Bgcolour	#EEDD82
Name	Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Caption	Portrait of Corot by Nadar. Date unknown.
Birthname	Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Birthdate	July 17, 1796
Birthplace	Paris
Deathdate	February 22, 1875
Deathplace	Paris
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, printmaking
Movement	Realism, Romanticism

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (July 17, 1796 – February 22, 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.

Biography

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Early life and training

Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, in a house at 125 Rue du Bac, now demolished. His family were bourgeois people—his father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner—and unlike the experience of some of his artistic colleagues, throughout his life he never felt the want of money, as his parents made good investments and ran their businesses well. After his parents married, they bought the millinery shop where his mother had worked and his father gave up his career as a wigmaker to run the business side of the shop. The store was a famous destination for fashionable Parisians and earned the family an excellent income. Corot was the middle of three children born to the family, who lived above their shop during those years.

Corot received a scholarship to study in Rouen, but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. He “was not a brilliant student, and throughout his entire school career he did not get a single nomination for a prize, not even for the drawing classes.” At nineteen, Corot was a “big child, shy and awkward. He blushed when spoken to. Before the beautiful ladies who frequented his mother’s salon, he was embarrassed and fled like a wild thing…Emotionally, he was an affectionate and well-behaved son, who adored his mother and trembled when his father spoke.” When Corot’s parents moved into a new residence in 1817, the twenty-one year old Corot moved into the dormer-windowed room on the third floor, which became his first studio as well.

With his father’s help he apprenticed to a draper, but he hated commercial life and despised what he called "business tricks”, yet he faithfully remained in the trade until he was 26, when his father consented to his adopting the profession of art. Later Corot stated, “I told my father that business and I were simply incompatible, and that I was getting a divorce.” The business experience proved beneficial, however, by helping him develop an aesthetic sense through his exposure to the colors and textures of the fabrics. Perhaps out of boredom, he turned to oil painting around 1821 and began immediately with landscapes.

During the period when Corot acquired the means to devote himself to art, landscape painting was on the upswing and generally divided into two camps: one―historical landscape by Neoclassicists in Southern Europe representing idealized views of real and fancied sites peopled with ancient, mythological, and biblical figures; and two―realistic landscape, more common in Northern Europe, which was largely faithful to actual topography, architecture, and flora, and which often showed figures of peasants. In both approaches, landscape artists would typically begin with outdoor sketching and preliminary painting, with finishing work done indoors. Highly influential upon French landscape artists in the early 19th century was the work of Englishmen John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, who reinforced the trend in favor of Realism and away from Neoclassicism.

For a short period between 1821–1822, Corot studied with Achille-Etna Michallon, a landscape painter of Corot’s age who was a protégé of the painter David and who was already a well-respected teacher. Michallon had a great influence on Corot’s career. Corot’s drawing lessons included tracing lithographs, copying three-dimensional forms, and making landscape sketches and paintings outdoors, especially in the forests of Fontainebleau, the seaports along Normandy, and the villages west of Paris such as Ville-d’Avray (where his parents had a country house). Michallon also exposed him to the principles of the French Neoclassic tradition, as espoused in the famous treatise of theorist Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, and exemplified in the works of French Neoclassicists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, whose major aim was the representation of ideal Beauty in nature, linked with events in ancient times.

Though this school was on the decline, it still held sway in the Salon, the foremost art exhibition in France attended by thousands at each event. Corot later stated, “I made my first landscape from nature…under the eye of this painter, whose only advice was to render with the greatest scrupulousness everything I saw before me. The lesson worked; since then I have always treasured precision.” After Michallon’s early death in 1822, Corot studied with Michallon’s teacher, Jean-Victor Bertin, among the best known Neoclassic landscape painters in France, who had Corot draw copies of lithographs of botanical subjects to learn precise organic forms. Though holding Neoclassicists in the highest regard, Corot did not limit his training to their tradition of allegory set in imagined nature. His notebooks reveal precise renderings of tree trunks, rocks, and plants which show the influence of Northern realism. Throughout his career, Corot demonstrated an inclination to apply both traditions in his work, sometimes combining the two.

First trip to Italy

With his parents' support, Corot followed the well-established pattern of French painters who went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity. A condition by his parents before leaving was that he paint a self-portrait for them, his first. Corot’s stay in Italy from 1825 to 1828 was a highly formative and productive one, during which he completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings. He worked and traveled with several young French painters also studying abroad who painted together and socialized at night in the cafes, critiquing each other and gossiping. Corot learned little from the Renaissance masters (though later he cited Leonardo da Vinci as his favorite painter) and spent most of his time around Rome and in the Italian countryside. The Farnese Gardens with its splendid views of the ancient ruins was a frequent destination, and he painted it at three different times of the day. The training was particularly valuable in gaining an understanding of the challenges of both the mid-range and panoramic perspective, and in effectively placing man-made structures in a natural setting. He also learned how to give buildings and rocks the effect of volume and solidity with proper light and shadow, while using a smooth and thin technique. Furthermore, placing suitable figures in a secular setting was a necessity of good landscape painting, to add human context and scale, and it was even more important in allegorical landscapes. To that end Corot worked on figure studies in native costume as well as nude. During winter, he spent time in a studio but returned to work outside as quickly as weather permitted. The intense light of Italy posed considerably challenges, “This sun gives off a light that makes me despair. It makes me feel the utter powerlessness of my palette.” He learned to master the light and to paint the stones and sky in subtle and dramatic variation.

It was not only Italian architecture and light which captured Corot’s attention. The late-blooming Corot was entranced with Italian females as well, “They still have the most beautiful women in the world that I have met….their eyes, their shoulders, their hands are spectacular. In that, they surpass our women, but on the other hand, they are not their equals in grace and kindness…Myself, as a painter I prefer the Italian woman, but I lean toward the French woman when it comes to emotion.” An example of this was his first Salon entry, View at Narni (1827), where he took his quick, natural study of a ruin of a Roman aqueduct in dusty bright sun and transformed it into a falsely idyllic pastoral setting with giant shade trees and green lawns, a conversion meant to appeal to the Neoclassical jurors. Many critics have valued highly his plein-air Italian paintings for their “germ of Impressionism”, their faithfulness to natural light, and their avoidance of academic values, even though they were intended as studies. Several decades later, Impressionism revolutionized art by a taking a similar approach—quick, spontaneous painting done in the out-of-doors; however, where the Impressionists used rapidly applied, un-mixed colors to capture light and mood, Corot usually mixed and blended his colors to get his dreamy effects.

When out of the studio, Corot traveled throughout France, mirroring his Italian methods, and concentrated on rustic landscapes. He returned to the Normandy coast and to Rouen, the city he lived in as a youth. Corot also did some portraits of friends and relatives, and received his first commissions. His sensitive portrait of his niece, Laure Sennegon, dressed in powder blue, was one of his most successful and was later donated to the Louvre. He typically painted two copies of each family portrait, one for the subject and one for the family, and often made copies of his landscapes as well. Corot exhibited one portrait and several landscapes at the Salon in 1831 and 1833. His reception by the critics at the Salon was cool and Corot decided to return to Italy, having failed to satisfy them with his Neoclassical themes.

Mid-career

During his two return trips to Italy, he visited Northern Italy, Venice, and again the Roman countryside. In 1835, Corot created a sensation at the Salon with his biblical painting Agar dans le desert (Hagar in the Wilderness), which depicted Hagar, Sarah’s handmaiden, and the child Ishmael, dying of thirst in the desert until saved by an angel. The background was likely derived from an Italian study. This time, Corot’s unanticipated bold, fresh statement of the Neoclassical ideal succeeded with the critics by demonstrating “the harmony between the setting and the passion or suffering that the painter chooses to depict in it.” In 1837, he painted his earliest surviving nude, The Nymph of the Seine. Later, he advised his students “The study of the nude, you see, is the best lesson that a landscape painter can have. If someone knows how, without any tricks, to get down a figure, he is able to make a landscape; otherwise he can never do it.”

