Premiere of "The Blue Butterfly"

My song, "The Blue Butterfly" dedicated to Henri Matisse premieres today.  It's the story of a blue butterfly and a painting Paul Cezanne had given him which inspired Matisse for many years to paint his many masterpieces. This is one in a series of songs from my upcoming album, "Painting Music."

In Hilary Spurling's brilliant biography of Matisse - The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, she tells the story of how Matisse was encouraged by Madame Matisse to follow his dream: he saw a blue butterfly and spent his last dollar to buy it so he could duplicate the blue of that butterfly in his painting.  The butterfly and Cezanne taught him in a very special way to become the painter he always knew he could be.

"Matisse said he had dreamed from his earliest years of the radiant light and colour he finally achieved in the stained-glass windows of the chapel at Vence in 1952. 'It is the whole of me . . . everything that was best in me as a child.' He told his grandson, who had been taken aback to find almost every conventional feature of a church interior missing from the chapel, that his whole life had been in some sense a flight. 'I come from the North. You can't imagine how I hated those dark churches.' One of the effects that pleased him most in the Vence chapel was a clear reflected blue of an intensity he said he had seen before only in the glint on a butterfly's wing, and in the pure blue flame of burning sulphur: the flames of the volcano that first erupted in a toy theatre in Bohain seventy years before. 'Even if I could have done, when I was young, what I am doing now--and it is what I dreamed of then--I wouldn't have dared.'" 

Here are the lyrics to my song:

The Blue Butterfly

She heard an echo. She understood in her soul
and from all the lives she’d lived before…
Intuition must be trusted. Blind faith cannot tell
when the mysteries are found at the bottom of the well.

Risks and faith in the smoldering fires
and the burning of his deep desires.
The Genie of the lamp’s
full of demons and the dance.
Singing Harmony in Red.
His passionate view of joy they said
crossed the Green Line, o wild Fauve;
paint the red room and orange grove.

The blue of that butterfly and Cezanne
made you more of a spiritual man.

Blue as a sulfur flame filled with Mediterranean light.
Such a blue, it pierced his heart.
He knew he had to buy that cherished butterfly.

The painting spoke in its own clear voice.
She knew right then that she had no choice
but to breathe in the harmony.
She made the greatest sacrifice
to decide and not think twice.
Cross the blue line, o wild beast,
break the mold and paint a feast.

The blue of that butterfly and Cezanne
made you more of a spiritual man.

Go here to listen now on Soundcloud.
Watch the video here.