|
Music
In The Witching Hour,
Michael further convinces Rowan that
they are a match when he
tells her he needs his Vivaldi while he's flying. Later, on the way
back from their honeymoon
in Destin, Florida, they
play Vivaldi on the car stereo. I have provided a link to a music
player that has Vivaldi's
Four Seasons as well as the
Canon and Verdi's La Traviata. Click the link below the references to
play.
In Lasher,
Julien's ghost brings Michael and Mona to the
double parlor by creating
an illusion in which the First Street house is transformed to appear as
it did while he was living,
and in which his Victrola
is playing his favorite arrangement of Verdi's La Traviata.
Michael often played Pachelbel's Canon for Rowan while she was
comatose, and it is the Canon that Ashlar and Tessa dance to in the tower in Taltos.
As
with the Four Seasons, La Traviata and the Canon are in the
music player provided
here. Below are the sources and arrangements of the songs on this site:
The Four Seasons
- Concerto No. 1 in E Major - Spring
- Concerto No. 2 in G minor - Summer
- Concerto No. 3 in F Major - Autumn
- Concerto No. 4 in F minor - Winter
Budapest Strings, Karoly Botvay
La Traviata
- Overture
- Noi siamo zingarelle
- Libiamo ne'lieti calici
- Di Madride noi siam Mattadori
- La Forza del destino: Overture
Bulgarian National Choir 'Svetoslav Obretenov'
Sofia Philarmonic Orchestra, Georgi Robev (2, 3, 4)
Vassil Stefenov (1, 5)
Taken from Masters of Classical Music: Antonio Vivaldi and Masters of
Classical Music: Giuseppe Verdi, Copyright 2001, Delta Entertainment Corporation
Pachelbel's Canon
Canon in D Major
Produced by Dirk Freymuth
Copyright 1999, 2005 Compass Productions
Below
is a link to PBS's site on the violinist Isaac
Stern, whom Michael Curry
went to see at the Municipal Auditorium when he was a boy. This same
concert is also mentioned
in Violin, where Triana Becker is inspired by Stern in a similar way that Michael Curry was.
Isaac Stern on PBS
Below is
a link to a site that has the
poems of Hilaire Belloc on
it. It is a free site. Also, here is the short poem by Belloc that
Gifford remembers
finding in her father's
papers after his death. It is interesting that Gifford remembers
the poem on
the night of her death.
The Catholic Sun
Wherever the Catholic
sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus
Domino!
Poems of Hilaire Belloc
|
Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1852) |
Mona's Ophelia
Mona
Mayfair's pet name for herself, or rather,
her secret name, was
Ophelia. Ophelia was a character in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Wikipedia
identifies her in
the following words:
Ophelia is a fictional character in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, and sweetheart
of Prince Hamlet.
When
Mona Mayfair goes to Blackwood Farm to die in Quinn Blackwood's
bed (not knowing he has
become a vampire as he has hidden this from her), she goes to several
florist shops in New Orleans
to purchase flowers for her
deathbed. When she arrives at Blackwood Farm, she has the staff there
assist her with bringing
all the flowers she has
bought into the bedroom where she scatters their petals across Quinn's
bed. Before she can finally
succumb to the illness
brought on by her giving birth to Morrigan, however, Quinn arrives,
followed by Lestat, to give her
the Dark Gift.
Click here for Ophelia on Wikipedia
|
|
 |
Film
Michael
Curry refers to particular films as the "house
movies", as they were what
fed his deep love of great houses as well as his particular fascination
with the Mayfair house.
I have a couple of the
movies listed here as links to their Internet Movie Database sites.
Take a look...
Rebecca (1940)
Great Expectations (1946)
There are several film versions that have been done of
Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, but this is the version that Michael most likely saw.
Literature & Poetry
D.H. Lawrence's (Lawrence was also the author
of Lady Chatterley's Lover) Bavarian Gentians is referenced in Lasher
by Gifford. A reading of
this poem sheds light on
why Gifford's memories drift to her early days with her husband, Ryan,
in the wake
of Rowan's disappearance.
Bavarian Gentians
Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft
September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.
Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like,
with the smoking blueness of Pluto's
gloom, ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening
into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black
lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off
light, lead
me then, lead the way.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this
flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from
the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or
a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among
the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on
the lost bride and her groom.
-- D. H. Lawrence
Below
is the rather long but very beautiful "Sunday Morning" by
Wallace Stevens that
Gifford was also reflecting on in Destin the night she died. It is in
small font because of its
length but a reading of
these poems not only tells us more about Gifford's point of view, but
sets a tone for the entire
story.
Sunday Morning
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges
in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She
dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The
pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without
sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to
silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
2
Why
should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall
she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things
to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling
snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn
nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure
destined for her soul.
3
Jove in the clouds had his
inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among
us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven,
brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The
blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then
than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent
blue.
4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before
they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm
fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the
grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor
cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance
of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable
bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where
triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For
maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums
and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall?
Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers
like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why
set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The
silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within
whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion
to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant
of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy
lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They
shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they
shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.
8
She
hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It
is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or
island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle
about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening,
casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
From http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Stevens_W/Sunday.htm
|
|
|
|
|
|
