By the time his music was performed publicly, it had been 18 years since the composer had stopped writing.
Ernest Fanelli is one of those poor, unsung prophets of music history who wrote works brimming with colorful ideas, expressed well ahead of their time. He was underappreciated, unnoticed, or fell short of his overall potential, yet later masters capitalized, either wittingly or unwittingly, on his remarkable innovations. Others undoubtedly lifted his discoveries to greater heights, but that doesn’t change the fact that Fanelli got there first.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” with Halloween only days away, we rediscover this forgotten composer and exhume his seminal masterpiece, “The Romance of the Mummy.”
It’s fairly obvious that Fanelli’s unpublished manuscript fueled the imagination of Claude Debussy, who in turn not only influenced the course of French music, but also changed the way artists and audiences thought about music heading into 20th century. That’s not to say that Fanelli was of the same caliber as Debussy. But like Hans Rott, whose lone symphony clearly influenced Mahler, he is an essential footnote in the history of a new kind of music.
Episodes from “The Romance of the Mummy” anticipate not only Debussy and Ravel, but also Paul Dukas and Florent Schmitt, Holst, Sibelius, Respighi, Richard Strauss and even Stravinsky, a figure Fanelli would not have known. Not all of these composers were familiar with Fanelli’s work – in many cases, it’s simply a matter of music history finally catching up – but Debussy most probably was. When Fanelli’s “Mummy” was finally given its first public hearing, Debussy did his best to distance himself from the composer. He was even known to have done an about-face if he happened to walk into a café and saw Fanelli sitting at the piano.
Fanelli lived from 1860 to 1917. A French composer of Italian descent, he studied at the Paris Conservatory for a stint – allegedly under Charles-Valentin Alkan (although it’s unlikely, since Alkan had already quit the Conservatory by the time he entered). Later, he returned to study under Léo Delibes. Fanelli was unable to complete either course, due to lack of funds. In the meantime, he eked out a career as a percussionist.
He was seeking employment as a copyist in 1912, when he showed Gabriel Pierné an example of his handwriting from one of his unpublished manuscripts, written some 30 years earlier. Pierné was so taken by the actual music that he arranged for the “Mummy’s” belated premiere.
“The Romance of the Mummy,” based on a novel by Théophile Gautier, tells the tale of an English archaeologist, who exhumes and falls in love with – well, a mummy. Papyrus rolls in her mausoleum reveal her back-story and fate. She is Tahoser, who falls in love of Poeri, a handsome Hebrew. The Pharaoh (unnamed, though it would have been Ramses II) desires Tahoser for himself. However, the lovely young woman falls ill when she finds Poeri is in love with Rachel. She is healed by the prophet Moses, who initiates her into the cult of Jehovah. Pharaoh becomes an enemy of the Jewish people and abducts Tahoser. When he dies in the Red Sea, in circumstances described in the Book of Exodus, Tahoser is crowned Queen of Egypt. Hence, her presence in the pharaoh’s tomb.
The first set of tableaux is titled “Thebes,” and is made up of the subsections “Before Tehoser’s Palace,” “On the Nile,” and “Triumphal Return of the Pharaoh.”
It was the conductor Adriano who discovered a second set of tableaux in the music library of Radio France, titled “Festivities in the Pharaoh’s Palace.” The three subsections of the second set are called “In a Room in the Palace – The Naked Jugglers,” “Grotesque Dance of the Egyptian Jesters,” and “Triumphant Hymns – Orgy.” The music received its first performance only in 2002 for this release, issued on the Marco Polo label.
Is it love or infatuation? Peer behind the bandages of music history on “Mummy Dearest,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Remember, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
Stream them here!
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