By Warren Boroson
Violinists don’t suffer from this illness. Nor do piano
players. Or percussionists. Or conductors.
But at least one legendary flute
player, Jean-Marie Rampal (1922-2000), has succumbed. In fact, Rampal may be
the only musician in history who has
confessed that he has been a not-infrequent victim.
The horrible
malady: the Giggles.
Rampal,
who is credited with getting flute players accepted as free-lance soloists, was
a fun-loving Frenchman, a bon vivant.
In his autobiography,
“Music, My Life” (Random House, 1989),
Rampal writes of getting the Giggles in the middle of a few different concerts.
And for a flute-player, a case of the Giggles is no joke. When it strikes,
Rampel goes on, “there is nothing a flutist can do to produce a sound. A
violinist…convulsed with laughter can still bow; a hilarious harpist can still
pluck; but a giggling flutist? He has no breath, and his instrument is
useless.”
One instance of
several he gives: He and another flute-player, Maxence Larrieu, were recording
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
“We were the only
French musicians amid a throng of Germans…. For some reason, we started to
giggle during the first take. Everyone joined in. I suppose they thought these
two French flutists were quite hysterical. An hour later, no one was smiling.
With each fresh take, our laughing intensified until we were sobbing. The
Germans regarded us with steely glares….”
Another attack occurred during a live performance in Germany. He and another flute-player, Aurele Nicolet, were playing a Telemann Trio Sonata for Two Flutes and Continuo. They were performing a richly ornamented duet, played like a duel. At their first performance, everything went OK, “but at the next performance of the piece we collapsed as the ‘duel’ began. The laughter took over, and I began shaking so hard I couldn’t go on; I took out my handkerchief and pretended to succumb to an attack of coughing. Nicolet just managed to end his turn, but the tears were streaming down his face. No one guessed we were actually laughing.”
Another attack occurred during a live performance in Germany. He and another flute-player, Aurele Nicolet, were playing a Telemann Trio Sonata for Two Flutes and Continuo. They were performing a richly ornamented duet, played like a duel. At their first performance, everything went OK, “but at the next performance of the piece we collapsed as the ‘duel’ began. The laughter took over, and I began shaking so hard I couldn’t go on; I took out my handkerchief and pretended to succumb to an attack of coughing. Nicolet just managed to end his turn, but the tears were streaming down his face. No one guessed we were actually laughing.”
I don’t know why people get the
Giggles. It may have something to do with contrasting the solemnity of an
occasion with the its inherent silliness. Solemnly playing Mozart with a superb
chamber group…looking at a few other players…and thinking: “We’re such rascals!
Such cutups! Such clowns! What are we doing, being so damned serious?” And then
the Giggles proceed to cascade. How
silly of us all to be laughing like crazy now!
“I once got bad case of the Giggles,” a friend tells me.
“I was in a medical examiner’s office, and there, on his table, was a glass jar
with ... a decapitated head floating inside. It was so absurd! I started
laughing and could hardly stop—even though other people in the office began
staring at me. God knows why I was laughing!”
I’m not sure how
to cure the Giggles. Removing the patients from that particular environment may
be the best solution.
Rampal was,
despite his malady, a phenomenally successful flute-player. (A flute-player for
the New York Philharmonic, Paige Brook, told me that a “flautist” made the most
money, a “flutist” came next, and a “flute-player” hardly enough to live on.)
The book is easy
to read, and I enjoyed encountering people I knew—like Jan Meyerowitz, a music
professor at Brooklyn College--and people I just remembered fondly, like Bill
Watson, who ran an all-night classical-music program on WNCN.
Rampal was in awe
of everything Hollywood. At a party there, he met actress Anne Baxter and told
her the name of the one person he most wanted to meet. Can you guess? Groucho.
She arranged it.
Groucho proved to be perfectly charming.
And he told Rampal that Harpo had taken his harp playing seriously: “Did you
know he even went to Paris to study with Henriette Renie?”
Rampal never
played with another great flute player, James Galway, in public, and pooh-poohs
rumors that they didn’t get along. (Galway
is now 74.) In fact, he gave Galway a few lessons and encouraged him in his
career; Galway always expressed his gratitude. Incidentally, Rampal was the
original Man with the Golden Flute. He owned a few of them. (It occurs to me
that while famous tenors have sung with other famous tenors, and famous
sopranos with other famous sopranos, Horowitz never played with Rubinstein [in
public], Heifetz never played with Menuhin, and Harry James never played with
Louis Armstrong.)
While Rampal was
by and large a convivial, good-natured person, he could lose his temper. In
Florida once, he began performing just as the audience began noisily slurping
down dinner—it was a dinner-theater, “better suited to Hello, Dolly!” He and his colleague began laughing uncontrollably.
“Maybe it was the array of loud sports coats and white patent-leather shoes….
Had we really flown and driven a thousand miles to play Mozart for people
picking strawberry seeds out of their false teeth?”
His unfavorite
restaurant? The Russian Tea Room. He stopped by one night to tell people
waiting for him that he couldn’t dine with them. The maitre d’ insisted that he
first check his coat – despite his explanation!
He also doesn’t
pull many punches. When he visited Las Vegas, he decided to stay at the “grotesquely
overdone Caesar’s Palace. Why not? If you’re going to the cathedral of bad
taste, you might as well worship at the highest altar.”
“I love cities…,”
he writes. “The suburbs are for the birds.”
“…for every good
[conductor], you will find two bad.”
He led a full
life, and quoting what he called another French artist, said, “Je ne regette
rien.” (Edith Piaf.)
Incidentally, he confessed that he didn’t want
to play the flute longer than he should have. The French, naturally, have a
phrase for that: sucrent les fraises.
Putting sugar on the strawberries.
Good Quotes
+ “I can, and do, play Mozart and Scott Joplin on the same
program…but I recognize the genius of one and the geniality of the other.”
+“If I were stranded on the proverbial desert island and
could take only one piece of music with me, I think it would be Don Giovanni.”
+ On Mozart’s dislike of the flute: “Because Mozart is a god
to me and because I am a flutist, I find it impossible to believe in a god who
didn’t like the flute.”
Jean-Marie in Concert
Four seasons (Spring) by Vivaldi
From Magic Flute with Alain Marion (two golden flutes)
Bach’s Brandenburg No. 4
Lo, the Gentle Lark (with Miss Piggy)
Beethoven, Romance
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