Rostand-related visuals

Rostand's La Princesse Lointaine has, not surprisingly, accumulated more visual material than the rest of the Rudel renditions combined, thanks to the involvement of Alphonse Mucha and several other artists. The holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire in Strasbourg include many bits of Rudeliana, images of which are usefully collected on an Alphonse Mucha fansite (French). Costume sketches, stage jewelry, photographs, that sort of thing.

The same site reproduces Mucha's Ilsee in its entirety, in a more user-friendly format than the site I mentioned previously.

A prelude to 'La Princesse'...

Among the handful of composers to have had a bash at the Rudel legend (besides the previously-blogged-about Kaija Saariaho) is the Russian composer Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945). I think you'd have to call him one of the minor late Romantics, on a par with someone like Anatoly Lyadov or Vasily Kalinnikov.

Tcherepnin (not to be confused with his son Alexander or his grandson Ivan, both also composers but of a very different stripe) studied composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory. While still a student he was commissioned to write an orchestral prelude for Rostand's Rudel drama, La Princesse Lointaine (1896). According to the Tcherepnin family's website, 'Tcherepnin later observed that his concept of professionalism owed much to the experience of writing and exhaustively rewriting his Prélude pour la Princesse Lointaine, Op. 4, under Rimsky's guidance'.

Inevitably, you can listen to the piece on youtube. It's quite floaty and tone-poem-esque.



Update, 6 August 2011: No you can't - it's been removed.

Bernhardt bombs

The great French actor Benoit-Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) (left), who created the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in Rostand's play, described to the American writer and artist Eliot Gregory (1854-1915) a meeting with Rostand and Sarah Bernhardt at which Rostand read his Rudel play, La Princesse Lointaine, aloud for the first time.

'I shall remember that afternoon as long as I live! From the first line my attention was riveted and my senses were charmed. The great actress ... accepted the play then and there.'

La Princesse Lointaine closed after 31 performances, and Bernhardt made a loss of 200,000 Francs. Monsieur Coquelin had a fairly clear impression of the production's failings:

'Between ourselves,' continued Coquelin, pushing aside his plate, a twinkle in his small eyes, 'is the reason of this lack of success very difficult to discover? The Princess in the piece is supposed to be a fairy enchantress in her sixteenth year. The play turns on her youth and innocence. Now, honestly, is Sarah, even on the stage, any one's ideal of youth and innocence?' This was asked so naively that I burst into a laugh, in which my host joined me. Unfortunately, this grandmamma, like Ellen Terry, cannot be made to understand that there are roles she should leave alone, that with all the illusions the stage lends she can no longer play girlish parts with success.

Ouch. But never mind the aging actress: as in the legend, so in this tale, it's the tender poet who suffers the worst, as Coquelin went on:

'The failure of his play produced the most disastrous effect on Rostand, who had given up a year of his life to its composition and was profoundly chagrined by its fall. He sank into a mild melancholy, refusing for more than eighteen months to put pen to paper.'

But the play Rostand came back with was Cyrano de Bergerac. Which only goes to show.

Poetry in the distance

The troubadours' theme of Amor de lonh, or distant love, has inspired more than its share of tiresome pining (cf Rostand's La Princesse Lointaine), but the American poet Sarah White uses Rudel's song Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai as a starting point for an illuminating essay on 'the impact of far love on her own vocation, life, and poetry'. Her book, The Poem Has Reasons, is a beguiling mix of memoir, poetry and... I suppose you'd call it literary non-fiction. It's definitely worth a look; I'd go so far as to say that it's the most rewarding Rudel-related work I've come across. There's a downloadable PDF of it on the website of its publisher, Proem Press.

Rudel by Mucha

In 1897, the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was commissioned to illustrate an edition of the Rudel legend written by Robert de Flers, to coincide with the production of La Princesse Lointaine, Edmond Rostand's play starring Sarah Bernhardt. The result, Ilsee, has become one of Mucha's most celebrated works. In 2007, a two-volume set of proofs for the book, hand-watercolored by Mucha, were put up for auction. Getty has two press images of the volumes.

A Czech website is selling individual pages as prints, and has the whole book online in low resolution (terrible navigation though).

Also online are a set of images from a (rather cheaply done) Dover Publications collection of artwork from Ilsee, with the text removed.

Rudel goes opera

The Rudel legend got a fairly limp treatment from Edmond Rostand (La Princesse Lointaine preceded his Cyrano de Bergerac by two years); it's also the subject of an opera, L'amour de loin, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (premiered in 2000), which I understand suffers from some of the same faults. For an idea, read a very nicely done review on this chap's blog.

Let's face it, Jaufré is no action hero. Which could explain why, despite the scores of renditions of the Rudel legend by some of literature's big hitters, he's still not all that well known.