Mysterious roses

In 1865, a girl named Animée Marie Marguerite Mercédès Larousse La Villette was born in Lorient, Brittany. Her mother, née Élodie Jacquier, was a painter, and her father was a military officer. The arts were very much alive in that household, and her parents encouraged the girl's musical inclinations (Rita, from here on).

One of the many family relocations that came with her father's career brought them to Paris, where at thirteen Rita was admitted to the conservatoire to study piano, while studying composition privately (it was already unusual enough to have a girl in the piano classes; having her in composition would have been an extravagance). By all accounts, the experience at the Paris Conservatoire cannot have been particularly pleasant, for her, or for her teachers. Rita was rebellious, had ideas of her own, thought the teaching methods were poor, and proposed her own as an alternative.

As an adult, the Parisian musical world was not made for her either. It was not that women were excluded, but certain assumptions prevailed there that sat uneasily with her way of doing things, she was an independent and ambitious woman. So, as soon as she could, she returned to Brittany with her husband, Émile Strohl, also a military officer, whom she had married in 1888.

With her husband's enthusiastic support, Rita Strohl devoted herself to composition. In those early years she focused mainly on chamber music and songs; it was then that she wrote the Six Poésies de Baudelaire mises en musique, Bilitis, and Dix Poésies mises en musique. That period, a very happy one for her, ended painfully with Émile's sudden death in 1900.

That blow, and the spiritual crisis that followed, opened a second chapter, centred on orchestral music and opera. This, as you can see, falls outside the scope of Liederabend. But knowing that many of our readers are Wagnerians, I cannot resist giving you the broad outlines and a thread to pull: in 1903, Rita Strohl met Richard Burgsthal, whom today we would call a multidisciplinary artist. René Billa (that was his pseudonym) was a musician, a stained-glass artist (works of his can be seen in Narbonne), an architect, and a painter. He was also a Wagnerian, a very devoted one. Together with him, Rita Strohl founded the Théâtre La Grange in Bièvres, conceived as a small Festspielhaus on the model of Bayreuth, and in those years she planned and composed opera cycles that made the Ring cycle look modest in scale.

But I return to the songs, and to Bilitis. From this cycle, set to poems by Pierre Louÿs, we heard La nuit, a few months ago, and I have marked for this week another of its songs, the sixth: Roses dans la nuit. Tomorrow is Sant Jordi Day, and Rita Strohl brings us our musical rose. In this song, Bilitis and Lykas venture into the forest at night, and a marking in the score sets the character of the piece: “avec un grand sentiment de calme et de douceur nocturne” [with a great feeling of calm and nocturnal sweetness]. We hear the stars shining, the stillness, and the emotion with which Bilitis describes her secret place, a bush of mysterious roses whose scent is never as intoxicating as when she is there with Lykas. Our performers will be, once again, Elsa Dreisig and Roman Louveau.

Have a wonderful Sant Jordi!

Roses dans la nuit

Dès que la nuit monte au ciel,
le monde est à nous, et aux dieux.
Nous allons des champs à la source,
des bois obscurs aux clairières,
où nous mènent nos pieds nus.

Les petites étoiles brillent assez
pour les petites ombres que nous sommes.
Quelquefois, sous les branches basses,
nous trouvons des biches endormies.

Mais plus charmant la nuit que toute autre chose,
il est un lieu connu de nous seuls
et qui nous attire à travers la forêt :
un buisson de roses mystérieuses.

Car rien n'est divin sur la terre
à l'égal du parfum des roses dans la nuit.
Comment se fait-il qu'au temps où j'étais seule
je ne m'en sentais pas enivrée ?

As soon as night rises to the sky,
the world is ours, and the gods'.
We go from the fields to the spring,
from the dark woods to the clearings,
wherever our bare feet lead us.

The little stars shine bright enough
for the little shadows we are.
Sometimes, beneath the low branches,
we find hinds asleep.

But more enchanting at night than anything else,
there is a place known to us alone
that draws us through the forest:
a thicket of mysterious roses.

For nothing on earth is divine
as the scent of roses in the night.
How is it that in the time when I was alone
I never felt drunken with it?