Through the 1840s, Corot continued to have his troubles with the critics (many of his works were flatly rejected for salon exhibition) nor were many works purchased by the public. While recognition and acceptance by the establishment came slowly, by 1845 Baudelaire led a charge pronouncing Corot the leader in the “modern school of landscape painting”. While some critics found Corot’s colors “pale” and his work having “naive awkwardness”, Baudelaire astutely responded, “M. Corot is more a harmonist than a colorist, and his compositions, which are always entirely free of pedantry, are seductive just because of their simplicity of color.” In 1846, the French government decorated him with the cross of the Légion d'Honneur and in 1848 he was awarded a second-class medal at the Salon, but he received little state patronage as a result. His only commissioned work was a religious painting for a baptismal chapel painted in 1847, in the manner of the Renaissance masters. Though the establishment kept holding back, other painters acknowledged Corot’s growing stature. In 1847, Delacroix noted in his journal, “Corot is a true artist. One has to see a painter in his own place to get an idea of his worth…Corot delves deeply into a subject: ideas come to him and he adds while working; it’s the right approach.” Upon Delacroix’s recommendation, the painter Constant Dutilleux, bought a Corot painting and began a long and rewarding relationship with the artist, bringing him friendship and patrons. He was promoted to an officer of the Salon in 1867.

Having forsaken any long-term relationships with women, Corot remained very close to his parents even in his fifties. A contemporary said of him, “Corot is a man of principle, unconsciously Christian; he surrenders all his freedom to his mother…he has to beg her repeatedly to get permission to go out…for dinner every other Friday.” Apart from his frequent travels, Corot remained closely tethered to his family until his parents died, then at last he gained the freedom to go as he pleased. That freedom allowed him to take on students for informal sessions. Future Impressionist Camille Pissarro was briefly among them. Another student said of Corot, “the newspapers had so distorted Corot, putting Theocritus and Virgil in his hands, that I was quite surprised to find him knowing neither Greek nor Latin…His welcome is very open, very free, very amusing: he speaks or listens to you while hopping on one foot or on two; he sings snatches of opera in a very true voice”, but he has a “shrewd, biting side carefully hidden behind his good nature.”

By the mid-1850s, Corot’s increasingly impressionistic style began to get the recognition that fixed his place in French art. “M. Corot excels…in reproducing vegetation in its fresh beginnings; he marvelously renders the firstlings of the new world.” From the 1850s on, Corot painted many landscape souvenirs and paysages, dreamy imagined paintings of remembered locations from earlier visits painted with lightly and loosely dabbed strokes.

Later years

In the 1860s, Corot was still mixing peasant figures with mythological ones, mixing Neoclassicism with Realism, causing one critic to lament, “If M. Corot would kill, once and for all, the nymphs of his woods and replace them with peasants, I should like him beyond measure.” In reality, in later life his human figures did increase and the nymphs did decrease, but even the human figures were often set in idyllic reveries.

In later life, Corot’s studio was filled with students, models, friends, collectors, and dealers who came and went under the tolerant eye of the master, causing him to quip, “Why is it that there are ten of you around me, and not one of you thinks to relight my pipe.” Dealers snapped up his works and his prices were often above 4,000 francs per painting.

Despite great success and appreciation among artists, collectors, and the more generous critics, his many friends considered, nevertheless, that he was officially neglected, and in 1874, a short time before his death, they presented him with a gold medal. He died in Paris of a stomach disorder aged 78 and was buried at Père Lachaise.

A number of followers called themselves Corot's pupils. The best known are Camille Pissarro, Eugène Boudin, Berthe Morisot, Stanislas Lépine, Antoine Chintreuil, François-Louis Français, Charles Le Roux, and Alexandre DeFaux.

The art of Corot

Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting. His work simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Of him Claude Monet exclaimed "There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing." His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Picasso pay overt homage to Corot's influence.

, ca. 1867, oil on canvas. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art.]] Historians somewhat arbitrarily divided his work into periods, but the point of division is never certain, as he often completed a picture years after he began it. In his early period, he painted traditionally and "tight"—with minute exactness, clear outlines, thin brush work, and with absolute definition of objects throughout. After his 50th year his methods changed to focus on breadth of tone and an approach to poetic power conveyed with thicker application of paint, and about 20 years later, from about 1865 onwards, his manner of painting became full of mystery and poetry, created with a more impressionistic touch. In part, this evolution in expression can be seen as marking the transition from the plein-air paintings of his youth, shot through with warm natural light, to the studio-created landscapes of his late maturity, enveloped in uniform tones of silver. In his final 10 years he became the "Père (Father) Corot" of Parisian artistic circles, where he was regarded with personal affection, and acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest landscape painters the world has seen, along with Hobbema, Claude Lorrain, Turner and Constable. In his long and productive life, he painted over 3,000 paintings.

Corot approached his landscapes more traditionally than is usually believed. By comparing even his late period tree-painting and arrangements to those of Claude Lorrain, such as that which hangs in the Bridgewater gallery, the similarity in methods is seen. Compared to the Impressionists who came later, Corot’s palette is restrained, dominated with browns and blacks (“forbidden colors” among the Impressionists) along with dark and silvery green. Though appearing at times to be rapid and spontaneous, usually his strokes were controlled and careful, and his compositions well-thought out and generally rendered as simply and concisely as possible, heightening the poetic effect of the imagery. As he stated, “I noticed that everything that was done correctly on the first attempt was more true, and the forms more beautiful.”

In the 1860s, Corot became interested in photography, taking photos himself and becoming acquainted with many early photographers, which had the effect of suppressing his painting palette even more in sympathy with the monochromic tones of photographs. This had the result of making his paintings even less dramatic but somewhat more poetic, a result which caused some critics to cite a monotony in his later output. Théophile Thoré wrote that Corot “has only a single octave, extremely limited and in a minor key; a musician would say. He knows scarcely more than a single time of day, the morning, and a single color, pale grey.” Corot responded:

“What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole, the value of the tones…That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more than anything else the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color gives you a kind of shock that I don’t like. Perhaps it is the excess of this principal that makes people say I have leaden tones.” Corot painted about fifty portraits, mostly of family and friends. He also painted thirteen reclining nudes, with his Les Repos (1860) strikingly similar in pose to Ingres famous Le Grande Odalisque (1814), but Corot’s female is instead a rustic bacchante. In perhaps his last figure painting, ‘’Lady in Blue’’ (1874), Corot achieves an effect reminiscent of Degas, soft yet expressive. In all cases of his figure painting, the color is restrained and is remarkable for its strength and purity. Corot also executed many etchings and pencil sketches. Some of the sketches used a system of visual symbols—circles representing areas of light and squares representing shadow. He also experimented with the cliché-verre process—a hybrid of photography and engraving. Starting in the 1830s, Corot also painted decorative panels and walls in the homes of friends, aided by his students.

Corot summed up his approach to art around 1860, “I interpret with my art as much as with my eye.”

The works of Corot are housed in museums in France and the Netherlands, Britain and America.

Forgeries

The strong market for Corot’s works and his relatively easy-to-imitate late painting style resulted in a huge production of Corot forgeries between 1870 and 1939. René Huyghe famously quipped that ”Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America”. Although this is a humorous exaggeration, thousands of forgeries have been amassed, with the Jousseaume collection alone containing 2,414 such works. Adding to the problem was Corot’s lax attitude which encouraged copying and forgery. He allowed his students to copy his works and to even borrow the works for later return, he would touch up and sign student and collector copies, and he would loan works to professional copiers and to rental agencies. According to Corot cataloguist Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, at one copying studio “The master’s complacent brush authenticated these replicas with a few personal and decisive retouching. When he was no longer there to finish his “doubles”, they went on producing them without him.” The cataloging of Corot’s works in an attempt to separate the copies from the originals backfired when forgers used the publications as guides to expand and refine their bogus paintings.

Popular culture

Two of Corot's works are featured and play an important role in the plot of the French film L'Heure d'été (English title Summer Hours). The film was produced by the Musee d'Orsay, and the two works were lent by the museum for the making of the film.

There is a street named Rue Corot on Île des Sœurs, Quebec, named for the artist.

Selected works

The Bridge at Narni (1826)

Venise, La Piazetta (1835)

Une Matinée (1850), Musée d’Orsay

Le concert champêtre (1857), Musée Condé, Chantilly

Macbeth and the Witches (1859), Wallace Collection

Baigneuses au Bord d'un Lac (1861), private collection

Meadow by the Swamp, National Museum of Serbia

L'Arbre brisé (1865)

Ville d’Avray (1867)

Femme Lisant (1869)

Pastorale — Souvenir d'Italie (1873), Glasgow Art Gallery

Biblis (1875)

Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864), Louvre

See also

Effets de soir

History of painting

Western painting

Notes

References

Leymarie, J. (1979). Corot. Discovering the nineteenth century. Geneva: Skira. ISBN 0-8478-0238-8

External links

www.Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot.org More than 600 works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot at the WebMuseum.

