Violent violets (another facet of spring)

Maria Candida Gentile’s Exultat was inspired by hearing a vespers service in the Roman basilica of San Lorenzo in Lucina: a candied violet steeped in church incense, embalmed in a cedar box, with an ample, expressive dignity and grace that is characteristic of the Italian perfumer’s work.

Yet this ecclesiastic accord is also a throwback to more ancient Roman rites: the festival of the Goddess Cybele, imported from Asia Minor to Ancient Rome around 200 B.C. and celebrated from March 21^st to 25^th. It celebrated the death and resurrection of Attis, the Great Mother Cybele’s son/lover, a god of vegetation, symbolically sacrificed in the form of a pine tree, chosen both because as an evergreen it never suffered seasonal “death”, and because Attis had died under it after self-castrating (a practice reprised by Cybele’s followers during her orgiastic rites). The pine trunk was swaddled like a corpse and wreathed in violets, a spring flower said to have blossomed from drops of Attis’s blood. On March 24^th, Attis rose from the dead to mark the renewal of nature: spring is a violent season in ancient cultures.

If the myth of Attis and Cybele came to mind, it is because I recently saw a resurrection of an epoch-making 1987 production of Atys, a 1676 opera by Jean-Baptiste Lully, said to be the aging Louis XIV’s favorite, directed by Jean-Marie Villégier and conducted by William Christie with Les Arts Florissants. In this version, Atys is loved by the goddess Cybele but loves the nymph Sangaride, who loves him too but is betrothed to the king. The ancient goddess of the forces of nature, dressed like a Baroque Virgin, sings that she would rather be loved than worshipped, yet because of the hieratic staging, this call for love is deeply frightening: a reminder of what Cybele demanded of her priests in the Phrygian and Roman cults, the bloody sacrifice of their manhood… And indeed, Atys is the first opera in history to end with the hero’s tragic death.

This blend of archaic cult and Versailles refinement is reflected in this bouquet of violets that pull the shy spring flower away from the classic lipstick accord and into more adventurous territory...

Violet Blonde by Tom Ford is one of last’s year most interesting mainstream launches – Tom Ford truly knows how to choose a scent with character. What he might not know is that this green, peppered violet and banana-jammy jasmine accord is divine not only because it smells lovely, but also because many Catholic saints have been said to give off this blend, in life or even after their death. Who knew Tom Ford was in odor of sanctity? Possibly the nuns in habit I saw at his counter in Le Bon Marché on Father’s Day: they were buying cologne for their chaplain.

Lady Shiloh by Hors Là Monde also wraps violet with a hefty and rather more indolic dose of jasmine, this time messed up with a musk and patchouli base that turns the Great Mother into a tousle-haired earth-mama with sand between her toes…

Geste by Humiecki and Graef may be a distant echo of the goddess Cybele’s unrequited love for the shepherd Atys in Lully’s opera, since it is meant to express the intensity of the love of an older woman for a much younger man. A blend of candied violets and dark, boozy, almost chocolate-y musk, with a metallic undercurrent and a weird-skin-scent vibe.

And then of course, there is Serge Lutens's masterful Bois de Violette, with its shards of amethysts and ambery honeyed fruit incrusted in sweet, oily wood...

Please take a moment to watch excerpt from the dream sequence of Lully's Atys: a moment of transcendent beauty that literally caused me to stop breathing the first time I saw it on stage...

Illustration: Stéphanie d’Oustrac sings Cybele in the 2011 production of Atys, directed by Jean-Marie Villégier.