Time Will Tell (19 page)

Thus Jehan, who always saw himself as a guardian to younger composers, wrote to Desprez and told him to compose a piece upon the words
Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo
. When he had completed it, Desprez should send it to Jehan who would arrange for it to be presented with due ceremony to Le Roi Louis XI. Knowing of Desprez's ambition and impatience, Jehan was more forceful than he would normally be. He impressed upon Desprez the importance of secrecy and made him aware that, without Jehan's introduction, the King would, in all likelihood, view a composition which quoted the very text that he had privately instructed to decorate his fortified Château as a sign of conspiracy. A man who already divined faces in clouds and designs in shadows would regard an unannounced composition using those words not as coincidence, but as evidence of a plot against his life. In this Jehan was trying to protect not only Desprez but also Bourdichon and other members of the retinue. And Jehan himself.

Desprez, as ever, listened to no one and, when he had completed the composition, sent it directly to Louis. Mercifully he also sent a letter to Jehan telling him what he had done, which allowed Jehan to prepare his defence. It was the only time that Jehan told a lie to Louis and it pained him greatly.

Ultimately Lady Fortuna smiled upon Jehan and upon Desprez, for Louis suffered yet another stroke and his memory failed him. Jehan was able to convince the King that Louis himself had asked Jehan to compose a piece using the same text that decorated the walls of his Château, and that Jehan – too busy with the affairs of St Martin and the daily services at Plessis-les-Tours – had asked one of Louis's new servants, the famed Josquin Desprez, to complete the task.

Jehan then explained the design to Louis, inventing his arguments as he went. After a lengthy exposition, he came to the final line:
In te, Domine, speravi; non confundar in aeternum. Amen.
[In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion. Amen.]

This, Jehan explained, was Desprez imagining Louis's prayer to God.

‘I don't like it,' said Louis immediately. ‘You write something for me.'

Louis was devout, Louis loved God, but Louis was afraid of death and did not want to be reminded of it too often. He had done many things in his life for which he might yet pay the price, and the suggestion of eternal damnation was like an open sore.

And so it fell to Jehan to compose a motet for the dying King, his five-voice
Intemerata Dei Mater
, a hymn to the Virgin which alluded only in the vaguest way to judgement in calling for safe deliverance through the intercession of angels, thereby recalling the figures that Bourdichon had painted.

It was, though, more than a composition for a dying King: Jehan was the same age as Louis and aware of his own mortality. This was a very personal expression, from the text itself, which referred to the dangers of living in exile, to quotations from his own chansons. It was a tapestry of the emotions and events of his life and, at the time, I was quite sure that it would be Jehan's last composition. And so it would have been had not Compère, over a decade later, asked Jehan to write a new piece.

Jehan returned Desprez's unperformed composition and explained what had happened. He assumed that Desprez was furious, for he heard nothing from him for several years, during which time the younger composer left Sainte-Chapelle and travelled to Hungary and Italy. Thus Desprez never learned how dangerous his actions had been, and Jehan never told him. It was fortunate that Louis's memory was clouded, for otherwise Desprez could have been accused of being a spy, for which the penalty was torture and execution. And, of course, his torturers would have gleaned information that may have led them back to Jehan.

It was not the first time that Desprez's singular wilfulness and desire for advancement had led himself and others into danger. Ultimately it was his ability as a musician that granted him safe passage through this life and, I am certain, will assure his fame after death. He will, though, have faced a sterner judgement in the next world.

As I look back now, an explanation that I had not seen previously emerges, one which suggests a reason for Desprez's later behaviour concerning Jehan's great thirty-four voice motet. Desprez, far away in Paris, witnessed none of the intricate details of Jehan's dealings with the King, and, in the absence of such explanation, he may well have formed the facile, false belief that it was because of the actions of Johannes Ockeghem that his own composition was never performed. Perhaps Desprez vowed then to have his revenge against the older composer, not knowing that, through Jehan's intervention, he had actually been saved from pain and death.