The Lyrical Landscape Rehs Galleries' exhibition of works by Jean B.C. Corot.

Find-A-Grave, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, photo and location of grave.

collection quotes - with source - by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Category:1796 births Category:1875 deaths Category:People from Paris Category:French painters Category:French printmakers Category:Realist painters Category:Landscape artists Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery

Name	Nick Drake
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Nicholas Rodney Drake
Genre	Folk
Born	June 19, 1948Rangoon, Burma
Died	November 25, 1974Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire, England
Occupation	Singer-songwriter, guitarist
Years active	1969–1974
Instrument	Vocals, guitar, piano, clarinet, saxophone
Label	Island
Url	Bryter Music

Nicholas Rodney "Nick" Drake (19 June 1948 – 25 November 1974) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Best known for the sombre pieces composed on his primary instrument, the guitar, Drake was also proficient at piano, clarinet and saxophone. Although he failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime, Drake's work has gradually achieved wider notice and recognition; he now ranks among the most influential English singer-songwriters of the last 50 years.

Drake signed to Island Records when he was 20 years old and released his debut album, Five Leaves Left, in 1969. By 1972, he had recorded two more albums—Bryter Layter and Pink Moon. None of the albums sold more than 5,000 copies on their initial release. His reluctance to perform live or be interviewed further contributed to his lack of commercial success. Despite this, he was able to gather a loyal group of fans who would champion his music. One such person was his manager, Joe Boyd, who had a clause put into his own contract with Island Records that ensured Drake's records would never go out of print. Drake suffered from depression and insomnia throughout his life, and these topics were often reflected in his lyrics. Upon completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake died from an overdose of amitriptyline, a prescribed antidepressant; he was 26 years old.

Drake's music remained available through the mid-1970s but the 1979 release of the retrospective album Fruit Tree caused his back catalogue to be reassessed. By the mid-1980s Drake was being credited as an influence by such artists as Robert Smith and Peter Buck. In 1985, The Dream Academy reached the UK and US charts with "Life in a Northern Town", a song written for and dedicated to Drake. By the early 1990s, he had come to represent a certain type of 'doomed romantic' musician in the UK music press, and was frequently cited by artists including Kate Bush, Paul Weller and The Black Crowes. The first biography of Drake appeared in 1997, and was followed in 1998 by the documentary film A Stranger Among Us. In 2000, Volkswagen featured the title track from Pink Moon in a television advertisement, and within a month Drake had sold more records than he had in the previous 30 years.

Biography

Early life

Nicholas Rodney Drake was born on 19 June 1948, into an upper middle-class English family living in Rangoon, Burma. His father, Rodney (1908–1988), had moved there in the early 1930s to work as an engineer with the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. In 1934, Rodney met the daughter of a senior member of the Indian Civil Service, Mary Lloyd (1916–1993), known to her family as Molly. Rodney proposed in 1936, though the couple had to wait a year until Molly turned 21 before her family allowed them to marry. In 1950, they returned to Warwickshire to live in the country estate of Far Leys, near Tanworth-in-Arden in west Warwickshire, just south of Solihull. Drake had one older sister, Gabrielle, later a successful film and TV actress. Both parents were musically inclined, and they each wrote pieces of music. In particular, recordings of Molly's songs which have come to light following her death are remarkably similar in tone and outlook to the later work of her son. Mother and son shared a similar fragile vocal delivery, and both Gabrielle and biographer Trevor Dann have noted a parallel sense of foreboding and fatalism in their music. Encouraged by his mother, Drake learned to play piano at an early age, and began to compose his own songs, which he would record on a reel-to-reel tape recorder she kept in the family drawing room. and captain of the school's rugby team for a time. He was also Head of House in C1, the College's largest house. School friends recall Drake at this time as having been confident and "quietly authoritative", while often aloof in his manner. His father Rodney remembered, "In one of his reports [the headmaster] said that none of us seemed to know him very well. All the way through with Nick. People didn't know him very much."

Drake played piano in the school orchestra, and learned clarinet and saxophone. He formed a band, The Perfumed Gardeners, with four schoolmates in 1964 or 1965. With Drake on piano and occasional alto sax and vocals, the group performed Pye covers and jazz standards, as well as Yardbirds and Manfred Mann numbers. The line-up briefly included Chris de Burgh, but he was soon ejected as his taste was seen as "too poppy" by the other members. Drake's academic performance began to deteriorate, and while he had accelerated a year in Eagle House, at Marlborough he began to neglect his studies in favour of music. He attained seven GCE O-Levels in 1963, but this was fewer than his teachers had been expecting, and he failed "Physics with Chemistry". In 1965, Drake paid £13 for his first acoustic guitar, and was soon experimenting with open tuning and finger-picking techniques.

In 1966, Drake won a scholarship to study English literature at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. He delayed attendance to spend six months at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, beginning in February 1967. While in Aix, he began to practice guitar in earnest, and to earn money would often busk with friends in the town centre. Drake began to smoke cannabis, and that spring he travelled with friends to Morocco, because, according to travelling companion Richard Charkin, "that was where you got the best pot". Drake likely took his first LSD trip while in Aix, and lyrics written during this period — in particular for the song "Clothes of Sand" — are suggestive of an interest in hallucinogens.

Cambridge

Upon returning to England, he moved into his sister's flat in Hampstead, before enrolling at Cambridge that October. His tutors found him to be a bright student, but unenthusiastic and unwilling to apply himself to study. Dann notes that he had difficulty connecting with staff and fellow students alike, and points out that official matriculation photographs from this time reveal a sullen and unimpressed young man. Cambridge placed much emphasis on its rugby and cricket teams, yet by this time Drake had lost interest in playing sport, preferring to stay in his college room smoking marijuana, and listening to and playing music. According to fellow student Brian Wells (now leading psychiatrist Dr Brian Wells): "they were the rugger buggers and we were the cool people smoking dope." By this time, Drake had discovered the British and American folk music scenes, and was influenced by performers such as Bob Dylan, Josh White and Phil Ochs. He began performing in local clubs and coffee houses around London, and in February 1968, while playing support to Country Joe and the Fish at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, made an impression on Ashley Hutchings, bass player with Fairport Convention. Hutchings recalls being impressed by Drake's skill as a guitarist, but even more so by "the image. He looked like a star. He looked wonderful, he seemed to be 7 ft." and Boyd, as the man who had discovered Fairport Convention and been responsible for introducing John Martyn and The Incredible String Band to a mainstream audience, was a significant and respected figure on the UK folk scene. He also sought to include a string arrangement similar to Simon's, "without overwhelming... or sounding cheesy". He recruited John Wood as engineer, and drafted Richard Hewson in to provide the string arrangements.

Initial recordings did not go well; the sessions were irregular and rushed, taking place during studio downtime borrowed from Fairport Convention's production of their Unhalfbricking album. Tension arose between artist and producer as to the direction the album should take; Boyd was an advocate of George Martin's "using the studio as an instrument" approach, while Drake preferred a more organic sound. Dann has observed that Drake appears "tight and anxious" on bootleg recordings taken from the sessions, and notes a number of Boyd's unsuccessful attempts at instrumentation. Both were unhappy with Hewson's contribution, which they felt was too mainstream in sound for Drake's songs. Drake suggested using his college friend Robert Kirby as a replacement, although Boyd was sceptical at taking on an amateur music student lacking prior recording experience. However, he was impressed by Drake's uncharacteristic assertiveness, and agreed to a trial. Kirby had previously presented Drake with some arrangements for his songs, However, Kirby did not feel confident enough to score the album's centerpiece "River Man", and Boyd was forced to stretch the Witchseason budget to hire the veteran composer Harry Robinson, with the instruction that he echo the tone of Delius and Ravel.

