The Music of the Netherlands Antilles. Jan Brokken

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СКАЧАТЬ The director seldom lavished such praise on one of his aspiring students, and the appeals commission worked overtime to process the huge number of applicants.

      In the mid-nineteenth century, the Paris conservatory towered above any other music institute in Europe. Talented young people were admitted with just as much difficulty as Christians in Mecca. The conservatory statutes contained a clause that excluded foreigners from taking lessons. Exceptions were only made for those with exceptional talent. Father Offenbach went to a great deal of trouble to get his son, Jacques, a brilliant cellist, accepted. If the aspiring student came from the New World, he did not stand a ghost of a chance. Louis Moreau Gottschalk was not even allowed to audition; he had spent his childhood in New Orleans, and as the director said: “America is a land of steam engines.”

      It helped that Blasini’s first and middle names were French: Jules François. He was assigned to the piano class taught by Georges Mathias, a former student of Frédéric Chopin. He did not stick it out for long at the conservatory: he enrolled on 26 October 1865 and was struck off the enrollment list on 31 January 1866. He took private lessons and studied with opera composer Jules Massenet, the up-and-coming man of the day. It was not until eight years later that he returned to Curaçao.

      At first I thought that Blasini was descended from an Italian Jewish family who had emigrated to Curaçao. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of Jews from Venice had settled on the island, including the Capriles family (originally called Caprilli), whose offspring distinguished themselves throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in quite a few disciplines, including medicine, psychiatry, trade, banking, and music. I suspected that Blasini’s father had been among that group of Venetian Jews. However, pianist Livio Hermans, a great authority on Curaçaoan music, cast doubt on this when I asked him about it.

      Indeed, the name Blasini is not included in the reference book History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles. Its authors, I. S. and S. A. Emmanuel, dedicated a separate chapter to the Jewish composers on Curaçao and only refer to Charles Maduro, Abraham Capriles, and Benjamin Namias de Castro. Nor does the name Blasini occur in the register of birth and deaths of the Jews on Curaçao from 1722 to 1830 that Krafft included in his Historie en oude families van de Nederlandse Antillen (History and Old Families of the Netherlands Antilles). That genealogical study did, however, provide another clue.

      Slave owners received compensation from the government of the Netherlands after the abolition of slavery in 1863. In his book, Krafft published a list of those slave owners; on page 348 we read: “Invoice for compensation payments for the slaves on Curaçao. Jean Blasini for his s. 600 guilders.”

      Jean Blasini was Jules François’s father. Two hundred guilders were paid for each slave set free. Jean Blasini lived in a small country estate, just outside the city limits, and had owned three slaves. Probably he was a Huguenot; quite a few Protestants who had fled France had settled in the West Indies, in Venezuela, Surinam, or in the Greater or Lesser Antilles. They kept their French first names—the father of the writer Cola Debrot, owner of Slagbaai, the biggest plantation on Bonaire, was named Jean Jacques, and his mother Marie Antoinette. Some of those French families had come to the Antilles via Antwerp and Middelburg, such as De Haseth, whose original name was De Hachette. Still others had fled from Saint-Domingue, including the families of Joubert and Perret Gentil. It is possible that Jean Blasini had belonged to that group of French who had sought refuge in Curaçao after the revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. This would make it a lot easier to understand why his son Jules composed so many danzas, a style of music often performed in Saint-Domingue.

      After consulting the two thick tomes of Hartog’s history of Curaçao, I discovered the Blasinis had originally come from Corsica, which made it less probable they had been Huguenots since no Protestants were living there. Whatever his background, Jean Blasini settled on Curaçao in 1820. Within a short period of time, he had enough money at his disposal to buy three slaves. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century a country estate was worth a pittance and most whites had at least five slaves, so he would not have amassed any great fortune.

      Only the wealthiest families in the nineteenth century could afford to send their children to Europe to study. It is possible that Jules was given a place to stay by his relatives in Paris, with a Corsican aunt or uncle. But neither money nor relations helped the slightest bit when it came to being admitted to the conservatory. You had to be extremely talented—and exceptional talent was precisely what helped Jules get accepted. It must have been the case that his teacher Jan Gerard Palm had found a patron to finance his passage to France.

      Once back on Curaçao, Blasini began composing. Only twenty of his works have survived. This is not just because he did not live long; it was the rule and not the exception for someone to die at forty-one in the days of tuberculosis and the galloping consumption. Many of his compositions must just have been lost. Blasini heralded the beginning of Dutch Antillean classical music, but in those pioneer days few works were filed away into archives. Livio Hermans found a few scores in Caracas; he suspects there are quite a few more to be found there. My own investigations have led to nothing; in Venezuela it is easier to find gold than printed paper.

      We also do not know what he looked like; there are no drawings or paintings of Blasini in existence. According to oral tradition he was short and had a sharp facial features, but then so do all Corsicans. He did not marry, had no children, at least no legitimate ones. When he died no one felt the need to sort out or see to his personal belongings.

      I first heard two of Blasini’s compositions on the CD Danza! by Harold Martina, which was released in 1992. After studying at the Instituto de Bellas Artas in Medellín and the Music Academy in Vienna, Harold Martina (b. 1935) made a name for himself as a concert pianist in Colombia. Wherever he performed, he made it a point to propagate the music of his native island of Curaçao. He put it into a broader Caribbean perspective and always highlighted the similarities with other parts of the Antilles more than the differences. On the CD he plays dances of Jules Blasini alongside those by the Cubans Ignacio Cervantes and Ernesto Lecuona and the Colombian Louis Calvo, major nineteenth-century composers totally unknown in Europe.

      The two works by his fellow countryman were called Los ojitos de una Mexicana and ¿Para cuál de las tres? The titles betray the fact that Blasini was a womanizer. “Which One of the Three?” referred to a gentleman who frequently paid a call to the yellow ochre house in Otrobanda where the three unmarried sisters Estela, Josefina, and Elodia Chapman lived. Evidently he had an eye on one of these three young ladies, and all of Willemstad wondered which one of the three it was. Judging by the music itself, Blasini had no chance whatsoever with any of them; a deep melancholy resounds throughout the dance. It is a dreamy piece of music I heard at practically every party I went to in the years to come.

      Blasini was an unrivalled Prince Charming. He did not charm just with his music; in Paris he had patiently observed how the ladies did their hair. Back in Willemstad his fingers conjured up towering hairdos. He was a frequent and highly sought-after guest in upper-class boudoirs, in which he not only touched the locks of hair, but shoulders and waists as well. The title of one of his cantatas alludes to this—Adagio: Ne m’oubliez pas.

      Blasini had young Curaçaoans play mazurkas and waltzes during the many piano lessons he gave. Chopin’s influence is clearly in evidence in the nocturne he composed. He found his own style in the dances in which he made use of the local rhythms. According to the prominent Curaçaoan pianist and composer Robert Rojer, they can only be played by a Curaçaoan; the rubato requires an extremely delicate touch down to the tenth of the measure. Toward the end of his life, Jules Blasini signed his compositions Julio Blasini. The half Frenchman had become fully Latin American.

      It is also possible that it was Blasini’s teacher Jan Gerard Palm (1831–1906) who introduced the works of Chopin on Curaçao. He lived a great deal longer than Blasini and composed more than a hundred miniature pieces, including six mazurkas СКАЧАТЬ