For the Shadows of Children - Music in Tous Les Matins Du Monde

Tous les Matins du Monde by Pascal Quignard, Alain Corneau. 

Music by Sainte Colombe and Marin Marais (played/arranged by Jordi Savall et al)

This film is a vehicle for its astonishingly beautiful, funereal music. The story fictionalises the life of the 17^th Century French musician and composer, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe and it is told through the memories of his student;  17th/18^th Century Composer Marin Marais (played by Gerard Depardieu and also, as a younger man, by Depardieu’s son). 

Death, loss and heartbreak are at the core of this sad film; the music reflects this.

The film begins with Marais announcing to his students “All notes must finish like dying”. The composer is old, corpulent and seems unable to play the viola properly anymore. Irritated by the sound of his students as they clumsily practise he is roused to make the claim that, in comparison with his dead mentor,  Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, he is ‘worthless’.  Marais then tells the story of de Sainte-Colombe.

Sainte Colombe’s life is devoted to playing the viola, taking care of his two daughters and repudiating all contact with the outside world. Dramatically, he refuses in outrage the king’s invitation to come to the palace and play as a court musician.

The death of Sainte Colombe’s wife is the single, most defining fact in his life. He mourns her constantly. His devotion to music is set in motion by her passing. He loved and loves her, living almost completely in her wake. Although he breathes and moves his life effectively ended the day she died.

Soon, his dead wife starts to appear to him. When he sees her first in his music room he has the place where she stood painted as a still life by his friend, Baugin.

As years pass Sainte Colombe’s wife appears to him constantly. He knows and he doesn’t know that she’s not real.

He tells her “It hurts that I can’t touch you.”

She replies: “There is nothing to touch but wind”.

The overwhelming force of an absent lover has torn him out of this world.

So with a teacher as morose as Saite Colombe you can see that Marais hasn’t licked his sense of fun off the stones. Marais, as a young man, arrives to seek a musical apprenticeship with Saint Colombe. The latter accepts him not for his skills, rather for his ‘grief’ (Marais had been kicked out of a previous singing apprenticeship when his voice broke).

So, a match made in misery, right from the get go!

Sainte Colombe is effectively a recluse whose world comprises his dead wife, his music and his 2 daughters. He places enormous demands on Marais to make the same renunciation for the sake of music.

The relationship between master and protégé breaks down on this point. Marais accepts the very poisoned chalice that his teacher had refused; he becomes a court musician and as a result he soon becomes persona non grata at the Sainte Colombe household.

Although he had begun a passionate relationship with Sainte Colombe’s daughter, in time Marais’ life as a court musician takes over and he leaves her, breaking her heart and only returning to visit her briefly on the death bed his rejection had prepared her for.

She hangs herself in grief after he rejects her.

No surprises then when Marais meets Sainte Colombe again after this dreadful event their conversation is

Saint Colombe: “So what do you seek in music, sir?”

Marais: “I seek sorrows and tears”

My first reaction was that this film is ponderous and turgid. That it takes itself a little too seriously and therefore succeeds in ignoring the paradoxical absurdities, ironies and downright comedies of its central themes – death and sorrow.

But then I thought, maybe I just don’t understand the 17^th – early 18^th Century imagination and worldview.

This film is set, after all, right in the middle of the “Little Ice Age” ; a meteorological period lasting from the 14^th until the 19^th Centuries characterised by much colder winters and shorter summers than we see today. With the attendant poor harvests and increased pressure on agricultural economies to say nothing of the impacts on physical and psychological health it can’t have been a particularly fun time to be alive in Northern Europe.

Even setting weather aside, life expectancy can’t have been high when any passing infection could take you off, so death and suffering must have been everyday intimates in a way that is hard for me to imagine.

What was I expecting in an historical film about death and suffering – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life?

For Sainte Colombe, music is not something that can actually be named. Neither is it something that can name: “Music exists to say things that words cannot say, which is why it is not entirely human”

Marais says he has found that music is for God. His teacher answers: “You’re wrong, for God speaks”. 

If music is anything at all, it is metaphoricity, which is to say it is elusivity – it cannot be named, it cannot name, it cannot be appropriated or appropriate. It is that which perpetually avoids being anything because it is itself naming and un-naming, appropriating and liberating.  

This non-state allows the musician and the listener to experience the non-existing spaces between life and death, between presence and absence. In a world where loved ones such as Sainte Colombe’s wife can be brutally, suddenly taken by illness at any time, this property of music is important. Sainte Colombe loves and is utterly torn out of the world by the absence of his wife. Music allows him to experience a reality that straddles the impossible space between life and death, it allows him to be with the woman he loves. Music becomes so important because he cannot be with her and he cannot exist without her.

What they settle on as a definition of music rests on its metaphorical and elusive properties. They describe it as a gift, a libation, a sacrifice to the dead: “A refreshment for those who have run out words. For the shadows of children”.