A WALK TO PARADIS: Simon Jenner's Airs
to Another Planet
David Hackbridge Johnson
There are mixed messages emanating
from the poetic aether in relation to Simon Jenner's project to respond
poetically to composers, the first volume of which has just being brought out
by Waterloo Press. Airs to Another Planet, is a title that suggests first and foremost
Stefan George as filtered through the extraordinary musical mind of Arnold Schoenberg,
but here we have ‘airs’ and not ‘air’ suggesting that George’s ‘Ich fühle luft
von anderem planeten’ has spread to other spheres. The word on the grapevine, in this case monitored
by Andrew Duncan, is that there could be as many as a thousand poems about composers,
or is it thirty epics? And are they
going to be spread over twelve volumes or fourteen? Airs
is volume one and it concentrates on thirty women composers. I am a composer myself and pride myself on delving
into the obscure reaches of the repertoire, but I haven't come across fully one
half of the composers poeticized here. Thankfully some are entering the mainstream at
last: Bingen, Strozzi, Farrenc, Mayer, and Fanny Mendelssohn. The back cover blurb calls Jenner ‘a master of
audio ekphrastic poetry’, which means he might be listening to the music of
each composer as he writes. This reminds
me of a book by Robert Kelly out of Bard College, who very kindly sent me a PDF
of his The Haydn Project some years
ago. Kelly’s poetic gambit was to write
poems as the music of Haydn was playing. He admitted that this was a sort of anti-aversion
therapy since Haydn was by no means a favourite composer of his. Has he changed his mind? And has this wonderful book ever been
published? The latest bibliographies
don't mention it but then they end in 2020. Whilst Kelly's responses to Haydn are
wonderfully oblique, Jenner's method is to inhabit the composers via a series
of dramatic monologues. They work
because he has learned from Browning that inhabiting someone isn't the same as
being someone, so that there is always the strangeness of occupying a foreign
body. Carol Ann Duffy did this in The World's Wife which for this reader
remains her best book. Jenner certainly
achieves the subversion of the expected in his hologramatic invasions of the
long dead.
I won't go through every poem, neither
will I list all thirty composers. Hopefully
people will buy the book on the evidence of a few works quoted here. There is no better place to start than a
perfect lyric that plays on the idea of courtly love, but seen through the
female troubadour, Comtessa Beatriz de Diá.[1]
With courtly love it's all in the eyes –
Jenner begins with those portals to the heart, but here is a woman who won't
shy away from love – who wants to stare love in the face: ‘I don't cast eyes
down: my honours to love level / and that's my true marriage'. As with much love poetry of the 13th century,
the target of cupid's arrow is impossibly remote – Raimbualt d'Orange is not
the poet’s husband, a man she refuses to name. The love object is a moral forbidden. The idea of golden braids as an item of
clothing restraint is an erotic conceit that culminates in a fantasy of
physical love: ‘as you pull me down: / gentle my body to your lips when all
braid slips.' But in the last line the
impossibility of this love is clinched by the fact that Raimbualt is dead, and
that the erotic act is consummated with his ‘dust-whipped bones'. Starting with this poem is a way into the
collection via the troubadour translations made by Ezra Pound in the early
years of the 20th century. It is to
Jenner’s credit that this revival doesn't feel like a tired rehash of a
bread-and-butter opera put on to save a cash-strapped company – and given that
Pound didn't translate a female Provençale poet, no trobairitz felt his pen – we are made doubly grateful.
I won't learn about Elisabetta de Gambarini[2]
before reading Jenner’s poem about her, as this would spoil the fun. Judging by those who ‘saw me do it / in
Vauxhall', she would appear to have been somewhat saucy, if I take Vauxhall to
be short hand for the Pleasure Gardens. I am assuming that ‘two oboes' and ‘violins
divisi' are euphemisms. What we have
here is a woman defiant, even though it appears she has been subjected to the
18th century equivalent of the producers couch. By her envoi ‘I'm not Eurydice' we can be
assured that this lady of the stage does not need to be fetched from Hades,
despite the ‘Orphic leers' of Dr Thomas Arne.
I can't quite come to Jenner's poem inspired
by Errollyn Wallen's The Paradis Files
as a virgin, since I know the opera at least quite well. Presumably Jenner wrote his poem ‘Maria Theresia
von Paradis Walks Errollyn Wallen’,[3]
whilst seated at the back of the stalls during one of the opera’s touring
productions. ‘Walks’ might be ‘walking
bass’, a reference to the jazz-tinged elements in Wallen’s wonderfully eclectic
score. There are a few references to the
staging: ‘stark stage / door frames naked of walls', evokes the production’s picture
frames in all their gold-gilt splendour, yet they're bereft of paintings – these
are portals to and from the 18th century – like a re-tread of the science
fiction series Stargate SG-1 which I
am not ashamed to admit I was glued to in the late 1990s. Jenner becomes Paradis on stage in a production
about her own life: ‘I touch the frame, run my nails / along, then feel time
blow between.' Jenner also includes
reference to the stage piano used in the production which instead of keys has a
lightbox: ‘old Austrian / fortepianos wefting wrong in raw weather.' As with the opera, Jenner touches on the
blindness of the protagonist: ‘green’s a sun-beat on my / forehead.' And listen to how the poet evokes the idea of
blind Paradis feeling her way in her own production: ‘feel the wing’s wind
cross me, singers brushing / my stories with static, taking up position.' Here are lines that make palpable the idea of
compensatory sensual experiences. Wallen
keeps the famous men in Paradis's life out of the opera, apart from Salieri in
his now traditional role as stage baddy –
the bigger hitters might have grandstanded their way through it. Jenner wants to bring them in, so we get walk
on parts for Haydn and Mozart. Jenner
can't resist a passing comment on their lack of appearance in Wallen’s opera: ‘they've
not coupled me here: a scherzando / shiver and their world’s unwound.' I thought that Paradis was alleged to have had
an affair with Mozart – Jenner makes Haydn the love object, although Paradis
reveals that, ‘we never unstrung one another. / Oh – his words played me like
his Joke / Quartet.' It is clear that Wallen
locates the drama of Paradis elsewhere. Do
Jenner and Wallen know each other? In
order to complete the audio ekphrastic circle, a musical setting of Jenner’s
poem about Paradis is desired. Perhaps
this refolding of the story can be brought about to give yet another angle on a
fascinating if largely forgotten woman.
This review is about only three of
thirty composers contained in a volume alive with the pasts it plunders. The poet achieves a rare conjugation between
ancient and modern – voices sound both alien and strikingly up-to-date. We somehow sense the dust from powdered wigs,
the warbling of vocalise exercises from overburdened chests, the unending
sequence of bird-pecking sounds as the harpsichord plectrum agitates the
string, and the scratching of a nib on parchment that is the poet’s own 21st
century Baroque. In entering Jenner's
world of silk and braid, of romance and bawdy, of almost invisible women, we
are entering our own.
DHJ 5.vii.2026