Classics and Their Role in the World of the Mayfair Witches
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Art
Rembrandt
This is the painting Rowan sees in her nightmares about being a Dutch surgeon, as if she has been transportedinto this painting. Note the Dutch surgeon's hat. Rembrandt is also the artist who painted Deborah Mayfair in Amsterdam in the 1660's. This painting was created in 1632.
Albrecht Durer
This painting by Albrecht Durer was created in 1500. It is the image that comes to Gifford's mind as she takes her first impressions of Lasher in the flesh. This is probably the best example we have of what Lasher actually looked like.
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 herin the following words:
Ophelia is afictional 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
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.
Vivaldi's 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
Verdi's 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
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.
Pachelbel's Canon
Canon in D Major Produced by Dirk Freymuth Copyright 1999, 2005 Compass Productions
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.
Isaac Stern
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.
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...
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 and Poetry
Bavarian Gentians
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.
~
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
~
-- From D. H. Lawrence
Sunday Morning
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 buta reading of these poems not only tells us more about Gifford's point of view, but sets a tone for the entire story
~
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 https://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Stevens_W/Sunday.htm (Site appears to be offline)
The Catholic Sun
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 own death:
~
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!
~