Post-production difficulties led to the release being delayed by several months. It has been alleged that the album was poorly marketed and supported, though the inclusion of the opening track "Time Has Told Me" on the Island Records sampler Nice Enough to Eat brought him a very wide audience (a track from his second album was likewise included on the subsequent sampler Bumpers). Drake was featured in full-page interviews in the pop press. In July, Melody Maker referred to the album as "poetic" and "interesting", though NME wrote in October that there was "not nearly enough variety to make it entertaining". It received radio plays from the BBC's more progressive disk-jockeys such as John Peel and Bob Harris. Drake was unhappy with the inlay sleeve, which printed songs in the wrong running order and reproduced verses omitted from the recorded versions. In an interview his sister Gabrielle said: "He was very secretive. I knew he was making an album but I didn't know what stage of completion it was at until he walked into my room and said, 'There you are.' He threw it onto the bed and walked out!" His father remembered "writing him long letters, pointing out the disadvantages of going away from Cambridge...a degree was a safety net, if you manage to get a degree, at least you have something to fall back on; his reply to that was that a safety net was the one thing he did not want." Eventually, in an attempt to bring some stability and a telephone into Drake's life, Boyd organised and paid for a ground floor bedsit in Belsize Park, Camden.

In August, Drake recorded three songs for the BBC's John Peel show. Two months later, he opened for Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall in London, followed by appearances at folk clubs in Birmingham and Hull. Remembering the performance in Hull, folk singer Michael Chapman commented: The experience reinforced Drake's decision to retreat from live appearances; the few concerts he did play around this time were usually brief, awkward, and poorly attended. Drake seemed unwilling to perform and rarely addressed his audience. As many of his songs were played in different tunings, he frequently paused to retune between numbers.

Although the publicity generated by Five Leaves Left was minor, Boyd was keen to build on what momentum there was. 1970's Bryter Layter, again produced by Boyd and engineered by Wood, introduced a more upbeat, jazzier sound. Disappointed by his debut's poor commercial performance, Drake sought to move away from his pastoral sound, and agreed to his producer's suggestions to include bass and drum tracks on the recordings. "It was more of a pop sound, I suppose", Boyd later said, "I imagined it as more commercial." Like its predecessor, the album featured musicians from Fairport Convention, as well as contributions from John Cale on two songs: "Northern Sky" and "Fly". Trevor Dann has noted that while sections of "Northern Sky" sound more characteristic of Cale, the song was the closest Drake came to a release with chart potential. In his 1999 biography, Cale admits to using heroin during this period, and his older friend Brian Wells began to suspect that Drake was also using. Both Boyd and Wood were confident that the album would be a commercial success, but it went on to sell fewer than 3,000 copies. Reviews were again mixed: while Record Mirror praised Drake as a "beautiful guitarist — clean and with perfect timing, [and] accompanied by soft, beautiful arrangements", Melody Maker described the album as "an awkward mix of folk and cocktail jazz". His frustration turned to depression, and in 1971 Drake was persuaded by family to visit a psychiatrist at St Thomas's Hospital, London. He was prescribed a course of antidepressants, but he felt uncomfortable and embarrassed about taking them, and tried to hide the fact from his friends. He knew enough about drugs to worry about their side effects, and was concerned about how they would react with his regular marijuana use.

Pink Moon

Island Records was keen that Drake promote Bryter Layter through press interviews, radio sessions and live appearances. Drake, who was by this time smoking what Kirby has described as "unbelievable amounts" of marijuana and exhibiting "the first signs of psychosis", refused. By the winter of 1970, he had isolated himself in London.

Although Island neither expected nor wanted a third album, Drake approached Wood in October 1971 to begin work on what would be his final release. The sessions took place over two nights, with only Drake and Wood present in the studio. Drake appears on Pink Moon accompanied only by his own carefully-recorded guitar save for a single piano overdub on the title track. "He was very determined to make this very stark, bare record," Wood later recalled. "He definitely wanted it to be him more than anything. And I think, in some ways, Pink Moon is probably more like Nick is than the other two records."

Drake delivered the tapes of Pink Moon to Chris Blackwell at Island Records, contrary to a popular legend which claims he dropped them off at the receptionist's desk without saying a word. An advertisement for the album placed in Melody Maker in February opened with "Pink Moon — Nick Drake's latest album: the first we heard of it was when it was finished." Pink Moon went on to sell fewer copies than either of its predecessors, although it did receive some favourable reviews. In Zigzag magazine, Connor McKnight wrote, "Nick Drake is an artist who never fakes. The album makes no concession to the theory that music should be escapist. It's simply one musician's view of life at the time, and you can't ask for more than that."

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell felt Pink Moon had the potential to bring Drake to a mainstream audience; however his staff were disappointed by the artist's unwillingness to undertake any promotional activity. A&R; manager Muff Winwood recalls "tearing his hair out" in frustration, and admits that without Blackwell's enthusiastic support, "the rest of us would have given him the boot." However, following persistent nagging from Boyd, Drake agreed to an interview with Jerry Gilbert of Sounds Magazine. The "shy and introverted folk singer" spoke of his dislike of live appearances and very little else. "There wasn't any connection whatsoever", Gilbert has said. "I don't think he made eye contact with me once. If you wanted to be uncharitable, you could say he was just a spoiled boy with a silver spoon and went around feeling sorry for himself."

Final years

In the months following Pink Moon's release, Drake became increasingly asocial and distant from those close to him. He returned to live at his parents' home in Far Leys, and while he resented the regression, he accepted that his illness made it necessary. "I don't like it at home", he told his mother, "but I can't bear it anywhere else." He would often disappear for days, sometimes turning up unannounced at friends' houses, uncommunicative and withdrawn. Robert Kirby described a typical visit: "He would arrive and not talk, sit down, listen to music, have a smoke, have a drink, sleep there the night, and two or three days later he wasn't there, he'd be gone. And three months later he'd be back."

Referring to this period, John Martyn (who in 1973 wrote the title song of his album Solid Air for and about Drake) described him as the most withdrawn person he'd ever met. He would borrow his mother's car and drive for hours without purpose on occasion, until he ran out of petrol and had to ring his parents to ask to be collected. Friends have recalled the extent to which his appearance had changed. During particularly bleak periods of his illness, he refused to wash his hair or cut his nails. Boyd was in England at the time, and agreed to attend the recordings. This initial session was followed by further recordings in July. In his 2006 autobiography, the producer recalled being taken aback at Drake's anger and bitterness: "[He said that] I had told him he was a genius, and others had concurred. Why wasn't he famous and rich? This rage must have festered beneath that inexpressive exterior for years." Both Boyd and Wood noticed a discernible deterioration in Drake's performance, requiring him to overdub his voice separately over the guitar. However, the return to Sound Techniques studio raised Drake's spirits; his mother later recalled, "We were so absolutely thrilled to think that Nick was happy because there hadn't been any happiness in Nick's life for years." Ryde has been described by Drake's biographers as "the nearest thing" to a girlfriend in his life, but she now prefers the description 'best (girl) friend'. In a 2005 interview, Ryde revealed that a week before he died, she had sought to end the relationship: "I couldn’t cope with it. I asked him for some time. And I never saw him again." Similar to the relationship Drake had earlier shared with fellow folk musician Linda Thompson, Drake's relationship with Ryde was never consummated.

At some time during the night of 24/25 November 1974, Nick Drake died at home in Far Leys from an overdose of amitriptyline, a type of antidepressant. He had gone to bed early the night before, after spending the afternoon visiting a friend. His mother claimed that, around dawn, he left his room for the kitchen. His family was used to hearing him do this many times before but, during this instance, he did not make a sound. They presumed that he was eating a bowl of cereal. He returned to his room a short while later, and took some pills "to help him sleep". Drake was accustomed to keeping his own hours; he frequently had difficulty sleeping, and would often stay up through the night playing and listening to music, then sleeping late into the following morning. Recalling the events of that night, his mother later stated: "I never used to disturb him at all. But it was about 12 o’clock, and I went in, because really it seemed it was time he got up. And he was lying across the bed. The first thing I saw was his long, long legs." There was no suicide note, although a letter addressed to Ryde was found close to his bed.

'Now we rise/And we are everywhere', taken from the final song on his final album.]]

