EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Marin Marais and Gerard Depardieu
DESTINY WOULD NOT, at first, have appeared to have favoured him. Marin Marais, the 17th-century master of the viola da gamba and composer of more than 700 works including instrumental pieces and operas, remains overshadowed by more familiar figures of the French baroque such as Charpentier, Rameau, Couperin and Lully, although, in time, this son of a shoemaker would serve as court composer at the Versailles of the Sun King, Louis XVI.
Marais was born in 1656, exactly 100 years before Mozart. Blessed with a beautiful singing voice, he was recruited for the king’s choir when he was only six years old. His gift earned him the surplice and red robe of a chorister; it also assured him of good food and a fine education, which included learning to read music and play the viol. But alas, this life ended when, at 16, his voice broke and he was banished.
Hurt, angry and determined, Marais already possessed the single-mindedness of an artist. Reluctant to resume life at his father’s modest dwelling, he sought out the increasingly enigmatic, near-reclusive viol player and teacher, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. By this time (1673), Sainte-Colombe, a grieving widower, had withdrawn even from his two daughters and spent his days in a wooden cabin, playing music and awaiting chance visitations from his dead wife.
While little is known about Marais, even less is known about Sainte-Colombe – yet Marais did approach the older man for lessons. Sainte-Colombe agreed because he pitied the younger man’s pain at losing his singing voice, but Marais soon proved too skilled for his teacher, who promptly dismissed him. The young man is believed to have returned secretly at night to hide beneath the cabin and listen to his former teacher play.
It is a good story, and particularly interesting as both of these musicians loved music above all else. Flash forward more than three centuries to the publication, in 1991, of Pascal Quignard’s elegant novella Tous les Matins du Monde, which quickly inspired film-maker Alain Corneau’s 1993 cinema adaptation, filled with beautiful interior shots dominated by the melancholic austerity of Jean-Pierre Marielle’s Sainte-Colombe.
The young Marais – blonde and relentlessly alluring – is played by Guillaume Depardieu. He exploits his teacher’s daughter’s musical assistance, seduces her and then departs, announcing he is weary of her. Years pass and he is transformed into the bulky shape of his famous actor father Gérard, quite a spectacle in 17th-century court dress, his meaty paw dwarfing the instrument he is, of course, not playing.
Anne Brochet is magnificent as the ruined elder daughter, Madeleine. Depardieu senior provides a breathy, high-speed voiceover. It is sad to think that Guillaume was to die in 2008, aged 37, post-pneumonia. Gossips still titter about Depardieu’s resourceful – if not quite successful – improvised bottle-as-toilet on an aircraft last year.
Undaunted, he features in Le Grand Soir, which will be screened during the Cannes Film Festival opening next week.