''Isle Of The Dead''
It was one of those misty, windy, moonlit November night in the sea side small French town!We were invited to a piano recital by our 9 year old son Mattis-Joti's piano teacher's husband, the Armenian old is gold Gabrell at the Music Conservatory Mattis attends!
Gabrell was playing Rachmaninoff!Though Gabrell didn't play 'Isle Of The Dead', on the way back walking, my head was still filled with it!It must had to do with Gabrells playing intensely well one after another joyful Rachmaninoff coupled with the effect of last few months one after another outrageous news coming out of my home country Bangladesh: the burning of Buddhist temple; the burning of slums and more than 100 garments workers burnt to death in Dhaka!I was thinking what made Rachmaninoff to compose his 'Isle Of The Dead' symphonic poem!Did he at all go through the pain as the painter of the same title went through?
It was one of those misty, windy, moonlit November night in the sea side small French town!We were invited to a piano recital by our 9 year old son Mattis-Joti's piano teacher's husband, the Armenian old is gold Gabrell at the Music Conservatory Mattis attends!
Gabrell was playing Rachmaninoff!Though Gabrell didn't play 'Isle Of The Dead', on the way back walking, my head was still filled with it!It must had to do with Gabrells playing intensely well one after another joyful Rachmaninoff coupled with the effect of last few months one after another outrageous news coming out of my home country Bangladesh: the burning of Buddhist temple; the burning of slums and more than 100 garments workers burnt to death in Dhaka!I was thinking what made Rachmaninoff to compose his 'Isle Of The Dead' symphonic poem!Did he at all go through the pain as the painter of the same title went through?
He must have felt affinity to the spellbind-stillness of the Bocklin painting, 'Isle of the dead''; moved to the point where he needed to stir the stillness and see the limit for himself!
Russian aristocrat of Tartar descendant Rachmaninoff had the opportunity to learn from the old master Tchaikovsky in his early youth!Tchaikovsky asked the young disciple once to write a section for the master when the later was still in his teenage years!Rachmaninoff endured thousand mile open sledge ride to run away from the post revolutionary Russia.After a short stay in Scandinavian countries he settled in America.Though giving hundreds of concert there he hardly composed anymore in exile as if he left his firebrand-soul in Russia!But again going back there could have been the riskiest bet!
Rachmaninoff was inspired by the best known painting of Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin's (1827–1901) Isle of the Dead, which he saw in Paris in 1907. He concluded the composition while staying in Dresden in 1908. It is considered a classic example of Russian late-Romanticism of the beginning of the 20th century.
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Prints of the work were very popular in central Europe in the early 20th century!''Lolita'' writer Vladimir Nabokov observed that they were to be "found in every Berlin home." Freud and Lenin both had prints of it in their offices!
Bocklin painted 3 versions of 'Isle of the dead''!All versions depict a desolate and rocky islet seen across an expanse of dark water. A small rowboat is just arriving at a water gate and seawall on shore.An oarsman manoeuvres the boat from the stern. In the bow, facing the gate, is a standing figure clad entirely in white. Just behind the figure is a white, festooned object commonly interpreted as a coffin. The tiny islet is dominated by a dense grove of tall, dark cypress trees.
Böcklin himself provided no public explanation as to the meaning of the painting, though he did describe it as “a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door.”
For me the disastrous news from Bangladesh were neither dream nor nightmare!Naked reality as much as the events in Syria, Gaza, Haiti and elsewhere!Though Bocklin didn't explain his painting, in his real life he lost 8 kids out of 14!He knew too well the stillness of a child's body and the cemetery that he had to go after the death of each child!Sometime if one is not big time ''awed by a knock on the door'' one might loose ones last bit relationship with sensitivity and sensibility!
Choyon K.H
30/11/12
Brittany/France