At the inquest that December, Drake's coroner stated that the cause of death was as a result of "Acute amitriptyline poisoning — self-administered when suffering from a depressive illness", and concluded a verdict of suicide. Though this has been disputed by some members of his family, Writing in 1975, NME journalist Nick Kent comments on the irony of Drake's death at a time when he had just begun to regain a sense of "personal balance". The funeral was attended by around 50 mourners, including friends from Marlborough, Aix, Cambridge, London, Witchseason, and Tanworth. Referring to Drake's tendency to compartmentalise relationships, Brian Wells later observed that many met each other for the first time that morning. Molly recalled "a lot of his young friends came up here. We'd never met many of them." His public profile remained low throughout the mid and late 1970s although occasional mentions of his name appeared in the music press. By this time, his parents were receiving an increasing number of fans and admirers as visitors to the family home in Far Leys. Island Records, following a 1975 NME article written by Nick Kent, stated "...we have no intention of repackaging Nick's three albums (which remained available), either now or at anytime in the foreseeable future" but in 1979 Rob Partridge joined Island Records as press officer and commissioned the release of the Fruit Tree box set. Partridge was a fan of Drake's, and had seen him perform early in 1969: "The first thing I did when I got to Island was suggest we put together a retrospective—the studio albums plus whatever else was there. I wasn't necessarily expecting massive vaults with millions of tunes, live recordings or whatever, but there was very little..." The release brought together the three studio albums as well as the four tracks recorded with Wood in 1974 and was accompanied by an extensive biography written by the American journalist Arthur Lubow. However, sales were poor and the album received little press notice; in 1983 Island deleted Fruit Tree from its catalogue. Drake gained further exposure in 1985 with the release of The Dream Academy's hit single "Life in a Northern Town", which included an on-sleeve dedication to Drake. His reputation continued to grow, and by the end of the 1980s, Nick Drake's name was appearing regularly in newspapers and music magazines in the United Kingdom: he had come to represent a kind of mythical doomed romantic hero in the eyes of many, an "enigma wrapped inside a mystery".

In 2010, the song Cello Song was used in a commercial for the Australian coffee brand Vittoria. The advertisement featured actor Al Pacino and was directed by Barry Levinson.

On November 11, 2010 -- just weeks before the anniversary of Drake's passing -- James Rotondi (or, "Roto", the former guitarist for the French band Air) played an evening of Nick Drake's songs, narrating and praising Drake's life story, at Pete's Candy Store in Brooklyn, New York.

Musical and lyrical style

Drake was obsessive about practising his guitar playing, and would often stay up through the night, experimenting with tunings and working on songs. His mother remembered hearing him "bumping around at all hours. I think he wrote his nicest melodies in the early-morning hours." These are difficult to achieve on a guitar using standard tuning; Drake used tunings which made cluster chords available using more conventional chord shapes. In many songs he accents the dissonant effect of such non-standard tunings through his vocal melodies. symbols and codes, largely drawn from nature. The moon, stars, sea, rain, trees, sky, mist and seasons are all commonly used, influenced in part by his rural upbringing. Boyd has said he detects a virginal quality in his lyrics and music, and notes that he never observed or heard of the singer behaving in a sexual way with anyone, male or female. Kirby described Drake's lyrics as a "series of extremely vivid, complete observations, almost like a series of epigrammatic proverbs", though he doubts that Drake saw himself as "any sort of poet". Instead he believes that Drake's lyrics were crafted to "complement and compound a mood that the melody dictates in the first place."

Discography

{|class="wikitable" ! Release date ! Title |- | 1969 | Five Leaves Left |- | 1970 | Bryter Layter |- | 1972 | Pink Moon |}

Notes

Sources

Boyd, Joe (2006). White Bicycles – Making Music in the 1960s, Serpent's Tail. ISBN 1-85242-910-0

Cale, John (1999). What's Welsh for Zen, Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-4383-6

Dann, Trevor (2006). Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake, Da Capo Press. London. 2006. ISBN 0-306-81520-6

Humphries, Patrick (1997). Nick Drake: The Biography, Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 1-58234-035-8

Rasmussen, Gorm Henrik (1980). Pink Moon — Sangeren og guitaristen Nick Drake, (in Danish), Forlaget Hovedland.

Various sources (2003). Way to Blue: an Introduction to Nick Drake , Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-8179-5

Various sources (2003). The Nick Drake Song Collection, Music Sales. ISBN 0-7119-4464-4

Petrusich, Amanda (2007) 33 1/3 Nick Drake's Pink Moon. ISBN 978-08264-2790-8

De Angelis, Paola (2007). "Journey to the Stars — I testi di Nick Drake", Arcana Editrice (in Italian)

Chartier, Henry (2008). "Nick Drake : l'abécédaire", Le Bord de l'eau (in French) ISBN 978-2-35687-002-5

Hogan, Peter K (2008)Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music.

Nick Drake: Under Review DVD (2007) ASIN: B000TV4PZG

External links

Bryter Music: The Estate of Nick Drake Official website

Nick Drake.co.uk Website with information, interviews with related people, pictures, news, etc., in direct connection with the annual Nick Drake gathering

Annual Gathering web site for the annual gathering of musicians in Tanworth-in-Arden to celebrate the music of Nick Drake, with information, pictures and forum

Nick Drake guitar tabs Nick Drake guitar tabs

The Nick Drake Files features discography, lyrics, transcripts of interviews with Drake, accurate tab, etc.

Nick Drake Tabs features accurate tabs from the algonet site plus some new ones, updated regularly.

Lost Boy – In Search of Nick Drake – BBC Radio Documentary

Nick Drake 1948-74 features artist chronology, rare Interplay One mp3s, and a complete list of known recordings

Remembering Five Leaves Left - ABC Radio National Radio Documentary on Into the Music

A Place To Be: Reflections of Nick Drake – "a collection, a celebration, in film, photography, painting, drawing and prose, of the impact the music of Nick Drake has had on other artists" (official "touring exhibition" site sponsored by the Estate of Nick Drake)

Three Records from Sundown: Joe Boyd Remembers Nick Drake English language audio documentary with Russian text translation.

Category:1948 births Category:1974 deaths Category:Alumni of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Category:Drug-related deaths in England Category:English folk musicians Category:English male singers Category:English singer-songwriters Category:English songwriters Category:Fingerstyle guitarists Category:Musicians who committed suicide Category:People from Tanworth-in-Arden Category:Old Marlburians Category:Elektra Records artists Category:Island Records artists Category:Universal Records artists

Ian Bostridge CBE (born 25 December 1964) is an acclaimed English tenor, well known for his performances as an opera singer and as a song recitalist.

Education

Born in London, Bostridge studied at Dulwich College Preparatory School and Westminster School, where he was a Queen's Scholar, then attended the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where he read modern history and received an M.Phil in the history and philosophy of science. He received his D.Phil from Oxford in 1990, on the significance of witchcraft in English public life from 1650 to 1750, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before embarking on a career as a singer. His book "Witchcraft and its Transformations 1650 to 1750" was published as an Oxford Historical Monograph in 1997. This has been an influential work in the study of the pre-Enlightenment, "achieving that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-worn subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again" (Noel Malcolm, TLS). In 1991 he won the National Federation of Music Societies Award and from 1992 received support from the Young Concert Artists Trust.

Career

Bostridge made his Wigmore Hall debut in 1993; his Purcell Room debut (an acclaimed Winterreise) and his Aldeburgh Festival debut in 1994; in 1995 he gave his first solo recital in the Wigmore Hall (winning the Royal Philharmonic Society's Debut Award); in 1996 he gave recitals in Lyon, Cologne, London and at the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Edinburgh Festivals, and in 1997 at the Alte Oper, Frankfurt.

On the concert platform he has appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis and Mstislav Rostropovich, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Sir Charles Mackerras, and the City of Birmingham Symphony under Sir Simon Rattle.

His first solo-featured recording was for Hyperion Records, a Britten song recital, The Red Cockatoo with Graham Johnson. His subsequent recording of Die schöne Müllerin in Hyperion's Schubert Edition won the Gramophone's Solo Vocal Award for 1996; he won the prize again in 1998 for a recording of Schumann Lieder with his regular collaborator, the pianist Julius Drake. An EMI Classics exclusive artist since 1996, he is an eleven-time Grammy nominee. His CDs have won most of the major record prizes including Grammy, Edison, Japanese Recording Academy, Brit, Echo Klassik and Deutsche Schallplattenpreis.

Bostridge made his operatic debut in 1994, aged 29, as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Australian Opera at the Edinburgh Festival, directed by Baz Luhrmann. In 1996 made his acclaimed debut with the English National Opera, singing his first Tamino (The Magic Flute). In 1997 he sang Quint in Deborah Warner's new production of The Turn of the Screw under Sir Colin Davis for the Royal Opera. He has recorded Flute (Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream) with Sir Colin Davis for Philips Classics; Belmonte (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) with William Christie for Erato; Tom Rakewell (The Rake's Progress) under John Eliot Gardiner for Deutsche Grammophon (Grammy Award); and Captain Vere (Billy Budd) with Daniel Harding. In 2007 he appeared at the ENO in the role of Aschenbach in Britten's Death in Venice, in a production by Deborah Warner.

