Recently in Tunisia, David Tresilian reviews former first lady Leila Ben Ali's testimony, now out in Paris, and visits the idyllic village of Sidi Bou Said just outside Tunis, looking beyond the revolution as such Arriving in the picturesque village of Sidi Bou Said, some 20 km north of the Tunisian capital Tunis, it can be tempting simply to follow the other visitors up the hill to the centre of the old village, where Tunisian craft items are laid out temptingly in front of the white-washed houses, their windows and doors painted a uniform shade of blue. Sidi Bou Said is easily reachable by train from the gare maritime station at the end of Avenue Bourguiba in the centre of Tunis, but most visitors to the village come by bus. During the summer months the area around the tiny train station, its only traffic the rickety trains that run to and from Tunis, can be choked with tour buses as a result, disgorging groups of tourists armed with umbrellas against the sun and clutching cameras and bottles of water. These are on their way to drink a glass of mint tea in one of Sidi Bou Said's laid-back cafes or to browse among the souvenir items, mostly Tunisian ceramics and jewelry, laid out in the sun in front of the houses. Sidi Bou Said, originally a fishing village, was developed early in the last century as a privileged destination, and sometimes residence, of visitors to Tunisia, with famous figures from the arts and other areas spending time there because of the village's marvelous location overlooking the Mediterranean, its picturesque blue-and-white houses, and the refreshing breeze that blows through its streets from the sea. The Swiss-born painter Paul Klee came to Sidi Bou Said during his visit to Tunisia in 1914, looking for colour, he said, as a way of renovating his picture-making, and the French painter Henri Matisse and writer Andre Gide also spent time there. However, the man who perhaps did most to develop Sidi Bou Said, turning it from a fishing village into something approaching an artists' colony, was the Franco-German aristocrat, musicologist and painter baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, who built an impressive Arab-style palace in Sidi Bou Said in the early decades of the last century, living there from 1911 to his death in 1932. Instead of veering left up the hill from the Sidi Bou Said station and following the other visitors to the village's shops, restaurants and cafes, one might want to go right instead towards the Mediterranean, following the road round to d'Erlanger's palace, called "Ennajma Ezzahra," or "the shining star." This has been beautifully renovated by the Tunisian ministry of culture, and it hosts a museum of traditional Arab musical instruments on the upper floor and showcases the baron's own fine orientalist paintings on the walls throughout. D'Erlanger, born into a wealthy banking family in 1872, had a large private income throughout his life and, aside from managing his affairs, never worked. However, rather than spend his time on idle amusements, as the wealthy classes of the belle époque sometimes tended to do, d'Erlanger trained as a painter and a musicologist. He traveled in both Tunisia and Egypt before finally settling in Sidi Bou Said and devoting himself to painting, the study of Arab music and the creation of Ennajma Ezzahra, a traditionally-styled Arab palace perfect down to the smallest detail. Today, d'Erlanger is most often remembered for the pioneering work he did in collecting examples of Arab music and in editing and translating mediaeval works written on music in Arabic, eventually publishing French translations of the latter in the six volumes of his La Musique arabe, published in Paris between 1930 and 1959. Aside from spending significant amounts of time early in life in Egypt, mostly on painting expeditions, d'Erlanger also played an important role in Egyptian cultural life by serving as vice-president of the committee charged with organising the Congress of Arab Music that was held in Cairo in 1932 and that brought together musicians and musicologists from across the Arab world. The museum of the Centre des musiques arabes et méditerranéennes housed on the upper floor of Ennajma Ezzahra contains many memorabilia of the Congress, including photographs of the Tunisian delegation of musicians and examples of their musical instruments. Strangely deserted on a recent visit, despite the many tourists wandering through Sidi Bou Said, the museum is very well cared for and well worth a visit. Together with the Arab palace of which it forms a part, it is a highlight of any visit to the village of Sidi Bou Said. A DEDICATION TO ARAB MUSIC: D'Erlanger is credited with having first suggested the idea of the Cairo Congress, a cross between a scholarly and professional meeting and a festival with live performances, to the Egyptian monarch king Fuad. While d'Erlanger himself was taken ill shortly before the Congress took place and died during its proceedings, he must take much of the credit for organising particularly its international aspects and for promoting Arab music much more widely than was usual at the time, notably in Europe. In his Diwan of Contemporary Life of 14 August 2003, the Egyptian historian Yunan Labib Rizk gave a detailed account of the work of the Congress in the Weekly, quoting from the relevant pages of Al-Ahram in order to reconstruct its reception by the Egyptian public at the time. "Most of those who wrote to Al-Ahram urged the restoration of Egyptian music to its authentic roots, rather than drawing on other traditions," Rizk wrote. Egyptian and Arab music was in danger of being neglected "because people have trained their sights on the West, whose music they seek to borrow from and emulate," one commentator in Al-Ahram wrote at the time, and hence there was a need to develop a better understanding of Arab music and better music education. The work of the Congress was divided among seven working groups made up of musicians from Egypt and from those Arab countries that had sent delegations, among them Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Syria and Iraq. There were groups dedicated to composition, the Arab musical scale, instruments, recordings, music