The Ravel Pavane

In order to recount suitably the extraordinary case of the pianist Marie Boutácheff, it becomes necessary that I should set out first, in their order, certain facts. These are not without interest and are essential to its complete understanding. They have to do with the effects of sound upon a highly sensitive organism.

I first met Miss Boutácheff in the early Spring of the year 1928. I had come over from Santa Cruz, the southermost of the Virgin Islands, to St Thomas, the colony’s capital, after a Winter’s residence on the other island. It was my intention to remain in St Thomas for about three weeks, to see the Spring tennis tournaments and for the renewal of social relationships with my friends in the capital. Then, about the first of June, I planned to take ship for continental United States, there to remain until my return to the Caribbean the following Autumn.

Miss Boutácheff had been spending the Winter in St Thomas, where she had been induced to come by several women friends, all painters. These friends of hers, as Rachel Manners, the landscapist assured me, had brought her, ‘two jumps ahead of a nervous breakdown’ from overwork, to our West Indian climate of spice and balm for the purpose of restoring her shattered health.

Miss Boutácheff, at that time very well known to and very greatly admired by a select circle of artistic people, was a serious artist, a pianist of great promise. She had, in fact, already ‘arrived’ professionally. She had given successful concerts in New York and elsewhere. She was a tall, blonde, rather slender woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, of that type which possesses enormous nervous energy coupled with a relatively low degree of physical vitality. She appeared, too, to be entirely free of that drawback which so frequently accompanies the make-up of people seriously engaged in the arts, and commonly named ‘the artistic temperament’. In a very marked degree she possessed the intangible assets of charm and personality.

We took to each other at once. Miss Boutácheff had read everything of mine, she assured me. I had heard much about her and had even attended two of her concerts in Aeolian Hall. She had been making every effort not to think of music for five months!

‘Hasn’t that let your technic down?’ I asked her.

‘No, I do not think so. I hope not! You see, I have been using a clavier – a silent keyboard – all winter. That, being merely mechanical, does not trouble me. In fact it is soothing, restful. It is only sound, Mr Canevin, that – excuse me, if you please; let us talk of something else if you don’t mind.’

It was I, as it happened, who started her later on, to ‘thinking of music’ again.

We were discussing Pelléas et Mélisande, and we got a little at cross-purposes because, to her, Pelléas et Mélisande meant the music of Claude Debussy and such performances as that splendid one of Mary Garden and the notable cast in that great seven nights’ performance of the Hammerstein production in New York City; while to me, from the writer’s viewpoint, most prominent was the written text of the story as it came from the hands of Maeterlinck. This, of course, as I might have known, Marie Boutácheff thought of merely as the libretto. We recognized at once that we were discussing two different problems of artistic expression.

‘I grant you,’ said she, ‘that I do not know accurately the Maeterlinck text! I have never even read it through once. The story, yes, of course I know that; in a general way, as one knows the “plot” of any opera. One has to remember, though, that Maeterlinck is a symbolist. I confess I do not know, exactly, what he is trying to express in his “opus”. I think it is jealousy; but, perhaps, it’s something else! To be frank, Mr Canevin, I never gave the subject any particular thought.’

‘From the writer’s viewpoint,’ I put in, ‘it is difficult to know what he is up to! It has never been clear to me, for example, just why, at the very beginning, the castle doorkeeper is discovered struggling with a refractory door; or why the maid servants are assembling for the purpose of pouring water on the threshold! It is, undoubtedly, symbolism – it could hardly be anything else. But – what, please, does it symbolize?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea!’ said Marie Boutácheff, and we laughed together understandingly. Then she told me about a little group of six pieces by the composer Arnold Schönberg. She told me how she had studied these very carefully; and failed utterly to ‘get’ what the composer was trying to express. It was ‘overtonal’ composition, much, in fact, like Debussy’s in Pelléas et Mélisande.

