etnobofin

Charles-Marie Widor – Toccata from Symphony for Organ No. 5 in F Major

St Germain-des-Prés is named for the famous abbey which has stood near the walls of Paris since the 13th century. But this morning, in time for mass on All Saint’s Day, and on the suggestion of my friend William, our destination was the quartier’s other well-known church. The Église Saint-Sulpice is nearly as big as Nôtre-Dame, and almost as famous: it even features prominently in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, for those who care.

It was nice to celebrate mass on November 1st (although the choir was frankly decrepit and the lack of an order of service made it occasionally difficult for us Protestant-raised anglophones to join in the sung responses in Latin and French).

However our real motivation for visiting St Sulpice was to hear the organ. William is an organist in his other life, so visiting St Sulpice is something of an obligation while he’s living in Paris.

Originally built in 1781, the great organ at St Sulpice is the only intact surviving example of the work of French master organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.  The organist at St Sulpice from 1870 to 1933 was Charles-Marie Widor, who composed one of the most pieces in the organ repertoire, the Toccata from his Symphony for Organ No.5

After the service, the postludes were an opportunity to hear the instrument in full flight – a Toccata sur Placare Christe servulis by Dupré, Franck’s Choral 1 en mi majeur and Gigout’s Toccata (one of William’s party pieces apparently).

On our way towards the exit, we absently joined a short queue of people who we thought were waiting to climb the church towers. In fact, quite by chance it was the line to visit the organ loft: a fact we discovered by asking the guy in front of us, a rather dapper looking gentleman who apologised for his bad French and turned out to be the organist at Turin Cathedral !

Up the spiral staircase we emerged among the pipes and blowers of one of the most famous organs in the world. It’s at least three storeys high and possibly has its own postcode. In the middle of it all was the saint des saints… the 5-manual organ console where Widor actually composed his Toccata.

Holding court between services was the titular organist, Daniel Roth who before coming to St Sulpice in 1985 was organist at Nôtre-Dame for 12 years. Long tenure is a tradition at St Sulpice. Since 1619, there have only been 12 named organists. Widor himself occupied the seat for 64 years!

William managed to have a chat with Daniel Roth for a few minutes, where apparently they got to geek out about speaking stops and bourdons and jeux de fond.  In among the pipes there was a little lounge containing photos and autographs of organists who have played at St Sulpice, including Albert Schweitzer, (who as well as being an organist managed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. As you do.)

After our morning’s organ pilgrimage, we emerged into the rain and headed for lunch with William’s fiancée – a superb meal at Le Pré aux Clercs on rue Jacob. We found out later that this bistrot was Ernest Hemingway’s favourite. In St Germain-des-Près it seems you are only ever one wine glass (or an organ stop) away from history…

The first part of the trip towards Paris took me up some back roads from Montpellier to Clermont-Ferrand, over the top of the Cévennes. It was a spectacular and remarkably traffic-free drive, made all the more fun by a computer glitch (I assume) at the car hire company that allocated me a BMW rather than a Peugeot.

It’s an hour or so from Montpellier to St-Jean-du-Gard, winding through the arrière-pays of northern Languedoc. October means hunting season, and the roads were dotted with huddles of parked cars. Hunters were pacing up and down in flourescent jackets, rifles draped over their arm, their dogs tensed and ready to dash into the undergrowth to retrieve whatever furry or feathery things their dayglo-orange masters had just killed.

131 years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson passed through St-Jean-du-Gard with a donkey, but today I just stopped to buy lunch before starting along the twisty high road to Florac, the départmentale route 9 known as the Corniche des Cévennes.

The Cévennes is another one of those relatively under-appreciated parts of France, formed by deep river gorges and high plateaus (called les causses) reaching up to a thousand metres and more above sea level. The region’s ruggedness and isolation meant that historically it was a refuge for French Protestants, and one of the hotbeds of resistance during the Second World War. Even today it’s a remote place: the Lozère département is the least populated in France, and has the highest average altitude of any region.

As the road climbs higher you leave coastal Languedoc behind. Vineyards and terracotta architecture give way to slate roofs, cattle farms and pine forests. When the road emerges onto the plateaux above 800 metres, the vast stretches of high country reminded me of the central North Island of New Zealand: sparse grasslands and plantation forest line the route. All that was missing was a snowy Mount Ruapehu peeking over the horizon.

Even after you leave the Corniche, the route towards Clermont-Ferrand loses little of its altitude. I passed through Marvejols (an interesting-looking town with an old centre that is probably worth a return visit) before joining the A75 autoroute that zaps north-south across the midriff of France, three quarters of a mile up in the sky.

A final detour from the A75 took me past the Viaduc de Garabit – a 120-metre tall railway bridge crossing the Truyère river. It was one of the major engineering achievments of Gustave Eiffel, who completed it in 1884 before starting work on a rather large tower in Paris. But Paris is for tomorrow. Today was about driving across the roof of France.

Winter hikes around the coastal lagoons

Ruined farmhouses in the arrière-pays

Asking directions from the locals, somewhere in the garrigue

Marsillargues cherries bought fresh from the Marché des Arceaux

Orangina, shady trees and a boules tournament in Sommières

Oh, and vineyards. Lots and lots of vineyards.