In this, as in so many other ways, Desprez was deceived by his very nature, for he would never seek or heed the arguments of others. In his isolation he would have remained convinced of the veracity of his opinion. As Thomas Aquinas says, the scribes and Pharisees were deceived in their understanding of our Lord Jesus Christ by their own malevolence; in the same way, Desprez was undone by his withdrawal from other men. He should have consorted more with others, for the truth is to be found in a group of men with shared goodwill and will never be discovered in the counsel of a single man who argues with himself.

Dominus mihi auxiliator et ego despiciam odientes me. Melius est sperare in Domino quam sperare in homine. Melius est sperare in Domino quam sperare
in principibus.

[The Lord is my helper: and I will look over my enemies. It is good to confide in the Lord, rather than to have confidence in man. It is good to trust in the Lord, rather than to trust in princes.]

 

 

Emma emerged into the courtyard of the conference centre. She thought her paper had gone well. No one had fallen asleep, nor had anyone leapt to their feet and challenged her. She knew that many were being polite, that they felt that her real contribution was this evening's concert rather than the afternoon's performance for which she would get no reviews. It was gone now, into the ether, and she felt the same relief she often experienced after a concert, when she would reward herself with a glass of wine. There was no time for that now, though; with the Basilica of St Martin just round the corner, she wanted to pay homage to the place where Ockeghem had sung all those years ago.

The modern basilica – modern, at least, by Ockeghem's standards – had been built at the end of the nineteenth century over the site of the original tomb of St Martin. The orientation of the new edifice was, in imitation of the new city itself, south-to-north rather than west-to-east. Gone was the elongated Nave, and in its place stood an eccentric confection of a cuboid base, neo-Byzantine decorations, and a strange neo-Classical dome atop which St Martin himself was perilously perched. Doubtless Marco and Charlie could explain to her its particular nineteenth-century charm, but it struck Emma as a rather random design, more fitting to the south of France than to a city famous for its association with the Valois Kings.

All that remained of the old building were two towers, which had marked the extremities of the former church: the one part of the North Transept and the other flanking the main West Door. Both had been renamed, as the Tour de Charlemagne and the Tour de l'Horloge respectively, giving the impression that they were self-contained edifices that had served different functions, the divorce from their original purpose total. Standing with the Tour de Charlemagne to her right, Emma looked along the Rue des Halles towards the remaining bell tower. The outlines of the original pillars were inlaid in the tarmac and she tried to imagine the columns rising into the darkening sky. The Altar would have been to her left and she would have been standing in the Transept. The scale of the building was immense, somehow more impressive in her imagination that it would be if it still existed, and the collegiate church could easily have housed everything that her vision encompassed – the road, all of the shops and the houses. It was impossible, in rush hour with cars and pedestrians hurrying to their destinations, to ignore the mundane and conjure the sublime. Where tapestries illustrating the life of St Martin might have hung, she discovered instead bright advertisements for washing powder; where a stained-glass window would have described the temptation of Christ, a sign for ‘Galettes et Gauffres' shuddered into neon life.

As the sun began to sink beyond a grey slate roof Emma abandoned her efforts to commune with the past. She couldn't understand why the city had been so keen to destroy the remains of the old church and not restore it. A board at the foot of the Charlemagne tower showed a nineteenth-century engraving of the church as it was originally: four solid square towers topped with pyramidal saddlebacks, and spidery flying-buttresses running along the length of the building. A slightly earlier picture showed St Martin after its semi-destruction by the Huguenots in the eighteenth century and the subsequent adoption of the ruins as stables during the time of the Revolution. It was like a cut-through, three-dimensional model that allowed the viewer to see both the exterior and interior of a machine, the two remaining towers linked by a run of pillars and shattered arches. The authorities seemed to have fallen in love with a particularly Romantic image of history, one where ruins were invested with their own quality, and dilapidation celebrated as a melancholic reminder of the inevitable passage of time. Beauty was revealed in the destruction of perfection:
we are not like these people
, it said,
and here is a reminder of that defining difference
. The inadvertent consequence of this ideology was that the town planners had been allowed to run a new thoroughfare right through the old church.

It wasn't merely the desecration of an historic building that offended Emma, but the distorting reverence that such thinking bestowed upon what remained, as if somehow that was more valuable than reconstruction. Music history was quite different: rather than venerating the intrinsic beauty of a manuscript, its economy and its function – all essentially abstract qualities – modern performers restored the music to life by setting aside qualms of historical accuracy in the pursuit of a living engagement with history.