Then she proceeded (I recall clearly how the experience she related interested me then and later) to tell me how she had noticed their inclusion in a program played by the very famous virtuoso Orféo Mattaloni. The six little pieces required only a few minutes to play through. They were little scraps of expression; ideas; chiefly interwoven phrases. She had gone to hear Mattaloni play them. She wanted, she said, to see if she could understand the composer’s meaning by listening to them. She described her experience at that concert –

‘Mattaloni paused just before that number on his program. He came down to the front of the platform and said to that big audience – it was in Carnegie Hall – “I beg that you will humor me! Keep silent, please, quite silent, between the numbers of this suite I am now going to play. No comment at all, if you will be so kind! I have studied them with the very greatest care. I will try to play them for you as they must be played. When I have finished all six – four minutes for them all – then, of course, such comment as you please.”

‘Then he sat down and played the six pieces through, very beautifully. He is a very great artist. They are, really, quite simple little things. And, do you know, perhaps it was merely my frame of mind at the moment, my “temperament” if you will! – I had come deliberately to find out Schönberg’s meaning, you will remember – I closed my eyes and did not open them until Mattaloni had finished the six. I knew them all, of course, intimately. I had played them many, many times. Well I “got” six little pictures, Mr Canevin, like sketches; little, sharp, cleanly-etched line-drawings. Street, vista, sunset, a church! It was really extraordinary.

‘And then when he had finished, there was quite an outbreak from the audience – boos; hisses even; applause, too; little murmurs and cheerings; several people in tears from their emotional reactions. The booings and hisses were for the composer; not for Mattaloni! He sat there and looked around at us, and smiled, inscrutably. That was all.

‘Then he went on with his program; a very fine one. Everybody was delighted with it and it got very favorable notices in all the next morning’s newspapers.

‘But, here is the odd part of it, Mr Canevin: I “went behind”; Sylvia Manners, who was with me, and I; and I said to him: “There is a question I wish to ask you, Orféo. Tell me: had you those images – I named them all – or, if you do not mind my asking you, were you merely playing it, as Schönberg wrote it down, with that inimitable technic which is yours alone?”

‘That pleased Mattaloni. He said: “I am very glad you have asked me that, Marie. No, not at all. No ‘images’. I ‘see’ nothing; nothing whatever in them; no pictures. And, believe me, I have studied the things adequately – months of work and thought and consideration upon that little suite which requires only four minutes to play through, and which gives you ‘sketches’ as you say; and, which gave part of this audience what they think is reason to hiss Arnold Schönberg! It is curious, is it not? No, they mean nothing, nothing whatever to Orféo Mattaloni, except – perhaps, because of their technical construction – a set of little children’s plaything-puzzles!” ’

As for me, I could only shake my head over this account of Miss Boutácheff’s experience. I appreciate the Moderns: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Debussy; and the others. And yet, I should be the same as Signor Mattaloni. I do not, I fear, often understand what they mean to convey. It naturally interested me to learn that so great a musician as Mattaloni felt the same way about such compositions.

After a slight pause, and meaning merely to make conversation, I remarked, ‘You know Mattaloni well, then, Miss Boutácheff?’

Miss Boutácheff forgot her convalescence. Her delicate, rather beautiful face lighted up with a sudden animation. She looked straight into my eyes.

‘He is a very great artist,’ she said. ‘Yes, Mr Canevin, I know him very well.’ Then at once she began to speak of Rachel Manners’s remarkable work, a long series of highly-colored, florid, glowing canvases, drenched with light, made that winter under the dazzling West Indian sun; paintings which have since brought her fame.

It was not until I had had the opportunity somewhat to digest this peculiar susceptibility of Miss Boutácheff’s for ‘musical images’ that she told me about the effect which another musical composition always had upon her.

This was Maurice Ravel’s Pavane. The Ravel Pavane is a well-known composition, though rarely performed at concerts; and I think I need say no more about it here than that it is a very ‘modern’ musical treatment of an antique Italian dance. It is, to me, very beautiful. I imagine most audiences like it, even though it must be classed as purely intellectual music.

