question is whether we will have a decent summer this year, having endured four horrendous months of bad weather from January to April.
An image that always comes into mind at this time of year is the time we spent in Bayreuth, Germany, where the great composer Richard Wagner lived for many years.
His enormous house, now a museum, was called Wahnfried and I remember so vividly us going to see it one afternoon in early summer. The sun was blazing down outside and there was a veritable ‘snowfall’ of jinny joes (the Irish name for airborne dandelion and other plant seeds) into the garden
outside. We sat in the cool of one of the downstairs rooms at the house, listening to recordings of the great Norwegian singer, Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962), arguably the greatest Wagnerian soprano of all time. It was an hour or so when one really caught one’s breath, as we listened to this sublime voice, looking out on all the greenery of the garden and the jinny joes floating down.
I’m also thinking of the summer days spent at Cassis in the south of France, a mere 20km east of Marseille, but an idyllic seaside town. It’s on a great harbour, filled with boats; Cassis is renowned for its cliffs and for the Calanques, the sheltered inlets that now form a national park in their own right. Close to Cassis is Cap Canaille, with some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe.
From the 15th century right up to 1789, Cassis was the property of the Bishops of Marseille, who ran the place as their own fiefdom. Up to the 1930s,Cassis had many industries, including stone quarrying and clothing. Stone quarried at Cassis was used to build the quays in many great
Mediterranean ports, including Alexandria, Algiers, Marseille, Piraeus and Port Said; Cassis stone also forms the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York. But when all the traditional industries in Cassis went into terminal decline in the 1930s, the town turned to wine making and tourism.
Cassis became one of the first three wine growing areas in France to benefit from the appellation d’origine controlée system introduced in 1936 and today, it’s one of the main wine producing areas of the Cote d’Azur, renowned for its whites and rosés. It’s not to be confused with creme de Cassis from Burgundy, made with blackcurrants.
As for the town itself, it’s a lovely mixture of quaysides and squares with fountains, all drenched in sunshine. Often, people will play petanque, a version of boules, that in its present form originated in nearby La Ciotat in 1907. Cassis has also attracted many painters over the years, including Vlaminck and Dufy. It’s no wonder that the Nobel prize winning author Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) said that if you’ve seen Paris and you haven’t seen Cassis, you’ve seen nothing.
As for the nearby town of La Ciotat, this is where the Lumiere brothers made their famous 50 second film in 1895 showing a train steaming into the station here. When the film was shown in Paris on December 28th that year, the world’s first commercial film show, it’s said that many in the audience were terrified by the moving picture of the train coming towards them. The Lumiere brothers had their summer residence in La Ciotat and it was here that they developed the world’s first colour photographic system, in 1904.
Beyond La Ciotat is Bandol, also famous for its wines, especially rosé. The bay here is very peaceful; just a seven minute boat ride from Bandol is the island of Bendor, owned by the Ricard family, who built a strange looking village here in the 1950s. I remember that the trip to Bendor was fascinating, but it was a boiling hot summer’s day and I’d neglected to put on any suncream, so that by the time we got back that night to our hotel in Cassis, I resembled nothing so much as a baked lobster! A very painful experience indeed.
At the other end of the Cote d’Azur, in Roquebrune Cap Martin to be precise, there’s an intriguing tale unravelling about Eileen Gray, the Irish born designer and architect, who lived for many years in France. Gray, who had been born near Enniscorthy in south-east Ireland, trained at the Slade in London but after she made her first trip to Paris in 1900,with her mother, to see the Exposition Universelle, she was hooked on France. Gray designed lots of furniture and her Bibendum chair is one of the most distinctive pieces of 20th century furniture design. Four years ago, an armchair made by her just after World War I sold at auction in Paris for an astonishing €21.9 million.
Gray also designed a unique modernist villa at Roquebrune-sur-Mer, called E1027. In recent years it has been badly neglected but for the past few years, restoration has been underway. A big fundraising effort is under way to complete the restoration and open the villa to the public before the end of this year. A film is to be made of the restoration project, with the title “Gray Matters”.
