To help you enjoy the music I’ve chosen to accompany various chapters in my novel about Berthe Morisot, here’s some context about each selection. It was so much fun to compile this soundtrack I may continue adding music when inspiration strikes!
Chapter 1 — Tea Picking Dance featuring the traditional Japanese stringed instrument, the koto, signifies the moment when Berthe sees her first Japanese print. The simple image of a woman in the private act of brushing her hair influences her future paintings.- Chapter 4 — When the Morisot family attends the opening of the opera Don Giovanni, Berthe is absorbed by the story of a father and son who are both in love with the same woman. The lyrics to Donna Anna’s aria, Non Mi Di Bell’Idol Mio could be describing Berthe’s growing attraction to Edouard Manet.
I cruel?
Ah no, my dearest!
It grieves me much to postpone
a bliss we have for long desired…
And what is it about this story that leaves Edouard Manet looking so miserable?
- Chapter 7 — Gioachino Rossini, a neighbor of the Morisots in Passy, is past his prime when he attends one of the weekly dinner gatherings Cornelie Morisot institutes to find husbands for her daughters. Still, he’s happy to accommodate Cornelie when she requests that he play something lively, like Enough of Souvenirs: Let’s Dance.
- Chapter 14 — After the German siege of Paris, Berthe goes to Cherbourg to visit her sister, Edma. The joy of seeing her sister again and of being away from the deprivations of Paris come through in her exuberant marine paintings of. From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea, from Debussy’s La Mer, conveys the wind, the waves, and the freedom Berthe enjoys while perched with her easel on the northwestern-most tip of Normandy. I couldn’t compile a playlist for an Impressionist artist without including Debussy, described in The NPR Classical 50 as having “the ability to see images with an Impressionist’s eye, working with the color and mass of instrumental combinations much as a painter works with pigments.”
- Chapter 16 — If Berthe had spoken English, she would have had several occasions to tell Edouard Manet, You’re No Good. Certainly, she would have thought Linda Ronstadt belting out this song summed up her situation pretty accurately.
- Chapter 30 — After Berthe’s pain and loss, it’s her daughter, Julie, who lures her back to painting in the Bois de Boulogne following a period of mourning. There, they attend a concert by Cécile Chaminaud, whose light, charming, Étude Symphonique, Opus 28, helps Berthe remember what life has to offer
- Chapter 32 — As Impressionism’s popularity wanes, Berthe’s friendships with her colleagues, especially Renoir, grows. She learns that Renoir has a penchant for singing songs from the latest operas, such as Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. The opera’s elegance contrasts with the bawdy music Offenbach wrote into one of his light operettas, Orpheus in the Underworld, in which hedonistic Greek gods dance the Can-Can.
- Chapter 32 — Renoir, Monet, Degas, and Mallarmé stagger down the sidewalk after one of Berthe’s weekly dinners singing songs like Nini Peau de Chien, extolling the charms of a prostitute, by popular café concert crooner Aristide Bruant.
- Epilogue — At the end of her life, Julie ponders the nature of the relationship between her mother and Edouard Manet. It’s the early 1960’s, and Julie admires the new American First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, so I Loved You in Silence, from Camelot, seems an appropriate song to conclude the soundtrack to La Luministe.