The French have an interesting terminology for objects whose presence in the world an abundance of paperwork has inexplicably failed to account for. ‘Ça n’existe pas’, they say. ‘It doesn’t exist’. This phrase comes in handy when, for example, the price of an object in a shop window cannot be ascertained because it is mysteriously absent from the stock list. Although you may be holding the object in question under the nose of the shop attendant, in the Platonic sense ‘ça n’existe pas’ (Adam Gopnik writes about this too in Paris to the Moon).

We had the disconcerting experience the other day of discovering that the building in which we live had also unexpectedly ceased to exist. We were in the process of changing our phone provider from France Telecom to SFR, which offers an all-in-one phone and internet deal. One afternoon, when we were still awaiting the arrival of the magic box which makes it all function, our phone suddenly went dead. When it was still lifeless the next morning, we wandered down to our nearest SFR shop. ‘Plug in your Neufbox!’, the young man behind the desk suggested helpfully. When we pointed out that we had not yet received our Neufbox, he rang whoever it is that these people ring, then turned to us and said, ‘La Poste tried to deliver your Neufbox to you yesterday, mais l’adresse n’existait pas’. ‘Well, the address does exist, because we live there’, we pointed out. ‘It’s a perfectly normal street address. La Poste delivers to us there every day. In fact, yesterday morning we even received a letter from SFR’. Our protestations failed to change the fact that at some point on the previous day, when an unsuspecting postal official, Neufbox in hand, had attempted to locate 5 rue Manuel, the building had perversely winked out of existence.

‘So where is our Neufbox now?’, we asked. It, apparently, was suffering an existential crisis too, and would take a week to rematerialise. No, we couldn’t go and fetch it from anywhere in the meantime because it was somewhere in the ether, ‘in transit’. And yes, this meant that we would have no phone line for a week. ‘Nothing I can do – rien à faire’, the increasingly harassed-looking young man asserted – another of those useful French stock phrases. I tried one myself. ‘Mais c’est insupportable…’ but to no avail. There’s no arguing with existentialists.

SFR refused to resend our Neufbox to our non-existent address, so eventually we found ourselves traipsing up to the back blocks of the 18^th arrondissement to retrieve the thing from a collection point. This turned out to be one of the strangest businesses I’ve ever seen – a tiny shop selling one rack of second-hand clothes, one rack of surfie gear and one rack of men’s underpants, with a large pile of Neufboxes sitting in the middle of the floor, presumably waiting to be called into existence somewhere.

Anyway, we got ours home and it worked perfectly, though it does rather like waking up occasionally in the middle of the night and making interesting patterns with its little coloured lights. Perhaps it’s just checking the nature of reality.

In other news, we had a very peaceful and happy Christmas – thanks in part to the Neufbox, which allowed us to have a whole family present-opening session via Skype. In the afternoon, we went down to the river and walked from the Invalides around to past the Tour Eiffel. The sun was getting low and there were black clouds hovering, but the light of that late-evening sun on the clouds was glorious – the golden statues on the Pont Alexandre III and the domes of the Grand and Petit Palais glowing against the dark sky, and light streaming along the river in front of the Tower. Just for fun, we took a slightly long way home via our two favourite Métro – the Ligne 6 from Passy, where you get to go over the beautiful Pont Bir-Hakeim, a double-decker bridge built in 1905, with beautiful wrought-iron in real art nouveau design, and the Ligne 5 up from Place d’Italie, on which you go right across the Gare d’Austerlitz on an elevated line – through an archway built high up the walls. On both these lines it feels like our childhood train sets have come to life! So there’s a Christmas Day outing – taking trains through the roof of the Gare d’Austerlitz…

Today it was beautifully fine, the first really sunny day for over a week, so just for fun we went to Versailles and had a gorgeous walk in the grounds of the Chateau. The sunlight on the frozen canals and bassins was very beautiful.

…a well-travelled year

Down the rue des Martyrs on Christmas Eve, there are long lines stretching from the doors of all the shops – the bakeries and patisseries, the cheese shops, the florists, the butchers and the fishmongers. In the last of these a woman was ordering  ‘a specially nice piece of cod for my cat, for his réveillon de Noël (Christmas morning)’.

Our friend Rachel reports that St Pancras station was chaos yesterday morning,  grumpy-looking people queuing all the way down to the British Library to try to make it onto a Eurostar. At the other end of the line, passengers arriving early and queuing at the Gare du  Nord were being offered mulled wine, coffee and madeleines.

We have pain d’épices and a very nice Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge, and so, on this veille de Noël, are retiring for bed contented.

Two evenings in a row I walked down to the Tuileries when I had finished at the library. The first was the evening before the snow fell, when it was sunny and beautiful. The next day it looked entirely different.