Marie Boutácheff said that one movement of this composition – the final movement which follows the Grave Assai, the suspended pause occuring on page six of the standard Schirmer edition – she had never, really, heard with what might be called her outward ears. When that movement began, that is, with anybody else playing the Pavane, and she listening, she ‘passed out,’ and, instead of hearing anything, got instead the mental sensation of seeing a picture. Near the conclusion of this particular movement, this ‘picture’ would disappear out of her consciousness, and she would again ‘hear’ the very end of the composition in a perfectly ordinary and normal manner.

She knew what were the musical sounds involved in this portion of the Pavane. She had played it herself many times and had studied it intensively. She always ‘heard’ every note clearly when she played it herself. So far in her career she had only practiced it. She had never included the Ravel Pavane in any of her own programs.

She knew, mentally, when hearing it played by somebody else, the precise sequence of the notes and chords, but, even when playing it herself, despite being able to hear every note, she nevertheless in some curious fashion ‘passed out’ in the same place and ‘came to’ in the same place.

Also – and here I could perceive the really strange element in the phenomenon – the seeing impression was a growing and an increasing one.

In other words, every time Marie Boutácheff ‘saw’ the picture which that particular section of the Ravel Pavane brought into her mind, that picture was more intense, clearer in its details, more real.

The ‘picture’ began with her outside the arched doorway which led into a vast ballroom in which the Pavane was being danced. She stood on a smooth marble flooring of square black and white tiles, looking in at the dancers.

Repetition had made it possible for her to get a clear and detailed idea of the appearance of the dancers; and every time she ‘saw’ the Pavane, she was a trifle nearer the entrance-way.

She had never been able to see all the dancers; only those just inside the arched doorway. But – there were other persons inside the ballroom around the corner, to her right, of whose presence there she was, somehow, certain.

Of the presence of those others she was thoroughly convinced. Delicate little snatches of conversation, in quaint, antique Italian, came out to her from the grouped dancers, as they made their formal bows to each other there inside the ballroom. Even odors as of some long-forgotten perfumes, floated out to her; scents of camphire and of bergamot. There was, too, in this composite set of sensations evoked by this portion of the Pavane, the feeling of a light, warm breeze, stirring the curtains of the gracious room; a little breeze which wafted itself out into the hallway where she stood looking in; entranced; breathless with an ever-increasing, almost heart-breaking longing to get into the ballroom – standing outside there on the cool, smooth, black and white marble tiles.

I have mentioned that Ravel’s Pavane is rarely performed in public. But, not long after I got back to the Continental United States that Spring, having been on the lookout for its possible inclusion in some belated, end-of-the-season program, I discovered that Harold Bauer was to play the Ravel Pavane at his last concert, and I bought a ticket and went to Carnegie Hall for the particular purpose of hearing it.

It was a delightful, although a somewhat startling, experience!

Of course I had a certain psychological preparation for what happened. I was prepared, after what Marie Boutácheff had told me, to get mentally some kind of an ‘image’. I got one! The little pause, noted in the musical score as Grave Assai, did, actually, give me a mental picture. I could ‘see’ it, intellectually, as it were (I had no clearly-defined visualization which could be literally described as a picture); four couples, dancing, as though at some distance; whether distance in space or time I can scarcely say. There were eight of the dancers in my ‘picture’; four demure ladies, all young; four cavaliers attending them through the dance; handing them about the square figures of those sedate, grave measures, with a distinctively mediaeval courtesy; with gallant, studiously languid, bows.

Bauer gave a magnificent performance throughout. In the Pavane he accentuated the rhythm, bringing out, as Ravel clearly intends, the sense of an orchestra. I could clearly distinguish the violins, sawing along through the dignified cadences of the mellow old dance-measures. I was sure I could hear, too, in those marvellously harmonized dissonances wherein the composer speaks to the intellect in overtonal groupings of notes, the viola da gamba, gravely sobbing out the measured beats of melodic ictus – óne, two, thrée, four; óne, two, thrée, four.

It was a very interesting experience. I understood after it very much more clearly what Marie Boutácheff had meant to convey to me.

Very soon after the Bauer concert Marie Boutácheff, her health now greatly improved, came back to New York.