Another film is underway, an Irish-Belgian co-production, about the life of Eileen Gray called The Price of Desire. Winona Ryder is to play Eileen Gray and the details of the film, which is being
directed by Mary McGuckian, are due to be released at the Cannes film festival later in May.
As for Gray herself, she spent the last years of her life in an apartment in the rue Bonaparte in the 6th arrondissement in Paris, where she died in 1976 at the grand old age of 98. For many years, this
great modernist designer and architect was unjustly kept in the shadows, but hopefully now, with the new film, her outstanding genius will be fully recognised. Certainly in her personal life, she was a rather strange woman, avowedly bisexual, happy to have affairs with men, but more devoted to
making love with other women.
And as for the Cannes film festival, that great annual extravaganza, it’s almost a year since the new film
about Renoir was released, directed by Gilles Bourdos. It had its first showing at Cannes 2012, but it isn’t being released here in Ireland until the end of this June. The film depicts the final years of the great painter, when he was living at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France, during World War I. It was released some time ago in the US and most of the American reviews I’ve read of it have been unstinting in their praise, so let’s hope that when it finally arrives in Ireland, it’ll live up to the hype!
But back in France, all kinds of interesting things are happening. Three beehives have been
put on the roof of the national assembly in the 7th, painted in the colours of the French tricolore. They will contain 60,000 bees, a welcome green environmental gesture at a time when the world’s bee population is under such threat. The beehives on the roof of the national assembly are being managed by a firm called Le Rouge Apiculture, which dates back to 1878. For many years, it has
managed a similar beehive on the roof of the French Senate, which is on the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens.
Talking about nature, Brigitte Bardot has been in the news again. At the end of March, her favourite cat, two year old Rontonton, went missing, frightened by the noise of pruning on the Bardot estate at St Tropez. Lots of people, more than 200, phoned in to offer help look for the cat and its disappearance made much national media coverage in France. Eventually and just recently, the cat was found, in good health, by the concierge of a nearby villa. The concierge received the finder’s reward of €600.
But back in Paris, another piece of French heritage is being offloaded. The Elysée Palace has an incredible wine cellar of 12,000 splendid wines, all French naturally, but in a gesture towards the austerity measures now being enforced in France, 1,200 of the bottles are being auctioned
off at Drouot at the end of May. They are expected to raise about €250,000.
Mind you, even in the present French government, many dissenting voices are now being heard against the wisdom of the austerity drive and attacking the German demands for austerity which have had a dramatically adverse impact in many parts of Europe. In return for all the French remarks against German austerity, some German politicians are now saying that France could turn out to be the problem child of Europe.
When it comes to French history, an outstanding book has just been launched, Eleven Days in August, the Liberation of Paris in 1944 by Matthew Cobb, who teaches at the University of
Manchester. It looks a fascinating read and many of the photographs are even more impressive, including the ones of the biggest demonstration ever held in Paris, when a million people turned out on the Champs-Elysée to celebrate the end of German occupation. There should be equally big demonstrations to celebrate when the German austerity regime ends.
Elsewhere in Europe, the news is equally interesting. In Italy, the new government is going to
ditch the very unpopular property tax. Naturally, there’s no sign of this happening in Ireland, where the political situation verges on the ridiculous. When the Indian woman Savita Halappanavar died in hospital in Galway at the end of last October, a very tragic and unnecessary death, it sparked off a
whole chain of events. The recent inquest revealed all kinds of shortcomings at the hospital. Ireland became portrayed internationally as a country where a throwback to a medieval style barbarism could still exist in the early 21st century. The government is now to introduce limited abortion legislation, but this threatens to fracture the coalition government, perhaps even ensure its demise. The general discussion about abortion has overwhelmed public debate.
No matter that the economy is still in recession, that nearly half a million people are out of work and that countless thousands of young people and families are being forced to emigrate, none of
this matters when it comes to all the energy and passion being put into the great abortion debate. If similar effort were put into solving all the other grave matters afflicting the country, Ireland would be a grand place altogether.
At least, the new king in the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, was crowned peacefully, which was a little amazing, because when his mother, Beatrix, became queen in 1980, there was widescale rioting and disorder. It just shows-time moves on and times change, but not it seems in Ireland, where old antagonisms live on as forceful today as they ever were.