The Fete de la Musique is typiquement français - as so many things are. More than mere tradition, the festival is on the civil calendar, a true holiday. From Nancy to Brest, from Toulon to Lille,from Bordeaux to Metz, the citizenry of this bureaucratic conspiracy ,(for such the author deems all nations),is encouraged to promenade about the streets with penny-whistles, accordions, guitars,basses, pots and pans, spoons, castanets, or( in default of all else) their unrestrained voices, to I>bang, scratch, screetch, schnoodle, yell, simper, cry and croon from dawn to dusk, heaping their cosmic cacaphony effrontery on the creaking altar of St. Cecilia.
There is some snobbery in my description: professional musicians always fancy that they play better than amateurs - who deem themselves superior to beginners - who sneer at the untrained. Concert professionals will likewise sneer at me. No matter: Music is an intention, not an act ; although the sage insight of John Keats,Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, does not apply to all situations.
France's vagrancy laws against street musicians are rarely enforced anyway ; there will always be the overly- officious cop.June 21st is the one day on which the French police are restrained by law from proscribing street music.
At 8 in the morning, after storing most of my luggage in the train station's lockers at Cannes, I boarded a train to out on a concert tour that would take me along the eastern part of the Riviera, through Antibes, Nice,Monte-Carlo and Monaco. The journey would terminate at 7PM at Menton, which is virtually on the Italian border. The night was passed at the Youth Hostel; but that is another story in itself.
My equipment consisted of a violin,a large boombox, and a collection of Music Minus One tapes. These are piano or orchestral accompaniments of violin pieces without the solo violin parts.For costuming I wore a fantastic Mexican party shirt,$3.50 courtesy of the Goodwill Thrift Shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And a light backpack for books, journals, maps, clothing.
Arrival at Antibes, 11:30 Mediterranean Azure Time!
Antibes is a scenic delight;then again,so is the rest of the Riviera. A good archaeological museum, a good Picasso museum (in nearby Vallauris), even a Napoleon museum.I did not visit this sepulcher to that dangerous eccentric. Antibes was founded by those ancient paradigms, the Greeks.This being their westernmost settlement, they named it "Antipolis": the anti-city.Being classical Greeks, each of the early inhabitants must have had his or her own idea of what the "anti" of their city consisted of. Even 25 centuries ago it was a popular resort; everybody wanted to live there and real estate speculation sent prices soaring. Legend states that Antibes was changed forever when F. Scott Fitzgerald invented Gatsbyism there during a week-long drunk. Although a reputed temple to Aphrodite is reputed to be preserved there, intact and erect, one must travel to its pungent suburb of Juan-les-Pins for the aphrodisiacs.
Antibes is not now as it was then. I arrived to discover that the 3-hour lunch-break plus siesta was roaring full blast. The streets were void of audiences and prospective customers; nor could I uncover any places to perform many places even if they should materialize. Bowing to the inevitable, the restaurant to which I made my retreat served up a delicious omelette aux fines herbes avec crudités,swaddled by un bon vin de Provençe.
On that day Nice lived up to its English homograph. A gorgeous day, good playing and generous tips. Back to the train station, another short journey and a final descent by mid-afternoon at Monaco's frontier suburb of Monte-Carlo.
The sounds coming out of my fiddle scraped tolerably against the harpsichord and orchestra contributions to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5.Neither my stirring performance nor the information provided by the signs had much influence on passengers leaving and entering the train station. The receipts were scarcely enough to offset inflation in this paradise of the super-rich. This was not surprising. The train station is quite literally on the other side of the tracks. Monte-Carlo itself could not be much more than the dormitory town for lackeys, servants and serfs that puts down roots alongside every plastic preserve of plutocratic pulchritude: Westport has its Bridgeport, Sausalito its San Rafael, Newport its New Bedford, Montauk its Easthampton. What hope was there, even for chump change, in this popular setting of ticket takers, café garçons, clerks, office workers, street sweepers, traveling salesmen .. A class of humanity no wit inferior to any other,mind you, yet hardly the proper reception committee for a co-metropolitan of Princess Grace!
As an artist who'd journeyed to France for no other purpose than to play his heart out at the Fete de la Musique I had every right to insist that my performances be attended by the beautiful people! My proper audience had to be royalty, (deposed or otherwise), movie stars, tycoons, politicians! With a write-up in Vanity Fair, or People Magazine, or Paris-Match! And my picture ( complete with Harlequin party-shirt), up there in a photograph next to Catherine DeNeuve!
A cab hove into view and I addressed the driver:
" S'il vous plaît, monsieur:je cherche le Casino!"
He pointed down the boulevard :
" Vous y aller tout droit!"
Down the Yellow Brick Road, off to the fabled Casino of Monaco,Europe's last bastion of true monarchism, fabulous amphitheatre of swindles and suicides,spies and scandals, patron of grand opera and ballet, birthplace of Monte Carlo methods in Black Jack, Quantum Statistics and Elementary Particle Theory!
