"I was corresponding regularly with Sarah, postcards of the Hagia Sophia, seen from the Golden Horn. As Grillparzer said in his travel journal, 'There may be nothing like it in the whole world.' He describes, enthralled, the succession of monuments, palaces, villages, the power of this site that struck me fully too and filled me with energy, so open is this city, a wound in the sea, a gash engulfed by beauty; to stroll through Istanbul was, whatever the goal of one's expedition, a wrenching of beauty on the frontier--whether you regard Constantinople as the easternmost city in Europe or the westernmost city in Asia, as an end or a beginning, as a bridge or a border, this mixed nature is fractured by nature, and the place weighs on history as history itself weighs on humans."
- From “Compass” - Mathias Enard
Compass
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Berlioz, Bizet, Rimsky-
Korsakov, Debussy, Bartok, Hindemith, Schonberg, Szymanowski, hundreds of composers throughout all of Europe. Over all of Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of the church chant and harmony, why am I getting worked up all alone on my pillow now, probably because I'm a poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about. Today no one is interested anymore in Felicien David who became extraordinarily famous on December 8, 1844 after the premiere of Le Desert at the Paris Conservatoire, an ode-symphony in three parts for narrator, solo tenor, male chorus, and orchestra, based on the composer's memories of his journey to the Orient, between Cairo and Beirut...The Desert invades Paris--"by unanimous opinion, it was the most beautiful storm music had every produced, no maestro had ever gone so far," Theophile Gautier writes in La Presse, describing the storm assailing the caravan in the desert; it's also the premier of the "Danse des almees," the Dance of the Almahs, an erotic motif whose subsequent fortune we know, and surprise of surprises, the first "Chant du muezzin," the first Muslim call to prayer that ever sounded in Paris."
- Mathias Enard, from Compass