Once again, etnobofin is moving cities. In the last 13 months or so, we’ve been living in Oxford, Birmingham and Montpellier. And from the beginning of October, we’re going to be calling a new town home.

I’ve accepted a job offer in Paris. To have found an interesting and challenging job in France during the current crisis is perhaps not a miracle, (hopefully my skills and experience have something to do with it) but it certainly makes me feel fortunate, and just a little proud that I’ve taken the next step along the journey I outlined earlier in the year.

This move should provide a little more permanence than the past twelve months. 2008 and 2009 have been necessarily unsettled (inevitable when you’re doing a international degree across two countries) I’m looking forward to the challenge of settling down for a while in the 5th largest city in the world by GDP.

I’ve followed klari’s blog for years, and a while back a now-defunct Parisian jazz blog called samizdjazz, so I’m excited about being close to a lot of musical happenings of various kinds. And I’m hoping that I can use some of my time in Paris to get back into playing some music.

However, if posting in the next month or so is sporadic, it’s because I’m moving across France, finding an apartment and starting a job. It’s gonna be busy, but it’ll be worth it. Thanks again to everyone who reads the blog, I hope you’ll find the impending Parisian adventures interesting!

Seen in Châtelet metro station today*:

A guy dressed in complete gangster outfit – fluourescent puffer jacket, baggy jeans, baseball cap twisted sideways – with a paperback copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal sticking out of his back pocket.

Respect.

Image: Thomas Claveirole (Creative Commons)

(*Sorry klari, I was in town for just 6 hours for a meeting – not a good time for coffee. Next time, let’s hope!)

Ignoring that Indian proverb about mad dogs, Englishmen and the midday sun, and needing a break from writing my dissertation, I set out on a mission yesterday to explore Montpellier’s slightly neglected river – the Lez.

On the map, it seemed like a simple exercise – following the river from Antigone northwards to Castelnau and then catching the tram back from from Place Charles de Gaulle. However, Montpellier has not quite reconciled itself with its river, making the journey more of a trek through suburban streets than a waterside ramble.

I started out at the eastern end of the Antigone quarter – a complex of monumental buildings aligned along an axis running a kilometre from the Hôtel de la Région all the way back to the Polygone shopping centre in the centre of town.

Antigone was designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, and although some praise its sweeping vision, I’m sweepingly unconvinced. The whole thing is vaguely totalitarian, as if it were dreamt up in fever dream by Ceaucescu. The scariest thing is people actually choose to live there.

I’ve been told by a couple of people that that fountain in the river was designed to be taller that the jet d’eau in Geneva – but when they switched it on, it soaked the diners on the terraces of the chain restaurants on the opposite bank. So today fountain plays at 33% strength. True or not, it’s a nice anecdote.

Continuing north from the Esplanade de l’Europe, the footpath soon deviated away from the riverbank – and I realised that despite the other magnificent infrastructure investments made by Montpellier, there was no public right of way along the banks of the Lez. Instead, you have to thread your way through side streets, very rarely glimpsing the river.

I never made it to Castelnau – my route involved traversing the main railway line, and the only crossing point was a road tunnel without any visible pedestrian footpath. So I backtracked through Les Aubes and Les Beaux-Arts (a rather interesting, slightly bohemian central suburb) to the centre-ville and caught the tram home.

Re-reading my map, it seems the northern stretches of the Lez are more promising for a riverside walk. So my next plan is to start from Place Charles de Gaulle and head north from there towards the zoo. I’ll just wait for a day when the temperature isn’t quite 34 degrees…

My antediluvian and well-thumbed copy of The Rough Guide to France once told me that Strasbourg was “the one city in eastern France worth a detour”. This week I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself a little with the place, joining the tourist hordes munching on ice-creams in the summer heat.

There’s a lot to like about the city – there are trams and numerous bicycle paths (bicycles rule Strasbourg far more than they do Oxford). And the architecture betrays a history far richer than most cities can claim: the whole of the mediaeval centre-ville is a registered UNESCO world heritage site.

Across the Ill towards the north, the city opens up from twisted old-town alleys into the broad vistas of the “German quarter”. Unlike other French cities, the monumental buildings here are not the result of Napoleonic or Republican fervour. Rather they are the Prussian puffery of the Kaiser in the period (1871-1918) when Strassburg was part of his German Reich. The resemblance to Berlin is deliberate and striking.

Of course today Strasbourg is generally happy to be a French city, but the Germanic influence is always present: bilingual streetsigns, a proliferation of Winstubs selling Meteor, flammekeuche and glasses of Gewürtztraminer and Edelzwicker.

If you arrive early in the morning at the market on Place Broglie, the old people and the stallholders still chatter in the local dialect of Elsaessisch. It’s like hearing whispers from another century.

I didn’t have time to run up to the European parliament district to visit Richard Roger’s European Court of Human Rights building. But Strasbourg is not resting on its architectural laurels: the city recently celebrated the arrival of the TGV line from Paris by encasing the old train station in a giant glass slug. It’s quite a striking renovation.