She called me up the day after her arrival, about ten in the morning. The New York musical season was over. It was well along in June, and those persons who, like myself, were for any reason lingering in the great city, were complaining of the heat. Marie asked me to come to tea at her studio the next day. When I got there, about four o’clock, several other people had already arrived. More came in after me. The tone of the gathering was congratulatory. These were Marie’s friends, and they were outspokenly glad to see her so greatly restored. I, even, came in for a measure of their approval, as a person somehow associated with the place which had wrought such a salutary change.

Orféo Mattaloni was one of her guests. He was, it came out, to sail for Europe on the third or fourth day following.

At Marie’s suggestion, hastily imparted between two admirable musical performances – and somewhat to my surprise, for I was only one of her new friends as compared with all these older and more intimate ones – I remained after the others had gone. She came back to me after seeing her other friends out of the studio, to where I sat on an enormous divan placed along the west wall of the big room. She was smiling and holding out her hands impulsively, as though I had only that moment arrived.

‘O, Mr Canevin, it is indeed good to see you!’ she cried, and settled herself beside me. Then at once she put into words what was in her mind, and I understood why she had asked me to remain.

‘Do you know,’ she said, eagerly, and turning an illuminated face towards me, ‘I’ve had the most remarkable experience! It was only a day or so after you had sailed from St Thomas. There was an entertainment for the Municipal Hospital, a benefit. Probably you saw the notices before you left. They asked me to play. It was rather short notice, but I was quite willing, very happy indeed, really, to do that for them. I was feeling very well, you see. There was no program, no precise list of what was to be played. It was of course a very informal affair.

‘I played several things; things I imagined the audience would appreciate. They liked them, and I was requested, near the end, to play again.

‘I played the Ravel Pavane, Mr Canevin.’ She paused, her eyes like stars.

‘Mr Canevin – it was remarkable – extraordinary!!

‘I was giving especial attention to emphasizing the rhythm – it suggests strings, you know: violins, a viola-like instrument or two, a harp, or perhaps a clavichord, accompaniment; when you analyze it, I mean. Everything went very well until that pause on page six of the manuscript; you know, the Grave Assai – we looked at it together there in St Thomas you remember, Mr Canevin – and then – then I lost consciousness sitting there at the pianoforte. I “came to” only at the somewhat abrupt ending; if you remember, there are merely a few concluding chords.

‘I had played on, mechanically; played on, somehow, to the end. My mind carried me on, I suppose! Nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary. I suppose I gave no outward sign of any kind. There was applause. But – when I left the piano this time, I remembered clearly what I had seen. It was all there, chiselled sharply into my memory.

‘I had been standing there outside the ballroom, as usual; only this time I felt a distinct sensation of anxiety. I wanted, oh, so acutely, to be inside the ballroom; to know if a certain person were also inside there; around the corner where I could not see. And, Mr Canevin, I actually managed to walk several steps towards the doorway. I was just on the very threshold when the Pavane ended.

‘It was all clearer; more alive, somehow. There were the ladies; the cavaliers in their velvet cloaks and their slashed sleeves, and their rapiers – worn even while dancing; only, as I’ve said, it was vivid now, pulsing with life – it was life, Mr Canevin; and I was a part of it; and yet, somehow, not quite a part of it. And over it all was that consuming anxiety to know.

‘I wanted to know if I – another self, so to speak, yet myself also – were inside there, and with someone else. It was harrowing while it lasted. The impression remained with me for days. It is not wholly gone even now. Everything depended on my knowing. Otherwise, I could not tell which of two courses to pursue. It was a question of all my happiness, Mr Canevin. I cannot describe how acute it was, how extremely vital to me.’

She paused, and relaxed her tense body, and slowly and with a gentle sigh sank back against the thick, soft cushions of the divan. Her eyes were closed; her breath was coming and going in audible, light sobs. It was plain that Marie Boutácheff had been through an extraordinary emotional experience. I sat very quietly, making no comment whatever, for several minutes – quite a long time, it seemed, under such circumstances!

Then, abruptly, Marie Boutácheff aroused herself, turned to me again with her eager animation. She said: ‘What do you think of him, Mr Canevin?’