In 1997 he made a film of Schubert's Winterreise for Channel 4 directed by David Alden; he has been the subject of a South Bank Show profile documentary on ITV and presented a BBC4 film on Leoš Janáček. He has written on music for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Opernwelt, BBC Music Magazine, Opera Now and The Independent.

Later engagements included recitals in Paris, Stockholm, Lisbon, Brussels, Amsterdam and the Vienna Konzerthaus. In North America he appeared in recitals in New York City at the Frick Collection in 1998 and Alice Tully Hall in 1999 and made his Carnegie Hall debut under Sir Neville Marriner. Also in 1998 he sang Vasek in a new production of The Bartered Bride under Bernard Haitink for the Royal Opera and made his debut at the Munich Festival as Nerone (L'incoronazione di Poppea) and in recital (Winterreise at the Cuvillés Theatre). In 1999 he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Roger Norrington. He works regularly with the pianists Julius Drake, Mitsuko Uchida and Covent Garden music director Antonio Pappano.

In summer 2000, Bostridge gave the fifth annual Edinburgh University Festival Lecture (previous lecturers included George Steiner, Pierre Boulez and Alfred Brendel) entitled "Music and Magic".

In 2004, Bostridge was made CBE for his services to music. He is an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi and St John's College, Oxford, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of St Andrews in 2004.

His brother is the Whitbread-shortlisted biographer and critic Mark Bostridge, whose book "Florence Nightingale: the woman and her legend" was published in the UK in 2008. They are great-grandchildren of John "Tiny" Joyce, a cousin of James Joyce and famous goalkeeper who played for Tottenham Hotspur before the First World War..

On 11 November 2009 Bostridge sang Agnus Dei from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, at the Armistice Day service in Westminster Abbey. This uses the words of war poet Wilfred Owen's "At a Calvary Near the Ancre". This Service marks the loss of the WWI generation, whose last members died earlier the same year.

Bostridge is now the music columnist for Standpoint magazine, the new monthly publication launched "to celebrate Western civilisation". He also serves on the magazine's advisory board. A collection of his writings on music, "A Singer's Notebook", will be published by Faber and Faber in Spring 2011.

Bostridge is married to the writer and literary critic, Dr Lucasta Miller, author of the classic study published in 2001, "The Brontë Myth". They have a son and a daughter.

Discography

Adès: The Tempest with Thomas Adès (EMI Classics, 2009)

Schubert: Schwanengesang with Antonio Pappano (EMI Classics, 2009)

Schubert: The Wanderer: Lieder and Fragments with Leif Ove Andsnes (EMI Classics, 2008)

Great Handel with Harry Bickett (EMI Classics, 2007)

Schubert: Lieder and Sonata with Leif Ove Andsnes (EMI Classics, 2007)

Wolf: Lieder with Antonio Pappano (EMI Classics, 2006)

Britten: Les Illuminations, Serenade, Nocturne with Simon Rattle (EMI Classics, 2005)

Schubert: 25 Lieder with Julius Drake (EMI Classics, 2005)

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde with Antonio Pappano (EMI Classics, 2005)

Schubert: die Schöne Müllerin with Mitsuko Uchida (EMI Classics, 2005)

Schubert: Lieder and Sonata No.21 with Leif Ove Andsnes (EMI Classics, 2005)

Schubert: Winterreise with Leif Ove Andsnes (EMI Classics, 2004)

Monteverdi: Orfeo with Emmanuelle Haïm (Virgin Classics, 2004)

Purcell: Dido and Aeneas with Emmanuelle Haïm (Virgin Classics, 2003)

Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge with Bernard Haitink (EMI Classics, 2003)

Schubert: Lieder and Sonata D850 with Leif Ove Andsnes (EMI Classics, 2003)

Mozart: Idomeneo with Charles Mackerras (EMI Classics, 2002)

Britten : Canticles & Folksongs with Julius Drake (Virgin Classics, 2002)

Britten : Turn of the Screw with Daniel Harding (Virgin Classics, 2002)

The Songs of Robert Schumann, Vol.7 with Dorothea Röschmann and Graham Johnson (Hyperion, 2002)

The Noël Coward Songbook with Jeffrey Tate (EMI Classics, 2002)

Schubert: Lieder volume II with Julius Drake (EMI Classics, 2001)

Henze: Songs with Julius Drake (EMI Classics, 2001)

Bach: Cantatas and Arias with Fabio Biondi (Virgin Classics, 2000)

Handel: L'allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato with John Nelson (Virgin Classics, 2000)

The English Songbook with Julius Drake (EMI Classics, 1999)

Schumann: Liederkreis & Dichterliebe etc. with Julius Drake (EMI Classics, 1998)

Schubert: Lieder volume I with Julius Drake (EMI Classics, 1998)

Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (Schubert Edition, Vol.25) with Graham Johnson and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Hyperion, 1996)

Britten: The Red Cockatoo & Other Songs with Graham Johnson (Hyperion, 1995)

Nyman: Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs with Dominique Debart (Argo, 1995)

Bach: St Matthew Passion (Evangelist) with Philippe Herreweghe (Harmonia Mundi, 1999)

References

External links

Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650-c.1750 (Doctoral thesis, at amazon.com)

Ian Bostridge recordings on EMI Classics

Ian Bostridge official MySpace music page

About Ian Bostridge

Audio interview with Ian Bostridge from Edinburgh International Festival

Ian Bostridge Discography

Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:English opera singers Category:Operatic tenors Category:Old Westminsters Category:People from London Category:English tenors Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music

Name	Charles Pierre Baudelaire
Caption	Charles Baudelaire ca. 1863
Birthdate	April 9, 1821
Birthplace	Paris, France
Deathdate	August 31, 1867
Deathplace	Paris, France
Occupation	Poet, Art critic
Nationality	French
Period	1844–1866
Movement	Symbolist, Modernist
Signature	Baudelaire signatur.jpg

Charles Baudelaire (; April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Baudelaire the Poet

Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary 'Parnassians'. As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of 'symbols', (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.

Beyond his innovations in versification and the theories of symbolism and 'correspondences', an awareness of which is essential to any appreciation of the literary value of his work, aspects of his work which regularly receive (or have received) much critical discussion include the role of women, the theological direction of his work and his alleged advocacy of 'satanism', his experience of drug-induced states of mind, the figure of the dandy, his stance regarding democracy and its implications for the individual, his response to the spiritual uncertainties of the time, his criticisms of the bourgeois, and his advocacy of modern music and painting (e.g., Wagner, Delacroix)

Anthologies of French verse often dedicate more space to his works than to that of any other 19th-century poet, and, above and beyond any considerations of influence/historic significance, the best of his work is among the finest French poetry.

Biography

Early life

Baudelaire was born in Paris, France on April 9, 1821 and baptized two months later at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church. His father, François Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was thirty-four years older than Baudelaire's mother. François died during Baudelaire's childhood, in 1827. The following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts. Biographers have often seen this as a crucial moment, considering that finding himself no longer the sole focus of his mother's affection left him with a trauma which goes some way to explaining the excesses later apparent in his life. He stated in a letter to her that, "There was in my childhood a period of passionate love for you". Baudelaire regularly implored his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner.

Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded. Baudelaire at fourteen was described by a classmate: "He was much more refined and distinguished than any of our fellow pupils [...] we are bound to one another[...] by shared tastes and sympathies, the precocious love of fine works of literature". Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to "idleness". Later, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law, a popular course for those not yet decided on any particular career. Baudelaire began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. Baudelaire began to run up debts, mostly for clothes. Upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother "I don't feel I have a vocation for anything." His stepfather had in mind a career in law or diplomacy, but instead Baudelaire decided to embark upon a literary career. His mother later recalled: "Oh, what grief! If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather, his career would have been very different... He would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier, all three of us".

His stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports, that he later employed in his poetry. (Baudelaire later exaggerated his aborted trip to create a legend about his youthful travels and experiences, including "riding on elephants"). Baudelaire returned to the taverns where he began to compose some of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. At twenty-one, he received a good-sized inheritance but squandered much of it within a few years. His family obtained a decree to place his property in trust which he resented bitterly, at one point arguing that allowing him to fail alone financially would have been the one sure way of teaching him the value of maintaining well-ordered finances.

Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender. During this time Jeanne Duval became his mistress. His mother thought Duval a "Black Venus" who "tortured him in every way" and drained him of money at every opportunity. She was rejected by his family. He made a suicide attempt during this time.

Baudelaire took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary newspaper. However, his interest was passing, as his was later to note in his political writings in his journals intimes.

In the early 1850s, Baudelaire struggled with poor health, pressing debts, and irregular literary output. He often moved from one lodging to another to escape creditors. He received many projects that he was unable to complete, though he did finish translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

Upon the death of his stepfather in 1857, Baudelaire received no mention in the will but he was heartened nonetheless that the division with his mother might now be mended. At thirty-six he wrote her: "believe that I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong only to you".

Published career

His first published work was his art review "Salon of 1845," which attracted immediate attention for its boldness. Many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, including his championing of Delacroix, and some of his views seem remarkably in tune with the future theories of the Impressionist painters.

In 1846, Baudelaire wrote his second Salon review, gaining additional credibility as an advocate and critic of Romanticism. His support of Delacroix as the foremost Romantic artist gained widespread notice. The following year Baudelaire's novella La Fanfarlo was published.

The Flowers of Evil

with author's notes.]] Baudelaire was a slow and fastidious worker, often sidetracked by indolence, emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published his first and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds), when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis.

The poems found a small, appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their subject matter. The effect on fellow artists was, as Théodore de Banville stated, "immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear". Flaubert, recently attacked in a similar fashion for Madame Bovary (and acquitted), was impressed and wrote to Baudelaire: "You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist".

The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Notable in some poems is Baudelaire's use of imagery of the sense of smell and of fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.

The book, however, quickly became a byword for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Some critics called a few of the poems "masterpieces of passion, art and poetry" but other poems were deemed to merit no less than legal action to suppress them. J. Habas writing in Le Figaro, led the charge against Baudelaire, writing: "Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid". Then Baudelaire responded to the outcry, in a prophetic letter to his mother:

"You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people. Moreover, since I was terrified myself of the horror that I should inspire, I cut out a third from the proofs. They deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don't care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron."

Baudelaire, his publisher and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals. They were fined but Baudelaire was not imprisoned. Six of the poems were suppressed, but printed later as Les Épaves (The Wrecks) (Brussels, 1866). Another edition of Les Fleurs du mal, without these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861. Many notables rallied behind Baudelaire and condemned the sentence. Victor Hugo wrote to him: "Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars... I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might". Baudelaire did not appeal the judgment but his fine was reduced. Nearly 100 years later, on May 11, 1949, Baudelaire was vindicated, the judgment officially reversed, and the six banned poems reinstated in France. Other works in the years that followed included Petits Poèmes en prose (Small Prose poems); a series of art reviews published in the Pays, Exposition universelle (Country, World Fair); studies on Gustave Flaubert (in L'Artiste, October 18, 1857); on Théophile Gautier (Revue contemporaine, September 1858); various articles contributed to Eugene Crepet's Poètes francais; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch (French poets; Artificial Paradises: opium and hashish) (1860); and Un Dernier Chapitre de l'histoire des oeuvres de Balzac (A Final Chapter of the history of works of Balzac) (1880), originally an article "Comment on paye ses dettes quand on a du génie" ("How one pays one's debts when one has genius"), in which his criticism turns against his friends Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval. , in a painting by Édouard Manet]] , muse and one time mistress, painted by Vincent Vidal.]]

By 1859, his illnesses, his long-term use of laudanum, his life of stress and poverty had taken a toll and Baudelaire had aged noticeably. But at last, his mother relented and agreed to let him live with her for a while at Honfleur. Baudelaire was productive and at peace in the seaside town, his poem Le Voyage being one example of his efforts during that time. In 1860, he became an ardent supporter of Richard Wagner.

His financial difficulties increased again, however, particularly after his publisher Poulet Malassis went bankrupt in 1861. In 1864, he left Paris for Belgium, partly in the hope of selling the rights to his works and also to give lectures. His long-standing relationship with Jeanne Duval continued on-and-off, and he helped her to the end of his life. Baudelaire's relationships with actress Marie Daubrun and with courtesan Apollonie Sabatier, though the source of much inspiration, never produced any lasting satisfaction. He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess. Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed. After more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the Roman Catholic church. The last two years of his life were spent, in a semi-paralyzed state, in "maisons de santé" in Brussels and in Paris, where he died on August 31, 1867. Baudelaire is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

Many of Baudelaire's works were published posthumously. After his death, his mother paid off his substantial debts, and at last she found some comfort in Baudelaire's emerging fame. "I see that my son, for all his faults, has his place in literature". She lived another four years.

Critiques

Baudelaire was an active participant in the artistic life of his times. As critic and essayist, he wrote extensively and perceptively about the luminaries and themes of French culture. He was frank with friends and enemies, rarely took the diplomatic approach and sometimes responded violently verbally, which often undermined his cause. His associations were numerous and included: Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Franz Liszt, Champfleury, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Balzac and the artists and writers that follow.

Edgar Allan Poe

In 1846 and 1847, Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Poe, in which he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape. Baudelaire had much in common with Poe (who died in 1849 at age forty). Both had a similar sensibility and macabre and supernatural turn of mind; both struggled with illness, poverty, and melancholy. Like Poe, Baudelaire believed in the doctrine of original sin, denounced democracy and the idea of progress and of man's natural goodness, and held a disdainful aristocratic attitude similar to Baudelaire's dandy. Baudelaire saw in Poe a precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart. From this time until 1865, he was largely occupied with translating Poe's works; his translations were widely praised. Baudelaire was not the first French translator of Poe, but his "scrupulous translations" were considered among the best. These were published as Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary stories) (1852), Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (New extraordinary stories) (1857), Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym, , and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (Grotesque and serious stories) (1865). Two essays on Poe are to be found in his Oeuvres complètes (Complete works) (vols. v. and vi.).

Eugène Delacroix

A strong supporter of the Romantic painter Delacroix, Baudelaire called him "a poet in painting." Baudelaire also absorbed much of Delacroix's aesthetic ideas as expressed in his journals. As Baudelaire elaborated in his "Salon of 1846", "As one contemplates his series of pictures, one seems to be attending the celebration of some grievous mystery... This grave and lofty melancholy shines with a dull light... plaintive and profound like a melody by Weber".

Richard Wagner

Baudelaire had no formal musical training, and knew little of composers beyond Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. Weber was in some ways Wagner's precursor, using the leitmotif and conceiving the idea of the "total art work" ("Gesamtkunstwerk"), both of which found Baudelaire's admiration. Before even hearing Wagner's music, Baudelaire studied reviews and essays about him, and formulated his impressions. Later, Baudelaire put them into his non-technical analysis of Wagner, which was highly regarded, particularly his essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris". Baudelaire's reaction to music was passionate and psychological. "Music engulfs (possesses) me like the sea". Baudelaire's writings contributed to the elevation of Wagner and to the cult of Wagnerism that swept Europe in the following decades.

Théophile Gautier

Gautier, writer and poet, earned Baudelaire's respect for his perfection of form and his mastery of language, though Baudelaire thought he lacked deeper emotion and spirituality. Both strove to express the artist's inner vision, which Heinrich Heine had earlier stated: "In artistic matters, I am a supernaturalist. I believe that the artist can not find all his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to him in his soul". Gautier's frequent meditations on death and the horror of life are themes which influenced Baudelaire writings. In gratitude for their friendship and commonality of vision, Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier.

Édouard Manet

Manet and Baudelaire became constant companions from around 1855. In the early 1860s, Baudelaire accompanied Manet on daily sketching trips and often met him socially. Manet also lent Baudelaire money and looked after his affairs, particularly when Baudelaire went to Belgium. Baudelaire encouraged Manet to strike his own path and not succumb to criticism. "Manet has great talent, a talent which will stand the test of time. But he has a weak character. He seems to me crushed and stunned by shock". In his painting Music in the Tuileries, Manet includes portraits of his friends Théophile Gautier, Jacques Offenbach, and Baudelaire. While it's difficult to differentiate who influenced whom, both Manet and Baudelaire discussed and expressed some common themes through their respective arts. Baudelaire praised the modernity of Manet's subject matter: "almost all our originality comes from the stamp that 'time' imprints upon our feelings". When Manet's famous Olympia (1865), a portrait of a nude prostitute, provoked a scandal for its blatant realism mixed with an imitation of Renaissance motifs, Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend, though he offered no public defense (he was, however, ill at the time). When Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his stroke, Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and she would play passages from Wagner for Baudelaire on the piano.