I found myself strolling down a winding causeway, surrounded by tall needle-sharp cliffs, cavernous abysses and staggering architectural miracles . Far away to the right sparkled the ashen foam off the bitter waters lapping the docks of the port of La Condamine (not to be confused with its 18th century namesake de la Condamine, although he too used statistics to make a fortune, on the stock market). To my left rose a dizzying mega-cathedral of high-rise apartment complexes bursting forth from the sheer cliff faces. Too overdone to be designated either beautiful or ugly; a grand passacaglia atop the groundswell of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This exotic scarp, fascinating though it might be, could not continue on forever , and I eventually entered onto a stretch of clean, quiet, well gardened and paved streets sloping downwards into the plaza of the historic Monaco Casino.
I won't try to describe this thing. I cannot, without descending to a kind of base, exaggerated caricature that would do permanent damage to my literary reputation. The Monaco Casino was designed by Garnier, the same person who delivered us the Paris Opera House; the gargoyles are interchangeable.
Across from the entrance to the Casino sits a traffic island seeded with grass, gigantic palm trees and little walkways. I walked to its edge; there I placed my violin case on the ground in such a manner that a line drawn from it to the Casino would form the minimal mutually perpendicular line to its grotesque facade.The sign announcing my kinship to Grace Kelly had been tossed away:Vive la Fete de la Musique! would be quite enough for the present occasion.
I began my concert with a Mozart concerto, #4 in D major. No boom box; the orchestral accompaniment could come later. From where I stood I could observe the dull, disinterested stares of persons walking through the Casino's entrances into those dark moronic mills filled with one-armed bandits that are identical(so I have been told)in almost all respects, to the machines in Reno, Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, Foxwoods and similar places. I doubt that I'd played more than 3 minutes, when I noticed a heavyset, jowled, scowling, weaponed, over-bathed, starched and booted, conscientious and much irritated local cop, goose-stepping his way through heavy traffic to get at me!
" Qu'est que vous faites là?" (What do you think you're doing there?")
"Mais, la musique! Je joue un concerto de Mozart!"
On has to understand that, among French middlebrows,the name of Mozart conjures up everything that is most bourgeois in culture, thought, art, education, class..You must pronounce it as " Mowzzzarrrrr.....". I could not have provided a better passport to respectability.
" Oh? Really? (I provide free translations) Who gave you permission to do that?"
" Isn't June 21st the Festival of Music?"
" In France; not here."
" I didn't know that. I'm just an American tourist."
" On ne fait pas la musique a Monaco!"
This inimitable phrase can be rendered in at least 3 ways:
The last is probably the most accurate. It implies that the making of music is somehow alien to the Monagasque national character. Strange indeed that he should make such a claim . Did he not know of the operas commissioned from Camille Saint-Saens and Jules Massenet by the mighty sovereigns of this land? Nor of the sensational concerts of Paganini and Lizst ? Nor of the world premieres of Stravinsky's scores? Nor of the world-renowned Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo,of the fabled Nijinsky, Bakst and Diagheliev? I was not about to remind him of this distinguished history. I figured that either:
I cannot believe that there is any merit in this.Here is a biography of Grace Kelly ( Princess Grace , Sarah Bradford; Stein & Day, 1984 ), which indicates that she was fond of good music from her childhood. Quote: ( pg.36):" Her favorite mood was 'sentimental' and her taste in classical music romantic, Grieg's Piano Concerto and Debussy's 'Clair de Lune', which her classmate, Doris Snyder, used to play for her on the piano at lunch time in the barn where they liked to put on records, jitterbug and giggle. This leaves only the first option: one is not allowed to make music in Monaco . My shock was therefore understandable: who was this man to tell me that 'music is not made in Monaco', when I'd accumulated so much evidence to the contrary? I knew more about this subject than he did!Little did it matter that he had probably lived in the Feydeau farce his entire life!
But I was tired from a hard day, nor disposed to argued with 250 pounds of muscle, a weather-beaten and trenched face, a pistol, club and tear-gas canisters all gathered in a single locus in association with one errant human psyche:
" I'm sorry", I repeated, "I didn't know that the French festival of music isn't celebrated here. I'll leave right away."
" No. You will pack your things and come with me."
Not a cloud troubled the sky of this now deeply troubled bright summer day as we walked the block and a half to police headquarters. I recall nothing about the building we entered; but the room into which he ushered me was narrow, painted a drab uniformly pastel blue, with a bit of sunlight coming in from a few small transom windows. There was no furniture. Facing the entrance stood a high semi-circular counter; behind it sat another policeman . A telephone rested on the counter in front of him. The table at his left held a computer monitor. His uniform resembled that of his friend. Crewcut, younger and thinner, he combined a goofy grin with a tendency to laugh at just about everything. He found it particularly funny that I also thought the situation comic, if not downright ludicrous: who is this strange American, he seemed to be asking himself, who appeared to enjoy the prospect of spending the next ten years in solitary confinement!