I was a trifle startled. I jumped to a conclusion which turned out to be the right one.

‘You mean Signor Mattaloni?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Marie Boutácheff.

‘I liked him immensely,’ said I, at once, telling the exact truth. The big, handsome virtuoso had, indeed, impressed me very favorably.

‘He is a great, a very great artist,’ said Marie Boutácheff softly, and suddenly tears stood in her eyes. I began to suspect that she had a ‘temperament’ after all! She moved along the divan until she sat close beside me.

‘I will tell you something, Mr Canevin,’ she said, and was silent for a little space. She looked down at her hands lying in her lap. Then: ‘It was Orféo Mattaloni whom I wanted to know about – inside the ballroom. He was the other person.’

I said nothing, but while I was turning over this unexpected statement in my mind, very quietly from where she sat close beside me, her voice now little more than a whisper, Marie Boutácheff began to tell me the story of that nervous breakdown. She had been, it appeared, and was still, very deeply and honestly in love with Mattaloni; and she had no means of knowing whether or not the virtuoso returned her love. Between the lines I discerned in Mattaloni a very noble character. Plainly the great virtuoso was a man of honor as well as that very great artist whom the entire musical world had already recognized and acclaimed. The Mattalonis, too, Miss Boutácheff had told me, had been great lords in Umbria in the Middle Ages.

He had been what might be called ‘attentive’ to her; had shown her that he thought very highly of her; but, whether as artist or woman, perhaps because of Mattaloni’s punctiliousness, she had been quite unable definitely to ascertain.

And, now that the two of them were together once more in New York, it had begun all over again for her.

She ended with another allusion to her mental picture derived from the Pavane of Maurice Ravel.

‘It is almost as though Orféo and I had lived over together similar events in that ancient setting. There was, in that experience of it, there in St Thomas after the benefit concert, the same type of anxiety which is making me unburden myself to you now. O, Mr Canevin, I know that if I could once get into the ballroom and see whether or not he and I are there together, I would know definitely what is in Orféo’s heart! It will kill me if I do not know, Mr Canevin.’

She ended her story, her face now drawn and tragic. I waited for some time before saying anything. Then: ‘Are you expecting to see him again before he sails for Europe?’

‘He is coming to dinner here tomorrow. So is Rachel Manners. Will you make the fourth, Mr Canevin?’

‘With great pleasure,’ said I, and rose to take my departure. I had a dinner engagement that evening, and there was barely time for me to get back to my club and dress for it.

The dinner the next evening, with Orféo Mattaloni and Miss Manners as my fellow guests, was a thoroughly delightful one. Mattaloni was at his scintillating best. He shone as a conversationalist quite as brilliantly as at the pianoforte later. He played for us, one brilliant thing after another, the lovely, lucid notes rippling off his fingers like strings of pearls. He was, as Marie had said, a very great artist. Here, at his ease, away from the strain and stress of public performance, playing only for an audience in full appreciative rapport with him, his performance was truly magnificent. He ended with the Fantasie Impromptu of Chopin. There was a long pause after that. Mattaloni continued to sit at the grand piano, the three of us across the room from him, in a row on the divan.

I had an inspiration.

I spoke to him, very quietly. ‘Will you play for us Ravel’s Pavane, Signor Mattaloni?’

I could feel Marie Boutácheff’s body go rigid on the long divan beside me, hear her utter a little smothered cry under her breath. She put her hands convulsively up over her face. Mattaloni did not notice any of this, in the dusk of the big room.

‘Certainly – very willingly, Mr Canevin,’ said he, and at once began it.

I closed my eyes, relaxed myself.

Clearly, distinctly, authoritatively, the strange, dissonant, mentally challenging chords followed one another. Mattaloni was playing very quietly, almost reflectively; precisely, I imagine, as Ravel intended his Pavane to be played. The idea of the old dance filled my mind; its rhythm exact, precise, as though under the baton of some ancient kapellmeister now dust these many centuries. There were the violins, the viola da gamba, the tinkling, precise clavichord. It was all there, beautifully clear and distinct; yet somehow distant, mellow with the dust of the fragrant centuries; an antique, a curiosity; to be sensed delicately, understandingly, with the intellect. It seemed a deliberate archaism; very beautiful, almost whimsical in certain of its nuances; steadily working on to accommodate the squares of slow-moving, graceful, formal dancers; complete to the very last measure – the last languid, formal bow of rapiered cavalier; the last deep, drooping courtoisie of demure signorina  . . .