She turned and walked towards St Gatien and the rehearsal, a route that led her along the Rue Scellerie with its half-timbered fifteenth-century houses – tall three-storey homes for the richer tradesmen. Tours, it seemed, was more proud of its old dwellings than its churches.

It was quieter here, easier to imagine the medieval town, and Emma wondered if Ockeghem had walked this very street, perhaps on his way to visit his friend, Antoine Busnois, who sang in St Gatien. Old maps and books, eighteenth-century furniture and paintings displayed in the windows of specialist shops invited her to stop and browse but she couldn't spare the time. In any case, she had no interest in antiques and she didn't know anything about antiquarian books, although her eye was caught by a shop selling old coins. Trays of mainly silver-coloured pieces were laid out in the window, each of them carefully packaged in a plastic holder inside which a handwritten note provided key details. There were quarters and old silver-dollars from 1930s America, even old British coins like the half-crown her father had found one day in his sock drawer and given to her. She saw a rack of older items – perhaps Renaissance, she thought, before rejecting the idea; if so they'd be in a museum, along with anything else more than a hundred years old.

Then she realised she was wrong; the trays held coins from the era she knew so well. Here they were, the Valois Kings, their names and dates respectfully stencilled in small writing: Charles VII (1422–1461) who appointed Ockeghem as Treasurer of St Martin; Louis XI (1461–1483), the Spider, the paranoid one; Charles VIII (1483–1498), the Affable, a weak name which made him sound like a nonentity; Louis XII (1498–1515) who cared little for music but who at least had the good sense to bring Leonardo da Vinci to France; and François I (1515–1547) who employed Mouton and De Sermisy, and during whose reign Josquin and Compère had died.

Emma was no collector, her only instance of deliberate acquisition being a cheap, weekly publication called
The World's Great Composers
to which she subscribed as a child, yet something drew her inside. It was dark, and a woman of about sixty was sitting at a small table, writing with a fine-nibbed fountain-pen on a slip of blue cardboard. To Emma's left was a shelf of large catalogues, and the walls were covered with engravings and oil paintings of Tours in years past.

‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,' said the woman. ‘Puis-je vous aider?'

Emma asked her about the coins she'd seen in the window. How much would one cost from, say, the reign of Louis XI? The woman stood up and walked over to the window and withdrew a tray.

‘Nossing ‘ere from Louis onze,' she said, ‘mais, zis one, from Charles Huit, c'est un
Karolus
. Ça, c'est trois cent francs.'

Three hundred francs: thirty pounds. Thirty pounds for a coin? It was a lot, but then it was a piece of history that one could own. Emma had seen music manuscripts from the period, even handled them, and the excitement of touching something five hundred years old surprised her now as it had before. She would never own a document that old. Perhaps she would one day own a piece of pottery from the fifteenth century, or an old painting, but that would be expensive and something she could only justify in her dotage.

On one side of the coin she could discern a heraldic cross and a single
fleur-de-lys
. The lettering around the outside was worn away but she could pick out some Latin:
Rex
was clearly visible, the rest illegible.

‘
Karolus Francorum Rex
,' said the shopkeeper. Emma nodded to indicate that she understood, then turned the coin over. On that side there was a large
R
and on top of it a crown. The lettering here was clearer and she read it out loud: ‘
Sit Nomen Domini Benedictum
.' She recognised
Dni
as a contraction of
Domini,
the genitive of
Dominum
.

‘Blessed is the name of the Lord,' she said.

‘Oui.' The woman seemed impressed. ‘Vous parlez Latin?'

‘Très peu, comme mon français. Can I buy it?' asked Emma, as if her nationality might in some way exclude her from the right to purchase a piece of French history.

‘Bien sûr,' said the woman.

Emma proffered her credit card and asked if the woman could wrap the coin. It was a present, she explained, not for herself. The woman looked around, lifting up papers and books, searching randomly for something to wrap it in, then stopped and held up a finger. She opened a drawer and took out a small velvet box. It was, she apologised, the best she could do and, as Emma was a worthy recipient of the coin, she would not charge her for the box.