On the back wall, at the level of the razed plain of his scalp, stood a round electric clock. Above it was suspended, in an ornate frame, a large, massively retouched photograph of the late Princess Grace Kelly- Rainier. Pearls bubbled from the corners of her eyes, their pupils enlarged, perhaps after a recent visit to the optometrist , by belladonna. Odours of American Beauty roses wafted around the edges of ruby-red lips. Her bared, delicate throat lay poised to allow the passage of that world-famous "can of Heinz's tomato soup" voice.Her green dress crinkled like crisp money.
My rude guardian took my passport and passed to his colleague.
" Scan the records to check if we've got anything else on this bum!" He unhooked the telephone receiver and dialed the number of his commanding officer:
" Hello? Captain? This is Frank. I brought in this Ameriloque! You won't believe it! He was begging in front of the Casino! Yes - you heard me right the first time -begging!"
Ah! What linguistics can do to honest toil! Obviously I hadn't been begging. Yet, even had it been so, stack that up against the millions of dollars pissed away daily at the roulette tables while most of the world goes hungry. But who am I to argue with the moral priorities of Ruritanias?
He hung up the telephone and waited for the results of the computer search. I pointed to the royal countenance:
"That's Princess Grace, isn't it?" I began, " I come from Philadelphia myself. In fact, my family knows her family."
Necks craned in my direction : " We went to the same performing arts academy . She studied theatre; I studied violin playing. We also went to the same high schools." Now they were listening seriously, " When I return home, I'm going to let the Kellys know how their son-in-law treats visiting Philadelphia artists."
Could I be telling the truth? Their glances became uneasy. These were unsuspected dimensions!
" Go on." I waved at the computer console, "You can check the records. I've lived in Philadelphia most of my life. It's a small place; everybody there knows the Kellys."
One can see that a degree of poetic license was being worked into these revelations: Stevens School for Girls is not Central High School, nor is the American Academy of Theater the same as the Settlement Music School. Although there are connections: the girls at Stevens dated the boys from Penn Charter; my two sisters went to Friends Select, another one of those private 'elite'Quaker high schools.
And Grace and I may not have attended the same performing arts academies, but all of us glamorous Philadelphia superstars,Mario Lanza, Sylvester Stallone, Bobby Darran, Grace Kelly and yours truly, learned the secrets of our craft from walking the resonant sidewalks of our hometown, unrivaled in music and dramatic art since Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, opened a preparatory school there and taught Italian to Sally Hemmings' children.
And every native Philadelphian has certainly met someone from the ubiquitous Kelly family at least once in their lives. Then I uttered the most important of my claims , which had the additional merit of being true:
" When I return home , I've only to pick up a telephone to contact the Philadelphia Inquirer. That's the city newspaper. They'll be thrilled to run this story."
Again the cops darted furtive looks at one another, their attitudes of suspicion not unmixed with fear. With an exasperated gesture, ( the Gallic shrug), the arresting officer retrieved my passport from the other guy and returned it to me. There was nothing in my criminal dossier anyway. I appeared to have won this round. Under other circumstances, I would have been locked up overnight, my passport stamped Entry Denied!
" Monsieur; you can go." His tone of voice was weary; a job as hard as his wasn't worth the pay. He raised his voice and cried: "This is not France!" Waving his arms, he pointed to the north. "In Monaco there is no Festival of Music! When you walk out of here, you go straight - that way! Go past 2 traffic lights - then turn left. That's France! " He rubbed his hands together , washing off so much dust: "There you can play music until you collapse!" He returned my violin case and we shook hands.
As I stepped out the door he delivered the 'afterthought' - as in the movies, when the police sergeant packs up and is ready to leave, then turns around and says , "Oh, by the way, we checked the registration of the gun. It's in your name." :
Casually pointing to the violin he remarked: "You must have learned to play that thing in a good school."
" Of course. Philadelphia's musicians are the best in the United States."
All Philadelphians believe this:one thinks of Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Walter Kapell, Marion Anderson, Peter Serkin, Samuel Barber, Efrem Zimbalist, along with many others
" Indeed.I've heard of it:L'Ecole des Quatre-Vents!"
With that he waved me out the door. I raced in a state of elation down the street, towards the two indicated traffic lights. Graduate of L'Ecole des Quatre-Vents ! Literally, The School of the Four Winds : Alma Mater of quacks, charlatans, cranks, schnoodlers, con-artists, poetasters, and all self-proclaimed vagabonds ! A badge of honor, a credential to carry with pride , bestowed upon me by a renowned academy, by virtue of the powers invested in a Monagasque cop! Granting rightful entry into any co-fraternity of troubadours, Cours des Miracles, Estaffod, Mead Hall, or gypsy caravel anywhere in the cosmos!
My friends, many of them distinguished maestros in their own right, should take notice: I, too, have won my laurels at the shrine of the Muses , and expect henceforth to be treated with the deference appropriate to my entitlement!