Villiers

« Je rêvais de retrouver la trace et l'image d'un Saint Louis à l'humanité sensible, un Saint Louis de chair, à figure humaine. Le temps, en l'élevant au-dessus de nos natures, lui a peut-être rendu un mauvais service. Il m'a imposé d'aller puiser aux sources les plus authentiques. Là où repose le trésor des paroles vivantes, laissées par les premiers témoins. Ceux qui ont vraiment connu le roi Louis IX, qui l'ont approché, accompagné depuis l'enfance jusqu'au trépas. J'ai remonté le filet d'eau vive. Je n'ai rien inventé…

Al centro di questa storia c’è un nobile inglese, Lord Ewald, innamorato di un’attricetta americana, Alicia Clary. A tormentarlo fino a spingerlo al pensiero del suicidio è la stupidità di questa donna, in sconcertante contrasto con la sua eccezionale bellezza. Egli vorrebbe una compagna con quelle fattezze, ma più intelligente e sensibile. Così, prima di risolversi a lasciare questo mondo, va a trovare un amico scienziato, le cui ricerche ha finanziato anni prima e che adesso è un punto di riferimento mondiale: Thomas Edison. Lui gli assicura di avere la soluzione e lo conduce nel suo laboratorio, a Menlo Park – sede oggi, tra le altre aziende informatiche, di Facebook. Nei sotterranei del padiglione, Edison ha costruito, grazie alle sue arti elettriche, un giardino dell’Eden artificiale, nel quale vive, come una Eva altrettanto artificiale, Hadaly, una «andreide»…

For many years, and still for many people, Stanford’s name was synonymous with music for the Anglican Church. In this role, he expressed an easy, trusting, but not smug or complacent, relationship with the Christian faith. The natural assumption is that Stanford the man held such a faith. Yet the truth is that we know nothing of his beliefs beyond what we may infer from the music. In the previous CD in this series, Stanford, in the Triumph of Love cycle, entered perfectly into the spirit of his friend Edmond Holmes’s belief in reincarnation while, in Die Wallfarht nach Kevlaar, he set Heine’s reworking of a Catholic Marian legend with total empathy. On a larger scale, we must note four Mass settings (two lost), a Requiem and a Stabat Mater. “Songs of Faith” is very far from a concert room equivalent to the well-known Bible Songs with organ accompaniment. Published as two mini-cycles, the first has texts by his friend Tennyson, for whom “There is more faith in honest doubt … than in all the creeds”, the second draws upon Walt Whitman. Stanford had already raised eyebrows back in 1884 with his Elegiac Ode, a cantata setting of Whitman’s lines “Come, lovely and soothing death” from his Elegy to Abraham Lincoln. Whitman’s belief in an afterlife was more complex than Holmes’s vaguely Buddhist creed, and Stanford seems once again perfectly at his ease.