education, and music history, with Egyptian musicologists playing a leading role throughout. According to the Egyptian minister of education of the time, Mohammed Hilmy Issa Pasha, also president of the Congress, the aim was to "put Arab music on firm technical and scientific foundations that are agreed on by all the Arab countries, to look into ways to develop Arab music, to define the musical scale, to establish a system of musical notation, to codify rules of composition and singing, to study musical instruments, to organise music teaching, to record the music and singing of the Arab countries and to study the existing works on Arab music." However, long before the 1932 Cairo Congress took place or Arab music achieved the kind of international recognition that drew European and other musicians and practitioners to it, d'Erlanger had started collecting examples of traditional Tunisian music, studying the instruments used in it, the ways in which they were played, and beginning to develop an adequate system of notation. He was motivated by similar feelings to those expressed in the pages of Al-Ahram, seeing these things as necessary in order to counter dangers of impending loss. Working with Ahmed al-Wafi, a traditionally educated Tunisian musician d'Erlanger met in 1914, he spent the war years and after on such activities and brought traditional musicians from across Tunisia together at Ennajma Ezzahra, the intention being to study the music as it was then played and to publish the results in scholarly journals. In the 1920s, d'Erlanger began to press ahead with what was to become his most important project: the collection, scholarly examination and publication of the major mediaeval Arab writings on music. According to Ali Louati, former director of the Centre des musiques arabes et méditerranéennes, writing in the beautifully produced guide for visitors, d'Erlanger's work on these materials, helped by the French orientalist Carra de Vaux, the Egyptian musicologist Alexandre Chalfoun and the Syrian practitioner sheikh Ali Darwich, allowed him to accumulate a mass of documents on all aspects of the "traditional and modern music of the Arab and Islamic cultural area," eventually publishing much of it in the six volumes of La Musique arabe. These volumes, compiled by d'Erlanger or under his direction, but in the main published after his death under the editorship of Tunisian musicologist Manoubi Senoussi, include translations of some of the most important mediaeval writings in Arabic on music. Volume one, the only one to be published during d'Erlanger's lifetime, contains French translations of books one and two of the tenth-century Muslim philosopher al-Farabi's kitab al-musiki al-kabir, or major treatise on music, for example, book three being contained in volume two along with the writings on music of the mediaeval Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Volume three contains translations of the writings on music of the 13th-century philosopher Safi al-Din al-Urmawi, the kitab al-adwar and the risala al-sharafiyya, and volume four contains a translation of an anonymous 16th-century treatise on music dedicated to the Ottoman sultan Muhammad II and a work on music by Muhammad bin Abdel-Hamid al-Ladhiki from the same period. In volumes five and six, d'Erlanger and his co-workers set out to describe modern Arab music in detail, including features such as its tonal and rhythmic system and its forms of composition. According to Louati, d'Erlanger's intention in putting together the books was threefold, the work being addressed to musicologists, western musicians eager to know more about non-western music, and "young people from Arab countries who are often imbued with western culture but who desire to know more about their national music and to learn its principles." "D'Erlanger had begun to study Arab music as an interested amateur," Louati writes, "and as someone fascinated by the achievements of a culture with strong traditions. His use of rigorous scholarly methods did not mean that he was not deeply committed to that culture, nor that he was not committed to seeing the rebirth of a complex and multi-dimensional understanding of Arab culture." Before starting work on La Musique arabe, d'Erlanger had been pessimistic about the future of traditional Arab music, complaining in 1917 that "bars and cabarets have taken the place of the zaouia [zawiya �ê" grassroots religious institutions], the processions have disappeared, the pilgrimages are less important than they once were, and in the cafes the orchestras are disappearing�ê� Even the bey has now got rid of his private orchestra, preferring to hear the notes of foreign instruments instead that seem to scorch the ears." It was to counter these developments and the losses they seemed to represent that d'Erlanger began working with the traditional musicians that came his way, eager to collect examples of the traditional music of Tunisia and the Arab world, describing it and aiming to produce an adequate system of notation for it in order to counter its disappearance. D'ERLANGER AS ARCHITECT: D'Erlanger's interest in Arab culture was not restricted to music, even though it was in the latter field that he made his most important contributions as a scholar and collector. Wandering through the cool and shady rooms of Ennajma Ezzahra even on a blindingly hot and sunny day, it seems clear that d'Erlanger may have considered his house, a painstaking reconstruction of a traditional Arab palace, to be at least as much of a tribute to traditional Arab culture as his work on music. The land on which the palace stands had been acquired in 1909 from Zubeida, sister of princess Kmar, a member of the bey's family, and work on the building, designed by d'Erlanger, began just two years later. Louati gives a lyrical description of this confection, noting how the interior spaces and decoration recall the traditional Arab architecture of the Maghreb, complete with interior galleries, courtyards, marble columns, carvings and elaborate decorative schemes. What perhaps marks out d'Erlanger's design from similar neo-Arab buildings elsewhere is the quality of the workmanship and of the materials used. No expense