A brief Google search reveals much history of Strasbourg that remains to be explored: including an institutionalised anti-semitism that lasted in the city until the 1700s, a short-lived soviet government of 1918 (it lasted 11 days), and the the military legacy of Vauban (he was kind of like Halliburton or Lockheed-Martin for Louis XIV).

So much left to see and do here. I’ll have to come back sometime.

*”A short business trip to Strasbourg“, rendered in Elsaessisch. The Hochdeutsch transliteration would be “Eine kleine Geschäftsreise auf Strassburg” or in French “Un petit voyage d’affaires à Strasbourg“.

Any train journey from the south of France towards Alsace requires a trip through the Franche Comté. Tucked into the lee of Switzerland and snuggled next to Burgundy, far from the TGV lines and the main tourist trails, the hills and valleys of Franche Comté form one of the least known and yet most beautiful regions of France.

Image: pafbox (Creative Commons)

The trainline cuts through some really stunning scenery. I’ve done the trip several times, in summer and winter, and it never ceases to amaze me. After leaving Lyon, you head northeast through Lons-le-Saulnier and skirt the foothills of the Jura mountains. The stretch of track from Lons to Montbéliard is worth the trip on its own.

The train follows the valley of the Doubs as the river winds through wooded hills, and you zoom straight past the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, probably one of the most interesting pieces of architecture anywhere in France.

The Franche Comté is a picture of bucolic peace – sleepy cows clustered in fields, woodlands laid over rounded hills, and the occasional village spire, with its typical Jurassien form rising above a clutch of red roofs. Even the traditional industries of the Jura are dainty – pens, clocks and spectacles. 

If Hobbits came to France, they’d live in the Franche Comté. And they’d make sure to book a window seat on the train, too.

Image: christing (Creative Commons)

Here’s a little story about why Twitter is great. It all happened over the weekend during our round trip from Montpellier to Antibes for the Keith Jarrett gig (the gig was fantastic, I’ve already posted about that below.)

After the gig, we left Antibes around midnight, and headed back onto the autoroute. As the lights of the city faded, Régine, who was driving, said to me “our headlights aren’t working properly.” And indeed, they weren’t – the sidelights were fine, high-beam was OK, but switching to low-beam plunged the road ahead into a disconcerting blackness.

(Image: Lezarderose)

Within a kilometre we saw an aire de repos with a Total station. So we pulled in, grabbed a coffee and a sandwich, and set about trying to fix the headlights. It seemed unlikely to be a bulb problem – both low-beam bulbs failing at the same time was just improbable. The most likely scenario was a blown fuse.

Régine, smart lady, had a set of spare fuses in the glovebox, and although I barely class myself as mechanically literate, I do know how to change car fuses (too many years driving second-hand Toyotas in NZ, where the engines last forever, but the electrics – mirrors, aircon, stereo – are well dodgy).  So far, so good.

But we couldn’t find the fusebox. The Skoda designers had hidden it well. We emptied the car looking for it. Behind the glovebox. Under the dashboard. In the door cavities. We even looked in the spare wheel compartment and under the bonnet. No joy. We had no maintenance manual, and the guys at the service station had no idea either.

Not wanting to be stuck at a service station outside Cannes until sunrise, I turned to technology. Figuring that at least a few of my Twitter followers somewhere in the world would be online, I tweeted via text:

Within five minutes a reply came back:

Now THAT’s why Twitter is cool. Of course, if I’d had a phone with internet access, I could have done a web search myself, but in the absence of that, a text and a network of Twitter followers worked just as effectively.

On reflection, the real benefit of Twitter in this instance is not the technology itself, it’s the type of user it attracts: high-frequency internet mavens. I knew when I texted my request that somebody among my followers, somewhere in the world, would be online and would do the internet search for me.  That wouldn’t happen with my Facebook friends (sorry guys).

So, thanks to Twitter and @paulie in England, @etnobofin (standing on the side of a motorway in Southern France) was able to find the hidden panel on the side of the dashboard of a Skoda Fabia, lever it off and expose the fusebox. Within fifteen minutes we’d replaced the fuses, got the headlights working again, and were on the road back to Montpellier.

I love living in this century.

Three things encountered on my walk in town this morning:

A completely honest beggar on rue de la Loge whose sign reads “Juste pour l’alcool et drogue“. I’m pretty sure it’s clever irony, because he’s got a nice-looking guitar and speaks pretty good English.

Two fabulous gendarmes on motorcycles who zoom through the crowds of pedestrians on the mall outside the Polygone shopping centre. One pulls up under the canopy outside the bank, proceeds to put his card in the cash machine and take out some Euros, while his partner keeps guard. Once he’s picked up his lunch money, the cops then zoom off again back through the crowd.

The regular morning cacophony on rue de Candolle, by the cathedral, where you can hear at least five or six instruments practising at once. Today it was cello, vibraphone, clarinet and trombone. The sounds bounce off the walls of the high, narrow streets, giving the impression that you’re walking through an Eric Dolphy album.