François Couperin's piece for harpsichord, "Les Barricades Mistérieuses" or "Les Barricades Mystérieuses" ("The Mysterious Barricades"), has caught the imagination of many artists, writers and musicians. These pages are devoted to charting the works it has inspired.

 

The pages are still under construction and I have a number of entries to add. But if you know of any references to the piece in novels, poems, paintings, or other pieces of music, I would be grateful to be informed about them. You can contact me at the following email address: sevnine AT miami DOT edu.

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Poetry

In 1937, the French Surrealist poet Maurice Blanchard (1890-1960) published a very short book of prose poems called Les Barricades Mystérieuses (Paris, GLM). Here is a translation of the entire work, as far as I know, the first in English. (Thanks to Marc Brudzinski for help; all inadequacies are entirely mine.) The poem starts with a reference to a mysterious barricade - bones blocking the road. The references to a battle in the first part of the poem suggest these bones are the corpses of fallen soldiers. In the third paragraph, the word "barrière" (both semantically and phonetically close to "barricades") occurs five times.  

THE MYSTERIOUS BARRICADES   Bones were blocking the road. Too bad! I said to myself, since the one buried alive will sprout, too bad for the bones! I twisted my feet a bit, I swore by the sacred names of gods but I made a good crossing all the same. Here’s to a good crossing! Here’s to the immense sea of existence! Here’s to the extra-long blast of a whistle [coup de sifflet en échelle double] as the salute to the dead!   It was undulating, the immense sea of existence.   In my profound life, in my cow’s life, I see a fence [barrière] as high as my muffle. And I put my big cow’s mouth on the fence. And the fence tickles my ribs. And the fence makes me laugh. Then, I lick my fence with my great big cow’s tongue.     I name the constellations of the Tunisian night, the stars that are healthy and those that are not, Cassiopea, Alpha Scorpio, I give names to those I don’t know, Poincaré Scipio the Younger or Felix Faure Pompey the Great, the daisies of the blue night, we the brothers of the undulating sea, we yell flamboyant stupidities, we bring back the captain, drunk as a pig.     In the evening of a grueling day, Cupid soared off to sleep, crying: “I’m going to be happy! I’m going to disappear for ever!”   And eternity soared into the sun, announcing: “I’ve come to stay a brief moment.”   But the sun jumped into the eye of the general. And it was the evening of the battle. And the general was guiding victory with a firm hand… Oh! What an awful day!   •   INVINCIBLE NATURE   I am the wheel that crosses plains and towns, I go bloumbloum on the paving stones to piss off the people, I break my axel and I squirt into the blooming wheat covering the ditches, I spread out like coins on marble.   The man came looking for me, the man who always wants to arrange things. He carried me on his shoulder and I made myself heavier and heavier.     A man is a stomach.   The acacia leaps from crow to crow.   Genius is the fetal state regained.   Refusal is a derailment with the dots on the “I”s and twisted frames, with a very strict security crew, with complaints for the asking.       A world pure at heart, at heart pin-stripe, charming, jagged.   Baby Jesus’s head was 24 centimeters around. The light was hiding in his light. And one could see him. Chromium merged with sulphur. The reverse side of the medal was posing for all the photographers. Fate was bound. Napoleon was reigning.   The rich factories, the Trois-Évéchés, the crepuscular smoke, the green grapes, all that reduced to powder was the prey of the weevils. The weevils, tamed they were circumcised. They were given virgin lands to populate. When there were more of them than drops of rain, in Brest, when it rains, they were shut away in a grain of wheat.   The agitators were agitating. The sun was shouting: “I am the sun!” The grain of wheat was moving, splitting open, getting stronger. And the town of Charenton was born. The rainbow, wound of the sexes, was getting an erection in his cloud.   When light-footed sleep reaches my horizon, the forest moves and the sparse bosks, somber kindlings launch themselves at the burning heart of the forest.   It snowed on the town. And on each roof of the town a turkey perched, immobile, its nose soft. At the command of the dawn, the whole town was impregnated.   •

The original edition contains a frontispiece by the artist Lucien Coutaud. I cannot detect any thematic connection between the engraving and either Blanchard's poetry or the title of the collection:

There is an indirect reference in a poem by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan. His poem The Cape of Good Hope (1955), published in a limited edition but subsequently reprinted in his Poems of Thirty Years (1982) and Collected Poems (1990), has a section entitled "A Dream at the Mysterious Barricades." The section comprises a number of verses each devoted to an artist or thinker: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Newton, Beethoven, Melville and Myakovsky. In these verses, intense descriptions of some aspect of their work or life are sometimes followed by an exhortation in the mouth of the character. Here are a few lines from the Myakovsky section, in which there is the only reference in the poem to mysterious barricades:

In a personal communication (facilitated by Claudia Kraskiewicz, to whom many thanks), the poet has said that he was not aware of the Couperin piece at the time he wrote the poem. He picked up the phrase "mysterious barricades" from the collection of poems by that name by the French poet Olivier Larronde.

As the epigraph to his novel The Mysterious Barricades (Douglas, Isle of Man: Times Press, 1964 - see the fiction page on this site), Cedric Glover quotes some verse by Ursula Vaughan Williams (wife of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) entitled  'Couperin's "Les Barricades Mystérieuses"':

The poem is unknown to the editor of The Complete Poems of Ursula Vaughan Williams (The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, n.d.). Whether it was written specially for Glover's novel (Glover was a musicologist and friend of Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams) or at some other time is therefore unknown.

A series of thirty-two villanelles by the American poet Jared Carter were published as Les Barricades Mystérieuses (Cleveland State University) in 1999. The villanelle is a complex poetic form of five three-line stanzas followed by one four-line stanza. The rhyme scheme is ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. The first line of the poem is repeated as the final line of the second and fourth stanzas and as the penultimate line of the sixth. The third line is repeated as the final line of the third, fifth and sixth stanzas. Thus, using bold for the first line and underline for the third line, the poem looks like this: ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. The danger of repetitiveness is offset by the poet's ability to repunctuate and recontextualize the recurring lines.

On the Music page of this site I quoted the comment made on Couperin's piece by the composer Luca Francesconi, that the piece is "infinite, interminable, with neither head nor tail." This was in connection to the appearance of the piece at the beginning of E.R. Eddison's novel The Worm Ouroboros, the title of which alludes to the figure of a serpent eating its own tail (see the Fiction page). One will surely be struck by the fact that the villanelle form used by Carter for this poetic sequence seems, in its own way, to embody the idea of something with neither head nor tail.

The first and last poems of the sequence also have a thematic link to the piece. The first, called "Improvisation," seems to be giving advice on how to improvise at a keyboard instrument (such as a harpsichord). Although the Couperin piece is not an improvisation, its harmonies do drift in a way that is evoked beautifully in the poem:

The final poem in the sequence is called "Comet":