers that have helped make music the experience that it is and has been. In part, this is an issue to do with ‘capturing’ – recording is so young, still, that it is easy to forget those performers who came before the clarity of modern technology. But it is also a sign of the hierarchy we often assign within the composer-performer-audience triad, with the performer, albeit at times unconsciously, seen as creatively less authoritative then the composer. I intend to celebrate some of these bygone women performers in the blog, starting today with some fairly unknown film footage from pre-WWII.
Between 1932 and 1940, film director Dimitri Kirsanoff made three short films with collaborator and cinematographer Boris Kaufman, all taking a piece of music as the inspiration and soundtrack. They were part of a wider project by director Émile Vuillermoz to encapsulate music in visual form and all show a different relationship between music and the visual. They range from the extraordinarily moving to the seriously unacceptable, with Kristanoff’s offerings occupying much of that spectrum.
All of Kristanoff’s short films centre around water as a theme. It tumbles through the landscape, around it, over it, sometimes hurling itself at the eye of the spectator. We won’t spend time here on the psychological weight of meaning behind such a choice of theme, be it conscious or unconscious, but will let it provide the backdrop to our focus, i.e. the women who perform in them, through music and drama. It’s striking just how the films demonstrate pretty much the entire gamut of women’s roles in the space of about 15 minutes. I have always found Delys Bird’s summation of these roles, in her 1992 exploration of the relationship between artisthood and motherhood, to be the most succinct and descriptive:
“Major constructions of the feminine in Western patriarchal societies are situated within the discourses of creativity and maternity, but women are positioned in a different gendered relation in each of these discourses. The fa¬miliar, secondary roles assigned to the creative feminine — as muse, nurse, handmaiden, wife or mother — are understood as necessary prerequisites to the environment that will enable masculine creativity to flourish.”
I am most interested in the first film, featuring French singer Ninon Vallin (1886-1961), which seems to me to offer the most complex reading, but the other two must be touched upon. The gradual erosion of female agency from number one to number three is stark and shocking. The final film, La Fontaine d’Aréthuse from 1940, is based on Symanowski’s violin and piano piece of the same name. The interesting part of it is how Kristanoff combines footage of the performers - Jacques Thibaud plays violin, Tasso Janopoulo is on piano - with the storyline. It feels like a very early forerunner of the Oxford Lieder Festival’s shadow puppetry take of performers and protagonists in their film of Erlkönig, though the concert dress of the two musicians in the 1940 film exudes a cultural authority the later film caricatures to an extent. My interest gives way here to extreme discomfort, as the nude female figure of dancer Sabine Earl appears (I had to promise YouTube that I am over 18 in order to view this). According to IMDB, this figure is ‘a vision of divinity’, being chased by The Hunter, who is fully (who’d have thought it?) if scantily dressed. It's not the nudity itself that disturbs me, but the fact that the woman is the only one undressed. Thus we have the single woman in the looked-at position - and her terrified flight leaves us under no illusion as to how powerless she feels - while the men wear the trappings of hegemony. It’s not acceptable to modern, post-Laura Mulvey eyes.
The 1936 film of Mompou’s Jeune Fille au Jardin is at least clothed, as Magda Tagliaferro plays the backcloth to dancer Clotilde Sakharoff. Again, we see both pianist and dancer, Tagliaferro bookending the whole with her visual presence, and Sakharoff occupying the middle section. This has a definite feel of a choreographed rendition of the piano music. Sakharoff takes many cues from the piano, occasionally to faintly and probably unintended comic effect, and making the whole feel the least experimental of the three films (although Tagliaferro lives up to her reputation as an innovating interpreter by making some notable choices in her own choreography, for example the exaggerated leaps of the opening line).
The first film, Les Berceaux of 1932, on Fauré’s song, is to my mind the most interesting and certainly the most moving. It’s interesting if unsurprising that the pianist remains anonymous here, in the accompanying role. Ninon Vallin takes centre stage as both musician and actor, her trademark clarity of language emanating from every second that she sings. She is first to be featured in the opening credits, in the largest font, before cinematography, and even the song writers. I choose this term carefully, as Sully Prudhomme, the poet, is listed above the composer, in the same size font, in a move that may feel surprising in comparison to common etiquette of classical music programme listings.
The film opens with an unaccompanied choral vocalise across a series of serene visuals. These segue from seaside to boat to house, as though the boat is the bridge between nature and humanity. Gradually, as the piano starts with the rocking figure of Fauré’s introduction, the camera pulls back into a dark room, the natural world now seen through a window. We see Vallin, the only musician to act in these films, appearing in costume, as she rocks the cradle.
The room creates a dark foreground, with Vallin’s equally dark figure turned from the camera towards the window in a manner reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting of the woman at the window. Unlike that iteration, however, it’s clear that this woman sees not what is outside, but what is in her mind’s eye, something beyond physical vision.
The window opens at the second verse - Mais viendra le jour des adieux, as though that first word, the ‘but’ that signals something more, has unlatched it. We see the men for the first time, and Vallin and her surroundings vanish for a few bars into the wave that crashes through the window. It brings the last verse with it, before the water calms at the end, on an incoming tide. The sea returns, without bearing its cargo of ship and men, and the piano stills to nothing.
Et ce jour-là les grands vaisseaux,
Fuyant le port qui diminue,
Sentent leur masse retenue
Par l’âme des lointains berceaux.
There are many ways of reading Prudhomme’s words, and what Fauré finds in them, but here I find both Vallin’s observational, slightly reserved tone, and Kristanoff’s visual world, offer a truly empathetic interpretation. There is no complete experience here; both the women in their homes, gazing longingly out into the external world, and the men, remembering that home they leave behind them, yearn for what is missing. While the darkness feels both stifling and protective, there is a real sense of regret for the men out on the seas, missing the child and its growing. Music and film feel like an observation on the parent-child relationship that excludes, at the same times as it yearns for the third person, and on the longing for new horizons that always realizes implicitly what it leaves behind.