seems to have been spared in the use of marble and stucco, reminiscent of the architecture of Cordoba and Arab Spain, though according to Louati the building is far more than simply an exercise in décor or an orientalist fantasy. "Ennajma Ezzahra," he writes in the illustrated book on the house, "is clearly the realisation of an oriental dream, and it belongs to that immense collection of ideas, forms of behaviour, and artistic expressions that accumulated from the first contacts of the western sensibility with the Muslim orient onwards, inspiring so many passions in it." However, d'Erlanger's version of an oriental dream, Louati says, was tempered by a good dose of classicism and common sense, "a taste for balance and a refusal to be swept away by the commonplaces of the orientalist imagination." "The baron set out to investigate the Muslim artistic heritage, searching through it for styles, materials, and ways of construction that were the most refined, the richest and the most securely anchored in tradition�ê� To say that Ennajma Ezzahra is an 'exotic construction' is nonsense. On the contrary, it is a work that emerges from the depths of architectural memory and rehabilitates a form of architecture that for the previous two centuries had been vitiated by European influences, resulting in a confusion of styles and an anarchy of decorative schemes." D'Erlanger's architectural scholarship, Louati says, expressed in concrete form in Ennajma Ezzahra, was of a piece with his attitude to the orient more generally. For him, there was a need to go back to the original sources of Arab tradition, whether in music or in architecture, in order to strip away later accretions. "In Tunis today," d'Erlanger wrote in 1917, "it seems impossible to find anyone who can play a page of classical music properly. It is simply impossible to find the five musicians necessary to do it. What can be done to change this state of affairs?" The answer as far as music was concerned was to research and reconstruct the sources of musical tradition and to instruct new generations of musicians. In architecture, d'Erlanger both created an instance of what for him was pure Arab Maghreb architecture at Ennajma Ezzahra, encouraging the worksmanship and the use of traditional materials that this entailed, and wrote tirelessly to the Tunisian government throughout his life with a view to preserving what remained of the country's traditional architectural heritage. Such efforts, directed at the bey and at the Resident General de France, resulted in a decree of 1915 preserving the facades, roof lines and footprints of the buildings at Sidi Bou Said, later campaigns being directed at preserving the architecture of the cities of Tunis, Kairouan, Sfax, Bizerte and Sousse. "The orientalism of Rodolphe d'Erlanger developed from the literary and pictorial stereotypes of his Paris years towards a wider and deeper understanding of Arab and Muslim culture," Louati writes. "His palace of Ennajma Ezzahra represents for architecture what his book La Musique arabe represents for musicology: a demonstration of authenticity and a fidelity to principles passed down from one generation to the next that nevertheless does not rule out freedom of design and interpretation, by doing so showing the flexibility and the capacity to adapt of tradition." MONUMENTS OF ORIENTALISM: Any visitor to Sidi Bou Said momentarily tired of such abstractions can turn instead to admire the details of the baron's palace, as well as the pictures by him on the walls, most in oils and betraying d'Erlanger's training as a painter in Paris in the 1890s. He seems to have followed a conventional artistic training, his technique incorporating the painterly discoveries of impressionism and his subject matter being resolutely orientalist. A first trip to Egypt in 1904/05 took him from Cairo south to Aswan, resulting in a significant clutch of works, and visits to Tunisia, and then settling in Sidi Bou Said, allowed him to develop his skills as a plein air painter. Louati says that one problem that must be addressed by any painter in Tunisia is how to capture the quality of the light, notably the blinding whiteness of the traditional buildings, along with the colours of the surrounding nature. D'Erlanger seems to have been a very good painter, with a feel for composition and colour and capable of remarkable painterly effects. Many of his paintings are on display at Ennajma Ezzahra, with some reproduced in the guide to the building. Souq ensoleillé � Assouan, done in Egypt in 1905, and Vue du village de Sidi Bou Said � partir du parc d'Ennajma Ezzahra are perhaps particularly effective pieces. Finally, the baron's palace at Sidi Bou Said and the six volumes of La Musique arabe might perhaps be seen as monuments to a particular orientalist sensibility, relics of a vanished age whose achievements were linked to political and economic domination as much as to connoisseurship. D'Erlanger's presence in Tunisia was related to the country's status as a French colony at the time, its economy mortgaged to French banking interests and its government a legal fiction behind which stood French political control. In d'Erlanger's case, such considerations are given added piquancy by the part played by the family bank, the Banque d'Erlanger, in floating the loans that had originally bankrupted the bey's government in the 1860s, leading to the kind of debt-bondage that was also a feature of Egyptian government at the same time, and eventually leading to the assumption of direct European control. Louati refers to this political and economic background in his book on Ennajma Ezzahra, but he doesn't see it as affecting the baron's interest in Arab culture, though it enabled it and financed it, possibly even serving as an essential condition for it. Getting to Sidi Bou Said: the easiest way to get to Sidi Bou Said from Tunis is by train from the gare maritime station at the end of Avenue Bourguiba. The train line runs through the site of the ancient city of Carthage, meaning that stops are possible at the various Carthage stations. This allows one to view the ancient remains and the way in which this extensive architectural park doubles as a wealthy suburb.
