Hope everyone had or is having a wonderful holiday season. Just before Christmas we were in
Paris for a week and
the city of Caen in Normandy for two more days. I was playing concerts during this time with the
Philip Glass Ensemble, and it was a big family time, with most members of the band bringing spouses along and some bringing their kids too for a wonderful work/vacation time in the City of Light.
For Lynn and me, this visit to Paris was especially music-oriented. We brought along a guidebook which we found fascinating and helpful, and which we enthusiastically recommend to any of you music-lovers who are planning a visit to Paris. The book is entitled
Paris: A Musical Gazetteer and it's written by Nigel Simeone, a music lecturer at the University of Wales. (The Amazon link is to an expensive hardcover copy, but with hunting I think it can be found in a cheaper and more practical paperback edition).
Most of the book is comprised of entries on specific composers, with amazingly complete information as to every place in Paris they lived, where they wrote particular works, where they are buried, and so forth. Other sections are devoted to theaters and concert halls and churches, with copious information on the significant musical events that took place within them. There are also detailed descriptions of four suggested walks that take in a number of musically significant sites along the way.
Here's a thumbnail sketch of some of the sights we took in, guided by this marvelous little book: the church of
La Madeleine, where both
Camille Saint-Saens and
Gabriel Faure served as organists and where
Chopin's funeral was held, with Mozart's
Requiem being performed on the occasion.....The small and dignified
Passy Cemetery in the elegant 16th Arrondissement, with its wintry views of the Eiffel Tower and the graves of Faure and
Claude Debussy....A walk through that same neighborhood of the "16th", where not only did we see Passy Cemetery but also strolled by the home where
Maria Callas spent her final years, and the mansion of the
Princesse de Polignac, at whose musical soirees countless premieres took place in the early 20th century....And on our last day in Paris, the church of
La Trinite, where the composer
Olivier Messiaen served as organist for an astonishing 61 years, from 1931 till his death in 1992.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as regards all that we took in during our Paris visit, but it gives you some impression of the fun you can have with Simeone's Gazetteer if you visit. Surely there is no city on earth more important to the history of Western music than Paris. From
Leonin at Notre-Dame Cathedral to Messiaen and
Pierre Boulez in our own time, a visit to this awe-inspiring and breathtakingly-gorgeous city confirms this truth.