And then – there came the deliberate pause of the Grave Assai, the beginning of the final crucial, movement which ends with an abrupt, soft chord.

And then once more I ‘saw’ the dancers, this time more nearly as a literal picture than had been the case at the Bauer performance.

I became conscious of something very strange indeed.

I stood, mentally, as it were, leaning over a high stone gallery coping; and there, below me, was a black and white square-tiled floor, a graciously arched doorway with blowing curtains, the remote figures of slowly-treading dancers within. A faint, soft scent, perhaps of camphire and bergamot, was wafted up to me on the lift of the warm air from below; and there – paused, expectant, near the doorway, a woman, walking slowly towards the ballroom.

The woman was tall, slender, graceful, with very beautiful hands which she held clasped before her in a gesture indicative of some deep and carking anxiety.

I was entirely conscious of the firm notes, the dissonant chords, clear-cut under Mattaloni’s masterful hands at Marie Boutácheff’s pianoforte. I record definitely that I heard, plainly and clearly, every note. The two impressions, that of the eye and that of the ear, were synchronous, simultaneous; overlapping each other, so to express it. I could feel my scalp prickle, and the cold sweat starting out of the pores of my face. I was conscious of my own two hands gripped together in a vise-like clasp as I watched Marie Boutácheff down below me there, walking slowly, steadily, towards the ballroom doorway.

I was torn with a racking anxiety. Would Mattaloni’s notes and chords continue long enough? Would there be time for her to reach the arched dorway – to go through it into the ballroom? Mattaloni’s pearl-like notes, those clear-cut, precise chords of Maurice Ravel, followed one another in a relentlessly-timed procession. There were, I knew, only just so many of them.

She reached the doorway – entered it; and, abruptly, the sense of tenseness fell away from me; I felt myself relax, automatically. I unclasped my hands. There was no gallery, no ballroom. There was only Marie Boutácheff’s studio. I let my head sink back against the deep cushion of the divan; and then I became aware of Rachel Manners speaking in a low voice, speaking to Mattaloni who had just struck the last firm, soft chord of the Pavane’s abrupt ending: ‘It was magnificent – magnificent!’

A deep silence followed Miss Manners’ impulsive little speech. Mattaloni continued to sit at the piano, his leonine figure only dimly visible in the dusk of the high room. Very quietly, then, he began to speak.

‘Had you remembered, perhaps, that the Pavane is dedicated “For a Dead Princess”? I think of her, always, when I play it. She was a Venetian, Rosabella Doria, daughter of the Doge Ludovico Doria. Her portrait, by Botticelli, is in the Louvre. She married my ancestor, the Prince Piero Mattaloni. That is how she became a Princess.

‘She was very lovely – tall, blonde, slender – a woman of the most intense spirituality!’

Mattaloni paused there, and, as one could almost feel the palpable silence of the dim, quiet room restoring itself, turned about, slowly, on the piano-stool. Then quite abruptly, he threw out his long arms in a sudden, impulsive, purely Latin gesture towards the three of us, and said: ‘It was of you, who are her very counterpart, my dear Marie, that I thought when I stood before the Donna Rosabella in the Louvre . . . ’

Marie Boutácheff rose quietly and turned up the lights. I saw her face as she turned around. It was transfigured, rapturous!

There is a ballroom in that Umbrian castle of the ancient house of Mattaloni, a ballroom with an arched doorway after the manner of Torrigiano – another great artist, in stone and mortar. There are large, square, black and white marble tiles in the antechamber, and a daïs in the ballroom. I know because I asked Mattaloni when I went to see him and Marie off on the Re Umberto.

He was greatly moved, he assured me, by my very kind interest.