Pli selon pli and its title
David7Gable
Somebody from rmcr e-mailed me asking for a translation of the title of
Boulez's Pli selon pli.
"Pli selon pli" means "fold by fold"--the pleats in your trousers are
folds--or, better yet, "layer by layer." The phrase is taken from a sonnet in
which the symbolist poet Mallarmé describes the fog being stripped from the
city of Bruges by the rising sun "pli selon pli." (Debussy, who wrote a
prelude to Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun," knew Mallarmé and frequented the
"mardis" or Tuesday evening soirées at Mallarmé's home.)
The full title of Pli selon pli is Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, and the
piece unfolds a portrait of Mallarmé layer by layer, movement by movement, as
Boulez has suggested. The first movement is entitled Don or Gift, which refers
to the gift of creation and the birth of the work, and the last movement ends
with "un peu profond ruisseau calomnié, la mort" (a very shallow and much
maligned little rivulet, death). Each of the five movements of Pli selon pli
includes settings of anywhere from one line of Mallarmé to a complete sonnet,
although the sonnet from which the title comes, "Remémoration d'amis belges"
(In memory of Belgian friends), is not among them. Nevertheless, the first
movement of Pli selon pli does for fog what La mer did for the sea. (Boulez's
programmatic depiction of hovering fog is largely accomplished by means of a
long soft roll on the suspended cymbals that underlies much of the movement.)
Like smoke or mist, fog was one of the classic subjects of the impressionist
painters and of Monet in particular. (In Manet's famous portrait of his
friend, Mallarmé, Mallarmé is depicted lost in reverie, smoking a cigar from
which the smoke rises, formless and wraith-like.) Painted in 1872, the first
painting Monet ever described as an "impression," "Impression: Sunrise"--which
was also the painting that gave rise to the label "impressionism"--depicted the
sun rising through veils of morning haze rising from the river Thames in
London. In 1874, Monet painted a picture that he entitled Fumées dans le
brouilliard: Impression (Smoke in the fog: an impression). Monet intended the
designation impression to help the viewer grasp that his paintings were founded
on the reality of the nebulous and atmospheric in nature as grasped by the
individual subjectivity. (And to grasp what Monet meant by an impression, you
have to bear in mind (a) that an impression is subjective, and (b) that
subjectivity is first of all an objective concept referring to the perceptual
apparatus of the individual--of the subject that perceives the object--and only
secondarily a metaphor for the irreducibly personal. Monet is never quite
certain which of these two meanings he intends by "impression" although he more
often than not intends the literal rather than metaphorical meaning.) But as
far as conservative critics and the mass public for painting were concerned,
something as inherently ugly as fog was an absurd and risible subject, like an
ugly nude (and indeed Monet's contemporary Degas was ridiculed for painting
ugly nudes. "Monsieur Degas, why are the women in your paintings so ugly?"
"Because, Monsieur, in general women are ugly.") Monet and the impressionist
movement in general are ridiculed in a contemporary play by one Henri Meilhac.
In the play there's a painter who has painted a flat grey canvas on which a
knifeblade is clearly depicted but nothing else. The subject? Fog so thick
you could slice it with a knife. As in the case of impressionist painting, the
listener coming to Boulez's Pli selon pli for the first time may find himself
bewildered by the almost total dissolution of the clear and solid outlines of
more traditional structure characteristic of the piece. Pli selon pli may be
the most amibitious piece of music ever written to depend so exclusively on the
allusive--as in Mallarmé--and the atmospheric--as in impressionist painting.
It should be added that it was not Boulez but Monet's older contemporary
Richard Wagner who created something analogous to what the impressionists did
in music for the first time and during the exact same period. Wagner's
depictions of the nebulous in nature include various vaporous substances, of
which a vivid example is the sheeting rains driven by lacerating winds depicted
in the prelude to Die Walküre. The sheeting rain is depicted by a long violin
tremolo on a single pitch, the lacerating winds that drive the sheeting rain by
the violently but seamlessly fluctuating dynamics that shape the string
tremolo. The metrical structure of this passage could not be inferred from the
seamless violin part if the double basses depicting Siegmund's relentless
flight were silent.
For the record, the use of selon in the phrase "pli selon pli" is an idiom.
Normally selon means "according to": "selon Joe" would mean "according to
Joe." Indeed, the lazy CBS translators, who obviously looked the word up in a
French dictionary and simply copied what they found, put the incorrect English
translation "Fold according to fold" somewhere on the original Columbia record
jacket.
-david
Raymond Hall
unsnipped underneath for your benefit. Maybe you could illuminate us with a
similar report on Le marteau sans maitre, and where it fits into the Boulez
ouevre. For some reason, this piece, arguably Boulez's most famous, doesn't
get mentioned much. I remember you saying there were four recordings of this
piece. Apologies for detracting from Pli selon pli.
Regards,
# RMCR WebSite Links :
http://www.users.bigpond.com/hallraylily/tassiedevil2.htm
# Main Page : http://www.users.bigpond.com/hallraylily/index.html
Ray, Sydney
"David7Gable" <david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20010620021358...@ng-bh1.aol.com...
Nicolas Hodges
>Maybe you could illuminate us with a
>similar report on Le marteau sans maitre, and where it fits into the Boulez
>ouevre. For some reason, this piece, arguably Boulez's most famous, doesn't
>get mentioned much. I remember you saying there were four recordings of this
>piece.
Four by PB, and I can think of two by other conductors (must be more).
Marteau never quite got to me. For me the most lasting pieces are
Figures-Doubles-Prismes, Memoriale, Structures II.
--
Nic
David7Gable
So Nic's reply to Ray appears on my server, but not Ray's original post????
-david gable
Nicolas Hodges
>So Nic's reply to Ray appears on my server, but not Ray's original post????
Must be something to do with size: his quoted the whole of yours (on
purpose). Do you have some sort of AOL 'family' measures switched on?
--
Nic
David7Gable
>--
Nope. Aol can't cope with long posts as technical support for aol just
admitted to me in live conversation online. Hard to believe, isn't it?
-david gable
Joseph Henry
>Four by PB, and I can think of two by other conductors (must be more).
Now five:
Robert Craft (Odyssey)
Bruno Maderna (Stradivarius)
Ondaline de la Martinez (Lorelt)
B. Tommy Anersson (Caprice)(instrumental movements only)
Peter Rundel (CordAria)
The four Boulez recordings are, of course:
Vega
Adès
CBS (reissued Sony Japan)
CBS Masterworks
Joseph Henry
Phil Badger
Max Schmeder
unwittingly made an insult. It's just that you perfectly whet the appetite
for the music you describe.
Max
David7Gable
>unwittingly made an insult.
Not at all. Thanks for the compliment. I love Pli selon pli and I've lived
with it for nearly a quarter of a century. It's a massive statement like the
Eroica that one never gets over.
-david gable
Paul Goldstein
> Honestly, David, you should be writing liner notes. I hope I haven't
> unwittingly made an insult. It's just that you perfectly whet the appetite
> for the music you describe.
Heartily seconded.
Paul Goldstein (longtime Boulez fan)