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RALPH THIBODEAU
shrine of rocamadour (france). inset picture: black wood statue of virgin and child at the shrine .
This year all over the world we celebrate the centennial of the birth of Francis Poulenc, one of the more prominent composers known as Les Six --or the French Six, as they have been called--with Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger.
I will let Poulenc speak for himself about an experience in 1936, when he was 37 years old, that was to change his musical life dramatically:
In 1936, a principal date in my life and my career, while on a working vacation with Yvonne Gouverne and Pierre Vernac at Uzerche, I asked the latter to drive me in his car to Rocamadour, which I had often heard my father speak of.
I had just learned, a few days before, of the tragic death of my colleague, Pierre-Octave Ferroud. The dreadful beheading [in a car accident] of this musician so full of vigor had left me stunned. Meditating on the insignificance of the physical body, I was drawn again to the spiritual life. Rocamadour succeeded in leading me back to the faith of my childhood. This sanctuary, surely the oldest in France, had everything to captivate me. Clinging in full sunlight to a dizzying craggy rock, Rocamadour is a place of extraordinary peace, accentuated by the very limited number of tourists. Approached through a courtyard, rosy with bay trees, a very modest chapel, built half into the rock, shelters a miraculous statue of the Virgin, carved, according to tradition, in black wood by St. Amadour, the little Zacchaeus of the Gospel [Luke 19:1-10], "who had to climb up in a tree to catch a glimpse of Christ." [According to the legend, Zacchaeus, and his wife Veronica, who wiped the face of Jesus, escaped from Palestine, and after a perilous sea voyage, settled in the south of France. After they traveled to Rome, where they witnessed the martyrdom of St. Peter, Veronica died, and
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Zacchaeus (now Amadour) returned to France, where he built the shrine, and carved the Black Virgin.]
The same...