The Music of the Netherlands Antilles - Jan Brokken Caribbean Studies Series

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language of the island. A part of them was European due to their exposure to European civilization, while another part was a product of living at the threshold of South America. In Chopin they encountered the same sort of split personality.

      Their admiration for the Pole no doubt had to do with the character his music exuded. Chopin was an elegant creature, if not as appealing to the ladies as I imagined him to be when as a nine-year-old I cut his picture out of a radio guide. On advertisements to promote his performances, they always printed Delacroix’s portrait in which the composer is immortalized with those wild chestnut brown locks of hair, a sharp straight nose, and the brooding look of an introvert. In reality his hair was matted and colorless and he had a hooked nose, pouting lips, and timid-looking eyes without any lashes. His dandy image was an invention, intended to spread the spirit of romanticism. Notwithstanding, he did possess an inner refinement.

      Chopin was reserved, proud, elegant, wistful, suddenly volatile and passionate, and then tranquil, closed, mysterious. He avoided women or sought refuge in impossible loves. Rejection was to be expected from the parents of the fifteen-year-old Maria Wodzinska, a young lady of noble birth in whom he was interested: he had no title and no money. When the inevitable rejection took place he slipped the letters from Maria in a folder and wrote on the cover in elegant calligraphy: “My Misfortune.” Like a true romantic, he cultivated his grief; George Sand had to practically kidnap him, and when she finally did snare him, he did not want to share his bed with her right away. She won her suit by mothering him and nursing him on Majorca, where he fell gravely ill. Chopin inspired love, he seldom expressed it; he gave, as Liszt wrote, “everything except himself.”

      These were characteristics that matched the Caribbean temperament. Despite what the Dutch believe, Curaçaoans are neither crude nor ill mannered. Like true islanders they show a great deal of reservation at first toward foreigners. Even among themselves, they only show their true feelings with the greatest of difficulty; nowhere is the distance from the north to south shore very far, and on an island word gets around easily. In public they hide behind male pride or female respectability, but even more so through a show of exceptionally courteous manners. In familiar surroundings, the slightest incident is enough to trigger volatile displays of temper in no way inferior to that of the Latin American; yet their thoughts are just as easily distracted and they engage in the most heated debates with a faint smile on their faces. In fact, they are just as wistful as a sunset, and it is precisely this mood we hear in Chopin’s plaintive harmonies.

      In Western Europe, the mazurka was not granted a long life. After Chopin’s death practically no composer dared try his hand at this dance form. The mazurka emigrated to Russia, where Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Glinka indulged in it as the purest expression of the Slavic soul. Therefore Sergei Rachmaninov dedicated his 1894 mazurka to Tchaikovsky and not Chopin. The mazurka that formed the final movement of Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de Salon was composed shortly after Tchaikovsky’s death.

      As far as I know Scriabin was the last Russian to compose an impressive series of mazurkas, written between 1888 and 1903. It was not until then that the mazurka began to become popular on the other side of the ocean. The dance was just as popular on Martinique and Guadeloupe as it was on Curaçao and Aruba; it was frequently a part of the concert repertoire in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo from 1890 until well into the twentieth century. Both salon pianists and jazz orchestras performed mazurkas.

      Chopin’s influence could be heard throughout the Caribbean islands during the entire twentieth century, and his name lived on, from Havana to Kingston Town.

      7

       Which One of the Three?

      Jules Blasini was probably the first person to bring Chopin sheet music to Curaçao. Chopin had already been dead for quite some time, but despite the triumphs he had celebrated in Paris, he had not had much luck with music publishers. It was partly his own fault: he had played them off against one another, hoodwinking them or branding them as Jews. They took a wait-and-see attitude until they could be certain that Chopin would prove a long-term success. It was not until 1860 that editions of his mazurkas, nocturnes, polonaises, scherzos, and ballads appeared in large numbers.

      Jules Blasini (1847–1887) had been taking piano lessons from Jan Gerard Palm. When Blasini passed his entrance exam to the Paris Conservatory, the director sent a letter to his teacher Palm congratulating him on having supplied him with such an excellent student. 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

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