Nadar

Nadar (Félix Tournachon) was a noted caricaturist, scientist and important early photographer. Baudelaire admired Nadar, one of his closest friends, and wrote: "Nadar is the most amazing manifestation of vitality". They moved in similar circles and Baudelaire made many social connections through him. Nadar's ex-mistress Jeanne Duval became Baudelaire's mistress around 1842. Baudelaire became interested in photography in the 1850s and denounced it as an art form and advocated for its return to "its real purpose, which is that of being the servant to the sciences and arts". Photography should not, according to Baudelaire, encroach upon "the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary". Nadar remained a stalwart friend right to Baudelaire's last days and wrote his obituary notice in Le Figaro.

Philosophy

Many of Baudelaire's philosophical proclamations were considered scandalous and intentionally provocative in his time. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, drawing criticism and outrage from many quarters.

Love

"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."

Marriage

"Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage." and adopted increasingly aristocratic views. In his journals, he wrote "There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions."

Influence

, 1848.]] Baudelaire's influence on the direction of modern French (and English) language literature was considerable. The most significant French writers to come after him were generous with tributes; four years after his death, Arthur Rimbaud praised him in a letter as 'the king of poets, a true God'. In 1895, Stéphane Mallarmé published a sonnet in Baudelaire's memory, 'Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire'. Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that along with Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire was 'the greatest poet of the nineteenth century'.

In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson credited Baudelaire as providing an initial impetus for the Symbolist movement, by virtue of his translations of Poe. In 1930, T. S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a "just appreciation" even in France, claimed that the poet had "great genius" and asserted that his "technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised... has made his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language". Eliot also alluded to Baudelaire's poetry directly ın his own poetry. For example, he quoted the last line of Baudelaire's 'Au Lecteur' ın the last line of Sectıon I of The Waste Land.

At the same time that Eliot was affirming Baudelaire's importance from a broadly conservative and explicitly Christian viewpoint, left-wing critics such as Wilson and Walter Benjamin were able to do so from a dramatically different perspective. Benjamin translated Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens into German and published a major essay on translation as the foreword.

In the late 1930s, Benjamin used Baudelaire as a starting point and focus for his monumental attempt at a materialist assessment of 19th century culture, Das Passagenwerk. For Benjamin, Baudelaire's importance lay in his anatomies of the crowd, of the city and of modernity.

In 1982, avant-garde performance artist and vocalist Diamanda Galás recorded an adaptation of his poem The Litanies of Satan (Les Litanies de Satan).

Currently, Vanderbilt University has "assembled one of the world’s most comprehensive research collections on...Baudelaire."

See also

Épater la bourgeoisie

Bibliography

Salon de 1845, 1845

Salon de 1846, 1846

La Fanfarlo, 1847

Les Fleurs du mal, 1857

Les paradis artificiels, 1860

Réflexions sur Quelques-uns de mes Contemporains, 1861

Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, 1863

Curiosités Esthétiques, 1868

L'art romantique, 1868

Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen)/Petits Poèmes en Prose, 1869

Oeuvres Posthumes et Correspondance Générale, 1887–1907

Fusées, 1897

Mon Coeur Mis à Nu, 1897

Oeuvres Complètes, 1922–53 (19 vols.)

Mirror of Art, 1955

The Essence of Laughter, 1956

Curiosités Esthétiques, 1962

The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1964

Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, 1964

Arts in Paris 1845–1862, 1965

Selected Writings on Art and Artist, 1972

Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire, 1986

Twenty Prose Poems, 1988

Critique d'art; Critique musicale, 1992

Online texts

Charles Baudelaire Largest site dedicated to Baudelaire's poems and prose, containing Fleurs du mal, Petit poemes et prose, Fanfarlo and more in French together with various English and Czech translations of his works.

FleursDuMal.org Definitive online presentation of Fleurs du mal, featuring the original French alongside multiple English translations

Selected works at Poetry Archive

Another selection

The Rebel poem by Baudelaire

Baudelaire's The Albatross and The Haunter in English translation

Les Foules (The Crowds) - English Translation

Sean Bonney's experimental translations of Baudelaire (Humor)

An illustrated version (8 Mb) of Les Fleurs du Mal, 1.861 edition (Charles Baudelaire / une édition illustrée par http://www.inkwatercolor.com)

Les fleurs de mal (the flowers of evil)

La Nouvelle Décadence - Extensive online library of Baudelaire translations and biographies

Discography

French composer Claude Debussy set five poems from Baudelaire into music in 1890 : Le Balcon, Harmonie du soir, Le Jet d'eau, Recueillement and La mort des amants.

French singer-songwriter Léo Ferré devoted himself to set Baudelaire's poetry into music in three albums : Les Fleurs du mal in 1957 (12 poems), Léo Ferré chante Baudelaire in 1967 (22 poems, of whom one comes from Le Spleen de Paris), and the posthumous Les Fleurs du mal (suite et fin) (21 poems), recorded in 1977 but released in 2008.

French singer David TMX recorded the poem Lesbos from the Flowers of Evil

References

External links

Charles Baudelaire Largest site dedicated to Baudelaire's poems and prose, containing Fleurs du mal, Petit poemes et prose, Fanfarlo and more together with various English and Czech translations of his works.

Charles Baudelaire International Association

Baudelaire's poems at Poems Found in Translation

Works by or about Charles Baudelaire at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)

(French only )

Category:1821 births Category:1867 deaths Category:People from Paris Category:French poets Category:French-language poets Category:Symbolist poets Category:French art critics Category:Decadent literature Category:French translators Category:Poètes maudits Category:Psychedelic drug advocates Category:Lycée Louis-le-Grand alumni Category:People with bipolar disorder Category:19th-century French writers Category:Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery

Artur Kapp (28 February 1878 – 14 January 1952) was an Estonian composer.

Born in Suure-Jaani, Estonia, then part of the Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire, he was the son of Joosep Kapp, who was also a classically trained musician. Kapp began his musical career studying organ at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory as a student of both Louis Homilius and composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1891. Kapp graduated from the Conservatory in 1900 as a composer and from 1904 until 1920 worked as a music director in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan, then returning to Estonia as a professor and conductor at the Tallinn Conservatory where he counted among his students such future notable Estonian composers as Evald Aav, Edgar Arro, Gustav Ernesaks, Riho Päts and Enn Võrk. He is, along with Rudolf Tobias (1873-1918), generally considered to be one of the founders of Estonian symphonic music.

Kapp's son Eugen (1908–1996) and nephew Villem (1913–1964) became notable composers as well, having studied at the Tallinn Conservatory under direction of the elder Kapp.

Some of Kapp's most enduring works are the 1899 overture Don Juan and the 1900 cantata Paradiis ja Peri ("Paradise and Peri"), both of which are large scale works that prominently feature the organ. He is possibly best recalled for his oratorio Hiiob ("Job") and Metsateel ("On A Road Through The Woods"), a piece for solo voice. Kapp's work is abundant and diverse and covers many classical genres. He wrote five symphonies, five concertos, overtures, four orchestral suites, in addition to the above.

After the Soviet invasion of Estonia during World War II, Kapp was forced to resign his position as a composer and retired to Suure-Jaani. He died there in 1952 at the age of 73. His professional career spanned more than five decades.

In 1998, the annual Suure-Jaani Music Days festival was founded to celebrate Artur Kapp's musical legacy, as well as that of his sons and fellow composer Mart Saar (1882-1963), who was also from the area. The Festival is organized by the Eesti Kontsert in conjunction with the town of Suure-Jaani and the International Artur Kapp Society. The venues for performances include Lutheran and Orthodox churches, the Kapp Museum, and the song festival stage.

External links/Sources

The International Arthur Kapp Society

Eesti Muusika Infokeskus/Estonian Music Information Center

Eesti Muusika Festivald - Suure-Jaani Music Days

Category:1878 births Category:1952 deaths Category:Estonian composers