1: The Market Demon

2: The Overnight Fungus

3: Stages of Theosophy

4: The Faces on the Walls

"The legend runs of a man who, entering an abbey, found many devils in the cloister but in the market-place found but one, alone on a high pillar. This filled him with wonder. But it was told him that in the cloister all is arranged to help souls to God, so many devils are required there to induce monks to be led astray, but in the market-place, since each man is a devil to himself, only one other demon suffices."

Humbert de Romans, who lived from 1194 to 1277, was fifth Master General of the Dominican Order and an ascetic soul. How many devils he would have thought an appropriate level of staffing for a concert hall is not recorded. Even if he had been able to imagine such a thing as a concert hall, it seems unlikely he could ever have imagined a fellow Dominican Monk would cause one to be built or that he himself would be commemorated in its name.

Yet, for a short period in the early years of the twentieth century, Paris was startled to discover that it had a new concert hall of ultra-modern design, very much after the manner of the new Metro Stations. The connection to the Metro Stations was easy to explain, for the architect of both was Hector Guimard, whose organic assymetrical forms had made the entrances to the Paris underground seem like gateways to Hades, for some easily-frightened early passengers. The stations have survived and become as much a symbol of Paris as the Eiffel Tower, though both were resisted at the time. The Concert Hall was not so fortunate: like a fungus, it came and went with indecent haste. If photographs and plans had not survived, it would seem like a mythical building. Looking at the pictorial evidence, can we be certain that it was not? The fact that for a few short years it really stood on the earth makes it more not less mysterious.

Designed in 1898, the Humbert de Romans Concert Hall, was not completed until 1901. By 1906 it had been demolished. The spirit behind the project was one Père Lavy, a monk, whose wealthy admirers gave some two million francs for this strange complex of buildings to be erected. As well as the concert hall, there was a chapel, a gymnasium, a billiard-room, cloakrooms, court-yard and quarters for the art-loving Dominican Lavy. This independent venture seems to have aroused the wrath of his superiors and Lavy was banished from his little empire soon after it was completed. As no one else knew what on earth the complex was for, it seems never to have been put to much practical use.

The photographs which survive suggest that Paris lost before it knew it had a shrine in which music was to be celebrated as a kind a sacrament. The branching mahoganny-covered steel roof implies a forest from a nightmare. The vast wide organ, built by the Abbey Company and designed with the participation of Saint-Saëns, fills the stage like an altar.

Camille Saint-Saëns acted as consultant for the organ built by the Abbey Company.

Above it, steel girders intertwine to support the motif of an all-seeing eye with a winged mask beneath it. On the photograph, a grand piano, sits marooned in the middle of the stage with a white cloth over it, suggestive of those little modern table-altars that the Catholic Churches began to use in the nineteen sixties, when the high altar was declared too remote from the people. Yet the feeling of this strange auditorium is not Catholic but Theosophical. It is almost as if the title page of a Scriabin Sonata had been conjured up in wood and stone. Quite what rites the mysterious Lavy envisaged on that stage will never be properly known. It is as if the world had stumbled into the living imitation of a chapter from J. K. Huysmans.

Some concerts must have taken place. Posters are visible on the outside wall on each of the stone facings in the wall, and each is surmounted by two mysterious faces. Thankfully the posters are not readable, beyond Concert Musical. It would be a pity to bring this building fully into the world of common daylight; its disappearance meant it could not be profaned by becoming a music-hall or cinema or warehouse. We can see but never stand in the cloakrooms and vestibules with their fantastic wrought-iron curlicues and electric lamps in clusters like strange fruits. We can imagine but never hear the sounds of that three-manual organ. Some of the seats, as assymetrical as the hall itself, have survived and are held in museums. Probably something of the evil of the place clings to them and a psychometrist would recoil at the touch of their metal as it brings back bad dreams.

© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001

version I, 14th August, 2001