Sunday May 5, 2024

 

Catédratico - Theacher

 

Historical and philosophical tale

 

My true and real name is Christian Diez Axnick Matilla Villar Dominguez… and in my distant family, on my grandmother's side, we find names like Schadeck, Hermann, Gotlieb. I have very old Spanish, German, Czech, Ukrainian ancestors.

 

My family on my father's side, Spanish, is more compact. A good forty years ago, we had friends, from Toro like us, but especially from Galicia, the Dominguez de la Torre. They had moved into an apartment in Sevran, near Aulnay.

 

They were “ Galleguitos ”, as they are called in Spanish. My family once knew another family, also from Galicia. All of them died in a tragic and terrible car accident at the time, not far from Toro.

 

The Dominguez de la Torre were very great musicians, of European stature. The father, his wife, two twins, and Téré, their sister. In their group there was a drummer, a Frenchman, and a Frenchwoman, a very good singer, like Téré. They sang rock'n roll and variety songs, punctuated by a few songs from the Galician repertoire. At the time of the group's titles " Il était une fois". I had the opportunity to see Joëlle, the singer of this group, at the Gonesse hospital, a few years before her suicide. I saw her in the emergency room. She was a great lady and a great French artist, of Danish origin it seems to me. His real name was Mogensen.

 

Otherwise it was really a very big group, the drummer sang rock in the opening, songs by Eddy Mitchel. They had two large electronic organs, a math and music teacher who supervised them during concerts, all kinds of instruments, and above all the girls had very pretty voices.

 

Mrs. Dominguez had fixed ideas, she had her husband, who made us taste chichas, and Fermin, a good-natured old Galician man. She was suffering. She said she didn't deserve to have had two gifted twin sons. And when her husband died, she did not resist, she threw herself from the 7th floor of the tower where the family lived. You really had to have courage to do it. She did it on a whim.

 

Thus ended the epic of one of the greatest French variety and rock'n roll groups, but with Galician origins. I had seen them with my father, my brothers, my mother and friends.

 

So if I have distant Spanish origins, where we find a Dominguez, they were really at the top of their art and varieties in the broad sense. Singing is a priesthood, an end in itself, and they were truly great artists and great musicians.

 

I also founded a group with friends who came with us to see them in concert. But it didn't last.

 

In Spain, the “ Catédraticos ” are the lion's share of the clergy. Under the Franco regime, the Catholic Church lived united and united. The clergy was very well trained. Otherwise, Franco also allied himself with the secularists, the Jews, the Muslims, the Protestants. He was the one who made the best alliance, so he lasted longer than the others.

 

Republican ideas have been discredited, either because they are demagogic or because they are utopian. However, apart from socialism, the republic also had its hours of glory, but it was unable to take and retain power in a conservative and traditionalist Spain.

 

My father was more of a democrat, he was also one of the greatest painters and lacquer decorators of the last century.

 

Today, freedom is total, the degrees of freedom have become more important, for all kinds of reasons.

 

Russian aggression calls into question European cohesion, it calls into question national interests and weakens peace as a whole. Once again, Ukraine is sacrificed, vilified, accused, slandered while so many Ukrainians were deported in 39-45.

 

The Russians have broken down the last barriers that ensured peace. Today Russian soldiers are paid to break Ukrainian, they are encouraged to do so.

 

This is where many learned to circumvent the church and its teaching, catechesis, the cardinal virtues. Political leaders have led people towards war. It is a cataclysm and a horror.

 

I maintain a socialist sensibility, because the ideas of the right are in an impasse. An artificial world made of one-upmanship and demagoguery is now slowing down the march towards peace.

 

The death of my brother David in 1998-1999, just shortly before the millennium, definitively took me away from political adventures. We live, as my father said, “ in the valley of death. ” The storm had destroyed everything, the roofs, everything. The workshop went up in smoke.

 

Investing today would cost a lot of money.

 

As I told you, Dominguez de la Torre were close to the heights of European popular music, and the friends with whom I went to see them later took me in turn to see one of the greatest groups of rhythm and blues of the time. We ourselves had formed a small group.

 

It was a really great band, partly self-taught, drawing some of its inspiration from Eric Clapton and J.J. Cole. Mustapha, singer and soloist of Tunisian origin, like Shiri Maïmon today, ran the house. In addition, there was an organ, extraordinary sax and harmonica solos, a rhythm section and a bassist. This group held its own against the biggest American or Anglo-Saxon rhythm'n blues groups, with very good solos, particularly on the brass side.

 

They toured America, making over two million a night. This means that it was a very large group, who started as amateurs and arrived as professionals.

 

Music can also be conquered. It was truly great modern music.

 

Today I went to rue de Thorigny, to the Hôtel Aubert de Fontenay, or Hôtel Salé, to visit the national Picasso museum. I did not regret it. All the great art dealers of the time were there, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Léonce Rosenberg and the German dealer Wilhelm Uhde, who notably dealt with Séraphine de Senlis.

 

This hotel corresponds to a donation made by the Picasso family in 1985.

 

It was especially these merchants who helped finance abstract art and cubism.

 

There are works by Fernand Léger, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger, still lifes by Henri Matisse, surreal and metaphysical frescoes by Giorgio de Chirico, and other works, an Armenian painter. The Picasso Museum above all allows you to contemplate the cubist and abstract works of Pablo Picasso.

 

Picasso was one of the rare left-wing artists, we can clearly sense the research in his work, this desire to flee academicism and attempt new modernist and expressive adventures.

 

My father, who was more to the right, was one of the greatest painters and lacquer decorators of the last century. Maruja, the daughter of his uncle, who was Republican mayor of Toro, was also one of the two or three founders of the Spanish radio-television orchestra ( RTVE ).

 

She knew very great musicians, Czech, Israeli, Spanish, German, including Narciso Yepès with whom she was very friendly, or even Daniel Barenboïm, or even Cobos, the Spanish conductor near whom she is buried, in Madrid or Salamanca . At the end of her life, she had an apartment in Madrid.

 

She made triumphant tours with the RTVE national orchestra, with Ravel, all of Beethoven's symphonies ( one at each stage ), the Spanish classics, Turina, de Falla, Albeniz and so on. She gave me a 33 rpm record, the 5th by Kurt Mazur.

 

Maruja was a virtuoso and a very great violinist, “ la prosora ”, as we called her. She was rather left-wing and deeply socialist. But fate did not spare her, like Mother she lost her father, she had to work hard. I went to see her at the TMP, where one of the greatest Argentinian mezzo-soprano in the world performed, who sang in this magnificently exceptional Argentinian classical repertoire. The orchestra ended with Ravel.

 

My family is a family of artists. Do we have family ties to the Dominguez de la Torres ? I don't know, I just know that I have ancestors named Dominguez too. The Dominguez de la Torre were also from Toro, then on Sevran.

 

Today, many great variety artists are no longer there. Popular music is not as easy as you think.

 

Today, I would like to continue this artistic family tradition. But for that, I would have to reopen a workshop to continue in lacquer and decoration, a difficult and rare profession.

 

I lack the means to do it, and the banks are quite reluctant to lend money.

 

On the other hand, we are almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century. We must try to project ourselves into the future, and anticipate it.

 

In the past, I worked for around ten years with Andrés Serrita, one of Sabicas' spiritual sons. He was then one of the greatest zambras guitarists in the world. I still remember this Manuel Torres concert in 1982, when he replaced Chano Lobato. An immense tenor who covered the audience for miles.

 

That’s the magic of music too. We don't decree music, we live it and it lives in us.

 

 

 

Christian Diez