This is really three posts in one, so keep reading…

We spent the weekend with friends in the Touraine (Loire), taking the TGV down there on Friday and returning yesterday morning. The countryside from Paris to Tours was snow-covered and lovely. The snow changes everything – the light and the shapes and the patterns of the landscape. Some shapes become more finely-etched, some fade and blur into one another. As we travelled south it began to snow again, quite heavily, and the sloping white fields melded into the white clouds and the white snow.

We were met at the station and taken on a (slow, cautious) detour to fetch the wine for the Christmas party our friends were holding the next night. The village was too small for snow-ploughs and gritters to visit, so the streets were snowed in. It was ridiculously Christmas-card like. In small French villages, buying a few cases of wine is not a quick transaction, especially when buyer and seller have been doing business for years. This involved a good long chat, leaning around the machinery in the bottling shed and talking about the crise financière and its effect Belgian drinking habits (this winery exports a lot there).  The deal was concluded over an apéro of very beautiful cuvée, for which we removed to their wine bar, in a low-roofed stone cellar. It was 11:30am. This is how things work in the Touraine.

Later that afternoon we went out to collect holly, crunching through the snowy woods with Kali the black labrador prancing happily along beside us. It was rather odd to find myself suddenly in the English children’s stories of my childhood – especially since I never did believe that even English children could possibly live like the children of Cherry Tree Farm. But there we were, collecting holly in the woods in the week before Christmas. How odd.

So we had a rather glorious weekend. We made lots of music, sung many carols, read, ate, drank very nice wine, talked and worked a little, and took long walks through the snow, by the river Indre and through the woods and fields. The view from the top of the hill of the big, frozen landscape, the crack of ice underfoot beneath the snow, the sparkle on the snow when the sun came out and the sky briefly turned blue, Kali with her muzzle covered in snow, dragging a big icy stick for us to throw – all these are unforgettable.

On Sunday it rained all day, steady, freezing rain, and the snow disappeared and the garden turned green again. And that was lovely too.

Incidentally, the ‘belles journées de gelée qui font les forêts si féerique’ is a line from a letter Ravel sent to his cousin in 1906 – a lovely example of his natural sense of alliteration and poetic rhythm!

I have been in Paris during all four seasons now, but last week was the first time I had seen the city under snow. And it was beautiful! A few days before it snowed the temperature plummeted. In the Place Félix Eboué down in the 12th arrondissement the fountain froze over. The four big stone lions had shaggy manes of icicles and a necklace of ice hung from the upper basin. Then on Thursday the snow started, falling and lying briefly even in our little courtyard. The branches of the Christmas trees in the streets and outside the restaurants drooped with real snow, and the city suddenly looked like a Monet painting. The Palais Royal was quiet and dark, and all the sparrows crowded together into one bare tree. We kept the door into the courtyard partly open at night, until the overnight temperature dropped to -4. That night when I dozed for a while with one arm outside the covers, and woke from a dream in which it was being pierced with a hundred tiny needles. After that we shut the door.

The Christmas windows in the grands magasins are alight, and the space in front of them is packed. The children stand on a little platform at the front and admire the dancing rabbits, bears, gingerbread people et al. and the adults cluster behind them and admire their outfits. You see, the Christmas windows are sponsored by the big label fashion designers, who get to dress the participants. So we have rag-dolls in Chanel, rabbits in Lacroix and gingerbread people wearing Yves Saint Laurent (now that’s something we never tried for our Christmas tree…). A mother explains the teddybears riding a big ice-creature to her ten year-old: ‘See the chemises marinieres they’re wearing? That’s so Jean-Paul Gaulthier!’

So Paris at Christmas is… stylish.

The shop-awnings along our rue des Martyrs are hung with greenery – no plastic trees here, but big branches of real ones, adorned with richly coloured  baubles or sprayed with ’snow’. They look beautiful, and nobody seems to mind the pine-needles on the footpaths and the floors.

Whilst I have recently come to realise that I am rather enjoying living in England now, on Tuesday, wandering around Paris, my senses came alive in a way they never do in London. Perhaps because the ordinary business of living takes more effort here — because of the language — I seem to notice and feel things more intensely; I use all my senses all the time, in a much more alert and concentrated way. This city makes me feel alive and engaged and very present and real. It is always a gift.

Here is Roy giving a talk on his book to a packed-out Shakespeare and Company on Monday evening. It was very good fun.

Following two glowing reviews for our Fauré CD (in International Record Review and International Piano) ­– both extended, very detailed pieces, by distinguished reviewers – the review in this month’s Gramophone, although we expected it, brought us down to earth with a thump.

