A MUSICAL EVENING WITH MARCEL PROUST

              That fabulous night-owl Marcel Proust, who slept by day and worked by night, was sufficiently wealthy to insist that those around him stick to the same schedule. He could even, when he needed to hear a piece of music to remind him on a fragment of time past, hire a string quartet to play it in his salon, never mind that the rest of Paris was fast asleep.

             One such soiree inspired Alan Bennett to write the TV play 102 Boulevard Haussmann, named for the address of Proust’s rambling apartment (now the headquarters of a bank.) In the play, the viola player comments on the cork with which Proust lined the walls to keep out street noise. (He also paid the servants of his upstairs neighbours to wear slippers around the house.) “It’s perfect for music,”  says the musician. “We’ve never sounded so good.” To which the first violinist responds sourly “Not at 1 in the morning.”

              Music at home was a commonplace in Proust’s time. Every parlour had a piano, and girls in particular were expected to learn how to play, and also to sing. Vast amounts of music were written for home performance, the best of it what became known as “art songs”, usually settings of poetry. I never heard such songs by Schubert, Mahler and Strauss in the concert hall  without wondering how they would sound as they were meant to, sung at a musical evening of the kind that Proust could conjure up.

            Does anyone any longer perform music at home? Taylor Swift and Celine Dion wouldn’t sing a note for any crowd of less than 10,000, nor does their material, more like anthems than songs, suit an intimate audience. Few modern instruments can exist without an amplifier, and the name of the smallest musical unit, the “garage band”,  implies its preferred performing place, well away from the living room. Nobody, it seems, can any longer perform except at the point where it becomes physically painful to listen.

              A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend of Russian extraction who shares my love of opera. He was passing through Paris en route to a musical event in Vienna, the celebration of a famous soprano. He too admired art songs – chansons – in particular those written by an obscure French-Argentinia composer…

            “Reynaldo Hahn!” we said in unison.

            That two people from opposite ends of the earth should bond over such an obscure talent was further proof that, culturally, all roads lead to Paris. Hahn had even known Proust - been his first love – and his songs are filled with the elegant melancholy of Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the realization that “houses, trees and avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”

              In proof of which, I offer the following.