Emma thanked her. It was a present for Ollie. They often bought each other gifts, even if it sometimes felt as if they did it for the sake of it. She preferred it when it was like this, an impulse-buy, and one made from the heart. She wasn't entirely sure that Ollie would share her fascination with history, but sometimes giving someone a present was an expression of oneself, and she hoped he would appreciate it.

 

It was only two hours since Emma had last seen the members of the group; while she had been working, they had been shopping. Susan had busied herself in the Galeries Lafayette and discovered ‘a fabulous little bathroom shop that had some lovely smellies'. Claire and Peter had trailed behind her and the former was rather bashfully boasting a bright pink scarf that Susan had picked out for her. ‘You're spring-flowing-into-summer, darling, and this colour is you,' mocked Peter privately to Emma. Peter himself had bought a vibrant striped scarf, a French take on the English college variety – ‘École non-normale,' he joked – and Marco and Charlie had visited St Martin, which they pronounced boring. Craig had struck off on his own carrying his radio, searching for the best reception in order to check the cricket score later, and had ended up in a brasserie near the station where he'd had steak frîtes. Meanwhile, Allie had discovered the
Académie de la Bière
near to St Gatien where he had ‘conducted some research' whilst Ollie had headed straight for the comic-book shops in search of
bandes dessinés
.

‘How did it go?' Ollie asked her.

‘Oh. Not bad. No one heckled or asked any difficult questions. How about you?'

‘I got a couple of things. You wouldn't be interested,' he said, holding up a small plastic carrier bag.

‘I got you a present,' she said, retrieving the small box from her handbag.

‘Oh, thanks.' Ollie lifted the lid. ‘Nice,' he said, but without any real enthusiasm. ‘What is it? I mean, I know it's a coin, but you'll have to explain.'

‘It's from the reign of Charles the Eighth, 1483 to 1498. I thought you might like it. It's a
Karolus
– Latin for Charles – and it seemed appropriate on a day like today. Ockeghem died one year before Charles died, so I just thought that there was a chance that Ockeghem himself might have used the coin. You could keep it in your wallet.'

‘What, and use it?'

She smiled. She realised her explanation had made her purchase sound dull, quite different to her own excitement. For her, the coin was history, as if the emotions and sentiments of a town and its inhabitants were somehow contained in the thin sliver of metal. She'd thought Ollie would understand, or at least pretend to.

Marco approached them. ‘Sorry,' he said, sensing he was interrupting a private moment. ‘The lighting guy needs to talk to you, Em. His name's François. Over there.' He pointed to a man in his forties wearing jeans and an expensive woollen jumper.

‘Look what Emma gave me,' said Ollie. His effort to express enthusiasm was strained and sounded false, but at least he was trying, Emma thought.

‘It's a coin,' he explained, and she left the two singers staring stupidly at the present as if, in so doing, it might yield its mysteries.

 

Emma had at one time considered calling the new group
Chiaroscuro
to signal her interest in the dramatic potential of light and shade, and to announce a new direction in the staging of early-music concerts. Just because the original composers didn't notate dynamics, tempo variations, articulation, and phrasing didn't mean that the original composers hadn't wanted the singers to exploit such means of musical expression. And, by the same token, it seemed to her simply perverse not to use the resources of a theatre or the architectural potential of a church to enhance the emotional force of the music and supplement the concert experience. Removed from its original liturgical context as sacred music was, she believed that lighting and staging provided authentic compensation for the religious theatre that was otherwise lost. When the music was originally performed, those closest to the ritual – the priests and choir – would have witnessed candles, censers, and complex choreography; and to those at the back of the church – the townsfolk – such proofs of faith would have wafted towards them in the semi-dark, like a half-heard radio play, which encouraged – in the words of the
Magnificat
– the imagination of their hearts. Ripping this music from its original context and clothing it in the anachronistic attire of nineteenth-century concert conventions was as spurious as the city's desecration of the original St Martin of Tours. Such po-faced seriousness alienated some audiences and prevented the music and drama speaking to them of the ineffable.