“Baudelaire’s life ended in 1861 in syphilitic delirium in a hotel room in Brussels. With him died the caustic dandy: the son of an art critique, the translator who brought Edgar Allan Poe to the French public, the stepson of general Jacques Aupick, the aesthete of impeccable style whose trenchant remarks often made him cruel, who flaunted his Haitian Mulatto mistress- his Black Venus- in the face of bourgeois conventions, and whose every breath and every stroke of the pen showed us why it hurts…”
Musical Selection for this Podcast
- Für Alina by Arvo Pärt
- Bird on the wire by Rosemary Standley and Dom la Nena
- Spiegel im Spiegel (mirror in the mirror) by Arvo Pärt
- O cessate di piagarmi (Please stop bothering me) by Alessandro Scarlatti, Nora Fischer, Marnix Dorrestein
- Suzanne by Leonard Cohen
- King Arthur or The British Worthy by Henry Purcell interpreted by Andreas Scholl and The Accademia Bizantina
- Où vont les fleurs?(Where have the flowers gone?) by Marlène Dietrich
- Vocalise Op.34 No. 14 by Sergei Rachmaninoff interpreted by Mstislav Rostropovich
- O Solitude by Rosemary Standley and Dom la Nena
- Les Fleurs by Clara Luciani