I’m not going to go into details here, except to say that the review and the reviewer demonstrably fail to meet the standards of critical reviewing for an international publication (names confused, dogmatism, subjectivity far beyond any reviewer’s mandate, utter failure to identify the salient features and clearly expressed purpose of the recording; plus the abjuration of proper editorial procedure in the publication of the review). What I’m interested in is a broader issue, one that Roy has been contending with for years. The main message of the Gramphone review was that the CD is ‘dull’. This opinion was formed not so much on the merits of the CD itself, but on Roy’s reputation as an eminent scholar. The publication of the review implies that this premise was unquestioningly accepted by the magazine’s editors.

For some reason it is acceptable (actually, pretty well essential) for a specialist in early music, for example, to be both a scholar and a performer, but for a pianist the title of ‘scholar’ is a damaging one. Pianists should be young, pretty and compliant (and, preferably, Russian).  There is quite a large issue here, concerning the perception of musical scholarship in the music industry, particularly the bits of it made up by those who are neither performers nor scholars (those that can’t do… review for magazines like Gramophone).

Being a scholar means comparing manuscripts and early editions and discovering errors that have lain uncorrected for a century. Being a scholar means gathering the testimony of performers who worked with composers, historic recordings, letters and articles written by the composers themselves, to put together an image of how the composers thought about their own music and wanted it played. Being a scholar means doing things like playing all of Debussy’s piano music to Debussy’s step-daughter, and listening to her talk about how her step-father played his own music. Being a scholar means having piano lessons with teachers who worked, studied and performed with the composers. Being a scholar means letting all of these sources and experiences feed into one’s own performance, so that the music is clarified, strengthened, enlivened, refreshed.

In Roy’s Fauré CD the rhythms are sharper, the contours clearer, the tempi more dancing, the dynamics sharper-etched, the drama more acute, than in any other recording of this music I’ve heard. Anybody who calls it dull either hasn’t been listening or has a hidden agendum. In this case, Gramophone prefers the word of a scholarly incompetent who doesn’t perform (that is, the reviewer, whose previous offerings include identifying Joyce Hatto as his ‘desert island pianist’ of choice) to a reputable scholar who does. The sad irony of this is that the album was designed specifically to bring to life music that’s often considered ‘dull’ in any case, by performers and audiences alike. If this review turns listeners away, it’s Fauré’s music that suffers most.

Two related examples are worth mentioning here.

First, I am reminded of my entry into the UK last September, when I admitted to the immigration officer that I might like, from time to time, to spend a day in the British Library. ‘Research! You’re not here to do research’, she hissed, ‘You’re here for an extended period of cultural enrichment!’

The non sequitur did not seem to bother her greatly.

Second (prompted by recent happenings in Australian politics): I find it extraordinary that large parts of the population, including senior political figures, have so little respect for scholars and scholarship that they will assert that hundreds of distinguished scientists are engaged in bad science, or – what was it, Nick Minchin? –  a conspiracy by ‘the extreme left’ to ‘de-industrialise the Western world’. (Yes, that is verbatim.)

I love being, and am proud to be, a scholar. I learn new stuff every day. I write about and perform what I learn so that other people can learn about it too. These are good things to do, and nobody’s ever going to tell me otherwise.

Ps: that CD is Belle Époque: A Portrait of Gabriel Fauré. It’s available through ABC Classics

We console ourselves with the knowledge that our composers had to deal with the same sort of scurrilous critiques. Here’s Ravel writing to the editor of Le temps in March 1907:

Sir,

I have received an article published in Le temps on March 19, in which my name appears very often. M. Pierre Lalo, with his consumate skill which is well known, attempts once again to prove that I have no personality. That is all very well and good…

After a moment’s pause he said, ‘Though I came only yesterday, I have  equipped myself properly for Bath already, you see,’ (pointing to a new umbrella) ‘I wish you would make use of it, if you are determined to walk…’

On the BBC website today, I watched the State Opening of Parliament, which took place on Wednesday. It is possibly the weirdest thing I have ever seen, certainly the weirdest thing involving large groups of people in silly costumes. Take note, Yeoman of the Guard: I don’t believe that Henry VII giving you your charter is a legitimate reason to continue wearing the costumes he presumably handed out at the same time. There were also far too many man in bright red tights. And the Ceremonial Changing of the Cushion*? Honestly.

On an entirely different subject, I have had a revelation about brussels sprouts. I was congratulating myself on having developed a way to prepare them in which they don’t taste awful. Then I realised that this was not sufficient. A vegetable that is merely palatable after careful (and not unskilled) preparation has not justified its continued existence in my kitchen.

*The Cushion upon which the Crown sits when it arrives (in its personal state coach) is not the Cushion upon which it is carried into some Gallery or other. Perhaps the Travelling Cushion gets dirty.